Truth Be Told

Whenever I find myself listening to the current President talk, I find it hard to believe that it is not a piece of performance art.  He says things over and over that are generally not true and is convinced people will just believe him.

For example he keeps referring to his phone call with the Ukrainian president as a perfect call.  First that means nothing since what is a perfect call.  Second in that call and the abridged transcript, he clearly did some things that were far from perfect like requesting investigations as favors.  Third, we don't have the actual transcript, just an abridged version.

The people who heard that call were alarmed and it led to a whistleblower complaint, the actual transcript being classified and put on a special server and ultimately to this impeachment.

Should he be removed from office for the call?  That is open to debate but the call wasn't perfect.

His comment about the economy are exaggerated and his depiction of where we were under his predecessor are actually ludicrous.  Since the 2008/2009 financial crisis we have seen a fairly consistent recovery, falling unemployment, rising stock prices, improved economics.  Most of that has continued but he has increased the deficit, spent additional millions on defense and hurt farmers and manufacturing as well as some consumers with his tariffs.  Is the economy good.  Yes, generally but it is not perfect or the best ever unless you are one of his rich cronies who has more profits, less environmental requirements and tremendously increased income inequality.

Working people have less benefits, less old age security, less health care and generally reduce salaries as they have found lower paying jobs.

Its perfect for a few and otherwise you struggle to get by.

I gather some people buy into his lies and many others just ignore them since they are afraid of his clout in their primaries.

The media is a large part of the problem as some have become pure propaganda and the others try to balance their reporting when the scales are simply not working.

The attacks on the media are working as our free press have failed being brave.

I just wish the truth was told.

More Lies and Misdemeanors

Perhaps one of the silliest lies told by our current chief executive regards hurricane Dorian and Alabama.

I can imagine him looking at some early forecasts and drawing a line in his head that led to Alabama.

This wasn't ever supported by the experts but after all he knows more than the experts, at least in his head.

Latter he included Alabama in a statement about what states could be impacted, probably an honest? mistake that meant nothing.

However it meant something to him and for whatever reason he decided to prove he was right by altering an old hurricane forecast.

This might have violated a federal statute, was unnecessary and simply the act of a toddler caught in a lie, deny reality.

Something that meant nothing now has been blown up into something else.

Why?

Well, he's the dontard.

China pays the Tariffs and Mexico funds the Wall

Its nice that those countries are so generous and the American taxpayer doesn't have to dig deep.

Farmers especially are enjoying the situation unable to sell soybeans and other crops to one of their biggest customers, losing market share they may never regain.

The economy is so strong that almost anyone can get a minimum wage job!

Get two or three even if you want to make ends meet.

Its always been true that new graduates struggle to find jobs but we now have burdened them with mountains of debt to increase their level of anxiety!

At least they can join the under employed auto workers and others drowning in the opioids that are so plentiful.

Helps keep you mind off the nukes in North Korea or the revitalized Iranian development effort.

Its an Alfred E. Neuman world, why worry!

Common Sense and the Common Man

I grew up in a working class neighborhood and spent my formative years with them.  I may have done fairly well in some aspects of my life but those years have shaped who I am.

The simple fact is that these are the people who did the hard work of the world, who get up early and worked hard for fairly minimal pay.

You worked hard, often drank hard, often served in the Army, and took no bullshit from anyone.

They weren't necessarily loaded with book smarts, but they had street smarts, faced fairly continuously with people taking advantage of them, making promises they didn't mean and generally treating them poorly.  The had to put up with it because it was often these same people who gave them jobs, and you had to work, it was just what you did.

Yet I see these people listening to one of the greatest bullshit artists I have ever seen and seeming to believe him?

Where has that common sense and healthy skepticism gone?

Yes, everyone lies to them to some extent, but this has reached extremes seldom seen before.

Where are the jobs he claims he is bringing back?  He is taking away health care, not improving it.  He is diverting money to build a useless wall to stop a crisis, that just isn't a crisis (may at least create a few jobs).  He has increased the cost of many goods via tariffs that haven't led to a resurgence of the 50s, the robots are still in the factories.

I get the circus aspect of his rallies, but people actually seem to be falling for the con.

It makes me wonder if old Abe know what he was talking about when he said you can't fool all of the people all of the time?  I hope so.

Lies, Lies, Lies

We have come to accept as normal the fact that the president lies a lot.

The following link takes you to an article that includes poll results about false statements and the level of belief

Fact Checker

Most don't believe them.

So he lies, we know he lies, but he just keeps lying.

Its so unprecedented in our democracy that it is like something out of the book 1984, except in that book the lies were actually believed.

Its hard t believe that he isn't aware of this, although he might not be, he seems to be one of the few to believe himself.

In some cases the lies are not even very meaningful.

Sometimes contradictory.  Is the wall being built or have Democrats stopped him?

In fact, its so bad that when he says something accurate, a lot don't believe him either.

That is the exception to the norm though.

Republicans, at least many of them, no longer value honesty in politicians.

Democrats and Independents still do.

Shows how principles are easily changed.

Sad really.

Inciting Bad Behavior

The problem with angry rhetoric is that when it works it leads to angry actions.

When you use it as a campaign scare tactic you have to accept that your words are somewhat responsible when people do things like send bombs to the people you have identified as the enemy.

Even if you are clueless enough to think otherwise, it doesn't really matter.

Calls for unity ring hollow when the only unity you envision is everyone agreeing and swearing loyalty to you.

Everyone in office takes an oath to defend the Constitution, not an individual.

No one is above the law.

Now certain people have authorities as defined in the Constitution, but only those authorities.

Disagreement on policies is not a crime, at least not in this country and disagreeing on things like the best way to deal with immigration does not make anyone an enemy of the people.

Attempting to corrupt our institutions does make someone an enemy of the people who are the authority for all of us via the laws of the land.

Going around lying about factual events is only perjury under oath, but it is always morally and ethically wrong.

When it incites behavior, even if not specifically called for it borders on abetting crimes.

History teaches us that violent behavior eventually leads to violent responses and then societies descend into anarchy or oligarchy.

Stop lying would be a first step towards a unified country.

Its also pretty easy.

Lies and Respect

Its becoming harder and harder to keep up with the lies being crated at recent campaign rallies.

He has no restraint and is willing to completely fabricate things such as a mythical tax cut proposal, Democrats funding the refugee caravan, riots in California, Puerto Rico using disaster relief to pay national debts, etc. etc. etc.

I don't know if anyone believes any of this, I guess some will, but it has to be a pretty small group by now.

Some of his behavior comes across as somewhat desperate attempts to retain majorities in the House and Senate and based on the current state of things, he might actually be successful.

Public figures in this country have generally lost the respect of the public and with a clown president is it any wonder.

This is in fact the result of negative campaigning which seems to be the only actual campaigning that works.

Gallup finds 21% of U.S. adults approving and 73% disapproving of the way Congress is handling its job.  The current president has never been over 50% approval.

In recent Gallup polls the number one issue identified by Americans is Government and Leadership.

None of the leaders of either party garners much respect.  The attacks have reached new lows in many cases and aren't likely to abate.

This lack of trust in our Government and leadership is problematic.

It makes it hard to form any sort of national consensus and while certainly open debate of issues is desirable this constant attack of individuals is unprecedented.

It will require a significant change in behavior by our politicians before it improves.

Not sure that is going to happen any time soon.

Fiction and Reality

At this point in the election cycle we see fictional promises of tax cuts, accusations without merit and other outright lies in an attempt to sway voters or energize the Republican base.

Whether any of it will work remains to be seen, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public, but some of the ranting fail any rational test.

The administration trumpeted about how it had reduced illegal immigration until it hadn't and then blamed the Democrats.

The great tax cut that did for little for the American public was a great success, until it wasn't and now they will pass a new one.

The deficit was going to be eliminated during his first term except it won't be and is in fact growing.

We are going to get respect from other nations, as soon as they stop laughing at us during a UN session

North Korea was going to eliminate its nuclear weapons, except it isn't.

He was going to fix health care, except it turned out to be complicated, at least for him.

In addition to being a sexual abuser himself, as caught on tape, he supports sexual abusers for significant appointments and makes fun of their victims.

He apparently thinks illegal aliens who get over the border are immediately allowed to vote.

He has disrupted the lives of the "Dreamers" who are in most cases as American as anyone and should be treated fairly.

He was going to expose the fraudulent voting, except he couldn't find any.

Its clear why his businesses have gone bankrupt multiple times, he doesn't understand the relationship between income and expenditures.

The fact that the economy is doing well, as it was when he entered office, is something, but it seems like he is trying to disrupt it and he hasn't fundamentally changed anything.

Well, he has added a lot of acrimony to the nation, its at an all time high.

Hypocrisy in Action

We've had some shoes drop but we still haven't had the big one drop yet.

The fact that the dontard is a liar and a womanizer is actually not surprise to anyone, or at least hardly anyone.

One the reasons he even got elected were the lies he spread about his opponents both in the primaries and the general election.

Still we are waiting for something akin to a smoking gun and the issue with that is that he has a lot of co-conspirators or at least enablers.

You see so many Republican politicians who even if a bit reluctantly who jumped on the bandwagon, putting personal gain ahead of the countries best interests.

They were overcame any ethical qualms they may have had and even abandoned some long held policies such as free trade in order to win primaries and hold on to their seats, maybe.

Primaries in both parties are a real distortion of the countries wishes since the number of voters is so small and it can be swayed by radical voters who show up to vote.

A small number of people who are adamant about an issue can sway a primary fairly easily nominating someone who is not in fact representative of the majority of that parties members.

The only way to fix that and to fix similar issue in the general election would be to make voting much easier or even mandatory so we actually had people who represented the majority.

You see however efforts at voter suppression by Republicans who know that they represent a small percentage of the electorate, generally the wealthier and whiter ones.  They are trying to suppress democracy in order to maintain control over the process.

Its so they can continue to line their pockets and those of their donors while they spend recklessly and reduce taxes to burden the future.

Its the face of greed and evil, but its fine with the evangelicals of this country.

Hypocrisy at its finest.

Trust Them

As a slogan it seemed to resonate with people who felt that the changes they had seen in their lifetime were somehow not so good.

These changes included improved diversity, more creature comforts, tremendous increases in technology but along with that there was a loss of certain jobs that used to pay well because they were outsourced, eliminated by technology or simply obsolete.

Opportunity in America has become something that you have to earn.  It was always so, but for a time, a period in history where nostalgia (not reality) tells us we all were living in Mayberry RFD or in Springfield with a father who knew best and a mother who cooked best.

Generally reality wasn't much like that but people forget the drudgery of the factories where the first thing a lot of workers did when they got paid was hit the bar, with a decent chance they would hit the wife later if she asked where his paycheck was.

Yes more women stayed home, some happily, many not.

This glorious period supposedly existed in the 50s, 60s and 70s when we of course had a country torn by civil rights protests and Vietnam war protests assassinations and presidential corruption which led to a resignation.

The idea that America was greater than rests upon a nostalgic view of men earning a decent wage and a cookie cutter family in a little pink house.

It ignores the racism, bigotry, sexual predation and rampant growth in drug use that was going on.

Why did so many of these idyllic children flee to the big cities as soon as they were old enough?

The progress in America has been steady and for most Americans things generally got better, unless of course you lost a high paying low skill job to a robot or a foreigner.

Instead of learning some skills or becoming an entrepreneur, it was easier to turn to opioids, Fox and Trump who told you it wasn't your fault, you should blame anyone who did well in the new economy.

Trust them, they will make the rich richer but something might roll your way, maybe, although probably not.  Just trust them.

Lies and Lies and Lies

There is a quote by the dontard in which he says , "I know words, I have the best words..."

He never claimed to know what the words meant though.

Its pretty clear that he doesn't.

He clearly uses words somewhat randomly, and make up a few but he may actually know what bigly means.

However clearly he has no clue in regards to transparent, or collusion, or obstruction.

He kept talking about how he wanted a transparent process to look at the documents related to the latest silly accusations about the justice department and FBI but the only people invited were two biased Republicans.

They most likely had long ago drawn their conclusions about what to say.

That would have been about as transparent as the Washington monument.

Since he is the clear record holder for lying as a President, long ago surpassing any contenders, it seems like we should come up with a word for his administration to fit in with the way he labels people.

Famously the Nixon administration was brought down by an informant who went by the name Deep Throat, which was in fact a porn reference.

Don't need an informant in this case, but maybe we could go with Stormy Liar for the dontard?

Seems to fit.

Web of Lies

You can always tell when the dontard is lying, he is tweeting or talking.

Accepting that a certain portion of the population actually believes that there is a Government that conspires against its own citizens and that the moon landing was faked, just saying something outrageous has its advantages.

If nothing else it allows the real misdeeds to seem like they are no worse than the false ones perpetrated via these lies.

You wonder about some of the people who help this happen, since at least some of them actually had certain individual accomplishments and some credibility.

I guess the same thing might have been true about some members of the Nazi party when it formed.

The dontard is really not in the same league, he is more of a third world character.

Idi Amin rose to power in Uganda and spouted some of the most outrageous lies, which played in his home country for a while at least.

Of course it all came apart at some point.

It usually does.

Lies and Pay Offs

Well not that its surprising, except maybe to people who refuse to believe reality, but we have found out that the medical letter used during the campaign was effectively a lie and that the money paid to Stormy Davis was ultimately from the dontard.

Not really surprising since the letter was incredibly non-professional and why would anyone else but the dontard lay out $130,000 to cover up an affair he had?

So what does it mean?

Since it is exactly what many people expected it simply confirms that the dontard continues to lie and fabricate stories for his true believers.

Being true believers, they will continue to believe what he wants them to, at least most of them.

The rest of us can simply shake our heads wonder how did we get here?

We have degenerated into people who don't trust authority and maybe this is the legacy of the 60s.

Of course those people now represent the authority we don't trust mostly.

Some of this goes back to the prostitution of our news media, which started with yellow journalism, had a brief period of glory in the middle of the last century but has now become nothing but a ratings game.

The internet has now enabled all sorts of stories to circulate, some real, some fake and some comic, but often the difference is hard to discern.

There is no clear voice of truth that people trust, we have different voices for different truths for different people.

Something is bound to change, but until it does, we pick the truth we like and consider all the others fake.

It doesn't work at all, but it what we got.

Reasonable People

One of the things that history teaches us is that unreasonable people often get there way.

Of course that's because what is reasonable is simply something we all agree on.

Take some of our popular media, willing to make accusations based on little or no evidence.

Its become so common that we see the credibility of the media under serious attack.

Of course we have had this issue before maybe most prevalently during the yellow journalism years the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Maybe it never really ended.

What is factual, real news, and what is "fake" news?

Sometimes its hard to say, but we do have some indicators.

Some facts are clearly witnessed by so many people with so much real and photographic evidence that to question them is simply outrageous.

The holocaust did happen, we had survivors, liberators and oppressors who verified it.

The mass shooting also happened.

In fact this idea that there is a group of people, ostensibly run by the Government that is perpetrating hoaxes about these terrible events for some political gain is so outrageous its almost ludicrous.

Except some people believe it.

The number actually seems to be growing.

Take vaccines or GMO foods.  There is pretty irrefutable evidence that the first doesn't cause autism and the second is perfectly safe.  However many people believe exactly the opposite.

Pretty much everyone gets vaccinated and therefore everyone with autism was probably vaccinated.  However, everyone without autism was also vaccinated.

Its simply not reasonable to equate the two.  Reason however is becoming a rare commodity in today's world.

Talking Heads

The world is a complex place, which was apparently a surprise to the dontard.

He seemed to believe that he could just tell people what to do and they would do it.

This may have been one of the reasons he had so many bankruptcies, of course it may have been because they did do what he asked.

His judgment is based on what people call talking heads, especially the ones on one particular news network.

Talking heads are not news people, they are opinion people who find facts that sort of support what they want to say.

A lot of these so called facts are really opinions of other people or half-truths that can be twisted like a balloon animal to resemble a real animal.

They aren't real animals and a lot of these facts aren't real facts.

The fact that they get repeated a number of times doesn't make them true, simply persistent.

Even reputable journalists don't get a lot of things right, although what they publish or say has some credibility.

Real events are complex and we always prefer simple answers.

The entire war in Iraq was based on misinterpretation of evidence.  It was misinterpreted because the people saw what they wanted to see.  When they didn't see real "proof" it was easy to assume it was there anyways, just well hidden.

This is pretty much the way some of our media operates, making leaps of faith and drawing conclusions, at least the talking heads do.

They simplify the complex and our dontard buys it.

Watch out folks!

Do We Believe in Magic?

Latest news about the republican agenda is that they want to pass more tax cuts.

The last ones have at least some popularity, not as much as they would have liked, but you put a few extra dollars in someone's paycheck, it seems like a good thing.

Of course it wasn't very much and it wasn't permanent and it seems that they know they don't have much chance of passing a new one, since it would once again favor wealthy investors although since it won't pass they may add a provision to make the temporary cuts permanent.

Why would they do this?  Well to get the democrats to vote against it so they can campaign that they are the ones who are keeping it from happening.

It assumes a certain lack of interest by the voters and based on past performance it might be somewhat successful.

After all enough of them believed the things the dontard promised even though his submitted budgets slash all the programs he promised to leave alone.

Sadly, this political maneuvering isn't just a republican thing, it happens in both major parties, where appearances outweigh reality.

There are a lot of tough realities in Washington that can't be fixed because of the fact that fixing them will cause a political backlash.

If we want to reduce spending we have to reduce the areas where we spend the most, and these consist of defense and popular programs like social security and medicare.

The alternative is to raise taxes to pay for them, which is not likely to happen anytime soon.

Do Americans want to address these problems?

Not really although they would like them fixed magically.

So they vote for people who make promises that are simply unrealistic for the long term.

Somehow we can spend and spend and rack up debts without consequences, instead of facing reality.

Its an Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause type of world.

Lying or Delusional

Whenever the dotard gives  speech the fact checkers point out all the lies, but is it a lie if you actually believe what you're saying?

I'm pretty convinced that he really believes most of the things he says (although he also lies a lot) because his megalomania convinces him that his version of the facts are true.

Of course he gets some ammunition from the silly news he watches on cable. but when he says that he won the popular vote despite all evidence to the contrary he actually believes it.

Unfortunately he is the only delusional person around.

Too many people are willing to ignore reality for their own version.

Politics don't change facts, and even if Al Gore is championing climate change, it doesn't make it political.

We live in a world where things that would have been absolute miracles are now commonplace with airplanes, instant communications, space exploration, computers everywhere, etc. etc.

This was because of science.

People who use the results of these wonderful inventions then question the scientific validity of scientific experiments.

Its OK to have some skepticism, but to simply ignore or deny repeatable experiments that prove a theory is, well insane.

Similarly we have people who actually believe the mass shootings were all staged as part of the gun control agenda.  Really?  If the entire Government and Media was working together they would have already taken all the guns.

No one, or at least almost no one, wants to take everyone's guns, they want to use common sense safeguards to prevent these massacres that keep happening.

They are very real and denying them and harassing the survivors is dastardly.

The Blame Game

We have an administration led by a person who tends to say the first thing that pops into his mind.  Often this is not exactly truthful, but once he says it he tries to defend it.

When some of the statements become indefensible he needs to find someone to blame, often the person who was supposed to explain his way out of it.

Of course you also see that the people he surrounds himself with are often uniquely unqualified for the roles they occupy.

All of this adds up to a constantly changing cast of characters who realize that the positions they hold are extremely precarious.

This has led to the chaotic atmosphere there as players try to determine if they will survive, or even if they want to stay.

Of course the dotard in charge takes no responsibility for the situation, blaming almost everyone else.

This plays to some extent with some of his base but what happens is, as time passes and they think he will be proven right, he isn't.

This leads to certain elements of his base realizing they have been believing a liar and a hypocrite, who isn't really going to solve all problems "so quickly".

He isn't actually solving any, and as even his recent budget acknowledges he is making some things, like the deficit and the debt much worse.
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Of course like it or not the show is scheduled to run for another three years, although the supporting cast can change in November.

Maybe this will make more people aware of the need for good government?

Empty Promises

Has the first snow of the season here, makes it seem like the holiday season.

So the current tax bill is going to make the deficit worse at which point the monkeys are gonna chatter about cutting entitlement programs.  So less for the old and poor and more for the rich, old and young.

It amazes me how many people walk around believing complete fabrications. Unfortunately one of them is our dotard.

A large number still believe our prior president was born in Kenya and that the Government staged the moon landing.

When a tax bill or health bill is formulated in secret by small groups it certainly leads to some distrust.

The less we know the better for them.

A lot of us don't seem to care until we don't like what happens and then want to know who let it happen?  Well we did.

What the Government does impacts you more and more every year.

We live in an interconnected world where rejecting the Paris accord leads to more future storm damage.

Letting the public lands be mined makes a few people rich but diminishes the rest of us and hurts wildlife.

Its our future and we need to insist on certain actions that are good for everyone, not just a few.

If you vote for the best liar, well you will be lied to a lot.

How you vote is less important than knowing why your voting.    Empty promises don't mean much unless people just accept them.

Paying for Research

As we see the monkeys in the House scramble around trying to figure out how to convince themselves that reducing revenues somehow reduces the deficit, we have our very own self proclaimed intelligent dotard saying that he is somehow the victim because those mean Democrats and Hillary researched his background.

Of course if he had even normal intelligence he would know this is common and was done by his own team as well.

Even sillier is the way the press is so easily manipulated by stories that really mean nothing at all.

The research resulted in a dossier which is either true or not. 

If there was some evidence that someone was directed to compile a false narrative, that might be something, of course it would still depend a lot on what the campaign or the Democratic party did with the information.

What is clear, at least to most intelligent observers, is that the other campaign and current administration have no problem making wild accusations without any research at all, sometimes based on a TV story, sometimes based on pure imagination. 

Accusations related to e-mails without even a shred of evidence that they had anything meaningful in them was done without any research of even common sense.

In fact if I was to list every instance of false facts and allegations I might be writing forever.

I guess the real joke is that they paid someone to do the research and as damaging as it seemed never used it either because they couldn't verify it or didn't actually receive it.

Hell they could have followed the dotard's example and just made stuff up.

Lots of people tell me that's the way to go.