The general Russia approach that Democrats now routinely depict as treasonous - avoiding confrontation with and even accommodating Russian interests, not just in Ukraine but also in Syria - was one of the defining traits of Obama's foreign policy. This fact shouldn't be overstated: Obama engaged in provocative acts such as moves to further expand NATO, non-lethal aid to Ukraine, and deploying "missile defense" weaponry in Romania. But he rejected most calls to confront Russia. That is one of the primary reasons the "foreign policy elite" - which, recall, Obama came into office denouncing and vowing to repudiate - was so dissatisfied with his presidency.

A new, long article by Politico foreign affairs correspondent Susan Glasser - on the war being waged against Trump by Washington's "foreign policy elite" - makes this point very potently. Say what you will about Politico, but one thing they are very adept at doing is giving voice to cowardly Washington insiders by accommodating their cowardice and thus routinely granting them anonymity to express themselves. As journalistically dubious as it is to shield the world's most powerful people with anonymity, this practice sometimes ends up revealing what careerist denizens of Washington power really think but are too scared to say. Glasser's article, which largely consists of conveying the views of anonymous high-level Obama officials, contains this remarkable passage:

In other words, Democrats are now waging war on, and are depicting as treasonous, one of Barack Obama's central and most steadfastly held foreign policy positions, one that he clung to despite attacks from leading members of both parties as well as the DC National Security Community. That's not Noam Chomsky drawing that comparison; it's an Obama appointee.

The destructive bipartisan Foreign Policy Community was furious with Obama for not confronting Russia more, and is now furious with Trump for the same reason (though they certainly loath and fear Trump for other reasons, including the threat they believe he poses to U.S. imperial management through a combination of ineptitude, instability, toxic PR, naked rather than prettified savagery, and ideology; Glasser writes: "'Everything I've worked for for two decades is being destroyed,' a senior Republican told me").

All of this demonstrates how fundamental a shift has taken place as a result of the Democrats' election-related fixation on The Grave Russian Threat. To see how severe the shift is, just look at this new polling data from CNN this morning that shows Republicans and Democrats doing a complete reversal on Russia in the span of eight months:

The Democrats' obsession with Russia has not just led them to want investigations into allegations of hacking and (thus far evidence-free) suspicions of Trump campaign collusion - investigations which everyone should want. It's done far more than that: it's turned them into increasingly maniacal and militaristic hawks - dangerous ones - when it comes to confronting the only nation with a larger nuclear stockpile than the U.S., an arsenal accompanied by a sense of fear, if not outright encirclement, from NATO expansion. Put another way, establishment Democrats - with a largely political impetus but now as a matter of conviction - have completely abandoned Obama's accommodationist approach to Russia and have fully embraced the belligerent, hawkish mentality of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Bill Kristol, the CIA and Evan McMullin. It should thus come as no surprise that a bill proposed by supreme warmonger Lindsey Graham to bar Trump from removing sanctions against Russia has more Democratic co-sponsors than Republican ones.

This is why it's so notable that Democrats, in the name of "resistance," have aligned with neocons, CIA operatives and former Bush officials: not because coalitions should be avoided with the ideologically impure, but because it reveals much about the political and policy mindset they've adopted in the name of stopping Trump. They're not "resisting" Trump from the left or with populist appeals - by, for instance, devoting themselves to protection of Wall Street and environmental regulations under attack, or supporting the revocation of jobs-killing free trade agreements, or demanding that Yemini civilians not be massacred.

The liberal elites-from Hollywood and the Democratic Party to The New York Times and CNN-a group that bears significant responsibility for the death of our democracy, now hold themselves up as the saviors of the republic. They have embarked, despite their own corruption and their complicity in neoliberalism and the crimes of empire, on a self-righteous moral crusade to topple Donald Trump. It is quite a show. They attack Trump's "lies," denounce executive orders such as his travel ban as un-American and blame Trump's election on Russia or FBI Director James Comey rather than the failed neoliberal policies they themselves advanced.

Where was this moral outrage when our privacy was taken from us by the security and surveillance state, the criminals on Wall Street were bailed out, we were stripped of our civil liberties and 2.3 million men and women were packed into our prisons, most of them poor people of color? Why did they not thunder with indignation as money replaced the vote and elected officials and corporate lobbyists instituted our system of legalized bribery? Where were the impassioned critiques of the absurd idea of allowing a nation to be governed by the dictates of corporations, banks and hedge fund managers? Why did they cater to the foibles and utterings of fellow elites, all the while blacklisting critics of the corporate state and ignoring the misery of the poor and the working class? Where was their moral righteousness when the United States committed war crimes in the Middle East and our militarized police carried out murderous rampages? What the liberal elites do now is not moral. It is self-exaltation disguised as piety. It is part of the carnival act.

The liberal class refuses to acknowledge that it sold the Democratic Party to corporate bidders; collaborated in the evisceration of our civil liberties; helped destroy programs such as welfare, orchestrate the job-killing North American Free Trade Agreement and Trans-Pacific Partnership deal, wage endless war, debase our public institutions including the press and build the world's largest prison system.

"The truth is hard to find. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important than ever," reads a television ad for The New York Times. What the paper fails to add is that the hardest place to find the truth about the forces affecting the life of the average American and the truth about empire is in The New York Times itself. News organizations, from the Times to the tawdry forms of entertainment masquerading as news on television, have rendered most people and their concerns invisible. Liberal institutions, especially the press, function, as the journalist and author Matt Taibbi says, as "the guardians" of the neoliberal and imperial orthodoxy.

It is the job of the guardians of orthodoxy to plaster over the brutal reality and cruelty of neoliberalism and empire with a patina of civility or entertainment. They pay homage to a nonexistent democracy and nonexistent American virtues. The elites, who live in enclaves of privilege in cities such as New York, Washington and San Francisco, scold an enraged population. They tell those they dismiss as inferiors to calm down, be reasonable and patient and trust in the goodness of the old ruling class and the American system. African-Americans have heard this kind of cant preached by the white ruling class for a couple of centuries.

Because the system works for the elites, and because the elites interact only with other elites, they are mystified about the revolt rising up from the decayed cities they fly over in the middle of the country. They think they can stuff this inexplicable rage back in the box. They continue to offer up absurd solutions to deindustrialization and despair, such as Thomas Friedman's endorsement of "a culture of entrepreneurship" and "an ethic of pluralism." These kinds of bromides are advertising jingles. They bear no more connection to reality than Trump promising to make America great again.

I walked into the Harvard Club in New York City after midnight on election night. The well-heeled New York elites stood, their mouths agape, looking up at the television screens in the oak-paneled bar while wearing their Clinton campaign straw hats. They could not speak. They were in shock. The system they funded to prevent anyone from outside their circle, Republican or Democrat, from achieving the presidency had inexplicably collapsed.

Taibbi, when I interviewed him in New York, said political power in our corporate state is controlled by "a tripartite system." "You have to have the assent of the press, the donor class, and one of the two [major] political parties to get in," said Taibbi, author of "Insane Clown President: Dispatches From the 2016 Circus." "It's an exclusive club. It's like a membership system. They all have to agree and confer their blessing on the candidate. Trump somehow managed to get past all three of those obstacles. And he did it essentially by putting all of them on trial. He put the press on trial and villainized them with the public. I think it was a brilliant masterstroke that nobody saw coming. But it wouldn't have been possible if their unpopularity hadn't been building for years and years and years."

"It's a kind of Stockholm syndrome," he said of the press. "The reporters, candidates, and candidates' aides are all thrown together. They're stuck in the same environment with each other day after day, month after month. After a while, they start to unconsciously adopt each other's values. Then they start to live in the same neighborhoods. They go to the same parties. Then it becomes a year-after-year kind of thing. Then after that, they're the same people. It's a total perversion of what's supposed to happen. We're [the press] supposed to be on the outside, not identifying with these people. But now, it's a club. Journalists enjoy the experience of being close to power."

At first the press, especially the television press, could not get enough of Trump. He received 23 times the coverage of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who spoke about things that do not make for great television-inequality and corporate corruption. Trump brought in the advertising dollars. 2016 was CNN's most profitable year. Then, alarmed at Trump's ascendancy, the press set out to destroy him. The press applied its Darth Vader Force choke. It did not work. They tried it again and again. The Force had deserted them.

"When a candidate makes a mistake and steps in it-[2004 presidential hopeful] Howard Dean is the classic example, the scream-then they [TV news shows] replay it every hour, 100 times a day," Taibbi said. "The critical part is that Dean was already in violation leading up to that moment. He was not the right person because he was anti-war. He got his donations from the wrong people. He makes the mistake. The press pig-piles on the person just instinctively. All this negative attention. The candidate freaks out and apologizes. He disappears for a while. He tries to soldier on. The next thing you know, there's a Page 16 story: Candidate exits the race. It's a script. But it didn't work with Trump."

The press, like the Democratic Party, is an appendage of the consumer society. These institutions are not about politics or news. They are about imparting an experience. They create political personalities, marketed as celebrities, to make us feel good about candidates. These manufactured emotions, the product of the dark arts of the public relations industry, determine how we vote. Issues and policies are irrelevant. It is marketing and entertainment. Trump is a skillful marketer of his fictitious self.

"When you work in that environment long enough you unconsciously become an agent for whatever that commercial strategy is," Taibbi said of the press in our corporate-run political theater.

"What we call right-wing and liberal media in this country are really just two different strategies of the same kind of nihilistic lizard-brain sensationalism," Taibbi wrote in "Insane Clown President." "The ideal CNN story is a baby down a well, while the ideal Fox story is probably a baby thrown down a well by a Muslim terrorist or an ACORN activist. Both companies offer the same service, it's just that the Fox version is a little kinkier."

The pseudo-events on television displace reality. This is how a reality star becomes president. Sixty million people think Trump's manufactured persona-the predominate tycoon-on "The Apprentice" is real. Our perception of the truth is determined by what appears on the screen. If an event is never broadcast, it somehow never happened. The electronic image is the word of God. The corporate state controls most of what is seen and heard on television, what ideas and events can be discussed in the mainstream media and what orthodoxies, including neoliberalism and the war industry, must never be questioned. We suffer an intellectual tyranny as pervasive as that imposed by fascism and communism. Trump, who is as gullible as the most habitual television viewer, exemplifies our cultural and political death. He is no more "authentic" than Hillary Clinton. But he appears on our screens as more authentic because he is more deeply embedded in the medium that controls our thoughts. He is what is vomited up from the perverted zeitgeist of a nation entranced and dominated by electronic hallucinations.

"People have this idea that Trump has no connection with the 'common man,' but he does," Taibbi said. "He has exactly the same media habits that ordinary people have. He believes the stuff that he reads on the internet and watches on television implicitly and unquestioningly. That is what gives him that connection with people. He thinks like they do. He has the same habits they have. A classic example is the thing with the so-called 3 million illegal ... voters. He reads that, probably in an Infowars story, it's policy like two minutes later. He doesn't go through the process of asking himself if it's untrue. He's a perfect consumer in that respect. That's what makes him so dangerous."

"[George W.] Bush was child's play compared to what we're dealing with now," Taibbi said. "Bush was a puppet. He was a vehicle for a very familiar form of right-wing capitalist politics. This Trump thing is totally different. Trump really is the actual engine behind this phenomenon during the entire campaign. There were no people behind the man, I don't think. The presidential campaign has no relation to the issue of whether or not you can govern effectively. The campaign is a television show. The values that decide whether a person becomes a candidate or can't become a candidate are more or less arbitrary. It has a lot to do with the commercial value of the candidate. You can't have an unentertaining candidate because the press needs to make money. They will unconsciously gravitate towards someone who does what Trump does, which is get [website] hits and eyeballs and ratings."

Trump's popularity increased the more the establishment condemned him. This would have sent a profound and disturbing message to anyone not as clueless as our liberal elites. They did not get it. They thought they could trot out Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Hollywood celebrities and get the rubes to fall for their routine one more time. They thought the country would again obey.

The liberal class, by embracing neoliberalism and refusing to challenge the imperial wars, empowered the economic and political structures that destroyed our democracy and gave rise to Trump. Multiculturalism, when it means, to use the words of Cornel West, nothing more than having a president who is a "black mascot for Wall Street," betrays the disenfranchised and endows the ruling elites with a false progressivism, a false humanism and a false inclusiveness.

Hillary and Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and the current Democratic Party leadership designed and built the massive system of imprisonment, essentially ended welfare, expanded our wars and pushed through NAFTA. They destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class families and are responsible for the mounds of corpses in the Middle East. Yet these liberal elites speak as if they are champions of racial and economic justice. They appear in choreographed pseudo-events to demonstrate a faux compassion. Now they have been exposed as fakes.

A genuine populism, one defined and often articulated by Bernie Sanders, could sweep the Democratic Party back into power. Regulating Wall Street, publicly financing campaigns, forgiving student debt, demanding universal health care, bailing out homeowners victimized by the banks, ending the wars in the Middle East, instituting a jobs program to repair our decaying infrastructure, dismantling the prison system, restoring the rule of law on the streets of our cities, making college education free and protecting programs such as Social Security would see election victory after election victory.

But this will never happen within the Democratic Party. It refuses to prohibit corporate money. The party elites know that if corporate money disappears, so do they. The party's hierarchy, pressured by Obama and the Clintons, elevated Tom Perez over Keith Ellison-whom a major donor to the party, Haim Saban, condemns as an "anti-Semite" because of Ellison's criticism of the Israeli government-to head the Democratic National Committee. They will press forward repeating the same silly slogans and trying to use the now ineffective Force choke on their political enemies. They may have lost control of the Congress and the White House and hold only 16 governorships and majorities in only 31 of the states' 99 legislative chambers, but they are incapable of offering any meaningful alternative to neoliberalism and empire. They are devoid of a vision. They can only moralize. They will continue to atrophy and enable the consolidation of an American fascism.

Fyodor Dostoevsky excoriated Russia's bankrupt liberal class at the end of the 19th century. Russian liberals mouthed values they did not defend. Their stated ideals bore no relationship to their actions. They were filled with a suffocating narcissism.

In "Notes From Underground," Dostoevsky lampooned the defeated dreamers of the liberal class, those who preached goodness but lived in moral squalor. These defeated dreamers denounced the social and cultural depravity they had largely created. They had an open disdain for the uneducated, the poor, the working class, the lesser breeds beneath them. And in the end they ushered in a moral nihilism to empower a dangerous class of demagogues, killers and fools.

For months now, our country has endured the tacit denigration of American ingenuity. Countless statements-from elected officials, activist groups, journalists and many others-have ignored our nation's superb blend of dazzling high-tech capacities and statecraft mendacities.

Fortunately, this week the news about release of illuminating CIA documents by WikiLeaks has begun to give adequate credit where due. And not a moment too soon. For way too long, Russia has been credited with prodigious hacking and undermining of democracy in the United States.

Many Americans have overlooked the U.S. government's fantastic hacking achievements. This is most unfair and disrespectful to the dedicated men and women of intelligence services like the CIA and NSA. Far from the limelight, they've been working diligently to undermine democracy not just overseas but also here at home.

Today, the massive new trove of CIA documents can help to put things in perspective. Maybe now people will grasp that our nation's undermining of democracy is home-grown and self-actualized. It's an insult to the ingenious capacities of the United States of America to think that we can't do it ourselves.

Contrary to all the public relations work that U.S. intelligence agencies have generously done for them, the Russians don't even rank as peripheral to the obstacles and prospects for American democracy. Rest assured, throughout the long history of the United States, we haven't needed foreigners to get the job done.

In our current era, can Vladimir Putin take any credit for purging huge numbers of African Americans, Latinos and other minority citizens from the voter rolls? Of course not.

Did Putin create and maintain the barriers that prevented many low-income people from voting on November 8? Only in his dreams.

Can the Kremlin hold a candle to the corporate-owned cable TV channels that gave Donald Trump umpteen free hours of uninterrupted air time for speeches at his campaign rallies? Absolutely not.

Could any Russian operation claim more than a tiny sliver of impact compared to the handiwork of FBI Director James Comey as he boosted Donald Trump's prospects with a pair of gratuitous announcements about a gratuitously re-opened probe of Hillary Clinton's emails during the last days of the 2016 campaign? No way.

Is Putin anything but a miniscule lightweight in any efforts to manipulate the U.S. electorate compared to "dark money" American billionaires like the Koch brothers? Give us a break.

And how about the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? The Kremlin can only marvel at the way that the CIA, the NSA and the bipartisan leadership in Washington have shredded the Fourth Amendment while claiming to uphold it.

To sum up: The CIA's efforts to tout Russia add up to jaw-dropping false modesty! The humility of "deep state" leaders in Langley is truly awesome.

Let's get a grip. Overwhelmingly, the achievements of thwarting democracy in America have been do-it-yourself operations. It's about time that we give adequate credit to the forces perpetuating this country's self-inflicted wounds to American democracy.

The Berkeley-Albany Bar Association has done it again! At its latest monthly lunchtime meeting, BABA served us up the perfect guest speaker -- and the perfect rubber chicken as well. What more can you possibly ask for. Our speaker clearly laid it out to us, just exactly what President Trump's new Supreme Court nominee is up to. "Neil Gorsuch is a positivist," the guest speaker said.

"But what the freak is a positivist?" you might ask. Our speaker was about to tell us -- and in more detail than we ever would want to know if we in any way plan to look forward to the next decade with hope. T.M.I.

"Positivism is an outdated English legal philosophy, tracing its roots back to John Austin, who thought that law was just a command of the sovereign. There was no connection between law and morality, as Austin would have it; law should be value-free. The sovereign ordered something and the courts enforced it." Period. "Positivism imagines that the law represents an order that must be carried out."

And then our speaker went on to tell us more about Gorsuch specifically. Apparently, not much compassion or morality or consideration of expert opinions or even the law itself is involved in Gorsuch's thought processes. It's more like if whoever Gorsuch considers to be the top dog tells him to jump, Gorsuch will just say, "How high?" And currently, that top dog appears to be The Donald.

But apparently there is one exception to Gorsuch's blind allegiance to Trump. According to the speaker at BABA, "There is, in Judge Gorsuch's reported decisions, a tendency to blur the constitutional lines between church and state." So. What if God tells him to do something and Trump says not to do it. Who will Gorsuch choose to be his OG? God or Trump?

And, also, what would happen if God contacts Grosuch on His hotline from heaven -- and Gorsuch gets a bad connection or misinterprets the call? What if God sez, "I am pro-life," and Gorsuch doesn't even realize that what God is saying has nothing to do with abortions. God is simply stating that He is for the rights of women, freedom for all, a fair living wage for the meek and that He is also anti-war -- but Gorsuch has simply gotten confused.

Or suppose God thinks that most American "wars" are crimes against humanity, that giving welfare to corporations (but not to the poor) is an Abomination and that the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama and Trump are all going to Hell for killing millions in the Middle East. Will Gorsuch then dutifully show up at the Pearly Gates and plead President Trump's case regarding why the Prez shouldn't be joining that huge bunch of panderers to Wall Street and War Street who are already in Hell?

But no matter what the real story actually is, apparently Gorsuch truly believes that his hotline to God is well-connected. But what if Gorsuch is actually right and not just some crank hearing voices in his tinfoil hat? In that case, anyone who actually knows what God is thinking is gonna be a really handy person to have on the Supreme Court, right? Until, of course, the day arrives when Gorsuch has to chose between God and Trump.

Or, even worse, what if Gorsuch chooses God over Trump and then discovers that Nietzsche was right?
(c) 2017 Jane Stillwater. Stop Wall Street and War Street from destroying our world. And while you're at it, please buy my books!

It was August 2014. Our secret and nefarious meeting had to be disguised as a public event.

So, the Russian Ambassador to the United States, Sergey Ivanovich Kislyak, spoke at the University of Virginia, in an event organized by the Center for Politics, which no doubt has video of the proceedings and was of course in on the conspiracy. Kislyak was once ambassador to Belgium and to NATO. He served an 8-course Russian dinner for select guests prior to the public forum in an underground lair deep inside Observatory Hill.

Kislyak spoke to a packed auditorium at UVA and took, I think, well over an hour of questions. He spoke frankly, and the questions he was asked by students, professors, and other participants were polite and for the most part far more intelligent than he would have been asked on, for example, Meet the Press.

He told the audience that Russia had known there were no WMDs in Iraq, and had known that attacking Iraq would bring "great difficulties" to that country. "And look what is happening today," he said. He made the same comment about Libya. He spoke of the U.S. and Russia working together to successfully remove chemical weapons from the Syrian government. But he warned against attacking Syria now.

There will be no new Cold War, Kislyak said, but there is now a greater divide in some ways than during the Cold War. Back then, he said, the U.S. Congress sent delegations over to meet with legislators, and the Supreme Court likewise. Now there is no contact. It's easy in the U.S. to be anti-Russian, he said, and hard to defend Russia. He complained about U.S. economic sanctions against Russia intended to "suffocate" Russian agriculture.

Asked about "annexing" Crimea, Kislyak rejected that characterization, pointed to the armed overthrow of the Ukrainian government, and insisted that Kiev must stop bombing its own people and instead talk about federalism within Ukraine.

There were remarkably few questions put to the ambassador that seemed informed by U.S. television "news." One was from a politics professor who insisted that Kislyak assign blame to Russia over Ukraine. Kislyak didn't.

I always sit in the back, thinking I might leave, but Kislyak was only taking questions from the front. So I moved up and was finally called on for the last question of the evening. For an hour and a half, Kislyak had addressed war and peace and Russian-U.S. relations, but he'd never blamed the U.S. for anything in Ukraine any more than Russia. No one had uttered the word "NATO."

So I pointed out the then upcoming NATO protests. I recalled the history of Russia being told that NATO would not expand eastward. I asked Kislyak whether NATO ought to be disbanded.

The ambassador said that he had been the first Russian to "present his credentials" to NATO, and that he had "overestimated" NATO's ability to work with Russia. He'd been disappointed by NATO actions in Serbia, he said, and Libya, by the expansion eastward, by NATO pressure on Ukraine and Poland, and by the pretense that Russia might be about to attack Poland.

"We were promised," Kislyak said, "that NATO would not expand eastward at all upon the reunification of Germany. And now look." NATO has declared that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO, Kislyak pointed out, and NATO says this even while a majority of the people in Ukraine say they're opposed.

The ambassador used the word "disappointed" a few times.

"We'll have to take measures to assure our defense," he said, "but we would have preferred to build on a situation with decreased presence and decreased readiness."

Wouldn't we all.

The Statue of Liberty went dark Tuesday, the day after President Donald Trump signed his revised executive order, dubbed the "Muslim ban 2.0," excluding all refugees and people from six majority-Muslim countries. The darkening also foreshadowed the next day, Wednesday, International Women's Day, which was organized as a strike this year: "A Day Without a Woman." Lady Liberty, who for more than 130 years has proclaimed to the world "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," had disappeared, at least for a few hours, from the New York skyline.

International Women's Day has been celebrated on March 8 for more than a century, but this year's global day of action was marked with an added sense of urgency. A man who was caught on tape bragging about committing sexual assault is now the president of the United States. ("I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it ... Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything," Trump said in 2005 to former NBC host Billy Bush, on an "Access Hollywood" recording that was released last October. Billy Bush would lose his job over the scandal; Trump would get elected president just weeks later.)

The day after Trump's inauguration, more than 4 million people protested from coast to coast, perhaps the largest political protest in U.S. history. The Women's March on Washington alone was three times the size of his inauguration crowd the day before, a fact that clearly enraged the president.

Two days later, Trump would sign an executive order imposing a "global gag rule," which bans U.S. foreign aid to any nongovernmental organization that provides abortion or even talks about it as an option. Trump also is pressuring lawmakers to pass the Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The law would strip funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides a broad array of health-care services to more than 2.5 million Americans annually. Only 3 percent of its services are abortion-related, and no federal funding goes to provide abortions.

With events in over 50 countries, this year's women's strike is the largest in recent history. "March 8th will be the beginning of a new international feminist movement that organizes resistance not just against Trump and his misogynist policies," the organizers' website states, "but also against the conditions that produced Trump, namely the decades long economic inequality, racial and sexual violence, and imperial wars abroad."

In a video promoting the global action, people declare their reasons for participating:

"I'm striking on March 8th because I believe women should be free to make the decisions regarding their own bodies ... I'm striking on March 8th for equal pay and equal opportunity, because women's work makes all other work possible and because it's about time we start valuing women's labor ... I'm striking on March 8th because when I go out, I want to feel free, not brave ... because women matter."

As dawn broke over Washington, D.C., on International Women's Day, Donald Trump tweeted: "I have tremendous respect for women and the many roles they serve that are vital to the fabric of our society and our economy." This from the man who has been accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment by at least 15 women, half of them just during his recent campaign.

Dear Deputy Fuhrer Carson,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your pledge to destroy the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 03-15-2017. We salute you Herr Carson, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence