Obama, Katrina and the Poorly Educated

Companion questionnaire to accompany Democratic Platform Document

On Monday, the shieldWALL unveiled its platform for the Democratic Party to take back the House and Senate in 2018 and the White House in 2020. As a companion piece to our platform document, we have compiled the following questionnaire to make it easy for voters to better understand your position on the issues and ultimately make the right choice.

So, when any of you are out campaigning for Democratic candidates for Congress and/or the White House, please carry a supply of these questionnaires with you and present one to any Trump voter you might encounter.

Please answer the following questions with a “yes” or “no” answer:

1. Do you receive Social Security? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

2. Do you receive Medicare or Medicaid? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

3. Do you have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

4. Does anybody in your family use prescription drugs? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

5. Do your children go to public schools? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

6. Do you or any member of your family have one or more minimum wage jobs? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

7. Could a robot do your job? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

8. Has any rich person ever gotten a big, fat tax break but failed to “trickle down” some of the money to you? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

9. Are you afraid that North Korea might start a nuclear war? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

10. Do you want clean air, clean drinking water and a clean environment for you, your children and your grandchildren? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

11. If you live near water, say, in Florida or California, would you be upset if your property slowly sunk under a rising ocean? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

12. Are you in favor of projects that actually do create jobs, such as renewable energy and infrastructure improvements, instead of phantom jobs tied to tax breaks for the wealthy? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

13. Are you an immigrant who would be upset if you got deported? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

14. Are you or any member of your family in the military and still eligible to be deployed to fight overseas? (If yes, you shouldn’t have voted for the Republicans or Donald Trump.)

15. Are you a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist who wants to kill Jews, Hispanics, Asians and African Americans and turn America into an all-white, ethnically pure, radical right-wing fundamentalist Christian society? (If yes, is that why you voted for Republicans and Donald Trump?)

If you answered “yes” to any question except the last one, WTF is wrong with you, man? Are you too lazy to educate yourself on the issues so you can be a productive participant in the electoral process…or are you just plain stupid?

If most or all of these issues are important to you, voting for Republicans is a vote against your own self-interest. Why would you support a political party that wants to take away those things that you need the most … and then shove a sharp stick in your eye just for fun?  It makes me want to add a few more questions to this survey.

16. Did you ever graduate from any school or attend classes beyond the third grade?

17. Did you know there are books, magazines and other materials like the internet that explain our country’s history, the American political system and the issues in any campaign?

18. Can you even read?

If you answered “no” to the last three questions, please don’t ever vote again. Not voting will be the best thing you can do to help make America great again.

Democrats: I got your platform, right here

If America is to survive our plunge into racist xenophobic Fascism and undo the colossal damage wrought by the Donald J. Trump administration, it is absolutely critical that the voters elect Democrats to majorities in both the House and Senate in 2018 and the White House in 2020.

I keep reading stories about how the Democrats don’t have a winning strategy or a platform that resonates with the majority of likely voters, so I came here to help. I’m prepared to offer you the following platform – free of charge. All you have to do is follow my plan and you’ll be back in the driver’s seat starting one year and change from now.

First off, Democrats, forget about Russia. The investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller may take many more months and will find what it finds. The best case scenario is that Trump gets indicted, impeached, imprisoned and raped repeatedly by a gang of bad hombres who were originally arrested for parking violations by Sheriff Joe Arpaio...and became hardened criminals while encamped in Sheriff Joe’s tent prison. Worst case? Mueller’s grand jury indicts everybody except Trump … and he pardons them all.

The point is, if you campaign on “Russia Russia Russia” and “we’re not as bad as Trump,” you will lose. Clearly that is not a winning strategy. One-third of likely voters would still support His Majesty King Trump even if he appointed Vladimir Putin as campaign manager (actually, he kinda did), and it's not enough to inspire others to come out and vote. What you need is a strategy that speaks directly to every American who is currently getting screwed by the Trump administration, including those people who are too stupid to know it yet.

I’d start out something like this:

* If you vote for Democrats, we won’t take away your Medicare or Medicaid…but Republicans will. Don’t take our word for it. Just ask them.

* If you vote for Democrats, we won’t take away your Social Security…but Republicans will. Paul Ryan has said so.

* Also, we won’t take away your health insurance but will find a way to fix it that doesn’t cost you more money. Republicans want to leave you with premiums you can’t afford or nothing at all.  

* We will find a way to lower the cost of prescription medicine. Republicans won’t do that for you.

* We will raise the minimum wage so you have more money to spend, which means more money for small businesses which will have more money to hire more people to make even more money to cover their taxes which help pay for the things we all need.

* We’ll make sure the rich people are doing their share. The Republicans just want to give them a bigger share. 

* We won’t close your public schools and give you a voucher for a charter school you can’t afford, and which is located many miles from where you live.

* We won’t start a nuclear war because our president is trying to out-crazy the crazy leader of North Korea. You can trust us with the nuclear football.

* We won’t abolish laws that protect your land, your air and your drinking water, and we don’t deny that climate change is real, so if you live near water, you’re safe with us. We won’t leave you to drown in a rising sea.

* We will develop projects that actually do create jobs, such as renewable energy and infrastructure improvements, instead of promising phantom jobs tied to tax breaks for the wealthy.

* We won’t try to convince you – once again – that wealth will trickle down. In the words of Rocky the Flying Squirrel, "That trick never works."

* We won’t ban you from living here or deport you and your family to your “country of origin” when at least some of you were born in the United States.

* We won’t encourage and defend neo-Nazis and white supremacists who want to run you over with a car or burn you in an oven while denying people of color their basic human rights, including the right to vote.

* And we won’t send your sons to Afghanistan to keep fighting an un-winnable war.

There’s more, but you’ll have to vote for us to find out all the good things we can do for you while at the same time clearing away the wreckage left by the current administration.

Oh, and by the way, we promise to gently but firmly ask Hillary Clinton to please go be a grandmother and leave politics for good, thank Joe Biden for his prior service and ask Bernie Sanders to go back to being an Independent and leave Democrat politics to us. Then, we promise to offer up some good, young, talented, vibrant and enthusiastic candidates that all Americans can rally behind and who have the best interests of the country at heart. You can’t promote fresh, new ideas with stale old candidates who are long past retirement age.

And finally, we promise to stop sending emails. Period.

If it looks like a racist...

Where to stick it?

My Trump voodoo doll just came in the mail.
I stuck the first pin in his head, but I realized he has no brain.
Then I stuck one in his chest, but I realized he has no heart.
Quite the dilemma.
But then, I knew where to stick them where there's plenty of room.

Trump’s trifecta of triumph: ‘I came, I fixed it, I’m moving on’

These days it seems that everybody has a prediction about faux-president Donald J. Trump. As Republicans continue to pull away from him – including even some of his strongest supporters – and his popularity drops into the low 30 percent range, stories have started to emerge predicting when and how he will resign the presidency.

I have my own theory. It goes like this:

On the surface, Trump doesn’t seem like the type of person to quit. Quitters to him are losers and he claims that he always wins. He wins so much we’re going to get tired of all the winning…except he’s been in office for seven months and he hasn’t won much of anything yet. Still, if you ask him, he’s the greatest president since Lincoln and he’s done more than any other mere mortal in history.

But scratch the surface and look a little deeper. As a businessman, Trump declared bankruptcy six times. What is Chapter 11 if not an admission of failure, a resignation of sorts, even if he did manage to make money every time? Bankruptcy is quitting on your own terms, and thereby hangs a tale.

For the time being, Trump continues to stumble and bumble through his presidency by touting accomplishments that aren’t exclusively his to claim and telling lie after lie about everything else. As he does, the investigations by House and Senate committees, the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller continue to fill up file drawers full of evidence regarding his campaign’s ties to Russia.

Collusion, conspiracy, money laundering, obstruction of justice, fraud, perjury – I don’t know what Mueller will conclude, but chances are at least some of these charges are going to stick to at least some of the Trump campaign staff and maybe even Trump himself. Meanwhile, I believe, former Trump aides like Paul Manafort, Carter Page and others who are facing their own criminal charges are probably singing like a New Jersey street corner doo-wop choir.

If they are, and if serious charges arise from these investigations, impeachment would seem to be a real possibility, and in my opinion, Donald J. Trump will never allow himself to be impeached.

So here is my prediction: Before the end of the year or early in 2018, when members of Congress are well into their re-election campaigns and dragging Trump’s baggage along behind them, Trump will stage a few of his patented ego rallies around the country, boast of his many accomplishments, remind us that he won an “amazing” 306 electoral votes (and the popular vote if you remove the illegal ballots) and declare himself to be by far the greatest president in the history of the United States, if not the greatest leader in the history of the world.

He will return to Washington, hand out pardons like Halloween candy to anyone who has been charged with any crime, and make the following speech:

“I came here last year to drain the swamp and make America great again. I told you that I, alone, could fix our problems and that Crooked Hillary could not. Nobody gave me a chance, but here I am, and I have kept my promises.

“The swamp has been drained of worthless politicians. The country has been unburdened from needless regulations. The economy is strong. I have created more than a million jobs and many more are coming back to America. The stock market is at record highs and the jobless rate is at record lows. And we got a good man on the Supreme Court.

“We have overcome tremendous odds from the fake media which has treated us unfairly, and from obstructionist Democrats who conjured up a phony Russia witch hunt to cover up the fact that they lost an election they should have won. And we fought a Congress that was unwilling or unable to pass our agenda despite having the majority vote.

“I promised I would fix America and I have. I have made us great again in a very short time. There is nothing more I can do. I can only hope that others who follow me will maintain the progress I have made and keep us on our path to greatness. That will be my legacy to all America.”

And then he will resign, just like Chapter 11, on his own terms.

Why is British television better than ours?

Ever since I discovered Netflix and Amazon video, I’ve been watching more and more cop dramas originating in the United Kingdom. For my money, they’re better by far than your run-of-the-mill American cop TV, where the only things that change from show to show are the faces of the actors and maybe the city of origin.

You know what I mean. TV Guide descriptions could easily read like this:

• “Cops shoot perps in New York City.”
• “Cops shoot perps in Los Angeles.”
• “Cops shoot perps in Chicago.”
• “Cops in silly shirts shoot perps in Hawaii.”
• “Profiling cops travel across the country, shoot perps in Boise, Sheboygan and Dubuque.”

And on and on.     

British TV? Not so much, and I have some theories as to why that’s true.

(1) First off, there are virtually no guns in the U.K., so every episode does not devolve into a shootout between cops and killers. Oh, sure, there’s the occasional shotgun or hunting rifle seen, but mainly people are stabbed or strangled or pushed off a bridge, and the cops use their wits and their wiles to investigate crimes without fear of being ambushed. There's actual police work going on.

(2) Next, there are very few car chases. A lot of these shows are set in hamlets and villages where narrow alleys and curvy back roads don’t lend themselves to the high-speed chase.

(3) Third, the actors don’t all look like runway models. They look like real people. Make that real “British” people with pasty white skin and bad teeth.

(4) And the weather…does the sun ever shine in Scotland or Wales?  If it does, they don’t film on those days, because every scene we see is dark, gloomy and depressing – as befits a series about violent crime.

I’m not saying there aren’t some American TV shows I like. There’s “Elementary” for example, (oh, wait, the major character is British); “West World (sorry, had a British star); “Orphan Black” (no, wait, Canadian); “Fargo” (Ewan McGregor, Scottish); “Vikings” (OK, I give up).

Anyway, there are a lot of good shows coming from the British Isles that a lot of people don’t know about. Following is a list of just some of the programs that I think everyone should be watching:

Hinterland

“Hinterland” is a detective drama series set in Aberystwyth, a quaint little town of around 15,000 on the west coast of Wales. (Despite all the y’s and w’s, it’s pronounced just the way it looks – “Ab-er-ist-with.”) The seaside town serves as the location of police headquarters, but most of the action takes place outside of town in a rural landscape, parts of which could have been filmed on the moon.

It seems that everybody lives on a one-lane dirt road in an isolated farm backed up against the mountainous and rocky terrain. Every building looks like a cross between a Viking mead hall and a recycling center. Sheds and shacks are scattered all around, dotted with rusting farm implements and broken down vehicles. It’s downright depressing, which is part of the attraction of the show.

Troubled big-city detective Tom Mathias moves to the small town and solves murders while searching for redemption.

Broadchurch

“Broadchurch” is set in a quaint seaside town in the southern “foot” of England where everybody lives within walking distance of everything and everyone knows everyone else. There’s lots of wind and waves and seagulls and even some sun. Except for the fact that people keep getting killed or raped there, it’s the kind of place where I’d like to live.

Troubled big-city detective Alec Hardy moves to the small town and solves murders and rapes while searching for redemption.

Happy Valley

Catherine Cawood is a strong-willed police sergeant in West Yorkshire, still coming to terms with the suicide of her teenage daughter Becky eight years earlier. Cawood is now divorced from her husband and living with her sister, Clare, a recovering alcoholic and heroin addict, who is helping her bring up Becky's young son, Ryan, the product of rape. Cawood is middle-aged, normal looking, slightly overweight, with unkept hair and a casual appearance. She’s far from the typical cop show heroine.

In this show, Cawood solves crimes while everybody searches for redemption.  

Peaky Blinders

A gangster family epic set in 1919 Birmingham, England, “Peaky Blinders” is centered on a gang who sew razor blades in the peaks of their caps and their fierce boss Tommy Shelby, who means to move up in the world. In this series, the cops are portrayed as the bad guys while the Shelby family gets away with gambling, bookmaking, bootlegging, gun running, assault, battery and murder, just to name a few of their crimes.

As near as I can tell, no one is seeking redemption.

Luther

Idris Elba plays troubled detective John Luther, who solves crimes while searching for redemption…from everything.

The Fall

“The Fall” is a little different. Metropolitan Police Superintendent Stella Gibson, who looks exactly like Gillian Anderson, is sent to Northern Ireland to help with a stalled murder investigation. She discovers that a serial killer who looks exactly like Jamie Dornan is on the loose. Rather than search for redemption, she searches for an excuse not to sleep with Dornan, as well as her boss and any other man with a pulse.

And finally…

Sherlock

Stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. Enough said.

For the record, there’s jolly more shows I could have mentioned, plus some brilliant TV out of Scotland and Ireland (be sure to turn on the bloody closed captioning), and don’t even get me started on Australia, mate. Well, I’m pretty buggered right now so I’m off to my local for a pint or two with those barmy plonks from down the lane. I pray you were a trifle chuffed by this edition of my blog. That would be smashing indeed.

Cheerio.

Remove the statues if you must, but leave history alone

I have a lot of thoughts about what happened in Charlottesville last Saturday and none of them is good. First off, there’s the reaction of faux-president Donald Trump to the violent attack by white supremacists on peaceful protesters and the death of 32-year-old Heather Heyer, who was mowed down by a car driven by a Hitler-loving racist.

Not until the third day was Trump able to mouth the words “KKK,” “white supremacists” (which he mispronounced) and “racists” in the same sentence, and then only after he was so widely criticized that he was forced to say something, so he read some words that someone else wrote for him and quickly ran away.

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

There was the comment by former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke, who told a reporter that he and his “white is right” terrorists were “fulfilling the promises of Trump” and “taking their country back.” TV networks intercut that with clips of Trump during the campaign, claiming he didn’t know who David Duke is. Well, I’ve known about David Duke for most of my life, so I’m writing that off as just one more Donald Trump lie.

But that’s not what I want to talk about, either. 

What I really want to say is this: The riot in Charlottesville started over plans to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from government property. In its aftermath, some people want to tear down statues in North Carolina and Kentucky, among other places, and there’s even concern about a Stonewall Jackson monument in Charleston, WV.

The truth is, you can tear down every statue of a Confederate soldier from Vicksburg to Gettysburg but you won’t change the history that goes with them…and I don’t think we should try. You can’t erase the Civil War by ripping General Lee off his pedestal in front of the Buggknuckle Courthouse or the Craptahatchee City Hall.

I’ve been to Gettysburg and I’ve read the history that was created there. I’ve seen the wheatfields and the Devil’s Den and the hills above Pickett’s Charge, and I’ve seen the statues of Union and Confederate soldiers who fought there. I’ve been to Harper’s Ferry and I’ve been inside the engine house where John Brown was captured, and I’ve seen the Burnside Bridge at Antietam and walked on ground that I’m sure was once covered in blood.

You can’t go to those places and not be touched by the enormity of it all.

Closer to home, you can’t change the fact that Stonewall Jackson was a prominent general in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, or the fact that he was born in Clarksburg, now in West Virginia, and is memorialized by a statue in front of the Harrison County Courthouse there. You could tear down the statue, I suppose, and change the name of Stonewall Jackson Lake and Stonewall Jackson Dam and Stonewall Jackson Middle School… but you can’t erase the legacy of Stonewall Jackson or his place in American history.

Frankly, it doesn’t bother me that Stonewall Jackson sits atop his horse in front of the courthouse in Clarksburg. After all, he was born there and he was a famous general during the Civil War. Those are true facts and I can live with them. I’m more offended when I see a confederate flag in the window of a pickup truck with a gun rack behind the seat, NRA stickers on the bumper and a Trump hat hanging from the mirror. 

But I can also understand that some people are offended by monuments to people they consider to be traitors to America and representatives of the wrong side of a war fought over the right to own slaves. If they want these statues moved from public property, that’s okay with me, too. Put them in museums or on private land or in the cemeteries where these people rest. Just don’t rip them down with chains and drag them off to a junkyard some place while pretending that Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee never lived.

That’s what's known as revisionist history…and I am not a fan.

*     *     *

As a side note, Paul Prather, a contributing columnist for the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader, says in a recent article that Robert E. Lee would have supported the removal of his statues from courthouses and other government buildings. “He would have told the supremacists to shut up and go home, although he would have phrased it more politely," Prather wrote. "He would have told Charlottesville officials to remove his statue.”

Prather also had some advice for the white supremacists who started the brawl in Charlottesville: “The Civil War ended 152 years ago. The Confederates lost. World War II ended 72 years ago. The Nazis lost. You’re on the wrong side of history. Move on.”

The Constitution: We're good, right?

The party of David Duke

What if other presidents had told Trumpian lies?

All presidents lie. They do it for different reasons – to protect national security, push unpopular legislation, cover up wrongdoing or gain authority not otherwise granted. Some of our greatest presidents have told some of the biggest lies, but no president has ever told so many needless lies about so many trivial things that are so easily debunked as our current faux president, Donald J. Trump.

Here’s a look at some big presidential lies and what might have happened if former presidents had told other lies in Donald Trumpian style:

Lyndon Johnson

The big lie: In 1964, Johnson fabricated an unprovoked attack on a U.S. warship in Vietnam’s Gulf of Tonkin in order to justify a massive air strike against the Viet Cong. Congress then passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution authorizing the president to escalate the Vietnam War.

Trumpian lie: “Lee Harvey Oswald was never in Russia and had no connection to any Russians before he shot President Kennedy. He was a conservative Republican from Tennessee who was upset that Nixon lost the last election. And there were no Russians on the Grassy Knoll. The whole Oswald-Russia-assassination story is fake news from the failing New York Times.”

Ronald Reagan

Big lie: In 1985, Reagan lied about a plan to free hostages in Iran by having Israel ship missiles to Iran. The U.S. would resupply Israel with the missiles, and the U.S. would receive the cash that had been paid for the missiles. That cash would then go to Nicaragua to fund the Contra rebels who were fighting to take down the elected Sandinista government.

Trumpian lie: “I never said that Russia was an ‘evil empire.’ That was illegally leaked by the nut job director of the FBI. I have looked into Mr. Gorbachev’s eyes and I have seen his soul. I think we can be friends. The Berlin wall was erected by disenchanted Germans from a Volkswagen factory who couldn’t agree on the spelling of ‘fahrvergnügen.’ Russia had nothing to do with it, and it fell down on its own because of shoddy workmanship.”

John F. Kennedy

Big lie: Early in 1961, when rumblings of a possible invasion of Castro’s Cuba leaked out, Kennedy said, "I have previously stated, and I repeat now, that the United States plans no military intervention in Cuba." Just months later, Cuban nationals, backed by the CIA, invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.

Trumpian lie: “There is no evidence that Russia is building missile launchers in Cuba or sending ships to Cuba loaded with missiles and warheads. It could be China doing it or another country or even a 400-pound man sitting on a bed in his mother’s basement. These supposed CIA images have been photoshopped and the story was fabricated by Jeff Bezos and the tax-evading Washington Post.”

Abraham Lincoln

Big lie: Running for office, Lincoln said, “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would…interfere with their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you…that there is no cause for such fears.” In 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves.

Trumpian lie: “Seven score and 14 years from now, we will be engaged in a great civil war between conservative Republicans concerned about the adoption of Russian children and their liberal enemies who believe in bogus conspiracy theories about email hacking and election dirty tricks. But people are saying that this nation, under a staunchly conservative Christian God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the Trumps, by the Trumps and for the Trumps, shall not perish from the earth."

Barack Obama

Big lie: “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.” Then the Affordable Care Act went into effect and at least 2 million Americans started receiving cancellation notices.

Trumpian lie: “Hillary Clinton didn’t even have an email server and didn’t use email, period. That was propaganda generated by a Russian Twitter bot and reported by Alex Jones, Breitbart and Fox News. That’s why I put those sanctions on Russia.”

Donald J. Trump

Big lies: “We will build a big, beautiful wall along our southern border and Mexico will pay for it. One hundred percent. And repealing Obamacare on Day 1 will be easy."

Trumpian lies: “The whole Russia story is a hoax. No collusion. No obstruction. It's the biggest witch hunt in history.”

Also:

“I had the largest inauguration crowd in history.”

“No president has done more than me in the first 100 days.”

“No president has done more than me in the first 200 days.”

“I won the popular vote when you subtract the illegal votes. I won more Electoral College votes than anyone.”

“I hold the record for the most Newsweek covers.”

“I’m bringing back all the coal jobs.”

“The Boy Scouts called me to say I gave the greatest speech ever.”

“The president of Mexico called to praise my immigration plan.”

“Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. I have people in Hawaii and you won’t believe what they’re finding.”

“I will never go on vacation. I’ll be too busy to play golf.”

“I will never lie to you.”

And at least one thousand more…

What if President Franklin could see us now?

There's a meme going around that says Donald Trump is the greatest president since Benjamin Franklin. If that's not stupid enough for you, it also praises Trump for bringing “class and dignity” back to the White House. Back from where, I wonder? Back from those black people who used to live there? What else could that mean?

I’ll get back to that shortly, but first, is it “class and dignity” to mock the disabled, shame minorities, lie to voters, lie to the media, lie to everybody else, launder money, conspire with Russians to rig an election, hire hookers to pee on you and brag about grabbing women by the pussy?

Is it “class and dignity” to encourage violence at rallies, demean a free press and threaten members of Congress who don’t vote your way?

How about shoving other world leaders out of your way to get to the front row of a photo at an international summit? Or insulting heads of other nations both in person and on the phone, including some of our closest allies?

Is it classy and dignified when you play to a base of supporters who called President Obama's wife – our former First Lady – a "man," "Gorilla Face" and "an ape in heels?" Is that the kind of "class" we have living in the White House now?

I am personally offended by anyone who is NOT offended by everything Trump says and does. I have lost some former friends because of my politics, and I expect to lose even more, but I make no apologies for my beliefs. Frankly, I’d rather not know anyone who likes, loves, voted for, supports, admires, accepts or tries to normalize a man like Donald Trump. To me this is simply not negotiable.

Getting back to the Obamas, some people don’t recognize a dog whistle when they hear one, but dogs do, and there seems to be a lot of barking going on outside. I’ve always said the worst kind of racists are the ones who either don’t know they’re racists or pretend like they’re not. A guy dressed up in a Klan robe and hood may be despicable, but at least he’s up front about it.   

On the other hand:

* I’ve had enough of people who use buzz words and racist code to talk about the former president and his family – either on purpose or because they’re too stupid to know better.

* I’ve had enough of privileged straight white people who think they’ve been discriminated against or somehow deprived of their liberty.

* I’ve had enough of religious leaders who overlooked all of Trump’s transgressions to get an anti-gay, anti-abortion justice on the Supreme Court and are now ramming Christianity down everybody’s throat. And don't even get me started on their tax-exempt status.

* I’ve had enough of anti-intellectualism and the denial of science.

* I’ve had enough of politicians who held their noses to help get Trump into the White House and are still holding them while he turns our country into an authoritarian state.

* And I’ve had all of the stupidity I can stand.

I could write another thousand words on this subject but I’m just too angry to think right now. Maybe I'll write more tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, who knows?  In the mean time, I'm left to wonder what President Franklin would think about Donald Trump. I don't know for sure, but I'm betting he’d be on my side.

We have your box ready for you, Mr. Shields

I guess faux-president Trump is on vacation right now. This is the vacation he said he’d never take because he’d be working so hard in the White House. You know, the White House he said he’d never leave and now can’t wait to get out of every Friday afternoon. The White House he thinks is a dump.

He says it’s a working vacation. If he’s working in New Jersey the same way he works in Washington, I’d expect him to put in a good solid one or two hours a day at best. Thank you for your service, Mr. Trump. When do you tee off?

I have mixed feelings about Trump going on vacation. The angel on my shoulder thinks we might get 17 days of relative peace and quiet while he’s in New Jersey “working” -- that's working on his short game, his hook and his slice. I mean, I don’t see where he’s tweeted anything yet today. The devil on my other shoulder is angry because he gets to go on vacation and I can’t.

My last vacation was in 2004 when my wife, her father and I went to the Outer Banks. That was 13 years ago. Three of my four grandchildren weren’t even born then and one of them will be starting junior high this month. Our last dog, Chelsea, was still alive and healthy and our cars were not yet antiques. I was working in a nuke plant where I made good money and had plenty of accrued vacation time. I retired after that vacation, and we haven’t gone anywhere since.

I know you’re wondering why, right? Well, I’m really glad you asked.

For one, we don’t travel all that well these days because of our pre-existing medical conditions. You know, the ones that were discussed at length during the Congressional debate on repealing the Affordable Care Act. I won’t elaborate, but trust me when I tell you that pre-existing conditions are very real and no joke, and if not for the ACA, would make health insurance completely unaffordable for my wife and me.

And that’s the second reason why we don’t take vacations.

Thanks to the vacationing Trump and the vacationing members of Congress, uncertainty continues to linger over the future of our health insurance in particular and our financial condition in general. It appears that some members of the Senate want to come back after recess and barf up another bad bill to repeal or replace the ACA, while for his part, Trump keeps threatening to cut off the government subsidies that make the ACA even marginally affordable.

This financial uncertainty makes it imprudent for retired people of modest means to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on a vacation, even if we were up to it physically, when the money might be needed next year to cover medical expenses. 

Even if nothing happens to “Obamacare” between now and the end of 2018, when my wife becomes eligible for Medicare, there’s another sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. As far as we know, House Speaker Paul Ryan still wants to mess with Medicare by extending the eligibility age or cutting back on benefits or going to full-on privatization. That causes even more uncertainty for people like us.

And how would we pay for changes in our health insurance? Why, we’d use our Social Security benefits, of course. But wait! Paul Ryan wants to take those away, too, which would leave us with about one-third of our current income. That’s assuming FirstEnergy doesn’t put an end to our pension payments the way they did with our life and health insurance.

Two years ago my wife and I were moving along through life – somewhat slowly but moving along all the same. We were moderately content if not full-blown happy and contemplating the possibility that we would never see another Republican president in our lifetimes. We’d live out our days with Medicare and Social Security to protect us the way they were intended, seeing as how it was our money to begin with, and use our small retirement fund if we needed it.

As the narrator said in "Cannery Row," the world was spinning in greased grooves.

And then out of nowhere we got Trumped.     

I won't go through all of that again except to say this: I no longer believe as I once did that good people who live clean lives, care about others, work hard, stay out of trouble and raise good families will be securely wrapped in the benefits they were promised when they reach their golden years. That no longer holds true. But if you’re rich enough, greedy enough, sleazy enough, self-centered enough and arrogant enough to take what you can from whomever you can and add it to your own portfolio, you’ll do quite well in Trump’s America, and thank you very much.

So are we going on vacation this year? Are you kidding me? I’m just hoping that in a year or so, if we’re lucky, we won’t be living in a refrigerator box under one of the bridges across the Monongahela River. On the bright side, while that might not be the beach we’d choose, at least we’d be living near water.

Here he comes...there he goes!

Running the country is not like a TV show. Oh, wait…

Over the past few weeks, I’ve made a lot of references to the TV series “The West Wing,” comparing fictional American president Josiah Bartlet and his staff to the current administration of faux-president Donald J. Trump. I’m about a quarter of the way through Season 4 (of 7) and I plan to keep watching until I complete the series.

I see a lot of things in the show that I wish were true, but I’m not stupid or naïve. It’s easy to create a perfect world in a television series because none of it has to be real. Creator Aaron Sorkin was free to inject his personal politics and beliefs into his characters and bring them out on the wings of angels, while making the “other side” into the bad guys who were wrong about everything.

I know it doesn’t really work that way and besides, I don’t need Jed Bartlet to be my president with his “manifest integrity, quick witticisms, fierce intellect and compassionate stoicism,” as described in Wikipedia. I don’t need a president who served two terms as governor of New Hampshire, speaks four languages and is a Nobel Laureate in Economics.

I also don’t need my president to be Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas), the popular widower of the movie “The American President,” who falls in love with an environmental lobbyist played by Annette Bening and then has to defend her against slurs from his opponent. I will give the film credit for one of my favorite movie quotes, however.

When his opponent shows an unfavorable photo of Bening’s character, President Shepherd hits him with this: “You wave an old photo of the president's girlfriend and you scream about patriotism and you tell them she's to blame for their lot in life, and you go on television and you call her a whore. Sydney Ellen Wade has done nothing to you, Bob. She has done nothing but put herself through school, represent the interests of public school teachers and lobby for the safety of our natural resources. You want a character debate, Bob? You better stick with me, because Sydney Ellen Wade is way out of your league.”

I don’t need my president to be “Dave,” the good-hearted but naïve temp agency manager (Kevin Kline) who looks enough like the president to impersonate him as a side job. Dave is hired to cover up the president’s extramarital affair with a White House staffer, and gets stuck in the job when the president suffers a stroke. His everyman temperament and common sense ideas make him a better president than the man he is pretending to be.

While I’m at it, I don’t need Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels in “The Newsroom”) to be the tempestuous TV anchorman who holds politicians’ feet to the fire while spouting long soliloquies about “the American Taliban” or why America is no longer the greatest country on earth.

I don’t even need Mr. Smith (Jimmy Stewart) to go to Washington as the idealistic newcomer appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate who discovers – and fights against – a corrupt political system.

I don’t need any of these men to be my president or my senator or my journalistic conscience because they all have one thing in common: they don’t really exist. All I really need is a president who is aware that there are other people in the country besides himself who have wants and needs and depend on the government to provide them. I need my president to be an actual human being.

I need a Congress that isn’t afraid to stand up to a child-like narcissist with a mental defect who has the country leaning toward Fascism because he’s too weak to say “no” to his white supremacist adviser.

I need a media that doesn’t sacrifice its ideals and trade its mission to tell the truth for the glitz of higher ratings.

No, I don’t need a government that’s run like a movie or a TV show because I can distinguish fiction from reality. I need a government that’s run like a government, and therein lies the irony:

Our current president is running the White House like he's still the star of reality TV. He brings in staff members, gives them tasks to complete and then hauls them off to the “board room” where he fires the ones who don’t accede to his demands. In other words, it’s “The Presidential Apprentice,” and it’s exactly like the TV show he had before running for office.  

I’m still not stupid or naïve but this I will tell you: If I have to put up with a TV show instead of an actual government, I’d much prefer that Josiah Bartlet, Andrew Shepherd or even “Dave” was the man in charge.