It's a New World out there today so let us give thanks

Let us be thankful that medical science has fallen into disfavor because global warming has fried the brains of formerly sentient beings. Paralysis is far more preferable. It sure beats listening to government recommendations, doesn’t it?

Of course, failed democracies are pretty common in history. For those paying attention, not much political news is news anymore. The rushed confirmation of another sexual predator to the Supreme Court was completely obvious at the time. Trump got to decide what the FBI could bring up in the confirmation hearings and who could testify. Sexual predators have to look out for each other. Boys will be boys and it’s all locker room talk and who can withstand a sobbing judge as he makes his case for liking beer?

I mean, besides women. And ethical people. The latter still do exist in nature though it’s hard to see that on Twitter where middle school roolz.

Some days we get to see a flicker of light amid the darkness, like reading that Hillbilly Elegy author is heading to a loss in his race to be Ohio’s next senator. His personal account of what he went through to emerge from his working poor roots is notable and good for him for doing so. He’s an expert - on him - but he’s not so hot as a sociologist defining poverty as a choice for everyone else. All that great education and now he’s an ardent Trump supporter? I’m sure he can blame that on receiving food stamps while owning an actual color TV. And it certainly has nothing to do with the mine owners adding black lung disease to tens of thousands of West Virginians while their politicians live off the mine owner dole and export global warming to the rest of us. (Yes, that includes you, Joe Manchin, as unremitting greed is a personal choice not a party decision.)

And Florida Governor Ron Desantis - considered the leading GOP presidential candidate if Trump doesn’t run - is in a tightening race for re-election, 47%-44% over Charlie Crist. If he loses in November, that’ll pretty much kill his presidential ambitions.

It’s very common to dismiss really craven political animals as ‘whores’ but why must we sexualize everything in life? Most people like sex, some to an excess that damages families and marriages and friendships. Like anything fun, some people are going to be excessive with it. But that really has nothing to do with most political choices by politicians. An obvious case in point is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She utilizes the old adage that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ and she positively takes to the conspiracy spew like a sow takes to mud-puddling. She’s been freed by her own party from doing any committee work where legislation gets crafted and negotiated, but none of her supporters expects their government representatives to represent their interests with anything substantive. She comes from a district where educational attainment is considered suspect, governments are considered to be foreign enemies and sports hunting includes hunting people whose skin isn’t pink enough.

She ran a successful business that was well funded by her kin. Now she just takes marching orders from the Circle of Trump and doesn’t give a damn who gets hurt. His blessing - for now - is all she wants to get a fat government pension, then she’ll go away to torture her family and friends.

Several other Trump mooks are doing the same in safe districts like Gaetz and Jordan. But Jordan’s in for a bit of bad PR when Clooney’s new docu-series gets released on HBO.

Up till now, he’s been allowed to skate under the well known double standard called IOKIYAAR (It’s OK If You Are A Republican). University of Ohio issued a report in 2019 that said its sports doctor, Strauss committed at least 1,429 sexual assaults and 47 rapes during his 20-year tenure. He was never charged and committed suicide in 2005. At least 3 of his victims have claimed Jordan actively aided the cover-up.

The release date of Clooney’s project isn’t known yet.

And that Lauren Boebert dame is not in a safe Colorado district, so her Brand-X Palin routine has a far more limited shelf life.

The point is, MTG has little power and she’s not acting like a whore. There’s many a far more ethical sex worker. Like any other professions they take health risks as part of the daily grind. MTG’s acting like a common greed pig, which is a very invasive but common species.

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The far bigger concern, of course, revolves around Old DJ Trump. And yeesh, where to begin?

Reporter Maggie Haberman is coming out with a new book that includes details and a couple of photos of documents he flushed down the toilet. They were retrieved after they clogged the toilet. (And I recall him ranting a few years ago about his hatred of newer toilets that use less water).

Trump had a pattern of disregarding normal record preservation procedures. In one occasion, Trump asked if anyone wanted to put a copy of a speech he just delivered up for auction on eBay, during a mid-flight visit to the press cabin Air Force One.

In other instances, Trump would task aides with carrying boxes of unread memos, articles and tweet drafts aboard the presidential aircraft for him to review and then tear to shreds.

A former senior Trump administration official said a deputy from the Office of Staff Secretary would usually come in to pull things out of the trash and take them off Trump's desk after he left a room.

A former White House official recalled that while document preservation was a key responsibility of the staff secretary, the rest of Trump's senior staffers lacked the sense of their obligation to maintain records of papers that moved through the West Wing.

Trump, of course, denies these allegations and called her a ‘maggot’. But his question about selling a speech on eBay is consistent with his long-known obsession with making a buck off of everything.

Next?

His first campaign manager, Paul Manafort, convicted then pardoned, was just interviewed and admitted sharing Trump campaign data with a Russian intel asset for money and said “I don’t apologize for things I’ve done in my life. Because I’ve always had the right motives for what I did in my life.”

Apparently, aiding Russian government interference in US elections is ethical when his ‘right’ motive was insatiable greed.

Ready for the biggest reveal?

From the New Yorker article released by authors Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker today, our Defense Department officials were constantly challenged, trying to restrain the ex-President.

He wanted a massive military parade to glorify himself, for example, but he didn’t want to include wounded soldiers, as France had done.

“Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade,” Trump said. “This doesn’t look good for me.” He explained with distaste that at the Bastille Day parade there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost limbs in battle.

Kelly could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” he told Trump. “In our society, there’s only one group of people who are more heroic than they are—and they are buried over in Arlington.” Kelly did not mention that his own son Robert, a lieutenant killed in action in Afghanistan, was among the dead interred there.

“I don’t want them,” Trump repeated. “It doesn’t look good for me.”

Also:

But Trump’s love affair with “my generals” was brief, and in a statement for this article the former President confirmed how much he had soured on them over time. “These were very untalented people and once I realized it, I did not rely on them, I relied on the real generals and admirals within the system,” he said.

It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

“Which generals?” Kelly asked.

“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.

Trump ultimately replaced the team of generals advising him with a guy he expected to be a yes-man, Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley.

Dressed in combat fatigues, Milley marched behind Trump with a phalanx of the President’s advisers in a photo op, the most infamous of the Trump Presidency, that was meant to project a forceful response to the protests that had raged outside the White House and across the country since the killing, the week before, of George Floyd. Most of the demonstrations had been peaceful, but there were also eruptions of looting, street violence, and arson, including a small fire in St. John’s Church, across from the White House.

In the morning before the Lafayette Square photo op, Trump had clashed with Milley, Attorney General William Barr, and the Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, over his demands for a militarized show of force. “We look weak,” Trump told them. The President wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and use active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted ten thousand troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne called up. He demanded that Milley take personal charge. When Milley and the others resisted and said that the National Guard would be sufficient, Trump shouted, “You are all losers! You are all fucking losers!” Turning to Milley, Trump said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

Eventually, Trump was persuaded not to send in the military against American citizens. Barr, as the civilian head of law enforcement, was given the lead role in the protest response, and the National Guard was deployed to assist police. Hours later, Milley, Esper, and other officials were abruptly summoned back to the White House and sent marching across Lafayette Square. As they walked, with the scent of tear gas still in the air, Milley realized that he should not be there and made his exit, quietly peeling off to his waiting black Chevy Suburban. But the damage was done. No one would care or even remember that he was not present when Trump held up a Bible in front of the damaged church; people had already seen him striding with the President on live television in his battle dress, an image that seemed to signal that the United States under Trump was, finally, a nation at war with itself. Milley knew this was a misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a “road-to-Damascus moment,” as he would later put it. What would he do about it?

In the days after the Lafayette Square incident, Milley sat in his office at the Pentagon, writing and rewriting drafts of a letter of resignation.

It gets increasingly more startling from there so I’m not going to quote it. More than any other link in this edition, you just have to read it.

1) What Milley had written in that resignation letter would have been a bombshell if it had gone public.

2) Instead, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates convinced him to stay on as Chair of the Joint Chiefs and convinced Mark Esper to stay on as Secretary of Defense. Not only did they view Trump’s impulsive efforts to make instant decisions about troop deployments and withdrawals dangerous to our national security, but they and Secretary of State Pompeo were duly alarmed that he’d attempt a military coup after the 2020 election results came in. They stayed on as the last guys standing who could thwart it.

3) After the 2020 election, Trump fired Esper and hired a team of toadies. Milley had not only been warning the Chiefs of Staff against any efforts to involve the military in the post election craziness but he approached several of these toadies and made it clear he’d put see them prosecuted and jailed if they attempted to use the military to prevent a peaceful transfer of power to President-elect Biden.

Seriously, it’s so startling you need to read it yourself. And take especial note that it was Pence, not Trump, that ordered the military to clear the Capitol building. And the final sentence in the article is a reminder that we likely would haver seen a military coup and martial law if Trump and his team were more competent.

Chilling. And we can now expect Trump and his millions of followers to try and discredit Milley, Barr, Pompeo, Esper and anyone else telling the truth about all the restraints they applied to keep Trump from attacking Iran …. and the USA.

And what if…. what if he gets elected again in 2024?

Sorry about my last newsletter, as it had a note of despair. I had a series of bad days that kept thwarting my daily agendas and I was in a bit of a funk when I wrote that.

Today, a friend located an inexpensive car battery then installed it for me. I couldn’t do it because the knee injury wouldn’t let me stand that long or go in the store to buy the battery.

So things are moderately better. Because of a friend. Friends have made life bearable the past two years and I thank each of you.