This essay is going to be a little short of words compared to most on The Pontificator. Brevity will relieve friends who might read my essays to be polite or feign interest. I wish I had more readers like them, but most who read I will never meet. I don’t know what they love or hate.
I know this. If the GOP retains its lockdown on all branches of the government after Tuesday’s “election”, the Confederates will have won their Civil War. It took 150 years, but they will have won. Donald Trump is a modern Jefferson Davis — the first president of the new Confederacy.
Trump is bigger than Jefferson Davis. Like Davis, the president works for a coalition of revolutionaries who despise democracy. They support a modern version of slavery, on which they pin the heroic title of Capitalism, right?
They are eager to kill to protect it. It’s why they are rabid Second Amendment advocates; it’s why they harass and threaten liberals on-line, on the phone, in the press, in the churches, and inside state legislatures.
It’s a system where everyone works for the wealthy to manipulate and exploit ignorant people who actually believe they are going to be rich and powerful oligarchs themselves, someday. All that is required is to work hard and prepare, prepare, prepare.
Sure, that works. Ask any brick layer or steel worker. Ask an auto worker. Ask a teacher or a nurse or a restaurant busboy. It isn’t going to happen.
Get real.
The only chance working people will ever have to earn high incomes is if rich people share the wealth by paying fair wages and taxes, which is the opposite of what they decided to do when they rushed through the recent “tax cuts.”
About 90% of the cuts went to the one-percent, right? Of course, the poor can buy lottery tickets. Lottery tickets sometimes work, don’t they? Doesn’t everyone in the USA have someone in their family who has won millions in the lottery? The lottery has been going strong since the early 1970s — almost fifty years. It must be working, because more people play the lottery than ever before.
Divide hard-working folks — who after long days at work don’t have the time or energy to think things through — with any number of issues that make no sense. The classic issue is abortion, of course. It always is.
Any woman can secure an abortion. It only takes two inexpensive pills or a boyfriend who has watched a couple how-to videos on the dark web. The only political question is whether abortions are going to be legal and safe or illegal and risky.
Legality or Constitutionality makes no difference to desperate women, but it might mean that a few unfortunates will spend time in prison away from their families should they get caught. Fear of prison increases anxiety, but it won’t stop a female impregnated by a man she hates. She will abort.
It’s been this way since the beginning of history. Before the process of abortion was known, women took their unwanted babies into the mountains to be eaten by wolves and crows.
The president has promised to punish women who have abortions. Judge Kavanaugh, the drunk sex addict and party animal who terrorized Dr. Ford during an alcoholic rut, promised Senator Susan Collins that he won’t overturn Roe v. Wade. He made the promise to secure her vote.
As the president likes to say, “We’ll see what happens.”
There are so many other fabricated issues; so many “scary” people — immigrant rapists, immigrant invaders, gays and their spouses, black political candidates, Mexicans who vote, socialist doctors, Obama and his ACA, Muslim terrorists, Muslims who aren’t terrorists, native Americans who don’t live in houses or apartments who want to vote, unindicted Hillary and her co-conspirators, lying reporters, homeless people, immigrant children who must be separated from parents and confined in cages, angry mobs of Democrats, and on and so on…. The list of imagined “terrible people” who everyone must fear is as long as America itself.
It’s a white supremacist’s wet-dream — burning crosses with any number of “horrible” people duck-taped to the raging firewood. Ethnic and cultural cleansing of “evil” Americans seems to give supremacists a certain cathartic release. It’s what lynching and castrating were all about decades ago.
Read Trump supporter twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it. They will terrify the uninitiated. It’s always pics of automatic weapons, Confederate and American flags, photos of prominent progressives with target-crosses on their faces, and a little blurb about how much the tweeter hates liberals and loves Jesus and President Trump. Often a Bible verse is added for righteous measure.
People who hate gravitate toward demagogues. The USA has enough haters to elect Nazis to every office in the land. On Tuesday, those of us who have a different opinion of right and wrong are going to find out who is right and who is wrong.
Are we going down like lemmings off a cliff into the maelstrom below? Will Americans drink the Kool-Aid of a Jim Jones sociopath?
We will soon know the truth about our country — if the Russians (or the Republicans who own the voting machines) don’t manipulate the results, as some in our intelligence agencies say they have already. In Texas early voters report that some machines are flipping votes for certain candidates. It’s a bad sign of problems to come on voting day.
NSA employee Reality Winner is in prison with no access to media, reporters, phones, or computers for a reason, right? Once people lose confidence in the integrity of the electoral process, the alternative is Civil War. We did that once. The war turned into a bloody mess that destroyed a generation of Americans. It’s a war that continues to be fought.
What if a miracle happens? What if the election is fair?
What happens if suppressed voters manage to get to the polls to cast provisional ballots when necessary?
What if all votes are counted; no one tampers with the computers nor the voting machines; everyone stays in line and votes until midnight if necessary in those states where the GOP disrupts minority voting to make it as difficult as humanly possible?
What then?
What if the GOP is thrown out and the Democrats take control of the Senate and the House of Representatives? It seems like a hopeless pipe-dream, but stranger things have happened.
The president will question the accuracy of the count, of course, and a countdown to revolution will begin by alt-right fanatics who are itching for a fight. They’ve already killed a dozen Jewish people inside a Temple in Pittsburg; they’ve threatened the lives of the most influential Democrats in the country — including two presidents. Right?
Does anyone think that white supremacists are going to end their bloody rampage short of total victory or defeat? Winning is going to be as problematic as losing, unfortunately.
An added burden is that everyone who has an ounce of political sense knows that the president is working with Russian and Israeli mafias to lockdown the country. We are going to become Russia with our own Vladimir Putin if certain oligarchs get their way.
Anyone who isn’t afraid has a false confidence reminiscent of passengers on the Titanic or the Jews who waited eagerly for the Nazis to cleanse them with warm showers.
Are Americans out of their minds? This election shouldn’t be close.
How can evangelicals support the GOP? A victory by Democrats ensures that Mike Pence, a sincere Christian by all accounts, will replace a president who had no history of association with any church or group of believers until he made his convenient Faustian covenant with Jerry Falwell, Jr. and Franklin Graham.
NOTE BY EDITORIAL BOARD: On August 25, 2020 Jerry Falwell accepted a $10.5 million severance package from Liberty University to step down. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, he blamed his wife for the sex scandals that followed him pretty much everywhere during his tenure.
We can impeach and remove our demented president. Some Democrats say Mike Pence will be worse. But sensible people must know that his hand on the nuclear button will be a safer hand, because he isn’t completely crazy like the Donald. Who can’t see it?
Is this lunacy what Americans want? Is this insanity what our brothers and sisters in arms fought and died for in all the wars we’ve won to keep freedom alive?
I don’t think so.
We’ll find out soon enough.
This election is a litmus test. Pray that all of us on both sides can survive and endure the results, which are sure to change America for good or ill.
Talking heads on MSNBC are calling the latest political developments involving the president a national emergency.
What’s going on?
The president nominated and the GOP is about to confirm a young conservative judge to sit on the Supreme Court who will make abortion illegal in all fifty states.
Everyone knows it’s coming.
The man’s name is Brett Kavanaugh. He seems to be a partisan hack — an ideologue who lacks common sense — but he’s smart and highly educated in conservative jurisprudence. Everybody says so, right?
He worked hard for Kenneth Starr to impeach President Clinton for lying to Congress about what at the time seemed to be a consensual extra-marital affair. Does anyone remember?
Ok, so what?
Well, the president who nominated him is a nut-job himself who can’t tell the truth, because he doesn’t know right from wrong; he has a mental disorder that renders him delusional, paranoid, and vindictive.
Trump sold folks a fiction that Barry Obama somehow misplaced his birth certificate — if found, it would prove he was a Kenyan usurper. As a candidate for president, Donny said that he had hired investigators to find the missing piece of paper. To this day, the president suspects that the document found was a forgery.
But he’s moved on, he says. Why don’t we?
Ok. So what?
[Note from the Editorial Board:On 6 October 2018, Donald Trump signed-off on the Senate’s confirmation of Kavanaugh to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States of America.]
Trump introduced and elevated to super-stardom a very young man, Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He enabled the kid to keep his atomic toys and to more effectively work to reunite his country with the south. The process of reunification is going on behind the scenes as I write.
Ok. So what?
A former CIA chief called the Korean summit, treasonous. The CIA chief no longer appears on TV. The president stripped his security clearance. He slapped him, somehow, off the public radar.
Ok. So what?
Some in the president’s inner circle have been indicted and pled guilty to more charges than anyone can name or count. The president replaces the unfaithful; turnover churns; life goes on.
Ok. So what?
A rotten, no-good coward — OK, someday they might make him/her a hero like they did John McCain — wrote an anonymous letter to the New York Times. The Times turned it into an “editorial”. The mole (or lion) works with a cabal of fellow travelers (or saviors of the Republic) inside the White House to unravel the president and disable his agenda.
Who wants to bet it was his Chief of Staff, John Kelly? Not me.
Ok. So what?
Christians meet daily to pray with the president to give him victory over his enemies, presumably. If the president falls, the vice-president Mike Pence will hold him up; he’ll carry-on the fight.
Ok. So what?
Tweeters, like myself, are being overrun by hoards of follower-bots. They aren’t real.
I look at who they follow — to make sure they are fake — then block them. (They seem to follow each other and a few other souls who actually are real — like me.) If I didn’t block, I’d have thousands of fake followers.
Note from the Editorial Board:No, the @BillyLeePontif on Twitter is not a hybrid form of artificial intelligence; Billy Lee is not an “AI BOT”, nor was he created by us. He was never sort-of-fake nor will he ever be.The Editors
“They” plan to make me and others like me unwilling and unsuspecting nodes in a huge network, which will light-up like a wildfire of California Christmas trees before the midterms to sway public voting through intimidation, threats, false tweets, and fake activity orchestrated by who? — public relations firms? — foreign governments? — trumpletonian hate groups? — Christian evangelists? — or all four groups working together (with Israel, of course) to finally conquer the world and secure the Holy Land for the Jewish refugees who still live there?
Is there anyone in Hell who knows what is going on and wants to tell someone?
Does anyone care?
Ok. So what?
I can’t be rambling. I don’t want to sound like a badly coded bot . I’ll lose my audience, correct?
Let’s get to it.
What is this emergency I am writing about, anyway?
It’s abortion. Only white supremacists, sycophants. and clowns in the president’s follower-base will stay behind to give him the time of day if he turns his heels to support a woman’s right to end her pregnancy. It’s that simple.
Can anyone make an argument for the president should he change his mind as he sometimes does to support the right of women to secure abortions? — because legal, free, and safe abortion was his position for years. Does anyone remember?
Does his head of yellow straw lose its luster if he betrays his pledge to capture and kill pregnancy-options in the USA?
Who knows?
Ok. Probably not.
Time to move on.
My hunch is that most people reading this essay do not remember living in the United States when abortion was against the law. They are too young.
I remember.
I remember the first time the word “abortion” appeared in a nationally syndicated magazine. I was in seventh grade. The word, which snuck its way into an issue of LIFE Magazine, created a sensation. Flood gates opened. Every news-outlet covered the story. For months, it was the only subject sophisticated people talked about.
I didn’t learn what the word meant until I was older and found an unabridged dictionary that defined it. After reading the definition, I still didn’t understand the word. In the United States of the 1950s and 1960s, many subjects remained off-limits and off-airways. When it came to sex and abortion, they were mysteries to children, certainly, but also to adults.
After the cultural revolution of the 1960s (which changed everything), it seems impossible for young people to believe that their country could be as naive as the USA once was. Young folks can’t imagine that the United States was a nation of mostly sheep who believed everything they read in books and magazines and everything they heard on the radio and watched on television.
It was a country with a vigorous right-wing press, but progressive views were scrupulously suppressed. No one explained what communism or socialism was, except to say that they were bad systems which existed in countries that wanted to destroy us. It was a time when citizens took everything their leaders said as absolute truth.
Believe it.
In 1968, I was a college sophomore who owned a convertible and a lot of spending money. At a party one night in early spring a beautiful girl I had met a few times came onto me. She boldly asked if I wanted to go upstairs and have sex with her.
I thought, I can’t make it with this beautiful girl unless I’m clean. I have to go back to the dorm and take a shower first. I told her, and she agreed to wait. After returning we went upstairs and made love.
I was slightly drunk and kind of scared — it seemed unnatural to be pursued by a pretty girl who had never shown interest in me before — but I went ahead and then it was over. I drove home and forgot about it.
The next weekend Alexa (not her real name, of course) called on the phone to tell me she was pregnant. I thought, wow! — now I can marry a beautiful woman. That’s a good outcome!
I asked her not to be afraid. I would take care of everything. Of course I would marry her and we would raise the child together. She could finish her education; I’d pay for it, and then I’d finish school after — while she took her turn caring for our child.
Suddenly she started crying. ”Oh Billy Lee” she sobbed. ”You are so honest and so kind. I can’t lie to you — I just can’t.”
”What are you talking about, Alexa?”
”The guy who made me pregnant is the drummer in the band at the club where I work. He hates me now and won’t speak to me.”
”You work at a club? What club?”
Well, enough voyeurism. The short version is she worked at a strip club where she was a go-go dancer employed by the band.
Ok. So what?
Well, the reason I’m writing this essay is to give people a picture of what getting an abortion was like fifty years ago when terminating a pregnancy was a crime in every state. It’s not clear that abortions will work in exactly the same way next year when the country circles back to once again make abortions illegal.
Drugs are available today that weren’t before. For less than twenty dollars a pregnant girl can purchase pills on the internet that will end her pregnancy. She can use bit-coin or other underground currencies to completely hide the transaction forever behind the most sophisticated encryption that organized-crime can devise.
She can ask her boyfriend to watch certain videos on the dark web. Voila! After an hour of viewing and the purchase of a few implements, he’s an abortion doctor.
When he’s ready, the termination of his girlfriend’s pregnancy will start its eternal journey down that rutted road to distant and forgotten memories.
In the 1960s, it was more difficult. Alexa set up a meeting with three doctors in an old house somewhere. She asked, and I tagged along. They signed some forms, which claimed that her life would be in danger if she carried her pregnancy to term. I drove Alexa to Maryland where we spent a week at the house of one of my dad’s friends who was in Europe at the time.
Alexa made an appointment at Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which was known to be a safe place where the doctors performed the procedure for women whose lives were in danger. Yes, it was expensive.
Her friends chipped in $600 — about $3,000 in today’s money. Though the hospital accepted her as a patient, the problem was that they wanted Alexa to return in three months. The abortion scheduling was crowded — booked solid. Alexa would be six months pregnant before it became her turn on the schedule.
Alexa and I decided to spend the week we had set aside for the hospital visit to go out each night to party in the Georgetown clubs in Washington DC — we ended up dancing and drinking away every dime of the money we had collected from her friends. Nightly, we returned to our borrowed house to make love with no worries about pregnancy.
It was liberating to love a beautiful woman unafraid of consequences.
I learned later that some in the neighborhood noticed the young couple coming and going at late hours from the house of their friend; they complained, but nothing came of it.
At week’s end we returned to our university where Alexa went to work on her friends to gather the money she needed for the final appointment. The school year would be over by then. Summer break was on its way. When she left on her second trip to DC three months later, she took the bus.
She knew what to do. She no longer needed me. The dress rehearsal was over. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to accompany her, she said.
I guess I don’t blame her.
As it happened, I became one of eighteen young men at the university who the government accepted into the army-officer training program that year. Over five-thousand applied in a futile effort to stay in school after the government ended draft deferments for college students — to better supply warm bodies to the killing fields in southeast Asia.
The army scheduled my training to start that summer in Georgia at Fort Benning. I couldn’t have been with Alexa, even if she wanted me, which she didn’t. In training, recruits were isolated in those days. Even a telephone call was impossible.
It turned out that it would be three-and-a-half years before I saw Alexa again. We ran into each other outside a steak house. She invited me to go inside and have something to eat.
She told me she owned a successful dance studio in Detroit. She looked amazing. She really did. She was happy. A good life lay ahead of her that would be full of all the good things that money from her business would buy.
I was dirty and unkempt. Again, I needed a shower, except worse. My clothes were rags, really. I explained that my military training didn’t end well. I became an anti-war protestor who spent maybe way too much time in the streets and the city parks. Someone put my car on blocks one night and stripped it of its MAG wheels and everything else of value.
I had no car.
I helped my friends organize demonstrations; I wrote unpaid copy for an anti-war newspaper. After resigning a pending officer’s commission (with the full support and encouragement of the Army) I dropped out of the university to fight the good fight against the Vietnam war and racism. I bussed tables a few hours a week in the same restaurant I once managed. Financially, I wasn’t doing well.
Alexa interrupted; she touched me on the arm and leaned-in to thank me for helping her that one time years ago when she needed a friend she could trust.
I felt unworthy. I felt shame. She was too good for me. This time in her expensive clothes and me in my filthy jeans, it was obvious to us both.
She paid for my meal and said good-by for the last time.
I grew up in a Navy family. Maybe it makes me a “Navy brat” to some. I really don’t care. Military families pay a high price. They move frequently, for one thing.
Dad was a naval aviator who, among other assignments, commanded in succession two squadrons of anti-submarine jet-helicopters — one squadron in Rhode Island, one in Key West. People who know me or who have read certain essays on this blog are aware.
Dad fought within and alongside the National Security Agency to defend our country. The United States created the NSA after World War II to monitor international shipping. The global fleet of tankers and cargo boats has grown to nearly 52,000. The USA is fortunate to possess high-tech sensors that can see nuclear bombs aboard ships. It’s one of many capabilities that keeps our country safe.
The NSA has been led by a succession of Navy Admirals, and Army and Air Force Generals. Today, the NSA is led by an Army General of Japanese descent. While others were interned, his dad worked for US intelligence during the last world war, it seems, so the president trusts him. He trusts him enough that in May 2018, he assigned him to lead the National Security Agency, the Central Security Service and the U.S. Cyber Command.
Now might be a good time to inform readers that I don’t now nor have I ever had a security clearance. I am a civilian pontificator who resigned (with a little help from an Army Lieutenant Colonel) a pending infantry officer’s commission decades ago, because I believed the Vietnam War was an atrocity. I had no appetite for the killing I would be ordered to perform to successfully engage in a war that for me at least made no sense.
What I have now is the experience of living with and around military and civilian intelligence officers during the first twenty-two years of my life. I lived near and was friends with the daughter of the man who discovered the missiles on Cuba that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. My dad became a significant player in that crisis. So I’m providing a unique perspective that other civilians might not have.
I suggested in a recent essay (47 TONS) that Japan is well on its way to becoming a threat to human survival should their chain of 6,852 remote islands fall into the hands of a cabal of wrong-headed leaders. The Japanese have accumulated 47 tons of bomb-grade plutonium from their fast-reactor programs. They are producing an additional eight tons per year.
A softball sized clump of about fourteen pounds is more than enough to make one unsophisticated atomic bomb. A state-of-the-art bomb can be made from a baseball sized clump weighing nine pounds.
Do the math.
The Japanese have other capabilities that should terrify anyone who might make the mistake to oppose them. They have a complex of labs they call RIKEN that span the islands. A deputy director hung himself at work a few years ago. The signs that something might be wrong at these labs are in plain view for anyone who bothers to look.
They have sophisticated missile and space programs called JAXA.
To their credit, NHK television has complained to the American public about the challenges Japan suffers from possessing and producing too much plutonium. Right now the USA seems to be preoccupied with Russia, Korea, and China. Russia says they have stealthy, multi-warhead nuclear missiles that can hurtle through the atmosphere at almost three miles per second.
Moscow is about 5,000 miles from Washington DC, or 2,000 seconds away — 33 minutes. Thirty-three minutes seems like a long time, but some are forgetting about the 300,000 Russians who live in Cuba, most assigned to the submarine and air bases Russia built and maintains there.
Cuba is 1,100 miles from Washington DC, which is a seven minute trip should Russia position their missiles inside Cuba’s jungled mountains. Again, seven minutes seems like a lot of time. The problem is, the missiles are stealthy; we can’t see them; even if we could, the United States has nothing that can shoot them down. They fly too fast.
News reports are currently downplaying the importance and extent of Russian progress in missile technology. The expression on Trump’s face after he came out of his two hour meeting with Vladimir Putin spoke volumes. Our sophisticated media can’t conceal for long that our country is in a deep hole. The situation for our side isn’t good.
Hillary Clinton mentioned another threat from Russia during the 2016 presidential debates. Her revelation was a national security screw-up of ginormous proportions, which the press let slide.
Everyone remembers Clinton calling DT, Putin’s Puppet. No one seems to remember her warning that unmanned Russian drones were sitting in the sands off our coasts.
US intelligence believes these drone submarines carry poisons — possibly plutonium, which will be released during a conflict.
I was living in Key West during the Cuban missile-crisis. My dad chased a nuclear-armed sub out of waters near Cuba. He almost started a war, but he spoke Russian and was able to make himself understood — the USA meant business.
He thought, as did everyone at the time, that we had caught Russia in the middle of its first installation of nuclear missiles on the island. The missiles weren’t yet armed; they posed no immediate threat.
Years later the Russians revealed that the missiles seen in the CIA photo-shoot were second generation. The first generation stood already buried — locked and loaded. Had an incident ignited an exchange of fire, Florida and Cuba would be distant memories to this day.
The incident involving my dad is retold, with a few perhaps intentional mistakes to protect national security, by Oliver Stone in his remarkable book, The Untold History of the United States. Oliver Stone was a warrior — a veteran of the Vietnam war. He has credentials that go beyond his opus of award-winning films, screen-plays, and books.
I’m not going to name names, but USA companies have milked the defense department for decades. They’ve dragged their feet to keep projects funded and on-going — why don’t we all figure this out together? — to maximize profits and bonuses for executives who in turn give money to senators and congress-folks who … well … only dummies are unable to figure it out, right?
Corruption is called corruption because it corrodes; what corrodes destroys. That’s the pickle-barrel the USA is in, and it could be the reason DT is kissing the behinds of the folks who developed high-speed, stealth missile technology, first.
Donald Trump might be trying to buy time for our side. In the meantime our leaders are playing parts in a charade of good cops / bad cops to de-escalate an existential threat to our country until balance can be restored.
To write it so a child can understand: the balance of power has shifted away from the United States. Our enemies are saying that the USA no longer holds the advantages we once enjoyed. If we mess-up, and even if we don’t, we could wake up one morning — those of us who survive — to see our country reduced to a smoking ruin of radioactive waste.
OK. That’s one view of what’s going on. It’s my personal view — at least today. No one else has said it, so that’s why I published. It’s something to consider. Maybe tomorrow, more information will come out. I’ll change my mind. Who knows?
There are other explanations for why DT behaved in Singapore and Helsinki like a traitor according to one of our recent CIA chiefs, John O. Brennan. By the way, I’m 70 years old — two years younger than DT. I’ve never heard a CIA director call any president a traitor.
EDITORS NOTE: On August 15, 2018 the president announced that he had stripped Brennan of his security clearance on July 26. Like FBI Director Comey before him, Brennan learned his bad news from television reports. The man who served six presidents and gathered the intelligence to conduct the raid that took down Osama Bin Laden wasn’t offered the courtesy of an e-mail or phone call. Instead, DT called him ”erratic”and slandered him by insisting that he couldn’t be trusted with the nation’s secrets.
Meanwhile, former senior advisor Omarosa Manigault called Donald Trump ”unhinged” and a ”racist.” Omarosa is married to Pastor John Allen Newman of Jacksonville, Florida and is herself a Baptist minister who served as a chaplain in the California State Military Reserve before joining the Trump Administration.
I’m not sure, but I think I once witnessed a cartel of intelligence officers assassinate one of our presidents. They sat on the Warren Commission, if anyone is curious about who they were.
One of the members was a fired CIA chief with a grudge. I was a teenager then. What did I know? — only what the commission spoon-fed me and every other American. Enough said.
We’ll never know the truth about the Kennedy assassination. Most people in the intelligence community disliked him, but so did a lot of other people including Cubans, Russians, and organized crime. All the people who know the truth or think they do are now dead or dying.
So, to get back to other explanations: Some think DT was groomed over decades by Russian oligarchs allied with Russia and Israel. To keep him in line they provided him with a wife who was born when he was a 24-year-old skirt-chaser. He had to wait, but the wait was worth it, for him at least.
She was the daughter of a member of the communist party from a region of Yugoslavia that would later be renamed, Slovenia. She was a model unafraid to pose nude. Who doesn’t know the story?
She Germanized her name to be more in line with DT, who came from a powerful family headed by a German billionaire. His dad was once reported by some in media to be the wealthiest American — at least for a few years. He’s notorious for building segregated housing in Queens with government money during the second world war. Enough said.
Is DT’s wife a Russian sleeper agent? Of course not. The thought alone is preposterous, right?
Another theory some have put forward to explain DT is that he is a racist and delusional old man in the beginning stages of bona-fide dementia; perhaps Alzheimer’s disease. It’s a little early for dementia, but I knew a woman who was diagnosed in her thirties. It took two years for Alzheimer’s to claim her.
DT’s White House physician said no; the president will live to be 200 years old if he adjusts his eating habits a little. He’s as sharp as they come — a stable genius.
DT attended a private military academy during high school. There were two reasons young men went to military academies in those days; I remember well. One was because they were either in trouble with the law or unmanageable at home. A private academy kept them out of the house and helped maintain a peaceful lifestyle for the parents. The other reason was to avoid going to integrated schools where blacks were beginning to be introduced into mainstream civilian life.
A college suite-mate of mine bragged that he avoided school with Negroes by attending a private military academy. He also thought Martin Luther King was a communist. I’m sure readers know the type. He graduated in criminal justice and went on to become the head of a police department in a northern state.
We’ve all met people like him, whether we know it or don’t — tall, good-looking, and bad to the bone. The war-resisters, the fighters for racial justice, the men and women of conscience who cared about right and wrong were systematically identified by conservative corporate leaders and kept away from both power and the best jobs at Fortune 500 companies.
A major company in Milwaukee hired me after I graduated. They investigated and learned that I had resigned my officer’s commission to protest the Vietnam War. The background investigation took four weeks. When it was complete, their top investigator fired me.
It was my first job in industry. I learned quick to omit any mention about my anti-war past and to avoid companies that employed investigators. It seemed obvious to me that I would be unable to make a good living otherwise.
The hammer that hit me hits everyone who resists the bad people. It’s the price the poor sometimes pay for standing against the wealthy and speaking truth to power. It’s capitalism’s unseen collateral damage.
I fear for the young people starting their careers today. A trail of internet evidence exposes every free thinking American to the prejudices of the corporate elites who want docile employees who shut up and do what they’re told, no questions asked.
My regret is that, looking back, it seems like I might have had a lot to give, but nobody wanted it; no one felt they needed it. If the truth is told, everyone is expendable and replaceable, right? How many times have the powerful said so to the powerless?
The lives that matter are the lives of the billionaires who rule over us all and call it freedom. I learned that white supremacists (racists) in America can achieve the highest levels of success and be admired by almost everyone who knows them.
It’s true.
But back to the intelligence assessments: Today a Russian woman was arrested who is accused of having established a channel of communication with the GOP through the NRA (National Rifle Association). The Russians planned to launder money through the NRA, according to the allegation.
The Russian agent, Mariia Butina, is now being held without bond, because she is a flight risk. She was having an “affair” with “U.S. Person 1” to gain access “to an extensive network of U.S. persons in positions to influence political activities in the United States” according to her indictment.
Why?
Well, it gets worse in the indictment, but I don’t want my essay to go off into the weeds. People will hear all about it soon enough. Take my word. It’s bad. Who knows what else the Russians planned to better enable them to manipulate hundreds-of-thousands of paranoid, Hillary-hating-Rambos who practice their shooting skills every week at firing ranges across America?
Use imagination for a moment. Imagine that instead of Trump, it was Clinton who won the election. The “deplorables” were ready for revolution, weren’t they? Remember how they attacked vote-counting centers after Al Gore carried Florida in the year 2000?
The GOP intimidated the Supreme Court to halt a constitutionally mandated recount of state voting that was beginning to turn against them. The Constitution of the United States makes voting the exclusive province of state governments, does it not? Look it up. The Supreme Court had no constitutional standing. It’s why the majority opinion took care to restrict its ruling; it was not to be used as precedent for any future rulings from any bench in America, ever. Right?
Who knows better how to incite and fund revolutions than the KGB agents who took down the Russian state and now own and run it as a personal fiefdom?
The citizens of the United States would have been in a second civil war right now, because the DT confederates were planning to insist that Hillary stole a rigged election, right? Does anyone remember? DT was preparing to lead a revolution against America with Russian help. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
Maybe Russia planned only to destabilize America. Like the Japanese at Pearl Harbor they didn’t plan for a lopsided victory. The Japanese had no plan to occupy Hawaii. They ran like frightened sharks and hoped we wouldn’t catch them. It took four years, but eventually we came, we saw their lovely islands, and we conquered.
Japan will remain in our vise-grip until the end of time. That was the plan, anyway, when their leaders signed the terms of unconditional surrender in 1945.
Some say that DT harbors a secret desire to become a dictator. He admires strong men and wants to be one. He owned a professional wrestling league and a football team for a reason, maybe.
It’s counter-intuitive, but we might have lost our country to destabilization and revolution had Hillary won the Electoral College. We have now a chance to save ourselves. We have to take that chance.
( Editors’ Note:Hillary garnered 65,853,516 popular votes to Trump’s 62,984,825. ”Third party” candidates took close to 8 million. Ms. Clinton’s margin over Trump in the popular vote was 2,868,691. Hillary won the most votes of any candidate; Trump lost the popular contest by almost eleven million votes. He received 46% of the popular vote. Hillary and the third party candidates received 54% — a margin of 8%. )
People who played ball with the Russians (like the NRA) to take down the “deep state” might want to consider that they risk being arrested someday for treason, because they aided and abetted our enemies who attacked and continue to attack our elections, a foundation stone of American liberty.
The deplorables sometimes behave like fascist bullies, don’t they? They have pretty much proved who they are over the past two years, haven’t they? Read their twitter feeds, anyone who doesn’t believe it.
They claim to be Christians who love military assault rifles. How’s that for crazy? No one who survives being shot by an AR-15 ever fully recovers.
According to polls, deplorables seem to be about forty-percent of the voting population. It’s disgraceful what they post on social media. They’ve brought the USA into a bad place.
To any Trumpletonians who might be reading this essay, here are some things to learn and remember. There is no “deep state.” White supremacy is a lie. Muslims, Negros, Mexicans, gay men and women, and progressives are people who are owed respect, because they are made in the image of God, if for no other reason. They mean you no harm.
Walls make the best prisons.
Be kind to strangers, even on Twitter. You might be tweeting to angels, unawares.
Today, as I write, the orange man (now blonde) who stole our election on behalf of the Russians held a meeting with Russian diplomats. He allowed only one press organization to cover and release photos. I asked some reasonably well-informed, smart people what press organization they thought it might be. They answered, Fox News.
Of course, their answer was nonsense. Fox News is clueless. It always has been. It’s run by a group of non-native Americans (their countries of origin are China and Australia) who have their own idiosyncratic ideas about what they want the USA to become. Their women parade around on camera half-dressed; recent lawsuits have disclosed that executives use many of them for sex.
They pretend to be patriots and Christians. Of course, anyone who isn’t deaf, dumb, and blind knows they are neither. They aren’t reporters either. Cheerleaders for GOP politicians is a better descriptor.
No, the correct answer is TASS, the Russian news agency, which is an arm of the Russian government. TASS made the press announcements. They released the photographs. And of course, life goes on. No one seems to care. On Tuesday, the FBI director — who led the investigation into ties between our leaders and Russian mafia-oligarchs — was fired.
On Wednesday (today), we learned that it was the president — he remains under investigation — who fired the FBI director; he celebrated by meeting with his Russian friends. They wore black suits, as if to highlight their bonds of power. The president lied, it turns out, about both the process and his reasons — according to members of his own staff, who leaked to major news outlets.
The FBI director learned that he had been dismissed when he saw the announcement on television — the place where most folks get the news they trust most.
Director Comey thought it was a prank. He was preaching to a new class of recruits somewhere in southern California. He read the announcement on the scrolling news ribbon.
Later, the leader of the president’s civilian bodyguards hand-delivered the director’s pink slip. One report claimed that the FBI head hired a commercial aircraft to make his escape home. (ABC News reported that he was able to secure a government plane.)
Unless the Russians go door to door arresting people, no one will ever care — certainly no one in the GOP, it seems. The typical American lives inside a psychotic bubble of evil. Some act like they’ve lost the ability to assess realistic threats to their way of life; to the things they hold dear. They’ve watched too much television, too many movies, too much pornography; they’ve explored too many fake news sites — sites designed by experts to manipulate them into believing absurdities.
The typical American takes too many drugs — some wake up with caffeine and amphetamines; some struggle through stressful work days that last way too long; they sustain themselves by swallowing tranquilizers or derivatives of heroin like oxycodone; some put themselves to sleep with barbiturates or alcohol or both. Some drugs are prescribed; they’re necessary. Others are illegal.
It doesn’t seem to matter. The appetite for drugs is massive; Americans spend billions of dollars each year for drugs they might be better off not taking. They might more realistically assess threats to their freedoms with minds less anesthetized. Feeling good while living in a high-tech prison bult by billionaires is unnatural and, if anyone thinks about it much, sad and more than a little pathetic.
Many Americans would strap syringes to their arms if they believed that no one would notice — as did Howard Hughes, the billionaire industrialist from yesteryear. Some readers may recall that our government confiscated his many businesses to make it easier to build and secure our country’s infamous war machine; the process drove Howard insane; he became dependent on drugs only they could reliably supply to keep him docile and compliant. He lived his last days wearing Kleenex boxes on his feet, because the tissues cushioned his arches and comforted him.
Howard Hughes watched movies all day long — movies he once produced; they often featured his long-lost Hollywood friends. When he felt sad, which was often, he tapped the end of the plungers in the syringes strapped to his arms. Sometimes he cried.
The Mormon FBI agents who baby-sat him allowed him to wallow. They left him to himself for the most part. He never traveled unless they took him. He never fled his gilded prison. His addictions made flight impossible. He might as well have been left to die on a sandbar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. He dropped off the face of the earth. Members of Congress, some of them, worried about him.
The public was asking, Did Howard Hughes die? He had vanished from view like a ghost. No one ever saw him. He must be dead, some argued. Others knew better. They arranged a phone call with his handlers — to allay the fears of those few who believed that bad actors held him against his will. Powerful congress members wanted to know the truth and share it with the public.
During the call — which was broadcast to the world via speaker-phone before a full congressional gathering — Howard said that he was OK. He was alive. Someone asked, almost as an afterthought, if he was happy. His reply stunned Congress into silence. He answered, No… I’m not happy.
The phone called ended, and that was that. A few years later, Howard died. The coroner said that he found broken needles embedded in the bones of Howard’s arms and legs. He weighed less than ninety pounds.
Erich Fromm published the book Escape from Freedom in 1941. It was a required read in my high school during the 1960s, which was a long time ago — for some people. It seems like yesterday to me.
Fromm was a German psychoanalyst who argued that true freedom, if it ever came, would scare people so bad that they would embark on an unhealthy search for security; for certainty. The search would be a kind of escape; a frantic fleeing from the painful dissonance that the dissimilarity between people with disparate values can induce.
This discord intensified inside the USA during the past decade or so. Does anyone really want to go through the list of things that Americans hate about each other? Must I mention gay marriage, abortion, liberal politics, civilian access to weapons of war, religion, race, ethnicity, politics, viewing habits, Facebook rants, Twitter smears, and on and on?
People follow; they unfollow; they block; they unblock. They flip channels. They jump from Facebook to Instagram and back again. Nothing works; nothing helps.
Erectile dysfunction, for example, is a subject that has been thrust into everyone’s faces; into the deepest recesses of our subconscious minds. It’s relentless. It’s been discussed with commercial intensity on every media channel. People who watch sports programming can’t escape it.
No one can turn off the voices that are driving us mad, because the people who manipulate the public don’t agree with our points of view; with our sense of life. Do I suffer from erectile dysfunction? No; Hell no! I wish I never heard the term.
Do I yearn for a leader; a guide; someone to stand things up; to set things right? Yes. Of course I do. But it seems like Christ Jesus is not going to visit anytime soon. Maybe a Second Coming is fantasy. Maybe we’ve been stood up. Maybe we need a Führer. Yeah, that’s it.
I said earlier that I borrowed this essay’s title from the book of the same name published in 1941 by the German-born psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm. I don’t know if the book is required reading today or not; perhaps it should be; better books might have replaced it.
I considered a different title; I did. Maybe the Stockholm Syndrome would have been better. It’s about the ten percent of hostages who take on the values of their tormentors. I thought and thought. No; Escape from Freedom was best.
At least for now.
Billy Lee
Note from the Editorial Board:The details of the life of Howard Hughes included in Billy Lee’s essay are based on his memories of events as recorded in press accounts written and televised in real time as they were unfolding. Billy Lee’s memories do not in every case align with current historical accounts, because the history of Howard’s life has been reconstructed and fictionalized by many sources — according to Billy Lee. Billy Lee believes current accounts are revisionist, and in some particulars may in fact be inaccurate. Billy Lee witnessed the congressional interview with Mr. Hughes as it occurred.
This essay is Billy Lee’s rewrite and revision of a politicaldig.com blogpost written by Ron Delancer, which circulated widely on social media and Facebook.
Billy Lee used it with permission it turns out — the post ends by encouraging readers to copy, paste, and share it on their Facebook timelines — but he revised it extensively, mostly for formatting, but also to make it readable for his thin slice of the web-reading public who, it seems, suffer from, among other things, personal problems related to the understanding and processing of complex ideas.
In defence of Billy Lee (who pays our salaries), he claims that his version is a parody of the original; a satire, really — a controversial satire at that. As parody and satire, his essay is sufficiently differentiated and is not intended to infringe or undermine any copyright protections of the article it satirizes.
The last ten paragraphs are original work by Billy Lee alone. We sue people who copy, duplicate, publish, or possess hard-copy of Billy Lee’s original work, so don’t do it. Links that take readers to our site are fine. In fact, we encourage it.
Here is a link to the original article: Poor Suffering Trumpsters
The BillyLeePontificator Editorial Board
A Trump supporter told a Hillary/Obama supporter whose initials are S. M., We suffered for eight years. Now it’s your turn.
S.M. wrote a brilliant response asking how exactly his “friend” suffered under Obama. Our readers will find below Billy Lee’s fractured mess — his version — of S.M.’s reasonable and respectful inquiry.
It is satire, people. Supporters of our nation’s newest president can click on the word satire to learnthe definition. It’s fun to learn new words — especially those with more than one syllable. The Editorial Board
Dear Trump supporter,
I am surprised you would wish suffering upon me. You know, you always hurt me when you are mean and insulting. Of course, it is your right under our Constitution, I suppose. I’ve never wanted to hurt anybody. I really don’t. You seem to hold an “US versus THEM” mentality.
Do you like to fight?
The election is over. Isn’t it time to put the political campaign behind and look for ways to work together as fellow Americans instead of lunatics?
There will never be a president who does everything to everyone’s liking. There are things President Obama (and President Clinton) did that I do not like and on the other hand I can point to stuff President Bush did that I actually agreed with. Notice I said “some.” Bush destabilized the Middle East and almost bankrupted our country. I didn’t much care for that part.
If you’re like me you owned a 401K retirement account in 2008. I lost about forty-grand bailing out Wall Street bankers. How did your 401K do? I lost my job when my company was forced to downsize; they couldn’t borrow to make payroll. How did your employer do? Did you keep working?
The United States was hemorrhaging close to a million jobs a month when Obama got elected. A person would have to be strung-out on meth not to remember. You do remember, don’t you? It was an economic free-fall for everyone. Billionaires did OK. That was the good part. For them, anyway. They not only survived, they prospered.
So let us recall that almost ALL of America was suffering at the beginning of Obama’s presidency. You get that, right?
Of course you do. But I wanted to look back over the last eight years and ask you a few questions. The hayseeds in your pant cuffs and pig manure on your rubber boots tell me that you might not know much about economics, but you do know what pig-shit smells like.
Well, here’s some shit. People said Obama was a Muslim from Africa who lost his birth certificate. He was gonna impose Sharia Law, Take Away Guns, Create Death Panels, Destroy the Economy, Impose Socialism and worse — his wife was a terrorist.
Some evangelicals insisted Obama was the anti-Christ.
Does your wife allow you to track pig poo-poo into your house? I didn’t think so. You have too much class to track yucky-stuff everywhere. So I was wondering: Why do you always say that you suffered so much under the Obama presidency?
I’m going to guess why and ask leading questions, you know, to sort of help you think up some answers. Maybe you’ll do me the kindness of answering a few of them, so that my readers can better understand why you choose to think and act like a moron. Hope you’re ready. Here they come: Gays and Lesbians can now marry and enjoy the benefits of freedoms long denied. Has this caused your suffering?
When Obama took office, the Dow was $6,626. When he left, it had tripled — to $19,875. Has this caused your suffering?
Obama gave us eighty-two straight months (nearly seven years) of private sector job growth – the longest streak in the history of the United States. Has this caused your suffering?
Think about the economy when Obama took power. The economy was in free-fall. President Obama created 11.3 million new jobs (far more than President Bush). Has this caused your suffering?
Obama dropped the unemployment rate from 10% to 4.7%. Has this caused your suffering?
Homelessness among US military veterans dropped by half. Has this caused your suffering?
Obama shut down our overseas black-site prisons, where people were tortured — in some cases to their deaths. Has this caused your suffering?
President Obama started the policy to pay travel expenses for the families of fallen soldiers. Grieving families, for free, can meet the returning planes that carry the remains of their loved ones. Has this caused your suffering?
We landed a rover on Mars and expanded our exploration of the cosmos. Has this caused your suffering?
The percentage of folks with no health insurance has fallen below 10%; 90% now have it-–an increase of 20 million people. Has this caused your suffering?
People are now treated for pre-existing conditions. Poor people with heart disease or cancer can buy good insurance at discounted rates. Has this caused your suffering?
Insurance premiums increased 58% during the Bush administration. The growth of premiums was far lower during the Obama presidency. Has this caused your suffering?
Obama added billions of dollars to mental health care for our veterans. Has this caused your suffering?
Consumer confidence grew from 38% to 88% during Obama’s tenure. Has this caused your suffering?
His bi-annual Nuclear Summit helped to convince sixteen countries to dispose of their loose nuclear material, so it could not be acquired by terrorists. Has this caused your suffering?
He saved the USA auto industry. American per-year car sales doubled during his presidency (to nearly 18 million vehicles). Has this caused your suffering?
The deficit as a percentage of the GDP (gross domestic product) fell from about 10% to 3%. Has this caused your suffering?
The total deficit dropped $800 billion. Has this caused your suffering?
Obama preserved the middle class tax cuts. Has this caused your suffering?
Obama banned solitary confinement for juveniles in federal prisons. Has this caused your suffering?
He enacted credit card reforms so that your interest rates can’t be raised unless you are warned first. Has this caused your suffering?
He outlawed government contractors from discriminating against LGBT persons. Has this caused your suffering?
He doubled Pell Grants. Has this caused your suffering?
Abortion is down. Has this caused your suffering?
Violent crime is down. Has this caused your suffering?
He protected Net Neutrality. Has this caused your suffering?
Obamacare extended the life of the Medicare insurance trust fund (it will be solvent until 2030). Has this caused your suffering?
He banned torture. Has this caused your suffering?
He negotiated with Syria to destroy their chemical weapons. Has this caused your suffering?
Solar and wind power usage is at an all time high. Has this caused your suffering?
High school graduation rates rose to 83% – again, an all time high. Has this caused your suffering?
Corporate profits are up. Bankruptcies are down. Has this caused your suffering?
Obama started the process to normalize relations with Cuba. We share embassies now. Has this caused your suffering?
Reliance on foreign oil is at a 40 year low. Has this caused your suffering?
US exports are up 28%. Has this caused your suffering?
President Obama appointed the most diverse cabinet ever. Has this caused your suffering?
He dramatically reduced the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. He avoided war with Iran and stopped their nuclear bomb program. Has this caused your suffering?
Obama decimated Al Qaeda and recovered a treasure trove of intelligence during the raid in Pakistan, which he directed and approved to apprehend its legendary leader. Did this cause your suffering?
Enough questions, already. Reasonable people should be able to agree that Obama pulled the USA out of a financial collapse and kept our country safe from attack by foreign terrorists.
Things are not perfect. A few dozen Americans went postal and shot up some places with weapons of war that no civilians should ever own. A lot of children got killed by crazy people.
It seems to me that our newly elected leaders are bonafide lunatics. I heard one psychiatrist say, no; it’s unfair to people who struggle with mental illness to equate their suffering with the behaviors of wicked people. Bad people don’t suffer. They are not debilitated by hurting others. They are energized.
It seems to me that people didn’t suffer during the Obama years; they hated, some of them; there’s a difference. Nasty people posturing as patriots hated on a black man who managed to become president of the most powerful slave-state in human history. He won a Nobel Prize for it; no one believed a country with a reputation for racial-cruelty would ever permit such a thing to happen. But it did.
I was 20 years old before a black man could sit at a counter and drink soda at a drugstore. Because of Barry Obama, most 20 year old kids today don’t remember a time when a white man was president. They were 12 years old and not paying attention, many of them.
Our new president is white and rich. He has over 5,000 times as much money as Obama. It’s one reason why he doesn’t respect our former chief executive. Lack of respect is one reason his family won’t live in the White House.
It’s not the only reason.
If he and his family colluded with foreign crime bosses to take control of our beloved America, well, everyone is going to suffer except those who choose to become collaborators.
When the nightmare ends, maybe years from now, the collaborators will suffer too. We live in the land of the free and the home of the brave — remember it, people — despite the low opinion some of our leaders might have of us. We will find new leaders.