Donald Jong Trump is NOT a Christian, let’s get that straight. If, “by their fruits ye shall know them” is accurate, then the fruit of Trump has been naught but meadow muffins, steaming cow pies of selfishness, narcissism and poorly masked sadism.
I suppose that it is telling that I’m far more pissed off that Trump has decided to destroy the credibility of the American word (with abrogating the multi-lateral Iran agreement) and to directly attack 62 million American women by pretending that “Christian” morals (although the administration will argue ALL morals, we know it’s the “Pro-Life” fascists he’s placating) than that I am angered by the GOP’s direct attack on my life, by attempting to destroy Obamacare — the only reason that I did NOT die in hospital last year, but actually got the treatment and drugs that have kept me alive and even returned my life to a livable, tolerable degree of health.
From November 15, 2016
It’s a character failing I have: I tend to become far more exercised at the injustices of others than to threats to my person. Why? Dunno. But it’s a fact, jack, going back to my taking on of my Third Grade teacher for making a speech accusing the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts of violating the Green River Law. (My parents and the principal agreed that I was right, but told me not to tell anyone, inaugurating my career as a political troublemaker. She retired at the end of that year, sparing the second graders of Nellie Iles her rather vicious ministrations thereafter.)
So, take my last essay, and add a zero to the final score. Listen to the stamp of tiny jackboots:
Watch: Sarah Huckabee Sanders callously laughs at women who will lose their birth control
Kaili Joy Gray / ShareblueFor the Trump administration to block women’s access to birth control is bad enough. To laugh at those women is exceptionally cruel. Donald Trump has utterly failed to deliver on his threat to repeal Obamacare and harm the millions of men and women who have health care because of it. So he’s going to punish women directly instead.
On Friday, his administration announced that he is rolling back the critical provision that covers birth control — a cruel, unnecessary, and costly decision that will affect 62 million women and their families…
Nothing “Christian” in that. But the modern “Christian” evangelicals aren’t actually Christians either, so it all works out: cruelty masked as religion; misogyny masked as “Christianity.”
The Utter Incompetent exercising imperial powers manages, day by day, to make the argument that Oligarchy, Kleptocracy and Kakistocracy is the inevitable result if we do not step up to the plate and demand it stop, now. We need fair elections, qualified candidates and rational debate of the issues.
Instead, we have rigged elections, clownish candidates and Goebbelsian GOPaganda controlling the political stage. We are faced with the Hobson’s Choice of Empire or Revolt. And the Orwellian fillip that it’s all in the name of “freedom.” “Freedom” to openly carry battlefield weapons in cities (even Wyatt Earp didn’t allow that in either Dodge City, Kansas or Tombstone, Arizona) and “freedom” to oppress and deny basic humane services to women in the name of a “religion of love.”
Even Al Qaeda isn’t THAT hypocritical.
But this latest attack on women, shrouded in the burial cowl of authoritarian “religion” is just that: an attack on women. Trump is a misogynist and a racist and all the spin that Sarah “Trailer Park Meth Dealer” Huckabee wants to put on it won’t change either of those facts. By their fruits ye shall know them.
h/t Gustave Doré
It is passing strange that the so-called “voices of decency” have been entirely silent on the Reicht while Trumpf jackboots his way through any program designed to lessen death and destruction, from his throwing gasoline on the fire of the North Korean nuclear standoff to his decision to gut healthcare, one dead child at a time. Now, don’t tell me this is “pro-life” brethren and cistern: the CHIP program insuring millions of CHILDREN was quietly allowed to expire, more because the GOP and Trump hate Hillary Clinton than because they openly want to watch poor children die. Although, I believe, it is a close call.
Take the totality: the GOPs mindlessly follow a man who is as antithetical to their values as he is to Democratic values, because they want to pass their agenda and he MIGHT sign the bills they put(in) on his desk. They defend and embrace every policy, no matter whether they believe in it before.
Of the Germans, it used to be said that they would always follow the “man on a horse.” The Republicans are the same, evidently, except that they only need the horse’s ass.
So much for ‘morality’ and ‘values’ or, to quote Harlan Ellison: you lie down with pigs, you get up smelling like garbage.
And the odor of the ordure that infests the GOP side of the aisle is overwhelming: a staggering offal stench of hypocrisy and, yes, evil, gussied up with phony catch phrases and “moral” arguments that don’t even really try to convince, anymore, but which are repeated ritually, as though they might stanch the stench.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The modern GOP is nothing less than a death cult, worshipping Thanatos and rejecting life at every turn — save for the theoretical lives of imaginary babies. But get them out of the womb and into actuality? Let CHIP die and, while you’re at it, let the “C” in CHIP* die, as well.
[* Children’s Health Insurance Program, CHIP, formerly the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, SCHIP.]
Beware of the false kumbaya, my friends.
As horrific and polarized as it has become, our media attempts to flood us with soporifics. After the massacre in Las Vegas, the news is equal parts breathless “who was the shooter?” and the truly horrific (parallel but not in collusion) warm and fuzzy hugs at the slaughterhouse.
This INTENTIONAL attack on women (hiding behind the false cloak of faux-piety) and children; the degradation and destruction of America’s good word and our credibility in the world (repudiating the Iran agreement, after flushing the Trans Pacific Partnership down the toilet, and throwing NAFTA under the bus); the rejection of life-saving science in favor of life-threatening superstition*; the utter rejection of the Rule of Law (but embracing the Rule of Lawlessness, the increasing polarization of our politics WITHOUT a middle whatsoever; and the increasingly GEOGRAPHIC — urban/rural — polarization is NOT leading us down the primrose path to reconciliation and hugs.
[* I do not equate religion with superstition, but rejection of science in favor of the LITERAL interpretation of a creation myth characterized by a talking snake is SUPERSTITION and has nothing to do with actual religious practice with any cult, save for the Thugee and Daesh.]
The simple fact that the GOP has grabbed TWO presidential elections this century with INCREASING minorities of the vote; that they took both houses of congress in 2016 with a minority of the votes cast, that they unethically installed a Supreme Court Justice who virtually guarantees that the gerrymandering case will go nowhere: all of these are monumental failures of the ballot box, with increasingly dire consequences. And it is the very soul of the republic (or, at present, oligarchy) that is at stake. These are not minor quibbles. This is not some policy issue debated hyperbolically; rather, it is ALL policy issues debated in an understated manner.
The enormity of the collective affront to our very Americanism is staggering. Worse, it is the effrontery* of buffoons — buffrontery.
[* effrontery
(?’fr?nt?r?)
n, pl -ies
I fear that the dominoes are too large and too far along in their falling. And I offer this word to the wise: look down the row and you can see the inevitable next station. Whether the train of history will make its stop and CONTINUE down the tracks, or whether the tracks end there, is anybody’s guess.
But we already have an intellectual toddler in immediate and unstoppable control of America’s Nuclear Arsenal™ so please don’t tell me to be calm. I will merely presume that you’ve been successfully sedated by the crowd who can’t report the “F”-word in Tillerson’s characterization of Trump as a “f*cking moron,” who can’t show us any carnage whatsoever, but keep shoving “happy ending” or “bittersweet human stories of struggle and survival” hug and fuzzy bunny stories down our throats like a force-feeding at Disneyland®.
The level of current political discourse
“It’s Friday, and you know what Friday is, boys and girls?”
“FORCE FEEDING FRIDAY, MICKEY!”
“That’s right, boys and girls. Now, hold his jaws open, Goofy.”
“Ahyuck, I got ’em, Mickey.”
“Give him the Twinkies® Donald!”
“(Unintelligible)”
“That’s it! Good work team!”
and so forth.
Beware the kumbaya. When you dismantle civilization, civility and civil order, the next thing that happens is called, ironically, civil war.
Beware the kumbaya my child:
The voice that soothes, the head that talks;
Beware the syrup of hate radio shows;
as well the High-Def idiot box.
We are NOT headed away from it. Do you get that? When a “normal” American citizen can fire virtual machine guns into a crowd for ten minutes, we are NOT heading away from it.
In fact, we are accelerating towards it. And, sadly, 2020’s Man of the Year will more likely be “Blood and Fire” than “Hugs, Rainbows and Hot Chocolate.”
I keep warning about this, and my track record is pretty good. A word to the wise is sufficient, but ten thousand to the unwise is a month’s worth of blogging.
Just saying.
Courage.*
* Yes, this is also ‘Kumbaya for Ostriches part ii’ [part i is here]
Cross-posted from his vorpal sword.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.