All posts by Mark D. Phillips

Memo: Try A LITTLE Ketchup on That Nunes Nothingberger

February 25, 2019 Mark D. Phillips 4,022 Comments

Posted 2/6/18–♣ Embellishment, holes and innuendo, that’s the Nunes memo. It’s a frivolous document palmed off beforehand by plotting republican lawmakers and all the usual suspects who befoul conservative media, as a scandal “worse than Watergate,” a scandal touching threat to US “rule of law” and other lamentable things, all so “very, very sad for democracy,” reprehensible things that make “Watergate look like stealing a Snickers bar” according to Fox News non-journalist (self-proclaimed) Sean Hannity. Republicans leaders called the memo proof positive Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, in trying to learn if the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, poses nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.

Public release of the cheap, sordid, security-sensitive memo was a lame, desperate and flagrant attempt by Representative Nunes to discredit the FBI and DOJ, not to mention the crucial, much-maligned Russia investigation. The contentious memo is now poised to lend a contrived excuse for Trump to fire with impunity two imminent threats to his royal throne, the storied Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein.

With the memo afloat, something in writing penned by a public official and casting doubt on the FBI’s adherence to legal procedure, Trump can cite a seemingly more legitimate scorn of the FBI and DOJ, ax their leaders with more probable cause than had he James Comey and still eschew obstruction of justice charges preferred by the Special Council.

Under the guise, thin as it was, of a key official record holding FBI and DOJ integrity in question, Trump could even keep the leaders in place while spreading confusion and doubt in the public mind concerning our most intrepid and indispensable institutions, not to mention the requisite Russia investigation.

Devon Nunes, fleeing grim conflict of interest optics, had recused himself long since from the highly-contested Russia investigation when a detestable ruse hatched at the time exploded in both his faces. Nunes’ claim to have found a source that proved Barack Obama once ordered Donald Trump illegally bugged only backfired when the scam was seen to boomerang and double back to the White House where it promptly revealed the all but blushing origin of the fraud, none other than bamboozling Donald Trump himself.

Trump, having griped that Obama had bugged his space illegally, couldn’t prove the claim though he more than implied he could. Nunes, however, emerged declaring a source of positive proof. At first the public was unaware his declaration was only valid since Trump himself had staffers inform Nunes it was true.

The looming source Nunes revealed so publicly and threateningly, the source of proof that Obama indeed bugged Trump illegally, was exposed later as empty-handed Trump himself immersed in yet another hollow slander attack, the release of baseless libel, detonation of yet another in an arsenal of Trump-crafted stink bombs that pack no viable punch but do tend to foul the nation’s air supply for weeks on end.

At close of day, both men were subject to public scrutiny for a cheap trick many perceived as scandalous in itself. Utterly shameful behavior, childish yet effective, still to them perhaps the trick was worth any degree of embarrassment, assuming, that is, either man is possessed of such an emotion.

Nunes then, a not so innocent bystander, indeed a brazen interloper, has now touched the probe again, recusal or not. The dubious Rep has now emerged the artful scribe of a much-touted memo he billed a sure indictment of the FBI and DOJ–cue the Messrs. Robert Mueller and Rod Rosenstein. It appears more a slander spun by Trump, Nunes and other ignoble Republicans aimed at impugning the fateful Russia investigation.

A banal assessment after all, the memo is likely to prove a mere limp and despicable scam by Donald Trump and Republican cronies, with the main assistance of sycophant Devin Nunes, a ruse with which to assert themselves politically, a wholly partisan Republican ploy to smear the FBI, its current leadership and even the Justice Department in order that Trump might finally dispense with constant irritants Mueller and Rosenstein unburdened by any legal hassle or repercussion. Either Trump is naively sure or trying to give the impression the untenanted memo “vindicates Trump” absolutely in a totally partisan Demoratic witch hunt to show he did collude with Russia, a hostile force known to have hacked the 2016 presidential election.

If the Nunes memo did in fact determine misconduct, the determination would constitute but a brief if rather embarrassing little footnote in the annuls of an extensive probe and would have but meager bearing on the investigation at large.

Nunes and his flunkies grasped at every single resource they believed would somehow spice up the memo, all to stunt, slur and disparage, all to slander, block and incriminate Bob Mueller, the FBI and the Justice Department while at the same time scorning and discrediting the fearsome Russia probe. In the end, the whole plot came to little avail. It’s worth noting that other Republicans leaders helped season the vile memo with their own treacherous lies, spin and rhetoric.

The Nunes group put all they had but ketchup into spicing up the contents of their tasteless new concoction, blind to the salient fact that nothing, even America’s favorite condiment, can enhance the shear flavorlessness of a total nothingberger.

Despite their having been needlessly and permanently maligned, the FBI and DOJ can gather cold consolation in the likelihood that ultimately Republican chefs will find themselves in the dread position of having to swallow their own deadly poison.

For Nunes’ part, the ne’er-do-well conspirator knows he’ll always bear the brand of having penned the first recipe for and boosted the mass production of America’s most prominent nothingburger and having won the rare distinction of being Donald Trump’s biggest, baddest, loudest, most shameless yipping lapdog.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Social Political Commentary

The Constant Threat of Gun Violence Harks Back to Guns Themselves

March 25, 2018 Mark D. Phillips 2,967 Comments

3/24/18-♣ We’ve all heard it used quite often over the years, the adage Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. This is nothing but a tagline for those against gun control, an eager phrase less clever platitude than dodge. It’s sophistry, a well-constructed lie, one that does its job admirably, given that its job consists of lending a particular lie the outward look of truth then ensuring that same lie is taken as true.

It’s a syllogism after all, a logical progression whose premise is demonstrably false. As a claim based on falsehood its logic, though at first glance lucid and clear, is flawed, its message corrupted and hence untrustworthy. Claims based on lies seem to flow quite logically, adopt the look of truth but in the end prove false, pose sensible but manifest absurd.

>>>>>>Since a premise often goes unquestioned, it’s a step in logic frequently accepted as true. In this way the element of inference in sophistry can act quite deceptively subtle and insidious while sophistry itself can be very misleading. It’s the jam that puts the sham in scam, you might say.

>>>>>>There’s more to gun violence than ever meets the eye of course, far more than springs from a well turned phrase. Those bucking gun control must concede that more people kill with guns than any other weapon of choice. They must admit that gun violence isn’t just out of hand but rampant in the United States today. Of those who kill, the greatest number kill with guns, weapons sold legitimately by mainstream gunsmiths and dealers with the endorsement and advocacy of the NRA.

If guns don’t kill people, people kill people, then it’s all of a piece that killers do the crime using guns, often rapid-fire arms too efficient and available to ever even broach the public safety. Through strong, relentless, wealth-fueled endorsement and advocacy, a slick NRA only ducks the point of gun violence, flouts the hand of gun makers, dealers and itself in the creation of gun violence all across the country. Its myth of some Second Amendment right to personal ownership of mass-killing devices only serves to heighten gun violence.

Its preeminent lobby and disproportionate influence over Congress sets the personal right to ownership of automatic rifles over the right of US citizens to life, freedom and happiness. Tipping American politics to its own advantage the NRA accepts, allows, defends, even boosts the pervasive incidence of gun violence.

Despite the component of free will in gun violence, the argument always harks back to dubious guns themselves, back to their very wide assortment, sophistication, fine utility, power to kill and of course, the key to all gratuitous forms of gun violence, the ripe availability of guns in every cast.

Okay, Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. So why chance gunning up people prone to kill with guns, especially guns expressly built for war conditions? If gun safety is so indispensable, why shrink the matrix of that safety to a crap shoot?

What need have common folk for combat munitions? They’re untoward protection. They’re inappropriate hunting tools. For that matter, the right to personal ownership of multi-fire rifles has as much to do with second amendment rights as the right to personal ownership of thermonuclear weapons.

Does the second amendment grant people the right to own fighter planes, army tanks, land mines or rocket launchers? Are assault rifles any less outrageous than WMD in the hands of ordinary civilians? Are there standing minimum-kill rates germane to any weapons of mass destruction ranking some benign and others hazardous? Don’t all rank extreme and quite superfluous in the average citizen’s arsenal?

Sure, the AR-15 looks cool and it’s certainly fun to shoot but the need to own it feeds onle one of two selfish motives, the first infatuation and the second animosity. You might call each respectively elfin fetish and rancorous whim or better yet and more to the point, love of play and the urge to kill. There’s nothing in between and, after all, average Americans needn’t swallow either lure to get by.

So, by what quirk do pyrotechnic fetishes and vitriolic kinks take precedence over school children’s safety, over their neurological health, over academic calm, over normalcy and general well-being, over guarantee of life, freedom and happiness under the US Constitution?

Add to the fact that guns do help people kill people the fact that during a heinous shooting in 1996 at Port Arthur, Tasmania, a man wielding more than one semi-auto firearm quickly slaughtered 35 people and wounded 23. Australia, bastion of individual rights and fiercely pro gun-ownership, did however succeed in in the quest to ban all semi-automatic weapons. It further launched a rare and genial gun buy-back program that was funded by the Australian government’s own Medicare system. More, the country hasn’t seen one mass shooting since.

Prime Minister John Howard rallied all 6 Australian states behind new, unique and very stringent gun control, working the awesome feat in as few as 12 days. Eventually his government managed to buy back and trash more than a million means of bold, excessive firepower, a million plus broad-fire and rapid-fire guns.

That’s not to say that Howard’s tack and Australia’s utter compliance pose a perfect model for US gun control but both did work admirably for the parties involved and America stands to take a valuable lesson from the highly effective John Howard method.

Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. In the end the lame catch phrase is woefully incomplete and the old saw should read thus: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people–in bulk and with rapid-fire guns too easy to get. It only takes the fatal blend of rage and guns to cause a mass killing today and the blight has not assuaged in the least for the simple reason that talk alone assuages nothing, argument nothing, stubbornness nothing, politics, greed and selfishness utterly nothing.

Does Congress fail to see the pressing urgency of stopping relentless murder in staggering proportions? Has it grown so wholly inured to constant blood-shed? Has it finally grown so shamefully indifferent to the decimating butchery taking place all around us, so cavalier, so all-fired insensitive to the cold, inane, merciless killing of even little school children?

Have legislators grown at length so deathly afraid of riling up contributors that they’re now loath to take the very simplest, most effective, most common sense, indeed the most popular legal measures to at least reduce the skyrocketing incidence of gun violence all across the nation?

Have they ruled the issue of large-scale gun violence once and for all a hopeless case, insoluble, negligible or is it that rife and toxic partisanship has seized up legislative chambers to an untenable state of permanent gridlock?

People are dying. Let me repeat: people are dying. Let me repeat: Even Children are dying regularly in senseless mass shootings across the country and nothing of consequence is being done to stop it. Hello, Congress! Hello! Hello! Is anybody out there?

To date, even the mixed efforts of law enforcement and criminal justice seem to assuage little or nothing at all in the way of mass killing. No, only action, immediate action, positive action, powerful legislative action set squarely against outrageous killing power in the hands of who-knows-what new offender pledges to curb the seemingly endless trail of bloody carnage thrust upon us too often over the years, the continual, needless, stoppable killing of the innocent and defenseless, that huge, tragic, ever-growing complement of victims who all too often includes our little ones. The powers that be know this and still nothing improves.

How can the general population itself act effectively in the fight against nationwide gun violence. We’re not fighting familiar opposition in our ranks but rather powerful opposition from lobbies that shouldn’t even exist within the halls of Congress. Is our demanding Congress institute common sense gun laws effective enough popular action? Apparently not.

The tack hasn’t worked yet, though many continue trying. How do average citizens calling desperately for urgent approval of common sense gun laws move to sway a Congress more impressed by a grease-palming NRA than all the horrific facts on record that legislation needs immediate passage in order to stem an overwhelming tide of wild, wanton, wide-scale murder?

Can’t we oust the NRA from our Congress? What’s the NRA to do with popular representation anyway? They’re currently facing financial crisis as well as investigation. Maybe they’ll just tend to implode by themselves eventually. Maybe not. In the meantime, in good conscience, what’s Congress waiting for, wholesale slaughter of more defenseless fellow Americans, massacre of more sweet, vulnerable children?

Is Congress so complacent, so detached, so desensitized it thinks the murderous trend will just fizzle on its own? How often must tragedy come about before lawmakers take viable action against heinous crime? Is the downside of gun law anywhere near as abhorrent as the ongoing annihilation of school kids?

It may be no coincidence the volatile fusion of unstable persons and their misuse of rapid-fire guns take a greater toll in human life all the time. Background checks are banefully insufficient and the prospect of punishment is small or no deterrent. It’s clear that our society can better control allotment of extreme and superfluous automatic weapons than the unforeseeable whims of the people wielding them.

It’s a sad day in America when at last it grows obvious that our own lives and the lives of all our loved ones are increasingly more dependent on the common sense gun control most Americans vehemently support and yet, practically speaking, absolutely nothing’s being done about the problem.

By Reuters account, in the exponential wake of mass shootings around the United States since 1999, at least 2000 people, some 39 in 2021 alone, have been killed or suffered some form of injury. More claimed mental or emotional impact. So where’s the end? When is enough, enough? Where are common sense, common duty and common decency? Why aren’t there more kind, conscientious lawmakers willing to act right now to avert more horror?

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Social/Political Commentary

Ethnic Cleansing Donald Trump Style

February 6, 2018 Mark D. Phillips 7,890 Comments

§ 2/2/2018–♣ Racism takes shape where power and bigotry meet. So it follows then that ethnic cleansing works the same pattern. It’s precisely that spot on which power and bigotry meet and it’s precisely since that’s the place where racism emerges, that all political processes beginning there are doomed to fail and the process of immigration reform, however well planned, is itself doomed to lapse into a state of ethnic cleansing.

Like any political process, immigration reform takes the personal character and sway of its progenitor and lately that’s the one and only Donald J. Trump. In consequence, Trump is that precise spot where power and bigotry meet and that precise spot where racism rears its head and given Trump’s vile personal character, that precise spot where American ethnic cleansing finally comes to us in spades, where appallingly ethnic cleansing Trump style comes about.

Donald Trump sits in the Oval Office. The President wields tremendous power at home and around the world. Sadly, he’s proven himself a thick-skinned bigot. His menacing bias can’t help but taint the president’s influence, poisoning all he does and yes, all he purports to do. There are many across the globe who tend to take a cue or plan a path scorched now by our Head-of-State’s unveiled bigotry.

Trump’s a man who pitched in front of the whole world that by and large Mexican immigrants constitute rapists and drug dealers, ceding that only some of the race are truly good people.

Trump’s a man who failed to denounce the head of a white nationalist group who led an obvious white supremacist rally near the White House, who co-opted the president’s casual stance toward racism, who heralded his intolerance of minorities including his aversion to some immigrants in a speech he commenced with the words “Hail Trump,” just oozing anti-Semitism, drooling racist sentiment and even soliciting “peaceful ethnic cleansing ” all of it met with loud cheers and a host of fervent Nazi salutes from his rabid following.

Trump’s a man who saw another white supremacist rally, this one staged in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, one precipitating the racist-fueled killing of a woman when a rally member plowed his car straight into a counter-protest group, peaceable people from the ranks of whom nineteen others were hospitalized and still our president told the world “there were good people on either side.”

Trump’s a man who once announced a particular judge could not preside impartially over a court case that involved the president simply because the said judge proved to be of Mexican descent.

Trump’s a man who independently busted a move to ban all Muslims from admittance to the United States, a man who’s committed countless other obvious acts of racism and acquiesced to many more beyond his immediate orbit.

Trump’s a man who’s an arbiter of world-class proportions who, showing disgust at a bipartisan immigration reform meeting, labelled Haiti and fifty-four African nations “sh__hole countries.” Bigotry plagues much of the rank and file but there it’s proven a rather cloaked and insidious racism involving few in seats of power. Spread from perches of power of course, racism is prone to exert far more influence over populations.

When the president said “sh__hole countries,” Trump apologists cropped up all across the breadth of the USA. A select group of Republicans utterly rushed to Trump’s defense claiming the president used the colloquialism sh__house, not sh__hole, like to parse the former term is a somehow less racist slur than the latter or certain nouns fare better than others in league with the word sh__. Sheese, Crikey, Gadzooks! Only in Trump’s White House!

Trump’s a man who in trying to seal the US-Mexican border, coldly initiated, justified and presided over separation of innocent immigrant children from their parents, some with very little chance of ever being reunited. He saw those children locked in cages, many sick and unwashed, without adequate medical care and hygiene provisions. It’s obvious this loathsome tack was basically inhuman, wholly averse to the great American ethic of human rights and social justice begrudged immigrants simply because they weren’t American citizens.

Donald Trump’s official power only serves to elevate his bigotry to the dire level of racism. In the same aspect, Trump’s power as President of the United States only serves to catapult that selfsame racism beyond the pale to the problematic realm of the extreme, to the highest attainable bar, to the top, to the absolute pinnacle of racism and Donald Trump himself to a spot as America’s premier racist. What could auger any worse for governance of a free and enlightened society than a commander-in chief who’s racist-in-chief as well?

The latest immigration reform began with Donald Trump and hence mimes the dubious character and sway of Donald Trump. Since Trump’s a bigot who wields the nation’s highest power, his brand of immigration reform is way out of bounds. It’s a gross perversion of immigration reform as a matter of fact. It’s racism incarnate that approaches ethnic cleansing.

With a bigot like Trump in the lead, the phrase immigration reform becomes nothing less than code for ethnic cleansing, that widespread atrocity that’s tantamount to genocide, that grim, inevitable consequence of uttermost racism.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Social/Political Commentary

Sean Spicer Normalized, His Lies, Contempt for Free Press Condoned at Annual Emmy Awards

September 18, 2017 Mark D. Phillips 11,198 Comments

♣ 9-18-2017∼Last night, fresh from a stint as the unrelenting, bowl-faced and demonstrable liar who used to drag the American free press through the mire, Sean Spicer managed a cameo spot at the annual Emmy Awards. With a not too biting spoof of himself, Spicer, one-time press secretary there reprised his role as Vice Liar-in-Chief to Donald Trump.

A cute trick, even Spicer lapped it up, though many were not amused and found in bad taste the attempt to quickly normalize the disingenuous Trump stooge on the questionable if quite obliging platform of an acting awards program. The odd bit opened with a piquant send up of Sean Spicer’s first lie in office, just a lame dodge, a cheap trick, a flagrant attempt to foist on the viewing public that conspicuously smaller crowd at Trump’s inauguration as the biggest inauguration turnout ever. Clearly, Sean never caught wind of that quaint if pithily relevant little modern-day invention called the camera.

Sean Spicer Appearing at the Emmy Awards

Many watching the Emmies have been scandalized to see a man lately chosen poster boy for national disgrace so casually celebrated, reduced to a mere political hack, his misdeeds diminished on national TV but I for one say, why not? Another shameless henchman shrunk to lies and deceit in the wake of blind ambition, just a cad who in a fit of ignorance once anointed Nazi concentration camps holocaust centers, Sean Spicer, much like George Goebbels, stayed true to the cause and in the mold of Adolf Eichmann he “vass only follovink orderss.”

Melissa McCarthy spoofs Sean Spicer on SNL

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Social/Political Commentary

Trump’s Tweets a Chronicle of Decadence, Indecency

July 3, 2017 Mark D. Phillips 12,024 Comments

g♣ 7-2-17 ∼ Monday morning Trump advisor Kelly Anne Conway said the media wastes time on the president’s tweets, time that might be better spent covering “finer policy points.” On Fox & Friends Conway claimed to have tested some one hundred sixty three tweets by Donald Trump back in June. She added “Three-quarters of them, at least, had to do with policy, bilateral meetings, legislation.” Like much Conway says though, her gripe and so-called tweet test were carefully spun and only served to cloud a key issue.

Ultimately, she’s wrong to rate superfluous the media time spent on Donald Trump’s largely outlandish tweets. Constant coverage of Trump’s tweets is all-important simply because the encapsulations, oft improvisational rants and riffs, engender Trump’s bizarre behavior and personality. They’re a road map to his personal knowledge, values and priorities, his loyalties, proclivities, his strengths and limitations, his political prowess and tactical maneuvering not to mention that quick bleed of his credibility worldwide.

They’re a blueprint for his mindset, emotions and character, a mosaic of his psychological makeup, of his neurological state, sensibility and temperament. The fixed, near-compulsive tweets of our newly elected leader, their iterative inaccuracy, rancor and vulgarity, their ongoing pettiness, cruelty and intolerance will always play a major role in any assimilation of Trump. They’re a source of news vital to public perception and appraisal of our newly coined and oddball commander-in-chief, news dire to public assessment of the people in orbit around him.

Is reportage of Trump’s tweets a waste of time? If there’s waste at all it’s Donald Trump’s and Donald Trump’s alone. In fact, the disturbingly frequent, shameful, petty, puerile, crude, vicious, demeaning, toxic, slanderous, disproportionate, inaccurate, inappropriate, dire, destructive, disruptive, counter-productive, self-revealing, self-indicting, self-discrediting, all but roundly self-sabotaging and generally destabilizing nature of the world leader’s Twitter log begs copious scrutiny from the press. The Fourth Estate is, after all, chief advocate for public awareness bringing to light often somewhat skewed, corrupt, dangerous and incompetent leadership. The Trump tweets have proven indispensable to coverage of the White House as we’ve lapsed into the Donald Trump era.

Sundry as the tweets are, many shame the president, shame the office of the president and the United States at large. This they do at home and all across the globe. Many tend to underscore Trump’s dubious judgment, preening vanity, impropriety and misplaced priorities. Many tend to lay bare Donald Trump’s boorishness, dishonesty, injustice and mean-spiritedness, ugly traits beneath the dignity and decorum of the United States presidency. Many more are basically indecent.

Frequently the tweets engender id-driven lashings out, gut responses, knee jerk reactions to perceived slights, makeshift diversions, thin, last-minute smoke screens, distractions from negative attention well-earned. They’re often made without self-control or circumspection, more the tantrums of a child than the measured declarations of a full-fledged and capable adult much less of a full-blown American a president.

The same tweets now comprise bona fide records, make official files, megabytes, maybe even gigabytes of damning information in a presidential archive which ought to bode shameful for Trump. Still weirdly, suspiciously, conspicuously, the man doesn’t get it. Still he carries on tweeting in his crude and reckless way, using Twitter in the same crass and slanderous tradition.

How can Trump fail to understand common decency? It’s this and other very pressing qualms about our leader which a vigilant and systematic study of his mounting tweets will surely help answer one day, will maybe help start his criminal prosecution, make his mental or medical diagnosis, pose at least a smoking gun, damning evidence, probable cause, reason enough to pry into the man’s professional dealings, into his mindset and capacities, his acumen for sane, legal, fair and effective governance on a national scale.

Maybe Trump’s a sick man. Maybe not. Maybe our leader did collude with Russia and maybe he didn’t. Maybe Trump’s corrupt as dirt or maybe utterly incompetent. Maybe Trump can govern effectively. Maybe he’s a clown.

Whatever the case, grave concerns are still in play and don’t forget, there are those who feel as I do, that a leader’s moral fiber, his voracity, his grace, his nobility, his reverence for democracy and all the American people, his love for both objective and universal truth along with grasp of media’s mission toward the best obtainable truth remain absolutely pivotal to good and viable leadership.

The gross moral turpitude oozing out of Donald Trump and leaching into the content of his many loathsome tweets ought to restrict the Chief-of-State from holding any public office. His Twitter bytes, many seeds of deep-down decadence whisper volumes and most inform the utmost importance in the news today of Donald Trump’s rank indecency.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Social/Political Commentary

A Sudden Dystopian Nightmare

June 2, 2017 Mark D. Phillips 6,574 Comments

§ ♣ 11-9-16, The Day After Election Day

Donald Trump is president of the United States today. While for winners most elections offer hope and celebration, they are seldom cause for worse response than pique from those who lose. The case of Trump is outside the norm however. Republicans seem elated with their triumph here and there and yet the choice of Trump is fraught with apprehension and dismay by a multitude on either side of the aisle.

After all, Trump’s a very temperamental man with narcissistic tendencies and irrepressible egocentric urges, boasting no obvious moral guide, no discernable code of ethics, no resolve that manifests remotely like principles which intrude on his little bag of tricks. He’s got no clear and cogent political philosophy and airs little savvy, little character, little grace, little restraint, little grasp of the chair to which he accedes.

Trump’s a veritable wild card. He’s totally unpredictable. He’s just as prone to fiendishness as good, just as predisposed to harm as help, just as apt to break things as make reparation. It’s been said Trump’s a bull who packs his own china shop given our new leader’s weird knack for self-sabotage. He’s his own worst enemy. I worry, is he ours?

On that score, it seems about fifty percent of the US voting public yesterday threw all caution to the wind, thwarted principle, shunned fine American values and frightfully, impetuously, undermined the dignity and integrity of a nation by electing Donald Trump, key dignity and integrity which, not unlike freedom put wrong, we’ll be hard-pressed to ever put right again.

In an arbitrary bid to put any low, two-bit authoritarian punk in our command just as long as that goon guaranteed to be their own goon and even though the greatness of our venerable democracy languish, Trump’s people took a giant leap of chance. They jeopardized the safety and security of a nation, this warm, brilliant, awe-inspiring lodestar of liberty, font of hope for social justice and equality, America and for what, another empty vow of broad political change, a vow purported to be kept but if needed, kept only under the volatile and vitriolic agency of lies, slander, racism, hatred and division?

Donald Trump has shown the world exactly who he is by his impudent behavior of the last eighteen months or so. Nonetheless, the American working middle class has brought to highest office this demonstrably cold, brash, ignorant old codger, this cheap cad of faint and dubious principles, this scoundrel of excruciatingly weak moral fiber.

Trump fans have compromised the Oval with a boldfaced slanderer, philanderer, panderer to racists and to bigots, loyal partner to misogynists and xenophobes, shameless source of transparent lies, ad hominem, conspiracy theories, sophistry and mud-slinging rhetoric.

They’ve designated undisputed leader of the free world a great preening narcissist, a raging western chauvinist, inveterate snob, bloating braggart, arch authoritarian, a dogma-drooling demagogue, divisive rabble-rouser, a devout fear-monger, hater-elite and contemptuous advocate for the deeply personal, supra-professional savaging of friend, enemy, rival and detractor alike, brutal predator, great white breast-thumping stalker of the frail, ubiquitous, ever-amenable doe-eyed scapegoat.

Where is honor? Where is reason? Where is insight? Where is any odd feature that resembles common sense? Where’s our erstwhile loyalty to righteousness and truth? Where’s our vanishing respect what’s noble, just, refined? Are there any of these disappearing virtues worth having, worth reviving, reinstating, reclaiming in this frivolous new epoch of disposable resolve?

Are they all just the outmoded, cornball, silly putty values of a pencil-necked geek like me and all the other neuro-typical mediocrities abroad. Are we nuts to want abstracted things like safety and security, like truth, justice, freedom and equality? Are we mad to want the glue of strong conviction that can hold these wisps together, lend them worth, show them love, keep them alive?

Truth, virtue, freedom, justice, conscience, nobility. All of these originate in nebulous array. In the mind all are mute, sheer, remote, intangible. Are any less essential for their stealth? Are the fruits of the amorphous just words, meager terms with which we designate or broach the unreal or do they constitute prototypes we scrutinize, understand, flesh out, fabricate, refine and protect. Humans entertain the most ingenious thoughts, then convert them into mighty institutions. We appreciate glorious ideas and their progeny. We know too that none are etched in stone.

They’re hazy things we render concrete, mere thoughts wrought tangible, 3D, real, extant by the miracle of human ingenuity. They’re hooey come to life, the fondest hopes, wishes, dreams and falderal with which we plot and undertake our most fabulous structures, our most intricate machinery, our government, our businesses, economy, technology, our streamlined electronic marvels. They’re that with which we speak our language, plan our days, cook our meals, show our love and bear our true intentions. They’re that with which we guarantee human rights and social justice, that with which the genuine, the provident, the Un-Trump strive on regularly and arduously to govern.

I wonder, do the Trumpers understand ingenuity or the knack we share for making real the unreal, for breathing precious life into our most incredible thoughts, into our highest aspirations, transcendent ideals which for more than two centuries have elevated, strengthened and protected us, that mystical and quintessential fusion of thought, faith, action, resolution and pragmatism curiously catalyzed by courage, poise, vision and integrity?

Thoughts, ideas, truths and ideals are born of mere fuzz within the boundaries of our quick and fertile brains. They demand an iron will to make them whole and keep them real. It’s ironic then that we whom somewhat dense and too pragmatic Donald Trump sees as dreamers, suckers, losers now urge that all these grand abstractions keep a place of permanence in our lives, be preserved, fostered, backed and guaranteed against the odds of being hijacked, garbled, co-opted or manipulated, claimed for use in power plays, partisanship or political gain, dragged around and chafed until they’re unfit for service.

So we cling to our ideals and aspirations, hopes and dreams of some locale where basic egalitarian principles can thrive, each reified and reinforced by our noblest institutions, first plans for which were spun in the potent mist of the human mind. We cleave to these crazy, idealistic things we can’t see or feel but think we might strive to make more real, might distill and then bequeath to our descendants and to theirs exponentially and on and anon. Are we dreamers? Are we suckers? Are we losers? Donald Trump would tell the world we are and then chortle.

Yea, right, we freedom-lovers, helpless fools that we are, all agog in some stultifying fantasy world, expend our every waking hour in false hope, hauling along through hill and dale this ostentatious wishing well, stopping once in a while only to search our pockets, squint our eyes, chant impassioned supplications, toss our tiny silver coins aloft and clenching whitened fists await reprieve from some delusory social injustice or trumped up Republican imprudence?

Not quite but in the jaded minds of cynical conservatives we’ve done some other things considered equally absurd as on the other hand, Trump consumes his time in the service of practical things like honoring truth, uniting citizens, aiding American institutions, easing the plight of the marginalized and disinherited, buttressing all but the most adverse of democrats, news media, egalitarians, blacks, Latinos, women, those who tangle or disagree with him, those who buck lies and conspiracy theories and the huge contingent of lazy, shiftless losers who exist outside the insular realm of affluence.

We lovers of freedom believe in the special merits which tend to support and sustain democracy like honor, respect, commitment, grace and integrity. We believe in the priceless benefits of a government leaving no one behind. Such credences are based upon some pretty abstruse ideas but then ideas just as real and utterly viable as we choose to make them. Sad that Trump and our other detractors no longer make them so. Sadder they’ve given up and sold them out.

Do we freedom-lovers scheme and plot mischief in order to flout a broken system whereby no appeal to decency is heard? No, not us, though throngs took the streets in a licit, disconcerted grievance against our new commander’s injudicious win. The bulk of us, dogged by the dubious choice of Trump, are quite distraught and disappointed midst the sobering realization that for four years we’re stuck with Donald Duck behind the wheel however we merely sigh a whimper of dissention and regret, fall to grief and as we loll about lamenting our egregious loss, dread the downright orgy of decadence to come.

Where’s America? Where’s that caring, generous land I thought I knew? Where’s the heart, the warmth, the usual compassion? Where’s the comity? Where’s the consummate benevolence ? Where’d they go? Where’s our long-established good will, our natural inclination toward the welcoming of strangers, that good old-fashioned Yankee hospitality at work once, carving out the legend of a nation? Are these weaknesses, the over-indulgence autocrats scorn? More likely they’re the strength, growth, humanity and empowerment only vigilant Americans employ. Where’d they go and where’s that even scarcer vigilant American?

Have they perished, after all, under that contumelious overload of pre-conceived notions, rife suspicion, grave mistrust, rank prejudice and rabid indignation heating fast since the Great Immigration of the early Twentieth Century and finally boiling over now as Donald Trump stokes the furious flames underneath with stunts like slurring very publicly the bulk of Mexican immigrants this way: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

In his coy condemnation of a whole race of people, Donald Trump pretends he’s certain most Mexicans who move across our border bring illicit drugs and crime including rape but then makes as if he’s venturing some educated guess that just a few of these immigrants might be seen as good people. These are venomous hyperbole, legionnaire sophistry, tricks, intricate artifice and gimmickry. They’re sanguinary lies that just begin to scratch the surface of our president’s duplicitous speech and behavior.

So where’s American pride these days, our strong collective consciousness, our facile understanding of the things this country stands for, its values, standards, excellence, ideals, all the stuff of inspiration, of advancement and aplomb?

Am I dreaming right now? Has perception left me dry? Could it be that we have always been a cold, bigoted, avaricious, self-serving culture underneath, that we’ve never proven warm, close or caring, never gallant or refined, never genial, never virtuous, principled or kind. It’s hard to say. I don’t know. I only know I find it very hard to shake the nauseating sense that having put Trump in office some half of US voters might well have made a deal with the devil and I hope that if they’ve done so indeed, that grace is in the mixture and there won’t be hell to pay.

I can’t quell the agonizing vibe attesting fifty percent of the US voting public have relinquished all commitment to the sacred, founding, time-honored principles of democracy, human rights, freedom and justice, those impermeable makings for a paste that’s bound Americans together more than two rare, pioneering centuries and this in trade for hollow guarantee of some less elitist government from a disingenuous billionaire, himself an elite.

No, I can’t help feeling some obscure cross-section of the country has surrendered our great American heritage to the echoes of cacophony arising from an empty little shell strewn idle on the beach. Such compromise happens at a staggering cost.

It’s disconcerting too that in the shadow of the bellicose Donald Trump campaign, a travesty that played to the very worst in human instinct, those many votes for Trump belied votes for xenophobia and misogyny just as much as for bigotry, racism and cruelty. Those votes for Trump were votes upholding lies, bullying, enmity, incivility, deep division and fierce violence which today imbue chaos, various hate crimes, sexual assault on women and random fits of grave instability, devastating wrong seldom seen in times of true and viable leadership .

Minority groups nationwide woke with dread today to harsh rekindlings of ire and resentment, to jitters of unrest, of confusion and uncertainty. Their dawn brought injustice, condescension, hostility, trepidation and a vast, new loathing for unnecessary scrutiny. For them the break of morning brought attacks both verbal and physical in the land of human rights, in the land where every human being is guaranteed asylum and safety, where all are pledged acceptance, opportunity and peace of mind, all promised life, freedom, happiness, equality, a land in which minorities were well upon the road to gaining miniscule fragments of this yet elusive covenant when trouble-making Donald Trump so rudely interrupted.

Does Trump glean this little slice of irony? Is Trump himself the little slice of irony at hand? Isn’t Donald Trump himself the very un-American cause of all this sad ironic strife, all this cheap, nasty, hate-filled, undue fray not heretofore given rise by any late president?

What a sad pass is this. What a fall from grace to play upon the world stage, untoward tribute to our imminent decline, stern witness to the rupture of a great civilization, grim accounting which only that high-minded voter might witness, acknowledge and abhor.

What’s done is done. We have a new president. We ought to try and bond behind our newly named leader and with fairness as a free, just and pluralistic culture, back The Donald when he’s right, duly buck him when he’s wrong and where necessary hold the man accountable in fond hopes that some small vestige of true American values may survive the next four to eight years. In the meantime, buckle up, hold tight and get yourselves pumped for a long and bumpy ride.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Food for Thought

Preserve Your Integrity, Keep Your Self-esteem and Retain Your Personal Perspective

Gallery May 20, 2017 Mark D. Phillips 4,725 Comments

• Always come to terms with life advisedly.

♣ Never come to terms with the world unless you must.

–♦©M. D. Phillips–awincingglare.com

Food for Thought

Youth is truly, Innately Entitled

Gallery March 21, 2017 Mark D. Phillips 3,284 Comments

• Kids anticipate boundless care from parents.

♣ A child is the treasure that keeps on taking.

Social/Political Commentary

Blaming the Victims: Trump Detractors Dissed Defending Honor, Freedom, Human Rights and Social Justice Currently Under Siege

November 29, 2016 Mark D. Phillips 5,114 Comments

♣ Spoiled sports? Sore losers? Crybabies? These are the kinds of cheap shots Trump supporters are taking lately at American voters who rue the election of Donald J. Trump, hordes of voters filling city streets nationwide and giving voice to their grave concern, dissent and solidarity.

Regular flack ranges in order of magnitude from shallow and inaccurate to false and misleading while every blast is lame, imprecise and misdirected of course. It’s the aim of Trump supporters, after all, to peg as mostly hypersensitive, unruly, ungracious and infantile the victims of Donald Trump and their dissent against his outright abuse, victims pegged by Trump before the world as indefensibly different, suspect, ominous, vile, inferior, undesirable, in effect somewhat less than human.

Trump’s abuse, harsh, constant, un-American, sets the kind of sad and dangerous precedent which begs public rebuke and renunciation from a free and diverse society. Whenever rebuke and renunciation do emerge, much in the name of honor, ethics, freedom and social justice, however, large groups of Trump-supporting name-callers emerge as well to belittle it.

There are many reasons name-callers cast their cheap aspersions on recipients of Donald Trump’s abuse. Of course they’re desperate to obscure beneath a vast barrage of false accusations those who call maltreatment what it is. Of the much shallower Trump-supporting name-callers, many view anti-Trump sentiment as tonic for the crestfallen, pap for those defeated when in fact it’s utter lifeblood for untold numbers of Americans who’ve sustained a heavy blow from this president.

Primarily, though, Trumpite name-callers hope to make small an issue undeniably huge. They hope to make miniscule the elephant in the parlor, to dismiss as insignificant and petty the preponderance of Donald Trump victims and their outraged advocates amassed on US streets yelling foul.

They stage their cheap derisions little guessing those who seek to label others only act out the hallmark of dysfunction and eventually they do what all dysfunctionals do. They blame the victim, in this case projecting on Donald Trump’s victims and their backers all blame for that abuse which in fact Trump himself has heaped on them.

By this devise name-callers can mitigate blame in the real culprit, collectively Donald Trump and the name-callers themselves, unaware of how transparent and rife with dysfunction their flimsy theatrics look to the more astute.

What gall not to take their abuse and like it, these too-dismissive name-callers seem to fault victims–like dissing minority groups as Trump has done is democratic while democratic activism against it is not.

Trump voters swear their candidate won democratically. They inform us that in this way democracy has been served and therefore Clintonite dissenters ought to shut up and deal with it.

Dissenting Clinton voters make a finer distinction however. Since an unjust man won by democratic vote, they say, democracy has been served and yet justice has not. They make a good point. At that, they make the whole point.

Anti-Trump sentiment in the American streets has nothing to do with winning and losing per say but rather with what manner of man has won and what that manner of man’s having won will mean for countless Americans targeted by Trump throughout the unrivaled travesty which marked his presidential campaign, what it will mean for all Americans as a treacherous blow to democracy, freedom and social justice.

It’s about social justice and Trump is front and center in the brouhaha, Trump who was really elected democratically in the technical sense but only after he stomped on social justice with the alacrity of a small boy breezing through a penny candy store with a shiny silver dollar clasped hotly in his hand.

Now he says the only thing that matters is that he won. How can Trump be so out of touch with the people, so oblivious to the irony of a win at their expense, so bereft of personal principles as to proudly place winning above fair play and social responsibility?

Is Donald Trump a man without discernment or a man without honor? To be sure he’s a man of rather questionable integrity with a long-languishing sense of human respect, no small considerations for the up and coming leader of perhaps the world’s freest, most pluralistic society.

This dirth of human respect shows a gross lack of principles. Where principles prove few and inconsistant the core values and priorities of a government and the society under its jurisdiction soon grow dangerously skewed. A cavalier stance grips the nation over time. In awhile patterns of living become erratic and soon Intolerance, incivility and violence rise and flourish.

In the absence of principles there can be no truth, no order, neither anchor nor sound frame of reference for the norms, mores, values and priorities of a people, no dependable criteria for human interaction nor reliable paradigm for human behavior.

The powerful seize control and do whatever serves themselves while the weak regress into self-absorption and mayhem. Time will tell us more on how this cavalier posture plays out in Trump’s imminent first term as chief executive.

It beggars belief that after such brash and stunningly un-American antics by a would-be statesman, such inconceivably raw, rabid, racial, ethnic, religious and sexual slurs as Donald Trump slung in his scourge of a presidential bid, there still exist Trump supporters who take his hapless victims and their natural, dutiful, infinitely democratic protestations lightly, who trivialize their sense of denigration and betrayal then mock their plight in general with Trumped-up charges of “spoiled sport,” “sore loser” and “crybaby,” charges little children might bring against other little children who are losing ungraciously at hopscotch.

How, after the brutal, more than year long, bigotry-charged and very public tongue lashing Americans underwent from Trump, could hecklers even dream any pigeonholed person, any demonized minority is anything but legitimately concerned for their welfare these days?

Are they blind or do they grasp indeed the flagrant stigmatization of a few with all of its deep, profoundly darksome implications, grasp its toll and opt anyway to lie, spin, distort, propagandize and diminish their fellow Americans for a vague political notion, some prescribed, heady, nationalistic whim, some distorted, self-aggrandizing myth about their own unerring superiority?

Do they understand it’s not social diversity alone but American honor, freedom, human rights and social justice, core American values and principles, the integrity of the Constitution itself that are currently under siege by Donald Trump and the extreme right elements he panders to?

Trump likely slandered those he did just to foment stronger passion and support for his political platform. He was that resolved to win at any cost.

It’s disturbing, however, to think that after all was said and done, Trump may never have taken the process, taken its negative implications or its many wretched victims very seriously, to think that in the final analysis all were mere conveniences for the candidate whose campaign was just a giant manipulation anyway.

Monumental damage has been done these many victims and America at large in the process. Some of it might be years undoing, some beyond repair.

Whether bigoted in itself or collaborative with bigotry, this dark dynamic stands as part of a tacit subjugation process spawned by Donald Trump and now furthered by an effete corps of denigrating Trumpite name-callers.

Victims of this tacit subjugation woke November 8th to find themselves frazzled and confused, dismayed about their places in this erstwhile Promised Land so many helped to build.

They’re tentative now, indignant, apprehensive about their freedom, safety, security and prospective treatment, as many not directly stung by the process are prone to be apprehensive about the freedom, safety, security and prospective treatment of loved ones, friends, neighbors and simple fellow Americans.

They’re concerned about the future. They’re fretful about the uncharted path our country’s chosen in making Trump its forty fifth president.

Those hit squarely by the Trump dehumanization tack, its stark implications and many gritty realities in the form of violent hate crimes and racist acts, some in fact credited right to Donald Trump himself, comprise anything but disgruntled fans left supping on sour grapes.

These are the disinherited, forced to feed on poison berries, many faced with possible life-threatening situations. All feel the long-sought, hard-gotten quality of their lives reduced dramatically with the advent of Trump given the swath this man has recarved for social injustice, incivility and racial strife, a swath shaven clean beneath the double-edged scythe of bigoted rhetoric and supplication to bigots everywhere.

Hillary Clinton voters, sore losers? Well, losers, yes. Democratic minorities lost big. They lost more than just an election this time. Sore? Yeah, like anyone finally making strides and beaten down for the umpteenth time feels pretty damned sore right now, like anyone seeing the faint glimmer of unity or feeling the vague bristle of pride and suddenly faced with railing and rampant Trumpism, confronted with fresh divisiveness and dehumanization feels pretty sore right now.

Spoiled sports? Okay, sports maybe. The spoiled are accustomed to winning however. Few constant winners here I’m afraid.

Crybabies? How so? Infants don’t struggle, don’t overcome. Fledglings don’t weep for lost ground. Only the cognizant, the caring, the compassionate, the consummately mature shed a tear for lost freedom, flagging justice and inhumanity which torment the soul, shame the race, shame through empathy both victor and victim indiscriminately.

The stigmatization of those in dread of Donald Trump as none but querulous spoiled sports, sore losers and crybabies, piqued fans grieving over the loss of a sporting event is short-sighted to the point of absurdity. It’s cruel to the point of atrocity.

It trivializes vital issues and those effected by them. It doesn’t nearly characterize the many feeling justifiably threatened by a newly elected leader who has daily both directed and drawn fierce hostility toward them, fierce hostility toward their groups and toward their counterparts nationwide.

Instead of pondering just how bias came to roost with such impunity, acquiescence and instigation from top leaders here in this, of all places, the good ole USA, many Trump voters have closed their minds and reduced themselves to name-calling, minimizing a critical situation, some blind to the finer details of that situation, others hip to them all but too insensitive or biased themselves to address them.

On the one hand, demeaning epithets bantied about in this puerile bit of name-calling gravitate toward sanctimonious dreck.

They’re drivel spewed about anti-Trump activists by a narrow, petty, vapid, heartless, largely dismissive clique of Trumpite drones loath to learn or understand what’s really at stake in the recent election for minority groups and others embroiled in passionate protest across the United States.

On the other hand, the designations made include tags affixed to activists by sharply astute, equally narrow, unfeeling but especially coy, politically driven spin-doctors, cold, practiced liars obscuring the truth by distorting the truth and finally assaulting the most basic if intricate truth running so much deeper than wounded pride or scorched ego chasing plain competitive loss, truth that lies at the heart of minority cultures, supports their safety and serenity, downright proves their rightful places in society, truth that forms the core of sacred American principles, values, rule of law, truth that embodies the very soul of our democracy.

While truth presents the one and only, steadfast, universal currency for human interaction, this diehard band of philosophical twerps continue to souse themselves in informational counterfeiting, communicational sobotage that conflates truth and impedes the advancement of all mankind. Still, incredibly, they find it a source of personal aggrandizement and pride.

In one of US history’s rarest instances, a presidential candidate acted publicly in a manner unbefitting a US president. He presumed to court brazenly and unencumbered the primal forces of racism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism. Then, winning as much because of it as in spite of the dalliance, Donald Trump acceded to the nation’s highest office.

Trump’s ostensible lies, vicious attacks on American citizens, shameless appeal to alt-rightists, bigots, misogynists and xenophobes were firmly endorsed by more than half the voting population. What were Trump voters thinking anyway? How could they not have gleaned that such a man was bad for America?

Donald Trump’s endorsement then doubled back to embolden, even mobilize the same hate factions against their traditional target groups with heightened enthusiasm, new justification and a sense of tacit, unbound executive permission, this crushing minority citizenship’s long-sought, hard-forged shield against aggression and rendering these target groups, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, women, gays and many others much weakened, more vulnerable than before, reducing them once again to the level of social pariahs, essentially bulldozing them physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually into degrading US policy-imposed exile in the confines of their own reputedly indivisible country, exile degrading as much for the country as the victims themselves.

Does this warped dynamic not run contradictory to human rights provisions? Does it not dishonor America, all Americans and the American presidency? Do we not value honor in America any more?

With election of someone who calculatingly romanced the bigoted underbelly of this nevertheless great country, a man who held minority groups up incessantly to rancor and public ridicule, millions across America feel aghast, disenfranchised, vulnerable, at serious risk, filled with understandable dread, doubt, disbelief, fear for their well-being, some for their very lives, those of loved ones, friends and fellow Americans.

Indeed, since Donald Trump’s election once inhibited racist acts and hate crimes have risen markedly, some in the name of Trump himself whom haters say inspired them.

So it is that many thousands in cities nationwide have spontaneously, without guide of leadership or organization, commandeered the city streets charged with fear, anxiety, incredulity and desperate hope as if adrift in some dystopian nightmare, fallen prey to some apocalyptic vision come to pass which, to pique their dread, some fifty percent of voters either cannot or will not concede much less comprehend, though certain of them see clearly, understand and celebrate anyway.

Spoiled sports? Sore losers? Crybabies? Americans under siege by their own is more like it.