Corrupting the Justice Department to end those opposing him?
Appointing toadies, suckling on the poison of power?
Cuddling with the man’s most despicable dictators?
CERTIANLY NOT WHEN HE SUGGESTS:
We ingest disinfectants to manage what ails us.
That it’s OK to grab someone’s genitals.
That “we could use a big fat dose of global warming.”
That his pennis is long and beautiful.
That breast feeding babies is “disgusting.”
That conviction of sexual abuse is abuse.
IT ISN’T THE PRESIDENT WHO IS ANTI-PROGRESS, SCIENCE, EDUCATION DEMOCRACY AND DECENCY THAT IS YOUR ENEMY, IT IS THAT FAMILY MEMBER OR NEIGHBOR THAT MONOTONOUSLY PARDON THEMSELVES WITH THE WORDS, “OH, I DON’T LIKE EVERYTHIG HE DOES!”
A legion of inexperienced juvenile toadies now locked in place at the head of your Defense, Homeland Security, Education, Trade, Office of Management and Budget, Energy, Labor, Veterans Affairs, Transportation, FBI, Health and Human Services, Secretary of State, CIA, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, and Environmental Protection Agency.
All parasites suckling on the poisonous tit of a megalomaniac.
All happening, while your protection from Inspector Generals, whistle-blowers and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are deceased.
You are on your own. Caveat Emptor, in all things – good luck!
Wake me up in 20 years when it is all over, the wicked are dead and I can know that somehow democracy pulled through.
List all the human advances you can, for all human time up to 1776.
It was 229 years ago that Thomas Jefferson wrote “All men are created equal…” and enterprise by the free was unleashed on a global scale. With little thought, there is not a one of us that would not marvel at what came of it.
Compare your list of what came under every imaginable despot those first 250,000 years of human existence, with what you can list the last 000.01% of it. Any comparative list would make those first 250,000 years seem devoid of advance in either human comfort, health, convenience, or nourishment. Almost regardless of your circumstance, your life today is with benefits and comforts beyond the imaginations of any ruler in history claiming to be above the law. This relationship between freedom and despotism is no coincidence.
Pride in our forebearers should ooze from every American pore while the return of a despotism boil everyone’s blood.
I’m going to doze off now, but with a hacksaw, on the chance I wake up in a prison.
America represented stability in the world, because our institutions were stable, our rule of law was stable, and our separation of powers was able to mute extremists. I believe that is how America provided the safest haven for secure investment and fertile ground for prosperity.
Now with our institutions, the rule of law, the separation of powers being dismantled and a tariff wars kicker, I wonder if the coming pain will root in time for a sleepy self-governing people, charged with running this show, to wake up and save their primacy?
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the same school Trump attended and constantly trumpets as proof of his intellect, joined US News and World Report officially proclaiming studies that show the United States has surpassed both Germany and the United Kingdom (amongst all others) as the acknowledge greatest education system in the World.
With Trump’s praise Musk now ends, the most glorious effort, copied the world over. It was the 1830’s when Horace Mann hit full stride, forever earning him the title, The Father of American Education on these principles:
The public should no longer remain ignorant.
Education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public.
Education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds.
Education must be taught using the tenets of a free society.
Education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers.
Why are we unable to understand that education, our ability to know, is the only thing that separates us from the lowliest of other species on the planet?
His Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson: “His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of US history was really limited.”.
His Chief of Staff, John Kelly: “A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law… God help us.”
LIKE TITANIC WE CALMLY SET SAIL WITHOUT BINOCULARS
Good people with thoughtful hearts seldom recognize how horrible an event can be and when they do, most sit frozen, drop jawed, as their heart is slowly eaten.
Titanic, The Gulf war, Deep Water Horizon, Pearl Harbor, Challenger, Chernobyl are amongst the many sufferings that could have been avoided if our better angels were heeded.
Now the most odious flight of all is about to take wing. As it has slimmed its way above to lord over us all, those saddened, thoughtful hearts hide in the cracks dreaming that lucidity and sanity will magically reappear.
No massive demonstrations planned, no public outrage evident, “Brownshirts” have won the day and there will be Hell to pay.
SELFISH: concerned excessively or exclusively with oneself
Long, long ago in a world now far, far away, I was reading of an eighteenth-century Scottish historian who suggested democracy would always eat itself. A people starting in bondage would develop great courage, he said. That would lead to liberty, in turn liberty would lead to abundance, abundance to selfishness, selfishness to complacency, complacency to apathy, apathy to dependence and thus back to bondage.
I had thought him wrong then and gave much of my life to prove him so, but I would not now. Age has given me clarity; a clarity I wish I did not have. Selfishness takes primacy in all beings and is particularly evident amongst human beings. How else could it be that we have ended the existence of so many other species and now stand on the precipice of ending our own.
Or as H. L Mencken, a devout conservative wrote, “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissist moron.”
Today, no one is a greater danger to Americans than Americans.
American’s worry each other, don’t trust each other, blame each other, condemn each other because there is no common ground for truth.
We are fully capable and with immense ease able to turn this around. “Everyone has a right to their own opinion but not their own facts,” an old, dead boss of mine once said. All it takes is a place for facts, one untainted source, one unopinionated source simply a factual accounting of what was, or precisely what Vote Smart once attempted.
Great changes, important movements that change civic culture and destiny almost always take place when people are in pain, either physical or fiscal pain. They do not happen when people are clothed, housed and fed or at least not until now, when the people’s slightest misgivings are kneaded into anger amongst their greatest good fortunes.
Long ago when I was a State Senator, I opened a letter, and a .44 caliber slug dropped out. Without a note, return address, or any sense of what I was condemned for, it seemed such a silly threat I saw no need to report it.
Today, fear sells. Fear-peddling politicians, Hollywood producers, the media, all get paid if we pay attention. And nothing gets our attention like screaming FIRE in the theater of anywhere.
Vote Smart’s worries were consumed with what was happening to us from within, most acutely by the changing character of the politicians trashing truth we had to select from. It has been an inferior crop of candidates, less distinguished, less principled, less devoted to the nation than to themselves.
Every generation of Americans has had some battle to sustain freedom.
Know it is this slowly chewing cancer dinning on truth and reality, where every fact is twisted and tortured for selfish gain that is our generation’s challenge. It was why we were building Vote Smart.
All politicians today, rant about our horrible world, and how much worse it’s going to be if their opponent wins. All while we wallow in lives that would be the envy of our grandparents and every generation of beings going back through all millennia.
How is it that we can be so whiny, holding this year’s long party of grievance. A party that has harvested most of the fruit grown by past American generations along with the buds that would have belonged to future generations. What the Hell, if we are going to do it, don’t we have some moral obligation to enjoy and party instead of complain?
Or, OR, we could do a simple thing, create a trusted source of just facts, facts without interpretation, in the dream that most, both conservative and liberal, will again find footing in truth and extend this glorious “experiment” that has brought so much advance to the world.
Much like me, “I never met a person I didn’t like,” said Will Rogers a century ago.
It’s a sad lesson learned by life’s end that, that feeling is not always reciprocal. As such, it was with Will who later said, “There ain’t nothing that breaks up homes, country and nations like someone exposing (what they really think of you)”
A slap me in the face awareness of this, first smacked me when opening my mail as a State Senator and this dropped out:
Turns out that the slug was from my campaign manager who thankfully also threatened then President Jimmy Carter, bringing in the Secret Service to hog tie him.
People you trusted can be taught to blame or hate from sources you never realized existed for reasons so foreign to your experience, you never, even in your darkest thoughts, fantasized where there.
So it is that most of my fellow Americans, who I trusted and have been so proud and encouraging of, MAY turn to the dark side on Election Day and unleash the lesser, angrier, more hateful selves that nests within us all.
The real thing is so rare that the only time I ever saw it was on an early episode of West Wing when Leo McGarry asked a cynical Josh Lyman to travel up north to see some Governor speak. What he saw was the real thing. You instantly wanted him to become President and in TV land he did.
It is that precious thing, the real thing, that I finally saw tonight in politics when Tim Walz spoke.
There is no mistaking the real thing. If you see it, you know it. It is a thing no human can counterfeit.
So thrilled with finally seeing it in my life it dampened my eyes just as it did with his teary-eyed son. Something else you just cannot fake.
I have been saying that every election for years. There are all sorts of polls of course and some, like say in health care, can be good, good for all of us.
But think about it, are those done by candidates used to find out what you think so they can thoughtfully represent you, or are they used to learn what you want to hear and tailor messages to fit?
If you think those polls are not used to manage you, manipulate you, well then, you are in the modern La La Land of every disingenuous candidate’s dream.
So, I say, lie to political pollsters! What fun it would be if they couldn’t finger who you are and were forced to be what they are?
Hardly a day has gone by these past nine years when I haven’t gotten up in the morning, opened my computer and hoped to hear news of Trumps fatal heart attack or brain aneurysm. He has represented all that I have opposed in life – honor, truth and decency.
He is a danger to all that I believe. I can’t say that my feelings do not border on hate, which is exactly what he has generated, not just against him but against each other, which for me is unforgiveable, both for him and for me.
The headlines tomorrow will NOT use the words intelligent, thoughtful or useful.
Political slapstick has NOTHING to do with leadership. The debate may generate great interest as its promotion has saturated the news coverage day after day after day, but you will only get a picture of what each candidate’s directors, producers, editors and even costume designers have labored over many weeks.
If you want the best vessel to deliver a product, whether it be Cambell’s soup, Kellogg’s cereal or a President, this is the show for you.
As American lives experience the best in all human time and citizens find time to turn and eat themselves, I find time for the little stories that speak to our basic natures.
This week I ran into these morsels:
Bags of poop are being ballooned from North Korea into South Korea, triggering air raid warnings to our troops.
Murdoch The Magnificent, the most rewarded sculpturist of fecal messaging, finally purchases his master peace of love with a fifth “Hail Mary” buy.
Two hundred sixty-nine thousand five hundred and twenty hours had passed since that first hour in my palapa in Yelapa overlooking the Sea of Cortez. I had been grilling fresh grouper and swilling down some cheap tequila I had sweetened with limes plucked from a bow hanging over my porch when the IDEA came to me. The thought that had me stuffing my backpack early the next morning, hopping a rickety old train and bouncing back home to an existence I hoped would finally make my life worth the living of it.
The IDEA rooted and passed through Oregon State University, Northeastern University, University of Texas, University of Arizona, University of Southern California, and finally anchored in those last 18 years at The Great Divide Ranch Research Retreat in Montana.
Losing the Ranch ended me on the spot, but I hoped not the Idea. Was I dispirited? You bet! But an “itsy bitsy, teenie weenie” bit of me was relieved.
I was no hotel developer, restaurant manager. I was no wrangler, no recreation park planner and certainly not a house mother to a few thousand young students and first jobbers that flowed through the gates of our remote research ranch. All those things I would never have to be again. What had consumed my time and responsibilities would end. What was left was the IDEA, one pristine, unopinionated, protected source of facts any voter could turn to with absolute confidence – Vote Smart.
The IDEA protected in concrete: No funds from corporations, unions or any organization that supported or opposed political candidates. All political board members had to join with a political enemy. No pay for most staff and those that were paid had to sign on for two years at minimum subsistence wages, with all the organization’s finances instantly open to anyone that cared. All to assure voters that anyone and everyone working on the idea had no political agenda and the effort they worked on had nothing to hide.
A sign I had hung on every office entrance.
The IDEA was something those few still surviving from the “Greatest Generation” were as certain of as I and the reason they became Vote Smart’s greatest supporters.
It was 2017, with the “Greatest Generation” vanishing and as Vote Smart moved and struggled to grow financially, a source of Sludge so noxious with deceit it would asphyxiate the nation with its stench, burst out of its adolescent silly-putty attracting absorbent, infantile, manipulable minds with no knowledge of what had been fought for since 1776.
Some loathsome media and officials seeking selfish advantage waded into the sewage attacking America in its best of times. They jumped into the fact-less slime encrusting every city, town, and hamlet, intoxicating the very worst in human nature.
The Sludge, earlier a Democrat, backer of Democrats, abortion supporter and gun control advocate, would become a gigantic record-setting deficit spender, the very antithesis of every conservative ever known.
It was as if he jumped into a phone booth, flashed out in a different suit and said: “There go the oblivious. I will lead them!”
Simplistic, crude and vindictive, it was leadership most foul, but leadership none-the-less. Politicians had so lowered the bar on integrity, they never saw it coming – someone who could see where the bar was going and simply dumped it into the dirt.
For me, this might be the chance for the return of civics education on an all-inclusive national scale.
We opened our new office at Drake University in Des Moines with as much fanfare as a small liberal arts school could muster, and I plastered its façade with quotes from those responsible for our being.
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” -Thomas Jefferson
“Liberty cannot be preserved without general knowledge among the people.” – John Adams
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.”
—James Madison
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“Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” – George Washington
Most importantly, after three decades of effort, trying to do and be everything, living in or at the offices, I turned over the day-to-day staff management to Walker McKusick, who had been with us for some years and was one of the most amiable, capable managers of people you could ever know.
For me, well, I would become obsessed with the vulgar, narcissistic, shameless sham leading millions of my countrymen, neighbors, even members of my own family. My disappointment with the Ranch, my desire to step back toward retirement would have to wait until I could re-root Vote Smart in granite for the coming fight to save democracy—or in Vote Smart’s vernacular, The Facts. The honorable world of compromise, negotiating disagreements, conservative vs. liberal or otherwise, was dead. Now it was simply truth vs. lies, fact vs. fable.
Like the last flicker of a light bulb that burns at its brightest, I would strain to deliver only to become a nobody after all.
