This post will remain at the top of the page for a while. Please scroll down for newer material.The war on Christmas is finally over! It’s holiday fundraiser time!by digby
I’ve been writing this little blog for 14 years now, if you can believe that. We must live in very interesting times to say the least if it can keep me blogging every day and keep you reading what I write. But for all the challenges we’ve faced during that period from the Iraq war on, I have to say that the last 13 months have been the most tumultuous and frightening of my adult lifetime. And I’ve been around a while.
There was the presidential inauguration, of course, and from that much else flows. “American carnage” indeed. It seems that every month every week, every day presents some new horror.
His relentlessly reckless rhetoric and behavior is wearying. His third rate staff and refusal to listen to experts is more than worrying.
The overall corruption of his administration and the explosion of all norms and rules that make a civilized system is alarming.
The tax cut he and his GOP millionaire cronies have devised is a perfect illustration of Trump’s credo: “to the victors belong the spoils.”
The destruction of American credibility abroad may be irreparable. The Russia connection and threat of cyberwarfare is downright nightmarish and the existential dread of a North Korean nuclear confrontation between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un is overwhelming.
And on top of the disaster of Donald Trump the US also suffered three devastating hurricanes, one of which the president treated as if it was one of the foreign countries he so despises and which is still barely recovering. And California has been on fire for months.
We had the worst mass shooting in American history this year when some nut with a cache of easily obtained semi-automatic weapons shot 600 people at a country music concert.
And then there was the shock of seeing torch wielding Nazis marching in the streets and the president of the United States issuing the chilling statement that they were “very fine people.”
We are ending this annus horribilis with the revelation of an epidemic of sexual harassment by powerful men across every profession in America.
Like I said, it’s been quite a year.
I still wake up every morning hoping the election of Donald Trump was a bad dream and I have awakened into a world in which I’m at least not terrified that the president of the United States is going to blow up the planet. He has demonstrated over and over again in the past year that he is not only monumentally mendacious, he is completely without understanding of the letter and spirit of the constitution and has an authoritarian instinct that is barely held in check by his own incompetence.
But there is a bright spot. Americans have awakened to the threat and in off-year elections across the country we are seeing a grassroots rebellion of sane, normal Americans who are organizing to elect replacements for the GOP congress that is enabling this lunacy. And in case Trump decides to fire the special prosecutor people will almost certainly peacefully protest in massive numbers.
There is a lot of hope. We will get through this together!
Throughout this difficult year I’ve tried to maintain one simple objective: to call it like I see it with as much clarity as I can muster. It’s more of a challenge than ever to keep your head and resist normalizing this assault on reason and truth but it seems to me that nothing is more important if we expect to come out the other side of this intact as a society and a country.
Soooo, if my writing, as well as that of my wonderful contributors Tom, Dennis, Spocko, Batoccio and others has been of use to you this year, if nothing else to keep you from feeling like the world is gaslighting you on a daily basis, and you would like to put a little something in the Christmas stocking now is the time. The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.
As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.
And I wish all of you very Happy Hollandaise!
cheers — digby