I think we are finally done with the car dealer. All that’s left is a check for extra car registration expenses due to an error they made. I’m sure that will arrive soon. What a royal pain! I’m happy to say that’s the only pain in the ass I’ve felt in ten days. Mrs. Lion tried some under-the-covers fondling last night. I just couldn’t get it up. Maybe some other attention will work.
I’ve been thinking about the sad state of our Union. The country is divided nearly in half over almost everything. I’m not so sure we really are. Politicians have always used a trick that seems to work every time; they attach a person to their beliefs. For example, we always hear about the attack on Ukraine as the work of Putin, president of Russia. Certainly, he is a powerful advocate of the war there. Stop and think about it for a minute. Could one man actually do this?
The answer has to be no, he can’t. If the army and other leaders didn’t agree, he would be dead if he tried. Polls in Russia show that more than half the population supports the war. But you can’t blame the people. It just doesn’t work. You need a figurehead, someone to burn in effigy. Putin’s the man. We can hate Putin, but it would be harder to hate the faceless mass of the Russian people.
Closer to home, we have the most aggressive war-of-personality people, Donald Trump. He identifies himself with what he likes to call a traditional Republican agenda. He wants less government, fewer immigrants. and himself as the supreme leader of the United States.
If you don’t believe me, consider his actions when it was clear he was losing the 2020 election. He tried to enlist the military to help him stay in office. The generals refused. He badgered state leaders to invalidate elections. They wouldn’t. He rallied his supporters with the war cry that the election was rigged. Almost two years after being evicted from the White House, he suggested on social media that the Constitution be disregarded and he appointed President.
All this would be laughed at if he didn’t tie his attempts to a popular agenda. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and talk radio, people have been convinced that Democrats are stealing from them. They have been told over and over those immigrants from Central America are drug dealers and criminals. People on Social Security don’t deserve a free ride. Medicare is a scam. The list goes on and on.
I’m not attacking those positions. I don’t agree with them, but they deserve debate. What I’m trying to do is to separate valid discussion from the way Trump has superglued them to himself and the far-right Republican party. If you support those positions, there are better, more honest advocates than The Donald.
His other trick is to demonize Democrats as dangerous traitors. If you don’t support him, you don’t deserve to live here. I’m a lifelong Democrat and I agree with some of the conservative positions. A lot of us do. We are people who support a more moderate, globalist position for our government. We work, pay our taxes, don’t sell drugs, or fuck porn stars. We’re honest people, just like most of the Republicans.
It’s time to realize that anyone who tries to divide us using gross exaggeration and lies is dangerous. We’re lucky that Trump is inept at collecting power. He’s very good at enlisting the less-educated citizens but fails when trying to rally the military and other government leaders to blindly buy his lies. He still insists he won in 2020. A lot of his citizen army agrees. The facts are in. He lost. I pray he loses again next time. Democracy is a delicate balance of honesty and good will. He has neither.
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Your inflated rhetoric against Trump smacks of an extremist viewpoint. We call it “blue anon”: the literal conspiracy theory that Trump is a tyrant who attempted to enlist the aid of the military to gain supreme powers, claiming the election was rigged when he knew it wasn’t.
There are much more mundane explanations for all of it than the above. I.e., his over-inflated ego seizes on the (far too many) irregularities in the 2020 election, such that he legit believes the election was rigged against him. Subsequent to that, everything he did was peaceable (“make your voices heard peacefully and patriotically”) and legal, and consistent with the above.
Certainly, given the by-now proven conspiracy that was the Clinton/Steele dossier and the 3 years of Russiagate, including illegal wire tapping in an attempt to get Trump to step down, impeach him, or hamper him, suggests that these Democrats and the deep state know no ethical limits in trying to usurp power.
I agree that Trump’s actions were ego-driven and strictly a personality/psychological issue. I don’t believe he is a calculating tyrant. But, he did try to enlist the military and state governments to restore him to power. I think he lies because he truly believes in a different reality. That doesn’t make him less dangerous.
I supported efforts to get him out of office because he is so unstable. I don’t disagree with everything he did as president. That’s why I am asking our readers to separate the man from the deeds. His work on immigration, for example, makes good sense to me if you take away his silly wall. Biden has continued the policy. He’s tried to make it more humane, but the sheer number of people who want to cross the border makes Trump’s policy more reasonable.
I’m not attacking everything he did. I’m not suggesting that everyone but him in Washington has clean hands. I am saying that he is an unstable man who doesn’t support the orderly transfer of power, and whose delusions drive him to make dangerous decisions. I don’t hate him. I just don’t think he is someone who will preserve democracy.
What evidence is there that he made an attempt to enlist the military to assist him in retaining power? Genuinely curious.
Yes, he legally and constitutionally attempted to persuade certain States to look more closely at the elections and change the slate of electors if they found fraud (which he was convinced was there).
As to orderly transfer of power, we don’t need to guess. He did, In fact, oversee an orderly transition of power once he had exhausted legal and constitutional challenges.
We also don’t need to guess how he did as President. In four years, none of your dire predictions came true and he ran a perfectly normal, results-oriented, mostly conservative administration DESPITE the hounding from Clinton’s manufactured Russiagate and hoax after hoax from the most hostile media any modern-day president has ever been subjected to.
Testimony by Trump aids during the January 6th hearings revealed that he tried to enlist the generals. It is illegal and unconstitutional to do what he did in Georgia to try to rig the vote there. Georgia is currently reviewing his actions. It’s likely they will charge Trump in the near future. What he did in several states goes way past legal.
Federal charges are being contemplated for his actions in and around Jan 6. He tried to get his VP to stop the Senate from accepting the electoral votes. He tried to get his own, unelected electors to replace the legally certified ones. Federal charges may follow about this. Pence refused to go along.
That is not orderly transfer of power. It is a blatent attempt to undermine our (United States) democracy. Trump only moved out of the White House when it was clear he would be moved out forcibly if necessary. He failed to provide an orderly transfer.
I believe Trump is mentally ill. He needs help.
Interesting premise to detach individuals as the identity of a policy, but I’m not sure it’s accurate. While I do agree that no ‘populist’ movement is ever solely the work of one person (hell, even the term populist infers people backing the issue) I do think people as a group do nothing unless a charismatic individual rallies them. Sure, they have to support the person (even as the Germans supported Hitler as he rose to power), but that individual is still the catalyst.
Which brings us to people. In the most basic of ways people of all “parties” are very similar. Our humanity unites us inextricably in what most people want or need from life. BUT……in my opinion based on decades of observation, is that the problem comes in when people seek to ACHIEVE those similar goals and others divide them over the best way to do so. That’s where a big human commonality comes into play: stupidity. If there’s anything that unites people of whichever flag they like to wave, it’s stupidity. Given that people will follow a nut rather than do the work to discern if a solution is viable, or even in their own best interest, politicians of all kinds have an easy time leading by division.
Another commonality? Corruption. Take economic debate for example. People argue over whether socialism is bad, or capitalism is good, or whatever, and I’d have to say, “how do we know?” We’ve never seen any of these systems operate as they are espoused. Each has been corrupted in their own ways with communism being the poster child for how quickly an ideology that sounds good on paper can go so wrong so quickly. But what about free market capitalism? When have we ever had that?
So even basic ideologies of economics, and governing devolve into corrupted versions of themselves and people, being the stupid, lazy, greedy nitwits that they are, flag wave and finger point rather than actually try to figure anything out. The reason our democracy is in danger is not because of Trump or Biden or Putin, or TikTok, or Wokeism, or whatever demon-of-the-day one wishes to blame, but because for it TO work TAKES work (and integrity) and neither seem to be abundant traits lately. The forefathers warned us repeatedly of this, and we, instead of heeding that warning, mindlessly blame whichever guy our guy says to blame, while both reap the profits from their positions while the sheep bleat out complaints over the din of whatever inane TV reality show they’re watching.
It’s all rather depressing.
I agree with your analysis. My point is that people who want to take advantage of public ignorance will set up straw men as living symbols. Donald Trump, for example, is a rather crazy person who has to believe he is right and apparently can’t tell a lie from the truth, is a perfect example. Putin is another.
I think it is incorrect to assume both are catalysts of the actions that brand them. I’m not saying that they aren’t responsible for what they advocate, just that the same things would probably occur with different symbols.
I can go with that. The idea of “if not him then someone else” makes sense in that most populists take advantage of the current climate/zeitgeist and then exploit it to their advantage. The reason I do still see the figurehead as the catalyst is that while people may kind of know they’re unhappy with the current state of affairs, they don’t think past the problem and rely on someone else for the solution. People like Trump or Putin then provide an easy-to-swallow/wrapped-in-patriotism solution (which is often NOT the solution but a means to a profitable end for themselves) and the people support it, thus empowering these figureheads. So, it’s kind of a dance where the dancer has to listen to the music but then if they read it correctly can then lead the dance.
As for blaming individuals? Well, partially perhaps, but I prefer to blame the people. And maybe that’s kind of what you’re saying in a different way?