Bits & Pieces #99

Nick Mulvaney, a clown who wanted to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was appointed by the idiot in the White House as head of that agency this weekend. The CFPB was put together by Elizabeth Warren to protect you and me from predatory big business, which is always trying to screw us.

Mulvaney has called the Bureau a joke but the only joke is Mulvaney and the asshole that appointed him

******

Donald Trump, the would-be dictator keeps attacking the free press in this country. Of course he hates the press because it is free to say stuff about him that he doesn’t like. Trump the most outrageous liar in the history of the Presidency calls the news “fake.”   Sure, sometimes there’s “fake news” especially when it’s being reported by Fox News, but most news by reliable outlets like NY Times and The Washington Post is very reliable as has been proven over the last hundred years. Trump has only discovered “fake news” in the last couple of years as he continues being caught in his thousands of lies.

It has gotten to the point where nothing Trump says can be believed by anyone but those few die hard fanatics who refuse to see anything wrong with a man who lies constantly and by his own admission abuses women.

******

So all the noise about sexual harassment has finally made its way to someone that the liberals didn’t want involved. I’m talking about Al Franken. What’s interesting is that Franken’s mess straddled the areas of accusation that have made up most of the stories; entertainment and politics. Let me try to shed some light on bow the various players’ inappropriate actions stack up against each other. The stars of the controversy so far are:

Donald Trump: accused by many women of inappropriate behavior. He paid them off and there is no one left to publicly accuse him – except the girls from the beauty pageants who seemingly have not been contacted yet. Of course it’s not like they don’t have enough to say to generate a headline. Trump has not just confessed to inappropriate behavior but has bragged about it. No apologies forthcoming. But wait! Just yesterday Trump decided to declare that the voice of the Access Hollywood tape is not his but that of an impersonator.

Roy Moore– It started with one woman, a Trump voter and has grown to a flock of accusers. This all involved teenaged girls, some under the age of consent, so we are talking about criminal acts in some instances. And it’s not just the girls but employees of a mall from which he was banned who are accusing him. He refuses to admit anything and has solicited a coterie of degenerate evangelical minsters who will accept any perverted behavior as long as their candidate is against gay marriage and abortion. They attack the women and the press and sing his dubious praises to their congregations. Why are these men, supposedly of God, defending a degenerate child molester? It’s pretty simple really. Moore backs up all their homophobic, misogynistic, racist beliefs and they know he will fight the fight they want him to fight.

So both of the above along with most of the entertainment figures so far involved in abusing women were in positions of power. This seems to be one of the principle attractions to the various perverts. Trump bragged about being able to wander around in the dressing rooms of his pageants while the girls were undressing. They were young girls and too intimidated to say anything. Moore played out his various perversions on the bodies of young teenagers even though he was in his thirties.

With Franken it was different.

Al Franken- The woman accusing Franken seems to have been on equal footing on the power scale with Franken: At the time of his transgression, in her own description of the incident they were supposed to kiss during a comedy sketch and she didn’t want to. Sure Al is nobody’s sex symbol but if Ms. Tweeden, who we have been told is a Republican, had reservations about kissing him, she was in a position to say so. She should have voiced those objections, that, by her own admission, she didn’t. So he did what the scene called for. She obviously didn’t like it and sticking his tongue down her throat surely didn’t help, but it really couldn’t be called any kind of an assault, certainly nothing like Trump’s grabbing girls by the pussy or Moore’s groping of underage girls. We’re talking about apples and oranges here and if you don’t see that it’s time to open your eyes. There is no comparison of what Franken did and what Trump and Moore have continued to do. If you think there is, you’re full of shit!

*****

The Trump administration held a conference this week to promote the use of fossil fuels. Really? Promote fossil fuels? That’s like throwing a smoker for a reunion of cancer survivors.

*****

Our pathetic President has now picked a fight with Time Magazine over whether or not he will be their Man of the Year in 2017. This is important, right? This is what the President of the greatest country in the world should be wasting his time on? With all the real problems inherent in the Oval Office, this clown is worrying about being on the cover of a magazine.

I hope his base is watching this. Maybe along with his backing of a child molester for the Senate, this will finally give those Evangelicals who don’t seem to find sex with children a problem, a real look at what they elected. And maybe they’ll start to wonder what the hell they did.

*****

The members of Congress each in their own inadequate way, are considering what the Republicans have described as the most complicated piece of legislation ever considered by American legislators; a tax bill. Based on their own description, one would think that they would have debates, meetings, open hearings and any number of other transparent investigations of what they are talking about. No way! The current GOP has stuffed the process into a backroom. Under the GOP, the legislative process has degenerated into the worst kind of underhanded deal making; a process in which the American people are left out in the cold and virtually without representation.

The only ones being represented in the current GOP dealings are the big donors that allow these cheap crooks to win elections and get into office.

The really unfortunate part of the whole process is the GOP is selling such a gigantic scam that they are forced to lie about it at every turn. We all see the commercials backed by Right Wing groups telling us how the tax bill will save the middle class. But anyone who has done even the smallest bit of research on the subject can see that these commercials are nothing but lies. The bill; obviously to anyone with even the least bit f economic background, steals from the poor to gives to the rich and while doing so, it, builds a crushing deficit, something that the Republicans have always said they were against.

For a couple of hundred years the GOP has babbled for solid economic policies. The current brigade of crooks in congress just doesn’t care. They only seek is to fawn before their rich backers and continue to get the bucks they need to compete in the electoral marketplace. You may say I‘m crazy but there is no other logical explanation for a bill that raises the deficit by over a trillion bucks while it cuts taxes on big corporations and gives money to those that don’t need it, even as it further reduces the possibilities for those that are struggling to get a small grip on their fiscal lives.

******

Is he really crazy? That’s the big question of the day and all the days that will come next. Our country is currently engaged with a North Korean dictatorship that will do anything, kill any number of people, to maintain its regime. Kim Jung Un understands that if he weakens we will kill him. He has seen us do it twice in the Middle East in recent years with Kaddafi and Saddam.

But our President, instead of realizing the situation and dealing with it in some logical way that does not include name calling and war inciting threats; spends his time attacking long gone former President Obama and former opponent Hillary Clinton who he unfortunately beat in the electoral college. (College? These guys didn’t even get out of grade school.)

Trump isn’t governing the country. He spends his time tweeting about unimportant, childish fights with anyone who disagrees with him. He has no concept of foreign policy but still makes no attempt to understand it. He has no idea what his decimated State Department used to do and doesn’t care. He currently operates under the demented concept that he can run it by himself and in that vein he has cut the jobs there by half, thereby losing hundreds of professionals and all their knowledge as well as their contacts, built up over decades.

Even if you agree with Trump’s stupidities you have to realize that the way he manifests them is not normal. Everyone lies to some extent, but Trump lies because he is able to speak. He lies about stuff he said hours before. He lies about things that are obviously not true, things that anyone can see are lies and he just does it anyhow. This is not normal or rational behavior. Normal people don’t look at a picture of an empty field next to a picture of a field full of people and say that they are the same. Normal people don’t attack Gold Star families. It is not normal to be so afflicted with the God complex that one will not take advice from anyone or listen to anyone who has more experience just because you were elected to national office.

The real problem is that Trump is not yet a slobbering, drooling mad dog. The problem is made worse because he is the President of a great country with the power to do great damage to the world. But the problem must be recognized despite this. One example of the problem manifesting itself can be seen in Trump’s behavior relative to the Russian involvement in our elections. James Comey saw this as a huge problem and so he went ahead with an investigation. Trump fired Comey using his handling of the Hillary Clinton emails as an excuse. The rest of the government saw Trump’s firing of Comey as an attempt to cover up his own involvement in the Russian affair so they opened both Senate and House investigations into the Russian involvement in our elections which everyone including Trump suspects will lead to Trump’s compliance with the Russians. Robert Mueller was appointed as a Special Prosecutor to run the investigation. So does Trump shut up and let the investigations that are really into his previous behavior go ahead like any sane man would? Does he stay out of the way and hope they fizzle out? No! He goes right back into the fire, trying to convince varies members of congress to drop the investigations, further proving that he is compliant in the obstruction of justice. There are only two conclusions. Either Trump is the dumbest man ever to cross Pennsylvania Avenue or he is certifiably insane.

*******

So it started today. Big time! Michael Flynn pled guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI. It’s a felony that carries a five-year prison term. With all the charges lined up against him and his son, this is a powerful indication that he is really spilling his guts. Mueller is going to use Flynn to drive a stake through Trump’s heart. Flynn is the one who was there from the beginning until he was fired after the election. Manafort is going to jail because Manafort wasn’t involved long enough to have enough on Trump for the big spill. He did have some information and he will get some time off for what he tells Mueller’s people but he will also do serious time. Flynn is the key, Flynn and his son and they are going to sing a Verdi opera.

In the end, depending on what he has to trade with Mueller, Flynn may not even do time. It depends on what he has to sell, and that’s the important part. Flynn is the John Dean of this Presidential downfall. Dean killed Nixon and Flynn will probably be the one to bury Trump.

Ty Cobb, Trump’s lawyer was on the tube today making a statement and whistling in the dark but Cobb and everyone else in the White House has to be in a high state of panic right now. Flynn was in every meeting and knows where all the bodies are buried. Once you agree to cooperate there is no going back unless you want to spend a lot of time in jail and in Flynn’s case, have your son as a cellmate.

It will now start to run up the line. People like Cohen, Martin and Sanders will lead to Kushner and the Trump boys and if you think those brats won’t sell out the old man, think again. The only spine that pair ever had is buried in the rotting corpses of the dead animals they mowed down for fun. I think this will be the greatest example of rats abandoning a ship since the Titanic went down.