Something Stinks in The Swamp!

Washington D.C. is one of the most beautiful cities in the entire world.

Just being able to walk among the majestic gleaming buildings of our nation’s capital can inspire the most jaded cynic.  Even Union Station looks more like a museum than a mere train station.   I have been through and seen the Capital building hundreds of times, but each time a shutter; a thrill; an awe overwhelms me.  Last week I looked out from the window of the Library of Congress to the newly refurbished Capital Dome and it has never, in my lifetime, ever looked as awe-inspiring as it does now.  It literally shines.

But there is a lingering smell in the air.  It started on November 9th as a faint odor.  Like  slowly rotting meat; a sweat smell of something decaying has gradually grown day by day until it is now almost impossible to ignore.   It makes one want to close their windows tight and shutter their doors and stay inside away from the gleam that is Washington D.C. The smell is so strong that some of my friends from as far away as Texas, Scotland and Austria are gagging from the stench.

Like any bad odor it must first be found before it can be rooted out.  And one must first open up all of their senses to find the source; not a pleasant undertaking but essential.  The first hint of the stench came quickly:  a professor in Indiana was confronted on Nov. 9th and a student yelled in his face, “Now, it’s our time, Faggot!”   On the same day, a woman in Florida was surrounded by a group of deplorable young males and they let her know that they could grab her p**** whenever they pleased.  A young Muslim girl on her way to junior high school in Texas was stopped and her scarf ripped off her head as hate speech was spewed at her.   So, the source of the smell started on November 9th.  All across America bigots, racists, homophobes, misogynists and the dregs of humanity slithered forth with a new empowerment.

This was now their time.  Political correctness was dead and Hillary was going to prison.  The wall would be built.  The immigrants were going back to those foreign countries.  No more women in scarves or those black gowns in the grocery store.  And no more jibber jabber foreign talk at the Walmart.   ISIS would be gone by February.  Closed American factories would magically open back up and hire only white male American workers from now on.  And those pesky black folk!   Oh, how we have waited for decades to get back at those pesky blacks.  Get out the Confederate Flag and tell them to go back to Africa.   America will be great again!

Can you smell it now?  No?  Just my ‘liberal’ slant of some one-off action?  Making a mountain out of a molehill?  Well, everybody can have their own opinion, right.  We can agree to disagree, right.  Well,  there are such things as facts and they keep piling up day after day and hour after hour.  Here’s a couple of facts:

1. Nov. 14. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate crimes, says it has logged more than 200 complaints since the election.  Anti-black and anti-immigrant incidents are generating the highest numbers followed by anti-Muslim incidents. Part of the reason it is happening is that hate group leaders are encouraging members to intimidate people. Go to: http://www.splcenter.org/reporthate
2. Nov. 17.  A group of students from Archer City High School, a school that is located about 25 miles south of Wichita Falls, Texas, chant “build a wall” while holding Trump-Pence signs. Archer City High School is composed of about 83 percent white students. The chants were directed at students from Fort Hancock High School, a school located along the Texas/Mexico border east of El Paso. That school is said to be 97 percent Hispanic.  Not one adult stepped in to stop the attack.
3. Nov. 20. Hate crimes in Michigan have spiked in recent days after the presidential election, alarming state officials and community leaders, who are mobilizing to prevent more bias.  Here are a few examples:  In Ann Arbor, police said a Muslim woman was forced to remove her Islamic headscarf after being threatened with being set on fire by a man. In Royal Oak Middle School, some students chanted “build the wall” at Latino students and on Friday, a noose was found in the same school. In Hartland on Nov. 12, the Saturday after the election, an Indian-American woman said she was spit on and called a terrorist by a man telling her to get out of the country.

I could go on and on but I should have made my point by now that something stinks in this country and his name is Donald J. Trump.

Now, I really want President-elect Trump to smell better.  Anyone can shower off the scum, right?  Well, no.  Not if you just keep wallowing in the scum.  This weekend Mr. Trump (he’s not President yet) decided to add some more stink to Washington in his pick of Senator Jefferson Beauregard ‘Jeff’ Sessions as attorney general.  Sessions is as racists as they come and has a long history of blocking any kind of immigration.  Oh, and he is from Alabama.

Then there is retired Lt. Gen. Michael Thomas Flynn who Mr. Trump picked as his national security adviser.  Flynn has said that Sharia, or Islamic law, is spreading in the United States (it is not). His dubious assertions are so common that when he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency, subordinates came up with a name for the phenomenon: They called them “Flynn facts.”  He is an Islamophobe who has said that the US is in a “world war” with Islamist militants and must work with any willing allies in the fight, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.  That term “world war” should bother you; as in III.

And we can’t leave out Governor Michael Richard ‘Mike’ Pence.  Pence is a raging homophobe.  From trying to jail same-sex couples if they even apply for a marriage license in his home state of Indiana to calling for “God’s Plan” to ban same-sex marriages nationally, Pence is to the LGBT community as Hitler was to the Jewish community.   And how did that work out?

Now, you can smell it:  RACIST, ISLAMOPHOBE, HOMOPHOBE.  And this is only the beginning.

So, what can we do about this.  Well, you know those pine scented air fresheners that are shaped like green fir trees and hang in most taxi cabs?   We can buy a whole lot of those or we can get our adult pants on and work to fight this stench.

Let America know,

“I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!“

Make a donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Democratic National Committee or whatever organization that you think will help destroy this stink.  And make a donation once a month.  There is a Women’s March on Washington on January 21, 2017.  Make plans to attend.   Make noise by calling your representative.  Better yet, write them a letter.  Keep informed with REAL NEWS.  Don’t be stupid and deplorable by reading fake news.  Facts are important and use them.   And don’t just be mad as HELL today; keep it up for four more years.

Every person who has ever had to find the source of a bad odor that infests their home knows that it takes time, elbow grease and determination to make your home smell nice and fresh once again.   This cleaning job is for your nation’s home.  This cleaning job is a tough one.  This cleaning job can only be done by all of us together, but we can clean this swamp of this filth.

Join me, won’t you.

                                                           And that’s my first View From the Hill.