Be The Power
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I don’t know. I just don’t know. I want to say we’re in the Final Days of the Trump Administration, but, alas, I fear that simply is not the case. I fear we’re going to have to suffer for a lot longer than any of us ever imagined. But the below video is interesting.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I’m willing to give Trump measured praise for managing to get Kim Jung Un to meet him, but I feel the whole thing could blow up in Trump’s face pretty quickly. By agreeing to meet Kim somewhere presumably on the Korean peninsula Trump is giving Kim exactly what he wants: respect on the global stage
Add to this the likelihood that Trump is completely clueless about the unintended consequences of his actions, and you the setup to a bad international relations joke. I have said many times before that during my in Korea, I noticed that problems were solved in one of two ways: either something really strange happens or there’s a fistfight.
Anyway, I still believe this isn’t over yet. I still predict it’s possible that a war would start between the US and the DPRK sometime in August. But we’ll see, I guess.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
These are the times that try men’s souls.
It’s possible that Stormy Daniels has, uh, “pictures” she got during her affair with Donald Trump. I am jumping to conclusions, but if those pictures are of Trump’s junk….lulz, nothing matters? I mean, would it really matter? Trump seems to have a God-like hold on his supporters, so the whole seeing Trump’s junk probably wouldn’t phase them.
I would like to think, however, that that might be rock bottom. That once we all get to see Trump’s junk that that would be it. Trump would still be president, still have the power to ruin everything, but psychologically, we would have reached the total be-all-end-all of how bad it could possibly get with Trump as president.
But nothing matters. That 35% of the electorate who would drink Trump’s Jim Jones Kool-Aide seem to control the country now, so we’re fucked. We all so very fucked.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
I only keep writing about this because it seems so obvious. It’s obvious that something like this is going to happen: Trump sometime between now and, say, August, will start a preemptive war with the DPRK. As Trump grows more comfortable with this power, he will look around and realize there’s an easy way out of the looming impeachment he will face once Mueller finishes his job.
Start a war.
And, given how Trump lacks any sense of human empathy, he won’t really care that starting a war with the DPRK will sentence about 1 million people to death. Add to this that 100,000 Americans are within range of the DPRK’s weapons and the reboot we had politically with 9/11 will look like chump change. Think of what we were worried about in early September 2001 and how we didn’t wake up from the post-9/11 grief period until just before the run up to the Iraq War.
Now imagine 10,000 American civilians — at least – coming home in body bags as part of a renewed Korean War and how that would draw attention away from TrumpRussia and how, generally Trump is completely incompetent. Trump could easily cruise into a second term should a war with the DPRK happen, regardless of the reason behind it. So that’s why I think we’re going to war with the DPRK between now and August. I say August because that would give the American military a few months to crush the DPRK and have the troops coming home in a big ass parade just around the time voters would go to the polls in November. At least, that would be the thinking of the Trump Administration.
The is little we can do about all of this, given the enormous power the American presidency has when it comes to starting wars.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
If you wanted to get all reflective about things, one might say that had Hillary Clinton won the Electoral Vote and was president now, things would actually be worse. I say this because Trump would have the best of both worlds — he could bitch an moan on Twitter all day about how bad things were, but wouldn’t have to actually do anything about it. Add to this how he probably would start Trump TV and you can see how things could be worse. And, what’s even worse, the same insane nutjobs who wanted to march on Washington and establish a deathcult in late October 2016, would be growing ever more hysterical.
As it stands, however, what’s going on is this: the Resistance needs time to rebuild its ranks of leadership. So, it’s going to be a while. The earliest anything is going possibly change is November 2018. Even then, between November and January, the lame duck session of Congress probably is going to cram in as many insane Federal judges as it can. But given that I think Trump is going to short-circuit the Blue Wave by starting a war with the DPRK between now and August, it could be much, much longer before anything changes. In fact, my big fear is the entire system is so broken that it could be a decade or more before The Resistance finally comes to power and even then everything will have changed so much that things simply won’t be able to snap back into place.
Having said all that, we need to think about that 35% of the electorate that continues to support Trump. It reminds me of the old SNL skit, “How’s He Doing” that had a round table of African Americans giving their views on Obama. I really think SNL needs to do a similar skit with Trump supporters. The issue is, and this is one I continue to struggle with: why is it so difficult for Trump supporters to see they’ve been duped.
This is not to say that they don’t have legitimate grievances, they do. They have a whole host of reasons why they should be upset with the existing order. I get that. But what I don’t get is their continued support for Trump personally.
And, really, the only thing that can give us any hope is that Trump doesn’t have any ideology other than winning the moment and whatever he tweets at any particular time. If he had an ideology he had thought through and was willing to defend, he would be a real danger to the Republic.
But, fortunately, he doesn’t have that. But what he does have as his fail safe is the ability to start a preemptive war with the DPRK. I still think that’s in his pocket. If things get too bad, he just arbitrarily starts a war with North Korea, kills about a million people needlessly and that’s that. We wake up in 2025 with President Tom Cotton getting sworn in.
Sadly, there’s no much we can do about it. I have proposed that the war with the DPRK will start between now and August 2018 and I have not seen anything to make me think otherwise. It has nothing to do with what is going on in Korea and everything to do with the continuing domestic crisis that is Donald J. Trump. A massive war with the DPRK will give Trump spectacular approval rating for a just long enough to prevent the Blue Wave from happening. That core 35% of the electorate who continue to support Trump no matter what will be the basis of a scary realignment of the American body politic as Trump becomes a war president.
And there’s not much we can do about it.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
If you want to change the national debate on gun control, if you want to save innocent lives, there’s a simple change of perspective that you can do that will help to caused that to happen pretty quick: make having an “A” rating from the NRA a badge of shame for a politician.
The reason why this is powerful is because it doesn’t cost any money. You just vow to yourself that something the whores in Congress believe is so cool is, in fact, pretty horrible. It’s the only way to combat the huge amount of dark money flowing into Congress from the NRA and their ilk.
You have to take a stand. You have to formulate some principles that you won’t waver from, no matter what. You won’t vote for someone with an A rating from the NRA. You’ll do what you can to support the efforts of the Parkland children. Tell all your friends that an NRA A rating is the worst thing a politician can have.
Get angry and don’t stop being angry until effective, common sense gun control is enacted. It’s the only way we can win this fight. It’s a battle that will take a long time and only end once we can claim total victory and lives are finally saved preemptively.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Sometimes, it seems as though the NRA is so powerful that the average person can’t do anything. I disagree. As history has shown us with what happened with the Anti-Masonic Party in the early 1800s, if the electorate decides collectively to do something, change can happen.
The party was founded in the aftermath of the disappearance of William Morgan, a former Mason who had become a prominent critic of the organization. Many believed that the Masons had murdered Morgan for speaking out against Masonry, and many churches and other groups condemned masonry. As many Masons were prominent businessmen and politicians, the backlash against the Masons was also a form of anti-elitism. Mass opposition to Masonry eventually coalesced into a political party. Before and during the presidency of John Quincy Adams, the United States endured a period of political realignment, and the Anti-Masons emerged as an important third party alternative to Andrew Jackson’s Democrats and Adams’s National Republicans. In New York, the Anti-Masons supplanted the National Republicans as the primary opposition to the Democrats.
Really, the closest modern thing I can compare what I suggest to is what MADD was able to do in the 1980s, but that was a lot easier for various reasons. I live in Virginia and the NRA ran attack ads against the Democratic gubernatorial candidate saying he had an “F” rating with them. I was like, “Wow, I’m voting for that guy!” So, if you really want to do something about the NRA, if you want to combat their power, vow to yourself you will never vote for anyone with an A Rating from the NRA. It’s a small, but powerful decision.
You’re going to have to kind of ignore the enormous power of the NRA propaganda. You’re going to have to say fuck that. Nothing they say or do will get you to vote for someone they support. Absolutely. It doesn’t matter where you live, if enough people take this pledge, eventually things will change.
I guess the point is, we have to take things into our own hands. Politicians live off the vote and enough people, on principle, refuse to vote for someone with an A Rating from the NRA eventually after a lot of bitching and moaning, Washington will get the picture.
But this won’t come easy. The NRA has a lot of power and the Trump Administration seems hell bent on imposing some sort of weird dystopia on America. But I still believe in American democracy, I still believe that we ARE a democracy.
I would also suggest you try to support the efforts of the teens protesting the NRA by not giving your kids grief if they walk out of school. But that is maybe a bit much for some people.
It’s times like these when I wish John Lennon was still alive. We really need him right now.
by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Dire times call for drastic measures and I think maybe we can learn a lesson from the origins of the Anti-Masonic Party in New England. Essentially, as I understand it, the people of New England got fed up with the shenanigans of the Masons in New England and vowed not to vote for anyone who was a member.
So, one could argue that America is ripe for a nation-wide political boycott of the NRA. In essence, if the populace simply collectively decided to not vote for anyone who took NRA money, maybe the pols in Washington would sit up and take notice.
Now, of course, this would not come easy. It would take just the right political moment. It does seem, however, that we’re careening towards just that type of moment. You can’t stymie the political will for as long and as absolutely as the NRA has without there being a folk backlash at some point. People on a individual level might eventually get fed up so much that they actually evoke real political change.
I don’t exactly have the highest hopes that this will happen. But you can always hope.
This is supposed to be extremely ironic. The music for this would be similar to To Sir With Love. It would be interrupted occasionally by gunfire. These lyrics did not turn out very well. I think I’m too angry to be poetic.
To Dana Loesch With Love
lyrics by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
please give credit if you produce or perform
that day of hiding under my desk in fear
has come and gone
but you now say I’m a crisis actor
exploited by the legacy press
looking for blood
all I can say is
to Dana Loesch with love
I watch you on my screen
with a scary scowl on your face
you’re hate personified I’m afraid
you taught me right from wrong
simply by watching you howel
if you told me to go to hell
I’d know it was the place for me
you’re as hateful as they come
if you told me to fuck off
it’d be an honor that’s for sure
the dystopian vision you feed your sheep
is enough to make me vomit
but there’s not enough gold in the world
for me to do as you say you hateful bitch
please shut up and vanish from the earth
if you told me to go to hell
I’d know it was the place for me
you’re as hateful as they come
if you told me to fuck off
it’d be an honor that’s for sure
[bridge]
Dana you shrew
don’t know what I’m going to do
wish you’d just go away
never to be heard from again
now I have to rebuild my life
the pain you have caused me is almost too much to bear
but I’ll get over it, I swear
I’m frustrated by how meh pop music is these days and I enjoy writing lyrics for no other reason than it’s relaxing, so you get this. It’s just me trying to tell a story in verse. You can be the judge as to how well I do. I have no beats, but I do like pop-rock songs.
Big Man On Campus
Lyrics by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
please give credit if you produce or perform
he hold his gun
thinks it’ll change everything
he’s going to rule the roost
the voices in his head said it was so
quietly walking to school
he can hear the bells ring
everything will change once it’s done
he’ll be on the top rung
he’ll be
big man on campus
at last, at last
big man on campus
at last, at last
he gets on campus
finds the spot he knows so well
things are going to endup swell
he begins to shoot with his gun
chuckling as the students begin to run
he’s got the power that he craves
people will respect him now
that’s a fact
because there’s no doubt
he’s
big man on campus
at last, at last
big man on campus
at last, at last
[bridge]
we’re all worried
as we hide in our classroom
when is he going to leave
will we end up dead
our we get to live
to tell the tale
thoughts and prayers
don’t mean shit
I’m afraid
we have to address the facts
make sure this can’t happen again
again, again, again, again again
when will there be no more
big men on campus
big men on campus
big men on campus
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