I could probably write all day and be miserable. Fortunately, I have to take my boy to a First Grade birthday party, so I am precluded from being miserable for at least the next few hours.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Have fun! When my kids were in grade school (not that long ago) school grades didn’t have birthdays, although children did, of course. Unusual concept, I think.
These days, any escape is welcome. Have fun at the party and close off the politics for a while.
I am traveling now and haven’t caught all of the latest trumpshit, so my outrage meter was at the usual sustained level of mostly angry, but today I’m catching up on the Muslim ban news and the needle on the meter zoomed into the red zone again. I’m pushing it down because I’m spending the weekend with my adult son and I won’t let the news ruin my visit.
I know others will admonish me to let it go and don’t go bananas every time trump opens his yap. Frankly, I don’t care to be told how I should feel or how to react. I’m pissed, I’m heartsick, and I’m ashamed of the idiot trump, and if I feel angry, I’ll respond with phone calls to my representatives and measured donations to local charities, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood when I can afford to.
I feel your pain, donnah. As for me, I do find myself having to use some discernment, though, on how much and how often to consume the massive amount of Trump idiocracy. It is so easy to immerse oneself in everything that angers you. I saw that with my dad when Obama took office, and the effects of his total immersion in his Obama outrage is going to follow him to his grave. It has become a central part of who he is now. So I’m trying to be a bit more rational and thoughtful than my dad was about where I expend my energy and time to fight this horrific man and his radical supporters. Everyone, I guess, has to find their balancing point. I find that more often these days I am trying to keep my wife from jumping off the proverbial cliff, yet every time I turn around she is either glued to the TV or to the computer, soaking up every bit of it. I am trying to keep her grounded and focused on the real things that we can do to resist this madness.
The victory will come from hard work on the ground, every day. Phone calls, rallies, talking to people you know. Fighting on the front line in the micro-world in which we all individually reside. And when the possibility arises, we all gather together for public shows of strength, so that others who might be afraid to speak up know that they are not alone. There are tens of millions of us out here who hate what is happening to our country. I hope we all realize that everyone pulling the rope in the same direction is the only way we are going to beat this.
I’ve got more than a little of that crazy in my family as well. It makes it really hard. It has gotten worse over the years to the point of keeping us apart. And more than a few spats on Facebook. What has happened to us?
It really is having catastrophic consequences. I am literally watching the loving relationship between a 50 year old cousin and her 75 year old mother disintegrate right before my very eyes over what is happening now. Her mom is an ultra conservative fundamentalist Christian and my cousin is very liberal. Her mom tells her how it breaks her heart every day that she is involved in “hate groups”, and that the Women’s March was attended and supported mostly by people “who want the right to kill their babies whenever it’s convenient”. My cousin continues to point out what she feels is her mom’s hypocrisy over wanting to save the lives of the unborn, yet supports policies and politicians who turn their backs on them after they are born.
It is so sad, but I am afraid that in a lot of cases, especially given the current extreme environment, things like this are simply inevitable.
Mike, I’m in Ohio, too, so we probably share a lot of issues statewide. We’re in Dayton, so we have usually been able to stay blue, but gerrymandering is strangling this area. Stoopit Boehner!
I am not going to let trump and his ship of fools dominate my thinking, but I am definitely going to be more active to fight him. I don’t need to raise my blood pressure!
I’m in Warren County. Steve Chabot is my congressman. Rob Portman my Senator. There will be no shortage of ways to resist this cluster fuck of Donald Trump. At the rate Trump is going, there will be opportunities locally every week to protest some unconstitutional or un-American overreach. There was a rally in Mason today in support of a Muslim family who were the victims of newsletters passed around their neighborhood telling people “there was a terrorist living in the neighborhood”.
Hard to imagine their are so many vile human beings living among us, and who are so willing to do Trump’s bidding to fan the flames of hate.
Applying Occam’s Razor to this weekend’s Executive Order Bingo, the clear answer is that the role of Rasputin is being reprised by Steve Bannon.
Why on Saturday? Because Ivanka and Jared Kushner are members of the Jewish Lubavitcher sect and observe an especially strict no-business Sabbath. So they were out of the way.
ashamed of the country that elected the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief. I just saw atrios has taken to referring to President Pig Fucker (in response to muslim ban apparently). Seems appropriate.
It’s oficially 10 o’clock, time to resuem my drinking regimin, Genteelman Jack is waiting.
The one good thingTM throughout is that we’re at a level of sustained public outrage that was woefully absent throughout the Bush II years. The mainstream press is openly saying “lie,” “fascist,” “un-American” etc. It’s The Boy Who Cried Wolf in reverse.
This is pure Bannon. He wants this fight. That’s why the order was worded to ban brown people without regard to anything. Same with the denier dog whistle in the Holocaust speech.
So this is a now a fight both sides want.
Bannon, Miller, and potentially in some aspect Sessions are running the entire WH. He definitely wants this fight but I’m not sure he was expecting such a strong pushback so fast. He needs to go. We have a Nazi running our country. They’re ordering customs to ignore the courts. This is going to end in full constitutional crisis we all feared. I’m just surprised it came within the first 10 days.
My girlfriend hypothesized that it’s coming so fast precisely because Bannon et al want to know what kind or pushback there will be so they know the outer edge they can push. I think that’s likely accurate as well as the possibility that they are taking a blitzkrieg approach to entrench the us versus them mentality in their supporters early on so they don’t gradually dissipate their support of the Donald. I provoking a big response from the left now, they help to solidify their supporters’ resolve.
Likely.
Should the focus should be on the order denying Iranian/ME Christians and current legal residents the ability to return more than the refugees? In an us v. them mentality, having people who already live here and who share the dominant religion are a key plank in changing who is “us” and who is “them.”
On the other hand refugees are people who need help and focusing on “good” immigrants v. “bad” immigrants with out respect to actions is a very bad thing as well. Honestly don’t know. I think one would be more effective but implicitly be worse. Yet going the other way might simply make it more likely to hurt even more.
It’s also instructive how many border/customs employees are happy to do so.
Yes I wonder how much of this is to see who will be loyal on the front lines of all these federal and state departments as these executive orders are announced. Who will be the storm troopers and who will be resistant?
Yes this is Bannon but I don’t think he expected this much pushback from all over the country nor the courts.
I also think he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He knows propaganda for sure but her doesn’t know administrative law yet he is the one crafting these executive orders and not getting the input on anyone to make sure they are legal. Seems to me he thought he could push this stuff through like he pushes through his propaganda and he has been disabused of that.
Also like all Nazis he thinks everyone secretly agrees with him and that he represents the true (if “silent”) majority and “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” etc.
Everyone that matters to him, which is people of northern/central European descent. He doesn’t give a shit about any of the rest of us except when he wants to kick us.
Well, here’s what Bannon thinks he knows:
10 things we learned about Trump adviser Steve Bannon from this recently surfaced speech
Updated by Tara Golshan Nov 17, 2016, 4:20pm EST
“…I certainly think secularism has sapped the strength of the Judeo-Christian West to defend its ideals, right?
If you go back to your home countries and your proponent of the defense of the Judeo-Christian West and its tenets, often times, particularly when you deal with the elites, you’re looked at as someone who is quite odd. So it has kind of sapped the strength.
But I strongly believe that whatever the causes of the current drive to the caliphate was — and we can debate them, and people can try to deconstruct them — we have to face a very unpleasant fact: And that unpleasant fact is that there is a major war brewing, a war that’s already global. It’s going global in scale, and today’s technology, today’s media, today’s access to weapons of mass destruction, it’s going to lead to a global conflict that I believe has to be confronted today…
…We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism. And this war is, I think, metastasizing far quicker than governments can handle it…
…If you look at what’s happening in ISIS, which is the Islamic State of Syria and the Levant, that is now currently forming the caliphate that is having a military drive on Baghdad, if you look at the sophistication of which they’ve taken the tools of capitalism.
They have a Twitter account up today, ISIS does, about turning the United States into a “river of blood” if it comes in and tries to defend the city of Baghdad. And trust me, that is going to come to Europe. That is going to come to Central Europe, it’s going to come to Western Europe, it’s going to come to the United Kingdom. And so I think we are in a crisis of the underpinnings of capitalism, and on top of that we’re now, I believe, at the beginning stages of a global war against Islamic fascism…
…I believe you should take a very, very, very aggressive stance against radical Islam. And I realize there are other aspects that are not as militant and not as aggressive and that’s fine.
If you look back at the long history of the Judeo-Christian West struggle against Islam, I believe that our forefathers kept their stance, and I think they did the right thing. I think they kept it out of the world, whether it was at Vienna, or Tours, or other places … It bequeathed to use the great institution that is the church of the West.”
You read that last part right: Bannon wants to bring back the Crusades. He wants to escalate global war.
In which light, the ban and the chaos of its execution take on a decidedly sinister cast. Especially with the White House now procaliming that it rolled out “seamlessly” and was a great success.
Yes, Bannon has said that he wants to cause chaos and tear down existing governing norms and structures. The biggest questions will be if the American people, Congress and peoples and governments worldwide will allow it. I think the vested interests of the current world order will be able to bust up the vision of Bannon and Trump.
I also think that enough people around the world will oppose this hyper-nationalist white Christian supremacist vision to beat them back. Frankly, it’s necessary for each of us to accomplish that as citizens. It won’t happen by sitting back and assuming it will happen naturally; we’ll have to fight.
I would think a first grade birthday party would offer all sorts of opportunities to try out techniques that could be used when dealing with our President…
A first grade birthday party!!!
Big, if you love kids. Just old enough to be a little unruly, but not old enough to be able to do much damage.
A great age.
We gave our son a truly memorable one. (His birthday is in the summer.)
We invited the 7 or 8 kids he most wanted to come plus a few extra parents so we wouldn’t have our attentions overtaxed by a bunch of nutcase-aged little kids, and set off in a rented minivan rom the Upper West Side of NYC to Six Flags/Great Adventures, a big theme park in the wilds of N.J.
Waterslides, rides, the works!!! Then the highlight of trip was supposed to be a minivan trip through the so-called “wildlife” area. And indeed there was lots of wildlife, except that with the exception of the monkeys the wildlife all appeared to be fairly heavily sedated. Barely moving, most of them. Probably part of the insurance deal.
The kids loved it anyway…hippos, water buffalo,giraffes, monkeys, all over the car..the works. Then after about 20 minutes of slow driving we got to the really memorable part…the elephants. Apparently it was mating season and in one group of elephants a male was preparing to mount a female. Not enough drugs to discourage tha urge, I guess. I mean..when I finally realized what was up his dick looked like a fifth leg!!!
A couple of the parents saw what was happening…I was too busy driving, dealing with the monkeys on my windshield and discouraging various kids from opening the windows to put food on the roof of the van to be paying much attention initially, but I noticed a sudden change in the voices of the parents in the back as they somewhat over-enthusiastically tried to divert the kids’ attention to the other side of the van. And then I heard my son’s voice saying “Oh look Dad!!! What’s that!!!???” as he plastered himself to the elephants’ side of the van. I wish I had a recording of the parents’ reactions as they tried to give these these well-before-the-birds-and-the-bees-age children some plausible explanations, especially the newly arrived and still very formal Chinese couple…they would bring their child to our apartment to play with mine but would try to avoid eye contact or any invitations into the apartment for months before they fully trusted us.
It was awesome!!!
Of course, eventually we were out of sight and everything returned to normal.
But memorable, to say the least.
Anyway…happy birthday party to you and yours.
And…don’t be miserable.
It’ll all work out eventually, this Trump thing.
Watch.
AG
Wow. Sounds amazing. Of course, farm kids have learned about where baby pigs and baby goats come from since whenever. I’m not convinced that this is necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I’m convinced it’s a good thing.
I’d pay money to see an elephant daddy in action.
You write:
Yup.
True enough.
Although…at least partially grown-up “farm kids” are also likely to have been the deciding percentage in Trump’s latest win.
I’d trade in a NY minute, myself.
AG
We had an inter-generational service in church today. All the kids stayed up, and we read poems. We had a passel of kids, too – at least 12. It was great. Of course, meditation with kids is never silent meditation. But that’s OK.
What Professor Loomis said:
“…Despite the strange belief by those who are personally uncomfortable with protest politics that protesters are a bunch of wankers who engage in purity politics and don’t show up to vote, in fact, protest creates the most possibly engaged voters who find new ways to influence the system. Even on last night’s post, there were some comments (and there really were on the LGM Facebook page about it) saying that protest didn’t really matter in the judges’ stay of the Fascist Trump’s executive order and that it all was a sign that “the system works” and we don’t need protest. This is ridiculous. First, judges do not operate in a vacuum. If you don’t have thousands of people take to the streets and shut down airports, this is not nearly as immediate. The judges won’t work as fast. Second, politicians don’t come out against the ban without the protests. This is all everyone’s talking about, except of course for the fact that a Nazi is running American foreign policy. If you want to fight Trump, you need active resistance. And that resistance is quite likely going to need to be escalated to placing bodies between state security and our most vulnerable comrades. This is how preparing for that starts. We need lawyers and politicians and judges. We also need activists and organizers. They are the ones who made the JFK protest happen last night, not the ACLU, although that organization is great and played a key role. But it was grassroots activism that started it. And of course we need you. And me. And everyone else.
As I and many others have stated, if you ever wondered what you have done when Adolf Hitler took power in Germany or Francisco Franco in Spain or Augusto Pinochet in Chile, well now you know. You would do exactly what you are doing now. If that’s going into the streets, then great. If that’s complaining about protestors or whining about liberals or whining about the left, then that’s what you would have done in 1933, 1937, and 1973. Only you can stop Trump. So do it.“
The bolded is perfect.