July 2024 Archives

Dear America,

There's one thing I always have to give lying Donald Trump credit for: he never hides what he is.  He can't.  Trump is one of the most overt miscreants I have encountered in my life, and I'm 78 years old.  His lack of character is so rampant that he can't fight it.  In one of his most recent rally speeches he said that he had been advised to "be nice," but before he began to be, he told the crowd that he couldn't oblige his advisors and he went at it like he usually does.  And he gets away with it because of hypocrisy...not just his, but his constituents' as well.  Let me explain what I mean.

In another recent speech, he expressed his love for his Christian audience and claimed to be a Christian himself.  That audience was self-professed "evangelicals" and evangelicals are supposed to be righteous Christians who evangelize on behalf of Christianity.  But the Bible states over and over that God deplores liars.  The ninth of ten commandments states that thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor, which has been interpreted over the ages to be a condemnation not just of lying in general but of liars in general too.  Yet Trump's evangelical supporters overlook not just the fact that he has lied, but the fact that he lies all the time.  Then there's the traditional attitude about chastity, especially outside of marriage...fidelity...which the Bible reiterates time and time again to be fundamental to virtue, and these evangelicals seem not to be bothered by Trump's infidelities, his flouting of that imperative.  And you can add the seven deadly sins as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas, among other religious authorities: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth, an one of which could be Donald Trump's middle name...all of which Trump has indulged in either overtly day to day in public or as proved in court and unrefuted by any testimony from him because he knows that if he lies under oath, he is guilty of a crime for which he can be tried and will be convicted. So Trump stands before them and claims to be their enforcer of virtue while his pants are on fire for all to see.  That's hypocrisy all around.

So now he stoops to about his lowest tactic yet: designating Kamala Harris as "lying Kamala."  It surprises me whenever I hear him say that that God doesn't strike him dead right on the spot.  But more surprising still is hearing the leaders of various evangelical organizations praising him as their and the nation's salvation.  Think about it.  They claim righteousness for themselves and some bizarre form of rectitude for Trump even though they admit that he is as vile in his conduct as a man could be, not just in the civil sense, but in the way of the dogma that they claim to govern their own conduct by rigidly.  And remarkably, they never seem to even glimpse the profound irony in their support for a man who has and continues to violate every principle for which they stand.  And they don't just stand for it; it is the creed by which they claim to live.  One can't help but wonder if they actually do live by it if they are so cavalier about Trump's apostasy in that regard.  Are they apostates too?  Frankly, I suspect that they are, which by implication means that we are in jeopardy of being overrun not just by an elected transgressor but by a transgressing electorate as well.  Our country is in profound jeopardy.  Who can we turn to for "salvation?"

Well, the answer is simple: us.  We have to stick to our principles and follow them to the polls.  This business of trying to refute every putrid lie that comes out of Trump's mouth should be abandoned.  We should concentrate on telling the truth to all who will listen and trying to get them registered and to the polls in November.  There will be no "converting" the heretics of the evangelical movements.  Let them protest all they want about the immorality that they perceive in us while they see none in their mirrors, or in their choice of governors either.  Trying to get them to look within is futile.  We need to "preach our gospel" among those who are sincere and bound by integrity and principle.  We need to proselitize among the convertible and leave the obdurate to face themselves.  After all, we're not their mothers, who undoubtedly taught them better.  

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

Now that J.D. Vance has been nominated as a vice presidential candidate, the prospect of the long term decay of democracy in our country is in the offing.  There is no point in reiterating the reasons why except to say this one thing, which I have said over and over again for decades: on election day, the American people get what they deserve.  And I'm afraid that what we deserve is corrupt, intellectually-dishonest liars.  But there is a point in discussing what we could do to avert such a fate.  Unfortunately, it appears to be in the hands of only one person to chose that course.  Joe Biden persists in accommodating his ego instead of the American destiny and its democracy, which he fulminates over and over again to be his primary concern.  Unfortunately, at least on this point Joe Biden is an intellectually-dishonest liar, and his claims of necessity for his second term make him corrupt as well in light of his preference for narcissism over the fate of his country.

I have no idea whether Biden is suffering nascent dementia or simple, sinful pride, but what difference does it make.  Whether Biden is just entertaining his own selfishness or he is  incipiently deranged, he is unwilling to admit his failing faculties, which puts his conceit in a class of conceit occupied by only one other person I can think of at the moment: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, better known as RBG.  Both RBG and JRB refuse to limit their self-interests and egotism despite the imminent risks we face as a nation for their failure.  In RBG's case, the fruition of her self-indulgence in refusing to resign from the Supreme Court even though she was slowly but surely dying of cancer came in the form of Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republican hypocrites forestalling appointment of her replacement until Donald Trump assumed the presidency.  (I never say that he was elected because the only thing he won was the electoral college.)  The only difference between then and now is that JRB is facing the Trump disaster from the presidency rather than RBG facing it from the bench.  I fear that if Biden doesn't step down from the nomination of the Democratic Party for the presidency of this country in the immediate future, not just he, but whomever the party might nominate in his stead if he ultimately comes to his senses, will succumb in November to a maleficent team of unabashed Machiavellians who will usher into this country a new medieval descent that could last a long, long time.  Both Trump and Vance claim that the 2020 election was fixed, and they are already prepping the political atmosphere to reiterate that claim should they lose in 2024.  If no one, that is, if the Democratic candidate for president doesn't make a concerted, competent, cogent counterclaim soon, the malefactors will have created a perhaps insurmountable advantage going into the election; they will have created faux-deniability that their supporters--what Hillary Clinton denominated a "basket of deplorables"--will jam their tongues into their cheeks and disingenuously insist that it is so.

You should understand a couple of things at this point.  First, I have voted for Republicans in my life, albeit rarely.  I voted for Francis Sargent for governor of Massachusetts and for Ed Brooke for its Senator back in the seventies.  I am not a "yellow-dog Democrat," though I must admit that I have trouble seeing merit in Republicans given their proclivities relative to candor and honesty.  Second, though it is not out of "yellow dog-ness," I will vote Democratic in the presidential election this year even if the party does run an old yellow dog because, as I have told my children over and over again, I cannot tolerate liars, which at this point in history is tantamount to swearing off Republicans completely.  Third, the false piety of Trump and Vance is not just dangerous, it is disgusting.  It gives all Republicans who are misguided in my opinion, but noble and sincere in their erroneous beliefs a bad name, and it diminishes us, America, in the eyes of the world's leaders and their people.  Mind you, I care not a fig how we are regarded as a matter of self-esteem maintenance.  But we may need those leaders and their people some day, and if we abandon them as Trump and Vance say they will in large part, they will abandon us in response.  We are not alone in the world now, but with Trump and Vance in office, we might become so...except for tyrants like Orban, Xe and Putin.

Trump will do what he did last time if he gets into office again.  He won't drain the swamp.  He will just populate it with his own sycophant alligators.  He won't defend liberty for all.  He'll promulgate power for his evangelical, reactionary constituency at the expense of the liberty of the rest of us.  In fact, the new Republican mantra is freedom for all...of us.  Subjugation for everyone else and their freedoms.  We are on the verge of a new dark age, and only JRB can save us...but not trying to save us himself.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

As far as the competency of our current president to become our next president, I have been struggling with my consternation over President Biden's mental state since the first few seconds of the June 27th debate.  And I was not reassured by his performance in the interview George Stephanopoulos did with him yesterday.  But this morning, after reading the reportage in the paper to the effect that my consternation is now a national lament, it came to me that we don't really have a problem.  We have the 25th amendment, and maybe the amendment is not just a reassurance.  Maybe it is a way to bring back all those "never Trump" voters and insecure Democrats to the fold.  Maybe the campaign should go something like this.  "Don't worry America.  Kamala isn't going anywhere either."  There; I've said it.  Joe Biden's frailty isn't a problem for America.  If the presidency gets to be too much for Biden, there is already someone there to take his place.

It isn't imperative to point that out, though it would help if Joe Biden said it.  It only needs to be raised as a campaign point briefly...but soon.  We are safe because under section four of the amendment, a majority of the cabinet with the vice president can start the process of removing the president, and if the president resists, the issue goes to the leaders of congress to put it before the House and The Senate, in which two thirds can effect the removal of the president and the ascendancy of the Vice President to the job.  In fact, Mike Johnson, the fundamentalist zealot who is now Speaker of the House, has proposed that the Democrats resort to this remedy now, though his partisans would never support it because they think Biden is a sure fire reason to vote for Trump.  But if Biden is reelected, there is no doubt that they would vote to remove him afterward, which would be necessary only if Biden resists the cabinet and Vice-President once they have voted him out.

So now, all that is left to do is to make sure that Vice-President Harris stays out on the campaign trail to reassure the voters of her competency and the policies she supports as next in line.  That reassurance will constitute a wink to the voters that they should vote for Biden no matter what because she is there to take care of us if he meanders too far from path he should be on.

So, chins up, America.  There is no need to worry after all.  Now that all of the voters can feel reassured, Trump can be defeated in November and we will all be spared the real danger to our democracy.  We have no choice but to thwart the aspiring autocrat in chief, "The Donald" as Rhona Barrett used to call him, from assuming power again by voting for Biden ourselves.  It's the patriotic thing to do.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

I've had something on my mind for about a week now, and it's probably the same thing you've been thinking about.  I tuned in to the June 27 debate between Biden and Trump with trepidation to begin with, but for some reason I watched even though I feared the worst.  It was to be two men of my vintage--I'm two months younger than Trump--trying to convince a skeptical world that neither of them was too old to run our country, at least to the extent that a president does so.  Note that I didn't say "young enough to run our country."  I didn't because "young enough" was a train that had already left the station for both of them a decade or so ago.  It's not that a person in his or her sixties is ipso facto too old; some people of that age are still possessed of the acuity needed.  But Trump probably was never possessed of that qualification, which is why he has never won an election other than in the electoral college.  And while Biden was at least marginally fit when he ran in 2020, the prospect of him staying so seemed a wing and a prayer then, and neither the wing nor the prayer eventuated.  So I tuned in and waited with bated breath for what I had come to assume would be a death knell of our democracy, and sure enough, within seconds of when Biden began his first debate response I had to restrain myself from turning off the television and going to be in the hope that it had been just a bad dream.  And by the time he had finished saying what he may have intended to say, I fell in to a despondent daze.  I watched for another ten minutes or so, my despair growing deeper by the second, and then I had had enough.  But an hour later I couldn't help myself; I yielded to the hopeful delusion that what I had seen already was just an aberration, not a portent.  I tuned back in, and nope.  It hadn't been an aberration.  Although Trump's outrageous blathering, lying, hyperbolic inarticulate ravings had now been amplified by incoherence--if you've ever read something he said in its aftermath you'll know what I mean--Biden still was getting the worst of it.  Since Trumpers don't acknowledge any of Trump's faults and shortcomings, Biden was clearly losing the debate.  I was crestfallen by the time it was over.  Then came Jill Biden's irrational, enabling delusional evaluation of Biden's performance, and my despair turned into anger.  The day after and the day after that just solidified my consternation, and continued to do so until this very moment.

But as time progresses, I become more aware of some disturbing realities that actually work in our collective favor.  First, the reasons for which people were committed to voting for either of these two deluded pretenders hadn't changed.  Trumpers were still going to vote for Trump and Bidenites would likewise vote for their man.  As to the previously uncommitted, they have been the voice that we will all be hearing loud and clear on November 5, the day after the election, and they are what worries me.  They tend to be thinking about the qualifications of the candidates rather than just choosing a side.  There is an old denomination used by Democrats: "yellow dog," as in "I'd vote for an old yellow dog" as long as he was a Democrat, and the yellow dog Democrats will still vote for Biden, if only because he isn't the other guy, and that includes me in this case.  Don't get me wrong.  I've voted for Republicans in the past like Francis Sargeant for governor of Massachusetts back in the seventies, and Senator Ed Brooke too.  But I would vote for an old yellow dog...hell, I'd vote for a dead dog...before I'd vote for Donald Trump, and I suspect that a Trump voter's got no better than a coin toss of a chance to get into heaven too.  But none of that is what motivates me today, now as I write to you.

Trump is a miscreant, and thus there is no point in even mentioning his loathsome qualities, including hubris, megalomania, conceit...just make a list of all of the worst qualities a president can have and Trump is a poster child for each of them.  But as for Biden, I didn't believe until he began parrying the obviously apt appraisals of his appalling performance in the debate with trite phrases like, when you get knocked down you get up again, and I just want to finish what I started, and I know how to do this job.  None of that rah, rah nonsense is worth a tinker's damn.  Yet despite that fact, and I believe Biden knows it's a fact, he persists out of the same qualities that motivate Trump: hubris, prideful-ness, personal ambition and a single minded commitment to his own self-interest and aggrandizement.

But while Trump will reside in his own kind of hell in the next life, Biden will have one of his own too.  But Biden will leave something he surely doesn't want posterity to see.  His name will be mentioned in the same sentences as people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and like that of everyone who, as the old saying goes, stayed too late at the fair.  Unfortunately, we'll pay a price for both of their conceits in the end.  Ginsburg's we are already paying, and I fear that Biden's is just a few months away...but it's coming unless he sees the light.

Your friend,

Mike