You're Fired!!

You lost. Now please go away and take your corrupt family with you, especially Uday and Qusay.* And also take Pence, Barr, and the other cowardly sycophants in your administration.

Don't worry, you won't be lonely; you and the other traitors will soon are already relegated to the cesspool of history, like Jefferson Davis, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Nicolae Ceaușescu, and Mobutu Sese Seko.

As Robert Reich wrote in The Guardian:

Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8% of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America.

Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy.

 

Other Destructive Elements of this Grotesque Legacy

• Environmental damage 
• Attempted sale of public lands to industry
• Concentration camps for immigrant children as a key element of the border separation policy
• Corrupting the judiciary with the appointment of Attorney General Barr** and hundreds of semi-competent right-wing ideological judges
• The cheapening of awards like the Presidential Medal of Freedom, given to political suck-ups
• The deaths of thousands of Americans who were told to deny the science behind the Covid vaccines
• Corrupting the the nation's voting system
• Warping "patriotism" into an invitation to insurrection and civil war
• Grifting his followers by soliciting funds for bogus reelection campaigns, scam PACs, and media companies
• Unanswered questions about Russia's influence in the 2016 election
• Normalizing brazen corruption, nepotism, vindictiveness, and self-dealing among government officials
• Joining blatantly criminal intent to comically inept execution
• Weaponizing science hatred, distain of education, racism, nativism, and hatred of competence
• Using presidential pardons as rewards for corruption and loyalism
• Condoning private raids on public funds and resources
• Corrupting the census to warp the national count to achieve racial and political goals
• Destroying the respect that the Supreme Court formerly held in the United States among most citizens

* Uday and Qusay were Sadaam Hussain's brutish sons. Both were killed by US troops.

** Update:  On Dec. 14, 2020, Barr announced that he was quitting and sent a Dear Leader love letter to Mr. Trump containing sickening fawning. 

Update, June 9, 2022:  "I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain." 

Representative Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Washington, DC.

Quotes for the Darkness

Over the years, I wrote down quotes that summarize the darkness of evil and lies that overcame us in USA during the 2017-2021 period and that continues to this date:

"Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty."

    Ronald Reagan, The New Republic (16 December 1981) 

"There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know."

    Attributed to John Heywood, 1546

"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love." 

    Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"Evil has a way of making friends with the good and dragging them into darkness."

    CSI Crime Scene Investigation, Season 11, Episode 16, 2011

"Totalitarianism can flourish where people systematically refuse to engage with reality, and are ready to replace reason with ideology and outright fiction."

    Emily Haber, German Ambassador to the USA, 2020 (commemorating Hannah Arendt, b. 1906) 

“In a dying civilization, political prestige is the reward not of the shrewdest diagnostician, but of the man with the best bedside manner. It is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance” 

    Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios, 1939

"The sadness of evil men is that they can believe no truth that does not paint the world in their colours."

    Eric Ambler, The Schirmer Inheritance, 1953

"The mob mentality relieves individuals from having to distinguish between right and wrong." 

    CSI Crime Scene Investigation, Season 3, Episode 9, 2002

"It's a hell of a lot easier to jump into the sewer than to climb back out." 

    Philip Marlowe, Private Eye, Series II, Episode 1, 1986

"Many just went along, step by step, down the road. They were the people next door," and they got violently drunk because "they were in physical pain because of the shrapnel in their bodies and in emotional pain from what they saw or did. It all started with lies, and lies, and lies, and intolerance."

    Arnold Schwarzenegger video message to Republicans, Sunday January 10, 2021

"Yes, democracy thrives on contradiction, even disagreement. But it dies when brute force silences the other, when sheer hatred breaks all bounds of decency and respect."

    Heiko Maas, Foreign Minister of Germany, in Spiegel International, January 7, 2021

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

― Voltaire, Questions sur les Miracles à M. Claparede, Professeur de Théologie à Genève, par un Proposant: Ou Extrait de Diverses Lettres de M. de Voltaire

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

    Attributed to  Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels (from the Jewish Virtual Library)

"Silence enables the liar,” .... “And silence helps it to spread. And so the first thing you have to do is say no, I’m not going to accept that we’re going to live in a post-truth world. It’s a toxin ..... in our political bloodstream." 

    Senator Liz Cheney, September 26, 2021

"From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud." 

    Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

"People always believe the lies," ...... "They want to believe any lie that hurts someone they envy."

    Richard McKenna, 1962. The Sand Pebbles, p. 426

"The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason."

    Tom Nichols, "What Are Trump Supporters So Afraid Of?", The Atlantic, June 22, 2022

"At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide."

    Abraham Lincoln, Address on January 27, 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois 

"And so the enabling lies spread. They poison hearts. They poison minds. They fill you with rage and hate, until along comes the activating lie, the dangerous falsehood that pushes a person towards true radicalism. How does a person come to the conclusion that cannibal pedophiles dominate Hollywood? Or that a vast conspiracy of politicians, lawyers, journalists, and tech executives (including conservative politicians, lawyers, and journalists) brazenly stole a presidential election?

"You believe that when you know your enemy is evil. You believe that when you know they will destroy the country. In that context, fact-checks and rebuttals aren’t just wrong, they’re naïve. All too often, when you’re arguing with the person who believes the activating lie—the falsehood that immediately motivated them to take to the street—then you’ve already lost."

David French, "Only the Church Can Truly Defeat a Christian Insurrection; It’s time to combat the right’s enabling lies." The French Press, January 10, 2021.

"America cannot remain free if we abandon the truth. The lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious. It preys on those who love their country. It is a door Donald Trump opened to manipulate Americans to abandon their principles, to sacrifice their freedom, to justify violence, to ignore the rulings of our courts and the rule of law. This is Donald Trump's legacy, but it cannot be the future of our nation. History has shown us over and over again how these types of poisonous lies destroy free nations.:

      Representative Liz Chaney, August 11, 2022, Iowa State University

  

"Few lies carry the inventor’s mark, and the most prostitute enemy to truth may spread a thousand, without being known for the author: besides, as the vilest writer hath his readers, so the greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work,"

    Political Lying by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)

"in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie,"

    Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X. (from the Jewish Virtual Library)

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

Carl Sagan, The demon-haunted world: science as a candle in the dark. New York: Random House. 1995. Ch. 13: Obsessed with Reality, p. 241

"The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. … When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper … is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity … he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’” Alexander Hamilton writing in the early 1790s

 

World of Lies and Corruption

I recommend that everyone watch the 2019 HBO mini-series, Chernobyl. It describes a world where every facet of life was dominated by lies, corruption, cover-ups, incompetence, vindictiveness, and lack of accountability. How far down this path have we descended here in USA? Just look at the highest levels of the Federal government in 2017-2021 and consider where we are heading: 

“What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all." Scientist Valery Legasov, Episode 5

"We're on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid." Episode 5

"...on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we can see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants. It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait, for all time." Episode 5

Banning Books

Republican governors and legislators have been banning books from schools and libraries in their attempt to impose thought purity and pander to the fears, racism, hatred, primativism, and nativism of their followers. My mother and her parents saw this in Germany in the late-1930s. Eliminating books and manufacturing a false and mythological past is an ultimate form of lying. Ray Bradbury addressed these issues decades ago.

“They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles and Carnival of Madness

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme."

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451: A Novel