It’s Lying Time Again. But When isn’t It for Trump, MAGA, and John Roberts?

Trump continues bragging about how we are winning the war that he and Benji Netanyahu started over two months ago.

But a warning from the great ethicist Sissela Bok, who wrote:

“Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse”.

Let me say in all truth that most of us have seldom questioned what our government says is true, even we are proven wrong about that time and time again. I pretty much broke free of that when I served in Iraq with our Marine, Army, and joint-multiagency advisors to the Iraqi Army, Police, and Border Forces in Al Anbar Province during the “Surge” of 2007-2008. I finally saw through the lies of the Bush administration and the Right Wing media that I had followed and believed for years. Raymond Reddington, played by James Spader in The Blacklist said it well: "Sometimes the truth hurts, but it's better than living a lie." Similarly, Leslie Nielsen who played the bubbling detective Frank Drebin quipped, “The truth hurts… maybe not as much as jumping on a bike with the seat missing, but it hurts.” But truth truth is that we all need to face painful truths about our own false beliefs, be they political, ideological, or even religious.

Visiting Bedouin on the Syrian-Iraqi border, Christmas Eve, 2007. A rare moment of life, light, and love.

I figured that out in Iraq and wrestled with it much of 2008 when the lies and the extreme racism manifested in more ways than I could ever have imagined. I remember listening to Rush Limbaugh traveling between Fort Story and Joint Amphibious Base Little Creek that summer of 2008. Limbaugh played a parody song by Paul Shanklin called “Barack the Magic Negro” which was about whites who supported Obama because of “white guilt”. Limbaugh’s commentary after it broke me. I pulled over on the side of the road, put the car in park and started to sob. I was still a Republican then, but this broke me. I called my Chaplain supervisor, a Catholic Priest from the Navy Reserve called to active duty and poured out my heart. A few weeks later I completely collapsed from the severe PTSD that I came home with and my Group Medical Officer referred me for help. The Reserve Priest was much more understanding than the active duty senior chaplain that I was dealing with at the time. When the incoming Group Commodore, who was struggling with the same things I was asked me “where does a Chaplain go to for help,” I said, “not to other Chaplains”. He cared, but I had no idea how much he was suffering. The man was a bona fide hero who had risen from the ranks, was promoted to Chief Petty Officer, then Commissioned rising to the rank of Navy Captain. So many awards for valor in combat, but wounded far more deeply than his physical wounds. His career collapsed the following year, then his marriage. A few years later he committed suicide outside the hospital his wife worked at. I was so embroiled in my own PTSD and suicidal thoughts that I had not kept up with him. I wish that I had. But, I digress as this fucking Trump war has set all my PTSD shit into overdrive and I have a terrible time sleeping.

Trump and MAGA are basking in knocking out of Indiana State Senators who stopped the MAGA effort in the legislature to gerrymander Indiana. Of course this was in a primary where MAGA extremism wins but very likely will lose when their candidates lose in the general elections in November, because Trump is cratering. The U.S. Supreme Court and the Virginia State Supreme Court have given the GOP some lifelines in House districts, but if things keep trending the midterms will still probably result in a Blue Wave, just not quite as large as it would by without these court decisions.

Chief Justice John Roberts. (Photo NBC News)

John Roberts whose majority gutted and dismembered what protections remained in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 said that the majority’s decision was not political. This was after Louisiana and Tennessee White Republican legislative majorities took the opportunity to use the decision to decimate any remaining black majority districts in their states. Roberts, who began his career in the Reagan administration’s White House Counsel’s Office with the mission to stop the VRA from being renewed. He wrote of the VRA at the time: “the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes.” While he failed then, he never stopped trying to disenfranchise African Americans. He began with a Supreme Court ruling in 2012 that freed states cited in the VRA from Federal oversight of redistricting or “gerrymandering”. From then it on was Racist Republican batteries unleashed in Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee. The Roberts majority’s decision on Monday destroyed what was left and made it far harder for those challenging blatantly racist gerrymandering to do so. John Roberts is a smart and patient man, willing to portray himself as a moderate who values the integrity of the Supreme Court.

Yesterday, Senator “I was around when Jesus walked the earth” Charles Grassley announced the Senate had included a 1 Billion Dollar funding package for Trump’s gargantuan Vanity Ballroom which Trump was being paid for by private donors. Pardon me, but I thought Trump promised that this architectural abortion wasn’t going to cost taxpayers anything. So why are the Republicans who also bitched about unnecessary government spending going all in to stick us with the cost of Trump’s vanity Ballroom? Really, isn’t this a blinding display of budgetary vainglory, hubris, and excess? But I guess the GOP’s reasoning is that of Seinfeld’s George Costanza, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

Late yesterday it was announced that the U.S. Navy had announced that three American Guided Missile Destroyers had repelled “unprovoked” Iranian attacks in the Straits of Hormuz. Mind you that the operation they were supposedly supporting ended abruptly yesterday when the Saudis said there were “no how or in no way going to let the U.S. Military to use Prince Sultan Airbase support more operations.” The Kuwaitis have also banned overflights by U.S. warplanes to attack Iran as well. Evidently, the Trump Regime is wearing out our welcome among our Arab allies. Anyway, the statement that it was an “unprovoked attack” is somewhat ludicrous since we, not the Iranians started the “please don’t call it a war.” Meanwhile, the Iranians said that they were in serious talks to resolve the conflict and the war just a few hours before. Of course today the shooting continued in what has to be the strangest ceasefire in the history or war. But then in Trump Speak, truth is lies, war is peace, peace is war, freedom is slavery, poverty is upward mobility, and murder promotes life. So why not call what is still a shooting war a ceasefire? It makes complete sense.

The Pentagon announced that the Navy had struck “military” targets around Bandar Abbas and another port nearby, including radar installations that we supposedly had already obliterated. Of course this was after Iran said that it was engaged with the United States in serious negotiations. I never in my life imagined that I would believe the word of Iran above ours. Hell, one of the main reasons that I enlisted in the Army in 1981 was because of the Iranian holding of American hostages in 1979 and 1980. The Iranian regime is a criminal regime, but as bad as it is the Trump Regime is worse by far.

I am no supporter of Iran by any means, but Trump is exponential worse. Trump has the military and economic means to commit genocide, which is what is silently happening as a result of his obliteration of the USAID bounding of food and medical care for endangered peoples around the world, and by the way Trump continuously blabbers about making allusions to nuclear war as he again did today. To make the comparison, it’s like supporting the Soviet Union when Hitler’s legions attacked, and as Winston Churchill, a foe of the Nazis and Soviets said: "If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons".

Anyway, I’m pretty tired. I started this article late Wednesday night, continuing it yesterday until I pooped out and finally started again this evening. I got a better nights sleep last night than the past couple of weeks, but I’m still really tired. This has been aggravated by situations at work where I keep losing valuable teaching time and dealt with IT issues, and the machinations of a principal who is now so MAGA that he takes the side of malcontents and their parents, even slandering other teachers. Lord knows what he has said about me, but thankfully my students are mostly internationals that like me and respect my fairness as a teacher. Their parents don’t bitch to him like spoiled American Christian kids do. Needless to say, he will be gone at the end of this academic year, but he appears to be on a warpath against teachers that don’t have his extreme MAGA Christofascist agenda, even though we all are Christians. It is now a very hostile workplace, which adds stress that I don’t need or want. The fact that he is planning to sit in to evaluate me as I teach the Bill of Rights to one class and the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” to the other means that I will probably step on his toes. Pray for me a sinner.

But the truth today is that over a period of four decades, the GOP was conducting a campaign of deception and propaganda to deceive the American people to the point that they would not only vote a man like Donald Trump into office not once, but twice, but even after he was proved to be a fraud, a criminal, and a serial liar, GOP conservatives who used to talk about morality, law and order, and Judeo-Christian values suddenly abandoned all of them. It was a travesty of the grossest order. Truthfully, Trump was a symptom of an already rotten political party and its supposedly “Christian” supporters.

Nothing like sweet Papillon Pups. My wonderful sweet Maddy Lyn and me.

Anyway that is all for tonight. Hopefully, I won’t be too tired to write tomorrow. There are so many topics that I want to write about and never enough time.