Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Trump turns the U.S. into a Ghoul Nation

Thanks to Trump, the United States has become a ghoul nation. Actions taken by this administration seem to be guided by a sinister side of Trump, especially one that feeds on ‘dead bodies.’ The word ghoul is also applicable in the derogatory sense when referring to a person who delights in the macabre, or is indifferent to someone else’s death. Has Trump expressed any sorrow or concern for anyone who has died or been killed on his watch? Not at all.

          Everyone, from CPO William Ryan Owens the Navy SEAL killed in Yemen less than a week into the Trump presidency, the four Green Berets, ambushed and gunned down in Niger on October 4, 2017, to the three U.S. Special Forces soldiers killed by an IED, November 27, 2018, near Ghazni in Afghanistan produced no reaction from Trump. Not one tweet from him about their sacrifice, and in most cases, Trump couldn’t even bother to be at Joint Base Andrews when the bodies were flown home. Ghouls are unconcerned with death.
        Just a few days after 7-year-old Guatemalan Jakelin Caal Maquin died in Border Patrol custody, 8-year old Felipe Gomez Alonso, also a Guatemalan died just before midnight Monday at a government facility in Albuquerque NM. CBP says it doesn’t know the cause of the boy’s death. Records show he was sent to a hospital, diagnosed with a cold, sent back to Border Patrol care and began having seizures soon after arriving there. He died later that evening while being transferred back to the hospital.
Trump supporters are secretly thrilled that these little sub-humans are now dead after illegally entering US territory…and it’s all their parent’s fault. If the immigrants hadn’t entered the U.S. through the desert they wouldn’t have lost their child. “Go die on someone else’s dime” is the Trump supporter’s attitude regarding the children’s deaths while in U.S. custody. There is no sympathy except for how it makes Trump look. That’s where their ghoulish sympathies lie.
A U.S. military report was released in December 2018 stating foreign civilian casualties during U.S. Drone strikes have dramatically increased under the Trump administration. Last year, Trump ordered all caps removed (in a simplified manner, caps were to be the maximum allowable number killed during U.S. actions hopefully restricted to maybe a dozen). Drawing on Defense Department memos and collateral damage assessments, so far in 2018, almost 3,500 civilians have been officially reported as killed - but governments in the countries where the strikes occurred claim the number is substantially higher and that the Trump administration is deliberately under-reporting the civilian slaughter. Meanwhile, the Trump administration pedals it as the price paid for America's freedoms. Ghouls do not care about collateral damage deaths.
In mid September 2018, Yahoo News is the first to report on a release that shows the Trump administration had transferred $13 million from Childhood Cancer Research and over $16 million from Head Start in order to give it to ICE for the supplying and construction of more detention centers and holding facilities for immigrants and their children. Why help kids when you can incarcerate…and possibly accelerate the death of…illegal immigrant children? Only a Ghoul nation would do this.
Even though FEMA has admitted fault for the thousands of pallets of now-undrinkable bottled water left on a runway in Puerto Rico as CBS reported in mid September, FEMA confirmed that it moved the bottled water in a cost-saving measure as a part of its effort to provide “the maximum support to disaster survivors, while also being mindful of our responsibility as stewards of taxpayer dollars.” Leaving it on the runway for months saved FEMA money and Trump gave their effort an A+. The supplied-and-lost-water could have saved some of the lives of the almost 3000 Puerto Ricans who died as a direct result of the effects of Hurricane Maria in the fall of 2017, and the inadequate response of the Trump administration. Trump denied the death toll from Hurricanes Maria and Irma in a series of tweets stating "3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths." Trump then blamed Democrats for the figures, "to make me look as bad as possible." It is always…ALWAYS…someone else’s fault, never the Ghoul that was directly responsible for making the tragedy worse.
The world judges the United States by what Trump does. We will pay for this for generations…long after we’ve paid for Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 1%.

Sunday, December 02, 2018

Trump Decay

There is a decay eating at America. A decay personified by the unchecked dishonesty emanating from the office-holder at the highest level of the government. There, resides an individual who lacks any moral character, who fans the flames of division, who encourages chaos among those in his administration and who surround him, who was actually laughed at by the entire world in his speech before the UN last September. That decay is spreading across the land. What a metaphor for what has happened to our country.
Ann Coulter, one of his biggest supporters, writes “For those of us who were ecstatic the night Donald Trump was elected president…it used to be easy to defend him against the charge that he is just a con man who would say anything to get elected. It’s getting harder.”
Sebastian Smith of AFP* wrote from the G-20 meeting in Buenos Ares on Dec. 1, 2018, regarding the announcement that Bush 41 had died:
One US president talked softly, the other harangues. One built international coalitions, the other tears them up. One was a war hero, the other avoided battle.

One was called George Herbert Walker Bush and the other is the current occupant of the White House…Donald J. Trump.
Trump was one of the first of current and past world leaders to praise the life of Bush. But even Trump's courteous statement couldn’t gloss over the undeniable contrast between the two. Using words like "humble," "quiet," "unflappable leadership," and "inspired" in their condolence announcement couldn’t detract from how alien they sounded coming from the Trump administration, especially Mr. Trump himself.
         Honor, honesty, and faithfulness are not words that would describe Mr. Trump. While he was running for president, Donald Trump was heard on tape discussing the payment scheme with Michael Cohen to pay off Karen McDougal for an affair Trump had with her just a year after he married his third wife. Another scheme was confirmed involving a quickie with adult film star Stormy Daniels one month after the birth of his 5th child Barron when the reimbursement payment to Michael Cohen showed up in the tax filing Trump released last April. What are the odds that those were the only two times that Trump had an extramarital affair covered up? Yet the evangelicals claim to love and support this man because he is the beacon of Christianity to the world. No one is better at the Bible than Trump.





          The Bible calls for people who’ve committed adultery to be put to death. Shouldn’t Trump head the list of the “first to be executed” for dozens of instances of adultery that he admitted to on the Howard Stern radio show, on the Access Hollywood tape, and other times when he publicly bragged about it? Evangelicals tend to cherry-pick what parts of the Bible apply when it comes to Trump.


The Trump Administration sounds like a broken disc that keeps repeating "I-didn't-know-better…I didn’t know better…IDKB…"
Donald Trump sides with dictatorships over and over against the interests of the American people - for personal gain, not to MAGA. (IDKB)
He can’t be bothered to attend a remembrance ceremony honoring US World War One dead, then gets angry with others who didn’t warn him how bad that would look. 
Ivanka’s use of a private email server. (IDKB)
Kellyanne Conway, Dan Scavino, Hope Hicks, and others in his administration, repeatedly violating the Hatch Act. (IDKB)
The self-serving exploits of Scott Pruitt, Tom Price, David Shulkin, Rex Tillerson, Mike Flynn, Ryan Zinke…the list grows every day.
Did Trump collude with the Russians to get elected? Rudi Giuliani rushes to Trump's defense on TV and says that even if he did, collusion is “not a crime.” Is it still alright if the Trump Administration didn’t know better?

Trump puts his stamp of approval on the murder of a legal U.S. resident that was committed by a foreign government…a foreign government that - by Trump’s own admission pays him personally millions of dollars - would not be sanctioned because it would be financially “bad” for the U.S. to hold them accountable. It would especially impact the businesses supplying military hardware to the Saudis, who were fighting a proxy war for the Trump administration in Yemen. As a reward, imported oil suddenly costs less, and Trump tweets congratulations to himself over the Thanksgiving weekend for the lower gas prices. Can your moral compass be compromised over artificially and temporarily lower prices at the pump so the Saudi government can get away with murder?
Speaking of getting away with murder, remember these four soldiers...
        Mr. Trump treats our military like an afterthought. There is no respect for the military. There never has been. To Trump, the military is just a convenient macho-looking backdrop for when he needs to puff up his ego and remind them he's their Commander-in-Chief. His record of avoiding the draft in the late 1960s along with his contrived bone spur excuse still produces a stream of hilarious comedy material because Trump can’t remember which foot had the bone spur that kept him out of the military. Should we be trusting a forgetful, dishonest coward with the nuclear codes?

His unforgivable attitude toward military veterans was on full display when he weighed in on John McCain’s capture and torture during the Vietnam War claiming it was nothing heroic – tweeting his new name for him was “very foul-mouthed Sen. John McCain”, called him incompetent - all the way up to a final disrespect by raising the White House flag after just a few hours at half-staff the day McCain died. Nor did Trump attend the funeral. Those who serve our country mean nothing to him. Veterans mean nothing to him.
That’s why he didn’t do anything on Veteran’s Day 2018.
That’s why he skipped the visit to the Aisne-Marne US cemetery in France on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One.
That’s why he threw our intelligence services under the bus twice in the past 6 months. Siding with Saudi Arabia in regards to who killed Jamal Khashoggi, and siding with Putin last July in Helsinki thereby validating his deliberate attack on our election…an election that got Trump into the White House.
And now it turns out Trump has had a very recent business interest in Russia, and in order to get the money to build a business in Moscow, he needed to be president of the U.S. so he could remove those unfair sanctions, allowing Russia’s VTB bank to finance Trump Tower Moscow. And the top penthouse would be given as a gift to Vladimir Putin…for getting him into the White House.
How is this NOT a criminal conspiracy?
I can hear the sputtering of the GOP and Trump’s supporters already…”Those are just coincidences…why, he never…that’s absurd…he’s…he’s doing it to protect us…that’s just more fake news…so what if he makes a buck or two off of it…who cares what the Emoluments Clause says…who cares if he continually lies to us about it?”
Hasn’t Trump been leaving clues all along about his intent to use his position to enrich himself at our expense? Keep in mind the tax cut bill he signed last December specifically gives huge tax breaks to real estate developers and golf course owners. Is that what you put him in office for? You are right about one thing though…you Trump supporters are not forgotten anymore. Trump is holding his middle finger up at you right where you can see it. And unless we see to it he dies in prison, Trump will get to keep and enjoy those billions – of your tax dollars - long after he leaves office. Thanks, Republicans.

This is the president we currently have. He is raping the United States in front of the world to expand his bank account. He’s using the power of the presidency in order to justify his own personal financial gains. We will have to start paying for that soon with our taxes. There is no other choice unless we choose suicide via civil war.
        Trump is leading us into a disaster. It’s like approaching Niagara Falls in a large rowboat. You climbed into the rowboat when you voted Trump into office and let him steer the ship of state. You’re already in the middle of the river; you either row for the side as hard and as fast as you can, or you go over the falls.
If you get to shore, what are you going to do about the ship’s captain whose bank account meant more to him than any peril you and the country would face?
Trump is rotting the United States from the inside out because Trump is in it for Trump…and Trump only. His solitary concerned is with his bank account. He doesn't give a damn about yours. If anything he does makes you a little extra money, it is incidental, not deliberate. Make America Great Again is simply a slogan on a hat Trump uses as part of his get-rich-quick scheme that will bankrupt the country. 

        The Trump administration is like a dead fish. The stink starts at the head.


 [*AFP is the world's oldest news agency, and is the third largest news agency in the modern world]