The content of his "character"

It's been a good long while since I posted here. But then this happened, and as usual the interesting times (in the worst Chinese sense of the word "interesting") we live in forced me to comment.

Donald J. Trump has always been a punchline to me. I considered him a self-absorbed, egotistic boor who I couldn't care less about decades ago when he started gaining attention for himself with his high-profile business dealings (more like business failures,but you know what they say about there being no such thing as bad publicity) and his crass acquisition of mistresses and trophy wives alike. I just couldn't be bothered to care about a man whose main purpose in life seemed to be putting his name on as many prominent buildings as possible because his ego was just that big. He was, on balance, a caricature of the crass, high-living tycoon that shows up in good satire and bad soap operas alike. And I was, at best, indifferent.

And then things changed. 

He got into politics. And eventually got elected President.

And then a whole bunch of other things came to light about him, and he went from being merely unsavory to being outright dangerous.

Donald Trump believes in a wide assortment of conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific woo and gives them a level of credence that belongs on a fringe web site. He's effectively used the United States government as a personal business marketing tool more than once, showed his contempt for Constitutional principles and nominated a number of sycophants and corporate lobbyists to positions in his cabinet and got rid of them when they weren't sycophantic enough for his liking.

He got in bed with wonderful international examples of authoritarian-to-totalitarian "leadership" such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Eun and did a number of things of things to insult or destabilize NATO, the European Union and individual allied nations. He uses his adult children as his personal public relations arm and is also dumb enough to personally involve them in his international and domestic political blunders. 

He makes himself out as a cartoonish ubermensch on Twitter, in reports on his physicals that read suspiciously like he personally wrote them and in assertions that he's a "very stable genius". And his racist, sexist and just plain assholish views and practices in and outside of his Presidency are just as well known.

Quite a few of these things are impeachable offenses while others are not, but regardless of whether he ends up getting impeached because of the Ukraine debacle one question remains, and it's a bad one:

How long will it take to clean up the damage he's caused?

Furthermore, will we be able to clean it up?

Rumors concerning my abduction by aliens...

...have been greatly exaggerated. But you might have given them more credibility in the two-plus months I haven't posted here.

An Open Letter (7/4/19)

The following letter was sent to the offices of Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth as well as Representative Jesus "Chuy" Garcia on July 3rd concerning the DHS Inspector General's report on CBP detention facilities in the Rio Grande Valley.)

Good afternoon. I recently had a chance to read the DHS Inspector General's report _Management Alert: DHS Needs to Address Dangerous Overcrowding and Prolonged Detention of Children and Adults in the Rio Grande Valley_ and was deeply disturbed by the conditions described in the report.

The repeated accounts of crisis-level overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate access to showers and hot food are disturbing enough in themselves, but the fact that the CBP's leadership attempted to deflect this criticism with a response that essentially says "this is the best we can do, given the circumstances" is no real comfort either. The CBP'S role is to detain illegal border crossers and then process them out to ICE within 72 hours of apprehension, not hold them in the equivalent of a overcrowded prison for weeks on end without processing. The fact that a good portion of these _de facto_ inmates are minors is equally disturbing. Likewise, the fact that I saw no mention of detainees being segregated according to possible criminal history is disturbing; are actual detainees with known criminal records or noticeable violent tendencies being segregated from the general detainee population, especially minors and women? Are such screenings even being made in the first place?

What is needed for improvement of these conditions is not merely increased funding of these facilities but thorough oversight by Congress. The Trump administration, as usual, can seem to range from a blase attitude to outright callousness towards this situation. The fact that they would prefer to bring tanks into Washington for an almost Soviet-style "salute to America" instead of working on comprehensive immigration reform speaks volumes about the administration's real priorities. It's apparently up to Congress to initiate positive steps to fix this issue. Please do your part in doing just that.

Thank you.