A New Kind of Progress

This is a country where you can be jailed for giggling when the blatant racist who is attorney general says something particularly stupid, even for him.

This is a country where a news reporter can be arrested for raising questions with the cabinet officer whose policies are likely to kill thousands of people.

This is a country where a college can lose funding because some of its students turned their backs on a secretary of education who knows no more about  education than a hog butcher knows about veterinary medicine.

This is Trumpistan, the former United States of America.

  

Its chief executive officer lies so serially, so obviously, that it's difficult to find kernals of truth in even his most mundane remarks.  If he says, "Good morning," staffers look out the window for signs of a hurricane.

He has no domestic policy except to destroy things that have annoyed him over the years of his perpetual adolescence, or to twist the law in ways that will ensure that his labyrinthine business empire continues to squeeze obscene profits out of everything within its reach.

See all those mountains and valleys and rivers and canyons where even the poor can afford to hike and swim and take snapshots?  Kick the little fuckers out and turn those lands over to people who know what to do with them, people like me, who will build towers and ticky-tacky, dig wells and mine coal, make us Great again.

See all those clinics and hospitals where 40 million Americans who never could afford it before are getting medical care?  Board them up and spend the money on bombs and guns to make us Great again.  Let the sick little fuckers cower in dark corners till they die.  What they deserve for not living good, right- wing lives.

See all those seedy little twerps in their shapeless tweed coats and green eyeshades, doing science to protect public health, save the planet from anthropomorphic destruction and improve the quality of life? Kick their hairless asses out into the street to sell pencils or sweep up dogshit until they get religion and learn the will of God.

See all those women of color lined up at Planned Parenthood for health care, birth control and empowerment over their own bodies? Toss their black asses back to the earthen-floored huts where they belong, barefoot and pregnant and boiling collard greens.  Give the money to cities and states to buy tanks and drones for the riot police.

See all those brown and yellow and red people, the ragheads and Pocahontases and Miguels, lining up to get handouts from our tax money? Pitch them and their squalling brats into filthy holding tanks until we can send them back where they came from, or anyplace else but here, which as everyone knows was built and made Great by white, male Americans.

Trumpistan has two kinds of media — failing and Fox.  Failing media, epitomized by the New York Times, assemble facts and package them in ways called “false news.”  Fox lies and repeats my lies and provides a forum where my minions can lie.  This is called reality TV. Fox is making America Great again.

In addition to domestic policy, the president of Trumpistan controls the country’s foreign policy.  This essentially involves making war or threatening to make war.  War makes America Great again because it makes American oligarchs richer.  Foreign policy requires the leader of Trumpistan to know the names of foreign countries and their leaders, which are often hard to pronounce.  That’s why he hires people like Tillerson and Flynn to pronounce them for him. But  you know how hard it is to get good help these days.  Take Flynn.  Take him way out on the ocean, give him cement shoes and let him learn to swim.

To do foreign policy, you’ve got to know the good guys from the bad.  Most of the best guys are dictators.  So they’ve got a little blood on their hands.  You don’t  see drug-dealers running around the streets of the Philippines, do you?  Dictators know how to run things.  They see something needs building, a tower, say, or a golf course, they just build it.  No screwing around with congress or parliament or whatever.

Here in this country, we’ve still got too many nuisances like laws and that damned Constitution.  But we’re getting there.  We’re making America Great again.

Beyond Outrage

The most loathsome animal ever to slither into the White House has now taken the presidency deeper into the sewer than it has ever been before.

By firing the director of the FBI, under the given circumstances and for such obviously phony reasons, the hollow narcissist who conned an entire country has all but acknowledged that he not only compromised his office, but he probably committed treason. Director James Comey, for all his flaws and shortcomings, was getting uncomfortably close to the smoking gun; he had to go.

Those Washington insiders who call Trump's action "Nixonian" are demeaning Nixon: not even Tricky Dick's infamous Saturday Night Massacre can touch Orange Boy's cynical sleaze in this case.Nixon abused his power by seeking to end an investigation into a tawdry domestic burglary committed by his agents to improve his chances of re-election.  He never made a dishonest dime from it.

Orange Boy is abusing the powers of the presidency to keep hidden far, far larger crimes against the people in order to engorge his personal fortune.

He has refused to divest.  He refuses to release his tax returns.  He is hiding things; big things; big, bad things.  

Already his agents and nominees to key posts have been found to have had suspicious dealings with Russia.  The racist attorney general had to recuse himself from the ongoing Russian investigations, although he gleefully participated in the decision to fire Comey.  Orange Boy’s original nominee for national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was fired because he was up to his ears in back-door foreign deals.  Two army secretary nominees had to withdraw.  Never in history has a new president nominated so many unfit people to so many high posts in government.  Far too many of them have been confirmed.  Science, public lands, public health, public services — every good thing done by or on behalf of national government for the last 80years — have been sacrificed on the altar of Trumpian greed.

And now this.  In spite of himself, our Inspector Clouseau was closing in on the ugly truth, and the little dictator fired him.

What else to expect from someone whose mentor was Roy Cohn?  Roy Cohn!  The very same Roy Cohn who earned his doctorate in demagoguery at the right hand of Joe McCarthy himself. The Roy Cohn whose bullying, cheating, dissembling  once befuddled the entire army hierarchy. The Roy Cohn whose empty legal offices in New York still reek of the graft, calumny and slime that got him disbarred.  That Roy Cohn, mentor to our so-called president.

The investigative journalist David Cay Johnston has adroitly assembled the record of how Orange Boy built his fortune through alliances with mobsters, deals with drug kingpins, platoons of labor goons, litigation, double crosses, contract reneging, cheating of little guys like laborers and small contractors.  He’s using the same methods now on an international scale.

Contrarian pundits would have us believe that the Russia investigations were hysteria rooted in old Cold War propaganda, warmed over for new times.  That is simply false.

This is serious concern about backdoor mortgaging of the presidency to a foreign power — any  foreign power — for the personal profit of the Trumps, at the risk of the national interest and security of the United States.

That smells like treason.  Of course it has to be properly investigated. By an independent prosecutor with broad powers to subpoena and require testimony under oath. Now.