#63 - In the Crosshairs of DJT's DOJ

So I took the day off from work today, a beautiful sunny fall day in New England, there is nothing like it really,  but a story caught my attention, that sent a chill up my spine.

As reported in the New York Post and on CNN today, that the Trump administration reportedly has obtained search warrants that would allow them access to the Facebook pages of thousands of anti-Trump protesters.

The requested data would include information on about 6,000 individuals who “liked” an anti-Donald Trump Facebook page, according to CNN.

Welcome to Donald Trump’s America, Welcome to the New World. It appears that DJT feels emboldened after calling out NFL protesters as SOB’s and telling the owners they should be fired.   He need’s to feed more red meat to his base, and must now target others who don't think he walks on water.  By vilifying others, he keeps all of his supporters marching to the beat of his own perverted drum.

Now it’s probably even money that I could eventually become a target of this probe, for in addition to posting “With Malice Toward None (...mostly)” to my small Facebook page, I post to half a dozen left leaning Facebook groups including a couple which are specifically Anti-Trump in nature.

My posts seem to resonate with those groups, and as there are over 60 posts, most of which deal with the natural born incompetence and egotistical, selfish persona of DJT, and average a couple of pages in length, I am thinking yes, I may eventually end up in the crosshairs of the DOJ. 

But that is fine by me, I welcome the fight.  So tell Jeff Sessions, that he can come and get me, I’ll be here waiting for him, but tell him this, and please quote me accurately.

“I’ll give you my keyboard when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

#62 - Standing on the Sidelines No More

During the presidential campaign, then candidate Trump told his fan base that only he could unite the country, only he could bring the country together.

I have to say, I never thought there was a grain of truth to it. I thought there was a higher probability that the moon was made of cheese.  But after the events of this weekend, I have to admit, I was flat out wrong. Donald Trump has exceeded even my jaded expectations and actually unified a large portion of America.

On Friday night at yet another one of Trump’s post-campaign, political campaign rallies, in one of the reddest of all the states, Alabama, in a clear attempt to placate his base of supporters, the President said that the NFL owners should fire any NFL player who refuses to stand during the National Anthem at the start of all the NFL games.  He referred to “those people” as “sons of bitches”, subsequently tweeted that the fans should boycott games until owners take these corrective steps.

He was essentially advocating that the owners break the law and fire employees (many of whom are under guaranteed contracts) for exercising their constitutional right of free speech, by kneeling during the national anthem to protest against abuse of people of color by police.

In the process he turned a very small story on the political landscape into a much, much bigger one. What began as a protest by a few NFL players against the oppression of people of color, was transformed into a fight for the individual right of free speech.  What followed were statements by the commissioner of the league, many of the team owners, including Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots, who contributed $1 million to the President’s campaign, in support of those individual rights of their players and for that matter, everyone.

And so this Sunday, across the league you had many teams protest the hate speech from the Commander-in-Chief by standing for the national anthem, arms linked together as a show a solidarity for their brothers who might choose to kneel for the anthem.  Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, not exactly a liberal snowflake, took a knee with his players in front of a giant American flag as it was unfurled just before the singing of the anthem,

New York Jets chairman and CEO Christopher Johnson, whose brother, Woody, is the ambassador to England and one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, called it ‘‘an honor and a privilege to stand arm-in-arm unified with our players during today’s national anthem’’ in East Rutherford, N.J.

The Jets, who some said, wouldn't win a game this year, beat the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, 20 – 6.   Unity certainly has a way of bringing out the very best of us

But the events of the day was summed up best by Joe Lockhart, Executive Vice President of Communications when he said: “I’d say looking at yesterday, everyone should know — including the president — that this is what real locker room talk is,’’

Trump’s attempt to use a singular absolute view of patriotism as a way to define himself as a leader and to denigrate others who have a different opinion than he, offers a perspective that virtually all NFL players and a significant majority of Americans find, pick your descriptive term: baffling, absurd, wasteful, valueless, infuriating, insulting, hateful, way beneath the dignity of any American, especially the President, but was….pretty much just another day at the office for the 45th President of the United States.

Trump’s perverse desire to divide Americans, while distracting us from the more important issues of the day: North Korea, Puerto Rico,  our health care system, has had the energizing effect of motivating those, who previously found it safer, both literally and figuratively, to just stay on the sidelines, to, for the first time in their lives, take a position, to kneel or lock arms or speak out and jump into the fray because in many ways they know, that hell will freeze over before this approach makes America great again.

With all this being said, it is not lost on me that I need to apologize to my President, for ever doubting that he had the necessary skills to unite us all.  I was terribly mistaken. 

So, Mr. President, from the bottom of my heart, I offer my sincerest gratitude, only you could bring the country together, only you could unite is, with that singular focus on a common goal, to protest you Sir, to protest you.

#61 - Rocket Man

In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Donald Trump was his typical Trumpster self.  Ignoring dialogue favored by diplomats around the world for generations, Trump used language typically reserved for that Tweeter thing he likes so much.  Referencing “loser terrorists” and calling the international nuclear deal on Iran “an embarrassment to the United States” and just for yuks, coming close to declaring war on Venezuela, just to throw out a little more red meat for that very red base of his, he still managed to save his best for Dennis Rodman’s BFF both on and off the court, that short little chubby guy with the funny haircut, from North Korea, Kim Jong-un.

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump said on Tuesday. “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime.”

Poor Elton John.  What did he do to deserve this?

Now Trump’s success in the primaries and in the election in coming up with Twitter friendly derogatory putdowns of all of his opponents, you know them all - Lying Ted, Lazy Jeb, Crooked Hillary etc, etc, may have led him to conclude that if he simply calls the chubby little guy some kind of nasty name, he will roll over and die, like the rest of Trump’s mediocre opponents did along the way. But I have my doubts. 

I’m just not sure “Rocket Man” should have been Trump’s go to insult.  It's not clear what the impact will be on this one.  The little guy might take it as a compliment, a pretty mild insult, or just an accurate description of one his bigger hobbies.  Either way, I don't consider this approach as adding value to the matter in any way whatsoever. 

North Korea has been a major thorn in the side of the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations going back 24+ years and now under the “leadership” of Kim Jong-un, the thorn has been getting bigger and has been getting pushed in deeper.  With each passing year North Korea has been improving both its nuclear capabilities and the delivery systems for those weapons and making America look weak and inept at dealing with this crisis.  And in recent months their progress on both of these technical fronts has accelerated. So now, through no fault of Donald Trump, North Korea now represents the single biggest wild card on the nuclear horizon.  China, Russia, the United States and other nuclear nations would all acknowledge that any nuclear armed confrontation is a lose, lose proposition, and as such, this belief has acted as a built-in control and provided humanity with a high degree of comfort that no one, absolutely no one would be dumb enough to actually engage in such an “undertaking”.  That’s been the working theory for 70+ years now and it has kept most of the world relatively safe.

Well that was before, and this is now.  North Korea and Kim Jong-un now represent the biggest threat on the world stage.  They are a throw-back to an antiquated world where an entire country is completely, completely (double emphasis intended) dominated by a third generation child king who has been described as irrational, selfish and childish. Recent reports have said he has a fondness for caviar, teen sex slaves and gory public executions. In an attempt to consolidate power and put an end to any possible political threats, it has been said that he has had his uncle and his half-brother assassinated. In other words. he appears to be a highly functional and sadly perverted, whack job.     

Enter Donald Trump, who was appropriately warned by numerous members of the outgoing Obama administration that North Korea represented the single biggest threat to America (If Obama knew this crisis was going to be placed in the lap of Donald Trump, do you think he might have been a bit more pro-active on this one?)  

In recent months, Trump has directly insulted Kim Jong-un by saying that he is not as powerful as he thinks he is, and announced that we were sending a big, huge powerful armada to the seas off of North Korea, even though someone forgot to tell the armada, which was actually moving AWAY from North Korea at the time.  Still more recently Trump has threatened to “rain fire and fury on North Korea, the likes of which the world has never seen”.  And now in Tuesday’s U.N. speech, without any attempt to offer a diplomatic olive branch, Trump threatens to “totally destroy” Rocket Man and North Korea.   Just in case you glossed over it, “totally destroy” is secret code for “Nuclear annihilation”

If Donald Trump has a strategy here, and I sure as hell hope he does, it seems to be that he announcing to Kim Jong-un, that “I am bigger, bader whack job than you!”

Sadly, this may be the extent of the Trump Doctrine, because on top of the fact that he offered no visible path for diplomacy to North Korea, he infers that the previously negotiated international nuclear deal with Iran deal might be on the chopping block.  This point is not helpful to getting North Korea to bend toward any type of diplomatic solution…on yes, that’s right, another nuclear deal.

Personally, I don’t subscribe to the theory that Trump employs strategy in anything he does.  I think the more accurate version of reality, is that on any given day, he is not sure who he is, what he stands for, and doesn’t have a clue about well, a lot.  While he says he is “detail oriented”, he is anything but that.   No, the simple truth here is Donald Trump really is a whack job.  But maybe the beauty of this, the potentially powerful beauty, is that in dealing with North Korea, this may absolutely be the best way to deal with them.  For if you subscribe to the theory that the Donald really is a whack job, as I do, there is simply no evidence on the planet to contradict the fact that he is certainly a bigger one and a much more powerful one than Kim Jong-un.

The Trump Administration has already achieved some level of success in getting Russia and China to back increased, but still not a high enough, level of economic sanctions against North Korea, either a sign of Trump’s diplomatic acumen or a sign of just how dangerous this situation has now become (I’m going with the second choice here).  Still, this is not something that Obama, Bush or Clinton could have pulled off.  Whether you agreed or disagreed with any of their positions or policies, they were all simply too… reasonable.

Having said all this, I don’t want you to think I am oblivious to the danger of having the most important man in the world (oh, how it hurts me to say this) actually be a whack job in his own right.   I get it, things can also go horribly wrong, and in the worst of situations countless innocent people can be killed or harmed, but I have a certain amount of faith that some of the people surrounding Trump, will, when the rubber really meets the road on this one, pull our guy back from the brink and avoid a catastrophe of epic proportions.  We have seasoned veterans with important military experience including Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Advisor, HR McMaster (See Post # ) and Chief of Staff John Kelly, advising Trump.  They understand the grave consequences of going to war.  They will speak up to the President, for they know the possible ramifications if they do not.   Therein lies the difference between the United States, even with Donald Trump at the helm, and North Korea.  In North Korea, if you say something the that Kim Jong-un doesn’t like, you get shot.

We can only hope that all of this is just our whack job’s amped up attempt at a very simplistic Good Cop / Bad Cop strategy that Trump is attempting to execute, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has seemingly be missing in action for most of the year, has secretly been working behind the scenes and actually working on a diplomatic solution.  We could also hold out hope that Jared, the Boy Wonder, has been pressed into action on this one, but then again….

While I have dissed Donald with some frequency (and you have my personal commitment, I will continue to do so), more for his incredibly consistent level of incompetence (a strong attribute of the highest caliber whack jobs) and less on his policy, and while I personally disagree with all of his bombastic rhetoric regarding North Korea, and don't believe it is helpful, as difficult as it is for me to say, he is still my horse in this horse race.  

So I am not at all ashamed to say that I am absolutely rooting for our whack job on this one.

And the rest of the world should be rooting for him too, as difficult as that may be.

#60 - Bookends to the Hijacking of Patriotism, Part 2

My earlier post on this topic dealt with Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players who chose to kneel during the national anthem as a form of protest to the oppression of people of color, and in the process they hijacked a common show of patriotic honor for their own special cause.

This post deals with President Trump’s campaign rally in Phoenix last week.  

Mr. Trump is always in rare form at his rallies.  He behaves as if he is still on the campaign, and he feeds off of the crowd, and the crowd feeds off of him.  It’s as if they were all once part of an original single cell organism, and they divided and divided and divided again, and with each division the resulting generations of offspring became more and more detached from reality, but at the same time, they all became more attached through an invisible umbilical cord to the amoeba-in-chief who despite being elected to the most powerful position in the world, still behaves pretty much like a single cell organism.

Anyway, at last week’s rally, President Trump, delivered a speech in which he called journalists “sick people.”

While criticizing media coverage has long been a surefire tactic to rile up his crowds, the depth of the President’s most recent jabs took even seasoned journalists by surprise. He accused the news media of “trying to take away our history and our heritage” and questioned their patriotism.

“I really think they don’t like our country, I really believe it” he said.

By now, the Liberal Press should be accustomed to the attacks and name calling from Mr. Trump, it's just part of the shtick that he pulls out for all of his rally goers. And it makes them feel good to boo and hiss whenever he brings them up and makes them seem like evil villains.

But the comments at the Phoenix rally were more alarming to journalists than most of his previous attacks.  Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist for The Washington Post, called it “the most sustained attack any president has ever made on the press.”

But I want to specifically focus on his comment where he said he believed that journalists didn't love our country.  In politics, it's certainly fair game to go after your opponents and challenge their positions, their experience, their skills, and  their competency.  I do it all the time, and with Mr. Trump, as we all know, there is never a shortage of material.

But I have never challenged his patriotism, nor to the best of my somewhat limited knowledge on this particular point, have I ever heard any members of the Flaming Liberal Press or the perpetrators of Fake News from CNN do so either. 

So while this was just one line from another one of Trump’s misguided, ego-gratifying rallies, it represented a serious escalation in the rhetoric against the press.   Most independent minded thinkers are fully aware of Trump’s tendency to misstate facts or just make something up on the fly, and this includes many of his supporters.  While they might acknowledge this behavior, it does not change their support for him. 

But in my mind this one is just a bridge too far.  Once again, Mr Trump attempts to vilify those who might oppose him, in this case the Liberal press, but this time he does it by making the case to his rally goers that if you are patriotic, you are with him. But if you have a different opinion, you are not. 

And not only are you unpatriotic, you are also sick.

We have almost become numb, hearing the extraordinary amount of divisive commentary from this man, but this one I can not forget and I will not forgive, not because it is another vile attempt to belittle and denigrate those who disagree with him,  but because he has the outlandish gall to hijack our collective patriotism and use it to fit his own minuscule political purpose.

While I do disagree with Colin Kaepernick’s protest of the national anthem, I do observe that his actions were intended for the benefit of others.   When Donald Trump did it, it was solely for the benefit of Donald Trump.

Neither one was good, but Trump’s stands out because of the intended animosity and hatred.   And more importantly because he is the President of the United States.

#59 - Bookends to the Hijacking of Patriotism, Part 1

Two stories caught my attention this week

The first was the continuing story of some NFL players who are choosing to kneel during the national anthem, following the lead of former San Francisco Forty Niner Colin Kaepernick who first did it back in a 2016 pre-season game stating:

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color”
”

When this first started, despite the fact that I personally sympathize with his position and believe minorities are not certainly not free from discrimination in our country, I was mildly miffed.  At the time I thought it was just a “one and done” story, but believed there were better ways to express a position.  Still, I wondered what compelled Kaepernick, and then eventually some other players, to grab attention this way in order to make their protest. 

I hadn't given it that much consideration until I read a response from former (Super Bowl Champion) New England Patriot Defensive End Chris Long who discussed his recent 'symbolic' gesture of putting his left hand on the shoulder of a kneeling teammate and said it proved the power of national anthem protests

Long (son of Howie Long, a popular sportscaster, a Hall of Fame defensive end and a product of Charlestown and Milford, MA) has had strong feelings about social issues in this country for years.  Long spoke to NFL.com last Tuesday about anthem protests, saying that his gesture proved how effective protests are in generating a conversation:

“No one gave a (expletive), frankly, until I put my hand around Malcolm. That just goes to show you the power of symbolic protests. All of a sudden, everyone cares about my protest, but they never cared about my actions — which kind of proves, well, why do you need (to protest during the anthem)? If guys were just like, ‘Hey, I’m over here! I want to talk about social issues,’ the reporters would be like, ‘We don’t care.'

Hearing this blunt rationale directly from one of the protesters made it really sink in, and as a result, made me disagree with it even more.  Let me first say that I applaud, celebrate and and honor any individual who fights for social issues or serves others who are in need, whatever that need is.  Those individuals represent the best our country has to offer.

From what I know of Chris Long, he is highly principled and caring man, however, he appears to believe that his voice and his opinion is so much more exceptional than the opinions of the rest of us, that he is deserving of special attention.   All of these players must feel that their voices must be heard, and so they pick the national anthem to amp up the volume. They have decided that their end justifies any means. 

Conservatives have frequently denigrated the “Liberal Hollywood types” who upon winning some type of award, use that podium as an opportunity to speak out for some ideal or against some perceived wrong.  I never had an issue with that, as they had earned the right to speak and be heard.  It’s a wonderful example of the exercise of free speech.  You can do it on a soapbox on a street corner or in a post on the Internet or at an awards ceremony where you have been given 90 seconds or so to thank your friends and family and/or make a point. 

But standing for the national anthem, removing your hat, putting your hand over your heart, and even singing (if you can hit the high notes) seems like a sacred moment to me, and I’d like to think is it for all of us.  It is a reminder that we are a country where free speech is embraced, despite the difficulties which often surface as a result of its exercise. 

And so when Colin Kaepernick and others kneel during the anthem, it feels both counter-intuitive and counterproductive to the cause they wish to discuss.  They believe that their cause is so special that they choose to protest a solemn moment for others in the stadium. They protest the county which grants them free speech as an indisputable right, but they want more than free speech, they want a podium, and a large one at that.  Near as I can tell, that is not a right guaranteed to us in the Constitution, and so for a brief but solemn moment, they choose to hijack our collective patriotism, in a poor attempt to promote their cause.

They are just looking for a shortcut, while the rest of us have to take the long way around.   I don't believe that deserves any sort of special treatment.

Look for Bookends to the Hijacking of Patriotism - Part 2, to follow.