Sucks of the year: the elite of perfidy

Groveling   Mitt

How low can you sink?  Ask Mitt Romney. He fawned and groveled at Donald Trump's feet, and went on television to suck the Trump rump.

Romney gave a speech on what bad candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were, but he reserved his invective for Trump.  He said:

"Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He's playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat."

Those remarks are the one time I can ever remember agreeing with anything Romney has said.  I did not trust him as a presidential candidate because of his duplicity.  He instituted a healthcare program in Massachusetts and excoriated Barack Obama for establishing the same program in the nation.  He talked about building American jobs,  but his venture capital company was actively involved in buying up American companies and shipping the jobs overseas.  He made a dismissive comment about 47 percent of Americans.  But when he attacked Trump's character,  he seemed to be underscoring what everyone could see, rather than ignoring and defending a degenerate fellow billionaire. 

And then  he thought Trump might choose him for Secretary of State,  and he put on his obscene exhibition of sucking.  Some Trump spokespeople said Trump had been toying with Romney in vengeance for the attack on Trump.  And Romney may have coveted the job so much that he was willing to debase himself for the TV cameras.  But what he really did was show a degradation of character as low as Trump's.  And he demolished any respect that people might have had for him.  He was stunningly perfidious.

Eddying Eddie

Another defector from trustworthy to perfidious is Ed Schultz.  His situation is a bit more nuanced and less obvious on the surface than Romney's.  He had been advocate for liberal causes, but then  he was booted from MSNBC and went to work for RT America,  previously known as Russia Today, a network funded by the Russian government.  After he  started anchoring the evening RT news,   he attacked some of the people he previously supported.  And he made nice to people he had previously disparaged.  

Romney has made no attempt to explain his abject submission to the degradation of Trump,  but Ed Schultz is trying to maintain some dignity..  The Washington Post published a story on Eddie's transformation from a liberal stalwart to one of  Putie's  (as he  once referred to Putin) boys,  and it was reprinted widely by major newspapers in the upper Midwest.  Schultz claims that he gave up advocate news formats, such as he did on radio and MSNBC, in favor of doing straight, objective news.  He gave a long interview about his change in direction to National Public Radio.  

A colleague from Fargo called Schultz the Kremlin's mouthpiece.  It is largely Schultz's former colleagues and people who knew him from North Dakota who cast skepticism on his motives.  He started out as an imitator of Rush Limbaugh, but the stories of his career say that he converted to liberalism with the catalyst of Democratic money.  The problem with that story is where Democratic money could come from and how it could be used to create a liberal spokesperson.  Schultz's own account of his conversion to liberalism is that his wife is a psychiatric nurse who worked with homeless people and her work gave him knowledge of these people and changed his sympathies.  

However, other accounts point out that he was a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives and later tried to be a Democratic candidate for the Senate.  He once decried Putie's human rights record and called Trump a racist because of his birtherism and claimed to be a friend of Hillary Clinton.  But now, he calls Putie a protector of his country,  approves of Trump,  and calls Hillary and her campaign deplorable for suggesting that the Russians were behind the hack of the DNC.  And that is where Schultz begins to repeat the GOP party line.

First of all,  there is no doubt the DNC was hacked.  We can look at the e-mails published by  Wikileaks.  Seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies say they have evidence that Russian actors and affiliates did the hacking.  Schultz and the GOP say they need to see the evidence before they'll believe that Putie and company had any hand in the hacking.  The problem there is that intelligence agencies do not want to reveal how they can trace hacks and they classify information.  If anybody reveals classified information,  the GOP calls them criminal.  It is for the possibility that Hillary had classified information on her e-mail server, which was never proven, that the GOP wants to lock her up.  Still,  Schultz and the GOP insists the classified information be released, knowing that intelligence agencies will resist revealing operational secrets.  So,  Schultz and his new compatriots deny that Russia was involved,  although a number of countries in Europe have also discovered Russian hacking and fooling with their internal politics.  Schultz does not say, let's see what an investigation by an independent panel comes up with on the hacking issue.  He simply denies that his boss Putie has anything to do with it.  And in that denial,  Schultz's perfidy becomes evident.

The nation is severely divided.  Conservatives,  led by the likes of Rush Limbaugh,  have generated a level of hatred against anyone they call liberals that is as intense as the divisions over slavery that led to the Civil War.  News articles that deal with Trump's election are flooded with comments that threaten and recommend violence.  The submission of prominent people such as Romney and Schultz to the infantile bluster of a person like Trump encourages the hate-filled and sends a message to the left wing that it has a choice of submitting or of preparing to meet violence with which we are threatened.  As a veteran who served his country to prevent just the kind of Holocaust-like politics of Trump,  I opt for resistance.  And that means confronting the perfidy of people like Romney and Schultz, who have shown that there is no integrity of belief and purpose when a rich celebrity commands them to debase themselves. 

In a time when so many people have lost any grasp of facts, it is imperative for those who still value truth to recognize that the greatest threat to America is the duplicity and perfidy within the country.  These men do not represent the striving for liberty,  equality, and justice. 

Get what done?

Posts keep coming up on Facebook about how Bernie Sanders converted people at his town hall in Wisconsin to his way of thinking.  The practice of distorting or misrepresenting what, in fact, people have said or done on camera to give it an interpretation contrary to what actually occurred has become a characteristic of the social media.  It is simply delusional.

The previous post on hating Hillary cites an instance at that town hall that commentators have largely ignored.  When a man says he voted for Trump because he is not Hillary,  they do not probe the reasons for his intense hatred. While Hillary Clinton may be opposed on legitimate political grounds,  the intense hatred of her lies outside the bounds of rationality.  The Hillary haters display the single-minded intensity of the brain-washed.  And this is something that all the rueful examinations of Clinton and the Democratic Party refuse to confront.  Ultimately,  the candidates and the political parties are not responsible for what voters think or do.  Political parties can be held responsible for the kind of propaganda they disseminate,  but the decision to sort out facts from falsehoods is one that individual voters make.  Political parties may, in more magnanimous moments, try to educate voters rather than feed their prejudices and biases, but the decisions to adhere to racism, misogyny, and other forms of intolerance and hatred rests with the individuals.  Political parties can be complicit in the formation of bad character,  but they are not the primary cause.  And so,  no one asked the Hillary hater why he hated her so much that he would vote for a man who gave us an 18-month audition of bad character and arrested intellect.  

Another moment during that town hall was revealing.  Moderator Chris Hayes asked the panel if they were  optimistic with the election of Donald Trump.  The two working men said yes.  When Hayes brought up the fact that a billionaire president-elect was appointing billionaires and generals to his cabinet,  one of the men said it made him optimistic because these are the people who get things done.  A quick camera shot of Bernie Sanders showed an almost dejected expression.  

Bernie Sanders' campaign message was about the one percent,  the billionaire CEOs, who managed to divert the recovering economy into their own pockets,  leaving the middle class workers sinking on the economic scale.  Economists have tracked how the economy has declined in its support of working people  since the 1980s while the billionaire class has managed to garner for itself the wealth created by the working class.  So,  here were two working class panelists who had grown discouraged by the slow economic recovery bragging about voting for Trump and the billionaires who get things done.  And no one asked them exactly what it was that the billionaires got done.  And no one pointed out that what they got done was hogging wealth for themselves while letting the manufacturing economy and the American middle class sink toward poverty.  For some reason,  those working men could not grasp that the people they voted for are the ones who created the situation they found so discouraging.  They bought into the idea that those white men got things done,  but did not recognize that they  got them done only for themselves, not for the nation.    And it was their deliberate efforts that impeded the recovery that Obama worked for.  

The conventional intelligence circulating among Democrats is that they lost because they neglected the working class. But how could the demonstrations of bad character,  the constant lying, the insult and abuse of Donald Trump be seen as a chance for change for the better?  If they had been Bernie Sanders supporters,  why did they not understand Bernie's message?

There is deep cause for pessimism revealed in that town hall.  People cling to the idea that the rich and powerful and malevolent run the world, and they suck up to them as saviors.  In trying to sort out how they are thinking,  one smacks into the wall of stupidity.  The only real hope for Democrats is in fixing stupidity.  And most people recognize it is not fixable.  It can only be subdued.  

Meanwhile,  Trump marches on with his merry band of billionaires getting done what they are inclined to do.  Get richer and more powerful.  

On hating Hillary Clinton

When Bernie Sanders held a town hall for MSNBC in Wisconsin last week, he engaged some people who had voted for Barack Obama but voted for Trump this past election.  When moderator Chris Hayes asked a union man why he, a Democrat,  had voted for Trump,  the man answered, "Because he's not Hillary."

That reply reveals a degree of derangement that has still to be diagnosed.  It is to be expected from Republicans because they are programmed to deny any facts that call into question the corporate agenda that forms the plank of their party and to cling to any falsehoods that discredit their opponents,  no matter how absurd.  But when Democrats move beyond justified disagreements with Hillary's policies or expressions of disapproval of some actions into blinding hatred,  they appear to have succumbed to some massive attack on the brain.

As the contest between Clinton and Sanders indicated,  there are factions within the Democratic Party that place emphasis on different matters.  Intra-party disagreements and their resolution are routine and normal in the development of a plank and a roster of candidates.  People, including party leaders,  work and wangle in behalf of their favored ideas and candidates.  When Wikileaks released a cache of hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee,  it revealed some strategies being suggested or applied  by Hillary supporters to advance her over Bernie Sanders.  The revelation forced the resignation of the DNC chair and created a disruption in the campaign.  And for those who opposed Hillary,  the cry was to read the e-mails to see what a conniving and disreputable person she is.  For those who did, in fact, read the e-mails, there was a preponderance of usual party business.  And there was the usual suggestions by the usual number of useless idiots,  such as using Bernie's Jewishness against him.  Or some leaders looking for some promotional advantage for their favored candidate.  Anyone who has been involved in party business, on whatever level,  knows there are small-minded people with malevolent ideas who think of themselves as ingenious strategists.   Dealing with them is a noisome but inevitable task.  The essential business of a political party is finding and making acceptable compromises.  If it does not have people who can do that,  the party is dysfunctional.  The primary race between Clinton and Sanders was attended by the usual petulant stupidities that competition inspires,  but it was a straightforward process.  And as political process works,  it did result in Clinton adopting many of Sanders' key platform points.  But among the dedicated Hillary haters,  that was not enough, and along with battling Donald Trump the party had to try to manage internal  dysfunction.  We ended up with Trump.

It  would be interesting to see the exchange of e-mails within the Republican National Committee and what kind of strategies were posed by the Trump and Never-Trump forces.  

The accusations against Hillary's corruption are often conflations from policy disagreements or surmises about her e-mails and her decisions.  Democrats who hate Hillary often post accusations that have been disproven by fact checkers.  They ally with the Republicans on those points.  While all of Trump's corrupt practices are documented on videos and in verified news accounts,  Clinton's alleged corruption is in a nebulous haze arising from personal hatreds.  Still the anti-Hillary Democrats hold her in malignant intolerance while displaying a remarkable tolerance for Trump. I wish in a way that Hillary would challenge Trump to launch an investigation for the purpose of trying to lock her up.  The charges against her have been processed by both Justice Department and Congressional investigations and no specific, chargeable violations have been produced.  Still Trump's are documented and flaunted by him for all to see,  but Hillary is the hateful one. It is doubtful that any further investigation can finally incarcerate her,  but that's what Republicans and Hillary-haters demand.  It is derangement,  the stuff on which true dysfunction based.  

In the matter of Russian-sponsored hacks into the DNC and other U.S. agencies,  the Democratic Hlllary-haters take up Trump's position.  They post materials that suggest that the intelligence community is in a conspiracy to generate hatred for Russia as a diversion.  This is despite the fact that 17 intelligence agencies of the U.S. have agreed that Russia has made a cyber invasion of the U.S.,  as if somehow 17 different agencies can be whipped into a conspiracy. And despite the fact that since the rise of Putin,  former Soviet republics have revealed Russian intrusion into their political affairs,   and that a number of Euro countries have uncovered such attacks from Russia.  Despite Russia's absorption of Crimea,  its belligerence and subversion in Ukraine,  and its participation in atrocities in Syria,  the Democratic fellow travelers dismiss Russian actions as a contrived ploy to divert attention away from Hillary Clinton's lost election.  And they deride liberals who express concern about Russian interventions and Trump's conflicts of interest as figments of liberal thinking coming from failures of critical thinking.

There are many Democrats who have acknowledged Hillary Clinton's evasiveness and the compromises the Clinton family has made with the corporate world.  But they have also acknowledged the record of her service to the liberal principles and policies that Democrats believe define a true democracy.  There is a blizzard of analysis about what the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party did wrong.   But one salient fact emerges.  Hillary won over Trump by nearly 3 million popular votes,  2.1 percentage points.  That salient fact is that whatever blame can be contrived to explain the loss,  the dysfunction within the Democratic Party is what won the election.  To Trump's campaign the factor is the useful idiots,  who keep blithely marching on into Trumpland.   May they enjoy their triumph.  The rest of us will find ways to resist or escape from them and the Republican menace.  

They are all the same.

How the U.S. became a Russian colony

Some people in Russia long for the old Soviet ways.  In some ways it was a better time for them.  Russia is now governed by "all-encompassing corruption" that one expert on the country calls “kleptocratic authoritarianism."   A kleptocrat is one who steals a country's resources through the use of political power.  The head kleptocrat in Russia is Vladimir Putin.  Donald Trump has expressed admiration for him.

Most Americans are dimly aware, if aware at all, of what has happened to Russia since the fall of communism and disbanding of the Soviet Union. When the old Kremlin lost control of the Russian economy,  the government looked for ways to privatize some badly run business enterprises.  It came up with a scheme to obtain loans from banks in exchange for giving the banks stakes in the companies.  The government defaulted on the loans and the bankers ended up owning companies which controlled things like oil and minerals.  The government auctioned off some of its assets which were obtained by the bankers at truly bargain prices.   Those people who then held the companies became astoundingly rich over night.  They were called the oligarchs,  a few extremely wealthy men who had the Russian economy in their possession.

Then  came Putin, a former KGB agent who knew well the tactics of Kremlin politics from the Soviet days.  A New York Times  story explains what happened next:

When Mr. Putin became acting president 15 years ago this month, Russia was an oligarchy — indeed the oligarchs, a small group of men who had grown very rich in the preceding decade, were instrumental in picking Putin out of obscurity and installing him at the helm. But within months, he made the oligarchs an offer they could not refuse: give up all of their political power and some of their wealth in exchange for safety, security and continued prosperity, or else be stripped of all power and assets.

Those oligarchs who did not cooperate with Putin's political extortion found themselves the targets of false charges and imprisonment,  sometimes death,  and sometimes exile from Russia.  The tactics of Stalin were applied again.  To keep their wealth and privilege,  most of the oligarchs were complicit with Putin.  The story explains:

The media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, who rejected the new rules, was forced into exile in the summer of 2000, and uber-oligarch Boris Berezovsky followed him a few months later. When the richest man in Russia, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, refused any such bargain, he was jailed and his company was taken away. The process of destroying the Russian oligarchy was completed.

Meanwhile,  America developed its own version of oligarchs.  As wealth became concentrated in the hands of the upper one percent,  CEOs drew enormous salaries, bonuses, and benefits.  Bernie Sanders drew support because he openly identified the American oligarchy and the degree to which it controlled and directed economic and social policy in America.  That one percent comprises an oligarchy.

When America elected Donald Trump president,  it elected an oligarch to run the country.  And Trump has frequently declared his admiration for Putin.

• "Look at Putin -- what he's doing with Russia -- I mean, you know, what's going on over there. I mean this guy has done -- whether you like him or don't like him -- he's doing a great job in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia period,”

• "Putin has big plans for Russia. He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe. I respect Putin and Russians but cannot believe our leader (Obama) allows them to get away with so much...Hats off to the Russians.”

• "I think he's [Putin] done really a great job of outsmarting our country.” 

• "I think I'd get along very well with Vladimir Putin. I just think so."

• "It is always a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond. I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect."

• Trump defends against allegations Putin has ordered the killings of journalists: "He's running his country and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country," Trump said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "I think our country does plenty of killing also.”

• "Why do I have to get tough on Putin? I don't know anything other than that he doesn't respect our country.”

Trump is the quintessence of the one percent, the American oligarchy.  He knows the strategies of predatory capitalism,  a consummate businessman.  He uses tactics that the Kremlin uses to intimidate and control in their American form:  He

• threatens or brings suit against people who disagree with him and his actions.
• slanders people with false accusations of criminal activity and incompetence.
• lies more than he tells the truth,  with 70 percent of his statements proven false.
• refuses to pay people who have completed work for him.
• has a history of philandering.
• has accusations of sexual assault by several women.
• has filed for four business bankruptcies that made money for him.
• uses Twitter and rallies to make false, juvenile, and vindictive statements against people who criticize or disagree with him.
• paid $25 million to settle a fraud law suit over the fake Trump University,  which included a $1 million  penalty for violating the New York state statute for fraud.

 In forming his  cabinet, he is stoking it with fellow billionaire CEO-oligarchs and retired generals who are willing to follow orders from the American Kremlin.  In the naming of Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State,  he is putting foreign relations in the hands of an oil executive who is a close friend of Putin's and the oligarchs he commands.  That nomination is made in the context of Trump's remark about Putin that "He wants to edge out its neighbors so that Russia can dominate oil supplies to all of Europe."

Tillerson has close ties with the Kremlin hierarchy and has worked out deals with its members.  The Kremlin milieu is what he works with.  And it is not a milieu devoted to peaceable and constructive international relations.  It is all about wealth, power, and control.  

Kremlin-backed hackers are known to have operated in European politics before hacking into American political parties and agencies.  They are advanced in cyber-weaponry.  The first goal of cyber-attacks and the posting of disinformation and misinformation is to disorient   people so that they lose any reference point as to what the truth may be.  Then, direct attention to people who seem to offer some sense of direction and security.  It is the world of George Orwell's 1984 plaiying out in reality.  And through conditioning by the media and the purging of educational institutions of courses that develop critical and creative thinking,  America has a large constituency which sees the one percent as its savior.  

The American oligarchy and its commander are in place.  The rules of the transition of power their traditions authorize their take over of America.  The big question is if the 99 percent will allow that to happen.

When people say God Bless America,  it is beginning to sound like a benediction as the America  that once aspired to freedom, equality, and justice is put to rest.  But then,  there is Standing Rock and the kind of resistance that indigenous occupiers of this  land mounted against an oil pipeline that threatens the land, the water, and the sovereignty of the people.  

Red Cloud saw the pattern being carried by Trump and his cabinet nominees years ago:  "The white man made me a lot of promises, and they kept one.  They promised to take my land, and they took it."

Trump's declared and demonstrated intentions are clear for all to see.  The conventional advice is to give him a chance, as he is the elected president.  But over an 18-month campaign he demonstrated what kind of person he is,  how he operates, and what he intends to do.  He is a despicable person who possesses none of what Americans once held as virtues.  .  And his intentions are affirmed by his choices for cabinet offices.  One must ask just what is it that he is being given a chance to do?  Many cannot accept him as president.  They cannot see how a person of his untrustworthy and degenerate character and intellect can represent them or what America once aspired to be.  

Americans can once again declare their independence.  Or they can submit to being a Russian colony--in fact, if not in name.  

Does this mean the Russians are hacking NVB?

This screen shot from early this morning showing the countries from where views of this blog are coming from is typical of the traffic for this blog.  Russians often view the blog 2 to 3 times more  than people people in the U.S.  I have no idea why that may be.  Maybe further investigation into what the C(A and FBI know may explain it.

Pageviews by Countries  Entry Pageviews Russia 64 United States 21 France 4 China 2 Ukraine 2 United Arab Emirates 1 United Kingdom 1 Poland 1

Is the election of Donald Trump inexcusable? Unforgivable? Will there be resistance? An uprising?

The contrast between the treatment of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is mind-shattering. Hilary was reviled in the most despicable terms.   Her opponents constantly called her a liar.  Benghazi and her e-mail server were always brought up in connection with her.

But Donald Trump whose lies are a matter of broadcast and twitter record is seldom called a liar, and no  one calls hims a shyster even though he has defrauded businesses that have done work for him,  declared numerous bankruptcies,  and whose biographers have denounced his sociopathic tactics.  

Republicans were in a fury that in Clinton's role as Secretary of State she might have influenced donations to the Clinton Foundation,  but Trump's potential conflicts of interest regarding the Trump Organization,  which seem unavoidable if he does not divest, raise nary a concern among Republicans.

Meanwhile,  Trump chatters and tweets away and some Democratic officials join in about bridging the divide and unifying the country.  People I encounter are more in the "you've got to be kidding?"  mode.  

What I hear most often from people around me is "Trump can never be MY president" and "these people I know who voted for him are not my friends."  There are tales of families forbidding political discussion over Thanksgiving tables.  But there are also tales of Thanksgiving meals eaten in an atmosphere of cold hostility.  Over the weekend I attended a bereavement dinner at which a person felt compelled to castigate Obama and liberals to the person sitting next to him when he found out she had been a staff member for prominent Democratic officials.  Aside from the outburst being inappropriate and discordant for the occasion,  it underscored the kind of mentality that has propelled Trump into office.  There are people who think the election  of Trump gives them a free pass to act out their malevolent impulses.  And those impulses are contrary to the fundamental principles on which the U.S. was founded.  

Trump held a year-and-a-half audition which clearly and irrefutably showed the world what kind of person he is.  He is all the things the right wing accused Hillary Clinton of in an exponential magnitude, and then some.  He

• slanders people with false accusations of criminal activity and incompetence.
• lies more than he tells the truth,  with 70 percent of his statements proven false.
• refuses to pay people who have completed work for him.
• has a history of philandering.
• has accusations of sexual assault by several women.
• has filed for four business bankruptcies.
• uses Twitter and rallies to make false, juvenile, and vindictive statements against people who criticize or disagree with him.
• is a full-fledged one-percenter in his actions and in the people he surrounds himself with.
• paid $25 million to settle a fraud law suit over the fake Trump University,  which included a $1 million  penalty for violating the New York state statute for fraud.

Everything he says and does is contrary to the objective stated in the preamble to the Constitution to "a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity."

His pronouncements and actions are more in line with the circumstances outlined in the Declaration of Independence for a people to revolt:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness} it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. 

Despite his comments about unifying the country,  everything Trump said in his 18-month campaign and every action he has taken and many of his threats are not a call for unity,  but a signal for resistance from those who believe in the principles that formed the nation's founding and guided the way it has progressed to realize those principles.  

The popular vote has been downplayed by the press for the most part.  But the 2.6 million votes and more than 2 percent margin now held by Clinton is unprecedented and astounding.  It shows clearly that a large margin of people do not want Trump to be president over those who voted for him. 

And the responses of those who supported Hillary Clinton,  particularly those who supported Bernie Sanders and those active in the Occupy Wall Street movement,  receives scant mention.   They do not think Trump represents America or, on a more basic  level,  the standards of decency, respect, and thought that form the common grounds of American character.  

To those people,  what divides them is not differences on political issues.  It is the fact that Trump supporters in choosing him have condoned and subscribed to the very behaviors that  Americans have fought wars over and given their lives to prevent in our  country.  To those generations that have grown up learning the lessons of World War II,  the election of Donald Trump is much like the betrayal of Anne Frank.  Their friends and neighbors have given America over to the forces of deceit, dishonesty, inequality, and injustice.  They cannot reconcile with those friends and neighbors because they can never trust them again.  

It is recognized that Trump voters are largely brain-washed.  They have been so besieged by the disorientation of talk radio, cable news, and the fake news sites on the Internet,  that they have voted out of a conditioned response instilled in them,  not out of beliefs arrived at by critical intelligence.  They cannot be engaged with facts and reason because they cannot distinguish between facts and the illusions created to dupe them in the virtual worlds they live in,  and the laws of reason have been repealed as far as they are concerned.  

There is a mass of voters out there who did not choose the candidate of personal insult, abuse,  denigration, mendacity, and menace.  They outnumber the Trump supporters by 2.6 million people.  They can prevail by denying that there is anyway that Trump represents them.  They can resist. They can follow the principles laid out in the Declaration of Independence under the knowledge that "it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government."

Gargoyles of human ugliness are reminders of the evil in the world.

Semper Fidel

I was in Havana, Cuba, once for about four hours.  At the time,  Fidel Castro was off in the mountains somewhere conducting guerrilla raids.  I was with a bunch of men wearing U.S. Army uniforms.  

The circumstance was caused by bad weather.  We had been flown from Germany to Ft. Bliss at El Paso, Texas,  for some test firing of guided missiles.  We had just taken off on the return trip to Germany to transfer to a trans-Atlantic transport to take us back to our post, when our flight was diverted to Florida because a storm was wending its way up the Atlantic coast.  At first,  we thought we would be picking up the flight at Miami.  But the aircraft scheduled to take us was hunkered down in New Jersey waiting for the storm to pass.  We were told we would have a 12-hour delay before we could reboard our aircraft to meet the one in New Jersey.

While we were lolling about the air terminal,  a man who worked for a tour service told some of the men he could provide a tour at a "special GI rate" to Havana and have us back in plenty time for our flight if we could get enough men to sign up.  The men got permission from the officers, who got assurances from the tour service that we would be kept in a group and returned in time for our flight.  They quickly found enough men who did not want to sit around an air terminal for a day and we were soon loaded on to a DC-3 for a quick hop to Havana.  

It was a routine tour.  We took a stroll along the water front,  were shown the town's architecture,  visited a rum distillery where there was a sample tasting (some of the men had trouble getting past the dark rum),  saw a cigar-rolling demonstration,  (rum and cigars were, of course, for sale), and ended up at a casino that put on an extravagant stage show.  The big band that played Afro-Cuban jazz was for some of us worth the whole trip.

But what struck most of us was an attitude we received from people we encountered as we walked about town.  Some of the people were obviously prostitutes,  but they all gave us angry looks and many said things in a spitting manner.  We could clearly make out the world "Americanos."  Gonzalez,  a bilingual from Chicago,  told us what the rest of the words were.  They weren't complimentary,   and clearly conveyed that our presence was not appreciated.

This occurred some months before Castro came to Havana and drove the Batiste regime out.  American businesses owned most of the sugar cane business and much of the tourist operations in Cuba. An American mobster,   Meyer Lansky,  owned or controlled the casinos.  Batiste's government and the businesses were cozy with the American government.  While some people were well off,  most were not.  The best hope for young women from the rural areas was to become a prostitute in Havana.  Americans were regarded as part of the mob that operated Havana as their personal den of iniquity.  Castro's raids against Batiste and the successful guerrilla operations led by him and Che Guevara were raising the hope that Cuba could be something different.  Americans and Batiste were regarded as the enemy.

Those people we encountered on the streets of Havana let us know we were part of what they hoped to be rid of,  and Castro was coming.  Castro was regarded as a liberator,  not only by Cubans, but by many people in America.  After he succeeded in taking over Cuba,  he seemed friendly to America,  but after a few months denounced the USA and formed an alliance with the Soviet Union.  

The case in Cuba was a matter of a dictator being displaced by a dictator.  Castro enforced reforms that rid Cuba of the mob and his full-bore communist programs did give many people services that they had not been able to afford before. Tom Lawrence reports what George McGovern said about a tour Castro gave him:  "He wanted us to see there were no prostitutes on the streets, no gambling dens, no nightclubs," McGovern told me. "That all left with the Americans, he told us." However,  he followed the precedent of Stalin,  detaining, executing, and oppressing dissenters and others he thought to be dangerous to his regime.

More than a million Cubans came to the U.S. as refugees,  centering around Miami and making it a bastion of anti-Castro activity.  Others settled elsewhere, as opportunity presented itself.  One of my colleagues when I first started teaching college was a former Cuban newspaper editor who became a professor of Spanish.  He in the  loudest terms let those around him know of Castro's atrocities, including the 5,600 executions at his command.    

One of the ironies of our time is that many people who were welcomed and protected by the U.S. in their flight from Castro supported Donald Trump in his anti-immigrant tirades. 

Over the years,  there have been many leaders, leaders such as George McGovern and Jimmy Carter, who have extended friendship to the Cuban people.  They saw the embargo and other actions against Castro were hardening and justifying the anti-American attitudes among the people.  With full recognition of the part America has played in Cuba's history,  they saw the need to reach past politics and show a respect and a regard for the people.  They thought that non-hostile relations was the best way to neutralize a Soviet outpost situated 90-miles from our shore.  

Obama has tried to bring Cuba into full participation as a country in Latin America, as opposed to being a pariah.  Other countries in the hemisphere have normal relations with Cuba,  but the American blockade has been an obstacle.  Castro made Cuba a prison-nation for his people,  and Obama has contended that the past ostracism of Cuba by America has not produced any results politically, but kept the people of Cuba in economic bondage.  

At Castro's death,  the right-wing critics rose up against Obama.  The President chose not to  condemn Castro for his treachery,  but said he'd leave it to history to decide.  Given the facts of the oppression and executions,  history has in effect already decided,  but Obama thought it best not to further inflame the situation at the time of Castro's death.  Donald Trump took the occasion to assert that if Cuba did not bend to his will,  he would revoke the diplomatic relations.  

Those of us who took that little tour of Havana in 1958 were reviled by people on the streets.  It was not the first time.  When we landed in Germany to bring guided missile air defense as part of the NATO agreement,  we were greeted outside the Frankfort air base with signs that told us to go home.  The military command initiated a huge public relations campaign to assure the people of Germany that our missiles were for air defense purposes only to enhance the peace,  not endanger it.  We were asked to participate in good will events with the German people.  Some of us became curious about how Hitler had managed to gain control of the people in the land of Goethe, Beethoven, and Bach.  There was a tendency in the people, even during those Cold War years,  that hinted at attitudes of racial superiority,  a tendency to place blame for personal failures on scapegoats, an acceptance of platitudes that reinforced their prejudices and mindsets.  We also discovered a resistance among some of the people to those attitudes of national superiority.  People who had resisted the Nazis throughout Europe became important in establishing the direction that post-war Europe took.  

Trumps rise to political power parallels that of Hitler.  But it also shares similarities with Castro's.  Fidel conducted his campaign with promises of removing Batiste and replacing his regime with democracy.  He betrayed many supporters,  and millions of Cubans left.  But many more stayed behind to try to continue their struggle.  Their lives did improve somewhat, although they were not free and lived under the suppression of Soviet-style communism.  Fidel, however, had a magnetizing personality that many people saw as their protector. He took measures to see that they never saw or experienced the kind of freedom and possibility that existed in America.  Many who caught those glimpses, however,  defected to America.

People like George McGovern thought it would be in the U.S.  interest to develop a relationship with Cuba so that its people could see the advantages of democracy and exert an influence for change.  Now Trump threatens to end the relationship.  Cubans will not have access to a vision of America.  And with Trump,  neither will a lot of Americans.  

It's the language, stupid.

If you want to demoralize a nation and turn it into a vassal state, attack the language.   You can't keep humans from making vocal noises or scribbling symbols on paper or poking at keyboards,  but you can make what they think are words mean nothing.  You can destroy their trust in language.  You can destroy their ability to see any meaning in language that actually registers on the brain cells.  You can reduce them to a state wherein language is only a noise, a command, such as "get up," "whoa,"  and "down, boy!" that directs their motions.

How do you do this?  By constantly making language useless.  American  Indians have experienced this.  The elders warned their people about learning the white man's language: it will endanger you.  A major part of the American subjugation of the Indian was in sending the children to boarding schools,  punishing them if they spoke in their native languages, and approving of their verbal responses only when they conformed to a degraded subservience to their "superiors."  It didn't work.  Elders hid their native languages and found ways to perpetuate them so that a means of conveying facts and truth could be retained.  While the white world found ways to deconstruct and make useless its own language,  people who value language as the vehicle of thought and truthful expression find ways to preserve the word as something that is useful and reliable.

The English  word was destructed by the use of deception,  by making promises never meant to be kept, by the making of agreements and treaties which were consistently broken,  by assembling a vocabulary which conveyed only insult and abuse as a means of directing hatred toward particular sets of people.  

This past election campaign has been a nuclear-level assault on  language.  Donald Trump is an anti-language warrior such as has been seen only in dystopian fiction.  His outbursts are incoherent, ungrammatical, and predication-free.   News organizations have termed his lying as unprecedented.    In checking out 334 statements Trump  made during his campaign,  Politifact found that 70 percent of his statements were false;  15 percent had a slight truth; and only 15 percent fell into the truthful category.  

And the American people chose him to be their president,  although the actual majority of Americans did not vote for him.  As of this post,  Hillary Clinton has 63,600,000 votes to the president-elect's 61,900,000, according to the Cook Political Report. Updated ballot counts show her receiving at least 48 percent of the national vote compared to Trump’s 46.7 percent. (The most recent update in the ongoing count puts Clinton's lead at 2,017,563 votes.)

What can make nearly half of the Americans be duped by a man who is termed worse than a liar? A liar, the experts on language say,  at least lives in a universe where the difference between truth and lies matters.  But Trump is a bullshit artist to whom truth and falsehoods do not matter.  Bullshit is dangerous because it wears away the ability of people to know the difference between truth and lies and ultimately they don't even care.  What is most alarming about the election of Trump is that almost half of the American people have shown that they do not care what is true or have lost the ability to discern what truth is.  

Harry G. Frankfurt, an emeritus professor from Princeton, is an expert on the dissolution of language and puts Trump in the category of a person who is lethal to language and culture:

Frankfurt’s key observation is that the liar, even as he or she might spread untruth, inhabits a universe where the distinction between truth and falsehood still matters. The bullshitter, by contrast, does not care what is true or not. By his or her bluffing, dissimulation, and general dishonesty, the bullshit artist works to erase the very possibility of knowing the truth. For this reason, bullshit is more dangerous than lies, since it erodes even the possibility of truth existing and being found.

An example of this destruction of language is found in the word "racist."  A racist, by dictionary definition  is "a person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another."  As Trump mounted his campaign of defamation and disenfranchisement of minorities,  the term "racist" was applied to him and those who support him.  But the GOP deflects the meaning of the term by saying it is just a matter of the liberals calling their disciples names.  A South Dakota legislator claims that such name-calling is why Trump got elected.  The people were just responding to the liberals for "Calling them racists and other juvenile names because they disagree with you?"  This is said by a legislator who lives in one of the most racist states in the Union,  South Dakota which is the home of Wounded Knee and nine detention centers called reservations.  But those reservations have been places where the language of Native Americans have been preserved along with a reverence for the land and a lingering preference for a society which cares for each other, rather than oppresses people of difference.  The hard facts about the history, past and present, of South Dakota's treatments of the Indians is dismissed when the term "racist" is just part of Trump's name-calling.   To this legislator and his kind,  the fact that people are being exterminated. persecuted, and oppressed for their disagreement with a political system based upon predatory capitalism can be erased by reducing the charge of "racism" to juvenile name-calling.  

President Obama recognizes the assault on facts and the ability to deal with them as part of the conservative agenda. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years,” he said.  Trump was “able to distill the anger and resentment and the sense of aggrievement.”

The assault on language shows up in much of our communications,  Obama said.  “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.  And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

In submitting to Trump's destruction of language,  his voters chose the same path for the same reasons as the Germans of the 1930s chose the Nazis.  The German people were in a state  of humiliation for having lost the First World War.  Hitler and his followers promised to make Germany great again.  Trump pounded on the idea that during a time when America moved significantly to expand the franchise of equality,  America had  fallen into a state of disrepute.  Without looking at any facts regarding where the nation was as it has worked out of the Great Recession,  the people fell dupe to his words.  And they also showed the same tendency to blame a minority.  Whereas Hitler managed to put the blame on the Jews,  Trump broadened the base for blame to include Latinos, Blacks,  women, and, at times, the LGBT communities.  It is the same tactic.  And the American people bought it.  61,900,000 voters decided to end America's role as a leader  and an example of probity for the free world.   Joy Reid states the case:

You’ve lost the morality card. No longer can the U.S. go around lecturing the world about democracy, because, in our democracy, the person who got the most votes will not be president. Nor does the party that got the most vote control the House of Representatives. Again, we’re required to accept this affront to democracy, because that’s our system. But our acceptance doesn’t make it any less democratic. 

You have also lost the notion of an exceptional America. Because as it turns out, We’re just another western nation into the ethno-national forces sweeping and swinging across Europe… We, as it turns out, are not so different at all.’ 

You have ratified Trump’s vulgarity, his crassness. You saw exactly who and what he was and you chose it. You are going to have to own that. If the incoming president makes you feel proud, I am very happy for you. But please don’t tell the people who are afraid that they have no right to be.

The reign of Donald Trump signals the victory of the destruction of language. You can't believe him.  You can't believe those who support him because their knowledge of the world about them is submerged in the muck of false, malevolent, and corrupt language.  There can be no arguments of reason because the counterfeiting of fact-based language has destroyed any possibility of dealing with truth.  

Like the Native Americans have  learned,  for the survival of language as a tool and for our own survival,  it is necessary for us to trust only language that is guarded and protected by those who value knowledge, facts, and the language that records and transmits them.  Those who value those things won't engage with those who use the defiled language.  To do so is pointless and exposes honest language to the disease that destroys it.  The survival of a useful and productive language is dependent upon enclaves of educational and deliberative institutions that maintain a rigorous and unrelenting standard for the use of language.  It must be protected from those who seek to undermine human communication.

That means that there must be elite who protects language from any influence from the Trumps and those who support and condone him.  And that means a severely divided America.  The future of civiization and any viable culture depends on those who serve in reverence for knowledge and language.