The Colonel's Forum

Well, it happened. Trump is getting a 2nd term. There are many Americans who find this unfathomable. There are people who are deeply saddened and concerned for our country, because they care deeply about America and they find Donald Trump antithetical to the country they thought they were living in. I sympathize with this because I felt the same way the first time he won office. It shocked me to the core, but that's because I was also ignorant about America back in 2016. I thought that character mattered. I thought that we all felt a President should represent the best of our country, the highest standard, and I knew Donald Trump is none of those things. But I was wrong. I needed to reset my understanding of America, and Americans, and I've done my best to do that. Don't get me wrong, I'm still sad this 2nd time around, and I do not believe Trump will be a good president for us. I'm just not shocked at all. It was kinda predictable. So if you find yourself in a stat...

  I typically start my day with a review of Google News because it's a decent aggregator of news from a variety of sources. My favorite mobile app for news is Ground News. For $10 a year they serve up the latest headlines while also showing you which news outlets are more (or less) biased. For a little more, they'll provide even richer data and allow you to customize your news feed and topics to avoid bias. They also do a great job of highlighting "blind spots" on both ends of the spectrum - topics that news outlets leaning right or left don't cover. To summarily dismiss all media as biased is a cop out, and it's also inaccurate. In the US, it's what lazy Trumpies say to give themselves permission to not think critically, to remain willfully ignorant, and to fully embrace their own confirmation bias. Trump feeds this narrative because it works to his advantage. "I am the only source of truth, trust only that which you hear directly from me" makes...

 I wasn't sure what to expect from the "presidential" debate. Gotta put "presidential" in quotes because Trump definitely didn't act that way. It was definitely entertaining though, and informative. Kamala got about 20% more specific on some of her policy proposals, which is needed. I think some of her critics are holding out for more details, but at the same time Trump is miles behind her in terms of offering specifics. When asked about his plan to replace Obamacare, he freely admitted that he has none, just "concepts of a plan." For a guy who ran on replacing it in 2016, that's "sad!"  Trump took a curious line of attack several times in the debate: "you've had three years, why haven't you accomplished [thing] in that time?!" There's all kinds of flawed logic and hypocrisy in that: Harris has been VP for 3 years, one of the weakest positions in any democracy. It's not the VP's responsibility to deliver ...

 I'm back. I miss blogging as a creative outlet, it's an exciting election cycle, and I got enough of a nudge from a friend to dust off the blog, so here goes.  Donald Trump is a felon, a liar, a narcissist, and generally a bad person. His supporters know this and they don't care. They can justify and minimize all of those things in an attempt to rationalize supporting him. For some of his supporters, it's a single issue - guns, abortion, affirmative action, still being mad that Obama ever got elected in the first place and seeking vengeance, whatever. But I think most of Trump's supporters are actually not single issue voters. I think most of his supporters today find a 2nd Trump presidency attractive for the same reasons they found the 1st one appealing: they're mad. There are any number of things in their lives that are not going as they'd hoped, they are struggling to live the middle class life they had hoped for, they're doing all the things their ...