I hate it when right wing defenders of President Trump, usually on Fox News, describe their political opponents in the Democratic Party as “liberals” or “leftists” or “progressives”.  Few things could be further from the Truth, except perhaps, as truth is defined by the protagonists of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984.  “Liberals”, “leftists” and “progressives” believe in the rule of law, constitutional government, equity, equality, honesty, good faith, toleration and most of all, in peace.  Of course, the terms liberal”, “leftist” and “progressive have been turned inside out and like almost every other sociopolitical adjective, their meanings have been drained and replaced by their antitheses.

Sanity and common sense seem to have become as irrelevant as truth in many parts of the world but exaggeratedly so in the United States, especially among the so called “mainstream media”, the Deep State and the Democratic Party, especially as it relates to the current “impeachment craze”.

Of all the issues on which to focus for such a process in today’s world, especially after the Russiagate hoax, none could be more bizarre than to focus on classifying a request to investigate partisan election meddling and apparent corruption as impeachable offenses and then to classify the release of appropriated funds as a bribe, while simultaneously screaming that delay in their release was extortion.  To an objective observer (few and far between in the United States today), the only partially sane explanation would be that the aforementioned “mainstream media”, Deep State and Democratic Party are so terrified at what such investigations might bring to light that appearing “idiotic, incoherent and ridiculous” is vastly preferable to the truth, and that any and all means to at least delay but hopefully derail any such investigations is worth any and all risks.

Some context.  Immediately following the Obama administration’s successful coup against the democratically elected (albeit corrupt) president of the Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, United States Vice President Joseph Biden was appointed as proconsul (an apt description based on historical precedent and current geopolitical realities).  Immediately following such appointment, his son Hunter, recently cashiered from the Navy for drug addiction (a young man with a long history of disastrous personal decisions and embarrassing conduct) was appointed to the board of directors of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company mired deep in allegations of corruption, despite Hunter’s having no experience in either energy or the Ukraine, an appointment which immediately netted him a generous fee of between $55,000 and $83,000 per month.  It was not a do nothing arrangement as Hunter dutifully intervened with the State Department, then under the leadership of Hillary Clinton, on Burisma’s behalf, and even more meaningfully, his dad, Vice President Joe Biden, forcefully intervened in having the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Burisma, Viktor Shokin, fired proudly boasting publicly that he had accomplished that task in a mere six hours by threatening to withhold a billion dollars in aid.

The utter incoherence of asserting that no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens has been legally proven when daddy Biden shut off a related investigation using clearly extortive threats to get the investigator removed, while simultaneously arguing in the House of Representatives’ “purported” impeachment investigation against President Trump that his delay in delivery of aid to the Ukraine constituted bribery and extortion, seems crystal clear, even if underlying “facts” remain safely ensconced.  That multilevel hearsay is considered evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors by Mr. Trump while investigation into the numerous “molehills” of evidence against the Bidens are considered “verboten”, even if cumulatively they appear a mountain even Muhammad’s faith could not move, defies common sense.  And yet, peddled with massive repetition and high volume hysteria by purported journalists who seem to feel their role is to obfuscate rather than find the truth, they are leading way too many American voters into buying such “literary” poison (the genre probably being fiction) generously gifted to them as fake Kool-Aid.  Admittedly though, I have no idea why Kool-Aid became synonymous with cognitive dysfunction in the first place, so my apologies to Kool-Aid everywhere.

Trump derangement syndrome can’t just be a spontaneous mass psychosis although it certainly matches the symptoms of such a phenomenon.  It began before he was elected and, with irony piled on irony, satire on satire and hypocrisy ascendant, followed the assertion by the leaders of the “mainstream” media, “Democratic” Party and Deep State immediately following one of the 2016 presidential debates, that candidate Trump’s refusal to pre-accept the results of the 2016 presidential election amounted to High Treason.

Have they no mirrors?  Are we as a human collective as stupid as they believe, or at least hope?

I do not agree with many of Mr. Trump’s policies although I have to admit many have been successful and would have been much more successful, had he not been opposed at every nook and cranny by the most disloyal opposition in United States history.  I do not agree with them because I believe they merely treat symptoms rather than causes and thus, like any good psychosis, after a time the causes will come back to bite us many times harder.  I totally disagree with his ludicrous pro-Israeli-anti-Iran policies, his anti-Cuban-anti-Venezuelan-anti-Nicaraguan and now anti-democratic-Bolivia policies. The only policies with which I agree involve the necessity of avoiding a return to the Cold War and instead, developing long term positive strategic and tactical relationships on all fronts with Russia and China as well as eliminating the utterly reprehensible interventionist foreign policy followed by his most recent predecessors.  The latter seem to be the reasons why his opponents feel he must be removed at all costs, regardless of the consequences to United States constitutional government, world peace or the survival of the human race.  His immigration proposals are logical in the context of the closed immigration system currently in place, one which his opponents previously advocated but now, for  cynical political purposes, refuse to reform hoping that the related suffering will add up to electoral opportunities for Democratic Party candidates.  Personally, I am an advocate of a much more open and efficient immigration system based on demographic as well as moral, ethical and humanitarian realities.  We need more, not less immigrants in order to support our social security system, but we need an immigration system based on policies properly executed and enforced, one fair to all applicants and not just benefiting those who refuse to abide by the rules.

I despise the political polarization into which the United States electorate has been herded, herded through “identity politics” which rather than solving real problems, exacerbate them, polarization setting race against race, culture against culture, gender against gender and class against class instead of uniting us all.  It is sickening that those most responsible for the growing climate of hate and hateful speech are the ones most responsible for creating it, and that they claim to represent the political left, when, as I indicated at the beginning of this diatribe, few things could be further from the truth.  I agree with most of the policies of the new purportedly radical wing of the Democratic Party, things such as free education and health care for all and the need to protect the environment, but those espousing those positions do so in so inept a manner that they make their adoption less, rather than more likely.  If I were a cynic, I’d believe that they do so deliberately in order to enable them to claim they support such policies while doing everything possible to assure that, economically, things remain the same.

Hmmm, perhaps I am a cynic.

Given the total dishonesty of the “mainstream” media and the conversion of the polling industry from an accurate predictive tool into a mechanism of political propaganda, perhaps things are not as utterly ludicrous as they superficially seem.  Perhaps normal citizens are, by and large, cognitively unimpaired and resistant to the deluge of fake news and propaganda to which they are abusively subjected.  Perhaps we are not in the “… you can fool all of the People all of the time, or most of the People some of the time …” stages to which crafty old politico “Honest” Abe Lincoln alluded, and perhaps we will throw the rascals out, or at least enough of them to make a difference, in the next general Federal elections.

But I’m not holding my breath, although as I look at my purple face in the mirror, … perhaps I am.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2019; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia although he has primarily lived in the United States of America (of which he is a citizen).  Until recently he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at http://www.guillermocalvo.com.