Commentary
Aren’t we better than this?
Donald Trump appeared at a rally in Conroe, Texas on Saturday. Conroe is the county seat of Montgomery County about 40 miles north of Houston. It is described by Rolling Stone reporter, Steven Monacelli, who attended the rally, as “…one of the reddest counties in one of the reddest states… and it showed.”
Monacelli wrote, “When I arrived at the press check-in station, the first thing I saw was a merchandise vendor with a Confederate flag — the banner of a nation that lasted only 4 years before being routed out of existence…set up directly across from a wooden cross.”
The rally, part of Trump’s “Save America” tour, not only drew the usual adoring crowd, but also the entire panoply of Texas GOP elite, including Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Attorney General Ken Paxton, and State Senator Dawn Buckingham who, according to Monacelli, “all spoke glowingly of Trump [touting] their endorsements from the former president.”
According to Monacelli, Trump claimed in his opening “remarks” that the the Conroe rally was the biggest rally ever, that the fake media won’t turn their cameras around to show the crowd size and, repeated a false claim he made at a recent “Save America” rally in Arizona about a 29 mile long line of cars coming to the rally. Only this time it was 30 miles long! As the the crowd began to jeer at the press. Monacelli turned around to take a photo of the overflow crowd and “someone flipped me off.”
So, I guess in places like Conroe, enough is not enough.
With Monacelli’s reporting serving as background, the real horror show came during Trump’s “prepared” remarks.
As reported by The Washington Post’s, Aaron Blake, Trump “encouraged people to engage in massive demonstrations in jurisdictions pursuing criminal investigations against him over Jan. 6 and tax-related issues. Then, minutes later, he said that if he’s reinstalled as president, he would consider pardoning some of the Jan. 6 Capitol rioters.”
You’ve got to be making this up, you’re asking yourselves.
Get real, dear readers. We’re talking about Donald Trump here, America’s tin-hat, wannabe dictator/president for life.
Trump’s actual words regarding the January 6 insurrectionists:
“If I run and I win, we will treat those people from January 6 fairly — we will treat them fairly. And if it requires pardons, then we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.
And Trump called out the prosecutors from Georgia, New York and Washington, D.C., who are independently investigating him, saying, “These prosecutors are vicious, horrible people. They’re racists and they’re very sick—they’re mentally sick. They’re going after me without any protection of my rights from the Supreme Court or most other courts. In reality, they’re not after me, they’re after you.”
Those prosecutors are Fulton County (Ga.) District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine, are all African American women.
Trump told his cheering mob, if any of them “do anything wrong or illegal,” he hopes to see “the biggest protests we have ever had in Washington, D.C., in New York, in Atlanta and elsewhere.”
In other words, opined the Post’s Blake, “I might use my extraordinary potential power to free those who broke the law to support me, and I would like you to consider assembling en masse to again rise up against another injustice that has befallen me.”
As if one Trump-induced riot wasn’t enough.
While some wavering GOP stalwarts called out Trump’s treachery, including (shockingly) Lindsey “How the Winds Blow” Graham, Susan Collins and New Hampshire Governor, Chris Sununu, they were quickly and strongly beaten down by the Trumpster blonde heartthrob, Marjorie Taylor Greene (I thought only good witches were blond.), accusing Graham in particular, of “pretending to be a friend” of Trump while slamming the South Carolina senator for condemning rioters involved in the deadly insurrection.
Unlike the “not-so-good” folks in Conroe, along with Trump’s politician toadies like Greg Abbot, I don’t just think, I know, “enough is enough.” And, like the immortal, fictional news anchor in the 1975 film classic “Network,” Howard Beale who implored his viewers to shout from their windows, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Beale actually prefaced one of the most famous lines in movie history with this: “I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad,” going on to say, “So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’”
Beale acted on the bad things he saw around him. And his listeners joined him. To you like-minded readers out there, this could be our Howard Beale moment. I know you’re as mad as hell as I am. The question is what do we do about it?
Enough is enough!
Around the Block 
thou rantest…preaching to the converted…the unconverted don’t care…
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Yes. But in this case I’m asking the “converted” to do something. Fool’s errand, I guess.
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I do things all the time!!! I write letters to all elected officials, not only my own. I vote in every election. I contribute to Democrats running for office. I am certified to register voters. I will go back to do that on the streets of Palm Beach when I feel safe again. I sign petitions to elected officials. Come join me!!!
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Eileen, thanks for your comments; you are to be commended for all the things you’re doing. I do most of the same things. Unfortunately, the results of these endeavors aren’t what you, I and most like-minded people are hoping for.
WRITE TO ALL ELECTED OFFICIALS: CHECK. And how many times, beyond a canned response do you ever hear back from one of those elected officials?
VOTE IN EVERY ELECTION: CHECK. But how about those who can’t vote in every election due to the simple fact that Republican dominated legislatures are making access to polls and voting nearly impossible?
CONTRIBUTE TO DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES: CHECK AND DOUBLE CHECK. And not just to candidates running in my own elections. But beyond the satisfaction of trying to “make a difference,” the bottom line is that the small contributions of people like us pale in comparison to the dark money and the vested interests that are in the pocket of just about every GOP candidate. As a friend who is a prominent Democratic consultant told me, “Online fundraising has simply gotten out of control – it’s too bad.” Think –– Jamie Harrison in NC, Amy McGrath in KY, Theresa Greenfield in IA and many others in the 2020 elections. Despite hundreds of fund-raising emails with glowing poll reports, many of which I responded to with donations, all three lost by landslides.
SIGNING PETITIONS: CHECK. But shouldn’t the email asking for a petition signing actually include a petition? Lois Frankel’s latest petition signing email request DIDN’T EVEN HAVE A PETITION TO READ! Clicking on “SIGN,” directed the respondent to a contact form and a plea for money. And, even if the petition was there, in the real world, except to show that Lois is an activist, what good would it do?
Our democracy is in an existential crisis. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money, special interests, corrupt secretaries of state manipulating election results, a stacked SCOTUS, cynical, manipulative, evil Republicans like Mitch McConnell out maneuvering his Democratic rivals at every turn, mean that the honorable, but ultimately, ineffective actions like the ones above, are no longer effective.
Enough is enough does not just refer to what Trump, his acolytes and his mobs are doing. It also means that, in the crisis situation in which we find our democracy, conventional methods are not working. We must find a better moral, ethical and legal way to fight back! I wish I had the answer.
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I fear, though I hope against fear, that your cry is too little, too late. Sitting up here in Canada, what I see is many Americans don’t really fear Trump the way you and I fear Trump, Ted. They see him as a fool, right enough, but most fools amount to nothing, so they think Trump will amount to nothing. Aside from a heart attack, stroke, or ulcerative colitis, the only place Americans will be safe from Trump is if he is behind bars, for life (or until a Republican president gives him a pardon!). Allowing him to stay out of prison is the biggest mistake decent American will ever make. Please, America, don’t make it so!
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