rule of law
Soliciting New Names for the Republican Party
Since the Republican Party no longer appears to be the Party of Lincoln (preferring dishonest seditious TV Reality Stars instead) and it is definitely no longer the “Law and Order Party” given their continuing unwillingness to hold dishonest politicians in their own Party accountable for their unethical and inciting offences, the Party should really consider a name change. Here are some ideas I have for a new name:
The News of the World Party
The National Enquiring Minds Party
The Chupacabras and UFO’s Really Exist Party
The Chest Hair Totalitarian Party
The 11,780 Missing Votes Party
The Alien DNA and Stop the Kabul Party
The Laser from Space Forrest Fire Party
The Seditious and Capital Vandals Party
The Censure Character and Integrity Party
The No Checks and Balances Party
The American Dear Leader Party
The One Dude Weird Worship Party
The Jim Jones Reinvented Party
The Grape Flavored Kool-Aid Party
The Kiss My Shinny Ring Party
The Alternate-Facts State TV & Propaganda Party
The My Pillow Party
The Forsake Our Founding Fathers Party
The Twisted Big Liars Party
The Bone Spurs and Lost Boats Party
The Walk to the Capital Party
The New Confederate Patriot Party
The Confederate Statue and Peculiar Reinstitution Party
The Throw Your Supporters Under the Bus Party
The Extort Another Foreign President for Political Gain Party
The Witness Tampering & Subpoena Obstructionist Party
The Vindictive Felonious Witness Retaliation Party
The Abuses of Power Party
The Russian Conspiracy Theory Champions Party
The Deference to Putin Party
The Alienate Your Traditional Allies Party
The Oops, We Found Another False Positive Dead Voter Party
The Dodge another Billion Dollar Law Suit Party
The Defamation of Character Party
The No Character and Wet Noodle Party
The Despicable Me Party
The Dr. Evil and Backwards Little Finger in the Mouth Party
I am pretty confident that one of the above names will be much more appropriate for the Republican Party. And, that way, by selecting one of those above names, the Republican Party no longer has to worry so much about soiling the good name of President Lincoln and his former Party that had once held a place of so much honor and respect for preserving America’s dedication to the rule of law and against the rule of men.
Pathetic Sycophantic Careers
Republican Senators may play to their misinformed Base during this impeachment phase by being unwilling to prevent a dangerous and seditious politician from ever holding public office again, but it will be the majority of Americans and history who will be the final judges regarding how little these Senators really care about justice, integrity, principles and the ideals of our Founding Fathers regarding their responsibility to be a check against absolute power and criminal abuses of power. These Republican Senators will be judged by their failure to honor their oath to protect our nation from insidious tyrants who attempt to thwart our Constitution. That will go a long way to justifiably put an end to their disgraceful and otherwise pathetic sycophantic careers as they cower in front of the disreputable beast they have deliberately chosen to pledge allegiance to.
The rest of America will then go forward to pledge allegiance to our more noble ideals that that justice is blind to wealth and power and that all men are created equal as represented by our nation’s flag. And those Pathetic Sycophantic Careers dedicated to lies and despotic ideals positioned against our democracy will just fade away forever into history as prime examples of how weakness of character can be the greatest threat to our republic and to any republic based upon constitutional law and self-rule.
What REAL Men Do
Apparently, real men are back and here is what they are saying…
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…just have draft-dodging bone spurs.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…think celebrated captured and tortured soldiers from Arizona who fought in Vietnam are not heroes.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…have despotic, undemocratic fantasies that the election they just lost and they, themselves, are having trouble rigging, was…rigged.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…think that soldiers who died or who were maimed while serving their country are ‘losers and suckers.’”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…fire their defense secretaries for adhering to American ideals of honor and respect for the Constitution over loyalty to a single self-aggrandizing, vindictively insecure individual.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…fire their heads of cybersecurity for contradicting their unfounded and un-democratic lies about voter fraud.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…fire naval commanders at sea for trying desperately to keep their crew safe from a deadly disease.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…hire former New York City mayors with damaged reputations as legal counselors to spread lies and attack and undermine our democracy.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…ignore Federal laws (18 U.S. Code § 1513) as they fire in retaliation decorated military intelligence officers testifying to the truth.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…demand more loyalty to themselves than they do to our Constitution.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…are good with a Sharpie Pen when hurricanes strike.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…unsuccessfully pay-off adult film actresses to keep them quite.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…are still looking for all those boat owners in North Carolina.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…ignore bounties placed on the heads of their soldiers.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…think democracy is too inconvenient and too inefficient.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…corruptly extort presidents of foreign nations by using U.S. government resources for their own personal and political gains.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…just get impeached.”
“Real men wear masks. Those who don’t…brood inside an oval office; launch endless, frivolous electoral lawsuits and never man-up to concede with honor.”
Well, there you have it. “Real men” wear masks. Doing their duty, they are protecting the ones they love, their fellow citizens and, to the extent that masks self-protect, themselves as well. All “Real Men” agree that you should wear a mask too. However, and for some reason we still don’t quite understand, after all these years, “Real Men” still don’t eat quiche?
Conspiracy Theorist in Chief
He is the “Conspiracy Theorist in Chief.” From Birther Stories to Deep State delusions to dangerous hallucinations about Election Fraud to hordes of imaginary caravanning terrorists at the border to his support of QAnon’s insane theory about a secret cabal of leading Democrats involved in a nefarious network of human trafficking, he is the king of misinformation and other flights of dangerously un-American despotic fantasies. As confirmed by his doctors in the white suits, this makes him uniquely qualified to identify elephants, but, leaving him without much ability to identify anything ever having to do with the truth, especially when it comes to COVID-19 (“Did I tell you, Bob, how dangerous this disease was in February, much deadlier than the flu but I’m down playing it because, you know, I don’t want people to panic? Plus, I like calling things that are the truth a hoax”).
Jumping Out of the Pages
It’s like Trump jumped out of the pages of a “Left Behind” book…he is that guy; the world leader that keeps doing unacceptable, evil, corrupt, unethical, un-American things yet people continue to follow him convinced that, somehow, all of this unacceptable, chaotic, narcissistic behavior, is making America great. And, ironically, the people who you’d least expect to follow someone like this, are following him—the very people who should have that special religious insight to know better.
Trump is the self-proclaimed 5th Avenue shooter who defends his thuggish, vigilante militia supporters whether they are White Supremacist groups in Charlottesville or presumptuous overzealous militia groups in Kenosha. Trump even defends his supporters when they are underage militia members charged with committing murder. Trump has his own Gestapo like secret police that he created from repurposed Homeland Security personnel—personnel that used to protect us from terrorist threats abroad but are now used to intimidate and threaten marching civilian mothers in Oregon protesting for justice.
At the same time, Trump claims to be the “Law and Order President who thinks all protestors marching for justice are rioters and looters. In Trump’s feeble mind, any protester marching for justice must be marching against him, right? Trump is only the “Law and Order” President for one race of people, his own. Trump is only the “Law and Order” President when they happen to be laws that apply to other people but these same laws are never to be applied to him or his supporters (i.e. Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, etc.).
People follow Trump to their own doom, like Herman Cain and other misguided conservatives, while the rest of us scratch our heads in complete horror wondering…how? How could they let somebody do this, all these self-destructive things that he does to our country, all the deaths people suffered because of Trump’s incompetent response to the pandemic, all the destruction done to our traditional American institutions like the Justice Department, all the abuses of power and all the abuses of position, all the corruption that lead to his impeachment, all the damage done to our Constitution, all the damage done to the rule of law, all the damage done to our values based upon respect for the individual, all the attacks against a person’s right to vote, all the actions to prevent votes from being delivered on time, all the remarks to persuade his supporters to break the law by voting twice, all the damage to our economy, all the actions never taken against national security threats from Russia, all the bounties on the heads of our military personnel in Afghanistan left unanswered, all the abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, all the American troops pulled out of Germany and redeployed elsewhere because of all the delicate feelings that were hurt by a stately German chancellor, all the insults to our military servicemen and servicewomen who are the complete opposite of “losers” and “suckers,” all the grief he’s caused our traditional allies that have stood by us since World War II, all the bone spurs suffered in a letter from his doctor, all the incompetent conflicting messaging with the experts at the CDC, all the vindictiveness, all the petty, illegal retaliations against people who testified under oath, all the distractions, all the name calling, all the division, all the doubt, all the confusion and all the chaos?
Think about it. Who sows this type of confusion and division? What makes anyone think this is sustainable or aligned in anyway with any type of Christian thought? How do people, especially those who call themselves Christians, justify in their minds that this type of behavior is ever acceptable? Are they so bound and determined to continue to follow this world leader to their own doom as they attempt to drag the rest of us along with them into that dark un-American pit they have chosen? I, for one, am fed up and unwilling to tolerate any more of this indecency, nonsense and self-destruction. Let’s put Trump back into the pages where he belongs before it is too late for us and for our 244 year old experiment in self-rule.
Permanent Despotism
The President deliberately cost hundreds of thousands of people their lives all because he believed a national testing plan would only benefit Blue States. This, taken together with the most recent revelations from Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” that the President knew how deadly COVID-19 was in the early weeks of February, paints a disturbingly grim portrait of an extremely morally compromised human being. That testing plan, had it been executed at its earliest, in all likelihood would have avoided the “shelter-in-place” orders that individual States were forced to later make. It would have spared us the devastation it is still causing our economy.
The President has a responsibility to consider all Americans whether they voted for him or not. The words of President Washington in his Farewell Address are just as valid today as they were 200 years ago: “Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally…The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.”
We are Americans—we belong to the United States of America. We don’t belong to Red States or Blue States of some foreign, different America that has committed itself to endless political corruption and intrigue. Leaders who are morally incapable of recognizing that we are all Americans with basic core commonly held beliefs about liberty and justice are dangerously ill-suited for the office of President. These individuals, like Trump, will never do the right thing for their country because, in reality, they have no country. They just have themselves and think only of themselves. They will lead our country into a state of “permanent despotism.”
It’s time to remove dangerous threats to our republic and to our democracy. Starting with this virus but not ending there. We need to remove the self-serving politically corrupt demagogues that have made this virus outbreak in our country so destructive, so deadly and so unmanageable.
References:
#CNN #News – Jul 31, 2020 – Report: Kushner’s Covid-19 testing plan ‘went poof into thin air’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell_Address
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address
Just Say “No” to “Make America Sick Again!”
The new administrative order that excludes the CDC from directly receiving data from hospitals around the country that is reported to the Federal Government is a clear attempt by a desperate individual in an ill-conceived plan to improve his political fortunes at the expense of the nation’s health and safety. By controlling the data being reported by hospitals, Trump expects he can hide and manipulate the data for his own personal benefit to spin the narrative in any way that he sees fit just like he’s always done. The truth is Trump’s enemy and just like the Devil, Trump will do anything he can to hide the truth from you by painting you a fluffy, Sharpie picture or a safe secure wall to show you how he is most able to so keenly keep out the invading hordes of foreign body antigens even if it means injecting disinfectant to do it. His objective is to deceive you into believing his many fanciful lies that will, ultimately, only lead to your own doom in the end. The story is all too common and all too familiar. It’s the story of a despot.
Meanwhile, the CDC doctors and other medical doctors around the country are left handicapped. Without access to this vitally critical information required by health professionals to aid in their efforts to stop the spread of this virus as quickly as possible, they are prevented from effectively doing their job as they work fervently around the clock to help reduce the tragically increasing number of deaths that keep occurring each day because of this pandemic. Hiding that data increases the risk faced by health workers and it also increases your own risk in being counted as a victim of this pandemic.
Trump’s disturbing self-serving, ego-centric pursuits are destroying this nation and its people by the hundreds of thousands as ICU beds fill up and places to put the bodies of those who have succumbed to this disease dwindle. Trump’s unacceptable behavior is not only becoming a more deadly menace to the effectiveness of our health system but it’s beginning to compromise our national security too. As we continue to become sicker, we are distracted from other nefarious players in the world who are already working to take advantage of the precarious situation. For example, consider the bounties placed on the heads of our military personnel in Afghanistan. The failure to act on that bit of intelligence is further indication of Trump’s inability to recognize dangerous, adversarial threats to our nation from nefarious foreign sources when it contradicts his own fanciful notions of how “he wants it to be.”
Had Trump prepared our nation like he should have months ago, had he not tossed the Pandemic Playbook prepared by the Obama Administration in the wastepaper basket when he took office, had he not fired the Pandemic Response Team in 2018, had he listen to his intelligence agencies, had he listened to the pandemic experts, had he not thought it a hoax and used his hoax story as a less than clever tool to make fun of the “Left” for the benefit of his political reelection campaign, there is every reason to believe we could have avoided the extreme shelter-in-place measures that local governments were forced to take because of Trump’s incompetence and failure in leadership. Then, later, after it appeared things were looking better, had Trump taken the advice of his experts at the CDC by not promoting the opening of America too soon and by not ignoring his responsibility to set a good example by wearing a mask, we could have avoided this sadly predictable but entirely avoidable resurgence of the virus. The unnecessary and economically destructive epidemic mess we are in is entirely the fault of Trump and his anti-science politically corrupted cronies who place their faith in ignorance and made-up tabloid conspiracy theories rather than science and reality.
Trump’s new campaign slogan seems to be: “Make America Sick Again.” It is apparently working in disturbing ways and in ways not too dissimilar from the actions that the Kremlin and/or other comparative totalitarian states might take. I’m sure the idea to control the data has nothing to do with Trump’s inexplicable peculiar fondness for Putin?
With reports about unmarked, unidentifiable Federal Agents kidnapping protestors in Portland, Oregon, questioning them, not charging them and then letting them go, we are left to grapple with yet more incomprehensible un-Democratic actions and abuses of power by a President who just does not seem to have a grasp of how democracy or the rule of law works in America. These unacceptable Gestapo like tactics are right out of a despot’s handbook. They are meant to intimidate the less powerful and used only as a means to deny citizens a voice; tactics a tyrant in a banana republic would embrace without a second thought. But, in America, it’s a violation of our Bill of Rights and of our Constitution. Is this an indication of how CDC personnel and other doctors who promote advice regarding how to decrease the risk of COVID-19 and/or other pandemic disease will be dealt with in the not too distant future when their advice contradicts the advice Trump wants to promote?
Dangerous despots are easily recognizable. We have thousands of years of history to reference in order to learn how to spot them. And this is a sure sign of one. In banana republics or in Russia, it would be a common, everyday occurrence to keep medical data intended for public review and public safety hidden from the masses. But, whoever thought it could happen in America where we are supposed to have safeguards in place to prevent this type of thing from ever happening?
This is a dangerous and an alarming turn of events that should have all Americans, regardless of Political Party, very concerned. Every American citizen who believes in freedom and liberty and the health of their loved ones should be demanding that this unacceptable and un-American self-serving action by Trump be properly reversed and corrected immediately. There is no excuse for threatening the public welfare or our stability as a democratic republic in this irresponsible way.
Freedom of information needs to be preserved. That is the American way and it’s the only way to fight this virus effectively. The CDC and the public needs to have direct access to this hospital data restored now. It’s time to just say, “No,” to “Make America Sick Again!”
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/us/politics/trump-cdc-coronavirus.html
https://gizmodo.com/white-house-tells-hospitals-to-skip-cdc-and-send-corona-1844385250
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cdc-covid-19-data/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wMlgEWZnN8
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/16/trump-administration-wants-all.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/trump-coronavirus-national-security-council-149285
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/05/trump-obama-coronavirus-pandemic-response
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-07-18/portland-protests-federal-agents
Katie – We are Fighting for that Shining City on a Hill
Katie,
You have lots of friends and lots of people who respected how well you were doing your job in Congress. And while I only know of you and don’t really know you, we can never really be sure of all the details in the private lives of others (nor, obviously, should all have any right to know all those details). Regardless, I read your article in the New York Times. You have presented yourself with distinction in the face of less than distinguished circumstances and it is to be admired.
I know your road will still be tough. However, I have no doubt you will make a full recovery. And I also suspect that if you wanted to return to public life to serve our country again one day, you could successfully do that.
The fight to return this country back to the ideas Americans used to value about liberty and justice for all and respect for the individual as a creature bestowed with certain unalienable rights by their creator needs to continue. And those thoughts that guide unwarranted hyperactive fears about fear itself at the hands and whims of a demagogue whose arbitrary actions are inspired by cable driven tabloid news needs to be rejected. And we need to succeed in both these objectives.
If we don’t succeed in these objectives, it will mean a road paved towards autocratic despotic government or even Russia itself (where Putin couldn’t be more pleased with the results of his interference efforts into our 2016 Presidential election). If that should happen, America’s democratic republic based upon the rule of law as envisioned by our Founding Fathers is certain to collapse as certain as the Ancient Roman Empire collapsed for similar reasons.
The lack of respect shown you with the release of pictures no decent human being would ever take let alone would ever release will be common place but exactly the type of “dirt” unprincipled characters currently holding some of our more important Federal government positions crave and propagate. It is a severe divergence from that Shining City on a Hill that we had all once wanted and another famous American from California once spoke about. We need to get back to being Americans who are less concerned about what divides us and more concerned about what unites us.
“These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow; they are not Jews or Christians; conservatives or liberals; or Democrats or Republicans. They are Americans awed by what has gone before, proud of what for them is still… a shining city on a hill.”—Ronald Reagan.
Ancient Rome’s Migration Disaster
We have it good here in America. We need to appreciate that. We live in a world that is interconnected. We need to appreciate that. In the late period of the ancient Roman Empire when migrants encroached on their borders, the people in charge thought much like Trump thought. The Romans called them “barbarians,” gave them a label, made them an enemy, a target people could blame for all their troubles (the “Bad Hombres” of their time).
That thinking cost the ancient Romans an empire. The ancient Romans completely forgot what their ancestors, just two hundred years prior, had brilliantly done to manage migration. We need to appreciate that too, understand it and study it. There is a way to solve our migration woes but what’s happening now, mismanaging how the money is allocated, misappropriations, inhuman conditions along with a sideshow of unacceptable bigoted Facebook postings by a small segment of CBP officers, this unthoughtful zero tolerance administration policy, this unchristian administration policy, is just going to make things worse.
We need to quit looking at migration as a negative and start looking at it as a positive. Fortunately for my Irish ancestors, we had Presidents dedicated to unifying the country with ideas of liberty and justice for all. There was no demagogue elected to the Presidency, to such a powerful position, who had any desire to fuel the fires of the prejudices and misconceptions Americans had at that time towards the caravan of Irish immigrants during the 1840’s and 1850’s. The Irish were the “Bad Hombre’s” in the eyes of many Americans who felt threatened by this influx of foreigners to their country but they weren’t.
My Irish ancestors helped make our nation great. We need to realize we are a nation of immigrants. Once we do that, there are some real policies that can be put into place. Rather than being that 30 foot multibillion, very expensive Band-Aid, they are cost effective policies that can help to address the sources of the problems. It will give the CBP what they really need, what they really want and what America really needs.
We are America, the land of the free, home of the brave, with emphasis on brave. We aren’t the home of the frightened little citizens threatened by caravan people who are only hoping to escape their unbearable conditions to make their lives better. We need to start acting like the country we were meant to be, what we used to be, full of honor and integrity and fearlessness, before we end up losing our republic in a way similar to the way the ancient Romans lost theirs’s. We need to grow up, learn and, most of all, be decent human beings about it.
Answering with Full Metal Integrity
The Republicans’ baseless accusations against Adam Schiff and their ridiculously tacky call for his resignation is not only “Grandstanding” of the worst kind but it is also the most vilest form of projection I have ever seen by one group of individuals in an attempt at projecting their own unapologetic twisted behavior onto somebody else. Not only is this an underhanded political maneuver on the part of these Republicans, it is also way beneath the integrity of even the most civilly debased political being that anyone might imagine can exist.
Adam Schiff, chairman of House Intelligence Committee, is way above the Republican’s dirty tricks. On Thursday, 3/28/2019, Schiff turned the tables on his accusers by highlighting the Republican’s own unethical behavior of not providing the proper oversight of their equally civilly absent President. Schiff convincingly outlined the evidence for collusion in his response to their inane request that dispels any myth that this evidence could ever be interpreted by anyone as “lies.”
Meanwhile these same Republicans fail to consider their own egregious misdeeds of participating in suspect memos tainted with political misinformation and running clandestine missions back and forth between the White House in order to contribute to the ample incidences of obstruction that has been made so public in its presentation by the President and his cast of Reality TV minions. The President’s `actions and the efforts by those in his campaign to coordinate with the Russians while, perhaps, not criminal under today’s laws as opinioned by the Attorney General, is still not OK. It also is certainly not OK for the President and his party line Republican soldiers to continue their vindictive, petty crusade of seeking revenge on their targeted political enemies who had every right to petition for an investigation into the odd behavior of this sitting President towards Russia and into the other strange choices this President has made.
This assertion is especially poignant when you consider that the President’s vindictive actions since the Attorney General released his summary report of the Mueller Investigation seem more representative of a Third World Country Dictator insecure in his own power than it is of a dignified American President who has any understanding at all of what it means to maintain even a minuscule measurement of integrity and decency. We need a return to civility and integrity. It should start with the President in a normal universe. Since that is an impossibility given this Reality TV Star’s DNA, we instead need more people of integrity like Adam Schiff in Washington to shut down and to call out those who apparently are absent any actual integrity of their own.
The Polarity Resistance 