Thursday, August 27, 2020

Trump Makes Nixon a Choir Boy

 

Amy Goodwin of Democracy Now! interviews John Dean, of Watergate fame.
Photo credit: screen capture.

"Hope springs eternal," is an expression attributed to Alexander Pope (An Essay on Man, 1732). I guess, for me at least, the expression is true. I am hoping for our "John Dean" to help take down Mr. Trump.

Who will emerge as the hero who saves our Democratic Republic from the authoritarian monster, Trump Party? Who will be our John Dean to take down our Richard Nixon, Donald Trump? 

“Authoritarian Nightmare”: John Dean Helped Bring Down Nixon over Watergate. He Says Trump Is Worse

Aug 27, 2020

As President Trump is set to accept the Republican Party’s formal renomination for president amid ongoing scandals and multiple crises, we speak with John Dean, who served as the White House counsel for President Richard Nixon from 1970 to 1973. His testimony during the Watergate scandal helped bring down Nixon. His new book is “Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers.” “I worked for the last authoritarian president we had,” Dean says. “Trump is of a different cut than Nixon. … He’s going to make Nixon look like a choir boy before it’s all over.”



Thursday, August 20, 2020

Yes. It Is

 

Photo credit: http://www.expertise-asia.com/2017/01/will-need-putin.html

“It is what it is,” to quote Mr. Trump.

Unfortunately for Americans, Mr. Trump's words were not just about the COVID plague deaths, but also prophetic about his treasonous acts.

Looking back, you recall, Mr. Trump stood idle, while:

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin took control of the Crimea, established a foothold in the independent state of Ukraine, orchestrated the Syrian strife into a victory for Bashar Assad, and through cyber-warfare, worked to have Mr. Trump elected president in cooperation with Mr. Trump’s elections committee, expressly with Trump Campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort and Trump-Fixer, Roger Stone.”

Yes, absolutely. 

That is now established fact, among many other findings, detailed in a bipartisan investigation in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s fifth and final report into Russian interference in the 2016 US election., which was released a couple of days ago.

No longer can Mr. Trump claim that it was all, a “hoax” and that his election chairman was not deep into treasonous acts with Russian intelligence operatives on his behalf.

According to CNN, “… the report makes very clear is that Trump's campaign chairman was 

a) working with a Russian intelligence officer 

b) seeking to share proprietary campaign data with him and 

c) attempted to sway public opinion about which country actually had meddled in the US election.”

“And that (Roger) Stone, whose prison sentence was commuted by Trump last month, was designated by the campaign to find out what he could about the information that had been hacked by the Russians and when WikiLeaks planned to release it. And that the two Russians from infamous Trump Tower meeting had more ties Russian intelligence than we previously knew. And that Russia continued through this year to muddy the waters about its interference in the 2016 election.”

Further you recall, during a joint press conference in Finland, “Mr. Trump groveled and made his views clear: he (took) Mr. Putin's “powerful” denial of meddling as true over anything national intelligence director Dan Coats and his team…warned him about.”

All this clearly adds up to, “…giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Add standing idle while the Russians paid bounties to Islamic extremists in Afghanistan for killing American soldiers, and there is nothing left but to say, “It is what it is.” 

Indeed. 

It is Treason.

Tuesday, August 18, 2020

Two Leaders

 

Two leaders came into focus last night: Michelle Obama and Gretchen Whitmer.

Both addressed the Democratic convention with momentous words of compassion, inspiration, hope, and leadership. Words that have remained unsaid since Mr. Trump took over the White House.

Please, watch…

Mich. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's Full Speech At The 2020 DNC | NBC News
Aug 17, 2020

Michelle Obama's Full Speech At The 2020 DNC | NBC News
Aug 17, 2020

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Crystal Clear

 

Our choice is as easy to discern as day and night come this November.

It is summed up in the statement Kamala Harris said the other day: "One American is dying of COVID every 80 seconds."

There is a plethora of reasons for voting against Mr. Trump. Chief among them is that he has no plan for dealing with the COVID plague. Is it not obvious that for him, your life and the lives of those you love are inconsequential, holding less value than yesterday’s coffee grounds?

Today, there is a world of reasons to vote for Biden/Harris, summed in the phrase, “…for the people”.

"He inherited the longest economic expansion in history from Barack Obama and Joe Biden. And then, like everything else he inherited, he ran it straight into the ground," she said of Trump.

"This is what happens when we elect a guy who just isn't up for the job," Harris said. "Our country ends in tatters and so does our reputation around the world."

If you didn’t hear her speak yesterday from the A.I. du Pont High School gymnasium, you should.

Kamala Harris during campaign-trail debut: “America is crying out for leadership” | FULL SPEECH



Friday, August 7, 2020

Playing the God Card

 

The other day Mr. Trump dropped his God Card, accusing Mr. Biden of not loving God enough. Mr. Trump would have his faithful followers believe he spoke God’s words through his own lips.

I call it another example of Divine Propaganda — using "God authority" to bolster one’s otherwise earthly political agenda.

Since college I’ve been interested in trying to understand how propaganda works. I remember Father Coughlin, the founding priest of the National Shrine of the Little Flower church, located in Royal Oak, MI, off Woodward Ave near Detroit, was one of the propagandists we studied along with Gov. Huey Long and Joseph Goebbels.

Why do people accept without questioning and asking for some sort of fact/proof? 

I guess it may be that their internal “B.S. identifiers” are turned off when it comes to their religious beliefs. When “God” is connected, the statement in question becomes synonymous with “the Word of God”, becoming fact because it comes from God Himself. It’s unquestionable because it’s from “God's Lips”, not from mere mortals. We know because the minister, in this case God’s servant on earth, Mr. Trump, said so.

I’ve been looking deeper into what I have come to call, Divine Propaganda, because Trump seems to be a master at it. For example, several friends, although highly educated, are Religious Right Trump supporters. 

Also, perhaps some of my interest originates from our childhood exposure to evangelical ministers like Dallas Billington, Rex Humbart and Ernest Angley, the early TV evangelists.

Today’s Christian Right Evangelicals appear to be following a path blazed by those Akron-based pioneers.

These three quotes from, Church of The Donald, Ruth Graham, politico.com, May/June 2018, opened one door to help me understand how “Christians” accept Donald Trump:

“Evangelicals, going back to the time of the Scopes trial, have always been sensitive to being seen as pariahs,” Mark Ward says. “You can get a lot of credibility with evangelicals if you simply make them feel like they matter, if you appear on their TV shows and send your administration to appear on their TV shows.”

"In a fundamental way, TV people are Trump’s people. “Trump appreciates people who can communicate in an attention-grabbing way,” says Wear, author of the 2017 book Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America. “I don’t think Trump would be drawn to a preacher who breaks down five chapters of Ephesians and lays out the Greek and Aramaic.”

"But viewers still appear to be loyal, and those viewers aren’t who you might think. Both TBN and CBN say their audiences are split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. This can likely be chalked up to another fact that might surprise people outside the evangelical bubble: their audiences’ racial diversity. Charismatic and Pentecostal preaching, and the related health-and-wealth “prosperity gospel,” are strong traditions within the black community. Popular black pastors including Creflo Dollar, Tony Evans and TD Jakes have all preached regularly over the years on TBN, Daystar, and other Christian networks. Paula White is the pastor of a largely black church. And CBN’s roster of reporters, hosts and regular guests is arguably more racially diverse than those of many cable news networks."

A few more quotes:

"Trump has always had a particular genius for circumventing normal channels, and he seems to understand the power of Christian television as a medium for directly reaching an important and particularly loyal segment of his base. When Pat Robertson interviewed him last summer, in a period in which Trump had granted no other non-Fox interviews for months, the president put it succinctly. “As long as my people understand,” he told Robertson. “That’s why I do interviews with you. You have a tremendous audience. You have people that I love.”

"For white evangelicals, who voted for Trump overwhelmingly and still approve of his job performance, the approach seems to be working. The networks continually polish Trump’s reputation, and perhaps more importantly, he’s talking to them. “Evangelicals, going back to the time of the Scopes trial, have always been sensitive to being seen as pariahs,” Mark Ward says. “You can get a lot of credibility with evangelicals if you simply make them feel like they matter, if you appear on their TV shows and send your administration to appear on their TV shows.”

"But viewers still appear to be loyal, and those viewers aren’t who you might think. Both TBN and CBN say their audiences are split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. This can likely be chalked up to another fact that might surprise people outside the evangelical bubble: their audiences’ racial diversity. Charismatic and Pentecostal preaching, and the related health-and-wealth “prosperity gospel,” are strong traditions within the black community. Popular black pastors including Creflo Dollar, Tony Evans and TD Jakes have all preached regularly over the years on TBN, Daystar, and other Christian networks. Paula White is the pastor of a largely black church. And CBN’s roster of reporters, hosts and regular guests is arguably more racially diverse than those of many cable news networks."

"TBN in particular has quietly become a major player, in part by capitalizing on the switch to digital TV two decades ago. When the Federal Communications Commission declared in 1996 that all television stations had to convert to digital broadcasting within a decade, the network’s founders, Paul and Jan Crouch, snapped up many local Christian stations that couldn’t afford the conversion. As a result, TBN is now the third-largest television group in the country, with access to 100 million households and more local television stations to its name than Fox or the three major networks. Its largest rival, Texas-based Daystar, also claims access to 100 million households, and carries many of the same programs. (CBN is no longer technically a network but a production company with a series of syndicated programs that air on stations owned by others, including TBN.)"

"Reliable data on the sector are hard to come by, but a 2005 survey by an evangelical pollster found that 45 percent of American adults watched Christian television on a monthly basis, just as many as in 1992. “It’s one of these stories that has just gone completely under the radar,” Ward says. “Even though it doesn’t have the same profile it had, it’s still a very decisive arbiter of the evangelical subculture.”

"But in the past two years, largely out of view of the coastal media and the Washington establishment, a transformation has taken place. As Christian networks have become more comfortable with politics, the Trump administration has turned them into a new pipeline for its message. Trump has forged a particularly tight marriage of convenience with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, which since early in the 2016 campaign has offered consistent friendly coverage and been granted remarkable access in return. Trump personally has appeared 11 times on CBN since his campaign began; in 2017 alone, he gave more interviews to CBN than to CNN, ABC or CBS. Trump’s Cabinet members, staffers and surrogates also appear regularly. TBN has embraced politics more gingerly—it is still not a news-gathering organization—but Trump has made inroads there, too, starting with his kickoff interview on “Huckabee.”


Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Withdrawing Consent

Photo Credit:  Sipa USA via AP, Portland 'Wall of Moms' Protect Demonstrators,
PEOPLE.com, Alex Milan Tracy

Today, I choose optimism as my guiding light when contemplating this coming election this November.

Why? 

Because we may soon be witnessing the death throes of the American oligarchy — government controlled by a few ultra-wealthy people, banks-too-big-to-fail, monopolistic corporations, and other “special interests” — as well as unrestrained American imperialism. That oligarchy, in one form or another, has run the United States since birth. Further, over the past 100 years, it certainly has driven the United States, at full speed, off the highway and over a cliff toward certain self-destruction.

Yes, Mr. Trump is flailing about, trying to distract media attention from his failures, grifts and felonious crimes; disenfranchising democrat-leaning voters; undoing our miserly economic and health safety nets; and disappearing our functioning federal government. The benefits of his “administration” have vastly accrued to the wealthy elite and corporations. The rest of us, the overwhelming majority of Americans, not so much.

Still, the signs are unmistakable — the Black Lives Matter Movement, the citizens of Portland; the state governors’ refusal to kowtow to threats of StormTrumpers; and the U.S. military’s steadfastness, honoring their oath, “to support and defend the Constitution”. 

Americans are waking to the certain knowledge that, indeed, they can withdraw their consent to be governed by the whims of the oligarchy, the ultra-wealthy elite, the corporations.

It is possible to have our American Dream and live it, too.

Trump: Tinpot Dictator? (w/ Noam Chomsky)
Aug 3, 2020



Is there a move towards fascism in the US? The Democrats are split, but it is the Republicans have gone way off the spectrum toward neo-fascism. Professor Noam Chomsky explains why...