Monday Reads: President Goofus

There’s been some interesting conversation I’ve seen recently from old high school friends surrounding the old fashioned notions of mores, manners, and civility.  I laughed at the Pearl Clutching around the idea that a few choice curse words could elicit a stern mansplaining from one old coot–actually my age but more of an old coot than some of us will ever be–while on a nearby thread was some of the most bigoted, hateful stuff I’ve ever seen surrounded by ***crickets***.

Evidently, the end of Political Correctness means you still can’t use the F Bomb but you can disrespect women, GLBTs, nonXtianists, and religious, ethnic, and racial minorities.   Meanwhile,  researchers find using the F Bomb seems to be a sign of intelligence and good use of language.   Voting and supporting Trump appears to be a function of stupidity, anger, and bigotry.

I’ve seen calls for civility shouted down as being some form of oppression of ideals. We’ve seen tons of discussion of the Vulgarian-in-Chief and his propensity to puke all over people’s twitter feeds. What do you expected from an unrepentant “pussy grabber” who gave his music teacher a black eye second grade and refers to it as:

I actually gave a teacher a black eye. I punched my music teacher because I didn’t think he knew anything about music … Even early on I had a tendency to stand up and make my opinions known in a forceful way.

This is the dude that just recently acted out his desire to punch the news folks at CNN by retweeting your basic NAZI. Actually, I like this version better.   That’s a very muscular-looking DOJ and what better way to celebrate taking down the Malignant Melanoma Mussolini than with a can of yucky beer?

At some point, however, you have to wonder why the entire country seems to be running down the road to CrudeVille. It seems most of us think that Kremlin Caligula has created a distinct lack of civility to our interactions and a high level of distrust in our institutions.

As Americans prepare to celebrate the country’s 241st birthday, they believe the overall tone and level of civility between Democrats and Republicans in the nation’s capital has gotten worse since the election of President Trump last year, a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds. The same survey also shows distrust of many of the nation’s fundamental democratic institutions amongst the public.

Seven in 10 Americans say the level of civility in Washington has gotten worse since President Trump was elected, while just 6 percent say the overall tone has improved. Twenty percent say it’s stayed the same. For comparison, 35 percent in 2009 said civility in the country had declined in the U.S. following President Obama’s election, per a Gallup survey. Eight years ago, 21 percent of Americans in that poll thought civility and the tone of discourse in the country had improved.

We’re all hoping the DOJ works at the moment. However, one official has just quit saying that doing the job is nearly impossible under the Trump Family Syndicate.  

One of the Justice Department’s top corporate crime watchdogs has resigned, declaring that she cannot enforce ethics laws against companies while, she asserts, her own bosses in the Trump administration have been engaging in conduct that she said she would never tolerate in corporations.

Hui Chen — a former Pfizer and Microsoft lawyer who also was a federal prosecutor — had been the department’s compliance counsel. She left the department in June and broke her silence about her move in a recent LinkedIn post that sounded an alarm about the Trump administration’s behavior.

“Trying to hold companies to standards that our current administration is not living up to was creating a cognitive dissonance that I could not overcome,” Chen wrote. “To sit across the table from companies and question how committed they were to ethics and compliance felt not only hypocritical, but very much like shuffling the deck chair on the Titanic. Even as I engaged in those questioning and evaluations, on my mind were the numerous lawsuits pending against the President of the United States for everything from violations of the Constitution to conflict of interest, the ongoing investigations of potentially treasonous conducts, and the investigators and prosecutors fired for their pursuits of principles and facts. Those are conducts I would not tolerate seeing in a company, yet I worked under an administration that engaged in exactly those conduct. I wanted no more part in it.”

Chen came to the Justice Department in 2015, after officials there created a compliance counsel position to help guide the agency’s enforcement of criminal laws against corporations.

We are getting to him.  Here’s the latest news from the Daily Paranoia.

Marches were held in dozens of city supporting Impeachment.  Support for his impeachment is still higher than presidential approval.

For a minute there, things were looking up for President Donald Trump. By late last week, his approval rating was hovering around 40 percent, which isn’t great but marked an improvement for the former reality TV star. But then Trump spent the holiday weekend railing against the press and blasting off tweetstorms—and the president’s approval rating took a plunge.

Gallup’s tracking poll pegged Trump’s approval at just 37 percent to start off July, while disapproval stood at 57 percent. Last week, Gallup found the president’s approval rating had briefly climbed to 40 percent before the fall-off back into the 30s.

The Gallup poll interviewed 1,500 U.S. adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Trump’s 37 percent approval rating is dismal, especially for a president so early in his tenure, when the American people typically afford the office a grace period of sorts. Around this point in his first term, for instance, former President Barack Obama had a 60 percent approval rating.

So, most of us hate him, we really hate him. Do you think we’re being uncivil about it?

Anyway, I’m going to make this short because I have to work today.  What’s on your reading and blogging list today?  We’d like to hear from you!