Telling it like it is

I reshare this not for the article, but Dan Weese's commentary. The only point I disagree with is whether we call it "treason" or something else, but I suspect that is a cultural difference in terminology. I further suspect that even now, bridges can be built with Republicans. But not with Trump et al. That is folly. But that's enough from me.



Aw criminy, not yet another pouring out of a jeroboam from where the grapes of wrath are stored. I, too, find the Treason word inapplicable to Donald Trump, for treason is a military crime, not a civilian crime, applicable only in time of war.

I was once a Republican. I was also a soldier. I ceased being a Republican about the time Reagan sold arms to our enemies and lied about it all. I am an identitarian Democrat who assumed that role most unwillingly.

Though I do not call Trump a traitor, I believe Donald Trump is conspiring with the enemies of the United States. I have solid facts to back that allegation. Would you care to dispute it? Of course you won't and you didn't on your blog, either. How many guilty pleas has the Special Counsel gathered in the course of his investigation? Let's review, shall we?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/07/13/a-summary-of-the-fruit-of-the-mueller-investigation-to-date/?utm_term=.b42fc2c33180

I will now take issue with this notion wherein the American Middle Class has been under attack for a long time now.

It is true, your language is policed: you can't use the N Word and you've had to quit telling racist jokes and other deep and abiding infringements upon your quotidian speech patterns.

And, regrettably, institutions have been perverted from the happy days of yore, when women and black people knew their place and queers were fired from their positions - see, I'm old enough to remember those bad old days if you are not.

Which national symbols are now disdained? I remember a bitterly cold day in Kitzingen Germany, when I participated in burning a flag. Of course, we were burning it in the First Sergeant's hibachi, in accordance with military flag disposal protocol. Friends of mine are buried in Arlington, men who died for the rights and freedoms accorded to American citizens, including the right to disdain the national symbols. And if you don't like it, I believe that to be an unpatriotic response, deeply offensive to this veteran, who will be buried under an American flag.

The American middle class brought most of its misfortunes upon itself. The trade unions had brought about the 40 hour week and the abolishment of child labor, the conservatives turned socialism into a dirty word. Now there is no American middle class.

There will be no compromise with such as Trump nor with those who strive to soft-pedal his manifest crimes, in hopes the debate will be rendered civil and conservatives can again attempt to browbeat their opponents with supercilious condemnation of the use of words such as Traitor. Donald Trump is the abject servant of Putin and the Russian mafia and there are no two ways about that.

Isaiah Berlin had this to say in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty:

"In the end, men choose between ultimate values; they choose as they do, because their life and thought are determined by fundamental moral categories and concepts that are, at any rate over large stretches of time and space, a part of their being and thought and sense of their own identity; part of what makes them human. It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilization: an ideal which remote ages and primitive societies have not recognized, and one which posterity will regard with curiosity, even sympathy, but little comprehension. This may be so; but no sceptical conclusions seem to me to follow. Principles are nor less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed. Indeed. the very desire for guarantees that our values ire eternal and secure in some objective heaven is perhaps only a craving for the certainties of childhood or the absolute values of our primitive past. 'To realise the relative validity of one's convictions ,said an admirable writer of our time, 'and yet stand for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilised man from a barbarian.' To demand more than this is perhaps a deep and incurable metaphysical need; but to allow it to determine one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous, moral and political immaturity."

http://ashesblog.com/2018/08/19/dear-bill-maher/