100 Day Watch

That had to be the weirdest 100 days in American history.  A political party entirely based on self-serving falsehoods is in control of every aspect of the American federal government.  For the previous eight years there had been an executive who could keep the Truthless inanity in check.  Now - all bets are off. 


The only thing keeping hope alive for the millions of Americans who are appalled and angry by the worst of us being in charge (not to mention the billions of human beings around the globe who are equally apoplectic) is that they're so bad at it.


The American Leader has Tweeted resentfully about being measured on the '100 Day' standard.  I won't quote the Tweets - the fact that Twitter is his main venue of communication is embarrassing enough.  Marshall Mcuhan, the great media theoretician, famously taught us:  "the medium is the message."  And the American Leader's medium is something called a "Tweet." 


Message received.


The W. Bush Junta seemed like a governmental nadir at the time.  We're learning that they can go lower.  The history of that benighted regime - from the stolen 2000 election to the war of choice to the attempted murder of Social Security - seems to have been tossed into the Memory Hole.  Those were dark days.  The Bush Junta used the 9-11-2001 terror attack to bludgeon its enemies.  Anyone who didn't fall into line with their installation of the Surveillance State was the enemy.  Democrats in Congress fell obediently in line with whatever the hateful cowardly Cheney-Bush scum wanted to do, including a bloody needless war. 


But the thing about the Junta was that they were seasoned veterans of government - though not the armed forces (the Bush 'war hawks' had the wealth and connections to get Vietnam War deferments.  Poor kids died in the jungle in their places). 


The Cheney-Rumsfeld types played by the rules because they knew the rules.  They dominated Congress because they knew how Congress worked.  They got their tax cuts and war and private data collection and invasions of privacy and drone bombing and environmental destruction done through the real levers of power.


This new bunch can't do any of that.  They're true outsiders in the sense that they are such extreme ignoramuses and rapacious know-nothings that nobody would ever have thought to bring them anywhere close to the federal government.  Even the Leader himself - what federal job would he ever have been appointed to?  Nixon wouldn't have hired him to plant microphones at his crappy hotels.  He couldn't be trusted. 


The Bush Junta represented the Banality of Evil with its administrative mastery of domestic cruelty, meaningless use of military force, and radical ideological incompetence in the occupation of Iraq.  They could make their friends rich but couldn't get anyone else a job. 


They knew how to make a mess but could not figure out how to clean one up.


The new Leader's bunch doesn't even know that much.  As hard as they try to do things like withdraw lifesaving health care from millions of Americans, they just can't get it right.  And that's not just the multiple bumbling billionaires in the administration itself.  That's "Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver" Paul Ryan and the Kongressional Keystone Kops that he leads.


Ryan has accomplished nothing in Congress other than to catch enough media coverage to become a VP candidate and, unbelievably, Speaker of the House.  Previous Speakers have been people who could build coalitions well enough to move legislation to passage.  They made sure there was enough material in each bill to satisfy just as many Representatives as were needed to ensure passage. 


Ryan has none of that.  Everything he's done over the course of his career has been a pantomime.  He wasn't in charge of anything so he could write 'budgets' with no real numbers and bloodless damning cuts to needed social programs.  They were not meant to be passed, they were meant as red meat to the Neanderthals back home.  Their voters were cultivated with the Truthless policies he published. 


The Rubes and the Caucasian Poors  got the lessons they were meant to learn.  "Government always bad."  "Health care makes non-whites healthy too, so nobody should have it!"  On and on.


But now because all of the responsible people have been run out of the Party, he's the only one left who even looks sober enough to drive home.  He spent years pretending he was sensible.  Now everybody is looking at him to actually pass all the cartoons he's been drawing. 


But it's all wax fruit.  It was never meant to be consumed.  Today it's the main course. 


So an administration that cannot cease stomping on its own foot is relying on Congressional leadership that can't stop knocking over the supper table.  Their only real "success" was in confirming robot judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.  But they couldn't get enough votes to actually do that.  An extremely limp Senate Majority Leader had to change a  200-year-old Senate rule that was considered sacred in order to do it. 


That's not a "victory," guys. 


The American Leader will continue to scribble his name on Executive Orders he likely hasn't read, but unless he can move things in Congress, sign them, and be backed by the Supreme Court, it's meaningless.  Real presidents have laws passed.  Without that, why bother? 


The 100 Day standard has shown this circus for what it is.  No jugglers, no high-wire act, no Ringleader.


Just clowns.

Batshit

I've just read the transcript of the recent AP interview with the American Leader.  And it's just flaming batshit sideways nutjob crazy.  This is a person who should not be allowed out of his house without an escort carrying a tranc gun.  The Leader of all the Americans is dumber and crankier than Uncle Charley from My Three Sons. 


I'd say "go read it if you have any doubts" but, first, who doubts?  Second, don't read it because if you're not already Canadian you'll want to come here and we're all full up on Americans.  And third, don't read it because your brain will become very angry with you and that never ends well. 


The Leader of America has, thankfully, failed at everything except getting enormously unqualified people into jobs that they are purposefully incapable of performing adequately.  George Orwell couldn't have picked a more savage bunch of fascists, racists and idiots. 


He says, Truthlessly, that he's accomplished nearly everything he promised to do within his first 100 days.  "Well, I'm mostly there on most items."  Like what?  He goes on about the electoral college, again, Truthlessly. 


It's almost comical when he rambles about how he has 'chemistry' with foreign leaders.  They're nice to him!  The fat dope American Leader has foreigners treating him with lots of completely unearned respect.  It's as if these people actually know about diplomacy.  It's as if they have their own constituents back home who they've convinced to put them in charge - who could know they'd be charismatic?  Unreal. He thinks they're just being nice because he's so Leadery. 


Clearly they're being very, very careful.  They're handling him the way you'd handle a drunk heavyweight Ultimate Fighter if you'd spilled a drink on him at a metal bar. 


He's jazzed that he saved $725 million on some F-35 fighters by - probably illegally - threatening Lockheed with giving the contract - again illegally - to Boeing.  $725 million.  The Pentagon spends well over $1 billion a day.  $725 million isn't even a rounding error to them.  And Lockheed would never dream of getting their money back on cost overruns on other contracts.  A major defense contractor would never do such a thing.  Never. 


This is what he spends his time on when he's not watching Fox & Friends.


He's been calling China a 'currency manipulator' for years (Truthlessly).  They stopped doing that a long time ago.  Now he thinks he can't call them out on that while they're helping him with North Korea.  Why?  If they were manipulating currency (which they're not) wouldn't you want your American Leader to try to do something about that?  So what they're helping with the NK's?  Can't you do both at once?  Isn't that part of negotiating - dealing on multiple exchanges that are both friendly and adversarial?  Didn't someone claim that he is a master negotiator?  I know I heard that at some point. 


Here's what he said about his very Leadership-like Syrian missile strike:  "When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I'm saying to myself, "You know, this is more than just like, 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that's involved," because people could have been killed." 


Umm, yes people "could have been killed."  When you fire $18 million in munitions at people, you presumably want to kill at least some of them.  Otherwise why not just send a firmly-worded note?  He goes on to explain that since the missiles were sent by "boats" that were "hundreds of miles away" they could have hit a "hamlet" or something.  So the American Leader thinks the GPS guided missiles could have gotten lost on the way?  And does he not know that his government has been drone-bombing "hamlets" for over a decade with thousands of innocent lives being taken?  This is news to the American Leader in charge?


He observes that the American government is really big - without resorting the word "huge" or it's derivative "hugely" for which we must grudgingly give him credit because fairness!  He does call out the "bigness of it" so he loses that credit immediately. 


We need to stop for a moment and examine the word "unintelligible" as in 'what the Leader of America said was unintelligible.'  As in the Associated Press, working with the journalists who did the interview could not figure out what the American Leader was saying.  Think about that.  They couldn't even make a stab at it.  Seventeen times.  17 times. 


He also used the (non) word "impalatable."  Like 'not palatable' like something you don't want.  He must hear 'not palatable' constantly in his life and has a need to shorten it. 


He's definitely going to build the Mexico wall but may sign a budget without wall money, so there's that.  He explained that he said NATO was obsolete back when he thought they were obsolete but walked back that statement by saying that now he knows what NATO is and it 's all good because they're obsolete, or something. 


He endorses Marine Le Pen in France without endorsing her but endorses her.  And when the American Leader was called on it he was all like "hey I'm just some guy saying who should win just like any other schmuck."  And when asked about France again he talks more about the wall he's going to build for sure some day because 1% of drugs are worth billions of dollars or something.


Should the cherub-faced spirit of Jim Crow - Attorney General Jefferson Sessions - go after Wikileaks creature Julian Assange?  Well, "never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it."  Really?  "...But if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision, but if they want to do it, it's OK with me."  Good to know there's firm direction from the top.


On his address to Congress:  " A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber."  Right.  I guess Lincoln never went there.


"I've done a lot. I've done more than any other president in the first 100 days and I think the first 100 days is an artificial barrier."  Let that sink in.


"I think my military team has been treated with great respect."  Is that supposed to mean something?  Really - please comment if there is any information intended to be conveyed by those words.  'My team is being treated with respect?'  Was there some intimation at any time that a senior military advisor to the Leader would not be treated with respect?  Or a White House official?  Was there a movie scene where somebody got mad in the Situation Room and yelled "fuck you, general?"


He Truthlessly quoted Rep. Elijah Cummings as having said "you will be the greatest president. He said you will be, in front of five, six people, he said you will be the greatest president in the history of this country."  Cummings challenged him to be a better man.  This is the answer he got back.


He quotes CNN and MSNBC and then immediately claims that he stopped watching them more than a year ago. 


But what really got ne was the difference he pointed out between the business world and government.  "Heart."  Business has none, and all this government stuff is about people so you need to think about humans. 


"You have to love people. And if you love people, such a big responsibility. (unintelligible) You can take any single thing, including even taxes."  And then he launches into a rambling tax reform word combination.  'You gotta love people and even when you're looking at taxes I'm looking at taxes we're going to do big taxes stuff and SQUIRREL!'


Absolutely surreal.  This is a 70 year old man who never realized that government stuff is human stuff.  When you stop health care for millions of people lots of them are going to die.  When you fire a bunch of missiles at people some people at the other end are going to not be alive at the end of the explody part. 


If you read this transcript and pretend it's an interview with a local grocer or something and not the Leader of America you'd wonder why somebody took all that time to question such a dumb cranky old gasbag.  Did Uncle Charley used to be famous or something? 


This is a man who fundamentally misapprehends his role in the world.  He desperately needs to be liked.  Did he talk to Germany's Merkel or Britain's May about the Iran deal?  " I mention it, but it's very personal when I talk to them, you know, it's confidential."  Personal how?  Personal why?  Why would you speak personally but not professionally with two major heads of state?


He just wants to be liked and have "chemistry" with people.  There's no strategy or policy objective other that being liked and getting paid.  And he constantly tries to self-validate over the Electoral College which he constantly and Truthlessly claims is tilted in favour of Democrats - of course the opposite is true.  He obsesses about TV ratings increases when he does interviews.  Of course the ratings go up.  Who doesn't want to watch the Crazy President Show?


If you edited out everything in the interview that's not - or shouldn't be - his job, it would be about a paragraph.  It's almost 100 days in and the American Leader is becoming more and more disjointed and delusional. 


Where do we go from here?  I so don't want to find out.

Truthlessness

Like everybody else, I've been trying to figure out how the US came to be led by it's worst citizens.  Part of the story is what I'm choosing to call "Truthlessness." 


It's not that the truth is not told.  It's not that the lies are thicker than the blackflies in Maine.  It's that there is no sense that there is a truth to understand.  There is no science.  There are no facts.  The Leader of America and all his appointees just think certain things based on the fact that they think them.  It's enough to think something is real - then it's real.


And that's okay for hateful greedy reality TV stars and assorted internet whackjobs.  But now that's the decision-making that's running America.  The American Leader says he was wiretapped by the previous administration, so it's true.  No amount of it not being true matters - if you says it's so, that's it.


The confirmation hearings for the new cabinet was dark humor.  They could literally have shown up in overalls and 'answered' questions in Russian - nothing they said mattered.  The Leader's stooges in the Senate had the votes - except in the case of the smarmy new Supreme Court Justice.  I that case they lost the vote so they changed the rules.   


Nothing that any of them said matters because there is no such thing as Truth.  So Betsy de Voss gets to be Education Secretary, in charge of the American public school system.  She's never taught in or attended a public school.  She thinks the Poors are given too much school and wants to withdraw school by making education at all levels a pay-for-play.  You want learning?  Pony up. 


The fact that education is the only thing that allows social or economic mobility is not relevant.  The fact that she demonstrably knows nothing about the topic of education but hates public learning is not relevant.  She thinks something and her inherited wealth makes it true. 


Rick Perry wanted to abolish the Energy Department when he twice ran for president.  Before his confirmation hearing he had to be told what the department does.  Don't matter.  There is no Truth.


Ben Carson was a sleepy-eyed former doctor.  Now he's the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  Why?  Because he grew up in a city?  It doesn't matter that he thinks the Egyptian pyramids were used to store grain - even though they're made of solid rock.  It doesn't matter that he has no more than a passing New York Post level of knowledge of Housing or Urban Affairs.  He's reliably on-side and lives the shared dream of Truthlessness. 


The rest are the same.  The American Leader and his government are there for their personal gain.  They want money and power.  But they can't earn money and power because they have no knowledge or skills.  But they are ideologues who can tell the Poors and Rubes enough non-information to get elected and appointed. 


To say they tell lies implies that there is a truth that they purposefully deny.  To them, there may or may not be a truth, but telling a self-serving story is always better.  For example, there may or may not be anthropogenic climate change going on, but if it is happening it doesn't help them.  So they deny it and call it a conspiracy theory.  Does it matter that it's true and they're dooming their grandchildren to living on a despoiled planet?  Please.  What matters is that they can stop doing things that are not in their economic or political interest.  They can help their friends to some short-term coal cash. 


But it becomes deadly very quickly when the American Leader starts to use his Truthlessness internationally.  To foreign leaders, truth matters.  When North Korea is threatened by an "armada," it could lead to a war which would cost hundreds or thousands of lives.  That's Truth.  It doesn't matter that being tough on Kim Jung Un plays well with the flyover states. 


And in case you were wondering, there is NO military option with North Korea.  The city of Seoul, South Korea (population 10 million) is within artillery distance from North Korea.  North Korea has a huge stockpile of chemical weapons that it can fire via artillery at the city.  If consulted, South Korea would never allow a strike against NK - it would mean the death of hundreds of thousands. 


Big the Truthless American Leader doesn't know or care.  The President of China had to explain the history of Korea to him.  And he admitted that he didn't know 10 minutes of the history of a country he's sending warships to intimidate - or worse.  A foreign leader had to explain it to him - where was the American State Department to explain this stuff?  Will he just not listen to them?  And what did the head of a communist super-power tell him?  What Chinese story does the American Leader now believe?  And does it fit with the Russian stories he believes?


What difference does history make, anyway?  It's just facts, and there are no facts. 


Imagine waking up in a world that you just make up as you go.  Somebody tells you some bad people did stuff, you just go with the first thing you think.  You don't try to know who they are or what they want or anything like that.  They're bad and that's that.  Hit them. 


Truthlessness.