Enough Politics Already

9539D001-DE79-44BE-A4F7-9DCA1DD446FFI’ve made a decision. I’m going to throw caution to the wind. I’m going to stop posting about Trump and about politics. I know what you’re thinking: finally! Let me explain.

We have a leader who doesn’t understand what it means to demonstrate leadership. And the empirical evidence shows that Trump has turned what he called the swamp into a zoo filled with corrupt, incompetent sycophants.

But you all know that. Deep down inside, even you Republicans know that he’s destroying the Republic. But people are gonna believe what they’re gonna believe and do what they’re gonna do, no matter what the reality is.

So I’m tired of pissing in the wind. Nobody gives a shit what Fandango thinks, anyway. Enough is enough. I’m calling it quits. No more posts about politics or about Trump. I promise.

For now, anyway.


Written for these daily prompts: Your Daily Word Prompt (caution), Jibber Jabber (finally), Ragtag Daily Prompts (explain), The Daily Spur (leadership), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (empirical), and Word of the Day Challenge (zoo).

Trump: The Great Distractor

85438C88-6139-40E0-96EF-FFBE32A8213CI’ve never done this before, but today I’m going to post here, verbatim, an editorial that appeared in this morning’s San Francisco Chronicle. Because this is what Donald Trump does….

We’ve seen this sequence before: A story, one that that President Trump wants to go away fast, erupts. He quickly says or does something so outrageous that it overtakes the news cycle.

Coincidence?

It wasn’t on Nov. 20, 2018, according to former National Security Adviser John Bolton in his new book, “The Room Where It Happened.” In that case, the story Trump wanted to eclipse was a Washington Post revelation that daughter Ivanka had sent hundreds of emails to White House aides on a personal account in violation of federal records rules. That was obviously an embarrassing story for a president who, as a candidate, had attacked his opponent Hillary Clinton for using a private email server while secretary of state.

So what could be jaw-dropping enough to bury the Ivanka story? Why, how about a defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman over the brutal dismemberment of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, contradicting the CIA’s conclusion that the prince ordered the assassination.

“This will divert from Ivanka,” Bolton quoted Trump as saying in drafting the statement.

It did.

Now along comes an even more explosive allegation Friday night: a New York Times report that Russian operatives offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill American troops in Afghanistan. The story alleged that Trump had been briefed about the intelligence finding, along with a menu of options that included sanctions, yet Trump had taken no action against Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But that was not the story dominating social media on Sunday. Cyberspace was buzzing with Trump’s retweet of a video with his white supporters in Florida shouting “white power!” in an angry exchange with anti-Trump protesters. Trump’s retweet, with his salute to “the great people of The Villages” retirement community, was later deleted, but not before it had 4 million views. The Team Trump spin crew tried to claim the president did not hear the “white power” words even though they came at the start of the 2-minute video.

White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnaney said the president, purportedly unaware of the racist shouts, retweeted the video to show solidarity with supporters who are “oftentimes demonized.”

Then on Monday morning Trump was back at it, retweeting without comment a video of a white couple pointing a semiautomatic rifle and a handgun toward a peaceful procession of Black protesters in St. Louis.

There are two disturbing trends on display in Trump’s Twitter feed. One is his art of deflection. The other is his unapologetic appeals to racism.

Trump is the distractor-in-chief. But as I wrote in my earlier post today, he is a traitor to America. If you are going to vote for him in November, you, too, are a traitor to America.

Image from this post on Medium.

He’s an Effin’ Traitor

EFEDCC32-2886-401B-8472-C9B523FB46E9If this report yesterday from CNN is true, I don’t see how anyone — even Republicans — can continue to stick their heads in the sand and deny that our president is a traitor to his country.

According to the legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, in hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the Trump posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.

Trump regularly bullied and demeaned the leaders of America’s principal allies, especially two women: telling Prime Minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom she was weak and lacked courage; and telling German Chancellor Angela Merkel that she was “stupid.”

Trump incessantly boasted to his fellow heads of state, including Saudi Arabia’s autocratic royal heir Mohammed bin Salman and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, about his own wealth, genius, “great” accomplishments as President, and the “idiocy” of his Oval Office predecessors, according to the sources.

The calls caused former top Trump deputies — including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials — to conclude that Trump was often “delusional,” as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone, or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest.

Bear in mind that yesterday’s CNN report followed hot on the heels of Friday’s New York Times blockbuster report that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops. The Times article went on to report that Trump and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March.

What has Trump done in response to learning in March that Russia was paying to have American soldiers killed? Absolutely nothing. Why not? Because the President of the United States is a traitor to his country.

FOWC with Fandango — Empirical

FOWCWelcome to June 30, 2020 and to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). It’s designed to fill the void after WordPress bailed on its daily one-word prompt.

I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (US).

Today’s word is “empirical.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Or you can simply include a link to your post in the comments.

The issue with pingbacks not showing up seems to have been resolved, but you might check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. You will marvel at their creativity.

Blogging Insights — Reading is Fundamental

Blogging insightsFor this edition of Blogging Insights, Dr. Tanya wants to know if reading is fundamental to being a blogger. She asks:

Do you think that reading is an important prerequisite for writing well? If so, what kind of reading material inspires or affects your writing?

Yes, I do. I can’t imagine being able to write well if you’re not also well read. Back in the day I used to be a voracious reader. I’d typically go through fifty to sixty books a year. I’d read books on the commuter trains I used to take to get to and from work. I’d read books on the many long airplane flights I had to take for my job. And I’d read for in bed about 30 to 60 minutes each night before going to sleep at night

But that was before the internet, before connected computers, before smartphones, before newsfeeds, before 24-hour cable news networks, before streaming services. Now I don’t read more than a half a dozen books a year, if that. Most of my reading these days is done on my iPhone. Specifically my newsfeed and the WordPress reader.

What kind of reading inspires my writing these days? Well, it’s mostly the articles that pop up on my newsfeed, those posts I come across in the WordPress reader, and things I see in my newspaper or in magazines.

So, bottom line, one way or another,DB368155-D086-431C-AE74-E8EC1FEE142A