State of the Union -- According to TRUMP

“But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord…” Hunter S. Thompson, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas

 -Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Ladies and gentlemen, honored guests, and fellow citizens, I stand before you as the greatest president in American history, the most popular, most loved, and most successful. Everybody is saying that my first year in office has been one long winning streak for our great country. The stock market is skyrocketing, because of me; our tax code finally makes sense, because of me; ISIS is defeated, because of me; we are taking control of our borders, because of me; violent crime is way down and our inner cities are being reborn, because of me; the middle-class is growing by leaps and bounds, because of me. In one year I have accomplished more than my predecessor did in eight years. Just goes to show what can happen when a real American, who also happens to be a genius -- a very stable genius -- occupies the White House.

-Our ratings are great, we’re breaking records every day. You may have seen that Apple will soon invest $550 billion in manufacturing plants here in America, which means hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of great jobs for American workers. Think of it, very soon, American workers in Wichita and Youngstown and Camden will be assembling iPhones for the world. This is phenomenal, and something my predecessor could never have accomplished because he never understood the art of the deal.

-America is winning again, and winning large, like my favorite NFL team, the New England Patriots. In my first year in office I met with more world leaders and logged more air miles than any president in modern history, and wherever I traveled, people lined the streets, waving, showing their love for me and my brilliant administration and our great country. The people of Saudi Arabia love me, the jews of Israel love me like one of their own, and the inhabitants of Puerto Rico view me as their savior. We are winning across the globe because I put America first like no previous president has done. Who else but me could toss rolls of paper towels to the people like I did when I personally organized the recovery and rebuilding of Puerto Rico, which, I might add, has been a tremendous success. Puerto Rico is back on track.

-Because I always put America first, I pulled our country out of the Paris Climate deal, a terrible deal, and look what happened: our economy is booming, blacks are doing better than ever, women are doing better than ever. All because of me. And while we’re on the subject of women, people are always saying how much I respect women, which is true, nobody respects women more than I do. This is why ten days or so ago women gathered in the streets by the tens of thousands all across the country to march in support of my administration. The fake news media reported that women were protesting, but we know the truth, don’t we?

-A lot of people are saying that my administration is the most transparent and ethical in American history, filled with individuals of the highest personal qualities, very fine people, who would never place private gain above public good. Only I could drain the Washington swamp in a year. Another promise kept. My administration is a well-oiled machine the likes of which has never been seen before. This is why I have passed more legislation in my first year than any other president.

-On the international front the United States has never been more respected. Iran and North Korea understand that I will not tolerate any threat to our great country. My generals, how I love my generals, are prepared to defend America from any foreign threat, and our fighting men and women are the best the world has ever seen. A lot of people are saying that the morale and spirit of our military forces has improved since I became commander-in-chief. I am not afraid to use our military power, including nuclear weapons. Every one of our enemies should know this. I hope Little Rocket Man is listening very carefully.

-Never has our great country been more united. We are one nation under a benevolent God who protects and keeps us safe from the evil in this world. Only I could make this happen, as only I know how to make America great again. All you need to know is that as long as I’m president, we will keep winning. Thank you, and may God Bless the United States of America, and me, of course, your very own dear leader.

Year of the Jackass

“I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed.” Donald J. Trump, speaking to the press on January 14, 2018.

There’s no point in deconstructing the many racist comments that Donald J. Trump has issued in his first, calamitous year in the White House. From the Muslim ban to the idiotic border Wall, the man is a racist and white supremacist, end of tale. The shocking thing to me is the craven reluctance of Republicans to exercise their constitutional duty and hold Trump accountable. As long as Trump is useful to Republicans, they will continue to shield him from the criticism and censure he deserves. This is a lesson in cowardice and hypocrisy that should not be lost on the public. As Noam Chomsky often says, the GOP is no longer a political party -- it’s a quasi-criminal organization, a gang of looters.

The news moves fast these days and trying to keep pace with Trump’s lame tweets and inane pronouncements (most of which are flat out lies) is futile, and the corporate media offers little help because nearly all reporting is devoid of context, history, and perspective; one can’t honestly learn much of use about this country or the world from the mainstream corporate media. As Chris Hedges frequently points out, the corporate talking heads are not journalists as much as they are courtiers, sucking up to the powerful in exchange for access; they support the ruling class rather than oppose it. It’s a sad state of affairs that has been building for many years, ever since media ownership consolidated into fewer and fewer hands -- all of them corporate -- and the corporate masters demanded that news divisions turn a profit. This trend moved in lockstep with the neoliberal notion that every facet of American life could be commodified, sold, traded, or squeezed for profit: health care, education, freeways, prisons, housing, and so on.

A strain of bad juju is loose in our land, felt most acutely by people of character, soul and heart, traits missing from the Republican mafia and the Trump White House. Destructive cruelty, mendacity, ignorance, and arrogance rule. Who but Donald J. Trump could make George W. Bush look, not only competent, but eloquent and coherent by comparison? It’s still very difficult to accept that the President of the United States is an ignorant, lazy, asshole with the mental capacity and attention span of a fourth grader. Of course there have been terrible presidents in American history -- Trump isn’t the first ignorant racist to hold the office, but he is the stupidest man to reign in the nuclear age, and his denial of the reality of climate change borders on the criminal.

If Hunter S. Thompson were alive to witness America’s descent to bonafide banana republic, he would surely load a pistol and blow his brains out. The first year of Trump has been, as HST might say, a King Hell year of complete degradation. It didn’t take Trump long to drop his pants and piss all over the tomb of the American Dream.

Trump’s erratic behavior and sheer incompetence are not laughing matters, as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently pointed out: “The nation has never faced a situation like this: It is unwise to take literally or seriously anything the president and his official spokesmen say. An administration with no credibility cannot possibly lead.” Bingo.

Hold on world, year two of Trump is about to launch. I guarantee you it will be the Year of the Jackass.

Letter from a Shithole Country

“A rotten system must be treated from within.” John LeCarre, A Legacy of Spies

What’s it going to take, America?

How much more of this carnival sideshow that is Trump and the Kleptocrats can we stomach? It has been blatantly obvious for some time now that Donald Trump has no love for anyone not of light pigment. Trump doesn’t just dog whistle, he plays an entire orchestra and the determined faithful who buy what the conman’s selling sway and swoon. The Trump Show’s not working for them on a material level, and never will because Trump is just using them as props in his show, but the faithful never fail to respond when he stokes their grievance and fear. Revving them up, yanking their chain about murderous Muslims and uppity blacks and dangerous Salvadorans, attributing their social and economic decline to brown people from the other side of the border, gets Trump off better than a two-handed handjob.

Donald Trump is a lazy, moronic, idiotic man of meager intelligence who is also an unrepentant racist and white supremacist. This was clear even before his recent comments about people who emigrate to the US from “shithole countries,” comments that have offended most of the civilized world. Deep down, way down, even Trump’s most ardent supporters must at least recognize that Trump is unhinged and dangerous. More aware citizens know that Trump must be chased, hounded and driven from office, not only for the aforementioned reasons, but because every day he remains in the White House he diminishes and embarasses our country.

I can’t imagine that any self-respecting Norwegian would abandon his or her country, a working democratic-socialist nation with a wide social safety net, in order to emigrate to the United States, a cruel, mean, murderous, racist, and grotesquely unequal country.

But what we must understand if we are going to survive, as a country, and quite possibly as a species, is this: even if Trump were to leave office -- through impeachment for money laundering, profiting from his office, or by dropping dead of heart failure after a lunch of Big Macs and fries -- the US will remain a nation in decline and decay because the current power structure will still be firmly in place, run by and for corporate interests and wealthy individuals; bought politicians will still be bought, pay to play will still be the unspoken law of the land; the War on Terror will go on because it’s a dependable revenue stream for the war industry and because there’s no domestic price to pay for the politicians who keep authorizing more and more money for the Pentagon. Yes, absent Trump the tone and tenor and language coming from Washington would undoubtedly change, but the same neoliberal (pursued by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades), pro-market, pro-monopoly, pro-corporate policies will still be in place, just as they were under Barack Obama and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Same basic policies,less obnoxious packaging.

Our country, far from perfect, laden with contradictions, is thrashing around like an epileptic, foaming at the mouth, unable to understand that what’s tearing us to shreds is unregulated capitalism, imperialism, and resurgent racism; we grasp at fantasy saviors like Donald Trump and Oprah Winfrey; working people fight one another while the oligarchs strip the nation bare, blaming the poor, the infirm, the elderly, Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorans, Iran and North Korea, for our ills when in fact we are the agents of our own demise. Too passive, too gullible, too willing to believe in myths and Hollywood, too easily manipulated by corporate propaganda.

The only way to retake our country is to break the oligarchy that runs it, not an easy task. Opposing Trump isn’t enough -- the Orange Menace is only a symptom of a malignant ailment. Forget the Democratic Party -- it’s too compromised and inept to be of any help. Even after a year of Trump’s policy mayhem and gross incompetence, the Democrats have yet to advance a coherent, compelling, alternative vision for the nation; they are waiting for Robert Mueller to bail them out, another fantasy that is doomed to fail.

A Temple of Thieves

“Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of those early Americans who started four major social justice movements in the nineteenth century -- the abolitionist, women’s suffrage, trade union and farmer -- populist progressive revolts. It started with the perception of suffering, humiliation, and deprivation. Then it moved to a realization that such abuses and exclusions were not ordained.” Ralph Nader

I suppose that throughout American history men, and it has predominantly been men, have entered politics with one eye on public service and the other on the advantages public office can bestow on them personally. For most of my lifetime, politicians cloaked their personal greed under the guise of serving their constituents back home, or by invoking that useful and empty catch-all, “the American people.”

Today it seems a seat in congress or the senate is viewed as a golden ticket to the spigot where the money comes out. The corruption in Washington D.C. is now so endemic that pandering to the folks back home isn’t really necessary, and there’s almost no reason for an elected official to hide the fact that he is voting on legislation that will benefit him personally. All that pablum about propriety and the sanctity of public service, serving the sacred Constitution, is a quaint remnant of the past. Legal plunder by men wearing suits, silk ties, cufflinks, and an American flag lapel pin is now accepted as the way business is done. Utterly immoral, yes, but what is mere morality when compared to money and influence?

Secure that money seat in the house or senate and you can set yourself up for years to come. Sure, pandering to donors is a pain in the ass, and asking people for campaign contributions becomes tedious after a while, but you get used to it and it gets easier, and once you’ve delivered the goods for the poultry industry or Wall Street or Big Pharma, they seek you out, shove checks across your desk or send you on all expense paid jaunts to Bermuda or Thailand. You become accustomed to these perks, begin to expect them, and cling to your office with bulldog tenacity. Soon enough you realize how little the folks back home matter -- it’s the campaign donors who matter, them you must satisfy, their calls you must take and their wants you must tend to; they call the tune, pay the band, you do the dance with a vapid smile on your face, waiting for the day when you can slide step from public office to corporate boardroom, think tank, or lobbying outfit. Then the real dough rolls in, a daily jackpot.

Sometimes I marvel at the small size of the minority who own and rule America. Several hundred people call the shots for tens of millions. The minority control the structures of power, enhance the impediments to real democracy, and feed the public a steady diet of superficial “news” devoid of context. It’s as if we have returned to 18th century Europe, when aristocrats gorged themselves while peasants starved or froze to death.

Remember what John F. Kennedy said many years ago, on that bitterly cold day when he was inaugurated, ask not what your country can do for you...Trump and his mafia have turned this noble idea on its head; fuck the citizens and raid the treasury, government is good to the extent it enriches the people in power.

The temple is jammed with thieves, and Jesus is nowhere to be found.