Trump came out with his budget proposal and to the surprise of absolutely no one he blew the military part of that budget up to monstrous proportions while cutting the state department and almost every other area of the budget.
In adding almost $54 billion to the military budget and over a trillion in infrastructure costs, along with tax cuts to the rich, he has shown clearly that he cares nothing for the conservative cause.
When Trump was campaigning he made a lot of noise about how we had a weak military and how he was going to fix it. Okay, this weak military had a budget that equaled the next seven largest militaries in the world combined. The problem with our military budget isn’t that it doesn’t contain enough money, it’s that it’s being spent in the wrong places and even when it is spent in the right places, too much of it is being wasted by Pentagon indifference to the grand theft that goes on within the walls of the five sided building. Theft and waste account for a large portion of the taxpayer money that is currently being thrown at our military.
Mick Mulvaney when speaking about Trump’s new budget loves to say that he is ashamed to ask a single mother of two in Detroit to help pay for Public Broadcasting. It doesn’t seem to bother him at all to ask that same lady to pay for all the loot that the crooks and idiots are taking and losing from our military budget.
We should never sell our military short. They are essential to America maintaining our position as the leader of the world but we have to be smart about it. It’s very difficult to be smart when we have a President with the mentality of a four year old with ADD. Donald Trump is in fact, the coward in chief, the man who used his father’s money to sleaze out of the draft and like another President who ran and hid in the marshes of the southeast and then became a huge military supporter, he will surly lead us into war.
Bush loved to dress up in be-medaled military gear, looking like nothing more than a South American dictator and strut across the deck of a carrier while pronouncing, “Mission accomplished!” Even as we were losing the war he started. The current moron showed the same penchant for playing military dress-up when he appeared on another carrier and waved the flags of war.
Trump was elected as the change President. Okay, it’s time to change the military not just make it bigger. First we need control of the Pentagon, which spends money like a drunken sailor in a Bangkok whorehouse. Instead of wasting money on planes that have not been functional in 15 years of development, instead of building tanks that have no practical value, maybe the Pentagon should look to building up our cyber command because that is where the next war will be fought regardless of how the military hardware manufacturers feel about it. Russia has already shown that in the hacking of our election process and those of other nations around the world. Cyber is already the current battleground and we are losing a war, which we could easily win.
If Trump had the intelligence to listen to General Mathis, one of the few functional cabinet appointments he has made, he might understand that we can only win wars if we also manage to win peace. It doesn’t take a genius to realize this. All you have to do is look at Iraq or Afghanistan. The State Department needs more money not less, but that wouldn’t give Trump a chance to dress up in ill-fitting jackets and silly caps and parade around carriers like a clown who just left his tiny car.
But with this ridiculous budget and the recent failure of Trump to repeal and replace Obamacare, along with the realization in all parts of the nation except the White House, that neither the Mexicans nor our congress are going to give this clown the billions to build his wall, it becomes clear that there is no plan by which Trump is operating.
Trump won an election. Like any good demagogue he was able to convince the naïve and the true believers that he was going to save their lives but like the lazy, incompetent, egomaniacal sociopath he is he did none of the work that would prepare him to lead the biggest economy and the most powerful country in the world and now he is completely without resources. He obviously has no idea how Washington works and thinks he can just order people around the way he did when he was a running his sleazy company.
There are those of us who voted against him but were hoping for the sake of the country that he might become some kind of functional leader, but observation over the last seventy days has blown that hope out of the water. This is a man too lazy to work hard and too egomaniacal to understand that he must learn. He is too much of a bully to ever understand how not to alienate everyone who can possibly help him.
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There has been a lot of talk recently about the possible accusations of treason against Trump and many of his associates. This has come up in relation to the Russians cyber attacks on our electoral process but right now this blog views that as only a remote possibility when seen in context with the statements of Steve Bannon, Trump’s closest advisor and a man who declared on TV at the CPAC convention last month that the purpose of this administration is the “deconstruction of the administrative state.”
What actually, does that mean? Well the “administrative state” is the system of taxes, laws, regulations and international agreements by which this nation is governed. One who wants to deconstruct that order is planning to destroy the state as we know it and open the political door to chaos.
Bannon has stated that “If you look at the cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction.” It sounds wild and improbable until you actually look at Trump’s cabinet nominees and realize that many of them, specifically EPA, education, labor, health & human resources, department of energy and even the Attorney General’s office have been staffed with people so at odds with the goals of those posts that they appear to have been appointed to destroy their sections of government. Agencies that were established to ensure that we have clean water, clean air, fair labor laws, fair housing rules, anti-discrimination laws, financial protections food and drug safety, high educational standards and safe nuclear protections have been handed over to men and women who know nothing about their franchises or are deliberately opposed to those franchise’s goals.
These agencies were established to foster and promote the welfare of the American citizen. They were established because history has clearly shown that neither congress nor the states are up to the task of doing their jobs and it was decided that these agencies would be established to carry out the work of making peoples lives livable. When Bannon makes his treasonous proposals he is speaking of a country where the citizens are left at the mercy of the corporate state and where big business will thrive on the people’s labor and will do its best to subjugate them for the benefit of the rich and powerful. This cannot be allowed to happen. Bannon’s vision of an America where industry and the states are free to ride over and crush the people is no better than that of any Third World dictatorship and his championing of this vision makes any Russian interference seem small time.
Bannon and Trump must be stopped in this plan. If they are not, if the disastrous cabinet picks are allowed to destroy their agencies, we might just s well throw in the towel. If Bannon and Trump are successful in destroying the cabinet agencies, the country as we know it is over. It is unbelievable that the media is allowing this situation to go almost unreported. This is the biggest scandal of the Trump administration. The Russians are a foreign power. Bannon is a treasonous snake operating right out of the White House. It isn’t like his goals are any big secret. He has stated them loud and clear for everyone to know. Why aren’t the Democratic leaders going after him? Why aren’t the sane Republican leaders doing the same? This guy is the most dangerous person in the country right now and he must be stopped before he runs what has taken two and a half centuries to builid and he turns this nation into a totalitarian swamp.
How did Bannon get into this position of influence? It wasn’t really very hard. He discerned at an early date that Trump was desirous of being President, not of leading the nation. He hooked on, understanding that if Trump could achieve the unachievable that he, Bannon would be in a position to promote his goals. He was right. Trump loves being President, loves the adulation of his base, loves making speeches and signing bills but has absolutely no inclination to do the work that a President needs to do in order to be successful.
Trump has made almost zero effort to learn anything about either his office or the people he has appointed, while Bannon, who is ever whispering in his ear, has done a lot of homework and makes the decisions that enable Trump to run off to his hotels and play golf with his friends.
One wonders how long it will take Trump to realize that all the decisions made so far by his administration have been disastrous. He has accomplished nothing and has made enemies of everyone. He has attacked the Intelligence Services, the Press, the Democrats, the Republicans, Wall Street, our judicial system, our ex-President who tried to help him, along with world leaders from Germany, Great Britain Australia, Mexico, North Korea, China and every other country, friend or foe that he has communicated with except Russia, our only true enemy. He has discarded treaties, ignored organizations with which we are involved, rattled his little tiny saber and done just about everything that a President can do wrong. And he’s done it all in just 70 days. That must be a new record for either gross incompetence or outlandish stupidity. Or is he just moving ahead on a plan set down for him by Steve Bannon that will lead to Bannon’s goal, the deconstruction of the state. I know that Trump’s base were looking for change, but I would be really surprised to find out that they wanted to create chaos. That’s what Bannon wants. Maybe, if he understood it, there’s an outside chance it’s what Trump would want too. I just don’t think he understands the cliff that Bannon is leading him toward.