The Iran War: Week Three

     Our nation is led by war criminals. That's the long and the short of it.

     Their war crimes started last year when we'd begun bombing fishing boats in the Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela and maybe even before that. Of course, all this mayhem to which a horrified world has played witness these past two-plus weeks is being carried out by two frauds and career criminals who, by all rights, ought to be in a prison cell.

     And the joint opening salvo the US and Israel is still, by all accounts, the worst.

     That was on February 28th when we'd begun bombing Iran. We were ostensibly aiming for an Iranian naval base and wound up bombing a girl's elementary school. Obviously the school had no connection to the IRGC but, apparently, neither we nor Israel cared very much. At last count, the death toll at the school stands at 175, mostly children.

     While our officials aren't sniping at and threatening journalists and news outlets, they refuse to talk about the school bombing in Minab, Iran. They're, as always, hiding behind the always-convenient dodge that we're "investigating", even though we're doing no such thing.

     I could go on and on about how illegal this war is, at how criminally feckless is our worthless, supine Congress and how it's surrendered its Article Two powers to this White House. I could talk about the shifting, conflicting rationales, with us getting into yet another proxy war for Israel, the complete lack of an exit strategy.

     I could also mention the arrogance of this criminal junta for not putting in even an iota of effort toward shoring up support for this war either in the press or the grassroots. At least the Bush administration put in a lot of effort to lie us into the Iraq war in 2003. This time around, this fascist junta couldn't care less what the American people think.

     And the Strait of Hormuz is closed (which was precisely what Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine warned him would happen) and we're lying about that. No, it isn't, the government is saying but the oil isn't getting through (which is why some California gas stations are charging over $8 for a gallon of gas). Trump is claiming that Iran's military is smashed, despite Iran having having one of the strongest militaries in the Middle East and one that won't be destroyed in a few days. So Trump spent the weekend begging our allies to reopen the Strait that he claims is still open. Guess what? This so-called Coalition of the Willing isn't so willing, after all.

     "Doesn't matter," Trump blustered, "We can do it alone. We don't need anyone."

     Russia certainly isn't going to help. Why should they? The lack of Iranian oil getting on the market means petrodollars are once again flowing into Russia's coffers, which means they can finance their endless war with Ukraine for the foreseeable future. Because everything Trump does somehow benefits Russia.

      

One Tin Soldier Stumbles Away

 

    Often, what passes for Trump's chaotic though processes are likely nothing more meaningful than endorphins randomly popping in his Swiss cheese brain, bubbles rising in a flattening glass of Diet Coke. A decade ago, David Brooks once said Trump's brain was like fireflies randomly beeping in a jar.

     During that same span of time, I've occasionally looked at this silly picture of an 18 year-old Donald Trump wearing his equally silly tin soldier uniform the day he graduated from New York Military Academy, which is no more an actual military academy than is Star Fleet Academy. I'd like to think we all know the basic reasons Trump was sent there in the 50's.

     Starting when he was at least seven years-old, Trump had been acting out violently. He kicked his music teacher in the shin at that age and began victimizing his younger, weaker siblings and classmates. By the time he was 13, his behavior was so violent and ungovernable, he was caught throwing rocks at a baby in a playpen next to his house in Queens.

      At their wit's end, Fred and Mary Trump had no choice but to enroll him at New York Military Academy. The idea was to prepare him for a military career, although Fred Trump later busted his hump getting Donald a total of four deferments due to bogus diagnoses for "bone spurs" to keep him out of Vietnam.

     But at least in the beginning, the idea was to straighten him out so he wouldn't spend the rest of his sociopathic life in Rikers Island. New York Military Academy's job was to give the boys a disciplined, structured environment to put them on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately, any such environment is also going to create an unintended subculture that might makes right and toughness is more important than developing character.

     As soon as Trump put on that silly uniform, a transformation took over him and he must have felt the petty, limited authority that costume gave him. In a way, the well-meaning mission of the academy had opposite the desired effect on students like Trump. The warped culture of the school just exacerbated Trump's already pathological bullying instincts that are still very much in evidence today.

     Stories persist over six decades later of Trump punching or shoving students against walls acting very much like the martinet that he apparently thought that uniform allowed him to be. The original idea was instill discipline in him. But all NYMA did was allow him to indulge in his preexisting worst inclinations, inclinations that are having disastrous effects all over the world that are costing innocent people their lives.

    That's why it's impossible to divine why Trump chose to put that old picture on his Truth Social account nearly two weeks after his chickenhawk war against Iran began. 

     And the warmonger who still lusts after a Nobel Peace Prize, who has bombed nearly a dozen nations and threatened others has already toppled Venezuela's president (largest oil reserves), is grasping after Greenland's untapped rare earth minerals (as well as Ukraine's), and is now coveting Iran's oil and natural gas fields.

     "On the mountain was a treasure
     Buried deep beneath the stone,
     And the valley-people swore.
     They'd have it for their very own." 

     That toxic mindset that was channeled and refined at New York Military Academy, which he started out by kicking teachers and throwing rocks at babies, has in the last six decades exponentially bloomed into something far more hideous and dangerous, a man who thinks he has the right to bully everything and everyone on the planet. Individuals, entire nations, law firms, companies.

     Yeah Iran is an evil, belligerent regime But you know what Iran never did? They never bombed one of our schools and killed over160 of our girls.

A Word of Explanation

Those of you who still tune in fairly regularly may've noticed  that I haven't posted in about 4 or 5 days. It's not as if I'm trying to avoid burning the candle at both ends and concentrating on my WIP. Lately, I've been barely able to manage a few hundred words a day. I've also been radio silent on social media. The reason I've been at low ebb is because last Friday I caught a very bad cold, which is alarmingly similar to the one I'd caught two Decembers ago. By yesterday, I felt much better and even walked into town for the first time in days. Then when I returned, I had a relapse. By this morning I started vomiting over the patio. I thought my immune system would've purged this disease and that I only had to deal with the aftereffects. But no such luck. All I can do right now is just hope for the best and that this cold will eventually go away for good. So, this is to let you know that I'm still kicking, albeit feebly, and that I fully expect to be back at 100%.

OK, Who's the Fucking Comedian?

 

The Day of the Dog

     Right about now, Cricket the dog is probably looking down from doggie heaven and snickering like Muttley. Or maybe she's anointing Kristi Noem, the woman who murdered her, with a golden shower.

     Former Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, a creature who makes Katie Miller look like Mrs. Santa Claus after smoking a pound of sinsemilla, got shitcanned by Trump. He cheerfully announced her termination, typically, on social media, naming her as the, get this, "Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas."

     Which sounds like something an 11 year-old would make up after being banned from playing Dungeons and Dragons by their parents.

     But it wasn't just that this overmade-up sociopath got fired but the timing and the manner in which she got the news. She was about to take the stage in Nashville to deliver a speech. She knew she was out of a job but, as they say in show business, the show must go on. She delivered the speech and made no mention of her humiliating termination even though the whole world knew of it by then.

     Trump then tapped Sen. Markwayne Mullin as his nominee to replace Noem, which took Mullin completely by surprise.

     At first blush, it looks as Trump did the first decent thing since stealing the White House for the second time but that would be foolhardy and misguided. Noem made Trump look bad and Trump can't have that. As for her squeeze, Corey Lewandowski, the human tampon... Well, his future is far more uncertain. Maybe Trump will name him the Fig Leaf of Freedom or something similar.

     Just yesterday, Noem followed up her testimony before the House on Wednesday by getting grilled before the Senate. Oddly, it was Sen. Thom Tillis, who's not seeking re-election, who savaged Noem the worst. Tillis ragged on her for killing her dog, Cricket, blaming her for not properly training the dog before taking it to a gravel pit and killing it before shooting a goat that same day..  (I'm sure Ted Bundy had days like that, when he just had to kill his way through a bad day.)

     The previous day in the House, Noem was called on the carpet for the outrageous expenditure of $220,000,000 in ad buys so she could preen in front of Mount Rushmore. And, it wasn't just that but the final destination of $143,000,000 of that nearly quarter of a billion dollars.

     It was given, without rhyme or reason, to a company that was formed just 11 days before the no-bid contract was given out (according to Sen. John Kennedy), to the husband of former DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, Ben Yoho (Yes, that's his real name). DHS's legal counsel, James Percival somehow said with a straight face, 

     "I have personally reviewed the allegations against Ms. McLaughlin, and I find them to be baseless. Nothing illegal or unethical occurred with respect to these contracts. Ms. McLaughlin was not involved in selecting any subcontractors. She is, however, a superstar in the public affairs world, so I am not surprised that she married a successful businessman whose services were attractive to these outside firms."

     So if there's nothing opaque about the transaction, then how come Yoho's house is blurred out on Google?

     That's the very definition of opacity.

     Trump doesn't mind if his Cabinet Secretaries are corrupt  Hell, he encourages it. Where he draws the line is if their corruption becomes conspicuous and can be traced back to him. If their corruption starts to rival his own, he gets jealous.

     There's no telling, yet, if those two jets worth nearly $150,000,000 that Noem ordered through the Coast Guard will actually be bought, even though Trump can't talk considering he accepted a gift of a $400,000,000 jet from Qatar.

      But Noem's 13 month-long tenure as Secretary of Homeland Security has been an endless skein of scandals from the beginning, culminating with her disastrous supervision of the crackdown on Minneapolis residents that resulted in the murders of two of them and Noem calling both of them domestic terrorists. 

     So lift a leg, dear Cricket, and bless your former owner with that golden shower she so richly deserves. 

Crenshaw Out

 

      In one of the biggest political stories at this moment, Rep. Dan Crenshaw (TX-Argh) has lost his primary to hang onto his seat to State Rep. Steve Toth. What's most remarkable is that Crenshaw lost by nearly 20 points.

     TX-2 is a tiny, ruby red district so it looks as if Toth will win the general election against whatever  sacrificial lamb the Democratic Party will put up against him.

     Despite Crenshaw's strong voting record rubber-stamping almost everything Trump wanted, he ran afoul of the thin-skinned sore loser after refusing to amplify Trump's lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Crenshaw was the only Texan running in tonight's primaries that Trump never endorsed.

     Crenshaw also didn't do himself any favors by threatening Tucker Carlson's life in a hot mic moment. Now MAGA voters are laughing themselves sick over Crenshaw's humiliating primary loss, one of the most stunning ones since Eric Cantor lost his in Virginia years ago.

     It only goes to show how unforgiving MAGA is over one transgression.

     Oh well. Maybe Crenshaw can play an extra as a short-lived foil for Johnny Depp if they ever make another Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

Make (White, Male, Christian and Straight) America Great Again

 

     Let's get one thing straight- Whenever you hear some loudmouth bellow, "MAGA!" or "Make America Great Again!" or, God help us, "America First!", they're really talking about making themselves great again. Yeah, there are a lot of female MAGAts out there but the ones usually screaming the loudest about recapturing America's lost glory are white, straight, Christian males. 

     And if there's any one wedge that will irreparably split MAGA into two rump factions, it's anti-Semitism. And MAGA is having a simmering civil war over it.

      Rep. Pete Stauber (R-MN) invited Nick Shirley, the right-wing YouTuber who claimed to have found widespread fraud in Minnesota’s safety net programs, and got two people killed and hundreds illegally arrested, as a result, to the State of the Union last week. One of Shirley’s fanboys, Tyler Oliveira, released a video that week in which he claimed, “I exposed New Jersey’s Jewish invasion."

     Immediately thereafter, Shirley (aka Baby Teeth), responded by saying, “EXPOSE IT ALL.”

     There are Old School MAGA factions who still stubbornly pretend to support Israel and all Jews (albeit with the cynical, unspoken dream of converting the last 144,000 to Christianity after Armageddon).

     Then there are those who are letting their anti-Semitism freak flag fly. Those consist of Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, the biggest mouths of the far right.

     When Trump came down that escalator in Trump Tower nearly 11 years ago and began ragging on Mexicans, he gave the waiting and primed MAGA base a huge permission structure to hate not only Mexicans but anyone else they, and Trump, don't like. That quickly metastasized into anti-Semitism. Trump didn't create or radicalize these people. He knew they were already out there just waiting for his message of hatred and bigotry. He merely energized them.

     If you look throughout all of American history, back to the 18th century before the Know Nothings, you'll see that virtually every racial and religious demographic had been stigmatized. Native Americans, African Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, Muslims, Jews, the Irish, Catholics, Germans, Italians, gays, transgenders. Even white American females, who had to wait 133 years after the Constitution was ratified for the right to vote. The list goes on. The only demographic that has not been seriously stigmatized has been white Christian males.

     Ever.

     Because they'd never allow themselves to be treated the way they treat those they hate. Of course, that doesn't stop some of them to hoarsely scream about "white genocide".

     It was white Christian males who formed the entirety of the KKK, which reached its peak about a century ago and even marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in huge numbers in 1925. Just 14 years later, the American Bund held a large rally in New York City under the protection of the NYPD.

     Yet, even as those large gatherings turned out to be the last big hurrah for both the KKK and the American Nazi Party, it wasn't their disgusting positions that brought them down but, in the case of the KKK, a woman's murder and, in the case of the American Bund, rampant corruption. Otherwise, we never disavowed their positions. After their seeming downfall, these factions merely went into hiding, recalibrated, softening their message. And they waited.

     Finally, their new savior came down an escalator, scowling down at them and they knew they found their man.

     David Duke, the former Grand Dragon of the KKK, almost immediately endorsed Trump in 2016 because he knew and recognized the dog whistle when he heard it. Rather than disavow Dukes' endorsement, Trump merely pretended not to know who he was because he didn't want to alienate his most reliable base. Later, he refused to blame American neo-Nazis after the deadly riot in Charlottesville. For all his polemics against countless people and organizations, Trump has never once come close to condemning anti-Semites and Neo Nazis.

     But many right wingers have always been anti-Semites and now they're trying to shoot a tranq into the Frankenstein they helped create. It started out by shambling. Now it's breaking into a sprint, pulling out the ineffectual darts.

     Right wing assclown Christopher Rufo is now taking it upon himself to sound the alarm about the anti-Semitism that's always been a feature, not a bug, of the far right. Which is a laugh, because Rufo was the one who started that despicable story about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating peoples' dogs and cats, a disgusting conspiracy theory that found its way on a presidential debate stage.

     And what these right wingers never realize is that, given the right time and opportunity, eventually, the rest of the base will come after them. It's inevitable. When you base your entire adult life on an ideology of hatred and throw in your lot with other like-minded people, they will start eating each other, betraying each other. We saw it in the bunker in the twilight of WWII.

     But out of all the prejudices that have infected the American mindset, the most durable is anti-Semitism.

     And then, there's Candace Owens. In her podcast Bride of Charlie just today, Owens said, "Now, I believe on the basis of evidence that Charlie's murder was likely a very sophisticated military operation that was meant, and here's the funny part, this is how insane these people are. Ironically, they wanted his murder to galvanize American support behind Israel. That was their plan."

     Owens is getting a lot of free lunches over Charlie Kirk's murder last September but if anyone will bring about that permanent rift between the Jew-hating and the Jew-tolerant MAGA factions, it'll be Owens. And when Owens inveighs against Israel, it's never through a Zionist lens but a simple-minded religious one.

     Then of course, there's avowed Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, who wrote last week, "The conservative movement is falling out of love with Nick Shirley because he expressed support for Tyler Oliviera, who exposed fraud in the Jewish community. They actually believe that the rules just shouldn’t apply to Jewish people. The double standard couldn’t be clearer.”

     In other words, "How dare the right step on our God-given right to publicly hate on and lie about Jews?"

     But it really starts with Trump and his economy-sized permission structure to others to hate those he hates. Which is everyone not named Donald Trump. More than once, Trump slandered American Jews for not showing sufficient loyalty to him, which is part and parcel to the Nazi mindset. Starting even before his rise to power in 1933, Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that the Jews were to blame for Germany losing WWI. Like Trump nine decades after him, Hitler was savvy enough to know there were tens of millions across Germany who nursed a grudge over that and the tanking economy in the Weimar Republic and were casting about for a common villain. The Jews fit the bill, especially the bankers.

     But the so-called MAGA movement is in serious danger of not only splitting in two but splintering off until the entire movement becomes an irrelevant collection of cranks sniping at each other.

     And I have to think about that famous poem by Martin Niemöller: 

     First they came for the Communists     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a Communist      

     Then they came for the Socialists     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a Socialist      

     Then they came for the trade unionists     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a trade unionist      

     Then they came for the Jews     

     And I did not speak out     

     Because I was not a Jew      

     Then they came for me     

     And there was no one left     

     To speak out for me.

“Now, I believe on the basis of evidence that Charlie's murd ..

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“Now, I believe on the basis of evidence that Charlie's murd ..

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This, Too, Shall Pass

     Maybe it's encroaching old age and diminished energy. Maybe it's outrage fatigue. I don't know what the problem is.

     The day I began blogging over 21 years ago, I recall having written five or six posts that first day. Four and a half years later during the last time Iran had seen this level of unrest, I was posting up to two dozen times a day.

     I'd always prided myself on being able to write 100,000-200,000 word novels while still maintaining this blog. Yeah, there many times when I had to push myself to write something. But there was always this stubborn sense of responsibility, obligation, if you will, to write about what's going on politically in this world, in this country. Yes, many times it's a grind but, until lately, the words still got written.

     But lately, I've been sitting on my patio looking out over Phoenix like an invalid. I spend hours and hours a day out here. Then, when the sun sinks into the west and I prepare to make dinner, I look at what I'd written and am amazed at how unproductive I've been. Some days, yes, I wear my pajama bottoms, keenly aware of how that feeds into the blogger stereotype. My new rescue cat, Midnight, zips around the house as if making a mockery of my lack of energy and motivation.

     Some would reflexively refer to what's afflicting me as "writer's block". I don't believe in that. I think it was Stephen King who'd dismissed writer's block as just a lack of interest or focus. But in my case, I don't think either applies. It's a curious and troubling form of paralysis with a dimly-realized provenance. 

     I may or may not have stated months or years ago about how difficult it was for me to get back my writer's identity. When Barbara began her final, awful decline in 2022-2023, I found I didn't have the time or energy to write and my writer's identity transformed into something else- Barbara's sole caretaker. Before and after she went in the hospital and, eventually, that nursing home, I tried, and failed, to complete no fewer than six novels. Even after she died in September 2023, I still couldn't put anything together. It was a loss of identity, an especially pernicious form of Imposter Syndrome, something virtually every writer goes through at some point. You're only as good as your last book, after all.

     I fought like hell to get that identity back. In the fewer than two years I've been in Phoenix, I've written two novels and, until lately, was proceeding rapidly with two others. My novella, The Final Bullet, was the first novel I'd published in nearly four and a half years, my first since Hollywoodland in December 2020. That's quite a drop-off for someone who was used to publishing 1-2 books a year.

     I'm in the home stretch of one but lately, I've gone from writing several thousand words a day to several hundred. I tell myself that I want to get the denouement right, that I don't want to have to engage in major carpentry when I start the revision process.

     But, deep down, I know better. And this paralysis has metastasized into my blogging.

     Now, anyone who knows anything at all about me knows that I never considered this dying form of citizen journalism anywhere nearly as important as my long fiction. Writing has been the sole constant in my life since my senior year of high school in 1977. Barb is long dead and no longer needs my care. And in this, the twilight of my life, this is the only identity I have left. It's the only thing that validates me as a human being, that gives my life purpose.

     Yet, as stated, there's another facet to my writing life. This damned blog writing about damned politicians. It's a stubborn sense of responsibility, undertaking this endeavor in the most thankless of mediums. And I've been prolific since coming to Phoenix. It's not as if the place inspires me. I can't wait to leave Arizona for good and get back to my beloved Massachusetts. Maybe it's a growing sense of my own mortality. It'd been said often that the older he got, the more prolific Isaac Asimov got. I think it was because he recognized the end was drawing near and that that little white light at the end of the tunnel was turning into a blinding spotlight.

     So maybe that's it.

     And lately, I've been afflicted with this crippling sense of paralysis, especially as regards the pages of this blog. In the nearly 18 years I've been running it, I've written well over 4500 posts. That's millions of words, easy. Sometimes I post daily for weeks on end. But now, I feel thick-tongued, incapable of weighing in on anything without sounding like an ignoramus. If I ever feel that way, my default setting is to not write anything, to put it off for another day and see if I'm in a better frame of mind.

     And it all started last Saturday when we bombed Iran again. I'm awestruck, and not in a good way, at the hideousness we've unleashed on the Iranian people. It's obvious to me that our so-called Commander in Chief is a blithering fucking idiot who never had any exit strategy in mind, never even questioned the ramifications of starting a proxy war for Israel's benefit. I'm horrified that we callously killed over 500 Iranians, including 85 schoolgirls.

     Yes, their Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was a brutal repressive dictator but we can't be the assassins much less the policemen of the world. He was their responsibility. And now we're about to unleash sectarian violence, if not civil war, in Iran and destabilizing the entire region. It was waged with simple-mindedness but the consequences are far more complex and I don't feel as if I'm up to the task. That's better done by people with far better minds than mine, people who have a better grasp of what's going on with the Middle East.

     But this sense of paralysis, hopefully, will prove to be just a blip on my intellectual and emotional radar. This, too, shall pass. Hopefully.