Fools Give You Reasons...

 

After last week’s column detailing only a fraction of the grotesque corruption Trump and his familiars are getting away with, I heard from a sometime commenter. “The most corrupt administration in US?!!,” he wrote. “Laughable! Thank God for President Trump. No he’s not perfect but the Biden and Obama administrations absolutely corrupt and throw in the mainstream media, including the Herald and the propaganda they push against America and you got corruption, buddy. At least Trump is standing up FOR America which is why the MAJORITY voted for him.” (sic)

I requested examples of Biden or Obama’s “absolute” corruption and for evidence of Trump being “for” America as opposed to only himself. I also pointed out that whereas Trump did win the last election, the majority of votes went to others. On the assumption he can’t differentiate between news and opinion, of which the Herald provides a variety, I didn’t ask for examples of its “propaganda against America,” of which there are none.

I guess he’s still formulating an answer.

His comment helps us understand Texas Republican primary results for US Senate. Longtime senator John Cornyn, a vanilla Trumpist who tried to get a Texas highway named after him but failed to grovel enough, lost to AG Ken Paxton; a man so glaringly corrupt that his own party impeached him and the Republican senatorial campaign committee spent $100 million to defeat 

him.

After a last-minute endorsement from Trump, he crushed poor Mr. Cornyn. After which the Republican campaign committee endorsed him. A serial adulterer and liar, an unethical scammer still under indictment, and first-order election denier. Sound familiar?

Two possibilities: either Texas Republican voters limit their news to Foxoid sources and haven’t heard about Paxton’s and Trump’s transgressions, or they know and consider them reasons to vote for them. Not despite. BECAUSE. The choices are equally damning of people still supporting Trump.

In the case of my commenter, it must be a bit of both. Bombarded for years from Fox with “the Biden crime family,” he swallowed it without chewing, despite, after years of “investigations,” having been shown no evidence of it. Fobbing off Trump’s self-dealing, lying, and illegal billions in family-enrichment as “not perfect,” the only inference is he’s okay with it. Admires it, probably.

To comprehend Trump supporters’ mentation, consider the latest verbal atrocity spewed by Deputy Chief of Staff and co-president, Stephen Miller: “The American people understand the hell that we inherited and the extraordinary paradise that President Trump is building.” That’s “climate change is a hoax” level lying. “Iran was weeks away from a nuclear bomb” b.s. “Nothing less than absolute surrender” narcissistic puffery. It’s the kind of barefaced, transparent lies away with which the Trump administration gets, daily. Not only gets. Has them amplified by rightwing media, hourly.

Here’s Miller’s “inherited hell”: Post-Covid, the lowest inflation and fastest-growing economy of any nation. More job growth than any previous president, most small businesses being created. Infrastructure being rebuilt. Reversed Trump’s Covid incompetence. There’s lots more. (I’ve been urged to dispense with fact-confirming links, but readers can easily find them.)

And Trump’s “paradise”? Soaring debt; an unending, unnecessary war based on a lie; accelerating inflation, especially food and gas; depletion of our military assets; handing world leadership to China; fulfilling Putin’s dream of weakening NATO; creating – deliberately – the most political division in our country since the Civil War, right out of the fascist playbook; and, to beat a moribund horse, wallowing in the most government corruption we’ve ever seen.

I’d have listed spewing hate for anyone who doesn’t support him, punishing dissent, and turning his DOJ into his personal Stasi, but MAGAs see those as positives. Same with his nightly barrage of repetitive grievances, childish name-calling, and pathological lying. It’s unsurprising that Stephen Miller, as loathsome a person as ever slithered the earth, produced the foregoing outrage, or that he assumes people will believe it. Nor, by now, is it surprising that they do. MAGA news sources are built around the concept that if a lie is repeated often enough, it’ll be accepted as truth.

It’s how my respondent can assert, with certainty, despite being unable to produce examples, that Presidents Obama and Biden were more corrupt than Trump. That kind of unquestioning credulity bodes ill for our republic, the survival of which depends on citizens’ ability to think.

But let’s end on a happier note. As Trump systematically destroys America’s efforts to study and mitigate climate change, other countries are filling the void. Australia has become a leader in solar power and, addressing sunshine’s inexplicable absence at night, its homes are increasingly equipped with high-capacity storage batteries. Elsewhere, Türkiye, where I just was, is creating massive solar farms, and, by law, manufacturing equivalent batteries to go with them. Several European countries are approaching 100% clean energy.

As Trump’s America, blind to science and averse to facts, falls behind – and not just in sustainable sources -- enlightened world leaders may yet save the day. Addressing climate change elsewhere, it seems, is easier than regaining sanity here.

Funny Not Funny

 

Analogy: Lucy Van Pelt is Iran. The football is the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump is, well, Trump.

As he decompensates while his stupid war spins out of control like a buzz-bomb firecracker, it’s obvious that Iranian leaders have figured him out. It’s the B-side of what other world leaders have recognized and used to their advantage: praise him like a child who used a potty, flatter him with participation trophies, and get what they want. Iran’s insight is to lie to him like he lies to everyone, get him to announce the latest “agreement,” deny it exists, induce him to make ridiculous, madman threats, announce more agreements, threaten more war crimes, back off, produce deadlines, rescind them, while they enjoy the result as he looks more out of touch, less and less powerful, and definitely not in control of anything; least of all, himself. Watch as the world backs away from him in dismay.

This is what Trump has done to America’s once-admirable standing in the world. Unconditional surrender was the goal. Or ending their nuclear program, “two weeks away from a bomb” every two weeks for ten years. Or opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was closed only because of his war. Since Trump spends most of his time on social media and watching toady TV, he must have seen Iran’s hilarious trolling videos, of which this is but one example. He’s become so dislodged from reality and unstable that aides kept him out of the room where it happened when planning the rescues of those downed pilots, lest he start issuing damaging orders.

This is the “president” we have, thanks to MAGA. It should frighten everyone. It's the patriotic duty of every American to vote only for Democrats until every MAGA Republican has been replaced in Congress.

The mullahs must be having a constant laugh as they make Trump look ridiculous to the world, including, of late, even former Trump-fluffer Tucker Carlson, who stopped licking and started looking. Though it was obvious before he descended that golden escalator, deniers can no longer deny: everything Trump says is a lie. About Iran, about elections, about climate change. About anything and everything. In a “president,” it’s an undesirable quality. Recent example: Iran’s “totally obliterated” navy just commandeered two commercial ships.

Trump’s calamitous, unnecessary, undeclared war/not-war has strengthened China and Russia, and convinced Iran that it doesn’t need nuclear arms. In its control of the Strait of Hormuz, it has a far more powerful weapon. No rational world leader other than Trump, who isn’t, would use nukes. Thanks to Trump, Iran now understands they don’t need them to disrupt the entire world and get whatever it wants. 

Foxotrumpic media insists he’s playing 4-D chess. He’s playing checkers. And, because he thinks the pieces are Oreos, he’s eating them. The best we can hope for from this debacle is a return to the parameters of the nuclear agreement President Barack Obama negotiated with Iran years ago, by which they were abiding, and which Trump, because his only constant is a need to punish those who don’t debase themselves for him, ended.

His unfitness is also manifested in the incompetence, criminality, and danger of the people he chose for his Cabinet. Three have been dismissed in the last few weeks, all women, despite the tendentious testicular travesties, the fulminating phallic failings of his male maladies. Atop the list is Pentagon Pete, who treats war like a game, a platform for self-promotion, strutting and puffing before his hand-culled press, embarrassing us before the world. Not content with firing minority generals and admirals, trying, apparently, to out-crazy Junior Arfkay, he just ended mandatory flu shots for troops. He must assume Trump will get his 1.5 trillion-dollar defense budget, in which case the expense of caring for unnecessarily sick soldiers won’t matter.

Tied for worst appointment, ever, is Kash Patel. Trump : judgment = strychnine : food.

For humor’s sake, recalling his promise to end Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine on day one, part deux, Trump predicted he’d have ended the Vietnam War “very quickly,” in five months. Why five? One for every deferment he got to keep him out of it.

Finally, this: Trump’s ill-planned, unjustified war, his undeniable decompensation over it, the worldwide effects of it all, are driving from memory the litany of his previous failures, the number of ways he’s endangered America, civilization, and the planet. But maybe that’s the point. If his war/not-war is over by November, Trump hopes, voters will be relieved enough to overlook the horrible and, in many cases, irreversible damage he’s caused in a mere six years.

Against that possibility, here’s a gift link to a New York Times article by Thomas B. Edsall. It’s a fact-supported recounting of all that Trump has wrought, and should be required reading for every voter, better written and more comprehensive than anything I could do. 

Brain Farts

My next newspaper column:

Here's a heavily reworked piece from a past life. That it’s a mishmash reflects how thoroughly recent Trumptivity has smacked my gob:  

America is losing its collective mind, so it shouldn't be surprising that med schools and even vaunted hospitals are offering "alternative medicine.” Some call it “complementary.” Give ‘em what they want, I guess. It’s as cynical as hiring Scott Pruitt to run the EPA.  

It’s hard to figure how otherwise intelligent people become convinced of the efficacy of whatever “medical” woo they wish, even when studies have shown it doesn’t work. Why is truth so unattractive? Why isn't inquisitiveness universal? Doesn't realism confer survival benefit? Or would we all be jumping off cliffs if we didn't have mythology? Maybe that's it. Maybe too many skeptical realists have already jumped.  

The neediness of the human brain, stacked against its obvious power -- the ability to create, to invent, to inquire, to love -- is a paradox. If it’s a stretch to write my way from frustration about “alternative” medicine to the destruction of democracy and the planet at the hands of Trump and Trumpists, they’re of a piece with climate change denial and the need to impose one’s religious views on others via legislation which flies in the face of separation. Because, I guess, when others don’t share one’s views, it threatens one’s ability to stave off dubiety.  

As there are billions of people on the planet with vastly differing religious beliefs yet equally certain in their singular truth, it’s obviously a fundamental human need. Amazingly, for some, the cult of Trump is replacing their religion. Trump, of all people: a faker whose only religion is self-aggrandizement. He’s brilliant, though, at deceiving others to accomplish it. Happy was he to move the US embassy to Jerusalem, helping his enablers to feel ever closer to rapturing, while figuring they’ll remain Earth-bound, sending money even as he fleeces their flock. 

At one time, believing the unprovable had survival benefits: when dangers were mostly natural and the advantages of grouping together were obvious, belief in all-powerful protectors were civilizing. But as society has gotten impossibly complex and the dangers we face are mostly human-generated, they’re becoming detrimental. Rather than encouraging people to cleave together and feel their common humanity as they once did, the increasingly hardened beliefs of a few are causing us to fall upon one another in hate and fear. Lies (Trump’s about the Iran agreement being among his latest) have, for half of us, become preferred over truth. 

Magical thinking is who we are, I guess. If, in the medical world, it only served to enrich some at the expense of others, so what? But it’s hurting people; and it's pretty clear, with anti-vaccination for example, that it can hurt us all, not just the gullible or desperate. 

When I see this mainstreaming of bogosity, I can't keep help thinking of the other side of the same coin: people murdering in the name of their gods, blaming natural disasters on gays, demonizing the educated, undoing environmental protections and human rights, ignoring climate change. They arise, seemingly, from the same shortcomings of the human brain.  

In less than a lifetime, we've gone from Model T to Tesla, from Kitty Hawk to Mare Tranquilitatis, crystal sets to satellite radio. The power of science is obvious. Yet despite -- or is it because of? -- the amazing progress we've seen at the hands of science, people willfully and in increasing numbers simply ignore it; reject it in order to maintain their prejudices. Or, in the case of today’s Republican Party, by legislating their falsehoods into law, their cash flow. The draw of delusion is great; if straws they be, grasp at them we must.  

But one shouldn’t get to pick and choose. Don't believe in evolution? Okay. Then don't get on an airplane. Earth is six thousand years old? Your call to make. But return your smartphone. Homeopathy makes sense? Drink it down. But put away that laptop, never avail yourself of GPS. Because if man and dinosaurs lived at the same time, if carbon-dating is bogus, atomic clocks don't work and organ transplants are impossible. If vaccines cause autism, and no-touch Reiki heals, Rovers aren't on Mars, Trump’s a truth-teller, climate change is a hoax, and nothing will happen when I click the button to send this in.

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Trump, Unmasked

My next newspaper column, sent in with too little time to address the latest mass murder. But Trump sent condolences, so it's all okay.

Based on emails I get, hardcore Trumpists are as impenetrable by facts as concrete by feathers. Either they enjoy being lied to, or they wouldn’t recognize a lie if it blackened their eyes. For everyone else, it’s incontestable: Trump’s campaign promises were free-floating falsehoods. Emailers insist he’s never lied, that he saved the economy after Obama crashed the excellent one he inherited. Which tells you everything.  

This isn’t about stupid lies, like the number of people at his inauguration, where the US ranks in taxation, how much tax reform will cost him, or voter fraud. This is about Trump’s lie-revealing, just-released budget, affecting millions of Americans, many of whom voted for him, inexplicably believing a man whose career was one of cheating, lawsuits, scams, and failures would be truthful and manage his office competently. 

Lies like protecting Medicare and Social Security. Like assuring us The Wall is indispensable and Mexico would pay for it. Like claiming he’ll never run a four-hundred-billion-dollar deficit. Promising to eliminate the federal debt (not the deficit: the twenty-trillion-dollar debt!) in eight years. Really, Trumpists? Now that we’ve seen his impossible budget, the mendacity is clear. Except to dead-enders, who, one assumes, consider arithmetic fake news.  

Trump’s proposal has the same chance of becoming law as I do of replacing Alex Jones on Infowars. Since a ten-page document directly affecting national security was too long for Donald to read, we know he had little if anything to do with producing it. But whether it was shown to him in pictures or highlights read to him with big words removed, he bestowed upon it his imprimatur. Presumably then, it represents his priorities. 

Like the Republican tax plan that’s already law, Trump takes the deficit, after Obama reduced by two-thirds the one Bush left him, to over a trillion for 2018. Using unrealistically optimistic predictions coming from the White House, which claim sustained economic growth fifty-percent higher than it’s practically ever been, the deficit would still be over four-hundred-billion ten years from now. According to economists using projections grounded in reality, it’d be around two trillion. 

How many Trumpophiles who raged at Obama’s (steadily decreasing) deficits will excuse Trump’s budgetary carnage? Or care they’ve been duped. How many understand why this is exactly the wrong time for such lop-sided tax cuts?  

Disagreements between liberals and conservatives about the role of government should, in theory, make for workable middle-ground legislation. Conservatives, though, claim social safety nets are abused by practically all recipients. Trumpists love cutting food stamps. Do they know it hurts military families along with their usual targets? Probably they’re fine with cutting housing assistance. But Medicare, Social Security? Even conservatives use Medicaid. The National Weather Service? Hanford cleanup? No concerns? Millions cut from gun-purchase background-checks: perfect timing. Condolences, though.  

What about people who believed Trump’s promises to return lost jobs? Okay with eliminating programs for displaced workers, neighborhood reinvestment, cutting mining safety regulations? Climate change research, sure: it’s a hoax. But the Chemical Safety Board? Legal services? Do no broke Trumpists need lawyers? Okay, cutting NPR, PBS, DOE, NEA makes sense: enlightened voters frighten Republicans. 

America already spends more on defense than the next dozen countries combined, but there’s a huge bump for the Pentagon, which can’t keep the F-35 flying. Billions for The Wall, naturally, paying for which amounts to giving a cookie to a child throwing a tantrum in aisle five. These aren’t the priorities that made America great.  

Remember that “only the best people” whopper? White House personnel turn over like tilled soil. Indictments, criminal behavior, ethics violations. Housing expert Carson gives a fat no-bid contract to his daughter-in-law. Zinke and Pruitt charge us for their fancies (the VA Secretary lies about his wife’s), while announcing they won’t enforce pollution laws. DeVos won’t enforce civil rights rules. Sessions plans to incarcerate more pot-smokers in private prisons whose stock he owns. Trump endorses sex predators, defends violent abusers, Kelley lies about when they knew. 

To anyone with a corpus callosum, Trump’s deceits scream out. Mismanagement, detachment, disinterest in new information, and now, a budget proposal designed further to enrich the wealthy and punish (and poison) those who, it makes sure, never will be. 

And Russia. Don’t forget Russia. The truth is out there.  

As to Trump’s promised infrastructure plan, well, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to the toll booth.    

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