11 IX 2019: Ego mendax vincit omnia

John Bolton has been made to walk the plank. I do not know Mr. Bolton. I gather from the news that he is a man of strong opinions and deeply held convictions. Hard to get along with, yes, bit of an extremist, maybe, deeply committed to the United States of America, no one doubts this.

I’m sure he used to put Trump in the shade from time to time. For Bolton is obviously the smarter and better informed, the logical thinker who is quite forward in expressing his own John Bolton has been made to walk the plank. I do not know Mr. Bolton. I gather from the news that he is a man of strong opinions and deeply held convictions. Hard to get along with, yes, bit of an extremist, maybe, deeply committed to the United States of America, no one doubts this.

I’m sure he used to put Trump in the shade from time to time, for Bolton is obviously the smarter and better informed, the logical thinker who is quite forward in expressing his own views, and quite forward too in denouncing contrary opinions. But on Trump’s playground, Trump is the only one who gets to be smart, well informed, and subtle, and Trump is the only player who is free to say what he thinks as loud as he wants. No, John Bolton had to go.

On the contrary, the Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, the Vulture-King of Bankruptcy, is most welcome to stay. He is a man after the President’s heart. They have a shared background in bankruptcy and barely legal business doings, and both are adept and chronic liars. The ever-willing Wilbur will be with the President until the bitter end.

7 IX 2019: Who is the real author of NOAA’s announcement?

Today’s news reports the issue of an anonymous statement by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration that criticizes the National Weather Service’s announcement that Dorian posed absolutely no threat to the Great State of Alabama.

Why was this statement anonymous, i.e., not signed by anyone in the NDAA? I supose they couldn’t find any practiced liars from the Trump Organization in their agency. Maybe they had an intern write it. Why did they take so long issuing this corrective? Should we take it at all seriously?

Maybe the agency did in fact issue the statement, because NOAA did not want to have its budget reallocated to Homeland inSecurity. So they threw Trump a lifebuoy, even if suspiciously late. 

OR, maybe it was not NOAA at all, but a Trumpian operative using NOAA letterhead. To test this hypothesis, I want to know first of all: Was the statement typewritten? or was it written with a Sharpie pen?

5 IX 2019: Sorry, King Cannot

There is an anecdote about the eleventh-century King Canute. His courtiers fawned on the old man, praising his dominion over land and sea. Canute ordered them to carry him to the far edge of the beach that had been exposed by the ebbing tide. He had them set his sedan chair right at the water’s edge and then commanded the sea not to get him wet. Of course, the incoming tide gave Canute a soaking and gave his courtiers a warning against exaggeration and flattery.

Our Ruler (some have called him King Con) is also surrounded by flatterers and yes-men. But unlike King Canute, he takes their flatteries at face value, for they coincide with his own self-evaluation. Trump recently got it into his head that Alabama was endangered. He called it “the great state of Alabama,” a characteristic phrase of George Wallace’s.

Where did he get Alabama? At least we know that it was not from the U.S. Weather Service. But whether he had earlier overheard someone mention Alabama in another context, or thought up Alabama’s peril all on his own, he has been sticking to his guns and even conjured up a Weather Service map that had been clumsily falsified to show Dorian menacing Alabama.

Why did he mention Alabama? Perhaps he was trying to play-act the “Empathetic President” and show the depth of his concern for Alabama. According to the latest U.S. News evaluative comparison of the 51 states, Alabama comes in at the 46th place in health care, 45th in economy, and 50th in education. So support for Trump in Alabama runs very deep. Or did he make his mistaken statement only because he was feeling expansive and wanted to show how supremely well-informed he was about a coming national emergency.

In any case, whatever he scribbled on the Weather Service map, even Mr. Trump cannot make a storm blow to the West if it does not want to. Unlike King Canute, who was quite ready to admit he had no dominion over nature, Trump was asserting his dominion, not over nature, but over information about nature. He knew where the storm was going, just as he knows that Climate Change is bogus.

4 IX 2019: Ubi caritas?

Nicolas Senèze of La Croix has presented his new book, How America Wants to Change Popes, to Pope Francis. The Holy Father’s response was a comment: “For me it is an honor that Americans attack me.” There are various conjectures about the meaning of this remark. I am inclined to read it through the lens of Matthew 5:12: “Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you.”

I hope that M. Senèze’sbook will name names and follow the money, so that we can know who is who in the little known American Catholic right. Catholic reactionaries  have been engaged in a long-standing conspiracy against Pope Francis, and I would like to know who they are. They are probably the same rich authoritarians that fund the Republican Party and a throng of right-wing Catholic organizations. 

The right-wingers are loud in their denunciations, but are, especially the wealthy ones, rather closed-mouth about the goals of their various conspiracies. Their favorite drink, politics aged-in-the-barrel with a religion chaser, very often induces paranoia. Hence the smoke, and fog, confusion and camouflage. The Catholic right in America stands in need of bright light and fresh air. Otherwise our assumption that they are merely chaplains of capitalism will go unchallenged. 

4 IX 2019: Ozymandias gotta get his wall on time!

The Secretary of Defense, with no regard for his duty to the American people and their military, has authorized the diverting of $3.6 billion in military construction funds for 11 wall projects on the Southern border. His explanation is a masterpiece of BS. He told Congress that he determined, on the basis I suppose, of his long experience as Secretary, that “eleven military construction projects along the international border with Mexico, with an estimated cost of $3.8 billion, are necessary to support the use of the armed forces in connection with the national emergency.”

The military construction projects are not barracks, missile silos, air fields, or PXs, but chunks of Trump’s Folly, the Wall.

The national emergency is the prospect of Trump’s not being re-elected and having to go to prison. Preventing this requires an abundance of deceit hitherto unseen in American politics and fulfillment of the promises of BUILD THE WALL and MAKE MEXICO PAY FOR IT.

So this unexampled waste of money is required by Trump’s personal needs, not “to support the [wasteful] use of armed forces in connection with the [phony] national emergency.” I am again and again amazed at Trump’s ability to appoint administrators who are a) all quite incompetent and b) shameless liars.

Trump & Co. have made the U.S. Government into a “privately held” company in which the CEO can do as his fears and whims incline him. They are taking money appropriated by Congress for FEMA and for the real defense of the U.S. and using it to advance his personal interests.

Misuse of huge sums of government money for personal purposes and operating a deceitful p.r. campaign in support of this are behaviors I associate with Third World dictatorships.

1 IX 2019: Terror masked by affected pride

A “straight pride” parade took place in Boston, sponsored by a group that calls itself Super Happy Fun America. Apparently, the Super Happy Fun Boys feel that the civil rights of straights are under threat and decided they should protest. So much for the window dressing. 

In fact, it shouldn’t be called a “Straight Pride Parade,” but a “We’re scared to death we might not be 100% straight parade,” and it is held to give sexually ambiguous males an opportunity to assert to one another their aspirational masculinity. I do not know how well “super happy” and “fun” and “America” are a part of this rather pathetic “straight pride” protest. Maybe “Super-Frightened Feeling-Threatened America” would be a more descriptive name for the sponsoring group.

30 VIII 2019: “Report upon the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice”

This is the title of a report prepared by a team of prominent lawyers for the National Popular League that was published in 1920. It consists mostly of a series of sworn testimonies, each termed an exhibit, that describe the criminal activity of the U.S. Dept. of Justice during what is now called “The First Red Scare.” This was, of course, when J. Edgar Hoover, the famous blackmailer, was just getting started. Could be that “criminal activity” seems a bit strong, but f denying people due process and other rights guaranteed by our Constitution is not a crime, I don’t know what is. 

Times have changed. I don’t think our Dept. of Justice is so criminal, despite the fact that at its top the DOJ is wholly corrupt. And we’re not rounding up and deporting socialist politicians and labor organizers. No, we are expending a lot more money and energy to round up illegal immigrants and their families, not through the DOJ, but through the Department of Homeland Security, a barely legal offspring of 9/11 hysteria. How bad is this? I read that the DHS will no longer admit staff of the House Oversite Committee to ICE’s prison camps, so we can safely assume that conditions in them are as bad or worse than we had earlier learned. DHS needs to conceal its incompetence, general inhumanity, and contempt for immigrants. 

Where do they get their funding? Trump is siphoning off money that was appropriated for other appropriate government activities to fund a bloated ICE and run a crash program to get his illegal wall built in time for the 2020 election. None of this shell game with funds has been approved by Congress. But Trump’s métier is playing shell games with other peoples’ money, always borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, and resisting fiercely any oversight. Is the Wall necessary or even useful for national security? Of course not. But it is necessary to Trump’s re-election, so it is Donald’s own Manhattan Project, a full-bore crash program to keep him out of jail. So he’s ready with implausible deniability and a pocket full of pardons for those he is encouraging to break the law.

18 VIII 2019: The war against children

Americans boast of our love of children. Childhood is routinely idealized as the happy, worry-free stage in life. We will do anything for our children, for they are the future of our country. 

Of course, the facts of our treatment of our children deny this. If we really loved our children and placed all our hopes of the future in them we would invest gladly and heavily in public education. We would not pass on to them an insupportable national debt. We would not squander their resources. We would not leave them with a corroded infrastructure and irrecoverably polluted land, water, and sky. We would not be shooting them on the streets where they play. We would not slaughter them in their schools. We would not be abusing them at the rate of some 700,000 children per year. We would not have aborted 45,789,558 of them in the period 1970 — 2015.

At the local level: We would not have allowed the state of Missouri to lead the nation in the number of children dropped from Medicaid — 16% in the last two years, as Tony Messenger reports in today’s Post-Dispatch. This is due to a mindless, heartless determination to save state money at the expense of children.

We would not allow a culture to be so inured to criminality as to refuse to disclose the identities of those who murdered their children. The Post-Dispatch reports one parent of a murdered child saying: “Around St. Louis we don’t snitch on people. We keep it in the streets.” “Snitches get stiches,” we were told in Ferguson, but can fear of retribution so paralyze people that they refuse to help defend their community’s children?

We would not allow our government to be hijacked by a man who cannot control his impulses that will bring our country ever closer to war, nor would we allow an entire political party to shelter him with barely believable hypocrisy.

We would not allow this same government to terrorize immigrants by taking children from their parents and subjecting them to imprisonment and abuse, hygienic and medical neglect, and incessant psychological trauma. This is a part of a policy of undisguised cruelty all to please those among us who want to “keep America white.” For I don’t think the American people would tolerate this mistreatment of children if the children were white. These foreign children present in our land are being subjected to what would otherwise be regarded and cruel and unusual punishment.

No, our idealization of childhood and sentimentalized attachment to children cannot protect them from our predatory behaviors. Our children make manifest our traditional national selfishness.

13 VIII 2019: Real malice of Trump Admin. towards immigrants revealed

I have long suspected that Trump’s antipathy towards immigrants is race-based. However, I did not think anyone from his administration would be stupid enough to state this. But today comes the news of Mr. Ken Cuccinelli (doesn’t sound like an American name to me!), the Acting Director of Citizenship and Immigration Services [sic] and his essays in literary criticism. He had earlier on Tuesday suggested a rewrite of Emma Lazarus’ celebrated poem that would run: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet, and who will not become a public charge.” Later, in an interview, he backed away from his rewrite and claimed instead that the poem on the Statue of Liberty refers only to Europeans, i.e., says “Whites only.” What is this stupid, callous wannabe-WASP doing in government service. What an embarrassment for us all! I imagine he will next require an applicant for a green card to pass a color test and be able to prove that his grandparents and great-grandparents were white. He will have a team of right-wing scientists produce a color chart to guide the good old boys from ICE and the border patrol.

This is Trump all over. We don’t want <colored> people from shit-hole countries. Why can’t we get some <Aryan> people from Norway? Cuccinelli’s interpretation of Emma Lazarus’ poem is the clearest declaration of racism that we have heard from the Trump administration so far. As we approach the election we will hear, I believe, much worse.

11 VIII 2019: J. Epstein’s death

Trump has retweeted the wild surmise of an attention-seeking fellow called Terrence K. Williams who has the oxymoronic job description: “conservative comedian.”Mr. Williams’ latest joke is that the Clintons were behind Epstein’s murder. Our President, with his keen tabloid mind, grabbed this bit of silliness like a dog grabs a bone. The Attorney General, Mr. Barr, another lover of the truth, has announced a thorough investigation of Epstein’s death – harumph, harumph, harumph!

I am inclined to think that it will turn out that Epstein killed himself. But if it turns out that he was helped into the next world, I would look not to the Clintons, but to Trump and Barr for an explanation.