Why is this situation with Iran happening now? What are we going to learn twenty, thirty, forty years down the road about the timing of these hostilities? Is it really just that Trump needed a diversion amidst all the impeachment heat? Pretty heartless and cold, if that’s what’s happening. Though it would be the perfect example of “Trump being Trump.”

A real and true glimpse of the man. Child.

Seven days into the new year, but it already feels old and familiar.

Congress needs an enema, or a heart transplant. Australia is on fire, twenty-five dead, half-a-billion animals gone. Iran is shouting “Death to America!”, but what’s new there? I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when the news out of Tehran is that many were trampled to death in the frenzy to mourn Soleimani. What the hell did they expect would happen when they’re packed like sardines into a confined space? Is this genuine grief or just thousands of drama queens being ridiculous for the cameras? 

The only thing I get from the ready availability of news is that nothing is normal. Everything is measured against some standard of shock value or sensational, over-the-top craziness. I’m tired of extremes. I’m tired of feeling like we’re watching the world collapse before our eyes.

Normal is a non-existent category. There is no frame of reference for normal.

So the U.S. recently took out a key figure in the Iranian military, along with some others.

Great. Many more years mired in an unwinnable war. Happy New Year, everyone. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride. And look who we have to lead us through it. When the Bible prophesies “a little child shall lead them,” it isn’t talking about Donald Trump.

What is the endgame here? Is Trump feeling pressure regarding impeachment? Is this some ill-conceived distraction? Someone just say “enough already.”

Imagine the trillion$ wasted on war. But war is good for business. What a loathsome, rotten, and tired way of thinking. Any thought given to the lives that will be lost? Any thought at all?

How about swords into plowshares? Otherwise, greed and fear and blind nationalism will yet do us in.

2020. Does this portend a year of clarity, when people take off the rose colored glasses and realize they elected a monster? Doubt it. The first day of a new decade, though. The year we elect a president. God help us.

No, Vlad, you’re not God.

So, Christmas come and gone again. It doesn’t hold the same lustre it once did. Every year, we try to capture its essence, but that’s an elusive thing. It’s never the same as it once was, and no playing of seasonal songs and carols can call it forth. It was always a feeling. Anticipation of the 4am reconnaissance missions, being nestled in, being cozy on a cold winter’s night. But lately it’s winter in name only. Yesterday it smelled and felt more like Spring. 

It’s difficult to keep looking at Christmas with the eyes of a child when you’re not a child anymore.

It remains nearly impossible for me to embrace this mystery that is support for Donald Trump. It approaches an almost mythical level of gullibility and misplaced hope. It runs counter to assumptions of what is proper and sensible and wise. The only way it begins to make sense is as an ill-informed reaction to perceived assaults on the “American Way,” whatever that is.

It’s a tenacious holding-on to the past, a debilitating, Bible-fueled narrow-mindedness, a refusal to acknowledge what and who America really is or can be. It is an allegiance to the pocketbook and superficiality. A hook, line, and sinker loyalty to a snake oil salesman. Or maybe it’s simply a thumbed nose to liberalism.

There has been no swamp-draining, and Trump is the farthest thing from a breath of fresh air. From all appearances, he is incapable of caring, dead inside. All he has done is brought his own entitled emptiness to the nation’s highest office, and landed a pile driver deep into a psyche that reveals cracks and fissures and signs of irreparable damage caused by being fed a constant diet of bullshit.

What is the endgame for Trump supporters? What do they want this country to look like when he is finished? If he wins or finagles a second term, what more are they expecting him to “accomplish?”

The possibilities don’t so much boggle the mind as cause one to grieve.

The six-page letter from Trump to Pelosi had to be written by Stephen Miller and company. It couldn’t have been Trump himself. He neither has that many words in his vocabulary, nor the ability to use what he does have.

He’ll most likely be impeached in the House at some point today, but it won’t matter at all. The Senate will exonerate, and then His Ugliness will go on the warpath.

This allegiance to a scumbag misfit is beyond infuriating, though not difficult to understand. The Republicans are in power where it matters. Period. And they’d like to keep it that way, even if it means compromising their values and walking around with their heads firmly up Trump’s ass.

Wow. We are in serious trouble. Blatant self-interest will be our downfall yet.

A big reason Trump isn’t gone already is because the economy continues to hum along. Rich and powerful people are happy, others are placated.

But doesn’t it feel like there’s a brick wall looming not far down the road?

Greta Thunberg has been named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, and the President of the United States couldn’t bring himself to do the honorable thing and simply congratulate her.

He really is a douchebag. Right, Lindsey?

For this 200th post, it seems appropriate to linger a bit longer and mine the vein that is Donald Trump. I don’t know the reason for the fixation. Maybe it’s because I’ve never liked the guy and I’m just trying to work through this (still) visceral anger. That’s what us liberals do, right? We’re always trying to get in touch with our feelings. We’re just a bunch of fragile flowers who care too much about silly things like breathable air, drinkable water, a sustainable lifestyle, and Presidents who aren’t assholes.

In the evolutionary scheme of things, perhaps we pansy liberal Socialists are destined for extinction, because we don’t have that ruthless killer instinct like The Donald (does he even have it, really?).

Or maybe we just aren’t motivated by the same things. Trump and company will disagree and say at some level we’re all the same, but that’s only because they need us all to be the same. They can’t comprehend aspiring to some higher good that doesn’t involve self-enrichment and astonishing arrogance and flat affect, and using any means to achieve an end.

When it comes to the ways of the world, our liberal heads are in the clouds, always daydreaming and refusing to acknowledge how things really are.

What’s beyond frustrating at this point is that the supply of adjectives has been exhausted. Sometimes it seems like we have no weapons left. Well-placed critique and thoughtful counter-narrative mean nothing to Trump, unless he’s tweeting something inane. He seems to get better mileage out of his limited vocabulary. Our only hope may be that he has the emotional IQ of a 6-year old, which could do him in.

Short of outright rebellion, there’s not much left to us who find the last three years to be a total loss, and the prospect of another term totally unacceptable. So here’s to keeping on keeping on, and hoping someone can find a chink in his armor.