Funny Not Funny

 

Analogy: Lucy Van Pelt is Iran. The football is the Strait of Hormuz. And Trump is, well, Trump.

As he decompensates while his stupid war spins out of control like a buzz-bomb firecracker, it’s obvious that Iranian leaders have figured him out. It’s the B-side of what other world leaders have recognized and used to their advantage: praise him like a child who used a potty, flatter him with participation trophies, and get what they want. Iran’s insight is to lie to him like he lies to everyone, get him to announce the latest “agreement,” deny it exists, induce him to make ridiculous, madman threats, announce more agreements, threaten more war crimes, back off, produce deadlines, rescind them, while they enjoy the result as he looks more out of touch, less and less powerful, and definitely not in control of anything; least of all, himself. Watch as the world backs away from him in dismay.

This is what Trump has done to America’s once-admirable standing in the world. Unconditional surrender was the goal. Or ending their nuclear program, “two weeks away from a bomb” every two weeks for ten years. Or opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was closed only because of his war. Since Trump spends most of his time on social media and watching toady TV, he must have seen Iran’s hilarious trolling videos, of which this is but one example. He’s become so dislodged from reality and unstable that aides kept him out of the room where it happened when planning the rescues of those downed pilots, lest he start issuing damaging orders.

This is the “president” we have, thanks to MAGA. It should frighten everyone. It's the patriotic duty of every American to vote only for Democrats until every MAGA Republican has been replaced in Congress.

The mullahs must be having a constant laugh as they make Trump look ridiculous to the world, including, of late, even former Trump-fluffer Tucker Carlson, who stopped licking and started looking. Though it was obvious before he descended that golden escalator, deniers can no longer deny: everything Trump says is a lie. About Iran, about elections, about climate change. About anything and everything. In a “president,” it’s an undesirable quality. Recent example: Iran’s “totally obliterated” navy just commandeered two commercial ships.

Trump’s calamitous, unnecessary, undeclared war/not-war has strengthened China and Russia, and convinced Iran that it doesn’t need nuclear arms. In its control of the Strait of Hormuz, it has a far more powerful weapon. No rational world leader other than Trump, who isn’t, would use nukes. Thanks to Trump, Iran now understands they don’t need them to disrupt the entire world and get whatever it wants. 

Foxotrumpic media insists he’s playing 4-D chess. He’s playing checkers. And, because he thinks the pieces are Oreos, he’s eating them. The best we can hope for from this debacle is a return to the parameters of the nuclear agreement President Barack Obama negotiated with Iran years ago, by which they were abiding, and which Trump, because his only constant is a need to punish those who don’t debase themselves for him, ended.

His unfitness is also manifested in the incompetence, criminality, and danger of the people he chose for his Cabinet. Three have been dismissed in the last few weeks, all women, despite the tendentious testicular travesties, the fulminating phallic failings of his male maladies. Atop the list is Pentagon Pete, who treats war like a game, a platform for self-promotion, strutting and puffing before his hand-culled press, embarrassing us before the world. Not content with firing minority generals and admirals, trying, apparently, to out-crazy Junior Arfkay, he just ended mandatory flu shots for troops. He must assume Trump will get his 1.5 trillion-dollar defense budget, in which case the expense of caring for unnecessarily sick soldiers won’t matter.

Tied for worst appointment, ever, is Kash Patel. Trump : judgment = strychnine : food.

For humor’s sake, recalling his promise to end Russia’s illegal war against Ukraine on day one, part deux, Trump predicted he’d have ended the Vietnam War “very quickly,” in five months. Why five? One for every deferment he got to keep him out of it.

Finally, this: Trump’s ill-planned, unjustified war, his undeniable decompensation over it, the worldwide effects of it all, are driving from memory the litany of his previous failures, the number of ways he’s endangered America, civilization, and the planet. But maybe that’s the point. If his war/not-war is over by November, Trump hopes, voters will be relieved enough to overlook the horrible and, in many cases, irreversible damage he’s caused in a mere six years.

Against that possibility, here’s a gift link to a New York Times article by Thomas B. Edsall. It’s a fact-supported recounting of all that Trump has wrought, and should be required reading for every voter, better written and more comprehensive than anything I could do. 

Our Stone Age "President"

With hinge screws flying off like sweat from an overweight “president” on an unstoppable treadmill, Trump, on Easter Sunday no less, posted the following NSFW screed on his North Korea-emulating propaganda outlet, Truthless Sociopath:

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

How very presidential. How honorably he presents America to the world. Our breasts should balloon with pride like... 

Nope, not going there.

No matter that he backed down, as usual. Every American who considers the presidency a position from which wisdom and humanity ought to emanate should find that rant unspeakably disgusting, demeaning the office and America.

MAGA doesn’t, of course, proving yet again how irreparably divided our country has become under Trump; how the regressive world-view of a belligerent minority has come to dominate American governance, despite representing not even a plurality of opinions. This isn’t “Art of the Deal.” It’s a madman, raving.

That Iran didn’t blink and Trump did makes it no less disturbing. Iran gets full control of the Strait of Hormuz, extracting millions in tolls, sanctions lifted, no constraints on building weapons, and declares victory. If it holds, Trump moves on, taking no responsibility for his economy-imperiling, America-diminishing war that empowered China and Russia. And, yes, Iran. But we’re to sing the praises of an arsonist who stopped setting fires. For now.

“Let those who have weapons lay them down. Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace,” was the Easter message from the first American pope, Leo XIV. Contrarily, Trump whisperer Laura Loomer wrote, “This is what I voted for. Bomb jihadis back to the Stone Age, where their mentality permanently lives. Trump said he’s going to bomb their infrastructure in Iran, and then he said ‘Praise be to Allah.’ On Easter. Amazing. Just amazing. Strategic bombing wins wars.”

Of which homily would Jesus approve? It’s a question the “Christian” Nationalists marionetting Trump stopped asking years ago. In Jesus’s name, they chose death and destruction. It’s confounding that people see the same thing and draw radically different conclusions.

Among the rotating stock of justifications for Trump’s war/not-war/but-really-war was liberating the Iranian people. “Rise up,” he exhorted. “We’ll have your backs.” Not exactly “bomb them back to the Stone Age, where they belong,” as Trump later put it, more cruel than Lovely Laura. No running water, no electricity, no hospitals. No fuel. No food storage, mass starvation. To Trump, to whom empathy is another obscenity, that’s “where they belong” – all of them, women, children, the brave souls who protested their government; students, teachers, healthcare workers.

Such inhumanity, even the threat of which is a war crime, is the wettest of MAGA dreams. They love it like they love a man who lies with every exhalation, who validates their hatreds, who hires people like Hegseth, not despite incompetence but because of it. Competence and sycophancy are incompatible.

As ill-considered as Trump’s war was, as obvious that he ignored warnings of its predictable, global consequences, he’s now ensuring that he’ll encounter no such pushback against his next war of choice, predicated on a draft-dodger’s need to appear tough. Firing General Randy George, Army Chief of Staff, was a warning to all senior officers to shut up and salute. When military leadership is left only to the most compliant, who’ll be there to refuse his next war crime, or, as General Mark Milley was, to resist another call to shoot protestors “in the legs or something”?

Trump unmasked the weakness of a Constitution predicated on goodwill, a commodity lacking among MAGA Republicans. His mental instability hasn’t triggered the 25th Amendment, nor impeachment and removal. When Congress is majoritized by people whose feck fits in a pixie’s hipflask, checks and balances become as outdated as the muskets behind the Second Amendment. A return to the respect for law and humankind presumed by the founders would require MAGAs to rediscover their humanity, currently Trumpofoxified out of existence.

When church and state become one, as the founders feared, we get stupid wars of arrogance, managed by people claiming God’s approval. People like Pentagon Pete, second only to Holy Mike Johnson in flashing faux righteousness like opening a trenchcoat in a city park. Maybe Trump’s handlers have convinced him that he, too, is doing God’s work. As a lifelong apostate, it’s unlikely he believes it, but he’s made billions by convincing MAGA he does. A miasmic, flattery-demanding “president“ and a Bible-banging Secretary of Defense, unchecked by spineless Congressional Republicans, makes a poisonous witches’ brew. It’s boiling over.

Footnote: Having taken a break to address health issues, I’ve been reassessing. Writing exercises an aging brain and offloads some stress, but its nugatory nature is undeniable. Further assessment to follow.

If The Shoe Fits...

🎵If you wanna know how he screws up so, it’s in the shoes.🎵  

Everything about Trump, his hires, and the chaotic misrule that followed, his failures, his cabinet’s incompetence, is manifested in Little Marco clomping around in oversize shoes. 

Wise readers who spend less time than I obsessively following the news and olds of Trump, might be unaware of this seemingly trivial but encapsulating fact: Trump, whose tastes run to grandiose gold and titular temples, is fond of cheap, shiny, wingtip shoes. So, either drawing on the billions he’s made during his “presidency” from unconstitutional grifts or, perhaps, from donations by gullible MAGAs, he bought some for his cabinet-makers. It’s reported he first asked their sizes, in which case the ill-fitting was a test of how much scaturient groveling he could elicit.

So there’s the Secretary of State of exceptional America wearing shoes three sizes too big, afraid to have said anything, submissively gluteosculating. Did he feel humiliated or, as it piled up, has he become inured? Either way, it explains how Trump got his war-not-war. No one pushed back, even those who undoubtedly apprehended the consequences. Trump chose lackeys, not people of competence and spine. Like Clark Clifford. 

So he got his war, about which he and perhaps his most unqualified appointee, Pete Hegseth, haven’t stopped bragging in the most vainglorious, tough-guy terms; war as video game, deaths as trophies. Who could observe the infantile, stupid preening of that tumescent pair and conclude they were ever capable of thinking past their emission of rockets and bombs? How stupid? Minesweeper stupid.

Trump expressed surprise at Iran’s response. No one told me, he claimed. Which, as usual, is a lie; in terms of repercussions, maybe his biggest. The Commander-in-Chief -- except for stupidity, Earth’s “most powerful” person -- didn’t expect attacks on other countries. Didn’t expect the Strait of Hormuz to be closed. Now that it happened, Trump is begging other nations for help. The same nations to whom he’s been giving the middle finger for years. As of this writing, other nations have gestured in kind. The grovelee became the groveler.

If this were a movie script, it’d have been hidden like the Epstein files. (Remember them?) While Iran blocks ours, Trump is letting their oil tankers through. Ukraine, abandoned by Trump, fighting for its life against Russia, is nevertheless helping the US and other countries with drone technology. Worried about the electoral impact of oil prices, Trump removed sanctions on Putin’s oil, gifting him billions of petrodollars to finance his war against Ukraine. While Ukraine helps us. And while Putin helps Iran target US resources. It’s inexplicable.

Or is it?

Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recently gave a speech in the well of the Senate. It’s long, so only the pathologically obsessed, like me, will watch it. So here’s the TL;DR: He detailed connections between Jeffrey Epstein, Vladimir Putin, and Trump. Epstein, he said, installed hidden cameras in every room of his home, where he provided powerful men with underage girls and young women. The infusions of money he obtained from Russian sources, the senator implied, were in exchange for supplying videos of those encounters to Putin.

As the E-files make clear, Trump was a frequent visitor. Unsaid, but a defensible conclusion regarding why Trump, a bully to everyone else while obsequiing himself to Putin: It ain’t “pee tapes.” We may never know, because Epstein hung himself. He did, right?

As much as Trump would like to declare victory, Iran keeps getting in the way, by continuing to strike neighboring countries and turning ships in or near the Strait into fireballs. People who understand these things, which doesn’t include Trump and Hegseth but probably does the admirals and generals they fired and some of those who remain but are silent or ignored, say the only way to prevent those attacks is by controlling Iran’s shoreline on the Gulf. Which can’t be done from the air. So “no boots on the ground” Trump is sending a Marine Expeditionary Force to the region, complete with landing craft and 2,500 Marines. So far.

Trump’s bones will tell him when to quit. That’s what he said: he’ll end the war when he feels it in his bones. If that doesn’t give you confidence in his Chiefly Commanderness, this will: Bragging about destroying Iran’s main oil facility, he said he might do more “for the fun of it.” While people suffer everywhere, and while Iran might hand the world to China, Trump is having fun.

To our infinite shame, America elected a shallow, thoughtless man whose deplorable choices for cabinet secretaries were approved by cowardly Republican senators, some of whom surely knew better. Whatever in Trump’s impoverished mind justified leading us into his illegal war-not-war, his conduct proves his dangerous incompetence. And Congressional Republicans continue to three-monkey our path to doom.

And now, this: Due to non-political circumstances, my focus will be elsewhere for the foreseeable future.

Wag, Doggie, Wag

 

                      Chat GPT, per me

“News that the Epstein files contain testimony about Trump raping a 13-year-old girl came at a bad time for the people of Iran.”

The quote is from a friend of a friend. Since Trump’s reasons for the war have changed every day, its implication is as compelling as any. After all, he predicted it. Was it to free the Iranian people, or because in this, the tenth year of Iran being two weeks away from building a nuclear bomb and missiles that can deliver them to U.S. soil, there was imminent danger? Even Trump’s Pentagon has denied that one. So Trump called reporters, trying out various justifications. It could also be God’s plan to hasten the Second Coming. Hegseth thinks so. Dismissing God, as usual, Trump blames Presidents Obama and Biden. Also, he "had a feeling." God help us.

The outcome of Trump’s illegal war won’t be known for months. Years, maybe. What we do know is that, because the Constitution gives the power to declare war only to Congress, what he did was unquestionably unconstitutional, and in violation of the War Powers Act. Interviewed by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Trump puffed, “Nobody could have done this but me.” He’s right. No other president has been or would be so willing to violate the Constitution for personal aggrandizement.

Even if it turns out well and peace blooms like the Rose Garden he destroyed, is this how America should do war? Started unilaterally by a pathological liar and malignant narcissist who sees everything through the lens of self? It’s suboptimal. From the reaction of Congressional Republicans, though, you’d never know it. To their list of avertebral acquiescence to Trump’s usurpations, add starting wars.

“Peace president” Trump expended little effort to make his case for war. Given his history of monumental lies, there’s no reason to believe anything he says about it now. The war has cost lives of Americans, Iranian schoolgirls, and who-knows-how-many other Iranians and residents of neighboring countries. Three warplanes, so far, countless drones and missiles, and we still don’t know why. “Freedom isn’t free,” was the callous response of Trump’s UN Ambassador to the loss of American lives. Whose freedom, he didn’t specify. Pentagon Pete clarified, saying, “We didn’t start this war.” Not only is the statement from a non-parallel universe, but by using the word, as has Trump, he exploded the argument by MAGA and Foxian state media that it isn’t war. Expecting to convince the credulous that Trump isn’t violating the Constitution. Another Big Lie. Like stolen elections.

It’s reported that urging from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman is what convinced Trump to go ahead, and to imply, contrary to US intelligence findings, that America was under grave threat. World leaders have come to recognize and exploit Trump’s vulnerability to flattery, so we can imagine what was whispered in his ear by those two, for their own purposes: “Sir, you’ll be remembered as a hero for all eternity. Golden likenesses will be built, their height commensurate with your towering stature. Cities and byways will bear your name. Do it, your excellency. Just do it.” China’s Xi’s whispering is likely to himself. “Deplete your weaponry while we increase ours, massively. Do it, Dupable Donald.” Putin thinks: “Keep it up, my pretty. Let Ukraine die. Do it for me.”

Would I suggest that Trump is hoping for pro-Iranian terrorist attacks here, so he can declare a national emergency and cancel the November elections? Nope. Not my style. For one thing, there’s never been a less four-dimensional thinker than one-dimensional (me, only me) Trump. But I reserve the right to be wrong. It could be the plans they’re hatching to claim China stole the 2024 election.

Trump’s success in kidnapping Venezuela’s Maduro fed his hunger to appear powerful. He’s smelled blood and likes it. We’re at war for reasons hidden within the mind of an observably disturbed man. That’s why the Founders gave declaring war to Congress; i.e., the people.

But for now, let’s watch events unfold before speculating further. There’s else to address. Like Undersight Committee Chairman Comer subpoenaing the Clintons to testify about Jeffry Epstein, hoping to shift attention from Trump’s role and embarrass them. He failed hillaryously. Wisely, Secretary Clinton pre-released her scathing opening statement to the public, in which she thoroughly dinged Comer’s hum.

Kash Patel is firing FBI agents involved in executing the judicial warrant to search Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents Trump stole, hid, and lied about. Those agents also worked on assessing threats from Iran, among others. Smart move. Great timing.

Finally, before I run out of room, there’s DHS lying about agents who left a blind man to freeze to death in Buffalo.

The worst of our worst are in charge, intentionally cruel and dangerously inept, at home and overseas. What it means is that Trump’s planned election sabotage MUST be overcome. Massive turnout might be the only way.