Category: Never My President

Posted on

"Don't Tell Trump"

Eric Schmitt, David E. Sanger, and Maggie Haberman writing for the NY Times:

Ms. Nielsen left the Department of Homeland Security early this month after a tumultuous 16-month tenure and tensions with the White House. Officials said she had become increasingly concerned about Russia's continued activity in the United States during and after the 2018 midterm elections—ranging from its search for new techniques to divide Americans using social media, to experiments by hackers, to rerouting internet traffic and infiltrating power grids.

But in a meeting this year, Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff, made it clear that Mr. Trump still equated any public discussion of malign Russian election activity with questions about the legitimacy of his victory. According to one senior administration official, Mr. Mulvaney said it "wasn't a great subject and should be kept below his level."

Unsurprising, but jaw-dropping nonetheless. On the one side: hostile actions from our most dangerous foreign adversary and the integrity of our nation's elections. On the other side: a sociopathic, malignantly narcissistic ego.

Posted on

Quote of the Day

Notre Dame is on fire and the stupidest fucking asshole on the entire planet just can't help but offer idiotic useless advice because this drooling moron imagines himself a fucking expert on everything. He's the loudmouth drunk at the end of the bar, but with nuclear weapons." ~ Jeff Tiedrich

Posted on

Dealing With Our Collective Trip Through Hell


I'm trying to be more patient with people these days. I really am. I don't always succeed (yesterday was a prime example), but I am trying to be more mindful of it.

What prompted this? A passage from The Palmer Report:

We, the American people, are in hell. It's been the case to varying degrees since the day Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election. These past couple weeks it's been even more startlingly the case than ever. Trump falsely exonerated himself, and he's now pushing his ongoing crime spree to entirely new depths. His top lieutenants are drunk with power and acting like cartoon villains. This has been an awful stretch.

This brought into very sharp focus the fact that it's not just me, or Ben, or my friends and family who feel we've slipped into an alternate reality where everything is awful and seemingly getting worse by the day. No, it made me realize that our entire fucking country—or at least the 70% or so who think the Orange Menace needs to be forcibly excised from the White House—is feeling the same frustration that I am that his crime spree and thumbing-his-nose at the Rule of Law is being allowed to continue unabated.

Subpoenas to obtain the entire Mueller Report? His taxes? His financial records? Well and good, but subpoenas aren't magic bullets that will open a trap door and send Trump directly into the not-so-loving arms of Impeachment (something that will never happen with the wholly-owned subsidiary of Russia, Inc.® Republican Senate in any case).  It is going to take months or years for the subpoena process to wind its way through courts that are being increasingly stacked in Trump's favor, so forgive me for not feeling overly optimistic at the outcome. (Funny how they can't actually approve any legislation but sure as hell can get all those judicial vacancies filled post haste with right wing nutjobs, isn't it?)

Add to this anger and frustration, everyone you see is suffering through some kind of personal drama.  Everyone. It may not be your drama, or even something you would consider drama, but it is real to that particular person just as yours is to you. So it pays to be kind and patient, even if that person is acting like a demon from hell. (They may in fact be demons from hell, or at least skinsuit-wearing Reptilians from Zeta Reticulii, but give them the benefit of the doubt and try to treat them like human beings.)

And we all have our coping mechanisms. I buy vinyl records that I listen to maybe a half dozen times, Instagram, and then file away on the "new arrivals" portion of the shelf to be played maybe once or twice more. Ben immerses himself in all things RuPaul's Drag Race (he's my resident expert) and games on his phone. Some people meditate. Some people get involved in the community. Other people cope in less-healthy ways.

Point is, showing more kindness toward each other and allowing for each other's quirks and coping mechanisms is the only way we're going to make it through this shit show until rational, sane adults who aren't beholden to Vladmir Putin are once again in control of this country.

Posted on

The Terribly Tiny God of MAGA Christians

From John Pavlovitz:

I feel sorry for professed Christians who support this President.

They have a profound and fundamental spiritual problem: their God is too small.

They passionately worship a deity made in their own image: white, American, Republican, male—and perpetually terrified of just about everything: Muslims, immigrants, gay children, Special Counsel reports, mandalas, Harry Potter, Starbuck holiday cups, yoga, wind turbines, Science—everything.

Their God is so laughably minuscule, so fully neutered of power, so completely devoid of functioning vertebrae that "He" cannot protect them from the encroaching monsters they are certain lurk around every corner to overwhelm them.

MAGA Christians sure put up a brave face, I'll give them that. They shower this God with effusive praise on Sunday mornings, they sing with reckless abandon in church services about Him, they brazenly pump out their chests on social media regarding His infinite wisdom, they defiantly declare this God's staggering might at every opportunity—but their lives tell the truth: They believe He is impotent and scared and ineffectual. You can tell this because they insist on doing all the things that a God-sized God would simply do as part of the gig.

They need to be armed to the teeth at all times because they don't really believe God will come through to defend them in a pinch—and will always be outgunned.

They want to change gay couples and transgender teenagers themselves, because they don't trust God to work within people as He desires. (Apparently God keeps making LGBTQ people, which really pisses them off.)

They want to stockpile and horde wealth, health insurance, and opportunity—because this is a zero sum game; because the God they claim turned water into wine, and fed thousands with a few fish and some leftover bread—can't make enough for everyone.

They are obsessed with building a wall and defending a border and turning way refugees—because their God isn't generous or smart or creative enough to help them figure out how to welcome and care for everyone who requires it.

They want no other religious traditions to have a voice, because their insecure and terribly tiny God is mortally threatened by such things.

MAGA Christians' daily existence testifies that their God is a microscopic, myopic coward, who has appointed them to morally police a world He cannot handle or is not equipped to direct and renovate. That's pretty sad.

In short, their God isn't a God worth believing in or worshiping—which is why they have to play God while they're alive. It's why they are furrowed-browed and white-nuckling their journey here—not content to let Jesus take the wheel for fear he'd drive them outside their gated community and into the hood and ask them to get out and care for the people they're so used to condemning.

If you're going to have a God, it may as well be right-sized. The world deserves this.

People deserve a God who is bigger than Franklin Graham's God and Mike Pence's God and Sarah Huckabee's God. Their God is small and terrified—and it suspicioulsy resembles them.

People deserve a God who so loves the world, not a God who believes in America First; whose creation begin without divides and borders and walls, because there is only a single, interdependent community.

People deserve a God who touched the leper and healed the sick and fed the starving and parted the seas and raised the dead—not a quivering idol who drafts bathroom bills and social media crusades against migrant families.

People deserve a God who is neither white nor male nor cisgender-heterosexual, nor Republican—because any other God isn't big enough to bear the title or merit any reverence.

MAGA Christians believe in God earnestly, pray to God passionately, serve God with unflinching fervor. The problem is their God is too small, and as long as they are oriented toward such a tiny, useless deity—they will continue to be compelled to do for God what they believe God should be doing, but can't or won't.

I feel sorry for them and for the world that has to be subjected to their pocket-sized theology when there is an expansive space waiting.

I hope and pray that these people soon find a God who is big enough so that they stop living so small.

For their sake—and for ours.

Posted on

Oh For Chrissake…


Just nuke the entire fucking country and be done with it.

"Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Tuesday that Attorney General William Barr told him he would send the special counsel Robert Mueller's final report on the Russia investigation to the White House before the public sees it, in case it wants to claim executive privilege over any parts."

Barr will send Mueller report to White House before public

This is a coverup and whitewash. Trump is guilty as fuck. They all know it, Mueller knows it, and Barr is covering up for Trump and his enablers now, just like he did for the ratfuckers in Iran-Contra.

These men's heads belong on pikes.

Posted on

Hahaha!

There's no denying that the country is a mess, but can you imagine the trouble we'd be in if Trump or any of his enablers were actually intelligent?

Posted on

Some Thoughts About The Manafort Sentencing Yesterday

This is a good summation from a front-pager at Balloon Juice, and he sums up quite nicely my own observations so I'm going to just copy and paste his words:

While everyone is correctly pointing out the terrible discrepancies in our criminal justice system, it is important to remember that Paul Manafort's sentencing today is not the end of this story. Next week Manafort will appear before Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Federal district court in DC. It was Judge Jackson who ruled that Manafort had, in fact, lied, obstructed, and witness tampered in regard to the Special Counsel, his investigators, and his prosecutors post trial and conviction in her court. And it is Judge Jackson who will sentence Paul Manafort next week. Unlike Judge Ellis, who is a well known crank and who, in a properly functioning political system with two actually functional political parties concerned about the general welfare, the rule of law, and the common weal, would have been removed from the bench a long time ago, Judge Jackson is considered to be a jurist who takes her responsibilities seriously. Do not expect Judge Jackson to be lenient. And don't expect her to ignore actual facts to state that Manafort had previously led a blameless life. Do expect her to hand down a sentence with teeth in it. It is entirely possible that Judge Ellis departed from the sentencing guidelines because he knew Judge Jackson wouldn't. Doing something like that fits with his history of contrarianism masquerading as jurisprudence. Regardless, Paul Manafort will die in prison. And we should all be thankful for that.