Managing the Outrage
by Deacon Blues
One of the reasons why I’ve been largely silent and absent from blogging since the election is the sheer volume of daily outrages and disappointments coming from the Trump transition and revelations surrounding the election. In the political environment of the last decade, blogging was more conducive to ongoing political discourse when you were only responding to 2-3 Bush administration outrages in a given week. With Trump, he averages that per day, and he knows he's suckering his base while he does it.
I’ve also decided that swinging at every pitch in the dirt from the Trump team is a futile exercise, because lying and misdirection are a core tactic with this group. So no, I’m not commenting on every new tragic cabinet selection. I'm not commenting on every new meeting Trump has with the flotsam of losers and supplicants. Every new stupidity from Kellyanne Conway or Trump’s twitter account will go largely without comment from me as well; Conway is a lying bitch serving a malevolent force. Instead, I’ll be waiting until the nomination hearings, and until we see the GOP’s actual agenda and legislation before responding. When you are dealing with a fire hose of evil, it’s simply best to step out of the spray.
Yes, Trump is Vladimir Putin's bitch. Yes, Putin ran a years-long, classic KGB infiltration, misinformation, and asset-capture operation right under the nose of our intelligence community, as part of a conspiracy to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president and insert a patsy into the Oval Office. Yes, the FBI and James Comey were part of that conspiracy. Yes, Hillary’s team and the DNC enabled some of this. Yes, Jill Stein and Michael Flynn are Putin's tools as well.
Yes, the same people who demanded numerous hearings on Benghazi and wanted to spend hundreds of hours on Hillary’s emails after her inauguration now cannot be bothered to confront why it’s acceptable for a hostile foreign power and the Koch Brothers to join forces, or why they are OK with a president enriching himself from his official duties while exposing himself and the country to extortion. All of that is true, and it sadly is nothing new: to the GOP, illegality, racism, and treason are OK as long as it helps them grab and keep power.
It’s just that I can only focus on so much outrage at a time.
Remember, the simple responses to every Trump move are two questions:
1. How does this Make America Great Again?
2. How does this help the working class?
Watching Trump and his team squirm and lie in answering those two questions will be enough to eventually topple them, but not before they seriously damage this democracy and kill our planet.