Apollo 11

I remember this day 50 years ago.

My family and I were gathered in the front room of a Jersey Shore vacation rental house. Avalon?

It was dark except for the glow of the black and white TV in the corner. An air of quiet, reverent excitement filled the room.

At age 5, I didn't quite understand it all. But I was being told by my mother and father and oldest brother, Brian, that this was an important moment. Shsh. Watch. I was told in response to a six-year-old's innocent questions.

And so we all focused with rapt attention on the glowing TV like we were watching the climax of a suspenseful thriller. We watched in awe Neil Armstrong take his first steps on the moon.

Like I said I didn't quite understand it all. But it's a life episode burned in my memory.
A found memory with all my family together, my younger brother, Brendan, next to me on the floor, sitting too close to the TV as usual.

But my father, this time, didn't seem to mind.

American Dream Or American Scheme?

"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

-- Edward R. Murrow

Forget the irony. The hypocrisy is suffocating.The grandstanding insufferable. The cruel indifference, disgusting. The crimes against humanity right under our noses, blatantly, gratingly criminal.

President Donald Trump has twisted the "American Dream" into a lurid, conniving, vain American scheme. And it will be on full, obnoxious display this Fourth of July 2019.

Happy Independence Day.

As we Americans -- purported champions of truth, justice and human decency -- fly Old Glory and fire up our BBQ grilles to celebrate our democratic liberties, we'd do well to consider whether those liberties we espouse so readily, are sound.

Just pause long enough in between rushed purchases of red, white and blue plastic hats and paper plates at Wal-Mart, to ask:

Are we still truly America -- "home of the brave" and "land of the free"?

If so, then where's the overwhelming brave citizen outrage defending those espoused freedoms in the face of unprecedented, destabilizing criminal threats to the Republic?

Fresh off another troubling, cringe worthy performance on the national stage -- shunning our allies and embracing murderous dictators at the G-20 summit -- while his punishing immigration policy imprisons thousands of children in concentration camps -- President Donald Trump plans to throw a grand ol' party.

For himself.

At our expense.

On our Independence Day.

Now, to be sure, this Fourth of July at the nation's capital there will be plenty of due homage to our patriots of the past and present, who have fought and died to win and defend our freedoms as a sovereign Republic.

It should end there.

But, it won't. Indications are that The Donald's professed "Salute To America" will pretty much be about The Donald.

Trump intends to contort America's most celebrated national holiday, typically geared toward honoring the brave freedom fighting Colonists who shed their blood for our Independence from imperialist England some 240 years ago, into essentially a Trump 2020 campaign rally.

Unspoken campaign slogan: "Keep America Grating."

The same narcissist whose policy has perpetuated the suffering of desperate Central American migrants, separating adults from their children and caging them like wild animals for months on end so his corporate campaign donors can reap daily dividends, ultimately scoring millions of dollars for literally caging kids -- is going to outdo his predecessors.

Trump plans to stage the most opulent and garish of Independence Day commemorations dating back to 1801 when  President Thomas Jefferson first opened the White House doors to the public for the nation's fireworks-punctuated birthday bash.

Big deal.

After all, P.T. Barnum, the world's first greatest showman in the 19th Century, once said: "The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived."

But there's a danger in all the vain hoopla, of course, as it's orchestrated to mask Trump's criminal degradation of America; the insidiously abnormal is incrementally being normalized.

How long can a society endure the incessant, corrupting eroding of American ideals under a demagogue like Trump without a devastating, lingering impact on our values?

We've already seen hates crimes spike in the States starting dramatically in 2017, Trump's first year in the Oval Office; the nation hasn't been so divided since the Civil War.

Surely, the Fourth in Washington D.C., with Trump as the ringmaster, will be a spectacle. A hard-to-resist circus sideshow extravaganza which would make showman Barnum, Trump's admitted mentor, proud. 

Supplicant major cable and network news channels no doubt will be tuned into the gaudy attraction, further legitimizing the unfit leader in return for consistent jacked ratings.

By doing so, the nightly cable and network news is guilty of just the kind of dereliction of duty that legendary TV broadcast pioneer Edward R. Morrow, who exposed the Communist fear-mongering of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950's, specifically warned the broadcast industry against.

"This instrument (TV) can teach, it can illuminate; yes, it can even Inspire," said Murrow in a 1958 speech to the Radio-TV News Directors Association. "But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it's nothing but wires and lights in a box.."

Anymore, we're pretty much stuck staring at "wires and lights in a box" -- deprived of anything inspiring or edifying particularly when Trump's tiresome mug fills the boob tube screen.

Non-the-less, snubbing tradition, the President intends to be intimately involved with D.C's Fourth of July festivities -- perhaps marching in a Bastille Day-like military parade, speaking at The Lincoln Memorial or stroking an M1A1 Abrams tank or two. 

Trump may have signed a 4.6 billion border bill on Monday, reportedly to improve care of the migrants in detention centers and bolster border security. But the measure fails to enforce the 90-day stay limit and doesn't allow legislators to inspect the facilities unannounced, as Democrats had pushed for.

In the meantime, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General announced Tuesday it had discovered squalid, over-crowded conditions at detention centers for asylum-seeking migrants near the border, confirming Democrats' recent discoveries.

"No child should ever be separated from their parent," said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, an outspoken critic of the detention centers, she appropriately described as "concentration camps." "No child should ever be taken from their family. They should be given water, they should be given access to human rights."

So, as the President delivers his scheduled Lincoln Memorial address about America's "tremendous" military might and our "great" democratic ideals, chances are brown-skinned children as young as two years old, with runny noses and wearing dirty diapers, may still be in need of water and sitting on cold, concrete floors just so Republican campaign donors like private prison companies, GEO Group & CoreCivic, can make millions of dollars.

"No child ever has to suffer for the benefit of another," added Ocasio-Cortez.

Fox News viewers falling for the liar-in-chief's "fake news" claims on the whole matter, 

should ask themselves why in the past week the acting director of Customs & Border Patrol resigned and typically Conservative-accommodating Bank of America announced it would stop financing the for-profit immigrant detention centers.

Just follow the money. At an estimated cost of $775 a day to house a single child, the federal government last year shelled out $2 billion to private prison companies. One company has cashed in on $43 million just since September for shuttling immigrants to camps.

As one private prison executive has said plainly, the President's immigration policy is "good for business."

Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee Jerry Nadler on Monday described the long-term housing of migrant children, he's witnessed in person, as "disgusting" and  "criminal."

"This clearly is child abuse and subject to prosecution," said Nadler. "It violates probably half a dozen laws."

Of course, Trump on the Fourth, will be surrounded by the exceedingly disingenuous and criminally complicit. The Republican National Committee reportedly is handing out VIP tickets for front row seats to big-time campaign donors. 

And don't be surprised if Trump propagandist outlet Fox News touts an exclusive sit down with the ever conflicted commander-in-chief.

As is the norm, the public are invited too.
But, Trump's grandiose plans suggest a logistics nightmare for the Washington D.C. police, as the fireworks display shift away from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to the West Potomac Park for the first time 20 years.

In the end, it won't have mattered how much fireworks, patriotic anthems, pompous poses and preposterous platitudes that ambitious White House loyalists squeeze into a single celebratory day -- meant only to sway the complacent and gullible towards viewing the impulsively autocratic President in a kinder, gentler light.

The truth is out there and it's begging to be seen and heard by folks who give a damn and are willing at least to not pretend all is copacetic in the White House.

If the American people somehow were to be swayed into a false sense of patriotic-infused security, by the intentionally distracting, manipulative Reality TV circus this Thursday, it's another resounding step towards game over.

If we were to forget Trump's dysfunctional behavior abroad or ignore his relentless divisive incites, obstruction of RussiaGate and his tortuous treatment of desperate southern border migrants in our homeland, we'll have abandoned our moral right to defend ourselves from the White House deception in the future.

Here, the words of the late famed American writer Gore Vidal forbode: "We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing."

Yeah, Trump is a fool and yeah he's dangerous as hell, the overwhelmed majority of Americans seem to be saying, but I got to take out the trash, feed the dog and kick the cat. No time to sweat it.

But, if the President's inhumane immigration policy, that has overseen the deaths of at least six children this year, doesn't ultimately dictate the end of Trump's presidency, it may just lead to our end as a free people.

What would stop an emboldened Trump, who has demonstrated not a sliver of compassion as he trashes our constitution and our country, from going further and start caging political opponents or members of The Press -- which he has repeatedly accused as "enemies of the people" and purveyors of "fake news"?

We already know that the President feels more kinship with the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korea's Kim Jong-un and the Saudi Crown Prince than he does with our allies.

As TV and radio broadcast pioneer, Murrow, exposed McCarthyism's oppressive overreach in a 1954 CBS address, he accused McCarthy of causing "alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad" and giving "considerable comfort to our enemies." 

That's exactly what Trump is doing.

Now, is the time to speak out and stand up to crimes against humanity -- signed, sealed and delivered not by the Democrats, or President Barrack Obama, but undeniably by our authoritarian President. 

It's Trump's policy that has reportedly lost track of an estimated one thousand immigrant children, as if they were mere slips of paper in an overwhelmed accounting system. 

Abetted by loyalist Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, it's Trump's policy, bereft of humanity or justice, that is exacerbating the desperate situation at the border -- and further dividing our nation.

So, yeah as we rightfully embrace our freedoms as Americans this July 4, we should be as mindful as ever of the old saying, "Freedom isn't free."

As President Trump, immersed in militaristic grandeur, embarks on his nationalistic speech before an immortalized President Abraham Lincoln, he should be reminded of a line from Murrow's 1954 landmark televised confrontation of McCarthyism.

"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

(Kevin McKinney is freelance writer and former daily newspaper journalist living at the Jersey Shore. His writing has appeared in publications across the country, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hill, The Spokesman Review, Knoxville News Sentinel, CounterPunch and McClatchy Newspapers. He tweets @WriteFight99. Email: mckinneywrites@outlook.com)

Three Long Years

I'm reposting my foreboding opinion published in a local weekly, the Cape May County Herald, three turbulent years ago. It was crystal clear then in May 2016 that Trump spelled doom. Predictably, the disease has only spread and threatens the death of America. Democrats, powered by 'The people,' finally must be the cure.

Blame GOP
For Trump

By Kevin McKinney 

As Donald Trump sells out America, leaving behind a slew of defeated establishment candidates to squirm and sweat before the funhouse mirror in this Twilight Zone playing on an endless loop, one thing is clear:

These United States of America aren't what we've cracked them up to be. And we wonder, were they ever?

Our once great nation's standards, values and hopes have seemingly crumbled right before our eyes into a reality TV rubble, where the truth is a joke, the disingenuous reigns, insults are hip, fear motivates and a walking, talking tabloid caricature has a serious shot at the Oval Office.

How did we get here? How did the most powerful democracy in the world become so desperate as to welcome the phony, inciting declarations of a billionaire successfully bidding for the highest office in the land? 

The Republican Party only has itself to blame. The unmitigated rise of ‘The Donald’ is as much about the tangible as the intangible, about a twisted, single-minded, conservative ideology which has long catered only to a powerful, select few.

In truth, it’s been a slow fade. Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Trump is just the tip of the iceberg, the most visible symptom of an insidious disease that for decades has been quietly compromising many aspects of American life - our security, health, finances and overall quality - certainly since Reaganomics trickled down, trickled out and left the people dry.

But, only now, in the flotsam wake of unprecedented, ultra-conservative, think-tank-orchestrated, corporation-endorsed, alarmist manipulation of the people's hearts, minds and lives since the watershed 2001 high-jacking of the White House is the devastation suddenly and sickeningly obvious.

Donald Trump is what happens, he's the result, the divine justice administered, in the wake of so much criminal negligence and inexcusable abandonment of the people in their most desperate times of need.

After eight hellish years of George W. Bush's "War of Terror" against the American people - through the inexplicable Sept. 11 failures, Iraq War lies, profiteering and bloodshed, domestic spying, bungled Hurricane Katrina response and the deregulation-instigated 2008 Great Recession - untold damage was done.

Then, while millions of Americans were losing their homes, jobs and savings, obstructionist Republicans blocked hundreds of bills, including those designed to help veterans, senior citizens, women victims of violence, ill Sept. 11 first responders, the jobless, middle class families, teachers and the underpaid.

Today, more than 16 million American children are living in poverty and the richest one-tenth percent of Americans have almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent.

The only time congressional Republicans have lifted a finger for the past seven years was to point it accusingly at the president. Fear-mongering and personal attacks became common. Trust in the Republican establishment evaporated like so many campaign promises.

Emerging from this toxic atmosphere was the bright and shiny political outsider, ‘The Donald,' to the rescue of the disenchanted.

Promising change in loud, condescending, childlike declarations - repeating his adjectives, "great," "amazing," and "special" - devoid of substance, the grand illusionist gradually won the hearts of the forsaken and desperate. 

Who can resist a peep under the sideshow circus tent?

Despite his anti-establishment appeal, Trump, in essence, is the amplified embodiment of everything ugly about today’s Republican Party.

Rock bottom line: Obsessive greed and the relentless pursuit of absolute power, is the mad scientist that inadvertently electrified and enlivened this amalgamation of our lesser selves, Trump, to run amok, deceive, disparage and ultimately destroy with impunity.  

"Cover-up General" Up To Old Tricks

Deja Vu all over again.

In 1992, New York Times writer William Safire didn't refer to then Attorney General Bill Barr as "Cover-up General" for nothing.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/12/10/opinion/essay-iraqgate-whitewash.html https://t.co/r3Rvd6vaqN

Despite Attorney General Barr's rosy, pro-Donald Trump spin on Mueller's findings this morning, the redacted Mueller report released today makes it clear:

The President isn't off the hook. Not by a long shot.

And no amount of predictable disingenuous declarations from any of Trump's loyalists -- whether it's from the coverup AG Barr, Fox News' syphocant Sean Hannity, President's counsel Kellyanne Conway or Trump's studious lawyer Jay Sekulow -- can change that.

President Trump hasn't been cleared of anything other than being honorable.

And as rare as it is these days, amidst a mounting Republican Party black-ops attempt to muzzle it, that's the God's honest truth.

As we already knew, Mueller reports, in part: "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."  
  
But now we know why, after laying out a slew of instances where Trump attempted to obstruct justice or collude, Mueller stopped short of indicting the President.

By his own admission, as stated in the report, Mueller felt constrained by the rule protecting a "sitting president" from indictment.

It's all surreal. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin have been scratching eachother's back right before our eyes for years.

Remember the Helsinki love fest last summer?

The President took Putin at his word, over U.S. intelligence, that Russia didn't interfere with our 2016 presidential elections.

And what does Trump have to say now that Mueller has unequivocally confirmed Russia's full court press to swing the election for the President?

Nothing, of course. Nothing outside of childishly disparaging the Mueller probe as a political attack "hoax" while claiming vindication. 

So, after Trump gains the presidency by suspicious means, he then tries to obscure the underlying particulars of his Russia connections.

And due to this suspect justice department rule, advocated by Barr, that protects a sitting president, it appears at first glance that Trump gets away with it.

Where's the logic? Where's the justice?  

But we've only glossed through the first chapter of this tale of White House deception and corruption.

It seems Mueller couldn't have played his hand any other way. The bar was high. He knew that Barr was on the record as opposing the indictment of sitting presidents.

And, as Mueller outlined in his report, he couldn't ethically accuse the President when it was clear he wouldn't get his day in court.

If Mueller had recommended charges, it would have kicked off a firestorm of protest from the attorney general, the President and accomplice Conservatives crying foul -- resurrecting claims of "witch hunt."

The fight to bring Trump to justice, perhaps, would have been stopped dead in its tracks. 

So, instead, Mueller punted to Congress. He submitted a thorough, but inconclusive report on Trump's shady behavior as President, knowing Congress will rightfully dig into it and find fodder for impeachment.

"We concluded that Congress has authority to prohibit a president’s corrupt use of his authority in order to protect the integrity of the administration of justice,” wrote Mueller in his 448-page report released by the Justice Department Thursday.  

Bob Mueller knows what he's doing.

Obstructors of Justice

 "It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence."

-- Judge Lawrence Walsh, Iran/contra special counsel

If anyone deserves to face obstruction of justice charges in this saga over special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report, it may just be the guy now in charge of it all.

The longer U.S. Attorney General William Barr deprives Congress of their constutional duty to review Mueller's crucial report on Russia's interference into the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, the greater the chance of our con man "President" escaping justice.

In case you may have missed it, AG Barr is the same guy who, in his first attorney general stint helped cover-up for Republican President George H.W. Bush and others in the "Iran-contra Affair," as well as "Iraqgate" in 1992.

That's why President Donald Trump, of course, picked Barr for the attorney general job. Like virtually every member of Trump's administrative team, Barr is the worst possible person for the job.

"Cover-up General"

New York Times writer William Safire in 1992 labeled Barr as the “Coverup-General Barr” after Barr devised a plan to bury evidence of Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iran-Contra,” according published reports.

In December of 1992 -- during his first attorney general stint, under Bush -- Barr intervened on his boss's behalf to defang special counsel Judge Lawrence Walsh's six-year, $47 million investigation into the Iran/contra Affair.

Walsh's probe was on the verge of exposing incriminating files of Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan's indicted former defense secretary -- and President Bush's diary that implicated the former Reagan vice president in illegal weapons sales to terrorist state sponsor Iran and illicitly funding Nicaraguan rebels.

But before special counsel Walsh, a fellow Republican, could lower the boom on five more ex-Reagan administration officials and spotlight his revealing diary in the final weeks of his presidency, Bush turned to his AG Barr for help.

Barr then suggested the President Bush pardon Weinberger and the five others to make it all go away. So Bush did.

Pardon Me?

 "I favored the broadest pardon authority," Barr said years later. "There were some people just arguing just for Weinberger. I said, 'No — in for a penny, in for a pound.' "
At the time, Walsh condemed Bush's pardon of Weinberger, saying it, "undermines the principle that no man is above the law. It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office—deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence."

Just a couple months earlier, Barr refused to appoint an independent special counsel to investigate reports that the Bush administration illegally funded billions of dollars in nuclear weapons to Saddam Hussein.

The administration of newly elected President Bill Clinton, who campaigned on nailing culprits in the purported illegal weapons funding for Iraq, never brought charges in Iraqgate.

Barr Letter Auditions For AG

This past June, Barr sent an unsolicited letter to Trump's White House lawyers arguing that the President's firing of FBI Director James Comey -- the original lead Russia meddling investigator -- did not constitute obstruction of justice.

Then he got the AG job thanks to Trump's nomination and the complicit Republican majority Senate.

Most of us know that our once-prized American ideals of truth and justice are under attack like never before.

If the Mueller report is buried or eviscerated of crucial findings before Congress reviews it, so will go our American ideals -- and our America.

If a Mueller report cover-up succeeds, what's to protect the numerous other state and federal investigations into Trump, his family and close associates' myriad disdeeds?

Other Trump Probes Jeopardized? 

Those other probes into mob money laundering, fraud, presidential profiteering, campaign finance violations and more, in theory, could be shutdown by this increasingly authoritarian president and his loyalist co-conspirators.

In some form, this is all going to come down to "We the people" speaking out and taking civil action -- through protests, marches, letters and calls to our representatives -- to defend our country.

Don't placate yourself into thinking the worse couldn't happen here. Adolph Hitler's incremental, but persistant eroding of Germany's Democratic norms, caught Germans off guard.

They didn't see the "Reichstag fire" coming, which Hitler used to consolidate his power early in 1933. 

And they didn't see the "Night of The Long Knives" coming just more than a year later in the summer of 1934.
In a matter of days, Hitler had several potential political rivals executed.

Any citizen outrage then, was too late.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/25/trump-russia-william-barr-republican-spear-catcher

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB365/

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/03/26/has-cover-general-william-barr-struck-again

More Questions

Now that Attorney General William Barr this evening released his initial summary on special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe it's clear the investigation wasn't the "witch hunt" the President labeled it.

But it remains unclear, despite what  President Donald Trump is predictably claiming, whether Trump committed obstruction of justice.

From Barr's summary on Mueller's report:

"The special counsel states that "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

Key words: ".. does not exonerate him."

It's far from a "total and complete exoneration" as the President labels the probe.

More questions than answers.

But the truth is out there and myriad investigations into this President  continue.

Mueller's Report Is The First Word

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report on Russian interference in our 2016 elections, whatever it says, isn't the final word on Trump malfeasance.

It's just the first.

The special counsel's work, completed yesterday and turned over to Attorney General William Barr, has already fed numerous other ongoing state and congressional investigations into the President's demonstrable myriad misdeeds.

Meanwhile, don't expect any earth-shattering revelations from AG Barr on Trump's bad behavior.

Barr is the same guy who obstructed justice for President George H. W. Bush and others in Iraqgate and the Iran-Contra Affair.

That's why President Trump picked him for the job.

Who knows what's in the Mueller report. Barr is reviewing. Chances are it doesn't clear Trump of any Russian collusion or obstruction, but doesn't nail the President as guilty either.

Hang on. It's going to get even louder and messier. Trump will declare vindication and his brainwashed base will predictably follow suit.

The Democrats will push hard for Mueller's full report, as they should. After years of Trump chaos, the people deserve and need to see the whole truth, not simple soundbite summaries from Trump's inside fixer, Barr.

In the meantime, stay vigilant. It's just as important for "we the people" to make sure our representatives stick to the task of getting some concrete answers to long-burning questions -- and ensure "justice for all."