They Claim to Be the “Real Americans”, But Trump and His Followers Are Merely Racist Bigots

Perhaps the most egregious Big Lie spun by so many on the Right Wing of this nation’s politics, is that THEY represent the “Real Americans” and the “Real America“.  I can’t pin down whether this Big Lie is the result of stupidity, ignorance, demagoguery, or some combination of the three. Yet I know in my gut how phony their claims are. We know that our nation’s shame today has to do with the dumbly demagogic Trump.  This thug proved his bigotry initially by surging to the lead of the ridiculously racist “birther movement“, hating President Obama simply because of his skin color. Yet had that not in itself been a perfect proof of his bigotry,  he underlined it in his dog whistling initial campaign speech.  In that speech he smeared Mexicans as  “murderous rapists” and an entire religion as “terrorist”.  With that disgustingly demagogic campaign opening, he appealed to the worst elements in our country, who falsely see themselves as the “Real Americans“,  when in fact they are only ignorant and dumb Right Wing Authoritarians.

These “Real Americans” are benighted fools who believe in the premise of American Exceptionalism.  They base their beliefs on two false concepts, which they believe were ordained by God:

• The U.S. has a unique mission to transform the world.
• The United States’ history and mission gives it a superiority over other nations.

Dress those premises up in any fancy rhetoric you might choose and all they really amount to is the same type of jingoistic belief that has been used since the dawn of recorded history by people justifying oppressing other people, either through war or economic exploitation. They use these beliefs to rationalize their own prejudice, fear and greed, against those they deem to be an unworthy other.  These self congratulatory  “Real Americans“, viscerally understood the true connotation underlying the seemingly innocuous Trump campaign slogan “Make America Great Again“.  Given the context of Trump’s campaign rhetoric, MAGA, stood for “White Supremacy“,  deporting Latinos and making war upon Muslims. This hateful and mindless bigotry was purportedly justified by the need to support their false Mythology of American Exceptionalism as a Nation of Rugged Individualists.

Another aspect of the Trump supporters imagining themselves “Real Americans” was their belief in their Heartland Myth of Who Are the Real Americans.  This provably false mythology, casts the so-called “Red States” and their overlapping “Bible Belt“, as the “true America“, where the “Real Americans” lead lives that exemplify “true Christian moral values“.  However, national surveys have proven time and again that “heartland” America, the Red States and the “Bible Belt” lead this country in only the moral hypocrisy of the publicly religious.

These States have the highest divorce rates; the most unwed births; the biggest drug problems; the highest poverty rates; the worst educational systems; the greatest political corruption and the least sense of communal values. They pretend to be the bastions of our national ethos and in truth are merely the fortresses of our most politically cynical and corrupt. The cynicism and the corruption of the Heartland’s Fundamentalist religious and political leaders was proven by their embrace of the New York conman, with an amoral history and no discernible religious values.

There is, however, one clear case to be made that our America is a wonderfully exceptional nation in human history.  These United States are the most racially, ethnically and religiously divers nation in all of human history. It is this singular fact that makes our country exceptional in the world today and it is a beautiful thing. Most ironic, given his bigoted mewling, is that Trump was born and raised in the most ethnically diverse county in these United States,  Queens County in New York City.  Having spent more than 25 of my 73 years living and/or working in Queens County I know from experience what a marvelous locality it is and how well people there get along with each other despite, or perhaps because of their diversity.  That Trump never appreciated his birthplace, is a function of his own upbringing as the son and grandson of racist bigots, infected with a fascist belief in Eugenics.

As the grandson on both sides of Jewish immigrants from Europe, whose grandmothers were not English speakers,  my love for my America is unsurpassed. Had my grandparents not emigrated to America, they would have probably been murdered in the Shoah, as were so many of my distant relatives.  Because I love my country, I have spent a long life immersed in its’ history. This country’s greatness is a direct result of the diversity of its’ people and contrary to the ignoramuses of Alt-Right fascism, our greatness is not the exclusive domain of the myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority.  Our country’s greatness is also due to the efforts of kidnapped African people, whose genius of intelligence and creativity has given so much to our culture and country, despite the enormous oppression they have endured and still endure

The Statue of Liberty does not stand as a tribute to those fools who pretend to be the ‘”Real Americans“,  who disparage others to compensate for their own limited capacity.  The Statue of Liberty represents the truth that we are a nation of diverse immigration, that blends its’ panoply of talents, in an attempt to create something of human greatness. The “Trump Real Americans” are in truth the enemies of our country’s striving to be great.

 

A New Look at America’s History and Why We Are Still So Racist Today

As we come off of our Fourth of July Barbecues and other amusements perhaps I am being too sour in presenting this article, especially because my weekend was such a pleasant one. Truth be told I wasn’t planning on posting anything today but then this article caught my eye and resonated with me.  America is my home and I love the country of my birth.  America is exceptional to me because it supplies me with the warm familiarity of a homeland,  has afforded me a comfortable life and the ability to raise my family.  So far my old age and retirement has been a comfortable one…….yet…..yet…..my experiences in this long life have taught me that all is not well in the country I love and frankly it never has been.  As long as we see the oppression of bigotry,  the diminishing of the working classes and the militarization of our American Empire,  I find it hard to feel content with the phrase “I got me mine”.  As a Jew, acutely aware of the past oppression’s of my “tribe”,  I am also sensitive to the oppression of others because of their skin color,  sexual orientation, religious belief, or even lack of same.  This article “O Say Can You See” articulates aspects of American history,  no less true because we don’t teach them in our schools:

“Ah, July 4th. Of all the national orgies of self-congratulation, militarism and, of course, shopping, this one stands out. Even more than, say, Memorial Day, it perfectly captures the combination of myths and ignorance that make up the fairy-tale view we hold of our national origins and character.”

“Better understanding our history is especially important to our ongoing struggle to come to terms with white racism. The truth is its roots run much deeper than most whites even begin to understand or acknowledge.

Fortunately, a new generation of scholars is bringing new research and perspective to our understanding of what really happened and therefore why white racism is so intractable.”

“What most of us think the Declaration of Independence says is this and only this

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

“But there was much more to the Declaration than those famous words. Far more attention was dedicated to a long list of grievances that the founding fathers had with the King. One of them was that the British were in cahoots with, “the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.” Another complaint which didn’t make it into the Declaration but was included in a precursor document, the Virginia Constitution, complained that the British were “prompting our Negroes to rise in arms against us…”

The first slaves arrived in what is now the United States in 1619. By the late 1700s, they were already a critical component of the economy and of the political conversation that led to the conflict with England.

So much so that historian Gerald Horne poses a radical reinterpretation of the founding of the nation’s origins, in his trailblazing book, The Counter-Revolution of 1776. “Ironically, the founders of the republic have been hailed and lionized by left, right and center for—in effect—creating the first apartheid state,” he writes.

Citing previously ignored evidence, Horne argues convincingly that a combination of alarm over the growing abolition sentiment in Britain, well underway by the late 1700s, and the deep-rooted fear of potential British support for slave uprisings were major motivating forces behind the desire for “independence” in the first place.”

The Truth About Our Racist War on Drugs Means It’s Time for Reparations America!

In recent years many people, particularly of course people of color, have been proposing that perhaps those African Americans, whose ancestors were slaves should be entitled to reparations to make up for hundreds of years of oppression in America. For more than 200 years much of the wealth earned in Southern States literally came off of the backs of the slaves.  There is great resistance to this idea among many American Whites, using the  rationale that those Whites alive today had nothing to do with the slavery that ended in 1865.  A new, credible study provides evidence that reparations may have little to do with the slavery of the past, but in fact American institutional racism today is such that we owe America’s Black citizens for the effects upon  their lives that racism today has inflicted and is still inflicting.

One of the posts I’ve done The Incarceration of Black Men in America, clearly shows that people of color are jailed disproportionately to White Americans.  Another more recent one

https://elephanttail.wordpress.com/2016/03/23/our-insane-war-on-drugs-was-really-a-racist-plot-that-worked/

returns to the origin of

https://elephanttail.wordpress.com/2016/02/03/americas-insane-war-on-drugs/

and shows that this so-called “War” was designed by the Nixon Administration to specifically destroy the Civil Rights Movement. The Racist intent of Nixon’s Administration terrible costs to individuals entrapped in the horror of our skewed Judicial system, is the fact that this policy has stigmatized Black American with the racist stereotype of being irresponsible drug takers. This of course is merely another accretion onto the already deplorable stereotypes of people of color and their lifestyles.  These stereotypes have been repeated for so long, that the majority of White Americans see them as proven truth.  The fact is that these stereotypes are and always have been, slanderous lies told in the service of denying the truth of our country’s bigotry.  Most of White America, even many who sympathize with the cause of assuring the equality of people of color, have absorbed these stereotypes since birth.  Those of good faith in the struggle for equality, often seek its cure in policies that are based on these stereotyped ideas of Afro-American culture and so advance programs that miss the mark. A new study highlights one of the great misconceptions that has driven a certain stereotype of the use of drugs by people of color.

We True American Patriots Must Stop Bringing Knives to Gunfights With These Trump Traitors

I originally published this in early October of 2017. Trump had been in power for 9 months, with Republicans controlling all three branches of government and things were looking bleak for Democrats. As much as I understood the threat that Trump posed, back then I probably couldn’t have envisioned how bad things would get and how bitter the taste of our hard fought 2020 victory would taste in the reality of Trump refusing to accept defeat. Sadly, I had known in my gut, that my country was in dire danger from this awful person and the fascists in the party he represented. Now 40 months later my perception has been proven by history and my solution has become imperative, lest our country succumbs completely to Republican Fascism:

Considering my long, Left-wing history as a New Deal Democrat and my minor political activism in the 60’s and 70’s, against American Racism and the Vietnam War, some would think that I am loathe to call myself a patriot.  They would be wrong.  Even as I decry the examples of how our America has failed to live up to the ideals of the American Dream,  emotionally I dearly love the country of my birth and the fact that I am an American.  In the years since the end of World War II,  Republicans and conservatives whose programs are aimed at benefiting the most wealthy among us, have worked to paint those of us on the Left as unpatriotic because we are not warmongering jingoists.  They have done this because they represent programs and ideals that are harmful to most Americans and so they must find ways to get people to vote against their own self-interests.  These purported patriots have sent American troops out to die and be maimed, in wars that never should have been fought and yet they pretend that they Honor Our Troops.  It is time that we on the Left take back the mantle of American Patriotism from those who have really dishonored and disgraced our country, in their greedy need to serve their oligarchic masters.  We need to stop bringing Knives to Gunfights.

Despite all the attempts by some on the Democrats to try to put a bright face upon last year’s election debacle, any words of comfort ring hollow.  Republican’s control the 3 branches of our Federal Government and a majority of our States.  The Supreme Court now has a new justice that makes Antonin Scalia look like a democratic socialist in comparison.  Along with the attempts to rally the Democratic Party and the Left,  we have been bombarded with dueling postmortems on the reasons for this awful loss.  The results of this loss are already devastating for so many of us not shielded by wealth.  At this time, the most important accomplishment that we of the Left can attain, is to organize countrywide at the grass roots level for the 2018 congressional election.  At the same time we must work hard at the local and State level to regain control of these localities and that is indeed an awesome, nearly impossible task.

From my perspective, we need to simplify our analysis of what happened to US this time and distill it down to its’ essence.  The battles that have been fought over the soul of this country, have been waged in earnest by the representatives of aristocratic and corporate wealth since the Goldwater loss in 1964.  They represent a well-funded strategy to disseminate propaganda undermining a sense of national community and perpetrating Right Wing mythology to such a degree that it eradicates history and becomes accepted as fact.  While the issue of a small federal government and an antipathy to taxation have be recurrent themes in American History, it took the would be oligarchs fed up at Goldwater’s debacle, to hire some of the best advertising and merchandising minds to craft the mythology of “evil liberalism” coupled with the accusation that the minorities without power were inexplicably in control of everything.  With Trump’s election, this strategy has reached almost complete fruition.

However, even more important in the battle between the American Right and Left Wings has been the tendency by Liberals, Progressives and Left Wing radicals to be hoisted on their own  petards of pretense.  That pretense has been that America is a Democracy under a semi-divine Constitution and that if only the country can follow the forms laid down by our Founding Fathers all will be well.  I’ve written many times, in many different ways that this is an illusion that has little to do with the real state of affairs in our country. I’ve also written about the false narrative of history that we on the Left have incorporated into our psyches to such a degree that most of us also function in a “bubble” of diminished comprehension.

Following that false narrative causes too many in the Democratic Party to rely on institutional wishful thinking like the Rule of Law,  that dictate we play by the “rules of the game“.  Yet for many of us that means existing in a psychological state of denial, because deep down we Know, or we suspect the truth that this battle is a war for the well being of the many, versus the autocracy of a few. A brief look at past history confirms the fact that the other side plays dirty, while we stupidly play by the “rules”.

• Nixon won election by secretly interfering with the Paris Peace Talks and prolonging the Vietnam War.
• The Watergate Scandal came to light when Nixon attempted to “bug” the Democratic Party
• The un-elected Gerald Ford made a deal to pardon Nixon in order to become President
• The findings of the Church Committee that the Intelligence community was interfering in the political process were ignored.,
• Reagan partisans interfered with Jimmy Carter getting the hostages released by promising arms and other benefits in what became The Iran Contra Affair.
• Bill Clinton was maneuvered into confessing adultery, after first perjuring himself by an elaborate, well financed sting operation.
• George W. Bush became President after dubious Florida voting tactics run by his brother Jeb, the Governor and a SCOTUS decision unprecedented in our history.
• George W. Bush won re-election based on voter suppression and voter fraud in Ohio and John Kerry’s refusal to fight on.

By dint of a combination of voter suppression, Russian Interference,  FBI corruption,  overt racism and the “Big Lies” of Trump,  we have elected perhaps our country’s most malevolent President. As his cabinet is formed from some of the worst elements of corporate greed, aristocratic elitism, and anti-democratic fascists,  most of us are threatened economically and socially. Trump and the Trump Cohort are in effect making war upon an overwhelming majority of Americans.  Yet for many in the Democratic Party establishment, their response to this dire threat is to maintain the belief that in the end reason will win out over the doings of a narcissistic, pathological liar abetted by a Party all to willing to ignore his Russian treason.

Of the many flaws I observed in Hillary Clinton’s campaign, perhaps the most damning was the belief by her political strategists that all they had to do was to emphasize the historical nature of her candidacy and counter point it with Trump’s sexism and misogyny.  They overlooked the fact that this country is for the most part sexist (why the wage disparity?) and that many Fundamentalist Christian women believed only a man should be President.  Meanwhile,  this putrid Billionaire, whose money comes from selling a boorish upper class brand,  was allowed to position himself as the economic savior of the middle class.  Virulently untruthful Republican campaign ads were met by too cleverly bland  and obviously ineffective Democratic ads, mainly showing Trump contretemps, racism and misogyny.  Never once did it occur to the Clinton Team that in truth a sizable minority of this country is sexist and racist.  The appeals to people’s higher natures fell upon deaf ears.

The sad irony of all of this is that Trump ascended to the lead in the nomination battle by appealing to the racism and sexism of the Republican base.  With the nomination secured, Trump actually adopted the message that Bernie Sanders had such success with, that many in the media disdained as a “populist” message.  You see just as Bill Clinton’s winning mantra was “‘it’s the economy stupid“, so Sanders had identified that the key issue in this election was exactly the unfairness of the American economic situation.  Hillary, belatedly moved towards Bernie’s position to secure her nomination, but then in the giddiness of positive polling numbers, began to retreat to her comfortable “Centrism“,  incorrectly believing she could reach out to that non-existent political cadre, the oxymoronic Republican Centrists and the even more non-existent “undecideds“.

My upshot is this.  I see the battle for political power as a war between the “haves” and the “have nots“, over the resources of the country.  We all know instinctively that when it comes to human affairs, “money and power” are fought for by warlike means, with no holds barred and the understanding therefore that all tactics are acceptable as long as they result in victory.  Most Left Wingers,  myself definitely included, see the human condition as a need for harmony and community.  This is the thrust of most of our political action. However, when you are fighting a war against an enemy of implacable fortitude; contemptuous for the normal rule of law; and without qualms or compassion for the innocents hurt as collateral damage;  to respond to that enemy,  you mustn’t allow yourselves to be bound by chivalrous behavioral norms.

We can’t win a war with the antediluvian Conservative Corporatists by dint of weaponry, or violence, because they are already fairly violent and well armed people.  The battle to be fought is with the deadly weapon of propaganda and in Trump’s peculiar case ridicule.  This “war” needs to be fought by creating effective memes and by crafting a mythology that makes people despise our enemies.  The motto of my college was “the truth shall make us free”.  While that is a noble aspiration, we have seen in this election that the  “truth” is malleable to pathological liars and that “love does not conquer hate“.  My take on this, though many might disagree, is that “when they go low, we go lower“.  If we lose the battles to come in the next four years,  we will inexorably lose this country to a Fascism every bit as virulent as that practiced by Hitler and Mussolini. The stakes are high and they’ve got the guns.  I have to believe though, that we’ve got the intelligence and the wit to prevail in the “War of Ideas“,  but we need to unleash it ruthlessly, without regard for the niceties of comity.

A metaphor for my mindset is this iconic movie clip below and the surprise ending, that really shouldn’t be a surprise.  Let’s be sure we’re the ones bringing a better gun to the gunfight of the next three years.

Is Trump a Moron, a Racist or Just an Obnoxious Boor?

My answer to the question posed by my title is that Trump actually can be described by all three of those negative nouns.  Throughout the torture of Trump’s short presidency it seems clear that the majority of Americans would use at least one of those terms to describe their commander-in-chief.  One thing I’ve wondered about though is how this awful person, impersonating a world leader, is seen outside America, by other than the adoring Russians. Below I’m sharing an opinion piece by the Liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz in full, because not only do I think it has pertinent insights, but it also places them in an historical context that interests me.

Is Trump Really a ‘Moron,’ as Tillerson Said, or Just Racist and Obnoxious?

“Winston Churchill, savior of Western civilization and arguably the greatest British leader in history, had some dark sides that have receded in memory in the shadow of his epic stand against Adolf Hitler. Churchill was a white supremacist who opposed India’s independence, supported concentration camps in South Africa, viewed Arabs as degenerate horse thieves and backed Zionism, among other reasons, as an antidote to Jewish Bolshevism’s war on the capitalist West. Churchill was also a champion of eugenics, which aimed to improve the human race by weeding out undesirables, a view that was popular in both Britain and the U.S. until it emerged that the Nazis were taking it to its logical extreme. Several decades before that, however, Churchill advocated sterilization of the mentally disabled as well as their isolation in internment camps in which they would be prevented from reproducing.

Churchill was one of the main supporters of the Mental Deficiency Act legislated by the British Parliament in 1913, which replaced the 1886 Idiots Act. In addition to people whose moral corruption cannot be corrected, the Act defined three levels of mental deficiency: Worst off were “idiots,” who needed protection from themselves, then “imbeciles,” from whom society needed protection. and then the “feeble-minded,” those with the lightest mental impairment, who needed constant training and supervision in order to function in society.

The law allowed authorities to detain the mentally impaired and to intern them in homes, camps or so-called colonies: over 65,000 were interned in Britain and a similar number in the United States, although America also instituted mass sterilization of the mentally impaired, which the British did not. The United States had a similar, though not identical, classification of the mentally impaired, which was heavily influenced by the advent of IQ tests. “Idiots” were those with IQs lower than 25, “imbeciles” had IQs lower than 50, but the term “feeble-minded,” which was used in Britain, was replaced by another term coined in 1910 by psychologist Henry Goddard. Those with IQs from 51 to 70 would henceforth be known as “morons.”

All of these terms were eventually deemed to be derogatory and were removed from professional lexicons by the early 1970s, along with the general change in society’s attitude toward the intellectually disabled, as they are called today. The term “moron,” along with “idiot” and “imbecile,” joined the ever-growing stock of insults that include “stupid,” “dumb,” “cretin,” “ignoramus,” “nitwit,” “simpleton,” “numbskull” and the like. But the word “moron” is still pejorative enough that if forced U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to humiliate himself in front of the country on Wednesday after NBC reported that he had used it over the summer to depict U.S. President Donald Trump. In a rare appearance before television cameras, Tillerson praised Trump’s diplomatic wisdom with superlatives worthy of Bismarck, Metternich and Kissinger put together, though he noticeably refrained from denying that he had called Trump a “moron.” That task was left to U.S. State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert, who asserted that Tillerson wouldn’t use such language. Stephanie Ruhl, one of the NBC reporters with the scoop, admitted that Nauert was right: According to her sources, Tillerson hadn’t called Trump a “moron” but a “fucking moron.” True to the principle that one can always find an embarrassing Trump tweet for just about everything, New York Magazine promptly located the 2014 tweet in which Trump showcased a caricature of a Founding Father telling colleagues: “I keep thinking we should include something in the constitution in case the people elect a fucking moron.” Trump probably meant it as a dig at former U.S. President Barack Obama.

Ruhl maintained that not only had Tillerson used the offensive term to describe Trump, but that U.S. Vice President Pence, U.S. Secretary of Defense Mattis and then-Homeland Security chief John Kelly had to dissuade the secretary of state from resigning. Ruhl, whose report was published as Trump was making his way to a Las Vegas still reeling from the horrific shoot-out last Sunday night, said that Tillerson’s tirade came after Trump’s monumentally offensive speech in July to thousands of boy scouts, in which he dissed Obama, praised himself and seemed to be using sexual innuendo to describe the lives of wealthy people with yachts. Tillerson, who devoted many years of his life to the scouts movement as he was climbing to the top of Exxon’s corporate ladder, blew his top and called Trump a “moron” – and probably nastier things as well.

He wasn’t the first and won’t be the last, of course. Stupidity is one of the more easily accessible and widespread explanations for Trump’s behavior. It’s no coincidence, of course, that his election resurrected the futuristic cult classic “Idiocracy’ about a dumbed down America that chooses a loutish porn actor as president. It’s true that Trump has claimed in the past that his IQ is much higher than that of Obama or of comedian John Stewart, but in that case, he’s doing an excellent job of concealing his intelligence, as his visit this week to Puerto Rico showed.

Trump came to the island under a cloud of criticism over the federal government’s allegedly slow response to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Maria as well his own dismissive attitude toward Puerto Ricans and their leaders, which stood in stark contrast to the tone of his message in the hurricane-hit states of Florida and Texas. But rather than trying to cheer up Puerto Ricans, as he did in Texas, or console them, as he would later do in Las Vegas, Trump insulted the island’s residents on their own home turf. He told them they should be grateful they weren’t hit with a “real catastrophe” like Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005. He didn’t stop complaining about the drain of Puerto Rican recovery on the federal budget, which he didn’t even mention in Texas or Florida. And to cap it all off, Trump was filmed tossing out paper towels to his audience in a scene deemed by one broadcaster as “the least presidential ever.”

Some people ascribe Trump’s behavior in such events to obnoxious racism rather than stupidity. Prejudice and racial stereotypes are such a prominent feature of his personality, they maintain, that he just can’t keep them under lock. He has described himself as ‘the least racist person ever,” but since he launched his presidential run by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, Trump has described Puerto Ricans as lazy, Muslims as wannabe terrorists, African-Americans as thugs, Jews as proficient with money and women as inferior sexual objects. It’s only among neo-Nazis, apparently, that Trump has found “some fine people.”

Others cite Trump’s sensational victory in the elections – assuming that it wasn’t all the result of a Russian sting operation – as proof of his political smarts. According to this view, all of Trump’s scandals, controversies, insults and inanities are but a ploy aimed at rallying his base, first to win the elections and then as leverage against the unruly Republican Party. Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Trump is a smart guy pretending to be a dunce. If that’s true, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should be worried by Barak Ravid’s report on Wednesday that Trump told the United Nations’ secretary general that the prime minister is more problematic that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. If Trump is a “moron,” on the other hand, as Tillerson testified, then his words about Netanyahu should be taken as seriously as his assertions about Obama’s birth certificate, his support for Marine Le Pen in the French elections and his praise for the homicidal Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, who will have the privilege of hosting Trump next month.

The problem with the Trump-is-actually-clever theory is that his outlandish statements and unfounded assertions don’t just harm America’s international image or divide its own population – they often do the most damage to Trump himself. The U.S. president has shot himself in the foot so regularly that it is only natural to assume he may not be the sharpest pencil in the box. He fired FBI Director James Comey, a move which Steve Bannon described as the worst presidential mistake ever, but then made things much worse for himself by admitting, contrary to the official line, that he did so because of the investigation of his ties to Russia. Trump made sure that even if Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t collect enough evidence on the alleged collusion, he would always be able to nail Trump on obstruction of justice. The same is true of Trump’s ham-handed effort to concoct a cover story for his son Donald’s hitherto unreported meeting with a Russian lawyer with close ties to the Kremlin, which fell apart within hours. Or the time he undermined administration efforts to claim that his Muslim ban was anything but by confirming that this is exactly what it was. And so on and so forth.

Intelligence is no guarantee of success, of course. Jimmy Carter had an IQ of 176, but most Americans consider him to be the worst U.S. president in modern times. Trump came to the White House with less useful or general knowledge than his predecessors, but his uniqueness lies with the fact that he seems uninterested in learning. He disdains the mainstream media, doesn’t trust his intelligence briefings and seems to rely on Fox News and even loonier right-wing news sites for his basic information about the world. He has admitted that he often makes decisions without knowing the facts, not a trait usually associated with the astute.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo wrote an article about Trump’s suspected dimness, which spawned the term “Trump’s Razor” after “Occam’s Razor,” of which Netanyahu is fond. Whereas Occam’s Razor stipulates that where there are several possible explanations for something, the simplest one is usually correct, Trump’s Razor says that where there are several possible explanations for something Trump has said or done, the stupidest is always the right one. But even if we assume that Trump is far from stupid, and definitely not a “moron,” most people would agree that both his election and his presidency are an insult to America’s intelligence, as well as the world’s.”

If You’re Angry About Kneeling Football Players Because of Our Troops…..You Are Either a Fool or a Racist!

Our race baiting, narcissist President has started a culture war against Black NFL football players in order to distract from his Russian treason.  More than a year ago Colin Kaepernick,  a National Football League Quarterback refused to stand during the playing of the national anthem, before a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers on August 26, 2016:

“During a post-game interview he was asked why he sat down and stated, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” 

This football season, Kaepernick has been blackballed by all the teams in the NFL, despite the fact that he is better than the many other Quarterbacks that have been hired instead.  Kaepernick’s highly principled stand has found favor with many other players, who have emulated his kneeling when the National Anthem is played before games.

Our America is and has been, a historically racist country when it comes to the people of color who were brought to this country as kidnapped slaves and who as a group have continued to be horribly mistreated after their supposed emancipation.  The were many reasons for Trump’s election including a probably treasonous bargain made with the Russians, but the overriding factor was Trump’s overt racism, which garnered support from a majority of White voters. One of the most destructive features of this racist oppression has been that Black people have suffered opprobrium whenever they have peacefully protested,  merely for trying to call attention to what is so blatantly obvious: Unarmed Black people are killed by Police in inordinate numbers.

Because of this need by many Whites to deny their White Privilege and  consequently their racism, these kneeling protests have been denounced for two obviously phony reasons.

• Disrespecting the American Flag
• Disrespecting American Armed Forces Personnel

Colin Kaepernick, took pains to explain that his protest wasn’t about American soldiers, but about the danger Black people face from Law Enforcement Officers.  However, his statements were ignored by conflating it with supporting the troops. Among the most disgusting members of our society are those who use the death and maiming of soldiers in warfare to support their own political aims.  These usages began in earnest during the Vietnam War, as the country began to realize it was a grievous mistake, by trying to silence dissenting voices. It has been used over and again to silence dissent as America has waged unjustified, unwinnable wars, in the name of corporate greed and mistaken militarism.  It reflects a blatant intent to push the American citizenry into supporting what is in fact American imperialism. As I wrote in “We Honor Our Troops and Thank Them for Their Service”:

The obvious place to begin is with the fact that this country does not honor its troops and hasn’t since the 1950’s. Our soldiers in World War II and the Korean War were at least honored when they returned from service with a great deal of benefits that would help them return to civilian life and put the horrors of their war experience at least at bay, if not fully sublimated. Can anyone doubt that the experience of being in a war is one of living through the horror of imminent death and the brutalization of having to harm others to keep oneself from harm?  Facing days on end with ones adrenaline cranked up to maximum,  knowing that death or maiming can come to you in an unsuspected moment,  having to watch the grisly results upon those you kill to protect yourself and your friends,  how then could someone come through this with their psyche unscathed?  Yet when the soldier’s time of war is over and when he or she is returned to the normalities of everyday life,  they do so with little thought or caring from the country that has used them so harshly.

That wars are generally fought with teenagers and young adults, at growth stages too impressionable to be able to successfully incorporate them into adulthood, guarantees that their perspectives are forever skewed by what they must endure to keep alive. This country threw away the lives of more than 50,000 troops in the senseless Vietnam War and left 5 times that number physically and/or mentally maimed. They didn’t return home to an adoring public and despite propaganda to the contrary, they were mostly treated by the war-hawks among us as pariahs, who had failed in their impossible mission. The benefits were slow in coming and meager compared with WWII.  PTSD, which is a real psychological condition, was viewed by many of our more “hawkish” congresspersons as a “failure of toughness” and the Veteran’s Administration actively worked at denying benefits and treatment to the vast amount of troops suffering from it. Many of our Vietnam vets wound up as homeless, which I well know because back then I was a Welfare Caseworker. As we’ve seen in the recent VA revelations, similar lack of care is happening for the veterans of both of the Iraq debacles and the Afghanistan misadventure.

“We Honor our Troops” is also unfortunate and hypocritical because we put them through untold suffering and in “harm’s way” for nothing other than multi-national oil interests, combined with the raging egos of the Bush Administration, where most of the architects of war had avoided military service when they were of age. By using the banal phrase “We honor our troops” we give these insane wars legitimacy on the backs of those who served, because by extension their service was in an “honorable cause”. There was nothing honorable in these causes and in implying there was, we are to my mind doing our troops a disservice. We shouldn’t be “honoring” our troops, we should be apologizing to them for harming their lives and their psyches, for the egos and for the greed of a few.

This past weekend, our President, the Draft Dodger chose to attack Black athletes for their stance against racism, because once again Robert Mueller is getting close to his traitorous collusion with Vladimir Putin.  Thus this megalomaniacal, misanthropic malefactor once again turns to ginning up his bases support, by appealing to to wrongly conflated “issues” entailing a jingoistic, militaristic misinterpretation of legitimate protests. We note that many Trump supporters have gullibly swallowed his nonsense whole and are saying they will boycott.  In my estimation these people are either fools, racists, or both.

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