Dictator Playbooks

So, now he has proposed another Supreme Court justice thanks to Anthony Kennedy. Brett Kavanaugh now seems a likely choice. He did, after all, help to elect Shrub, in yet another republican illegal election ploy. Republicans seem not to mind gaining the throne via illegal means.  He also went after Bill Clinton, so the Drumpf should be thrilled. He is more likely than not to oppose Roe v. Wade, so he is a threat to women’s right to choose.

But mainly, the threat to our republic comes in a different form, and would be especially pleasing to Trump. He appears to believe that presidents should not be fussed over by the courts for illegal doings.  Should they commit a crime while in office (see Trump) they should not be required to answer until after they leave office. It would be “too disruptive” to the country’s governance for the President to have to answer to charges that he is a criminal. He (Kavanaugh) says, “There is after all, the impeachment process”.  But, he ignores the fact that, should republicans retain power, they don’t do impeachment of one of their own.  Republicans only countenance impeachment if the sitting president is a democrat.

And therein lies the central issue. Republicans in Congress now seem to believe that they (republicans who hold office) are immune to the laws of our land.  It seems not to matter what President Trump does, or says. Nothing, it would seem, will trigger even the slightest critical commentary, no less a move to censure.  So, impeachment is simply “off the table”, regardless of what Trump does.

Even when seven Republican congressmen met recently in secret in Moscow, with members of the Russian government—neither democrats nor members of the press were allowed to listen in—the republican leadership was silent. Can you imagine what they would have done or said had the democrats done the same thing? They were practically rabid about Hillary’s deleted e-mails, but meeting with Russians in secret in Moscow? Nope, not a word.  And what did Sean Hannity say about the meetings?  Well, he said absolutely nothing. Apparently, such meetings are A-OK with Sean baby.  Richard Selby headed a delegation that included Senators, Jerry Moran (R-KS), Steve Daines (R-MT), Ron Johnson (R-WI), John Kennedy (R-LA), John Thune (R-S.D.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.) and Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX). There is no public record of that meeting.  And Mitch?? No comment.  Gowdy??? No comment.

So, now, instead of a government system that includes by intent, “checks and balances”, we have a single, fully compliant government in which one party can do as it pleases, without any check on its actions at all.

So, beginneth the lesson on dictatorships.

We have a president who seems to adhere to no norms or ethical standards of behavior. He appoints unqualified family members to positions in government, he refuses to place his financial holdings into some kind of blind trust, he continues to make decisions that will benefit him personally, he categorically refuses to release any information regarding his personal finances, is almost completely incompetent in both his appointments process, and his management of his cabinet, he seems to know nobody who is not either corrupt personally, or simply incompetent to lead the offices they are being asked to run, and, last but not least, he really is abysmally ignorant about almost all of the policies he is overseeing, and is attempting to change.  He is anti-science, mainly I think because of his overall ignorance.  He has failed in almost every business enterprise he has initiated, to the point that he seems to specialize in failure (see his three failed marriages).

And his appointments have been almost uniformly a disaster, including in almost all cases people who fundamentally oppose the missions of the agencies they are being picked to lead.  Education and EPA are but the simplest examples, with DeVos and Pruitt serving as exemplars of terrible cabinet selections.

The Congress, both branches, now stand wholly in the control of the Republican Party. In the past, that statement would not necessarily be a bad thing.  Republicans of old used to have some principles worthy of the name. Now, the term “conservative” has become a bad, very ugly joke on humanity.  Conservatives used to pursue “conservation”. Now, they all seem to pursue exploitation, for personal gain. Even that old rascal Barry Goldwater must be turning over in his grave.  So, neither the House nor the Senate operates any check on the president. Perhaps to the contrary, Mitch and Ryan have perhaps existed to spur him on. He knows they care not one whit what he does, so long as he does not piss off their personal bases. And his main base, the Evangelicals, the Neo-Nazi’s, and the KKK wing of our country, seems to love whatever he does, mainly because they have no moral or ethical principles either. So long as he acts to protect white male supremacy, they love him.

And so now he has left NATO in a shambles, as he left the G-7 in disarray.  Mainly, it seems to be his modus operandi. You enter a summit meeting, you yell a lot about how unfair the world treats America, you yell even louder and more incoherently at one or more of our “friends” (see, Canada, and Germany), then you leave and claim that all is well and you personally made the meeting wildly successful.

And no one says anything in response. The media reports, as the media always reports. Trump’s media (Fox, et al) reports that all is well and Great Leader has done a magnificent job once again, and the rest of the non-Trump media report what actually seemed to have happened. They, of course, are then labeled as “fake news” by Trump & Fox and Friends.  And so it goes on.

All this tangled web he has been weaving seems straight out of the Playbook for Dictators. Mussolini, Hitler, most of the Russian oligarchs, and the other minor dictators (Kim, Duterte, etc.) all play from the same book.

But I thought we were better than this. I thought we had independent branches of government that would/could act to restrain a loud mouth, brainless twit like Trump. I thought also that the news media, whatever its political leaning, would still act to protect the public interest.  And finally, I thought that the American people would be able to look at the behavior of an idiot like Trump and declare that he was not speaking for them, and not acting for them when he separated two-year old kids from their parents, because it was God’s will that such a horror occur.

But apparently, I am wrong on all counts. We have a Congress that seems fully compliant with whatever diarrhea comes out of Trump’s mouth and feeble brain.  They will apparently support him even should he do what he suggested—going out on Fifth Avenue and shooting someone, just cuz.

And the media no longer operates in the public interest. We have The Trump PR machine (Fox) and then we have the other “fake News” media that keeps trying to report actual facts.  But the actual success of the rest of the media to keep reporting actual facts depends in part on the willingness of the American people to take in and understand actual facts. The American people now seem not simply to disagree about actual facts. They seem to hate one another, to the point that some members of the Trump PR machine are actually suggesting that a literal Civil War is near. That is, people may begin arming themselves and then shooting the people they hate.  Cuz that’s what a Civil War entails.

And my real question is, whose side is the 101^st Airborne Division (et al) on? I no longer have a simple answer to that question.

And so we approach this coming November in terrible fear for the actual continuation of our formerly great nation.  Maybe the American people will surprise, nay stun, me by voting the right wing out of office. And then Snow White will appear and perhaps sing to us about beauty.