President Trump

The smoke of Satan

If this isn't the bottom for Election 2016, I don't want to see what the bottom is. I mean that with every fiber of my body and soul.

Worse, The Bottom comes to us courtesy, I am sorry to say, of a Catholic priest -- an unethical, seemingly insane and wicked Catholic priest, but an alleged man of God nonetheless -- and his deeply ironically named, off-the-rails fanatical organization, Priests for Life. Of course, Priests for Life is completely in the tank for Donald Trump.

I know I am burying the lede. I have to work up to the lede, though I imagine you can guess what it is from the obscured Facebook screenshot. Trust me, you don't want this lede upfront.

NO, you don't. Steel yourself as I dawdle.

What we have, courtesy of Fr. Frank Pavone, isn't just sacrilege -- it's diabolical. Diabolism in the name of Trump.

God help us, that orange abomination is diabolical, literally, in his ability to inspire all those he touches to engage in naked, unapologetic wickedness. Like this.

Just today, I thought I had seen the bottom of this horrible election being dredged with the news story that Trump had a 12-year-old with cerebral palsy and his mother thrown out of a Florida rally -- with the rabble assaulting them all the while. 

But no.

The bottom now has been dredged in the name of Jesus Christ and of being "pro-life." Upon the altar. By a Catholic priest.
 

FROM TODAY'S article in The Washington Post:

Ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election, the Rev. Frank Pavone took an aborted fetus, laid it upon an altar Sunday and posted a live video on Facebook. Pavone, a Catholic priest who heads New York-based Priests for Life, said the fetus was entrusted to him by a pathologist for burial.

During an already heated and divisive campaign season, Pavone’s video has raised questions for some about what is appropriate antiabortion and political activism in the church. As of Monday afternoon, the video, which is 44 minutes long, had 236,000 views. In it, he holds up a poster of graphics of abortion procedures.

In Pavone’s Facebook appeal, he wrote, “we have to decide if we will allow this child killing to continue in America or not. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform says yes, let the child-killing continue (and you pay for it); Donald Trump and the Republican platform says no, the child should be protected.” 

A call placed to the spokesman for the Diocese of Amarillo in Texas, which is Pavone’s diocese, was not immediately returned Monday. The receptionist, however, said her phone has been ringing off the hook.

In a blog post for Patheos, Scott Eric Alt argued that what Pavone did was sacrilege, a violation of Catholic Church canon law, which states that the altar is “reserved for divine worship alone, to the exclusion of any secular usage.”

“Being pro-life is about respecting the dignity of the human person,” Alt wrote. “It is the antithesis of respect for the dignity of the human person to use a dead child as a political prop to lobby for your presidential candidate the day before an election.”

THERE.  There's your lede. In supposed defense of the right to life and the dignity of all humans, born and unborn, a Catholic priest who heads a "pro-life" organization desecrates the body of an aborted child upon the altar of God in cheap, vulgar political theater. This sacrilege -- this defiling of both a dead body and the sacred altar -- came in support of Trump, a presidential candidate who unconvincingly proclaims himself "pro-life" while advocating violence, racism, torture and state-sponsored murder of innocents abroad.

And let us not forget that Pavone's favored "pro-life" candidate is on tape bragging about numerous instances of sexual assault.

C.S. Lewis would have been hard-pressed to imagine such perfidy in service of Our Father Below for a sequel to The Screwtape Letters.

This . . . this is the smoke of Satan in the sanctuary, fetid incense burned in worship of Deep Cheeto. A dead, apparently saline-burned aborted child, splayed upon the altar as if at an Aztec temple. An offering to Quetzalcoatl?

No, Donald Trump.

Mein Gott im Himmel! Somehow, it seems appropriate to express horror in the original German when speaking of Trump and his "souled-out" sycophants.

I HAVEN'T felt this soul-sick -- physically ill, even -- since the worst days of the Catholic child-abuse scandals in 2002 and 2003. Then, I damned near left the church. Such has been the devilish vengeance this campaign from hell has unleashed upon the church -- upon what's left of the "pro-life" movement.

This has the feeling of the devil demanding his due from a movement that sold its soul to Republican politics long ago.

Feeling? One cannot tangibly prove such things, but it seems to be more like a lead-pipe cinch to me.

In this church where we have been asked to cross too many bridges too damned far, a line has to be drawn. A spiritual line has to be drawn, and rotten limbs have to be cut away for the sake of the Body of Christ. Frank Pavone doesn't need to merely have his faculties suspended; he needs to have them removed completely. He needs not to be able to present himself publicly as a Catholic priest.

Now.
 
And then let the state's criminal investigation begin.

Alles, was alt ist neu wieder

A young Donald Trump supporter in Sanford, Fla., (motto: "Arbeit Macht Frei") figures it's the Zionists keeping America down. And only Trump can Make America Jew-free Great Again.

Oh, there's also this.

"Follow Alex Jones at infowars.com. The Young Turks is not the best network to follow -- the truth is with David Duke and Alex Jones."

David Duke, of neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan infamy, is back in politics, by the way. He's running for U.S. Senate in Louisiana.

Yeah, I think we've seen this act before. Started badly, ended worse -- 60 million dead, all told.

And der Führer, Benito Mussolini and Hideki Tojo didn't even have a nuclear arsenal at their disposal.

Really, no matter how much a candidate disavows the support of Nazis and Kluxers -- and Trump grudgingly has . . . eventually . . . more or less -- is it really that difficult to grasp that there's something horribly wrong with any candidate the spiritual heirs to Hitler can heil?

3 Chords & the Truth: The Voice of Music

The sounds coming off the campaign trail certainly aren't getting any sweeter -- and propriety prevents me from telling you what the presidential election sounds like to me -- so I guess we need to counteract that on this week's 3 Chords & the Truth.

Oh, crap. Reality has Trumped that possibility. (Sorry, couldn't resist the cheap joke.)

I guess, then, we will have to just do our best on the Big Show to replace the voice of discord with our own Voice of Music. We probably can't drown out all the noise from the rubber room, but I'm betting the Voice of Music will take care of most of it, making for a dramatically more pleasant run up to Armageddon Nov. 8.

I THINK this will work.

Please, God, this has to work.

OK, let's remain positive. Yes, this will work. The Voice of Music will remedy all.

We should all be feeling much better 30 minutes into this edition of 3 Chords & the Truth. You know, power to soothe the savage breast and all of that.

What do we got to lose?

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

An American eulogy

Read this letter, dated Jan. 20, 1993, from George H.W. Bush to Bill Clinton.

You Donald Trump supporters, especially. Read it, goddamn you!

Read this wonderful letter and behold what we have lost as Americans. Read it as the hourglass empties on that too-brief era when there was such a people as "Americans."

Read it. Read it and think on what we seek to throw away -- are throwing away -- for the sake of a horndog Cheeto with terrible hair and worse character.

Remember it and our squandered patrimony when the bullets start to fly.

CROOKED HILLARY'S GONNA TAKE YOUR GUNS . . . THEN HAUL YOU OFF TO A FEDERAL PRISON CAMP!

Just look at all the WikiLeaks emails! Why do you think she was hiding the Goldman Sachs speeches?

Listen, you slobs! If you vote for Killary Clinton, you're going to have black helicopters and federal gestapo troops coming to take away your guns and your rights!

You think this woman respects the Constitution? You think she wouldn't lower the federal boom on God-fearing Americans and throw 'em all in politically correct prison camps?

JUST LOOK AT THE EMAILS!!!!

If you don't want Hillary's storm troopers marching down Main Street -- if you don't want the U.S. Army turned against American citizens, you must vote for Donald Trump and the Christian, freedom-loving, limited-government, Mexican-rapist hatin', states-rights respecting Republicans. Just look at this exchange with a freedom-loving, right-thinking Republican during one of those Goldman Sachs speeches:

MR. (Lloyd) BLANKFEIN (CEO, President, 
Goldman Sachs): I have to say we Republicans -- 
we obviously reach out to both sets. To a person 
-- a person regarded as someone who may be 
expected to be more partisan and has spent so much 
time is is very, very well liked by the Republicans.

PARTICIPANT: First off I would like to
thank you for all the years. Of course, I'm on the
other side.

MS. CLINTON: The dark side?

PARTICIPANT: It's the dark side right
now, but otherwise the sun does come through. You
have to be an optimist. But you have to put a
great, great effort, and I commend you for it. But
I would like two things. No. 1, you just talked
about Sandy. And since you were First Lady and a
senator -- forget the Secretary. But what is wrong
with our politicians -- I served in the Corps of
Engineers. Whether it's in Iraq, Iran -- anyplace
outside the US you can build bridges overnight.
You could have gone into Sandy. You could have
gone into New Orleans.

The actual problem is the law from the
1800s. No military, which is the only force, not
the National Guard. They don't have crap. It's
the military. Like down in New Orleans. If we
would just change the dumb law -- because it hasn't
been changed because politicians have no say once
the president declares it martial law. Put the
military up. They would have cleaned up that
coast. You wouldn't have the frigging mess you
have today. But we can do it for everybody else in
the world, but we don't do it because the state
judges don't have no authority. The mayor don't
have no authority, because you're going to put a
military officer in charge. That's one question
why you haven't looked at --

MR. BLANKFEIN: They did that in New Orleans.

PARTICIPANT: Forget the -- the second thing you mentioned about Afghanistan. Most people don't realize the Russians were there before us for
ten years and whatever, and we supported Tannenbaum
to beat the hell out of them. A lot of our
problems is because we have a competition with the Russians. If we would -- the Russians by nature
hate the Chinese, but forget that.

If we were more or less kind of like forget that
superpower, superpower, and work with them
-- two superpowers equal a hell of a lot more
in the world. You wouldn't have an Iranian
problem, we wouldn't have the Syrian problem, and
why don't we just cut Israel loose? Give them the
frigging bomb and just blow the thing up. That's
my question to you.

MS. CLINTON: Those are interesting
questions for sure.

First, I think you're referring to the
posse comitatus, which has been actually in
existence -- if not from the end of the 18th
century, the very beginning, as you said, of the
19th century. And it is a law that really limits
what the military, the US military, can do on our
soil, and it has been supported all these years in
part because there is a great suspicion by many of
US government power -- and there is no more obvious
evidence of that than the US military.

However, we do call out the National
Guard, which is under the control, as you know, of
the governor and the adjutant general. But it is
clearly in the line of command as well from the
Pentagon. So although it took some difficulties
with Katrina we did get the National Guard out.

With Sandy we got the National Guard out. But
you're right, that if you were to want to have the
military, the actual US military involved in
disaster recovery, you would have to change the
law. And it's something that would be a big fight
in Congress because a lot of people would not vote
to change a law that would give any additional
authority to any president, Republican or
democratic, to order the US military to go anywhere
in the United States.

We kid about it, but I used to see it
all the time when I was a senator. There is this
great fear that the US military is going to show up
and take away your guns and confiscate your
property. I think it's --

MR. BLANKFEIN: Was the last time that
happened with Eisenhower?

MS. CLINTON: Yes. That was to enforce
a court order.

MR. BLANKFEIN: It was shocking,
jarring.

MS. CLINTON: It was. Wasn't it the
82nd? I mean, they flew through to desegregate the
central high school, and it was viewed as a very
provocative action.

PARTICIPANT: The fact is it proved
what was right. Not what the politicians think.
It's a case of sometimes the politicians, which
includes --

MS. CLINTON: The politicians for more
than 200 years have been united on this issue.
There was a posse comitatus law before that. But
the sensitivity about it was heightened and new
regulations were put in after the Civil War, but --

PARTICIPANT: No disrespect, but if you
were right you could not have had Illinois,
Oklahoma, California join you. You had governors
that were appointed there. Military law.

MS. CLINTON: Well, you can declare
martial law. You can declare martial law.

PARTICIPANT: Military was always --

MS. CLINTON: Well, I personally could
not favor turning control over to the United States
military as much as I respect the United States
military. I guess I'm on the other side of this
with you.

I think that the civilian rule has served us well,
and I don't want to do anything that upsets it even
though I have a very personal experience. You
remember when Castro opened the prisons and
sent all the criminals to the United States?

MR. BLANKFEIN: The --

MS. CLINTON: A lot of those prisoners
were ordered to go to a fort in Ft. Smith,
Arkansas, Ft. Chaffee, and my husband was governor
of Arkansas at the time. It was a military fort,
so the United States military ran it. So if you
were on the fort you were under US military
authority, but if you stepped off the fort you were
not. And the result was there was a riot where
prisoners were breaking through the gates, and the
US military would not stop them.

So my husband as governor had to call
out the state police. So you had the military
inside basically saying under the law we can't do
anything even to stop prisoners from Cuba. So it
is complicated, but it's complicated in part for a
reason, because we do not ever want to turn over to
our military the kind of civilian authority that
should be exercised by elected officials. So I
think that's the explanation.


Uhhhhhhhhh . . . .

FYDT

And let God's people say amen.

We're gonna need more than one basket

This guy, at the rally with his wife and three kids, in his "She's A Cunt, Vote For Trump" shirt. pic.twitter.com/NDQMz1uteG

— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) October 11, 2016

Don't look now, but pornofascism™ is a real thing that we didn't know existed before, like, today.  And I think the deplorables are overloading Donald Trump's basket.

Another thought: "White trash" is a concept for which everybody has a little bit different definition, but we all know it when we see it. Brother, are we seeing it here.

This is where I'd usually say "God help us" or "Lord, have mercy," but I highly doubt we'd appreciate the divine assist. We're going to get exactly what we want, good and hard.

The end of the GOP, explained in 2:03

In 1968, a certain experimenter -- let's call him Dr. Nixonstein -- began his efforts toward building a bigger and better Republican Party.

Nixonstein had early success in his project, which came to be known as the Southern Strategy after the main target for exponential growth, as he cobbled together a new party from what, at the time, seemed to be promising components.

But 48 years later, something happened. Let's call it The Disillusionment of Nixonstein's Monster.

And for the shocking play-by-play from Bumf***, Wisconsin, we take you to BuzzFeed News correspondent McKay Coppins:

ELKHORN, Wisconsin — In a jarring illustration of the chaos now engulfing the Republican Party, supporters of Donald Trump clashed bitterly with GOP leaders at a rally here Saturday — booing elected officials, heckling Paul Ryan, and angrily demanding greater establishment support for their beleaguered presidential nominee. 

The confrontations took place at Fall Fest, an annual party fundraising event held in Ryan’s Wisconsin congressional district. Trump had been scheduled to appear at the event in a show of GOP unity, but Ryan abruptly disinvited him Friday night after the Washington Post published a leaked 11-year-old video of the businessman lewdly bragging about groping women. Over the next 24 hours, a parade of high-profile Republicans condemned Trump, and several retracted their endorsements altogether, calling on the candidate to drop out of the race. 

As the program proceeded Saturday afternoon with politicians giving pro forma pep talks about the importance of voting in November, the audience in attendance — split between mainstream Republicans and rowdy Trump fans — shouted at the stage, and at each other.

Just as Paul Ryan finished speaking in Elkhorn... pic.twitter.com/6HtAqf3bGQ

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) October 9, 2016

OH, MY. We return you now to Bumf***, Wisconsin, for this breaking-news update and McKay Coppins:

When, early in the event’s program, Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel tried to address the recently leaked video that has sent Trump’s campaign into a tailspin, the crowd erupted in angry protest. 

“Get over it!” one heckler yelled. 

“Trump! Trump! Trump!” others chanted. 

Appearing taken aback by the reaction, Schimel made a brief nod toward support for the nominee — “Donald Trump will appoint judges that will defend our Constitution” — and then quickly changed the subject. 

Other elected officials became more combative with the audience. When Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner talked about how voters had been coming to the Fall Fest for years to support Ryan and other local Republicans, hecklers shouted, “Not anymore!” and, “I’m for Donald Trump!” 

“Why don’t you listen to what I have to say instead of interrupting me?” Sensenbrenner snapped. Soon, the 73-year-old congressman was in a shouting match with the Trump supporters in the crowd. “Listen to me, please,” he kept repeating, before ordering the audience to “clean up your act." 

By the time it was Ryan’s turn to speak, the mood had grown indisputably hostile. He took the stage to scattered boos, and shouts of, “What about Donald Trump?” and, “Shame on you!” 

“Look, let me just start out by saying: There’s a bit of an elephant in the room,” Ryan told the crowd. “And it’s a troubling situation … but that is not what we are here to talk about today. You know what we do here at Fall Fest? We talk about our ideas, we talk about our solutions, we talk about our conservative principles.” 

Trump supporters greeted the message with a chorus of boos and abuse. 

“Trump for president!” 

“Mention Trump!” 

“You turned your back on him!”

NOTE: Extremely NSFW. That's why the Donald is in such a jam   TAKING ITS LEAD from its brand-new lord and savior, Donald Trump, it would appear that the now-rogue Nixonstein's monster knows exactly where to grab the political party that gave it life.

Indeed. Sounds like a hell of a reality-TV series, doesn't it?

Freedom of speech for me, but not for thee

Above is a thing that actually ran Wednesday in the college newspaper for which I wrote and edited more than three decades ago.

The headline: Free speech argument should not be used to justify hate speech. The headline soft-sold the column, actually.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up off the floor. Obviously, The Daily Reveille at Louisiana State University ain't what it used to be.

Let me put it this way: I read Anjana Nair's column in the Reveille, but I'm having a hard time believing that a piece arguing against freedom of speech and the First Amendment -- and let's be clear, if you're against free speech, no matter how distasteful, you are against the First Amendment -- appeared in a newspaper that would not exist but for the linchpin of our Bill of Rights.

(Trust me. This is Louisiana we're talking about . . . and LSU. Without some serious constitutional badassery covering its 6, the Reveille likely wouldn't have made it past 1934. Actually, the Reveille almost didn't make it past 1934. Interesting story. Anjana Nair probably never heard about it.)

Milo Yiannopoulos

This . . . this because of Donald Trump, Republicans behaving badly and . . . and . . . Milo Yiannopoulos was coming to town! (Cue the panicked population of Tokyo fleeing from Godzilla.)

Apparently, Milo Whocaresopoulos is some sort of ragingly gay, alt-right media whore who specializes in Internet misbehavior and pissing progressives off. And he likes Trump.

And Trumpkins like him because all the right people really, really hate him. The latter group includes Anjana Nair.

So, allow me to throw some quotes at you from this opinion piece that I have a hard time believing actually ran in a newspaper at an institution allegedly devoted to unfettered inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge.

QUOTE:

"I once thought I loved free speech. As someone involved in media, the First Amendment was my best friend. That is, until I faced the reality that people, like they do to all good things in the world, abuse it and use it as justification for reckless and hateful behavior."

QUOTE:

"Walters says it is unreasonable to limit free speech just because someone is afraid of getting their feelings hurt. In the real world, he says, there are no safe spaces or trigger warnings. 

"Walters is partly right: To stop a message because it might offend someone is not a justification for censorship. What is justification, though, is the fact that the free expression of hateful ideas has led to an environment of tension between the groups who are perpetuating such speech and the groups who are targeted by it. This in turn leads to an atmosphere in which only the ones inflicting the harmful speech feel comfortable.

"Let’s be real: The only people who feel the need to defend their freedom of expression behind the First Amendment are those who are clearly misusing it as a platform to attack censorship in its entirety.

"Even Walters admits that there are limits to free speech, such as not being able to yell 'Fire!' in a movie theatre when there isn’t one. Why does that exception exist? Because it causes a sense of panic and fear when there’s no justified reason for it — just like hate speech."

QUOTE:

"When the First Amendment was written, it couldn’t have accounted for Twitter battles and social media showdowns influencing human opinion and behavior. It couldn’t have foreseen the existence of people like Yiannopoulos and Trump, who force us to define what abusive speech is." 

END QUOTE. (Thank God.)

Oh, mercy me. Pass the smelling salts; Generation Y has the vapors.

Really? Loutishness is a modern construct unknown to our forefathers?

REALLY???

Come now. Public reprobates, demagogic invective and "hate speech" hardly were unknown in 1789.

In fact, by Miss Nair's standards, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams should have been locked up for being mean in public, what with all the "hate speech" flying around during the campaign of 1800:

Negative campaigning in the United States can be traced back to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Back in 1776, the dynamic duo combined powers to help claim America's independence, and they had nothing but love and respect for one another. But by 1800, party politics had so distanced the pair that, for the first and last time in U.S. history, a president found himself running against his VP.

Things got ugly fast. Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward. Even Martha Washington succumbed to the propaganda, telling a clergyman that Jefferson was "one of the most detestable of mankind."

AND THEN Adams' people got around to l'affaire Sally Hemmings.

It may be a novel concept to those who cannot remember a time when "social media" didn't exist, but hateful people always have been quite effective at hounding the "vulnerable." Perhaps a bit more slowly than today, but effectively nonetheless.

The only difference today is that there seems to be a market for professional cranks like Milo Whateveropoulos to get onstage somewhere and say out loud what my generation's halfwits used to scribble in men's room stalls. Yet that so threatens our precious snowflakes on college campuses that they're willing to upend our entire constitutional order to stamp out societal angst.

Yeah, that should work out really well in reducing tension on campus.

The only conclusion I can draw from this column being published in an actual newspaper on an actual college campus is that today's morally preening hand-wringers stand as complete reprobates next to yesteryear's utter libertines. I think the following Oscar Wilde quotation is apt when considering the Trumpkins and Milo Whositsopoulos:

"I may not agree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to make an ass of yourself.”

COME TO think of it, it applies pretty well to this Reveille column, too.

Politics in the age of short-fingered vulgarians

  
My wife thought I was having a stroke.

There I stood in the Varied Industries Building at the Iowa State Fair, mouth agape, jaw slacked. My eyes must have been a little glazed over. I stared at the Republican Party of Iowa booth.

Actually, I stared at the Crooked Hillary photo booth. That stood in front of and perpendicular to the life-sized Donald Trump cutout, where bunches of good Iowa people were lining up to take a picture with the cardboard candidate.

I found myself compelled to take pictures of the people taking pictures, if for no other reason but to reality-check myself that this campaign -- this insane presidential contender -- was really happening, and that a formerly mainstream political party had entered the terminal stage of a decades-long descent into bat-shit madness.

THIS COARSE display . . . this supreme unseriousness and spleen venting . . . this is how the the government becomes delegitimized (see Obama Derangement Syndrome) and the country becomes ungovernable. This is how we lose faith in democracy, and how we cast off all our hopes for the future.

This is so beneath us as Americans. We are so beneath us, at least beneath our better selves, as Americans.

This is how everybody becomes The Other, and this is how opposing political parties become Lebensunwertes Leben. 

How damned sad that what's left of Republicanism sounds so much more serious in the original German.

The Real Donald J. Trump -- star of stage, screen, divorce court and bankruptcy -- would sound just as nuts in Classical Latin, alas.

As we were leaving the fair Sunday, I asked my wife whether this would be the last Iowa State Fair we'd go to without having to get a passport or obtain a visa. Would Iowa end up in the Republic of Heartland, while Nebraska joined with the Dakotas in the new Canadian province of South Manitoba? Would the United States still be united in 2017, somehow, despite Trump ginning up panic and rage among the booboisie about the "rigged election"?

Could be a hell of a "reality show."

Call it The End of the World as We Know It.

And we feel . . . pissed.

What is the candidate's position on bodily fluids?

I could be mistaken (no, not really), but isn't nuclear annihilation a pro-life issue?

Because now it's on the table, thanks to the Republican presidential nominee.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe today -- and this followed several minutes of various iterations of "Oh, my God! Oh, my, God! Oh, my God!" in the subtle manner of the four-star Air Force general, CIA director and National Security Agency director that Michael Hayden used to be -- host (and former GOP congressman) Joe Scarborough related the following. Quote:

Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times, he asked, at one point, ‘If we have them, we can’t we use them?’ That’s one of the reasons why he has, he just doesn’t have foreign policy experts around him.

Three times, in an hour briefing, ‘Why can’t we use nuclear weapons?’

End quote.

Comrade Trump

If you're not the kind of person who believes in divine judgment, or that nations can fall under divine judgment for their collective sins, maybe now would be a good time to start.

From Vox:

On Wednesday, Donald Trump did something extraordinary even for him: He called on a foreign power to launch an espionage operation against his chief political opponent, hacking into Hillary Clinton’s email server to find 30,000 emails she allegedly deleted. 

“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump said. “I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”

When Trump said it, it didn’t sound like a joke — especially in light of recent events. Over the weekend, Wikileaks released about 19,000 emails that were stolen from the DNC servers by hackers who were almost certainly linked to the Russian state. These emails included talk of a (never-realized) plot to attack Bernie Sanders on his religion, a revelation that exacerbated divisions inside the Democratic party and thus seemingly helped Trump’s political chances. 

All of this has raised one big question: What the hell is going on with Trump and Russia? 

The answer appears to be twofold. First, the Kremlin appears to be interfering in the US election in a way likely to help Trump become president. Whether or not that’s the intent of the meddling, that is the result. 

Second, Trump is deeply, weirdly pro-Russian.

I RECOMMEND reading the whole thing. Apart from saying that, I am too gobsmacked to comment.

Except for this: The only people crazier and more dangerous than Donald J. Trump are those Americans who would like to see him anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Why is that? Because when -- God willing -- Donald Trump is long gone after a resounding defeat in November, the aggrieved fools who voted for him will still be around, ripe to be exploited by the next dictator-in-waiting.

If on the other hand -- God forbid -- Trump wins, we will have no recourse but to again learn what Abraham Lincoln well knew when he gave his second inaugural address March 4, 1865:

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

THE WISDOM remains the same, only this country's sins have changed.