Forgetting 2016

No, there wasn't a military parade this 4th of July.  But perhaps we Dems won't take back Congress in November, and that military parade will happen in 2019.

Meanwhile, Trump still has his rallies.  Taxpayer funded lunatic rants.  And each one is more rage fueled than the last.  Why not?  Each time he surrounds himself with his stupid and angry followers, he is guaranteed the same national attention he got before he won the presidency.

There have been mad, tyrannical leaders on the world stage in the past.  Who could forget Qaddafi's ninety minute bizarro rant at the United Nations in 2009?

The UN is a favorite stage for the lunatic leader.  Ahmadinahad's 2011 assaults on reality and the world were so offensive that there was a walkout by US and European delegations.

And now we have Trump.  Yes, after the election, the media reflected shamefully that maybe they should not have given him so much coverage.  But the ratings!  Who could take their eyes off this train-wreck in motion?  And yet, the end result was an electorate that had not heard a single Clinton speech while being fed the full blown ugliness of Trump's assaults day after day after day.

What we learned -- what I thought we had learned -- from the election coverage, was that Trump feeds on that coverage.  He may be stupid, but he knows how to play to the crowd.  And he knows that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

He is also batshit crazy.

Put that all together and we have the Trump rally.  He personally hates people.  But he adores his adoring crowds.  And surrounded by people cheering him on, there is nothing he can say that is too unhinged.  And surrounded by TV cameras, he cannot be happier.  Unless, of course, that he knew that those TV networks were going to be playing his insane attacks, name calling and lies, on a regular loop, all damn day.

They even call it "Trump's greatest hits."

Have we learned nothing???

I have been weaning myself from MSNBC and CNN.  Honestly, there isn't that much news being covered.  You can hear the headlines of Trump's daily obscenities in the first five minutes of any hour.  Yes, it is important to keep us informed about what is happening in Puerto Rico, a country neglected by Trump, still not recovered from last year's hurricanes as they anticipate the next one.  And we need to keep hearing about the horrendous abuses to immigrants and families seeking asylum, a humanitarian disaster caused by Trump and his gleeful attorney general.  Jobs being lost, prices going up, wages stagnating as Trump acts out his decades long fantasies about economic power.

We need to keep hearing about how our allies are now needing to defend themselves against our mad leader.  And what happens now that North Korea is doing what it has always done, lies as it pursues its plans to threaten and eventually dominate the Korean peninsula?  And then there is Putin, Trump's favorite dictator.  With no adults in the room to provide an honest reporting, we can be assured that Putin will be leading Trump around by his dick, I mean, promises of wealth and power (or at least a Trump hotel in Moscow).

We have some amazing investigative journalists, who have been uncovering scandal after larceny after lie after outrage.  It has been exhausting for those who worry about our democracy to keep up with the tragedies and the cons.  The last thing we need is for our news organizations to run Donald Trump's rallies on a never-ending loop.  We don't need to see them.

After one of the all-too-many mass shootings, some of the media decided that it was wrong to continue to use the shooter's name.  That kind of notoriety could only exacerbate the problem by encouraging other disturbed potential attackers.

It is not much different with putting a camera on Trump.

I was sickened yesterday when I began hearing the rants from his latest rally.  And then heard them again.  And again.  This morning I posted to @MSNBC to stop playing those vile and violent videos.  I won't watch them.  When he starts to screech and rage, call names and tell lies, I will turn off the television.

We should have insisted on more responsible reporting in 2016, but we didn't know any better.  Today we do.  I hope you will help me by telling your news outlets to stop promoting the goals of this disturbed and powerful dictator.  Tell them to stay on message, keep us informed, and treat the rallies and tweets as the fake news that they are.

Intimidation

Try finding out what happened Tuesday at the National Press Club.

The bulk of the media reporting calmly and rationally outlines the creepy plan that the NRA has proposed to curb gun violence in the schools.  Predictably, it involves weapons, armed guards and/or teachers and of course, lots of taxpayer dollars going into the coffers of arms manufacturers.

The presentation of this creepy plan, however, has been pretty much not remarked upon except by Dana Milbank who noticed that the spokesperson for the NRA was surrounded by jack-booted thugs, heavily armed.  The intimidation was palpable as these thugs ordered photographers not to take pictures -- in the meeting room of the National Press Club!

This is the look of the future, if we give credence to the greedy, power-hungry fools in the NRA.  Paid gun Asa Hutchinson heads up the NRA "task force," coming up with false information to justify arming guards in all schools.  And the NRA parades the one father of the twenty children murdered in Sandy Hook who is against gun control as though this is proof positive that their plan is the right one.

But the most essential and overlooked aspect of this bizarre press conference -- requested by the NRA -- is the atmosphere in that room.  Twenty armed guards surrounding speakers in a venue that has never been associated with violence is a strong message if you are not so intimidated by it as to not see it.

This is the future that the NRA would want for our country.  Imagine schools with armed guards.  Malls.  Theaters.  Street corners.

Imagine an armed presence in your middle schooler's classrooms and hallways.  There will always be the students who challenge authority; do you really want it to be authority with a gun?

In the eye of the national press these men chose to give orders that had nothing to do with the safety of those involved.  In the national eye, they felt they had the right to order the media not to take pictures -- as they were presumably trying to sell the public on what a good idea it is to have an armed presence.

And now picture your smart-ass son facing down an armed guard.  Or a couple of high school kids making out in the hall.  Or even worse imagine a student being suspected of holding drugs.

Is this the future we want?

As I heard this news story (in disbelief) I thought of Nazi Germany, and the phrase "jack-booted thugs."  I thought of the happy citizens of North Korea, and how "happy" we would all be, how well-behaved would be our children, if the alternative was facing down armed thugs.

The most amazing thing about this brutal show of force, other than how effective it was in cowing most of the media, is that we are allowing the gun nuts to take over.  At a protest by mothers demanding gun control there was also a notable presence of those against gun control, and they were heavily armed.  We allow protesters to carry assault weapons.  As I write that last sentence, I find that I actually don't know what else to say.

We allow armed men (and sadly women) to walk our streets showing us their weapons.  We allow ourselves to live in fear, not of the government they claim they need to be protected from, but of the mentally unbalanced who are allowed to intimidate us with guns.

If the national media won't speak up to this intimidation, what hope is there for our children?  Under the claim that we are "free" to be armed, we have become the militaristic society from which our democracy has promised to protect us.

Who Wants to Be a Superpower?

A few days ago, after passionately writing herein about President Obama's caving to the republic party regarding tax breaks for the wealthy, I attempted to email Keith Olbermann.  Time after time, the email came back as unreceivable, and when I investigated further, I found that the address I was sending, countdown@msnbc.com, was being read as something different.  I tried to alert MSNBC, but apparently being too big to care, I never heard back from them, but at least that email wasn't returned.  And then I stopped trying to send the original email because, to be honest, I was a little spooked.

And then the threats from WikiLeaks, that they would attack any institution that attempted to mess with them.  And then word that they had, apparently attacked.  DOS, denial of service, attacks were reported to have occurred at PayPal, VISA and MasterCard, seemingly in retaliation for those companies refusal to accept donations to WikiLeaks.

Let me urge you to read Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It by Richard A. Clarke.

The threats that Clarke describes are not around the corner; they are here.  While we argue about whether the wealthy and the country's largest corporations should be allowed to die with their wealth intact, China, Russia, North Korea, and independent hackers are studying vulnerabilities in US cyber networks.  And we have a lot of vulnerabilities.

Caught in the debate around privacy issues versus the right of the government to access our access, we do nothing.  Yet we surely know that hackers are in and out of our systems constantly.

Big banks and other private industry resist developing cyber security measures because, in the style of Scrooge McDuck, they prefer to deny the threat in order to have more pennies to pinch.

The utilities that represent the half-dozen or so major internet service providers also provide the gateway to internet access, and internet hacking, yet refuse to come together to find a system to protect the country from cyber attack.

And of course, all of the above want the government to stay out of their business,  a policy which our presidents, democrat and republican, honor.

So, what it comes down to is that this huge superpower is very vulnerable, and unwilling to face that vulnerability.  The psycho-state of North Korea, by virtue of not having any internet, also lacks vulnerability.  Ironically, that gives North Korean government-sponsored hackers control that a nuclear weapon could never wield.

So what are our options?  I could get really crazy paranoid, I guess, and that would do no good.  I could continue to live in the state of denial, where I would have lots of company.  The middle ground is to continue to try to be heard, writing and calling legislators, sending letters to the editor, blogging.

With a Congress that is more concerned with tax breaks for the wealthy and keeping gay men and women out of the military, I don't hold out a great deal of hope for intelligent legislation on cyber security.

Perhaps our president will stand up and demand regulated, monitored and safe cyber security.

And if that doesn't happen, Italy and England seem to have done okay since their demotion from being superpowers.  How bad can it be?