Month: October 2017

The Opposition

The Republican Party is imploding.  Ana Navarro, one of my favorite Republicans, tweeted the other day, concerning the exodus of conservative Senators Bob Flake and Jeff Corker…

Will last sane Republican left, pls take Reagan’s portrait & turn-off the lights?

CNN recently published Say goodbye to your Republican Party, an opinion piece by Kurt Bardella, also about this exodus, and specifically Steve Bannon’s role in it, summarizing…

And now the Republican Party as we knew it is gone. It is a thing of the past. There is no going back. The silence of the majority has eroded the moral fabric of the Republican Party.

And just to bring the point home for me, a very dear friend of mine had this to say, and I literally could not agree more…

I understand political compromise to get the closest one can get to a representative of one’s wishes, but I’m not willing to compromise on basic integrity, honesty, truth, and decency.

The Republican Party, if not imploding, is definitely changing. And not for the better.

I had hoped that one of the bright points of the current presidency might be a reckoning within the GOP.  That when forced to take sides, enough of them would chose what was right over what was expedient.  A few have, but many have not.

I’m losing hope that the few remaining Republicans with principles have any hope of retaking control of their party. From the recent resignations, it appears they are too.

I also hoped this might lead to a party split, and/or the formation of a new conservative party, one for REAL conservatives. But I fear that’s not happening either.

It seems the people who call themselves “conservatives” (quotes intentional) are perfectly fine with a party and leadership devoid of integrity, honesty, truth, and decency. They seem perfectly happy with the abandonment of facts, knowledge, rationality, expertise, and science. They are quite comfortable with dismantling any and all aspects of the First Amendment, just so long as you don’t do anything even tangentially related to the Second Amendment.

None of this I can abide.

And that’s not even starting in on the “nationalism” dog whistling that targets anyone who isn’t a straight white Christian male citizen. And while not all “conservatives” are giddily embracing this new bigotry, many are.  But more importantly, the ones not welcoming this are remaining silent, or willfully ignorant, of its existence.  For me, this silent complicity is just as bad as active participation.

This I cannot abide either.

I’m at the point where I’m ready to do the unthinkable, and join the opposition, even if only as a temporary, “enemy of my enemy” sort of thing. Truth is, I already have, I just haven’t announced it publicly yet. I wasn’t quite sure how I would explain it. Well… I guess I just did.

Therefore…

As long as men like Donald Trump are in power, as long as men like Steve Bannon shape policy, as long as men like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan stand by and do nothing, and as long as true conservatives no longer feel welcome in the “conservative” party, I will do anything and everything I can to support the opposition.

So I did.  I joined the opposition.

When I renewed my driver’s license a few weeks ago, under the section for updating my voter registration, for the first time ever, I checked the box next to the Florida Democratic Party.

I hope this is temporary.  I very much would like to go back to my previous “No Party Affiliation”.  Or even join a viable third party that might rise from the ashes of the current GOP.  But for now, anyway, I am a Democrat.

God that feels weird.

But the world became a much weirder place on June 16, 2015, and even more so on November 8, 2016. And it hasn’t gotten any less weirder yet.

Because here’s the thing.  Sometimes you can’t stay in the middle, sometimes you have to pick a side.  Sometimes you have to stand up and be counted.  Sometimes the not making a choice is making a choice.  Like RUSH said…

You can choose a ready guide
In some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide
You still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear
I will choose free will.

Okay, so that doesn’t fit the situation exactly, but you get the idea.

You Can’t Trust the Media

You’ve heard this before, probably a lot lately.  Fake News!

Trump supporters have a whole toolkit full of excuses for their president’s behavior, from “he speaks his mind” to “he’s still new to the job”, but one of the popular excuses I’m hearing lately is a little troubling, and it goes something like this…

Oh, that’s just the media, you can’t trust them, you can’t believe anything they say.

Okay, let’s stop and look at this for just a moment, I promise this will be brief.

Is the media a profit-based enterprise driven by an agenda that has nothing to do with the truth?  Yes.

Does the media use sensationalism, hype, and exaggeration to attract viewers/readers/eyeballs?  Yes.

Does the media frequently present things in a way that makes whatever it is look worse than it really is?  Yes.

A big fat outstanding “YES” to all of the above, and more.  But…

There is one thing the media uses, a tool of the trade, if you will, that they cannot alter for their own benefit, even though they may try.

Facts.

Facts have a lives of their own, outside of the media, they can be corroborated and verified independent of the entities reporting them.  A fact is either true or it isn’t (which is to say it is not a fact), and because we have the entire sum of human knowledge available at our fingertips, this can usually be determined quickly and easily.  Hell most of them are on videotape.

It doesn’t matter what spin a reporting organization puts on it, it doesn’t matter how far left or right they lean, at the core of what they are reporting are facts.  Or made up bullshit.  And guess what, it doesn’t take long to figure out which organizations deal in facts (no matter how honestly or dishonestly), and which organizations have no interest in actual facts, choosing instead to make up their own “alternatives”, for readers/viewers who also have no interest in actual facts.

So, no matter what the story is, look past the sensationalism, look past the bias, look past the hyperbole, look past all the other media circus nonsense, and pull out those little nuggets of facts buried there at the bottom.  Use multiple sources, covering the entire spectrum, from left to right, and eventually you will see that, although the spin may be diametrically opposed, those core facts are still there, unchanged.  Living a life of their own.

The part you cannot trust is the analysis of those facts.  You can’t trust the spin.  You can’t trust the sensationalism.  You can’t trust the editorializing.   But… facts is facts.  You can trust facts.  The one thing legitimate media does reasonably well is vet their facts.  Partly because it’s far too easy to disprove false facts these days, partly because they suffer a huge loss in reputation when they get the facts wrong.

So…  You can’t trust what the media says about President Trump?  Damn right you can’t.  But that’s not the end of the story.  Know this… What the facts say about President Trump – that’s reality.  And no amount of tinfoil lining in that red baseball cap will change the facts.