Who Are We, Where Are We, and Where Are We Going?

The first question, “who are we,” is the saddest question of the lot. 77,302,580 of us elected a President who, at the time of the election) was charged with a total of 88 felony counts (including inciting an insurrection on January 6, 2021) across four criminal investigations and who was convicted of 34 of them. They voted for a Presidential candidate who was sued for defamation and rape in civil court and who “lost two defamation cases to Carroll in 2023 and 2024 in federal court after a jury found him liable for sexually abusing the onetime columnist and subsequently defaming her. Two juries awarded Carroll $5 million and $83 million.” This sham of a man is a known mobster. He is so corrupt that even the most incompetent of the western world’s banks wouldn’t risk other people’s money on him. After all that, Donald Trump, convict-traitor-con-artist-business-failure, was elected President of the United States even while promising to blow up the country and trash the economy and sell-off our national security to practically any bidder. Worse, about 90 million eligible voters were either too lazy, too stupid, too cowardly, or too stoned or intoxicated to bother to vote at all. That is the quickest way for me to sum up who we are. If the United States of America isn’t one of Trump’s “shithole countries,” no one is and there is no such thing relative to my home country.

As a result, here’s “where we are”: a country with a convicted convict as President, a boot-licking billionaire’s pool boy for Vice President, a Cabinet filled with the moral, intellectual, and competency equivalent of a coked-up biker gang, a Congress more than half-filled with uneducated, cowardly, treasonous, superstitious and anti-science, bought-and-paid-for fools who were cheaply corrupted with a billionaires’ pocket change, and a county that is overwhelmingly stocked with marching morons who cheer this clown college on as if they are the second coming of Beelzebub himself.

Leaving us with “where we are going.” It didn’t take the Republicans a whole week to blow up a good bit of the stock market, with the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq all dropping significantly on the 27^th due to depressing news about crypto currencies, AI competition from China, and vaccine manufacturers’ losing value anticipating the nutcase anti-vaxer, Robert Kennedy Jr., heading the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s just the beginning of where this is all going. Usually, it takes a Republican at least a whole term to trash the economy. Nixon threw the nation into a decade of recession with his Vietnam War excesses, Reagan extended Nixon’s recession for another dozen years with dribble-down economics, and Bush II blew up everything from manufacturing to banking and housing to restaurant jobs with the Great Recession, even Trump made it all the way to early 2020 before losing more jobs than any President in history with his botched handling and cover-up of the Covid 19 pandemic response. This time, Republicans have hit the ground running, disabling practically every critical regulatory, national security, consumer protection, and infrastructure investment apparatus the federal government provides. I expect a full-blown recession to be in progress by no later than the end of the year. And it could be a whole lot worse than that.

Republican threats to dismantle FEMA and anything resembling federal support to states has all of the income-producing states on the west coast talking about stopping federal income tax payments to the federal government. That has several other blue states buzzing about becoming part of Canada or cutting off federal funding. Red states, of course, are all dependent on blue states for their welfare and they can’t threaten to leave the Union because no productive, educated citizen cares if they go. Russia and Putin have to be celebrating their propaganda successes because this is exactly what Nikita Khrushchev promised in 1956 when he threatened/promised “We do not have to invade the United States, we will destroy you from within." If the United States does manage to self-destruct, that will leave China and Russia as the world’s remaining super-powers.

I suppose this is what Republicans promised when they threatened to “make America grate again?” I know they are sure grating on my patience, tolerance, sense of security, and humor.  However, it’s not hard to see where this is going with Putin’s “useful idiot” as President, a fascist South African billionaire’s pool boy backing him up, the Secretary of Defense being a semi-literate talking head from Russia’s “favorite American television network,” the rest of the Cabinet possessing not a single useful piece of knowledge of skill, a House of Representative that is half-filled with fools and crooks who are busy counting their bribery checks, a Senate that destabilized and too cowardly to even enforce established federal law, and an Extreme Court that is the disgusting laughing stock of every literate person in the world. Republicans have disabled and disarmed the entire federal government and all of our enemies are waiting to see how far we’ll tear ourselves apart before they destroy the remnants.

If you rural goobers think you have it bad now, your imaginations are as stunted as I have always suspected. You don’t pay enough taxes to put a coat of oil on the highways that pass through your abandoned and neglected towns. Ten generations of the best and brightest who were born and raised in your hateful, racist, superstitious villages have abandoned “home” as fast as possible and they’ve been paying your bills from the nation’s great cities since the turn of the last century. The Republicans you’ve elected will “fix” that and you might live long enough to feel a moment of gratitude for what you’ve been given before it all goes away. Is that “great” enough for you?