Week of 03/20/2017

America, Stop Trumping Yourselves!
– by David Matthews 2

There is a term that was little used when it was needed in the 00’s.  That term was called “Bushwhacked”.  It meant the act of being screwed over by the mechanizations of President George W. Bush.

The best example of being “Bushwhacked” was in the summer of 2005.  Remember when gas prices were going up and up with no legitimate reason for it other than naked corporate greed?  We all begged and pleaded with our re-elected President to do something.  And he did.  He told us that there “was” a solution that was being stalled in the Congress, and that all we the masses had to do was to get it moving and get it to his desk to sign, and our problems would be over.

And we did that.  We put pressure on Congress to get Junior’s energy bill out of limbo and through both houses and right to his desk for his signature, which he did sign.  And then right afterward he told us that, first, he was grateful for us doing it; and, second, while it will speed things up for Big Oil to make more money, it also won’t do anything for us, the people that have been getting screwed over by Big Oil.  At least not in the immediate future.  But maybe down the road, in the year 2020 or so, it might help us.  Maybe.

Bushwhacked.

And bear in mind that this was just a few months before Hurricane Katrina would rip through the Gulf Coast and really screw things over for America from sea to shining sea.  And that in and of itself was yet another case of being Bushwhacked.

Sadly, though, “Bushwhacked” really didn’t get too much traction when it was needed.  Partially because we were still being knee-jerked around by the neo-cons and their perpetual war machine and their neo-Orwellian tactics.  It’s a little hard to get angry about being screwed over when the fear-mongers in the Bush Imperium would conveniently jump out from under their rocks and scream “Terrorist chatter” and then watch as we panic.

And by no means was Barack Obama’s White House tenure any better!  He screwed over America too, especially when it came to the “Too Big To Fail” banks by giving them a free pass instead of rounding the criminals up and frog-marching them right to prison.  There is a reason why I spent most of the previous eight years referring to Obama’s tenure as the “Obama Fail”.  Because it was.  “B” for effort, “D” for results.

But now Obama is out and we have a new guy in.  A narcissistic self-promoting clown act whose sales pitch comes straight out of the CNBC series “American Greed”.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the long-running cable TV series and look for all of the people that engage in pyramid schemes and listen to what they have to promise.  The only things that separated those people from our newly-elected President of the United States are a hair coif and bad spray tan.

And so we have a new term named after him…

Trumped: the act of being screwed over by the mechanizations of President Donald J. Trump.

And the wonderful thing about this term is that it doesn’t necessarily have to involve Trump directly.  It can come from his cohorts, his acolytes, his soothsayers, his allies, his “basket of deplorables”, or from anything concerning Trump.

For instance, when Candidate Trump talked about a huge wall all along America’s border with Mexico and getting the Mexicans to pay for it, and then President Trump suggests it could be a fence in some places and that America will actually be paying for the wall, but he would somehow get Mexico to reimburse us afterward.  That’s being Trumped.

Or when President Trump first promised in January of this year that everybody would be covered under his new healthcare plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, but as of yesterday his own people are saying that it won’t.  That’s being Trumped.

But there’s another screwjob being done that Trump is involved in, but it has little to do with Trump and more to do with our own delusions.

I’m talking about the delusions of liberals and progressives and everyone else that didn’t vote for the orange-skinned-wacky-man that somehow Trump’s tenure would be short-lived.

This delusion began shortly after the election that Hillary Clinton lost.  Well, that must have been some kind of mistake, right?  We just need a recount.  Except the political mechanism in place wouldn’t allow that.  Remember the Florida Fiasco of 2000?  Not the first time that a “sure thing” lost.

Then the talk turned to the Electoral College.  Well those electors that could go “faithless” will do that, right?  I mean, who would want a genital-groping blowhard elected President, right?  Well, apparently all of those nepotistic-appointed electors do.

Oh, but don’t worry, they say, Trump won’t be in the White House for very long.  He’ll embarrass the nation enough times, and then at some point the GOP will step up and remove him from office!

Except they’ve become Trump’s enablers and myrmidons.  Sure you have plenty of GOP people that spoke out against Trump during the campaign, but once he became the nominee, the party ranks closed in and all of those people that promised to “keep him honest” are now towing the party line of “dance with the one who brought you”.  The same line, by the way, that liberals sung when it came to President Bill Clinton during the whole intern scandal.

Well, that’s okay, right?  I mean all “we” have to do is have Trump impeached.  There’s that whole thing with Russia and hacked emails and Trump’s people engaging in clandestine meetings with Russian officials that may or may not have violated the Logan Act.  All we need is a special prosecutor and some articles of impeachment and Trump is out, and we may even get Vice President Pence out too!

Right.  If only there was a mechanism in place that would allow a special prosecutor be appointed that didn’t have to go through the possibly-tainted Attorney General’s office.  Oh, wait, there was.  There was an actual law in place that would have required that.  It was put in during the Clinton years!  Except that the law expired during Bush Junior’s tenure and nobody thought about extending it or putting it back in during the eight years of Obama.  Oops!

As for “impeachment”… you mean getting an article of impeachment about a sitting GOP president through a GOP-controlled legislature, whose committee and subcommittee heads have a proven track record of re-writing the rules on a whim, if not outright violating said rules without any concern for the consequences, and have no incentive otherwise to go against their own party?  Tell you what, why don’t you just get a lottery ticket, because you’ll have a better chance of winning that than in getting the GOP to go against their own, even if that one happens to be a TV personality with a marginal grasp of reality.

Oh, but there’s still the media, right?  They’ll keep Trump in line!

Right, because Trump has such “respect” for the media… or at least the media that kisses his ass and sings his arias.  The rest of it he condemns as “the enemy of the American people”.  (No joke or exaggeration.  Google it if you don’t believe me.)

Well you may have noticed a softer tone coming from the media Trump hates.  It’s subtle, but it’s there.  This comes after Trump quietly met with the owners of said media and told them that their outlets weren’t “treating him fairly”.  You’ll find eventually that a lot of those “enemies of the American people” will become more “fair” for Trump.  And by “fair”, of course, we mean they will kiss his ass and sing his arias just like Fox News and Breitbart and talk radio have been doing.

Remember, folks, that the air-fluffed ego-driven corporate-owned media is part of the establishment, and, no matter what, they will protect said establishment, even if the person at the top of said establishment is an admitted genital-groping self-promoting TV personality with a filthy habit of having 3am Twitter-tantrums without any accountability.

Let’s get brutally honest here... you liberals and progressives and other non-Trump people are just Trumping yourselves if you cling to this delusion of yours that you can somehow make Trump’s tenure end sooner rather than later.  Baring a complete and utter mental breakdown that leads us to the absolute brink of unprovoked thermonuclear Armageddon, you need to accept the fact that Donald Trump will be our president at least until the end of 2020, if not longer if you guys can’t get your own act together by then.  To cling to the fantasy that somehow we can rid ourselves of Trump anytime sooner than the next presidential election is nothing more than sheer political pornography.

Don’t get disgusted by it.  You’re not the only group that engaged in said poli-porn.  Don’t forget that the conservative and neo-conservatives were churning out their own poli-porn fantasies about Obama for the whole eight years he was in the White House.  The whole birther thing was out-and-out political pornography from a bunch of prudes that claim to hate the real thing, and they continually churned out fantasies of them being able to impeach Obama for crimes that they couldn’t even fabricate.  The only things missing from their fantasies were Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy and a box of condoms.  Or maybe they wanted to do the impeachment fantasy vote bareback.  Hey, who am I to judge, right?  To each their own.

Like it or not, folks, we’re stuck with Trump for at least the next three-and-three-fourth years.  He’s going to be here, dishing out crazy at every opportunity, pissing everyone off with his Twitter-tantrums, mocking everything that doesn’t pander to his ego, and Trumping the whole world just because.  Accept it.  Deal with it.  And then ask yourself what needs to be done not just in the short term, but until his first term expires.  Because as long as you cling to your poli-porn fantasies of him being removed by some “higher force”, then we all will be Trumped.

Week of 03/13/2017

The Folly Of One-Day Protests
– by David Matthews 2

This past March 8^th was International Women’s Day.  It originally started 108 years ago as a way to celebrate and push for the rights of women.  It was started by the Socialist Party of America, which probably blows the minds of a few folks, first because something with that much traction was started by a group that calls themselves “socialist”, but also because it was yet another actual “third political party” which, of course, “should not exist” according to the eternally damnable socio-political script.

Anyway, this year, the women’s groups decided they were going to put an added “spin” to their celebration.  They wanted women to “boycott” the world for one day.  Women were told to not go to work if they could help it, don’t shop, don’t shop online, and pretty much do nothing just for that one day.  And to show solidarity, they were asked to wear red, even if they had to go to work.

They called it “The Day Without A Woman”, and it was meant to be like the “Day Without Immigrants”, where all immigrants were asked to stay home that one day.

Sadly, though, it turned out to be more hype than protest.

For starters, there really was very little notice about this.  It was sort of dumped on most of the public with maybe a day or two warning.  I’m sure that there were plenty of women that wanted to participate that would be in a quandary of sorts.  It’s one thing to show up on the day after President Trump’s inauguration, on a weekend, and march and protest.  It’s another to just drop everything with a day or two notice in the middle of the week to take part in a “strike”.  I’m sure with a lot more media coverage that this would have had more of a public impact.

Plus, as we learned from the “Day Without Immigrants”, there are consequences to just not showing up at work.  Many places are considered “at-will employment”, which means that the boss can just fire you without any reason.  Several people who simply refused to show up that day were told the next day that their jobs were gone, and there was nothing that they could do about it.

But there’s a larger problem with these kinds of “protests” that make them self-defeating, and it’s something that we’ve seen plenty of times in the past.

Remember the years of gas-gouging?  In the early half of the 2000’s, gas prices seemed to go up and up without any reason other than for greed.  People were pissed about it, but yet they were not pissed off enough to do something serious about it.  They still wanted their overpriced and overhyped gas-chugging urban assault vehicles.  They still wanted to travel and to take vacations.

So their compromise was to have a series of so-called “gas-outs”, where they would take just one day and not visit a gas station to put gas in their cars, and that would supposedly “stick it” to Big Oil.

Except that it didn’t.  Every single one of those one-day “gas-outs” were nothing but big huge stinking failures.  Every single one of them.  They didn’t “stick it” to Big Oil.  They never could “stick it” to them.  And Big Oil didn’t care.  They knew that this kind of protest was inherently doomed to fail.

Let’s start with the obvious: a “one-day strike” is inherently doomed to fail as long as it involves a non-essential service or business.  If a police department or a fire department or ambulance service or a hospital decided to have a one-day strike, then that would be serious, because it’s an essential service.  But not showing up to buy gas for one day?  Big flipping deal!  You’ll just be back the next day.  Don’t show up at a store to go shopping today?  It means nothing if you’re just going to go back there tomorrow. 

Did you know that all stores in America used to be closed by law on Sundays until just a few decades ago?  So the loss of one day of commerce is really nothing in the long run.  It’s just an impromptu holiday.

So telling women to not shop on one day?  Big deal!  Everyone knows that they’ll be back to the stores the next day.

But tell them to suddenly not work for one day?  Well that could translate into them being out for more than just that one day.

And let’s not forget who we’re talking about when you’re carrying on this laughable “protest”.  We’re basically talking about the bigoted conservative and neo-conservative and “traditional Christian” groups, the Cult of Trump, that strongly believe that women should be barefoot, pregnant, silent, submissive, and in the kitchen instead of the workplace.  The ones that believe that we should be living in some dystopian sexist society straight out of Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale” novel.  You’re not hurting them when you pull this kind of stunt, even if it had any meaningful impact... you’re just validating their stereotypes and feeding their bigotries!

Let’s get brutally honest here... if you’re serious about “making a statement”, then you need to do something significant and long-term.  Unless you’re working in an essential service such as police or fire or healthcare, then any one-day “outage” will be dismissed as nothing more than an impotent tantrum from a bunch of whiners.  You need to look at meaningful sacrifices, and you need to be the one that is making those sacrifices.

Remember the old parental disciplinary line of “this will hurt me more than it will you”?  Use that as your guide when it comes to making your “statement”.  When you’re going up against entrenched power, then you need to understand that whatever you have in mind has to hurt you a lot before it can even start to affect them.

And while I’m on the subject, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that there were just too many protests for the “Day Without A Woman” to have any kind of significant meaning to it.  I mean you had the nationwide Trump protests with celebrities and pink hats that really made the statement that needed to be made.  Having another protest similar to that just a month-plus afterward and just because it would fit into International Women’s Day?  That was overkill.

As a practical libertarian, I’m all for the equal rights of women.  Equal pay for equal work should be the default in any society that claims to be “free”.  That is what being a libertarian – and not the “pretend” kind that you see in the media - is really all about.  But simply wanting equal rights and being “pissed off” for not having them yet is not enough. 

Think back to what women had to endure a hundred years ago just to get the right to vote.  Do you really think they would be content with an endless stream of protests designed to “make a statement”?  Of course not!  So why settle now?  It’s time to stop “making a statement” and start making the goal happen.