Losers prove their credulity in refusing to concede

November 25, 2020November 25, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Credulity: a tendency to be too ready to believe that something is real or true.

President Donald Trump apparently still believes he won the election. The conservative media outlet Newsmax relayed these beliefs in story published Tuesday, November 24. It states:

“President Donald Trump is vowing to “never concede,” the “most corrupt election in American political history”— despite the General Services Administration giving the go-ahead to Joe Biden to begin a transition to the White House.

Trump’s remarks came in a late Monday night tweet. He wrote: “What does GSA being allowed to preliminarily work with the Dems have to do with continuing to pursue our various cases on what will go down as the most corrupt election in American political history? We are moving full speed ahead. Will never concede to fake ballots & “Dominion.”

Clearly, Trump is hoping to paint himself as a heroic figure and a martyr in the face of his massive loss in the 2020 election. President-Elect Joe Biden earned exactly as many Electoral College votes in this year’s election as Trump achieved in 2016 while defeating Hillary Clinton. Trump branded that victory a “landslide” and claimed it as a mandate to do what he wanted with the nation, no matter what the laws governing his conduct and activities dictated to the contrary.

His supporters embraced the landslide mentality while crowing “elections have consequences,” never acknowledging the corrupt nature of Trump’s tactics either during the election or in the months or years to follow. His supporters were so eager to believe in their man as a political Messiah and a literal tool of God that Trump once claimed he could shoot people in the street and his supporters would not abandon him.

That’s not loyalty. That’s cult worship. All of it depends on credulity, the willingness to believe that everything that Trump says is true. In fact, so little truth has come from Trump or his administration the entire Republican Party has been forced to lie along with him or risk running afoul of his considerable ire. Political operatives at all levels and stripes have cowered as cowards while credulity swept over the nation.

The problem with credulity as a rule of thought is that it is so easily converted to fascist beliefs in the classic sense. That’s exactly what has transpired under the authoritarian rule of Donald Trump, the Con Man turned Strong Man.

Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe.

Trump began his rule by embracing authoritarian leaders around the world. He repeatedly suggested that his own position bestowed dictatorial powers upon his person. He invited forcible suppression of his perceived opposition on many fronts, beginning with chants of “Lock Her Up” during his political campaigns. He is finishing now by trying to steal the election (while gaslighting the nation about it) from Joe Biden by attempting to overturn legitimate election results using lawyers, guns and money, whatever it takes. All those are taking the form of real threats. In Trump’s mind, the fear of losing justifies using any means to take power back from people he considers inferior to his own cabal. Amusingly, he promised to pack up and disappear if he lost the election. Well, he lost. But instead of leaving, he’s floating around in a toilet bowl of porcelain consternation while his orange face paint leaves skid marks on his legacy.

As for the strong regimentation of society, Donald Trump repeatedly Tweeted the words “Law and Order” all this year while encouraging police brutality and marching across a Washington street in the company of military leaders. All to hold a Bible aloft as if he is a warrior for God. As if, indeed. Trump is so un-Christlike there is no metaphor or allegory to draw a sufficient comparison.

And finally, let’s consider what Trump has done to the economy. Despite all claims to the contrary, Trump’s tax cuts massively benefitted the rich while leaving the middle class and poor wondering why their tax bills shot up the same year in which there was a supposed tax cut. The excuse: “Oh, well you had to let your accountant or employer know that you wanted more money taken out this year. In the long run, it will even out.” Thanks for telling us, asshole.

Then came Covid, and millions of people were thrown out of work in the wake of Trump’s patent denial that the pandemic was a threat at all in America. His credulity was revealed later in the year when journalist Bob Woodward published interviews with the President in which he openly admitted that the Coronavirus was a really ‘bad deal’ in terms of how it compared to annual flu and the like. Put plainly, Trump lied to the American people about the threat. He did so to avoid causing any sort of reaction that might upset the economy. That backfired when hospitals were overwhelmed as the pandemic swept across the nation and people started dying by the thousands. We’re now at 250,000 as the predicted peak season in the winter months is about to hit.

And what is Trump doing about the pandemic in the last days of his presidency? Nothing. He doesn’t care if more people die. If anything, he’s ignoring the fact of his massive failure to manage the pandemic all along.

Yet today, he did trot out to claim victory for the Dow Jones average reaching 30,000. Ironically, that performance is more of a response to the predicted stability brought about by Biden’s election victory.

Credulity reigns among Trump supporters.

But credulity still reigns in the minds of Trump and his supporters. They are so eager to believe that he could not lose, they increase their loser status with every new layer of denial.

The Urban Dictionary lays it all out in its definition for the word LOSER.

Loser A “loser” is someone who doesn’t know what they have and fucks it up.They are always making bad choices and fuck up their and everyone’s lives around them.

That is a perfect description of what the Trump era has done. Trump never knew what America is about in the first place. His Make America Great Again slogan was nothing more than anachronistic, nationalistic, racist beliefs wrapped in a security blanket of victimhood to which Trump grandly appealed with his downtalking manner and his phony-ass sympathy for the downtrodden.

He’s a fraud and the King of the Losers when it comes to understanding what it means to accept defeat with a degree of honesty and class. He makes losers out of all of us by persisting in his sociopathic game of vain heroics. The best thing that could happen for America is for Donald Trump and his family to face the fire of legal persecution for the emolument breaches, the grifting of government money, the corruption of post-election lies and the collusion between Trump and the long line of criminals associated with his sick rise to power.

And that includes the whorish evangelicals, the sycophantic GOP and the suburban women praying to God he’ll point them out in the crowd.

What GOP stands for these days

October 29, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

I looked up the history of the acronym GOP as a shorthand for the Republican Party. The Wikipedia page on the Republican Party says this:

“The term “Grand Old Party” is a traditional nickname for the Republican Party and the abbreviation “GOP” is a commonly used designation. The term originated in 1875 in the Congressional Record, referring to the party associated with the successful military defense of the Union as “this gallant old party”.

I’d always thought it stood for Grand Old Party, which is just as lame. But these days, the Republican Party is anything but Grand or Gallant. So the old terminology is moot. I propose that we give the GOP a new set of more accurate terms to replace its traditional claims to grandness or gallantry.

GOP and dying wishes

The option I propose, given the Republican Party’s tactics over the last fifteen years or so, is a far more accurate description of how the GOP operates. We’ll get to that in a moment.

But first, we need to understand the nature of the most recent hypocrisy. That is the installation of a third Supreme Court justice by decree of Donald Trump. We all recall how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell self-righteously claimed that no President up for election within the year should be granted the right to nominate a Supreme Court judge. So McConnell blocked Merrick Garland’s nomination, only to invite Trump’s last-minute nomination of a constitutional originalist to replace the recently deceased Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose dying wish was that her replacement would not be named until after the election.

The GOP has for decades been whining about so-called “activist judges” on the Supreme Court. Their concerns have focused on the idea that supposedly “liberal” justices are legislating “from the bench” by voting in favor of civil rights, economic parity, corporate responsibility and environmental justice in America rather than dragging the nation back to an interpretation of the United States Constitution before slavery was outlawed, women had the right to vote and America was a population of just 2.5M people. But here’s a fact that matters: The country is 130 times larger today according to the United States Census Bureau. We have fifty states, not just a few. We are a diverse nation thanks to immigration over dozens of decades and a couple centuries. The Constitution as it was originally written was never sufficient to cover all that change. The Founders knew that, which is why the power to commend Amendments to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were implemented. To ignore that wisdom is to kick the Founder right in their constitutional nuts.

Yet that’s what some in the GOP love to do.

Changing America

The idea that America is the “same place” as it was 243 years ago is an example of the controlling, abusive notion that all the Amendments and beneficial changes in law and policy installed since that time are meaningless affectations adopted by a whimsically feckless population of liberals.

Ironically, this country would not even have the Second Amendment if things had stayed fixed in place as Constitutional originalists would have it. On that subject, perhaps they’re correct that amendments can be used for ill-suited purposes. After all, America does not seem capable of managing “A well-regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state…” Now we’re being gaslighted by vigilante militias and the GOP, both who claim to represent an originalist interpretation of the Second Amendment that ignores that opening phrase in favor of the latter, “…the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

That is the gaslighting tactic (a lie by selective judgment) upon which activist interpretations of the Second Amendment now depend. As a result, Americans are literally being gaslighted to death by rampant gun violence in the streets, doctrinally motivated mass shooters armed to the teeth, and self-professed militia members playing soldier while claiming self-defense.

Why do all these people deep-down claim to want to arm themselves? Many claim that their armory is to prevent the government from having too much power. Here’s a sobering fact: more Americans have died from gun violence on American soil than all the soldiers killed in wars on foreign soils.

That means we are being gaslighted by the idea that guns are the path to safety in America. The people who make that claim (through the NRA, and other bodies) form one of the GOP’s pet voting blocs. Some equate even the idea of personal freedom with gun rights.

Yes, our country had to fight for its freedom to gain liberty from the rule of England. Guns are useful tools in war. That’s what they were invented for. That’s why a well-regulated militia truly is necessary for the security of a free state.

But it is principles, not guns, that form the true foundations of freedom.

Liberalism and democracy

It was liberalism and the determination that America should be independent from the rule of a king that established the country in the first place. There is also the issue that the nation’s Founders recognized the danger of establishing or enforcing a state religion, so the Separation Clause was written specifically to avoid the rule of one religion over the country.

These days the Christian evangelical community persists in claiming that the United States of America is a “Christian nation,” founded on “Christian principles” and therefore subject to the directives of theocratic directives from whatever source they might be issued. This is another form of gaslighting, a way to “manipulate (someone) by psychological means into questioning their own sanity.”

Crazy times

These are crazy times we live in. To perpetually insist that something is true that is not true, especially by accusing those most affected by that untruth of being wrong, is psychological abuse. So is being a bully over every issue that confronts you. That is what the President of the United States does every single day of the year.

That is also the central tactic of the GOP these days. Choose any principle; be it racism, feminism, gay rights, environmental protection, even the rights of an individual in comparison to a corporation, and the GOP finds a way to flip those concerns around as a means to gaslight people into submission. Crazy times indeed.

Racism and the GOP

When it comes to racism, the GOP inherited the originally vicious views of Southern Democrats and turned into a voting bloc first exploited in dog-whistle fashion by the grandfatherly visage of President Ronald Reagan. The Southern Strategy persists through the era of President Donald Trump, whose open appeal to racists to gain votes for his re-election includes patronage and Retweets bragging that there are “good people” on both sides of the debate over civil rights in America. He doesn’t bother to explain what kinds of “good people” want to persecute blacks and send American citizens “back to Africa” or whatever racist taunt they choose to exhort, but Trump doesn’t care about such details. He is happy to gaslight principled citizens into questioning their own good judgment by wondering what the President means by describing angry white citizens as “good people.”

Blacks and police brutality

The scourge of police brutality toward black people in America is so longstanding and frequent that movements such as Black Lives Matter emerged to heighten awareness of the problem. But conservatives gaslighted the issue by pumping out alternative slogans such as Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. Rather than address and acknowledge that 200+ years of racial suppression continues in this nation, the opponents of full civil rights for people of color selfishly claim persecution for themselves.This is gaslighting at its worst.

The GOP encourages this attitude of denial with its support of Trump and the specious slogan Make America Great Again. Those words are a dog-whistle act of gaslighting unto themselves. They insinuate that the advances in civil rights, environmental protection and religious equanimity established by the Constitution are illegitimate.

Constitutional originalism is gaslighting

Now the Senate has installed yet another constitutional originalist in the Supreme Court. This is an outright act of the sort of judicial activism against which the GOP has railed for decades. It is gaslighting in its most extreme political form.

That is what the GOP stands for these days: Gaslighting Over Principle.

We’re stuck with it for the time being, but there will come a moment in history when the tables turn again. That may come sooner or later. But gaslighting does win the day on November 3, the country as we’ve known it for 243 years will cease to exist, and we’ll all be subject to the violent instincts and abusive advances of a highly conflicted man and his dysfunctionally self-absorbed family.

That’s the choice we’re making on November the third. We can let ourselves be gaslighted into insanity, or we can stand against the GOP and its lying tactics, sycophantic whorishness and cloying lust for power, black eyes and all.

The crazies have put their man on the moon and want to keep him there

May 17, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

man_in_the_moon_

One of the interesting things about being a content creator in the marketing world, as I am, is the things you learn from translating often complex concepts into communications people can understand.

A few years back I wrote a series of whitepapers for a company that handles requisitions and distribution of healthcare supplies for hospitals across the Midwest. They often step in as a third party partner to take the burden of managing those logistics off the back of the hospital so that administrators can focus on the actual healthcare side of things.

Pandemic pressures

We’re all learning the importance of these services as the Covid-19 pandemic continues its spread across the United States of America. The federal government, state governments, and local authorities all got involved procuring and distributing healthcare supplies to healthcare companies in desperate need of them.

One wonders if the company for which I wrote that content has seen an increase in demand for their services, or if they’ve been cut out of the deal entirely We’ve witnessed fights at the highest levels of government over whose responsibility it is to manage the process of manufacturing, ordering and distributing supplies critical to the treatment of Covid-19 and protection of all the people working in the healthcare world.

Where does a third-party system fit in all that craziness?

Making connections

When healthcare becomes a political topic, we seldom seem to make connections about the systems necessary to make a “good healthcare system.” It’s all about ideology instead. Some decry the idea of a “socialized” or national healthcare system in favor of the profit-driven model we have now. But when systems quickly break down and supplies are in short demand as they obviously are during this pandemic, it makes you wonder if pride in the quality of our healthcare system is not somehow misplaced.

In testimony before a national committee assessing our government’s response to this pandemic, Rick Bright, the recently ousted vaccine official, stated that grave danger exists because the United States is not prepared or responding well to the challenges caused by this virus. “The world is confronting a great public health emergency which has the potential to eclipse the devastation wrought by the 1918 influenza which globally claimed over 50 million lives,” he said. He proceeded to advocate for a coordinated national response, as opposed to President Trump’s choice to that burden onto state and local authorities. Trump has crazily bounced back and forth between the two, claiming one moment to own all authority while at the same time blaming state governors for their poor handling of the supply and demand of PPE and other needs.

Emergency rooms

As I write this I’m sitting in an emergency room tending to the needs of a person close to me. I’ve been in dozens if not hundreds of waiting rooms like this over the years while serving as a caregiver to family members and friends in need of support. I have close friends who work in the healthcare systems of this country. Some are administrators while others serve as doctors, nurses, and many other specialties. I also have friends who work in healthcare communications and public relations. All of these people are great at what they do.

But I’m not so sure our overall healthcare system is great at what it does. And when a national crisis like this strikes, we lack a legitimate collaborative mechanism to coordinate efforts in the face of genuine threats. This essentially qualifies as a coarse example of willfully broken trust on behalf of an ideology that stipulates, at many levels, that healthcare concerns are a question of individual responsibility and a system based on the Ayn Rand mantra of “every man for himself.” In many ways, that amounts to an approach in which women are cut out of the equation of making decisions about their own healthcare needs.

Patient advocacy

That doesn’t even account for people with healthcare issues at hand. I’ve witnessed firsthand what it means to advocate for a patient with what the health insurance industry categorizes as a “pre-existing condition.” It was painful and often dehumanizing to realize that the person you love is considered a liability by everyone you encounter. From the employer offering the insurance to the companies issuing it, that pre-existing condition caused people to shuffle us around like checkers on board.

I’ve also seen medical mistakes up close, such as the time a batch of chemotherapy was wrongly applied by a nurse and leached out through a hole in the abdomen to leave a chemical burn on her stomach. We probably could have sued over that incident, but we were so grateful to be getting treatment at all that the idea of rocking the boat was not an option. Plus we didn’t believe in that course of action. Our doctors and nurses were responsible people. Mistakes can happen.

Perfection is not what medicine is all about. Likewise, no healthcare system will ever be perfect. Yet there’s a new awareness of how medicine is supposed to work in this world, and what it means when it doesn’t. We’ve also become aware that denying that a problem or a pandemic threat exists does not solve anything. It makes things worse. Delays response. Causes panic and fear. Costs lives.

Yet somehow, quite crazily, many people seem to prefer denial over credible response.

Billing games

Perhaps it’s time we took more pride in what healthcare is supposed to do rather than what it costs to do it. All the exorbitant billing games played by healthcare providers, administrators, and insurance companies are wasting billions on what amounts to a massive blame game in which everyone battles over the proceeds from the price of a procedure while no one wants to admit what it legitimately should cost. I say it’s time to take healthcare insurance administration out of the hands of the companies forced to administrate it. The corporations and non-profits of this world don’t need that hassle. It confuses their mission and causes nothing but headaches for all involved. That’s why a public option is the best thing that could ever happen to the world of business, especially small businesses where keeping employees insured is a massive burden.

Medical insurance is itself a crazy proposition. I’ve seen medical bills for a chemo treatment sporting a tab of $44,000. Later I learned that its true cost was a fraction of that. The provider and insurers haggle over that big bill and eventually settle on some sort of money exchange. How is that a remotely intelligent way for healthcare to be administrated? It is not. The healthcare industry knows this. But competitive factors keep everyone locked into a profit-making model dependent on actuarial systems designed to limit treatment. That’s the pre-existing condition of the healthcare industry as a whole.

Risks and rewards

I know doctors that hate the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare because they perceive it as an administrative burden and a potential limit on their profits for their profession. Physicians take on a ton of risk between the costs of their education, the insurance for their practice, and the fixed operating costs of running their business. And because it is a business, they are not fond of regulations impacting all these factors that affect their specific situations.

So we should respect those concerns and reduce those burdens through an intelligently designed cooperative between government and free-market healthcare providers. We already have successful models for public/private partnerships in facilities such as Argonne National Laboratory where real science takes place and is available for use by businesses that can use that research in commercial and other applications. This is America, people. We can make these things happen.

Stubborn claims

But it’s the stubborn claim that government is a bad thing that has damaged public trust over the last forty years. Remember when our country had actual pride in the fact that we were the first nation to put human beings on the moon? Now the public dialogue seems to be dominated by a brand of people who insist that it never happened, or that the earth is flat, and that the theory of evolution is the scourge of humankind. Their distrust of government aligns with a distrust of science founded in the radical notion that both are trying to pull the wool over their eyes. We’ve witnessed that radical worldview in calls to “Fire Fauci” and the actions of armed protestors storming the capitol in Michigan to demand concessions from that state’s governor.

These outcomes are all products of conspiracy theories invented to grant ownership of reality to distrusting souls eager to defy and deny reality. The fact remains that the administration of government, medicine, and science all take hard work to do. The entire premise of Make America Great Again was the solutions were simple. Yet Trump himself has had to repeatedly admit, “Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?”

It takes commitment and costs money to do healthcare, science, and government right. It is astounding to realize how quickly Republicans reacted with major stimulus funding when they realized how badly Trump and their entire party had botched response to this pandemic. Of course, their instincts are always to throw money at the people who need it least. That’s why every Republican President since Eisenhower has presided over recessions, sometimes multiple in number under one administration.

The needle and the damage done

Orange Donald too

Meanwhile, the Democrats want to grant assistance to millions of people cast out of work by the effects of a pandemic made far worse by the delay caused by Donald Trump’s feckless denial there was ever a problem in the first place. The press has needled Trump over his many contradictions on the subject, and Trump has responded by claiming he “knew all along” that the pandemic was going to be bad. Yet that’s an even worse admission of guilt. If he knew, why did he not act rather than claiming it would all disappear “like a miracle?” That belief system sits well with people who saw Trump as a Magic Man in the first place.

But this dumbing down of our country to satisfy the conspiratorial urges of a willfully disenfranchised and selfish populace needs to stop. Now. We all know where that starts. Some just refuse to admit it. They’ve put their own man on the moon and want to keep him there because he talks about hoaxes and gives credence to alternative views of reality. But the evidence of this folly is the pain we’re seeing from the crippled concept of supply and demand in the healthcare industry today.

The right kind of pride has everything to do with conscience and credibility and nothing to do with crazy claims of conspiracy.

Waterboarding Trump might get the truth out of him

January 6, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Trump told an audience in Iowa that McCain wasn’t “a war hero because he was captured” and that he preferred “people that weren’t captured”.

–The Guardian, Saturday, March 23, 2019

The Guardian article from which the quote above was taken went on to observe, “The late Senator John McCain spent more than five years in captivity in Vietnam after his plane was shot down in 1967. He refused an offer of early release. Trump received draft deferments during Vietnam for bone spurs.”

Trump once stated that he was “not a fan” of Senator McCain, especially after McCain rose from his sickbed to vote against a pet piece of legislation that Trump dearly wanted to pass.

It doesn’t take much effort to see the difference between the two men. McCain was a man of staunch principles and a life to prove it. Trump sees things in terms of good or bad only as it relates to what he wants in life. And on that front, Trump chose not to serve in the military on grounds that he was “not a fan” of the Vietnam War.

Stark contrasts

If Trump wasn’t a fan of either the military or the war, imagine how much he would have liked being submerged in rat-infested waters, kept in a cage with little food, starved and beaten, or outright tortured as prisoners of war endured in many wars. We think also of Louis Zamperini, the Olympic runner who became a POW in Japan and suffered mightily under the persecutorial eye of Mutsuhiro “the Bird” Watanabe, who targeted the American soldier for his status as an officer and reputation as a famous Olympian. Yet Zamperini persevered, and his life was chronicled in a movie titled Unbroken.

By contrast, Trump hired a ghostwriter to pen a laudatory book about his life called The Art of the Deal, The author stated that the book should be reclassified as fiction, a chronicle of fabrications design to paint Trump as a business mogul when instead he’s a fraud. And as for Trump’s personal fortitude, he apparently considers it a form of torture to walk from his golf cart onto the green to make a putt. So he drives on the greens instead. He has bluntly stated that exercise shortens life. His own staff testifies that he seems to consider exercise itself a form of torture, and avoids it.

A self-made man

Trump shares classified

If a man is so selfish and apparently weak of body and spirit that he views his life as if it were a battery running out of charge, imagine how that man would crumble if he were forced to stand long hours in the heat or cold, work manual labor until his hands bled and his feet rotted or was forced to endure mental and psychological pressure for years? That man would crack and tell everything he knew if it meant less suffering for himself. That is the nature of Donald Trump, a traitor that cannot keep even classified information secret in his role as President of the United States.

Trump is now Commander-in-Chief of America’s military. But one wonders how he’d act if he were called upon to protect his fellow prisoners from punishment or torture. Would he do as John McCain did, and take that suffering upon himself rather than give up secrets or allow others to suffer in his stead? We already know that Trump has betrayed our military allies and even left our military partners on the battlefield to die. All because he only cares about himself.

A life of betrayal

The Atlantic documented the many ways Trump has chosen to betray even those close to him. “Betrayal is a leitmotif for this president’s entire life. Think of how he cheated on his wives. Think of the infant child of a nephew who had crucial medical benefits withdrawn by Trump because of Trump’s retaliation against his nephew over an inheritance dispute. Think of those who enrolled at Trump University and were defrauded. Think about the contractors whom Trump has stiffed. Think of Jeff Sessions, the first prominent Republican to endorse Trump, whom Trump viciously turned against because Sessions had properly recused himself from overseeing the investigation into whether Russia had intervened in the 2016 election. Think about those who served in Trump’s administration—Rex Tillerson, John Bolton, Don McGahn, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, James Mattis, and many more—who were unceremoniously dumped and, in some cases, mocked on their way out the door.”

And let us not forget Michael Cohen, much less Stormy Daniels? Trump betrayed them too.

Abuse of power and authority

But Trump’s penchant for selfish intrigue and political betrayal caught up with him in the form of impeachment for withholding military aid for reasons of personal political benefit, an abuse of power, and obstruction of justice in conducting a coverup. Trump has called all investigations into his behavior a “witch hunt,” which is his way of claiming that he is being subjected to a form of torture.

So a disturbing pattern is evident in the way Donald Trump conducts himself. He maligns those that have a genuine set of principles and ridicules or betrays those whose experiences have proven them capable of standing by those principles. Meanwhile, Trump fawningly begs and borrows the mantle of religious authority offered by evangelicals even though his life has been a steady diet of the Seven Deadly Sins from lust to covetousness and greed.

Waterboarding Trump

It would be massively interesting if the Republican Party and the Senate were to abide by its professed belief that torture is permissible when the truth needs to be known. Trump himself has stated that waterboarding is “not tough enough” to drag the truth out of some people. Well, now that Trump has threatened to commit war crimes against Iran if he does not get his way in the region, perhaps the Senate might choose to waterboard Trump to get the truth about his bribery and extortion attempts in Ukraine. If he’s so determined to behave like the dictator of a rogue nation, it would be wise to pre-emptively test the man’s character since he doesn’t think torture is all that bad. A nice session of waterboarding under the watchful eye of Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would do the trick. He can even let Franklin Graham use holy water if Trump prefers. Surely a man of God such as Trump wouldn’t mind a baptism of that sort?

Or would he?

We did not do this to you, Republicans, you did this to yourself

September 27, 2018September 27, 2018 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

newt gingrich A few years back when my daughter was a teenager, she had a problem with a contact lens that had scratched her eye. It was tremendously painful, and it happened late at night, so I took her to the emergency room at our local hospital.

We sat in a curtained room waiting to be seen. The wait took quite a while. As it happened, there was an intoxicated man in the next stall over. He was strapped to a table with an armed police guard standing watch over him.

The drunk guy was yelling, “I want my booze!” over and over again. Occasionally he’d lace that sentence with an expletive or two for special emphasis.

An hour passed as we waited and finally the drunk guy started to settle down. We could see him through a crack between the curtains as he leaned his head back and turned his attention to the policeman guarding him. “Why did you do this to me?” he complained.

The officer stood there calmly and replied: “I did not do this to you, sir. You did this to yourself.”

I think about that incident as the testimony is about to unfold today in the case of Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican nominee for a lifetime position as a Supreme Court Justice. As news has emerged of testimony by multiple women accusing Kavanaugh of a range of sexually violent behavior, the potential justice has categorically denied it all. Not just some of it. All of it.

Ryan smiling Perhaps we’ll see a dramatic turn of events and Kavanaugh’s name will indeed be cleared. An entire lineup of archly conservative Republicans ranging from Newt Gingrich to the peripatetic Senator Lindsay Graham has classified the progression of accusations as a “character assassination.”

But that’s a political claim. The Republican-led Judiciary Committee refuses to allow an FBI investigation. So they don’t really want to know the truth. They want to blame the Democrats for allowing any real sort of truth to come out, preferring instead the version of “truth” they want to use in order to shove Kavanaugh through this process before the GOP loses control of the government in the November elections.

Drunk with power

To gain some perspective on the true context of the situation, we need to consider that the entire Republican Party has been on a power binge since the Donald Trump Train rolled over the nation. Drunk with permission to do what they want, wild with authority granted by control of both the House and the Senate. And the Supreme Court. That’s the branch of government they so desperately desire to lock up for decades.

But first, Republicans have engaged in a power-drunk bender of passing tax cuts for the wealthy even as their pet President imposes tariffs on our trade allies. Why, Trump is even handing out $50B to support farmers after gutting prices on soy beans and corn through ill-conceived penalties on China. The nation will have a hangover from Republican grain alcohol for years. All while gutting those pesky environmental laws in a fit of pique over being questioned all these years about why their industrialist allies pollute and waste our national resources with aplomb.

But like so many things in life, especially excessive habits, a price must sooner or later be paid.

Owning up

Now one of their chosen has been strapped to the gurney of accountability and Republicans don’t like it one bit. Kavanaugh is accused of violent sexual behavior in his youth, but he is denying everything and anything that ever happened. In so doing, he has become the poster child for every hypocritical Republican claiming to be a paragon of family values while dire secrets hidden in the past come pouring out of the closet. There’s a pattern here.

ct-dennis-hastert-lawsuit-met-20170222 Because we’ve already witnessed the downfall of Good Ole Boy Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the House, whose career went South when legitimate allegations of child sexual abuse were corroborated. Many of those abuses happened long ago and were buried under piles of hush money paid by Hastert to buy the silence of his victims.

The current President of the United States openly questioned the legitimacy of Kavanaugh’s growing list of accusers on basis that Poor Old Donald Trump has been falsely accused of such behavior in the past. But Trump has also openly admitted to sexual abuse of women on multiple occasions. He has also paid for the silence of women with whom he had sexual affairs. These transgressions were far more recent and even more telling about the character of the President than the accusations made against Kavanaugh, who seemingly behaved very badly as a stupid kid drunk with the power of his own appetites.

So it’s a sick little cabal that is in operation right now. How many more Republicans side with Kavanaugh because they fear the evidence of their own past? We hear people whine in the news that from now on “no man is safe” from the accusations of women from their past. But if men have committed sins the likes of which Kavanaugh is accused, then that information should be public knowledge if they intend to accept political or public positions. The nation does need to know who it can trust. People with dark lies in their past are far more likely to commit dark lies in the present. Their judgment is inextricably skewed by the repression required to hide and ignore those sins.

We need the Republican Party in this country. We need the conscience and values it once could claim as foundations to its existence. We need the Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower and even, to some degree, the party of Richard M. Nixon, whose administration, while ultimately corrupt, did install the EPA as a protection for American’s natural and human resources.

The real story here is that Republicans appear to be ignoring both very recent history and the truth of dark deeds done in the past. But we did not do this to you, Republicans. You did this to yourself.

Reasons why America should feel shitty

December 4, 2016 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Wait, could it be? For a second there it looked like a face on the rump of that shit.

Almost two years ago when the 2016 election campaign had just begun, I’d written quite a bit already about the achingly awful qualifications of prospective Republican presidential candidates. Every one of them was a shitty choice. None of them had leadership qualities or anything resembling a broad enough worldview to serve as an effective president. And I said so.

Long before that patent situation served up such a stink, I’d spent quite a bit of time on social media savaging and ridiculing neoconservative thinking on subject matter ranging from health care to religion to social issues and culture. This consistent engagement on such subjects proved frustrating to some of my conservative friends. A few unfriended me on social media such as Facebook. Frankly, I was glad to be rid of them. Their cognitive dissonance in defense of Republican failures on the economy, speculative wars and backward cultural and social policies reeked like a pile of confusing shit.

At one point, it was passed along to me that a casual acquaintance and cycling friend who had followed me for a while on Facebook was Unfriending me. A friend passed the reason along. “He says you make him feel shitty.”

Well, when conservatives (and so-called neoconservatives) set out to make the lives of so many people a living hell by blocking equal rights for gays, ridiculing civil rights efforts for minorities and publicly torturing women (can you say Rush Limbaugh and Sandra Fluke?) over health care and reproductive rights, someone has to speak out.

The shitty behavior doesn’t stop there, however. Neoconservatives went on the attack toward President Obama before he was installed in office. But Obama had done nothing to earn their ire on the order of what Donald Trump has just done to insult Americans. So conservatives went “desperate” by insisting he was a Muslim to make him look like he was a sympathizer with Islamic terrorists. Still others attacked him on grounds of the legality of his birth certificate. That was just a shitty attempt to disqualify the man for political reasons, yet there were underlying racial insults behind those attacks as well.

When Obama exhibited genuine leadership or would not give in to such torments, dog-whistle campaigns emerged insinuated he was “uppity,” a racially driven conflagration designed to threaten and control our President. The attacks on the looks of his wife were similarly ugly. And they never relented.

It is next to impossible to counter such ignorance and prejudice. People who think and act that way, all the way up to national leaders such as Sen. Mitch McConnell, are just shitheads by nature. His angry promise to block all attempts at governing in order to make President Obama a one-term president was a display of shitty character.

Yet some people seem to admire shitty characters. It’s in their blood to choose ugly and angry behavior over a considerate or God Forbid, academic approach to problem-solving and policy. That’s why men like Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld proved so popular among neoconservatives eager to whip the world into shape using military force or even torture to get their way. The motto is Be Shitty to Others Before They Can Be Shitty to You.

Religious conservatives aren’t much better. Throughout history conservative cabals have consistently defied the “turn the other cheek” admonitions of Jesus Christ to side with zealots and nationalists eager to win the world for Christ through war.

This is a really shitty thing to do to the fundamental precepts of Christianity, which calls us to “love our enemies.”

But let’s admit it: Jesus had his hands full even in his own day with religious legalists and warlike zealots, one of whom turned out to be the disciple that betrayed him to the authorities. These are the types of shitty believers who think they know better than God how to run the world.

Zealots for Christ are still running amok in the world, starting new Crusades toward other religions and acting as if they have absolutely no confidence in their own God, lest they should leave it all to faith and trust as the Bible says. Instead, they grab hold of the Bible and make it a bludgeon for creationism or Manifest Destiny or hating gays for simply existing on this earth.

It’s all the work of narrow-minded zealots who don’t like to be held accountable for the cause and effect of their shitty ideology, which actually blows over like a house of cards when held up to the merest intellectual or moral scrutiny. But zealots never let that happen, because their approach to theology is to attack first, and apologize never.

As a result of all this defensive posturing, conservatives, as a rule, know quite well how to defend their shit better than anyone else. And they use creative methods.

A favorite practice of conservatives (social, political, religious, fiscal) is to accuse the other side of the very faults they find so offensive in themselves. This is the Repression Factor in all conservatism. Rather than come to grips with reality, it is far easier to deny instincts of fear or failure or sexual desire than to act in good conscience and seek out the reasons why those repressive instincts exist.

But sometimes its just mean-spiritedness that drives repression. That’s how conservatives “Swiftboated” the honorable military career of John Kerry. It is also why neoconservatives and the Alt-Right accused Obama of being Muslim to paint him as a sympathizer with Islamic terrorists. That’s a really shitty thing to do, and lacks any significant conscience.

Which is why I don’t feel any real need to apologize to my conservative friends for making them feel shitty the last few years. Because the outcome of this Republican shitstorm is the election of Donald Trump to President of the United States. Even devout conservatives know this is a really shitty outcome for the party. Yet they’re holding their noses and chortling “victory” because they think they’ve won.

But that reminds one of the old joke about the guy that lost his sunglasses down an open latrine. He goes in to grab them and his buddy asks how much shit he can expect to encounter if he jumps in to help.

“It’s only ankle deep!” Comes the reply. So the friend jumps in and find himself neck deep in raw sewage. “I thought you said it was only ankle deep!” he moans.

“Well, I dove in,” his friend replies.

And that’s a perfect allegory for where we find ourselves headed into 2017. We’re all neck deep in a really situation because 26% of America saw fit to vote for an orange-faced maniac who treats everyone he meets like shit.

That’s why I’ve been so willing to make my conservative friends feel shitty for so long. Because I saw this coming. I knew where the ugly Bush years were leading us, and what it meant that people saw fit to treat President Obama like shit just because he was black, or they thought he was Muslim, or believed he would take away their guns.

That was the shit sandwich neoconservatives and the Alt-Right served America the last eight years. Now we’re all told we have to eat it. Some of refuse. And that’s why I’ll keep on making conservatives, friends and otherwise, feel really shitty about what transpired in 2016.

We don’t have to take this shit. And we won’t.

The yahoos think their time has come

January 20, 2016January 20, 2016 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

“There are bonfires on a lot of hillsides tonight, the sound of drums and wild hooting, people with serious scores to settle muttering at each other in the darkness. The yahoos are out there, and they think their time has come.” –Hunter S. Thompson, from the book Generation of Swine

At opposite ends of the country, the yahoos have indeed come home to roost. Out west in Oregon, a band of selfish firebrands is dining on Cheetos and having the nerve to complain about the number of dildos they’ve received in the mail from truly disgusted Americans. The message and the gifts are real, but the yahoos won’t admit how fitting those dildos really are. Someone’s about to get fucked over. And it’s not real Americans.

Real Americans understand that public lands are just that: public. That means no one gets to use or keep that land all to themselves. Or graze cattle for free. Or take over a wildlife sanctuary and cut down fences in some sort of barbed protest against the fact that a nation like America really exists, and it has laws, and breaking those laws does not mean you are a patriot. It means you are a forceful, deceitful pack of dicks. And hence the dildos. Enjoy them fellas. You earned them.

Meanwhile, back East where it is barbed comments, not barbed wire, that represent the fencing in Washington politics, we have the Queen of All Yahoos endorsing Donald Trump for President. That would be Sarah Palin, whose own daughter could have used a few dildos to block all those pregnancies in her campaign for abstinence over real sexual education.

But that’s how the Palin family rolls. Their opinions matter far more than the truth. Yet even Fox News, where the very name of the network is an oxymoron, and where all supposed news is dispensed inside conservative condoms to protect the Righteous Right from the ostensibly poison sperm of truth and reason, could not endure the bukkake being spit out from Sarah Palin’s mouth. So they fired her.

Which should be a lesson to Donald Trump, of all people. He’s fond of firing people as a publicity stunt for his own manhood. This is a man who admits to lusting after his own daughter, and whose bankruptcies are as frequent as his financial triumphs. Yet he’s leading the polls as the Republican nominee, and Sarah Palin just endorsed him.

The cognitive dissonance of all this brain-fucking deadness is clearly evident to people with conscience and morality. But those that have already sold their souls to the devil of Right Wing unconsciousness are more than happy to have cartoon figures like Donald Trump and Sarah Palin do their talking for them. Trump comes packaged with prejudice while Palin can’t read the back of a cereal package without confusing the grapes with the nuts. They’re a perfect pair, if political apocalypse is what you crave.

That’s why the so-called Militia out in Oregon is so fascinating. Those folks are also caricatures of true patriots. They’re standing their ground in what they consider their neighborhood with the same violent vigor one George Zimmerman used to gun down Trayvon Martin.

This is all happening because the Republican Party, which has long been an evil caricature of what it once stood for, has had stunning success making laws in complicity with a public that truly gives a rat’s ass about what the Constitution actually says. That’s how we got Stand Your Ground. Citizen’s United. And conveniently ignoring the entire first phrase of the Second Amendment. That’s a trifecta of shit bad lawmaking.

The Supreme Court, our nation’s highest court we might add, is ruled by five conservative yahoos in black robes who spout ridiculous justifications for gun laws (Antonin Scalia) or say nothing at all about anything (Clarence Thomas) before voting in line or in league with the other three yahoos, whose names don’t really matter except to say that they’re all (to a man, we might note) politically activist judges.

For all the judicial intelligence they’ve demonstrated, you could replace them with a trio of highly prejudiced, book-burning, creationist, Klan-joining PTO leaders from the Deep South and get the same goddamned results.

Despite this credulity, the yahoos as a movement have spread their seed and stock across America like a turd-covered blanket. And the frightening reality is that millions of Americans appear ready to wrap themselves in that stinking garment and give thanks to the Lord for the warmth of purpose it provides. Never mind that 50% of America has not a penny to its name and owes $20,000 on the Discover card, they’re getting 5% Cash Back in Rewards! That’s how the modern American economy works. That’s trickle down economics in a nutshell.

But any pig farmer on earth can tell you… that when you’ve stood around in the hogslop long enough, it cease to smell. That is the only logical explanation for the populism and popularity of a man like Donald Trump. Or any of those Republican candidates. But here’s the truth about Trump: He looks as happy as a pig in slop, does he not? That explains his skin tone perhaps.

And now that backwoods pig princess Sarah Palin just waded right in with him. And as Donald himself would say, “This stench is terrific!”

Which means the best treatment of all for those Oregon yahoos would be to load up an armored cement truck (we can have on government contract by Oshkosh, the military machine manufacturer) with a couple thousand pounds of raw, stinking manure. Then back it up to the window of that hog slop of a protest the “militia” is conducting out at Malheur and let the shit absolutely pour inside that building. It will find its own equilibrium, and if those yahoo bastards happen to drown in it, that will be cosmic justice of the first order. Of course, they might also float to the top with the piles of dildos they’ve received, thereby proving our original point. We can clean the stinking mess up later but first we’ve got to take action.

That holds true for the Trump and Palin Shit Train as well. Even Great Britain got involved by holding sessions in Parliament to call bullshit on the Trumpster, who is either purposely making a mockery of democracy or having too much goddamned fun to admit it.

When all this is said and done, we all know that Trump will go on being Trump. You can wallow in a lot of shit and still come out clean when you have that kind of money behind you.

Palin, by contrast, will have to live with the stench of yet another failed campaign on her record. She’s already been seen drinking her way through several video manifestos. That’s what yahoos do, you see. They drink and scream and huddle in their cars making viral stench consumed by millions of people with shit for brains.

Yes, Hunter S. Thompson was right. There are bonfires on the hillsides tonight. The yahoos are out there, and they think their time has come.

Starting today, let’s give them all the shit they all deserve.

Republican toothpaste won’t go back in the tube

December 11, 2015 / Christopher Cudworth / 7 Comments

Graphic by Christopher Cudworth

So, the campaign for President is headed toward 2016, and what have we seen from the Republican side? A whole lot of foaming at the mouth about the state of the nation. Yet it’s a brand of political toothpaste that seems to be causing cavities in the GOP.

alg-donald-trump-jpg From the vacuous, poisonous observations of Dr. Ben Carson to the highly corrosive language of Donald Trump, Republican candidates are grinding away at their base. For the American people, it’s like brushing teeth with sulphuric acid.

Yet Republicans keep doubling down as they brush with racism and xenophobia, as if that’s the way to establish a clean and loyal base.

Meanwhile, Ted Cruz is rinsing himself with evangelical fervor, and Marco Rubio just hopes his hard smile wins some converts somewhere. But as always with seemingly forthright Republicans, it turns out there might be a little rotten behavior behind that smile.

marathon-man-1976-04-g We’re faced with a party whose tactics most resemble the dentist in the movie Marathon Man. Cruelty, anger and hatred are the prescription medicines of choice. Are voters expected to lie back and take this? For how long?

America suffered through eight years of the antics of Dr. Clousseau dentistry under George Bush while the sadistic political practitioner Dick Cheney (is that him in this photo above?) called for the power of a Unitary Executive while approving torture as a means of extracting information in Black Sites around the world. All while stockpiling military-industrial money for himself in the back offices of the White House.

dick-cheney So you see, the Republican toothpaste does not go easily back in the tube. Trump isn’t really trying anymore. He just keeps spitting out bits of his teeth and gums along with his racist, xenophobic brand of Republican “misery loves company” ideology.

“This hurts you more than it hurts me,” seems to be the Trump mantra. And people follow along, because authoritarian patients love anyone that promises their selfish misery is being acknowledged as the American Way.

It’s apparent they had their Wisdom Teeth out long ago.

When prejudice is its own brand of patriotism

November 28, 2015November 28, 2015 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

MarcoRubio1 With Donald Trump leading the Republican polls on a wave of prejudicial fervor to “take back America,” and men like Marco Rubio taking the aggressive stance that conservative politics are the only answer to America’s social ills it might pay to step back and look at what that phrase “Take Back America” really means.

Because you could flip a couple words around in that phrase and find out what it really means. “Take America Back” might be a better description. Because that’s what conservatives really want to do, take America “back” to the supposed Good Old Days before social revolution opened the doors to real social equality.

Let’s first consider the fact that the “Good Old Days” never really existed in America. One could point to the period before the 1960s when white America and a largely Christian dynamic ruled the nation, and call that the Good Old Days. But in terms of equality for all Americans, the social mores of that period ignored millions of people in terms of civil rights. Blacks and other minorities were still banned from public spaces and certainly prevented from gaining certain kinds of employment. Women also were typically forced into subservient roles as housewives and order-takers in the work world.

That’s why the 1960s were a necessary step to break down a social order that evolved around the dominance of white males over society.

There was a convenience to those prejudices that fostered the dominance of white males. Those conveniences persist today, and are readily identifiable in the behavior of all those who respond to the dog-whistle racism of slogans such as Take Back America.

Prejudice is the easy choice for many Americans because:

It excuses responsibility and blame for the real cause of social problems in America. Blaming the predominance of gun violence on black people is a convenient red herring distraction from mass shootings conducted by white individuals espousing racist worldviews. Same goes for white supremacy militias armed to the teeth in fear of the government. Gun violence is a product of disenfranchised people of all races that have easy access to guns. But blaming gun violence on race exonerates the vigilante justice system that has emerged in America.
Racial prejudice dismisses and obscures valuable social contributions by people of all races. The best way to avoid acknowledging equality and the social competition it represents is to effectively target a race, nationality or religion with slurs, stereotypes and falsehoods that diminish genuine social contributions. That’s why men like Donald Trump categorize all Mexicans as criminals and rapists, to belittle one group while seemingly complimenting the other. In fact such tactics are an insult to the intelligence of all involved. But those who stand to gain from the power bloc represented by the accuser will often ignore or embrace the pain of others as a sign of their own superiority.
Prejudice is an aggressive response to fear. Striking out against those you choose to fear is the principal measure taken by all those captive to racial, political or religious prejudice. As mentioned in #2, fear over social competition with other races is a frequent driver of oppression. This was the case with slavery in the south, followed by segregation that lasted well into the “Good Old Days” of the 1950s and beyond. In fact fear drives a deep strain of racism across all of America these days, and men like Donald Trump know how to leverage that fear into a political power base. The dog-whistle tactics of the NRA with its fear-mongering about “protection” against all sorts of perceived enemies is what raises money and garners political power for that organization. The power of prejudice is all about fear.
Prejudice is all about feeling persecuted. Right beside fear as a prejudice-driver is typically a claim of persecution. When any group in society is losing a culture war of any type, be it religious, civil, business or nationality, persecution is the justification for lashing out against another group. Prejudice was the motivator for Adolph Hitler, whose goal it was to strike back and subjugate the perceived persecutors of Germany. He had all those he either feared or considered inferior put to death. A persecution complex is a product of tribalism, which is driven by the social need to dominate and conquer fear. But it amounts to little more than blaming others for the disadvantage people often create for themselves through their own shallow, often dogmatic thinking. Yes, there is genuine persecution in this world, and it should be confronted. But creating memes of persecution for the sake of attention and grabbing social power is inexcusable. We see that brand of persecution complex at work in the so-called “War On Christmas,” which is not a war at all, but in fact represents a justifiable disgust with the commercial and boorish nature of the holiday that has strayed so far from its original roots it barely exists as a religious holiday at all. Christians themselves are to blame for the grandiose commercialism that overshadows the meaning of the season, yet it is convenient to claim persecution by those who dare to question the dominance of the disgusting spectacle Christmas has become.

All these brands of fear and discrimination combine to form the prejudicially populist notion of what it means to “Take Back America.” Throw in a bit of disgust about taxes, social programs and other self-interested protestations that actually pale in comparison with how much our nation spends on militarily aggressive “defense spending” and the package of fearful prejudice as a nationalistic life force is complete.

Every Republican on the GOP ticket represents one form of prejudice or another. And sure enough, all they can ever find to say in defense of their fear-based, persecution-hugging worldview is that the liberal media is to blame for all their ills. It all fits the pattern. Prejudice rules among ignorant fools.

Even the lone black person among Republican candidates seems perpetually confused by his roles in this election cycle. Ben Carson has actually stated that slavery was essentially a good thing for blacks in America, and that blacks were happy before all this social revolution stuff occurred. Carson ironically fits the model of what many white Americans seem to want from a black candidate, one that speaks their own prejudices from a platform in which the oppressed speak the words of the oppressors.

And that’s Republican political strategy in a nutshell. Find a way to make people too stupid to recognize their own pain, and you’ve got a voting bloc that will do whatever you want, blame whoever you tell them to, and parrot talking points that actually kill the hopes of all involved.

These are strange times in which we live when prejudice is considered a brand of patriotism.

The Republican Field of Dreams

November 23, 2015November 24, 2015 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Everyone knows that in youth baseball, the weakest fielder is always assigned to play right field. That’s because the number of left-handed batters is typically fewer than those who bat rightie, and young right-handed hitters generally are not known for their ability to drive the ball to the opposite field.

But of course the greater insult for any hitter is that moment when you’re up to bat and the opposing team’s Right Fielder actually moves in when you’re up at the plate. That’s a real insult to your hitting skills. When the other team does not even consider you a threat to hit one past their worst fielder, you know you’ve got problems.

Such has been the case with the Republican Party candidates in the state of Iowa. It’s no coincidence perhaps, that in the state known for the Field of Dreams also hosts the early innings of the presidential election. Already a few candidates have disappeared into the outfield corn with no intention or possibility of coming back. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, for example, vanished between the cornstalks before the game in Iowa really started. Now Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal is gone too. Vanished. His act was too corny we must presume.

ben-carson Bye Bye Ben

Now it appears Ben Carson is headed for the same type of vanishing point. His inability to even keep score as the game went along is responsible for his fading political game.

Every time he came up to the plate it felt like he was facing the wrong way or claiming he was being thrown the wrong pitches for him to be successful as a hitter. When the media actually quoted statistics about the things he claimed that he’d said and done in the past, his press clippings did not match up with his Babe Ruth brand of bravado.

He probably won’t quit the game, because he truly believes he belongs in his strength and prowess at the plate. But he was the candidate for whom the Right Fielder moved in the farthest, and his soft-spoken opinions still never made it out of the infield.

Hard-Liners

There are still some supposedly Big Hitters in the Republican Field of Dreams. Slugger Donald Trump comes to mind. But who thinks the man can really hit a political curveball? He’s a power hitter for sure, and his alg-donald-trump-jpg mighty swings at the plate cause even a few liberals to jump in their seats in fear that he’ll connect somehow. Yet while some keep rooting for Trump to hit the ball out of the park, so far all he’s managed are some hard-liners.

Plus, he’s the prospect no one really wants on the team. He doesn’t fit in the Republican clubhouse, that’s for sure. That queasy little Single-A manager Lindsey Graham even predicted that a Trump election would mean the end of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, those actually rooting against the Republican Oligarchs are wringing their hands in hopes that prognosticators such as Coach Graham are correct. There is an evil quality to any team that claims to hate the very political league in which they play.

Snapping pitches

Then there are truly strange competitors such as Carly Fiorina, the woman who certainly believes there is no such thing as crying in baseball. You can see her down there snapping at pitches with her teeth instead of the bat.

No Carly Fiorina doubt she’s a fierce competitor, but does she even understand the first thing about the baseball of politics? There’s an art to this game, of hitting them out of the park. Snatching the ball in mid-air with your choppers and spitting the ball out in the dirt is not going to impress people who want to see if you can lead a team with your political hitting, catching and throwing. That’s just not how the game is played.

Hopeful sluggers

Deep in the lineup of Republican shallow hitters we find both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Cruz is the Ty Cobb of political baseball, while Rubio swings his Latin heritage like fiesty little batboy that has not yet made the team in tryouts.

Ted-Cruz One can easily imagine Cruz sliding into second or third base with his cleats up, begging for a fight. Indeed, he’s challenged none other than President Obama to come insult him to his face.

The Cobb-like Cruz prides himself on this bad boy reputation, courting conservatives of all pinstripes. That means he must change his uniform daily in an effort to appeal to the tight-lipped fiscal conservatives waiting to back his No Legislation League as well as the religious conservatives begging Cruz to strike down the laws supporting legalized abortions.

Overall it’s a strange crowd to whom Cruz the Crusher seems to appeal. The Tea Party seems to love him, and editors at Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze.com website push his story as if the entire world of conservative baseball depends upon the guy who seems to care not if there is a team on the field with him at all. He’ll take on an entire team of progressives on his own if you let him.

The Angry Batboy

And Marco Rubio? Well, we know he’d willingly cork his bat if it meant he could get elected to something other than the Republican batboy position he now occupies. He keeps jumping off the bench when it looks like there might be a fight on the field after a media brushback pitch.

MarcoRubio1 He certainly keeps his eye out for opportunities to look tough. But like any batboy, he’s not a part of the real action even though he keeps swinging bats at the umpire, the ball girls and anyone he can reach if they give him any guff.

Yet it turns out that upon closer inquiry, Rubio has not even kept pace with his tab at the Hot Dog Stand of life. So there are serious questions whether he’s ready for the Bigs at all.

Swinging at everything

Paul-Ran Finally, we come to the ballplayer with two first names sewn on his back, one Rand Paul.

Whenever Paul comes to the plate, the Right Fielder and the Second Baseman stand together just outside the infield

Everyone knows that Libertarians can’t hit for crap. They swing at every pitch as a matter of need and habit. Once in a while they might foul one off high into the seats behind home plate. But without any ball or strike rules to govern the game, a Libertarian hitter tries too hard to make an impact with fans who think the rules of political baseball just suck.

But Rand is consistent in his ways, to be sure. Like his daddy Ron Paul, Rand has been known to stick his head out in front of a fastball, and the crack it makes when it hits his skull brings a few fans to their feet! “Look, they holler! “Our man is the only one with his head in the game!”

So Rand has been hit by a few pitches, yet he looked absolutely asleep at the plate during several Republican debates, disappointing not only his fans, but those who would like to see some blood on the stage. This is America, after all.

There’s Your Field of Republican Dreams

So the Field of Republican Dreams is just that. They all have dreams of being the President, but the field on which they’re playing is not really connected to reality.

That’s what comes of contending that you hate government while trying to get elected. The entire ball field gets turned inside out when you make statements like that. It’s as the pitcher is suddenly throwing from home plate and the batter is standing on the mound screaming, “Throw me the high hard one, I’ll hit it out of here!”

But honestly, from that vantage point, every hit you get would turn out to be a foul ball. That’s certainly what it feels like when listening to people like Donald Trump, whose infield chatter has included a call to force Muslims to carry identification just like the Jews did in Nazi Germany.

Fantasy Camp rejects

Did someone let an insane fan on the field? Are all these ballplayers on the Republican Field of Dreams just a pack of baseball Fantasy Camp rejects whose talent never let them be real ballplayers?

It’s true: we’ve all been dumbstruck watching how deathly shallow the Right Fielder is actually playing these guys. It’s clear that none of them can hit, and very few can even field a question without complaining it is a Gotcha Pitch.

The Mighty Something

The Great American Pastime may be baseball, but American Politics has always run a close second. And in this context, one must consider the epic baseball poem Casey At The Bat because it sheds considerable light on the Republican Righties who’ve come to the plate in this presidential election cycle. The poem seems prescient about Republican Prospects in the 2016 Election:

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clinched in hate;

He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.

And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,

And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;

The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,

And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;

But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

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