I reprint the entire definition, because I cannot see any sense of evil enumerated that Trump DOESN’T fall into.

“Morally bad or wrong; wicked: an evil tyrant“? Check

“Causing ruin, injury, or pain; harmful: the evil effects of a poor diet“? Check

“That which causes harm, misfortune, or destruction: a leader’s power to do both good and evil“? Check

And so forth.

Each morning I turn on the news summary to see what the latest abomination is, and come away nauseated. There is no hyperbole in that. Sadly, unless one keeps a catalog of vile acts on hand, it is almost impossible to keep track of the bewildering array of vicious, nasty, rude and evil actions taken by this maladministration in the name of Donald the Unhinged.

How about I try for JUST today?

OK: Gina Haspel confirmed, thanks to six quisling Democrats and the betrayal of Lindsey Graham of his best friend, John McCain, all choosing to look the other way on torture and the INTENTIONAL DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE in the light of a congressional mandate that it be preserved.

Glad to have a person with THAT moral fiber running the CIA. Let’s get Bernie Madoff out of prison to run the Securities and Exchange Commission, shall we?

Oh, and this “feminist” BS: “She will be the first woman to serve as director. When Haspel joined the CIA in 1985, there were fewer opportunities for women to live the life of a cloak-and-dagger operative that she found alluring….” (From the Washington Post article on it.)

Seriously? The betwixt-leg plumbing is what’s important here? Yep. I have spent my entire adult life listening to the litany of “first woman” to do whatever. It isn’t actually a meaningful observation.*

(Were I a woman and read the preceding, I would be profoundly disturbed and sickened. But in our headlong dash to prove how “equal” we are, we spend much more time touting up phony “victories” than in actually pursuing equality. Consider the notion of equal pay. But then I’m a white male and know nothing, except, perhaps, why so many of my less-enlightened brethren feel themselves discounted and want to fight back with White Supremacist groups and votes for evil jerks like Pence and Trump.)

From the same article:

“It is not my way to trumpet the fact that I am a woman up for the top job, but I would be remiss in not remarking on it — not least because of the outpouring of support from young women at CIA who consider it a good sign for their own prospects,” Haspel told senators at her confirmation hearing last week.

Now, while we celebrate this “first” consider that Trump is fixing to announce a tailored “withholding” of funds to any clinic which ALSO offers abortions OR abortion REFERRALS.

Hooray for women! What a field day for feminism!

(I am being sarcastic, please note, for the more literalist readers.)

No: this is evil. Evil in appointing the torturer and evidence destroyer; and evil and the unilateral overturning of American consensus on a woman’s right to choose and doing everything in his power to keep women from their constitutional right to choose what THEY want to do with their bodies. In the modern GOP, women are considered little more than brood mares, and nobody ought to be astonished to understand that. It is a fact. An EVIL fact, but a fact nonetheless.

GOPs do not LIKE facts and make up their own facts, and Trump merely heads the parade.

Again: refer to the definition above and understand that this is … evil.

What OTHER evil today?

The Trump Maladinistration is going after the FBI, the Muller probe and the Russia investigation by trotting out a new, ginned-up conspiracy theory that somehow “Obama’s FBI” (a mythological creature, like a minotaur that is both evil AND imaginary) placed a mole in the Trump campaign and was “spying” on Donald the Unhinged.

The fact that the entirety of the Republican party (with exceptions so rare as to be all but unworthy of mention) is now so concerned with defending Der Trumpenfuhrer that the  notion of a treasonous collusion with Russia (now confirmed beyond reasonable doubt) DOES NOT MATTER.

These “patriots” colluding after the fact, and aiding and abetting treason after the fact is as absurd as it is evil, but I don’t write the facts. I just report them. The word you’re grasping for is … evil.

Now, remember: I grew up Republican, switched to Democrat and was raised and trained to be skeptical of both parties and of policy on a gear-level. But there is no “partisanship” here. There is only the abrogation of norms, and the flouting of the traditions of our republic that TRANSCEND party and partisanship.

Collusion with Putin is wrong, no matter who was doing it. Had it been Mother Theresa running for president, it STILL would have been wrong AND evil.

Sorry, Charlie. Starkist isn’t looking for tunas with good taste. Starkist is looking for tunas devoid of moral scruples to enact an agenda of resentment, revenge, misogyny and misanthropy.

Starkist (in this jingle) scored bigtime.

The “Freedom” Caucus threw the GOP House leadership under the bus, killing a hateful “Farm bill” that featured greater restrictions on SNAP (the program formerly known as Food Stamps) with work requirements, etc. that there is ZERO evidence works to move people out of poverty.

Now, ironically THAT evil was killed by the Ayn Rand wing because they wanted a vote on IMMIGRATION. (The Republican buzz word for hating native Spanish speakers that is mindlessly reported in the press without ever noting that the MAJORITY of “illegal immigrants” are NOT Spanish speakers and are often lily-white Europeans. We call it dog-whistle racism and it is, in fact, EVIL.) So, the evil of the selfish “trumps” the evil of the resentful in a weird outcome where two wrongs actually preserved a right. For now.

Farm bills have ALWAYS been bipartisan, but Paul Ryan wants his “stomp the poor” partisan bill as a legacy to prove that nobody hated or resented the poor of America more than Paul “I’m a good Catholic” Ryan who still, by his actions, worships at the altar of Ayn Rand. How’s THAT for irony?

Because, RESENTMENT of the poor is the issue. Not keeping the ever-dwindling middle class from falling INTO it.

And that is evil. Even to the “Christians” who seemingly support Donald the Unhinged with all the fervor of their “godly” souls. You know, like Franklin Graham, who, last week, DEFENDED Donald the Unhinged blatant and squalid adulteries as “not his business” after almost making a career of attacking Bill Clinton for HIS adultery.

There’s a word for that. Hmm. What is it? Oh! I know!

Evil.

If you’re a Black man, you don’t actually get to be president. You can hold the office, but Donald the Unhinged can jump in and hijack the “birther” movement and ride it to the White House. Mitch McConnell can withhold judicial appointments all the way to the Supreme Court to appoint federal judges to the bench for LIFE who, in one infamous case, didn’t know anything about rules of evidence, and had never even tried a CASE! (Fortunately, that was an evil too far even for some Republicans and the nomination was withdrawn.

What’s the word for that?

Right: evil.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruett takes a first-class airline ticket junket to Morocco with his “security team” –rationalizing the need for his mafiosia-style protection that he’s in ‘danger’ — and, having zero business in Morocco (save to acquire for his landlord’s husband a liquified natural gas contract) and sticks the taxpayers with the six figure bill.

Zero accountability. One hundred percent evil.

If you’re a Native American, lip service can be paid to “genocide” and certainly to the shameful history of US government relations with Indian tribes, but, if there’s oil to be raped from the ground, you CAN’T have a national monument preserving your cultural sites, designed with your input.  Because … MONEY.

And that’s evil too. (Bears Ears National Monument, all but castrated by Trump and land rape artist Zinke, another exponent of evil in Trumpland, selling off public lands at fire sale prices. Luckily, we still have the federal judiciary to uphold the laws and … oh wait. See Mitch’s Revenge on America, above.)

The problem that the Democrats face in the fall is that they won’t exhaustively enumerate ALL the evils done by this maladministration, and the Pavlovian conditioned that form the bulk of the modern GOP base will pretend that all is well, just as they did during the entire blighted GW Bush Maladministration and War Crime Festival, a/k/a “The Festival of Mendacity.”

The FOM logo

There IS no policy to debate here. There is only the steady and voluminous erosion of American norms and of the institutions that BOTH parties used to adhere to as bulwarks of our democracy and our freedom.

A freedom more now given lip service to than a freedom allowed by the Republican majorities in the congress and legislatures throughout the land. Authoritarian and high-handed measures protecting untrammeled greed (“pro-business” in the Orwellian coinage) and the destruction of clean water, clean air and clean lands that Mr. Pruett (mentioned earlier in Morocco) is almost gleefully enabling, rolling back every protection that he can find to roll back.

In a world in which fossil fuels are no longer viable, the entire philosophy of the Trumpian trampling is seen though the lens of Big Oil. Which is not only evil, but insane, to boot.

I haven’t had time to go into the Foreign Policy magazine report that Michael Cohen met with the Qataris days before the FBI raid on his quarters, probably in furtherance of what increasingly looks like a mafioso-esque shakedown of institutions and governments for pay-to-pay access to Donald the Unhinged. This dovetails with the perception that Qatar’s position in US foreign policy seems entirely dependent on Qatar’s willingness to bail out Jared Kushner’s troubled 666 Fifth Avenue skyscraper.

This is, allegedly, evil.

See? In just one day’s news I am overwhelmed by the tsunami of male bovine fecal matter hitting the rotating blades. Now, multiply that by the four hundred plus daze [sic] of this maladministration and one gets the vaguest inkling of just how bad this is.

In the space of a month, Donald the Unhinged has severely crippled the United States’ ability to act as an honest broker in any Israeli/Palestinian peace, destroying a tradition going back at least to Jimmy Carter and the Camp David Accords.

And our withdrawal from the Iran “deal” –in that same month — has harmed us far worse than Iran with NOTHING to show for it, save that Europe increasingly distrusts us and the entire post WWII alliances that have maintained the peace since WWII are coming unraveled — DIRECTLY due to the selfish and short-sighted idiocy of  Donald the Unhinged.

And Turkey is all but set to withdraw from NATO and ally with Putin. Good going Donnie.

And GOPs, ever conditioned to follow “the man on the horse” go along, even when Donald the Unhinged’s policies are in direct contradiction to Republican verities held for years and mindlessly defended on hate radio with almost rabid fixation.

Der Trumpenfuhrer says the Iraq Invasion was wrong? OK. We roll over and play dead.

That is not “principled” of course. It is merely evil.

And yet, even when the Resident of the White House lies continuously, reflexively, and, seemingly, in a majority of cases, we are loath to characterize his mindless and endless mendacities as “lies.”

And certainly not as “evil.”

Which I, frankly, have to point out is a form of collaboration.

And that’s evil, too.

If he existed, Satan would tell you that he’s never had a more fertile field nor a more untrammeled existence.

So, with no brightness to contemplate, we can at least vicariously feel good for him.

It’s not much but right now, it’s all we’ve got.

Or, as Andrew Sullivan notes in New York Magazine:

 In one respect, it seems to me, the presidency of Donald Trump has been remarkably successful.  In 17 months, he has effectively erased Barack Obama’s two-term legacy.

Don’t bother noticing that what he’s done is to erase the mandate of the American electorate in two presidential elections, which is something that has never happened before, and which takes us one step closer to civil war.

American dead at Antietam.

Courage.

Cross-posted from his vorpal sword