The Coronation, July 15-18, 2024, Milwaukee WI: A Look Back to 2016 and 2020.
Regardless of where you live, please visit and share this website: VOTE.GOV.
There is much content to follow. Your choice, as always.
*
The title of this post concerns the Republican Convention beginning Monday in Milwaukee, and anticipates the expected outcome.
Succinctly, this year for the first time in my adult life, I am urging every voter to cast their ballot for their Democrat candidates.
What is now the Trump Party, includes over 120 elected Republican legislators who actively promoted a challenge of the 2020 Presidential election, including Cong. Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota. (Cong. Jim Hagedorn was in this cadre, but died in 2022.) The former Grand Old Party now consists of those who have left the current party, or been forced into exile.
*
In the 15 years I’ve been writing these musings, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing opinions from the heart based both on facts and feelings, often before some scheduled event. I try to think things through. I’ve done lots of these – 2,017 at last count – and they’re all archived and easily accessible by word search and by date, and I access one or another quite often, there are 7 in this post alone.
We’re completing eight years of the Trump hurricane, and watching the end of a political party, the GOP, as it was once correctly called, the Party of Abraham Lincoln. And we’re within sight of the loss of our Democracy, to be replaced by a Project 2025 autocracy. Anyone who thinks this through even a little knows this is a looming catastrophe if Donald Trump gets the keys to the Oval Office.
The temptation when being being buffeted by a storm, is to seek shelter till it blows over. This is a storm where the wreckage may be permanent. It is time to pay attention, and no time to hide out.
*
I offer the following many links as possible guides to your own thinking.
This post is about July 15-18, 2024, but first…
Here’s what I wrote about the 2016 Republican National Convention after the first night. It was my only post specifically about that convention (though I gave it space on July 22 as well). At the time of that election I didn’t pay adequate attention to Donald Trump, who I knew basically as “The Apprentice” (I have never watched an episode). I knew of Trump Tower, and that Trump had zero experience as an elected official anywhere. He was an entertainer.
All the character issues were yet to be exposed.
Four years later was very different, of course. Here’s the last of five posts (August 30, 2020) I did during the time of the “T” Convention August 24-27, 2020. Here are the other four in 2020: August 24; August 25; August 26; and August 27. Note that all of these were posted several months before the 2020 election and, of course, before January 6, 2021.
This year, 2024, most recently, are July 1, July 4, July 6, and today.
I’m glad I archive these posts. I’ll repeat this process next month, right before the Democratic Convention. I’m just an amateur writer, but looking back at the past notes is sobering…and I’m already worried about the state of our democracy if the lawless coalition bent on control of the U.S. happens to win on November 5.
*
Other recommendations.
I’d also recommend reading this editorial from the Philadelphia Inquirer, reprinted as an editorial in the July 8, 2024, Minneapolis Star Tribune.: Mpls Star Tribune July 8 2024. (I’m a long-time subscriber to the STrib.)
I subscribe to three on-line commenters on history and law who I consider extraordinarily credible. Here are recent posts from each, all pertinent. Most particularly in this election season, they are worth your subscription, and they deserve support: Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American; Joyce Vance, Civil Discourse; Jay Kuo: The Big Picture and Status Kuo.
POSTNOTE July 12: The above text was complete yesterday afternoon (July 11) before the President Biden news conference, which I watched in its entirety, and the release of the approximately 5,000 word editorial from the New York Times about the Trump candidacy for President. I thought President Biden with a fine job with the news conference; the NYT editorial is powerful. Joyce Vance, today, provides a link to the editorial, and summary comments. Heather Cox Richardson features a very interesting part 1 of a two part interview with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, here.
FINAL THOUGHT: I post to about 600 folks. I have no idea who, if anyone, reads any particular post. But I do know I’m read, based on people I hear from, not only from comments. I suggested to a friend recently that an informal personal gauge for myself is that if one in a hundred gets something out of a post I write, it’s worth it. You apparently are the one for this post, so thank you.
What we have become accustomed to in this country – called “the American way of life” or however stated – is under active attack by weapons like lies and power and control strategies from a stinky band of skunks. There is no passive way to deal with filthy politics, in which we are awash, and this is not an ‘everyone does it’ fantasy. This is a fringe of one side of the ideological spectrum that saw an opening for power and control, and are bent on exercising it with all of the weapons in their arsenal. No holds barred. I don’t get hysterical about things. What we’re approaching now, with Project 25 and the like, is getting very close to the edge. I urge you to not only get engaged, but to share these posts if you think they are useful. Again, thank you for reading.
PS: a particular message to the other side, the one that buys the premise that there are winners and there are losers, and the losers best suck it up. It doesn’t work that way…for either the winners or the losers. Any kid who’s ever played ‘king on a hill’ and won the hill learns soon that getting the hill has its own perils. A functioning society has to figure out how to work things out for all sides. Probably the best example of winning is Nazi Germany, where the promise was a 1,000 year Reich, which ended up at the end of 12 years with an entire society crushed, which – good for them – was helped out of its pit by things like the Marshall Plan.
POSTNOTE JULY 13: Joyce Vance on ‘Christian Nationalism’; Heather Cox Richardson on going back to White Male Privilege.
COMMENTS (more at end)
from Patsy: Amen to ” This is not a routine year.” Thanks always for your thoughts.
from Joyce: Very well stated, Dick!
from Joni: I found the NYT editorial interesting and very unsettling. Your choice of the word “catastrophic” is spot on as well, and I wish with my whole heart that I could disagree or find some evidence to support thinking otherwise.
*
from Dick: July 13, 9 p.m.: at about 5 p.m. I received a phone call from a friend that Donald Trump had been injured in a shooting in Pennsylvania. I was not home at the time. This entire evening has been consumed by reporting o various kinds, including already the rumors that the Biden campaign was responsible. As time goes on we will find out what is real.
from Jeff: Since you again have pondered these things and are a Catholic, the whole thing does spur the question of the morality of tyrannicide, a much debated issue amongst the Greek and Roman philosophers and the HMC over the centuries.
The other side of the killing Hitler is a good thing coin: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand started WW1….just starting to consider the chaos that Trump being killed might have created. Civil War? several Oklahoma City events? cities being captured by militias and declared separate from states and nations…..things much worse than January 6 to be sure.
response from Dick: Indeed, this situation begs lots of serious conversation about our own societies contradictions. Indeed, at Mass this morning the pastor decried the violence very carefully: a Catholic congressperson in attendance going to Mass, speaking of the reaction of his children who were there, apparently; a reporter reporting on the screams of children; an Army Chaplain Priest whose talk is about “moral injury” – how the world is and should be. No mention that I recall of the role of a deadly weapon, though the same priest had talked passionately about this topic just weeks ago.
I often think of the quandary of Hitler and his ilk. I think of the initial assertions made about who did the deed at the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City – initially the suspect was somebody Middle Eastern looking, as I recall, and of course turned out to a white military veteran who’d been a Boy Scout.
I think even more about the fact that character assassination is as much killing as physically shooting someone; it is a weapon of choice in today’s politics, as is lying in all of its many forms, sanctioned as freedom of speech. These have been very useful weapons, and I don’t expect that to change post-shooting.
The suggestion, from an apparent schoolmate, was that the young man who presumably did the shooting was a loner and bullied in school. And, of course, already there is strategic political thinking – the Democrats must be to blame. There is a lot to be contemplated, for sure. It was a huge shock to get the news yesterday afternoon.
We live in a powder keg with the open access to weapons: that is a crucial bottom line. There are nuts in every age in every place, but only in our country can they be armed and extremely dangerous legally carrying weapons of war.
POSTNOTE July 15: Overnight from Joyce Vance, here; and from Heather Coxx Richardson, here. I encourage your subscribing to both of these credible sources of information. I will probably not further append to this post, there the news about the Butler PA incident will doubtless continue.
POSTNOTE July 20: See new post here. Generally I post once or twice a week. The next scheduled post specifically on politics will be right before the Democratic Convention about a month from now, but almost certainly I will have some commentary on the political atmosphere between now and then, so check back once in awhile..
Dick,
I totally agree, endorse, amplify your idea we cannot put our heads down and wait for this storm to pass. We need to speak up and, of course, VOTE!
Kathy
Trump is trying to distance himself from the 2025 Agenda, but look at his own website’s “Agenda 47.” It is as scary and threatening; e.g., as quoted by the Advoacte: If reelected, Donald Trump will “cut federal funding for any school or program pushing critical race theory or gender ideology” and “create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values.” Just one of many backward ideologies and white cis Christian platforms. I have to perform an exorcism on my iPad after visiting his website: donaldjtrump.com
Please Vote!
The coronation will take place on Thursday when the “I just wanna be king” man-child takes the throne with all number of MAGA folks lying prostate at his feet. No doubt, he will have a very large dressing on his right ear that will be very visible as he mounts the throne to await being crowned. He will thank God for protecting him from those who do not want to see him reelected. Now granted, God may not recognize Donnie as someone with whom he has frequent contact if he/she/it even remembers any contact with the five-time draft dodger but hey, holding a Bible high above his head for a news shot/spot or invoking the name of God when necessary to appease his cult followers given how well that works to keep them at his feet, hey, why not make such a claim? The whining of his usual “poor me, ain’t it just awful that I am the victim here just like you and I am doing all that I can to support you fellow victims in spite of Biden and all of those people trying to keep me from standing up for you!” What an unselfish guy who except for the fact, of course, that in the eyes of the ignorant, arrogant, narcissistic and five-time draft dodger who just wants to be king after being a dictator for a day and a few cozy chats with his buddy, Putin, it is rally all and only about himself and no one else including the Constitution that Donnie took the oath in 2017 to “protect”