Thirsty

     If you're like most Americans, you're glad that FIFA's gone from America for another few decades. The tickets and concessions were criminally overpriced. Let's get back to baseball, where at least athletes are allowed to use all four of their fucking limbs.

     But, as always, Trump had to make FIFA all about himself, even though he'd never shown any particular fondness for soccer until the World Cup came to North America. You might remember when Gianni Infantino, Trump's personal Gollum, came to the White House in a very misguided attempt to show Trump the gold FIFA trophy. Trump actually asked if he could keep it.

     Chelsea won their championship. Then Trump wouldn't leave the stage and the team literally pushed him to the back. Later, Trump admitted that he stole the trophy and that it was sitting in the Oval Office. Chelsea had to settle for a replica.

     Then, when Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in the World Cup final, Trump was allowed, for some bizarre reason, to hand the FIFA trophy that he wanted to keep to Spain. Then he wouldn't leave the fucking stage. Infantino rushed across the platform to remind Trump that it was time for him to leave but he stubbornly refused to leave, posing with the team as if he had anything to do with their victory.

     Because this needy, infantile asshole always has to make everything about himself. Not only that, if Trump is anywhere within a parsec of someone else's moment of glory, he needs to steal their thunder. This is why he crashes weddings to which he's not invited, this is why he won't leave stages when sports teams try to celebrate their victories. He cannot let other people experience joy after hard-won achievements. He has to co-opt them as his own.

      Keep in mind what Trump said recently.

      “The one thing about sports is you break it down into, you know, a two-hour period. You don’t have to wait a lifetime to find out, ‘Is somebody a winner or a loser?’ You got a lot of losers, mostly losers, fortunately. It’s a good thing to have a lot of losers. I always like to hang around with losers actually because it makes me feel better." Then he added,

     "I hate guys that are very, very successful and you have to listen to their success stories. I like people that like to listen to my success." 

      But Trump doesn't just surround himself with "losers". When sports teams win championships, he insists on hanging around like some bloated version of Zelig and, in his desperate need to assimilate, tries to become unto them.

      Seriously, can anyone think of another occupant of the White House who was so pathetically thirsty and needy? Can anyone reading this think that that's a good quality to have in a commander in chief?

Womp Womp

     There was a reason why Bari Weiss's co-opted CBS was the only network to carry Trump's usual whiny grievances over the 2020 election results last night: Because they were the usual whiny grievances and networks are finally getting wise to this embittered carnival barker.

      Basically, Trump wanted to sow distrust among the American electorate in advance of the 2026 midterms and declared the entire electoral system was broken beyond repair. If that was his goal, then it stands to reason that the only people who would even give this preposterous idea any house room would be MAGA voters, aka Republican voters. Ergo, last night's spectacle could only harm Republican incumbents and candidates this November.

     To bolster his arguments, Trump said that he'd declassified a tranche of documents (it's unclear if he'd magically done this just with his mind) "proving" that China meddled in our 2020 election, switched votes from him to Biden and that the intelligence community covered it up.

     However, on review of the declassified documents, journalists and pundits couldn't find the slightest shred of proof that China or the intelligence community did any such thing. In fact, even Trump himself never once said that the government has the smoking gun of any such conspiracy. In short, there was no there there.

     The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, which has been ceaselessly slamming Trump this year, wrote, "Since Mr. Trump declassified the memo, we can quote the part he didn’t. Vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results. The systems in each voting location are not connected to the Internet or to each other, and many methods for exploiting them rely on physical proximity.” And even if some results were compromised, “audits and paper trails very likely would uncover such an effort.” 

     Another thing that Trump didn't say: In contradiction of leaked disclosures to the press, Trump never claimed that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, Georgia's Democratic senators, weren't legitimately-elected. That would've been a first in American history: The head of the executive branch claiming that duly-elected officials weren't actually elected, after all.

     That would've been a red line even Trump wasn't willing to cross.

     It's abundantly clear why Trump is trying to steal the 2026 midterms: He knows when Democrats get back the House, they will impeach him for a third time on Day One. There's little to no chance he'll be expelled by the Senate. Democrats may take back that chamber, too, but they won't have the 57 votes they'll need for expulsion. But Trump takes impeachment seriously even if there's no real followup in the Senate.

     This is why he's leaning on Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE Act (that's he's misnaming as the SAVE America Act) despite the fact that there just isn't enough votes to pass it. It's unpopular in the Senate and it's unpopular with the people. But Trump is incapable of listening to and being guided by reason and facts. He lives in his curdled little dream world and is increasingly angry at the round hole that won't let in the square peg. 

     And, as insane as it is that Trump is still litigating election results from nearly six years ago, the facts remain clear: Trump tried, and failed, no fewer than 63 times to overturn the results. Some of those defeats came at the hands of judges that Trump himself had nominated. Two attorneys who'd worked on his behalf wound up getting disbarred and another was forced to surrender his law license. Trump's ceaseless conspiracy theories about 2020 wrecked careers and, with his usual sociopathy, Trump couldn't have cared less.

     And the media is finally catching on to the fact that this buffoon, who still can't admit that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, that Biden beat him by 7,000,000 popular votes and won the electoral college 306 to 232, will offer nothing of any substance. Donald Trump has become the very delineation of the adage that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

     I'm no psychiatrist but to me, that's the definition of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a quality you do not want in a person with his finger on the big red button.

Georgia on His Mind

     What the hell were 77,000,000 people thinking? Is there even an inflection point anymore?

     Not that I believe or ever will believe that Trump won in 2024 or even 2016, what's indisputable is that Trump managed to get over 65,000,000 people to vote for him in each of the last three general elections. If the numbers are to be believed, Trump had conned 62,984,828 voters to cast their ballots for him in 2016. Four years later, that number actually increased to 74,223,975.

     Despite the most ruinous administration in history, after hundreds of thousands of Americans needlessly died from the worst pandemic to hit this nation in a century, after sending thousands to attack the Capitol and stealing classified documents, 11,239,147 more people voted for him, essentially saying, "Yes, we need four more years of this shit." Only Joe Biden's 81,283,501 votes from the more sane of us saved us from ruin in 2020.

     So where was that sense of urgency in 2024 when Trump refused to go away? While I will always believe to my dying day that Kamala Harris won that year, 77,302,580 still voted for Trump, meaning every time this idiot runs for president, he gets millions more to vote for him, making his supporters the largest cult in human history.

     That pretty much qualifies the United States to be, collectively, the stupidest nation on earth. God only knows what the other eight billion people on the planet think of us.

     And in the year and a half since he stole the White House again, Trump has plainly been slipping into dementia. It's not worth belaboring all the countless instances proving this. While Joe Biden's every miscue and gaffe was magnified to cartoonish dimensions, Trump seems to get a pass not only from the Beltway media but also from government officials.

 

     And no one has come out and said that Trump can no longer speak publicly without embarrassing himself and the nation. At the last G7, the other leaders, legitimately-elected ones, gave him short shrift. The picture above is perfectly representative of how isolated Trump, and the US, is. While the other world leaders were smiling and shaking hands, interacting with each other like normal human beings, Trump stood off by himself scowling at the press.

     And the day after tomorrow, Trump's going to fill up our TV screens and monitors with his sagging umber puss and declare that Georgia Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock aren't really senators, that they were never really legitimately elected.

     This will be a first in American history, one in which a "sitting president", who never won an election in his life, will openly disparage the legitimacy of actually-elected officials in Congress. Trump will do so not because he really gives a flying fuck about election integrity but because he wants to de-legitimize the Georgia 2020 election results that Biden won by nearly 12,000 votes.

     He is obsessed with Georgia. Earlier this year, he pulled off a Gestapo-like raid on Fulton County, impounding through the ODNI and Kash Patel's goons at the FBI all the paper ballots and voting machines. DNI Tulsi Gabbard was there furtively hiding behind a corner and Trump even called the FBI agents in real time to congratulate them on a job well-done. He'd even had the DOJ subpoena Fulton County election workers.

     All because he can't stand the idea of losing.

     

     Where is the inflection point, where's the red line, where's the Rubicon? How much longer are we supposed to live under this unceasing madness? What will it take for the 25th amendment to be invoked against this murderous, slouching, demented, shamelessly corrupt moron? 

“I have always depended on the kindness of fascists."

 

     One could make loose comparisons (As I had over the years) between Lindsey Graham and Blanche Dubois, the ill-fated character in Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire. Both were clearly insane Southerners who were supported by delusion that was delineated by histrionics.

     Like his late running buddy, Senator John McCain, Graham was always a warhawk so it tracks that Graham spent his last few weeks on this earth supporting Trump's idiotic war against Iran. But Graham had already pulled the rip cord on his bomb vest and blew up whatever complex and meaningful legacy he should have had.

     A decade ago, he made a game attempt to find his conscience and maybe even his spine. He wrote on Twitter, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…. and we will deserve it.” If anything, what Graham had written 10 years ago seems even more prescient now than it was in 2016. And that tweet was hardly the only time he'd publicly inveighed against Trump. Here's a fairly exhaustive list of the times Graham told the truth about Trump in 2015-6.

      One suspects Graham of assuming that Trump would lose in 2016. He never thought he'd ever have to suck up to perhaps the greatest monster this world has ever seen.

     Perhaps Graham thought he could stand on his principles, such as they were, and live to tell the tale.

     But the plain fact is that after nearly 24 years in the Senate, Graham doesn't have a single meaningful, transformative piece of legislation with his name on it. Like so many other lawmakers before him, like Mitch McConnell, Graham's genius lie in his ability to survive like a cockroach and keep getting reelected, to successfully fake relevance by basking in and staying in close proximity to those who''d actually had it.

     The man who had called out Trump for what he was- pure poison to the Republican Party and the nation in general- became just another one of his golfing buddies. Graham's one saving grace was his unwavering support of Ukraine. (In fact, he'd met with President Zelenskyy in Kyiv just hours before his death.)

     Graham had sunk to being just another one of those never-trumpers who'd bent the knee and the neck once he was shoe-horned into the Oval Office. Like Rubio, like Cruz, like JD Vance, he stood by his man even after he'd savaged his old friend John McCain in July 2015 and said McCain was only a hero because he was captured.

     Lindsey Graham became just another punchline on the Beltway- Just another politician who'd sold out his principles so he could bask in the tonic of Trump's power. He'd suggested Trump should be given a peace prize only one named after himself. Except for when he'd briefly regained his spine after the January 6th attack on the Capitol Building, Graham became just another shameless suck-up.

     But when Graham's legacy is reviewed, after the tributes and  hagiographies are written, the enduring image of Graham will be the lead image above- When Graham had a hissy fit over Democrats opposing the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. Graham acted like a titty-twisted little bitch not because he wanted Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court but because Trump wanted him on it. And it didn't matter to him that Kavanaugh had been accused of rape and sexual assault. His histrionics actually became more notorious than Kavanaugh's own.

      Lindsey Graham served as an object lesson in how easily a politician's soul can be bought and sold for conferred power, the illusion of actual relevance. And it can't even be said that he was better at it than anyone else. Washington is filled with guys like Lindsey Graham and always will be. Graham only stood head and shoulders above the rest because he was more shameless and overt about it than anyone else.

The Day We Became Americans

 

     On this day 250 years ago, the Declaration of Independence was read to the American people for the first time. It took place at the old Philadelphia State House, now known as Independence Hall. As every schoolchild knows, the Declaration was signed on July 4th but the actual reading to the public took place four days later so they could coordinate readings in the other colonies and to prepare official, engrossed (handwritten) copies.

     The Continental Congress couldn't have picked a better man for the job. The honor of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence fell to Colonel John Nixon, merchant, military officer and former sheriff of Philadelphia. He was one of the most respected men in the city and had a strong, authoritative voice.

     The Declaration was actually an evolution from the Remonstrances of the mid 1660s that were drafted and signed in most of the American colonies. These Resistance Petitions, as they came to be known, were respectful documents pleading with King Charles II to respect their autonomy. But they were nonbinding, ineffectual pleadings only and they certainly never came close to even threatening to wrest their independence by force. 

     Approximately 2000 Philadelphians crowded the square that day to hear for the first time what their representatives had hashed out behind closed doors that summer. One of the most explosive parts was the lengthy list of 27 grievances they had with the British Empire. Mostly written by Thomas Jefferson, they listed grievances such as King George III's refusal to allow the election of colonial officials, wearing them down through a process of attrition, etc.

     Essentially, it was the first moment the colonists realized they were no longer British subjects but Americans officially divorcing themselves from the authority of what was considered the mightiest nation on earth. It was at once exciting and frightening. Now that the second Continental Congress had announced independence, if the revolution failed, those who'd taken part in what was then a mere rebellion consisting of a piece of paper would've been hanged as traitors, including Jefferson.

     It was an incredibly fragile start to our independence and it's difficult to appreciate the guts that it took the Founding Fathers just to sign said declaration. When the Constitution was drafted in March of 1789, it took several years for everyone in the Continental Congress to actually sign it. Later on, John Adams would remind us that the entire Continental Congress was never under the same roof in Independence Hall at the same time because of British spies and the threat of arrest and execution.

     It's impossible to imagine such courage in our government today. The US Congress, in all its bicameral glory, is filled with dissembling, feckless characters. Indeed, our history and that of Congress is more than merely studded with convicted criminals. If Trump wrote the Declaration of Independence, there's no doubt that he would have made all 27 grievances detailing how he, and not the American people, were wronged.

      Perhaps it's unfair to compare our leaders of today to those of colonial America. The Founding Fathers were also vastly flawed, conflicted men. Some called for independence, others for conciliation and some wished to remain under the yoke of British tyranny. But in the end, they put their lives on the line and committed to a course of action where the preferred outcome was far from assured.

     And, again, it's impossible to imagine such courage from their latter-day descendants. In the 18th century, there was little room for "evolved thought" and no tolerance for dissembling. Hashing out the terms for independence was complex, sure, but their moral vision and impetus was clear.

      Our nation was created by brilliant and learned men who'd founded the greatest experiment in democracy that the world has ever seen and they'd done so in secrecy, by candlelight and on fragile pieces of parchment. They knew they were taking their lives in their own hands while they did so yet their mission was clear.

     Nowadays, we see Donald Trump bumbling his way through the G7 and the NATO summit in Ankara and, suddenly, King George III didn't look so mad, after all.

Schrödinger's Senator

      Is he dead? Is he alive? Is he both? It depends entirely on whom you ask and what their political stripe is.

     On, fittingly, Trump's 80th birthday, Mitch McConnell was rushed to the hospital after suffering what was rumored to be a cardiac event. He was unconscious and the paramedics had to do CPR on him. He's been in the hospital since and hasn't voted in the Senate since June 11th.

     His office is claiming that McConnell is working closely with his staff from his hospital bed and that it's business as usual. Nothing to see here, folks.

     And the Beltway media dutifully acts like the stenographers they are.

     But here's the thing: We wouldn't have known that McConnell was found unconscious in his DC home or that he'd been administered CPR if it wasn't for Desirée Townsend, an independent journalist and one of McConnell's neighbors.

     Townsend somehow got hold of the EMS audio recordings that detailed the life-saving measures performed on McConnell that night.

     Now, as you can expect, the GOP is circling the wagons and being completely opaque if not outright disingenuous about McConnell's condition. Up to a point, one has to understand why. After all, we're talking about a man's medical condition, which, according to HIPAA regulations, has to be kept confidential. But Mitch McConnell isn't just any other patient.

     The state of McConnell's health has national security implications. As the former Senate Majority leader, McConnell had access to top secret intelligence that few others in the country have. And that's where his wife, Elaine Chao, comes in.

     Chao, bizarrely, fled to China days after her husband's hospitalization to speak to the Chinese Vice President. One of their daughters closed down her Twitter account. Townsend said no one has been in McConnell's home since June 14th.

     Now, I don't indulge in conspiracy theories like Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who's openly accusing Chao of being a Chinese spy.

     Scott Jennings claimed he'd heard from McConnell recently and that they'd spoken for 17 minutes. But consider the source. This is Scott Jennings we're talking about, who's just a reliable right wing rodeo clown on CNN, so you have to take whatever he says with a grain of salt.

      Now, there's some cause for believing that there's the usual Republican skullduggery afoot. According to Kentucky election laws, if a US senator cannot finish their term before August 3rd, it automatically triggers a special runoff election. If the senator in question survives past August 3rd, it goes to the general election in November.

     The reason why Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, can't name a replacement is because Republicans changed the laws back in 2024 forbidding him from doing so. So, basically, The GOP is playing Weekend at Bernie's with McConnell to ensure that Thomas Massie, the outgoing US Congressman, doesn't throw his hat in the ring. Massie is the ultimate wild card and the Kentucky GOP's worst nightmare.

     They're terrified that if McConnell is indeed proven to be incapacitated prior to August 3rd, Massie will enter the special election and split the Republican vote, paving the way for a Democrat to occupy McConnell's seat.

     So the Republican Party is still clinging to McConnell's withered body for the next few weeks in the name of party primacy. 

Why I'm Not Celebrating the 4th of July

      Let me clarify something before I get going: I love my country in the way that a man still loves his first girlfriend. The magic is gone, it can't be recaptured and compatibility was an illusion all along. 

     America was never a perfect country and never will be. And on this semiquincentennial, I'm in a position to compare the America in which I'd grown up to the fascist hellscape it's become. I'm not going to belabor why I say this except to ask those in my generation if their lives are actually better now than they were a half century ago.

     Gerry Ford was the president during the bicentennial. In an otherwise bland and mercifully brief presidency, Ford presided over the 200th anniversary of our nation's independence. Vietnam was just a memory and the nation was recuperating from Watergate and Nixon's mishandling of the economy. We Americans were excited to celebrate that unique milestone.

     Although he was an ineffectual Republican, at least Ford didn't have a bloated ego like the current squatter in the White House.who's obsessed with naming everything after himself and putting up monuments in his so-called honor. Ford wasn't concerned with monetizing the presidency and making a pile of money while taking away government assistance from the poor.

     Fast forward a half a century. The America State Fair has been a clusterfuck from the beginning. The stage is literally falling apart while dancers rehearse, failing generators resulted in a busted Ferris Wheel and melted ice cream, people suffering from the heat are on life support, states are pulling out of the state pavilions, you couldn't even pack a phone booth with the people who were foolhardy enough to show up and virtually all the musical acts pulled out because they weren't notified of the partisan nature. Patriot Front, a fascist hate group, today took over the National Mall, fighter jets are flying overhead while people below ignore them and Trump's fireworks display, consisting of 880,000 pyrotechnics, is going to cause a health crisis and pollute air quality (a study that was then suppressed by the government),

     There's no way to redo this, no way to make it right. Next year will be the 251st anniversary. Who cares about that?

     And always, Trump tries to recast everything in his bloated, umber image. And while Americans struggle to gas up their cars and put food on the table, Trump admitted he'd stuffed his already bulging, bottomless pockets with $2,000,000,000 last year.

     Sorry, I'm just not feeling it. And that goes for many of us.

     We're a nation that's at war with a nation that wasn't threatening us (sound familiar?). Masked goons are sweeping across the streets of America and murdering American citizens with impunity. Jobs aren't really being created, inflation is up and our government is crawling with psychopaths and freaks who so disrespect your intelligence, they're brazenly telling us we're living in an unprecedented Golden Age.

     The Founding Fathers would be horrified.

     Happy 250th? Nope, sorry. Not feeling it.

     If it can be construed as a "celebration", then I'll "celebrate" by walking down West Peoria Avenue in Phoenix and going to the local Barnes & Noble for the first time in over two years and maybe buy a book. I may stop off at the nearby Chili's for dinner, maybe have a beer then perhaps see some of the fireworks from my patio. Then I'll work on one of my novels before going to bed, looking forward to the relief tomorrow that this grotesque spectacle is at last over.

A One Man Crime Wave

 

 

     I'd like to think if Teddy Roosevelt were alive today, he would've punched Donald Trump in the face. In Medora, North Dakota the other day, Donald Trump took part in a ribbon cutting ceremony at the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. As it often happens, the ribbon cutting ceremony involved gold-plated scissors.

     After they cut the ribbon, Trump then tried to slip the scissors into his jacket and eventually walked off with them. At this point in his life, Trump is like a Temu Auric Goldfinger, the Bond super villain who's obsessed with gold (He even has his own Oddjob in Steven Cheung, for fuck's sake). If he sees gold, he immediately grabs it.

     You might remember the time last year when professional Trump suck-up Gianni Infantino brought the FIFA trophy to the Oval Office and made the mistake of handing it to Trump. They had to practically pry it out of his grubby little hands after he asked, in all seriousness, "Can I keep it?"

     Hilary Shea, a licensed pathologist, put out a short video explaining the difference between a true kleptomaniac and someone with actual dementia. 

     "The stealing is usually a symptom of changes in the brain affecting memory, judgment, impulse control, or the ability to recognize ownership... I do not think that Donald Trump is actually, psychiatrically speaking, suffering from kleptomania. I do believe it is just one more sign and symptom of dementia. As always, Donald Trump has got to go."

     Considering his ongoing crime wave, especially since he stole the presidency again with Musk's help, it's very easy to conclude that Trump is a kleptomaniac. After all, his latest financial disclosures show that he hauled in $2,2 billion last year, a level of corruption that is, to use one of Trump's favorite phrases, the likes of which have never been seen before.

     But we've also seen just in this past year a serious degradation of his cognitive faculties. And when I saw Trump literally try to pocket those gold-plated scissors, I immediately thought of Barbara.

     In the last year she was living with me, long after her own dementia began presenting, Barbara got obsessed with a pair of scissors I kept in the kitchen drawer. We needed a pair for various things I regularly needed to do in the kitchen. But every so often, Barbara would remove them from the drawer and walk off with them. 

     I'd ask her to put them back and she'd always respond in a towering rage that "they're mine!" She'd developed this perverted sense of ownership.

     I'm seeing this in Trump and, naturally, it alarms me as it should alarm all of us. It got to the point Barbara couldn't or wouldn't get to the bathroom on time, or feed herself or even write her own name. And seeing her infantile sense of ownership reflected in Trump just scares the shit out of me.