Are you as fed up with what is happening in America as I am? Several days ago I tried to finish a book review, but I just could not get into the book itself... My brain is now overloaded with both the good and bad of the political rhetoric that gets worse and worse every day... You know what I mean--such as the two sample videos above and below.
When you move from moments of JOY learning about what could happen in America if we vote for the first woman in the nation to become president; and then move to what is happening with MAGA who continues to show support for one of our last presidents who has become a blight on just how bad it could get under another term, it is hard not to drown in the blizzard of emotions that comes with all the lies spewed by MAGA. Yes, I feel comfortable enough to say who is doing the lying, given that we see the individuals actually screaming them out to everybody! One of the authors I'm now reading broke from talking about his book, The Christian Case Against Donald Trump, to speak out against Tucker Carlson and others... (above) But I wanted to add a little more about his first book, MAGA Seduction, simply as a reminder of exactly what we went through during his previous stint in the White House...
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dehumanizing and debasing politics of the right wing under Donald Trump’s leadership. I’ve been Pat’s mentor in ministry for 15 years. We’re now both retired from leading churches, which gives us a greater freedom to speak than active church pastors enjoy. So rather than becoming demoralized by the way so many evangelicals have followed after Donald Trump, we’ve both chosen to do what we do naturally – speak pastorally into the situation, for the benefit of Christ’s people. Over the past four years, Pat and I have spoken frequently and at length about the eerie resemblance the current white American evangelical church bears to the German Evangelical Church of 1934 Germany, which became complicit with the nationalistic fascist agenda of Hitler. We both yearn for the Confessing Church of Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to rise out of the evangelical morass that we see today. Having formed an alliance with Trump, the white American evangelical church is poised to relinquish all claim to moral authority; indeed, to authority of any kind. In a painful departure from the father of the Protestant movement, Martin Luther, who abhorred the mixing of political will with church doctrine, white American evangelicals have doubled down on Trump’s political rhetoric, baptizing phrases like “Make America Great Again” and “Build the Wall” into ecclesial vernacular. And while on the one hand what is chaff should be allowed to blow away in the wind, I fear that what is true and wholesome wheat is also about to be trampled into permanent disrepute by our own devices. The words “unprecedented times” have perhaps been overused in 2020, but I do believe that we American evangelicals find ourselves at a critical crossroads as we look toward the 2020 election. The course of our future will be directed by whether or not we continue to collectively align ourselves with the depravity of Donald Trump’s vision for our nation. And most thinking individuals know what happened on January 6th, when Insurrection occurred!
But when 81% of white American evangelicals vote for Donald Trump, and, four years later, appear poised to vote for him again, something terrible has happened to the church I love and gave 40 years of my life to serve. In my years of friendship with Pat, I have been regularly impressed with the way his Jesus style of spirituality and pastoral heart meshes with an incisive mind and a quick wit. He writes and speaks with wisdom and clarity yet doesn’t talk down to his audience. His disarming affability has a way of bringing complex topics into accessible focus. This is why I’m so thrilled that he has chosen to write this book, on a topic that crucially needs to be brought into clear focus without being alienating. I believe that Pat is up for this task. He wrote this book out of passion for the church of Jesus Christ and its call to stay true to the values of the Kingdom of God, including a commitment to the sanctity of all life, from conception to the grave. Calling forth the American Confessing Church may be too lofty a goal for one book, but I believe it is a prophetic voice during our painful current wilderness.
A Note to Those Who Support Donald Trump When you read this and find yourself disagreeing with me, which you certainly will at some point, let this first thought be the most important thing you hear: I love you and I respect you. May our relationship not be defined by our difference of opinion about President Trump. Christians who disagree ought never to be enemies, nor even to harbor secret disdain for one another. We can be angry. We can (and sometimes should) give voice to that anger. But in our anger let’s not sin against one another,[1] neither by overly harsh words nor by undue silence. When we oppose one another, let’s show each other the honor of a sharp disagreement, speaking with clarity and listening with charity. May our model be Jesus Christ, himself, who somehow managed to exhibit both grace and truth in a world that despised him.
But there's only so much of this stuff that you know is written for somebody else (MAGA members) who may never even have heard about the book(s) I mention... So I went out looking for a different angle. And I have to say that I was actually shocked when I started reading.
First, I want to point out that MAGA Seduction was published in 2020, so we know that the brief excerpt was based upon Trump's first presidency. since then, Kahnke has written another book which I've been talking about earlier--The Christian Case Against Donald Trump. This book is even more comprehensive and, in addition, the author has created videos on YouTube for each of the chapters of the book. If you wish to gain further information on this author, you should subscribe to his site there, Culture, Faith, and Politics
Being dumb’s just about the worst thing there is when it comes to holding high office. —HARRY S. TRUMAN
...but Reagan’s talent as a television performer, in an electoral process increasingly dominated by that medium, papered over his ignorance beyond Spencer’s wildest dreams: he thumped the incumbent governor, Pat Brown, by an astounding million votes. This should have been cause for jubilation, since it meant the definitive end of Reagan’s acting career, but some saw it as ominous. Newsweek’s Emmet Hughes wrote that Reagan’s win “dramatizes the virtual bankruptcy, politically and intellectually, of a national party.” Such scolding couldn’t have mattered less to Spencer. If he could make Reagan look knowledgeable enough to be elected governor, he would be the go-to Svengali for dumb candidates everywhere. According to Spencer, he wound up managing more than four hundred Republican campaigns. The victorious Gipper offered Californians a vision of their state that was as lyrical as it was incoherent: “A wind is blowing across this state of ours. And it is not only wind; it will grow into a tidal wave. And there will be a government with men as tall as mountains.” He didn’t explain how he planned to retrofit government buildings to accommodate such gigantic civil servants. And though he nailed the audition, California’s new governor was unprepared for the role. Lou Cannon wrote, “He did not know how budgets were prepared, how bills were passed, or who it was in state government who checked the backgrounds of prospective appointees… [H]e didn’t know what he was supposed to be doing, or how he was supposed to spend his time.” Cannon recalled an early press conference where a reporter asked Reagan about his legislative program: “The novice governor did not have a clue. Turning plaintively to aides who were attending the news conference, he said, ‘I could take some coaching from the sidelines if anyone can recall my legislative program.’ Aides piped up and told Reagan some of the items in ‘his’ program.” Thanks to those trusty 5 x 8 cards, Reagan convinced voters he was well-informed enough to govern, but not a pointy-headed know-it-all like those intellectually curious hippies at UC Berkeley. The former TV pitchman infantilized the electorate by selling it simplistic solutions. “For many years now, you and I have been shushed like children and told there are no simple answers to the complex problems which are beyond our comprehension,” he said. “Well, the truth is, there are simple answers.” Reagan could deliver this anti-intellectual message with compelling sincerity because he believed it. The man who never cracked a book in college preferred solutions that didn’t require any homework, and so, apparently, did millions of Californians. According to his longtime adviser Ed Meese, “Reagan wanted to be known as a person of the people, not like an Adlai Stevenson.” Ah, Adlai Stevenson. We’ll hear that name a lot as we explore the Age of Ignorance. But before we meet Adlai, let’s consider what his party, the Democrats, were up to during the Ridicule stage. If the Republicans have been conducting a perverse experiment seemingly designed to answer this question—Who’s the most ignorant politician the U.S. is willing to elect?—in the 1950s, the Democrats started asking a perverse question of their own: Who’s the most flagrantly cerebral politician we can nominate? Adlai Stevenson II, the grandson of Grover Cleveland’s vice president, Adlai Stevenson I, was governor of Illinois when, in 1952, Harry Truman urged him to run for president. Unlike the plainspoken Truman, Stevenson was a fire hose of lofty rhetoric. In actuality, he was probably less intellectual than Truman, who read a ton and amassed a large personal library. Stevenson, on the other hand, died with only one book on his nightstand: the Social Register. He wasn’t much of a scholar, either: he had to leave Harvard Law School after failing several courses. But no one appeared more intellectual than Adlai. Throughout his political career, he cultivated the image of an egghead. In fact, the journalist Stewart Alsop coined the term “egghead” to describe him. Although political adversaries such as Richard Nixon soon adopted that word as a term of derision, Stevenson took pride in it. “Eggheads of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but your yolks!” he declared. His personal motto was “Via ovicapitum dura est”—The way of the egghead is hard. Yes, Adlai was not averse to inventing Latin quotations in his effort to pander to the highest common denominator. All this eggheadedness was catnip for Democrats, as were his dizzying flights of oratory. It was no accident that Stevenson’s speeches were distinctive, since his stable of speechwriters included John Kenneth Galbraith, Archibald MacLeish, John Hersey, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. They crafted high-minded if overwrought pronouncements such as this: “[T]he victory to be won in the twentieth century, this portal to the Golden Age, mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity, for it is a citadel guarded by thick walls of ignorance and of mistrust which do not fall before the trumpets’ blast or the politicians’ imprecations or even a general’s baton.” Such verbal gusts make one suspect that Stevenson paid his speechwriters by the word, but his Democratic audiences ate this stuff up. During one speech, a woman shouted, “Governor Stevenson, you have the vote of all the thinking people.” His response: “That’s not enough, madam. I need a majority.” Stevenson’s rueful comment reflected an awareness of his low electoral ceiling, a concern that delegates at the 1952 Democratic National Convention didn’t share. They nominated him for president, despite his weakness for vocab words like “imprecation.” In the general election, he lost by a landslide—442 electoral votes to 89—to Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, in spite of a spell in the groves of academe as president of Columbia University, kept his speeches Latin-free. “The knuckleheads have beaten the eggheads,” the columnist Murray Kempton declared. As president, Ike would be a role model for future anti-intellectuals like Reagan and George W. Bush, with comments like this: “I heard a definition of an intellectual that I thought was very interesting—a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.” He disdained “wise-cracking so called intellectuals going around and showing how wrong was everybody who didn’t happen to agree with them.” But Eisenhower, whom his secretary called “deathly afraid of being considered highbrow,” was more of an egghead than he let on. While he projected the image of a man who preferred golfing to reading, he often stayed up until 11:00 p.m. poring over government reports and other documents. This was just the kind of subterfuge that the John Birch Society expected from a commie spy like Ike. Stevenson’s defeat didn’t cool the Democrats’ ardor. They nominated him again in 1956—and this time, when the general election rolled around, he did even worse. By then, Adlai’s original booster, Truman, had decided that he was too eggheaded to win. “I was trying as gently as I could, to tell this man—so gifted in speech and intellect, and yet apparently so uncertain of himself and remote from people—that he had to learn how to communicate with the man in the street,” Truman wrote. “I had the feeling that I had failed.” Surely, after two electoral thrashings, it was time for Stevenson to abandon his futile effort to connect with voters. Nope: he gave the nomination a third shot, in 1960. This time, however, possibly having looked up the definition of insanity, Democrats put Stevenson out of his misery (miseria, in Latin) and chose John F. Kennedy...
“Politics is just like show business,” he said. “You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.” If his first gubernatorial campaign was a hell of an opening, Reagan’s White House years would provide him with ample opportunity for coasting—before he achieved a hell of a close, with Iran-Contra. It’s commonplace for commanders in chief to age visibly from the burdens of the office, but not the Gipper. As Cannon noted, “Reagan may have been the one president in the history of the republic who saw his election as a chance to get some rest.” He could’ve used all that downtime to acquire the knowledge necessary to fulfill his constitutional duties, but his laziness and incuriosity put the kibosh on that. At press conferences early in his presidency, he sounded like an actor who hadn’t bothered to learn his lines. When asked about the placement of U.S. missiles, the best he could ad-lib was “I don’t know but what maybe you haven’t gotten into the area that I’m going to turn over to the secretary of defense.” As the Sound of Music incident suggests, Reagan’s interest in briefing materials might have peaked when he acquired Jimmy Carter’s debate prep. Frustrated by his aversion to reading, cabinet members resorted to bringing him up to speed—or, more accurately, half speed—by showing him videos and cartoons about the subjects at hand. But even these Oval Office versions of Schoolhouse Rock! bored Reagan, who spent briefings doodling. Though a team of psychologists gave him a semblance of sentience when he ran for governor, by the time he became president his semi-informed veneer was wearing thin. The journalist Elizabeth Drew, who covered him during the 1980 campaign, observed, “Reagan’s mind appears to be a grab bag of clippings and ‘facts’ and anecdotes and scraps of ideas.” Embarrassingly, he often appeared stupidest when talking with or about foreign leaders. In a 1979 interview, Reagan told NBC’s Tom Brokaw, “If I become president, other than perhaps Margaret Thatcher I will probably be younger than almost all the heads of state I will have to do business with.” When Brokaw noted that he’d be considerably older than French president Giscard d’Estaing, Reagan replied, “Who?” (After Reagan was elected, Brokaw, demonstrating a gift for understatement, called him “a gravely under-informed president.”) After a half-hour briefing by the Lebanese foreign minister about his nation’s factional conflicts, Reagan’s only contribution was “You know, your nose looks just like Danny Thomas’s.” (The former star of the sitcom Make Room for Daddy might have been the only other person of Lebanese descent he’d ever met.) In a photo op with the Liberian ruler, Samuel K. Doe, Reagan called him “Chairman Moe.” Welcoming the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, to the White House, he said, “It gives me great pleasure to welcome Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and Mrs. Lee to Singapore.” During a meeting with Pope John Paul II, at least, he didn’t mangle the pontiff’s name; he just fell asleep. Reagan sometimes seemed like Voltaire’s Candide, an innocent in a constant state of wonder about the world around him. He called a 1982 trip to Latin America “real fruitful,” having gleaned this mind-boggling insight: “They’re all individual countries.” Reporting on this tour, Lou Cannon wrote, “Over and over again along the way, he expressed enthusiasm in what he was seeing for the first time, and his aides found it appealing and naive.” A foreign ministry official in Brazil was less enchanted by his wide-eyed ingenuousness. After Reagan suggested that Brazil could be “a bridge” for the U.S. in South America, the official noted, “If you look at a map, you will see that we cannot be detached from the South American continent. We are not a bridge from South America; we are in South America.” It’s possible the Brazilian was still sore after Reagan, raising a glass at a state dinner in BrasÃlia, offered a toast to “the people of Bolivia.” Belatedly recognizing his goof, he tried to explain it away by saying that Bolivia was where he was headed next. His next stop was Colombia; Bolivia wasn’t on his itinerary. But the Brazilians shouldn’t have felt singled out. Reagan’s ignorance spanned the globe. He demonstrated unquestioning devotion to the government of apartheid South Africa, possibly because he rarely asked questions about the place. When he did, the question was rhetorical, as in “Can we abandon this country that has stood beside us in every war we’ve ever fought?” It’s true that South Africa had been steadfast in its support, but not of us: many of its officials had ties to a party that supported the Nazis, and John Vorster, who led the country for thirteen years, had been jailed for cozying up to Hitler. Incredibly, Reagan claimed in a radio address that South Africa was a bastion of racial equality: “[T]hey have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertaining and so forth were segregated. That has all been eliminated.” This would have been welcome news to Nelson Mandela, had it reached his prison cell. Turning to a country he presumably knew more about because he despised it so much, Reagan said, “I’m no linguist but I have been told that in the Russian language there isn’t even a word for freedom.” Reagan was half right: he was no linguist. The Russian word for freedom is svoboda. Reagan might be best remembered for saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” but many other quotable nuggets emerged from his piehole: “Nuclear war would be the greatest tragedy, I think, ever experienced by mankind in the history of mankind”; “All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk”; and the admirably candid “We are trying to get unemployment to go up, and I think we’re going to succeed.” As the gaffes piled up like banana peels in Bonzo’s dressing room, it was time to call in the man who had disguised Reagan’s obliviousness before: Stu Spencer. Summoned to the White House, the Gipper’s trusty cornerman revealed his agenda to a reporter: “I’m here to see old foot-in-the-mouth.” Reagan’s mythologizers have worked hard to bury this image of him as an object of ridicule, but early in his presidency that’s what he often was. Their preferred narrative—that his White House tenure went from strength to strength—is false. Two years after he first entered the Oval Office, perhaps checking under the desk for nuclear waste, Reagan was struggling. As the economy proved obstinately resistant to the miracle of Reaganomics, his approval rating sank to a woeful 35 percent, barely higher than what most of his films would have notched on Rotten Tomatoes. Reagan’s refusal to take responsibility for his failures frustrated Pat Schroeder, a Democratic congresswoman from Colorado. In August 1983, she took to the floor of the House and coined a political cliché: “Mr. Speaker, after carefully watching Ronald Reagan, he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology—he has been perfecting the Teflon-coated Presidency.” Her remark proved tragically prescient. Two months later, 241 U.S. military personnel stationed in Beirut as part of Reagan’s confused Lebanon policy died in the bombings of their marine barracks. He changed the subject. In what should have been called Operation Expedient Distraction, he ordered the invasion of the minuscule Caribbean island nation of Grenada, a mission roughly as challenging as the conquest of a Sandals resort. His approval rating soared. As his popularity grew, the press cowered. In On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, Mark Hertsgaard documents the Fourth Estate’s wariness about roughing up Reagan. “We have been kinder to President Reagan than any president that I can remember since I’ve been at the Post,” said Ben Bradlee, the executive editor of the Washington Post. His colleague at the paper William Greider theorized that the press, in its obsequiousness to Reagan, was compensating for being blindsided by his election: “It was a sense of ‘My God, they’ve elected this guy who nine months ago we thought was a hopeless clown.’ ” Reagan’s burgeoning status as Teflon Ron owed much to the media’s decision to handle him like a glass unicorn. “I think a lot of the Teflon came because the press was holding back,” his communications director, David Gergen, said. “I don’t think they wanted to go after him that toughly.” “Teflon” became an overused label for politicians, as journalists employed it to describe not only Reagan but every president since. Fearing the damage this practice could inflict on its trademark, in 1985 the manufacturer of Teflon, DuPont, pushed back. “DuPont simply wants users of Teflon to add a little circle with an R inside to denote that Teflon is a registered trademark,” the New York Times reported. “A printed message being sent to reporters all over the capital adds, ‘It is not, alas, a verb or an adjective, not even when applied to the President of the United States!’ ” Despite this stern warning, Teflon® Ron never caught on. Given the press’s reluctance to fact-check Reagan, it’s no surprise that the public gradually stopped caring whether anything he said was, well, factual. In 1983, the New York Times devoted an entire article to this chicken-or-egg mystery, titled, “Reagan Misstatements Getting Less Attention.” “[T]he President continues to make debatable assertions of fact, but news accounts do not deal with them as extensively as they once did,” the Times reported. “In the view of White House officials, the declining news coverage mirrors a decline in interest by the general public.” No one seemed to care when Reagan indulged in one of his favorite vices: attributing fake quotations to Lenin. “Mr. Reagan said at a news conference three weeks ago that ‘just the other day’ he had read an article quoting ‘the Ten Commandments of Nikolai Lenin’ to the effect that Soviet leaders reserved the right to lie and cheat to advance the cause of socialism,” the Times noted. “After the statement, the White House acknowledged that Lenin did not issue ‘Ten Commandments’ as such. Lyndon K. Allin, a deputy White House press secretary, said Mr. Reagan got the reference from a clipping sent by a friend citing 10 different ‘Leninisms.’ ” The Times didn’t point out that Reagan, while arguing that the Soviets reserved the right to lie, was reserving the right to lie about the Soviets. As journalistic oversight shriveled, Reagan’s childlike solutions to the nation’s problems went virtually unchallenged. His decades-old binary oppositions, us versus government and us versus communists, yielded made-for-TV catchphrases. “Government is the problem” and “The Evil Empire” became as ubiquitous as “I pity the fool” and “Watchu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”VII He added another rhetorical empty calorie in 1984, when his reelection campaign inanely declared that it was “Morning in America.” Speaking to business leaders in 1985, he’d apparently run out of catchphrases of his own and borrowed one from Clint Eastwood: “Go ahead, make my day.” The quote had an interesting provenance: Clint’s cop character, Dirty Harry, had said it while pointing his gun at a Black man. It earned Reagan a thunderous ovation from his largely white audience. But there were bumps on the road to Reagan’s Hollywood ending. His approval rating plunged twenty points after news of the Iran-Contra scandal broke. Wisely, Reagan didn’t try to brand this illegal arms deal as Morning in Nicaragua. He deployed a potent alibi instead: his ignorance. When he swore that he had no idea what had been going on at the White House, right under his nose, millions found the explanation plausible. His numbers ticked back up. After Iran-Contra, some in the media wondered whether their decision to coat Reagan with Teflon® had done the country a disservice. Newsweek’s Robert Parry groused that the press corps “seemed to be a little fearful that if it wrote stories that were perceived as tough on this president, the public would not like them.” The media’s unilateral disarmament during Reagan’s presidency didn’t mean the Ridicule stage of ignorance was over, however. Just as Ronnie the actor had granted a “blanket waiver” only to his own talent agency, the media issued a free pass only to him. Reagan’s ignorance defense during Iran-Contra was the rare instance when he highlighted his obliviousness instead of trying to hide it. Another of his glaring flaws, however—his laziness—became his favorite topic for self-roasting. He owned his sloth and, with his trademark grin ’n’ nod, let the nation know that he was in on the joke. Reagan managed to be both a bumbling sitcom dad and his own laugh track. “It’s true hard work never killed anybody, but I figure why take the chance?” he jested. After four years of Carter, that annoying grind who always did his homework, Americans seemed to enjoy having a president who didn’t even bring his homework home. “I am concerned about what is happening in government,” he said, “and it’s caused me many a sleepless afternoon.” Returning to this seemingly bottomless well of hilarity, he cracked, “When I leave the White House, they will put on my chair in the Cabinet Room ‘Ronald Reagan slept here.’ ” What a kidder! Even with the president napping, doodling, and watching Julie Andrews, the White House was in no danger of becoming rudderless: the ship of state was being guided by the stars. His wife Nancy’s belief in astrology—specifically in a San Francisco–based astrologist named Joan Quigley—filled the leadership vacuum. In his memoir, For the Record, Donald Regan, who served as both Reagan’s chief of staff and treasury secretary, made palpable the trauma of working in an administration under Quigley’s cosmological control. In 1985, arrangements for the crucial first summit between Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in Geneva, couldn’t be solidified until Quigley had done her planetary due diligence. “As usual, Mrs. Reagan insisted on being consulted on the timing of every presidential appearance and action so that she could consult her Friend in San Francisco about the astrological factor,” Regan wrote. “The large number of details involved must have placed a heavy burden on the poor woman, who was called upon not only to choose auspicious moments for meetings between the two most powerful men on our planet, but also to draw up horoscopes that presumably provided clues to the character and probable behavior of Gorbachev.” But Quigley wasn’t the only one pondering the heavens during the Geneva summit. According to Gorbachev, at one point Reagan turned to him and said, in all seriousness, “What would you do if the United States were attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?” This scenario, lifted from the 1951 sci-fi flick The Day the Earth Stood Still, was an obsession of Reagan’s. In an appearance before the National Strategy Forum, in Chicago, he was asked to name “the most important need in international relations.” He replied, “I’ve often wondered, what if all of us in the world discovered that we were threatened by a power from outer space—from another planet. Wouldn’t we all of a sudden find that we didn’t have any differences between us at all—we were all human beings, citizens of the world—and wouldn’t we come together to fight that particular threat?” Got it: The most important need in international relations is an attack from outer space. These extraterrestrial musings were so frequent that, whenever Reagan uncorked one, his national security adviser, Colin Powell, would roll his eyes and say, “Here come the little green men again.”
I began to think about this after talking with Professor and Chair of Political Science at West Virginia University who, when we were discussing those individuals who were running for office, it was my first thought that they really weren't different than he was as a university faculty and administrator, he quickly pointed out that he personally expected more from those running for a national position--they needed to be better informed than he was! I soon saw that this was a great rule as we look at the federal level candidates...
In fact, there were many issues that I'd come to think was important that were, indeed, NOT happening... My first open-eyed awakening was when I was working in Personnel at WVU. I was privy to the entire budget listing for all employees there. But, the faculty and administrators had been blacked out... Well, it you are like me with an abundance of curiosity, I simply took a page, held it up to the light and read the salaries of some of those individuals who were blacked out. What amazed me was that their salaries were lower than many non-faculty! Now, I could be wrong, but when I realized that, starting, with grade school teachers, there was a major inequity for those who were actually teaching us, I began to question just how "dumb" were those who were responsible for teaching us subjects that we would need in the future... Simply due to their low salary.
Then I started to realize that even a "personnel classification system" could be inequitable...For instance, when I first was promoted into what in essence was the second highest level of secretaries/assistants which was those who responded to the needs of vice-presidents/provosts, there was a difference in what actually was being performed for each of those senior administrators. And it affected me! I had been working for the Provost for a number of years. Then an organizational change occurred and new vice-president positions were created and the title of Provost was eliminated. By that time I had transferred to the vice-president for Instruction. While at the same time, a higher level staff support plus a secretary was added to respond to the needs of another vice-president. Thus I was performing all support staff for my boss while the other vice-president's secretary was only doing secretarial support... When I asked about it, I discovered that a classification system cannot adequately provide for individuals getting assigned higher-level responsibilities, at an institutional level...
In effect, there was always going to be some level of inequality and the only way to advance would be to move into a different higher classification...And, even then, it was only as good as it could get to compare one individual's worth/responsibilities, versus another's...
As I grew older and more involved, I learned that this type of basic inequity could get even more of a problem. Individuals were being asked to actually train a new individual/supervisor, even though they would be making more than that individual. One of the ways that organizational changes were made was my promoting an individual that they wanted to replace, but moving them upward, but into a staff position... It is not my intent to explore all of these variables in which I was personally involved, other than to note that, often, new employees were not even qualified to handle the position. Or, worse, had been hired as a favor to the superior, much like was being done in the federal government. Therefore, the result of this process created extremely difficult situations where an individual, even one that held a degree, could not handle the job in which they were hired... Been through that fiasco!
Therefore, it is quite clear to me that we are indeed becoming or have already become a dumber and dumber nation... Fortunately for me, there are a number of videos that can explain just how one comedian/author chose to explain just how and when millions of Americans have chosen to elect a dumb president(s)!
And, of course, we all know who the last one was...The man who never even read the morning briefing slaved over by his gofers, who were angry or even just use to that particular president not doing much reading or anything else... Why read when you can create a cult of those who are concerned more about their own biases, their own failures, or their own desires to play soldiers who were allowed and praised by that president... And who cares, if he suggested drinking bleach to kill the coronavirus... Hey, he's entertaining, so he must be qualified to be our leader...Right?
Me, I'm going to vote for a woman who is fully qualified to be our president.
Kamala Harris (born October 20, 1964, Oakland, California, U.S.) is the 49th vice president of the United States (2021– ) in the Democratic administration of Pres. Joe Biden. She is the first woman, the first Black American, and the first Asian American to hold the post. She had previously served in the U.S. Senate (2017–21) and as attorney general of California (2011–17). Biden pulled his bid for reelection and endorsed Harris as the Democratic Party’s nominee in the presidential election of 2024. In early August, Harris was officially named the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee following her victory in a virtual vote of party delegates.
Her political career may be taking a new route now that President Biden has dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and has chosen to endorse Harris, who has secured the Democratic nomination. So why did the California native choose a college across the country, in Washington, D.C.? The vice president has said she knew she wanted to attend a historically Black college or university (HBCU) and enrolled in Howard University in 1982. Attending Howard was a dream come true, Harris has said, as she grew up hearing stories about the institution from her aunt who is also an alum. While at Howard, Harris represented first-year students on the College of Arts and Sciences Student Council, became a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and served on the institution’s debate team. She graduated from Howard in 1986 with a bachelor of arts degree in economics and political science.
Today, she frequently looks back at her time at Howard as one of the most important aspects of her life. “The thing that Howard taught me is that you can do any collection of things, and not one thing to the exclusion of the other,” Harris told Howard Magazine. “You could be homecoming queen and valedictorian. There are no false choices at Howard.”
Following her journey at Howard, Harris returned to California to attend the University of California, Hastings College of Law, which has since been renamed the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. While in law school, Harris served as president of the Black Law Students Association. She graduated in 1989, earning a juris doctor (JD) degree and was admitted to the California Bar in 1990.
How Vice President Harris Continues to Celebrate Her Education
Though it’s been more than 30 years since Vice President Harris graduated from both Howard and law school, she continues to celebrate her education today. She frequently returns to her undergraduate alma mater to support and encourage current students, as well as to host campaign events. Harris visited Howard in April 2023 to criticize lawmakers who are seeking to restrict and ban reproductive rights across the country.
Beyond her many visits to campus, Harris regularly speaks of her experiences in college as ones that were not only formative for herself but also for her peers who looked like her. “That was the beauty of Howard,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir. “Every signal told students that we could be anything—that we were young, gifted and Black, and we shouldn’t let anything get in the way of our success.”
Whoopie Goldberg and the View members have done their research and have made their decision to vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz... Now is the time you should have already watched or read as much as you needed to do to make your decision for whom your vote will be made. We already have seen that Trump will be planning to not accept the final voting millions of us have already submitted their votes or will do so next Tuesday... If you, too, are looking for joy, freedom and toward the future, do take time, right now to read and share this basic information!
God Bless,
Gabby
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