What’s Wrong And What Isn’t
POST 1281
The White House Correspondents Dinner
A highly armed shooter sprinted past security people. He was stopped before he could hurt others. That is the only good news about what happened.
The far bigger issue is that the President of the United States is and has been promoting American violence going at least as far back as the Central Park 5 case in 1989. We can reasonably attach the current assault to Trump’s violence promotion. He urges his supporters to beat the hell out of protesters, to attack journalists and he slyly slips in references to the Second Amendment as “remedies” for his detractors. Why shouldn’t the WHCD intruder have the same remedy available to him?
Trump sent his ICE thugs to attack American citizens, legal non-citizens and undocumented people. There have been many deaths in ICE’s detention prisons and on our streets, all done at Trump’s direction. Inviting him to speak at the WHCD seems like a foolish normalizing of his attacks on the First Amendment and his violations of the personal safety of others. Bad idea.
After inciting the January 6 violence that killed and maimed, he pardoned the convicted seditious conspirators (insurrectionists), leading us to believe that there is not and never will be accountability for those who do violence against others and against our country, if their pardons serve Trump well. And he uses the power of the presidency to ignore laws and start wars.
Just what did anyone believe would happen when the President of the United States himself condones and promotes violence?
We have always been a violent country, regardless of self-serving claims about peace, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, all of which disappear in the face of an armed assailant. We are now a thugocracy led by a thug. Nothing good can come from that, unless one thinks violent attempts at murder are goods thing.
We have well over one gun per citizen distributed about our country and somehow the puff-up types think this is good. I invite them to ask the survivors of any of our mass murders, loved ones of those who so easily commit suicide with a gun, murdered bystanders when the 7-11 is robbed and victims of drive-by shootings if they agree. I bet our president thinks the threat of such violence is a good thing.
Beyond that, too many of our media folks, many who were in attendance a the WHCD, allow themselves to be led along like sheep. They don’t do a Joe Wilson “You lie!” even though nearly everyone in the banquet hall and those who weren’t there know Trump lies, cheats and steals as easily and as often as he breathes. Instead, they fail to report simple but ugly truth.
This last comment for this section is from Karla Von Huben:
I suspect that most people are going to think this [WHCD violence] is fake, just like the ‘attack’ in Butler that resulted in no scar on his ear. I also think it’s going to backfire bigly. I’m just so sick of this lunatic I could scream. Or cry. Or throw things.
She ain’t wrong.
Closing In – Maybe
The 1973 War Powers Resolution is a plain language act that was triggered by Richard Nixon’s secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia in 1969-1970. The Act makes clear that no President may send our troops to war without the consent of the Congress. But that consent not only hasn’t been granted for Trump’s war, it hasn’t even been requested.
Sec. 2, (c) of the Act states,
“The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.”
Trump cannot identify any immediate threat to the U.S. posed by Iran and none of the other authorizations apply, either.
Sec. 5 (b) clearly states,
Within sixty calendar days . . . the President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces . . . unless the Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such sixty-day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States. [all emphasis mine]
None of those “Unless” exceptions exists, so Trump will have pull our troops out of Operation Epic Blunderor get Congress to formally authorize his by Friday, May 1. Of course, that will require a Congress with a spine.
Republicans hold majorities in both the Senate and House and they could stop him from causing yet more senseless deaths and carnage. But Republicans are despicably obsequious little rodents. They may cave to Trump’s demand for the right to bomb whomever, wherever, using the pressure of his twin threats of:
- Them being blamed for losing Trump’s epic folly, and
- Them getting primaried in November.
If you listen in a quiet area you can hear their little rodent knees knocking.
Regardless of how they go paws up for Trump, he will do the equivalent of invoking a fictitious Bavarian law from 1198 AD and he will invent a quotation from the Magna Carta to claim his right to murder Iranians and anyone else anywhere, anytime he “feels” like it to justify his unjustifiable war or to blow up little boats in the Caribbean.
This is going to get even more moronic and far more deadly. And at this point, failure is an option. We The People will know Trump is to blame, even as he rage tweets against the “horrible people” in Congress and the vile journalists.
Sadly, he’s statutorily wrong, but this spineless Congress won’t do anything to stop him.
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* Bill Barr, Trump’s last attorney general in his first administration, was a strong proponent of a “unitary executive,” as were many other fascist wannabees. Now that their favorite fascist and his cadre of billionaires, as well as his sycophantic little rodents have succeeded in making billions of people around the globe miserable, we have to wonder what percentage of them still thinks a unitary executive is a good idea. Maybe we should just tax every one of them down to middle class wealth, just as a unitary executive could.
The time for action is NOW!
Keep standing up,
speaking out
and taking action, like:
- – Register voters
- – Give to the ACLU
- – Train to fight ICE
-
Count-down Timer
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To The November 3, 2026
Mid-Term Election
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