“I can take about an hour on the tower of power/’Long as I gets a little golden shower”

Frank Zappa, “Bobby Brown,” Sheik Yerbouti

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Today’s NYT website headline:  “How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a Crisis for Donald Trump”

The Crisis?  Apparently, Russian spies and contract spooks were keeping surveillance on Donald Trump to gain personal information to use against him for purposes of blackmail.  The most scandalous revelation, from a pilfered report that may or may not be real  (like all the “evidence” so far presented about the Russians and their bold attempt to subvert the United States by making sure the Democratic Oligarch lost the election to the GOP Oligarch) was “According to Source D… Trump’s perverted conduct included… defiling the bed where they [the Obamas] had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him.” 

Donald Trump has mocked a disabled reporter, had lurid conversations with Howard Stern about his sexual preferences and openly talked about “grabbing pussy,” encouraged the mob at his political rallies to beat people up, gotten into a Twitter war with a beauty pageant queen he called “fat,” castigated a judge as corrupt because he was born in Mexico (he wasn’t; he was born in Indian, home state of Veep Mike Pence), gotten into a fracas with Gold Star parents, seemed to encourage “second amendment solutions” against political enemies, and maybe best of all said “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

The report concluded that, “Trump’s unorthodox behaviour in Russia over the years had provided the authorities there with enough embarrassing material on the now-Republican presidential candidate to be able to blackmail him if they so wished”.

Crisis?  Blackmail?  Really?

Given what Trump’s done and gotten away with, prostitutes and golden showers are going to be his undoing?  The man has disproved all the accepted truths about American politics already–insulting minorities, the disabled, gays, women, you name it.  And this is going to be his Waterloo?  LBJ famously said that you could do anything but be “caught in bed with a dead woman or live boy.”  Trump could do both while getting his own golden shower from a transgendered Muslim Communist and there would be no fallout.

Yet liberals are in a constant state of apoplexy about this stuff.  Why not talk about, maybe stuff like Social Security, Medicare, the Supreme Court, Wall Street, trade pacts, jobs, etc.   Oh, that’s right, because the Democratic Party isn’t really very different from the GOP on that stuff.

So instead there’s this focus on Trump as Aberration, a vile and disgusting man (which is true) who is SO different from anyone in American political life that he is a danger to our future, a Hitler-in-waiting in fact.

Trump is in fact your normal Republican, but very open and vulgar about it.  Hell, a GOP senator from Louisiana paid hookers to make him wear diapers.; a GOP rep from Florida was caught soliciting teenaged boys for sex; an Idaho senator was arrested for lewd conduct in an airport restroom . . . so on sexual matters, Trump’s hardly abnormal by Republican (or American) standards.   So can we stop with the Helen Lovejoy “Won’t somebody think of the children” shrieks and get on to more serious things?

Trump and his party, with some Democratic complicity and some Democratic apathy, are acting simply in the interests of the ruling class.  They’re continuing to redistribute wealth and power from the 99 percent to the Oligarchy.  Instead of all these absurd sideshows about sex, how about some resistance on issues that actually matter to the people of Flint, Philly, El Paso, Chicago and everywhere else.  Indeed, Dem dreamboy Cory Booker and others in the party who got big money from Big Pharma just joined with GOP senators to kill a bill to explore, not invoke but just explore, importing cheaper drugs from Canada (see list below). Mostly crickets on that story while the Trump cascade continues. (As a friend said, “unlike Trump’s hookers, Cory Booker pissed on the whole  country”).

Gold, as in power, not Gold as in showers, has to be the issue here, and liberals, like a dog chasing a car, prefer to go after the salacious and lurid rather than the tangible and material problems that affect the lives of the non-rich.

Now, to be sure, the issue of a GOP candidate-cum-president working with the Russians is a real one, and potentially explosive, like Manchurian Candidate stuff in the worst-case scenario.  But none of that has been shown here.  The reports have been unverified (see James Bamford, the authority, on this, and this too), and the recent disclosure (bogus or not) concedes that “Trump has declined various sweetener real estate business deals offered him in Russia in order to further the Kremlin’s cultivation of him.”  The Russians also offered him sweetheart deals relating to the 2018 World Cup and, again, “for reasons unknown, Trump has not taken up any of these.”

Now any foreign “cultivation” of an American president is really not a good thing (though we’d all have been better off if JFK and LBJ had been buddies with Fidel and Ho back in the day), but there’s no evidence of that yet.  What we have are lurid stories about an openly lurid man, not pleasant or indicative of good character to be sure, but pretty far down on the list of the dangers he poses.  Trump may be a pervert but if that were disqualifying, there would be no Congress (or any other institutions frankly), but he’s mostly just your normal Republican and normal politician.  Time to focus on gold, not gold showers.

Besides, as Granddad Freeman said . . .

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