As that learned philosopher Alice Cooper once said, welcome to my nightmare. Nightmares, actually, since (as usual) we have one terrifying tale of fright for the right, and one spine-tingling scare story for the left, just to be even-handed.

Of course, if you ask any Democrat, they'll tell you that each and every day that they wake up to realize once again that Donald Trump is president is its own kind of nightmare -- and an ongoing one.

This year, in order to be a bit challenging, the spooky stories for right and left will have a common theme, which might be called: "Be careful what you wish for." Because too many among us hope that Donald Trump will be removed from office, without really considering the consequences should that ever actually come to pass. So I flipped a coin and assigned impeachment to the Democrats and the use of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Republicans. What follows are the bone-chilling tales of terror which might just be the direct results of getting rid of Trump, to frighten anyone who hasn't fully thought through what might happen next.

Both these frightfests are rather apocalyptic in scope, but then again we live in some pretty apocalyptic times. So sit back, relax, eat some Hallowe'en candy, and prepare to be scared silly. Boo!

Democratic Nightmare -- Holy American Empire

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There's an easy test to see whether Republicans in Congress care about financial deficits: Is there a Democrat in the White House? If so, then deficits are so important that the situation requires threats of government shutdowns and defaulting on the national debt to fight deficit spending. However, if there's a Republican in the White House, then (as Dick Cheney so eloquently put it) "deficits don't matter." This was on full hypocritical display once again this week, as congressional Republicans voted to blow a $1.5 trillion hole in the national debt, so that the wealthy and big corporations can enjoy massive tax cuts.

We haven't seen precisely what these tax cuts will entail. But from the absolute horse manure Republicans are already spouting about it, expect it to be pretty blatantly tilted towards the upper end of the income scale. Just one single change Republicans are considering would save Donald Trump a whopping 81 percent of his own federal income taxes, although few have noticed this fact yet. This week, unconcerned with the reaction to cutting the state and local income tax deduction, Republicans pondered cutting the tax-free deduction for 401(k) plans. When questioned whether all of these changes would cause taxes to actually rise on much of the middle class, we got a world-class "Big Lie" from Kevin Brady, chairman of the tax-writing House committee:

"In about a week, you will be able to see the reforms proposed and where we are heading with it," Brady said. He said he couldn't guarantee that every American would see their taxes go down because of the changes, but he could "guarantee that every American will be better off because of a simpler tax code that lowers those rates and improves their paychecks."

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While admittedly the Democrats have some fence-mending to do between the two wings of their party, at least their rhetoric doesn't lean quite so much towards military metaphors. But over on the Republican side of the aisle, both sides seem to be using the term "open warfare" to describe what is going on. Steve Bannon was the first to use the belligerent "warfare" terminology, but it now looks like allies of Mitch McConnell are just as committed to a battlefield fight over the course of the next year.

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Republicans are playing a game of peek-a-boo on their tax plan. They don't want to release the full details, because they know full well this will leave them open to attack from both the left ("Not one penny more for the One Percent!") and from the right ("Why are we blowing up the deficit, now that we're in charge?"). But the congressional Republicans who are in charge of drafting the tax bills do still need to gauge support for various proposals, so they are currently engaged in selective leaking in order to run these ideas up the old political flagpole, to see if they are salutable or not (so to speak) among their members. The latest of these is to sharply reduce the amount of tax-free income that can be socked away in a 401(k) retirement plan. President Donald Trump initially pushed back hard against this idea, but today indicated that he might just be open to negotiation on the issue. Which begs a much larger question: Will Trump actually go to the mat fighting for any particular tax issue? Or will Republicans just flat-out ignore the White House, knowing full well Trump is so desperate to sign a major piece of legislation that he'll agree to pretty much anything they come up with?

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I have to begin with an apology for that headline... but in the era of Donald Trump, it was impossible to resist. Senator Jeff Flake made the news today by announcing he will not be seeking re-election next year. He did so in a rather spectacular fashion, with a Senate floor speech that came close to denouncing Trump and all he stands for. As time goes by, more and more Republicans are taking the opportunity to do the same thing, but so far this hasn't much impact on the political world beyond the realm of rhetoric. So while I appreciate Flake's statement for the entertainment value alone, I also have serious doubts as to whether it means much in the grand scheme of things.

Jeff Flake has been positioning himself as the moral savior of the Republican Party's soul for some time now. Earlier this year he released a book titled Conscience Of A Conservative (reprising the title another senator from Arizona used a half-century earlier), in which Flake denounced the coarseness introduced by the Trump takeover of the GOP. His floor speech today is merely a continuation of this theme.

However amusing this all is for liberals, though, Flake's announcement today wasn't entirely unexpected -- because he stood a good chance of losing to a primary challenger next year. Leaving the Senate now is at least somewhat self-serving, because it's always easier to exit on your own rather than have your base voters hand you the pink slip. What this means outside of Arizona, though, is that we'll likely see a Flake replacement who is even more conservative and closer to Donald Trump. Barring an upset victory by a Democrat, this is now almost assured.

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Call it the refusal of "trickle-down economics" to die. Ever since Ronald Reagan introduced the idea, Republicans have clung to a very mistaken concept -- that tax cuts always pay for themselves. Though proven false again and again, this is the fallback Republican position when trying to hoodwink the American public into massive tax cuts for those at the tippy-top of the income scale. "Don't worry," the GOP tells the public, "these tax cuts will generate so much new growth that they will pay for themselves!" As always, the reality turns out to fall far short of this lofty goal.

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Call this the week when White House Chief of Staff John Kelly lost all remaining shreds of credibility. Kelly, as we all know, was supposed to bring the adult supervision to the White House that would magically transform Donald Trump into a serious president. A retired Marine Corps general was going to whip the White House into shape, and clear sailing ahead would thus quickly ensue.

That was the plan, at any rate. But this week Kelly was used as a political pawn by Trump, and it didn't exactly go well. By the end of the week, Kelly was just as guilty as his boss of making stuff up when talking to the press, or (to be less polite but more accurate) just flat-out lying. Kelly was supposed to elevate Trump up to his level of competence, but instead what has happened is Kelly got dragged down into the sewer with Trump.

Hey, he knew what he signed up for, right?

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In a few weeks, there will be elections for two governorships, in New Jersey and Virginia. These off-off-year contests are always closely watched, especially by those hoping for a shift in the balance of power. However, no matter the outcome, these two states aren't always accurate harbingers of how the midterm elections will turn out in the following year. Still, it being an off-off year, political pundits don't have any other key election results to talk about, so expect to be hearing lots of opinionating over the next three weeks or so.

As things currently stand, one Republican and one Democrat are leaving office, meaning an open race in both states. Chris Christie is stepping down in New Jersey, and Terry McAuliffe is leaving office in Virginia. Both were precluded from running for re-election by term limits, it is worth noting.

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President Donald Trump, once again, has been caught in numerous despicable lies, this time both to and about Gold Star families. This continues a pattern for Trump, of disrespecting other people's military service when they are not whole-hearted supporters of Donald Trump. But over the past 48 hours or so, Trump has hit new lows in this regard. And yet he still has the gall to denounce professional football players for "not respecting the flag."

Previously, Trump disrespected John McCain, who spent over five years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, saying Trump only liked soldiers who didn't get captured. Astonishingly, he paid no political price for this outrageous snub. Later in the campaign, Trump got into a battle of words with a Gold Star family who spoke out at the National Democratic Convention. Again, Trump paid little political price for this unseemly spat. Earlier this year, Trump reacted to the news that a U.S. Navy vessel had been in a collision that resulted in sailors' deaths by saying: "That's too bad." Again, Trump paid little political price for this callous reaction.

On Monday, Trump held an impromptu press conference, and he was asked why he had not even mentioned the fact that four U.S. soldiers had been killed in Niger twelve days earlier. Not only had Trump failed to utter one word about these deaths, but when the body of one of the soldiers who died in action was returned to the United States, Trump was out on the golf course with Lindsey Graham.

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The CBS newsmagazine show 60 Minutes and the Washington Post may have just clinched a Pulitzer Prize, for their bombshell reporting on how some bought-and-paid-for congressmen did the bidding of Big Pharma for campaign cash and, as a direct result, made the opioid crisis in America worse by limiting the enforcement powers of the Drug Enforcement Agency. But, Pulitzer consideration aside, they've already won an even-more-impressive award: a politician's scalp, metaphorically nailed to the newsroom wall. The television show and the companion print articles appeared Sunday. Tuesday morning, the White House announced that former Representative Tom Marino had been withdrawn from consideration for the job of running the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy -- a job more commonly referred to as "the drug czar."

To state all of this in a slightly different fashion, journalists did a bang-up job of exposing what on the face of it appears to be not only blatant garden-variety corruption, but also a rather inhumane disregard for human lives at the expense of both corporate profits and campaign cash. It also highlighted how major corporate lobbyists can essentially write their own legislation, which will then be passed by a supine Congress without a single voice being raised against such self-serving legislation. That is what good journalism is supposed to do -- hold our elected officials responsible for their heretofore hidden actions.

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