I Tried; I Failed

I had planned on watching the entire debate. I couldn’t. After about 20 minutes, I had to turn it off. Donald Trump was setting the new world’s record for lies and misinformation per minute. Biden sounded old and sometime confused, like he said that he “beat Medicare.”

The CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, let Trump get away with every lie he told (like when Trump said that Democrats — and Biden — support “post- birth abortions”).

Quite honestly, it was painful to watch. So I stopped and went back to watching “DCI Banks” on BritBox. Once it’s over, or maybe tomorrow, I’ll read what some of the political journalists I respect have to say.

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.

WTF?

83383F66-3798-4863-85B7-133FDBE0DFF0A Tennessee Republican state representative, Micah Van Huss, recently introduced a measure at the state’s capital that would recognize CNN and the Washington Post “as fake news,” and condemn the two outlets as being “part of the media wing of the Democratic Party.” Van Huss said these two media outlets are denigrating Tennessee’s citizens by implying that they are “weak-minded followers instead of people exercising their rights that our veterans paid for with their blood.”

“To describe the entire Republican Party as a cult led by President Trump is problematic. If journalists are going to refer to the party as a cult, and its supporters as cultists, they must define what “cult” means. Otherwise, they are assuming that a cult is some obvious phenomenon and everyone knows what the word means,” reads a portion of Van Huss’ resolution.

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Meanwhile, in Montana, Republican state representative Rodney Garcia, is claiming that the U.S. Constitution allows for socialists “to be tried, and if they’re found guilty, they can be jailed or shot.” Garcia said he believes that the Constitution’s treason clause in Article III allows for the jailing or killing of “enemies” of the U.S., which he believes to mean socialists.

Garcia’s statements were even a bit much for other Republican lawmakers in the state. “Your reckless and un-American remarks are beneath that of a public official and do not represent the values of the Republican Party, the Montana House of Representatives, or the people of our great state,” several state lawmakers wrote in a letter to Garcia.

“Your actions have irreparably undermined the body in which you serve and have irrevocably broken the trust of those you were elected to represent. We believe it is clear that you can no longer effectively discharge the duties of the office you hold; therefore, it is our request that you submit your resignation with immediate effect,” the letter continued.

But Garcia was unfazed. “They can ask me to step down, but, no, I don’t think so,” Garcia said. “I will only resign if God asks me to.” Then he added, “I’m going to run for the Senate and I’m going to win. People are going to have to eat their words.”

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I know that, in the age of Donald Trump, things are crazy in politics, but seriously, where do Republicans dig up some of the characters they run for state legislative offices? And what is wrong with the voters who vote these assholes in office in the first place?