Russian Hacking
Detecting Fraud
Thirty one instances of suspected voter fraud out of one billion votes from 2000 – 2014. Something needs to be done about this according to fringe elements of the political spectrum. To them, that fraction of a percentage of probable voter fraud cases is way too high. For all you who are partial to statistical numbers: 0.0000031% of those votes are suspected of being fraudulent. The study was conducted by Loyola Law School Professor, Justin Levitt. Levitt is also the author of an earlier study on the same subject entitled, “The Truth about Voter Fraud.”
Similar studies confirm these results including one conducted by the Bush II administration. And the few cases that do exist may surprise you regarding who is committing these crimes. For example, a truly egregious, well publicized instance of voter fraud was committed in 2018 by Republicans in North Carolina. To increase the irony, it involved absentee voting. And then, just recently, the Republican Party in California somehow believes that they are exempt from State laws protecting registered voters against voter fraud when they decided to sponsor ballot boxes that are not owned or officially sanctioned by the State of California.
The California Republican Party is misleading voters into believing that the Republican operated drop boxes are official ballot boxes. The leaders of any other group of people involved in similar nefarious activity would be automatically hauled off to jail without a second thought since this action is typically regarded as a felony in California. Lastly, the President himself is encouraging his supporters to vote twice which is also a felony. It’s disturbing to think that a presumably respected long standing national Political Party would decide that turning to a life of crime is the only way it can win elections. It seems the ones making the most noise about voter fraud are the ones who are most often committing it.
Traditionally, the majority of absentee voters have been Republicans (including the President and the administration’s own Press Secretary—talk about Black Kettle complexes). So, if anything, voter fraud would have favored the Republicans not the Democrats if there were any merit to this erroneous claim. The assertion that there is rampant voter fraud being made by President Trump has no basis in fact. At 0.0000031%, voter fraud is virtually non-existent. The claim made by the President is itself fraudulent, dishonest and irresponsible.
Why would the President risk upsetting or alienating Republican voters and, really, all voters, by threatening to take their absentee voting rights away? Because Trump wants to give his Base something to rally behind and to hate. It’s what all demagogues do. It’s what all despicable people do who have no ethics, no morals to guide them and no integrity. If there’s nothing to hate, they’ll invent something to hate. It also sets the stage for Trump’s attempt to discredit the election results should he lose the election. This is something only a despot would do.
Even if voter fraud was rampant instead of the incredibly miniscule percentage of 0.0000031%, why would you throw the baby out with the bathwater? If you were truly concerned about election fraud, why not address the voter fraud in productive ways that improve the security of voting by mail? That way it would increase the confidence in the legitimacy of those votes. If you found the majority of voter fraud cases occurred at Polling Places, would that cause you to outlaw Polling Places? Such an action would be absurd and a deliberate attempt at destroying our right to self-rule.
We are in the middle of a pandemic that Trump initially labeled a hoax, a pandemic Trump failed to take seriously and then failed to do anything about for months. As a consequence, local governments were forced to take extreme measures absent any real leadership from the Federal government. It was a disease that Trump knew how deadly it was at the time he was calling it a hoax. This revelation caught on tape by Bob Woodward shows the dishonesty of a man who is willing to sacrifice the lives of the people of his own country in favor of what he deems to be his own favorable political fortunes. The destructive suggestion that voters should physically go to the polls to expose themselves to the very real chance that they could contract a deadly disease, a disease causing hundreds of thousands of deaths here in the United States, when there are more reasonable and safer ways of voting available to us is probably the single most irresponsible action a President has ever made in our lifetimes. This point especially resonates when you consider the President himself caught COVID-19 as a result of his own irresponsible recklessness.
For this reason and many other equally disturbing reasons, Trump is a dangerous threat to our democracy and to our country in general. Trump is especially dangerous when he advocates against our right to vote. No respectable American President dedicated to self-rule would ever advocate such a position.
Only a totalitarian leaning despot afraid of losing power would argue that your right to vote in the manner prescribed by the laws of your State should be taken away from you. If that’s not an offensive affront to our democracy, I do not know what is. A President who is against voting safely and securely should make you pause to reflect upon the stark possibility that we are truly a democracy in jeopardy. But it’s not in jeopardy because of voter fraud. It’s in jeopardy because of a different kind of fraud. And that fraud is the current occupant living in the White House.
References:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47323556
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL6ixYa1hUY
https://www.factcheck.org/2016/10/trumps-bogus-voter-fraud-claims/
https://www.politifact.com/article/2016/dec/17/fact-checking-claims-voter-fraud-2016/
https://www.lls.edu/faculty/facultylistl-r/justinlevitt/
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%20Truth%20About%20Voter%20Fraud.pdf
https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/Fool+me+once%2c+shame+on+you%3b+fool+me+twice%2c+shame+on+me
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/truth-about-voter-fraud
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ca-gop-ballot-drop-boxes/
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/12/california-gop-says-it-owns-unofficial-ballot-drop-boxes.html
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.
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.
Mr. Mueller’s Peculiar Legal Gaffe
Robert Mueller stated he couldn’t indict a sitting President because it is “unconstitutional.” It was a bold statement to make especially since it is not true. This OLC opinion that I presume Mueller is basing his own conclusion upon has not been tested in the courts. Furthermore, there is nothing in the Constitution that says that the President is above the law which is effectively what such a conclusion asserts.
In fact, I would argue the Constitution states the exact opposite: the President is not above the law. And I would probably win my argument dependent only upon the number of beer drinking judges on the bench that might not be totally impartial. When our Constitution was written our founders had just a few years earlier fought a war to end the rule of a man who was legally above the law. That would be the King of England for those who missed the memo. When considering that our founding fathers would not ever want any man to hold that much power ever again, the statement Mueller makes seems absolutely absurd.
It is generally understood that Mueller is basing his conclusion on an untested opinion by the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) that was offered in 1973. Ken Starr’s team in the 1990’s offered a more recent opinion. Starr’s team asserted that a sitting President can be indicted. Around that same time, a Supreme Court ruling affirmed that a sitting President can face some civil lawsuits (Clinton v. Jones, 1997). And prior to that ruling, in 1982 (Nixon v. Fitzgerald), the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, Warren Burger, in his concurring opinion that favored protecting Presidents against being sued if their actions were directly associated with official duties, stated this:
“The dissents are wide of the mark to the extent that they imply that the Court today recognizes sweeping immunity for a President for all acts. The Court does no such thing. The immunity is limited to civil damages claims. Moreover, a President, like Members of Congress, judges, prosecutors, or congressional aides — all having absolute immunity — are not immune for acts outside official duties. Ante at 457 U. S. 753-755. Even the broad immunity of the Speech and Debate Clause has its limits…”
“In United States v. Brewster, 408 U. S. 501 (1972), we held that the Speech and Debate Clause does not prohibit prosecution of a Senator for accepting a bribe designed to influence his legislative acts…”
“When judicial action is needed to serve broad public interests — as when the Court acts not in derogation of the separation of powers, but to maintain their proper balance, cf. Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, or to vindicate the public interest in an ongoing criminal prosecution, see United States v. Nixon— the exercise of jurisdiction has been held warranted. In the case of this merely private suit for damages based on a President’s official acts, we hold it is not…The Court has recognized before that there is a lesser public interest in actions for civil damages than, for example, in criminal prosecutions…”
If the Supreme Court ruled that sitting Presidents are not immune from all civil lawsuits (Clinton v. Jones) and if an earlier 1982 ruling included statements by the Chief Justice that indicates civil lawsuits are less worthy of interest than criminal offensives when perpetrated by elected officeholders, then there should be no question that a sitting President can be indicted for criminal offenses. The integrity of the office demands that we have people holding that office who have respect for the law. Presidents are required to face criminal prosecution just like any other citizen, and, in fact, they should be held to a higher bar than any other citizen given the importance of the office.
Failing to prosecute whenever egregious criminal offenses are perpetrated by occupants of our nation’s highest office damages the integrity of the office itself and damages our nation’s credibility as preserver of justice. The arguably errant 1973 OLC opinion was rendered by a likely Presidential apologist at a time when another more infamous President to date faced the threat of criminal prosecution. Had Mueller explicitly stated his intention to follow a traditional standard set by previous Presidential Investigators to refer the matter to Congress then I do not believe many, absent the political pundits, would find fault with that. However, when evaluating the incredible amount of dissention, past Supreme Court opinions and the quality of arguments made against that infamous OLC opinion of 1973, it is all the more reason to believe that Mueller’s assertion that his failure to indict a sitting President is settled constitutional law was a very peculiar legal gaffe to make indeed.
References:
https://www.justsecurity.org/44264/supreme-court-justices-president-indicted/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_v._Jones
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/us/politics/can-president-be-indicted-kenneth-starr-memo.html
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.
Where have all the Patriots Gone?
In the United States, since our very inception, we detest despots. This sentiment is clearly expressed in our Declaration of Independence: “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” So, I really have some questions about the trip a small delegation of lawmakers made last week to a country whose leader exemplifies despotism.
These are the names belonging to the delegation that went to Russia on July 4th, 2018: Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.), Steve Daines (Mont.), John Thune (S.D.), John Kennedy (La.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), John Hoeven (N.D.) and Rep. Kay Granger (Texas). Instead of celebrating our country’s independence from a despot these seven government representatives decided it was better to patronize one in Russia. In general, it doesn’t really matter to me if the intent of this trip was to discuss the proof they had regarding Russia’s interference in our election nor does it matter much if they had any earnest warnings for Russia against trying the same thing in our 2018 elections. That could be done in other ways without having to go to Moscow. By engaging in a trip to Moscow now, there seems to me to be a high probability that it creates the perception that we (the United States) are just accepting Russia’s recent violations of international law.
Such a perception would amount to appeasement. We all know the result of the last time leaders of the Free World tried appeasement (reference Neville Chamberlain). Hint: it didn’t work out so well.
So, I think some real soul searching on the part of this delegation needs to be done but does this delegation also need to be reminded about who their host is? The leader of Russia is someone who is suspected of human rights violations, suspected of murder, attempted murder, has squashed expressions of freedom and, of course, attacked our own country by interfering in our elections. Putin is a leader who has invaded two other independent countries that led to portions of those sovereign states being removed from their sovereign control. In 2008, Russia invaded Georgia then sponsored what amounts to puppet governments in the former Georgian provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. In 2014, Ukraine was invaded by Russia where Russia simply annexed Crimea outright.
The worst part about the trip this delegation of US representatives made is that it occurred on the 4th of July, our Independence Day. This is a day where we should be shouting to the world in no uncertain terms that we will be free of despots, all despots. Therefore, if this delegation’s intention were not to make a complete mockery of our most patriotic holiday of the year where freedom rings loudest, it may have come close to doing just that despite what its intention truly may have been.
References:
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/395719-gop-senators-visited-moscow-on-july-4
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=626664156
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/21/politics/senators-russia-congressional-delegation/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of_Independence
https://pixabay.com/en/revolutionary-war-historical-102237
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied_territories_of_Georgia
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-paul/russia-georgia-war-in-200_b_4891391.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_Abkhazia_and_South_Ossetia
The Great American Presidential Apprentice
Coming January 20th at 6:00 AM PST/7:00 AM MST
Stay tuned for the Premier of “The Great American Presidential Apprentice,” the new world leader Reality TV show you don’t want to miss is coming this January 20th. As President-Elect he has nearly caused one international incident after another from China, to Japan, to NATO and then throwing in a Russian Hacking denial or two for grins, but he’s just getting started. Just wait until he becomes President on January 20th. Populist autocrats all around the world can’t wait either.
Watch as he fires Congress while his supporters cheer with glee. Then watch him fire the Supreme Court as they cheer some more. And then watch him fire the Constitution but not before steamrolling over the Bill of Rights amidst ever more louder cheers (even the beloved second amendment does not get a reprieve). In addition to his Constitution defacing antics, “Draining the Swamp” will take on a whole new Reality TV meaning as he successfully convinces us that he needs to fill up the swamp in order to drain it.
No Presidential Press Conference will be as much fun to watch as the ones he has planned for his “Press on Trial” segment. All those nasty people in the press corps will be put on trial and then, you guessed it, fired. Watch as he deflects attention away from questionable lawsuit settlements to some poor group of Broadway entertainers whose only crimes were that they asked that the rights of others be respected.
Watch as he dismantles your democratic institutions right before your very eyes, magically and then replaces your republic with a fiefdom. The White House will never be the same. In fact, it won’t be because it is being renamed. Henceforth, it is now, “The Great House.”
So, tune-in on January 20th! It will be like a having a Political Rally right in your very own living room! America will be great again!!! And, oh, by the way, he is also renaming America to the “United States of Greatness,” but, then, soon to be just, “Great, the Country,” because he intends to fire all the States too. Additionally, everyone must now salute the red, white and combed-over flag.
And, for all of you who belong to questionable faiths who should not be let into the country, don’t forget to wear your official state issued religious identification badges because, afterwards, you might win an all-expense paid trip to his new resort, “The Taj Mahal Luxury Internment Villas,” near the new wall site. And don’t pay any attention to those bellhops who look like armed guards. As long as you don’t go anywhere, they won’t bother you.
*Check local listings for availability and times (times may vary).
Russian Hacking and Other Insecurities
It really is beside the point whether the Russian hacking actually helped Trump win the election. I don’t think that the intelligence communities ever claimed that they had such evidence. The CIA, FBI and the other intelligence agencies repeatedly claimed that the evidence only showed that the Russians were responsible for hacking our computer networks and that this effort was intended to benefit Trump. Trump repeatedly denied that the Russians could be responsible; over and over again, doing as much as possible to cast doubt upon and discredit the various intelligence agencies at every chance he could. Now it appears that Trump might concede a little bit by acknowledging that maybe there was some hacking by the Russians but careful to qualify that this hacking didn’t help him win the election.
While it is difficult to quantify, it is not difficult to understand how the result of the collected hacked information appearing on WikiLeaks, each week a new set of hacked data presented during the campaign, kept negative attention focused on Clinton’s e-mail server scandal and alleged Clinton Foundation issues. It is difficult to argue that this did not have an effect on the election. But, even so, the not so easily quantifiable presumption that there may have been an effect on the election is distinct and separate from the election result itself which, obviously, is something we can easily quantify. So, absent other evidence, it could never really be argued that the election result is not valid based upon this presumption alone without a great amount of difficulty.
Regardless, Trump continues to put his self-interests above his country. If the President-Elect is unable to comprehend the duty he has to protect the security of his country even above his own interests, how can he be expected to protect its people and the democratic values our country holds dear? Is this really the type of characteristic we want in a President?
The fact that we have a President-Elect who is so insecure about his own election result that he would think the evidence that implicates that the Russians hacked our systems necessarily implies that his election result is invalid may be another indication of just how lacking in character and unqualified a President-Elect we have. Most normal statesmen (and/or stateswomen) would be more worried about protecting our country rather than protecting some less meaningful election result. The last President that might have been accused of having this much insecurity is Nixon.
Interestingly and similarly, that President also went to great lengths in his efforts to protect his 1972 election result even going as far as becoming involved in a conspiracy to cover-up a crime. It’s amazing how more things change the more they remain the same. So, if anyone had any doubts before, it’s pretty clear to me now where this Presidency is headed.
The Polarity Resistance 