hypocrisy

Seriously?

2024-11-17 By Radcen Leave a Comment

I’m speechless. I don’t know how to phrase what I need to say without coming off as Captain Obvious. It’s so unreal and bizarre that if the scenario were written as a book or a movie it’d be laughed at and ridiculed. But here we go…

So Trump was re-elected, which is another post for another time, but he’s currently filling his cabinet, and his choices are, well, bizarre.

Matt Gaetz, suspected pedophile and abuser, for Attorney General.
Tulsi Gabbard, known Russian apologist and tool, for Director of National Intelligence. Unlikely to be able to qualify for a security clearance.
Robert Kennedy Jr., non-medically qualified quack and anti-vaccine advocate, for HHS Secretary.
Pete Hegseth, a Major IIRC, for Secretary of Defense.
Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, truly the “dynamic duo”, leading a new made-up Department of Government Efficiency.

There are more questionable appointments, but you get the idea.

Not only that, but Trump wants the Senate to agree to abandon their Constitutionally required “advise & consent” process and allow ‘recess appointments’… basically Trump wants no interference. He just wants to appoint them with no oversight. Ummm, no.

Anyway, Trump could not come up with a list of more unqualified people if he tried. And maybe that’s it. Maybe he’s purposely trying to fuck everything up and leave the country in such a state of disrepair that it’s ruined beyond repair. I mean, we know Trump thrives on chaos. We know he’s thin-skinned and has taken criticisms as deep wounds. We know he’s petty, hell he tells us this himself. We also know that he wants to be perceived as “The Man”, and what better way to prove to the world he’s The Man than to single-handedly bring down a country as large as the United States?

No person who has the country’s best interests at heart would nominate the people he has been nominating. It’s way too black helicopter conspiracy theorish, but I cannot help but believe he is purposely trying to destroy the country. I swear, this man makes me think things I never imagined myself thinking.

Everything will be fine

2024-07-08 By Radcen Leave a Comment

In October 1993 Russia had a “Constitutional crises”… read: coup attempt… that shocked the world. Tanks were involved. Smoke. Lots of smoke. 100+ deaths. At one point while I was watching it unfold on the news I remember two men hanging out a burned-out window and defiantly waving their flag. I do not recall which side they were on nor can I find that photo when I do a Google search. Anyway, that is the image that is still etched in my mind 31 years later.

The primary feeling I had at the time was pride in my own country. My thought process went something like this…

How fortunate and proud I am to live in a civilized country where disagreements are settled at the ballot box and we don’t have banana-republic-like attempts at seizing power when it doesn’t go our way. It’s good to be an American.

😐

Yeah. Sigh.

Now, before you start reminding me of our own past, it’s time to trot out the obligatory disclaimer. Our history isn’t perfectly clean. We’ve had our own tests, not the least of which was our own Civil War. But for the most part we’ve done pretty well, and I thought we had matured and advanced. We’ve had violence, but few direct assaults to replace the government. Fast forward to January 2021 and here we are, having our own version of Russia’s “October Coup”. The circumstances leading up to the events are strikingly similar.

The hyper-partisanship in our country right now between the far-left and the far-right is truly mind-boggling, probably hysterical. That doesn’t bother me so much, you could say at least each side cares, or you can intellectually understand why they think like they do. What bothers me is the middle, the “milquetoast moderates”, the people who are dismissive, and can’t be bothered, to the point of thinking, “Oh, it’s no big deal. Everything will be fine.” Will it? Maybe everything will be fine, but history says maybe not.

And what if it’s not? For the moment we don’t have a wannabe-dictator, our laws still work… for the most part. In this year’s presidential election we have a chance to send the wannabe packing, averting a crises for at least another four years. Bottom Line: The choice in 2024 is crystal clear. Donald Trump. Yes, or no. You either want what he will do for/to the country, or you don’t. The Dem candidate is 100% irrelevant. Get serious about your own future. Vote accordingly.

The Great Debate of 2024

2024-06-28 By Radcen Leave a Comment

President Biden and Donald Trump squared off in their first debate of 2024 last night, and I am going to share my initial thoughts.

I didn’t watch it.

Slow down, take a Valium, I almost never watch speeches or debates first-hand. Posturing, posing, blah blah blah, nothing really of substance, puke. Here’s what has worked pretty well for me for decades. If you listen to the pundits immediately afterward, it’s all spin. Let a couple days go by. Things and people settle down a bit. Real live thinking people have had time to flesh out the fluff and churn out some reasonably objective observations. And I will still do that, but breaking from my tradition I am going to give some initial thoughts.

I did watch about two minutes after it had already started. Just happened to catch the last minute of Trump’s turn and the first minute of Biden’s turn. Watching Biden was painful. He did not have a good night, to put it mildly. I literally did a facepalm. Trump? Lie lie lie lie lie lie, and lie some more. In the minute I watched I think he told about six lies in one sentence, almost. And it’s all stuff that is so easily disprovable. Then top it off with a lie so big no honestly contemplative person would buy into it… except his menagerie of gullible suckers, they’ll lap that shit up. What was the big lie, you ask? Something about Democrats wanting to abort babies after they’re born. Another facepalm. You can’t make this shit up.

I keep hoping I will wake up one morning and the last eight years will have been a horrible nightmare.

But I digress. Anyway, there are three kinds of people in our political wasteland, currently… “crackpot conservatives”, “whackjob liberals”, and “thinkers”. I checked some social media echo chambers. The crackpot conservative echo chambers wouldn’t defend anything Trump said (they never do), but they laid on Biden hard and heavy for his fogginess. The whackjob liberal echo chambers were a little better, but not much. They tore into Trump’s lies but also dusted off the trusty “Look, a squirrel” deflection and tried to spin Biden as being “not Trump”.

So, who won? Bottom line, if you’re a crackpot conservative you think Trump won, and if you’re a whackjob liberal you think Biden won. (Thinking people are still contemplating, we’ll let you know in a few days.) This outcome was so easily predictable.

So, who REALLY won? No one. Not a single person in the United States of America is winning with this poor excuse for a political nightmare of a novel.

Donald Trump… anti-Patriot

2024-05-27 By Radcen Leave a Comment

What is the definition of “patriot”? Turns out the history and actual definition is long and complicated… which I think I will address in another article soon, it’s really quite interesting… but I have observed the current popular definition is something like this: “Love of our country and willing to defend and protect it and its institutions by what ever means necessary to preserve it.”

Most people would interpret “…whatever means necessary…” to mean serve in the military and be willing to fight. I certainly include that, but that doesn’t even scratch the surface. It also means to help and support your country and society in ways such as voting, taking issues seriously, maybe run for office and serve in an honest and respectable way, not thwarting the country by being a criminal, and so on. It does not mean being a lackey for con artists. “America: Love it or leave it!” is not a patriotic mindset, it’s a destructive authoritarian philosophy that goes against the very freedoms America stands for. I don’t need to see 18 flag waving & bald eagle memes a day on your Facebook page, or an ‘FTB’ stick on your penis-gratifying F-250 with the balls bigger than yours on the trailer hitch, to know you’re a poser. Superficial allegiance is empty and shallow. Talk is cheap, it’s what you DO, not what you say.

Having said all that, these are my definitions what I believe is patriotism is and what patriots are, or should be, based on what I mentioned in the first paragraph. Your definition may differ, and I’d certainly be open to hearing that. In doing research for this article I learned the historical definition and use in much deeper and varied, but for good or for bad language evolves constantly, so we have that, but I digress…

The problems come in when the concept of patriots and patriotism is perverted to the point that “blind hate” is spun as “blind love”, and that’s where we come into what Mr Donald Trump… you knew this was coming, didn’t you?… believes and his gullible sycophants parrot, so let’s go ahead and note some things a true and honest patriot does NOT do…

A true patriot does NOT…

…disparage a war hero.

“Amid audience laughter, the moderator, Republican pollster Frank Luntz, then interjected, “But he’s a war hero!”

Trump responded, “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”

Later that day, Trump retweeted, with seeming approval, a web post headlined “Donald Trump: John McCain Is ‘A Loser,’” that recapped his exchange at the summit.”

and

“Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, ‘We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,’ and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. ‘What the f— are we doing that for? Guy was a f—ing loser,’ the president told aides.”

Fact check: Donald Trump did call John McCain a loser

…disparage a “Gold Star Family” (family of a service member who dies in combat).

“Khan and his wife, Ghazala Khan, gained national attention after they spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016. Khan said in his speech that Trump had “sacrificed nothing and no one,” for his country. The Khans’ son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004.”

Gold Star Father Khizr Khan Says Trump Has The “Soul Of A Coward”

…cancel a planned memorial ceremony for war dead or call service members who die in combat “losers” and “suckers”.

“When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.”

Emphasis in bold mine.

Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers (Warning: Paywall)

…request that disabled soldiers be excluded and removed from a military parade because they don’t want to see them.

“President Donald Trump did not want injured veterans to be present at a military parade because he believed it would make spectators uneasy, The Atlantic reported Thursday.

“Nobody wants to see that,” Trump said during a White House meeting ahead of a planned military parade in 2018…”

Trump didn’t want wounded veterans to attend a military parade because ‘nobody wants to see that,’ report says

…take credit for legislation they had nothing to do with.

“The president frequently touts his support for US veterans and their families and has falsely taken credit more than 150 times for the passage of the Veterans Choice Act of 2014. Trump was not president at the time, and his predecessor, Barack Obama, signed the bill into law.”

My comment: The Act was sponsored by John McCain, no less. 😝 Claiming to hate a man then stealing his work. Oh, the irony is delicious.

<same link as above> <Is this an “Ibid”>)

…dismiss trauma and wounds by soldiers injured.

“President Donald Trump said Wednesday that U.S. service members treated for concussion symptoms after Iranian airstrikes earlier this month had “headaches,” adding it was “not very serious.”

and

“The commander in chief also said traumatic brain injuries, or TBI, known as the signature wounds of post-9/11 wars, are less severe than losing a limb.

“No, I don’t consider them very serious injuries relative to other injuries that I’ve seen,” Trump said. “I’ve seen what Iran has done with their roadside bombs to our troops. I’ve seen people with no legs and with no arms. I’ve seen people that were horribly, horribly injured in that area, that war.

“No, I do not consider that to be bad injuries, no,” he added.”

President Trump Downplays Severity of Troops’ Head Injuries After Iranian Attack

…divert approved money from legitimate military projects to serve military members and their families for their own pet projects.

“Most of the nearly $10 billion that the Trump administration diverted from the armed services to build barriers on the U.S.-Mexico border will never be seen again, Pentagon and congressional officials confirmed Friday.

That includes some of the money diverted from military construction funds and all the money former President Donald Trump had reprogrammed from a variety of other Pentagon initiatives, such as National Guard equipment, a new amphibious assault ship for the Navy, F-35 fighter jets for the Marine Corps, Osprey tilt-rotors for carrying forces to battle and C-130J transport planes.”

Most of Pentagon billions moved to border wall not recoverable

…avoid military service by dodging the draft with (paid for, most likely, my suspicion) specious and untrue medical exemptions.

“…the diagnosis of bone spurs came from a Queens, New York podiatrist who had a relationship with Trump’s father, Fred.

“Donald Trump’s excuse doesn’t add up, but it does explain his disrespect for our service members and veterans,” said Haley communications director Nachama Soloveichik. “A man who went to elaborate lengths to avoid the uniform at all costs can’t understand the selfless sacrifice American heroes make.”

Side note: Even Adolf Hitler served… volunteered… for the Army and fought in battle… valiantly. And spare me the Goldwin’s Law crapola, the point is true.

Haley Campaign Press Release – Donald Trump and the Mystery of the Spontaneous Bone Spurs

…advocate for the elimination of the Constitution.

“In December 2022, Donald Trump called for the termination of the United States Constitution, citing his long-debunked Big Lie of a stolen election. In a post on Truth Social, Trump wrote “Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

Side note: Per this article very few elected Congresspeople have repudiated these comments. Surprisingly, both my Senators (Grassley and Ernst) have. My House Representative (Hinson) has not.

9 out of 10 Republicans silent on Trump’s calls to terminate the Constitution

…openly advocate they will be a dictator. Twice!

“In his own words, he is promising to rule as a dictator on ‘day one,’ use the military against the American people, punish those who stand against him, condone violence done on his behalf, and put his own revenge and retribution ahead of what is best for America. Bottom line: Trump is a danger to the Constitution and a threat to our democracy,” Singer continued.”

My thoughts: Trump says… Trump says… blah blah blah. 🙄 Trump says lots of things.

Trump says ‘a lot of people like it’ when he floats the idea of being a dictator

…and the biggie… a patriot would NEVER instigate and attempt an insurrection for the sole purpose of ending our country as we know it by spitting in the eyes of real true American Patriots.

“The witnesses — ranging from many of Trump’s closest aides to law enforcement to some of the rioters themselves — detailed Trump’s “premeditated” actions in the weeks ahead of the attack and how his wide-ranging efforts to overturn his defeat directly influenced those who brutally pushed past the police and smashed through the windows and doors of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The central cause was “one man,” the report says: Trump.”

Note #1: As of this writing Trump’s legal status regarding this event is undetermined.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-lit-that-fire-of-capitol-insurrection-jan-6-committee-report-says

Note #2: While the “United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol” labels the events of January 6, 2021, as “insurrection”, that legal label is outdated (as is “treason”) and legally vague, very difficult to prove in court. The ‘meatier’ and more enforceable crime is “sedition”, and is basically treason and insurrection combined, but easier to prove in court. At least two participants have been convicted of seditious conspiracy, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and former Proud Boys National Chairman Enrique Tarrio.

2 more Oath Keepers sentenced to prison terms for Jan. 6 Capitol riot

and

Jan. 6 prosecutions: A look at cases, charges by the numbers

Conclusion…

…Donald Trump did and/or said all these things. If nothing else the man is consistent. Donald Trump is not a patriot. This is 11… let me say that again for those in the back… ELEVEN examples of anti-patriotic viewpoints of Mr Trump, all supported with credible and verifiable links and sources.

To make it worse are his gullible sycophant supporters who double down on this patriotic perversion. Some of them are people I know who would never have endorsed or condoned this perspective as recent as ten years ago. How many times does a man have to look you in the face, and brazenly lie to you, for you to finally figure out he’s lying to you and is not what he says he is? Seriously, people! 🤦‍♂️

If after reading this and considering the information provided you still take his side there’s no hope for you. You are beyond redemption. You are also NOT a patriot yourself.

The choice is yours.

On the ballot: Should he be, or shouldn’t he be?

2024-01-02 By Radcen Leave a Comment

2023 was a slow year for radcen, post-wise. There was a lot going on, to be sure, and just as we could get thoughts together something new and even more bizarre would pop up. That being said, let’s hope 2024 will be a more productive year.

Today’s topic is whether or not Trump should be removed from the ballot due to his alleged participation of the insurrection of January 6, 2021. It’s a heavy question and we as a nation have never been faced with anything even remotely like it, given that Trump is both a former president and is current running for president.

The pertinent part of the 14th Amendment reads:

“Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights

Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/section-3/

The crux of this post is whether nor not a candidate, in this case Trump, needs to be indicted first. The far-right says ‘yes’. They say Trump has never been indicted, so who is to say if he’s an insurrectionist, or not? The far-left say ‘no’, all that is required is that someone at the state level… and ALL elections, even for president, are state elections, this is true… decides so. It boils down to this simplicity, though some will toss in various nuances.

We here at radcen.net side with the far-right on this one. I know that if I were running for office and my name were removed from a ballot by a state Secretary of State my attitude would be, “Who the hell are you to declare me an insurrectionist? I’ve never been convicted of insurrection!”

The far-left is saying, “Nowhere does it say a conviction is required.”, and no, it doesn’t. Are you on the far-left claiming we need a disclaimer in every law and Amendment stating whether a conviction is required for anything restrictive? Really? Seriously? That’s an absurd stance to take.

While the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” is nowhere to be found in the Constitution, it has long been upheld to be a founding pillar in our sense of justice… at least in principle, if not application, but we digress. This is why radcen believes a conviction needs to be obtained. One is not officially a murderer until they have been convicted of murder, even if they did actually do it, and I bet if there were a law restricting murderers no one on either side would even question a conviction being necessary. Same here. No, we don’t need disclaimers in every law, this is… should be… a given. Does radcen want that lying cheating thieving bastard off all the ballots? Damn straight he does! A second Trump term would be the worst thing to ever happen to our country. But radcen is not willing to abandon his principles to do so. Neither does radcen want to kick the can down the road.

Moving on to Side Note #1: Both sides are trotting out legal scholars who mare making points for their side, and proclaiming, “See? Even Constitutional scholar ‘X’ says we are correct!” *sigh* No, they’re not. They’re just expressing their opinion, and that we have scholars with roughly equal credentials spouting opposite arguments means exactly that, it’s just their own educated, albeit biased opinion, nothing more.

Side Note #2: The far-right is blathering on about, “Let the voters decide.” Oh, isn’t that just fucking precious? <eye roll> You’ve just confessed to not believing in the rule of law. Any shit against the wall to do an end-run for your repugnant America-hating candidate. Spare me your faux concern for fairness.

Side Note#3: We here at raden.net believe the final question will end up at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), and we believe SCOTUS needs to intervene (it has been done, there is precedent), and make a final and definitive decision sooner rather than later. Do NOT let the chaos languish until a few months before the general election.

Ok, people, peace out. 🙂

ETA – 6 May 2024: And here we are a few months before the general election and the Supreme Court is dragging it’s feet. smh