A Progressive Perspective

…but an oath is just words to a con-man and politics, in the ballistic trajectory of Donald Trump’s rapacious ego, is just a game. More accurately, it is a “shell game” and the Presidency of the United States is the current shell under which he hides the “pea.”

In truth, this country is the final big achievement…score, in the “long-con” of Trumpism. Forget buildings and golf courses. Trump now gets to paste his name on a nation.

It is the capstone of a years-long marketing and licensing campaign that has been fueled by a mixture of racism and bigotry and ignited by a deeply damaged narcissistic mentality that values retribution over magnanimity and brutality over grace and humility.

I’ve heard it said that “What this Country needs is a businessman who will run it like a business.” I hear this mantra recited over and over in earnest by average people, most of whom work as hourly employees and small business people who have “bootstrapped” their way into a level of success by turning guts, a good idea and a SBA loan (or their inheritance, or a check and a worried glance from Dad…) into a company.

“Politicians… (they spit the word out like an errant fly that has landed on their collective tongues…) …are the problem with this country!”

“Donald Trump isn’t a politician, he’s a businessman!”  So QED, what this country needs is Donald Trump.

But the real high rollers and corporate execs know a thing that the average working stiff does not understand and that is that people are overhead and if you don’t know what overhead is, then you don’t understand a foundational concept of business strategy and that is that the purpose of running a business is to turn a profit and the quickest and cheapest way to turn a profit is to reduce overhead (and overhead is any expense that does not directly translate into profit).

Quite simply; people (their upkeep, their mistakes, their needs) are a drag on the bottom line and when it comes down to a choice between people and the bottom line, people will lose that coin toss almost every time.

And this, my friends, is the simple reason that you cannot run a country like you run a business:

Because in a properly run, successful business, profit is the bottom line and everything that the business does and everything that the business owns is there to contribute to that purpose. Anything that doesn’t generate profit is a write-off (this is another very important term that you need to know if you are going to run a successful business. It is a term that Donald Trump knows very well…).

Conversely, in a properly run, successful nation, people are the bottom line. Their growth and the realization of their potential is the nation’s bottom line.

But, people are stubborn and reticent to let go of a concept that they have come to hold dear. So let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you could run a nation like you run a business.

OK. But here’s the thing about that…

No one ever seems to ask the next logical question in making that statement:

What kind of business is a Nation and what kind of businessman should be running it?

Let’s examine for a moment, the kind of businessman that a minority of voters in America just hired to run our country:

They see Trump as a builder.
Trump has built structures such as the Trump Tower and he did so with concrete supplied by mob owned companies and with labor supplied by immigrants working in this country illegally, but Trump does not build anything now and he hasn’t for a long time, because there were too many people and too much overhead involved in the business of building things (that’s why so many people got stiffed in those endeavors…).

They see Trump as a casino tycoon.
But in fact Trump, who would have never received a license to operate a casino in the first place if a proper investigation had ever been done, was a spectacular failure in a business that should have been nearly bulletproof financially. Trump used his casinos as cash cows and brags about how much money he took out of them and how the casinos fueled his growth.

They see Trump as a financial genius and a graduate of the Wharton School of business.
He attended classes for two years at the Wharton school, but Trump has no graduate degree from Wharton, or anywhere  else, and there is no evidence that he was a distinguished student.

Trump does know one thing very well and that is how to work the bankruptcy courts in his favor. Indeed, Trump filed bankruptcy six times! This is backed up by PolitiFact which documents all six. Let’s go through them one by one:

Bankruptcy No. 1: The Trump Taj Mahal, 1991
Trump’s first bankruptcy may have hit the businessman, personally, the hardest, according to news reports.

He funded the construction of the $1 billion Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, N.J., which opened in 1990, primarily with junk bonds at a whopping 14 percent interest. A year later, the casino was nearly $3 billion in debt, while Trump had racked up nearly $900 million in personal liabilities. So Trump decided to file for Chapter 11 reorganization, according to the New York Times.

As a result, Trump gave up half his personal stake in the casino and sold his yacht and airline, according to the Washington Post.

Bankruptcy No. 2: Trump Castle, 1992
Within a year of his first Chapter 11 filing, Trump found himself in bankruptcy court again for Trump Castle, which opened in 1985. It was his “weakest gambling hall,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, and ironically faced competition from Trump Taj Mahal. In March 1992, the Castle filed a prepackaged bankruptcy plan, and Trump gave up his 50 percent share in the casino for lower interest rates on $338 million worth of bonds.

Bankruptcy No. 3: Trump Plaza and Casino, 1992
The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, which opened in 1984, declared bankruptcy at the same time as the Castle. A $210 million joint project of Trump’s and Harrah’s, the casino had racked up $250 million in debt by 1992, after a staggering 80 percent decline in cash flow. So Trump Plaza filed for prepackaged bankruptcy that spring as well.

Bankruptcy No. 4: Plaza Hotel, 1992
Later that year, Trump filed bankruptcy on another Plaza, this one in New York. Trump purchased the Plaza Hotel in Midtown Manhattan for $390 million in 1988, but it accumulated more than $550 million in debt by 1992. In December 1992, Trump relinquished a 49 percent stake in the Plaza to a total of six lenders, according to ABC News. Trump remained the hotel’s CEO, but it was merely a gesture; he didn’t earn a salary and had no say in the hotel’s day-to-day operations, according to the New York Times.

Bankruptcy No. 5: Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts, 2004
Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts filed for bankruptcy again in 2004 when his casinos — including the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Marina and Trump Plaza casinos in Atlantic City, and a riverboat casino in Indiana — had accrued an estimated $1.8 billion in debt, according to the Associated Press. Trump agreed to reduce his share in the company from 47 percent to 27 percent in a restructuring plan, but he was still the company’s largest single shareholder and remained in charge of its operations. Trump told the Associated Press at the time that the company represented less than 1 percent of his net worth.

Bankruptcy No. 6: Trump Entertainment Resorts, 2009
Trump Entertainment Resorts — formerly Trump Hotels and Casinos Resorts — was hit hard by the 2008 economic recession and missed a $53.1 million bond interest payment in December 2008, according to ABC News. It declared Chapter 11 in February 2009. After debating with the company’s board of directors, Trump resigned as the company’s chairman and had his corporate stake in the company reduced to 10 percent. The company continued to use Trump’s name in licensing.

No my little write-offs, Donald Trump is not a Real Estate mogul, or a Casino Tycoon, or a Financial Genius. He is, at best, a salesman and what he sells is a name (…and the thin, scrim of a mystique that is associated with that name). Donald Trump has a product to sell. The name of that product is TRUMP.

Ever wonder why Donald Trump talks about himself in the third person? He isn’t. He is talking about his product! He will not divest himself of the business of selling that product because in Donald Trump’s strange little world the Product and the Man have merged into one thing. To divest himself of that would be akin to severing a limb.

“He’s soooo unpredictable…”
Is he? Everyone in the media talks endlessly about how “unpredictable” Trump is, but in reality, Trump is nothing if not predictable. He is only unpredictable if you choose not to recognize the pattern of his behavior and his life.

Is he a liberal or is he a conservative?
They are flummoxed about the chasm of disparity between what he says and what he does. They look to his cabinet appointees as a way to divine the mystery of Trump.

“Well just look at his cabinet picks” they say…”those are the cabinet picks of a real rock-ribbed conservative!”

True that! But what makes you think that Donald Trump is the one that picked those people as his cabinet?

Donald Trump has no concept of representational government or of the bureaucratic framework that is necessary to form an administration. Furthermore and perhaps more importantly, he does not want to know. In point of fact the one defining characteristic of Donald Trump’s nature as a man and as a politician, is his complete lack of intellectual curiosity. Why would Donald Trump waste his time and energy in selecting a cabinet. That is what he hired Steve Bannon for.

Donald Trump hires people and he fires people on a reality TV show (or did until NBC canceled the show). His supporters seem incapable of discerning that the fake boss on a scripted reality show is not who Donald Trump is. I am beginning to believe that Donald Trump cannot make that distinction either.

He has failed at everything else. He failed in Real Estate. He failed in the Casino business. But Donald Trump is not stupid. He knows what he is doing. He will follow a very predictable pattern and do what works for him. He is recreating his own new reality show in which he gets to play the President.

That is how he will run the country (at least until his violations of human decency and the law become too great for even his Republican lackeys in Congress to ignore).

But Donald Trump does not understand that a President is not elected to run a country. A President is elected to serve (and protect) a country.

Why is all of this so hard for people (especially people in the media) to understand?

The answer is simple: They are looking under the wrong shell.

I’m done with them. The Republicans have taken over the network.

I’ve cancelled all of my season passes to everything;

…to All In (Chris Hayes lets them walk all over him even though he knows that they are lying to him),

…to Rachel Maddow (who will do anything and completely muzzle herself just to get a republican, any republican, to talk to her…)

…and to Lawrence O’Donnell (who has turned his show into a Jerry Lewis telethon for African Kids…I want kids to have desks but enough already with the info-mercials. Why don’t you just have Sally Struthers sell it for you…).

Chris Mathews never lets anyone finish a sentence and spits all over the desk (If the network had any sense they would retire Mathews and give the show to Howard Fineman who is twice as smart as Mathews even on his worst day….).

…and Brian Williams is still stuck in Network Anchor Talking Head mode.

Greta just shows up and is sitting in a brand new set in prime time. What a slap in the face to Joy Reid.

Joy Reid is the only one there with the guts and the intelligence to stand up to any of them and they have scheduled her in the wilderness of early mornings on weekends. Total disrespect!

Scarborough (who secretly runs the whole network and has veto power over everything that they put on the air…) and Greta can have the whole stinking pile of shit and just call it Fox News Lite (which is what it is slowly becoming).

Pathetic!

Whew. I am glad I got that out of my system. I feel much better.

OK. The truth is that I like all of those people and I believe that they try very hard to do a good job as journalists.

But I am mad at them (or perhaps more accurately their network) for one, very good reason. And I will explain that in my next posting. Stay tuned, or as Rachel likes to say; “Watch this space…”

Oh yeah, I almost forgot; Lockup sucks!

…and in doing so (regardless of the final outcome…), you will have helped all of the citizens of this Country and properly fulfilled your Constitutional obligations.

Look. I know that you don’t want to hear this, but it has to be said and it has to be said now while it still matters…while we are still an intact, functioning Democracy.

You have a serious job. A job of great import and consequence.

You as Electors have an obligation to act in support of and in accordance with the intent and the institutions of our Democracy.

Institutions like the Supreme Court that protect our freedom. Institutions like the Environmental Protection Agency that protects our air and land and water. Institutions like the Federal Trade Commission that protects us from fraud and deceptive business practices.

Hmmm. That last one rings a bell for some reason. What was it? Oh yeah, Donald Trump will compromise the office of the Presidency with his foreign entanglements. He will break the law (just as he has done many times before) and he will be impeached.

Between now and then, people will suffer. Some people may die. Not people who look like you, but they are people, with families, just like you.

You have an obligation to act above and beyond partisan, political stratagems (and make no mistake – Trump’s win was entirely strategic and in no way reflective of the will of the people. If you doubt that, just check the vote count…) and instead cast your votes to reflect allegiance with the interests and in protection of, all of the citizens of the United States.

You have an obligation to ensure, as James Madison put it, that “factions” of citizens with a common interest don’t harm the nation as a whole.

It is up to you to act as the last, best hope for the preservation of our freedoms and our Democratic way of life.

Because, here’s the thing:

Set aside for a moment the fact that Hillary Clinton is on track to beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes nationwide, which is an unprecedented number.

Instead let’s just focus on the empty vessel that is Donald J. Trump;

Donald Trump has not and will never act in anyone’s interest but his own. He cannot because he just isn’t wired that way. He sees the world through the lenses of self-interest and self-aggrandizement. Those lenses filter out any sense of obligation as a public servant. Donald Trump does not serve anything or anyone but his own rapacious ego. He can only do what he has always done throughout his sordid and sleazy career; he takes ownership, then he fails, leaving others to pay the price.

I beg you to not hand the stewardship of this great Nation to a foolhardy, fascistic, vulgarian with the impulse control of a three year old and in doing so, allow him to steer it (Us) onto the rocks of ignorance and fear and bigotry that masquerades as a policy agenda. To do so would do lasting, perhaps irreparable damage to our Democracy.

You need to understand that and do something about it before our Country and our people suffer that damage. Damage that you will have to accept proportionate responsibility for. You will have to live with the knowledge that you could have done something about it before it happened but you didn’t.

Now, take a good long look into the eyes of your kids, into the eyes of your daughters and figure out how you are going to explain that.

You are right protest voters; your Government is not listening to you…

…and voting for a bloviating racist with no experience as the mayor of a one horse town, let alone as the leader of the free world, or for a third party candidate with a limited knowledge of the world and an even more limited chance of actually winning an election, will not improve that circumstance.

Know why? I’m sorry, that was a stupid question. Of course you don’t know why. I forgot for a second that your ignorance of anything beyond your own self-centered, impotent rage is complete.

So I will skip all the hints and just tell you the answer to save us both some time.

Here it is:

Your government isn’t listening to you because you are the fucking government!

That’s right. Turns out we live in a self governing, Representative Democracy which means that if you don’t bother to learn about the ways and means by which our government functions (or does not function) and instead just sit in your self imposed, fact free bubble yammering about how “the Brown people have ruined it for all the decent God fearing White people that belong here,” then you miss some important truths.

Truth One: It is your task and responsibility as a Citizen of this country to elect representatives that have not only earned the public trust through their experience in the complex job of governance, but also understand that running a country and providing for the public welfare both domestically and throughout the World, is very serious business! If they fail, people can and will die.

Truth Two: That Brown person had a life far more difficult than yours. He or she didn’t sit around whining about how all the White folks stole his country. He got off of his ass and did something about his circumstances.

Truth Three: People can only deceive you if you don’t bother to find out the facts for yourself.

Truth Four: There are no elites. (right about here you should be imagining Oz talking to the Scarecrow…) There are only people just like you. The only difference between them and you is that they bothered to open their eyes and their mind to a wide, wide world of facts and knowledge. They don’t just bump along doing the same thing over and over and wonder why the difficult circumstances of their musty, moldering little lives don’t change and how they got left behind.

They actually look for answers. And if they don’t like the answers that they find they don’t stick their fingers in their ears and pretend that the facts they discover are just wrong. They accept the facts that they encounter and then go about trying to change the set of circumstances that lead to those facts.

Write letters, make phone calls, show up at town hall events. Start a movement, gain insight and knowledge and use that knowledge to chart a course for making things better. That is how people out here in the real America actually bring about meaningful change that benefits everyone.

Truth Five: Blowing things up because you are frustrated and angry is what children do. Stop acting like a petulant child and consider the fact that giving the nuclear codes to an ignorant narcissist with sloppy impulse control makes you not only stupid but also a threat to your fellow citizens.

Truth Six: When you “shake things up” (think; beer and earthquakes…and a nuclear arsenal…) what you end up with is a big fucking mess.

Truth Seven: You voted for a con man who told you what you wanted to hear. He got away with that because he knew that you would be too lazy, foolish and full of ambiguous and nonsensical anger at his opponent to bother with considering minor details like how in the world a man-child that has failed at every enterprise that he has ever started (until he finally hit upon the idea of licensing a brand name that was made famous by his involvement in a game show), could possibly have the intelligence, preparation and wherewithal to run the largest and most complex federal government in the world.

Truth Eight: Now that you have elected the “Little Rascals” (Google it…) to high office you are about to be taught a very hard lesson in just what will happen if you ignore truths One through Six.

…or for that matter how to open the doors or how to start the damn thing.

So there you go buddy…hop on in and start her up. Oh, right. We should probably tell you first that those keys are not just a shiny object that make a funny noise when you shake them.

Here’s the thing Mr President Elect: Sitting in the back seat and sticking your head out the window isn’t the same thing as driving the car. And spending a year and a half pissing on the tires doesn’t get you any closer to that knowledge.

Looks like the dogs are now running the fucking kennel and half of the country is about to learn what the rest of us already knew:

We will be the one’s left cleaning up the shit.

Power Play

Trump loses with *Women, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Millennials, Gays, Muslim Americans, Disabled Americans, Three Legged Dogs and Rodeo Clowns, but pulls out a win with nothing but white men (*and 53% of white women…). How?

OK, let’s stipulate right up front that Donald Trump had help in eking out a very narrow electoral victory in the 2016 Presidential election. Help that came from Russian Intelligence, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and from Julian Assange via his Russian Propaganda subsidiary known as WikiLeaks. To say that this constituted an unfair advantage is to state the obvious. To conclude that it was unlawful is reasonable but as of yet not proven beyond a reasonable doubt. That said, the shorter and perhaps more cynical take away is that stupid people get the same voting opportunities that intelligent people get, so we need to take a hard look at ourselves, to understand exactly how so many Americans ultimately made such a foolish choice.

To that end and from that perspective, I offer the following observations:

Coalitions are difficult things to create and even more difficult to maintain. Mostly because self interest will almost always negate common cause. So the trick to creating and maintaining an effective coalition is to link the self-interests of many, often disparate groups with a common cause. In other words; make them think that your cause serves and furthers their self-interest.

Blue collar, white collar, college educated, non-college educated, rust belt, bible belt, heartland, elites, Republican, “Reagan Democrat”

None of those labels really mattered very much to Trump.

For Donald J. Trump the through-line to creating and maintaining his coalition was quite simply POWER. Specifically the overarching fear of White people that they are losing their dominance in a country in which White people have held all of the power since the founding of the republic.

The narrative for Trump’s campaign was already in place.

This is a critically important point because it served to expedite what is perhaps the most difficult and time consuming part of any political campaign: Fashioning the campaign’s theme and it’s narrative.

Fear of change actually masquerading as a “desire for change” became Trump’s sub-textual narrative. The concept of stoking and playing on that fear made for an effective narrative because it was already there, in place when he arrived on the scene. He did not need to create a narrative that he needed to sell or explain to people. All he needed to do was push a button. He knew exactly what and where that button was and he pushed it hard. That was Trump’s genius; his ability to “read the room” on a national scale.

The fear of the loss of power at every level and aspect of the lives of many White people in this country is at the root of Trump’s win and also accounts for the stealth nature of those voters for the pollsters.

I mean think about it; Who the hell wants to admit to themselves, much less to a stranger that is asking you to divulge your political preferences and the reasons associated with those leanings, that you feel powerless to shape or control many aspects of your own life and are existentially afraid of losing your ethnic dominance in society? Hell, how many people are even really introspectively honest enough with themselves to make that realization?

Conversely, Hillary Clinton attempted to create a coalition using the opposite formula; that being inducing people of different groups to all put a somewhat nebulous common cause above their own self interest.

That only works if your campaign has a theme and a narrative that are truly inspirational on a gut level and can offer a way and a means to express your contempt and disillusionment with the previous administration, Barrack Obama did, Hillary Clinton did not.

The reasons why she did not are many. But the short answer is 1: an improving economy that has not yet improved the lives of all Americans, 2: baggage and 3: a weak (read “damaged”) brand.

Barrack Obama, despite having a funny name and being a Black man with relatively little experience in the political arena, had very little actual baggage. So his inspirational narrative along with being the visual and idealogical opposite of his predecessor, sparked the interest and energy of a diverse coalition of people and so eclipsed what baggage he may have brought to the campaign. In addition, his brand; HOPE and CHANGE connected viscerally with people struggling to find a handle on the turbulent times and was exactly what people needed after the complete demoralization of the Bush presidency.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, despite having what seemed on paper to be a compelling narrative; which was her being the most qualified candidate in perhaps the history of the republic in addition to being the first woman in history to be nominated as the candidate of a major political party, had enough baggage (both actual and fictional) to fill a train car. That baggage eclipsed her poorly formed inspirational narrative which was never clear to people on a visceral level, leaving her already weak and suspicious coalition very little reason to forgo their self interest and sign on to her cause.

Point of clarity: When I say that Hillary Clinton had a poorly formed narrative I mean that it was not connecting with an existential condition of her coalition. In other words she had to keep explaining why the narrative of her campaign mattered to people and how it would improve their lives.

In addition, her brand; STRONGER TOGETHER is something straight out of a team building retreat playbook. It’s nice and morally accurate but it offers nothing to speak to the self-interest of an electorate that has struggled and suffered through a difficult recovery with very little to show for it and that becomes an even steeper climb if you want your message to resonate with a portion of the electorate that sees “rugged individualism” as a cornerstone of the American mystique.

Add to that a deep resentment harbored by a key component of her coalition (voters aged 18-35) over the perceived (and actual) undermining of their preferred candidate (Bernie Sanders) by his own political party and you have a recipe for failure.

Many people that she badly needed to connect with did not ever see her as the Avatar of positive change in their lives. Her seeming reluctance to embrace the policy agenda of Bernie Sanders, a wildly popular candidate with a huge and ferociously loyal following, along with her failure to throw those followers a bone by selecting a running mate that could inspire and motivate those voters to come over to her camp (I like and respect Tim Kaine but inspirational he ain’t…) and the result was a campaign that was doomed to lose momentum instead of gaining it over the long and brutal slog to election day.

Her failings as Secretary of State, her historical controversies and her tendency to be secretive and equivocal, even in areas of her private and political life that are quite benign, only served to provide fertile ground for Trump and his surrogates to flog the narrative that she was “crooked” and deceptive.

“But what about Trump” you say! “He is a straight up con man, and has enough baggage to fill Trump Tower twice.”

True. Donald Trump is not without baggage. To be sure, he brings with him all of the dark and lesser tendencies of our nature as a people and as Americans; Racism, Bigotry, Misogyny, Homophobia, lechery and debauchery. He has defrauded and lied to people in every facet of his life both public and private, on an epic scale.

But here’s the thing;

Donald Trump, while being compromised morally, legally and politically, undoubtedly embodies, for much of White America, the television caricature of “POWER” in all of the possible definitions of that brand. And make no mistake, power is very definitely the heart and shriveled soul of Trump’s brand. Don’t believe me? Well here is a simple exercise to prove my point: take any edifice that Trump has plastered his name on in gigantic all caps garishness, cross it out and in it’s place use the word POWER. I think that will illustrate my point quite effectively. Even his campaign slogan; “Make America Great Again” can easily be crossed out and replaced with “Giving Your Power Back To You.”

And giving them back their power and primacy in a changing nation is a very seductive message, both overtly and covertly, for those people that are deathly afraid of losing it. 

Still confused? Ok, let me put it another way; his supporters don’t give a damn about Trump’s baggage any more than you would care about the morals or life history of a man that you just hired to commit a murder. They will let Trump do and say whatever he wants as long as they feel like he serves their deviant and warped desires. In the words of one of his supporters: “He should be hurting the people that we want him to hurt…”

Prediction: 

The seeds are being planted with the election of this President, that will, in the near future, bear some very strange fruit. Yes, that is an historical reference and one that should terrify anyone with a soul. 

Not long after I moved to California (in truth it was about a week…)

…I came out of my new apt to find that my brand new car had been broken into during the night and the tape deck (it was the 80’s) and everything else in the car (including my new sunglasses) had been stolen. The door was badly damaged as they had used some kind of pry-bar to break in. Half of the dashboard had been ripped to pieces and the car wouldn’t start because the wiring had been so badly damaged when they ripped out the stereo. A whole new ignition had to be installed. The door had to be replaced and the new paint never matched the rest of the car after the repair.

I was shocked and sickened. I felt violated and scared. I was full of rage that someone who I didn’t know, whom I had never met and to whom I had never done anything, would do this to me.

I grew paranoid and mistrustful and I was filled with a vague unease for years after that experience. It shook me and it changed the way that I looked at the world in a very fundamental way.

I feel that way now.

I feel like some evil motherfucker has broken into my country and stolen something from me. I feel angry, helpless, mistrustful and paranoid.

And once again I feel changed in a way that I have never felt before. I have been violated. I fear that everything in my world has changed in a way that can never be put right.

I spent the night pacing and nauseous. I had to take a Valium and an Ambien just to knock myself out last night to get any sleep at all. I woke up today praying that I had just woken from some horrible nightmare and that none of it had really happened. The truth is that the nightmare is only just beginning.

I take some solace in the fact that I live in a state that voted overwhelmingly for the qualified candidate. We are a spot of blue in an ocean of red. I feel like a survivor from the Titanic and now our little lifeboat is cast upon a sea of hatred and ignorance.

It seems that I finally have one thing in common with Donald J. Trump. I think that we need to build a wall…

Donald Trump Jr posted a statement on social media recently using an analogy of skittles and refugees. In that analogy he poses a hypothetical that; before you sits a bowl of skittles and within that bowl, lurk three that are rumored to have been poisoned.

He looks into the camera and asks; “Do you eat the skittles?” [cut to video of frightened prairie dog]

The maker of Skittles responded to this post with an obvious but clearly overlooked fact on the part of Mr Trump Jr. That being that “Skittles are candy, refugees are people…”

True that!

This nonsense coming from a man who has never been at risk from anything more dangerous than a bad manicure and who regards Africa as his own personal killing field.

Syrian refugees are men and women and children that have done nothing beyond foolishly being born and raised in a country that is now being systematically destroyed in a campaign of relentless and indiscriminate violence.

Here is the thing, Junior…

To sit in your plush office and pontificate on things, about which you know nothing and about which you care even less, and equate the abject pain and suffering of innocent people desperate to leave a war-torn region which is now little more than a bloody pile of rubble that they used to call home, with your inane metaphors about toxic candy, is not only foolish and reductive, but it is also the definition of callousness and indifference.

Mr Trump; if you are worried that your candy may have been poisoned don’t blame it on the candy. Asshole!

Keith Olbermann is back in the ring with a new webcast that he is doing as a political correspondent for GQ

Welcome back Keith. We’ve missed you.

Are Donald Trump’s supporters Deplorable? Perhaps the real question should be; is there a basket big enough to dump these haters into…

Hillary Clinton told an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth recently at a gathering of the LGBT community. In the context of trying to explain the popularity of Donald Trump and the nature of his appeal to the rabid group of core supporters that follow him unflinchingly and unconditionally, she made a statement that half of his supporters could be categorized and placed into what she described as a “Basket of Deplorables.” People who’s motivation for seeing Trump elected seems to stem from their unbridled hatred for groups of people that they see as “the enemy.”

The media uniformly decries that statement as a gaffe on Clinton’s part and they lament that this will hurt her with the general electorate who will see this statement as an affront to their motives and beliefs. I for one, would like to commend Secretary Clinton for her candor and her longanimity with regard to this and other matters related to this carnival sideshow that is masquerading as a political campaign.

The Conventional Wisdom says that you can criticize a candidate but not his supporters. But that CW presupposes that those supporters could perhaps be in contention as potential supporters of the opposing candidate if they can be converted to an alternate point of view either during the election or as constituents after the election has taken place.

The CW says: “you are the president of the country not of your supporters.”

Really?

Is Barack Obama the president of the 60% of republicans who believe that he was not born in the United States and is therefore not really our legitimate president? They say that he isn’t. Who are we to argue with them.

The simple fact is that the Trump campaign is only a viable campaign because it appeals to the racists, bigots, homophobes, xenophobes and the various and sundry others that would prefer a revisionist version of “the good ole days” in which white people could lynch a black man (or Muslim, or homosexual, or Hillary Clinton…) in peace without a bunch of  bleeding heart, politically correct, Liberals ruining it for everyone.

Do these deplorable people constitute 50% of Trump’s supporters? I don’t know.

But here is the thing: Without that ferocious and vitriolic segment of his supporters in the mix, Trump would not control enough of the voting populous to sustain a viable Presidential run.

The simple fact is that the deplorable behavior that Clinton referred to is on display for everyone to see. I would direct you to this video as an example of the blatantly racist, bigoted, and yes, “deplorable” attitudes and behaviors that are common at every trump rally. These rallies are little more than well organized Lynch mobs.

The CW said that if Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation into law it would destroy our country.

The CW said that LBJ should not have pushed the civil rights bill or declared a war on poverty.

The CW said that the country wasn’t “ready” to elect a black man as President of United States.

The truth is that Conventional Wisdom is nothing more than a means by which the status quo can remain the Status Quo.

The Conventional Wisdom conveniently forgets that the only times in our nation’s history that meaningful change has ever occurred is when brave citizens and their elected representatives chose not to listen to the CW and instead named hatred and bigotry and ignorance for what they are, when they are encountered and understand that for us as a nation to move forward, those circumstances must be condemned, loudly and publicly.