Reading this comic, one has to be amazed at how absolutely insane our reality has become. I’m beginning to think that impeachment won’t be enough, that maybe it is time to bring back tarring and feathering (in this case, perhaps using Sparky’s penguin feathers). The future, if we are lucky enough to have one, will probably look back at this time with horror and disgust.
The blog Margaret and Helen has been quiet since before Thanksgiving. But Helen Philpot finally broke the silence with an epic rant, titled:
Philpot gloriously lambasts Twitter, Roger Stone (saying “given enough time I can probably prove that while not every asshole is on Twitter, they are all on a Republican payroll somewhere”), the Washington Post, Fox News (“the only place with more assholes full of shit than Twitter”), the NRA, and (of course) the “Cheeto in Chief”, AKA “the Great Orange Yeast Infection”.
Go read it. Just one warning: Philpot actually uses the F-word (for the first time ever).
Politicians who come from the business world like to claim that they are going to “run the government like a business”. There are two problems with this: The first is that running a business is nothing like running a government. If you doubt this, just do a search for “why government should not be run like a business” and read the resulting articles from places like Forbes and the Harvard Business Review.
The second problem is that most businesses (especially ones that are large) are actually not particularly well run. Would you want a government that is run like the largest US industries, like automotive (GM), cable TV (Comcast), big oil (Exxon Mobile, Halliburton), big banks (Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Bank of America), or US airlines (United, Delta, Spirit)?
And when we do elect a businessman like Donald Trump, just look at the things that happen. We had a sobering example of that this week, in an article from the LA Times.
Two years ago, Donald Trump signed orders to hire 15,000 new immigration and customs officers, and border agents. A year later, things were not going well, so Customs and Border Protection (CBP) did something that many large business often do, they outsourced the job to a large management consulting firm, Accenture Federal Services. Accenture was paid $60.7 million to recruit, vet, and hire 7,500 people for CBP. A government report says that “Accenture claimed it would have the capability and capacity to perform all steps of the hiring process within 90 days of awarding the contract.” But more than a year later, they have hired a grand total of 33. Just 33. Period. That’s over $1.8 million per person.
The problem seems to be that nobody wants the job. CBP currently has more than 3,000 job vacancies, and most years they lose more employees than they are able to replace.
What’s the next step? Doing what American businesses do every time they need people for a job that no American wants? Which would be to hire a bunch of illegal Mexican immigrants to guard the southern border. After all, that’s what Trump himself does.
And speaking of illegals:
It would appear that we aren’t in a much different situation than we were before with respect to the shutdown. Donald Trump has just delayed the inevitable. He is still threatening to shut down the government again, and the Democrats have absolutely no need to cave (like he just did). He could call a national state of emergency, but that would almost certainly be blocked in the courts (at least for months or even years).
Kate McKinnon (as Wilbur Ross) and Steve Martin (as Roger Stone!) are both absolutely hilarious in last night’s SNL cold open:
Today, on the 35th day of the shutdown, Donald Trump announced a temporary reopening of the government for three weeks. And no, he didn’t get any funding for the wall. He totally caved.
Why? Could it be because he already lost a handful of Republican Senators, who yesterday voted against Trump as a warning shot that if the shutdown went on much longer Trump would find himself humiliated by a veto-proof bipartisan budget bill being passed by Congress? Well, probably not.
Was it because his base started crumbling, once Trump’s temper tantrum started affecting their wallets?
Or because this is actually hurting the economy and reducing the security of the US more than his silly imagined illegal alien invasion.
Or because he wasn’t going to be able to make his campaign speech State of the Union address? You know how much he loves pomp and pageantry.
Well, it is probably more likely because of something that happened this morning to business people trying to fly:
Pressure to end the shutdown increased on Friday after air traffic was delayed at two New York-area airports — LaGuardia and Newark — in addition to Philadelphia International Airport due to staffing issues at a Federal Aviation Administration regional air traffic control center.
I’m willing to bet that even though he said this was temporary, and threatened to declare a national emergency if he doesn’t get money for his stupid wall, there is no way he would dare to shut down the government again in three weeks. Mark my words.
Trump loves to claim he’s tough, but he always gives in.
On Friday there was an Indigenous Peoples March at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. A group of teenagers surrounded a Native American elder. What happened was captured on video, and you can see one teen blocking the man’s path, and other teens laughing, jumping around, and mocking the marchers.
But here’s the really ironic part. The teens were wearing red Make America Great Again hats, and were saying “Build the wall”.
Do any of those young idiots understand that a wall would be completely useless to keep out Native Americans? Maybe not, because they don’t seem to understand that a wall would not keep out actual illegal immigrants either.
Welcome to the Idiocracy.
We created a political system where politicians are routinely bought and paid for. And it doesn’t even take that much money, so anyone can own a politician at bargain prices. Are we surprised if the rest of the world wants to get in on such a good deal? Well, at least it’s a good deal for the buyers.
And in an era of multinational corporations, where even our traditional powerful corporations (like car manufacturers and oil companies) are often owned by foreign interests, how can we even tell who is buying whom?
Speaking of that, when is the right wing going to realize that their beloved Fox News is owned by foreigners?
An article in Wired magazine points out that, while the idea that Donald Trump has been compromised by the Russian government and is purposely acting as their agent is horrible enough, the alternative is even worse.
The pattern of his pro-Putin, pro-Russia, anti-FBI, anti-intelligence community actions are so one-sided, and the lies and obfuscation surrounding every single Russian meeting and conversation are so consistent, that if this president isn’t actually hiding a massive conspiracy, it means the alternative is worse: America elected a chief executive so oblivious to geopolitics, so self-centered and personally insecure, so naturally predisposed to undermine democratic institutions and coddle authoritarians, and so terrible a manager and leader, that he cluelessly surrounded himself with crooks, grifters, and agents of foreign powers, compromising the national security of the US government and undermining 75 years of critical foreign alliances, just to satiate his own ego.
In short, we’ve reached a point in the Mueller probe where there are only two scenarios left: Either the president is compromised by the Russian government and has been working covertly to cooperate with Vladimir Putin after Russia helped win him the 2016 election—or Trump will go down in history as the world’s most famous “useful idiot,” as communists used to call those who could be co-opted to the cause without realizing it.
Not just elected him, but after two years of insanity more than 40% of the American people still approve of him. Nobody will ever trust the USA again. Leader of the free world? We’ll be lucky if the rest of the world ever takes us seriously again.
A complementary article in USA Today comes to the conclusion that Russia must have compromising information on Trump. They believe this kompromat is most likely “the possible entanglement of Trump’s finances in New York with the Russian mob.”
The same article calls out “the titanic hypocrisy of the Republican Party and of Trump’s apologists in the conservative media.”
If President Barack Obama had shredded his notes of a meeting with the Iranian president, or if Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager were sitting in jail for lying about meeting a Chinese business associate — and alleged intelligence officer — to share polling data, that alone would have been enough for the GOP to impeach everyone from the president to the White House chef.
Welcome to the wacky and not-so-wonderful world of Donald Trump, where everything you know is wrong, including all things that come out of the president’s mouth. Can we stand much more of this?
One of my readers posted a link to an article “What if Mueller Proves Trump Collusion and No One Cares?“. The subtitle is even more interesting, “Last week we saw evidence that Manafort shared polling data with Russians, but most Americans were looking the other way.”
The article’s point is that there is (for the first time) actual credible evidence that Donald Trump and his campaign helped the Russians throw the election. That isn’t just collusion, that’s treason. And Trump does what he always does and distracts us. As the article goes on to lament, everyone was talking about the shutdown and immigration, so the news about the actions of our own orange Manchurian Candidate got lost in the noise. We fell for it.
Today, the news is that in the middle of Republicans leaders condemning Representative Steve King for his racist remarks, Trump is sending out blatantly racist dog whistles to his base. Everyone is outraged and this new story is now dominating the news. Which is actually hilarious, because everyone already knows that Trump is a racist scumbag. Even his base, but they of course love him for it.
All I can say is that Trump’s latest shocking stunts (including shutting down the government over a wall that will not do a single thing to solve his imaginary immigration crisis) show that he must be terrified that we now have the smoking gun that can end Trump’s presidency and even send him to jail for the rest of his disgusting life. But that will happen only if we stop letting ourselves be distracted by Trump and his shenanigans and start paying attention to the real news.
Trump doesn’t care if he destroys the US and sells us out to the Russians. He doesn’t care if he destroys the Republican party (and he will succeed if the Republicans don’t wise up to him soon, although it might already be too late since the Republicans have been complicit in all of this as well). He only cares about himself and saving his miserable neck. He will keep doing outrageous things to distract us. I predict Trump will do something completely nuts tomorrow, and again the media will eat it up.
We need to focus. Because if Trump is able to distract us by doing more and more outrageous things (which fire up his base), then there is no limit to what he might do. Even start wars. Drop nuclear weapons. Or worse.
If we keep being fooled over and over by his obvious tactic, then shame on us.
We need to just laugh at him and say “there you go again.”
Here are 18 suspicious things that Donald Trump has done that make him look like a Russian asset, if not a full-blown Russian agent. Read them.
It looks like 1984 is happening, but just 35 years late. Because the slogans from the novel — War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength — have become the slogans of Donald Trump’s Republican party.
Trump tells us that in order to have peace, we — a nation created by immigrants — have to wage war against immigrants. In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, Trump said “This is a war against people that are vicious, violent people, that we have no idea who they are, where they come from.”
As for Freedom is Slavery, in his speech this week, Trump claimed that in order to protect asylum seekers who are are fleeing horrible crime in their home countries, and to protect them from assault “on the dangerous trek up through Mexico“, we have to build a wall to keep them out. Trump has also defended the use of tear gas against asylum seekers and we’ve seen families with children put in cages.
But mostly, yesterday was a banner day for Ignorance is Strength, when Trump officially admitted that Mexico isn’t going to pay for the wall, and then insisted that he never said any such thing. Of course, we have tons of evidence that Trump said exactly that, both on video and in writing. Who are you going to believe? Trump, or your own lying ears and eyes?
If that weren’t enough, the poster child for 1984 yesterday was Rudy Giuliani. I have been trying to avoid writing anything about Giuliani since he became a clown, but yesterday in an interview with The Hill, he outdid himself. Maybe he figured that he has to say crazier and more outrageous things in order to get any attention. Well it worked.
First, Giuliani said that President Trump’s legal team should be allowed to correct special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, before Congress or the American people get the chance to read it. He said that it was “a matter of fairness”, “so we can correct it if they’re wrong. They’re not God, after all. They could be wrong.”
Seriously, I am not making this up. I guess Giuliani believes that if you are powerful enough, you should be able to “correct” any criminal charges against you. After all, it’s only fair. The law is only for the little people.
Note that back when Mueller was appointed, Trump praised him and supported the investigation. Trump said:
As I have stated many times, a thorough investigation will confirm what we already know – there was no collusion between my campaign and any foreign entity. I look forward to this matter concluding quickly.
But speaking of collusion, Giuliani downplayed reports this week that Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, shared information during the presidential campaign with the Russians, which is collusion. Giuliani responded “Should he have done it? No. But there’s nothing criminal about it.”
Since he was on a roll, Giuliani also downplayed the news that Trump’s longtime personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, who was recently sentenced to 3 years in prison, is going to testify in public before the House Oversight and Reform Committee. Giuliani said “I have no concerns about Cohen at all because I can prove with very little effort that he is a total, complete and absolute liar.” Giuliani has also called Cohen an “unethical… scumbag” and added “He’s a horrible person.”
Of course, I can prove with very little effort that Giuliani is a total, complete and absolute liar, because in May 2018, before Cohen agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, Giuliani praised Cohen, saying that “The man is an honest, honorable lawyer.”
Speaking honestly, I don’t know which is worse: if Cohen is an honorable person and the things he is accusing Trump of doing are true, or if Cohen is a “total, complete and absolute liar” and a “horrible person”, and yet since 2006 he was the personal lawyer for Donald Trump and a vice president of the Trump Organization. After all, Trump told us he hires the best people.
These are the first few paragraphs of an article by conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan. You should read the whole thing.
When is the moment we can say that Trump has clearly gone over the line in erasing democratic and constitutional restraints on his personal power?
I’d say declaring a national emergency when there isn’t one to fund a project he can’t get through Congress pretty obviously qualifies. Wouldn’t you?
He couldn’t manage to get his wall funded when his own party controlled the entire government. He even turned down a bipartisan offer to build a “wall” in return for a path to citizenship for Dreamers last year, because he wanted a reduction in legal immigration as well. He petulantly refuses to accept greater funding for border control and immigration enforcement if his symbolic wall isn’t part of the package. He says he intends to use the military to do what a civilian border force is constitutionally designed for. He even intends to seize private land in order to construct the Great Wall of America, using a military version of “eminent domain.” And he says he has the power to do all this anyway and is only negotiating with congressional leaders because he feels like it. His benchmark for when an emergency begins? When Nancy Pelosi refuses to budge. Which is proof that this “emergency” is pulled out of his giant, shapeless ass.
And for all this, he has shut down much of the federal government as leverage to get his way, jeopardizing public safety and health, disrupting the lives (and now paychecks) of millions.
Somehow, it seems to be apropos to think of this situation as a Calvin and Hobbes comic (with Hobbes played by John Barron, Trump’s imaginary friend).
This comic makes a big point. Donald Trump made stopping illegal immigration the cornerstone of his presidential campaign. But he has been caught employing illegal aliens over and over again, as recently as a month ago. If people like Trump would stop hiring illegal aliens, that would be far more effective at stopping them than any stupid wall.
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