Draining the swamp using a soda straw...

To be clear:

We have a President who cannot tell the truth, or is easily confused, such as “Look what’s happening in Sweden” during a rally in Florida 2/18—I do not want to list all the lies because that would be too long a list…

We have a Vice President who suggested that HIV prevention funding be drained in order to fund state-sponsored ‘gay cure’ therapy, and in 2015 signed Indiana’s Religious Freedom Act into law, allowing business owners to deny service to any person if they felt that serving them would violate their religious beliefs.

We have a Secretary of State who started working for ExxonMobil in 1975 as an engineer and served as the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of the company from 2006 to 2016. He not only has close business ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin, which have generated controversy particularly in light of the revelations about Putin's business dealings in the Panama Papers, but has previously been the director of the joint US-Russian oil company Exxon Neftegas.

We have an Attorney General who was denied a Federal judgeship on the grounds he was too racist.

We have a Secretary of the Treasury a rich banker with no experience or known views on policy, whose appointment seems to fly in the face of draining the swamp—he worked for Goldman-Sachs and went into business for himself in hedge funds, where he garnered serious criticisms for aggressively foreclosing on properties due to slight clerical errors.

We have a Secretary of Health & Human Services who, a House member since 2005, had shown bad judgment by actively trading shares of medical and pharmaceutical companies while shaping health policy in Congress. An outspoken critic of the ACA, he has also vowed to “reform” Medicare and Medicaid.

We have a Secretary of Transportation who is a sheer testament to nepotism, related to Mitch McConnell, with experience as Labor Secretary in G. W. Bush’s administration—we all remember how well the unions liked her, and how much the average working American benefited from her tenure.

We have a Secretary of Energy who has previously vowed to dismantle the Energy Department, who “regrets” having said that, and is known for actively campaigning against big government but during is governorship of Texas from 2000-2010 doubled the budget for government, and the state has suffered from budget woes ever since he took office.

We have an Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, a climate change denier, who said that scientists “continue to disagree” about the science of climate change and that those who deny the science of climate change are having their right to “dissent” violated, and called a belief in climate change a religious belief.

The list continues but one cannot help but notice a disturbing trend: extremely rich, insiders of the President have taken hold of cabinet positions, to the detriment of those who believe that the slow gains in environmental protections, healthcare reforms, and upholding the basic rights of those who are not Christian, heterosexual Caucasians are being destroyed. I believe that the President’s supporters are thrilled with many of the changes, but many also have not seen what the erosion of human rights, environmental protections, and healthcare options looks like. They will if this trend continues, and many of his detractors do not wish to see any further erosion of that which has been slowly gained over the years.

Projection: A study in Cognitive Dissonance II

Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.

What we are seeing in the latest diatribes issued from the White House are a classic example of what psychologists refer to as “projection.” In a tweet dated February 3, 2017, Trump insisting that protesters against him have been secretly paid — “Professional anarchists, thugs and paid protesters.” A follow-up to this is Kellyanne Conway who stated to Andrew Kaczynski in a CNN interview on the same date, “There’s nothing peaceful and nothing democratic about folks who are out there just trying to re-litigate the election and protesting things they know nothing about.”

It is documented that the students had nothing to do with the black-shirted people who crashed the protest in Berkeley, and the students were not paid. So the question is, why would anyone who supported the aims of the protesters cause such terrific damage and halt what students saw as a legitimate protest to air a grievance? On the other hand, it would make far more sense for a person or persons ideologically opposed to such protests to foment such destruction in order to discredit the legitimate protest, whether they “hired” the black-shirts or not. Given the rhetoric streaming from Conway’s interviews dating back to last November, it is clear she is not sympathetic to the aims of anyone who presumes to protest things “they know nothing about.”

Clearly it seems that the mis-information coming from the White House is aimed at discrediting the right of people to peacefully protest, and then blaming them for a group of people who, in spite of the peaceful nature of the protest as it was envisioned, destroyed property and managed to disrupt the protest. As far back as 2012, Bannon commented on the Occupy Wall Street protests and compared them to Hitler’s Brownshirts (SA) in the 1930s. He stated that “ ‘You see the infrastructure of these Brownshirts, which essentially they are, and what they intend to do to intimidate decent people,’ Bannon said of the "professional left." ‘The victims of this film are some of the most liberal mayors in this country, in Oakland, and in Portland, and in Seattle, and places like that. People that tried to work with these people. You'll see the carnage they leave in their wake. ...The Occupy movement is really a combination of the internet, the media, and street thugs. Right? It's a weapon of intimidation,’  Bannon said in September 2012. ‘It is the moral equivalent today of the Brownshirts of the 1930s. It's going to be used as a weapon of intimidation.’ ” (Andrew Kaczynski, CNN, February 7, 2017)

This is an eerie premonition of the violence that happened during the February 1, 2017 exercise in free speech: Milo Yiannopoulos was given an opportunity to air his views in front of a large crowd at UC Berkeley, views that normally tend to racist and misogynistic opinions as befits his position at Breitbart News. A large number of students took exception to that, and organized a protest after trying to keep him from speaking and failing at that effort. Yiannopoulos billed his speech as a call to deny Federal Aid to universties such as Berkeley, and an article published in Breitbart (by Jack Hadfield 01/31/17) “Backed by the Freedom Center (Mr Yiannopoulos) will call for the withdrawal of federal grants and the prosecution of university officials who endanger their students with their policies, starting with UC President and former Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano and Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks.”

One can easily determine that Breitbart had a large stake in making their views known, and the protests were billed as an effort to prevent freedom of speech. Then, as violence broke out, the President took again to tweeting the next morning, “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view — NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”  Nowhere is it mentioned that those who were protesting had their freedom of speech curtailed by an organized group of rioters who destroyed property and caused harm to those in the area.

This is all too reminiscent of Nixon’s dirty tricks efforts, as well as the spawn of these tricks which played out in the 2012 election by the Republican Party—set up a right-wing, vitriolic speaker in the heart of a liberal community, cast the issue as a freedom of speech issue, encourage thugs to disrupt a protest (thereby denying freedom of speech to those protesting), then blame the protestors for the disruption while crying all the while about freedom of speech being curtailed.

This is projection at its finest, that is to say, freedom of speech should be extended to those who agree with this administration. It is the hallmark of the communication we are getting from the White House to date.

Theocracy was considered a poor form of Government by our founding fathers

"Those who would renegotiate the boundaries between church and state must therefore answer a difficult question: why would we trade a system that has served us so well for one that has served others so poorly?"
Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Conner opinion, June 27, 2005

It is another disturbing trend I am witnessing in this current administration, and one that smacks of an ignorant and self-serving agenda continuing to demonstrate a contempt for the Constitution and it’s attendant Bill of Rights. There are those who will rightly argue that the phrase “separation of church and state” appear nowhere in any document. However, those who propound a reverance for traditional values cannot ignore the thinking of those who made these documents possible.

“For example, in an 1802 letter to the Danbury (Conn.) Baptist Association, Thomas Jefferson, then president, declared that the American people through the First Amendment had erected a ‘wall of separation between church and state.’... James Madison, considered to be the Father of the Constitution, said in an 1819 letter, ‘The number, the industry and the morality of the priesthood, and the devotion of the people have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church and state.’ In an earlier, undated essay (probably early 1800s), Madison wrote, ‘Strongly guarded...is the separation between religion and government in the Constitution of the United States.’ ...The principle was articulated by Roger Williams, founder of the settlement in Rhode Island, in the 1600s. The framers of the US Constitution adopted the principle. It has been upheld by every Supreme Court since 1879 - that is until the year 2002 when the court approved school vouchers. ...As eminent church-state scholar Leo Pfeffer notes in his book, Church, State and Freedom, "It is true, of course, that the phrase 'separation of church and state' does not appear in the Constitution. But it was inevitable that some convenient term should come into existence to verbalize a principle so clearly and widely held by the American people....[T]he right to a fair trial is generally accepted to be a constitutional principle; yet the term 'fair trial' is not found in the Constitution. To bring the point even closer home, who would deny that 'religious liberty' is a constitutional principle? Yet that phrase too is not in the Constitution.” (source:Theocracywatch.org)

It is interesting to note that the current Vice President sponsored a bill in 2004, which in essence proclaimed that Christianity and the Bible transcends the political order and cannot be subordinated to the political order. From the New York Times: “Since the Supreme Court decision Marbury v. Madison in 1803, it has been clearly established that the courts have the ultimate power to interpret the Constitution. But right-wing ideologues, unhappy with some of the courts' rulings, have begun to question this principle as part of a broader war on the federal judiciary. The amendment that passed this week reflected an effort to use Congress's power to stop the courts from standing up for the First Amendment and other constitutional principles.” (New York Times, June 18, 2005)

This has much broader implications for policy than deciding if a manger scene should be sponsored by a city govenment at Christmas, as the above article stipulates “other constitutional principles.” Those other principles can be easily seen in the 14th Amendment, specifically the equal protection clause. The clause, which took effect in 1868, provides that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction “the equal protection of the laws.” It will do no good in this case to stipulate that each state must be unhindered in it’s freedom to exercise prerogatives not reserved to the Federal Government, because 75% of the states were needed to ratify that amendment, that is to say, 75% of the states agreed to the letter of that amendment. Those broader implications serve as justification for essentially denying civil rights to individuals based on narrow interpretations of Biblical text, and Kim Davis immediately comes to mind.

Alternative facts vs Deliberate deception: A Study in Cognitive Dissonance

I do not know where this excerpt orginated, I have seen it posted in several places:
"Bertrand Russell in his introduction to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus says that facts are what make propositions true. Suppose we have a fact A and that the proposition "A is true" is true, and we have an alternative fact B and "B is true" is also true. In itself this is not a problem, and so there can be alternative facts, for example if A is "I own a cat" and B is "I own a dog". However, if A and B contradict each other, then any reader of Aristotle or George Boole or even Ayd Rand would tell you that both A and B cannot be true. So, yes there are alternative facts but there are none that contradict other facts."

It has also been mentioned that the term "alternative fact" is present in arguing cases in a court of law. The thrust here is that when one person asserts something, such as "I did not steal that watch," and when other witnesses testify that they saw that person pick up that watch and put it on, that would appear to be irrefutable evidence. When the attorney for the defendent presents another fact, that the watch in question was identical to a watch the defendent can prove ownership of and that the alleged "theft" was inadvertant, this is still not an alternative fact to the question at hand: possession of a watch that does not belong to the defendant. The intention is not a relevant point in this inquiry, but intention may certainly mitigate any consequences from the action of taking something not belonging to the defendant: that is to say, an inadvertant possession of something not owned may not be "theft" but something else entirely.

There can only be one "fact" that, if proven true, indicate contradictory statements to be false. That being said, statements of "alternative facts," which are not borne out by evidence, are false. That means they are lies if the intention to deceive is present. If no one intends to deceive, that is more difficult to prove that anyone "lied." If lying entails the deliberate misrepresentation of a fact, then ignorance of the fact of the matter may not be a "lie," but something else entirely.

But this remains, that anyone with a desire to possess integrity would take pains to ensure that an inadvertant falsehood is corrected. Here we have the foundation of my objection to the actions of Conway, Spicer et al. Given the opportunity to correct mistaken assertions, they have blithely chosen to let the falsehood remain while moving on to other topics or stubbornly clinging to the notion that either what they state must be free from error or that others haven't taken all other "facts" into consideration.

For instance, the illustration of the blind men and the elephant is a good example of incomplete understanding leading to false ideas of "fact." One blind person examines the elephant, and feeling only the tail, concludes the elephant is more like a thick rope. Another feels the leg, and concludes the elephant is like a tree, another man feels the flank and concludes the elephant is like a wall. None of them are wrong, but the error lies in mistaking incomplete information for the sum total of all information available. On these grounds, the likes of Conway and Spicer hope to allay the assertions of the media that this administration condones lying. However, what these people are doing is bringing up incomplete "facts," not alternative facts, and present these incomplete considerations as if they were complete. In addition, all this is done to push a proposition of value, e.g. something which the government wishes you to believe and accept as good or bad. 

When I ask you to accept a proposition of value, I am asking you to adopt an attitude toward something I am asserting, and rate it good or bad. I can bolster my contention, and tie moral or ethical considerations into the mix. By doing this, I can sway your attitude toward a good or bad evaluation. Case in point, the notion of alternative facts vis a vis crowd size at the inauguration this year. Spicer stated that this inauguration's audience was the "largest audience to witness and inauguration, period." By all measurements, this is not true, but crowd size is not the issue here. His inability to tell the truth about events is the issue.

For example, on February 2, 2017, Spicer asserted at a press briefing that Iran had fired a missle on a US vessel. When he was corrected, that actually a Saudi vessel had been fired on, all but inaudibly accepted the correction but in no way did that change the tenor of his admonishment that Iran was being "put on notice" for the attack. He did not go on record changing his inaccurate statement, and Fox news (if you can call it that) put out a public announcement with the false claim intact. This has not been retracted to my knowledge, and this is far worse than any claim about crowd size. This is how wars start. Not with alternative facts, but with deliberate false claims that are not retracted and come to be believed by a large segment of people.

You don't like the word "Fascist" to be used to describe the Trump Administration?

So, we hear of the Bowling Green Massacre, which according to Conway was an honest mistake on her part to name it that, then goes on to say it was never mentioned nor investigated. My understanding is that about 90 newpapers covered it, and the people who were found guilty of charges stemming from the event are serving time in prison after a lengthy investigation--how many "honest" mistakes, without any retraction or setting the record straight do we need to hear before coming to the reasonable conclusion we are being lied to? Another example, Spicer in a press conference stated that Iran had fired on a US vessel, and when corrected did not retract his statement but blithely moved on to a new topic. Trump states we have Iran "on notice," hangs up on the Australian Prime Minister after a heated call--I wonder how many incidents it is going to take before people come to the logical conclusion that the Trump administration communications are composed of lies, and appears to be spoiling for a fight with anyone that dares to stand their ground. This goes for the press, other nations, and citizens of this country. You don't like the word Fascist? Fine. Call it whatever you like, he appears to be isolating this nation vis a vis other nations, is in a calculated fashion misinforming the people of this nation, has appointed people for his Cabinet and to the NSC who have aims inimical to the Constitutional rights of the citizenry, is provoking hostile responses from other countries by threatening military action or to build walls etc ad nauseatum. Maybe we need a new word to describe all this, but it seems to me that the old words fit just great. Liar. Cheat. Thief. Greedy. Egomaniac.

Garland vs Gorsuch

As this editorial cartoon inaccurately conveys, Gorsuch had an easy time being appointed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006. 11 years have passed, and there is a big difference between being apppointed to the Circuit and being confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. His views in many areas do not seem to fit my view of a balanced and fair arbiter of Women's rights, the environment, separation of Church & State, and Civil Rights. From the publication The Hill, dated 2/2/17 by Maria T. Cardona:
     "In several cases involving access to contraception for women, Judge Gorsuch repeatedly sided with restricting that access to women in several instances including being an employee of a secular company who chose on the basis of religious freedom, not to pay for contraception in the health plans of their employees offered through the Affordable Care Act (Burwell vs.Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.). ... On environmental issues, the Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune, warns, 'Judge Gorsuch’s dangerous views favor polluters and industry over the rights of the people. His record shows that he will limit the access of everyday Americans to the courts and prevent agencies like the EPA from fulfilling their mission and doing their job to protect our air, water, and health. He’s even been described as more extreme than Justice Scalia.'
    In the era of an incompetent, run-away White House who seems impervious to the limits that exist for the Executive Branch, Democrats should judge Judge Gorsuch on whether he will be a credible independent check in this out of control Oval Office.
Will he be able to side with Americans’ interests and not corporate interests? Will he be able to side with workers and not CEOs? Will he be able to protect the environment over profits?"
    To those who cry foul that Democrats should treat Republican nominees exactly as Republicans have treated Democratic nominees, remember that Merrick Garland had all the qualifications that Gorsuch claims to have, and Republicans allowed Garland's confirmation to languish. On March 20, 2016, in the publication RealClear Politics, Ian Schwartz quotes conservative pundit George Will:
    "On FOX News Sunday this week, columnist George Will called on Republicans to at least consider President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court. Will criticized Republicans for using the "Biden rule" as an excuse to deny Judge Merrick Garland, Obama's nominee, a hearing.
    Will said it was disheartening to hear "my friend Mitch McConnell" be unwilling to consider President Obama's Supreme Court nominee and hold confirmation hearings. Will scolded Republicans for saying this is a way to protest executive overreach, when this is a "clear constitution right and duty of the president."
Will would later lecture Republicans for not taking the nominee Obama has offered, warning them if Hillary Clinton is elected president her choice will be much more liberal and much younger than Garland, who is 63.
    "If Trump is president we'll have to guess who will be the nominee," Will warned on FOX News Sunday this morning. 'Do Republicans really think Donald Trump will make a good Supreme Court choice?' "
One of the few times I have been in agreement with the likes of Will...