From Facebook:
Long vent:
Basically every day, if not every few hours, journalists reveal another pre-emptive Trump attack on our democracy, another giant kick-in-the-face to the 81 million people who have voted to remove him, another desperate, ever-escalating plot to steal the election, another action to further disembowel our agencies and institutions to render them powerless to function on behalf of the citizenry, another executive order or regulatory change to cement the personal corruption that he and his accomplices have infected into the government to ensure that taxpayer funds are used to line their pockets, incite hatred, weaken civil rights, and further inflate the power of the wealthy.
What I want to focus on here is the people in his administration who are making this all possible. I don't mean the corrupt shills assisting in his seditious, anti-American, democracy-attacking coup attempt, such as the corruptly pardoned perjurious criminal national disgrace Michael Flynn who is begging for the U.S. to turn into a dictatorship, or Powell and Giuliani, who should long ago have been sanctioned and disbarred (and Giuliani should have been prosecuted for his role in Trump's conspiracy against the U.S. in connection with violation of our election laws and national security, for which Trump was impeached and should have been convicted) -- these three are unhinged, demented hacks that a seven-year-old can see are lying and/or delusional.
It is or it should be astonishing that people so low, so debased, so utterly lacking in character, and also so embarrassingly and clowinshly incompetent could be advising a person who occupies the presidency, but then how can we be astonished. We are not.
After all, we've lived through four (or is it four thousand) years of this; like attracts like. This is, after all, the man who started his tenure in the White House with Palin, Vanilla Ice, and Ted Nugent flipping the bird to the former First Lady and Secretary State and first female nominee of a major party, who beat him in the popular vote by 3 million votes, an act of revolting crassness and contempt for the White House, the office of the presidency, and the democratic process itself; an act that was grotesque and offensive at the time and in that moment, and which, nearly four years later, still rather neatly encapsulates the petty vileness of the grifter whom Americans elected in 2016 with Russia's help; the fact is that it was only failing D-level reality-celebrities, washed-out losers like Pence who even Indiana voters could not wait to get rid of, sexual assaulters and criminals like Arpaio and Roy Moore, fired lunatics like Flynn, who gravitated into this corrupt rapist's orbit from the moment he descended his gilted white supremacist escalator in 2015.
Powell et al are nothing if not well-suited to the personality of the putrescent husk of a human being into whose thirsting maw they shovel their sackloads of conspiratorial shit.
The ongoing attempted coup is real, and it is abhorrent, and it is insane and desperate. But I believe that it will continue to fail -- no thanks to 106 Republicans in Congress, including Kevin McCarthy (the Minority Leader) and Steve Scalise, and the newly elected incoming senator Tommy Tuberville, another human caricature straight out of central casting who is all too real (thanks, Alabama!), and 17 + Republican state attorneys general, and no thanks, frankly, to basically every federally elected Republican, including Mitch McConnell, who let Trump's lies go unchallenged and repeated for six weeks, allowing those poisonous lies to ferment and flood across the rightwing body politic.
As many others have noted, the fact that a coup has been attempted is a terrible, terrible thing; the fact that it is not over and that there remains an outside chance it may succeed, is doing incalculable damage to the country. Trump is openly courting Alabama's latest contribution to the demolition of democracy, a worthy successor to the cretin Roy Moore and the racist Jeff Sessions, Tommy Tuberville, to help him try to steal the election. I don't believe that Trump really thinks he has a shot of success, by the way. I think Trump is well aware he can't stay in office, so what he is trying to do is display his power, harness that power, and do the absolute maximum damage he possibly can to hobble Joe Biden -- which, because Biden is the president-elect, means the maximum amount of damage that he can do to the United States.
And this is where the accomplices come in -- the lawyers, the bureaucrats, the staffers who are doing their damnedest to undermine the smooth transition of power, who are rushing through every conceivable contract, appointment, rule change, executive order, arms sale, troop withdrawal, or execution that they possibly can, to give voice to Trump's giant screaming tantrum of rage, and to inflict as much harm and pain as they possibly can.
Please remember that Donald Trump doesn't know how government works. He does not read. He doesn't read his briefings. He doesn't know what the APA even is. He has no understanding of and doesn't care what the Constitution says or what any statute requires. Anything that he wants done, he needs lawyers to help him. He needs minions, operatives, flacks who understand what positions still remain open and how to fill them. Do you think for one second Donald Trump has a flying clue how the civil service works, or is supposed to work? Who do you think conceived the idea of reclassifying Trump appointees to the ranks of regular civil servants so they cannot be fired? You know it wasn't Donald Trump. It was the staffers who understand exactly how to embed his flunkies who came up with that.
Every hour we're seeing something more offensive and disgusting, something that makes us throw up our hands in rage-revulsion. A president who literally doesn't give a rat's ass that over 300,000 people are dead with numbers soaring and no end in sight, who has presided over and facilitated mass death and pain and loss and yet mocks the most basic, and easiest of efforts at containing the virus, who has LIED about that virus and called it a hoax, just as he lied about and called Russia's attack on the 2016 election a hoax, just like he lied about and called his Ukraine crimes a hoax, just like he yesterday lied about and called Russia's attacks on our cyber infrastructure a hoax, just like he has lied about and attacked the results of the 2020 election and democracy itself. This same man has openly encouraged domestic terrorism against people of color and Jews and called for the military and police forces to attack protestors, and turned murderous white people into heroes. This is a man who stole money from our military and protection of our infrastructure to build a Berlin wall on our Southern border over bipartisan objection. This is a man who is at war with democracy, a person who has fundamentally and deeply betrayed his oath of office, whose actions and lies have been a form of treason-- not only a refusal to defend our country from attacks from without and within, but himself the perpetrator of attacks on the United States, our people, and our system of government.
This is a man consumed with himself, determined that his personal corruption should reach as far and as deeply as possible, and in this grotesque endeavor he has many allies and enablers, from his preternaturally robotic son-in-law to the reincarnated Nazi Steven Miller to the less visible architects of the dismantling of the Office of Personnel Management. They are worse than sycophants and self-promoting toadies, they, too, are fully culpable criminal assaulters of democracy deeply determined to undermine, box in, hinder, and harm democratic government and embed a patronage system for Republican cronies. So when you see headlines about each depravity, large or small, remember as always that Trump alone can't "fix" it: he has an army of deeply corrupt people at his side.
Whether it is the unholy rush to execute human beings -- literally to cause the federal government to kill as many people on death row as he can, especially if they are of color -- or to appoint the flackiest, hackiest, most partisan and utterly unqualified apparachiks onto any advisory board he can find; whether it is handing out licenses to cronies to engage in pollutive mining and drilling projects on federal and/or Native American lands, whether it is rolling back environmental regulations or abusing his power by firing his cybersecurity chief, whether it is firing and sidelining Pentagon officials (and studding the Dept with flunkies), whether it is drafting the language of pardons for the criminals who helped him obstruct justice or floating ideas for additional pardons for his criminal cronies and corrupt children or himself, whether it is firing Inspectors General, -- remember that these actions only happen because Trump finds people to carry out those wishes, and dreadful people willing to rush into the void created by Trump's forced resignations/firings.
Remember that lawyers draft the pardons to be maximally effective and far-reaching. Policy "wonks" and lawyers come up with the rule changes. The people he appoints, like David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski and KellyAnne Conway, to accept those positions - are scum to accept them. Absolute scum.
Personally, I've found the last two weeks among the worst, and most overwhelming and harrowing, of the entire miserable public years of this disgusting man and his equally reprehensible accomplices, including not only the sycophantic sophistry of clowns like Rubio and Cruz and the braying gaslighting of the women who help launder Trump's lies, like Kayleigh McEnany and Ronna McDaniel, but Trump's media co-conspirators like Hannity and Tucker Carlson.It's hard to believe it was only nine days ago that the Trump-packed Supreme Court rejected the patently frivolous Ken Paxton-pardon-seeking Texas lawsuit trying to overthrow the election by 9-0. It's not even news anymore.
All I've read since then is how democracy "held." Democracy remains on the damned brink.
It is nauseating that others who are sworn to defend the United States, the Republican Senators and House Reps, so blithely betray their oaths -- even though we witnessed them do it when they attacked the impeachment in the House in 2019 and acquitted him of his crimes in the Senate earlier this year. But to see them continue to do it when he's literally trying to steal the election after-the-fact and when thousands are dying a day, and Russia has attacked us again...to see them continuing even when he is only 31 days away from removal -- it still pierces the heart in a combination of fear and disgust and horror and anger.
Watching what's going on in Georgia -- ongoing Republican assaults on voting rights, disgusting racist attacks on Rev. Warnock (including false allegations of anti-Semitism by dreadful people trying to gaslight away their own racism), the repulsive white supremacist appointee Kelly Loeffler posing with KKK officials, Mitch McConnell only finally, months too late, allowing more Covid relief in a cynical attempt to boost Loeffler and Perdue's election chances -- and knowing that it's but a microcosm of what's to come for the next four years is know exhaustion, in advance.
I've been feeling this exhaustion coupled with a rising anxiety that feels like a saw in my gut, of the kind I have not felt since the the fall of 2016, when my canvassing in Pennsylvania made clear to me that the polls were not capturing the extent of the enthusiasm for Trump and that Hillary might well lose. I keep telling myself this does not make sense: Trump is leaving office. Biden and Harris have massive challenges, and it's going to be wall-to-wall obstruction and bad faith from the right, and infighting among the Democratic coalition, but by definition it'll be better than the last four years were. I will be be disappointed in some of Biden's appointments and probably a fair number of his decisions, but they are probably at least not going to be a source of rage/fear/revulsion. There is reason to think his administration's work on racism and the environment is not going to be merely cosmetic. Warnock and Ossoff might win Georgia. Maybe. Turnout is incredible so far. (But who knows in whose favor...)
I'm so, so, so tired of the gaslighting and bad faith on the right. I'm so tired of the pettiness, the cruelty, the brazen hypocrisy, the whataboutism, the manufactured and performative outrage, the corruption, the racism, the misogyny, and, fundamentally, the contempt. The contempt for other people, for human life, for fairness, for truth, for basic decency. It's abusive. It's corrosive. It's exhausting. It's wrong.
I can't wait until this monster and his miserable party are out of the White House. If only they were out of government entirely.
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