Tag Archives: Donald Trump

legal news

Talk about a flimsy indictment … ?

We need a return to the actual practice of real law in the U.S. Department of Justice, not a campaign waged on hatred for a former top DOJ official.

What we’re getting from the DOJ is an effort with the cadence being called by the president of the United States. Sweet mother of Jesus … this has to stop.

A federal grand jury has handed down a two-page indictment of former FBI Director James Comey who took a picture of rocks on a beach that spelled out a colloquial phrase that one can translate to “kill Donald Trump.” DOJ tried this once before and a judge tossed it out summarily.

What are we talking about? Someone arranged some rocks on a North Carolina beach in the form of two numbers: 86 and 47.

86 means in street parlance to “get rid” of someone. You know, “I think I’m gonna ’86’ that guy.” 47 is the numerical sequence of Trump in the order of men who have held the office he occupies. You got it? Sure you do!

Comey took a picture of it, I guess thinking it’s funny.

What the nation needs so desperately is an attorney general who follows the actual rule of actual law. Trump fired former AG Pam Bondi because she was insufficiently on board with seeking revenge against Comey. Trump has hired his former personal lawyer, Todd Blanche, to serve as interim AG. Blanche must want the permanent job so much that he’s willing to do Trump’s bidding.

Every lawyer on Earth with half a brain says the same thing: This is the flimsiest indictment they’ve ever seen and it will meet the same fate as the first one … it’s headed straight for the crapper.

national news

Time to wish for a brighter future

Donald J. Trump has worn this old man out. I am pooped, man. All the negativity I can muster has failed the move any needle in determining whether POTUS 47 has heard me, let alone taken any steps to follow the advice I have laid out for him.

So … with that as a predicate, I am announcing a new tactic in my ongoing campaign to get through the POTUS’s thick, vacuous skull. I am going to post what I wish in a future president of the United States.

You probably can guess that one of my goals will be seek a kinder, gentler administration. This bullying, lying, hostile approach hasn’t worked. It hasn’t produced a form of governance that works for the nation. It hasn’t given this blogger an opening through which I can appeal to whatever semblance that might exist within what passes for a heart in the POTUS.

I want a president who knows how to govern. I want someone who is faithful to the sacred oath he or she will take on inauguration. I want a president who understands working with a team around him or her. I want a president who will listen and heed dissent. For that matter, I want a president who will honor dissent as an essential element of how to govern with the limitations of a democratic republic. I want to elect someone who won’t demonize critics as “the enemy within.”

Over the course of next several months I intend to touch on those topics. I intend to relate the future blog topics to probable idiocy we will see from Trump. I won’t spend much energy criticism the incumbent,  but will look forward to what I hope the future brings that will address those concerns of the moment.

I hope you’ll join me. See ya down the road.

national news

We will survive this crisis

Barack H. Obama is being hailed in many quarters these days as a wise man, a title he was largedly denied while he served for two mostly successful terms as president of the United States.

But here he is today, being hailed by progressives as standing among the greatest of the 47 men who have held the high office. Forgive me, but I believe some folks are getting ahead of themselves. History isn’t done drafting how Obama will stand among the Americans who have served as president.

He did, though, offer a bit of wisdom to Jenna Bush Hager, daughter of the man he succeeded as president. Hager interviewed Obama on the current crisis that threatens to engulf our political system. Obama said, simply, that we have been through many crises already and have managed “to come out of them better” and stronger.

I intend to cling tightly to that view. I believe that’s the case.

We fought a civil war that killed about 600,000 Americans. We have fought two world wars against tyrants who sought control of the planet through the use of force. We have survived a great depression that saw fortunes vanish in an instant, where the once-wealthy were left with nothing on Earth. Three presidents have been impeached. A fourth president resigned from office to avoid a fourth impeachment. Americans have marched in the streets to protest war, economic policy and any assortment of decisions made on high.

We have at this moment a tinhorn charlatan, a fraud, a con man seeking to corrupt the system of government beyond anything we recognize. And now many Amerians are worried that he no longer has the mental capacity to make rational decisions.

Are we going to fall apart and crumble? No! The founders must have expected some form of what is takiing place, and crafted a Constitution built to withstand the pressure it is feeling.

The founders knew what they were building. I believe, as does President Obama, that we’re going to survive.

national news

Clearing the air on Trump

Donald Trump is the least fit man ever to occupy the office of president of the United States.

There, I have just repeated a mantra I have been declaring on this blog since the moment it became clear that Trump was considering a run for the nation’s highest elected office.

However, I now am going to state what hasn’t been repeated … which is that I and many other critics take no joy in blasting the POTUS over the way he has conducted himself. I now will clear the air.

When President Bush invited all the living former POTUSes to the White House to honor his successor, President-elect Barack Obama, he did so with grace and dignity. Bush turned to Obama and said that despite deep political differences, he wanted Obama to succeed. He wished him well, as did all the former presidents.

This is worth mentioning because of the criticism that has been tossed at the Trump foes over the course of his time as POTUS. These “never Trumpers” don’t “hate America.” They don’t want the nation to fail. They don’t seek to destroy this nation’s standing as the lone military superpower.

They don’t criticize Trump with gleams in their eyes and warm feelings in their tummies.

They are angry with Trump. They dislike the nation denigrating itself by allowing the president to make a fool of himself on the world stage. They understand that when the president criticizes our allies, or salutes dictators for their strength he is speaking ostensibly on behalf of 300-plus million Americans. This pluralistic society of ours cannot stand in synchronized lockstep with a man who states his desire to wipe a nation off the face of the Earth … which is what Trump has done with Iran.

No one with an ounce of conscience should support such a notion. I possess more than an ounce of it, so I am adamantly opposed to the idea of wiping a civilization off the planet.

I oppose Trump not because I detest him personally. I do so because I love my country. I want us to succeed. I actually want Trump to succeed. However, it is abundantly clear that POTUS 47 lacks the thread of compassion to do the right thing for the nation he was chosen to lead.

I take no joy in acknowledging that truth.

national news

Waiting for ‘restoration’

Joe Biden’s presidency is going to be measured favorably, I believe, by those who earn a living making such judgments. President Biden’s single term likely won’t be held up against the likes of those who won re-election, but a single word does come to mind when I ponder Biden’s tenure in the Oval Office.

The term is “restorative.” Biden was able during his four years in office to restore much of what we came to expect in our head of state, head of government and commander in chief. Biden respects and honors the trappings of the office. He inherited an office in 2021 that had been all but ruined by the term of Donald J. Trump.

I want another restorative presidency to take hold in the 2028 election. Trump will be gone … thankfully.

One of the key tasks of the next president will be to return the decorum and dignity that the U.S. presidency deserves. Such a restoration can come from any one of the individuals in both parties who will seek the office in a couple of years. It might be that Joe Biden, elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972, is the godfather of D.C. decorum. He has been at or near the center of power for more than five decades.

The good news of the 2028 election includes he guarantee that Donald Trump will be gone. The bad news will be that the MAGA movement he created will take some to disappear. I sense along with others that the MAGA cabal is beginning to fall apart. I have noted on this blog many times that America doesn’t need to be “made great again.” The U.S. of A. has been great all along.

May the next president of the United States restore the dignity Americans deserve in their highest elected office. And may the next president represent the very best of us, not the worst of us.

national news

GOP silence speaks volumes

Republicans’ stone-cold silence in response to Donald Trump’s lies continues to boggle my noggin … such as what he said the other day about the potential end to the Iran war.

You cannot make this stuff up!

He started the war with Iran. Trump is now working to end it. If he succeeds and the Iranians stop firing back at us and Israel, he’ll take credit for ending that war. Yes? Of course he will!

But then he said the other day that no previous president in U.S. history has ended a war. He has ended eight of ’em, or so he said. Hold on a second, Mr. Ignoramus in Chief.

In 1941, we were drawn into World War II when the Japanese bombed our fleet in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. President Roosevelt asked Congress the next day to declare war against Japan, which it did. Then the Nazi Germans declared war on us and we responded by declaring war on them.

Nearly four years later, FDR died of a stroke, up stepped Vice President Harry Truman to take over as commander in chief. On May 7, 1945, President Truman accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender. WWII in Europe ended … on Truman’s watch. Give ’em Hell Harry wasn’t done. We dropped two A-bombs on Japan in August 1945. The Japanese surrendered on Aug. 14 and on Sept. 2, 1945, Japanese military leaders signed the surrender documents aboard the battleship U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

I learned of that historical sequence when I was a little boy.

He keeps blathering about his “landslide” election as POTUS; it was nothing of the sort. How he won more Electoral College votes than any POTUS since President Reagan; another provable lie.

And through all of this, the Republican conference in Congress sits silently on its hands, saying nothing to correct the record.

These GOP officials disgrace themselves, the government they are elected to run and the once-great political party they supposedly represent.

International news

Avoiding comparison to Hitler

Readers of this blog will not find a direct comparison between the man who runs the U.S.A. to the worst despot ever to darken the world’s history.

I just won’t go there. You see, as much as I despise Donald Trump and his effort to turn the United States into some kind of tinhorn dictatorship, i simply cannot make the leap to compare him to Hitler, the father of the “thousand-year-old Third Reich” of Nazi Germany … tha lasted in fact from 1933 until 1945.

I’ve already taken one big leap by suggesting that Trump has gone mad, reversing an earlier vow to avoid diagnosing the imbecile in chief from afar. I am safe in suggesting it, given what the whole world is witnessing.

Let’s be real about Hitler. He killed 7 million Jews in effort to eradicate them from Earth. The Nazi army stormed across Europe from 1939 to 1945 and killed an estimated 20 million people along its murderous rampage.

At the end of the Third Reich, Hitler married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, and then on his wedding night watched her kill herself before he blew his brains out in the subterranean Berlin bunker where he hid from the advancing Red Army.

Donald Trump is a lot of things. He is evil. He has malice in his heart. He lacks any semblance of human compassion.

Adolf Hitler, though, wallows alone in history’s cesspool.

national news

Trump finds ‘sweet spot’

Well, gang, it appears that Donald J. Trump may have finally — finally! — hit the ball on the sweet spot of his bat and has elevated talk about whether to remove him from office.

It took a threat to annihilate an entire population of Iranians to energize the discussion into the realm of possibility.

Yes, the POTUS delayed the deadline he had imposed for Iran to clear the Strait of Hormuz. Then he announced a ceasefire with Iran.

Trump had gone to war with Iran by bombing the daylights out of the Islamic Republic. Israel is our fearless partner in this endeavor,

Why the ceasefire? Perhaps Trump seeks fend off the chatter related to the 25th constitutional amendment that could be used to remove from the POTUS’s office. I know the stock market went nuts today with news of the ceasefire and Trump’s delaying of the deadline.

Whether he, indeed, has found the sweet spot and possibly derives some political gain, well … that’s OK with me.

I do not want to send young Americans to war. I took part briefly in another war a long time ago. I am certain we are in no mood to do it again. The sweet spot could bring us much more pleasure.

military news

Trump will have hell to pay

Why in the name of public discourse would your friendly blogger want to revisit an issue he has covered until he turns blue in the face?

Because I believe it demonstrates precisely how we have gotten to this point in Donald Trump’s term in public office.

I have said repeatedly since before Trump became a serious candidate for the only public office he has sought that a candidate for the presidency needs to have some public service experience to understand what “public service” means.

Trump’s entire adult life has been geared toward self-enrichment, self-aggrandizement and fattening his personal wealth. He has earned billions of dollars since being elected POTUS. He has funneled business toward the companies he once ran.

He doesn’t use gentile language when speaking to us as president of the U.S.A. For a POTUS to speak as he did this past Easter tells me in graphic language that this man is a phony Christian, that he doesn’t comprehend what this holiday means to actual Christians. Easter is the holiest, most joyful holiday on our calendar of faith. Yet it fell to Trump to drop an f-bomb when referencing the war against Iran … which he started!

His unfitness for the office he holds tells me everything I need to know about this profoundly immoral POTUS.

medical news

Gotta ask, finally: Has Trump lost it?

My commitment to avoid offering armchair diagnoses of Donald Trump’s mental condition remains fairly strong … although I am going to acknowledge some kinks in the armor.

A lot of men and women, some with medical degrees, are saying the same voice about Trump: They believe the boy’s mental acuity is on a serious glide path toward the ash heap. I now shall acknowledge the obvious, which is that if enough medical experts detect cognitive decline in the head of state and commander in chief of the strongest military in world history … that’s time to engage in a serious discussion.

The question? Is it time to invoke the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the one that empowers the removal of a president from the awesome power at his disposal? We well might be entering that phase.

Trump is increasingly addled. He is changing policy stances literally every hour, or so it seems. He is angering out political allies. He started a war with Iran and has yet to tell us why he has subjected our young warriors to the prospect of war with a nation of 91 million citizens.

I don’t know if it’s time to invoke the 25th. I am leaving that call to others. A growing number of them are saying, “Hell yes, it’s time!”

I’m getting close to joining that amen chorus.