Away for most of the week, I managed only a column with disconnected slices of MAGA. Pardon my pejorism:
Cutting Through The Crap
"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." Orwell
"“The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.”
Plato
"The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant" Robespierre
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Government, MAGA Style
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Taking Dictation
Two months in, Donald Trump is not acting like a dictator. He’s become one. He’s assumed every trait he’s admired in the world’s worst: capricious, insulting, boastful, striking at enemies perceived and real, threatening, suppressing art, banning words, hiding history, bullying, raving like a lunatic. Fulfilling dreams born of a life of failures masquerading, he knows, as success. Hurting the weak, to feel strong. Punishing people and places that show concern for racial and religious minorities, unwinding protections for Americans of different sexual orientation, gutting departments that serve people about whom he couldn’t care less, including his enstupened MAGAs – people and things he considers useful only as ways to flash see-me power.
NOAA and the National Weather Service? Cancer research? Promising more “clean” coal (which doesn’t exist) plants to stick it to “lunatic” environmentalists. Is it all retribution for when, as a shady businessman and social pretender in NYC, his peers ridiculed him? For which he made up by sexual predation?
But why such an ugly start to this column? Maybe because I’ve just returned from NYC, where my brother, intubated in an ICU and unresponsive, faces uncertain recovery. While there, news didn’t stop. Each day, already emotionally taut, brought a new outrage from Trump and his coven of unqualified but willingly subservient people. Plans to undo climate-related and pollution-preventing regulations, hurting everyone but his grateful bankrollers, who slather him with flattery. Attorney General Pam Bondi promising, enthusiastically, to weaponize her department for Trump.
Trump calling non-slavish news organizations criminal. Overt attacks on free speech, ho-hummed by the “patriotic” right. Ten Senate Democrats caving to Republican budget blackmail; House Democrats stood firm against it, a plan that cut social spending, increased it for the Pentagon, and granted more power to Trump and Musk to do their worst. That’s what ugly is.
We picked a good time to be with my brother. As a physician, I could provide context and translation of his situation to my sister-in-law, whose strength has been stretched to its limits. Always an optimist, she imagines him returning home. I can’t, but it’s too soon to say.
The chance of America returning home, however, is less than my brother’s. Because of the unhealthy mind of one man (not counting supra-president Musk) in a position and disposition to destroy everything that makes America what it is, we’re in real trouble. It’s governance by intimidation. Trump must imagine himself alongside Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, Stalin, Kim Jong Un, Viktor Orban, Saddam Hussain; arm in arm, grinning his signature, plasticized thumbs-up.
To whom can we turn to undo the madness? Cowardly and avaricious elected Republicans, whose party once eschewed authoritarianism, have forsaken America’s foundational principle of separation of powers. Once outraged by President Barack Obama’s executive orders, they’re now mum as the word at Trump’s, who, in his first four years, issued as many as President Obama did in eight. The pace, now, is furious. In both meanings. Including helping to curtail free speech around the world.
Every day, there’s something worse. Even as their rights disappear along with those of the people they hate, MAGA voters revel in it. Their sources of what passes for news blind them to the implications if Trump achieves the total control he desires, facilitated by surrender of those who could stop him. Right-side submission is already complete. From the left, podcasters and YouTubers are issuing fighting words; but words (like these here ones) aren’t action.
Courts? Trump’s control of them, personified by Aileen Cannon, isn’t yet total, but he’s filled them enough to make them unlikely rescuers. One brave judge just took a stand against Trump’s ominous use of an antique act for extralegal deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members. Forcing the ultimate showdown, he ordered planes carrying them to turn around. They didn’t. Trump continues deportations, ignoring judicial injunctions, attacking judges personally after being ordered to follow the law. Time was, Republicans would denounce such dictatorial lawlessness. Not MAGAs. They wished for a mad king and got one.
Until he retired, my brother was a nationally recognized lawyer. Despite Trump’s vindictive, okay-by-Republicans attacks on lawyers who dared to defy him, he’d have stood up, too. My dad was an appellate judge who scrupulously followed the law even when he disagreed with it, leaving legislating to legislators, unlike Trump’s Cannonade. Ironically, when my dad was in a similar medical situation to my brother’s, I was our family’s physician-guide for painful decisions. For my brother, it’ll be his wife’s and daughter’s role, for which I’m grateful.
Bereft of feck, Democratic leadership is useless. The Republican party has thrown in with global enemies and, worse, home-grown ones, the ones rising to Trump’s occasion, willingly, anti-constitutionally, turning every strand of government into a bullwhip in his hand. Unable to tell Reich from wrong, nearly half of Americans appear glad for Trump’s corrupt goose-step to despotism.
Once, I believed America could protect itself from that, and would.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
DOGE Ball
When I was a surgical intern, we had a patient, a young girl, maybe eight years old, who’d had a severe infection in her leg, necessitating removing much of the skin of her thigh. Her bandages required regular changing; because of the pain and her young age, it was being done in the OR, under general anesthesia.
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Betrayal
From my never-ending reach for common ground comes a fact so incontrovertible that we'll all agree: under Trump, America has sided with Russia and others of our adversaries. Supporting facts: The Oval Office encounter with Volodymir Zelensky, in which both Trump and Vance attacked him aggressively and angrily. (That the ambush was pre-planned seems obvious; admittedly, that invites disagreement.) Also: the UN resolution that Russia was the aggressor when it invaded Ukraine. In voting "no," America joined Russia, China, Hungary, and fifteen other retro nations. Despite US opposition, the resolution passed overwhelmingly. Such is the respect for the US that Trump has engendered.
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Conning The Conned
Notwithstanding its faults - slavery, native American genocide, Japanese internment, misogyny, persisting racism, favoring the wealthy, the Electoral College - I've always believed America was a respected and trustworthy force for good in the world. By votes of its people, it made efforts to correct those faults, showing the world that, unlike dictatorships, democracy's ills can be self-healing.
Wednesday, February 19, 2025
King Me
If I were to discover that any thought I had or any demand I were to make would be actualized, I wouldn’t use that power to rename bodies of water. Because I’m not a psychopathic narcissist, I wouldn’t decide to take over a national artistic institution and declare, like “Soviet Realism” back in the day, what art is and is not acceptable. Or threaten to shut down news agencies; not even Fox.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Is Enough Enough?
If a dictatorophilic “president” refuses to obey the law, and when his party in Congress doesn’t care, who’ll stop him? The Constitution is but a piece of parchment. What can believers in democracy do? Roll it up and smack him with it? The weakness of constitutional democracy is “Consent of the Governed.” It works only when citizens and their leaders willingly submit to its laws.
Wednesday, February 5, 2025
Let Me Count The Ways
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
Brick By Brick
Image source: anntelnaes.comAfter an exhausting week of stamping out human decency in his government, Trump spent the weekend taking the Miami golf cure. I spent it getting over not being confirmed as Secretary of Defense. I thought I had a shot; my resumé is on a par with Pete Hegseth’s, if not greater. We both served in the military in war zones, but, unlike me, he didn’t receive a Purple Heart. We both provide weekend opination via public media; and whereas mine is mine only, he shares his platform as a mere co-host. In managing huge bureaucracies, we’re identical. What put me out of the running, I think, is that I’m not a problem drinker or a sexual miscreant, both of which are touchstones in the upper echelons of today’s Republican Party.
Wednesday, January 22, 2025
God Help Us
We’ve just returned from visiting my brother and his family in NYC, which we hadn’t done for several years. Between getting up at 4:30 a.m. for both flights, long and sleepless, staying in one of the smallest hotel rooms anywhere, I’m still uncombobbled. This offering, therefore, will lack my usual cohesive brilliance.
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Oh, The Inhumanity
Upon learning of the horrific fires in Los Angeles, death, destruction and suffering by his fellow human beings, President-elect Trump wrote, “What’s happening in Southern California is an indescribable tragedy. When in office, I will continue President Biden’s skillful efforts at guiding federal resources to their aid. My government will do everything possible to succor the suffering and rebuild that great city.”
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Capitulants
"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
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