Week of 02/06/2017

Some Needed Advice For Progressives And The Rest Of The Resistance
– by David Matthews 2

Okay, this is an open letter for those of you who didn’t vote for the orange-skinned-wacky-man that are right now outraged and angry and even afraid of what Donald Trump is doing now that he’s the President of the United States.

First off, if you’re a Trumpet looking for political ammunition, screw you.  I didn’t vote for your guy, but I also didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton either.  I’ve been on the political outside back when your self-appointed messiah was still just a narcissistic businessman, and the only “enemy” on his mind was a bad breeze hitting his hair.  And I’m not telling these guys anything that I wouldn’t be telling you if your boy lost the election either, so get over yourself and go see a doctor about that stick up your ass.

Okay... now that I’ve pissed off 49% of the country... again... this is for the rest of you sorry lot.  The progressives, the liberals, the Democrat Party supporters, not to mention the average ordinary person who didn’t vote for the orange-skinned-wacky-man and his theo-fascist members of the Cult of Trump.

First, welcome to the ranks of the political outsiders.  As you heard me tell off the Trumpets, I’ve been here for quite a while now.  I know some of this will be new to you.  Some of you have not felt this scared before.  You’re not used to seeing us socially revert.  If you paid attention in school, you’d learn from your history lessons that we’ve been here before and how it’s different now than when it happened before.  And if you didn’t learn this in school, then we all know which educational institutions have failed us.

So you had your little marches after the inauguration, and you had your moments of rage at the airports, and you keep saying that you need to mount a “resistance” to stop the Cult of Trump.  Hey, good for you.

So now what?

Well I’ll tell you what most of you will do... you will go home and you will grumble for the next three-and-a-half years.  You’ll tell your friends on Facebook and Twitter that you’re scared and you’re angry and you’re outraged and that you wish the election never happened the way that it did.    And that is all that you will do.  You’ll be pissed off and angry, but that’s it.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret: that’s precisely what the Cult of Trump expect of you.  That’s why they’re acting like the pompous self-righteous ass-clowns that they are about your little demonstrations and protests.  Sure, it’ll ruffle the orange-skinned-wacky-man himself, but that’s because he’s a narcissist.  He curses the wind if it blows the wrong way.  But for Vice President Pence and the rest of the Cult of Trump, they know better.  They know that you’ll have your little “tantrum” and then you will go home.

That’s why I find it hard for me to take any talk of “resistance” seriously right now.  Most of you are like “Yeah, I’m pissed, I’m mad as hell, but I have to take my precious to soccer practice.”  And, again, that is what the Cult of Trump expects of you. 

In fact, let’s get brutally here... this is what the power elite in Washington and all the various state governments have always presumed about you.  They operate on the presumption that while you’re pissed about something right now, you’ll shut up and go back to work tomorrow once you’ve had your little tantrum, and then they will go right back to work finding new and different ways to screw us all over on behalf of their K-Street and C-Street friends.

So if you are serious, or if you want to be serious, then you need to understand that this is not just a four-year “thing” when you can squeeze something in between your precious tax deduction’s soccer practice and work.  The Women’s March and the airport protests need to be the warm-up act.  So that’s the really the first piece of needed advice to give to you...

Be prepared for the long haul.  This is not a one-and-done deal.  You can’t just say “we protested and they heard us.”  No, they didn’t hear you!  And they never will “hear” you, no matter how loudly you complain.  All they hear is the wail of a child’s tantrum.  You cry out, they roll their eyes, you go home, it’s back to business-as-usual, lather, rinse, repeat. 

You want to really be “heard”?  You need to be out there every time, every day, on every issue.  Just like the GOP did for the last four years under Barack Obama.  They disagreed with and objected to every issue, every day, every instance.  Even when it exposed them to being the lying hypocritical sacks of monkey crap that they are.  They were still out there and saying “no” and “hell no” and “what part of ‘no’ don’t you understand”.

And, no, it’s not going to be easy.  You’re not going to get respect.  You’re going to get ignored and ridiculed and tormented over it.  You’re going up against a political death-cult being led by a narcissist!  They don’t care about you or about what happens to you.  Ever.  At all.  Period.

This next one is just as important...

Your side lost!  Accept it!  In the 2015 documentary “The Death of Superman Lives”, Bryan Singer supposedly countered the demands of Warner Brothers executives to micromanage in his production of “Superman Returns” by pulling out an earlier photo of Nicholas Cage dressed as Superman and reminded them “this is what you tried to pull off”.

Well the same holds true to those of you who voted for Hillary Clinton.  You need to accept the fact that you backed the wrong candidate in Hillary Clinton and that you lost the election.  Sure, Bernie Sanders could have beaten Don “The Ego” Trump, but the Democratic National Committee didn’t want Bernie.  They sold their souls and their party’s reputation to muscle Hillary in, and the vast majority of you bought into that deal.

And you need to own that.  You need to accept and own that reality, because the Cult of Trump will beat you with it like Bryan Singer did with Warner Brothers.  Trump and his cult have and they are and they will continue to remind you that you lost the election.  This is how bullies behave.  They find your weakness and they exploit it.  Trust me, I know this from experience.

Own the narrative!  One of the things that the GOP did that allowed them to take over Congress in 2010 and edge out this past November is that they were allowed to own the narrative on the issues.  They had a message for everything Obama did or wanted to do, and that message was “not on our watch”.

Yes, their obstructionism was nothing short of out-and-out sabotage, but they controlled the narrative, so it became a “political tradition” that only existed in their heads and only lasted for as long as Obama was in the White House.

Trump certainly knows how to own the narrative.  Remember his pet nicknames for his challengers?  “Low Energy” Jeb Bush? “Little Marco” Rubio?  “Lyin’ Ted Cruz”?  “Crooked Hillary Clinton”?  They certainly stuck in all our heads.

And as long as Trump is allowed to engage in his 3am Twitter-tantrums, he will continue to own the narrative as President.  That’s something that you as would-be members of the resistance need to neutralize.  You need to own that narrative.

Expel the losers!  One of the things that the so-called “Tea Party” movement in the GOP did was to get rid of a lot of old “mainstream” members.  The ones that were willing to work with “the other side of the isle”.  And they didn’t wait for the voters to do it in the November election.  They did it in the primaries.

And that is what you need to do as well.  Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Shummer, and the rest of the Dems need to be put on notice that their futures in Washington are numbered.  Pelosi and the rest of the incompetent failures have already said that they’re going to simply wait until the nation somehow “comes to their senses” and votes out the GOP in the 2018 mid-terms.

So let me ask you who claim to be “the resistance” (with an intentional small “r”): if you really think that Trump and his cult are that dangerous, do you really think that the nation can last until 2018 to “come to their senses”?  Remember that this is someone who has proven to throw Twitter-tantrums at 3am without a care as to the consequences.

If Pelosi and Shummer and the rest of the lot can’t do what you expect them to, then you need to start using another “r” word in their faces: recall.  And, yes, that especially includes the ones in your district.  That means that you – and I do mean you individually – have to do your bit and actually vote them out.

And, yes, ideally you need to get rid of the Democratic Party altogether.  They are losers and they are being led by losers.  And the Cult of Trump and the rest of the GOP know this and they expect the Democratic Party to continue to serve as the Party of Losers so they can keep being elected and re-elected.  So that party needs to go away.  It has long outlived their usefulness.  Let the Greens and the Libertarians pick up the challenge of the Cult of Trump. 

Sadly, though, I don’t see that part happening anytime soon.

This next piece is equally important...

Keep the focus on Trump himself!  Your problem is with the ego in the Oval Office, not his current wife and his complex family.

Unless Melania Trump does something really stupid, keep her out of the discussion.  If she’s smart, she’ll stay out of the mess and let her husband get all of the grief.  Yes, she was a model in her day, and, yes, she posed nude, and, yes, we can see more of her through the Internet than any other First Lady in American history.  Deal with it.  It has no bearing on the here and now unless her husband decides to wage a morality war on behalf of his C-Street “friends”.

And their young son is certainly off-limits until he turns 18!  Same for his grandchildren.  That should be without saying, but some people (*ahem* SNL writers *ahem*) do need to be reminded of that.

And unless Trump decides to let his adult children get involved in government activities, they should be off-limits as well.  Don’t harass Ivanka Trump just because you hate her daddy like one idiot did.  Keep your focus on President Donald J. Trump himself.  The president seems to think it’s all about him anyway, so let’s not disappoint him.

This next piece of needed advice is unique, and it really needs to be said...

Don’t make stuff up about Trump!  I am really serious about this.  You do not need to fabricate birth certificates like the GOP did to Obama and try to claim that Trump is really some cross-bred quasi-orangutan born in a remote lab in Brazil by some 1940’s German fugitives.  You don’t need to claim that Trump is actually the host for some ugly hair-like alien parasite serving as the vanguard to some alien invasion, or that his brain was replaced by a Russian mini-server controlled by Vlad Putin.

You don’t ever have to do anything like that... because Trump actually writes his own crazy material.

This is the man that claimed in public to know more about fighting terrorists than the generals in the Pentagon.  He who never served in the military and got the usual GOP chickenhawk deferments claims to know more than the military men and women that still serve today.  That is not an exaggeration. That is real!  He actually said that.

This is someone who appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast this past week and started out by talking about how bad “Celebrity Apprentice” is now that he’s not the host of it but he still serves as “Executive Producer” and then asked those assembled to pray for better ratings.  That is not an exaggeration.  That is real.  He actually said that!

He who boasted that women will let him do anything he wants because he’s got money.  He who actually said “Grab ‘em by the pussy.”  He who appeared in Playboy videos and professional wrestling events and upgrades his wives in the same regularity that most people upgrade their cars and now sucks up to bible-thumpers.  These are not exaggerations.  These are real.

Remember George W. Bush and his “Bushisms”?  People didn’t have to make anything up about Junior because he wrote his own material.  The same holds true for the orange-skinned-wacky-man currently in the White House.

So you don’t have to make anything up about Trump.  Ever.  Leave the fiction-writing to his hack team of Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and the folks at Fox News and Breitbart.  That seems to be their specialty.

Don’t trust the media to help!  You and I both know that there is no such thing as “alternative facts”.  Those are just soft language words for lies, lies, and more goddamned lies.  But the media is trying to spread that in their attempt to “normalize” the Cult of Trump.

And that’s not the only instance.  Remember all the talk about the “alt-right”?  You don’t hear too much about that lately, do you?  No, you don’t hear about that now that Trump’s personal Rasputin, Steve Bannon, is in the inner circle.

How about “the age of post-truth”?  That’s another one of the media’s inventions.  Once upon a time we used to call it for what it really is... the brainwashing of a cult!  It’s otherwise known as “doublespeak”.

But the media doesn’t want to call out the people engaging in doublespeak.  No, they just wash their hands of it and say we’re in “the age of post-truth”.

Pissed off about that?  You should be!

The air-fluffed ego-driven media is really no more liberal than it is conservative.  The media in its entirety is part of the status quo, no matter who is in that status quo.  Sure, some of the air-fluffed ego-driven personalities are “liberal”, but they work for conservative bosses and owners, and they don’t want to lose money, prestige, or access simply because of who won the election.  So they will suck up to Trump and his cult followers and they will do everything that they can to “normalize” the stupid, no matter how stupid it may be or how stupid it may make them look.

So don’t expect the media to help you.  They are not your friends, and they are certainly not on your side.

And the last piece of needed advice is this...

Clean up your own act.  Just as important as owning the narrative is making sure that you’re not looking like hypocrites.  Own up to the failings of Team Obama.  Acknowledge they exist.  The Affordable Care Act may have helped some people, but it hurt a lot more with dwindling choices, skyrocketing premiums, and outright price-gouging from Big Pharma.  We dropped the ball in Lybia and Syria and that did help to create the Islamic State.  The economy wasn’t that “great” if you’re one of the millions that have been forsaken by our country, and, yes, I’m saying that as someone who was part of the millions that were considered “unemployable”.  The banks literally were able to buy their way out of any kind of accountability thanks to Obama’s Justice Department, and that is all the way up to and including the recent Wells Fargo incident.

You need to own this and accept this and acknowledge this if you want to move forward, because this is what Trump has been using to get converts to his cult.  You want to overcome that?  You need to clean up your act and own up to those failings.

No, it’s not easy to counter the Cult of Trump.  You’re going to feel like you’re shouting at a brick wall and getting discouraged when it doesn’t fall.  But just remember that it wasn’t that long ago that a very vocal minority of fanatics and flakes that were written off by majority, and yet somehow they got control of the Congress, and now that same group managed to get their people in the White House.  You want to counter that?  You have to learn from their example and do better than them.

Week of 01/30/2017

Welcome To The Cult Of Trump
– by David Matthews 2

Well here we are!  As of this column’s posting date we are a little over one week into the presidency of Donald J. Trump and the world has not been blown to pieces... yet.

Last year I said that I would give our new president a chance to prove his critics wrong and I urged others to do the same.  I wasn’t suggesting that we forgive him for his past antics.  I wasn’t saying that we should forget what he said on the campaign trail.  I was saying that we all should give him one chance, just one, to do the right thing.  To prove that he really could be the president that we really need.

Yes, it’s a naïve dream that somehow a mystical transformation would occur between Election Day and Inauguration Day with the person that won.  But it does follow into the myth that we are told about the people running for office; that politics is a win-at-all-costs blood-sport and that the caricature that we see on the campaign trail is not an honest indication of the real person that gets elected and inhabits that office.  We saw that eight years ago when the “hope and change” Obama that gave us Obamamania became the “jobless recovery” Obama that let the rich criminals buy their way out of prison and stick us with a health reform program that still found ways to screw us over.

We were hoping that the reverse would happen with Trump, that the orange-skinned-wacky-man would be the leader he promised to be after he won the election.

Unfortunately, between Election Day and Inauguration Day, Mister Trump has put that “one chance” to the test even before he put his little hand on the borrowed bible.  It was very hard for someone like me to tell others to give him that chance when he continued to hold pissing contests with people on Twitter.

I know we’re used to incoming world leaders being stoic and noble, accepting victory with grace and humility.  Not rubbing it into the wounds of others who still have a hard time digesting the loss.  That kind of antic is not how you unite people.  That’s how you aggravate and agitate and divide them.

But I suppose that is to be expected.  We have all been immersed in a political death-cult for a while now, and, like any cult, it feeds off conflict and paranoia and divisiveness.  As the Italian tyrant Benito Mussolini strongly believed and incorporated into his principles of fascism, a nation is defined by its wars.  So too has been not only the man that is in the White House today, but also the people that follow him, the party that supports him, and also the belligerent masses that voted for him.  It is the very polarization that I saw creeping in way back in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s that has led us to where we are today.  They live by polarization and confrontation and agitation.  They know nothing else.

And now, here we are just one week-plus into Trump’s reign, and I cannot say the word “Administration” when it comes to the man.  I had hoped that I would after eight years of Barack Obama’s failure and after eight years of George W. Bush’s neo-Roman Imperium and eight years of Bill Clinton’s Regime.  I really wanted to refer to a president’s tenure in the White House as an “Administration” after so many years of not being able to say it honestly and truthfully.  That’s why I try to give each incoming president since the end of the Clinton Regime that one chance to do the right thing.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump’s three-ring White House clown act didn’t even make it through twenty-four hours in charge without pissing away that one chance.

When it came to the size of the Inauguration Day crowd in the Washington Mall, the media pointed out that the attending crowds were fewer than those that showed up for President Obama’s first inauguration eight years earlier.  Two photographs taken from the same vantage point atop the Washington Monument shows this.  The day after his inauguration, President Trump declared that the media was somehow lying about those photos, and, not long afterward, the brand-new White House Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, showed his gross incompetence by attacking the very media assembled in front of him and pompously declared that Trump’s inauguration was the largest assembled in person and online “period”.

Twenty-four hours.

That’s how long Donald John Trump was able to piss away my optimism for his presidency.

It took Barack Obama six months before I dubbed his tenure as the “Obama Fail”.

It took George W Bush four years - four years – before I dubbed his tenure as the “Bush Imperium”, and that was taking 9/11 into account.

Donald Trump and his lackeys pissed away their one chance in not even twenty-four hours.

Now there were a few ways the Trump gang could have walked back their asinine declaration.  They could have said that it was just from the president’s perspective, and that it’s hard to look beyond the big white tower in the middle of the Mall that blocked much of the view.  They could have said that they meant the numbers of potential viewers online and through the various international media outlets.  They could have said those white spaces in the Mall as seen from the Washington Monument were tarps because it was raining that day.

But, no, Il Trumpe’s declaration stands, and to make matters worse, we actually have Kellyanne Conway telling the media that Hack Spicer wasn’t “lying”; he was giving “alternative facts”.

“Alternative facts”.  Because we supposedly can’t call people “liars” anymore. 

Except when Il Trumpe refers to the Senator from Texas as “Lyin Ted Cruz”.  Or says that Hillary Clinton lies and lies, and the Democrats lie and lie, and that liberals lie and lie, and that the media does nothing but lie.  But Trump and his people and the GOP cannot ever “lie”… they can only give “alternative facts”.

And even before the term “alternative facts” was invented by the three-ring White House Circus, we have editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal declaring that they will no longer accuse people in office of “lying”.  Because lying involves intent and supposedly you can’t accuse people if lying if they don’t know that they’re lying.  And this was before Trump even put his hand on Abraham Lincolns bible and desecrated Lincoln’s memory.  I should point out that the Wall Street Journal is owned by the same News Corporation that owns Fox News, which helped Trump get into the White House, so no big surprise there.

It’s scary when you have read the works of George Orwell, with all of the references of “doublespeak” and “thoughtcrime”, and then have those things being carried out right in front of the world.  It’s no wonder why his books are now soaring in popularity again.

And I haven’t even gotten to the other things that happened this past week! I haven’t even mentioned the infamous wall that Il Trumpe promised that we would never have to pay for… until he got into office and now we are going to be paying for it now and, at a later point, somehow Mexico will compensate us for it.  Boy did we get Trumped on that!

I haven’t gotten into his gross religious bigotry by giving preference to Christian refugees over Muslim ones and then putting in a blanket ban on all Muslims coming in from certain countries, including those that were previously allowed in.  The carnage just yesterday over the airlines and airports trying to enforce that blanket decree should give anyone pause over what kind of person we’ve elected.

And the insane part about this is that he believes that what he is doing is not only right, but it’s the greatest thing that could ever happen in human history.  And how does he know this?  Because he’s regurgitating polls conducted by the biased Fox News – the very Fox News media outlet that helped propel him into office by giving him trillions in free publicity – and those polls claim that “the people” love him and support him.

I haven’t gotten into his picks for his cabinet, which look more and more like an exercise in how not to govern.  We have a nominee for Education Secretary whose qualifications are almost out of a TV commercial with someone saying they can perform brain surgery because they stayed at a brand-name motel.  We have a nominee for Labor Secretary whose experience is that he is the CEO of a fast food burger franchise.  We have a Treasury Secretary nominee that came from Goldman Sachs.  Remember the last Treasury Secretary from Goldman Sachs?  Hank “Too Big To Fail” Paulson!  And how about the Department of Energy being led by failed presidential wannabe Rick Perry?  This is the same Texas Governor that previously wanted to eliminate that very department, when he could remember what that department was, and who also believes that rain comes from Christians praying really, really, hard!  No, I am not making that up.

Then there is Trump’s continued assertion that he was the victim of “voter fraud”, even though he won the election.

Most people would simply take the win as that, but not for Donald J. Trump.  No, he demands that the public accept his delusion that he didn’t just win, but that he won by such an overwhelming majority that nobody would ever question his legitimacy.  While his Trumpets were pretending to be history teachers and bringing up the number of times presidents were elected by the electoral college but lost the popular vote, Il Trumpe is demanding a full investigation of the very election he won to find those mythical “two-to-three million” – now “three-to-five million” – illegal voters that supposedly only voted for Hillary Clinton.

Movie buffs should remember this kind of antic.  It’s almost straight out of the 1954 motion picture “The Caine Mutiny”, with Humphrey Bogart as fragile Lieutenant Commander “Old Yellow Stain” Queeg and his search for missing strawberries and a duplicate key that did not exist.  Only it took a while before Queeg’s crazy began to surface, and Trump’s crazy was showing even before he took office.

Oh, and I should point out that Trump’s pick for Attorney General has a real “winner” of a history finding voter fraud that did not exist.  I guess in Trump’s world, guys like “Yellow Stain” Queeg would be the Secretary of the Navy.

Let’s get brutally honest here… the whole world, not just America, is in the shadow of the Cult of Trump.  Because that is the only way to describe his kind of leadership.  It’s not an administration that earns respect, but one of a cult that expects and demands praise and compliance.

I’ve said before that the man in the White House is a narcissist.  I don’t make that claim lightly.  And that’s not to say that we haven’t had a narcissist in the White House before.  I’m sure history will pull up a few names like Teddy Roosevelt or Richard Nixon.  But previous presidents have had the benefit of staff members and cabinet members serving as a buffer from their more dangerous sides.  Trump has direct access to the masses through Twitter to say whatever he wants, unfiltered, no matter the consequence.  That may be okay as a private citizen, but as president, he speaks on behalf of the United States.  A 4am Twitter-tantrum, the kind that Trump is infamous for, could very well spark a nuclear war depending on who pisses him off.

But what makes this Cult of Trump truly dangerous is not just the man at the top of it.  It’s not even the people that he’s chosen to serve as his myrmidons and soothsayers and propagandists.  It’s the members of the GOP, who originally vowed to keep Trump in check but are now serving as toadies and lackeys, betraying their own words and beliefs.  But even more than those people, the truly dangerous element in this Cult of Trump are the masses that voted for him and who are now mindlessly supporting him.

And that’s where the real danger lies to freedom, because now we’re not talking about the people on Pennsylvania Avenue and K-Street and C-Street in the District of Columbia.  We’re not talking about faceless lobbyists and think tank “experts” and career politicians.  We’re not even talking about state legislators and state-level lobbyists.  Now we’re talking about our own neighbors and co-workers.  The people that we see on a daily basis.  People that we talk with and work with that treat Trump as a great messiah who can do no wrong and say only what they themselves believe as gospel.

These are the people that I’ve been seeing and hearing all the way back to the late 1980’s.  The ones that used to be written off as a few kooks and crazies.  The ones that made talk radio the influence that it is today.  The ones that made Fox News the influence that it is.  The ones eager to push Bush Junior’s “War of Terror” into country-after-country without end.  The ones that bought into every manufactured lie about Barack Obama for eight years, even made up a few about him, and are now telling us the orange-skinned-wacky-man they religiously support should be obeyed without question.

These are the people that put Trump in the White House.  And now that he’s there, they’re operating on the belief that they can do anything they want, just like him.  A community center that gives aid to refugees is threatened.  A mosque in Texas is burned to the ground.  One Trump supporter disrupts an air flight demanding to know who doesn’t support his personal messiah.  Another physically attacks an airline employee at JFK Airport for no reason other than she was wearing a hijab.  A whole town in Montana was being threatened by the “alt-right” community!

We’ve seen this before, people.  Not just in Germany or Italy, but also here in America.  Fascism and their bullying tactics know no bounds or decency.  America is shamed by these kinds of people, and the insane part about it is that they are so wrapped up in their own cultish devotion that they will never see what they are really doing, never mind own up to it.

The only thing I can tell these Trumpets is that they better pray that the atheists are right about the afterlife, because, if not, they will never enjoy the kind of “reward” they see themselves getting when they die.  Even the Old Testament talks of “the chosen” suffering for forty years in the desert for their sins of hubris, and that’s being lucky.  And, news flash, Trumpets: you’re not even close to being “the chosen”.

For the rest of us, we have no choice but to put up with the Cult of Trump until those in power decide they’ve had enough of the self-appointed political messiah of the masses.  That’s not to say we need to be silent or compliant.  The January 21^st Women’s March in Washington and around the world was a good start.  We have all spent eight years putting up with the GOP and their death-cult games.  Eight years of obstructionism and insurrection and shutdown threats and fake birth certificates.  Eight years of being told “no” and “hell no” and “drop dead”.  It’s long time they get back exactly what they’ve been dishing out.

The Cult of Trump is really not Trump’s creation.  Like a few other things that he takes credit for, he simply affixed his name to the death-cult mentality that as always been there.  Most of us can only hope that there will still be a country left when this cult is finally out of power so we can clean up their messes.