Enjoy the Outdoors. Love the Planet.

It’s the 4th of July and this time our celebration is not like any other year in the 242 year history of our country.

The buffoon whose elevation to the highest office in the land occurred in January of 2017 has proved to be an unmitigated disaster for the USA. This #PoserPrez seems to spend all of his time watching Fox Noise, thinking of new ways to insult our allies and undo the considerable legacy of Barack Obama, all the while searching for new and disgusting strategies to cozy up to his man-crush, Vladimir Putin.

Well, when he’s not a Mar-a-Lago playing golf, that is.

There are so many dimensions to the tragedy unfolding in our corporate life today. As we come to the day on which we celebrate our Independence, it can be a challenge to choose exactly what it is about tRump and tRumpism that sucks the worst.

Is it his cruelty and arrogance? His hard-to-believe, near-total ignorance of the history of our nation? The fact that he knows less-than-zero about how the levers of government work?

Could it be the fact that he demonstrates no interest in carrying out the duties of the Presidency? Is it his complete and thoroughly-documented general incompetence?

Maybe it’s his constant lying, exaggerating, denying, minimizing and just completely making shit up?

Honestly, it’s hard to choose. Pick one. Keep in mind that my short list here is far from complete. Truthfully, I barely scratched the surface.

For me, it’s easy. It’s the fact that our #LyingLoserPrez is trying to march the country towards Fascism. All the signs are there. He is undermining the First Amendment’s protection of journalism, of a free press. He screams “fake news” whenever anyone in the media points out one of his constant lies or just refuses to flatter him sufficiently in their stories.

He is setting us up for a foray into fascism with his constant “other-rizing” of immigrants and minority groups, pushing them farther and farther to the edge of our society and making them vulnerable to having their rights limited or taken away altogether.

Our constitution mandates that everyone within the jurisdiction of the United States receives the protections it affords. Not only citizens. But our unPOTUS still feels perfectly at liberty to separate children from their parents, some of whom are as young as six months, and then lock them in cages; the few places we have been permitted to see where kids have been interned look startlingly like dog kennels.

And this is happening to families whose only crime is the misdemeanor of crossing the border illegally. That describes, roughly, 90% of the families and individuals who have been rounded up by ICE or the Border Patrol. If people crossing the border are asking for asylum, their coming to the U.S. is no crime at all! But they’re being interned and having their children taken anyway without a case being opened for their asylum request.

This would-be tyrant is also fond of ignoring the rule of law. Of acting as though the law of the land simply doesn’t apply to him. And–to compound the felony here–he believes that he has unfettered power to pardon, not only all his family and friends and staff who have engaged in criminal behavior along with him, but to pardon himself!

Right! That’s never been done in the United States. And wrap your mind around this stark reality: our President is claiming the right to pardon himself for crimes he keeps insisting he has not committed! It’s insane! And about 25% of the American people have no problem with it. Or any other criminal outrage coming from the accursed occupant of our White House.

So Happy 4th of July, patriot! Reflect on the unhappy state of our nation today. And resolve to defend Lady Liberty from the many crimes and outrages committed by this petty, corrupt madman. This thoroughly incompetent madman, at that!

And join your fellows in the resistance movement. If we don’t make common cause with one another and defend our once-great nation from this usurper, his enablers and minions, this 242nd celebration for America may be the last one where all her citizens enjoy the full rights and blessings granted them by the Constitution.

“Bulldog Ben” Basile

© 2018 Ben Lawrence Basile

Photo credit Ben Lawrence Basile