Trump's War on Evidence

Do you ever wonder what constitutes “evidence” in the president’s mind?   For most people, evidence refers to the facts of forensic investigations and eyewitness testimony, at least in the legal system.  In the president’s mind, however, “evidence” seems to be whatever he wishes is true right at the moment. 

In science, evidence refers to established facts and data.  Scientific research includes carefully controlled experiments aimed at investigating various aspects of the material world, both biological and physical. 

In chemistry and physics, attention is paid to the composition and properties of elements, changes induced by chemical combinations, the laws of motion and theories of gravity, evolution, etc.  Among the luminaries are included Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and the late Stephen Hawking.      

The difference is striking between what constitutes evidence in law and science and what the president seems to think it means.   The president for years asserted President Obama was not born in America.  He insisted there was no birth certificate to prove otherwise when in fact there was. 

He appeared wholly ignorant of the fact that Congress has always had a committee that verified each candidate was qualified to run for office.  As early as 1789 there was a Committee on Elections organized by Congress after the first election. 

(This was split into three Election Committees in 1895.  The committees were later abolished in 1947 but their duties were taken over by the new House Administration Committee. ) 

If a candidate for president were younger than 35, for example, that would be red-flagged, as would the fact if he or she were born in another country.  

There was some discussion on this point concerning Ted Cruz and whether he qualified as a “natural-born citizen” who could become president because he was born in Canada; the answer was probably” yes” since his parents were Americans, although the need for final resolution of the issue never came to a head.

Years ago (1964) there was some minor issue raised about Senator Barry Goldwater—whether the fact that he was born in Arizona while it was yet a territory (and not a state) would create a problem.  He was born in 1909 and Arizona was not admitted to statehood until 1912. 

Was he a “Natural born Citizen”?  As the senator was not elected to the presidency, the issue was not further addressed at that time—the point being, there is a congressional committee that examines closely all such matters. 

President Obama could never have taken office had he not met all the qualifications for president, including his birthplace in Hawaii making him an American citizen. 

Obviously the current president does not care to read much history but such congressional procedures and safeguards are locked in place; they are there for him to consider should he ever wish to turn over a new leaf.  What kind of “evidence” did Trump have for making such a claim in the first place? 

He had none whatsoever other than right-wing sources who spread it as rumor and then repeated it as anti-Obama fuel to fan-the-flames of racism.   It was always a false assertion.  Apparently, Trump has a problem answering questions by relying on facts and evidence.

Even after President Obama released the short form of his birth certificate, Trump could not let the matter go and demanded to see the long form. 

Consider:  the short form was already recognized as a proper legal document and legitimate for passport acquisition and other purposes.

The author discovered this for himself when he needed to request a copy of his birth certificate in 2013 in order to renew his passport; the certified short form of my birth certificate was delivered along with a brief history of its official adoption (2011).  It was accepted as proof of citizenship by Passport Services, within the Bureau of Consular Affairs, under the U.S. Department of State.

It actually takes an extra step or two to re-acquire the earlier long form version which President Obama also did—and finally Trump kept quiet.  After years of Trump making totally false allegations on this matter, without the slightest shred of evidence, he was forced to keep quiet.

When the Central Park 5 went on trial for rape, Trump took out full page adds calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty.  All five teenage defendants were convicted in 1989 but exonerated in 2002 when another man, already convicted or rape and murder, confessed to the crime. That man’s DNA proved a match to evidence left at the scene of the crime.    

After spending six to thirteen years in jail, the Central Park five were finally cleared and New York agreed to pay them $41 million.  Even then, Trump did not change his opinion. 

The renowned film-maker Ken Burns made a documentary on the case in 2012 and opined: “Apparently Mr. Trump is unfamiliar with the concept of wrongful conviction.”    

When a person throws out false accusations without evidence, it is shameful; when that same person refuses to change his opinion even after the legal system fully concedes a mistake was made, it is more than shameful; it is morally reprehensible.

And yet, all of this is only half the story.  The first part deals with a president who ignores facts not to his liking, such as Obama being an American citizen.  For the record, Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961 (which is two years after Hawaii became the 50th American state on August 21, 1959.) 

The president likewise stubbornly refused to accept the exoneration of five falsely accused individuals, their wrongful convictions proven by the new science of DNA evidence and the confession of the actual perpetrator! 

Now let us examine what happens when it comes to highly credible allegations of Russia’s 2016 election meddling and the Saudi Arabian government’s role in the murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, Turkey. 

Suddenly the president becomes an expert on the insufficiency of evidence, a piece of irony reaching a level of lunacy given his long history of falsehoods and uncontrolled hyperbole.

Even though all the top intelligence agencies concur that Russia meddled in American elections, Trump chooses to ignore their findings! 

The president’s response to the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Kashoggi was no less shocking and boggles the imagination.

In authoritarian regimes, everything is top-heavy and top-down; orders come from above.  People don’t risk taking controversial actions on their own with such potentially serious consequences waiting to ignite. 

For Trump to suggest that the “question” of whether the Crown Prince (next in line to be king) was involved--ranging from prior knowledge to actually authorizing the murder—is in itself disingenuous and superfluous. 

Once again, American intelligence agencies (with some access to Turkey’s key information) have already expressed a high degree of confidence that the answer is yes, the Crown Prince was involved—it could not be otherwise in such a society as Saudi Arabia now is.    

The head of the CIA, Gina Haspel, met with Senators (12/04/18) to brief them on the matter. A couple of the Senators came out fuming and furious from what they learned: 

Senator Lindsey Graham said of the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), there’s” zero chance” that the Saudi Prince wasn’t involved in the murder of Kashoggi. 

Senator Bob Corker thought that if the crown prince were put on trial a jury would find him guilty of murder in “about 30 minutes” and there was “zero question” in his mind that the crown prince ordered and monitored the killing of Jamal Kashoggi.

And what is Trump’s position on Russian meddling and the Crown Prince’s involvement in the murder of Kashoggi?  The president points out that Putin denies being involved in any meddling and the crown prince denies being involved in any murder. 

What does the president make of all the evidence to the contrary?  Apparently, he has made up his mind to ignore it for as long as he can.  He chooses to believe the two heads of foreign states over the opinion of his intelligence agencies, even though those nations have a long history of human rights abuses.

Trump thus reveals himself to be a practitioner of the double standard taken to a new height of chutzpah or, perhaps better stated, a new low of intellectual incompetence and moral depravity. 

While he himself is repeatedly guilty of making the wildest accusations against others without a shred of evidence, he turns right around and ignores mounds of real evidence not to his liking—even though such evidence points to a highly likely conclusion and at times rises to nearly irrefutable proof. 

Note well: He repudiates genuine evidence on the one hand and offers unwarranted claims and wild speculation on the other.  The president willingly spreads falsehoods while he dismisses bonafide evidence. 

He is becoming the poster boy for “double standard” thinking:  a “switch-hitter” who revels in ignorance, falsehoods, hysteria, fear, bluster, and close-mindedness. 

His reasoning, values, and opinions create an amazing mess of inept and inane contradictions. 

T

his would be true for any average citizen with a similar history of such strange and inexplicable utterances.  

Such a person would be recognized by the field of psychiatry as needing therapy. 

When such behavior is witnessed in the leader of a democratic nation, such psychological instability leads to grave concerns for the mental health of the president and the welfare of the nation. 

The president’s foibles and follies appear to reflect willful blindness, criminal deception, and the placing of smug egotism over constitutional duties; taken all together, they threaten to drag the president across the threshold of impeachable offenses. 

Any man who holds truth itself--and the evidence upon which it is based--in such contempt cannot be trusted to lead America.     

DISHONEST DONALD

Dishonest Donald denies that global warming is occurring.  He is hoisting the flag of anti-intellectualism in order to lead the reactionary charge against all things scientific.  His kind of medieval and muddled thinking should have died out long ago but atavistic “throw-backs” do occur and he is the living proof.   

A government report just came out (11.23.18) that concluded just the opposite of what the president tweeted.  Based on the collective scientific efforts of hundreds of scientists, the report concludes that the future will be extremely costly for the U.S. if more is not done to check global warming: 

“Climate change will cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, hitting everything from health to infrastructure, according to a government report . . . .

“Global warming would disproportionately hurt the poor, broadly undermine human health, damage infrastructure, limit the availability of water, alter coastlines, and boost costs in industries from farming, to fisheries and energy production, the report said.”

(from cnbc.com “The Fourth National Climate Assessment Volume II”, Nov. 23, 2018, Reuters.)

One can also check out NASA’s website for a concise explanation of global warming and the extensive science behind it.  You can find it at climate.nasa.gov which includes a page devoted to Global Climate Change with sections on “Images of Change” and “Climate Time Machine.” 

Dishonest Donald points to cold weather in New York and gets that smug look of stupefied mediocrity upon his face with which we’ve become all too familiar.  Seasons continue to exist as do vicissitudes of daily weather—as distinct from changes in long-term planetary climatic conditions.

He does not understand that the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that human-caused climate change is real and continuing.  If he knew how to read, he could have learned that no one ever said global warming meant that every spot on earth would be steadily warmer than the day before. 

That’s a figment of Dishonest Donald’s diseased imagination.  Egomania corrupts reason and narcissism corrupts comprehension.

Even if serious reading is a skill beyond his mastery, Dishonest Donald could check out from the public library a book like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and look at the pictures: the disappearing glaciers at the top of mountains, for example, or what’s happening beyond the Arctic Circle. 

The fact is, Dishonest Donald never seems interested in educating himself where it involves any amount of effort or dispassionate reasoning based upon scientific evidence.  He appears to be wholly incapable of rational and objective thought under any and all such circumstances.

You know, deserts are places on the earth where very little rain falls.  If Dishonest Donald were standing in a desert on one of those rare days where rain occurs, do you care to guess what would he conclude?  He would announce that the definition of a desert as a place with little rain is all wrong!  This is a grown man acting like he has the mind of a six-year-old . . . and not a very bright six-year-old at that.

The warming pattern is derived from many scientific criteria and averages measured over years, decades, centuries, and millennia.  The conclusions are based on a massive amount of evidence collected by thousands of scientists around the world over the last half-century. 

The prediction was never for one single steadily increasingly, ever-worsening heat wave.  No, the prediction states that extremes of weather will worsen, including droughts, storms, floods, and yes, even cold snaps and blizzards.  Scientists understand and can explain the cause-and-effect between global warming and these extreme weather events, including cold weather.

The first time we heard the phrase “once-in-a-hundred year” event (gigantic floods, a storm like Sandy, etc.) it seemed pretty scary but perhaps an anomaly—only now we are hearing such statistical phrasing far more frequently.  The anomaly that was the exception is rapidly becoming the new norm.   

There are sound reasons, well understood by climatologists, why such extreme weather events are continuing to increase in frequency, duration, and severity due to global warming--as recent history amply demonstrates. 

Dishonest Donald’s poles are mixed up.  He has stupidity where intelligence should be, ignorance in place of knowledge, meanness in place of compassion. 

Dishonest Donald has been put together backwards.  He loves to contradict, bully, and bamboozle but nonsense repeated day after day doesn’t cease to be nonsense. 

There are ways to measure carbon dioxide emissions in the air and trace them to their human sources.  What the president suggests defies both logic and the laws of nature, of elemental physics. 

He prefers to indulge the desire to live in an imaginary fantasyland where whatever he says would be believed and no one would ever be allowed to disagree with any of his wretchedly foolish and idiotic pronouncements.  He doesn’t seem to get “Freedom of Speech”, Education, or Science in America.

There is a place called the Great Pacific garbage patch where thousands of tons of plastic are swirling together in an unholy mix: 

“The plastic concentration is estimated to be up to 100 kilograms her square kilometer in the center . . . An estimated 80,000 tons of plastic inhabit the patch, totaling 1.8 trillion pieces . . . Research indicates that the patch is rapidly accumulating.” (from Wikipedia, “Great Pacific garbage patch”.)

This is just one of five such patches or gyres in the Pacific Ocean; there’s another called the North Atlantic garbage patch as well.  Plastic is a human-made product.  Would Dishonest Donald have us believe that the plastic did not emanate from human sources?

Imagine filling a bathtub with water, adding food coloring, watching the color of the water change and then hear someone suggest that the colored water has no relationship to the added food coloring! 

Imagine building mills, mines, and factories near streams, creeks, and rivers and dumping all sorts of horrific waste byproducts into the water and then claiming human activity has nothing to do with the toxicity of the water!  Historically, this is exactly what took place during the Industrial Revolution.

Imagine the millions of pounds of greenhouse gases being poured constantly into the atmosphere and thinking that it has no effect on anything!  This defies both the laws of physics and common sense. 

At a time when America needs an educated, intelligent, and far-seeing visionary in the White House to recognize and address these urgent crises, we get instead a reincarnated wreck from the superstitious past, a man incapable of comprehending even the simplest examples of scientific inquiry and fact-based conclusions. 

He is evolving backwards, it appears.  Next stop, The Twilight Zone.

PRESIDENT EXCUSES SAUDI ARABIA'S MURDER

The president does not think there is enough evidence connecting the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia  to the murder of journalist Jamal Kashoggi.  This from a man who has constantly engaged in the wildest exaggerations imaginable of any president in our nation’s history! 

His double-standard hypocrisy boggles the mind.  Never has an adherence to the search for truth been so stretched out of shape and malformed as we now see daily. 

The president refuses to acknowledge that Russia interfered in our elections in 2016. 

He refuses to believe that Saudi Arabia’s authoritarian regime would have a critic murdered when the whole world knows it would--and did.  

The president persists in this willful blindness despite the fact America’s own intelligence agencies told him that it was so! 

A man so ignorant and so disrespectful of the truth has neither the character nor mettle to lead the nation.  He has become increasingly a danger to our democratic beliefs, procedures, and traditions. 

Such dishonesty and hypocrisy will never do—it is time for him to go.

TRUMP ATTACKS FREE PRESS

Maybe it’s just me but does anyone else see a parallel between these two events?
Compare Oct. 2 and Nov. 7 of this year:

1. Oct. 2, 2018: A journalist named Jamal Kashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He was a critic of the Saudi Arabian government because he advocated that freedom of expression be allowed.  It is reasonable to presume that the Crown Prince, Mohammad bin Salman, was involved in approving Kashoggi’s murder.
2. Nov. 7, 2018: The president bans CNN news reporter Jim Acosta from attending future news conferences and later strips him of his press pass, the suspension to last “until further notice”.

[A slightly doctored video was released to try and justify this action even though it was plain to everyone that Trump was angered by Acosta’s questions; a quite transparent phony excuse was only added later.  Dictators lie and manipulate evidence--not the president of a democracy.]

These two events may not seem equal in scope and magnitude; indeed they are not.  Jamal Kashoggi was murdered while Jim Acosta was merely denied entry to White House press conferences.

The parallel is far more subtle.  In both instances, rulers who dislike being questioned or criticized took action to curtail freedom of the press.  Trump has made “fake news” one of his mindless slogans to heap scorn upon the media he doesn’t like.

He has also engaged in vitriolic attacks on honest hard-working, fact-checking journalists who represent our nation’s constitutional commitment to freedom of the press.  He does not limit his acidic remarks to some shady gossip sheet, either, but vilifies the best of the best: our most honored and acclaimed media-based journalists.

It is obvious from history that autocrats, demagogues, and dictators of every ilk hate criticism of their actions, whether personal or political.  These two rulers fit the pattern all too well.  They know their actions do not fare well when placed under media scrutiny to be openly and thoroughly debated.

Granted, Acosta’s banishment is far less drastic than the Kashoggi’s murder but then, America has a long history of respecting democratic institutions and freedom of the press: we should know better.

Any occupant of the White House should know better than to engage in incessant attacks upon professional journalists doing their jobs, especially since the facts are often correctly reported by the press and more accurately than anywhere else.  Meanwhile, the president’s tweets and outbursts are sloppily and inaccurately “rationalized” by the White House.

Trump’s reliance on exaggeration and falsehood is too well known to occasion further comment here.  In part his reliance on lies speaks to the narcissistic nature of his personality.  Beyond that, however, his contempt for the truth is part of the same vile pattern that all would-be dictators find useful: squelch criticism and dissent by all means available, fair or foul.

If power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.  We half-expect the worse authoritarian rulers in the world to make an effort to stamp out freedom of the press in order to keep their corrupt ways hidden from view.

We don’t expect the president of the United States to indulge his own private temper tantrum against a respectable member of the press corps simply because he became irritated.  At least, we didn’t use to expect such a result but who knows where the “new normal” (however mangled) may lead us?

To all those who say it can’t happen here, I say look again.  We see that movement toward the fascist right can occur in a series of small incremental steps just as readily as through an outright coup.

Trump’s mishandling of his news conference, his savage verbal attack upon Jim Acosta, is a small but significant step in the erosion of America’s freedom of the press.  The president is attempting to silence his critics by putting a muzzle on them and, through them, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

How much longer will it be before we read of the death of an American journalist?

Is There Really a Black Santa Claus?

IS THERE REALLY A BLACK SANTA CLAUS?

                                      (Yes, Virginia, there is)

            Mom was talking.  “Yes, chile, you see you don’t know nuthin’.  You see a Black Santa Claus over there in the department store and you don’t think nuthin’ of it which shows me how ignorant you is.  Get that piece of candy out of your mouth ‘fore I slap your face good and hard, you hear me?

            “But it wasn’t always like that ‘cause there was a time when I was a girl, there wuz no Black Santa Claus.  Each and every one of them Santa Clauses was white, especially the beard, just as white as the finest cotton you’ve ever seen!  That’s ‘cause the white folk, they created Santa Claus and they controlled his color and where he could work, too. 

            “The white folk says Santa wuz always white ‘cause he came from the North Pole with all that snow.  Now ain’t that some lyin’!  But that’s what they said and every Santa Claus was always a white man when I was growin’ up.  I know because my mommy and daddy didn’t let me sit on no white man’s knee, uh-uh no way!

            “Then, after the longest time—I wuz already growed up—things finally changed.  First there was a Black Santa Claus downtown and then there was one over here in the shopping mall.  By and by there was a few more of them until it was no longer such a big deal.  Kids wanting presents didn’t seem to care, they just wanted Santa to remember which presents they were asking for!

            “Some of the Black Santas were really good with kids because they had all that love and kindness stored up in them through all those hard lean bitter years and naturally it just had to come out.  There was only one Black Santa Claus I ever met remember meeting who wasn’t exactly up to the job.  What I mean to say is he wuz a little bit crazy.  The job got the better of him and after a while he couldn’t do it no more but when he first started he was the best Black Santa Claus anybody had ever seen!

            “He was good with all the kids, not just the Black kids the way that was true for some other Black Santa Clauses.  This one could make any kid laugh and talk.  He could tickle them with his whiskers and get the children to reveal their best secret wish for Christmas.  He was very clever with the kids’ parents too and they went away feeling like they had seen the real Santa Claus, the same as the kids.

            “He had a long white beard which was truly his own and not a fake glue-it-on kind.  He seemed to feel winter in his bones and knew what Christmas Day meant to everybody and he gave off warmth and light to every child who came near. 

“I knew the man myself and know he was a good man but I gotta be truthful and admit that he had a bit of a temper.  When you come right down to it he had one of the meanest mean streaks of any man I ever knew!  And that was his undoing of course, chile.

            “You see, as he got older, he started getting a little bit cranky and a little outspoken, what rednecks used to call “an uppity nigger” where I grew up.  I guess all those years of being Black and pretending to be the one and only true Santa Claus must have softened up his brain a little.  As he got older, Christmas by Christmas, he got meaner and that’s when all the trouble started.   He just didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut.

            “He moved from city to city because no department store would keep him on for two seasons in a row: once was enough.  He began moving northward until he finally reached the land of Canada.  He would offer to play Santa Claus somewhere and the townspeople would take him up on his offer because they didn’t know what they wuz getting themselves into.  He’d do good for a while but then he began to say nasty things he shouldn’t have been saying.

            “Now that I think about it, chances are he was beginning to go crazy but nobody knew it.  You know, like dementia or something.  The last I heard of him he was in Canada somewhere up around Hudson Bay and still headed northward.  Oh chile, you should have heard him when he was talking like he was clean out of his head!  I heard him many times and I still remember a lot of what he said.  He’d see some white ladies passing all dressed up and he’d start in on them:

            ‘Good morning, ladies, how are y’all today?  My my, aren’t those some fine-lookin’ furs.  I wonder just how many of them tiny mink animals do you think they had to kill to make your fine fur coat?  I heard somewhere it was about 20 but as big and fat as you is, I bet it was 50!’ 

            “I had to chuckle at that and how them ladies hurried off because he done insulted their feelings.  And that was his good side when he used humor like that, not his mean side.  When this Black Santa Claus I’m tellin’ you about really got wound up, then watch out!

            “Here, let me read you something.  I wrote him a letter once and he wrote back:

            ‘Dear Big Nose, it ain’t none of your damn business why I talk to myself or why I say mean things to passers-by.  You see me doing my job and you see I can do it as well as anybody else; better, I reckon, because I’m the real true Santa Claus!  That’s what drives me crazy and makes me mean-spirited.  Everyone assumes because I was born with black skin that I couldn’t possibly be the real Santa Claus.  That’s why I am so angry.  I can pretend to be Santa Claus in a store but I can never be the real Santa Claus, right?

            ‘Why, these dumb jackasses know so little of their own planet.  They’ve never been to my home at the North Pole but they think they can tell me what’s there!  They’ve never seen me doing my work up there when I make toys for children!  Who do you think was the very first person who stood at the North Pole?  A Black man, just like me!  And if that don’t answer your busy big nose, maybe this will: I ain’t saying mean things to nobody, I just am telling the truth. 

‘What’s mean about the truth?  That’s what Santa Claus is supposed to do, ain’t it?  Who ever heard of a Santa Claus who tells children lies?  You want me to say: “Yes child, I promise to bring you that new red sled on Christmas morning—ha ha, kid, I’m lying to you!”  Or maybe you want me to say “As poor as you folks is you’ll be lucky to get anything in your sock—don’t even bother to hang one up!”

            ‘Them ladies in the mink fur coats were fat and I said they was!  Where do you think they get mink coats from?  They kill them beautiful little mink animals just so those lazy overstuffed big-ass hippopotamuses can come in here and slap down their money and buy things!  That’s a disgrace and I said so.  How is that crazy talk?  Instead of you scolding me for talkin’ mean to them ladies you should be thankin’ me for talkin’ as kindly as I did ‘cause I could have said a whole lot worse.    I didn’t say the half of what I was thinking!’

“Well chile, the letter goes on like that but that’s the better part of it . . . before this here Black Santa Claus starts in with some obscenities and profanities which your ears don’t need to hear.  It got me to thinking, after I done growed up some more, that maybe he wasn’t so bananas after all but it just sort of looked that way.  Of course a lot of us felt like that.  I wasn’t the only one who secretly admired his honesty and laughed at his jokes.

“We remember his good years and how he was the best Santa Claus the children ever seen and that’s why they loved him but he didn’t make it easy for us because he started getting worse and ever meaner.  I heard reports of him from time to time as he traveled and some of the things he said and done.  And chile, that mouth of his just kept getting’ worse and worse!

“Now it’s time for you to go to bed.  That’s the story of your daddy and why I married and divorced him and why he won’t be coming ‘round here no more.  Tomorrow is Christmas Day and I want you to go to sleep and dream of what you may find in your sock tomorrow morning.  Now you get along to bed and I’ll be in shortly to wish you nighty-night.”

            “Good night, mom.”     “Good night, chile.”

Brett Kavanaugh: A Judge by any Other Name

I wonder what kind of judge Brett Kavanaugh is?  I mean, he does understand that the legal system is set up to look for the truth, doesn’t he?  The Judge seems to think if he denies the allegations of sexual misconduct aimed at him that should be the end of the discussion.  And he calls himself a judge? 

By that line of reasoning we should go visit inmates in jail and ask them “Are you innocent or guilty?”  All those who say they never did anything wrong should be let go immediately based on their word.  Or is that why the legal-political system conducts investigations and establishes standards for evidence? 

Maybe the Judge is telling the truth and maybe he isn’t, but one thing is for sure: sweeping allegations under the rug won’t work.  When the allegations are serious, as these are, there must be an investigation.  When the accusers are credible, as these are, there must be an investigation.

The counter-accusation of a “vast left-wing conspiracy” is ridiculous and falls utterly flat, inviting disbelief at the inane ineptitude of it all.  Wanting to get to the truth should be reason enough to go forward.  Why is the Judge’s word any more believable than Dr. Ford’s? 

It is absurdly insulting to even hint that the woman must be making up her story but the man is not capable of lying about what happened!  Maybe a crazy woman who is mentally unbalanced with a long history of fraudulent acts, but a professor of psychology at Stanford?  Get real! 

And it’s not just one woman any longer; its “accusers” in the plural. 

The accusers have supporting witness testimony regarding the drunken parties attended by Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge in which an atmosphere was created that both tolerated and encouraged sexual assaults on the women present.  That truth is coming out slowly but surely. 

Kavanaugh missed an important lesson in our history; Americans are charitable and tend to forgive those who come clean but those who lie to cover up their misdeeds are not forgiven so readily.

In the past year or two we’ve seen captains of industry, entertainment, and politics trying to lie their way out of similar situations, only to resign, get fired, or criminally charged. 

“America’s dad”, Bill Cosby, is about to be sentenced to jail.  “Oh no”, he couldn’t possibly have drugged and raped all those women . . . but that’s apparently exactly what happened.  The “Me, Too” Movement is uncovering many examples of how rich and powerful men got away with sexual assaults for years.   

Of course they always all deny it for as long as they can . . . until too many women come forward or there is testimony and evidence produced to support the accusations.  Suspects routinely deny committing any crimes or immoral acts, don’t they? 

Men in expensive suits accused of sexual assault are no different.  They likewise will deny any assault, crime, or other immoral act . . . but the truth has a way of breaking through to the light, doesn’t it? 

It’s par for the course these days.  The Judge and his cronies in the GOP are trying to sweep the new accusations under the rug while they minimize and belittle the accusers.  That’s not a fair, objective, and impartial legal sense of fair play by any stretch of the imagination. 

As a Judge, Brett Kavanaugh should know better! 

If he didn’t have the moral rectitude to enter into a loving friendship with a woman when he was in high school, that should give us pause.  If he didn’t have the conscience or virtue to treat women with respect as his equal, that should give us pause as well. 

And if he still chooses to lie about what happened--which seems the most likely explanation--then we have to question his ability as a judge and his honesty as a human being.  How could we ever trust him to develop the insight and empathy on cases where understanding the human predicament is vital? 

How can such a man be trusted to rule fairly and intelligently on cases involving women if he comes from a male chauvinist background that objectified, sexualized, and mistreated women to gratify his own sexual impulses? 

If he couldn’t be an open and trusting friend to women in high school, his values were screwed up and immoral, if not to say criminal.  Given this background—drunk at frat-like parties and on the prowl for forceful sexual conquest—we must ask: what are his real values and beliefs today? 

Beneath the polite and well-rehearsed answers, what does Brett Kavanaugh really believe and feel? 

A man who can be accused of engaging in drunken and lewd behavior, including sexual assault, is not made of the right moral caliber to become a judge on the United States Supreme Court.  

Why? The American Cloud

Within the American atmosphere which rises above our heads—one layer atop another—there exists one special layer many people can’t see or prefer to ignore as though it never existed.  That is the layer we must call the American Cloud of Violence. 

Many Americans are dumbfounded by the amount of violence that is occurring so frequently in our country these days.  To top it all off, in recent months several mass shootings have occurred to greatly accentuate our sense of shock with its admixture of disbelief, horror, and sorrow. 

Perhaps the first and most challenging question to ask is “What is to be done?”  That’s a tough question, apparently, and one which I will not attempt to address here.  There is often a second question, equally troubling, that also escapes easy answer, which is “Why?” 

Even a quick glance at comparative statistics reveals that other nations do not suffer anywhere near the same number of murders as the United States.   I don’t have any magic answers for either of these questions but as regards the second, I’d like to offer a few thoughts.

Today when people and the press discuss violence, they generally are referring to the latest murder on the street or the latest mass shooting spree in a theater, school, or other crowded public venue.  Lone murders with a single victim are still reported, of course, but the nation’s attention only seems to be truly aroused and riveted by the stories of mass shootings. 

We know (or at least can surmise) that some of the shooters are troubled individuals.  They may have had a hard life, been victims of abuse themselves, or suffer from some sort of emotional and intellectual shortfall: mentally ill or otherwise warped personality. 

Of course, not all shooters are certifiably crazy, certainly not within the parameters of the legal system.  If they knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of their deadly actions, they can be found “sane”.

(This designation may befuddle those of us who can never think of murder and mass slaughter as the actions of a sane person but we must keep in mind that the legal definition of “sane” is more narrowly construed than the general public’s use of “crazy”).

I would suggest that there is another kind of violence to consider: that which permeates all of American history.  We like to flatter ourselves with our boasting of economic progress with a cutting-edge technology that is truly amazing, whether civilian or military.  And that’s all true—as far as it goes.

The fact is, such boasting is hardly honest self-reflection and seldom does justice to the larger picture.  When people ask “Why does America have so much more violence than other nations?” a good place to start would be with our own history.  Ask yourself which other countries can match us in this regard:

First and foremost, we have a long and bloody history when we consider how Europeans used violence to wrest land away from Native American nations and tribes.  It started in the early 1600’s and didn’t stop until the late 1800’s and in some aspects continues on even today. 

Second (as if that wasn’t bad enough) we have the long and bloody history of slavery.  It’s not easy to summarize the grotesque and psychotic nature of the violence of the slave system--perpetrated by American slave-owners and their overseers--other than to say it was as bad and persistent and cruel as one can imagine.    

People today hear the word “violence” and they think of a criminal, weapon in hand, breaking the law by robbing a store.  That’s a violent crime to be sure and we have a right to condemn and prosecute the offender. At the same time, we conveniently choose to forget that a great deal of American violence has previously been committed by people in positions of power who repeatedly and immorally gave themselves a free pass time after time. 

Indeed, there was hardly ever an act of aggression or oppression against Native Americans and Black slaves that could not be rationalized, no matter how cruel, petty, gratuitous, vindictive, or just plain malicious it was.

The story of the American nation itself—and its rise to prominence as a world power—is inextricably woven into this Cloud of Violence with all of its horrendous whippings, rapes, murders, and massacres once tolerated as “legal”, “normal” and “sane”.

I shall not attempt to go into all of the details of this relentless and merciless campaign of endless brutality against Native Americans and African-Americans.  The specifics are simply too gory and I do not have the time or space to do them justice; further, I do not wish to be accused of indulging in horror stories merely for the sake of their shock value.  Yet for a couple of centuries almost any kind of violence could be perpetrated against Indians and Blacks with little fear of arrest or prosecution. 

The wars of conquest against Native Americans were brutal campaigns of near-genocidal subjugation; they included horrific massacres: Pequot, Kingsley Cave, Sandy Creek, Wounded Knee, to name but a few.  This is not to speak of the unwonted violence wrought by settlers who murdered with impunity, knowing that no legal action would ever be taken against them.

As for slavery, what can one say of a system that attempts to strip an entire race of its essential humanity?  A system that would not treat Black slaves as human beings but as property, where bloody whippings were commonplace alongside other types of humiliating degradation and violent punishment?

If Americans are looking for the cause of today’s acts of violence, I suggest they start here with a truthful account of the “approved” and “legal” violence perpetrated against millions of Native Americans and African Americans over the last three centuries.

This long bloody and brutal record has never been equaled in modern times nor any worthy attempts made to atone for the worst of it: no apologies, no reparations, no programs to elevate their descendants into a position of opportunity and equality alongside other American families whose ancestors never suffered a similar fate. 

For Black Americans, their historical memories are saturated with a sad and violent truth.  Their ancestors were sold or kidnapped into slavery in Africa, followed by the horrific Middle Passage where many tens of thousands died before the crossing was even completed.  

Bodies were frantically thrown overboard when the situation warranted it, as in escaping British ships aiming to capture the slavers (“slave ships”) to help end to the slave trade. 

The gory and horrific Middle Passage was followed by slavery in the Americas with maiming, murder, rape, and whipping commonplace—to say nothing of the violence of the brutality of slave labor itself.  

The horrendous nightmares and screams, the despair and despondency, the whispered prayers for mercy and tearful pleas for compassion went unheeded time and time again. 

All of this and more rose into the living breathing atmosphere above our heads; all of this misery and suffering, pain and heartache rose into the American Cloud of Violence.  There is no wind or storm so strong that can ever dissipate this layer of violence that has become an indelible part of the story of America.

For Native Americans, the cruelties and sufferings could fill many books, each page soaked with the tears, sweat, and blood of men, women, and children who only wished to live in peace and continue their way of life. 

The racist myths that were developed to try and rationalize these aggressive land-grabbing acts are still with us today: the “heathen” and the “savage” populate our history books so the victors can offer a greatly distorted self-serving tale of what happened: a story that is essentially a lie from start to finish. 

In fact, many thousands of Indians were pushed off their lands, villages and crops were destroyed, women were raped, and their fighting braves killed by the mechanical trigger action provided by superior weapon technology.

European diseases ran rampant through the villages and on their death marches; whole tribes were forced into submission, the survivors relocated to the worst land no one else wanted.  On these poor reservations they were allowed to suffer and die from starvation and illness.  

All promises were broken and treaties disregarded as though they never existed—deceit and treachery of the most evil kind were constantly practiced until defrauding Native Americans became its own recognizable form of the brutal and greedy aggrandizement of wealth, aided and abetted by the arbitrary abuse of power. 

Much of this mistreatment will make a person ill if they dig deep enough and get down to the foundation facts.  The massacres committed by European-Americans are without reason, justice, or mercy; soldiers and armed civilians senselessly slaughtered innocent women and children.  Christianized Indians and peaceful Indians were murdered, to--just the same as those "hostiles" fighting to hold onto their land and way of life.  

And all of this violence, too, arose above our heads and remains within the American Cloud of Violence. The list goes on; there are many other groups of Americans who suffered legally sanctioned violence at the hands of their New American Masters. 

Indeed, nearly every colored minority, every working class stiff, every oppressed woman, every activist who ever protested for civil and constitutional rights against an unyielding dominant social structure, has faced violence. 

It is the American way not to allow any of these groups quick or easy access to their constitutional and human rights but to oppose with ferocious intensity all such attempts to achieve even the slightest degree of equality with the dominant social class.

All of this violence rises into the atmosphere above our heads, into the American Cloud of Violence.  I could go on but this blog is long enough as it is. 

The point is, the next time you or your friends or anyone else appears mystified by the amount of violence occurring in America today, just remember one thing: American history.

This is a history replete with brutally enforced oppression and subjugation of conquered or enslaved peoples.  You must remember American history truthfully with all of its violence perpetrated against Black people, Native Americans, women, colored minorities, workers, organizers, activists, and all the rest.

The violence today is not an anomaly, not some unexpected hiccup or unrecognizable phenomenon departing from an idealized (but falsified) American norm of peace and good will. 

Today’s violence includes acts that fit perfectly into the American continuum of death and destruction of innocent lives.  Today’s violence accurately reflects its own true history where every page of the nation’s story is blood-soaked with the injuries and deaths of tens of thousands of American lives.

To make matters worse, this one-sided and rationalized bloody story is reproduced endlessly in our movies and television shows, in our books and magazines, our newspapers and textbooks. 

The history of these bloody tales is so awful, so long, so constant, so unremitting—that it is hard for even a normal and sane American to keep his or her life in balance. 

That being true, what effect will the American Cloud of Violence have on the minds and emotions of less stable individuals coming from broken homes, from dysfunctional relationships of physical and emotional abuse, living lives all too often augmented by the demons of booze and drugs? 

What does the Cloud of Violence do to all those unfortunate individuals suffering from the mental ravages of delusion or rage at being bullied, ignored, taunted, and humiliated?  Just like the rest of us, they grew up in a world breathing in the fumes and noxious toxins emanating from this Cloud of Violence every day of their lives!

What do Americans expect is happening to their minds--our minds--when all forms of our cultural media show tens of thousands of pictures of guns and violent bloody scenes constantly, every hour of every day, year after year?

Listen America!  Did you think there would never be any consequences or repercussions for three centuries of brutal violence against minorities? 

Did you think we could continue to pretend forever that none of it ever happened and that somehow this foolish pretense would win the day against the legacy of reality?

The harsh truth of all this is not the frequency of violence being committed by murder and mass shootings that we are witnessing; the harsh truth is that we have no reason to be surprised by all the continuing violence.   

We have lived our whole lives under the American Cloud of Violence.  We have been breathing its poisonous vapors for years.  Surprised?  Hardly!  Violence begets violence.  If anyone should understand that basic fact, Americans should.

No matter how hard we whine or complain or wish life in American society could somehow be otherwise, the American violence of the past will not leave us alone.  We can pray and hope and plead but we cannot change or undo the past.

The next time you hear anyone discussing violence--trying to understand why other countries don’t experience as many murders and mass shootings as America does--I suggest you point them toward a path where they might one day find an answer by whispering three words: slavery and genocide.

Maybe when they’re ready they will even be able to understand what is meant by the American Cloud of Violence.  It may seem invisible above our heads; it may be that meteorologists have not yet recognized it as a legitimate meteorological phenomenon, but I tell you it exists and that it is there. 

"American history" is not the whole answer by any means to the two questions posed at the start of this blog, but it is at least part of the answer and must be recognized as such; to ignore our violent past or to pretend that it is not part of the answer to any degree, is to condemn ourselves and American society to an endless cycle of violence that can never be broken.

The first step is to admit the truth of our own violent history.  We must do so honestly and start to atone for our own nation’s sins, before we can find a meaningful way to take the next step, whatever and wherever that vital life-saving second step may turn out to be. 

And maybe someday, against all odds, that ever-present Cloud of Violence always floating above our heads will finally begin to dissipate, and "peace and tranquility" will return to earth once more.  

Trump's Seven Stages of Denial

Stage 1:

I didn’t do it, nothing happened, Fake News!

Stage 2:

Okay, maybe something happened but I wasn’t there and don’t know what it was.

Stage 3:

All right, could be something happened and I was there but I didn’t know what it was, nobody told me, and anyway somebody else did it, not me, someone who is no longer close. 

Stage 4:

Sure, something happened but whatever took place, it wasn’t illegal.  I give you my word and the word of my lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen.  Ask him.  (Has anyone seen Michael?)

Stage 5:

Come to think of it, perhaps I did do something trying to help others but whatever happened it was an accident. I’ll swear to it under oath. (Get that Bible away from me!)

Stage 6: There’s nothing wrong nobody can prove.  You know why?   Because somebody smarter than you gave out a lot of non-disclosure forms and paid a lot of hush money: what, me worry? (Don’t forget to pay Pecker and tell him to kill those stories!)

Stage 7:

If you have evidence contradicting my statements, bring it on! . . . if something did happen that I accidentally did (or maybe might have done) that was bad,  sure, I might have done it…but let’s forget about all that for just a minute—how would you like to be Secretary of _____________ ?

Trump seems to be of the opinion that he paid enough hush money through his fixer, Michael Cohen, to always keep him out of hot water.  People who know the truth are silenced through hush money and non-disclosure forms: that’s why he’s always so damn cocky. 

He knows how to silence would-be accusers before they have a chance to say anything.  He/she cannot talk about Trump’s alleged misbehavior because he/she signed a Non-Disclosure Form and accepted a bribe (er, I mean “hush money”). 

Trump says: You can’t impeach a president who tells lies, it’s in the (Russian) Constitution!

FAKE NEWS!  WITCH HUNT! 

From King James to King Donald

 As most of my friends know, I used to be a teacher.  I’ve corrected so many papers that it’s become second nature to me!  I’ve done so much proofreading in my time I can do it in my sleep.  Even when I read a real book by a real author, my mind never stops whirring about how the prose could be improved. 

Lately, of course, I’ve been writing about our president with the pen of criticism.  Sometimes it gets hard; it gets tiring; it gets demoralizing to try and find enough words to describe the president’s self-centered ineptitude and mean-spirited imbecility. 

Luckily, occasionally I come across another writer who has already done a good job of describing him.  Now, with the usual caution about avoiding plagiarism and such, I’d like to borrow three paragraphs from this fellow’s description of King James I and see if I can’t apply it to our own day and time. 

You will see these three paragraphs twice, the first version being the actual words from J. A. Williamson’s book and the second is my own reworking of his writing.  The words in red indicate the changes made; the rest remains the same! 

As regards James I (reigned 1603-1625):

“The tragedy was that he thought he had nothing to learn.  He had grown from infancy as King of Scotland and had acquired a sound knowledge of the politics of that country.  But Scotland was utterly different from England . . . . At the same time he had watched Elizabeth from afar enjoying power and respect such as he had never attained; and he had totally misinterpreted the conditions of her success.

“Thwarted in practice, he had formed a grand theory of the rightful status of a king, and he came prepared to apply it in a country of whose political habits he knew nothing— not even that it had any.  His theory was that a monarch was free, unbound by any human restraints.  He was accountable to God alone, and the dictates of his own thought and conscience were his sole guides.

“Before ever he reached London there occurred an act symbolic of Stuart kingship.  A pickpocket was caught in the crowd that thronged to greet the king, and was instantly hanged without trial on the royal command—five centuries of English law wiped out by the wave of a hand.  James probably thought he had made a good impression as a lion of justice.”

-J. A. Williamson, The Evolution of England (1931, 1946), p. 211.

And now to apply the same writing to our current president:

As regards Donald I (reigned 2016- ____ )

“The tragedy was that he thought he had nothing to learn.  He had grown from infancy as King of Money and had acquired a sound knowledge of the dollar sign of that country.  But Trump Tower was utterly different from America . . . . At the same time he had watched Obama from afar enjoying power and respect such as he had never attained; and he had totally misinterpreted the conditions of his success.

“Thwarted in practice, he had formed a grand theory of the rightful status of a president, and he came prepared to apply it in a country of whose political habits he knew nothing— not even that it had any.  His theory was that a president was free, unbound by any human restraints.  He was accountable to Money alone, and the dictates of his own narcissism and greed were his sole guides.

“Before ever he reached the White House there occurred an act symbolic of Trumpian kingship.  An honest man was caught in the crowd that thronged to greet the president, and was instantly hanged without trial on the royal command—two centuries of American law wiped out by the wave of a hand.  King Donald probably thought he had made a good impression as a jackass of justice.”

-R. E. Rosenberg, The Evolution of America (2018), p. 1

Based on Williamson’s description of King James I (at least I didn’t have to come up with any original writing of my own; it’s good to take a break once in a while!)