Should The New York Crank seek the Democratic nomination for President? This is an extremely serious question (almost).

Thanks to free clipart like this example from Clipart-Library.com

anybody can make a poster and run for President. And  it looks as if

quite nearly everybody does.

I mean, why the hell not?

As of this posting, there are already 29 declared Democratic candidates for President. That rises to 30 if you count not-quite-announced probable candidate Joe Biden. It rises to 31 if you count not-yet-decided Stacey Abrams and to 32 if you count not-yet-decided Bill deBlasio, the less-than-wonderfully-competent mayor of New York.

A million gurgling bile ducts'

worth of incompetence

Given that incompetence seems to be a prerequisite for the job of head of state these days, I will bet up to two cents…no, make that three cents…no, make that a nickel…. that deBlasio will sooner or later declare himself a candidate. But I’m getting ahead of myself. So back to the incompetence thing.

Exhibit A, of course, is the creepy clown, (or should that be kreepy klown?) currently occupying the White House. Collusion or no collusion, it’s a wonder the guy can tie his own shoelaces without inadvertently hanging himself. 

The little staff

that wouldn't

Until recently, it would appear that all kinds of horrors were not visited on the people of the United States, and possibly of the world, simply because Trump's underlings ignored his orders. This was exacerbated by the fact that Trump either forgot he had issued the orders, or didn’t know what to do when people disobeyed him.

It would appear that after two years, Trump figured this out, fired most of the Defiant Ones, and is slowly replacing them with Yes men (there seems to be a shortage of Yes women) whose slavish devotion to His Klownship for all I know might lead us either eventually or very quickly to a major depression. Or runaway inflation. Or a nuclear war with North Korea. Or us unilaterally nuking…I dunno, maybe France or England.

We don't need comic opera.

We have Donald Trump.

The thing about Donald Trump is that he’s on trend. Incompetence at the top of national governments used to be confined to nations about which composers of limited talent wrote operettas back in the 1920s. As one parody of these operettas, written by a nearly-forgotten humorist named Newman Levy, described the quintessential  situation:

The scene: a public square in Ruritania  

Fair Ruritania, land of gay romance

Where the people have a strange and curious mania 

For gathering in the public square to dance.

Derision of the gods

You don't have to limit the current examples of Ruritanian comic opera to Brexit. (You didn't think I'd leave out Brexit, did you?) For another contemporary recreation of Ruritanian incompetence, I herewith submit to you Ukraine. 

There, a comedian with zero political experience, who stars in a TV sitcom about a shlub with no political experience who is accidently elected President of Ukraine, was in fact elected President of Ukraine. A perfect example of life imitating art, imitating life, imitating art, in a zen-like wheel of repetitive insanity. 

We don’t need versified parodies of operettas. The gods are already mocking us.

The new Ukranian President Zelenskiy almost makes Trump look good. He has no political experience, and makes promises that call for explanations, without offering any explanations. In other words, he's just like Trump, only funnier. Zelenskiy has promised to fight governmental corruption without explaining how he’ll do it. Ditto his promise to end the conflict with Russia in Eastern Ukraine. 

(Maybe he’ll do both by simply surrendering the nation to Russia. That would serve the citizens of Ukraine right for thinking they’re in on the joke.)

Should deBlasio's campaign slogan

be "You could do worse?"

Now we come to wavering U.S. Presidential candidate Bill deBlasio, who presently happens to be mayor of New York, the city where I live. DeBlasio's strongest claim to the Presidency, so far as I can determine, is that he is not really the worst mayor New York has ever had. He is merely incompetent. Not to mention tone deaf.

For an example of his tone deafness I give you his stubborn insistence on going to the gym each morning. No, there’s nothing wrong with going to the gym. It’s how and where he goes to the gym.

The mayor lives in an official residence on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He works in City Hall, in lower Manhattan. Between those two points there are, last I counted, three Ys (the closest to him only a few blocks from his residence) and more private health clubs that I can count. So where does he go?

To his favorite YMCA in Brooklyn, a round trip drive of — I’m estimating here — twelve miles. But deBlasio doesn’t take the subway, the way the late Mayor Abe Beame often did. Instead, he gets into a gas-guzzling SUV, followed by a a security detail in two other gas-guzzling SUVs, and burns carbon all the way to Brooklyn and back.

Cogestion pricing? That's

for the little people.

Then, because traffic gridlock is so bad in New York, deBlasio slams the city with a congestion pricing tax that has upped my taxi fare whenever I need a taxi to go to the doctor, or when I’m horribly late to someone’s home. 

DeBlasio's traffic congestion tax adds to the impossibility for most New Yorkers of owning any kind of a car, for any reason, in Manhattan. Make an exception here for the super-rich, who deBlasio aids and abets while opposing them.

And then he positions himself as an environmentalist.

Why won’t he walk to a neighborhood gym? He evidently loves his Brooklyn Y more than he loves any thing else. Which means, if he becomes President, that Air Force One will be flying him to New York each morning, where a Presidential motorcade will meet him on a daily basis and take him to his Brooklyn Y and then back to the airport again. Terrorist crisis? Let it wait. President deBlasio is on his treadmill to oblivion.

Did I mention that in New York the subways are a mess, public housing is falling apart, potholes are a plague, infrastructure is rusting, affordable housing is vanishing, triple-digit million dollar skyscraper condos are sprouting like weeds, and most of the city’s once great schools continue to be mediocre at best?

One reason for all that? Fourteen of the city’s agencies, offices and corporations lack a permanent head. The mayor simply hasn’t gotten around to doing that part of his job. It’s more Trump-like than Trump.

Will they love him in November

like they do in Nevada?

Meanwhile, incompetent deBlasio busily buzzes off to faraway places in Iowa and Nevada, testing the waters for enthusiasm about his candidacy for President.

All this is right on trend. Tone deaf incompetence is creeping toward universality. Have I mentioned Venezuela? Do I need to?

So that’s why I’m considering running for President. If elected, I promise to sleep in, wake up in foul moods, throw temper tantrums wherever and whenever possible, secure world peace including between Israel and Palestine, eliminate nuclear weapons, tax the rich until they bleed from their eyeballs, fix the environment, lower temperatures two degrees Celsius, get us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, provide Medicare for all (but only for the people who want it), and force every child of a celebrity millionaire to take the college entrance exams under the trained and watchful eyes of murderous thugs armed with AR-15s. 

Vote for me.

Hand wringing at the Associated Press: neutrality, politics, Pussy Riot, Ukraine, Cossacks, Sevastopol, Crimea, and the nomenclature of geography

O, the handwringing agony AP goes through,
explaining where Crimea is.

The Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, wherever their borders begin and end (the borders keep moving around), are not my favorite parts of the world.

My grandparents fled from that general vicinity, a genetically-challenged horde of remorseless barbarians and rapists called Cossacks chasing them down on horseback from behind, cracking what were probably the very same whips they used on Pussy Riot a century later.

So I have not the slightest yearning to visit the aulde sod. Not ever. Screw ‘em. Chernobyl was what they richly deserved.

As you might gather from what I’ve written so far, I am not a purely unbiased observer. In fact, anybody who can remain unbiased about that part of the world, in my opinion, has a brain made of equal parts of machine parts, fried microchips and sawdust. So far as I’m concerned, everybody there – pick whatever political flavor you prefer – is an odious turd until incontrovertibly proven otherwise.

So I watch with some cold-blooded amusement as the Associated Press gets its knickers in a twist deciding what and where the hell Crimea is, and how to locate it geographically while remaining unbiased. Or at least while maintaining the appearance of being unbiased.

Of course, all news reporting must have some kind of bias. Reporters and editors choose what to observe and report, and what to leave out, and how to arrange what they do report. Otherwise, an AP report of a public execution might begin, "Edmund 'The Thug' Cossackova was hanged in public today in front of a crowd of 1172 people, 42 percent of whom were wearing brown shoes and 61 percent were wearing black shoes while most of the remainder wore sneakers, except for a woman in purple pumps...."

But I’m wandering off-topic. Well, only sort of.

In a recent post on its own blog, those cog-brained Makers Of Important Decisions at the AP wrung their hands and declared:

Previously, we wrote “SEVASTOPOL, Ukraine (AP).” But Ukraine no longer controls Crimea, and AP datelines should reflect the facts on the ground.Therefore, effective this week, we are using the city name and “Crimea”: “SEVASTOPOL, Crimea (AP).”

 But wait a second, you totally unbiased, always accurate, AP neuterheads. Russia is in the process of annexing Crimea, if not the whole Ukraine, right? So shouldn’t your stories be datelined, “SEVASTOPOL Russia, (AP)?”

Well, err, ah, um, uh, n-n-n-nooo says the AP. Why?  And they explain that, too.

Why not “SEVASTOPOL, Russia” if Russia formalizes its annexation of the territory? The reason is that Crimea is geographically distinct from Russia; they have no land border. Saying just the city name and “Crimea” in the dateline, even in the event of full annexation, would be consistent with how we handle geographically separate parts of other countries. For instance, we just say “Sicily” and “Sardinia” in datelines — “PALERMO, Sicily (AP)” — even though they are part of Italy, and “Guadeloupe” in datelines

So, uh, let me see if I understand this then, AP. When you report from Alaska or Hawaii, which are geographically separate from the lower 48 of the USA, you don’t consider them part of the United States? 

Well, yeah, I get it that you dateline stories “Honolulu, Hawaii (AP)” and “Anchorage, Alaska, (AP) but that’s no different from datelining stories “Buffalo, New York (AP),” or “East Yipsilanti, Michigan (AP)” and both of those are geographically contiguous with the rest of the United States.

And what about Nantucket, Massachusetts? It’s an island, that is detached from the rest of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So shouldn't you be datelining stories from there, “Nantucket, Atlantic Ocean (AP)?” Or, “The Independent Island and Primarily Wealthy Peoples’ Republic of Nantucket (AP)?”

And what about the island of Manhattan, which is not only separated by water from the mainland United States, but also from Brooklyn and Queens and the rest of New York State? If you follow your own stupid rule, shouldn't the dateline from a story about Times Square be datelined, "Broadway and 42nd Street, Manhattan (AP)?"

Once you start going down this road to nonsense nomenclature, dear editors, you're going to get lost  in a knotted tangle of your own underwear. And don’t expect the rest of us to find and untie you.

We’re all too busy wondering what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and whether Putin is toying with World War III. You’ll have to count the angels dancing on the head of a pin all by yourselves, while we look at news reports written by people who concern themselves with the news, not with appearances and politically neutral nomenclature.

Nuclear catastrophes for dummies: I’m talking to you, Lindsay Graham

Required reading for
Republicans and Tea
Party stalwarts

Let me start out with a small dose of whatever the opposite of nostalgia is.

I’m talking about when I was in the fifth grade, or maybe it was the fourth grade, back in Nineteen F….well, nevermind the year. What I have in mind is a day when my teacher, complying with instructions from the New York City Board of Education, which in turn was complying with orders from whatever department ran something called Civil Defense, taught us a life-saving drill.

The drill went like this. Out of the blue, the teacher would shout, “Take cover!” And we nine- and ten-year olds would dive under our wooden desks and cover our heads with our arms. It may have looked silly, but this was going to protect us from a nuclear blast and nuclear radiation. Don’t ask me how. I still haven’t figured it out.

Black and blue under

my old school desk

Drills like this continued through high school. I have to tell you that as we grew older, the desks – the old fashioned kind, standing on wrought iron legs that were screwed to the floor ­ – the desks seemed to grow smaller a. A number of times I banged myself up pretty badly, knocking a knee against the wooden seat, or banging an elbow or a forearm or my head against the wrought iron legs. I had angry black and blue bruises from practicing safety.

And the beauty part was, none of it was worth a tinker’s damn. You can’t protect yourself from nuclear radiation by hiding under a wooden desk and putting your arms over your head like a puppy who’s afraid he’s going to get swatted with a newspaper. What you can do in this position is, you can get very nasty radiation burns on your forearms and eyelids before you go blind and you die vomiting from radiation sickness.

Had war ever broken out, the United States and Russia  would have been as done as a porkchop broiled down to ashes and a charred bone on a barbecue grill. We had something called MAD, which stood not for Mother’s Against Drunks, or something having to do with Madison Avenue and advertising, but for Mutually Assured Destruction.

The ultimate MAD men

MAD was kind of a lunatic deal between the United States and the then Soviet Union: you can launch a hail of nukes at us and kill us all, but before we’re all dead, we’ll do the same to you. The beauty part of the deal was, it worked both in forward and reverse. Whether you were an American or a Russian, the warning was the same: don’t start up or somebody’s going to roast your hide even if you roast theirs.

Eventually, somebody realized that given the inevitability of Murphy’s Law, if we kept relying on MAD, something was going to go wrong, go wrong, go…well, you know. A piece of radar would read an aluminum foil pie plate tossed like a frisbee as an incoming nuke. Or some bored-to-insanity soldier in a silo would press a red button just to break up the day and see what happens. Instantly, somebody would launch a counter-strike. And them…kaboom!

So eventually, we learned to live without worrying much about the Russians, and they, without worrying much about us. It was just too MAD. We instead spent our time invading small Asian and middle-eastern nations instead, and later sending home only the dead bodies of our volunteers because, after Viet Nam, we finally eliminated the draft. 

Smart, brutal gangsters

The Russians, meanwhile starting acting like American gangsters with bigger-than-normal brains. They stole natural resources. They stole entire companies, and when the lawyer for one of those companies, a man named Sergei Magnitsky protested, they arrested him and beat him to death in prison.

Sitting on top of this festering heap of corruption and violence is what I can best describe as a crooked ex-cop, Vladimir Putin, former head of the KGB, or whatever they call it now. Putin has a rogue cop’s mentality. If you want it, grab it. If somebody protests, tune him up ‘till he dies. You want the Ukraine back? Send in the troops.

Putin is a very dangerous excuse for a human being, and what he wants now more than anything is to bring the Ukraine, historically a Soviet republic, back under the control of Moscow. So while his troops in the Ukraine might (or might not) be committing an act of sheer brazen theft, the last thing you want to do is walk up to him and tell him his mother is a diseased hooker, and furthermore he can go pound sand up his butt. 

This is a delicate situation. Mistakes happen. And mistakes breed automatic counter-mistakes, thanks to the MAD system left over from the cold war.

Enter Lindsay Graham,

high as a kite on stupid pills

Senator Lindsay Graham has seized on the current situation in the Ukraine like a fifteen year old juvenile delinquent, trying to find out if it’s really true what they say about gasoline and matches. He’s actually only trying to make President Obama look bad now that Obamacare is starting to work, taking a Let’s-you-and-Putin-Fight stance. But he’s holding a lighted match while standing over an open container of gasoline, and anything explosive can happen.

On CNN recently, Graham declared:

“Putin's on the wrong side of history. He's on the wrong side of the law. Make him pay a price. The Ukrainian people are dying for their freedom. I hope we will stand with them. Not just in words, but in deeds.”

Stand with them and 

do what, die with them?

Even if you’re not really talking about military action, Lindsay, one thing has a way, as they say, of leading to another. Some homicidal yutz assassinated the crown prince of Sarajevo, and the next thing you know, we had World War I. Somebody today blockades Russia and the next  thing you know…kaboom!

Well, the good news is that if people like Lindsay Graham have their way, we can fan the nearly-dead embers of the Cold War back into a nice crackling campfire. In order to arm for that, we’d have to reinstitute the draft. And once the lives of virtually every American son and daughter are at stake, you can bet the voters won’t be putting up with bullshit like Dick Chaney's Iraq invasion again.

However, a warning. One of these days, just by accident, a cold war across a now-rusty iron curtain could get red hot. And if that happens with Russia, happy Nukeday.

I’d like to leave you with with the heartwarming conversation between a young infantry private in training at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and a grizzled old training sergeant, back in 1962. It was during a lesson  on something called CBR – Chemical, Biological and Radiological warfare. And here, I swear, is precisely how it went.

PRIVATE: Sergeant, what do you do if a nuke goes off say, within walking distance? 

SERGEANT: Son, let me teach you what to do by the numbers. One: Ten-hut! Two: At ease. Three: with your feet spaced eighteen to twenty-four inches apart, do a deep knee bend. Four: stick your head between your legs and push it as far back as it can go. And five: kiss your ass goodbye.