Hey! Whaz Happening? This post will include my entry for longest run on sentence in the English language. I have to say English so that I can exclude two masters of the craft: Gabriel Garcia Marques and Roberto Bolano, whom I can not hope to touch their mantels with my puny entry.
But first let me discuss my latest theory – the three forks in the news: real, fake, and alternative-reality. The last is a twist on what many have been discussing. In alternative reality news the news maker believes, or is trying to make you believe, that something is real that just plainly is not. If they know it’s false that’s gas-lighting (and, well, hey, lying too.) If they don’t know it’s false then it’s delusional.
Fake news is when someone makes sh*t up, but it’s not about them “they are reporting.”
Let’s take the case of Jason Cheffetz (R UT3rd). It’s been reported that hundreds of people jammed an auditorium in his district to give him a piece of their mind. Some reports said hundreds were outside that couldn’t get in and that the crowd was over one thousand. What did Chaffetz have to say about all this, after cutting the meeting short by an hour? The people yelling “Do Your Job!” and “Vote Him Out!” were not from his district. They were outsiders bused in to cause trouble. Where would they have come from? Nevada? Wyoming? One person tweeted “Oh look Honey, they’re having a town hall in Utah, load up the RV!” He might have a point some might have come from Salt Lake City, which is just north of his district. Maybe, Chaffetz is trying to save face with a “My constituents would never do this to me” kind of indirect statement.
Oh yeah? After the despicable way you treated Hillary Clinton with your repeated BS investigations?
But that is not the lead story of today’s bizarro world we find ourselves in. If I were to tell you late last spring that Donald Trump would be president and that he’d appoint a guy who touts false stories cooked up by far-right web-sites and grocery store tabloids, and that this guy has made trips to Russia, been wined and dined by the Russian government, all paid for by Putin and given a speech in Russia for which he was paid, and that when Trump was running for president, that in his building where his campaign was located there was a server, and that server communicating with a Russian bank, and that bank was owned by a close associate of Vladimir Putin, and was set up so that was the only other server it could communicate with, and was communicating in ways that made those seeing it thought odd, in that it was trying to be very secretive about what it was communicating (i.e. we ain’t talking simple wire transfers between banks), and that when the Trump organization was asked about it they denied that there was such a server, and that server immediately went silent only to be replaced by another server doing the exact same thing, and when the Trump organization was asked about the second server they denied it, and that server immediately went dead, and that the person in question was appointed National Security Advisor to the president, and then it came to light that this self same person, as a private citizen had conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. on the day of, or day after, our President declared sanctions on Russia for interfering in our elections, and that self same person denied that he discussed sanctions in those conversations, that he was only making logistical arrangements for the president-elect to have a telephone call with the Russian president, and he didn’t say anything like “don’t worry about those sanctions once we get in power we’ll take care of it” and three top officials in the new administration parroted those same denials and corroborated his story (which by the way is now known to be false so were those officials lying, or were they lied to, and does it make any difference because either way they’ll deny they knew they were being lied to and throw this guy under the bus regardless?) and he denied discussing sanctions or actions the new administration would take; that is until February 9, 2017 when nine Federal agencies said they had proof of one of two things about allegations about the Trump campaign, and that is either they had evidence about Trump and his golden shower incident in Russia, which they say it wasn’t that, or they had hard evidence that this individual had in fact talked directly and specifically to the Russian ambassador about those sanctions, while a private citizen, putting him in violation of The Logan Act, which would be the least of his worries because he would be in violation of “a bag full” of laws to quote the Democratic congressman from the House Intelligence Committee and that “losing his job would be the least of his worries,” and that this individual would then say in the face of this evidence that well, maybe he had mentioned the sanctions, but he couldn’t really recall (Would you like to hear your voice saying those words to the Russian ambassador? Huh, Bunky? Would ya? I can’t hear you?), and that there was evidence that this self same person had been having conversations with the Russian ambassador going back to the summer, which coincidentally was the same time that those mysterious servers in direct communication between Trump and Russia were in use, and oh by the way activity spiked on those servers before primaries and the Republican nomination, what would you say?
Would you say, as many Republicans are saying, “Oh well, that would be terrible if true, but let’s give him a chance.”?
Give him a chance to do what? Tell the Russians all our sensitive data secrets? They’ve already killed two of their own based on the M6 information that some fool leaked. It turns out that the CIA will not approve someone that this guy, Flynn, wanted as his associate. And the intelligence community thinks the president is a security risk. Why would they think that? Surely not because during his phone call with Putin he had to ask someone what our nuclear deal with Russia was? No, it had to be something worse.
Republican representatives are now needing police escorts into and out of their own town hall meetings as well as airports where they try to avoid angry crowds of protestors. They are sneaking in and out of places via back doors and alternate routes. Are they like Chaffetz thinking all these folks are bused in protestors like they did or condoned during the Tea Party, once their wealthy donors and right wing conspirators took over that movement and co-opted it?
Reality is a funny thing, sometimes you can’t believe what’s happening right in front of your eyes. Back in the 60s there was a computer programmer joke that said a printer was spitting out stuff directly from the computer and the programmer was looking at it saying, “This can’t be happening.” But it was!
The right wing Republicans (oh heck, all the Republicans with few exceptions) who have been attacking Obama, and the Dems and the things that the majority of things that people in this country want because they’ve been listening to a small minority and well funded corporate lobbyists who are also funded by billionaires are now running smack dab head first into the brutal fact that people don’t want them to do what they’ve threatened to do for years, in some cases decades, but now that they have the power and could do it.
People don’t want regulations cut so our air, water, land, and seas are more polluted.
People don’t want Obamacare repealed. They like it. Even though Republicans are saying they’ll repeal Obamacare but keep the good things in the Affordable Care Act, playing off the fact that many people don’t realize it’s the same thing.
People want gun violence curbed with some common sense laws.
People want public schools, where 90% of all children in this country go, improved. They don’t want the money cut, or siphoned off into other alternatives.
People want immigrants to feel welcome. They don’t want the wall.
The list goes on, but the stats are clear on what the majority of people in this country want, and it’s none of the things Republicans or Trump are pushing.
Republicans are in their own alt-reality bubble and have been in it for so long that when their own constituents turn up at their meetings to protest their stupid ideas and despicable behavior the reps say that it can’t be so.
I have news for them. Oh, yes it can! There it is. Right in front of their eyes.
In other news the Senate in the middle of the night confirmed Tom Price for Health and Human Services on a straight party line vote. Price, it has been said, is the guy to lead the charge on gutting Obamacare. He’s a doctor. He’s an inside stock trader and manipulator of stock price by legislation, so there’s no question about his ethics. He also has worked on getting rid of it before, just think what he’ll be able to do now!
I get the sense that not only has the dog bit the tire and can’t let go and is being whapped repeatedly as the car goes down the road, but it seems the whole kennel of mongrels has been let loose and is inside the car pushing buttons, moving levers, grabbing the wheel trying to figure out how this thing works. Excuse me, they aren’t trying to do that, they’re just running wild in the car and don’t give a damn how it works or where it is headed.
Meanwhile back in the White House the president tweeted the wrong name of the Japanese prime minister and his wife was left alone to wander around as Melania was nowhere around after the photo shoot. It’s kind of like a celebrity food show we’ve been watching. You’d think a dinner party at a famous person’s house would be sophisticated and classy but it’s not. It’s shallow, and lacking in manners and common courtesy.
I would say “God help us” but I’ll amend that to “We must help ourselves!”
I’d like to see constituents showing up at town halls with papers for their rep to sign that are pledges. Pledges that they’ll give up their Congressional health care and seek health care from the choices available in their political entity. Pledges that when Congress is not in session, or does not work 40 hours that they will work at minimum wage in their districts. Most of them signed that stupid “I won’t raise taxes” pledge that Grover Norquist shoved under their noses. A thing I never understood. How could a non-government entity demand a representative sign a pledge that directly would effect the people? Yeah, they have a right to do so, and the poor babies were scared because that little man is so threatening. Now they have an angry mob of their constituents to deal with. I wonder if they can see what’s going on, right in front of their noses?
1,439 days to go
The run-on sentence? 632 words. I can do better.
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