White Invaders Injustices to the Indigenous People

      

        In some recent online videos about the history of the American West, the content creators quoted from diaries written by soldiers who served in the U.S. Cavalry during the mid to late 1800s. During this encroachment into Native territory, the soldiers constantly use the word "hostiles" to describe the Natives they encounter. They seem mystified. 

Now, what would make those people hostile? 

        It is bad enough U.S. history books are filled with derogatory references to Natives as - Indians, redskins, injuns, heathens, savages, pagans, and barbarians. Even our Declaration of Independence refers to them as "merciless indian savages." But to be baffled by their hostility? It never seems to occur to those troopers that the Natives are hostile precisely because those troopers are invading their land, taking their food, and killing their family members. If Natives regularly pushed their way into the various forts the US military had established along what was called the frontier and were taking off with all the goods they could carry, how would the troopers react? Would they be hostile toward people who did that to them? Why were the people who already lived on that land considered the invading culture? Why were they required to give up their land just because white intruders under their self-appointed Manifest Destiny decided they owned whatever they could see or grab? In the United States, white trespassers still occupy Native lands.

        "Where did they come from?"

            For example, here is the most likely scenario that happened along the coastal area of what became Virginia on May 13, 1607, when a Powhatan native came across the first English invaders. In basic sign language, this occurred:

Native: Who are you?

Immigrant: We're here to build a settlement named after our king, called Jamestown, on this land.

Native: Why?

Immigrant: Is this your land?

Native: Yes, we hunt and fish here. Who is your, uh, king to give you this permission?

Immigrant: We're here on his orders. See, here is the signature of King James.

Native: Is he with you?

Immigrant: No. But his name is on this piece of paper, making it legal.

Native: So, you're guided only by marks on a piece of what looks like thin skin of some sort. The man who made them is not with you. There seems to be just a small group of you with no females, and many are doing nothing...

Immigrant: Most of us are sick.

Native (looking around): Unaccompanied, seems to be a minor bunch who are in poor health. To do anything else would be inhumane...so, alright, you can stay here for a while. We'll send over some food. The water in that river is no good...too salty. There is a spring not far that way with good water. The trees provide plenty of cover for protection - and for heat and cooking. We'll check up on you.

Immigrant: We can never repay you.

And they never did. As a matter of fact, they took it away from the natives.

         The same scenario played out on November 11, 1620 (per the Julian Calendar), near what became Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts. There, the circumstances were even more problematic and dire for the Pilgrims. (They had put the 'grim' in their religious identification due to their own intolerance for other viewpoints, which is why they were now seeking a new homeland.) Winds had blown them off course, so they did not get to where they were attempting to reach in the "New World." Now, it was almost winter, and they had used up most of their supplies to get to this uncharted place. The Wampanoags were the only reason the Pilgrims survived the first winter. The Pilgrims had tried to pray their food, safety, care, and well-being into existence. But, whatever they were praying to took no note of them. The Natives took pity on the strange invaders and extended to them far more "Christianity" and Christian character than the Pilgrims ever reciprocated.

        "Our king and our church said we own you people now...and your land, too!"

        Meanwhile, down in the territory being vandalized by the ever-so-compassionate conquistadors of Spain, St. Augustine had been established in 1565 as a Catholic mission. It was a foothold for the Spanish conquest of the territory. To really get things off on the wrong foot, since 1513, there had been lots of barbaric treatment of - and violent contact with - the local natives, like the Timucuans and the Calusas, as the conquistadors fought their way into this new land. This would foment an even more hostile living environment that would be the future of interaction between the two cultures in what became Florida.

    The conquistadors had the noxious habit of enslaving any person who fell into their hands because the church ruled that they could. The people they met were heathens. They were not to be afforded God's mercy and treated as equals. They were sub-humans in the eyes of the church because they didn't worship the same god, they spoke a weird language, and they had different customs. How dare they?

     The Spaniards abused them in every way they could: they used them as targets, to ride on like animals, and forced at swordpoint to mine metals or ores out of the ground, or plant and farm crops. The Natives were not malleable at all and resisted every effort of the Spaniards to subjugate them. All that was left was to kill the indigenous men and rape their women. That would spread their "friendly-to-whites-only" diseases throughout the local population, and then they'd just wait for nature to take its course. The same callous attitude was displayed toward the indigenous by the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese as well.

    Naturally, they couldn't have known that the diseases they carried, that they were immune to from centuries of living in Europe, these people had no defenses against. Even a simple cold was lethal to many of the indigenous. But the invaders didn't know, nor did they care. They assumed the Indigenous land was theirs for the taking, so if the inhabitants got the sniffles and died, then the white invaders could justify it by saying, "It was an act of God and was meant to be!" 

        That is what made the butchery, cruelty, and hostility so disturbing: the cold-blooded treatment of all Natives by these invaders based solely on their holy book, the Bible, which they all claimed guided them. Since these indigenous people were different in enough ways, the invaders asserted that their God's attitude was "do whatever you want to them." Such Christian compassion and charity!

        Enslavement was condoned. Barbarity was approved of. Seizing land without verifying if anyone lived there first was seen as a noble thing to do for their king and god. It spread their gospel...while spilling blood everywhere it was carried and preached. It didn't matter that the natives couldn't understand a word of what the Spaniards were babbling at them. The church leaders had told them all should hear the word of God. That meant the monks and priests with them read it out of their books - because of course God would intercede and make the natives understand Latin in their own language - so they had to stay and be quiet, then profess to grasp and accept whatever was shouted at them. When that failed over and over and over, the church ordered them slaughtered. Better no heathens at all, especially those who heard the word and rejected it. This scenario was played out everywhere these European Christian-influenced invaders set foot...the Caribbean Islands, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, India, Singapore, China, Hawaii...etc. In a little over 100 years, North, Central, and South America became the testing ground for all the appalling and criminal actions these invaders could think up in dealing with a new race of people. If it was the wrong thing to do, these invaders did it.

        The Tainos couldn't understand why the Columbus crew needed so much material draped over them.

        

        When Columbus and his followers stumbled upon the Caribbean Islands and the Americas, he and the Spanish hooligans who came after him instituted a bloody legacy reputedly established much earlier by the Vikings. In those Norse legends, Leif Ericssen and Eric the Red fought men called skraelings in their encounters far to the west of their Northern European homelands. Not to be outdone, the conquistadors came up with a variety of ways to terrorize anyone they encountered that would humble whatever violence the Vikings unleashed.

The British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese enhanced that blood-thirsty reputation when they got to the New World. In many cases, they were almost giddy about their barbaric treatment whenever they came in contact with the indigenous people.

    And then, on top of all that, the hypocritical Americans insisted on calling the native people they encountered while pushing westward into their lands...savages!

       And yet some people don't think any reparations are owed to the indigenous people, to those who are descendants of the African Slave Trade, and to the descendants of the Asian 'Coolie' Trade. How in the hell can any person look at the information that is currently available - information that white people recorded without any embarrassment - and not think these abused people are due SOMETHING for all they have suffered and been subjected to at the hands of our Caucasian ancestors? To deny them that is a strikingly undiluted example of white privilege.

        The people who endured the barbarism of that white privilege deserve justice. It is long, long overdue.

Religious faith - points everywhere...and nowhere.

   

     Christian churches are not about the overarching message of the Protestant Bible, but rather about which interpretation of the book is correct. They all squabble with each other over the most inconsequential, ignorant, and petty things in their interpretations (Immersion vs. sprinkling, wine vs. grape juice, Saturday vs. Sunday...etc.) but they fail to address whether the bible is even worth basing an entire life-system on. (Full Disclosure: It's not.) Then, there's the matter of the Protestant Bible deriving from the Catholic Bible with its six extra books. Which one is the real "Christian" book? Does older mean truer and more reliable?

    Christianity's core is completely lacking in substance but has been protected, camouflaged, and embellished over the centuries spawning several offshoot industries and power centers all meant to conceal its main emptiness. They were designed to gloss over that emptiness and give it a veneer of authenticity, reliability, and truth. It is none of those things. It only pretends to be. 

    The Christians themselves sum it up with their vacuous "You just gotta have faith." What good does that do in proving the truth of something? If faith is all that is required, then Muslims are right about their faith. Mormons are right about theirs. Hindus are right about theirs... Who could ever be wrong if "you just gotta have faith?" 

It's time to grow up and realize gods were created by cavemen to explain thunder and lightning.

Pennsylvania Driver Proves Religion Poisoned Her

When the late Christopher Hitchens penned one of his best selling and most controversial books “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” he said the title was meant to sound as brutal as it did. Because religious poison is at the bottom of some of the most idiotic things humans do when they let Bronze Age stories written by semi-literate goat herders dictate how they should live their lives. And when they believe they are under 24-hour surveillance by a supernatural agent who they think they can manipulate, it gets even worse.

Here is just the latest example of why religion is dangerous.

On January 7, 2020, near Weatherly, PA, Nadejda Reilly decided just reading the bible, praying, and going to church was not enough. She needed to put God to a test. The end result was nearly catastrophic when she deliberately drove into oncoming traffic and rammed another car with three people in it. She injured two of them as “a test” of her faith in that God. And it convinced her God passed her test with flying colors. 
Law enforcement authorities revealed that she showed no empathy for the injured people and no regret for her actions. When interrogated, the 31-year-old woman told investigator Trooper Bruce Balliet that she drove around the area ‘for several hours’ so this was premeditated. She claimed she was waiting for a sign or a calling from God but when she received nothing she decided to take matters into her own hands.

"Reilly related that God took care of her by not having her injured," wrote the investigator in an arrest affidavit. "Reilly expressed no concerns or remorse for the victims and stated she did not care if the other people were injured because "God would have taken care of them."

The injured were taken to the hospital for treatment. Reilly was charged with aggravated assault and other offenses and her $50,000 bail was also revoked as it was deemed she would do it again if given an opportunity.

While a verdict on Reilly is yet to be announced, her actions have been strongly criticized and Church leaders opined that her actions were not faith-based, but were delusional.

That begs the question: how can anyone say her actions were not faith-based? Do they know her mind? Do they know the depth of her faith and how she believes God works in her life? They immediately go to a “she’s delusional” excuse. They are correct about that - but she is delusional because of her faith, not in spite of it. She honestly "believes" -  because she has been indoctrinated since the time she was a young child to accept some adult's insistence that there is a sky daddy somewhere up there who performs magic. That is delusional. She believed some supernatural power would take control of her vehicle and guide it safely through traffic if she just had enough faith. That thinking almost got four people killed (Reilly and the three people in the car she rammed). Notice the woman never has to provide any evidence that those who survived were protected by a God. She just asserts it. That should not fly in any court in this country.

This is how religion, particularly Christianity in the United States, infects people to the point of trying to kill others and not caring about the end result because some God will take care of the collateral damage. It’s another version of the old blood-thirsty “Kill ‘em all...let God sort ‘em out” slogan.

This woman injured two people and didn’t give a damn because she believed that God would protect those she almost killed - if God loved them enough - so it wasn’t her problem. God saw to it she wasn’t injured, thus proving to her that God exists - in her mind. Obviously, God kept the others from being killed so what's the problem? There's no harm done.

Why is it religion seems to inflict stupidity on its believers? People do dumb things all the time but this woman's belief in her religion convinced her that ramming another car and walking away means God loves her. So the material and physical costs don't factor into how much love she just experienced. Nor, apparently, can she figure out a less destructive or less harmful way to test her faith. We can expect her to do this every time she drives, to see if God still loves her. (I wonder...what if God doesn’t care about the people she rams into next time? Should it be her call that they die that day all because she wants to test her faith in God?) Is this how God expects his flock to perform, by testing whether he’s paying any attention to them each moment? A God that ignores people is indistinguishable from a god that is imaginary.

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 5^th 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 100^th 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] 

Trump Supporters Still Want Their P*ssies Grabbed

At a recent Trump rally, women (and one guy) wait to have their genitals fondled.

Trump in 2005:  “…when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

In Trump’s mind, being a star means being above the law. So pussy grabbing by Trump is not illegal. 
Trump even admitted, "I was aware at the time that I was being recorded by a TV program".

However, this was just “locker room” talk, remember? He meant every word of it, he just didn’t mean for you to find out. It’s his way of puffing up his street cred with other serial sexual predators – by exchanging ideas for violating women safely behind locker room doors. You weren’t supposed to catch him admitting what he really did to his victims. But he thinks what he did was okay. He told the world he “could get away with anything.” Getting caught voicing his preferred method was his only miscalculation. And the people who voted for him approve that message!

Does he care if you disapprove? Does Trump care about anything other than making money off of gullible people? Trump has a simple five-word response that sums up his attitude. Verified by numerous named sources in Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, one of Trump’s most frequent responses to a variety of issues is “I don’t give a fuck”, "I don't give a shit", or “I don’t give a damn.”

Case in point: Money trumps the law.

Trump in November 2016, to Chris Christie (when he and Steve Bannon explained to Trump that legally the money raised for the Trump transition team could only be used for actual presidential transition team tasks as it prepared to take over the government): “Fuck the law,” Trump shouted. “I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money.”

THIS IS THE REPUBLICAN’S LEADER - AND THE BIBLE-WIELDING EVANGELICAL’S CHOSEN MORAL REPRESENTATIVE.

Congratulations GOP and Christians, this is the man seen as the embodiment of your values around the world. This is the man you believe God picked to lead the U.S.

Does he care about presidential optics he has created? Stormy Daniels, Karen McDougal, shoving aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Dusko Markovic so Trump could be in front at the NATO members photo op in May 2017, being laughed at when falsely bragging about his accomplishments in front of the UN General Assembly. 3000 Puerto Ricans are confirmed dead from Hurricane Maria and its after-effects, which were criminally mismanaged by the Trump administration, yet Trump gives himself an A+ and told reporters "I think we did a fantastic job in Puerto Rico."  Trump proudly says he’s a nationalist…even though he admits he shouldn’t say it. He doesn't care that nationalism has strong negative connotations and is closely associated with white nationalism and in particular National Socialism…you know, Nazis.

Did Trump really hire “the best people” to work for him? Recent Trump administration departures include Nikki Haley, Don McGahn, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Tom Price, David Shulkin, Rob Porter, Dina Powell, Scott Pruitt…many left under a cloud of corruption…and those names are just the most high-profile ones. These are Trump’s hand-selected “best people” and they have been either forced out or found they cannot work with him. Why would they no longer want to help Trump make America great again?

What about that massive parade that was supposed to showcase our great military (and by extension, it’s Commander-in-Chief), right down Pennsylvania Avenue…uh, soon, how 'bout July 4^th, no, no, Veteran’s Day on November 11^th, no wait…? Never mind, it’s been cancelled. As usual, Trump didn't give a damn about the cost until the Pentagon released figures showing the parade that Trump wanted would cost nearly $90 million. Then, to save face, Trump claimed he cancelled it due to budgetary concerns after Democratic politicians falsely inflated the price. That’s how Trump honors our military…with a false show of force designed to stroke his ego that would have wasted millions of dollars, it would have added nothing to military might or readiness, and that money would have been far better spent on our military families and veterans.

Does Trump actually care about helping our military? Trump has gone golfing at least 70 times since taking office yet hasn’t once visited troops in an active zone he sent them to. So far, all "General Bone Spurs" has done is use our soldiers, sailors, marines, and air force crews for photo opportunities or to send them off secretively - like they're a bunch of pawns or playthings - while he flexes his muscle and uses his military school background to play-act as the new sheriff in town. He told everyone on live TV he was smarter than our generals.
We lost four Green Berets in Niger October 4, 2017, because Trump added Chad to the list of seven banned countries - all because they didn’t use the right kind of paper for their passports. Chad troops then pulled out of Niger and the vacuum was filled by ISIS-supporting militants. With no advance intelligence, Trump ordered the US African Command to send lightly-armed US troops into the area with no plan, no support, no backup, and no extraction force available. Then when four Americans were killed (along with several Niger troops) Trump did nothing. Absolutely nothing. He even ignored the Defense Department's statement for him to read to the public about the ambush. Nor did Trump call any of the families of those killed until he was exposed at a press conference on October 16^th lying that he was the first president ever to call all the families of those who died in service to the US on his watch. He further sullied the whole affair by insulting the widow of Sgt. LaDavid Johnson, on her way to claim her husband’s body at the airport, and his off-the-cuff callousness was confirmed by the widow’s mother and her congresswoman who were riding in the car with her. Trump claims they are the ones who are lying about the incident, even though Chief of Staff John Kelly corroborated that Trump had said to the widow about her husband’s death “well, he knew what he signed up for…” 
How and why did we lose a SEAL in Somalia? Why was Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens killed in that botched raid in Yemen just a week into the Trump presidency? Why are we still losing military personnel in Syria when Trump can, and does, launch Tomahawk cruise missiles from the comfort of his golf resorts as his way of resolving issues in that country? Trump even salutes generals of countries we are technically still at war with.

         Taking care of our military starts with our veterans. Yet what has Trump done for them? According to the publication Stars & Stripes, Trump’s approach to the whole Veterans Administration issue was to appoint a trio of wealthy Mar-a-Lago members (those are people who pay him personally hundreds of thousands of dollars a year) who have no military experience to run the VA in secret. And although Trump has repeatedly promised his total commitment to “take care of every veteran”, now, almost two years into his administration, he has yet to detail how he would do that, or when he might start. Meanwhile, wait times at almost every VA facility have increased because Trump froze federal hiring and spending which blocked any additional staff or doctors being added, or upgrading with needed equipment, thereby degrading veteran’s health care even more.

Why hasn’t anyone handed Trump an AR-15 and asked him to show us how he would have confronted the gunman at Margery Stoneman Douglas High School during his killing rampage on Valentine’s Day 2018? Trump said that’s what he would have done, run into the building and confront the shooter. Lead by example, Trump.

Does Trump care that everyone around him considers him an idiot, or more generously, a child? – The transcript of the July 20, 2017 meeting at the Pentagon reveals Trump left a room full of staff members, Cabinet officials, and military leaders stunned after showing he couldn’t grasp simple concepts on diplomacy, and reasons not to launch a war - Rex Tillerson blurted out ‘fucking moron’ as Trump left the room; the West Wing resembles a dumpster fire as seen through the eyes of Michael Wolff in his book Fire and Fury, the September 2018 New York Times op-ed letter that claims others are actually running the government as "the adults in the room" instead of Trump, the entire White House is understaffed and feels they have to be the guardians at the gate to keep Trump from acting on his wildest impulses as chronicled in Michael Lewis' The Fifth Risk, reporter/author Bob Woodward, who has an impeccable record for honest and accurate reporting, writes in his latest book Fear: Trump in the White House that many are concerned that the president acts like a petulant five-year-old, or describe him as having the attention span of a 5th or 6th grader, incompetent, completely self-centred, lacking a moral compass. And don't forget, after claiming as a candidate in 2016 that "the world was laughing at us" Trump is the one who actually got laughed at - by the entire UN General Assembly on September 24, 2018.

Does he care about the deficit?

In September 2018, Trump's top economic advisor, Larry Kudlow, gave a talk at the Economic Club of New York in which he said that tax cuts aren't to blame for deficits. It’s entirely too much spending, mainly on social programs. Just how could Kudlow make such a preposterous claim? Because the GOP - who rammed through that Tax Cut Bill that transfers the tax savings wealth to the top 2% of people in this country, authorized with Trump's signature - tells him to say that. They don't want to answer for what they did to the other 98% of Americans. But it is Trump's $1.5 trillion tax cuts - and only Trump’s tax cuts - that are fueling the increase in deficits. It is now 17% higher than at this time last year according to his own Treasury Department. And even though Republicans control the Executive, Judicial and Legislative arms of the government, there's been absolutely no spending discipline at all by them. However, Republicans blame what they call “obstructionist Democrats” as causing the spending increases that are ballooning the deficit...and claiming Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the culprits that really need radical reductions.

Does Trump care that a legal U.S. resident was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey? Jamal Khashoggi was no threat to Saudi Arabia. He was simply disliked by the Saudi prince over an article he wrote. And the official story, from the Saudi government, and even Trump himself, has changed five times? Is it okay for someone to murder a legal resident, then as president, a shrug of the shoulders is the only requirement in order to maintain a highly profitable financial arrangement (not just for US defence contractors but Trump personally)? Is it okay to kill journalists or representatives of the press? Is it okay to at least body slam them to the ground like Montana Senator Greg Gianforte did last year since Trump told a recent rally crowd that someone who could do that was his “kind of man”?

The presidency is supposed to be the beacon of moral leadership to the world. Instead, we have a president who has thoroughly disgraced, dishonoured, debased and degraded the office.

You in his administration…you in the GOP who cover for him...you evangelicals who CONTINUE to support him…you who voted for this vastly unfit-for-office man…you are all complicit. You are all enablers. You all figuratively lift your skirts every day and encourage Trump to grab your pussy because he's a star. And because he's a star, you support his getting away with ANYTHING by letting Trump just be Trump. As his hands grab your genitals it gives him the courage to imprison babies of migrant parents at the border, let economically-friendly countries kill American residents with no consequence, side with Putin against all of the US Intelligence agencies, sign a tax bill that promptly gave him a $2 billion windfall because tax breaks in the bill were specifically designed to go to real estate developers and people who own golf courses. How did that happen? That is going to make America great again? For who? Trump has not hidden who and what he is from anyone. By voting him into office, you have made this nation the laughing stock of the world. 

Just ask the UN.