Mr. Trump’s agitated, increasingly irrational dementia doesn’t get 1% of the media attention former president Joe Biden’s occasional gaffes, stumbles, age-related hesitations still get.
It’s as if by his longtime assertion of brash incoherence Trump has inoculated himself, perhaps with one of Dr. Brainworm’s non-harmful, anti-scientific health injections, against anyone questioning even the most insane things he says or does. It’s just Trump being himself. Take two Tylenol and call me in the morning, when you have autism.
Heather Cox Richardson, American historian writing for future historians, records some of the latest insane Trump actions, posts and pronouncements, in her most recent Letter from an American. If you don’t subscribe to her free nightly email, you really should, her perspective is super well-informed and often illustrated with fascinating historical parallels. She is also a brilliant writer. Here’s the last paragraph of last night’s impressive inventory of floridly insane actions by the Commander-in-Chief:
Late this afternoon, Trump praised his remodeling of the Oval Office to include copious gold fixtures, some of which match polyurethane appliqué available from the home improvement store Home Depot. On social media, Trump posted: “Some of the highest quality 24 Karat Gold used in the Oval Office and Cabinet Room of the White House. Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, ‘freak out’ when they see the quality and beauty. Best Oval Office ever, in terms of success and look!!! President DJT”
Innocuous enough, out of context, perhaps, a vain compulsive old liar bragging about his impeccable 24 karat taste. But read along with everything else this increasingly mad, impulsive, vindictive man has done the last few days, weeks, months and years and the many objectively false things he repeatedly, angrily insists are true, it sends a chill up the old spine.
The good news, such as it is, is that in order to remain the smartest man in the room (always very important to Trump, as he has said, in moments of candor) he’s had to surround himself with fools and spinelessly ambitious people willing to meekly perform being even stupider than old Stupid Is As Stupid Does. To me, that collection of loyal incompetents is one of our greatest advantages in this perilous moment.
The cream of the wealthiest 1% who are dying for a permanent one party government run by a corrupt, pliable authoritarian, to protect their vast, inheritable privileges in perpetuity and screw everybody else, have a very problematic front man for their Project 2025 in America’s President Project 2025.
Heather Cox Richardson, not AI, describes the speech President Project 2025 delivered at the UN last week:
Trump’s speech went on to depict a fantasy world in which he had single-handedly saved the world. He claimed to have forged peace on two continents during his first term but said that “era of calm and stability gave way to one of the great crises of our time.” He then turned to the United States, claiming that “four years of weakness, lawlessness, and radicalism under the last administration delivered our nation into a repeated set of disasters. One year ago,” he said, “our country was in deep trouble, but today, just eight months into my administration, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world and there is no other country even close. America is blessed with the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, the strongest friendships, and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the earth.”
And that was the frame for the next hour of rambling boasts and insults.
Trump claimed that he had reversed the “economic calamity” left by former president Joe Biden. He had brought down costs and inflation, he said, and economic growth and manufacturing were both booming. He claimed that in his four years, Biden had attracted less than $1 trillion in investment while he had secured $17 trillion. Tax cuts and deregulation had, he said, made the U.S. “the best country on earth to do business.”
“In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world,” he said. “We had the best economy ever, history of the world, and I’m doing the same thing again, but this time it’s actually much bigger and even better. The numbers far surpass my record-setting first term.”
Trump claimed: “On the world stage, America is respected again like it has never been respected before. You think about two years ago, three years ago, four years ago, or one year ago, we were a laughingstock all over the world.
An insane bully has crippled one of our two political parties, rendered it a mere flapping appendage to his overbearing will. The incoherence of the crazed leader is fervently embraced by his most ambitious and ardent followers, everybody else in the party simply does his bidding, out of fear of his rage.
He orders criminal acts because the Supreme Court already told him, the 6-3 winner of Trump v. US, that he’s allowed to do whatever crimes he wants as much as he wants and plus he “has his Article II” and no pardon, even if he sells it openly for $10,000,000, can ever be challenged in court (see Trump v. US).
In spite of all the long-time professional prosecutors at the Department of Justice reporting that there is no righteous case to be brought against James Comey, (and others [1]) leading to the resignation (firing according to Trump) of President Project 2025’s own recent appointee who refused to bring this legally infirm indictment, he will appoint somebody, totally unqualified, to do what he wants them to do and they will do it. With the cringing blessing of the righteous, blonde attorney general, Pamela Jo Bondi.
So James Comey is indicted the other day on two counts stemming from the same supposedly lying sentence, elicited by supreme weasel Raphael “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz a former debating champion. The DOJ’s inspector general has already found Comey’s statement to have been truthful. Cruz tried to lay a clever lawyerly trap, during Trump’s first administration, but it didn’t work. Still, it is good enough for Trump’s latest inexperienced Acting State Attorney. That single sentence of claimed perjury is the sum and substance of two serious, and extremely flimsy, felony counts against James Comey with a penalty of up to 25 years in prison. Yer typical Trump case.
Watch Lawrence O’Donnell explain that all to you in the first minute or two. Then watch James Comey address the country to express his resistance to tyranny and his confidence in the American system of justice and the strength of our democracy.
Let it add a little bit of steel to your spine during these nerve-wracking days, (talk about the times that try men’s souls.) Let it be a tonic like that top rated Jimmy Kimmel monologue, like all acts of courage and clarity during a time of terror, cowardice and incoherence.
Woof, woof…grrrr!!!!
They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets!
[1] or NY Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff, Fed governor Lisa Cook, NJ Representative Lamonica McGiver, or anyone else who catches the Orange Polyp’s evil eye.
Jewish new year starts at sundown on September 22nd this year. The day before, slain highly influential MAGA promoter Charlie Kirk’s life and work were celebrated by MAGA nation.
Shortly after Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered, the NY Times published where he stood on various issues. They republished it yesterday, when thousands of the faithful are lined up to pay homage to this martyred Christian champion of free speech (to hear some tell it) at a mega-MAGA-rally celebrating his life and work. Look how mercilessly the super-judgmental New York Times smeared him for exercising his First Amendment rights to express a tiny bit of arguably antisemitic rhetoric! (The preceding sentence is an example of irony).
He was a proponent of “replacement theory,” a once-fringe conspiracy theory positing that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants. That ideology motivated the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
Mr. Kirk also accused Jewish philanthropists of fomenting anti-whiteness by supporting liberal antiracism causes like the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country,” he said on his show in 2023.
Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”
Allies of Mr. Kirk often sought to defend him against accusations of antisemitism by citing his support for Israel. Mr. Kirk defended Israel’s actions in Gaza. After his death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel mourned him as “a lionhearted friend of Israel” who “stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.”
Heh, takes one to know one, eh, Bibi?!
Read the article for more of the lionheart’s highly commendable free speech views:
On his most recent show David Feldman played the entire 4:00 clip of Bernie Sanders reacting to the murder of Charlie Kirk, saying he could find no way to edit it any shorter. I agree. Feldman’s only regret about Bernie’s statement is that it wasn’t delivered from the Oval Office. Mine too.
Imagine how much different the world would be if corporate Democrats hadn’t orchestrated the summary replacement of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 primary after putting their big donors’ fat thumbs on the scale in 2016 to give Hillary her turn.
My father, who had many wonderful qualities, was also locked in a lifelong war never to be wrong. He never escaped the prison of his terror of being humiliated, of feeling again like the helpless victim of vicious abuse he was as an infant, child, teenager. He said as much the night he died. “My life was basically over by the time I was two,” he rasped sadly, in that dying man’s voice that comes at the very end of a losing battle with cancer.
My father was very sensitive, in many cases he was super compassionate and caring. When it came to taking responsibility for his actions that hurt others, he would not. His anger was always righteous, his analysis of who was actually at fault was always flawless (to him), and he had a great ability to turn every conversation to his advantage, to deflect all responsibility by constantly reframing what you were actually talking about. This inability to admit that he was ever wrong caused him to distort reality whenever he felt trapped. He also quickly wrote off people who hurt him, one perceived strike was enough, and he never apologized to or forgave anyone that I can recall.
This distortion, blame and inability to forgive put great emotional obstacles in front of me and my little sister. “Life’s hard enough, Elie,” he said that last night of his life, “without your father placing obstacles in your way, like I did for you and your sister, and I am truly sorry for that.”
Good to hear, finally, and that first and last apology was gratifying, but, sadly, he was dead by the next evening.
I’ve finally come to understand, in the last chapter of my life, that if something hurts you, and you tell the person who’s hurting you that it hurts you, and they continue to do it, you have to get away from them.
People who continually hurt others have a problem they will always blame you for. Their problem only becomes yours if you tolerate being blamed for it. It turns out you can’t negotiate with someone who insists on their right to do what you have told them hurts you. They will immediately become the victim of your unprovoked attack, you are persecuting them, they’ll cry, tears of betrayal in their eyes. This insistence that you are victimizing them is pure contempt for you and your feelings.
Once you have seen contempt on the face of someone close to you, you cannot unsee it. When you learn a person will never change their insistence that you are solely to blame for every conflict, will never compromise or concede anything, ever, there is only one move: you need to get away from them.
I fondly believed all of my life — to my detriment in the end, when I was metaphorically lynched by a group of my oldest, closest friends during one of the most vulnerable times in my life — that every disagreement or hurtful pattern with people I cared about would yield to goodwill, humor, a gentle, reasonable presentation of facts, an exchange of views, an accommodation of everyone’s feelings.
Displays of genuine friendship can mend a painful situation with someone who cares deeply for your feelings. Someone who loves you yields to what you need. They don’t need to be persuaded that you’re hurt. They can acknowledge when they’ve hurt you, and try not to do it anymore.
All of the goodwill, friendship and benefit of the doubt in the world will not move someone who, damaged enough early in life, can never, ever, admit they are wrong or ever did anything, even unintentionally, that could possibly hurt you.
You will hear from these types that you are one who has the problem. Strictly speaking, this is true, the problem you have is that you are locked in a relationship and still trying to reason with someone like them. They will tell you that you are over-sensitive, self-pitying, ruled by childhood trauma you never overcame, blaming them unfairly, that you frighten them, that your expectations of others are too high, that you can’t control your emotions, you’re too analytical, blind to how much they love and respect you, that you don’t realize how hurtful you’re being to them by unfairly accusing them of hurting you.
To put it bluntly, these fucks will say absolutely anything to avoid conceding anything to you about the reasonable, foreseeable effects of their hurtful behavior. When you see this behavior is a pattern, and it doesn’t stop, weed these folks out of your life, there is no other healthy option. There is really no middle course with someone who insists on their right to treat you as they see fit, even if you tell them many times that you can’t stand the way they treat you.
I don’t really mind being called over-sensitive anymore, not as much as I used to, anyway. I am sensitive, exactly as sensitive as I need to be. I would like to become ever more sensitive, because sensitivity is where all the beautiful things, as well as the painful ones, live. I am sensitive because I am sentient. I will not deliberately hurt somebody in my life, I try not to hurt strangers either most of the time. If I find out I’ve hurt someone I know, I’m quick to make amends. If I am over-sensitive, I greatly prefer it to being insensitive, under-sensitive, whatever the opposite of over-sensitive is.
Being sensitive, and knowing exactly what causes us the most pain, we need to learn to protect ourselves from repeating familiar harm. I have found, over and over, that once I see contempt in a friend or family member, or anyone else, and contempt becomes their final answer, that I always feel immediate relief when I get away from that person. Contempt as a final statement doesn’t heal, doesn’t change, is not amenable to negotiation.
A show of contempt draws a life and death battle line, humiliating to the person who shows contempt, who can then never back down for fear of more humiliation. Their agitated implacability makes finding peace impossible. Contempt is a relationship breaker, walk away from it and you will always feel tremendous relief. It is one horrible thing you no longer have to try to accommodate your sensitive feelings to.
There is enough of that horror in the world we can do nothing about, without having it inflicted by those close to us who insist, irrationally, counter-factually, that they love and admire us and that we have to love them no matter what because of that. Love is sensitivity to the feelings of the person you love. It is nothing else.
Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.
This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.
It’s hard to disagree that we all need to be part of a vast network of moral resistance. The damage to our society that the Project 2025 government is busily doing is pure, punch-you-in-the-fucking-face fascism in action. Opposition to such bullying, lying and flagrant disregard of law would seem to be a bipartisan effort, except to tens of millions who respond to the reasonable fear and insecurity that accompanies powerlessness by following a strongman who have no qualms about bullying. The bully, they feel, will protect them, so they revere him and justify his bullying as part of a larger plan that humans cannot comprehend. The face eating leopard will never eat their faces, they believe, because they faithfully worship the mighty predator.
We must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance, as Reich says. It is our only hope to save our professed, widely shared values about justice, human equality and the inherent dignity of every individual. These values are under determined attack by literal American fascists who believe in an inalterable hierarchy of unaccountable power and privilege for superior citizens. The frustrating question is “how, exactly, do we organize and participate in this desperately needed vast network of moral resistance?”
I have been trying to find a way to get directly involved and have so far come up with very little, outside of signing up for, and donating to, my local Democratic organization. This is part of our dilemma as Americans. We are programmed, from birth, by thousands of hours of ads viewed in our earliest years, to be avid consumers. There is a seductive illusion of freedom created by the vast variety of consumer items we have the complete liberty to choose among (assuming we can afford to buy them). This phantom freedom also creates a childlike dependence on the cool things we can buy at retail superstores and other, less tangible, shiny objects sold to us by hucksters.
Our politicians? They need millions of dollars to run for federal office, and that money doesn’t come cheap, most of them feel they have to take it from whoever offers it to them, if they are going to win elections. We wind up with Chuck Schumer and company as the compromised Opposition party whenever Republicans are in the majority. The Democratic party can’t condemn an American ally for starving a besieged, captive population in an area that ally is constantly bombing. Desperately hungry people, lined up for food, are shot dead by an occupying army on a daily basis. But the Democrats corporate and lobbying sponsors would be furious about an official Democratic party condemnation of these war crimes by a beloved American ally. So Amy Klobuchar condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza, decries the forced starvation of the victims of Israeli policy, and two days later smiles in a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting the US to show that he can come visit his allies with impunity.
This is what decency and civilization demand. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it. It’s why, at a moment when the forces of fascism are so organized, well-funded and gleefully defiant in their sadism, terrorism (masked ICE squads accountable to nothing but unelected American Nazi Stephen Miller) and contempt for our experiment in democracy (which has allowed them to legitimately take power, as Mr. Hitler did back in 1933)
On Thursday, Trump’s loyal, cowed and bullied senators, who have already voted for cloture rather than allowing any further debate about Emil Bove III, their boss’s cynical pick for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals court (the cadaverous looking, bullying, morally repellant Bove has never been even a traffic court judge) will likely have the votes to put a man currently the subject of contempt of court proceedings into lifetime office as a judge. The contempt proceeding against Bove has been delayed for months by a temporary restraining order (which usually last a week or less) granted by Noemi Rao, rabid Federalist Society federal appeals court judge crazed in her assertions of illimitable Trump Executive Power and her vigilance against “usurpation” of such power) allowing Trump’s lickspittles to put Bove onto the one man short list to replace Alito or Thomas.
How do we organize and participate in a moral movement to stop that, by Thursday? The war against fascism is a war of attrition, and we all have to keep doing our part to protect values we all believe in, values under attack by a lawless regime fueled by bullying, death threats and the thrill that unaccountable sadism inspires in millions of our fellow citizens. God bless these United Shayyyyysh.
That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose. Musk’s AI creation, Grok, recently expressed religious veneration for the greatest human/deity in history, Adolf Hitler. Hitler famously said “conscience is a Jewish invention”. I don’t know if Mr. H. was right about that, I do know that iron-willed repression of conscience was necessary for the men originally tasked with the liquidation of Jews, men, women and children, and others deemed undesirable by Mr. Hitler. Members of the einsatzgruppen, the death squads, regularly developed drinking problems, suffered nightmares and mental breakdowns after shooting countless civilians in the head and forcing locals to bury the dead in trenches. They had a high burnout rate and had to be replaced regularly, which (along with the bullets needed for battles everywhere) was one impetus for a mechanized Final Solution.
Part of the far-right’s (not very coherent) critique of “wokeness” is that it is empathy run amok, turning victims of the “woke virus” into performatively empathetic weak prey animals unaware of the true Darwinian nature of the world where only the ruthless can triumph morally. The New York Times published a brilliant op ed by Jennifer Szalai on the Christian right’s condemnation of empathy as practiced by most of the rest of us. An excellent discussion, with some great insights from, and into, my hero, Hannah Arendt. Not surprising that Hannah made an excellent contribution to Jennifer Szalai’s analysis of this perverse Christian nationalist condemnation of empathy.
Here’s a taste:
The Death of Thinking
The death of thinking, in fact, was what Arendt worried about in her work on totalitarianism. When she reported on the trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, what struck her was his “thoughtlessness.” At one point Eichmann declared that “he had lived his whole life according to Kant’s moral precepts” — a claim that was particularly outrageous to Arendt, who elsewhere wrote about Kant’s concept of the “world citizen.” Such citizenship was not, she maintained, a matter of “an enormously enlarged empathy” but something more rigorous: “One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”
Click on the image below for the piece, gifted to you by The New York Times, which owns it, I’m just providing them a free ad.
Hannah Arendt pointed out that Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann’s inability to speak, except for cliches, revealed his inability to think. Language is an indispensable tool for discussing and understanding the world around us. Fascists deliberately distort and oversimplify language. This destruction of language is an essential part of destroying the ability to think critically. Critical thinking, like Critical Race Theory, is a deadly threat to would-be tyrants. Here’s a small, insignificant example of the blurring of language in the service of a point of view.
A MAGA podcaster interviewed Kash Patel, just before he became FBI director, Kashyap wearing a grey T-shirt with K $ H in large letterboxed letters, over the words “Fight with Kash”.
Interviewer: “You say the FBI has Epstein’s list. They’re sitting on it. That doesn’t seem like something you should do. You’re protecting the world’s foremost predator. That seems like an evil thing, regardless of who may be embarrassed in the release of that list. Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederast, the largest scale pederast, in human history?”
Kashyap Pramod Patel: “Simple. Because of who’s on that list.”
I was surprised to learn that Kashyap wasn’t always a revenge-fueled man of infinite ambition. In fact, back in the day, the upper caste Indian Hindu, son of an immigrant from Uganda whose family tree is traceable back 18 generations in Gujarat, was kind of woke. Wikipedia informs us: Patel attended Garden City High School and his senior-year quote was “Racism is man’s gravest threat—the maximum of hatred for a minimum reason”, by Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel.
Make of that what you will. Patel has obviously evolved a long way from his quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s friend Abraham Heschel days.
To set the record straight on language, though. Words have specific meanings and uses. Losing nuance is a step toward incoherence, especially dangerousin an age where a solid 40% consider passionate incoherence superior to a reasoned factual argument, for purposes of moving masses of confused people to concerted action. This solid incoherence embracing 40% owns most of the guns in America.
The words pedophile and pederast are not interchangeable, though both describe adult men who sexually prey on often unwilling underaged victims. These fuckers have very specific tastes. Epstein and his guests were powerful, lust-crazed monsters who did terrible, lifelong damage to many vulnerable, groomed, underaged young women and girls, but I’ve never heard it alleged, except by a MAGA podcaster, that serial rapist Jeffrey Epstein was a pederast.
Not that it makes much difference to the abused boy or girl. If you’re raped as a child, do the sexual predilections of your rapist really matter?
Words and nuance do matter, though, especially in this incoherent age of MAGA and its worldwide analogues. Incoherent, fervently believed rationales for doing things generally lead to bad endings for everybody involved.
More on FBI director Kashyap Pramod Patel, from his most recent incarnation (from Wikipedia):
This is from Steve Bannon’s ad for a movie, based on a book by Kashyap Pramod Patel that contains a partial enemies list, produced by Steve Bannon:
From Steve Bannon and the visionary team behind “Clinton Cash”, this groundbreaking film will leave you on the edge of your seat. “Government Gangsters,” based on the best-selling book by Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, pulls back the curtain on the sinister world of corrupt bureaucrats, government officials, and their media accomplices, as they conspired to bring down a sitting President, Donald J. Trump, and all those who support him. This explosive film uncovers the depths of deceit and manipulation they employ daily, betraying the very system they vowed to protect. “Government Gangsters” is not just a film-it’s a revelation that will forever alter your perception of government. May we never need another film like this.
gratuitousblahg 