Give Trump A Chance? You Don’t Need A Crystal Ball To See The Problem With That.

Someone on my Facebook page responded to a derogatory post about Trump by writing, “This is the most ridiculous thing ever. Give the man a chance. He hasn’t even been inaugurated.”

I generally refrain from responding to comments like this on FB, because it is an exercise in futility. Trumpites live in an alternate reality where logic and reason as we know it do not exist. Since this is my blog, however, I can write what I damn well please, so there.

Under many circumstances, I might agree with the commenter, but we’re talking about Donald Trump here, and that’s a whole different ballgame. It’s different because we already know Trump all too well after months and months of campaigning and debates. We know for certain he is a habitual liar, and seems a true believer in Hitler’s observation that, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”

We know Trump has no interest in facts, science or the constitution. He has demonstrated this on numerous occasions by skipping important intelligence briefings, condemning the well-established fact of climate change as a hoax, and by harassing and, in some cases assaulting, people who openly disagree with him.

Based on recent comments and tweets, we know that Trump has no problem with starting a new arms race with Russia and trade war with China. What kind of a fool thinks those are good things to do or will help our country in any way?

With state electors abrogating their duty to be the last line of defense against a tyrannical leader in America, we have no choice but to give Donald a chance, so the FB commenter will get his wish, to everyone else’s detriment.

Bill Maher made the observation that watching Trump in action is like watching a three-year old play with a loaded gun. You already know things are not going to turn out well.

Destroying Democracy From The Inside Out

We do live in historically relevant times. You and I are unfortunate enough to have front row seats to the dismantling of the American experiment from the inside out. Angry, brainwashed, short-sighted white American voters managed to do what no military power could accomplish, and write the last chapter to the story of a country founded on democratic ideals that were eventually subverted by greed, racism and hubris. Everything the founding fathers had hoped for, everything countless Americans died for during the Civil War, everything civil rights protestors marched for, every great social advancement Americans ever struggled for, will be under attack over the next four years by Donald Trump. And with a Republican Congress, there is little hope of stemming the fascist onslaught.

Every new day brings the announcement of another unholy appointment by Trump. His administration will be a who’s who of democracy’s enemies, a cadre of conservative ideologues who live in a reality of their own making ripe with Aryan fantasies, internment camps and public executions. Trump and his cohorts are convinced they can do the impossible and turn back the clock of human progress to an imagined pre-Civil War era of bucolic mansions and happy slaves.

Trump is the great white hope. His life of privilege and excess mean nothing to his followers because it’s his mission that counts, making America white again. In the process that is now underway, we clearly see his list of priorities for America: Destroy public education, eliminate environmental protections, give Wall Street the keys to the White House, revive the drug war, stack the Supreme Court with conservatives, crush dissent, undo the welfare safety net, privatize Social Security and Medicare, substitute news with propaganda and, perhaps of utmost importance, fill his personal coffers to overflowing.

There were a few people who saw this coming, but their message reached a small minority of citizens who bother to look beyond the corporate media for information. The prophets were never taken seriously and had now power. No one in Trump’s America wants to hear from any smarty pants know-it-all.

We are stepping into a new world thanks to our president-elect, where the messiness of democracy will simply be dismissed in favor of one man’s blind faith in his own decision-making capabilities. Who needs a constitution when you have Donald Trump?

Your fundamental Constitutional rights are under attack

There are days when I wonder how any observant, thinking citizen can resist taking to the streets to scream in rage. Take this article from AlterNet, Pentagon Preparing for MassCivil Unrest.

“A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."”

In other words, the DoD is spending tens of millions of dollars conducting research on how to deal with civil unrest, people taking to the streets in protest. Called the Minerva Research Initiative, the DoD is funding research at colleges and universities to study the dynamics of civil unrest. If we were talking about preparing for violent riots, that would be one thing, but this research includes non-violent and peaceful protests, conflating them with “"supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves.”

Our government equates peaceful protests to violent uprisings. We’ve already seen a glimpse of this during the Occupy Movement of 2011 when we learned from formally secret documents that the FBI treated the peaceful organization as a possible criminal or terrorist threat. As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) stated,  “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.

The First Amendment to the Constitution provides for 'the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.'" Apparently, the DoD and the FBI disagree. Instead of spending tens of millions of dollars to address the causes of civil unrest, like poverty, joblessness and income inequality, our government is using that money to figure out how to keep us quiet and oppressed. This isn’t a conspiracy. This is reality and it should make us all mad as hell.

We’re under attack, dear citizen

Democracy itself is clearly under attack in America. Congressional Tea Party extremists are circumventing the will of the people who elected Obama to office twice by sabotaging the President’s agenda anywhere and everywhere they can. They cost us billions by shutting down the government and they are blocking Obama’s judicial appointments for no other reason than they can. As Elizabeth Warren says, congressional Republicans are working feverishly to nullify the results of the last two presidential elections.

Then there are the right-wing billionaires, most notably represented by the Koch brothers, who are buying national and local candidates and quietly pushing their “privatize everything” ideological agenda through state houses just below the radar, again undermining the desires of the American people.

Finally, as I wrote about yesterday, we have a deep state or secret government run by high-level military and government officials who rule over surveillance operations that are not only unaccountable to voters, but unaccountable to the politicians who are supposed to oversee them.

The question is simple, but the answer is complex: How do the American people get their government back? Perhaps it’s already too late. It may be that the Pandora’s Box of policies and programs ripe for abuse that Bush and Cheney opened after 9/11 cannot be closed. In 2016 when we vote for our next president, our choices will probably be the establishment’s Democrat Hillary Clinton against some rabid lunatic like Cruz or the slightly less crazy Christie. Regardless, the end result will be 1) things will continue pretty much as they are (bad), or 2) the Republican will win and our country’s collapse will be hastened (worse).

There have been more and more articles in recent years discussing the similarities between the rise of the Third Reich in Germany during the twenties and thirties and America’s situation at the beginning of the 21^st century. Why didn’t the German citizens see what was happening and stop it? How could they stand by and watch as a madman ascended to power? How could they be so blind? For many converging reasons, I think the average German who opposed Hitler felt powerless in the same way that we who oppose our government’s actions feel powerless. There is no organized resistance party we can join to bring about change. The government won’t allow that. The goals and agendas of the opposition groups that do exist are far too diverse at this point for meaningful resistance. And too many people are still too financially comfortable to tip the balance in favor of real change.

So we write blogs and send letters to our representatives and grouse to friends and family, and all the while the drones keep killing and the NSA keeps listening and the rights we once believed we had as Americans keep disappearing. Our country is under attack while we continue sitting on our collective ass in a classroom listening to someone read My Pet Goat.