“Hypocrisy, Inept, Sloppy, Full of Shit”

March 3, 2017.

“Hypocrisy,”  “Inept,”  “Sloppy”, “Full of Shit”.   Such expletives are now regularly bandied around the Internet news services when referring to our new Administration.  President Donald Trump, Vice-President Mike Pence, White House and NSA Advisor Steve Bannon, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson—all senior officials in the Trump administration, many with ties to Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak (member of the FSB=Russian intelligence service) and other senior Russian officials are under investigation and potential indictment by Congress.

Rex Tillerson had many ties with Russia through his leadership of Exxon-Mobil.  Attorney Jeff Sessions and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner both met with Russian ambassador and reputed spy Sergei Kislyak on occasions before the election.  Jeff Sessions denied such meetings, lying under oath to Congress in his deposition before being confirmed as Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in the United States.  Under tremendous political pressure to resign, Sessions has recused himself from current investigations occurring through the FBI and Senate/House Oversight Committees on National Intelligence and a Special Investigative Committee led by Republicans who are looking into allegations of Russian interference in the November, 2016 Presidential election.  It is well known the Russian’s hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails.  What is not clear is how much President Trump and his administration officials knew at the time.

Vice-President Mike Pence, in what has been called by many “the height of hypocrisy” is reported to have used his own private e-mail server for state business.  While not illegal under Indiana law, Pence is doing now what he accused Clinton of attempting to do, that is keep her interactions with the Clinton Foundation out of the reach of public accountability.  Pence is doing the same for his own emails, as there is no record he kept copies of his private emails dealing with state business and turned these over to state officials to archive.  The emails currently being discussed were recovered from state servers.  Pence is himself guilty of violating state law by not preserving his private-account emails pertaining to public business.

It is telling that this new Administration is now producing a “scandal a week.”  The real question to ask is “Who is running this horse and pony show?”  President Trump apparently tried this week to “make nice” to the American electorate, by softening his tone on Immigration, and offering to spend more on defense.  However, his initial proposals to pay for the military defense increase called for cutting money for the State Department and other discretionary areas in such a  fashion that senior Republicans termed his proposal as “dead on arrival”, even before the formal budget is submitted.  He is also planning to dismantle and to replace the Affordable Care Act (so-called Obamacare), with a leaner version, which in many minds means less coverage for those who most need this expansion of Medicaid.

President Trump may believe one speech will reset his relations with a restless electorate and an equally skeptical Europe.  President Trump may daily declare “I have never had any conversations with the Russians.”  However, no one believes him, since on so many occasions he has already contradicted himself so many times over, no one can tell if he knows the difference between the truth and a bald-faced lie.  In common parlance, President Trump and apparently now Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner are “full of shit!”  We will reserve the terms “inept” and “incompetent” for White House Advisor Mike Bannon.

In reasonable times, reasonable persons attempt to be reasonable.  Normally, a new president and his senior officials would be given “some benefit of the doubt.”  However, these are not reasonable times.  This President is hell-bent on instituting an alt-Right agenda based on his own peculiar view of the world and a new form of reverse racism.  His views are not representative of the majority of the American populous.  However, like the racist South who brought in negro slaves and justified their presence because of the wealth to be realized on short fiber cotton, so today, conservative Republicans and others watch as the Stock Market soars to stratospheric heights with new wealth being created daily, simply on President Trump’s promise of lowering corporate taxes and having less governmental regulations.  The view the rest of the world has held about the United States for many years that our representative democracy is tainted by our own self-interest is finally coming true in the Trump Administration.  The new President Trump cares only about himself, and about the country’s corporate wealth, power and prestige.  Trump and his Administration give lip service to rights of women, minorities, the poor and those starving for their next meal, but when they get right down to it, they really don’t care for anyone or anything other than retaining governmental power and generating corporate wealth.  The “trickle down” economics so popular in Republican administrations if replaced now with old-fashioned greed.  Trump considers this “doing the business”, which is okay for a department store, but distorts the governance of the country, no longer representing many of us, forgetting the promise for all of us “of the people, by the people, for the people.”  Such is the new American Way.  “Let me get my share of the wealth, and if anything is left over after I have finished eating, you can have my scraps,” says the Trump administration.
I fault this new administration for being inept with their rollout of new government policies, sloppy with the institutions of power, first abusing then recusing themselves.  So full of hypocrisy as to make even the most conservative Republicans cringe and hold their noses, the only thing of certainty is that the whole of this Trump administration is “full of shit.”  Normally this phrase is reserved for the worse of the worst!  In the case of this administration of President Trump, we struggle to find new words to describe this debacle of leadership and power!

It is sickening to watch such poor governance in such a great nation as ours!  It makes me ashamed to call myself an American.  This is the most shameful attempt at the execution of executive power and leadership ever foisted upon this country in my lifetime. President Trump is the worst President ever to arise in the history of this nation.

Initially, I thought to pray for the man in the hope he might find reformation.  Now, I simply pray for God to contain the damage.  Hazardous waste is hazardous no matter where it is placed.  It is better simply to be contained in impermeable rock, salt mines or if radioactive in layers of concrete.  For some waste, even hundreds of years is not enough to contain its poisons.  I am praying now for God to enclose this man and his administration in impermeable glass, surrounded by lead and concrete.  Then we will take this block of glass, metal and stone and carry it by submarine to the Mariana Trench and allow this block of glass, metal and stone which encloses President Trump and all his polices of government to sink down 10,994 meters to deepest bottom of the sea.  “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return!”  Return to the watery ocean from which your ancestors arose!  Only the words of such a eulogy will bring this tragedy of government to its fitting end!

May God help us, I pray! May God help us all!

Through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, in whom we make our prayers this day and every day which is yet to come.  In Jesus’s name, Amen.

“A Voice of One Crying”