Skip to main content

It Ain't Over until it's over


After three weeks in Japan I would have thought Operation Epic Farce over by now, but the war lingers on without Dotardly Don having achieved a single one of his administration's goals. Whatever they were? It has gotten so bad that the Angry Orange is no longer allowed in the Situation Room after venting on his generals for not having located the downed pilots over Iran, or so the story goes. Hard to know what is fact or fiction anymore as the loudmouth has vented so many lies and misleading statements that no one seems to know what is going on inside the White House at this point.

Chairman Pooh has stepped into the breach to proclaim China the only reliable alternative at this point, and sadly he is correct. Trump has squandered any capital the US had in terms of being the arbiter of peace and stability. The White House couldn't look more chaotic if it tried. He's lost all support from European leaders after their attempt to coddle him last year. They now see their discussions went nowhere as Trump didn't make any effort to consult NATO member countries before launching this war. He went solely on the advice of the crooked Bibi Netanyahu, who has long since been brandished a war criminal and now would be arrested if he ventured into most European countries, even Hungary, which saw a massive turnout upend the rotund Viktor Orban's nearly two-decades rule come to an ignominious end.

This was another black eye for Trump, as he had actively campaigned for Orban, even sending VP Vance over on the last day to shore up support for the crestfallen Prime Minister who was trailing badly in the polls and claimed Russia was trying to assassinate him. It appears to have been a fake plot orchestrated to help bolster his candidacy. Sound familiar? No matter, Magyar's Tisza party won a clear majority. Magyar, who couldn't have a better name to represent the Magyar Republic, was once a protege of Orban turned active critic, who pulled off an election victory much like Donald Tusk did in Poland two or three years ago by taking his message to the street. There was an even bigger rally after Orban's defeat!

Unable to influence elections, unable to oust religious clerics, unable to open the Strait of Hormuz, the US couldn't look less powerful than it does right now. So what does Donny Dumbo do? He tries to remind us how successfully he pulled off his raid in Caracas back at the start of the year and tell us how the media only focuses on the negative. All this shows is how terribly he misjudged Iran and that NATO countries would be at his beck and call when needed.

However, what seems to really get his goat is Pope Leo, who called for an end to all this unnecessary bloodshed in a speech he gave in Algeria. Trump described the Pope as "weak on crime" and "terrible for foreign policy," essentially calling him the worst pope ever. As if to rub salt in the wound, his ORR canceled its long-standing relationship with Catholic Charities in Miami to provide aid to asylum seekers and unaccompanied children coming into the United States through Southern Florida. We are talking about an annual budget of $11 million here, a tab I'm sure Leo will pick up. All you can say is "what an asshole!"

It took Donnie less than four months to totally destroy any image he once had of being a man who stopped wars, promoted peace and was "gifted" a Nobel Peace Prize by Marina Corrina Machado. In the process he has alienated major MAGA figures like Tucker Carlson, Theo Von, Megyn Kelly and numerous others who are calling for him to step down before making any further embarrassment of himself. Through it all, Trump continues to insist he has more support than ever, posting images of himself as Jesus and other heroic figures, which just led to further rebuke. This is a man in his final stage of dementia.

We were led to believe that Joe Biden was too mentally incapacitated to remain in office, which led him to concede his nomination for a second term back in July, 2024. For the record, Biden wasn't proclaiming himself Jesus or starting wars around the globe to hide his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. Even Melania now finds herself under fire after proclaiming "I didn't sleep with Jeffrey."

Trump has clearly lost his grip on his administration, finding himself literally shut out of meetings and no longer aware of what is going on around him. We are left to ask who is running this shitshow? Certainly not Back Nine Donnie. If he is not ranting on Truth Social, he is catching a quick 18 at Mar-a-Lago. This administration is far worse than any that has come before, except for maybe Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, but that was eons ago.

Meanwhile there is a Semiquincentennial to prepare for. He still wants to stage the Ultimate UFC fight on the White House lawn despite all the negative publicity it has brought him. It's been dubbed the "Freedom Fight," if you can believe, but at this point you can believe just about anything as we have reached full stage "Idiocracy." There will be plenty of Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator to go around.

This leads to the inevitable question, "Are we winning yet?"


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified.  After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution.  Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through.  But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 .  The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others.  Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified.  A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.