I heard today our President planned to order troops down to the border, maybe make a human Wall now that Congress won\u2019t fund a concrete or steel one. Yesterday I heard he wanted to force the Washington Post to register as a lobbying group. Two days ago he started a trade war with China. The day before that he called up the Russian president to congratulate him on his Big Win and maybe have him over for a pow-wow at the White House. The week before \u2026 well, the list goes on and on, one outrageous act or tweet or threat at a time, each on the heels of the next. <\/p>\n
Try to keep up with this guy. You can\u2019t. He\u2019s up in the pre-dawn hours, fingers flying over his device, threatening, bullying, ranting and raving. One day he\u2019s waging war on California, the next he goes ballistic about immigrants, same afternoon he goes after the mainstream media and fake news, a little later he\u2019s attacking somebody or some company he doesn\u2019t like, give him time to catch his breath he\u2019s calling out some Congressman he\u2019s got a derogatory name for, in between he\u2019s firing another cabinet member. It never slows down. It never stops. <\/p>\n
Democracy, in order to function properly, demands a bit of respect for opposing opinions. Demonizing the other side, well, that works for creating a dictatorship or a totalitarian regime. We\u2019re right, the others, lock em up! The news media, fake fake fake! Make em register as lobbyists, shut em down, lock them up too!! The political opposition, liars, crooks, lock em up!! The truth, there is no truth other than ours! <\/p>\n
Day after day the foundations of our experiment in democracy are under assault, death by a thousand pinpricks and tweets. We get numb to the outrage, we grow weary of what a year or so ago would seem unbelievable, we close our eyes and our ears, overdosed with all these attacks on our institutions. But the water is growing hotter, we just don\u2019t notice the incremental heat being steadily turned up with every lie, with every affront, with every firing, with every personal attack, with every violation of the norms of decency we no longer expect. By the time it\u2019s too late to jump out of the pot, we\u2019ll have no one to blame but ourselves. Dictators don\u2019t always come in with a coup, sometimes they come in with the stew.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I heard today our President planned to order troops down to the border, maybe make a human Wall now that Congress won\u2019t fund a concrete or steel one. Yesterday I heard he wanted to force the Washington Post to register as a lobbying group. Two days ago he started a trade war with China. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[927,928],"class_list":["post-9919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-degrading-america","tag-fascism-made-easy"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9920,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9919\/revisions\/9920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}