Are we nuts yet? I think I am.
Notes from the Cuckoo's Nest: Am I a Russian? Are You? And What about That Guy over There?
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/86024
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According to Engel's reporting, there are armies of Russians in front of keyboards cranking out this stuff in a concerted effort to get Americans to hate one another, mistrust one another, and generally lose faith in ourselves, our system of government, and our fellow Americans.
And it's working, ain't it? The Russians have a man in the Oval Office, a guy who loves Putin, loves the love letters he gets from Kim Jong Un, and is undermining our intelligence services, ignoring the threat to our democracy, and lending all his efforts to further divide this country until it cracks.
And it's cracking, ain't it? The evidence is written in blood, written in rallies, written in the miasma of corruption and barely-concealed criminality that covers the waterfront from pedophilia to presidential malfeasance and nonfeasance, from pardons to prostitutes to stripping away of regulations meant to protect us from pollution of air and water. Add to that the creeps like Tucker Carlson and the always-odious Ann Coulter, telling us that the threat of white supremacy is a hoax, or that even a mention of background checks by Trump is a blow against the empire.
And don't it just begin to seem that very real daily malevolence is at work here. We get up, turn on our computers or our TVs and up pops the latest shooting, scandal, or presidential pally boy and pervert found dead in his cell under the most suspicious of circumstances. How can we bear such times and live?
Can we trust what we read? What we're told by anyone anymore? I'm so gaslighted and fucked over by now that I'm beginning to think I might be a Russian agent myself. I do know I've spent a lot of time sowing division with things I write, so maybe I'm working for Putin now. Maybe it's not just discourse between citizens in a democracy now. Maybe calling out the racism and decrying the corruption and ugliness of the right wing is doing nothing more than furthering the progress toward the cliff we all seem to be heading for in this once-fairly-ok country Trump promised to make great again. You know, like back when black people were charged poll taxes or made to pass impossible tests in order to vote, or when they had to drink from separate water fountains, attend separate schools, or piss in separate rest rooms. Or back in those great days when women couldn't get credit in their own names unless their husbands co-signed for the spoiled bitches.
I gotta tell ya, I'm an old man now. I've been through the political wars since I was still in my teens. I've done my tiny bit to combat the right wingers across the spectrum of their perfidies and predations against minorities, against working people, against common decency, against the raids on Social Security and the assaults on sanity, the environment, and a more viable future on this planet. Like so many others, I was sickened and appalled by the massively wasteful war in Vietnam, the virulent and persistent racism, and the constant rip offs of the treasury. Like so many other people of good will who wanted so desperately to love our country, I was disgusted by Nixon and Kissinger, by the bumbling Gerald Ford who pardoned his boss and told us our "long national nightmare" was over. I was nauseated by Reagan's phony role-playing when he cast himself as an archetypical American hero, affable, likeable, and good natured, though he was a dark and maggoty figure, wriggling with deeply embedded racism of the kind he shared with Nixon in late-night phone calls to that pathologically damaged human being. Like many others, I lent energies to opposing the nuclear buildup of the '80s, opposed wars little and bigger, from the invasion of Grenada to the war in Iraq. I lived through decades being told that the Russians were coming, that they were not our friends, and they were not bearing gifts. I shuddered when Reagan made an on-air joke about launching nukes their way. I hung my head as I watched the dumbing down of the presidency under Reagan, then the bred-in-the-bone privileged stupidity of sub-mediocrities like George H.W. Bush and Dan Quayle, his hand-picked white bread VP, the dim-witted son of money who corrected a grade school kid who had correctly spelled "potato." I opposed Clinton's welfare reform bill, and went nuts when he signed off on repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act that would later help the bankers to pillage the country and bring the entire world to the brink of financial collapse when the big money thieves stole so much they nearly brought down the entire house of cards. And, like so many, I was sickened and appalled by the dim-witted George "Dubya" Bush and his merry band of neo-con henchmen and enablers, many of whom would later turn up again, undiminished, in the Trump administration. It was truly horrifying to see a man like Dick Cheney defending torture after getting us mired in Iraq, needlessly and criminally, even as his old outfit, Halliburton, pocketed billions for doing bad work and endangering American solders in the process. Like so many others, I remember Rumsfeld sending soldiers to Iraq in unarmored Humvees because that crooked administration was so eager to go to war they couldn't wait, excusing the lack of concern for the troops by saying "you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want." This was from a Secretary of "Defense" in charge of the most expensively funded military force in the world, where so much money disappeared without a trace.
And now, along with my fellow baby boomers, I went from diving under desks in grade school to now seeing Russians in the White House woodwork. Don't bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over to me.
I thought we'd seen it all, those of us who've been on this long strange trip since the Cold War. But now it seems like we ain't seen nothin' yet. Despite the craziness we've witnessed, nothing could have prepared us for what we've seen in the past three years, a massive exhibition of mind fuckery far beyond the imagination of the most gifted, addled, or paranoid writer of fiction. It's a screenplay that would have been laughed off the screen, with a cast of characters too bizarre to make it into a Marvel comic book, with a dastardly orange super villain with cotton-candy hair, a murderous Korean shrimp who writes him love letters, and cunning Russians attacking us at the most vulnerable points of our nation's original sins of slavery, racism, and distance from our ideals.
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Are we nuts yet? I think I am.
= new reply since forum marked as read
My late husband, who studied American history and its political structure, often said that the Presidency has much too much power. The Parliamentary system (as in the UK, Canada, Australia etc.) has a leader -- Prime Minister -- who is essentially the first among equals. He/she is elected leader of the Party by Party members and runs for election in a riding. If his/her Party wins the most seats, he/she becomes Prime Minister and answers to the House of Commons and the Senate. His Cabinet is made up of elected members. It works well.
OTOH, you have an elected President who is also Commander-in-Chief. You treat him like a king, and if he doesn't like what bills the House creates and the Senate passes, he has the power of veto. You have an electoral college which ignores a situation where Hillary gets more popular votes than Trump but declares Trump the President. You have very small states (population-wise) with the same number of senators that the very large states have. Your checks and balances fly out the window when state-gerrymandered districts elect a majority of Reps who are the same Party as your President and the majority of the Senate.
Yes, I know how this all came about -- politics is the art of compromise and the Founding Fathers made compromise after compromise. Founding a nation by means of revolution, rather than evolution makes for some unusual decisions that may seem eminently sensible and workable at the time. Aside from the Amendments to the Constitution, the President according to the Constitution is still essentially the King, and is treated like one (Ruffles and Flourishes, anyone?). The USA is often called a democracy, but it really isn't -- at least today it isn't.
And because it isn't, every American ally feels at risk. We don't sleep well at night, not knowing if we are, or are not, deemed a "security risk", with our exports tariffed to the max by your mad "King" and his idiot acolytes.
With apologies to anyone who feels insulted by this post.....
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It just takes patience and persistence.
The eye of the hurricane lies within.
Exactly! 
Now that republicans love Mother Russia. "Russia is our friend".
Times have changed.
Putting money into Trump was the best investment Putin ever made.
"... retired Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis said in May 2015 that among world threats “in the near term, I think the most dangerous might be Russia.”
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/dec/6/donald-trump-james-mattis-differ-on-vladimir-putin/
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Thanks for the good OP, reflects a lot of my feelings now as an old timer......
