An Underwater Mansion

The titanic vessel lurches and lists
All aboard know
Something has gone horribly wrong

The captain is mad
And has been mad
Since long before they left port

There's a mutiny on the deck
And no one can agree
How to right the ship

The captain deploys loyalist thugs
To quiet the objections
But the objections only grow louder

The crew beats each other senseless
While the captain watches
And cheers them on
While his vessel seals its fate
As an underwater mansion

The control tower radios the captain
Should we send help
The mad captain lies
And tells them
It's smooth sailing

The crew battles amongst themselves
While the ship submerges
The captain alone steals the safety raft
And escapes
Unnoticed

No one aboard the ship survived
Except the mad captain
Who lived to tell tales of his own heroics
Though nobody ever believed him

Opinion - Donald Trump Is The Plague

I didn't want to write this.  I initially dreaded it.  But I ended up enjoying it in much the same way I enjoy taking a shit.  It had to be done, and I felt a great sense of relief while doing it.  It's as if the news about Trump had me backed up for more than three years, and today I had to drop a massive political deuce.

I personally believe that an eight year Trump Presidency will set the U.S. back for decades in healthcare, education, infrastructure, election and judicial fairness, criminal justice reform, domestic relations, foreign relations and everything else that matters to a strong democracy.  Four years has been devastating.  Mistrust for the government is at all time high from both sides of the political fence.  Things aren't getting better, they're getting worse and they are going to continue to get worse until we get a new President.  Eight years would be an unmitigated disaster that I believe will set the U.S. back for decades.  The damage will be categorical and sweeping.

I got so sick of hearing about Trump that I was started trying to avoid political news like the plague.  How ironic that there is now an actual plague happening, and it is being made worse by political news made by Donald Trump.  Covid has been exacerbated by Donald Trump to the point that you could almost say that he, himself, is the plague for 1) not wearing a mask, and 2) not listening to Fauci and the other doctors (who've been studying viruses for 30+ years) about Covid response.

But Covid response is only one of the long list of grievances against Trump.  This only a partial list, and these are only the ones I could come up with off the top off my head.  These are only the things he's done since being President.  You be the judge.

Grievances:

• Appointing Betsy Devos
• Appointing Jeff Sessions
• Appointing Bill Barr
• Affiliating with Roger Stone and then bailing him out of prison (when Stone was sentenced to prison for lying under oath, withholding documents and physically threatening someone to cover up for Trump.  Corruption at the deepest and highest levels.)
• Appointing Mike Pence
• Appointing Brett Kavanaugh (even though he ruled against Trump on the tax returns, which was great)
• Still no sight of his tax returns (he's been giving excuses for years)
• Failed Covid response (ignoring Fauci and other doctors, causing a second spike in Covid)
• Charlottesville (There aren't good people on both sides.  There are racists and anti-racists.)
• Still no gun law reform, even after countless mass shootings (Including schools.  Trying to give teachers guns instead of reforming gun laws?  NRA lobbying.)
• Openly encouraging racism and police brutality (posting "White Power" video on Twitter)
• Elderly neighbors screaming and fighting with each other over political disagreements started by him
• Countless public tirades
• Disrespecting female reporters
• Not reading briefs (including ones about Russian plots to kill American soldiers)
• Funneling government funds to family members and campaign donors
• Failure to label KKK and white nationalist groups as terrorist organizations
• Failure to adopt anti-lynching statutes
• Hiding in a bunker during the BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd
• Failure to address criminal justice reform (and trying to set it back by appointing a racist Attorney General in Jeff Sessions).  Private prisons, kids in cages in ICE custody, marijuana still on list of Schedule-1 narcotics, systemic police racism and brutality, overcrowded prisons - nothing done to address these issues.
• Kicking migrant university students out of the U.S. during a pandemic (after most, if not all of them went through a fiercely competitive application process to get here.  Some of them could have gone to any university in the world.)
• Mass manipulation by lying and distorting the truth to the media
• Taking political advice from Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other conservative wing nuts rather than expert advisors
• Cowtowing to Putin and Kim Jong-un
• Promoting an anti-malarial drug for Covid with no proof that it actually works (he allegedly owns a stake in the company which produces the anti-malarial drug, but we don't know because we haven't seen his tax returns.  How convenient.)
• Rigging elections (gerrymandering voting districts, making it difficult or impossible for people of color and other political opponents to vote)
• Appointing right wing idealogues to the judiciary at the behest of Mitch McConnell
• Publicly insulting respectable public figures and their families (John McCain, to name one)
• Attempting to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act during a pandemic (Take health care from people with a deadly virus going around?  It's as if he's purposely trying to kill people.  No doubt that blacks and other minorities would be disproportionately affected by this.  This is the work of a sociopath.)
• Committing a treasonous and impeachable act by threatening to withhold U.S. aid from Ukraine on the condition they investigate Joe Biden's son (the fact that he is still in office after this shows how deeply corrupt the political system is).
• Calling Covid "Kung Flu" as if it were a joke.  (It's not.)
• Berating legitimate journalists and calling them fake news when they ask him legitimate questions he can't answer

Again, this isn't a complete list.  This is just off the top of my head.  I may have to keep adding to it, but I hope to God not for long.  Tell everyone you know to vote for Joe Biden this November.  It's literally a matter of all of our health and safety. 

This is no game.  We need a new President, and it's urgent.