Uncomfortable Truths

In the New Year, I’m hoping to see less and less stories like this one, which demonstrate the pettiness of both the Clintons and the Trumps. Unfortunately, I doubt I’ll get to see less and less because our next president is an attention addict with delusions of grandeur, fed by a mass of sheeple who will enable the man to do the same things they falsely believed Hillary had already done. Yet to the victors go the spoils, and Trump is correct in his criticism.

Hillary lost the election for three reasons:
1. The Russian campaign against her and in favor of Trump;
2. James Comey and the FBI’s role in tipping the scales against her while soft-pedaling negative news about Trump; and
3. Team Hillary's overconfident abandonment of the swing states to chase red states, yet without a “kitchen table” message.

Go back to the days right after the convention when Hillary went dark for much of August, when she decided to raise money for the party. A conscious decision was made to raise cash and trash-talk Trump’s fitness for the job, rather than use that time to cement into place a narrative built on jobs, unions, and Main Street. Yes, Trump won the White House by less than 200,000 votes across several swing states, and did not rack up a “landslide” as he repeatedly claims. And yes, they were probably as surprised as anyone at their election-night victory. But at least his campaign took nothing for granted, and instead went head-first into her swing state firewall while she visited red states.

We’ll now reap the aftermath of a minority-support president acting like he has a mandate. We’ve been here before and seen how this play ends; usually badly, like 2005-2008. But just like Barack Obama was a response to the Bush/Cheney years, Donald Trump is for better or worse a response to Barack Obama. He represented something she did not: change, perhaps dangerous change, but change nonetheless. He now must deliver with his business-as-usual cabinet what the working class thought it was voting for. The fact that he can’t and won’t shouldn’t surprise anyone except the millions who were lied to once again.

Managing the Outrage

One of the reasons why I’ve been largely silent and absent from blogging since the election is the sheer volume of daily outrages and disappointments coming from the Trump transition and revelations surrounding the election. In the political environment of the last decade, blogging was more conducive to ongoing political discourse when you were only responding to 2-3 Bush administration outrages in a given week. With Trump, he averages that per day, and he knows he's suckering his base while he does it.

I’ve also decided that swinging at every pitch in the dirt from the Trump team is a futile exercise, because lying and misdirection are a core tactic with this group. So no, I’m not commenting on every new tragic cabinet selection. I'm not commenting on every new meeting Trump has with the flotsam of losers and supplicants. Every new stupidity from Kellyanne Conway or Trump’s twitter account will go largely without comment from me as well; Conway is a lying bitch serving a malevolent force. Instead, I’ll be waiting until the nomination hearings, and until we see the GOP’s actual agenda and legislation before responding. When you are dealing with a fire hose of evil, it’s simply best to step out of the spray.

Yes, Trump is Vladimir Putin's bitch. Yes, Putin ran a years-long, classic KGB infiltration, misinformation, and asset-capture operation right under the nose of our intelligence community, as part of a conspiracy to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president and insert a patsy into the Oval Office. Yes, the FBI and James Comey were part of that conspiracy. Yes, Hillary’s team and the DNC enabled some of this. Yes, Jill Stein and Michael Flynn are Putin's tools as well.

Yes, the same people who demanded numerous hearings on Benghazi and wanted to spend hundreds of hours on Hillary’s emails after her inauguration now cannot be bothered to confront why it’s acceptable for a hostile foreign power and the Koch Brothers to join forces, or why they are OK with a president enriching himself from his official duties while exposing himself and the country to extortion. All of that is true, and it sadly is nothing new: to the GOP, illegality, racism, and treason are OK as long as it helps them grab and keep power.

It’s just that I can only focus on so much outrage at a time.

Remember, the simple responses to every Trump move are two questions:
1. How does this Make America Great Again?
2. How does this help the working class?
Watching Trump and his team squirm and lie in answering those two questions will be enough to eventually topple them, but not before they seriously damage this democracy and kill our planet.