30 V 2018: “Poor little innocent guy!”

President Trump is using the occasion of Roseanne Barr’s fall from grace to complain of the unfairness of the media to HIM. His tweet for Memorial Day became a celebration of his glorious achievements, and now his tweet about Roseanne is a lament for “the media saying the most horrible things about this president,” to use the words of his mouthpiece, Sarah Sanders.

Really? Trump says in public the sorts of things Nixon used to say in private and then resents the fact that he is criticized! Trump acts the bully when he can get away with it and indulges in self-pity when he can’t. I imagine our President was a bully/sissy bipolar when he was a little boy, and he relies now on what he learned then.

Memorial Day 2018: Read all about it!

At 4:17 a.m. today President Trump posted a tweet in which he charged the Wizard of Oz with espionage, a disclosure that will, he said, bring about the biggest scandal the Emerald City has ever seen. Trump claims he has discovered that the Wizard had embedded Toto in the Trump Campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. This scheme was thwarted by the Trump and his Team. Toto found so many crooked people producing so much dirt that Toto was unable to decide what to include, what to exclude from his report, and thus missed the last balloon to the Emerald City. He was soon apprehended, and after several days of enhanced interrogation finally confessed. However, Trump says he is prevented by national security concerns from publishing all of Toto’s confession, and so will be making available only a redacted version to select members of the House of Representatives.

David Nunes announced that the House Intelligence Committee is going to hold hearings about what he calls “an act of war.” Nunes maintains that it has been a false assumption that Toto is an American dog because he comes from Kansas. He [Nunes] has obtained classified documents that suggest that Toto is, in fact, an immigrant. However, Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board disagrees, maintaining that Toto had been a wholesome American dog, but was beguiled by the attractions of the lewd way of life in the Emerald City, and then bribed by the promise of citizenship there to undertake this criminal breach of faith. Mr. Newt Gingrich claimed in an interview this morning on Fox News that he knew all along that Toto is a Democrat. Dick Cheney has called for an immediate invasion of the Emerald City to bring about a regime change. John Bolton, National Security Adviser, declared in a release this morning that unless the Wizard agrees to step down, he will hit the Emerald City so hard that nothing but a Munchkin colony will remain.

27 V 2018: Oh, just ignore him, because he’ll never shut up.

I am puzzled and, indeed, quite angry at the way the news media keep falling into the traps Trump sets for them. It is, I think, clear that Trump’s principal tactic is to drive attention away from one outrage by committing another outrage that will be snapped up by the media and fill the news until Trump’s next offense. These maneuvers of Trump’s are the real “fake news,” and the media should be ashamed that they are treating them as something real.

How about a boycott of Trump’s lies and stunts? He needn’t be excluded from the news altogether, but reports might be limited to, e.g., “President Trump Twittered three times this weekend,” and the curious or naive sent off to hunt up Trump’s tweets for themselves.

Most of what Trump does and says is calculated to deceive, is demonstrably in one way or another a lie. By reporting Trump so assiduously the media are complicit in distributing “fake news,” are enabling deceit.

24 V 2018: Biggest political scandal in history?

President Trump has boasted that “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!” This is wonderful not only because of the originality of the coinage Spygate, but also because yet again he is claiming a superlative for himself, even as he describes everything that has to do with him in superlatives: the most votes, biggest crowd at inauguration, biggest number of accomplishments in first year of presidency, probable winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, etc., etc.

This reminds me of the Elder Seneca’s (d c39 A.D.) story of a remark he made when he heard Lucius Cestius (a vainglorious orator) boasting that he would be the best in any field: “‘If I were a Thracian gladiator, I would be Fusius; if I were a pantomime dancer, I would be Bathylus; if I were a racehorse, I would be Melissio.’ I could not contain myself and shouted: ‘If you were a sewer, you would be the Cloaca maxima!’,” sc., the “Biggest Sewer,” the name given to the principal sewer of ancient Rome.

“Biggest political scandal in history” is not applicable to Spygate, whatever that is, but would fit the President & Co. perfectly and so Trumpy can claim yet another superlative for himself.

22 V 2018: Must speak the Trump’s English; “Is that going to be on the quiz?”

I read that two U.S. citizens were detained for about 40 minutes by a border guard who became suspicious of them because they were speaking Spanish in Montana. I do not like to think how long the border guards might detain citizens whom they hear speaking any language that sound like Arabic. Indeed, eventually anyone who does not speak ungrammatical English using a Trumpesque lexicon will be viewed as a threat to homeland security.

I also read that Trump’s shysters are trying to find out what questions the Special Prosecutor might ask Deceitful Donald and to limit the range of these questions. This reminds me of students who, as the date of a scheduled quiz approaches, keep asking the teacher “Is that going to be on the quiz?” I always answered this question by saying “Yes,” no matter what the topic, and I hope Mr. Mueller will do the same thing.

21 V 2018: Misc

1) Trump: What a discourteous little shit! It seems he can do nothing without disparaging someone from the previous administration. If this should require lies and falsifications, well, that’s where Tweety Boy excels, if not in the sophistication of his deceits, at list in their number.

2) U.S. and Israel: What can I say? Two rogue states that share the motto: “If you want it, take it.”

3) It is said that a monkey with a typewriter, given enough time, could type out all the world’s classics. Well, monkeys with guns, given enough time, will commit mass shootings and worse.

4) I think that the Trump “base” and Trump’s election should be blamed ultimately on America’s pathetic schools. Many lament the dumbing down of public education in recent years. For nowadays most adults can barely read, cannot write, and can speak and understand only an adolescent dialect, like Mr. Trump. But this decay is only the most recent of the failures of public education. We see that the members of the Trump base, even the much talked of “male college graduates,” have not been taught, or have not been motivated to THINK, an activity that a democratic society must require of its citizens if they are to vote responsibly.

10 V 2018: Enthusiasm for torture

The process of confirmation of Gina Haspel has re-opened the issue of the use of torture by the government of the United States. We failed to deal severely with this issue back when John Yoo, now a professor of law at Berkeley, and Jay S. Bybee, now a judge in the federal appellate court, were cooking up the so-called “Torture Memos.” 9/11 made the people of America pee in their pants and surrender their rights, morals, and dignity to those who claimed they could keep us safe. We were and ought to be ashamed of ourselves. But what we have now? An antinomian president who is a torture booster, with some of the old crew of torture-enthusiasts to cheer him on. Nomination of a veteran of the torture era to the directorship of the C.I.A. has summoned up a number of demons from Hell. That amoral ghoul, Dick Cheney, has appeared singing again his old “hurt ’em bad” song by way of claiming yet again that he was right all along. And Lt. General Thomas McInerny, making his pitch for torture on the Fox Channel, uttered some gratuitous insults against Senator John McCain for which the General deserves to be horse-whipped.

I will repeat now what I said back in 2002-2003, aged advocates of torture ought to volunteer themselves as laboratory subjects for the development and refinement of torture techniques.

9 V 2018: “Israel expels Human Rights Watch official”

This was the header of a brief notice in today’s paper. The state of Israel has given Human Rights Watch’s Omar Shakir two weeks to leave, claiming that he is an activist for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, a group that is trying to bring about Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territories.

It is no surprise that Israel is expelling the local director of Human Rights Watch, given its record in human rights. Israel may have started as one of those “tolerably repressive” regimes that Jeane Kirkpatrick used to talk about, but it has long ago ceased to be tolerable. Israel has become a garrison state, with a vast nuclear-equipped military complex that has been funded by the U.S.A. as its principal military base in the Mediterranean. Israel has been allowed to treat the Palestinians much as the U.S. treated the native American populations, driving them out, expropriating the good land, and crowding those who remain of the former inhabitants into reservations, denying them all political and civil rights.

American is to Israel as the U.S.S.R. was to communist regimes in Eastern Europe that could not have crushed their people and built up their military without Soviet aid and protection. The U.S. pretends to be even handed in its dealings with the Middle East. But who is so gullible as to believe that, given America’s funding of Israel, its blind tolerance of Israeli repression and colonizing? Who also is so gullible as to believe America’s assertion of the inviolability of human rights, when we turn a blind eye to Israel’s outrages, and support the State of Israel however heinous its behavior.

7 V 2018: Oliver North, Now and Then

The NRA has announced that Lt. Col. Oliver North, U.S. Army Ret., will be its new president. I read this online:

“This is the most exciting news for our members since Charlton Heston became president of our association,” NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said. “Oliver North is a legendary warrior for American freedom, a gifted communicator and skilled leader. In these times, I can think of no one better suited to serve as our president.”

So, “a legendary warrior for American freedom.” You can read of Col. North’s slightly distinguished military career in a Wikipedia article. I rather think what Mr. LaPierre means by “legendary warrior for American freedom” is that North lied to Congress, has had a long career on the extreme-right vaudeville circuit, and worked for Fox News, among other gigs hosting a show called “War Stories with Oliver North.” A more correct description of Col. North might be “has-been bull-shitter for right wing causes.”

I remember Col. North’s appearances before Congress’ Irangate hearings, back when he was running guns to our Iranian friends. In his testimony, when he was not issuing challenges to ordeal by combat, he spun so many impossible yarns that Senator Daniel Inouye was overheard saying of North “This guy is Joe Isuzu,” the comedic compulsive liar featured then in Isuzu television commercials. We must not dismiss this as a narrowly partisan evaluation, for the real leader of the Republican Party at the time, Mrs. Nancy Reagan, is quoted as having observed “Ollie North has a great deal of trouble separating fact from fantasy.”

I am not at all surprised that North is to be president of the NRA. He is for many an anti-factual figure of manufactured legend and lore, and he will bring more energy to the job than Charlton Heston who always seemed more dead than alive. What does surprise me is that such a glib liar and t.v. show patriot was not recruited early on into the Trump Administration where he would be such a good fit.

6 V 2018: Misc.

1) I read that Trump plans to appoint Dr. Oz to the Presidential Council on Sport, Fitness, and Nutrition. Dr. Oz will be a perfect fit in the Presidents circle of friends. The Trump crew prefers its own pseudo-science to any authentic science, and Dr. Oz is one of the principal purveyors of pseudo-science in America today. Some have called Dr. Oz’s credentials and ethics into question, but most members of Trump’s “Evangelical Advisory Board,” mega-churchers, TV spielers, preachers of the gospel of prosperity, gay-baiters, seem to be short on credentials and ethics also. Dr. Oz is a creature of the bogus world of television and that gives him a lot in common with the retired reality-show host, Donald Trump.

2) The NRA did not forbid its members to “carry” at the national convention, but at least one of the convention venues forbade firearms. I saw a cartoon portrayal of this: a group of NRA members with their AK47s standing in front of a building bearing a sign “No Guns.” The way the excluded NRAers stood there cradling their weapons made me think of little children who have just been told they cannot bring their favorite toys to a party.

3) President Trump addressed the NRA convention. Satan addressing the other fallen angels had not so great a rapport with his audience as did Trump at the NRA.