We feel no remorse when lies catch up with dishonest people

March 6, 2023 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

About a year ago, I wandered down a rabbit hole while researching conservative attitudes about the January 6th insurrection. Along the way, I stumbled upon comments by Scott Adams, the cartoonist responsible for the Dilbert comic strip. He was raving about politics and blaming everyone for the problems of America but those most likely causing them. At that point in time, I stopped reading his comic strip in the Chicago Tribune, one of the newspapers to which I subscribe.

Like millions of other Americans disgusted by the vagaries of corporate life, I found Dilbert funny in some ways, and tragic in others. Adams is certainly adept at pointing out the fact that lousy bosses often rise to the top, and that middle managers have a hard time getting them to understand, much less embrace the truth.

And yet, Adams himself appears to have a hard time understanding the truth about many things. Most recently, he branded all Black people a “hate group” in one of the biggest gaslighting faux pas of all time. His Dilbert comic strip is now getting canceled right and left. Even the company responsible for getting Adams’ content out to newspapers had heard and seen enough. They dropped him too.

Sinking lower

As reported on the website Popverse, this is how it all went down. “On February 22, Adams posted a live YouTube stream in response to a Rasmussen poll that asked Black Americans whether or not they agreed with the phrase, ‘It’s okay to be white’ — a phrase that is a known slogan for alt-right and racist groups. 53% of those polled agreed, with 26% disagreeing and 21% unsure.

Adams’ response to the poll was vehement. “If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people… that’s a hate group,” Adams said during the broadcast. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people… because there is no fixing this.”

Adams deserved to get popped for making those racist remarks. Perhaps like many people claiming some sort of free speech clause… he’s now feeling like the punishment doesn’t fit the crime. Popverse notes: Adams continues to be glibly unrepentant for his comments and their effects., “I’ve lost three careers to direct racism so far. Crocker Bank, Pacific Bell, and cartooning. All three were perpetrated by White people for their own gain,” he tweeted on Monday. “No Black person has ever discriminated against me. That’s partly why I identified as Black for several years.”

Drunk with power

Mr. Adams seems like a massively conflicted character, almost a cartoon of his own making. That self-conflicted nature reminds me of the time that I was sitting in a hospital emergency room with my daughter when she scratched her eye and was in some pain. We waited a long time to see a physician. While we sat there together a man strapped to a gurney in an open area was moaning and groaning loud enough for everyone to hear. “I want my booze!” he kept bellowing. “I want my f******* booze!”

No alt text provided for this image — When people get too belligerent, they sometimes need restraint.

This went on for a half hour at least. A security guard stood by his side keeping watch over the obviously inebriated man. Finally, the angry drunk turned his head to the policeman nearby, while saying, “Why did you do this to me?”

The officer leaned close enough to speak quietly to the man, and said: “We did not do this to you, sir. You did this to yourself.”

That’s a lesson that Scott Adams is learning right now. His self-inflicted punishment is costing him in terms of national image. There are financial implications as well. He’s lost comic strip revenue that once included income from 2000 newspapers in 65 countries. Even his book publisher is dumping his book project titled Reframe Your Brain. Why would anyone buy a book like that after learning the way Adams thinks?

Possible markets

Actually, there are probably millions of people eager to buy Adams’ book because they think just like the guy. Racism in the United States of America has gained stature among Right-wing activists enervated by the likes of Donald Trump, who blessed them on several occasions, even inviting them to be part of the January 6, 2020 attack on the United States Capitol building.

The most disturbing part of the type of dishonesty that leads to social injustice of this order is how many supposed Christians embrace Trump and by proxy, the racism that goes with it. That favoritism emerged during his 2016 campaign when the likes of high-profile Christian evangelicals such as Franklin Graham branded him God’s favorite candidate and stood by him through all sorts of scandals that would have tanked any other politician. The only thing that helped Trump survive his own power-drunk surge toward the White House was evangelical dismissiveness toward his clearly corrupt nature.

Graham is now starting to show regrets about his Trump support, but the harm done poisons his legacy and has damaged democracy in the United States of America. As reported on WNYC, “Like his father, Rev. Billy Graham, before him, Rev. Franklin Graham is one of the nation’s most prominent preachers, influential in the evangelical world and in the highest echelons of Washington. But where Billy Graham came to regret that he had “sometimes crossed a line” into politics, Franklin Graham has no such qualms about showing his full-throated support of the President. An early advocate of Trump’s candidacy, he has remained stalwart even as scandals pile up. Graham tells the New Yorker staff writer Eliza Griswold that Trump’s critics have forgotten that “he’s our President. If he succeeds, you’re going to benefit.” Of Trump’s many personal scandals, Graham says only, “I hope we all learn from mistakes and get better. . . . As human beings, we’re all flawed, including Franklin Graham.”

Hypocrites and legalistic zealots

But evangelical Christians that follow the likes of Graham are nothing if not devout once they make up their minds that God is on their side. Even after two well-deserved impeachments and a massive set of lies about the threat of Covid, about 30-35% of Americans refuse(d) to give up support for Trump.

There is effectively a 1:1 relationship between the percentage of people that vote for Trump and those that adhere to a biblically literal worldview on subjects such as creationism, the contention that the earth and all life were conceived in just six literal, 24-hour days, that a literal flood once covered the entire earth and that all “kinds” of living creatures were preserved aboard an ark that floated for nearly a year.

There is zero scientific evidence supporting any of those contentions, yet nearly 1/3 of Americans eagerly defend such untruths as absolute truth. To put it more bluntly, they are quite used to lying to themselves to defend their belief system and other equally shallow and self-centered priorities, often based on anachronistic ideology and traditional understanding of scripture failing to allow for scientific or cultural advancements debunking the so-called biblical version of reality.

The culture and lifestyle devoted to literalistic, fundamentalist, and legalistic religion also spends considerable effort trying to turn their belief systems into law, even demanding that religious beliefs such as creationism be taught in public schools. These attempts at imposing Christian law ignore the Constitution’s clear ban on imposing a state religion. The pursuant retort is that the Constitution itself is based on so-called “Christian values,” and that America is by design a “Christian Nation.” None of this is in the least bit honest.

Pushback is not persecution

When the American public conducts pushback against attempts to turn religion into law, the hard-Right Christian community loves to cry “persecution.” This version of victimhood is a gaslighting attempt of its own kind. That’s why Trujp was successful in garnering the right-wing Christian voting bloc. He plays the victim himself, and earns sympathy as a result. Before Trump, the Christian Right voted for George W. Bush on the dog-whistle hopes that an authoritarian embrace of Christianity would win the day.

This push toward American theocracy was predictable. The signs have been there for decades, as “Rock musician Frank Zappa once said, “The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it’s moving America toward a fascist theocracy, and everything that’s happened during the Regan (sic) administration is steering us right down that pipe.”

The ironic aspect of all this theocratic favoritism is that President Barack Obama is a practicing Christian with a healthy family in comparison to Trump with his multiple wives, porn star associations, and lust for his own daughter. Yet the Right Wing eagerly branded Obama as a “Muslim” as if that religious affiliation disqualified him from office. In specious fashion, the dog-whistle goal was to associate President Obama with Islamic extremism with hints of abject racism mixed in.

Speaking of Democratic Christians, President Joe Biden is a devout Catholic man that has seen suffering and sorrow in life and approaches challenges with compassion and contrition. Former President Jimmy Carter devoted his entire life to service after occupying the highest office in the land, yet the Right-Wing still refuses to recognize his true Christian nature versus the dishonest puppet-play religiosity of a man like Trump who couldn’t quote a Bible versus when asked about it. Yet he promised to ban abortion and gay marriage, and that trumps all other qualities among conservative Christians.

An ugly history

Looking back 150 years or so in American history, this political zealotry disguised as Christian righteousness is sort of ideological monstrosity that once pushed the notion that Manifest Destiny granted White Christians absolute dominion over the North American continent. The grand excuse that God favored white people was used to wipe out Native Americans through wars, theft of land, distribution of disease and alcohol, broken treaties, and when all else failed, outright genocide.

That same brand of Christian gaslighting supported slavery for centuries, in part because the Bible didn’t specifically ban it. Never mind that Jesus preached love and spiritual equality for all souls regardless of race. That truth was too inconvenient for pro-slavery fascists and ostensibly devout Christians that ultimately seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy.

This pattern of hypocrisy and denial of culpability for hideous outcomes wrought by hate-based religion is consistent. It leads to dishonesty about social justice and produces the worst offenses against humanity, all while claiming that Christianity is one of the most persecuted religions on earth. That brand of gaslighting and dishonesty is beyond disturbing. That is why Christianity as a religion needs a reality check. If the tradition can’t handle honesty about its own corruption of scripture to justify selfish actions, then it doesn’t deserve to have the word CHRIST in its name. Jesus specifically fought that kind of religion during his ministry, yet legalistic Christianity persists in its sins of power to this day.

The not-so-anonymous hate club

All this dishonesty allows racism to persist to this day as well. That’s why a big market remains for the brand of hate espoused by Scott Adams. A stubborn segment of American culture has refused social change for centuries. That means some conservative publisher will pick up the rights to Adams’ book and it will sell well among deplorables eager to embrace the high-profile confirmation bias offered by Adams.

That love for famous people spouting hate and lies is the same reason people have flocked to Fox News for decades, where Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and other well-known “commentators” preach right-wing talking points even when they know it is damaging to the nation they claim to protect. That makes them liars and hypocrites of the same order as dishonest Christians, which makes ugly sense because biblical literalists and constitutional originalists adhere to the same brand of a belief that anachronistic texts hold never-changing truths.

It has taken a while, but the like of Fox finally got caught red-handed after perpetrating the lies of Trump and the Republican Party for decades. Now Rupert Murdoch is plotting ways to avoid culpability for his corrupt regime of liars by trying to throw them under the bus. Murdoch and Fox (and by proxy, the GOP and Trump) are addicted to the money and power they gain by lying to the world. But they sure don’t want culpability. They’re the same sort of addict as the guy strapped to the gurney crying out, “I want my booze!” They are addicted to the thing they most need to leave behind.

The lesson behind all of this is that while it is hard to be honest, it is even harder being honest and ethical at the same time. In a perverse way, Scott Adams passed the honesty test with his racist comments. Yet he fails miserably at being a person of good character with an ethical foundation worth imitating. By his own confession in fact, the cartoon Dilbert was (also) always about hatred for the world and a self-righteous indignation at being wronged in his employment. One now wonders if the people firing him had an incredibly just cause. As in, “Was Scott Adams always an unemployable jerk?”

About this whole enterprise of Right-wing hate and dishonesty, and how it eventually catches up to people we can honestly say, “We did not do this to you. You did this to yourself.”

This article was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn Site Honest-To-Goodness.

Christopher Cudworth is the author of the book Honest-To-Goodness: Why Christianity Needs a Reality Check and How to Make It Happen.

What we can learn about America from Nashvegas

April 25, 2022April 25, 2022 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

The scene outside the main entrance of the Kid Rock establishment in downtown Nashville could serve as the poster scene for the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. People wandered the streets in various states of drunken cognizance, which is just another way of saying cognitive dissonance. Some clung to each other in human chains while acting like they were free of the burdens that bind us most. Mostly these were members of Bachelorette parties. Some wore sashes indicating their Bride-To-Be status and others debauched in sashes designating their subservient roles.

The Bachelor parties were best-identified by their Bro Behavior, stumbling along in groups of five-to-ten wide, passing through the crowds like the Dark Matter of human existence. Don’t bump into one of them or the world around you could explode. We all live on a vigilante street these days.

Outside the doors of the Kid Rock’s Big Honky Tonk and Steakhouse, a man stood holding a cardboard sign with the words “Let’s Go Brandon. Fuck Joe Biden. God Bless” in handwritten defiance as he faced the crowds, sucking on a cigarette as if it contained the elixir of life itself.

I pondered his mission and realized that he most resembled those doomsayers bearing signs about the end of the world. They’re forever warning us about the End Times, and they’re always wrong.

The Let’s Go Brandon folks think they’re clever disguising the phrase Fuck Joe Biden behind the banal cheer they bellow and brandish on tee shirts. Of all the modern-day attempts at conspiratorial political subterfuge, this one proves the fatal instincts of the terminally deceived. Following Trump has proven to be nothing but a dishonest and brutally dismissive brand of folly from the beginning of the ex-President’s campaign to his current tempestuous residency as a deposed despot clinging to the hope that he can return to office to dismiss the vast record of crime and corruptions left in his wake. That is Trump’s only hope for salvation in this world: he needs power to even feel like a human being.

Surely he’d have been one of the ringleaders in the days of Sodom, when men nearly beat down Lot’s door so that they could abuse the strangers inside. Trump loves the look of terror in people’s eyes and the fear he engenders by proclaiming slogans such as “You’re fired!” That was Trump’s form of verbal rape back in the days when he was given license to formally torture people on “reality” TV. But it was never about reality it all. Trump’s entire world is a crazily concocted contrivance of his appetites and insecurities. He wraps himself in the clothing of self-aggrandizement and prances down the avenue in a sash just like those Bachelorettes he’d love to grope and fondle, since that’s his ilk.

Holding hands while the walls come tumbling down.

And that’s what I learned during a venture into the heart of Nashvegas. America is obviously possessed by a self-consuming desire to abuse and be abused. To millions of Americans, the two are not even separable concepts. And when their self-indulgently abusive nature worships at the feet of men like Trump, the threat to all of us is real. Trump caters to the desire for abuse with his downtalking style and claims of victimhood that fuel the sense of entitlement this new-age confederacy of disenfranchisement finds so appealing, and so absorbs slogans like Make America Great Again that make their conflicted spirits feel whole again.

States where Trump is popular love that style of whining deprecation. Those trucks bearing flags abusively redesigned with black and blue stripes alongside those flabby Trump banners indicate a cult-like obsession with alt-authority that dominates the Trumpian mindset. It is significant that the same tactics used by the socialist-fascist tropes of old are so effective on the religio-fascists now vexing America. Trump has convinced millions of people they are the “free thinkers” in this world when every aspect of their behavior speaks to the exact opposite mindset.

The same depressing cultural gutspeak washes over cities like Nashville and Las Vegas every damned day of the year. These places are a grand excuse to lower the moral bar as far as one wants to go, and never feel the need to apologize for it. Nashville was the city of choice for a bachelor friend of mine, and we had a dose of fun without trashing ourselves or anyone else around us. I’ll admit. We had fun. We drank some. Listened to some good music. Chatted up some ladies to pass the time and got back home by 3:00 a.m. But that’s not what many people chose to believe about “reality” when it comes to visiting Nashville or any place like it. The phrase “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas…” speaks to a brand of willing self-indulgence and truth denial that indicates a disturbing tendency lack of responsibility that can’t help spill into other aspects of life. Are we on the way to replacing the United States of America with the Untidy States of Vegas?

We all need to cut loose once in a while and lose our cares. I like a good glass of whiskey as much as the next person. We toured a distillery and learned the art of making fine spirits from grain to mash to swan-neck distillation. But there’s a lesson in how whiskey is made. The first vapors through the process are too toxic and dangerous to drink. They can make you go blind and half-crazy if you’re not careful, and kill not just brain cells, but the whole damned body associated with it. That’s what I really learned in Nashvegas, Tennessee. It seldom pays to consume the first of anything whether it comes out of a still or from the mouth of a man telling everyone else to keep still because he considers himself the biggest expert in the room.

But Trump and his people are drunk on the notion that their primary notions and instincts are good for us all. A trip through the streets of Nashvegas on a Saturday night exemplifies the madness afoot across so many sectors. This is hardly what America needs to become great again. While it’s not all about sobriety, there should always be room for sober consideration of what greatness actually, really means. And this is not it.

This isn’t so much about the core issues of morality as it is about recognizing that wherever morality is twisted into shapes of personalities eager to dismiss and abuse others, we’re facing a real danger to society. That means the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah needs to be studied more closely. The lesson never was that gay people or strangers far from home are the real threat in this world. The actual moral is that people with authoritarian domination on their minds are evidence of the breakdown of society. They are banging on the doors of civility in this nation, and around the world. It is our holy and moral duty to keep these fascist monsters at bay.

Trump is their leader here in America. We must never forget that.

The Red Letter commonality between MAGA and MRGA

March 7, 2022March 7, 2022 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

In which we study the similarities between Make America Great Again and Make Russia Great Again

*MAGA rioters attack Capitol police on January 6, 2020*

We all watched the outcome of MAGA (Make America Great Again) in the United States of America. Four years of MAGA propaganda by the Trump Administration led to an insurrection against the nation by a manic mix of pro-fascist “demonstrators” claiming the 2020 election was stolen.

That was a horrific moment in American history. But the worst part of the Trump years was the support provided by the Christian evangelical community who cheered on Trump’s often lawless campaign to use the office of President as his personal stomping grounds for whatever enemies he chose to attack. All of Trump’s vengeful behavior was dismissed as necessary because he was ostensibly acting for the “greater good” by literally carrying out the will of God. According to populist notions of Trump’s rise to power, he was the one anointed to advance the idea that the United States of America is a Christian Nation under God.

That was one of dog-whistle (or God-whistle) messages driving Make America Great Again. It carried with it the promise to ban abortion and block gay people from civil rights, two key social issues to conservative Christians tied to the anachronistic dogma of the religion when it dominated American society. And this despite its demonstrated history of supporting institutional slavery and racism in the likes of ‘Christian-based’ groups like the KKK.

MAGA’s ugly underbelly

MAGA’s ugly underbelly revealed itself during Trump’s first campaign for president as he embraced racist organizations, complimenting them as “good people.” Those groups and others coalesced into the aggressive branch of MAGA whose militias broke down barriers, attacked police, and threatened to murder the Vice President, Mike Pence, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

And while all this happened, the evangelical leadership in America either remained silent or cheered on the events while justifying Trump’s reign of terror by claiming that “God works with flawed people.”

The terrifying fact of the religious rationalization is that it is now being extended, in a brutally ironic fashion, to the leader of Russia, Vladimir Putin, during his military invasion of Ukraine. And here’s the kicker: Putin is carrying out this mission for much the same religious reasons that the American evangelical community wanted to Make America Great Again. Putin views Ukraine as a necessary iconic element in the re-establishment of a Christian-dominated Russia and for all we know, the rest of Europe. This war in Ukraine is an attack on a sovereign nation that values free and fair elections just like the United States of America and other democracies around the world. But Putin wants to install his Christo-fascist version of power over the nation’s people and its resources and call it Russia+. This is Putin’s version of MAGA. So we can legitimately brand it MRGA: Make Russia Great Again.

American Christian’s support for Putin

*Conflating God with country is a favorite pastime of the Christian conservative community*

Thus it is no coincidence that America’s evangelical Christian community and their conservative friends seem to support Putin. There are also whispers in the halls of End Times Theology that “this is the big one,” because religious zealots hoping for the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ to rule it all pray that this is their moment of vengeance against the heathens and humanistic believers who want to solve the world’s problems, not turn them into an excuse for Armageddon.

Even Israel can’t make up its mind what to do about Russia, because Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself a Jew. There are political and economic striations to consider as well, so the nation perpetually caught between Jewish and Christian interests is now stuck between the rocks of conflicting ideologies, convenient loyalties, and funding to protect its own people.

MRGA and the Taliban

But MRGA will stop for no one under Putin’s direction. His army might be exhausted by the time he overcomes Ukraine, but the people of that occupied nation will keep fighting back. The frightening truth is that if anyone else gets involved beyond sanctions, Putin has threatened nuclear retaliation, even aggression. He also took control of nuclear power plants in Ukraine, and he’s such a despot that he might just let some radiation leak to cow people to his will.

The really sinister part here is that MRGA has been cheered on by some of Trump’s high-profile fans and supporters, including Tucker Carlson at Fox News––and others. In an interview on Fox News, retired Army Colonel Douglas McGregor, who served under Donald Trump and apparently remains loyal to the cause, opined on behalf of Putin telling host Stuart Varney: “The first five days Russian forces I think frankly were too gentle. They’ve now corrected that. So, I would say another ten days this should be completely over.”

Macgregor went on to say that the war could have “ended days ago” if Zelensky had acquiesced to what Russia wanted.”

Those statements drew a rebuke from a noted Republican purist Liz Cheney: “Douglas MacGregor, nominated by Trump as ambassador to Germany; appointed by Trump as senior advisor to the Secretary of Defense, says Russian forces have been ‘too gentle’ and ‘I don’t see anything heroic’ about Zelensky,” Cheney wrote. “This is the Putin wing of the GOP.”

So we can see that the militaristic nature of the latter-day GOP willingly dismisses any notion of international principle in favor of personal opinion, purpose, and priority. It is the classic example of the “ends justifies the means” approach to gaining and retaining power.

This fealty to power when fueled by aggressive conservative and Christo-fascist instincts is devastating to the health of democracies around the world. It is also brutally ironic given the resistance in the Christian sphere to similar efforts by conservative Muslim sects to establish religious control over entire countries. The entire American occupation in Afghanistan, the “war” that lasted more than twenty years–– was driven in part by attempts to rid the country of the religiously driven motives of the Taliban, an arch-Right brand of Islam. And the United States of America failed to quell that influence.

Ugly convenience

None of this surprises us because the ugly convenience of justifying social control and even conducting wars on religious grounds is as old as civilization itself. But consider the irony: It was Jesus that resisted the legalistic control of society by the religious authorities of his day. They killed him for trying to promote a more liberal and socialistic brand of religion based on love, compassion, and a personal relationship with God. None of that was evident in the conduct of the MAGA revolution in America, whose selfish conduct resounded in the halls of Congress when thousands of fascist-minded people beat the police and raided the Capitol.

Nor is there any sign of Jesus Christ in the Russian MRGA attack on Ukraine. This is also a selfishly narcissistic and vainglorious attempt by Putin to grab respect through brute force rather than earn it by respecting international law and having the confidence to build a nation that does not depend on corruption, dirty dealings, and graft to survive. Like Trump, he’s both immensely calculating and lazy at the same time, and sure enough, Trump initially complimented Putin’s military move into Ukraine as “savvy.” God Forbid if Trump was still President. He’d probably be cheering Putin on as Ukrainians died because Trump no doubt has a chip on his shoulder toward Ukraine’s President, who stood up to his corrupt effort to bribe him into doing some political dirty work on Trump’s behalf. To Donald Trump, there is no sweeter feeling than gaining revenge, and now we can see how bad the situation would be if Trump were still in control.

Functionally, we now recognize that MAGA and MRGA are essentially the same thing, twisting religion to serve despotic needs. That is the Red Letter commonality between two equally fascist movements. It also bears strong resemblance to the motives behind the second World War. And that’s bad news for everyone in the world.

The Trumpism Spectrum explained

November 9, 2021November 9, 2021 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

A HANDS-ON LOOK AT HOW WE GOT FROM THERE (2016) TO HERE (2021) UNDER THE RULE OF EX-PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP

However we define Trumpism, there is no denying its existence in the United States of America. Its effects were on full display during the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. The question we now face is whether Trumpism should be primarily defined as a political or personal condition.

The tactics used to promote Trumpism began with the political slogan Make America Great Again. Those four words symbolized the Trump campaign’s claim that the nation was in desperate need of recovery.

The MAGA slogan worked wonders with those already convinced that Donald Trump represented something “great” about America. His purported wealth and worldwide brand delivered a pre-packaged sense of competency and vision.

Yet that is not what Donald Trump ultimately wound up selling. Instead, he saw an opportunity in convincing people that the nation had abandoned them. That gave millions of already disgruntled people the idea that they had something genuine to complain about. Whether they knew the true sources of their purported misery, or whether they were justified in their self-proclaimed victimhood did not matter. Trump tapped into their anger. That was all that mattered.

To his retinue of pledged supporters, Trump added the support of the evangelical Christian community by choosing a dogmatically zealous Mike Pence as his running mate. The implicit promise in that action was banning abortion and installing some form of Christian theocracy on the nation.

Safely delivered from political criticism by his religious associations, Trump engaged with far-less-admirable brands of populists. Specifically, he offered approval to avowed racist groups as “good people” and chortled with glee as militia groups and violence-prone police threatened to bust heads as a means to maintain order.

All the while, he continued the drumbeat against illegal immigration and repeated his warlike call to ‘build the wall.” That brand of xenophobia resonated with Americans convinced that brown people were freeloaders and stealing their piece of the American pie. Others welcomed Trump’s dog-whistle racism as justification for their own terminal prejudices. Meanwhile, the wealthiest MAGA supporters happily embraced Trump’s “I’ve Got Mine” mentality because it promised a return to tax policies favoring their economic status.

As illustrated in the Trumpism Spectrum, it is easy to trace the initial migration from slogans to tribalism, and from religious legalism to populism. All these tactics were designed to cement a coalition of committed collaborators in the Make America Great Again cabal. Anyone that criticized that cabal was accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome, a supposed mental condition that caused people to act irrationally in response to the ex-President. But that invented term was itself a form of gaslighting, an attempt to make sane people feel crazy about their grip on reality.

Adding to the mix was the rising influence of conspiracy theorists including QAnon, a willfully ignorant and semi-mysterious source of insane accusations and outright lies invented by some Internet gnome lurking on the outskirts of humanity. While Trump griped and whined about the supposed lies contained in the campaign-driven Steele Dossier, he did nothing to counteract rumors that Democrats were involved in human sex trafficking or the daily piles of Right-Wing garbage pumped out by the political right, including but not limited to Fox News.

As Trump’s presidency proceeded, he relied on an increasingly aggressive mix of propaganda to cover up his many illegal activities and political graft in defiance of the emoluments clause and bans on pursuing campaign aid from foreign governments. He was impeached twice for his corruption, but excused by Republican henchman in both the Senate and the House. A few freely admitted that he’d cheated and even broken the law on several counts. But they are power-driven hypocrites and political whores of the worst kind. They are loyal to their party and traitors to our nation.

The only place that Trump’s lies and cheating seemed to catch up with him was during the Covid pandemic when it became obvious that he was both incapable and unconcerned about protecting Americans from a deadly disease. Rather that amend his ways, Trump’s authoritarian instincts drove him to evolve from a man in a perpetual state of denial of his real performance to a man recognizing his failures. Those he feared more than anything else, and in an effort to protect himself from legal and financial jeopardy, he began to plot ways to steal the election in 2020.

This was nothing new, as even before the 2016 election Trump refused to commit his approval for results if he lost. He merely expanded on this tactic in 2020, denying in advance that he could possibly lose. When he did, he launched the Big Lie that the election was “stolen” from him. This lie was invented to foment unrest among his deplorable cabal of truth-denying bigots and zealots. It also appealed to the selfishly wealthy along with the fearful politicians that stood by him through two legitimate impeachments for corruption.

But the sickest loyalty of all is the continued support for Trump even after the acts of sedition conducted by Trump supporters at his direction. The violent, multi-front riots brutalized police officers and left people dead as a result of the insurrection. In the end, Trump invented a brand of fascism that entirely suited him, as he stood watching it all transpire on television even while his violent mob sought to capture and kill the Vice President of the United States. Trump didn’t care. Like his fast-food mentality dictates, he was “having it his way.”

That’s how we got from There to Here over the last six or so years. Looking back at the progression as illustrated on the Trumpism Spectrum graphic, it is pretty clear that it will be too hard to go back through time and fix things. Instead, we need to race forward in the near term to prevent it from happening all over again in 2022 and 2024. Trumpism is a toxic brand of hate-driven politics that was used to beat the nation over the head with an American flag. Despite his ugly pleas, we owe Donald Trump nothing in the way of compassion or compensation. He has done nothing to earn either privilege nor does he deserve it. He is no longer an American in any sense of the word. He is nothing but a greedy traitor, a perpetual con man and an abusive sociopath with nothing to offer the United States of America but an end to the great experiment that launched a democracy worthy of admiration by the whole world.

But under another four years of Trump, that great experiment would cease to exist.

The world would be much different had Al Gore become President of the United States

August 17, 2021 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

What now seems like ancient history, the 2000 United States Presidential election was far closer than most of us probably recall. The website 270 to win shares this succinct summary of what transpired in the wake of Bill Clinton’s two terms:

“The United States presidential election of 2000 was a contest between Republican candidate George W. Bush, then-governor of Texas and son of former president George H. W. Bush (1989–1993), and Democratic candidate Al Gore, then-Vice President.

Bill Clinton, the incumbent President, was vacating the position after serving the maximum two terms allowed by the Twenty-second Amendment. Bush narrowly won the November 7 election, with 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 266 (with one elector abstaining in the official tally).”

The election was skewed by several factors, including the distraction of Ralph Nader running for President. The nearly 3M votes he received undoubtedly stoles votes from Gore’s side of the ledger, potentially handing Gore the victory had Nader not stubbornly stuck to his efforts.

What most might recall is the long delay in vote-counting that came down to a Florida decision that handed the election to Bush and Cheney.

2000 Election Facts

Outcome of race unknown for several weeks due to dispute over close vote totals in Florida
Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 2,882,728 votes, but no Electoral Votes
Gore won DC; however one elector did not cast a vote
One of only 5 elections (1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, 2016) where the popular vote winner was defeated
Popular vote totals from Federal Elections 2000.
Issues of the Day: Impeachment, Presidential ethics, Good economy

To make matters worse, the controversies over recounts and the narrow margin of 537 distinguishable votes was thrown first to the Florida Supreme Court and then the United States Supreme court, where five justices nominated by Republican Presidents Reagan, Bush and Nixon all voted to install Bush as President of the United States.

Then the Shit Show began.

First, Bush and Cheney triumphantly ignored credible warnings about the 9/11 attacks handed over from President Clinton and Richard Clarke. We all know what happened then. Terrorists flew planes into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. The world watched in horror and fear, but the first thing the Bush clan did was fly bin Laden family members out of the country. As reported on CBS News, “Two dozen members of Osama bin Laden’s family were urgently evacuated from the United States in the first days following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, according to the Saudi ambassador to Washington.

One of bin Laden’s brothers frantically called the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington looking for protection, Prince Bandar bin Sultan told The New York Times. The brother was sent to a room in the Watergate Hotel and was told not to open the door.

Most of bin Laden’s relatives were attending high school and college. The young members of the bin Laden family were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret place in Texas and then to Washington, The Times reported Sunday.”

Bush and Cheney did the big power play of attacking Afghanistan to get at the vigilante member of the bin Laden family. They failed. Then Bush admitted, “I am not that concerned about him” In fact, bin Laden escaped into Pakistan to hide out for another decade or more before being hunted down and killed during the Obama administration.

All the while, American forces rooted around in Afghanistan trying to quell the influence of the Taliban, who were essentially blamed for the 9/11 attacks when actually, it was just one rich hermit and a band of willing mercenaries that carried out the dirty work of killing thousands of Americans on a bright fall day in New York City on 9/11.

Lying all along

So the Bush-Cheney regime never had the story right or a plan in place to exit Afghanistan if nothing was being accomplished. The Taliban might have been chased into the hills, but did not disappear. When American killed one Taliban leader another one simply slipped into place. As all this warlike activity transpired, warlords sucked up skidloads of American dollars while our troops tried not to get killed. Thousands did. Tens of thousands more were wounded. And still we stayed.

That was not even the worst part of life after Gore lost to Bush. Because one of the pet projects of the illegitimate President was to attempt a Middle East takeover with an invasion of Iraq. The United States attacked that nation based on falsified information about weapons of mass destruction of which international inspection teams found no evidence. Even General Colin Powell got sucked into the Post-9/11 fray and lied to us all about what was really going on in Iraq.

Which was awful, but still no reason to invade that nation on claims that it had anything to do with 9/11 or that Iraq posed any terrorist threat to the United States. Yet still we attacked. Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and sentenced to death. But all that America could find to do in the wake of that murderer’s death was to round people up and torture them in the same prisons used by Hussein to persecute his own countrymen.

The Iraq War Crimes Adventure also welcomed mercenary forces from guns-for-hire companies such as Blackwater and Halliburton, both of which reportedly direspected American troops and committed war crimes of their own on occasion.

The Brookings Institute reported: “But there were two problems: Despite its mission of guarding U.S. officials in Iraq, Blackwater had no license with the Iraqi government. Secondly, the murky legal status of the contractors meant they might be considered exempt from Iraqi law because of a mandate left over from the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. governing authority in Iraq that was dissolved more than two years prior.”

The relative lawlessness that led to billions of dollars wasted in military expenditures, torture and war crimes in Iraq seemed not to bother the Bush regime. It was our soldiers that paid for this folly with their health and their lives. Men like Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld famously dismissed our military’s lack of preparation for the Iraq venture by stating, ““You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Unapologetic wastefulness

Such was the unapologetic approach of Bush and Cheney to everything they encountered. As America squandered trillions in its treasure on extended, fruitless wars, the world’s climate was busy heating up due to global warming. The Republican control of the Oval Office, Senate, Congress and the Supreme Court ensured that no legislation would pass to help counter the rolling effects of carbon dioxide polluting the atmosphere. Al Gore published a book warning that America had better look out for its true enemy, which was climate change, but conservatives mocked him as pedantic and hypocritical.

Now the government in Afghanistan has collapsed and the Taliban rushed across the nation taking over provincial capitols and finally, the national government in Kabul gave up and ran off. None of the Afghani troops “trained” by American forces over the last two decades put up any resistance. The entire Bush-Cheney debacle collapsed before the world’s eyes. Meanwhile, climate change is burning up the world with July 2021 registering as the hottest month in all recorded history.

It would have been so much different had Al Gore not been blocked from serving as President of the United States. He won the popular vote. In all likelihood, he even won the Electoral College vote if politics had not been played in the queasy state of Florida.

We could have avoided 9/11. Most certainly, the former VP is a prudent man who understood the threat of terrorism in real time, not as some abstract distraction to be avoided by the likes of Bush and Cheney. America might well have taken steps to ward off climate change as well. At least we’d have a start of some sort.

Lies and racism

Instead, we were forced to suffer through eight years of blatant lies and ractist attacks against President Obama, who also happened to rescue the nation from the collapsed economy wrought by the many abuses wrought upon it during the Bush years, when the price of health insurance alone climbed by 96%. When Obama pushed for the Affordable Health Care act, Republicans attacked the concept as unconstitutional and socialist. But much like Al Gore, Obama had American’s long-term interests in mind.

Sadly, the populist reaction to good governance was to install an openly racist demagogue in the person of Donald Trump, a TV personality that ignores science, denies climate change, and claimed to love our troops even while his apparent buddies the Russians were placing bounties on their heads. The facts about Republican corruption are plain to see. They should be much more broadly known.

Trump was nothing more than a feckless version of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, combined. He exhibits the same bumbling inability to communicate effectively, instead engaging in a “downtalking” approach soaked in the ideology of victimhood. He pats his supporters on the head with patriarchal cynicism and glee, also welcoming the adoring affections of hypocritical evangelical supporters eager to trade their religious ethics for access to power.

Trump devastated the country with hapless tariffs, greedy tax cuts and rampant golfing excursions that cost the country hundreds times more than the meager $360K (or whatever) salary comes with the office. Where Obama was serious, considerate and collaborative, Trump was specious, angry, and bullying.

That approach appealed to his deplorable political base, which included openly racist populists and whorishly sycophantic political operatives within his administration that to this day claim that a legitimate election was stolen through some outlandish method for which there is zero evidence. That led to a massive insurrection in which the core of governance in the United States of America was under attack by a fascist mob urged on (and gleefully witnessed) by Trump and his minions.

But then, there was zero real evidence for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was zero evidence that Rush Limbaugh was ever honest or right about anything in his life. There was zero evidence that torture was necessary or desirable in Iraq. Zero evidence that Guantanamo was a good way to hold supposed terrorists when many were simply people caught up in the military horrors executed upon Iraq and Afghanistan.

There is zero evidence that anything the Republican Party has done the last twenty to forty years has benefited the United States of America in any way. There is less than zero evidence that the party proper has any intention of admitting to its incompetence, cruelty, or the many criminal indictments and convictions of its political representatives during the Reagan, Bush II or Trump administrations.

Yes, this country and the whole world could–and should–have been much different if Al Gore had become President. Instead, we’re left with a nation torn apart by domestic terrorists, gun proliferation, racism on the rise, and attacks on the Capitol by lawless vigilantes acting on the urges of a twice-impeached ex-President who lied so often in office that the entire world was gaslighted by his dangerously narcissistic psyche.

His toxic brand of rule led to more than 600,000 Americans dying from Covid-19 infection in a country where it was perfectly possible to prevent such tragic loss of life. But Trump lied to the nation about the threat, obscured its potential contagiousness, and mocked those wearing masks to prevent its spread. Even to this moment in time, his ardently deluded supporters refuse to wear masks and are contracting the Delta variant and dying in the hospital while begging to be vaccinated.

But it’s too late, in most of those case. It’s almost too late to recognize the pandemic that is Republican policy and the anti-government plague it has wrought on the country. As President Joe Biden noted, we have a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” That symbolizes the delusional nature of gaslighting tactics dating all the way back to President Ronald Reagan and his anti-American claim that government must be shrunk down to nothing in order to serve the people better. He was a liar just like the Bushes and the Cheney’s and the Trumps. The McConnells and the McCarthys are just as bad, along with the Fox News and Tucker Carlson crowd. It’s sickening.

None of this would have happened if Al Gore had become President. None of it.

Worshipping the wrong heroes

March 31, 2021 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

G. Gordon Liddy. A lifetime cheater who claimed a higher ground.

The Chicago Tribune carried a news story about the death at age 90 of G. Gordon Liddy, the well-known mastermind of the Watergate burglary that led to scandal and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon.

Liddy said of his actions, “I’m proud of the fact that I am the guy who did not talk.”

That sort of “loyalty” leads to all kinds of misery in this world. The Tribune article contained this interesting observation. “Born in Hoboken, N.J., George Gordon Battle Liddy was a frail boy who grew up in a neighborhood populated mostly by German-Americans. From friends and a maid who was a German national, Liddy developed a curiosity about German leader Adolf Hitler and was inspired by listening to Hitler’s radio speeches in the 1930s.’

As we all know, followers of Hitler were famous for ‘not talking’ even as the regime carried through on plans for a Holocaust taking the lives of millions of people. All while Hitler claimed to be aiming the nation toward a “higher ground.”

But Liddy liked Hitler because he felt kinship with the man’s journey from frailty to power.

“If an entire nation could be changed, lifted out of weakness to extraordinary strength, so could one person,” Liddy wrote in “Will,” his autobiography. Liddy decided it was critical to face his fears and overcome them. At age 11, Liddy roasted a rat and ate it to overcome his fear of rats. “From now on, rats could fear me as they feared cats,” he wrote.

That instinct for payback against the world seems to have driven Liddy to extremes in ideology that bordered on manic. “While recruiting a woman to help carry out one of his schemes, Liddy tried to convince her that no one could force him to reveal her identity or anything else against his will. To convince her, Liddy held his hand over a flaming cigarette lighter. His hand was badly burned. The woman turned down the job.”

That refusal to join Liddy’s team was an indication of sanity. No completely rational person behaves as Liddy did in that or any other circumstance.

Manic charisma

Liddy’s crazed brand of commitment to cause and manic charisma grew a great following among conservatives as he became a popular media personality. “Liddy learned to market his reputation as a fearless, if sometimes overzealous, advocate of conservative causes. Liddy’s syndicated radio talk show, broadcast from Virginia-based WJFK, was long one of the most popular in the country. He wrote best-selling books, acted in TV shows like “Miami Vice,” was a frequent guest lecturer on college campuses, started a private eye franchise and worked as a security consultant. For a time, he teamed on the lecture circuit with an unlikely partner, 1960s LSD guru Timothy Leary.”

Liddy never hid even his most dire intentions, even illegal motives: “Liddy became known for such offbeat suggestions as kidnapping war protest organizers and taking them to Mexico during the Republican National Convention; assassinating investigative journalist Jack Anderson; and firebombing the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning think tank in Washington where classified documents leaked by Ellsberg were being stored.”

History shows that Liddy worked to subvert the legitimate dealings of government on behalf of Nixon. After serving time for his crimes, he decide to plant roots of public distrust in the government and even law enforcement agents. “In the mid-1990s, Liddy told gun-toting radio listeners to aim for the head when encountered by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “Head shots, head shots,” he stressed, explaining that most agents wear bullet-resistant vests under their jackets. Liddy said later he wasn’t encouraging people to hunt agents, but added that if an agent comes at someone with deadly force, “you should defend yourself and your rights with deadly force.”

It is no wonder that an America fed such rhetoric for so long grew immune to the use of high-powered, cop-killing weapons such as AR-15s when men like Liddy were spouting anti-government rhetoric over the decades. Liddy normalized such violence in the minds of millions of people. He made them believe that violence equals patriotism and freedom.

Fascist roots and violent instincts

Liddy’s autocratic attitude and fascist roots fueled his violent instincts. These he spilled into the American dialogue without remorse or responsibility. We can draw a straight line from Liddy’s unhinged rhetoric to the brute nature of Trumpism and the insurrection at the Capitol driven by domestic terrorists, white supremacists and stark-raving nationalists claiming.the higher ground even while they devastated law officers charged with protecting the elected official inside.

One can easily imagine G. Gordon Liddy masterminding such a coup, just as he tried to do way back in the 1970s.Trump preached to his followers in advance of his attempted sedition, “Come to DC. It will be wild!”

Trump’s level of corruption exceeded even President Ronald Reagan’s administration, one of the most corrupt in history with a pile of indictments and convictions left behind. The leading contender for Most Corrupt was Colonel Oliver North, who engineered the Iran-Contra affair and then went on to preach in mega-churches that he’s always been on God’s side.

Generations of lies

The liar in chief Donald Trump made a career exploiting cognitive dissonance in his followers.

A significant portion of America has spent several generations worshipping the wrong kind of heroes. That political bulwark Pat Buchanan claims this backwards philosophy of elevating criminals and corrupt bigots to top-level posts is pointing the country in the right direction. In a column titled “Trump–Once and Future Kind,” he praises the ex-president for his supposed success in economic terms. “Trump succeeded in enacting the traditional GOP platform of low taxes and deregulation, producing record-low unemployment — before the pandemic hit”

But Buchanan exhibits cognitive dissonance in his failure to even mention how Trump instantly spoiled economic prospects by selfishly denying the portent of the pandemic because he feared any deleterious effects to the economy. The result was a pandemic that spilled out of control, resulting in the need for economic lockdowns at the state level to assist overwhelmed healthcare systems. Trump’s lack of vision and stubborn claim that the pandemic was not a threat––despite his own admission to Bob Woodward that it was––directly caused the downfall of his supposed plans for prosperity. Trump has no one to blame but himself for his failure as a President.

Yet Trump speciously claimed the election itself was fraudulent because he could not imagine that so many would show up to vote against his despotic lies and political deceptions.

Blame Bush and Cheney, if anyone

Trump liked to blame all of America’s problems on President Barack Obama. But actually, the endless wars and drain on the economy caused by the economic recession under Bush took every effort by Obama to reconcile. He was largely a success at that, and won a second term despite constant Republican obfuscation.

Obama could not cure all of Bush’s mess because the GOP never admitted they were the primary cause. The feckless administrative style of George Bush depended on the direction of Dick Cheney, mastermind of the doctrine that led our country into the war in Iraq under false and badly miscalculated pretenses. That cost the country $7T in Iraq alone, all while torturing and killing its residents in the supposed name of peace. That war was America’s greatest failure, worse in many respects than the Vietnam debacle fifty years before.

All this misguided saber-rattling impoverishes the nation yearly, with a military so bloated by waste that a recent investigation into its accounting procedures resulted in a “no-contest” from the accountants hired to do the job. “We can’t even begin to figure out where the money goes,” was the summary issued, and I paraphrase, but that’s the outcome.

It all comes back to the toxic misappropriation of honesty and truth by men like G. Gordon Liddy, Oliver North, Dick Cheney and Donald Trump. They are all men raised to believe in themselves as a higher power unto itself. Those who believe in them are worshipping the wrong kind of heroes.

Cymbalism is hard at work in America

December 7, 2020December 7, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

UNITED STATES – NOVEMBER 19: Rudolph Giuliani, attorney for President Donald Trump, conducts a news conference at the Republican National Committee, on lawsuits regarding the outcome of the 2020 presidential election on Thursday, November 19, 2020. (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

Unless you live under a rock, you likely saw star witness Melissa Carone testifying at the Michigan election hearings at the behest of that crotch-grabbing, apelike fart machine known as Rudy Giuliani. To Trump Supporters, he’s the Great Ape of the GOP. To his detractors, he’s a sad little monkey banging conspiratorial cymbals (symbols) together in hopes of making a few bucks before his battery runs out.

Carone’s daftly aggressive, self-proclaimed expert testimony at the so-called hearings went viral because her seemingly drunken, completely unproven claims about results from that state’s election were so far-fetched even her hairdo could not seem to keep up with the madness. The crazies seemed to be spewing out the top of her cranium.

The United States is repeatedly plagued by drama of this nature. It is being driven by claims of Republicans (with and without hair) that the election was fixed. All these claims have proven pointless, false and outright scandalous in court. But they keep parading new monkeys in front of judges across the country. More cymbals. More clashes.

The reality show spectacle of modern day politics is a carnival side show highlighted by the GOP’s witless attraction to the hot mess world of blathering blondes and quasi-attractive female attack dogs who earn their keep saying things only the terminally ditzy dare utter in public. Sarah Palin turned out to be the rule, not the exception. They wanted to make her Vice President of the United States, but she sounded quite a bit like Melissa Carone at times.

But Carone takes the hapless blather to a new level. It is also no coincidence that the ecklessly bold hairstyle of Melissa Carone holds quite a parallel to the tragically coiffed visage of Donald Trump. But truth be told, he’s far more vain, drama-driven and idiotic than any female in history. His hairdo is symbolic of a desperate brand of vanity and a need for complimentary attention bordering on sociopathy.* He’s a freak, in other words.

The affectations of the terminally vain do matter. They legitimately warn us that appearances do matter. That is especially true when it comes to toxic personalities disguising themselves as credible human beings. The sight of Rudy Giuliani’s bad makeup job running down his face during a press conference is proof that he’s busy hiding something, and failing at it.It may be fear over his crumbling persona or his cymbal-clashing loyalty to his Monkey Master Donald Trump. In any case his appearance and behavior are a sickness of spirit on full display.

The fact that Trump’s supporters so easily dismiss these painfully obvious signals of disturbed minds is evidence of the tribal nature that an ugly jungle ethic has produced these days in America. The vigilante justice hiding just outside the Beltway is no more sophisticated or considerate than a band of murderous chimpanzees.

Are Trump supporters stupid? That’s not the right question. They are tribally devoted. They follow the orders of those in power. That’s far more dangerous than being stupid. That’s the militia mentality at work in America today. It is primal, racist, nationalistic and frankly, quite evil. And Trump loves it.

It is simply unacceptable to cheer on a being whose claims to authority are so base they represent a step backward in human evolution. We should never malign a beast so nobly earnest as the orangutan, and that is not the intention here. But when it comes to the lower instincts of primates in general, we have to consider both appearances and facts. Donald Trump appears to be functioning at a cognizance level just below human most of the time. He refuses to read even the most basic information assigned to his job. He denigrates medicine and science.

As a point of consideration about the face of this blunt trauma mentality, one of these photos is an image of an angry Donald Trump. The other is an apparently disturbed orangutan. See if you can honestly tell the difference?

The point we’re making here is that supporting Donald Trump constitutes a step back from what civilized people believe about human society. The display of sloppy rhetoric combined with primal gossip by Melissa Carone serves as a textbook example of cultural devolution. It’s hidden behind sex and ritualized behavior just like it is in nature, but the purposes are the same. It’s about gaining and keeping control over others.

Melissa Carone in her petulant monkey mode.

True to form, Carone behaved like a snotty little monkey at the zoo flinging shit against the windows to disturb the onlookers and get a reaction out of everyone. This is how Trump behaves as well. When he leaves, they’re going to have to hose down the insides of the windows at the White House. He’s been holed up flinging shit at the world for weeks now.

This is what we’ve been reduced to in America. It’s long past time to admit that Trumpian Zoo is a failed experiment in jungle despotism. He needs to be sent back to his own cage in Mar-A-Lago where he can carouse with the likes of Melania and Melissa and please himself openly without our having to put up with his lowbrow antics and greedy Banana Republic appeals.

Let the man have his grunting mates and a lacivious harem. That’s how he likes to live, and he has the right to do so. It’s just not what the Founding Fathers had in mind for a civilized nation like the United States of America.

*Sociopathy refers to a pattern of antisocial behaviors and attitudes, including manipulation, deceit, aggression, and a lack of empathy for others.

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.

On elections and political awakenings

November 2, 2020November 2, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

I was quite a young man when Ronald Reagan was elected. Yet right away, I knew that we came from a different political place. While no ‘one-issue voter,’ the environment has always been a main concern. Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, said things that made me want to scream. “When the last tree falls,” he was once quoted, “Jesus will come.”

In some ways, nothing much has changed in the Republican Party since then. Religious zealots still influence party leaders. The GOP still cuts taxes and blames government spending for causing the national debt. Conservative warhawks rattle swords and send young men (and now women) to useless wars. Stories are invented and blame is deflected from all these ideological travesties. Reagan claimed surprise at the Iran-Contra scandal. Bush claimed not to know that terrorists were plotting the 9/11 attacks. Then he claimed to know that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Behind the scenes Dick Cheney sent war profiteers to work and profited massively in the process. Then news of torture emerged. As a nation, we behaved no better than Saddam Hussein.

Then the Recession hit and millions lost their jobs. From that wreckage emerged a healing candidate named Barack Obama. He led the nation out of its tanked conditions and set a course of steady economic recovery that continues to this day.

Bitterness and denial

But people bitter about their party’s persistent failures were also in denial about the effects of Republican policies that devastated unions, devalued labor, flattened worker wages and shipped jobs overseas under the capitalist philosophy of globalization. So they cast around for blame and found cause for their anger in an intelligent Black President whom they accused of sowing the seeds of economic, race and class division in the country. It didn’t take much for those same people to transfer that hatred to a woman possessed of a similar intellect to Obama, and who spoke plainly about the “deplorables” more eager to make trouble than to make peace and work toward a better America.

These disgruntled Americans found their hero in a troublemaker named Donald Trump, whom they praised for his “honesty” about the state of the country and embraced the euphemistic slogan “Make America Great Again” because it conveniently covered up the greedy notion that the nation would be improved by turning back efforts to grant civil rights and economic parity. Instead, MAGA masked the selfish notion that diversity is the enemy of all prosperity.

These are the people that voted for Donald Trump. They may have had varied reasons; desire for tax breaks, banning abortion, contracting in a fit of xenophobia, or replacing the Constitution with conservative Christian beliefs, but all became one with the cultish opportunity to vote into a power the man promising to give them each what they wanted.

To some extent, that is what happened. Massive tax breaks were passed. But the result was that the nation tumbled into greater debt and a bulging national deficit. That doesn’t make America great again. Then Trump struck a trade war with China whose effects required billions in farm subsidies to bribe farmers into accepting the market losses incurred as a result. Guess who paid for that? American taxpayers.

Everything the Trump administration did, it seemed, produced a net-loss or required a quid pro quo that too closely resembled his bankrupt behavior in personal life. Then news broke that Trump University was nailed for fraud and forced to pay a $25M settlement to those bilked by the fake school. Then the Trump Foundation got caught doing illegal stuff as well. It was also forced to close down with a warning that no one involved could engage in non-profit activity again.

Avoiding facts at all costs

Trump’s defenders, including the Republican Party, whose platform Trump absorbed like orange face paint, were increasingly forced to go outside the realm of fact to find ways to defend their corrupt leader. Even the seemingly righteous on the Right Wing so often collapse under the falsehood of their virtues, it is no longer a joke to brand all of them a tragedy waiting to happen. Such was the case with Jerry Falwell, Jr., now Rudy Giuliani, and a long line of Fox News sexual harassers whose highbrowed social and political criticism was proven farcical when the truth came out about their immorality and corruption. They’re all phonies in the end.

How do Right-wing defenders deal with the hypocrisy? They deny it is real.

When Trump was impeached for engaging in corrupt behavior in trying to coerce Ukraine into doing his political bidding in favor of his campaign, his supporters conveniently called it “Fake News.” Then the Senate broke its oath to the American people by refusing to conduct a legitimate inquiry by calling witnesses associated with the high crimes and misdemeanors Trump committed. Trump then doubled down in his corrupt instincts with even more disturbing behavior by granting favors to other world leaders, especially where his personal business interests lie. Donald Trump is the most corrupt politician to ever hold office in America. Anywhere. No one comes close.

Hoping for change

Rational Americans have awaited a political awakening when it comes to Trump’s entire lack of character on these and other issues. His verbal and social media support for white supremacists, violent militias and police who commit acts of brutality, even murder, are all signs that his fascist instincts lie just beneath his fake tan and vainglorious hairdo.

This all goes back to the Republican belief that began with Ronald Reagan’s unwitting tolerance for men and women who believe that the “ends justifies the means.” It is ironic indeed that the GOP and Trump should be questioning Joe Biden’s mental fitness when Reagan proved daft and fecklessly blind to the corruption taking place under his watch.

I saw it all for what it was way back when I was in my twenties experiencing my first political awakening. I’ve listened carefully over the years for signs that principled people were at work within the Republican Party. Those people have all been silenced, chased away or forced to act with complicit devotion to a narcissist brute with zero morals and even less character.

They call him a hero. A Savior. Some even insist that he’s a Messenger of God.

If any of those things were true, Trump has done nothing to earn them. In fact, his denial of the Covid-19 threat has produced 20% of all the world’s deaths from the disease even though the United States of America represents 3% of the world’s population. He’s not a Savior. He’s a failure.

The same goes for virtually everything thing advocated by the GOP for the last forty years. What single policy can anyone point to that improved the lives of everyday Americans? The Bush tax cuts were a pittance for middle class and poor Americans. So were the Trump tax cuts. These policies were lies designed to bribe people into supporting a policy with just two priorities: retaining and granting the rich even more money.

Tomorrow is another election. The GOP is doing everything it can to ignore its ugly, corrupt past and horridly compromised present in order to win the day. This is not America’s finest hour. I’ve been railing at Republicans ever since the dawn of my political awareness. My successes on that front are admittedly local in nature, but we do what we can.

Let’s hope this election is not America’s last faint cry for survival as a democracy, a republic, or a nation. Because that’s what’s at stake this time around. If Trump wins, the best we can hope for is a Senate and House takeover so that the man writhes in frustration until he withers and dies while Tweeting on his golden toilet bowl.

The White Beard Factor is killing America

August 3, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

An associate on Facebook sent me a link to the ravings of a so-called “Christian activist” Scott Lively. I clicked through and right away saw what the guy was going to be like. He had the full white beard of so many nationalistic arch-patriots claiming Jesus as their Savior with hate in their hearts.

It used to be true that these guys were relatively harmless. Typically they stood out in the front of the house yelling at kids and dogs to stay off their yard. That was their fortress against the world. Probably a little whisky in their morning coffee, a quick read of a few pages in a greasy Bible, and out they’d go to stand in the morning sun playing pocket pool with their saggy nutsack waiting for some errant kid to wheel a Sting-Ray bike across the turf grass.

On humid days, their aviator glasses would fog up, requiring a quick rub session using the cantilevered fabric of a shirt hanging from their profuse gut. If the lawn was deemed safe from intrusion for the nonce, they’d pick up their sprinkler-soaked copy of the Wall Street Journal and sit on the front porch with a pistol in the milk crate just in case the n****** decided to waltz into town.

I’d like to say that I hate to generalize, but I really don’t. When the cliche fits, some people get to wear it. Just take a look a this Scott Lively guy and read about his views. Then study that White Beard and tell me you haven’t seen it on a thousand angry mugs in a thousand photos of Trump rallies. These are the rapid consumers of Fox News who tune into local AM Radio stations to listen to tripe from the likes of Salem radio and Rush Limbaugh and even that faux-kindess stuff from the Moody Bible Institute and evangelicals across the nation.

The White Beard Factor is real. These guys consider America their front lawn. They’ve got the pistols and the sagging nutsacks to prove it, and they’re just itching for a chance to swing into action.

Lacking that, they’re in full support of an angry bastard who covers his face in war paint and sports a radical combover to rival the aging vanity of every White Beard in the country. These are men of a certain age whose toxic masculinity oozes from their brains. On one hand they’ll yell at the kids on their lawn and the next wink at their porch buddy with a creepy smile and say, “She’ll be a hot one in a couple years.”

This is how the White Beard Factor works. It utters its fears, spews its anger and claims all it can see as a personal possession. And it is killing America one conflicted soul at a time.

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