What About

 

Ken Paxton. Herschel Walker. MTG. Pete Hegseth. Pam Bondi. Lauren Boebert. Matt Goetz. Kari Lake. Tommy Tuberville... DONALD TRUMP!

Graham Platner.

That’s all I have to say about that.

Well, okay. There’s hypocrisy enough to go around. But if democracy is to survive, and, given how many so-called patriots don’t care or would prefer it doesn’t, survival is hardly assured, it’s existentially critical that Democrats retake control of Congress. Also, Susan Collins is very annoying. 

If Dems were to retake the Senate – I mean, seriously, Paxton vs Talarico is a tough call?? – I’d hope they’d find a new majority leader. Which is all I have to say about that.

Speaking of Trump – our querimonious gudgeon-in-chief – it’s hard to say which is more obvious: his continual lies about his equally idiotic and catastrophic war, or that Iran is playing him like a pawn-shop ghaychak.

His only consistent approach is to lie that we won the war, that Iran has no military capability left, even as they continue to strike, and that prices are coming down. Who ya gonna believe? Trump or yer lyin’ gas pumps?

But that’s not his only consistency. Equally consequential and destructive is his penchant (I like people who pronounce it “ponSHAWN”) for hiring the most unqualified people available; people guaranteed to ignore the law and to do his bidding. Bill Pulte is the most recent and among the most glaring examples. Trump wants him to be our next Director of (oxymoron alert!) National Intelligence; a man with zero experience in the field. None. Less than Pentagon Pete had in managing the world’s largest military.

What pulled Pulte into contention is his history, as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, of drumming up fake charges against people Trump hates. For their truth-telling and for using their positions as our Constitution intended. Clever deceiver that he is, Trump posits Pulte as “temporary” director, thus avoiding the need for senate confirmation which, even from this Trump intanked collection of electorally invertebrate Republicans, appears uncertain.

He’ll be there long enough, though, to look for ways to charge Democrats with treason or something. That there’s little else of importance to be done as DNI is confirmed by Trump having him keep that housing job. I won’t mention the dildo thing. Not that kind of guy.

How about this: hiring Elias Irizarry a convicted, then pardoned, J6 rioter for a sensitive anti-terrorism job in the Pentagon? He was only nineteen at the time, and he has apologized for what he did, including, I guess, deleting a week’s worth of texts on his phone, before and after January 6. The job requires top-secret clearance. Some of the flying I did in Vietnam required that, too. They didn’t want to give it to me because my dad once had a law client who was the brother of a member of the Oregon Communist Party. I guess things are looser now, in the current administration.

At least Mr. Irizarry isn’t among the hundreds of pardoned J6 felons who’ve gone on to commit crimes running the gamut from property crimes, fraud, illegal firearm possession, planned assassination, and more. At least fourteen have been charged with sex crimes, including child abuse. Victims of President Biden’s government weaponization, Trump says, deserving of taxpayer money for reparations.

Follow the law? In testimony before Congress last week, Markwayne Mullin, another questionable hire as head of DHS, refused to commit to obeying court orders. For Trump, that’s the opposite of disqualifying.

Another consistency in today’s version of Republican conservatism is, since entering the Trump zone, axiomatic: any election in which a Republican candidate loses is, inarguably and definitionally, rigged. Evidence, consistently lacking in all instances, is unnecessary nor to be sought. All that’s required is saying so. The consistent debunking of every claim, from mules to hacked machines to millions of votes from non-citizens to forged mail-in ballots, only goes to prove it. Never has anyone produced a credible sequence of steps by which the rigging occurred.

California’s ridiculously slow vote-counting is perfect substrate for conspiracists, a group that includes House Speaker Holy Mike Johnson, a man by his own assertion in direct communication with God. “Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it’s impossible to prove,” he said. “But I think everybody knows instinctively something is wrong here.” The fact that it’s impossible to prove is all the proof Ministerial Mike needs. It’s instinct. Like Trump’s gut, as opposed to expert advice, when it comes to policy decisions.

We end today's reality check with something definitely-not cognitively-impaired, gut-following Trump posted on his Truthless Sociopath platform:

“Communists always do well with the Voters or, as they would say, THE PEOPLE, in the Early Years! But, in the end, the Country, State, or City, GOES TO HELL! Great Violence proceeds at levels never seen before, and the entity dissolves into Poverty, Squalor, and Crime. Remember, breathtaking ‘Popularity’ first, and then, guaranteed DEATH AND DESTRUCTION!” 

So sayeth the “Leader of the Free World.”

Veritas

 

In the year 50 B.T., I was awarded a seven-year scholarship to Harvard, one given, back then, to only fifty applicants per year. Had I done well enough, it included acceptance to grad school. To my grandmother’s chagrin, I turned it down. It wasn’t because of Ivy League stigma. It was because I was sure they’d made a mistake. Imposter syndrome, I guess. From the right, that stigma is gospel. I attach none to Harvard graduates, though, and not just because I married one.

Notwithstanding MAGAfied asperity, Harvard, like many other storied universities, has contributed immensely to our nation. If successful, Trump’s Id-iotic need to take them down would cloud the future of all of us. Turning away or deporting foreign students who come to partake of American scholarship already has. Whether they stay or return home, those students become positive representations of America, wherever they are. The US and the world need them. Typical of the current administration, shutting them out is short-sighted ignorance.

Trump, who lies about everything, denies being rejected by Harvard. Which means it’s true. Given daddy’s war bucks, a consequential qualification in decades past, that says a lot. In Trump, imposter isn’t a syndrome, it’s a definition. His native-born narcissism compels him to say he knows “more than anyone” about everything, voluminous evidence to the contrary. His birthright insecurity demands he “gets even” with any critic or institution that reveals the truth. That, he doesn’t deny. He’s proud of it. 

From this thin-skinned, partial president, having, as his niece tells us, “absolutely no redeeming qualities,” unchecked vengeance is ominous. Like his embarrassingly false Harvard accusations. Antisemitism is promoted there? From a guy who surrounds himself with de facto Nazis? Whose eponymous “university” scammed people out of millions? That guy wants to dictate how and what to teach in America, and who can do it.

For Stephen Miller and the Project 2025ers skulking around 1600, enfleshing their resentment of “the other” and fear of the educated, Trump’s attacks on universities are a perfect match. Aware that small-ell liberal education is a disinformation repellent, Republicans have pushed anti-intellectualism for decades. But it’s only with Trump that it’s come to reside so openly in the White House. Yet millions of voters observe Trump’s inability to carry an off-script thought to completion and consider it laudable.

The danger to democracy of Trump’s Projectile 2025 attacks on universities and public education can’t be overstated. That includes his whisperers’ desire to control what courses are taught, which words are acceptable, and to expunge books that refer in positive ways to anyone not white and Christian. Even in the Library of Congress. 

MAGA’s un-Christian priorities, manifested in their “Big Beautiful Budget Bill,” make their aims copiously clear. As everyone not sitting to the right of Congressional aisles knows, their tax cuts for wealthy donors, etched in reaganite, are “balanced” by cuts to every program that, for decades, has helped the less fortunate have a shot at dignity and overcoming poverty. Dismissed by Trumpists as moochers. But they’d in-your-face the Ten Commandments, to which none adhere, into all public buildings.

The BBBB not only doesn’t balance the budget, it REALLY doesn’t. insisting it doesn’t increase the national debt, Holy Mike Johnson, whom God has on speed-dial according to Mike, bears false witness. This, despite calculations by the Congressional Budget Office and conservative and liberal economists, all of whom predict increases in the trillions. Surely the Bible-brandishing Speaker knows Revelation 22:15. He must think doing what he considers God’s work excuses all transgressions. That the bill will lead to more hunger and disease, pollution and poverty, he must assume, is included in the absolution. If he were capable of it, he’d be ashamed.

But none of them feel shame. Shame at America’s foundational values and basic decency being discarded like Trump’s first two wives. Shame at defunding vital research, causing scientists to abandon their work, halting nascent discoveries. Shame at ceding intellectual leadership to geopolitical adversaries, at cutting disaster aid and weather warnings, because who cares? Shame at the emergence of a police state, in which ICE agents, enthusiastically cruel, wear masks to hide their identity, like criminals. In which elected members of the opposing party are arrested, their staff zip-tied “for their safety.” Shameless, America-rejecting MAGAs love what they see, incurious about what they don’t.

Trump’s vengeful attacks on Harvard are crimson lib-stick. Trump’s voters, made unable to look beyond their cultish glee, are blind to the dire implications for America. Which is precisely the point of his pre-dawn bleats and ill-conceived executive orders: feed them the phobic satisfaction they crave, while he enriches himself with paid-for pardons, bitcoin scams, and other shameless corruption. And while his gang of anti-democratic oligarchs, the ones actually in charge, destroy constitutional governance, brick by bricolage.

But why worry? As Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) reminded us, defending her party’s cruelty, “We’re all going to die.” 

A Musky Odor

 

I offer belated Merry Christmas wishes. And Happy Hanukkah. Also Kwanzaa. Let’s leave National Cookie Day, Ugly Sweater Day, and the hundreds of other December “Days” to those who observe them.

That Christmas fell, as always, on the 25th and, in a rare confluence, Hanukkah began on it, with Kwanzaa only a day later, feels like an event of celestial significance, like a transit of Mercury, planetary conjunctions, or solar and lunar eclipses.

It might remind us to celebrate, every day, the evanescent and improbable gift we’ve been given of life on this fragile, verdant (so far), life-sustaining (for now) planet; but a grain of sand on an infinite, possibly otherwise lifeless desert. And a reminder of humanity’s wasteful, ultimately useless fixations on political, religious, and racial differences.

In this holiday season of joy, reflection, and perspective, it’d be sacrilegious to focus on the tribulations about to befall us when virtual POTUS-elect Elon Musk takes the reigns of governance while PINO-elect Trump fulminates feebly, arguing agency.

But I will.

Because, whereas what goes on down here amounts to naught across the cosmos, affecting nothing beyond our imperiled atmosphere, it matters immeasurably to those of us currently alive and, more importantly, to our progeny.

Honoring the season, I’ll not comment on those who claim to love God more than the rest of us do while offering unwavering support for the most ungodly leaders this country has ever seen. Including those who, like Holy Mike Johnson, flaunt their prayerfulness like a bloody shirt, while showing little concern for our diminishing earthly abundance, respectful stewardship of which their professed religion demands.

Consider Elon Musk, who embodies the worst of what’s to come in a Trump “administration.” Unelected, wealthy beyond imagination, conspiratorial, nasty, undeservedly egotistical, and Nazi-adjacent, having received zero votes and occupying, at best, a filamentous position in government with no legislative role at all, he issued a last-minute warning about an agreed-upon budget bill on which both sides had been working for weeks: “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in two years!” And lied about its contents. Then, when Republicans fell in line like scared children, he tried to blame the potential government shutdown on Democrats.

Trump, it’s said, doesn’t like the implication that Musk is in charge. But, absent Musk’s willingness and ability to spend whatever it takes to defeat its Republican opponents (pocket change, to him), the bill would have passed. Belatedly, Trump chimed in, for appearances.

Whatever this is, it’s not democracy. It’s rule by threat and intimidation. Because Trump defers to the more wealthy and successful, practically unlimited power rests with the world’s richest man. What he wants, he’ll get. As long as he stays out of the way of Trump’s prosecutorial plans, Trump has no reason to stop him, and Congressional Republicans have neither the integrity nor courage.

So why might Musk have been so anxious to kill the bill? It’s been well-publicized that the stripped-down version that finally passed eliminated funding for childhood cancer research and for making cancer drugs and other treatments more accessible. Other than characteristic Republican post-birth, anti-life policies, and to ensure enough spending will be cut to allow his and the oligarch fellowship’s tax cuts, there’s a less well-known reason. Also stripped were limitations on and regulations of investments in China, where Musk has huge holdings in factories and plans for more. That bit of prestidigitation handed him millions.

Plus there were regulations on “deepfakes,” computer-generated images of people saying and doing things that aren’t real. Musk’s more-influential-than-Trump’s social media platform, X/Twitter, is full of that stuff. And it’s a big part of rightwing disinformation campaigns. Another win for him, and for disinformers everywhere. And he isn’t even the most dangerous. But, according to Putin’s Tucker Carlson, anyone voting against Putin’s Tulsi Gabbard is an “enemy of the United States.” 

This is government bent to the will of a few very rich people, with no regard for the people who, deluded and distracted, put them in office. No one expects hardcore Trumpists to be bothered by any of this, and they never will be. For the rest of us, though, it ought to signal a maybe-final call for awakening and resistance.

Nevertheless, Happy New Year. I hope it’ll show I’m wrong about everything.