Now that Trump thinks he can act without legal restraints, will he work to undermine the the upcoming election?
Posts tagged as “democracy”
Don’t be fooled. On Tuesday you were just seeing Trump’s best Sunday school behavior. And even that was barely passable. Trump is still Trump, no matter how you clean him up.
Op-ed
Since Tuesday night, all I’ve been seeing on Facebook are smug conservatives and hopeful leftists posting about how “presidential” Trump was in his speech before Congress.
As Colonel Potter used to be prone to say on MASH: “horse hockey!”
Any resemblance to an authentic presidential demeanor was all delusional and in the heads of those who are easily fooled. If you had never seen Trump before and were watching him for the first time, you would have thought him to be a mobster who was on his best behavior for a court appearance to plead his case — which is pretty much what he was. But on Tuesday, many people couldn’t help but compare the Trump they saw with the Trump they expected to see — which, I’ll admit made him look a little polished by comparison.
Your help is needed to help the President of the United States determine which news sources are the most trusted. If you are not a Trump supporter, you should not fill out this survey because it will skew the results.
One thing you can say about Trump and the boys, they’re bringing transparency to the White House in a way that no administration has ever done. This isn’t on purpose, mind you. But even a five-year-old — and everyone else except his supporters, it seems — can see right through him.
You might have heard about Trump’s “Media Survey.” It’s an online survey with a secret link known only to his supporters. He knows they’re his supporters because they’ve told him so, evidently by buying a red Chinese made baseball cap online or something. Anyway, they received an invitation to take the survey from the Trump/Pence disorganization.
Self censoring your social media posts to keep “inconvenient” stories out of the hands of Trump supporters who might use them against us is an exercise in futility.
By Telefonkiosk (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
To defeat Trump, we need to know the whole story. We also need to hold true to our values.
Sadly, these days many people get all of their news from the Internet. Sadder still, many only read news stories after being directed to them by their Facebook friends. Because of this, I take great care when posting a news link on Facebook to make sure I’m linking to the best source I can find.
I also take great care to make sure I’m not linking to stories with exaggerated importance — the type of story that makes a mountain out of something rather meaningless that Trump and his minions has done or said that really doesn’t matter. Desperate or greedy websites publish plenty of this type of story as clickbait, eliciting a knee jerk reaction from us. We Trump opponents can be easily seduced by those who flatter us by pointing out how smart we are.
Editor’s note: When Joshua Kricker sent us a link to this video this afternoon, we were astonished. At center stage in this video, shot on…
We’re being confounded by the issues.
The press, run by giant corporations by the way, wants you to believe the problems facing the United States are complicated. From the mass media we hear that we are a nation divided by a complex range of issues which they then fire at us like bullets from an Uzi, in a constant stream. We buy into this and define our stand on an issue by issue by issue basis. All you need do is take a look at your Facebook “newsfeed” to see this process at work. Over and over and over again we express our position on everything from same-sex marriage to health care rights to the environment to Julian Assange.
The Other Sunday Funnies Welcome to a new feature on If This Be Treason. The Other Sunday Funnies isn’t what comes buried in the advertising…
A while after leaving Canada and returning to the United States, I enrolled in state college and majored in political science. One of the first questions that arose in class was, “what makes a legitimate government?” I had long thought about this during the terms of Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. It’s still a basic axiom that governments remain legitimate only so long as they rule with the consent of the governed. The people give that consent (it does not have to be verbally acknowledged or recognized; it can be tacit consent, i.e. doing nothing to oppose the government’s policies) as long as they at least have some belief that there are relatively fair elections and through our elected representatives we have some voice in the laws that are made and the policies being carried out. At least that’s the theory in America. If you’re living under a blatant military dictatorship another set of principles apply.
These days American government is all just a magician’s show, nothing but slight of hand and misdirection.
That’s only to be expected. For years Congress, the Presidency, Wall Street and about everyone else who holds the real keys to ownership in this country has been maintaining the illusion that you and I, who have nothing but a borrowed pot to piss in, are actually the owners of this great land and that the government works for us.
It boggles my mind how the tea baggers can get it so wrong.
I think most Tea Party folks probably trace their ancestry back to Europe. Most probably they imagine they originally hail from England, since once upon a time Merry Olde was considered to be our “mother country.”