We were better

There has not been, in my lifetime, ANY verified evidence of widespread voter fraud, anywhere in this nation. Statistically, there has been zero impact to any election, that has even had proven voter fraud. The immigrant (including the illegal immigrant community) is statistically much less likely to commit crime, especially violent crime, than any other segment of our population. The military cannot do policing at the border, it is against 18 USC 1385 (Posse Comitatus Act). Ask anyone you know in the military, literally every one of them gets trained on this. The law prohibits them from making arrests, assuming policing powers, conducting lawful searches or use of force against US citizens outside of the confines of a US military compound.

These are the facts. I don't care what you think about Russia, or what you think about Trump. But, please, for the love of God and all that is holy, at least educate yourself before you just accept the Sinclair/Faux News/Trump/MSNBC/CNN line. Most of it is demonstrably untrue, or in other words a BIG FAT LIE. You can support all of Trump's tax cut, tarriffs, deregulations, that is all policy and those are the consequences of elections. Even the fornication and low dealing is just personal stuff that is not my business in anyone else's life, so I don't care about Trump's. But don't make yourself accept the lies. Not when there is verifiable information, supplied by the government THAT TRUMP RUNS, that he/they all ignore. It is extremely telling about you, forget about what it says about Trump. You are what you stand for.

Standing for bad or good policy is just politics. Whatever, it cycles as the years roll. Standing up for lies, for plain fabricated nonsense, believing it, no matter what evidence is presented, because you heard it come out of their mouths, is not their fault. They are bad people for knowingly lying, for spreading stupid and false and hurtful things they know are not true. But, what you do with and how you react to that information is about you, not them.

That is where you get into your morals, your internal being. Refusing to accept facts because it disturbs your views is what has gotten us here, on both sides of politics. And, it is getting to be time that it starts getting called out. Data (fact) does not support any of that temper tantrum/rant/campaign rally/stream of consciousness we saw today. A statements not backed up by facts is how a lie is defined. Just like saying all corporations cheat at taxes and pollute the environment. That is a lie. Used to be, lying was wrong and grounds for removal from office for Congress, Presidency. We just have kind of accepted that it is normal. We did this, and we are letting it degrade daily.

What does it say about us, that our President flat out lies, in public, over stuff that does not matter. Our Congress does nothing, or worse, covers for him, tries to fabricate "facts" to back up the lies. It doesn't work. Didn't work for Clinton, won't work now. We are better, we deserve better and we should demand better. We get what we accept. And we have accept much too low a standard for far too long.

Nothing will improve, regardless of election outcomes, unless we demand truth, responsibility, clarity, transparency and results. Whether the Democrats or Republicans win, whether they all get voted out and it is all Independents, whatever, unless we demand better of them, we just exchange the chess pieces, we don't change the game.

Again, if the POLICIES are you cup of tea, that is fine, vote for them. But, don't vote for liars to implement them. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU! If anyone had doubts about that, I would think this last year and change ought to have made it clear. How many of you have seen any change in your pay check from the "tax cut"? How many of you understand why Amazon and Jeff Bezos got billions in tax cuts, but somehow they are scamming the Post Office? (Which is also a lie, it is the law, and the Post Office loses money because of the jacked up pension payment arrangement Congress passed years ago. Without that, the Post Office would not have had to raise the price of postage because of the profit they would have made.)

But, if you find someone that is selling what you are liking and telling you the straight story, that you can verify with the available data, have a ball voting for them. But even if they are selling what you are liking, if they are telling you lies, voting for them is kind of self defeating. It won't work. It is true on both sides of the aisle. Plenty of both parties are flat out liars. And they deserve to go away, far far away.

As long as we are willing to accept this, be complicit with it, refuse to require anyone to stand up to it, it is going to continue to fester and hurt. When stupid things happen in the world, are you going to believe anyone in this Administration or this Congress about what happened? Do you find any of them credible? When we are trying to figure out why soldiers and sailors died, like the 4 in Niger, and you have no reason to trust anything any of them say, what do we do? We bury 4 bodies and shrug. That is what it has come down to, and instead of understanding and fixing what went wrong, we got to have fights about lies about what a Congresswoman said (that was on tape, every fricking thing in the world is on tape), from a guy that was a 4 star general and is the White House Chief of Staff.

When Russia poisons citizens on British soil, and the President congratulates Putin on winning the "election", but Sarah Crazyeyes says he was tough on him, what are you going to believe? When we kick out 60 diplomats but let 60 new immediately back in, but Sarah Crazyeyes says he is tough on Russia, what are you going to believe? Things matter, truth matters. Imagine, and it is not hard to do, that Britain and Russia end up in some satellite war in some place that satellite wars happen, like Syria, Lebanon, Western Africa, and it starts to snowball and spread, and suddenly, this government says we have to send American soldiers to die in defense of whichever side they take, why would we believe them about any of it?

They have lied about the stuff that does not matter. Crowd sizes, voter fraud, the guy that won the election and is in office, is convinced there was widespread voter fraud. Or he is constantly lying. So he is either deluded or a liar, which one is worse? At this point, the lying is worse in my eyes. It is a constant choice and a constant refrain. And it has infected the entire administration.

Corruption is just lies with money and gifts. So, if they are going to lie about the size of crowds, the number of people being raped/attacked, voter fraud, why wouldn't they lie about getting gifts from lobbyists? Why wouldn't they lie about getting a room for 20% of the going rate, that was actually a whole condo, not a hotel room? Why wouldn't they lie about their travel costs, and violating government rules for travel? Why wouldn't they lie about getting payments from foreign governments, while conducting government business relative to that foreign government?

Why wouldn't they? I mean, they have demonstrated they will lie about almost anything else. And, if you have it happening in the Administration you are running, and it never gets addressed truthfully and with transparency, it is on you. If you serve in that Administration, you get tarred with that brush. If you worked for Clinton, you worked for a President that got impeached. Mostly, it doesn't matter what your job was, you were part of what happened. That is the way it is. And, none of these people are rising above this. Everyone is a great person, while they are committing felonies that they plead guilty to in court. Everyone is doing a great job, before they resign because they spent more than the President's annual salary in 6 months worth of travel expenses.

It sucks, it is lying and it is pervasive and it is pitiful. Honestly, it leaves you wondering is the President in command of all his faculties, or is he just this dishonest? And, are the people that serve around him in anyway convinced they are serving the people, or just flacks for the President? Is anyone in Congress, in charge of committees, going to actually exercise oversight in a straightforward and transparent manner, or just write duelling memos that make no sense and convince everyone just how stupid the whole lot of them are? Are any of the investigations going to actually question the principals involved? And I don't mean Mueller, I mean the committees that are supposed to oversee Interior, EPA, HUD, HHS, State.

How completely incompetent has the government leadership become? Do you sleep better? Are you sure that those young kids that are overseas, fighting "our fight" have anyone watching out for their best interest in terms of foreign policy? Are there any experts at all? Or is it Steven Miller and the rest of the cast of Friends that are running all policy?

Lies, it brought down Nixon, it forever stained Clinton. We seem to accept that it is par for the course for Trump and all around him. People I know that live honorable and upright lives, that have no lie in them, make allowances and excuses for it. Pass around the most factually inaccurate and completely discredited political "memes" that echo things that 30 seconds on Google would prove to be wrong, factually incorrect, completely fabricated. And they love it. Get all kinds of sideways at any mention of fact, or question as to the basis of their statement. It is shocking.

And scary. We have always risen because of the general great good of the American psyche. We have fed, clothed, freed, supported, cured, treated, educated and improved the lot of more people on this Earth, than all the other nations of the world combined since the dawn of history. But, is this to be what we become? Xenophobic, isolated and just plain uninterested in facts and knowledge? Because that is what tore down Germany, twice, Japan, the Soviet Union. We have weathered their tyrrany and evil, as the protector and defender of the "good" side of the equation. However flawed we have been, the trajectory has been up.

This feels like going down. And it pisses me off. This is not about anything other than being intellectually and morally lazy and just accepting whatever dog whistle blows that we hear. It is dangerous, and expensive, and stunting. It sucks, and I wish there was something better to say about it. It won't get better unless we demand better, and we are too lazy to demand much of anything except what makes us feel good in our little shells. We have come to let fear motivate us, fear of those people coming here, fear of those people getting that, fear of those people that look different, fear of those people that believe different, fear of those people that do not participate in our own personal echo chamber.

Instead of feeling challenged, engaged, willing to think it through, if it does not sound like our personal dog whistle, it is just "bullshit". End of the matter. No investigation, no learning to see if you are really right or just think you are, no broadening, no respectful dialog, nothing but "bullshit", take your toys and block them on social media.

You all realize that blocking someone on social media does not solve the issue at hand, right? You still have skin in the game as citizens to engage and figure out how to make this better. It is your duty as a citizen. You are supposed to want to do it, but if you do it because you have to, that is fine to, because it is too important not to do.

They, all the the they's are lying to you. It is up to you to verify your thoughts, and make arguments that are actually factual. And, the Daily Blast or Shittalker.com is not a verifiable source. You don't even have to figure out how to use the encyclopedia, just speak it to Siri or Alexa and see what the real information available is. It is amazing how much you will find that the real, factual information does not match either side of the argument on satellite or AM radio. It has not echoed forth from Rush for decades. It is actually an accident when they do get it right. We just used to not be too lazy to accept that weak sauce.

We have an alarming number of Americans that actually believe Alex Jones. And believe Jill Stein. And believe "insert name of talking head here". Not because they verified the information or checked the viewpoint for truth. They believe it because they are on TV/online/radio. It must be right, and it sure sounds good to my little soul, why figure out it is wrong and make me even more uncomfortable.

With the ease of gaining information we have, that these Democrats or Republicans, Hillary or Trump, can lie to you and you cannot even be bothered to go figure it out for real, is really alarming about the future of our nation. Rejecting something the Wall Street Journal or Washington Post writes because they don't agree enough with your politics is ridiculous. Rejecting it because it is wrong is perfectly acceptable. But, not even attempting to figure it out, because the source is left or right, is just plain lazy sloth.

We were better. We had integrity. We were not as smart. We were not as educated. We were not as connected and aware. And we were still better, because we had integrity. Man, it just breaks my heart to write that.

Peace.