I saw this morning a headline at the CNN site that begins: “The President’s hatred of looking foolish …,” and I wondered if this hatred is the cause of Trump’s chronic anger. If someone who makes a fool of himself on a regular basis suffers from hatred of what he keeps doing, what are we to expect but that he is chronically and profoundly pissed off. Of course his temperament is such that he must blame others for this and seek to avenge himself on them. So he makes the U.S.A. suffer because of frailties.
9 I 2019: Ventriloquist’s Dummies
Trump’s propagandists have stepped up their efforts to inject some mindless fear into the body politic. These motor-mouths are so much in sync during this border wall pseudo-crisis that they seem like a chorus of a ventriloquist’s dummies. Trump himself is apparently working from the script that Stephen Miller (an Eichmann look-alike) keeps re-writing for him. Newt Gingrich is back on Fox News [sic] mouthing whatever he is told to say. Republicans in Congress are so united in repeating their assigned texts that one could think that they are guided by a single mind that does their thinking for them. We are in trouble.
I I 2019: Happy New Year
Can no one get Trump to behave like a president (Gotta fake it til you make it.), and stop telling lies??? I guess the answer is “no one.” Trump is a vulgarian and mendacity is the foundation of his personality. All his cries of “Fake News” can easily be answered with another line from the playground, sc., “Takes one to know one,” for Trump is assuredly a “Fake President.
So we’re off to a great start, with our president tweeting about a distinguished retired general “Known for big, dumb mouth.” Can’t he do better than “big, dumb mouth”? Trump has reverted to the playground whence he came.
27 XII 2018: The Great Wall
Trump continues to pedal his wall. Anyone with a brain knows that it is a ridiculous idea, a mere public relations farce. But see how the Republicans are falling in behind him licking as they go. Disgusting.
I doubt that The Wall will be unable to stop, or even discourage, anyone who really wants to enter the United States illegally. The Wall itself will have to be guarded against demolition or tunneling and we would become like the East German regime with its Berlin Wall and like the Iron Curtain countries that spread miles of barbed wire and squads of shoot-on-sight troops on their borders. And, of course, if you want to get around the Wall, the extensive seaboard of the United States has always welcomed surreptitious entries. The only success that could be gained by the Wall would be to put more hot air into our presidential Windbag.
24 XII 2018: Hoc uolo, sic iubeo, sit pro ratione uoluntas. — Juvenal
I will approach the end of the year with this famous line of Juvenal’s. These are the words of a wealthy woman who has called for the immediate crucifixion of one of her slaves. When asked what is his offense and advised to take time to examine the case, the matron replies: “This is what I want, this is my command, let my will take the place of reason.”
I have not seen this line applied to Trump, but isn’t it a perfect fit? Put the migrants in concentration camps! Build a $5bn wall! To hell with the democracies who were our allies, I want to court Vlady and Erdogan. You can’t make an omelet without giving Vlady his way in Ukraine and Syria, or without allowing the slaughter of a few Kurds to please dear old Erdogan.
Trump’s willfulness is even more apparent in his clashes with the law. I’m not referring to his semi-criminal past, but to the present. Trump does not know and has not troubled himself to find out what the law allows and forbids. When he is caught trying something illegal, he curses the law, curses lawmakers, curses the courts. The entire government is supposed to fall into line behind his “Sic volo.”
16 XII 2018: More gas escapes over weekend
This weekend saw TV appearances by Giuliani and Stephen Miller.
Rudy revived his fast talking, anti-logical, criminal lawyer routine. Why do the TV stations keep inviting Giuliani to appear on their shows? I think putting Giuliani before the public is so very cruel. Or is this Rudy’s desperate need for attention at work?
Miller was on-the-air to declare his (and Trump’s) kamikaze-type determination to build the border wall. I don’t know why a wall has such appeal for these reactionaries except that it sounds better than an electrified barbed wire fence.
3 XII 2019: Why $38 billion worth of “military assistance” for Israel??
Senator Rand Paul has provoked a bi-partisan ruckus by stalling a bill that would authorize a giveaway to the State of Israel amounting to $38 billion worth of military assistance over the next ten years. The ruckus has seeped out of the Senate into the wider world and so we find a group named Christians United for Israel spending some $100,000 on a media assault on Senator Paul.
I suppose these Christians are of the sort that believe that they can force God’s hand to speed up the Second Coming through their support of the rogue state of Israel. But why should a secular democracy like ours throw money at one of the most discredited nations? The Israelis are our allies! No, they are not. They are sometime clients of ours who have shown complete disregard for international law and common decency. So now our allies in the East are the Saudis, who murder people at will, and Israel, whose treatment of the Palestinians is no better than European treatment of the indigenous peoples of the New World.
29 XI 2018: Trump; Putin; Bolton; Confederate states.
Trump: Cannot someone make Trump stop lying? Any hope for the future of America requires the re-introduction of truth into public life.
Putin: His boyfriend Putin has buggered Trump again.
John Bolton: Saw an article on line by Paul Begala “John Bolton is a coward.” Now I do not know John Bolton, but from what I’ve heard of his behavior and from the company he keeps, I reckon he is a coward.
Confederate stupidity: So Cyndy Hyde-Smith has been elected to the Senate by Mississippi, another demonstration of the semi-civilized character of this state of the old Confederacy. In a state-by-state evaluation of the quality of education, Mississippi comes in 46th, just ahead of Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Does the abject educational level explain the vitality of ignorance and bigotry in the South. They have elected someone better suited to be elected Magnolia Queen because she really knows how to shout the old rebel yell of “Segregation forever!”
26 XI 2018: Secularizing our national calendar; A war we maybe could win
Well, Thanksgiving Day has come and gone, and so too, of course, has Black Friday. It seems to me that Black Friday is the most important feast of the American religion of Consumerism. America could create a liturgical calendar around Consumerism’s holy days: Start with Halloween followed by Black Friday; the next would be “The Holidays,” i.e., the month of December; then comes Superbowl Sunday, then Eggs and Bunnies Day, Memorial Day, Mothers Day, Fathers Day, July 4th, Labor Day. Other feast days might be Newcar Day, the day the new models of automobiles are revealed, or Chic Week, the season of the fashion shows in Paris.
These are some possibilities that come immediately to mind. The point is that I think we should replace the residually Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter, with a series of secular holidays that better reflect who we are as a nation. The economic benefits of this plan are obvious, and tensions that arise from the original meaning of Christmas and Easter could be put to rest.
I’ve been reading about the battle at the U.S.-Mexican border between I.C.E., the U.S. Army and the unarmed migrants. This, finally, is a war we can win. Look at the resources we can bring to this conflict. We have our Wehrmacht, our SA (the Texas “militias”), and our SS (I.C.E.), concentration camps where children can be separated from their migrant parents by way of penalty, and we have additional sites to contain the migrants in America’s for-profit prisons and detention centers. I’m waiting for Trump to escalate the crisis and order our soldiery to open fire on the migrants in a repeat of the Boston Massacre. Trump is being inexorably forced into a corner, and the only way he can get out is to start a war.
24 IX 2018: Cindy Hyde-Smith, a ghost of the old Confederacy
It has been revealed that Sen. Cindy Hyde Smith received part of her education at a segregation academy, one of the hyper-christian private schools founded to perpetuate segregation. Now Sen. Hyde-Smith’s campaign regards this news as a conspiracy by the “gotcha liberal media.” I guess this is thought to be like the “gotcha questions” so feared by Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. The campaign also denounces publication of this news as “a new low.”
Now then, the information published did not come from a “gotcha question,” but from investigation of public-access records by the press. And to call publication of this information “a new low” — I guess Sen. Hyde-Smith’s campaign staff doesn’t know much about politics in the Old and New South.