And please, 2020, take Donald Trump and his entire administration with you on your way down.
Monday, December 28, 2020
So long 2020, it's been lousy to know ya. And good riddance!
And please, 2020, take Donald Trump and his entire administration with you on your way down.
Tuesday, December 22, 2020
A Christmas carol for the time of Trump and plague
On the first day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
A phony Trump College degree.
On the second day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Two failed casinos
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the third day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Three pandemics spreading
Two failed casinos
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the fourth day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Four dissembling lawyers
Three pandemics spreading
Two failed casinos
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the fifth day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos failed
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the sixth day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Six walls a-building
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos failed
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the seventh day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Seven speeches lying
Six walls a-building
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos failed
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the eighth day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Eight caged children crying
Seven speeches lying
Six walls a-building
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos failed
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the ninth day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Nine Ivankas vamping
Eight caged children crying
Seven speeches lying
Six walls a-building
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos bust
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the tenth day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Ten Kushners complaining
Nine Ivankas vamping
Eight caged children crying
Seven speeches lying
Six walls a-building
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos bust
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the eleventh day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Eleven Rudys ranting
Ten Kushners complaining
Nine Ivankas vamping
Eight caged children crying
Seven speeches lying
Six walls a-building
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos bust
And a phony Trump College degree.
On the twelveth day of Christmas
The Donald gave to me
Twelve pardons absolving
Eleven Rudys ranting
Ten Kushners complaining
Nine Ivankas vamping
Eight caged children crying
Seven speeches lying
Six walls a-building
Me-lan-i-a
Lawyers with forked tongues
Pandemics
Two casinos bust
And a phony Trump College degree
Friday, December 18, 2020
The Execution of the Week. Is it coming soon to a TV station near you?
Donald Trump first publicly advertised his sociopathic blood lust
with this full page ad in 1989
Over at the Rectification of Names, the blogger Yastreblyansky suggests that Donald Trump’s next act may be another television reality show.
But instead of being “Apprentice”-like, this show will be “effectively the ongoing Trump presidency as he makes incredible deals for the American people, drains the swamp, and makes America great again.”
How will he do that?
“…the apprentice will be working for a government rather than a corporation, on a different project each season; for example creating healthcare for the American people that is much better and cheaper than Obamacare, eating China’s lunch, or building a wall and making Mexico pay for it.”
I won’t spoil the rest for you. It’s a hoot! Get yourself over to Yastreblyansky when you’re done here and read the piece in its hilarious entirety. However, I don’t think that’s where Trump is really going. And no, I’m not saying he doesn’t want a reality show. I’m saying that his mind has taken a turn too dark and too ominous for light entertainment about launching a government program.
Trump’s blood lust was merely incipient when he took out a full page ad in the New York Times years ago to advocate the execution of five teen-agers who turned out to be innocent of assault and rape. Besides, New York State was no longer executing anybody for anything by then.
But his urge to kill human beings has now bloomed into a tangible thing. After 17 years with no Federal executions, and despite the fact that support for capital punishment is dribbling away, the U.S. government has carried out more executions in one year that all the state governments combined.
Nor is that enough for Donald Trump. He and his outgoing Attorney General, Bill Barr, have arranged for five more human beings to get snuffed before Inauguration Day, including the only woman on death row. She will be the first woman to be executed by the Federal Government in 70 years.
President-Elect Biden has vowed that there will be no Federal executions on his watch — so what’s a poor bloodthirsty sociopath like Donald Trump to do? Here’s what I think. I think he’s going to launch a TV series called “The Execution of the Week.”
Beheadings, stonings,
and so bloody much more!
Each week Donald Trump will go to a different country and witness a different execution by a different and more barbarous method.
One week it’ll be a public beheading ordered by Jared Kushner's pal in Saudi Arabia, Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Another week, a trembling political dissident in China gets shot in the back of the head with a bullet that his family was forced to pay for.
Yet another week, Trump will go to Moscow where we’ll witness the FSB kill a journalist by squirting novichok in her eyes. And so on. Did I mention stoning an adulteress and a homosexual to death in Brunei? We could have two brutal executions in one night!
The shows will be an hour long. During each, we’ll hear from an advocate for the accused, from proponents of the death penalty, as well as interpretations of the law in the nation Trump is visiting. Legal commentary will come from some of the last remaining Fox News commentators who Trump still likes, like Judge Jeanine Pirro.
Outside “experts” will also get called in to comment on the guilt of the condemned person or the incontrovertible appropriateness of the sentence — learned deep thinkers like Rudy Giuliani and Tucker Carlson.
Finally, the accused themselves will be given an opportunity to plead their own cases, and grovel on their hands and knees before Trump, begging for their lives. Trump will be wearing a special gold ring, which the condemned prisoners will be required to kiss. But Trump’s answer will always be the same:
“Forget it," he'll sneer, "you’re executed!”
At that point, America’s formerly MAGA audiences will get to watch an actual life getting snuffed out, while Trump stands and applauds approvingly. When it's over he'll grab Melania's hand as the two board his own private aircraft. They'l fly to a palatial house called Far é Gargle at an undisclosed location in an undisclosed state.
No doubt Trump expects that the ratings will go through the roof.
Given this nation’s recent pathological history, he’s probably right.
Monday, December 14, 2020
Merde in France! Les restaurants! Les bars! Un désastre énorme!
So listen up, plague victims. Here in New York, vaccine or no vaccine, infection and death rates are so high that the mayor has finally bitten the bullet, swallowed the bitter pill, and closed restaurants to all but outdoor dining. (Lotsa luck on that, with temperatures often hovering close to freezing, particularly when it’s raining, snowing, or the wind is blowing.)
The cries of pain among New York’s restaurateurs and barkeeps are legion. But the problem isn’t just local. Or even just American. In France, the great, les formidables, and the merely modest-but-superb neighborhood restaurants are also feeling the pain of COVID-19.
Restaurants and cafés there have been ordered closed until January 20th, and then only if the pandemic subsides sufficiently, in the judgment of the authorities, to allow reopenings. Meanwhile, bars and nightclubs in France have been shuttered since October 30th, reports the publication Connexion France.
The United States, with slightly more than five times the population of France, has roughly eight times as many COVID-19 cases — but the government of France seems a bit more determined than a certain crowd at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to tamp down its nation’s infection rate even before everybody can get inoculated.
Glock? What Glock? I have
my 50-caliber Hyperbole
When Americans are told to mask up and stop eating out, they tend to reach for semi-automatic weapons and plot to kidnap the governor of their state. In France, they instead lunge for their hyperbole.
Once the piddling trickle of government loans to stressed restaurants has stopped, said an executive of a food service research company, “a massacre will happen very suddenly.” Presumably he was thinking about a massacre of the restaurant business, not of government officials. But even so.
Meanwhile, French representatives of the sous chefs in hotel kitchens also had some wild hyperbole simmering on the front burner.
"We hope to make this crazy government understand that the sector is on the verge of collapse, and that we are closer to having one foot in the grave than being able to reopen," said a vice-president of a French hotel union.
Perhaps it's worth noting here that restaurants, cafés and bars have a place in French culture that lacks a real equivalent in the United States.
Dumpy apartments and
magnificent bistros
If you’ve been to France and noticed all the cafés, restaurants, and bars that all but clutter the grand boulevards and narrow back streets of French cities, there’s a reason for it. And that reason goes back to — I’ll tell you how I know this stuff a bit further on — that reason goes back to French income taxes. Specifically, income taxes in the 19th and early 20thCenturies.
See, France, like all advanced nations, needed an income tax to thrive. But French manners — la politesse — made it a big no-no to ask people what they earned. Or for their employers to snitch on them. So instead, more than a century ago, the French equivalent of the IRS would send an inspector to your home to look around. He’d finger the damask drapes, sink his shoes into the plush carpeting, ogle the Dégas painting on your living room wall and think “These people are clearly loaded.” And then you'd get socked with a tax bill that might you wish you had both feet in the grave.
Disgust the inspector
To counter taxes and trick the inspectors, French citizens began turning their homes into dumps. The stuffing isn’t coming out of the couch? Quick, adopt a cat! The paint is peeling off the walls?Merveilleux! One has accidently spilled a pleasantly insoucient glass of Margaux on la carpette? Don’t try to blot it up. Leave the stain there to disgust the inspector.
Unsurprisingly, personal living quarters during that era became so yucky that the French didn’t much like entertaining at home. They tended to invite friends to dinner, or just for drinks, out of the house. And before you could say Ooh la la, restaurants and cafés were ubiquitous in France.
The tax laws have since changed and some French folks do entertain at home — usually a very nice home — these days. But the restaurants, the cafés, and the bars are all still there, although they're closed for the moment. Or for more than a moment if they get snuffed by the fallout from COVID-19
From fox hunts, to culture courses,
to very chi chi weddings
I learned all this stuff about eating in restaurants and its place in the lives of French citizens as a young college student, attending a way-off-campus seminar on French culture at a then-decrepit castle about 30 miles south of Paris. It was, and still is called Chateau Meridon. The educators who once ran the place, which was originally built as a French baron’s country hunting castle, have long since departed. These days, new owners have spiffed the joint up, and made it a venue primarily for elegant weddings, offsite business conferences — and who knows, maybe even a stray bar mitzvah. Although these days, Covid-19 may be inflicting pain on the chateau, too.
But I hope you'll remember that until recently, and with any luck soon again, one of the best reasons to go to France is to go to restaurants, from the Five Star Michelin gastronomic palaces, to the little neighborhood bistros.
Is there a moral to this story? Yeah, sort of. Chuck the diet. Eat while you can, for tomorrow you — or perhaps your favorite restaurant — may be dead.
Friday, December 11, 2020
Nuclear bombs, dead bodies, capital punishment, and Donald Trump
The Nagasaki blast. It killed fewer people than all the Americans who have died of COVID-19 to date. (Photo, Wikimedia Commons.)
As of December 11th, the date I’m posting this, America has lost 293,000 of its citizens to COVID-19. Commentators have taken to comparing the huge number of COVID-19 deaths to the loss of American soldiers in WWII.
I prefer another comparison.
A nuclear bomb.
In fact, two nuclear bombs.
The A-bombs that the U.S. used to flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to estimates that are sometimes described as “over conservative,” killed or wounded a combined 225,000 people. That’s 68,000 fewer than the 293,000 Americans dead of COVID-19.
An atomic blast aimed at taking out a city of 293,000 or fewer persons could completely wipe out, the entire population and then some of, municipalities like: Savannah, Georgia; Paterson, New Jersey; Sunnyvale, California; Jackson, Mississippi; Springfield Missouri; Salem, Oregon; Providence, Rhode Island; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Vancouver, Washington; Tallahassee, Florida; Little Rock, Arkansas; Montgomery, Alabama; Salt Lake City, Utah; Birmingham, Alabama; Des Moines, Iowa; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Buffalo, New York; Lincoln, Nebraska; and…but why go on?
America, we’ve been nuked
There are 251 significant American cities have smaller populations than the American population lost to COVID-19 thus far. America, we’ve been nuked. Yes, nuked by a virus, not an atom bomb. But the end result is the same — dead American bodies, unimaginable human suffering, and a line of coffins stretching into the distant horizon, and growing longer every day.
And who, through his policy of neglect, denial, and downright lies, not to mention inattention when there was a golf game to be joined, is responsible for likely half those deaths? Yes, Donald Trump.
He has, whether through benign neglect or, more likely cold indifference, killed off enough Americans to fill a good-sized city, with more deaths coming every day, more than 3,000 a day at latest count.
Is there no accountability for this?
Trump also likes to poison,
shoot, and electrocute prisoners
Remember, we are talking about a president who has no qualms about putting people to death. His Justice Department this week executed a man named Brandon Bernard for murder who was just 18 years old at the time the crime was committed. The case had been appealed up to the Supreme Court. The New York Times reports:
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that if the prosecution had not withheld the evidence and knowingly elicited false testimony as Mr. Bernard claimed, there is reasonable probability that he would not have been sentenced to death. She also contended that an appeals court that denied Mr. Bernard’s motion in a case related to the testimony “got it wrong,” and required too strict a standard that “perversely rewards the government for keeping exculpatory information secret.”
Speaking of perversity, in Donald Trump’s haste to execute as many prisoners as possible before he leaves office, Bernard was one of six federal prisoners scheduled to be executed between election day and Trump's last day as President. And Trump, evidently in the thrall of his own depraved personality, has urged that instead of lethal injection, his condemned victims ought to be electrocuted or face a firing squad. In the face of declining support for the death penalty, even some parts of the religious Christian community that usually backs him seem shocked.
A twisted inner lust?
It’s hard to imagine why Donald Trump wants this, other than to satisfy some twisted inner lust for cruelty.
But if the murder of two people, or murder committed by a mentally-ill woman are worthy of the death penalty by electrocution, a hail of bullets, or even an injection of poison in the view and practice of the Trump Administration, what kind of punishment is Donald Trump worthy of for an atomic bomb’s worth of dead Americans?
And will he ever be held to account?
Sunday, December 06, 2020
Thursday, December 03, 2020
What will Donald Trump wear when he finally moves out of the White House? Plus: Straying monoliths and Lisa Desjardins' vanishing cat.
Just a suggestion
It ought to be evident to just about everybody by now that our beloved President will not go cheerfully, if at all. He may get out of the White House by January 20th, but not with a smile on his face. And who knows whether he will find some excuse to refuse to get out?
What if he has to be ejected by force? Some folks relish the thought of his being escorted out in handcuffs. Or just walked out with each arm held in a hammerlock by a different Secret Service agent or U.S. Marshal. Not I.
I prefer carrying him out in a straightjacket, like the addled madman he is. It reinforces what everyone ought to know — that he is an out-of-control loser who belongs not in the Oval Office, but in a padded cell at an institution for the criminally insane.
Which brings me to another bit of insanity.
Yup. This thing. It popped up (supposedly) in the Utah desert one day, all science fiction-y and mysterious. Then just as mysteriously it vanished, only to pop up again (assuming it's the same one) in Romania. And then in California.
Some think it's a beacon for interstellar space ships, manned by extra-terrestrials on their way here to conquer and eat us. Some think it's a practical joke. Some, including me, think it might be a new phase in the work of that mysterious English artist, Banksy. Either that or you practical jokers in Sigma Alpha Epsilon had better cut it out.
But lately, my opinion on the matter has begun to change. I think its mysterious disappearance is of a piece with the disappearance of the cat who used to intrude on the reports-from-home of PBS Newshour reporter Lisa Desjardins.
Thanks to the COVID-19 Plague, Desjardins has been reporting to us more or less regularly from a room in her home. From time to time, her tuxedo cat would pop up in the background. I mean this cat (circled in black on the white shawl atop the gray ottoman) who I caught snoozing while Lisa was giving us the Washington lowdown.
Once, (alas, I didn't think to photograph it) the cat was lasciviously licking its most private parts. Perhaps that's why I haven't seen the animal recently. I suspect that during broadcast hours it has been banished to the bathroom that contains its sand box.
Or perhaps, Lisa's cat is with the monolith in Utah. Or is it Rumania?Or is it California?
Between the pandemic and all the Trump insanity, not to mention the wandering monoliths and the banned cat, I wouldn't be surprised if all of us end up in straightjackets.
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