A Fighting Chance, part two

2016: A Post-Election Manifesto

I ended part one thusly: 

As bad as the Sixties were, they cannot hold a candle to what has happened to our hopes & dreams, our hearts & minds, our bodies & souls since November 9, 2016.
So I want to talk about the Electoral College, the Constitution, The Bill of Rights, your rights, what's real, what's fake, who stands to gain & what the BEST THING IS YOU CAN DO to save us, because we are perched on the brink of the worst moment the ENTIRE WORLD has ever seen. There is an effort by hostile foreign actors to take control of the entire world. What is more desirable than money? POWER.

HE IS NOT THE PRESIDENT.

Stop referring to Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. It would be best if you didn't refer to him as president-anything, because he is not.

He stole the election by using a combination of dirty tricks, aided by dangerous foreign actors, for his own financial & personal gains. HE IS A FASCIST. He is a traitor to our country. He is colluding with outside forces, assisted by inside forces, to destroy our democratic system & replace it with a sort of monarchy which has no name, as of yet.

BOYCOTT THE MEDIA

Of course you need to know about current events, but they'll find you. You can't avoid it in this world. You might listen to your radio in your car or at home. The television might be on in your house or in a public place where you happen to be. You may walk by newspaper stands & see headlines. You could get emails with breaking news. A friend or family member might phone you to call your attention to something. You might see headlines on your phone.

The truth is, we consume TOO MUCH NEWS & opinion because we each have some need to do so. The reasons are different for each person, but suffice it to say: If something has your attention, you can't PAY attention to your own ideas & solutions.

Media is fond of saying something has "captured the imagination" of people Do you want your imagination to be captured? Do you want someone or something to have that much control over your very thoughts? This is a horrible thing to envision. I see a crowd of people staring at a huge screen with political icons & a totalitarian speaker in the center of it.

Since the election, every major media source has begun to refer to Agent Orange as President Trump. They have made statements like "that he will be our next president is a certainty" and "we need to accept that the next four years are going to be a challenge." BULLSHIT! This is irresponsible reporting by hacks, not journalists. We have precious few journalists. We have lost most of them to death & the ones who exist usually succumb to the big dollars paid to pundits & talking heads eventually. Right now we have Kurt Eichenwald & David Fahrenthold & JoyAnn Reid & a few others I'm not mentioning, but only because of time considerations. Let me tell you why these people are different.

A reporter, hack, pundit, talking head, etc. has marching orders. These can be tacit or blatant. Probably the worst of these are former speechwriters or other campaign or administration operatives like Chris Matthews & David Brooks. They make great efforts to sound like they're reporting actual news when in truth, they are giving you their opinion. The closest they get to TELLING the truth is INTERPRETING the truth. You must not allow someone to form your opinion, but unless you cut the cord, that's what you're doing.

So why does Kurt Eichenwald, who works for a for-profit commercial magazine & expresses strong opinions about Orange in his stories in Newsweek & on Twitter, stand out as a journalist? Because his opinions are based in FACT. A journalist is not supposed to tour Auschwitz in 1944 & deny what's happening there. He's not supposed to phrase his comments neutrally. He's not supposed to equivocate the extermination of Jews with the allied bombing of Dresden, as if they were the same crime against humanity.

A journalist is our window on the world. He points his lens at what is actually happening. He doesn't tell you it's something it's not. He affirms that what he is showing you is exactly what you think it is. You both have eyes. You both see murder or abuse or beauty or horror. He would not be a journalist if he tried to put a gloss on it to make it look better, or melodramatically claimed it was a disaster (Orange's favorite word) when it was nothing of the sort.

The fact that the Fourth Estate upon which we rely for facts & truth is jumping on the same bandwagon makes it as complicit in the rigging of this election as Putin, Assange & Bannon. STOP LISTENING TO THEM.

IT'S CALLED BRAINWASHING, DUMMY

Every time you allow a buzzword like "disaster" to plant itself in your consciousness, you are contributing to a buildup of concepts that affirm the "disaster." Like, don't think of an elephant. What happened? You thought of an elephant. Don't think of Donald Trump. See? Your mind was filled up with Donald Trump. WORDS HAVE POWER. That's why they are used to control people, to create bias in the media, to incite riots & wars. 

The most important thing you can do right now is change the way you think. If you contribute to the cultural obedience Trump sees in America, WE WILL LOSE.

IT'S NOT A POPULARITY CONTEST

People like me, who are committed to righting the wrong we were astonished to see happening right in front of our eyes are not "Hillary bitches." We do not all think the same or have the same goals. I share many of Donald Trumps beliefs. I disagree with several important planks in Hillary Clinton's platform. I sympathize with the stoners who thought Gary Johnson would legalize pot, dude, because, yeah. And I understand the appeal of the Green Party, which, if it had a platform, would be the only choice a person of conscience could make in the age of Global Warming.

But making a choice about hiring an executive, a CEO, for a trillion-dollar company, especially when that choice can make the difference between living normally & being blown to smithereens in a nuclear strike is SERIOUS business. Most presidents in the last 100 years have been under-qualified for this job. In political science, it's been shown that perceptions of a person are more powerful than actual fact. 

We also know people have a tendency to follow the herd. We don't want to make a decision, or we don't know how. We look to others for guidance. We have been & are a nation of sheep, a term coined by William J. Lederer back in 1961.

And more recently, we've begun to admit that our choices can be influenced by attractiveness, either physical or ethical. Bill Clinton, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, all went a long way on their looks, in addition to their actual skills. Richard Nixon lost to Kennedy because of 5 o'clock shadow & a scowl. Candidates who had fewer skills ran on their looks anyway--Gary Hart, John Edwards, Dan Quayle--& their detractors had to find a way to take them down in spite of it. Jimmy Carter flogged his honesty, saying, "If I ever lie to you, I don't want you to vote for me." 

Regardless of facts, presidential candidates get a lot of mileage with persona & personality. George W. Bush, it is said, was a guy you wanted to have a beer with. Donald Trump had a popular television show which apparently made him seem goofy & harmless & successful.

And Hillary Clinton? Well, who hasn't taken a shot at her wardrobe or her tendency to yell at a microphone? These picayune details were eventually accepted as a cover for the misogyny that her detractors packed into a bombshell & dropped on her. 

And yet, she is almost universally regarded as the most qualified, most experienced person for the job of President of the United States. Her salary wasn't even DOE! We were going to get her for the same price we paid for Gerald Ford & W. & Reagan, who slept through his 8 years in office.

The media spent countless hours referring to Clinton as "unlikeable," putting that thought into the electorate's collective head, without ever exploring the origin of that myth or questioning people who would say things on the street like, "I don't know why, I just don't like her." The media promulgated that the two major party candidates comprised the most unpopular opponents in the history of our nation. Of course, they had no way of knowing this, but it made for a hell of a soundbite. 

IT'S NOT REALITY TV, EITHER

And yet, that's what it feels like. Just as "reality tv" bears no resemblance to reality, this stolen election is something we never thought could happen here. Just like reality tv, this entire production was manipulated by bad writers & unethical producers. 

Brought to you by Trump-TV, the 2016 General Election was sponsored by Russia, China, ISIS, InfoWars, FOX-NEWS & CNN and paid for by Viewers Like You.

As we watched early in 2016, the impossibly obnoxious Trump knocked out every contender with a punch even cameras couldn't replay in slo-mo. We were stunned as he "debated" his way to the nomination, but we never really believed it. By then, ISIS was attacking Paris. We didn't think the story to lead off the evening newscast would be Donald Trump clinching the Republican nomination for president.

But it happened. then came the Tweets, bigly, or as he actually said, "big league." The tweet parade led to revelations. Michael Auselo in Florida was reporting the bribery of Pam Bondi, the state's Attorney General. Trump gave her a $25,000 "campaign donation" & she suddenly abandoned her office's plan to investigate Trump University. Then Bondi & Trump got VERY cozy. Trump was fined $2500 for making this illegal donation, but according to him, it was

chump change.

David Fahrenthold took a No. 2 pencil & a pad of paper & wrote out 13 pages of names--the charities to which Donald Trump claimed to have donated via the Trump Foundation. In the meantime, of course, Trump & Co. were trying to turn Clinton into a criminal for using a private email service when she was Secretary of State. Fahrenthold could find nary a charity who'd ever received a penny from Trump--though it did appear as though Trump used the foundation to pay the annual Boy Scout dues for one of his sons.

Kurt Eichenwald discovered that Trump had paid $86,000 to operatives so he could investigate opening a casino in Cuba, while the country was still under U.S. embargo. Might seem like a small amount of money, relatively speaking, but it was Anti-American, treasonous & criminally actionable. Then Eichenwald exposed an ongoing relationship between Donald Trump & Vladimir Putin that just kept getting bigger & bigger as the men lied about it, got sloppy with WikiLeaks & made YUGE public mistakes. 

Video dropped of Trump admitting to being a sexual predator. Lawsuits ebbed & flowed between Trump and a child he raped when she was 12. An additional 14 women came forward to testify that Trump had sexually assaulted them. Accusations of white slavery from the days when Trump provided underaged models to business colleagues abounded. 

In fact, there are too many offenses committed by Trump, both legal & criminal & unbearable, for me to list. But these are the things we need to keep in our mind when we think about him.

 Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, did nothing even remotely scandalous. But her husband's indiscretions were downloaded onto her as if she did. The woman who showed every troubled marriage that it could be saved, with dignity, was obscenely insulted & persecuted by Trump and all his minions.

Taken as a whole, adding in the 100 other offenses that occurred after that graphic was made, there is no way in hell Trump could be elected president. A bunch of things happened that we didn't really pay a lot of attention to. Twitter & several other major Internet institution were hacked & went down for hours. The Russians were blamed. They'd been blamed for other Twitter hacking in previous years, all documented in the media. Then in October, they were accused of being behind the statewide hack of Florida's voter database. This, along with several other stories, didn't seem to ruffle a single feather in America.

But then we saw it. Trump told us for weeks that the election was rigged & on Election Day, by about 9pm Pacific Time, the weirdest, most impossible "results" were being reported on the mainstream media. By the dawn's early light on November 9th, commercial media was declaring Donald Trump the winner of the United States' Presidency.

BULLSHIT.

We now know it was what he said--a rigged election, courtesy Vladimir Putin. The way it happened is being investigated. But more importantly than actually finishing an audit or recount, or taking apart voting machines or reading code that shows where the malware made everything goes sideways, there is, at last, a saving grace: COMMON SENSE.

In his pamphlet of the same name, patriot Thomas Paine advocated independence of the 13 Colonies from England. Never since that day has the term made more perfect sense than at this time. People all over the world are shaking off disbelief & embracing the truth. The United States of America got robbed. Russia got the better of us. They sent out a jester/juggler to distract us while they did their work. Now they are going to take over our country. We are about to become subjects of Vladimir Putin. 

We've been heading toward a feudal state ever since this commercial for Apple broke records at the SuperBowl. The conceit of the 1984 ad is that people who are blind worshipers & followers of IBM will be liberated by the Macintosh computer. In reality, an old addiction was simply swapped for a new one.

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE IS YOUR FRIEND

Just as voting for Stein or Johnson or Bernie in protest would be a very wrong thing to do in the face of the clear & present danger Donald Trump presented, bitching about the REAL reason the Electoral College exists would be suicide right now.

Don't you think the Republican Electors in the Red Battleground States, who have NOT voted for a President yet, whose votes are required to certify the election, are as scared shitless as you are? Being a Republican does not automatically lower a person's IQ, no matter how snarky devoted Democrats want to be about it. America has an opportunity to experience a new unity by urging the EC to vote for Clinton and dumping Trump.

A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin. Considering Trump's fantasy cabinet picks, it looks like he'd like to raze buildings & forests & build new real estate which he can own, built by people he'll never pay. Kinda like the Pyramids. 

W E HAVE CONSTITUTIONAL PROTECTIONS

We can burn flags. We can say whatever we want to about our President. We can make dirty movies & write dirty books. We can take drugs & drink alcohol. We can protest anything we think is unfair or wrong. And we can kick any treasonous asshole out of the White House for dozens of reasons.

The one thing we do NOT want to do, however, is impeach. Impeachment means we are allowing this traitor to take the oath of office & assume the Presidency. When he is impeached, his Vice President steps up to take his place. Mike Pence may be even worse than Trump. But whether or not he is, Putin will be president. 

Donald Trump must never assume office. He must be stopped, legally, peacefully & eternally, by the citizens of America. We love our country, the UNITED States of America. We are patriots not only to ourselves, but to our countrymen & women. If anyone just rolls over & goes to sleep for four years, they will not only wake up dead, they will be betraying everyone else in America.

DEMOCRACY IS HARD, BUT IT'S WORTH IT

It's really not that complicated to make Trump go away. But it requires commitment. It requires being a real patriot. Do you remember how you felt on 9/11? Like the entire world had gone insane, like you were watching the destruction of America right before your eyes? Is that how you feel now?

Did you want to go to war, have homicidal feelings for Osama Bin Laden, weep endlessly for the families who lost loved ones, or whose loved ones were never even found? 

Do you remember a time when you were proud to be an American, recently or long ago? Do you remember a time when you were ashamed of the actions of some of your countrymen, in any decade of the 20th century, or in the last few years?

YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

Just remember a few things. 

• Donald Trump is not the president.
• Hillary Clinton won the popular vote and deserves to win the Electoral Vote
• The only reason Trump has more "Electoral Votes" is because the media says he does.
• We will not survive a Trump presidency.
• Trump is in league with Putin, Assange & the Chinese, as well as every dictator he admires
• Do not refer to Agent Orange as President Trump
• Feel free to talk about President Hillary Clinton
• Keep the truth in your conscious thoughts all day long. 
• Don't give up.
• Say the Pledge of Allegiance. 
• Sing the Star Spangled Banner or America all day long
• Imagine having a skilled CEO in office who can fix what's broken
• Think of your neighbors, our troops, the children who are no longer safe. Protect them.