Watched Saturday Night Live hit job on me. Time to retire the boring
and unfunny show. Alec Baldwin portrayal stinks. Media rigging election!
4:14 AM - 16 Oct 2016
Tweet
Nothing funny about
tired Saturday Night Live on Fake News NBC!
Question is, how do
the Networks get away with these total Republican
hit jobs without
retribution? Likewise for many other shows? Very
unfair and should be
looked into. This is the real Collusion!
4:52 AM - Feb
17, 2019 Tweet
They are mutually exclusive, but they
shouldn’t be. For a man who castigates the duly-elected leaders of democracies,
purported allies like Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron, but
speaks admiringly of brutal autocrats, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North
Korea’s Kim Jong-un, perhaps this comes as no surprise. It is odd that in the
history of the United States, which has been embroiled in wars since its
inception, the greatest threats to our democratic republic have always come
from within. We seem to have come to a breaking point where either Donald
Trump’s vision triumphs and ends our system of democratic checks and balances
or Donald Trump is contained until he leaves office to give American democracy
a chance to revive.
We have not been this divided since
our Civil War era, an explosive internal struggle that almost sank the nation.
There are structural flaws that stem from the fact that our country was created
in an era when agriculture dominated commerce. Our Founding Fathers, mostly
landowning farmers, just did not trust the city-folks whom they felt would,
sooner or later, outvote their agrarian interests. With under two percent of
our nation’s workforce committed to farming, over 85% of our population living
in urban communities, it’s pretty clear that that reality is happening.
The very composition of half of our
Congress, the Senate, is based on land mass and not population. Tiny liberal
Rhode Island, with a little more than a million people, and sparsely-populated
conservative Wyoming, with around 600 thousand residents, each square off as
Senatorial equals – two per state – against the liberal 40 million population
California, the 20 million population New York and the conservative 25 million
Texas. Within 25 years, assuming continuation of current demographic trends,
that anomaly will be amplified as 16 states with 70% of our total population
will control less than one-third of the Senate.
Demographics also tell us that white
Protestant Americans – the core of Donald Trump’s base – are already a
minority. As the vitriolic “resistance” from liberal states and virtually all
large cities will attest, Donald Trump only represents his base and the
wealthiest greed-mongers in that one percenter constituency (the latter, aka
donors and supporters of sympathetic Super-PACs).
For this minority of Trump-base-constituents
to continue to dominate our political institutions – based-supported
Republicans control most state legislatures/governorships, the U.S. Senate, the
Presidency and all currently-nominated federal judges) – democracy must be
stopped. The base cannot tolerate a democracy that must, by sheer numbers
alone, marginalize their power to reflect their actual numbers, not the
exaggerated influence that our system of government has actually given them.
They need their strongman to force their agenda on the rest of us, to sabotage
anything that dilutes their power based on their obviously-dwindling percentage
of the total U.S. population.
Strongman Trump’s disdain for
constitutional “due process,” evidenced by his constant lambasting tweets
against any judicial decision that contradicts his policies, his belief that there
are no constitutional barriers against his usurpation of the
constitutionally-defined appropriations function of Congress (merely by
declaring a national emergency in the face of statistics generated within his
own administration that contradict almost every single stated basis for his
“wall” construction), and his declaration that mainstream media are the “enemy
of the people” are the platforms of a dictator-wannabe. His slogans are based
on lies, his firebrand political style has given rise to hate-groups willing to
come out of the shadows in open defiance of non-white values. How many hateful
perpetrators of violence against non-whites have referenced Donald Trump’s
words and policies as justification for their actions?
Yet Republicans cling to his coattails,
addicted to his failing policies because they voted for them while forcing
moderates in their midst to leave office, under their belief that they can no
longer hold national office without Trump’s endorsement and the support of his
base. Even though they wince as they vote, they continue to place re-election
over what they know is right.
As much as Trump rips most of MSM
(mainstream media), if the messengers of his populist propaganda arm – Fox News
where presenters like Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram are so
inebriated with their perceived power as spokespeople for Trump’s base – he
trembles in fear and finds ways to appease their directives. Nothing else seems
to move him. Oh, he explodes against even comedic depiction of him, even suggesting
that legal action should be taken against any network that would deign to mock
him.
We know his instrumentalities of
change include appointing cabinet-level personnel who have spent serious years
attacking their departments, often trying to abolish them, ready to defy their
legal mandates to serve the new master. He has appointed biased judges with
questionable sexual behavioral issues as well. He has fired even his own
appointees, when they do no do precisely what he wants (even if illegal), with
the greatest frequency in American history. His executive orders, often
substitutes for legislation he knows would never pass, live in a judicial
system that is under constant assault, struggling to preserve democracy against
a spate of clearly unlawful presidential commands.
And he loves raising the hackles,
firing up the hatred (“lock her up, lock her up!”) of his base in rallies and
through tweets. “Since announcing
his candidacy in the 2016 presidential elections to the end of his second year
in office, U.S. President Donald Trump has sent 1,339 tweets about the media
that were critical, insinuating, condemning, or threatening. In lieu of formal
appearances as president, Trump has tweeted over 5,400 times to his more than 55.8 million
followers; over 11 percent of these insulted or criticized journalists and
outlets, or condemned and denigrated the news media as a whole.” Stephanie Sugars, Research Assistant,
writing for CPJ North America (CPJ.org) on January 30th.
Even as Donald Trump once hosted NBC’s Saturday Night Live, he now believes
that they are part of a Democrat-driven conspiracy to discredit him and force
him from office. His first and latest anti-SNL tweets are reproduced above. The
latest was after SNL mocked his wall emergency on the February 16th telecast.
“This was the seventh tweet that Trump has
sent out blasting ‘Saturday Night Live’ since he hosted the show in November
2015 in the midst of his presidential campaign. But he’s lately been suggesting
that some sort of legal action should be taken against NBC.
“‘A REAL scandal is the one sided
coverage, hour by hour, of networks like NBC & Democrat spin machines like
Saturday Night Live. It is all nothing less than unfair news coverage and Dem
commercials. Should be tested in courts, can’t be legal? Only defame &
belittle! Collusion?’ he wrote on Dec. 16.
“Some presidents have taken ‘Saturday
Night Live’ with good humor. President George H.W. Bush invited Dana Carvey to
the White House after Carvey impersonated him on the show during the 1992
presidential campaign. In 1976, Gerald R. Ford all but embraced Chevy Chase’s
portrayal of him as a klutz by inviting the comedian to the White House and
even doing a cameo on ‘SNL.’” Daily Variety, February 17th. “Can’t
be legal”? “Retribution?” Is the First Amendment simply an inconvenience that
can readily dispensed with? Why is it that autocrats uniformly attack free speech
and the free press? Always. No matter that you might be liberal or
conservative, if you believe in a truly democratic form of government, you have
to know that Donald Trump does not.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I only hope that the
damage that Donald Trump has done to our nation, the world, its people and to
our own democracy can still be reversed.
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