I'm not sure of what to think

Does adding a second bible add any substance, legitimacy or truth to what Trump swore to on Inauguration Day?  I doubt it.  It only serves to create an image of false piety for a man from whose mouth only comes lies - including the words "And" and "The".

- - - - - -

As I write this entry, less than two weeks have expired since Trump took office, and we're already seeing chaos in the land. Previously approved refugees, legal residents/green card holders, and other vetted people are being denied entry to the USA, because of Trump's latest executive order. How does this make us any safer? How does this make us appear to the rest of the world?  To me, it only gives nations such as Iran a propaganda advantage, as they will not reject previously approved holders of American passports from visiting their country. And to make things worse, the 3 Arabic speaking countries which are exempt from Trump's executive order (Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia) are those in which Trump has business interests.  Two of these countries (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) are countries that supplied the 19 hijackers that commandeered the planes on 9/11/01, killing almost 3,000 Americans.

An op-ed piece in the Huffington Post is already.talking about the inevitability of impeachment. But is that what a Democrat should be looking for?  Each day that Trump is in office, he tarnishes the GOP brand and helps to mobilize more potential Democratic voters - people who could be very useful in 2018 and 2020. When the Women's March gathered 3 times on the National Mall as many people as Trump's inauguration, one has a potential movement.  But when one takes into account the other 1,500,000 people protesting around the world, it's easy to see that a raw nerve has been touched.  We have to make sure that the reaction gets us the results we want.

- - - - - -

It is no accident that ALL of Trump's appointments have been to the extreme political right. His deal with Pence is likely the same he offered to John Kasich: You run both foreign and domestic affairs, while I make America great again.  Kasich has some ethics, Pence does not. He is a religious wingnut, someone more dangerous to us than Trump - something that I found hard to believe at first.  If we are stuck with a President Pence, he will follow the GOP policy with no compromises allowed. This is different from Trump, as he can easily be manipulated with flattery.  

The Huffington Post piece noted that Trump suffers from Malignant Narcissism.  Otto Kernberg characterizes it by an absence of conscience, a pathological grandiosity and quest for power, and a sadistic joy in cruelty. And everything said about Trump indicates a diagnosis of Malignant Narcissism would be one of the things high on the list of possibilities. Can we afford this in a national leader?

It is possible to manipulate someone like Trump.  It has often been said about him, that if you are the last to give him an opinion, he will often lean your way - as long as he feels in charge and feels that he is the strongest alpha male in the room.  However, it is much harder to manipulate someone like Pence, as his currency is power. Pence is smart enough to wait around until someone self destructs. And that's what Trump seems to be doing, seeing how much work and thought goes into being president.

- - - - - -

But I go back to the title of this entry, as it raises an important question: Is it in our best interest to help get Trump out of office, taking an immediate gain? Or, is it better to help Trump stay in office until the 2018 elections, preventing a potential President Pence from serving more than 6 years as President in his own right?  Can we afford the damage that Trump will do to this country in a little under than 720 days?  

I've already accepted that Trump will destroy as many external checks and balances as he can, regarding those we have on large businesses.  I've already accepted that Trump will be a disaster for the environment, given his belief that Global Warming is a Hoax.  And I've already accepted that he will be a disaster for human rights. Do we know ALL the risks of removing him from office either via impeachment or via the 25th amendment to the constitution?  I don't think so.  And that worries me.

Ineptitude and Confusion

Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Outliers, notes that it takes about 10,000 hours of "practice" to become expert practitioner in almost any field. For most of us, this means that once we enter the work force, it takes about 5 years to develop expertise in our craft.

Most of us talk about common sense when it comes to preventing problems. But when it came to the "O Rings" on the Challenger space shuttle, did we heed the call of the engineer who wanted to call off the launch? Or, did we heed the needs of the politicians who wanted to send the bird up on schedule? Common sense gets thrown away when large institutions get involved with doing anything, as they have too many competing interests.

Right now, we're seeing the American right wing make a lot of noise about Obama not doing what America needs. Do they expect a "Superman"? And what about the "dittoheads" who parrot what Rush Limbaugh says? Could any of them do any better? It's a miracle that Obama has not crashed and burned, given less than 2 years on the job and the fires he has had to fight.

Both political parties are responsible for the mess we're in. The oil spill has shown how corrupt the MMR department became, because the United States has had no energy policy (except to buy it from risky areas such as the Middle East) and has had no intention of pursuing one. The law in Arizona shows what the lack of a real immigration policy has done to the United States - We depend on the illegal aliens who do much of the grunt work native Americans no longer do. When was the last time we went to a diner which didn't have illegal staff where the public didn't see them? What about many of our gardening services - I'll bet that many of their workers are illegally here as well. Do we want to kick them all out and end up paying more for these services? Most people will say NO to that. So what do we do?

Let's focus on immigration first. (I've covered Resource/Energy policy in a previous posting.) The people who want us to seal the border are correct. How can we have a serious immigration policy when we can't control who is immigrating to the United States? We need realistic penalties for those employers who hire illegal help. This also means that we need an easy (100% accurate) way to validate a prospective employee's right to look for work in this country. This is likely to be a big problem, but not an unmanageable one - I don't hear of any problems with US Passports being issued to illegal aliens. A similar document could be used as proof as our right to work here, and it could have biometric validation for safety.

But what about our dependency on the illegal work force? It would be inhumane to send these people home to countries where no work is available *and* it would disrupt much of the service sector economy we depend on these days. The conservatives are right when they talk of these immigrants as having broken laws. Why should they be first on line to be legalized? Once legal, why should they be first on line to become citizens? They have shown us a great disrespect by breaking the law for the first action they do on American soil.

I propose that any program developed as part of a real immigration policy consist of the following:

1. Building an effective border "fence" to keep people from crossing our Southern border illegally.

2. Create a foolproof way to validate that a person has the right to work here, and have meaningful penalties for those employers who hire illegals without appropriate due diligence.

3. For a one year period, create a temporary amnesty, where people illegally resident in the United States could apply for residency (not leading to US Citizenship for them or their children once legal residents). This application may not be done on United States soil, but must be sent to the United States from foreign soil. (In short, the illegals must go home to apply for legalization of their status.)

4. Only legal immigrants and their offspring may gain United States citizenship. (We may need to clarify this with an amendment to the constitution.) However, illegal aliens (and their children) who filed for legal residency (according to rules of #3 above) may only become American Nationals - they may carry American passports (like residents of some Pacific islands), work in the United States, travel freely, but NOT vote or hold public office. In short, they gain permanent green cards and American passports.

Even with these changes, this is the tip of the iceberg. We need the labor, and they need the work. All I'm proposing is a humane way of breaking the political deadlock and making political reality reflect the reality we all see every day.