by Jim Wright

American journalism is dead.

Or it might as well be.

They just can’t do it. They just can’t use the word. Just can’t do it.

by John Pavlovitz

At times in this life it can be a challenge to figure out who the bad people are, but sometimes they help you.

Sometimes they do the work for you.

Sometimes with their every vulgar, bitter word from their mouth, they testify to their personal malignancy and they make it easy to identify them.

Generally speaking, there are things that good people do and things good people don’t do.

Good people don’t refer to entire countries as “shitholes”—most notably countries that have given birth to our very humanity; ones that for hundreds of years have been colonized and poached and mined of their riches by powerful white men; countries whose people have been enslaved and sold and forced to come and build your country. 

Good people by any measurement we might use—simply don’t say such things.

Of course good people also don’t say they could grab women by the genitalia, either.
They don’t defend racists and nazis and call them “fine people,” days after murdering a young girl and terrorizing an American city.
They don’t brag about their penis size during debates, or suggest protestors at campaign rallies should be roughed up, or crack jokes about captured war heroes, or make fun of the physically disabled.
They don’t.

Good people don’t tweet anti-Muslim rhetoric in the moments immediately following a bombing in order to bolster a position.
They don’t leave American territories filled with brown skinned people without power for months upon months, after publicly ridiculing their public servants and questioning their people’s resolve.
They don’t erase protections for the water and the air, for the elderly, the terminally ill, the LGBTQ.
They don’t take away healthcare from the sick and the poor without an alternative.
They don’t gouge the working poor and shelter the wealthy.
They don’t abuse their unrivaled platform to Twitter-bait world leaders and to taunt private citizens.
Good people don’t prey upon the vulnerable, they don’t leverage their power to bully dissenters, and they don’t campaign for sexual predators.

But this President is not a good human being, and there’s simply no way around this truth.

He is the ugliest personification of the Ugly American, which is why, as long as he is here and as long as he represents this nation, we will be a fractured mess and a global embarrassment. He will be the ever lowering bar of our legacy in the world.

And what is painfully obvious in these moments, isn’t simply that the person alleging to lead this country is a terrible human being—it is that anyone left still defending him, applauding him, justifying him, amening him, probably is too.

At this point, the only reason left to support this President, is that he reflects your hateful heart; he shares your contempt of people of color, your hostility toward outsiders, your ignorant bigotry, your feeling of supremacy.

A white President calling countries filled with people of color shitholes, is so far beyond the pale, so beneath decency, and so blatantly racist that it shouldn’t merit conversation. It should be universally condemned. Humanity should be in agreement in abhorring it.

And yet today (like so many other seemingly rock bottom days in the past twelve months) they will be out there: white people claiming to be good people and Christian people, who will make excuses for him or debate his motives or diminish the damage.

They will dig their heels in to explain away or to defend, what at the end of the day is simply a bad human being saying the things that bad human beings say because their hearts harbor very bad things.

No, good people don’t call countries filled with beautiful, creative, loving men and women shitholes.

And good people don’t defend people who do.

You’re going to have to make a choice here.

Let’s play “what if?”

WHAT IF OBAMA HAD:

~an affair with a porn star

~paid off the porn star to buy her silence

~been accused by 19 credible women of sexual assault

~been accused by his former wife of rape

~been accused by a 13 year old of rape

~been caught on tape admitting how he enjoyed assaulting women

~cheated on three wives, once with a porn star three months after his son’s birth

~had kids by three women

~married an immigrant

~a father who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan

~spent one third of his time in office at golf resorts

~spent more on weekend and family vacations in his first year in office than the previous President did in two full terms—eight years

~taken money from a 9-11 fund claiming he was a victim

~been the first President in decades to refuse to release his tax returns, after promising he would release them after the election

~multiple bankruptcies, screwing thousands of businesses and vendors and investors

~been the subject of thousands of lawsuits

~connections going back thirty years to the Russian mafia

~bought the Plaza Hotel in NYC for $400 million and had it repossessed by the banks

~bought a yacht for $29 million and had it repossessed by the bank

~built 4 casinos at a cost of over $3 billion, filed for bankruptcies, stiffing contractors and employees

~started his own airline, never made a profit, planes and helicopters repossessed by the bank

~started companies dealing with mortgages, steaks, and vodka, all went out of business

~stiffed hundreds of suppliers, vendors, and contractors over the years in a host of projects and forced them to take him to court before he settled

~paid a $25 million fraud settlement to people who had “enrolled” in his phony University

~shifted kids cancer charity money into his business

~been sued by the federal government twice for housing discrimination, lost, and paid fines

~accused his campaign opponent of being “crooked,” even though the opponent had been investigated six times for “crooked” acts, with zero evidence found for each, resulting in no trials and no convictions; while he had gone to trial 1597 times in 30 years for “crooked” acts where evidence warranted a trial, and 236 times he was found guilty of “crooked” acts or settled cases when it was clear he would lose

~been sued over 3500 times over his 30 year career

~ignored security clearance warnings from the FBI about his daughter and son in law while giving them access to top secret files

~appointed an agent of a foreign power as the U.S. National Security Adviser

~invited top Russian diplomats into the Oval Office and gave them classified Israeli top secret info

~fired the head of the FBI and openly admitted he did it because that guy was getting too close to finding out how he had colluded with the Russians in throwing an American election

~threatened nuclear war with North Korea

~openly profited from his office by encouraging foreign government officials to stay at his hotels and resorts

~took millions from Russian oligarchs

~appointed one of his daughters an “adviser” and allowed her to make millions selling access to the White House with her line of foreign –made products and family hotels

~bragged about walking in on teenage girls naked at his beauty pageants

~bragged about wanting to sleep with his daughter

~campaigned openly for a Republican pedophile for the U.S. Senate

~insulted and ridiculed a Gold Star family

~attacked a Gold Star widow

~accused our troops of being thieves and “living the good life”

~attacked homeless veterans

~mocked, insulted and lied about Native Americans

~mocked and insulted a genuine American war hero and POW

~defended the KKK and the Nazis when they marched openly in Charlottesville, one of them driving his car into a crowd and killing a young woman

~went overseas and talked shit about America

~called America a hellhole

~attacked the judicial system, the DOJ, the CIA, the FBI and the State Department

~ignored reports from all 17 U.S. Intelligence agencies that the Russians had hacked an American election in his favor, and insisted there was no “proof”

~bragged about his “success” in Puerto Rico while people were still dying

~made it easier for the mentally ill to buy guns

~mocked and imitated a handicapped NYT reporter

~promised to hire only the “best people” and now has four of them facing federal indictments and pleading guilty to felonies with many more on the way

~proposed a budget that added $7 trillion to the debt and slashed safety net programs like Medicaid ($300 billion cut), SNAP ($213 billion), and disability programs ($73 billion), in order to provide his billionaire friends a trillion and a half dollar tax break

~criticized a security officer for not going into the Parkland school to face an AR15 with a pistol, and bragged that he would have gone in, with or without a gun—even though he claimed “bone spurs” as an excuse for avoiding the draft

~lied over 2000 provable times in the first year of his presidency

The Current Occupant has done ALL these things, with the list of jaw-dropping outrages growing daily. Yet 80% of Republicans still support him. Remember when Republicans and conservative pundits wrote long critical essays and went on TV to express their disgust with Obama when he had the temerity to put his feet up on the Oval Office desk? I do. 

We are in the process of normalizing this continuing shit show. The only way to stop it in its tracks is by showing up in force at the voting booth and saying, with overwhelming numbers, that THIS WILL STOP NOW.