“The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.” – John F. Kennedy

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no-one representing public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agenda or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystal and nervously consulting horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true; we slide, almost without noticing, back into the darkness.

“The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound-bite (now down to 10-seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on Pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.” – Carl Sagan

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.” – Isaac Asimov

“You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant.” – Harlan Ellison

What’s wrong with America? A huge topic, right? Well you’ll be relieved to know that this article isn’t going to be a rehashing of tomes like Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’!

It’s true that America wears it’s faults on it’s sleeve:

It’s tendency towards isolationism.
It’s suspicion of clever and educated people.
It’s self-serving foreign policy.
It’s levels of poverty.
The National “Guns don’t kill people” Rifle Association.
The impending health and obesity crisis.
It’s poor food standards.
It’s incarceration rates.
It’s homicide rates.
The half-million or so ‘medical bankruptcies’ every year.
The lobbying power of big business.
It’s falling educational standards.
The heavily funded climate-change denial lobby

And sadly, altruism doesn’t come naturally to a lot of Americans. I’m constantly seeing on Quora, question like “why should my healthcare contribution go to helping someone else?” and “Why should my hard-earned taxes support some unemployed layabout?”.

Nor does the US government act in a more enlightened manner. An awful lot of what’s wrong with the world today is due to self-serving US foreign policy. There was no altruism involved when they invaded countries like Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Cuba, Panama and Grenada; and continue to meddle in the affairs of Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ukraine, Palestine, etc.

And as the richest nation on the planet, the topic of foreign aid should be a source of national embarrassment. The UN suggests that industrialised countries contribute around 1% of their GDP to helping poorer countries deal with poverty, famine, disease, etc. In a list of the top 20 nations and their foreign aid contributions, the USA is in last place with 0.17%. Sweden tops the list with 1.40%, and Britain is 6th with 0.71%.

And foreign aid isn’t just altruism… it doesn’t take much imagination to see how the problems besetting the poorer nations could lead to civil wars, displaced populations and other humanitarian crises. All of which can destabilise whole regions, often with global consequences.

Anyway, these issues are comprehensively addressed elsewhere, so I’m not going to talk further about them. But they are perhaps symptoms of the deeper malaise that I am going to talk about, and that is the thread of sleaze and corruption that runs through US politics.

About the author.

I would describe my politics as centre-left, but more than anything, I am radically anti-radical! I don’t think that Marxism, communism, fascism, isolationism, totalitarianism, religious fundamentalism, or racial supremacism have ever solved any problems, or made the world a better place. Nor have xenophobia, sexism, booking-burning, and the sort of intolerances espoused by both extremes of the political spectrum – not just the far-right.

My love affair with America and American politics is more than 50 years old, going back to the Nixon/Agnew years. It also involved me living and working there, as well as travelling extensively, on and off, over a similar period.

These are my credentials, and I would argue that they have given me a comparatively neutral and objective view of American society and it’s politics.

US Politics

Firstly, we need to acknowledge that politics is no longer a level playing field; the entire planet is shifting to the right. And for no better reason than it suits big business. The left wants to put checks and balances in place, to protect shareholders, the environment, public health, etc. Big business resents this as it potentially impacts profits, so it buys politicians with campaign contributions (aka legal bribes), it has a huge influence on the media, and it also uses its money and power to change public opinion, and in doing so, subverts the democratic process.

From a global perspective, the aims of the Democrats (Liberals) and the Republicans (aka GOP, or Grand Old Party) have been so similar that traditionally, elections have been more to do with personality than anything else. Most people would struggle to link the party to people like Truman, Eisenhower, FDR, etc. The separation between them has always been paper thin; the Democrats may be more protective of the environment and the welfare of ~~USthe~~ citizens, but both parties are strongly pro-business, they both support a strong military, and they are both trying to make America a better place.

If you’re in any doubt, this is a GOP election manifesto from the 1950’s.

Sadly, this was probably the heyday of the Republican party, and arguably close to the heyday of America. For the last 40 years, under the influence of people like Newt Gingrich, Mitch McConnell, etc. the Republicans have slid progressively to the right; and under Donald Trump, so much so that to a current Republican supporter, Eisenhower’s 1956 platform probably looks more like a liberal manifesto.

So we should probably acknowledge that the Republican party of the 1950s is gone, perhaps never to return. Right now, the entire planet is shifting to the right. And for no better reason than it suits big business. The left wants to put checks and balances in place, to protect shareholders, the environment, public health, etc. Big business resents this as it potentially impacts profits, so it buys politicians with campaign contributions, luxury holiday, and other incentives, and it has a huge influence on the media. It also uses its money and power to change public opinion, and in doing so, subverts the democratic process.

Here’s a couple of examples:

An article in the Scientific American showed that the fossil fuel and related industries “…funnelled $558 million to almost 100 climate denial organizations…”. The result is a lot of people have been persuaded that global warming is a left-wing plot.
In 2017, US president Donald Trump was persuaded to pull the USA out of the Paris Accord on Climate Change. This decision came at the urging of 22 Republican senators in a letter to the White House dated May 25, 2017. Records show that between them, those Republicans received nearly $32 million in campaign contributions from the energy sector and $18 million from the oil and gas industry.

The distance between the ideologies of the two parties is quite significant, and there is a recent tendency by the Republicans to treat the Democrats as America’s real enemy. Not Russia, not China, nor Iran, North Korea, etc. This is dangerously divisive, as Americans are becoming increasingly aware. It is also the point where they crossed a line between being pro-America to being pro-party. Recently Arnold Schwarzenegger had a falling-out with Trump supporters for this very reason… they are putting party before country.

All of which makes it a tough sell at election time for the far-right. Who would vote for the party that wants to deregulate big-business and remove environmental protections, but then reduce social welfare, and affordable healthcare? Who would vote for the party that ignores the needs of the poor and working classes, but then give tax-breaks to the uber-rich?

The answer to this dilemma, which we saw in the 2024 election, is smoke and mirrors. And a complicit right-wing media.

To stand any chance of getting elected, they need to persuade people that they are still the best party for the average US voter, and also that they represent the interests of Christian voters. So they are forced to get ‘creative’, and a far-right Republican party is necessarily predicated on lies.

The average voter

Having positioned themselves on the far-right, the only way they have a chance of getting elected is by targetting unsophisticated or less educated people, primarily in the red states; and confuse their priorities. They tell them things like… our sovereignty and culture is being threatened by immigration… “let’s build a wall to keep foreigners out”. They tell them that “the woke liberals are undermining American values”. And “The Democrat paedophiles want your kids to go to drag shows”. The real issues that face these communities are things like poverty, health, employment and education, which Republicans plan on doing nothing about, so in essence, the Republicans must persuade these people to vote against their own best interests.

But this strategy worked in 2016 and again in 2024, so clearly they know their audience.

The Republicans are also aware that educated voters tend to vote Democrat, and so to this end, they’ve declared themselves to be “against higher education and critical thinking” alleging that “it undermines parental authority”.

These are not the actions of a party even remotely interested in ‘Making America Great Again’, and certainly not reminiscent of what made America great in the first place.

The end result is there for everyone to see (but sadly, an awful lot of people don’t see it):

Four of the five states with the highest poverty levels are red (Republican) states.
Four out of five with the lowest poverty rates are blue (Democrats).
Four out of five of those with the worst education are red.
The five states with the best education are all blue.
Four out of five states with the highest incarceration rates are red.
Four out of five with the lowest incarceration rates are blue.
All five with the worst healthcare are red (and ten of the worst eleven).
The ten states with the best healthcare are blue.

And two more stats that should be an embarrassment to the Republicans,

The five states with the highest Covid death rate are all red.
Eight of the ten states who rely the most on federal funding are red.

Consider this last statistic for a moment… the states most likely to vote for policies such as reducing social welfare, affordable healthcare, maternity benefits, etc., are the states that get the most federal aid.

Check out this chart of per capita federal aid by state.

Sociologists refer to this as cognitive dissonance. Political historian, Timothy Snyder came up with the term, Sadopopulism – A political strategy or occurrence that promises the people everything they want to hear, but which actively hurts them. Also known as voting against one’s own best interests.

This is a situation that the GOP have engineered, and clearly one that works well for them. And as long as voters in the red states remain poorly educated and unsophisticated, and they are susceptible to right-wing rhetoric, this situation will probably continue. The GOP needs these people, but it’s clear to most neutrals that they’d be better off under a Democrat government.

Christian voters

The Republicans have also been successful at creating the illusion that the GOP is a natural fit for Christian voters. And in this, some branches of the American church also have a lot to answer for. They are complicit in the deception of encouraging churchgoers to vote for a party who are the antithesis of Christianity.

If Jesus were amongst us today, He’d be preaching peace, love, tolerance, helping people less fortunate than ourselves, and other ‘socialist’ values. He would be unimpressed with modern GOP values such as greed and acquisitiveness, white supremacy, gun ownership, and the wilful neglect of the poor, the sick and the homeless.

I imagine Jesus would find Trump’s MAGA Republican party to be a complete abomination.

So with this carefully constructed support base, only one more thing is needed to (artificially) maintain the Republican Party’s viability. and that’s a propaganda mouthpiece to tell everyone what a great party they are, and how appalling the opposition is. Cue Fox News (see below).

Obviously, no-one expects politicians to be saints; the ability to tell plausible untruths is practically a prerequisite for the job, especially when it comes to things like high-level diplomacy, homeland security, and protecting the populace from things they don’t need to know. And I’m not talking about the easily disprovable schoolboy lies that Trump tells; I’m talking about the subtle lies and misdirection that a great statesman (like a world-class poker player) routinely uses.

But the Republican party executive branch have taken untruths and misinformation into the realms of sleaze and corruption, and frequently fall foul of the law. Checkout these figures:

A little arithmetic shows more than 200 indictments for GOP administrations, compared with 2 for the Democrats.

Clearly, Democrat voters hold their politicians to higher standards than Republicans. And it’s hard to imagine that the Democrats would ever choose someone like Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.

So… let’s examine the idea of Republican party corruption chronologically by president, starting with Nixon:

Richard Nixon:

His choice of VP, Spiro Agnew was investigated under suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion, tax fraud and taking ‘kick backs’ from contractors. He eventually pleaded ‘no contest’ to the charges of tax fraud and resigned.There’s no suggestion that Nixon was implicated in any of this, but he did choose him to be his VP, and presumably had him vetted, so he must accept some of the blame.

Then there’s the Watergate scandal. Again, it’s not certain how much Nixon knew ahead of time about the burglary of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters in the Watergate building, but it was done at the behest of his administration, so he must at least share some of the responsibility. And there’s no denying his part in the later attempts to cover-up the burglary, which led to his impeachment and resignation.

Two investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post uncovered the details of the whole scandal, and Carl Bernstein told CNN in 2003 “It was not about a break-in, a single break-in, it was about a pattern of illegal activities involving beating up members of the political opposition physically, stealing their memos, wiretapping political opponents, breaking into offices of psychiatrists, firebombing think tanks.”

Ronald Reagan:

Ever heard of October Surprise? I hadn’t, and when I eventually read about it, I could feel my eyebrows rising and thinking “how the hell did they get away with this one?”

But let’s back up a little. Firstly Ronald Reagan was the first US president to go the ‘populist’ route, and telling people what they wanted to hear. Carter was trying to align America with the rest of the world on things like metrication, and address America’s poor environmental record. Reagan’s election platform was “we don’t need these ‘tricky’ foreign metric systems”, and as far as the environmental issues were concerned, “there’s nothing wrong that can’t be fixed with a little American ingenuity”… exactly what the electorate wanted to hear.

But the October Surprise was different order of nastiness. It was a Republican conceived idea to win the 1980 election. Jimmy Carter was in office and about to face Ronald Reagan in the election. About that time, Iran held 52 US hostages, and the feeling amongst Republicans was that if the Carter administration managed to get them freed, he patriotic fervour that would ensue would hand Carter the election.

So what happened? The Republicans secretly sent envoys to Iran, and promised them weapons in exchange for guarantees not to release the prisoners until after the election. The Republicans were so desperate for power that they were arming America’s No. 1 enemy. And it worked… Iran got their weapons, the hostages were not released in time, and Reagan won the election.

Then there’s the Iran-Contra scandal, where Reagan sanctioned the selling of massive quantities of weapons, again to Iran, who at the time were engaged in a conflict with America’s then ally, Iraq. The proceeds from these sales were sent to the Contras in Nicaragua to help in their fight with the popular, socialist Sandinista government.

So that’s twice that the Republican party did secret deals involving supplying weapons to America’s enemy, Iran. This wasn’t just corruption… in any other country, this would be called treason.

George W Bush:

His election win in 2000 against Al Gore was arguably due to gerrymandering, voter suppression and other chicanery. There’s no evidence of GWB’s personal involvement, so he had deniability. But he won the election because the State of Florida was finally awarded to him, and even though Al Gore won the popular vote, the US’s complex electoral college system meant that Florida was the tie breaker and so he (Bush) won the election.

But there are many stories of black voters being turned away, votes erroneously going to Pat Buchanan, Jeb Bush (GWB’s brother) illegally declaring thousands of votes as ineligible, claiming (wrongly) they were from convicted felons. Finally, the incomplete Florida vote was certified as accurate by the secretary-of-state (Katherine Harris) who in a major conflict of interest had been appointed by Bush’s brother Jeb.

Donald Trump:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.”
– H.L.Mencken (b. 1880 – d.1956)

What can you say about Trump? He’s known worldwide for his complete lack of dignity and gravitas, his failed businesses, his charity scam, his name-calling, his disrespect for America’s closest allies (whilst cosying up to Putin and Kim Jong Un), his tacit support for white supremacists, his philandering, his denial of his 2020 defeat, his failure to welcome Biden to the White House, his sanctioning of the insurrection.

As then there’s his famed braggadocio:

“Nobody knows more about technology than me.”
“No one reads the Bible more than me.”
“There’s nobody that’s done so much for equality as I have.”
“There’s nobody who feels more strongly about women’s health issues.”
“Nobody knows more about taxes than me, maybe in the history of the world.”
“Nobody’s ever been more successful than me.”
“Nobody knows banking better than I do.”
“Nobody’s bigger or better at the military I am.”
“I am the least racist person you’ll ever meet.”
“Nobody knows more about trade than me.”
“I can be more presidential than anybody. I would say more presidential, and I’ve said this a couple of times, more presidential other than the great Abe Lincoln.”

Who but someone with severe personality disorder would say these things? And we know about his fragile ego. Even though he won the presidency, he couldn’t stand the idea that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016. Nor the idea that Obama’s Inauguration Day crowd was bigger than his. He had 100+ campaign-style rallies during his first term of office. And the Russians wrote the book on how to ‘play’ Trump by massaging his ego and seeming to agree with him. These are not desirable traits in the supposed ‘leader of the free world’.

But I do admit that he (Trump) does seem to have a sense of irony. As the person who made 30,573 fact-checked false or misleading claims whilst president, he called his social media site Truth Social! And as the president who added $7.8 trillion to the national debt, gave tax-breaks to the uber-rich and did nothing for the poor and the working classes, and generally diminished America in the eyes of the world; his mantra to his support base is Make America Great Again.

You could almost admire his gall, but what about the sleaze?

Well let’s start with the Russian collusion that arguably got him elected. Trump is fond of saying the Mueller Report exonerated him, but actually it does nothing of the kind. It describes 126 ‘inappropriate conversations’ the Trump campaign had with Russian Intelligence, but it concluded that there was insufficient evidence to recommend criminal proceedings, which Trump interprets as proof of his innocence. In actual fact Robert Mueller was later forced to say “if we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

There are many other suggestions of corruption by Trump; here’s one by Avaaz.

“Purchases of both Trump’s Scottish courses were sealed despite speculation of money laundering in Panama. Around half of the buyers involved in his Panama Ocean Club were from Russia and a key investment player was “notorious fraudster David Eduardo Helmut Murcia Guzmán”. A report by Global Witness indicates that while Trump struggled to obtain loans in the US and was selling off high-end real estate, his Panama project made him the beneficiary of Columbian drug cartel money.”

There has never been a less ‘presidential’ president. As well as showing a lack of respect to other nation’s leaders, he mocked a disabled journalist, and is trying to legitimise name-calling in US politics… amongst many other slurs, he called President Biden ’senile’ and VP Kamala Harris ‘retarded’.

His first response to the Covid Pandemic was to say “it’s a Democrat hoax”, and then to underplay the severity of it with comments like “The Coronavirus is very much under control” and “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down”. He was slow to introduce lock-downs and mask-wearing mandates, and constantly undermined Dr Fauci and the CDC experts with his uneducated opinions. Some people estimate Trump’s handling of the crisis led to 400,000 unnecessary deaths.

He denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, started more than 60 court challenges… clearly aimed at his support base, because he knew that he had no evidence to support his claim.

He was caught red-handed trying to subvert the democratic process. During an hour-long conference call, Trump tried to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”.

He knowingly triggered the January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol Building, which essentially was an attempted coup d’etat to stop the certification of Biden’s presidency.

He wanted his VP Mike Pence to support him and declare the election invalid, and when Pence refused, his effigy was hanged by Trump supporters in front of the Capitol Building during the insurrection.

Trump is the only US president to have been impeached twice. Once for ‘abuse of power and obstruction of Congress’ when he was being investigated for Russian collusion, and once for his role in the 2021 insurrection.

After he left the White House, he took box-loads of classified documents back to Mar-a-Lago, arguably just for the bragging rights, but who knows what else someone of Trump’s character might have done with them?

He is now a twice convicted felon, and his legal team appealed the convictions in the hope of dragging-out the legal process long enough to get elected, and stay out of jail. And sadly for everyone, it looks like it worked.

Trump is a career con-man and remains a toxic, divisive influence in America, and unfortunately an inspiration to all the unprincipled, bottom-feeding politicians in other countries. According to most political commentators, his presidency between 2016 and 2020 was considered the worst of all time.

And hot off the press, something the US Supreme Court sat on for as long as they could.

“Prosecutors lay out new evidence in Trump election case and accuse him of having ‘resorted to crimes’”

Full article here…

https://apnews.com/article/trump-jack-smith-election-supreme-court-0b9969b480036bb1f7c61a73980d406c

The fact this same person is now heading back to the White House adds up to either a sad indictment of the US electorate… or the success of the GOP tactics of confusing voter’s priorities.

The role of the media

In most industrialised countries, the traditional role of the media has been to keep the public informed, and to keep politicians honest. In America there is no federal authority to maintain ethical standards in the media. The news outlets are left to decide for themselves how ethical and/or accurate their reporting should be. The result is this:

It shows as we all know, that different outlets have different political biases. But if you check out where outlets like Fox News, OAN, Newsmax and Infowars are in this picture, you’ll realise that not only are they biased to the far-right, but their position near the bottom indicates that their ethical standards are low, and their reporting is unreliable. By comparison, the left-wing mainstream media tends to be centre-left rather than far-left, and they are mostly in the top half of the chart, implying reliable reporting.

It seems that the centre-left voters hold their preferred media channels to higher standards than right-wing voters. They have little time for opinion, rumour, or gossip, and are more inclined to say “give me the facts and I’ll make my own mind up”. Right-wing supporters on the other hand are clearly happy listening to opinion based journalism from the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. The right-wing press is far more likely to lie, and to fabricate news items, than the left wing press.

Fox News’s chosen mission is to actually misinform their viewers, and spread propaganda rather than news. Instead of keeping their politicians honest, for the last 8 years, they have chosen to tell viewers lies and distortions about (for example) what Biden has done to the economy, employment, immigration, etc. Blaming him (for example) for the inflation that, due to the impact of Covid, and OPEC manipulating oil production, has beset ALL industrialised nations.

They also choose to spread all the lies and outpourings that come from Trump’s fevered imagination. In 2023, they were made to pay nearly $800 million to one company, and are currently embroiled in multiple other cases where they have defamed people and companies by pursuing Trump’s claims that the 2020 election ‘was stolen’.

None of this would matter if the Fox News and Co. were ‘cult’ outlets with low viewing figures, like the far-left equivalents, but unfortunately Fox News is by far the most watched news channel on US TV.

We know that Fox News lies because they admitted in a libel defence that a) They are not a news organisation, and b) That their hosts lie, and you would have to be unreasonably stupid not to realise that.

And yet, according to Pew Research, 93% of Republican voters cite Fox News as their primary source of political news! We must conclude that a large percentage of US voters are happy to be lied to… presumably as long as those lies conform with their prejudices!

So four years on, despite all his known character flaws and his various failings, Fox News has almost single-handedly engineered a win for Trump in the 2024 election. By giving plausibility to Trump’s lies, they are effectively brainwashing their target audience… the unsophisticated Republican voter.

Trump owes everything to Fox News trashing the Democrats, but when a newspaper has the temerity to criticise Trump, he declares that the press “… are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

Conclusions

It is beyond dispute that the Republican party is more corrupt than the Democrats, and often lacks any ‘moral compass’. They lost the moral high-ground, probably 50 years ago with Richard Nixon, and since then, with any number of quasi-treasonous acts, have made no real attempt to regain it. They remain a viable party only because of: 1) their ability to distract people from what’s really important, and vote against their own best interests, 2) the lobbying power and financial might of Big Business, and 3) a lying media in the form of Fox News.

Fox News is similarly lacking in any scruples, and are a de facto propaganda mouthpiece for the Republican party; a combination that has echoes of Joseph Goebbels and the German Nazi Party of the 1930’s. And given that: 1) everyone knows that they lie, 2) 93% of Republican voters get their political views from them, so clearly don’t care that they lie, and 3) they are the most watched news channel in the US… they are both influential and subversive, and it’s difficult to see where the next Democrat victory is going to come from.

Furthermore, the Republican party have demonstrated time and time again, that they will put party before country to get their chosen candidate into the White House. Something that cannot truthfully be said about any recent Democrat administration.

The world now watches with trepidation as Trump becomes POTUS #47. The world political situation continues to deteriorate with North Korea sabre-rattling, China/Taiwan facing-off, the Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Hamas conflicts dragging-on, and now the Syrian situation further destabilising the middle-east.

Furthermore, if the authors of Project 25 have their way, the US will slide even further to the right, and America will become unique in the industrialised world in putting the needs of business ahead of the needs of its people. They propose a bleak, dystopian, ultra-capitalist future with even less in the way of social welfare, affordable healthcare and civil rights than they have now. Where business is unfettered with regulations for worker and environmental protections, and there are no federal agencies such as the FDA, FAA and NOAA. They want Christian belief taught in public schools, a total ban on abortion and contraception, an end to marriage equality, a ban on ethnic and gender studies, and on all references to slavery. It’s easy to foresee a ‘brain drain’ in reverse, where the most qualified and employable people leave the US for countries that care about their citizens.

Climate change is upon us, and no longer a subject for debate, and it’s consequences are beginning to bite. Unfortunately, as we approach the point of no return for the planet, the next US president and the most powerful man on the planet, doesn’t believe in climate change, and promises to do everything in his power to undermine the global progress that has been made.

What the world wanted from the US election was a steady hand on the tiller. Instead we have Donald Trump, self-declared expert on every subject, who in reality is an intellectual pygmy, who’s fragile ego can’t stand being upstaged (think Anthony Fauci during the pandemic), so as he prepares for government, he’s appointing mediocre/unqualified yes-men in all critical government positions.

At the moment, there are around 7 billion people re-evaluating the Unites States; the country, the political system, the constitution, and the people.

Approximately half the voters chose someone known to be a liar, fascist, braggart, rapist, multiple philanderer, sexual predator, and convicted felon; over a young, intelligent, morally sound, admirably qualified Democrat challenger to be their next president. Ultimately, they were either conned (see my comments about Fox News above)… or they were not.

If they were conned, one is forced to conclude that half the US electorate is gullible, stupid or wilfully ignorant.

If they were not conned, then they must approve of Trump’s character and his values.

To honest, I’m not sure which is worse.

As a postscript, I have to say there’s something very wrong with a constitution that prohibits convicted felons from voting… but allows them to stand for president!

All in all, the prognosis for America, as well as the planet couldn’t be much worse.

And my 50-year love affair with America is over.