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In making, once again, my morning sortie to the Snake Pit—my current term for the place where I catch up on the daily dreadful drip of awful accountings emanating from the trump-sphere—that house of horrors whose migraine-inducing potential is always lurking in the shadows, a headline caught my eye concerning the president’s latest pronouncement regarding his, as it turns out, imagined “ultimate” authority to overrule states’ governors and reopen the  businesses within their boundaries at whim. With my ears still ringing from the sting of yesterday’s news of trump’s unwillingness to authorize funds to save the postal service from insolvency, this new bit of baloney begs the question whether to bite the bullet and bail or to bury the angst beneath yet another layer of bullshit-buffering bravado.

trump’s attempt to prosecute his pique at Jeff Bezos by punishing the postal service amounts to an abuse of presidential powers; beyond being inappropriate, it’s also un-American. His claim of unlimited presidential power vis a vis re-opening the economy is not only outlandish, it also betrays his profound ignorance of constitutional law. The president’s foolish claim would be laughable were it not for the fact his ignorance undermines states’ decision-making ability by making it, as writes Neal K. Katyal, Georgetown law professor and former acting solicitor general of the United States , “harder to concentrate accountability and decision-making where it belongs, in the states.”  Writing in today’s New York Times, Katyal reminds us of the Supreme Court’s having ruled 30 years ago that “when it’s unclear who the decision maker is, ‘the accountability of both state and federal officials is diminished.’”

But beyond the headlines delineating the distressing developments of the day, I return once again, as I often do, to pondering how on earth a once-seeming sane country such as ours (while acknowledging some may not agree with this assessment) could have drifted so far and so rapidly from sanity.

From covfefe to covid, the president’s bewildering response to the crisis has now grown viral in its own right, evolving as it has into a hybrid covfefe-19 of mind-numbing proportions, yet his numbers still fail to fall as one might expect were large segments of the electorate more capable of comprehending his crackpot course.

This haunting phenomena may be viewed as the natural outcome of Republicans’ diligently draining the depths of the gene pool in their determined drive to diminish the electorate to the level of trump-like simplicity requisite to maintain their hold over a public for whom their relevance no longer has meaning.

This dumbing-down of the educational system by means of successive waves of Republican-sponsored  tax-reduction scams-turned-laws, beginning during Ronald Reagan’s administration and continuing to the present day, is finally revealing its true cost to the country as evidenced by the unquestioning adherence to trump dogma of folks lacking the ability to detect or comprehend incoming signals indicative of extreme cognitive dissonance that the more astute or intellectually curious might find suspect.

trump supporters, particularly those swooning to the hypnotic spell of Rush Limbaugh, most televangelists and the stable of Fox News propagandistic provocateurs, seem especially vulnerable to such utter bullshit.

But the spell they live under is not confined to the uneducated alone—well educated professionals are also susceptible to it. I was informed only yesterday, by a close relative, concerning someone we both know who, despite higher-than-average intelligence, good education and a proven track record in a successful career, believes the moon walk was a hoax! Apparently, ignorance respects no socioeconomic distinctions.

There has long been an undercurrent in American life of suspicion in science and hostility toward the intellectual segment of the population. This phenomenon is not confined to our culture alone—the history of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime in Cambodia serves as a chilling reminder of what can happen when a society loses its moorings. trump and those like him, while not yet bold enough to round up the educated and quiet their voices, would like nothing better than to silence the voices of the Fourth Estate, as evidenced by his continual attacks on what he terms “fake news” and its purveyors.

The Republican Party under its present leadership would, given enough rope, not only destroy our democracy, it would also forever alter our cherished way of life. It is sometimes difficult to fully appreciate change, since it usually occurs gradually. Witness how much a child can grow in a short period of time and consider how differently those changes are perceived by those who were away during that period and then returned to see the changes all at once. That difference in how changes in one’s perspective can alter the way change is perceived may also be appreciated through the study of history.

In a letter Abraham Lincoln wrote to congress on the fourth of July, 1861, he described the purpose of the federal government thusly, “to elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial burdens from all shoulders, and to give everyone an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

Were trump capable of stating his true aims with such eloquence, he would likely say the purpose of government is to “lower the condition of all men save those who serve my purposes, to place the artificial burdens on everyone’s shoulders save those who adulate me, and to  give no-one save those who sing my praises an unfettered start and a fair chance in the race of life.”

Tim Konrad

2020.04.14

Each day, I swear to myself, today I will not spend inordinate amounts of time writing about trump, and, each day, I hear of another outrageous thing he has done, is planning to do or has tweeted about.

Last Friday, my peaceful morning was upended when I heard of trump’s directing OSHA to cease requiring employers to notify the government of suspected cases of coronavirus among their employees. Doubtless his ‘intuition’ had something to do with that bit of genius planning since it flies in the face of common sense and, of course, ‘science.’

Yesterday it was an article saying trump doesn’t want to save the postal service from bankruptcy, ostensibly because of his feud with Amazon. Destroying the postal service might be a swell idea, particularly if you have friends you could position to profit from its privatization in exchange for funding to help float your re-election efforts.

This morning was a double whammy—after discovering trump’s tweeted indications he might fire Dr. Fauci, I then learned disturbing details concerning things the president said at last Friday’s edition of his dreadful daily ‘briefing’ when he revealed his continued ignorance of the nature of viruses. I’ve largely stopped watching these unbecoming displays of presidential pomposity and pitiful self-promotion as a matter of personal protection. Wouldn’t it be nice, I’ve lately found myself thinking, if he’d just take a break and go play golf for a while?

But no! Never one to miss a chance to blow his own horn, no matter how inappropriately, at Friday’s gathering of reporters regretting their career choices, trump revealed his unfamiliarity with the way viruses work, as reported in the British online news outlet, the Independent, when he said, during his daily virus briefing turned campaign rally, “Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.”

Upon hearing this saddening bit of trivia’s opposite, Walter Shaub, former director of the government’s Office of Ethics, wrote “Trump says that this ‘germ’, meaning the virus, is especially ‘brilliant’ because it can’t be stopped by antibiotics, which work only on bacteria and not viruses. Now might be a good time to tell the people close to you that you love them.”

In the same briefing, when asked what metrics he would use to decide when the country can be re-opened, trump said, while pointing to his head, “the metrics are right here.”

Also, in that Friday briefing the president more than once described the virus as “a genius:”

A genius doing battle with a genius! How comforting!

trump said the virus is genius in “the way it’s attacked so many countries at so many different angles.” Come to think of it, that’s much the way he himself has proceeded in his attacks on our governmental institutions.

As the pressure continues to build among trump’s most vocal business leaders to open the country back up for business, the likelihood of his doing so prematurely grows greater. If he does this, without provisions having first been made for mass testing and contact tracing to determine the true spread of the virus, which is almost certainly greater than that known today, a resurgence of the pathogen is near guaranteed to occur. Additionally, given the length of time it would take to implement those safeguards, and considering the difficulties that would likely accompany efforts to secure the needed funding, this late in the game, such a resurgence would result in more needless deaths, thwart efforts to resume business and serve to prolong the length of time we all would have to hunker down in order to ‘re-flatten the curve.’

No longer content to remain simply the “emperor with no clothes,’ trump has now set his sights on emulating the Roman emperor, Nero, as he figuratively ‘fiddles’ while the country ‘burns’ around him. While not vexed by the demons that plagued Caligula, he surely has his own equally imaginary ones—the Deep State, the media, the Democratic party and Nancy Pelosi. He obsesses about these self-conjured misgivings despite a complete lack of evidence of their existence and has even gone so far as to incorporate this fantasy into his perennial re-election campaign, as he fans the fires of his fans’ fantasies with fearsome fakery.

One is compelled to wonder just how many coronavirus deaths it’s going to take for trump’s supporters to realize their boy is the cause of the problem and not its solution?

Tim Konrad

2020.04.13

Anyone not infected with the president’s magical thinking should know by now that he is, first and foremost, a liar, and not merely an ordinary one, but a charlatan beyond parallel whose mendacity is unprecedented in the history of executive branch mischief-making. Dishonesty seems as effort-free to this man as breathing is to most. Yet, when his lies begin to cost people their lives, as is now happening with this pandemic threatening to knock on our doors with potentially fatal import, his lying, as intolerable as it has always been, has now gone beyond dazed acceptance to the point where it has become completely and totally intolerable.

Whatever genetic mutations must lurk deep in the genomic backgrounds of those who still believe trump capable of leadership, these folks have, at this juncture, and by virtue of their blind acceptance of what any normal person would plainly see as absurd beyond reason, forfeited their right to continue adding their voices to the national discourse.

Reading an article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “trump Was Warned Early and Often: Examining His Halting Response,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html

is enough to rouse a mystic from his meditations. The piece amounts to an indictment, laying out, in stark detail, each mis-step trump made and each squandered opportunity he missed on his way to becoming the man on whose watch an unprecedented toll in lives needlessly lost and unbelievable disruption to peoples’ lives and livelihoods has taken place.

And, while trump may not accept responsibility for any of it, history most certainly will!

Among the many ironies of the trump abomination is his fondness for framing his so called “accomplishments” as unprecedented, when the truth of the matter is the only thing unprecedented about this man’s presidency is his enormous failure to rise to the occasion, to exhibit even one scintilla of the qualities that define leadership.

There have been few moments in our nation’s history when the need for a complete change of course has been more sorely needed than the one in which we find ourselves today. Yet, as history has demonstrated, no reforms of this magnitude are possible without great and at times sacrificial effort on the part of those desirous of such change—efforts like those exhibited by the brave voters in Wisconsin who risked exposure to the coronavirus earlier this week as they stood in long lines under adverse weather conditions to exercise their voting rights.

It is one thing to witness the spectacle unfolding before us, like far too many of us do as we take in the daily disheartening downpour of dire news, of which we’d sooner remain blissfully unaware, and then carry on with our affairs while seeking distractions from our social separation in a disempowering fog of disenchantment, disengagement and detachment. It is quite another thing to act, to commit to making our voices heard, to scream to the rooftops, Enough!!!

Were we to take to the streets and rise in mass protest like that witnessed in the 60s, the established order would be forced of necessity to alter course. But, given the reality of our current situation, where public gatherings are not possible, and for good reason, we still have the power of the pen to air our grievances to our elected representatives; we still have the power of the written word to lodge our protests online and in letters to our newspapers; we still have the power of the purse to contribute whatever we can to the candidacies of those brave souls willing to fight for us by bringing the battle to public office.

In this place and at this moment, when many of us are forced of necessity to suspend our normal activities, rather than spending our time in pursuit of self-indulgent distractions, we could devote some of our time to making our thoughts known, to participating in our democracy in a manner similar to that of our nation’s founders, only, thanks to modern technology, we, unlike the founders, have the option of becoming armchair activists, voicing our outrage in media. Such acts, however, only gain strength in numbers. If we don’t take the time to make our voices heard, after all, no one will hear them.

And nothing will change.

Tim Konrad

2020.04.11

Anyone not infected with the president’s magical thinking should know by now that he is, first and foremost, a liar, and not merely an ordinary one, but a charlatan beyond parallel whose mendacity is unprecedented in the history of executive branch mischief-making. Dishonesty seems as effort-free to this man as breathing is to most. Yet, when his lies begin to cost people their lives, as is now happening with this pandemic threatening to knock on our doors with potentially fatal import, his lying, as intolerable as it has always been, has now gone beyond dazed acceptance to the point where it has become completely and totally intolerable.

Whatever genetic mutations must lurk deep in the genomic backgrounds of those who still believe trump capable of leadership, these folks have, at this juncture, and by virtue of their blind acceptance of what any normal person would plainly see as absurd beyond reason, forfeited their right to continue adding their voices to the national discourse.

Reading an article in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “trump Was Warned Early and Often: Examining His Halting Response,” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-response.html

is enough to rouse a mystic from his meditations. The piece amounts to an indictment, laying out, in stark detail, each mis-step trump made and each squandered opportunity he missed on his way to becoming the man on whose watch an unprecedented toll in lives needlessly lost and unbelievable disruption to peoples’ lives and livelihoods has taken place.

And, while trump may not accept responsibility for any of it, history most certainly will!

Among the many ironies of the trump abomination is his fondness for framing his so called “accomplishments” as unprecedented, when the truth of the matter is the only thing unprecedented about this man’s presidency is his enormous failure to rise to the occasion, to exhibit even one scintilla of the qualities that define leadership.

There have been few moments in our nation’s history when the need for a complete change of course has been more sorely needed than the one in which we find ourselves today. Yet, as history has demonstrated, no reforms of this magnitude are possible without great and at times sacrificial effort on the part of those desirous of such change—efforts like those exhibited by the brave voters in Wisconsin who risked exposure to the coronavirus earlier this week as they stood in long lines under adverse weather conditions to exercise their voting rights.

It is one thing to witness the spectacle unfolding before us, like far too many of us do as we take in the daily disheartening downpour of dire news, of which we’d sooner remain blissfully unaware, and then carry on with our affairs while seeking distractions from our social separation in a disempowering fog of disenchantment, disengagement and detachment. It is quite another thing to act, to commit to making our voices heard, to scream to the rooftops, Enough!!!

Were we to take to the streets and rise in mass protest like that witnessed in the 60s, the established order would be forced of necessity to alter course. But, given the reality of our current situation, where public gatherings are not possible, and for good reason, we still have the power of the pen to air our grievances to our elected representatives; we still have the power of the written word to lodge our protests online and in letters to our newspapers; we still have the power of the purse to contribute whatever we can to the candidacies of those brave souls willing to fight for us by bringing the battle to public office.

In this place and at this moment, when many of us are forced of necessity to suspend our normal activities, rather than spending our time in pursuit of self-indulgent distractions, we could devote some of our time to making our thoughts known, to participating in our democracy in a manner similar to that of our nation’s founders, only, thanks to modern technology, we, unlike the founders, have the option of becoming armchair activists, voicing our outrage in media. Such acts, however, only gain strength in numbers. If we don’t take the time to make our voices heard, after all, no one will hear them.

And nothing will change.

Tim Konrad

2020.04.11

A quick perusal of the headlines this morning yielded two bits of unsettling information concerning the two leading perpetrators of Republican chicanery. In my haste, I neglected to properly source either of them. By means of a quick online search, however, I was able to confirm the validity of both. The first informed me that the president has stated that mass coronavirus testing is not necessary and won’t happen (CNN), and the second indicated that the Senate majority leader is opposed to remote voting.

What appears to unite these two pronouncements is an overwhelming urge on the part of these individuals to succeed in their malevolent schemes at any cost and totally without regard for whatever consequences may ensue.

Were mass testing employed, it would doubtless indicate the extent of the virus’s infiltration into the population has reached much further than has been reported thus far. Were this to be widely acknowledged, the public would likely become incensed at the lack of transparency concerning the government’s handling of the emergency to date. That realization, plus the emotional impact of learning the true numbers of those infected and those who have perished would reasonably lead to a deeper understanding on the public’s part of how the president’s deception-ridden mismanagement has necessitated the prolonging of the length of time stay-at-home orders will be necessary in order to finally contain the pandemic.

Despite what just happened in Wisconsin, where people wishing to exercise their voting rights were needlessly compelled to risk exposing themselves to the coronavirus by standing in long lines, in defiance of social distancing and common sense, McConnell has been in firm opposition to bills sponsored by Democrats that would enact progressive nationwide electoral system changes. The president also opposes mail-in voting, despite having registered for absentee ballots for him and the first lady.  If vote by mail were instituted nationwide, current demographics indicate that Republicans would, for the foreseeable future, have a hard time winning election. Were this to happen, the real-world effect on Republican candidates seeking to maintain their grip on power would be forever altered.

The ancient Greek philosopher and sage, Epicurus, is credited with having said “nothing is enough to the man for whom enough is too little.”

There is a certain kind of person about whom this saying is particularly applicable, a type whose proclivity disposes them to seek the possession of more than their fair share of the earth’s bounty. People of this predisposition are found in all walks of life, in societies worldwide and throughout every period in history, predating the world of the ancient Greeks and continuing up to the present moment. They are the takers, the ones for whom contentment lies always just beyond their next acquisition, people whose overpowering need for fulfillment knows no bounds and whose lust for power drives them to act with utter disregard for the welfare of their fellow human beings. We see them daily and remark at their utter callousness: Their indifference to suffering, so long as it’s not they who are doing the suffering, is remarkable.

The current president is clearly such a man, as is the current Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Each of them appears unburdened by conscience. The power possessed by these men and their enablers allows them to do untold damage, wreaking extreme hardship on the lives of those not perceived as being of benefit to the furtherance of their agendas and whose welfare, as a  consequence, matters little to them if at all.

The effect of these people’s actions is always most felt by those on the losing end of their deal-making, because, in order that they may have more, everyone else is forced to make do with the scraps remaining.

The same holds true, unfortunately, for these men’s followers, the current crop of new Republicans, who’ve abandoned their long-standing party principles in their fervor to join the cult of Mammon These people, while taking advantage of relaxed or rescinded environmental regulations, gerrymandered redistricting, repressive and restrictive voter laws and the panoply of other unenlightened legislative agendas they have devised to permit them to line their pockets in myriad ways with their ill-gotten gains, do so at the expense of clean air and water, a corrupt health-care system, deferred maintenance and decaying infrastructure, and, of course, the underprivileged.

When the president disavows any and all responsibility for his so-called “handling” of his government’s pandemic response, those who support him and his dishonorable agenda hardly blink an eye, sated as they’ve become with the untruthful pronouncements emanating from his propaganda ministers at Fox News and other similarly corrupt media outlets.

Meanwhile, as the president’s approval ratings soar, our democracy is eroding before our very eyes.

To compound this tragic farce, not only do we have greedy, soulless Republicans muddying the mix, but we are also plagued with the addition of hordes of terminally imbecilic voters! The makings of a perfect storm if ever there was one!

It’s no wonder, then, that beings from other worlds, should they in fact exist, have not made their presence known to us. If you were a member of some team of alien visitors peering down upon us from above and witnessing this Faustian drama unfold, would you be so foolish as to make first contact with a people racing so hell-bent toward their own self-destruction?

Tim Konrad

2020.04.10

In both recent conversations with friends as well as in online and media presentations of late, there seems to be a tendency in some quarters to disparage Joe Biden as incapable of fulfilling the duties of president, should he be chosen to run. While it appears certain at this point he will win the Democratic Party nomination, fanning the flames of doubt surrounding his fitness for office is counterproductive at best, and may prove to be, in a worst-case scenario, disastrous.

Even though it might feel good in the moment to put down Biden out of preference for Bernie becoming elected president, or for whatever weaknesses one might perceive in Joe as a candidate, it is vitally important we all remain mindful of the power of our words and the clarity of our true intentions. The memory of the effects of those sitting out the last election because Bernie didn’t make it to the ballot should be ringing loudly in our ears. Those who followed that line of reasoning—while remaining willfully ignorant of the effect their decision might have had, and ultimately did turn out to have, on the current makeup of the Supreme Court, not to mention the unconscionable dismantling of the EPA, etc., etc.—in all likelihood made the difference in getting trump elected last time.

Given the stakes in the upcoming election, in which each vote left uncast will be, in essence, a vote for duplicitous donald, statements that cast doubt or otherwise tend to foster the notion that Joe Biden, should he turn out to become the nominee, is unqualified to be president are, in essence, playing into the Orangutan’s hands— (with due apologies to our simian brothers and sisters).

Regardless of whatever misgivings we might harbor concerning Joe Biden, be they his age, his sometimes halting delivery or fears he will reinstitute policies reminiscent of those represented by Hillary in the last go-round, the prospect of Trump filling yet another Supreme Court vacancy (a likely event) should send any sane person resolutely marching to the ballot box this fall to prevent this scourge from creeping any further.

Folks who say they can’t vote for Biden, or that they’re going to vote Green or Libertarian or whatever, or simply plan to leave that part of the ballot blank–all those people will be, by so doing, increasing the odds of a trump victory.

The only way to defeat this abominable travesty of everything we hold sacred and prevent him from further harming the Republic, women’s rights, the environment, social equality, and so many other things we hold dear that he has fouled with his grubby and greedy little fingers is to rise up in a great Blue wave this November and deliver him a defeat of unprecedented proportions.

Future historians will debate the paradox of the trump era for generations to come. We, collectively, have the power to determine what they will say about us. Let us not be like the citizens of Nazi Germany who chose to look the other way while their Jewish neighbors disappeared in the night.

To prevent the unthinkable notion of a second trump term, we must all be responsible citizens. Remaining mindful of the power of our words to shape the views of our neighbors, we must participate, exercising our voting privileges with judiciousness and with wisdom aforethought!

After all, what value has history if not to teach us what not to repeat?

Tim Konrad