Trump is Completely Insane

     And the rest of the Republican Party isn't too far behind.

     As of this writing, the federal government will shut down under Trump... again. Because Republicans have recently used spending bills, even he stopgap ones, as tools for leverage, they think they're entitled to literally hold the nation hostage until they get their demands. Of course, tied to the spending bill are unreasonable demands that Democrats simply won't go for. Republicans accuse the Democrats of making similarly unreasonable demands. 

      Desperately trying to drive this point home, Trump today said Democrats want to make everyone transgender through reassignment surgery and were demanding health care for "illegal immigrants". But the culture wars bullshit and finger-pointing are falling apart and poll after poll shows voters will likelier blame Republicans than Democrats for a shutdown.

     Trump actually said Democrats want to “force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors”, which anybody who knows anything knows it illegal. He also claimed Democrats want to give free health care to illegal immigrants, another lie. In fact, Democrats want to restore Medicare cuts, among other things. And the Republicans, as usual, have nothing but lies to counter with.

      Earlier this month, Trump abruptly canceled a meeting with Congressional Democratic leaders, saying there was no use in negotiating with them. Trump relented and agreed to meet with Schumer and Jefferies only after Mike Johnson and John Thune private told Trump that his refusal to meet with them would seriously hamper their bargaining position.

     Then Mike Johnson threw a monkey wrench in the works by adjourning Congress for a week (Just a month after they came back from a month-long vacation), long after the shutdown starts at midnight tonight (while also refusing to swear in newly-elected Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva, largely to deny her the chance to sign the bipartisan discharge petition related to the release of the Epstein files. Johnson could've sworn her in during a pro forma session- he's done it before for Republicans- but chose not to this time because, you know, Democrat).

      Hakeem Jeffries pegged it when he said, “They’re not even pretending as if they want to find common ground.”

      In every government shutdown going to back to at least 2013, Republican brought it about. They love getting their own free health care and the power that elected office gives them but otherwise, they loathe the very idea of government. They don't give a shit if the government shuts down as long as they get to keep drawing their paychecks.

     But in his poo-flinging press conference in the Oval Office today, Trump let slip something that ought to be making headlines- He said the shutdown will affect only Democrats, that they're the only ones who will get laid off. Another fact check- government shutdowns don't result in layoffs but unpaid furloughs and they certainly don't discriminate against one party or another.

     Trump is completely demented and no one is calling attention to the fact that the country is barreling toward the edge of a mile-high cliff because Trump is essentially a meth-addled chimp behind the wheel of a Mack truck. And that also should be making headlines.

"We will not live on our knees."

 

     So, James Comey has just been indicted, which, I suppose, makes him as guilty as a ham sandwich.

     It doesn't take a political or legal expert to see why Trump is essentially ordering the Justice Department to go after the former FBI Director. In the first months of Trump's first criminal junta administration, Not only would Comey not agree to let Michael Flynn off the hook for his own crimes (FARA, anyone?) but he was also the one who was heading the investigation into Trump's Manchurian Candidate arrangement with Russia.

     Well, as we all know, Trump's committed more crimes than Wrigley's has Skittles. And it's in the nature of mob bosses to go after those who investigate them, even after the fact. And we know Trump's pulling the strings, Earlier this month, he wrote,

     “We can’t delay any longer. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! They have to act. They have to act fast.”

     Fact check: James Comey had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump getting impeached and indicted all those times. He'd just barely started an investigation into Trump's collusion with Russia during the 2016 election when Trump fired him on May 9, 2017 (the next day, he hosted two high-ranking Russian officials in the Oval Office after kicking out the western media).

     Now, why was Trump in such a hurry to indict Comey? Well, among the two charges they brought up, one was lying to Congress. Lying to Congress comes with a five year statute of limitations, meaning that Comey's 2020 testimony would've only been subject to an indictment until October 1st this year.

     Obviously, it didn't matter to Trump that a Justice Department Inspector General report concluded that Comey probably wasn't being untruthful to Congress (unlike the right wing ideologues and other assclowns that he's shoehorned into the government thanks to invertebrate Republicans).

     So Trump installed former cop Eric Siebert into the role of acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia as soon as he sleazed back into the Oval Office. Then Trump decided he wanted to indict Comey on vague and unsubstantiated charges.

     However, being an attorney with some scruples, Siebert looked into the matter and eventually saw there was no there there. So he declined to empanel a grand jury.

     Ketchup hit the walls at the White House and Trump decided Siebert had to go. In reality, Siebert left of his own accord, even though Trump screamed on social media (and, yes, he actually said this), "He didn't quit. I fired him!"

     Trump then installed yet another one of his countless morally compromised private attorneys, former beauty queen Lindsey Halligan, who's literally an insurance attorney who's never litigated a case in her life.

     And, like a true mob boss, Trump isn't satisfied with going after his perceived enemies- He has to go after their families, as well. Earlier this year, after right wing pseudo journalist Laura Loomer carped about her, Trump ordered the firing of James Comey's daughter, Maurene Comey, from her position at the powerful and infamously independent SDNY. Starting six years ago, Ms. Comey began handling the case against Jeffrey Epstein right after he was arrested in July 2019.

     But the Comeys are just the tip of the iceberg. The real issue is the separation of powers that's supposed to exist between the DOJ and the White House. The two buildings are separated by a lot of real estate and that's symbolic.

     As with the first time Trump was in the White House, he plainly looked at the DOJ as his private law firm, one that he fully expected to go after his enemies as well as quash investigations into his countless crimes and that of his corrupt cronies. Why should anything be different the second time around? That's why his mantra of Biden's Justice Department being weaponized rings ludicrously, considering he's giving marching orders to Pam Bondi and her US Attorneys. And if they don't give him what he wants, he fires them.

     And if the Democrats take back the House and Senate, next November, he's truly fucked and he'll be looking at, bare minimum, a third impeachment. Because right now, we're witnessing in real time the development of a scandal that will make Watergate look like a walk in the park, one that ties many of Trump's scandals together with a nice red bow, including the Epstein files.

Now We Have Our Own Martyr (Sort Of)

 

     Don't have much time because I'm trying to finish a novel. But I'd be remiss in my responsibilities if I didn't comment in a timely fashion about the reinstatement of comedian Jimmy Kimmel. Coincidentally, this move by Disney came the day after Charlie Kirk's memorial service in Glendale yesterday.

      Kimmel will return to ABC tomorrow night and he'll do so as a near martyr at the hands of the MAGA movement. It may be the most-watched opening monologue in the history of late night TV, which will only be a ratings bonanza for ABC (so they should get back some of the $15,000,000 they paid out to Trump in bribe money). They've probably already upped their asking price for air time from their sponsors.

     In a way, it didn't come as any surprise. Disney had been telegraphing this move ever since the day after Kimmel's show was pulled off the air. Disney's executives were desperately looking for an off ramp, especially when they realized that, as yours truly predicted, the cancellations of Disney+ subscriptions reached Biblical levels and their stock's share price plunged by 2.1% (at a time when the Dow Jones Average was up 1%).

      Disney may have saved their stock price (MAY have) but now Nextstar has the stability of the merger to contend with. Disney painted themselves into this corner. Plus, it all depends on whether Nexstar and Sinclair choose to run future episodes on their affiliates. But my guess is they'll follow Disney's lead.

      But Trump and assholes like Brendan Carr don't take defeat very well (Look at January 6, 2021). They'll still want to take out their pound of flesh by jeopardizing the Nexstar merger, which none of us should give a shit about. Expect that bald-headed rat fucker Carr to continue sabotaging the merger. Again, none of us should give a damn about whether or not it goes through. But if the merger goes off and the FCC can't or won't scuttle it, it would give me more than a twinge of satisfaction. That will make Trump's defeat permanent. It's not as if he can threaten to cut funding from Disney, Nexstar or Sinclair.

     Last night, John Oliver said on his show that "giving the bully your lunch money doesn't make him go away. He'll just come back hungrier." And he's right. Appeasement didn't work with Hitler in 1938 and it doesn't work with Trump. In fact, just hours after Disney pulled Kimmel's show, Trump went on Truth Social and began demanding the firings of Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon.

     It only goes to show that if you punch bullies hard enough, they'll recede. And if you punch corporations where it hurts the most, which is their wallets, they'll be shamed into doing the right thing, however cynical and self-interested their motives.

     So fuck them all. Fascists can't and won't be made happy. For now, we can point at Trump and laugh Curly Howard-style as Trump completely loses it over Disney and threatens to sue them like he did ABC and CBS. But, if Disney was so concerned about its bottom line, don't look for them to be shelling out protection money to Don Dumbo any time soon.

Homeland Strategic Consulting Bribery

     I've quietly had a wild hair across my ass regarding Tom Homan, the so-called "Border Czar". He has that fat, soft, cruel face almost peculiar to latter-day fascists that just cries out for someone to Photoshop a black SS uniform below it and a Nuremberg Nazi rally as a background.

     He's a rare holdover from the Obama administration (God only knows what Obama was thinking when he hired Homan for immigration enforcement back in 2013). But under the first Trump administration, Homan was one of the loyal foot soldiers who'd carried out Stephen Miller's astoundingly sadistic family separation policy and carried out his duties with relish.

     So over the last eight months, I've been watching Homan bluster his way on one talk or news show or another, proudly boasting about playing his part in carrying out the "president's" agenda of Making America White Again, amazingly without the "Horst-Wessel-Lied" playing in the background on Fox.

     So, let's take a little stroll down Memory Lane, Dear Reader, shall we? Where was Tom Homan exactly one year ago today? Why, he was in West Texas accepting a $50,000 bribe, in cash, from FBI agents posing as businessmen. Yes, exactly one year ago today (you've gotta love the timing), Tom Homan waddled out of a meeting with his coat pocket bulging with $50,000 in flash money he'd just accepted from the FBI.

     How did Tommy Boy wind up on the FBI's radar? Well, the subject of an unrelated Bureau investigation revealed that Tom Homan was currently accepting bribes in exchange for steering government contracts their way if and when Donald Trump took back the White House. It was an old game Homan knew well. After all, until Inauguration Day, Homan owned a consulting group called Homeland Strategic Consulting, one that steered government contracts to those in the private immigration enforcement community (including GEO Group, the notorious private prison company).

     After the election, Homan announced he was shutting down HSC, saying he wanted to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. One would be amazed that he was able to keep a straight face until one realizes that, like all Nazis, Homan has no sense of humor and is physically incapable of smiling.

     So, the FBI continued their investigation even into late November when it became apparent that Trump stole yet another election, this time with Elon Musk's help. Once he was shoehorned back in the White House, he began assembling a kakistocracy that made his first Cabinet look like George Washington's by comparison. Things started to go south in the investigation when Kash Patel, after becoming FBI Director, began asking for a status check on the probe.

     Right after that, Trump's DOJ dropped it.

    Yeah, Trump drained the swamp, all right, then replaced the crocodiles with megalodons.

     All things considered, it's amazing that Homan was able to be bribed for such a paltry sum of money, considering the much vaster sums collected by Trump daily in bribes and protection racket money. It makes one think of the late Sen. Ted Stevens accepting bribes in the form of home renovations and a Laz-E-Boy chair or, during Iran Contra, Oliver North taking his bribes in snow tires.

      So, did Tom Homan commit a crime? Well, yes and no. Since Homan wasn't a government official a year ago, he can't be charged with bribery. Plus, if he didn't directly solicit the bribe (and there's no evidence yet that he had) then they can't charge him with bribery. But there also would've been possible conspiracy charges if Pam Bondi hadn't deep-sixed the investigation. 

     If Homan accepted the bribe in exchange for government contracts, then that's conspiracy to commit a crime and whether or not it actually took place is not a defense. For instance, to use the old analogy, if I plan to rob a bank then decide not to pull it off, I can still be charged with conspiracy to commit robbery. The anti bribery laws are no different.

     Naturally, this resulted in Homeland Security furiously denying the truth by claiming that it's (ho-hum) a "deep state" operation and (ho-hum) a partisan hit job and that there's no truth to the matter. The problem: Homan was videotaped by the Bureau accepting the $50,000 bribe (obviously, Bondi's goons at Justice have already erased it).  This isn't a Biden thing or a Merrick Garland thing- It was the FBI doing its job and they had the receipts until Bondi came in and 86'd any and every investigation into the swamp creatures of Donald Trump.

     All that remains to be seen is if Trump demands that $50,000 bribe from Homan for having the temerity to use his name to make a little coin on the side.

Still Past His Jail TIme

     We all know Donald Trump nurses grudges for years, decades, even. His pudgy orange puss is still burning over President Barack Obama roasting him at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. He still has a mad-on about Rosie O'Donnell, as he's demonstrated twice lately. And when his brother, Fred Jr. (Mary Trump's father) died, Trump went to a movie, obviously remembering that bowl of mashed potatoes he dumped on his head when he was seven.

      It's impossible to imagine how a human being can be such a thin-skinned little prick. I honestly don't think there's a suitable analog in world psychiatric history. Normal adults move on. But Trump is not a normal adult and I would posit that he's still not an adult except in a biological, geriatric way. 

     I think we can safely add Jimmy Kimmel to Trump's lengthening list of pathological grudges, one that's probably longer than the Manhattan phone book. It was during the Academy Awards that was hosted by Jimmy Kimmel that he'd given Trump a smackdown in real time for the ages. Trump was watching the Oscars and decided to take a swipe at Kimmel, calling him untalented (Again, Kimmel was the host of the Academy Awards, an annual show with a television viewership of about a billion people).

     Kimmel thanked Trump for tuning in then asked him, "Isn't it past your jail time?" Imagine a shot of Trump's double-woven head in the foreground watching Kimmel and his pudgy little fist shattering a glass of Diet Coke as Kimmel faced him in front of a billion people. There's no coming back from that, if you're Donald Trump.

     So Kimmel's indefinite suspension from his show came as no surprise. The guy who's recently sued the New York Times for $15 billion and the Wall Street Journal for $20 billion had no problem pressuring his stooge Brendan Carr at the FCC to pressure Disney and ABC to get rid of Kimmel just as CBS had with Stephen Colbert.

      And all Carr had to do was put out a post on social media doing his best "Nice place you got here. Be a shame if something happened to it" act and threatened to pull ABC's broadcasting license. Knowing in advance what a bunch of wet-legged corporate cunts are running ABC, they responded the next day by suspending Kimmel.

     Trump could count on this because they just paid him a $15,000,000 bribe to drop his defamation lawsuit (CBS paid him $16,000,000), even though legal experts said both networks could've easily won them in court. Now ABC's parent company Disney is facing massive boycotts that are being posted all over social media. If they're so concerned about their license and bottom line, let's see how they survive this. Maybe they can call the executives at Target and ask them how they're faring these days.

      And no one in the similarly wet-egged mainstream media seems to have the guts to even speculate if Trump had something to do with this, if he got on the phone with Carr and basically ordered him to threaten ABC into firing or suspending Kimmel. It all goes back to the Oscars and Trump getting humiliated in front of a billion viewers.

     A few nights ago, Kimmel said in his monologue some things about the MAGA movement. He said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

     Even so-called liberals on Twitter have strung up Kimmel in effigy and used him as a piñata, calling his remarks "idiotic." To them, I say, "Go fuck yourself." What Kimmel said was the absolute truth and had to be said. And now the FCC and Trump are trying to masquerade their ginned-up rage as morality and public duty.

      What it comes down to is that now we're living in an environment copied and pasted right out of the Third Reich where anyone who insults Dear Leader can expect to get deplatformed or canceled. This is a chilling moment in US history in which criticism can be credibly called hate speech (which is still protected under the First Amendment) and legally actionable.

     And nobody in Trump's inner circle seems to care or notice they're doing all this on the behalf of a bloated man-child who reacts to criticism like a three year-old who doesn't get that candy bar he demands at the supermarket.

Alexander the Not So Great

 

     The DSM-V, the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of mental disorders, may well prove to be the biography of the entire right wing movement, especially MAGA. If you turn to any page in the DSM-V, you will see something disturbingly familiar. Schizophrenia, manic depression, paranoia, persecution complex, sociopathy, pedophilia and pederasty, you name it. You'd be very hard-pressed to find any category that doesn't represent at least one right winger you know. 

     Ali Alexander could occupy a whole section all by himself. He's essentially a one man psychological sideshow and psychiatrists from all over the country could send their kids to Ivy League schools by exclusively studying this guy. About the only good thing he has going for him is an unfortunate resemblance to Sammy Davis, Jr.

      So, it only tracks that a mentally disturbed individual like Alexander would throw in his lot with the likes of Donald Trump, who could publish his personal edition of the DSM-V as he's done with the King James Bible. The enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that.

     Alexander, you might remember, two years ago admitted to soliciting nude photographs from underage boys and sexually harassed others. He vowed to retreat from public life but, like everything else that comes out of Alexander's mouth, that was a lie. All he did was re-platform himself on Telegram, that right wing domain that could make a city sewer look like a class 10,000 clean room by comparison.

     And Alexander had a suggestion for Donald Trump on a live stream:

     "My attention is going to be on trying to get Kash Patel fired, trying to get Donald Trump off his fat ass to avenge his friend, trying to use state power to tell civil libertarians to shut up while we excise all of antifa from our country. I think 500,000 people need to be arrested, tried, and possibly killed if they're convicted for treason or something like that. I think America needs a penal colony. I do not want to coexist with these people."

     Setting aside the irony it's mutual that we don't want to coexist with an antisemitic child molester and armchair genocide artist, what Alexander's calling for, and how he's calling for it, sets him apart somewhat from the bilge ejaculated by the MAGA elite since Charlie Kirk was killed.

     He's literally asking Trump to round up, detain, prosecute and possibly execute a half a million Americans, which is nearly the population of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

     It's impossible to see how Alexander thinks the US government could execute half a million of Americans over a murder carried out by one person or how even Trump thinks he could get away with it. They already think they're in a life or death civil war with liberals. How would murdering half a million innocent Americans not bring such a civil war about? Does he really think even Pam Bondi's DOJ could successfully get half a million federal capital murder convictions that would stand up on appeal?

     Or is Alexander thinking more like extrajudicial executions? Trump couldn't even get his supporters to go to the New York courthouses when he was facing one civil or criminal trial after another. Does he think he has the power to dispatch a nation-wide army of MK Ultra assassins who would have the magical ability to immediately determine who's a liberal or not?

     But it was how Alexander couched his demand that also deserves attention. Not only is he making an unreasonable demand that alone ought to be a criminal act, but he says, "... trying to get Donald Trump off his fat ass to avenge his friend."

     Now, I'm not going to feign outrage over Alexander's disrespect toward the office of the presidency because, 1, Trump deserves no respect and 2, I never believed nor will ever believe that he ever was the president. But that phrase, " trying to get Donald Trump off his fat ass" shows the blatant disrespect and even contempt that he actually feels toward Trump.

      As I keep saying, it's in the nature of right wingers to eventually turn on each other. Just read about the final days and weeks in the Berlin bunker for an illustration of that. But I've also found myself saying over the years that MAGA sees Trump as a vessel to enact their own sick agenda.

     Contrary to popular belief, MAGA isn't entirely made up of paranoid, hind leg-chewing morons. Like Putin, they know a useful idiot when they see one. And when they don't get what they want from him, when they want it and how they want it, they have no problem with letting him know in no uncertain terms. Alexander just proved it.

We Need to Talk About Brian

     So, Brian Kilmeade wants to execute all the homeless.

     It's impossible to imagine people like Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley saying something that astoundingly heartless. But that's emblematic and perfectly illustrative of the depths to which television discourse has sunk in the Age of Trump.

    On September 10th, the day Charlie Kirk was shot, Kilmeade was on Fox and Frauds, Pete Hegseth's old perch, and said, “Or involuntary lethal injection… or something. Just kill ‘em.” They were discussing the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian woman who had been senselessly murdered by a homeless man who'd been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

     It inspired a firestorm on social media, as well it should. It was so great, that Fox's brass strong-armed Kilmeade into issuing a fake apology (which is being accepted at face value by the usually supine MSM). But what everyone seems to be missing is the fact that Kilmeade's co-hosts, Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt, acted as if Kilmeade hadn't said anything. No condemnation, no correction, nothing. They could have taken that opportunity to remind Kilmeade that murder is, you know, illegal and that his comment was astoundingly cruel.

     But they chose not to do that. Either they're cowards  or they're onboard with Kilmeade's suggestion for genocide.

     Kilmeade never should have been given the chance to save his job by issuing a brief, bullshit apology. He should have been fired on the spot. But they, too, are cowards. Or maybe it was greed. We all know corporate entities first look to the their bottom line in time like this. Ad revenue, market share. That's what's important. Then they inevitably mask their fiscal damage control as morality and spout bullshit about such comments "not being consistent with our values", blah blah blah.

     Kilmeade should be out of a job right now and making preparations for doing a podcast out of his mud room. And Jones and Earhardt should've been reprimanded, at least privately, about their complicity.

     Kilmeade's remarks about the homeless, especially the mentally disturbed, is alarmingly consistent with Nazi Germany's attitude toward their own mentally impaired. Nazi Germany, obsessed with purifying the Aryan race of all "impure elements", rounded up their mentally, emotionally and physically-impaired citizens. They even had a word for them: "eaters". Then they stuffed them into trucks and gassed them to death using exhaust fumes. That first wave of the Holocaust was the T4 program.

     And in his zeal to execute all the mentally impaired homeless, he never seemed to have given a single thought to the question, "How do you determine who's mentally ill or not?" There are different gradations of mental instability, after all. Some is organic, some self-inflicted (drug and alcohol abuse), some are environmental. Some can still function in society, some cannot.

     But no one deserves to be homeless and no one certainly should be executed by sneaky lethal injection. How is injecting poison into their bodies better than setting them on fire or gassing them in a truck?

      I live in Phoenix, a city that has a homeless problem exceeded perhaps only by San Francisco. Metropolitan Phoenix has, as of the 2020 census, a population of roughly 5.2 million people. Public officials dismiss the homeless problem by saying "only" 1% of the city's population is homeless. That means, if that statistic holds true, there are over 50,000 homeless people wandering the streets of Phoenix. That's enough to populate a small city.

     As I've been living here for nearly a year and a half, I've had quite a few interactions with the homeless. I try to be a good liberal and help some of them out because I've been homeless twice before, not including my current situation. And, yes, you could say that about half of the homeless are out of their minds. Some get hooked on fentanyl or some other drug. Some of them walk down the street by themselves pumping their fists and screaming at no one in particular.  And, yes, some of them can be violent.

     And people often become homeless through no fault of their own. As heartless as Massachusetts is with its housing laws, even they can't hold a candle to Arizona. In Massachusetts, evictions are carried out by constables or sheriffs. In Arizona, property owners can call in the police department, even though eviction is a civil and not a criminal matter. 

     Several homeless people here told me their landlord gouged them on their rent. Others told me their significant other had passed away (something with which I can perfectly sympathize). Again, many of these people are homeless through no fault of their own. Who in their right mind would want to live on the streets of a city where the summer temperatures often exceed 115 degrees and the sidewalks, according to NASA, reach 160?

     Living in an environment like that, with an entire city and state government letting you fall through the cracks, will take a relentless sledge hammer to your mental and emotional well-being.

     But sociopaths like Brian Kilmeade don't consider these things. And Fox's willingness to keep him on the payroll proves they're part of the problem.

Ancient Rome As Object Lesson

     I took a day off yesterday. The reasons were manifold.

     I'm in the final stretch of a new novel, I'm about to shoulder the responsibility of editing and rewriting my roommate's book and, frankly, I just needed a break. I suppose my biggest reason for my brief sabbatical was the distaste I feel toward my fellow humans in the wake of Charlie Kirk's tragic death.

     The virulent, misdirected fury and threats from the right wing are part of it. Then there was the conspiracy theories. "They got the wrong guy." "Look, Kirk's tee shirt went up!" "That guy signaled with his white hat!" The rhetoric, as it always is, is overwrought. Plus, even though I've been getting an obscene number of hits this summer (Google analytics says I'm getting 12,000 to 17000+ hits every day but I doubt many of them are legitimate), I cannot escape this crippling sense that nothing I say makes a difference. As Archibald MacLeish once described it to me, it's "like shouting down an empty well."

     So, is silence the answer? Putting a bushel over our light so as not to run afoul of hypersensitive sensibilities? Of course not. But when something within you tells you to step back, you step back, especially when it seems to assume the force of an urgent imperative.

     Today, all I can do is reiterate my belief that Charlie Kirk's murder was a senseless act. A family lost its husband and father and all the assassin did was inflame an already angry and illogical nation of fools, making them spiral into a bottomless vortex of conspiracy theories and rape and death threats.

     I would also caution you to remember ancient Rome. Not the late Roman empire when it was sacked by the barbarians in AD 476 but Rome when it was at the height of its power.

     Rome was, obviously, one of the greatest global empires the world had ever seen. There was much about ancient Rome that is at once familiar and alien and repugnant to us. Ancient Rome, a city of one million people, was a beehive of deception and intrigue. Virtually every senator had a spy network and assassination was virtually common from the time of Caesar.

     The intrigue, of course, reached the highest levels of Roman society in which emperors were assassinated even in broad daylight. But the tendency to deify dead emperors was one of the aspects of ancient Roman society that we may find repugnant.

     The statue above is of Emperor Titus, the second figure in the 27 year-long Flavian dynasty. In his all-too-brief reign of just over two years, Titus was known for completing and opening the Flavian Amphitheater, now known as the Colosseum. He was, by all accounts, a benevolent ruler, who got rid of show trials and assisted in the relief efforts after the eruption of Vesuvius.

      And after his death on this very date in AD 81 (he reportedly died in the same farmhouse where his father, Vespasian, had in AD 79), his brother, Domitian, on assuming the throne, decided to deify his brother (despite having been caught openly plotting against him). This was a common tradition in ancient Rome. 

     Nowadays, we tend to look at such transformations with a hint of disgust or even ridicule. No man, after all, is a god no matter how great of an emperor he was. It automatically elevated flesh and blood, fallible men to a place at the right hand of Zeus, beyond reproach, impeachment or even criticism. 

     Americans have never divested themselves of the occasional urge to deify, in our own way, a fallen figure. We name airports and towns after them, streets and highways and so forth. And we tend to put these people on a mile-high plinth, as if their ideology, no matter how cynical, hateful and self-serving, alone makes them worthy of being put in the pantheon of the gods.

     This is what I've been seeing and hearing since Charlie Kirk was shot and killed last Wednesday in Orem, Utah. Trump ordered flags flown at half mast, even though Kirk wasn't an elected official. The NFL had a moment of silence for him last Thursday, the European Union had their own (even though it was broken up). It's all so disproportionate.

     America, in its nearly 250 year-long history, had tried to emulate Rome in all its glory and yet all we can seem to to do is emulate its worst features. Assassination in Rome was almost common and, while it isn't as common in the United States, it's getting to be that way. July last year, someone took a shot at Trump and another suspected gunman was stalking him at his golf club in West Palm Beach. Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in their home in Minnesota just two months ago and, that same day, another lawmaker and his wife were shot and injured. Then Wednesday, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.

     We keep saying violence has no place in our society yet it rings increasingly hollow as the bodies stack up like cord wood. While we piously repudiate violence, none of us seem to have the will to do anything meaningful about it. And saying this culture of violence needs to stop does not mean it will happen, not now, not tomorrow, not for a long time, if ever. And opportunistic individuals, and we know who they are, are even now using Kirk's death as the right wing's Reichstag moment. They want to use his murder as a pretext to murder their perceived enemies on "the radical left."

     This is the moment they've been waiting for and the moment the rest of us have dreaded.

     Yes, assassination should have no place in our society but it falls on deafened and boxed ears. Even though he may have said some horrible things in the past, including about gun violence, one has to give Charlie Kirk credit for one thing: He was famous for being willing to debate his critics and detractors in a civilized setting. We need to get back to that. But I'm not holding my breath. 

     What perhaps sickens me most of all is how disingenuous it all is. Look at the video below and tell me how serious Trump really is about Charlie Kirk's death. When asked how he was holding up, he couldn't wait to start bragging about his ballroom

 

     Deification in ancient Rome was always meant to be permanent but history plainly shows us it never was. When a Republic or an empire falls, its gods fall with them. Rome's policies and beliefs may have sustained it for nearly 1000 years. But, as Yeats once famously wrote, "the center cannot hold." This, too, shall pass. But before it does, will it prove to be the ignition point that sets this nation ablaze until it no longer exists?

     I refuse to speculate because the possibilities are too horrifying. 

History Doesn't Repeat Itself...

 

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari) 

But it often rhymes, as Mark Twain said.

    I've tried playing nice. I've tried being respectful and not gloat over Charlie Kirk's murder yesterday. I've condemned the shooting and reiterate my stance again that there is no excuse for gun violence, which, ironically Kirk was addressing moments before he was shot. I've said his murder was a cowardly act and that there's no excuse whatsoever to permanently take a man away from his family.

     But there's no making the red hat crowd happy. It's impossible. They're never happy unless they're miserable about something, unless they have an enemy to hate. They're latter-day Nazis. They live for it. These people cannot exist without hatred, a common enemy they can loathe and revile. It's impossible for me to imagine the burden of living with so much hate but, bless their little black hearts, somehow they bravely shoulder that emotional burden.

     And appeasement doesn't work for these social and mental maladroits any more than Chamberlain's appeasement policy worked with Hitler. So, why not tell the truth about Kirk, a truth that's already long since been made self-evident with his idiotic pronouncements, writings and podcasts. Because being respectful doesn't work. They're going to be furious no matter what we say or do. So why not get our money's worth?

      So we should turn our attention to one Horst Wessel, a long-forgotten Nazi who was assassinated in 1930 at the tender age of 22. Horst was a misguided little boy who became a brownshirt, the SA that enforced the Nazi Party's doctrine. Eventually, with almost frightening rapidity, he rose to become a leader of several SA units. Goebbels got his attention and it was mutual.

     A law student, Wessel came to see the law, like Trump and his fascist goons, as an instrument of power and vengeance. In his two diaries, he gives the impression that he was a True Believer in the fascist agenda, even though one could say he was in it for the pussy. He was notorious for his procurement of women, which possibly led to his assassination.

     Lord only knows what evil this person would've committed had he lived long enough to see the Third Reich. But when he was shot and killed, Goebbels was looking for a martyr and poster boy for the Nazi Party and he found it in Wessel. And even though the Nazis weren't officially in power, they gave Wessel the equivalent of a state funeral and all the publicity that goes with one. Goebbels got his martyr. In fact, it could be said that Wessel's murder helped propel Hitler to victory in 1933.

     And then, the purge began.

 

 Enter George Conway

Even though Conway is a Republican, one has to give credit where it's due. And Conway bravely took a big ole size 13 to the right wing hornet's nest that began furiously buzzing the second the shot rang out at Utah Valley University yesterday. On Twitter today, Conway drew an accurate parallel between Charlie Kirk and Horst Wessel. It's obvious that Conway wasn't trying to establish a connection between Kirk and Wessel but the circumstances surrounding their deaths.

     George said it, I believe it, that settles it. 

     The martyring of Wessel in 1930 eerily parallels the rapidly growing hagiography now surrounding Kirk since the moment he died. MAGAts are now vowing vengeance and even bloodshed against liberals over Kirk's murder even though just one man was responsible for it and we don't even know who he is or why he did it, let alone whatever ideology he may have.

     But they're as desperate to pin this shooting  on liberals as Nazis were in pinning Wessel's murder on the Communists who really did shoot him. After they arrested Albrecht "Ali" Höhler, Wessel's assassin, he was given just six years in prison. But when the Nazis came to power in 1933, with their infamously long memories, they pulled him out of his prison cell and illegally executed him and several of his confederates.

      When Conway made the comparison, MAGA World lost its collective shit. The ironic thing about that is that if Wessel had lived until the summer of 1934, he probably would have been a casualty of the Night of Long Lives that decimated the SA. And if today's MAGAts lived in Germany 100 years ago, they would've sung full-throated praises to Wessel and the people he worshiped.

     Instead, they're feigning outrage that Charlie Kirk would be compared to a Nazi. But, again, that's not what Conway did. He was merely drawing a connection between the Nazi outrage over Wessel's killing and MAGA's outrage over Kirk's killing. And, let's face it, it feeds into MAGA World's white grievance and perpetual sense of persecution. 

     And, like Wessel before him, it has to be said that Charlie Kirk was also a monster-in-waiting. He threw verbal brickbats at anyone who wasn't a straight, white, Christian Republican male. He said women should get married younger and have white babies. He said Black women weren't mentally equipped to do things done by white men. He questioned the qualifications of Black pilots of the planes he flew on.

     Just because Charlie Kirk is dead, it doesn't obligate any thinking person in the least to pretend that he was a great pillar of American society. There was nothing remotely special about him and one wonders what all the hoopla is about. The bilge he spewed on his podcast was absolutely indistinguishable from the other boilerplate bilge one can get on tap from any other right wing podcaster. And we need to stop pretending otherwise and acting as if he was a great head of state.

RIP Charlie Kirk

 

     Gun violence has crept back into MAGA World. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a rally at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah this afternoon. The alleged shooter has already been apprehended. The lead image above was taken just moments before Kirk was shot in the neck.

     While obviously it's a tragedy for Kirk's circle, starting with his wife and kids, one necessarily has to ask how the right wing feels about its Second Amendment now. One also has to ask if this will change anything. Well, here's my answer:

     It will not. 

     After all, Congress notably did not enact any gun legislation after Congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana was shot in the hip years ago during a practice for the Congressional baseball game. Nor did they even meaningfully address the issue when Trump was allegedly shot in Butler, PA July last year.

     In fact, rather than address the issue of the prevalence of gun violence and easy access to firearms, MAGA, predictably, began spinning Kirk's shooting death as a politically motivated act, leading Elon Musk to say that "the left is the party of murder." (Which is ridiculous because most mass shootings are carried out by right wingers.)

     Obviously, this overheated rhetoric doesn't help matters any and, not only is it counterproductive, it also doesn't address the root cause of gun violence. Around the same time as the shooting in Utah, there was a school shooting in Colorado in which three people, including the shooter, were shot.

     But nobody's talking about that. MAGA World is too busy shedding tears over Charlie Kirk.

     And, again, what happened to Charlie Kirk was a tragedy and no one deserves that. Mr. Kirk wasn't just a right wing provocateur but was also a family man who leaves behind a wife and children.

     And while we have to offer our sympathy for his family and think of them, we also need to think about what caused this to happen. We need to keep reminding ourselves that in a country, the only country, in which here are more guns than citizens, these acts of terrorism and murder will inevitably happen.

      Yes, what happened to Charlie Kirk today was senseless and cowardly. But if we're going to mourn his death, we also have to mourn the deaths of the countess people who have lost their lives to mass shootings and individual acts of murder. And I don't recall the right wing shedding any tears over the murders of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband. They were also notoriously silent when Judge Esther Salas' son was shot and killed and her husband wounded.

     Instead, MAGA World harrumphs and turns its collective head when it's one of their own who commit these heinous acts, even blaming the victims for their own fate.

     Gun violence cannot be the norm in this country yet it is. So it's time to ask the right wing again and again, "What are you going to do about it?"

     

     Well, we all know what Charlie Kirk himself said about it a couple of years ago.

Denial Isn't a River in Egypt

     If it wasn't for the fact that so many female victims, many of them children at the time, lost their innocence, virginity and freedom to Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, the GOP's reaction to the Epstein files would be hilarious.

     Gym Jordan doesn't want to hear any more about Trump's relationship to Epstein, acting as if their underage victims were Ohio State wrestlers. Karoline Leavitt is back to spitting venom at the White House press pool. And virtually every Republican lawmaker on Capitol Hill (with the notable exception of Thomas Massie), when asked about the documents released yesterday by the House Oversight Democrats, is diving into elevators as if they're the fountain of youth. Byron Donalds, now suddenly an expert in Trump's penmanship, has pronounced the signature a forgery.

      

    Ironically, the big boot that kicked the hornet's nest was the doodle that Donald Trump had drawn for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday, something we'd known about, and had seen, last July when it was revealed by the Wall Street Journal. The House Oversight Committee had demanded the birthday book for which the doodle was created by Trump from the Epstein Estate.

    What made it notable was the detonation of the inevitable coverup- Namely, the administration's frenzied attempts to get us to believe that the dirty doodle was a "Democrat hoax" and that "the president* doesn't doodle".

     Now, they're going back to the same old tired denials because, really, in the face of such irrefutable evidence, it's all they have. They're squinting as hard as they possibly can and telling us that isn't Trump's signature, anybody can see that! Only, the signature at the bottom of the doodle is perfectly consistent with Trump's penmanship during that period. It's even in Sharpie.

     How ingenious of those dastardly Democrats, to fake a dirty drawing and forge Trump's signature (ironically placed where the pussy would be) 12 years before Trump launched his presidential campaign.

     And Democrats are promising more disclosures in the days to come. Here's another problem:

     The House Democrats may have released that drawing through conventional and official channels but it was Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal that first brought them to light. It's right wing media and right wing activists that have been spearheading this effort at full disclosure. People like Steve Bannon and Alex Jones have been calling for the full disclosure of the Epstein client list, all the way down to provocateur James O'Keefe.

     It's not a hoax and it's certainly not engineered and led by Democrats.

     And it wasn't House Democrats that Trump sued for $20 billion. It was Murdoch's WSJ.

America Is Ruled By a Vindictive Psychopath

     I still can't believe that we're in a position of having to win hearts and minds on this, that we have to scream at the tops of our lungs about how very, very wrong all this is.

     Just today, the Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that banned Trump's DHS from racially profiling people of color. It was a decision that was so scummy and obviously racist and partisan that the six right wingers on the court didn't even issue a majority opinion explaining how they thought targeting people just for speaking Spanish or with an accent was lawful and fair. Only Brett Kavanaugh put down his beer long enough to issue an opinion, stating that racially profiling brown people was a "commonsense" measure.

      Then, also today, Trump's fascist goons announced this. Per Jessica Corbett's lede in Common Dreams:

     "After several days of US President Donald Trump threatening a militarized invasion of Chicago, his administration on Monday announced 'Operation Midway Blitz,' claiming it is 'in honor of' a young woman allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant accused of drunk driving about 140 miles south of the Illinois city..."

     As usual, the Trump administration is seizing upon the death of a white woman in order to justify raiding and occupying an entire city. They know this is all they have. Long derided by Republicans of being a crime-infested ewer, Chicago's violent crime rate has actually gone down under Mayor Brandon Johnson.

     But facts mean nothing to Trump and his insane clown posse. And the very ridiculous name, Operation Midway Blitz, shows that Trump indeed intends on targeting Chicago even though the fatal car accident they're using as a pretext for taking over a major American city happened nearly 150 miles away in Urbana, IL.

     It's very reminiscent of Trump's equally ridiculous attempt to annex Canada in his homemade Anschluss. Or his invasions of Los Angeles and Washington, DC.

     It's impossible for a rational mind to comprehend how legally and morally wrong this is and why everyone doesn't feel this way. The idiot Trump cultists supporting these extralegal invasions, in violation of Posse Comitatus, honestly seem to think that when Trump's masked goons begin swarming our cities that they, too, won't be swept up in the government's indiscriminate net. This especially goes for Trump's Hispanic supporters, who maybe didn't get the memo that Trump's shock troops were just given permission from the Supreme Court today to round them up just for speaking English with a Latin American accent or working a landscaping job.

      Another thing that many of us have forgotten is that appeasement doesn't work with dictators. Neville Chamberlain found that out the hard way when he struck the "Peace for our Time" deal with Hitler that wasn't worth the paper it was written on. It was announced in London on September 30, 1938, about six months after Hitler had annexed Austria. 11 months later, he invaded Poland, touching off WWII. Months after that was the catastrophic failure at Dunkirk and the London Blitz.

     As we all know, or should, Hitler had sweeping ambitions to take over all of Europe and, eventually, the world. Trump's schemes aren't so epic. His goal is to Make America Aryan Again but there's a method to his madness.

     Trump is trying to get as many Hispanics out of the country as possible in order to throw the midterms in his favor. This is why he ordered Greg Abbott call a special legislative session to gerrymander their electoral map mid-decade to steal five seats from Democrats. He's trying to jerry-rig the Electoral College, that useless relic from the 18th century, in his favor so that when he illegally tries to run for a third term in 2028...

     Well, you can infer the rest. He gets to serve a third term, thereby staying out of prison for the rest of his life, or he may just decide to suspend the 2028 elections altogether. Remember, after 1933, Germany didn't have another free and fair election until 1946.

     And it's no coincidence that the places Trump is balefully eyeing are all Democrat-run cities in Democrat-run states. There are many red cities in red states with much higher crime rates than Chicago, DC and LA but, again, facts mean nothing to Trump.

     Just imagine if Joe Biden and Barack Obama tried doing this in red cities in red states.

Joe Schnitt and the Honeytrap

     In the novel I'm writing, Ink and Iron, I've just recently written a passage hat seems perfectly apt to this late-breaking news story. It's a third person reflection by Vince Callahan, a media-hating, cynical strike-breaker in 1919 Boston. He says, "If you can’t beat them, rather than join them, find a way to make the jackals work for you for a change."

     I never considered Jailbird James O'Keefe a journalist in any way, shape or form. He's the right wing bomb-thrower who literally wiped ACORN off the map with a heavily edited video that made Republicans lose their shit in a defunding frenzy. He once broke in Senator Mary Landrieu's office in Louisiana and tried to bug her phones. And his antics and personal corruption were such that Project Veritas, his own organization, kicked him out a few years ago.

     However, this time around, we actually found a use for this idiot.

     The screengrab that you see above is from the official Twitter account of the DOJ. God only knows why they actually posted this confession on social media but there it is.

     It's a confession and quasi-apology written by one Joseph Schnitt, the DOJ's acting deputy chief at the Office of Enforcement Operations. In this strange confession, Schnitt tells his boss, Jeffrey Pollak, the Principal Deputy Director of the Office of Enforcement Operations, that he was caught in a honey trap.

     He admits to meeting a woman named "Skylar" on a dating app named Hinge (her profile, not surprisingly, disappeared). He met her twice last month on the 4th and the 16th. Furthermore, he goes on to admit that he told "Skylar" about Ghislaine Maxwell but was careful to add that he told her only what had been reported in the media. Except, that's not true.

     Because, you see, according to Jimmy O'Keefe, "Skylar" was a plant and Schnitt told this plant that the DOJ planned on removing the names of every Republican from the Epstein client list that Pam Bondi now claims doesn't exist and to leave in the names of Democrats and liberals.

      Since Republicans are shameless rat fuckers, especially the ones in this administration, that's not surprising. What is surprising is that Schnitt could be so stupid to admit this to an undercover operative working for the most ham-fisted right wing provocateur on the planet, then to admit it to his boss, in a cell phone confession with a depleted battery, who then put this confession on the DOJ's Twitter account.

     Their response was incredible- In apologizing for this serious lapse in judgement and basic human intelligence, they then ran with his story that his comments were "personal thoughts" and nothing else. The DOJ never addressed the much more serious revelation that they were planning on protecting Trump and every Republican on Epstein's client list that, again, Pam Bondi now claims never existed, and to leave in just the names of Democrats.

      What else is notable is that this was turned up not by the mainstream media (except after the fact) but by a right wing boob like James O'Keefe. This alone ought to show the cracks forming in MAGAworld, that even O'Keefe is trying to take down one of Trump's operatives. Everyone, it seems, except certain Republicans at the top of the government, wants to get to the bottom of this Epstein mess.

     Obviously, people like Joe Schnitt are more successful at fucking rats than women. 

Phase One 2.0

     I'm half tempted to rename this blog, "Welcome Back to Pedophile Island". I spent much of last month flogging the Epstein story. I'd provided commentary on late-breaking news items regarding the Epstein files and even addressed Katie Johnson herself. Like my MAGA counterparts, I simply wouldn't let this story vanish into the memory hole.

     And, like the creepy girl climbing out of the well again and again in the Ring movies, this is a story that just won't die. As stupid as my aforementioned analogs are, even they're beginning to wake up to the realization that they're being conned, that they were sold a rotten bill of goods. They're beginning to feel like that blind kid in Dumb and Dumber who was handed a decapitated parakeet with its head duct-taped back on.

     It didn't take Republicans long to get back to their rat-fuckery. They just got back to the Hill yesterday after a six week-long vacation courtesy of Mike Johnson and, hours later, they released a tranche of 33,000 documents that were either heavily redacted or was in the public domain. It was Phase One redux.

     You might remember Phase One. It was a truncated series of disclosures that Pam Bondi's staggeringly corrupt Justice Department made last February. They produced a thick printout of so-called Epstein files that were handed out exclusively to MAGA influencers. By the end of the day, even those morons realized they were had and were handed information that had already been in the public domain. They might as well have given them the galley proofs for James Patterson's latest ghost-written novel.

 

     Yesterday, the GOP did the same thing and the parakeet's head fell off yet again. “Their stories are heartbreaking," James Comer piously said yesterday through a flood of crocodile tears, "What they have suffered and endured should never have happened and is sickening.” One half expected him to conclude with vowing to hold impeachment hearings against Clinton, Obama and Biden.

     Also yesterday, Epstein's victims held a large press conference. They immediately saw right through the Republican Party's ruse and promised to compile their own lists. This story's not going away. It has legs long enough to reach up to the North Pole. Let's take stock of how this has played out this year:

     After campaigning on the Epstein files and their disclosure, the White House and its private law firm, aka the Justice Department, has fought tooth and nail to keep these documents from getting out. It started just a month after Bondi was installed as AG. Phase One was handed out to carefully-curated, selected right wing "journalists", which right there should show you how closely they were circling the wagons. 

     Except MAGA didn't play along like they expected. They cried foul and said the documents were already in the public domain. Those idiots literally expected to see pictures of Hillary Clinton drinking the blood of trafficked children in the basement of Ping Pong Comet Pizza. "What gives?" they cried. "Why, O why is the president shielding Democrat pedophiles?"

     Bondi then asks a judge to unseal grand jury documents pertaining to Epstein, knowing damned good and well that such testimony would only provide a small sliver of information not already in the public domain. After six days, the judge, predictably, denied her. Trump fills up his Depends and Foley catheter bag and accuses Obama of making the whole thing up.

     After claiming she had the Epstein client list on her desk, she then said months later that the Epstein list didn't actually exist, which really made MAGAworld erupt. It was the biggest reversal since the 509th Bomber Group went from capturing a flying saucer to a weather balloon in Roswell. "Why is our Republican superhero protecting Democrat pedophiles?! Why won't he pull the trigger on them?"

     Meanwhile, the Republicans in the House had been slow-walking the whole thing. Nonetheless, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, in a rare show of bipartisanship, hollered again and again for the DOJ to release the Epstein client list. 

     Trump filled up his Depends and Foley bag again and called the whole thing a Democrat hoax. After yelling at his MAGA base to shut the fuck up about Epstein, he then goes on a never-ending tirade about the Epstein files. He snarls at them and tells them he doesn't need their support.

     Then we found out Bondi and Blanche told Trump last May he was in the Epstein files. He fills up his Depends and Foley catheter bag yet again. 

     Then we find out that last March, Bondi had pressed 1000 FBI agents to comb through the Epstein files and to flag Trump's name in them.

     Mike Johnson then slides off Trump's lap long enough to kick the can down the road for six weeks and abruptly calls for a six week-long vacation. But the can was at the end of the road patiently waiting for them and Comer and Trump's enablers already had their plan in place. Release some more worthless bullshit and hope MAGA falls for it.

     Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting, well, you know.

     Then, Todd Blanche, Trump's "former" defense attorney, went on a two day fishing expedition in Florida to find out what Ghislaine Maxwell had to say. Despite being in the middle of the Epstein child sex trafficking ring, Maxwell suddenly couldn't remember key details, never took responsibility for anything and assured us that Donald Trump was a perfect gentleman during the countless days and evenings he was the company in the most prolific pedophile in US history.

    "May I have my pardon now?"

    Trump then crows that the twice-convicted for perjury sex trafficker who's clearly angling for a pardon exonerated him. He's not fillingi his Depends and Foley catheter bag so quickly, any more.

     Instead, she got as a consolation prize a transfer to a cushy facility in Texas. 

     And these MAGA morons still haven't connected the dots and they haven't seen Trump as the guilty man he is. Yes, there may be some Democrats on Epstein's list but if Trump takes them down, he'll go down with them and he knows it.

      Trump is so guilty even that blind kid holding the dead, headless parakeet can see it.

One More Time, For Clarity's Sake...

 

     ...Donald Trump is trying to murder as many Americans as inhumanly possible. How is this not screamingly obvious? And why is no one doing anything about this?

      Last April, in the midst of Donald Trump's soft, slow motion genocide of the American people, the CDC's funding to examine and prevent drowning deaths was quietly axed. This was obviously done with the blessings of Secretary Brain Worm, a lunatic whose total authority over America's health infrastructure should keep every American shivering in a dark corner every night.

     Per NPR:

    "Drowning kills more than 4,000 people each year in the United States. It's the leading cause of death among children ages 1 to 4 and is one of the top causes of death among children ages 5 to 14. A single drowning costs millions of dollars in terms of medical costs and societal loss..."

       To put that in more concrete terms, drowning fatalities cost the United States $50 billion a year, which far exceeds whatever relatively paltry amount of money the government will save with these unnecessary and nonsensical budget cuts and "restructuring." Labor Day is also when more drowning deaths occur than at any other time in the year when people try to get in some last minute swimming before the end of summer. I would imagine, if anyone in the supine mainstream media finally confronted Kennedy about these cuts and asked him why he'd midwifed them into being, he'd tell them that breathing in water is good for human lungs.

      He would.

     And this silent act of genocide, and that's exactly what it is, is hardly an outlier. It started practically the day he sleazed his way back into the White House thanks to a tidal wave of Musk money and Starlink satellites hacking into voting machines. One of the most shocking cuts was when Trump ordered the clawing back of half a billion dollars in food aid shipments to food banks last March that had already been allocated by the USDA.

      Then there was the cutting of FEMA funding so people living in disaster-stricken areas couldn't get loans, grants or disaster relief like they could in the good old days before the government suddenly turned into a rabid kleptocracy run by sociopath billionaires and juvenile delinquent fist fuckers. In fact, the psychopath running FEMA just last July proposed a billion in spending cuts.

     This would include red states that enthusiastically voted for Trump not once, not twice but three times and would no doubt do so a fourth time if Trump decides to say, "Fuck the 22nd amendment".

     Then there was Wetbrain Pete Hegseth's Pentagon that decided not to share crucial satellite weather data with national and regional weather services, a sudden hoarding of data that came just in time for the devastating floods that hit central Texas last July that cost over 130 their lives.

     And then of course, there was the Big Beautiful Steaming Sack of Dogshit that was placed on the stoop of America and set on fire by the merry band of sociopaths in Trump's GOP. That bill infamously will throw at least 17,000,000 Americans off their health care by cutting $880,000,000,000 from Medicaid over the next decade and will drastically cut nutritional assistance to kids on free school lunch programs and food stamps.

     All so bloated billionaires could get another round of tax cuts, permanent ones this time.

     And then there's the government's move to end research and development for cancer and to force people to get a doctor's prescription for a COVID vaccine. 

     Keep in mind this is hardly an exhaustive list of all the ways that Trump has endangered or guaranteed the needless loss of American lives in the last seven plus months.

     It's impossible to see how anybody can look at all this as anything less than a soft, slow motion genocide being carried out by a dying psychopath with a contempt for human life who wants to drag the rest of us into Hell with him.