But it ain’t gonna be easy!
This is the photo I took this morning after mulling over the column I wrote last week which graces today’s Duluth Reader:
I’m about to make a video talking about this as embark on what I think is the most important congressional campaign in the United States. A thoughtful patriot running against a good person and another person who has thrown in his lot foolishly with the forces which have always been a threat to America. Is Pete Stauber a “traitor” as I wrote in the column I am so proud of. Yes, I think he is. He is because his treason is founded on lies he knows to be lies…….unless he is fabulously stoopid which I must concede is a possibility.
Here’s my column in the Reader
By coincidence I was texting with my French pen pal yesterday and mentioned my column in the Reader. She often reads them to challenge herself because I don’t write in elementary English. Like me I get the drift of French stories but my skill is modest and I miss a great deal of nuance.
So I was pleased when she stayed up a little later after our conversation to read my column and then told me it was brilliant after having translated it into French. She sent me the French version for me to practice my French. I am not willing to figure out how to put it here but anyone who wants to should easily be able to translate the column on their cell phones.
I may put the sign I scrawled out and stuck to my office desk in our front yard. It doesn’t call anyone a traitor, like I called Pete Stauber a traitor, but it says No Traitors. We can not thrive as a nation if we have too many Benedict Arnolds in it. Benedict was a liar. Not at first. But he got tired of not being given the credit he thought he deserved and as I recall, fell in love with a loyalist. Then he betrayed the cause and switched to the Enemy that Washington and company were busy fighting having become traitors to the King themselves. That’s right patriots were traitors. Being a traitor is all in one’s point of view. If you love your country do you do its bidding even if a dictator like a Hitler, a Stalin or a Putin has seized control and demanded that you to terrible things in the name of the country they have taken over?
I never agreed with my grandfather’s point of view “my country right or wrong.” I want my country to be right. I do not want to defend it when it is wrongheaded. I want to change its mind. Donald Trump is wrongheaded – villainously so. Pete Stauber only seems to know that Trump has become the Republican party’s Big Brother and for his survival he is championing the villainy of his big Brother Trump.
You find that king of loyalty in criminal gangs like Italy’s fascists, Germany’s brown shirts and Russia’s Bolsheviks. Today you find it in Trumpism which is based on a narcissist’s lies. Even Pete Stauber briefly acknowledged that lie when he suggested attacking Congress with upside down American flags, guns and zip ties was not all that sporting…..But Stauber knows winning is everything having cheated to win a national championship hockey tourney. He knows Donald Trump lost the 2022 election. But he decided to stick with the Trump lies. The moment he did that he became a traitor.
I will cut many, perhaps most, Trumpers some slack. They have grown distrustful of everything they hear. I believe, I hope, they sincerely believe that all the lies they know Trump spews is somehow more truthful than the main street news that Republican grifters, racists and ideologues have claimed since my childhood was liberal, prejudiced and anti-them.
That is bullshit. But I say that having followed the news obsessively since I was in grade school 65 years ago. I have made that case before and I’ll continue to make it. The simple fact is bending the truth can make people money. Touting a phony company to lure investors to steal their money is one way. Selling ads through eye catching bullshit news is another way as we’ve seen with Mr. Peckerwood testifying that his scandal sheet has been used by people who pay to slander or buy off witnesses or intimidate them into silence.
I know honest history better than most 70-year-olds and a lot better than much younger less experienced or less read people and a helluva a lot better than ignorant shysters like Donald F the truth Trump. Pete Stauber is a lackey to his liar-in-chief.
That’s my campaign. I am needed in the United States Congress to make all the other Pete Stauber’s nervous. If can I’m going to fan my campaign across the nation to make sure Republicans go where the desperately need to be….the wilderness to think about their flirtation with a sociopath’s attempted take over of Democracy…….just as our founding fathers feared might be possible.
I am very uncertain that Republicans can ever again become dependable but boring managers of our complex nation but it would be a helluva lot better for Earth and Americans if they did. I’m of a mind with poor old Rodney King who was kicked to the ground by about 500 cops. Someone videotaped the blue beating he got and Los Angeles erupted in flames. That simple black man was appalled at the damage that followed and asked imploringly “can’t we all just get along?”
I agree with Rodney. But the anti-beatitude Republican party desperately needs a Come-to-Jesus moment. This agnostic intends to get it started. NO TRAITORS!!!!!!! No effing traitors!!!!!
