Enough Pandering to the Handicapped, Too.

        

         It’s about time. We’ve been indulging another minority for a few decades and thanks to Trump it should now stop too.

A new era [actually an old era, but one that Trump and his supporters remember fondly] is here. We have returned to a time of rugged individualism, of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps and learning to live without the government doing anything for us…a time when whiners, crybabies, and the disabled weren’t tolerated. They were rightly shunned. What do the namby-pamby, sniveling fuss buckets, and the disabled give back to society? Nothing. They just take, take, and take. And the American taxpayer has to foot the bill as well as put up with their bitching about equal opportunity. Not in Trump's America. All that has changed.

President Trump has courageously tweeted that transgender people can no longer serve in our military…because of the cost and the disruption…which doesn’t actually exist, but why let facts get in the way…so now it’s time to address the cost and disruption of handicapped ramps, handicapped stalls, and handicapped parking spaces. Handicapped people make up a small portion of our population, maybe even less than the transgender population, so why do we have to use our tax dollars to appease them?

          If we don’t need those 15,000 or so transgenders serving and defending the country, then we sure as hell don’t need to accommodate people in a wheelchair or have some disability where they think they should get special treatment. Maybe those transgender servicemen and women are performing a valuable service, but Trump has made it abundantly clear he doesn’t want their service. So what are the wheelchair-bound and other handicapped people providing? Short answer, it's not any recognizable service…it's obstruction, excessive use of parking and bathroom space, a drain on the economy, and causing others the discomfort of having to see them in public. That's just for starters. We don't want their 'service' either. If Trump can ban transgenders, he can ban these mooches too.

When the wheelchair-bound and disabled are out in public and need a bathroom, they’ll have to use it like everyone else. (Stop and think about it. What did the disabled do 50 years ago? Well, just do that again and stop whining to the government to make things easier for you!) Or just stay home and do your business. By banning transgenders, Trump is saying he wants to make the country great again where you didn't have to see them, so it’s a logical step toward not having to see the handicapped either. Make America Great Again by not making us uncomfortable. Trump is indicating that if it makes us uncomfortable, then it needs to go. Besides, it’s healthier and builds character if we use the stairs rather than a wheelchair ramp anyway. Only about 10% of the population needs them. Why should the other 90% have to be inconvenienced?

If you catch a handicapped person whining about their disability, you know what to do. That’s another way to make America great again.

Unless you, unfortunately, happen to develop a bone spur in your foot...or just make up that disability Then the system needs to be restructured to your wants, needs, and desires, especially if it helps to avoid military service. But…and this is a very important but…this only applies to an extraordinary man. A man who was born into a wealthy family and had been given everything by his father in order to make millions of dollars, who then goes bankrupt four times, loses three casinos, is sued over 360 times by the people he has cheated in business - or because he set up a phony university or something like that, is repeatedly unfaithful to and divorces his first two wives and marries a third (who within two months the man is bragging on an Access Hollywood bus that he might cheat on her and boasts about grabbing other women by the pussy). That kind of man deserves respect, deference, sympathy, loyalty….and is entirely above reproach.

After all, he set the bar on how much respect these disabled people deserve.

Trump Finally Chalks Up a Victory - He Saved a Hat

What a courageous, unprecedented and outstanding service Trump has provided the nation. On Saturday Trump retrieved a Marine's hat after it was blown off his head by a gust of wind. It's something any 5-year old would do but naturally with the bar set so low for Trump, conservatives are celebrating and treating it like Trump just won the World Series. 

A jackass trifecta

Sarah Palin tweeted “Thank you President Trump.” Former game show host Chuck Woolery added his two cents with “NOT AT ALL SURPRISED IT’S WHO HE IS…” in all CAPS no less - so we know how proud he is of Trump's hat rescue.  In case Chuck Woolery forgot, this is ALSO who Trump is...

Trump leaves Melania to fend for herself when they meet the Obamas at the White House on inauguration day.

        Fox News used the hat incident to blast Obama because at a rainy Rose Garden news conference in 2013 (yes, they had to dig back through 4 years of video) Obama’s umbrella was being held by his Marine guard, rather than Obama holding it. So Trump was praised for rescuing a Marine’s cover while Obama is chastised for rudely allowing a Marine to do what he was supposed to be doing when the Commander-in-Chief is speaking in the rain. (How dare Obama allow the president's Marine Escort to do exactly what they are supposed to be doing?) This is worthy of scorn, but if your name is Trump and you bend down to get a hat, that's presidential.

Obama thanks the Marine for holding the umbrella - how unethical is that?

A Virginia Wesleyan University student wrote about the hat pickup “It shows respect and it goes a long way when it's a president showing respect.” How about all the respect Trump showed our intelligence services over the past year, even comparing them to Nazis just a week prior to his inauguration? Or the respect he showed CPO William Ryan Owens when Trump ordered his SEAL Team 6 into Yemen on January 28^th which caused the death of Owens and Trump couldn’t even bother to be in the situation room while the mission was underway? Did Trump show any of that respect when he invented his “bone spur in the foot” excuse to get out of military service in the late 1960s? 

Trump's official "Medal of Honor" photograph.

The video of Trump went viral on Saturday at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland as Trump was boarding a helicopter to return to the White House. Walking along the tarmac, a Marine's hat flew into the air, prompting Trump to grab the hat, pick it up, and place it back on the Marine's head. Trump then patted the Marine's arm like he was a good dog. But the deed was short-lived. Moments later, the hat is seen once again flying into the air, sending Trump after it for a second time. This time Trump gave it to another official and then boarded the helicopter.

The second time Trump just picks it up and hands it to someone else.

             Is picking up a Marine's cover somehow akin to moral purity or upstanding citizenship? Does this compensate for his grabbing women by the genitals? Is this how the conservatives offset Trump’s less-than-stellar G-20 European visit? Will it cause Kim Jong Un to re-think developing a North Korean nuclear ICBM? Does it equate to passing meaningful legislation or coming up with health care to benefit all Americans? Does it trump (pun intended) months and months of Russian-collusion-denial that his son Jr. just admitted to on Tuesday? 

             Like father, like son...a lie is a perfect band-aid.

              So a hat flies off - 'predisent' Trump picks it up and returns it. Most children do that. When you have nothing better to rally around, picking up a wind-blown hat must be as good as conservatives can hope for to show how Trump is Making America Great Again.

               Or you could say it is exactly two letters and a period too long.

A Farewell to the American Experiment - How it was lost

After listening to the testimony, or more accurately, the lack thereof, from Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, Assistant AG Rod Rosenstein, NSA Director Mike Rogers and National Intelligence Director Dan Coats on Wednesday, June 7^th, there is an unwitting, unprecedented, and unnerving thread implied from their non-answers. And that is; they don’t have to account for anything. They don’t have to explain anything. Even though there is no “executive privilege” that prevents them from answering the oversight committee’s questions, they tacitly told the American people “Go screw yourselves. We don’t work for you. We work for the guy in the White House, and anything to do with Russia is none of your damned business." So they give the impression they owe no allegiance to anyone…except for Trump. They must protect Trump at all costs. Why?

From now on, it's Trump first.

At this point, with a lack of any concrete information or even any useful tidbits, one must extrapolate the reason for those refusals from what we do know. Here is the rundown on Trump and his associates’ inexplicable actions, false statements involving the Russians, and Russian efforts to subvert our election:

·        Mike Flynn is fired after lying about his discussions with Sergey Kislyak about sanctions against Russia. He also was paid $43,000 by Russia Today TV in spring 2016 for a speaking engagement in Moscow and is seated right next to Putin, even leading the standing ovation for Putin. He conveniently forgot to mention that when vetted. Trump still defends him.

·        Jeff Sessions lied to Congress during his Senate confirmation hearings to become Attorney General about his two, and now possibly three, unreported meetings with Kislyak before the election. He just forgot about those meetings.

·        Jared Kushner fails to mention a dozen secret meetings with Kislyak on his high-security clearance SF86 form, as well as with sanctioned Russian bank president and KGB college graduate Sergey Gorkov in November and December 2016. Kushner's lawyers claim he just forgot. He even went to extraordinary lengths in December to establish a secret line of communication between the Trump administration and Russia, using secure facilities at the Russian Embassy.

·        Roger Stone, who admits contacting Guccifer 2.0, identified by US and European intelligence agencies as the go-between to the Russian military’s GRU and WikiLeaks, and aided in the release of the DNC hacked emails. He says there's nothing wrong with that.

·        Carter Page, identified by Trump as a key member of his foreign policy team who was discovered in transcripts between Russian intelligence agents as an unwitting dupe for them, admits on MSNBC that he met with Kislyak during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Trump claims he barely knows Page.

·        Paul Manafort, who made millions helping pro-Russian Ukrainian officials for almost 10 years, and who was instrumental in having the only item changed in the Republican platform at the Convention - denying aid to Ukrainian forces fighting the Russians - is made Trump's campaign chairman and appears with him on stage at many rallies. Trump later claims he hardly knows him.

·        Rex Tillerson, former head of Exxon/Mobil who personally received the Russian's highest civilian award, the Order of Friendship medal from Vladimir Putin, and who was working on a $500 billion oil deal in the Arctic above Siberia until the Obama sanctions against Russia for taking Crimea away from Ukraine stops it, is made Secretary of State by Trump. Until December 6, 2016, Trump had never met or talked with Tillerson at all. Why did he choose Tillerson?

·        The Congressional investigation into Russian meddling in the election has expanded to include Michael Cohen, personal attorney and close confidant to Trump. Cohen told ABC News that House and Senate investigators have requested “information and testimony” about any contacts he had with Russians officials.

·        When Trump held his very first foreign policy speech April 27, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC, unbidden, he went up to Sergey Kislyak and greeted him warmly, indicating he had met him previously. He greeted no other ambassador in that manner. Also in attendance, Jeff Sessions.

In just the last month alone, there are these additional Russia-related items:

May 9, 2017, Trump fires FBI Director James Comey. Trump goes on TV later that week and tells Lester Holt of NBC News that he fired him because of “this Russia thing.” It is then revealed he brags to Ambassador Kislyak and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who meet with him in the Oval Office that Comey is “a real nut job” and “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
             May 18, 2017, it is revealed by former CIA Director John Brennan that Trump’s advisers, including Michael Flynn, contacted Russian officials at least 18 times in phone calls and emails between April and November 2016.

May 22, 2017, it is reported that Trump called Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and NSA Director Michael Rogers to request that they deny in public any evidence of collusion between his campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election.

May 31, 2017, President Vladimir Putin acknowledges that some “patriotic” Russian individuals may have engaged in hacking but insisted Russia as a country has never done it.

June 1, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reports that from the earliest days of the Trump administration, they attempted to have the State Dept. lift sanctions against Russia. These are the very sanctions put in place from Russian tampering with our election. The White House does not deny it.

June 5, 2017, an NSA report, dated May 5, is leaked to Intercept, an online news site, by Reality Winner, an NSA contractor in Georgia, who is then arrested by the FBI. The report provides details of a 2016 Russian military intelligence cyberattack on a US voting software supplier. A US official confirmed to CNN that The Intercept's document is a genuine, classified NSA document. The FBI does not arrest people for releasing fake documents, only real ones.

June 9, 2017, the Trump administration says they are considering easing some punishments the Obama administration levied against Russia for election interference abuses, even returning two compounds that were closed in December because they were being used by Russian intelligence. The Trump administration asks for nothing in return.

You notice these instances never involve the Brazilians, the North Koreans, or the ambassador from Sri Lanka. It is always the Russians. Always. But hey, maybe they are ALL just coincidences.

It appears the Russians hold some kind of sway or power over Trump, something so damaging, that our highest intelligence and law enforcement officials; Rogers, Coats, Rosenstein, and McCabe, are willing to cover up for and protect Trump. They refused to answer any questions in any way, even so far as refusing to just answer yes or no to simple procedural questions about the investigation or what Trump asked of them. These are our TOP INTELLIGENCE PEOPLE. The people who were overseeing our security and matters related to intelligence gathering for the US. Yet on their watch, our election was hacked…even Trump admitted it at his first post-election press conference on December 11th.

Two of our most incompetent "intelligence" officers - McCabe (L) and Rogers (R)

McCabe and Rogers failed at their one and only job at the time. They failed to prevent Russian hacking of US computers - and that most likely aided Trump. Trump publicly asked the Russians to do it so why does he still insist the whole Russian hacking story is fake news? It is more and more likely that the Christopher Steele dossier is valid and fully factual. What must the Russians have on Trump that our intelligence and justice officials are willing to risk their integrity, their public perception and their loyalty to this country? How harmful must this information be? It appears if this information was revealed, it would be so damaging that our Constitutional Republic would be brought to an end. Is it the alleged hookers and pee tape? Is it the billions of dollars Trump owes to Russian-controlled banks? So much money that it could cause massive damage to the US economy now that Trump is president? Are there illegal deals the Russians can prove that Trump is involved in, like money laundering through the Bank of Cyprus, where our new Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross Jr. was Vice President?  

The subterfuge and “shiny metal object” distractions Trump’s surrogates throw up is reminiscent to what was palmed off on Americans immediately after the assassination of JFK. What had happened in Dallas was initially considered so potentially detrimental that a lie had to be created to prevent the US from launching a war against the Soviet Union - a war that would leave at least 100 million people (40 million of which would have been American) dead from a nuclear exchange. This is what Lyndon Johnson used as leverage against Earl Warren to force him to form the committee to gather information on the assassination but find Oswald guilty at all costs. Americans must be deflected from thinking the Soviets were in any way involved. So it seemed strange that the Dallas Police immediately began saying Oswald was a communist. (He wasn’t, he was a Marxist.) And the FBI revealed they knew of his ties to Russia as he had just returned from defecting to the Soviet Union. But the Warren Commission whitewashed everything down to claiming that while Oswald was a communist sympathizer, he was a lone nut who just wanted his place in the sun, so he killed Kennedy but wouldn’t admit to it. Two days later Jack Ruby just happened to be in the right place at the right time to silence him. See, it’s all just coincidence.

One further point that needs to be made. Trump’s lawyer, Marc Kasowitz was the lead attorney for the Russian state-owned bank sanctioned by the US - and that same bank’s CEO is the one who met with Jared Kushner during and after the campaign that Jared failed to disclose on his security clearance application. Defending Russia's illegal activities and Trump and his family's treasonous actions seem to be Kasowitz’ only business.

Throughout all this, Trump has downplayed Russian tampering while exhibiting diminished mental acuity, moral ineptitude, complete fabrications, vicious acrimony, and a disdain for common decency. Yet his supporters and intelligence officers like McCabe and Rogers don’t give a damn about it. Russia can meddle anytime they like. Our highest ranking intelligence people condone the interference and give Trump a pass on it. This is now just the way the presidency works. It's the end of our Constitutional Republic.

If this goes on unchecked, then we are no longer a free people. We are now pawns of a hostile foreign power, and Trump, Mike Flynn, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Rex Tillerson, Carter Page, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, J.D. Gordon, Mike Rogers, Dan Coats, Rod Rosenstein and Daniel McCabe are all traitors to this nation.
        It’s hard not to come to that conclusion.

John F. Kennedy's 100th Birthday - Clint Hill's Remembrance of the Assassination

May 29, 2017 is the celebration of John F. Kennedy’s 100^th birthday. For a man who was president a little less than three years he certainly impacted much of the world. He made errors, he had human weaknesses, and numerous flaws like all of us do. But he was able to motivate people and touch their hearts in a way few men have done down through history. A case can be made that it is because of his assassination that so many find some connection to him. Almost everyone who was old enough that day can remember where they were and what they were doing when the announcement was made of his murder. I cannot and will not forget him. While I was just 11 when he was gunned down, I saw and understood the traumatic impact it made on the world’s population. I didn’t understand why it had happened, just that it had. I believed the lie the government built around his assassination.

My mom came home from work that afternoon in tears. She later told me that she was devastated that day because she had voted for Kennedy in 1960. She secretly admired and supported Kennedy but said dad never knew because he was a hardline conservative and voted for Nixon. Mom felt he would get extremely upset if he knew her vote cancelled his out in that election. Mom said she never believed he was killed by Lee Oswald, but not wanting to incur dad’s wrath, she didn’t bring it up because dad believed the Warren Commission Report on the assassination. I came to the conclusion that we had all been lied to only later in life, mostly because my dad reacted scathingly toward any suggestion, from anybody, that the Warren Commission didn’t get it right. He never questioned any of it; he believed it hook, line and sinker. I was finally convinced the Warren Commission was wrong when I began reading the works of Harold Weisberg in the late 1980s at the behest of a guest that had been interviewed at a radio station where I worked.

I have never stopped reading everything I could get my hands on regarding the assassination. 

What prompted this post, in honor of JFK’s 100^th birthday, was the release in 2016 of the book Five Presidents: My Extraordinary Journey with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, written by Clint Hill and Lisa McCubbin. I had read Clint’s Warren Commission testimony but was always fascinated by his story pre and post assassination. The book is his remembrances of his time in the Secret Service.  Agent Clint Hill was immortalized in Kennedy assassination history as the man who rushed up to the presidential limousine after the first shot was fired. He appeared to be the only agent “on the job” that day. So his observations, to me, are vital. He at least reacted. He heard the shots and knew what they were. He was a critical observer. It is important to know what he saw. His recollections have changed over time, mostly because he has been “encouraged” to reflect the official line that Oswald did it by himself from the TSBD’s Southeast 6^th floor window. But Hill did not hear the same number of shots, as he himself said back then. He also saw a different head wound than the Warren Commission conjured up.

In his book on pages 153 and 154 Clint Hill wrote “Suddenly, there was a loud explosive noise, like a firecracker, that came from behind…I saw President Kennedy grab at his throat and lurch to his left. I realized the explosive noise had been a gunshot.”

Hill heard the first shot and saw that it had hit the president. To his credit, he reacted appropriately and was the ONLY Secret Service agent to attempt to reach the president after the gunfire started. The other agents appear to be doing nothing more than bird-watching. The mystifying part is, if the shot came from the back, why did the president grab his throat and “lurch to the left”? That would suggest a shot from the front right.

Agent Glenn Bennett, sitting in the car directly behind the presidential limousine, testified that he SAW the second shot hit the president in the back, exactly where the autopsy diagram, marked at Bethesda Hospital by Dr. Boswell, shows it struck the president’s body [which means it could only have come out of his throat if it was travelling upward]. 

Agent Bennett stated it hit the president about four inches down from the right shoulder. At that angle it could not have come out the throat moving downward, as Arlen Specter reinvented it for the Warren Commission. None of the Parkland doctors who saw the throat wound thought it was an exit wound. Their testimony was eventually bent to fit the single bullet theory. But when they first saw it, every medical person in Dallas identified it as a wound of entry.

Hill continues his story with this: “While I was running there was a second shot. I didn’t hear it – perhaps because I was so focused on catching up to the car, or because of the sounds of the motorcycles on either side of me drowned out the sound – but I am convinced, from all the evidence I’ve seen, read, and studied, that this second shot was the one that hit Governor Connally.”

Agent Hill only heard two shots and surmised there was a third, not because he heard it, or saw its effects, but because of what he read and studied afterward. From this it is apparent that Hill, like all other members of the Secret Service, claims all three shots hit their targets; shots one and three hit Kennedy and shot number two (that Hill didn’t hear) hit Connally. If that is their official assessment, how do they explain the shot that ricocheted off a curb near the triple underpass and injured bystander James Tague? This has never been answered, and for all intents and purposes, it has been ignored because it doesn’t fit their speculative story. Nor does it square with the official Warren Commission version which has the first or second shot missing (to the Warren Commission, this wasn’t an important point) but one of those shots was re-cast as hitting Kennedy high in the back/lower neck area, passing through his neck to continue in a downward trajectory to slam into Governor Connally hard enough to shatter his rib, punch out of his chest, smash the radius bone in his right wrist and then in almost pristine condition, slide backward into his left thigh, coming to rest next to the thigh bone. Even that deep in his leg it was still able to work its way back out at the hospital and roll underneath the gurney mat the Governor had been wheeled into the hospital on. And the second bullet that hit Kennedy - supposedly the same caliber from the same rifle as the previous shot  - hit Kennedy in the skull against a much less dense bone (than a radius bone) and shattered into so many small pieces it appeared as dust and minute particles in X-rays.

               The most damning part of Clint Hill’s recollection is this from page 155 “The president’s head was in Mrs. Kennedy’s lap, his eyes fixed, and a gaping hole in the back of his skull.”

Clint Hill indicates where the gaping gunshot wound was on President Kennedy's head.

Other than Mrs. Kennedy, no one but Clint Hill had a closer look at the damage to the president’s head only moments after it happened. No one. This observation is in complete accord with what the Parkland Hospital doctors also said. They described it as a 4 to 5 centimeter blasted out area in the back of the head, in the occipital-parietal area. Which means the killing shot came from somewhere to the president’s front. Lee Oswald did not fire that shot.

Agent Hill stated this description of the head wound to the Warren Commission, even telling Arlen Specter “The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying in the rear seat of the car. His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion of the car.”Yet that wasn’t part of the Warren Commission’s conclusion. They decided the Bethesda autopsy doctors were right that the damage to the president’s head was on the right side over his ear. It is still a mystery why the Warren Commission did not call Kennedy’s personal physician George Burkley, M.D. as a witness. He was the only physician to observe the president at Parkland and at the Bethesda proceedings. His exclusion from the Warren Commission hearings was a conscious omission on Warren’s part. We can only speculate as to why.

Roy Kellerman, the agent who was in the right front seat of the limousine stated that the last two shots came almost one on top the other, and his testimony is backed up by Constable Seymour Weitzman who was in the lead car, by reporter Mary Elizabeth Woodward who was the closest reporter to the presidential limousine at the time of the assassination, by Abraham Zapruder and his secretary, and by Linda Kay Willis among others. All of those people testified to the Warren Commission that the second and third shots were very close together, and ALL of their testimonies...ALL OF THEM...were ignored. Agent Hill says he only heard two shots, but modified that to three after reading and studying the assassination. Or, he heard only two because the second and third shots were so close together that they blended into one over the sound of the motorcycles, his footsteps, and his hard breathing to catch up with the president’s car. He was trying to do his job. Ascertaining how many shots were fired wasn’t his top priority at the moment.

Agent Hill, center, in the dark suit, moments after the first shot was fired.

I recommend this book for those interested in the work of the Secret Service. On that point it is fascinating. I wish I could recommend it because of revelations about JFK’s assassination. But Clint makes it clear he supports the Secret Service/FBI story that the first and third shots hit Kennedy and the second one wounded Connally. The injury to James Tague is ignored. The Warren Commission Report says that Clint Hill’s assessment is wrong. The Commission invented the correct scenario - where Tague’s blood loss was caused by one of the shots that missed - The first or second shot goes through both Kennedy and Connally, and the last one practically blows the right side of the president’s head off. That is impossible based on the existing evidence…i.e. the location of the earliest gun shot wound in the upper back as marked on the autopsy diagram - that was signed by the president’s physician, - the X-rays of Kennedy’s head wound as compared to the official photographs of the same area, the virtually pristine bullet, CE399, which contained no blood, viscera, marks from the clothing it passed through or even lost much of its weight after injuring two people and smashing two hard bones. The discrepancies exist to this day and there has been no attempt to correct them.

John F. Kennedy deserves much better treatment from the U.S. government, especially on the 100^th anniversary of his birth. I consider us fortunate to have had him as our president if only for those few fleeting years. His death sent our country on a path it was never meant to tread. We can never repair the damage that has been done. But we can strive to get the country headed back into the right direction. It won’t happen under this current (Trump) administration. But it is something we can all aim for when the time is right.

The Republicans and evangelicals are to blame for the Trump presidency

We must never forget how Trump won the 2016 election. Yes, there was Russian interference. Yes, the Clinton campaign was poorly run. Yes, there was acrimony and divisiveness on the part of most of the candidates. Yes, there was fake news slathered across the internet and repeated by the media. Yes, millionaires and billionaires gave Trump boatloads of money to run, even though he claimed at his rallies that he was self-funding so no one would own him. But Trump’s biggest boost came from the far-right fundamentalists who decided Trump represented their core Christian values…which is astounding given all the vulgar, unethical, immoral, and downright unchristian things Trump had said and done on the campaign trail. Then again, maybe those who professed Christian values didn’t really have them, but rather were far, far more closely aligned with Trump’s narrow-mindedness and were easy to manipulate.

They actually yelled "Heil Trump!"

         A 2016 collaborative scientific paper by Edward Dutton of the Ulster Institute for Social Research in the UK and Dimitri Van der Linden of the Rotterdam University in the Netherlands spotlights a reason for this. ‘If religion is indeed an evolved domain…an instinct…then it will become heightened at times of stress when people are inclined to act instinctively…” wrote Dutton. Trump’s campaign was built on stressing people out by scaring them with rapist Mexicans, terrorist Muslims, job-stealing Asians, currency-manipulating Chinese, payment-cheating NATO members, outmaneuvering-trade-partners in NAFTA and TPP, free-loading health care recipients, and a crumbling defeated America. It was a perfect vehicle for enlisting the evangelicals. Their instinct to “circle the wagons” from heightened stress over Trump-manufactured pseudo-problems assured him of their vote. Why think things through rationally when you can just instinctively let an authoritarian bigot do the thinking for you?

 According to Pew, Quinnipiac, and NBC/Wall Street Journal polls, over 80% of white evangelicals turned out to vote for Trump, [no less than 85% of white evangelical men] and that made just enough difference. The Republicans are the reason Trump got the nomination as the Republican candidate in the first place. They could have stopped it, or stepped in and changed the course of his candidacy for over a year. But they all chose party over country. They knew of his tampering with the Republican platform before he got the nomination, changing one item - a provision to deny defensive hardware to Ukraine in their fight against Russia. They knew he had numerous failed businesses that put him in financial jeopardy over and over and in debt to dozens of banks around the world. They knew of the countless multi-million dollar lawsuits against him, many that were still in the courts. They knew he had had repeated interactions with known mob and criminal figures. They knew he was an immoral womanizer and a serial sexual predator because he bragged about it on the Howard Stern show, not once but on three occasions, even infamously on the Access Hollywood tape. They knew of his shady dealings with the Russians because he boasted about his interactions with Putin and Russian government officials in several TV and radio interviews. They knew he lied, and that he lied repeatedly. He even doubled down on his lying over easily verifiable stories. The Republicans and evangelicals KNEW all this…yet they voted him in any way. Because of that, we are now suffering through the Trump presidency. Their support is why we have the chaos in the White House and across the land. It will only get worse and spread around the world until Trump is forced out. But there will be blood in the streets when it happens because he now thinks of the presidency as his legitimate right. No one should be allowed to challenge him thanks to the Republicans and evangelicals.

The Republicans and evangelicals are solely responsible for this catastrophic administration, and they must be held accountable. Every decision Trump makes, decisions that harm this country; whether judicial, legislative, environmental, military, diplomatic, or economic, it is on the hands of the Republicans and the evangelicals. If it was within my power, I would ban the evangelicals from ever voting again. They have shown that their religious view negatively impacts their judgment, meaning they cannot be trusted to vote in the interest of the nation any more than a rabid bear can.

                  The clowns applaud their Clown-in-Chief.

          And voters should be reminded of Republican support for Trump in every election from this point forward...no ifs, ands, or buts. Like when the Republicans dig in their heels and insist that the FBI’s investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia won’t slow down the president’s legislative agenda, or passing a huge tax plan that transfers more wealth to the richest one percent of Americans [of which Trump is a member], when they try to gut healthcare and leave millions of Americans with lesser or poorer quality coverage, when they rescind regulations and laws that harm American workers but put more money into the hands of billionaire CEOs in the nation. The GOP is the new Whig Party.

                               Coming soon to theaters everywhere.

Trump is all about the show, the theatrics, the use of gold paint to cover the cheap wooden frame, and nothing more. He is using the presidency to make himself rich again, even as he fails to make America great again. We wouldn't be in this intolerable position if the GOP had not nominated…and evangelicals had not helped elect…this thoroughly unfit man for the office. This must never be forgotten…or forgiven.

Trumpus Maximus - The Greatest Military Genius of all time

All hail our great military leader Donald Trump. The man who said no one is better at “the military” than he is. The man who said he knew more about ISIS than the generals and he even had a plan right then and there on how to destroy them. The man who, because of attending a military school, said "I always felt like I was in the military." Feeling like it and actually being it are two very different things, except in Trump's mind. He is also the man who, as late as October 2016, demeaned our military as weak, crumbling, and failing. The man who, when he had the opportunity to serve in our military in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, couldn't because he had a bone spur in his foot. When asked in 2015 which foot, he stammered and then said “It’s in the records. You’ll look it up in the records.” Does that sound like a man who actually had a bone spur…in either foot? It was only later he changed it to spurs (plural). And there is plenty of photographic proof that the bone spur didn’t stop Trump from doing ANYTHING else - other than serving his country.

But now that he's the Commander-in-Chief, despite that painful bone spur, he has the opportunity to show us how his military prowess is second to none and makes astoundingly perceptive and strong moves that showcase our military. Suddenly U.S. armed forces are the best in the world and getting so much better under his leadership. Here are just a few examples…

He sent Navy SEAL Team 6 to Ghayil in Yemen on January 28^th and 29^th to grab Al Qaeda’s number two man hiding there. Later the Defense Department said they were also to snatch any laptop computers and cell phones they could locate. But it turned out the SEALS were sent without a proper strategy in place, the necessary support, or an extraction plan. They ended up in a fight for their lives. When the raid was launched, Trump couldn’t even be bothered to be in the situation room. Instead, he was in a White House bedroom tweeting that he would be on the Christian Broadcasting Network that night and urged people to watch. Then at precisely the time Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens was dying, was Trump checking out what measures could be taken or how quickly Owens could be rescued? No. The time-stamp on his tweets shows he was deleting his previous message and resending it to correct the time – that folks could see it the next night. At no time did he give a damn about the men he sent in harm’s way. The following day, Trump declared the mission a huge success that gathered important information in the fight against terrorism.

Ghayil, Yemen after Trump's poorly planned raid 

But U.S. military officials told Reuters the operation was a disaster. It was approved “without sufficient intelligence, ground support, or adequate backup preparations.” They returned with no cellphones, no computers, and no al-Qaeda operatives. It was also revealed that Central Command had initially denied any civilian casualties until Yemeni authorities began releasing grisly photos of mangled, dead children killed in the raid. Over 20 Yemeni civilians died, six Americans (not the original 3 as claimed by a military spokesman) were injured, a $75 million dollar OV-22 Osprey was destroyed, and of course, Owens was killed…all for nothing.

The late CPO William Ryan Owens - Bill Owens holds a photo of his son.

On February 26^th, the Miami Herald published an article that Bill Owens, the father of William Owens, refused to meet with Trump on Feb. 1st when his son’s body was flown back to Dover Air Force base and issued a statement from his home in Miami saying “Don’t hide behind my son’s death to prevent an investigation…I want an investigation…the government owes my son an investigation.” To date, Trump has not authorized any review or investigation into the botched mission, nor is there any investigation being conducted by anyone in the military. Of course, that’s what great military leaders always do.

A beautiful piece of chocolate cake kept Trump from concentrating on tomahawk missiles aimed at Iraq...or was it Syria?
        On April 6^th, Trump authorized the U.S. Navy to launch 59 tomahawk cruise missiles at airfields and infrastructure in Syria. Congress was not notified to approve military action, nor do we know by what legal authority the US launched the strike. Later, the White House admits that the Russians were forewarned, and they promptly warned the Syrians who cleared out of the base. Trump said the strike was in the “vital national security interests of the U.S.” but then conceded on Sunday that it was an “impulsive action” prompted by a video earlier in the week of gassed children. Post-operation reconnaissance photos show several partially destroyed buildings, four destroyed aircraft in their shelters and 16 older jets around the airfield damaged. The runways were left completely intact. Syrian jets even use them later that morning for another bombing run on rebel-held territories in northern Syria. So how effective was this attack?

On April 13^th, a MOAB (Massive ordinance air blast) is used for the first time in combat. It is a 21,600-pound air-dropped non-nuclear bomb with a blast radius of one mile. No Pentagon explanation is offered as to why this type of bomb was used, supposedly against an ISIS underground cave system in eastern Afghanistan (strangely, not Taliban or Al Qaeda positions.) Asked about it at a WH meeting Trump didn’t seem to know what it was but claimed he “authorized” it by allowing ‘his military’ to do what it needs to. The bomb had actually been authorized for use by the Obama administration. But Trump - being a military genius - took credit for its use and for U.S. military proficiency in dropping it. Without explaining how the numbers were arrived at, Defense Department officials said only ISIS fighters, first 36 and then upping it to 96, were killed, no civilians were harmed. It is later revealed that the information is wrong. At least two Afghani civilians, one a child, were also were killed in the blast. But Afghani children slain by a  U.S. bomb won't generate Trump's outrage like gassed Syrian kids do. (Update April 21, due to a US military request, Afghan government officials have retracted their earlier statement that two civilians were killed by the MOAB blast.)

Trump is ignorant about where the USS Carl Vinson is while threatening Kim Jong-Un

And then we have the icing on that beautiful piece of chocolate cake. On April 11th as tensions with North Korea rose, Trump said on Fox News that he was “sending an armada, very powerful” to the Western Pacific. It was going to be saber-rattling at Kim Jong-Un and warning him that the U.S. was prepared to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korean nuclear and military facilities. But photographs released by the Navy showed the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and its escort ships sailing through the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java on Saturday, April 15, and later they are in the Indian Ocean conducting an exercise with the Australian navy. White House officials blamed the mix-up on the Defense Department, describing a glitch-ridden sequence of events, from a premature announcement of the deployment by the military’s Pacific Command to erroneous explanations by Defense Secretary Mattis and NSA Director H. R. McMaster, both of whom fed the false narrative that an American armada was racing toward the waters off North Korea. US Navy officials state “We made no such statement.” Mattis and McMaster are supposedly some of our best military minds.

Nothing will confound our enemies and reassure our allies more than bullshitting them at every opportunity. Make no mistake, our enemies are watching...gleefully. They are taking the measure of just how this administration operates.To the world, it appears this administration is either completely incompetent or the biggest pack of liars to ever be assembled in one location. And the Liar-in-Chief is Donald Trump. We are forced to trust this bumbling, amateurish, short-attention-span braggart with the nuclear codes. Until he is removed from office, I can’t sleep well at night. Neither should you.

Update April 20^th: U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis addressed confusion over the aircraft carrier group on Wednesday, saying "The bottom line is, in our effort to always be open about what we are doing we said that we were GOING to change the Vinson's upcoming schedule. [No he didn't.] We don't generally give out ships schedules in advance but I didn't want to play a game either and say we were not changing a schedule when in fact we had.” The U.S. military's Pacific Command explained on Tuesday that the Carl Vinson strike group first had to complete a planned period of training with Australia, but it was now [April 19th]"proceeding to the Western Pacific as ordered.” This was an after-the-fact explanation; the subterfuge was just the Trump administration being 'transparent' according to Mattis.