Less Sense Than A Norway Rat

“Revolutions have a habit of succeeding when the time comes for them.” Eugene V. Debs

I skipped Trump’s falsehood laden speech on the make-believe southern border crisis. I can’t stomach listening to that fool spew for one minute let alone nine or ten. Every time Trump opens his mug, especially on the subject of immigration, he demonstrates his stupidity, incompetence, and manifest unfitness for the office he holds. After Trump won the electoral college I remember pundits wondering if the office would change the man. I scoffed. The office hasn’t changed Trump one iota, but he has changed the office, trashing it like a rock star amped on Cutty Sark and cocaine trashes a hotel room. The deliberate mendacity, cruelty, corruption and ineptitude of Trump and his administration has been astonishing. Never have I seen anything close, not from Nixon or the murderous Bushes. Trump occupies a league all his own.

That the major commercial broadcast networks aired Trump’s nonsense bothers me. None of them had to grant Trump time to disseminate lies and pretend that he cares about the fate of women and children. (I’m fairly certain that were Trump adrift with his family in a leaky lifeboat he would kick the lot of them over the side to save his own skin. Trump doesn’t have a humanitarian molecule in his bloated white body; the man thrives on cruelty.) The networks would do America a huge public service if they would immediately stop covering every Trump bellow, belch, bleat, fart and Tweet. Give Trump any kind of platform and the damage is done.

For the record: no national emergency exists at the southern border.

The crisis is wholly manufactured inside Trump’s mushy brain, with some assistance from Stephen Miller and other far-right trolls. The Big Speech was the latest Trump stunt, yet another diversionary feint, no different than his ordering regular military troops to “guard” the border against a caravan of a few thousand unarmed migrants ahead of the midterm elections. Didn’t work then, won’t work now. By boasting -- on television no less -- that he would own a government shutdown unless Congress coughed up money for his wall, Trump backed his ample butt into a corner and now he can’t extricate himself without appearing weak and foolish, which is, of course, precisely what he is. Trump claimed he wouldn’t blame Democrats for the shutdown, but of course that was just another lie as he is now blaming them every chance he gets.

Some dealmaker, huh?

Donald Trump is ignorant and weak. What blows my mind is that Republicans continue to follow this meathead as he leads them toward the abyss. Can’t any of them straighten their backs and think for themselves? By now, after every lame thing Trump has done, you’d think some impulse for self-preservation would kick in. Norway rats have more sense.

Compared to climate disruption, income inequality, and undeclared wars that drag on for nearly two decades with no end in sight, the security of the southern border doesn’t keep me awake at night. What disturbs my slumber, in addition to things aforementioned, is the near certainty of another financial crash, the lack of affordable housing, education and medical care for working people, and the insidious size and reach of Amazon. America is insane, a country that no longer has even the dimmest notion of itself. Cruel, racist, war-mongering, unequal, undemocratic, this is us.

Great? Exceptional? Indispensable? Not by any measurement that really matters.

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.