Looking Away

 

                    (AI image)

For weeks, I’ve been wanting to write about something other than our dangerously deranged “president,” but his transgressions are endless and dangerous to ignore.

Nevertheless, despite his threat to “bomb the s#^t out of Oman,” a long-time ally; taking credit for falling drug prices resulting from President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act; succumbing to Earth’s cruelest dictator Kim Jong Un’s weaponized flattery to the detriment of ally South Korea, a longer-time ally, further destroying trust in America; floating the Strait of Hormuz as US territory; threatening the International Criminal Court; blaming vandals (now his all-purpose, go-to excuse for his screwups) for damage to the White House lawn created by his self-celebrating grandstand; launching yet another First Amendment attack; demanding ridiculously expensive and inefficient redesigns of aircraft carriers; further enriching himself by turning his scammy crypto company into a bank; welcoming his unapologetically politicized Attorney General to a political rally – in just the last week – I’ll ignore it all. Instead, from my former life, a surgery story:

Almost erasing the bad luck in her life, Daphne chose to exsanguinate when I and OR staff were immediately available. She’d nearly died before arriving at the hospital. The call came just as I'd finished another midnight emergency case, so I was there to greet her. She wasn't in a position to be sociable. In shock, confused, vomiting blood, she was riding very close to the edge of life.

Her husband looked nearly as pale as I told him she needed immediate surgery, we'd see what we'd find, do what we could. It was a critical situation, I said, stating the obvious. Pushing the gurney myself, running, I pointed the husband to the waiting area and banged through the OR doors.

One thing about operating on the hypercritically ill: when you start from zero, there's no downside. I'm the only hope she has, but I can't make it worse. Death is the default outcome. What you might expect, based on the odds, is a bleeding duodenal ulcer, the surgical approach to which is generally straightforward: get in there quick, make an incision through the pylorus (the sphincter muscle at the distal end of the stomach), throw a couple of well-placed sutures around the duodenal artery, and calm is restored.

Daphne was anything but routine, though: due to taking high-dose steroids, she had two gigantic ulcers, encompassing most of her stomach, front and back, one of which had eroded into her splenic artery. No wonder she was bleeding so massively: that's a really big one, and I'd never seen it be the source of gastric hemorrhage. I put my finger through the hole in her stomach, onto the artery, to stanch the flow and give the anesthesia team a chance to catch up on blood and fluid replacement, during which there was nothing for me to do but stand there, a warm-blooded cork.

A professor of mine once said, "You don't need to worry about bleeding, Doc, unless you can hear it." Good for a laugh. This bleeding, I heard: frightening, shrill, threatening life like a banshee.

Daphne and I were in a fix. Those ulcers took up over half her stomach, plus, by tying off the artery, I'd probably just killed her spleen. At first I tried to save some of her stomach, but it became clear the remnant wouldn't survive. So, against everything desirable in a dire emergency, after prolonged shock, when fast and minimal is best, I removed her entire stomach and spleen, fashioned a sort of stomach-substitute reservoir out of intestine, and connected it to her esophagus. Too much surgery for such a sick lady, but it's what she needed.

In training, there was a generally adversarial relationship between surgeons and medical docs. In practice, happily, it's the opposite. I was partnered with a sensational group of intensive care specialists, and, working as a team, we pulled more than a few people out of the fire over the years. Daphne was one. Despite my having told the family to expect, at best, a long and complicated stay in intensive care, Daphne recovered on a semi-straight path, returning to her tough life.

She lived in half a hovel, to which I made many house-calls over the years. Her kids, named after cartoon characters, struggled in school; her husband rarely worked. But every Christmas I got a card from her, thanking me for another year of life she'd not have had. Once in a while she'd call with some health concern or another and, since it was hard for her to get around, I'd go see her and do what I could.

Several years later, a urologist ambitiously -- maybe injudiciously -- removed her urinary bladder for chronic infection, and once again she teetered on the edge of dying. This time, she had healing problems after she got home, and, by momentum I guess, I became her home-health aide, debriding her wound for months at her sad little home. I guess I didn't want those Christmas cards to stop. They did, eventually, but not for a few more years.

Wicked

 

According to current TV ads, there’s a new, more effective hair growth pill. It’s good news, and timely: I’m running out of hair to pull out. By now, every non-comatose American should have realized everything Trump says, without exception, is a lie. That there remain believers, a diminishing number but apparently floored at thirty percent of voters, is alopeciafacient.

What evolutionary aberration produced such people, and why haven’t the responsible genes been bred out? Ironically, it’s probably because people they hate the most, “libtards,” they call them, have, through decades of good governance, put in place programs enabling their continued existence, despite what would otherwise be unsurvivable credulity. Trump is the thanks we got.

How often has he claimed victory in his unnecessary, unconstitutional, poorly planned, ill-managed, Iranian war of distraction? How many times, after what, the 20th or 30th, bombing run, has he claimed Iran is “begging” for an agreement? Following his latest such bleat, while Iran was busy negotiating with Qatar, not the US, over control of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran announced its conditions for opening it. In digestible form, here they are:

The United States must “correct its behavior,” including permanently ending the war, lifting the naval blockade and sanctions, releasing all frozen assets, fully compensating Iran for war damages, and promising never again to threaten it.

Does that sound like begging? Does it suggest Trump is winning his war of stupidity? Do his repeatedly disproven claims indicate a man of sound mind? A man who should remain as titular head of our country? Over the weekend, he bragged about “great poll numbers,” when they are, in fact, terrible (for him, not America). Even Fox “news” polls!

So, what explains it? Presumably, not even the hardest-died Trumpist would believe him if he said the skies were clear while standing in a downpour. So it must be insanity. Either he thinks whatever he says becomes truth, like God herself, or this. It’s not within a light-year of normal. He’s melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.

If Trump’s cultists were born that way, they can’t help themselves. But surely, some Republican senators have the capacity to see; Tommy Tuberville, Marcia Blackburn, Ron Johnson, and their comparables excepted. Rand Paul, dogged defamer of Anthony Fauci, M.D., was such an unqualified doctor that, after repeatedly failing national certification boards, he made up his own and declared himself legit.

Yet there he sat last week, abetted by compatibly corrupt Congressionals, kangarooing attention away from their inability to govern, pushing debunked conspiracies, misconstruing and misquoting Dr. Fauci’s private diary. Shameful is a word too mild. They pushed venal, disgusting lies. Knowingly, calculatingly, disgracefully. As contemptible as their capitulation on Todd Blanche.

Republicans in Congress aren’t your friends, MAGA, and Trump’s lies aren’t the harmless kind four-year-old kids spin. Allied nations no longer trust America, whether by virtue of breaking inkwet agreements or consistent dishonesty. Can’t you understand that his delusional inability to see reality, much less accept it, has led to worldwide catastrophe? And not just making us less safe by weakening us economically and militarily, and by dismissing our allies, but by strengthening our adversaries, maybe intentionally.

Having gutted USAID, Trump is responsible for tens of thousands of deaths around the world, ending the flow of medicine and food to the sick and the hungry. Unsatisfied, he’s doing the same at home, defunding food stamps, child care, maternal health programs, limiting access to healthcare, deregulating poisons. And, just now, ordering changes to childhood vaccinations that will, at the very least, cause unnecessarily many trips to doctors’ offices, extra expense for parents, and multiple jabs for children, rejecting years of settled science, based on assurances from the worm that ate its way through Arfkay’s brain. And, because it’s already happening, will increase childhood diseases. And deaths.

His justification: “I saw this early on and I’ve seen proof of it, where they have a vaccination that looks like the size of a, a bottle of soda poured into a little child’s, uh, body. And bad things happen in many, too many cases.” No, really: those are his exact words. Proof, he calls it, like evidence of Deflection Pool vandalism he just admitted doesn’t exist. Vaccinations the size of a soda bottle! Has America become so lost that there are MAGAs who hear that and think, “By golly, he’s right”?

Trump is hallucinating, conspicuously deteriorating, confirming it by posting nightly AI slop, portraying himself as a muscled superhero, or blasphemously kissing Jesus on a golden (of course!) Crucifix, or an AI-buffed, Medal-of-Honor-wearing Four-Star General. Not even Mussolini and Kim Jong Un, who also suborned glorification with posters and statues, went that far. And his flunkies stand by, grinning and nodding their heads.

But let’s conclude with well-deserved comic relief: A lawsuit filed by Trump against Citibank for “debanking” him prompted their disclosure that, rather than political, it was because they’d gathered evidence of money laundering in his accounts. Karma. Prosecute THAT, Todd Blanche!

Smoke And Mirrors

Even before the latest news, Trump’s Deflecting Pool fiasco was the perfect metaphor for his disastrous “presidency.” It has it all: incompetence, arrogance, cronyism, lying, corruption, blame-shifting. Then his weaponized and degraded DOJ dropped charges against an Olympian canoeist who dipped his hand into virescent waters to touch a cerulean shard. The charges were ridiculous from the outset, transparently intended to give credence to Trump’s desperate scapegoating for his self-created disaster.

There was never substantiation that David Hearn caused a penny’s worth of damage, let alone the thousand-dollar threshold for a felony charge. Yet Trump’s incompetent and embarrassing choice for US Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, recidivist disprover of the “ham sandwich” trope, and, like so many of Trump’s competence-not-required appointees, a former Fox “news” personality, incited an indictment, repeatedly claiming there were photos, witness testimony, expert analysis, and damning video showing the man VIOLENTLY ripping sealant from the bottom of the pool. USING BOTH HANDS!

Shortly after we learned that the government’s expert contradicted everything Trump-level prevaricator Pirro claimed, the charges went the way of day-one-ended Ukraine war, Mexico-paid border wall, and Iran’s obliterated nuclear program pronouncements. It happened immediately after Mr. Hearn’s lawyers petitioned to release grand jury transcripts, likely to have revealed the malfeasance of Trump’s DOJ lawyers in securing the indictment. Withdrawing all charges, Judge-not Jeanine’s report described the damage as due to “rushed and botched installation,” with no evidence of vandalism.

That’s not all, because, with Trump, it never is. When he secretes lies, like climate change hoaxes and stolen elections, and unlike his wives, he sticks with them forever. So, even after the revelation that his inexpert hire’s shoddy work and not vandalism caused the damage, he kept insisting the opposite. So accustomed is he to lies getting him out of trouble, he released a video which, he claimed, confirms very vandalistic vandals vandalizing vandally. It doesn’t. Have a look. What it confirms is Trump’s psychopathy.

Whether Trump knows he’s lying or believes the lies is moot. MAGA believes. Republican kangaroo courtiers create diversions to wipe them away. We’re camel-strawed with a “president” for whom lying is a way of life, a formerly useful political party that has embraced it as modus operandi, and a Republican-controlled Senate too cowed and corrupt to reject Trump’s uniformly alarming nominees for critical positions. Like Todd Blanche, up for permanent Attorney General.

Two outgoing senators, Carolina Tom and Texas John, with nothing meaningful to lose, made a sham show of refusing to advance Blanche out of committee unless he’d put in writing the undoing of Trump’s slush fund for insurrectionists, seditionists, and other criminals, as well as the unspeakably corrupt, permanent exculpation of all crimes, past, present, and future committed by Trump, his spawn, and his businesses. All of which was “negotiated” by Blanche in the baddest of faith.

Predictable as Trump lies yet to come, they executed a mammoth cave after Blanche smoked a few mirrors, purporting to have complied with their demands. He did nothing of the sort. Surely all three know it, but now they have the cover of darkness. The honorable duo turned out to be just as weak as their compadres of contemptibility.

The original Blanche-created outrages were formally agreed to and signed by both parties: Trump suing Trump. Included in that document was the stipulation that it could be revised only by agreement and signature of both parties. What Trickster Todd produced was a unilateral “memorandum.” The prior agreement remains in effect unless Trump signs on. Will he? Whereas it purports to have ended the crime-loving slush fund, it appears to keep in place the prosecution-avoiding provisions for all of Trump’s prior and current crimes, possibly allowing the pursuit of future crimes he’ll surely commit. Assuming Trump’s pet DOJ would choose to. Will it?

Even if the memorandum was bilaterally signed, wiping out all previous provisions, which it isn’t, there remain plenty of reasons why Blanche should be rejected like a moldy tomato. The timid two and all Republican senators know it. As acting A.G., he approved going after the so-called pool vandals, which they weren’t. He okayed the persecution of six Democratic members of Congress who reminded troops they can refuse illegal orders. He was instrumental in withholding and lying about the Epstein files, quidded a suspicious quo with Ghislaine Maxwell, and did Trump’s bidding in indicting James Comey.

Without fail, he’s demonstrated loyalty to Trump over the Constitution and ethical departmental independence. He was and remains Trump’s personal attorney, which he doesn’t hide because Republican submissiveness guarantees he doesn’t have to. He’s the archetypal Trump appointee and, as such, will likely be confirmed.

We can only wonder if any of the approval monkeys dba Republican senators look at the harm being done by the Trump goons they okayed and have regrets. If not, they’ll have eternity to ponder what they did, assuming Hell exists, which is doubtful, but in the era of Trump, I kinda hope it does. I’m willing to take my chances.