PMC Commentary

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PROGRESS — Update 3 — minutes away

First this:

"Leadership, Senator, leadership, should I have the honor to be nominated." — Nominee Pete Hegseth, speaking to Sen. Tommy Tuberville at his confirmation hearing.

Such were the first live words I heard broadcast from Trump's 30-ring circus of wonder-striking incompetence now on tour in Toontown. No high-wire act from Hegseth, but gobs of excellence in bungling and self-preservation.

Thus began the bottomless void of Trump-appointed unfitness. Also abysmal were the Senate committee's Hegsethian carnival barkers as they tippytoed their way through the malodorous heaps of Pete's monkeyshit.

For them, off the agenda were any troubles or worries, this business of managing an $850b hellfire machine. One Trump-pocketed bagman asked the potential defense secretary how many pushups he could do. Earlier, the denseness-insuperable Tommy T. consumed his time for yet-plumbed unseriousness by gibbering about woke pansies forcing DEI seminars on our manly troops.   

Day One only, only one hearing. And this is the high point of Trump's Toontown, for it's not yet begun to lay waste.

***

Update 3  

Well, yes and no. The page under construction is not this one. It's moving. In fact it has moved, and what's more, its construction is done — save for a third party flipping an on-switch (as I understand it).

Any minute, that's the word. As of midnight last, the official, automated word from this commentary's new platform was that the spark of creation will occur within 48 hours. Whereupon my vast team of computer engineers and graphic designers advised me ... Who the hell knows. Could be Tuesday. Could be Wednesday. Probably a conservative CYA word.

Thus, I am now doing as you may do. Every so often I go to pmcarpenter.com and take a look. The easier way to do so from time to time, if you so choose, is by entering that precise address in your url window, bar, or whatever it's called, and then bookmarking it. (Important: For the new site, any other, preexisting address ist kaput. So bury it.) 

Any ... minute.

When satire goes sour

Andy, my boy, what were you thinking? There's little in this world that I enjoy as much as Swiftian remarks. And you make them so well. But, as you know, satire — good satire — must be based on reality. Which leads us to a high school setting of the dreaded compare and contrast.  

True, your latest touches on reality, a moment of it, a flicker, a flash, one rare occurrence in which the U.S. Supreme Court recalled, though only by a majority of one, that we have a Constitution and from it, whole bunches of laws have sprung. Hence, your latest: 

Nation Stunned By Apparent Existence of Rule of Law

Again, a touch, or, to be precise, an aberration. A welcome one, but on the other hand, a grim, ghastly one. It reminds us just how rarely the rule of law has reigned of late, as well as all that comes from its reliability. The latter appears to be shot.

What's more, no longer are we haunted only by the law's enforcers, those who've exchanged the very foundations of legal theory and Western civilization for self-interested, capricious lawlessness and Soviet-style governance. We chose to haunt ourselves.    

 

 

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A government training ground for petty inflexibility - and deploying the ultimate defense

Last seen I was telling you that I'd resume writing just after my arrival in the Seattle area on Tuesday. With exacting promptness I then violated precisely that on Wednesday. But today, Thursday, I'm here to report that though yesterday's transgression was real, what I committed against the Transportation Security Administration on Tuesday was one of a sinless phantom.

Not to boast of my infinite virtues, but I'm a gentle soul. Still, on rarest occasion, my fuse will shorten and my larynx explode with a stream of invectives aimed at any knuckleheaded organization that abuses my sainted nature. In the cranium-musclebound opinion of TSA, however, the wrongdoer was I. My crime of heinous enormity: In a carryon was a bottle of body wash.

This grave offense called for summary confiscation, although the Big Book of Rationality defines it as theft. The offending object was to be a belated Christmas present for my Seattle-based daughter; the item, a pricey little thing with some sort of exotic odor, brilliantly marketed as a niche product to gullible gift-giving ignoramuses like me.  

I'll spare you the megillah's almost impressive torrent of TSA's stupefying rules, regulations and stern, immovable proscriptions. Some, though, just might contain an on-the-spot workaround, assuming an on-the-spot agent possesses comprehensive knowledge of the subdepartment's own measures and obliges the baffled traveler with the appropriate countermeasure.

My pit bull official was not of that breed. (After my final arrival and later digging around in TSA's website I discovered the puzzle's solution.) And so the ensuing theft of my property converted to ashes what little was left of my fuse; I bent to slip shoes on and arose with a volcanic eruption of seething profanities.  

I confess my untoward part of the needless, even silly conflict — an instance comparable to a traffic cop writing someone a ticket for doing 36 mph in a 35 mph zone and then impounding the car, while obvious good sense would have precluded both acts. An exaggeration, though still comparable.

But my far greater regret? Rather than blowing up I should have whipped out what for quite some time I've hoped becomes a commonplace among baffled others. It's a hugely valid stance to take — especially against official pettiness — even though it lacks the wobbliest of civilized legs. That's okay, it's the principle of the thing, and more so the much-needed continuing exposure of what the president-elect has exhaustingly called our two-tiered system of justice. He's damn right about that.

Every U.S citizen is expected to kindly and quietly obey officialdom's countless rules — including the super dumb but perfectly by-the-book evadable ones — and of course every law. Today, a correction, or update. You are expected to do so. A few of the privileged are not.

Trump has made a joke of Georgia state felony charges, two extraordinarily serious federal indictments, and the presiding judge of his New York state felony conviction — primed for a toss-out by the incoming president's personal Supreme Court — recently announced that sentencing would be bare of even a fine, let alone any jail time.  

Or, take the civil side of such things. Monday, again in NY, a U.S. district judge held Rudy Giuliani in contempt of court for a second time; the former lawyer has repeatedly defied court orders to help satisfy a $148 million defamation judgment against him. You, I — we would have been in big trouble, right then and there. And tomorrow another judge will hold hearings on yet another of Giuliani's contempt, unless he weasels out of it via his claim of sudden poor health.

I should be so privileged, whether facing mountains of criminal charges or staring down all manner of unwelcome behavior. You too should share in the privilege. The first above malefactor was the selfsame everyday citizen of these shaky United States — shaky only because of his many, many other acts of illegality and chronic boorishness — when his legal woes began and then, one by one, collapsed.

It just seems to me that the ideal way all other U.S. citizens confronted by disagreeable governmental authority should loudly and, perhaps, even profanely proclaim that since such powers allowed Citizen Trump to simply wave them off, they're due the same right. It wouldn't be long, I should also think, before a great majority of citizens came to understand that it was the sitting president of the United States who uncorked these acts of civil disobedience on a massive scale — that he brought down our once-reasonably civil society.

Two brief must-reads, one reasonably short must-hear

Today I'm headed for the Great Northwest. Destination Seattle, home to daughter and fiancé. I'll return on the 19th, and of course continue writing in the interim.   

Before departing I want to note three essential items, in ascending order of their predictability.  

Trump Confirms Jeff Bezos' Report on the Imminent Reduction of His Campaign-Promised Tariffs

The president-elect affirmed the news in a Truth Social post: "The story in the Washington Post, quoting so-called anonymous sources, which don’t exist, incorrectly states that my tariff policy will be pared back. That is wrong. The Washington Post knows it’s wrong. It’s just another example of Fake News."

New Evidence Revealed: God Speaks Only to Schizophrenics

From Andy Borowitz:

Elon Musk Tops Forbes List of Most Exhausting Men

NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—Declaring himself “deeply humbled by this honor,” Elon Musk on Tuesday landed at the top of Forbes’s list of the 400 Most Exhausting Men.

In an impressive feat, he dethroned Donald J. Trump, who had topped the list for the past 37 years.

The Tesla CEO said that he had “no intention” of resting on his laurels as he rolled out ambitious plans to meddle in the elections of Sweden, Nepal, and Botswana.

According to Forbes, despite being the World’s Most Exhausting Man, Musk is still not interesting.

 

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A presidential tragedy and its tragic aftereffect

An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day.

— President Joe Biden, op-ed, The Washington Post

Thus demonstrated is the wicked power of the passive voice; it spares accuracy, reality, and frequently a malicious perpetrator. (President Nixon on Watergate: "Mistakes were made.")    

A moment of restoration: "Donald Trump mounted an unrelenting effort to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day" — this day, four years ago.

Yes, I know, the honored rule of presidential tactfulness and all that; another deployment of Those Who Shall Not Be Named. Yet every rule has an exception, and this one positively screamed for it.

The "unrelenting effort" came not from some mysterious Floridian wind. One man called it to life and unleashed a hellish four years of a nation needlessly, viciously divided.

Topping off Biden's peculiarity of language is its host, The Washington Post. About his op-ed, the paper reports that "President Biden warned Americans not to forget the violent attack ... and he accused President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of trying 'to rewrite'" history. 

The reporter, Michael Shear, at least has the decency to use the active voice. Yet he matches and even surpasses Biden's peculiarity by writing that he "accused President-elect Donald J. Trump." True, the therein-named party is known by all, we get it. But Michael, where in God's name did President Biden accuse Trump? The name is nowhere in the op-ed. 

Back to our theme, which I write sans passive anything. Continues Shear: "In 2022, a year after the Capitol assault, Mr. Biden stood in the building’s Statuary Hall to condemn the marauding mob."

I sought the transcript of his remarks. Again to the rescue arrived the passive: "One year ago today, in this sacred place, democracy was attacked — simply attacked," said Biden. Simply, however, was pin-pointingly accurate. The attack was so bloody simple, it was the first of its kind to erupt absent any human agency.   

Such a silly and minor thing, some would say — fussing about the robbed-of-responsibility passive voice. To them I answer, use it all you like, go crazy with it, never again dare to actively make note of ... whatever. But among eminent politicians, there is no whatever; they trade in profundities, life and death, perhaps democracy's death.    

And to them I answer, I'm not the first to make such a fuss, and neither was Orwell when he penned the essay "Politics and the English Language." The twosome are just awful. Of our subject the author wrote: "Characteristic phrases are: render inoperative, militate against, prove unacceptable...," and now, an effort that "has been underway."

So keen on this higher-realm violation of direct, straightforward language, in the essay's closing Orwell listed a handful (six in all) of the urgently advised: "iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active."

Prepare — comes the Big Picture, as in, now. When compared to the paramount thesis of Orwell's manuscript, to the aforementioned "some" I concede only that which he conceded. The passive voice is but one villain engaged in battling what is most vital: "To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration."

The passage lies in Orwell's opening, where he also assessed a popular opinion which, I am sure, remains popular: "Any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism." 

Let us update that sentiment, or rather, its reverse effect. Had President Biden responded not in-kind but in number and name to Trump's assaults on history's truth, would we suffer this day? And throughout another 1,459 of 'em?

Think on it, Joe.

 

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America's one-man threat, his Truth Social, and your host as poet

His acknowledgement may have arrived 57 days late, but his assessment was spot on. "Our Country is a disaster, a laughing stock all over the World!" observed Trump on New Year's Day in one his otherwise crackpot epistolaries to his Truth Socialists. 

Updated just six days ago, his readership stats are from the social-media ranking site Search Logistics, which further informs us that all such platforms "will show you whatever content they need to keep" their audiences, adding, even if that content doesn’t necessarily tell the truth.

Well, I guess that pussy cat is out of the bag. I'd estimate Truth Social's ratio of untruths to truths at 20,000:1, the lone digit representing his candid admission that with him as president-elect the United States is now a disastrous laughingstock (which he misspelled, of course). Alternative interpretations are welcome. Good luck.

Other than Trump's extravagant falsehoods — which I concede are interesting reading for the morbidly inclined (moi) — what's striking about Truth Social, owned, operated and written, so to speak, by the world's most powerful human menace, is its minuscule readership. Two million? Peanuts, President Carter would have said, considering a South African neo-Nazi's site has in the neighborhood of 450 million. 

The question is to be asked: Yes, but once Trump is officially the world's most powerful menace, will his site not swell in numbers? Social Logistics answers: "It's clear the platform faces challenges in expanding beyond its core audience." One reason is provided in this post's second sentence: Truth Social is crap from a crackpot.

There are other reasons. Seventy-five percent of Americans "didn’t recognise the brand at all" in a 2022 survey, and "of the 25% of respondents who recognised Truth Social, only 16% said they liked [it]"; "only 7% of people aged 18 to 34 [the prime market for social media] said they plan to use Truth Social often"; and among Democrats, "1% said they would use it."

So here's a site that is massively unread and scarcely followed (there's also a massive difference between readers and followers), yet this unrenowned chamber pot of bottomless falsehoods has enlarged Trump's net worth by hundreds of millions of dollars. Hence another question asked, again by Search Logistics: "How much money does Truth Social make?" Its answer: "None."

The void is both emblematic of Trump's serial business failures (while enriching himself at others' expense) and deeply symbolic of his jibjabbing political rot. Our country, a disaster? Much like his first term, he's inheriting from a Democratic president a healthy economy: GDP growth, millions of new jobs, higher wages, fallen inflation and near-historic low unemployment.     

And he's about to blow it all up — again, just like his first term. Trump was just clever enough then to avoid tampering with President Obama's stellar turnaround of a typically ruinous Republican economy, until an atypical event dropped in his lap. None called his gross mishandling of the pandemic something to laugh about, however.

Now, all we can hope for, the very best we might dare anticipate, is that Trump perseveres in making America only a "laughingstock all over the world." To be regretted is that global laughter would come with domestic pain. Regretted, but deserved; pain, and lots of it, is what Americans voted for.

We on the pain-averse side will have to bear the other side's stupidity, which, I further hope, we can do without despairing. On that topic, it was a bit more than a month ago that I wrote a poem, my first-ever (and probably my last). As a lover of W.H. Auden's works, I chose the theme of his "September 1, 1939" — historically the world's most dreadful day, which he expressed brilliantly, as always, yet concluded, "May I ... /  Show an affirming flame." Meaning resistance to despair.

Such was what I attempted in my own way. I titled the poem "2015-2025," for Auden had written of his "low and dishonest decade." He also used the words "negation and despair." These two phrases I lifted from his "1939," both of them perfect in descriptive usefulness concerning our own years.

For those of you with a poetic bent or just an interest in verse forms — something I developed only while contemplating which of their innumerable variations to use — I adopted Auden's loose iambic trimeter but went with a construct known as a rondeau, commonly a poem of 13 lines, three stanzas, two separate rhymes, and in which the last line of the second and third stanzas repeat the first stanza's first line. Which produced this:

𝘈𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴
𝘈 𝘭𝘰𝘸 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘥𝘦,
𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘸 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘧𝘢𝘤𝘦
𝘚𝘱𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘪𝘹𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘯
𝘈 𝘨𝘳𝘪𝘮 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘢𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘦.

𝘠𝘦𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺 𝘳𝘩𝘺𝘮𝘦𝘥
𝘚𝘭𝘦𝘦𝘱𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘯𝘰 𝘦𝘶𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘤 𝘥𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮
𝘢𝘴 𝘈𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴.

𝘕𝘰 𝘸𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘰𝘯
𝘫𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘯𝘦𝘨𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘱𝘢𝘪𝘳,
𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘯𝘰𝘸
𝘞𝘦 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧𝘴𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘦
𝘈𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘥𝘢𝘺𝘴.

Our self-induced anni horribiles, starting with '25

I've been cranky since 9:01 a.m., the time at which I realized I had missed "Bugs Bunny & Friends," aired each Saturday at 8 a.m. on MeTV. The old Warner Bros. tunes are a kind of visual heroin for me, one desperate fix every seven days. I really do need it — especially this year for one very obvious reason — for it soothes the brain, relaxes tension, and once a week I laugh, something much too subdued since listening to some aged, self-centered gibberish from my still-extant ex-wife.

Forsooth, without my fix I fulminate for a couple hours, then turn sullen, morose and altogether gloom-drenched. Thus it is in this mood that I pass along but a few likeminded news items I ran across this morning which relate to America's one annus horribilis, courtesy mostly of the aforementioned obvious reason.  

One somewhat dated story, recommended by today's NY Times' DealBook, centered on trembling corporations trying to appease Cro-Magnon Donald Trump, his quarter-witted congressional allies, Elon Musk and their millions of entirely witless admirers who are as racist as they are fascistic. Yes, corporate trembling is all about their D.E.I. programs. Some have ingeniously changed the title of such to "I.E.D." That should throw off the racist pricks.

After reading about invertebrate corporations I moved along to another dated DealBook link (NYT), a story that briefly touched on the English tongue's contamination. The piece dealt with the corporate giants of Amazon, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs' post-pandemic requirement that all employees return to the soul-killing office five days a week.

That itself has nothing to do with language contamination, but this does. The story cited a "former senior vice president for people operations at Google." Senior veep for what? What in hell kind of dystopian sci-fi post-apocalyptic ... silliness? ... is "people operations"?

This linguistic inanity, now virulent and, for people, utterly inhuman, began with the plain simple words of "Personnel Office" being molested and mauled into "Human Resources," which makes me think of Soylent Green. Now Google's innovative toxicity, which is bound to make other senior vice presidents of "people" wet themselves with envy, then acute monkey-do.

In the story's theme — "RTO," return-to-office policies replacing remote work — we again encounter the twisting minds of corporate big shots. Google's just-cited former senior vp argued that "the academic studies that have been done [on RTO], and there are not that many, show a range of outcomes — and they generally show a kind of neutral to slightly positive."

Having risen to the upper echelons of Big Tech, this chap believed, or so I must gather, that merely asserting his assessment would put an end to the RTO debate. Like, you know, the Times reporter wouldn't check around a bit more? Well she did. She interviewed a Wharton School organizational psychologist, who essentially said the vp was an idiot, noting the opposite conclusion from "a meta-analysis of 108 studies." (Requote, senior veep: "there are not that many.")  

The corporate exec's blanket refutation of remote work "flew in the face of researchers [who] have found hybrid work benefits companies." A Stanford economics professor said "that employees who work two days a week at home are just as productive and less likely to quit." The prof was also a man of the world, telling the Times that, for instance, Amazon's RTO policy "was really an attempt to reduce the work force without official layoffs." 

But, to those who enrich themselves by impoverishing others through budget slashings and mass firings had another card up their $300 sleeves. They argued that "return-to-office mandates are driven by the belief that face-to-face interaction fosters" the wonders of "stronger teamwork, innovation and productivity," while "also reinforcing company culture."

(The passage triggered a memory and a chuckle. While in grad school studies I asked my professors for independent reading courses rather than sitting in a seminar circle which might have promoted innovation while reinforcing university "culture." To me it seemed intuitive and indisputable that I could learn a helluva lot more reading for 90 minutes instead of sitting.

After several of my reading-alone credit hours landed on the grad studies director's desk, the shit thereupon hit the department's circulating air. What in hell do you think you're doing? came the gentle inquisition. Too many independent readings attenuate the university's "culture," I was informed, among other knuckle raps. Yet I was pretty sure that one "difficult" grad student among the massive herd would not, yea, verily, could not upend one university's historic culture. Even my ego wasn't that inflated.)     

There were other news stories I read this morning that anticipated 2025's gloom, reflecting my Bugs-less own. There was the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft's report on "dark money think tanks" — big trouble looms there — and a Political Magazine piece sort-of predicting "the largest cyberattack in history"; A.I. "bad actors" igniting an "artificial market panic"; and "an infectious disease outbreak" unlike known others. I quote: "The disease is found to be one for which there is an experimental vaccine, but using it would require an emergency use authorization. The Health and Human Services leadership is now full of vaccine skeptics."      

Then a Bulwark story on Trofim Lysenko, a Stalin-era Russian biologist whose pseudointellectual theories on crop agriculture — plant biology based on Marxist ideology — sparked only crop failures, then famine and millions dead. The point? Assuming Senate confirmation, Mr. Lysenko will soon be in charge of HHS. See above.

One other item dropped in my inbox, this one from Andy Borowitz remarking on Ann Telnaes, the "Pulitzer-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post." Rather, the Post's former cartoonist. She quit this week. The instigation came from an editor who killed her correctly illustrated concept of the paper's owner and other multibillionaires "debasing themselves before Donald J. Trump," wrote Andy. He encouraged the cartoon's widest possible circulation elsewhere, likely bringing far more attention to it than the Post would have. I shall do my littlest part. 

Oh, also concerning WaPo, I've been meaning to enter the booth and make a confession, but it never fit one of my posts. Ann Telnaes's walk does. Weeks ago I canceled my Post subscription, though it nagged at me. I read a few pleas from the paper's journalists who properly pointed out that Jeff Bezos couldn't care less about — to him — the nickel-and-dime enterprise. Folks, pleaded reporters and opinionists, rampant cancelations hurt only us. Confession: I broke, I resubscribed. And I still can't say which act was the responsible one.

A final item (and yes I hear your thanks). Somewhere this morning I read that President Carter served in the submarine service during WW II. That struck me as ahistorical, yet realizing I had no Jimmy bio in my disheveled library, I sought Wikipedia's infinite knowledge of everything. There, no wartime submarine service, his sub years came later. He attended local colleges and then on to the Naval Academy, 1943-1946.  

I mention this relative insignificance because my eyes had wandered elsewhere on Wiki's page, observing that Plains, Georgia, "had been impoverished by the Great Depression, but the [Carter] family benefited from New Deal farming subsidies." The line struck me like a thunderbolt, excuse the cliché.

Christ Almighty and hellfire damnation why is it that American voters so routinely pass on even the potential of visionary and deeply humanistic politicians such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose singular genius fucking saved this country from imminent implosion with, as he acknowledged, creative yet "experimental" programs. Can't know until we try 'em, he said. Some flopped, some were banned by a 19th-century-minded Supreme Court, many others succeeded.

Next, and hitting me even harder, was the vastly repellent thought of a U.S. presidents poster featuring portraits of the unexcelled Roosevelt and the lowest-life sociopathic scumbag Trump.    

Perhaps it was that occasion that compelled me to the enlarged gloom of this post, a mood detonated by the personal tragedy of having missed my one-hour fix of "Bugs Bunny & Friends," with Wile E., Sylvester & Co. Lord do I need it.

Still, something tells me I'll recover. Otherwise, I do hope your Saturday is a pleasant one. 

A new look for a statutory humper, and the GOP clown show goes on

Do you know this man?

You do, but as a participant in the Witness Protection Program he debuted on the popularly unwatched OAN network last night. Furthermore, determined to appear anonymous while in the tender care of the U.S. Marshals Service, he pulled a Joan Rivers trick — a face redo. 

The Daily Beast reports that some of the network's several viewers blamed Matt Gaetz's abnormal appearance on a bad makeup job or bad lighting. The consensus, however, is that he sought the needle. One dermatologist observed that his face was altered by an "overly heavy hand and poor placement" of neuromodulators, as the Beast put it, which sent me to the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery. Neuromodulators are just "wrinkle-relaxing injections of botulinum toxin." In a word, Botox. 

The dermatologist added that Gaetz's fresh facade is "too heavy in the forehead and not lateral enough to prevent Spock Eye" — a facial feature that in no way even remotely suggests an alien Gaetzian intelligence. The good doctor also said the technique used "pushes the brow down and makes him look more menacing than usual." Really? At any rate, nothing can ever subtract from the menace of Gaetz's mind. 

So much for a rearranged visage. Let's move along to Matt's first OAN show. As a guest he had (what else?) a Republican pol, Rep. Thomas Massie, a firm no-Mike-Johnson-as-speaker guy. (I confess, my "so much for" looks resistance was futile; speaking of faces, Massie's appeared more as skid-row panhandler than a U.S. representative. But who knows, perhaps this is his polished look.)

Tonight @RepThomasMassie joins @mattgaetz to discuss the upcoming Speaker vote: "I'm a 'Hell No' on Speaker Johnson"

Click the link to watch tonight's show at
9PM ET | 6PM PT https://t.co/Bgm0eOgOZi pic.twitter.com/HBkaKz5Lk4

— One America News (@OANN) January 3, 2025

No news in that clip. Massie's opposition has been public for some time. Also unnewsy was male-groin masseuse Lauren Boebert's addition to the show. If, she said, Johnson would only pay Chip Roy's extortion, i.e., name him as Rules Committee chairman, then the speaker's  reelection would be in the bag. 

Lauren was sharp as ever. She overlooked the virtually guaranteed riot to erupt from such a Johnson-Roy deal — the rioters, those now rather amusingly called the "more moderate" reps in the House Republican caucus. (Hey, everything's relative.) 

Still, really pissed off they'd be. For a Rules Committee chairman wields nearly the power of a speaker, or what used to be powerful speakers. He's the big cheese when it comes to setting the rules for how a bill shall be put to the House. The chairman's committee can permit an open rule — all proposed amendments are due free speech — or choose which amendments may be heard or shut them down altogether.

And pissed indeed should one of the roughly 30 Freedom Caucusers among more than 200 House GOP members extort his way to a bill-funneling chairmanship.

Thus I hope Johnson cuts the deal with Roy, so that the circus goes on. After all, no House Republican governance whatsoever is the most ideal form of Republican governance.  

(No such luck. This, as I was writing.)

Friday Fright Night or Day for Mike Johnson

I'm assuming the sun will be setting by the time those who cannot govern get around to choosing or maybe not choosing the next victim of their ungoverning and ungovernable ways, the 119th Congress' speaker of the Madhouse.

The job, as you know, is currently sorta held by God's own vicar, Mike Johnson, and his bicuspids. Why he would want the title again is anyone's guess, seeing that it comes complete with the tyrant Dionysius' hoplite sword held at the handle by a solitary horsehair, suspended over the speaker's chair.  

Vicar M.J. has the blessing of Trump — he's a "good, hard working, religious man," said the infidel — but Mr. Elect's benediction has become rather rickety of late. His pinwheel-eyed hypnotic hold on all Republican House members has faded.

That's bad. Even with his attenuated partisan powers, Trump is still more influential than God Himself when it comes to Bedlam's R inmates — but it will take only two of them (Axios says three) to defy Trump and the vicar's reascension (unless his opponents simply vote "present"). 

Mike is in there fighting, though, the little scrapper. (Referring back to the above, he appears to have the same confidence in God saving him as Mike Huckabee did when he bombed out of the 2008 GOP presidential race after assuring his audiences that the Good Lord would see to his election.) Mike is battling the Washington way — with bribery: "process reforms."

And a proposed rules change: "A resolution causing a vacancy in the Office of the Speaker shall not be privileged except if it is offered by [nine members] of the majority party." One R said that with the change they'd be "in a better position ... to make sure" that both the speaker and the party's disastrous agenda could "go forward."

But there's no rules switch yet, and one Republican, Thomas Massie, has already voiced his intention to go rogue. There's also Chip Roy, who told Fox Business' 12 viewers this week, "I remain undecided." He added that others were unsure as well. 

Yet Chip seems a trifle confused, though not about Mike's support. He further told Fox that "he was concerned Johnson’s leadership could 'limit or inhibit our ability to advance the president’s agenda.'" Chip my boy, your president's agenda is based on massive deficit spending, which you are dead-set against. Mike's fine with it.

As for the speaker's vote, however it turns out, it's likely to be chaotic — par for this party's course. What once was an easy and swift ceremonial gathering the contemporary GOP has converted into another of its slapstick obscenities. Because its members are not only incapable of governing, they're ungovernable children to boot.

 

 

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On Trump's tariff obsession, and perhaps some history that'll surprise you

Merely one pre-apocalypse peek into its creeping reality was the president-elect's surefire conviction yesterday that the New Orleans terrorist attack was delivered unto us through our "OPEN BORDERS," created by "weak, ineffective, and virtually nonexistent leadership" including "the DOJ, FBI, and Democrat state and local prosecutors" — all of them "incompetent and corrupt," having ignored the immigrant, "violent SCUM that has infiltrated" our nation.

Once his go-to demagogic xenophobia was proven grossly inaccurate in its conclusion, he simply fired off another of his standard-issue doggerel:    

"TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING!" (This morning he refashioned his inaccuracy into one of his always-correct prophecies: "With the Biden 'Open Border’s Policy' I said, many times during Rallies, and elsewhere, that Radical Islamic Terrorism ... will become so bad in America that it will become hard to even imagine or believe. That time has come, only worse than ever imagined.")

The point to be made is not that Trump was wrong about the New Orleans tragedy. As a natural-born cretin of the highest order, he's always wrong, the proverbial exception to the rule, here. What occurred yesterday occurred yesterday; that is, it was a one-day affair. What instead should shatter our nerves is the grueling, prolonged and pervasive wrongness of his second tenure — a presidency grounded in lurching simplicities born of a simple mind.

Trump posted one, below — one with many siblings, each just as ugly as this one — on 30 December. I recall no major reporting on this simplicity, indeed none at all. And yet its stupidity far outweighs that of yesterday's, and of more pertinence, its stupidity is slated to endure for four years. If enacted, as repeatedly promised by Trump, no longer will the words "the end of America" be a recent political slogan. They'll be our reality. This causes me to ponder: Was not yet another Trumpian pledge to annihilate the American economy worthy of at least page 2A coverage?

Truth Social: "The Tariffs, and Tariffs alone, created this vast wealth for our Country. Then we switched over to Income Tax. We were never so wealthy as during this period. Tariffs will pay off our debt and, MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN!"

He attached this graph. 

Trump's enthusiasm for historical tariffs and most of the graph's peaks lack some rather necessary perspectives. The earliest tariff imposed (1790) at Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's urging was necessary for a fledgling postcolonial economy eager to build a domestic manufacturing base. One superb way to accomplish that? Make imports costly and collect a few bucks for a shaky federal government in the process.

Another way to interpret the graph is to keep these little items in mind: Throughout the 19th-century the United States most commonly had no military to speak of, no intelligence agencies, no Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid, no food stamps, no children's programs, no education programs, no environmental programs, no housing assistance, no transportation or labor or energy department, no small business administration, no workers' compensation, no health or science research and development, etc. — in brief, everything that makes for a safe and civilized nation.

In the graph there's one other element powerfully relevant to tomorrow, one overlooked or dismissed by tariff zealots. The graph's years are difficult to make out, but see that yellow line which precedes a sudden bump in tariffs after they had nearly bottomed out because of the 1913 income tax? Yeah, you got it, that was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 in action. It cranked up rates to near-historical highs in reaction to the economy's ills, propelled retaliatory tariffs globally, devastated U.S. exports and imports, and is known by economic historians to have been a leading contributor to the depth and duration of the Great Depression.

A final note — one of irony, that which looms as a leading contributor to the American Apocalypse of 2025-2029, then a yearslong hangover. Among the Republican Party's abnormally huge number of chronic gripes is the cost of U.S. social programs. But let us again don our history caps. What political party was the first to establish a sizable one? One that by 2023 had sprawled to annual federal outlays of $151 billion? 

Yes! The Grand Old Party. Even before it began waving the Bloody Shirt, the Republican Party instituted an 1862 pension program for Civil War Union veterans, plus the widows and children of those killed in action. The program's recipients ramified from there. So unique was its pension plan, the GOP was in fact a global pioneer in social spending, which soon spilled into what the party would later deride as the "nanny state." (For an unsurpassed history on this topic, consult government professor Theda Skocpol's Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States." You'll thank yourself. It's brilliant.) 

An aside: In 2013, the Associated Press discovered that the federal government was "still making monthly payments to relatives" of Civil War soldiers. Payments were "going to two children of veterans ... each for $876 per year." 

The Republican Party: the first, the original, the nation's all-time procreating king of "welfare queenery." Ain't no way Trump's tariffs could ever pay for all that followed, for all that keeps citizens relatively secure, and for all that maintains the economy's health. If he tries, goodbye America. (Now that's worth a pretty big news story, is it not? And one virtually every day?)    

"I am become life, the savior of worlds" - Harland Dorrinson

2025 Canceled by Popular Demand

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (The Borowitz Report)—In what experts are calling an unprecedented move, on Wednesday the year 2025 was canceled by popular demand.

“There was widespread support for this,” said Harland Dorrinson, who led the movement to dispense with the year. “One day in, it’s clear that 2025 was a terrible idea.”

“Let’s just move on to 2026 and see if that’s any better,” he added.

After the successful cancellation of 2025, there was growing support for scrapping the next four years.

In praise of Elon Musk

"We're just days away from Elon Musk's presidency," notes Andy Borowitz in his latest missive — a preface to self-survival in the Age of Trump returned. More solemnly, one of his readers offers this bit of ancient Greek stoicism: "There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."

Epictetus clashed with Buddhism, which teaches that the only way to happiness is to cease all desire, that being the true root of our evils. Enter a Marxist internal contradiction: Striving to cease desire is desirous. Myself, I'm fond of Taoism, whose essence only a real imbecile of daily political commentary would boil down to "Fuck it ... whatever" — although that rings of Epictetus.

Still, there are joys on this journey. And a rather sizable one relates to the much-predicted civil war to come, should Trump lose another election. What a marvelous, even divine twist of fate: The idiot won, yet we're getting that civil war anyway — and praise Epictetus, Buddha or Jesus, the war is entirely between Trumpers.

Like all civil wars, theirs is vicious and bloody; but unlike other civil wars, this one is a delight to those looking on. The bloodbath is between Trumpian modernists and MAGA medievalists, personified by Elon Musk vs. Steve Bannon. And the war's most delightful aspect is that Trump has taken sides — that of the modernists, thereby shafting his far more loyal troops in Magastan.

Even the latter have their own little civil war going. Some are crying outright betrayal by Trump while others defend, claiming he has always supported skilled immigration, which, of course, is a lie, just one more being propagated by the panicky president-elect. As for the most bizarre aspect of this bleeding freakshow, Trump was right to ally with Elon. Why bizarre? Never before and never again will you read those three words: Trump was right.

But to get back to philosophy, my poet friend in the Land of Borderline Human Indecency — not that his country is borderline indecent, just that it borders one — there comes this, in prose: "Whenever I feel the need to listen to the speech of angels as they boogie on the head of a pin, I have only to read the latest review of the latest break-through book in philosophic thought. I will be told that it is all a matter of language."

There, as precisely as the matter can be conveyed, is the reason I no longer follow the latest roadblocks of breakthrough books in philosophic thought. Accuse me of the Middle Ages' scholastic obscurantism if you wish, or of its contemporary form — Trumpism — properly defined as an organized belief system engaged in the closing of minds. No need to accuse, though. I confess. On the rack of breakthroughs, they broke me.   

"It is all a matter of language." Yes indeedy, modern philosophy has been mired in this rut since Wittgenstein's 1921 breakthrough Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which essentially declared that, because of language problems, answering philosophical questions is a nonsensical exercise; this, followed posthumously in 1953 by his Philosophical Investigations, which essentially gave us Emily Litella in writing.

What does this have to do with the joy of Trumpism's civil war? Writes my above-cited friend, Canadian poet Norm Sibum, in philosophy "one starts with a premise." One such premise might be: "Ramaswamy and Musk ... are partly right when they say that Americans are too attached to mediocrity to be of any use to the planet."

Ah, yes, but when they "call for excellence" instead, "one is justified in asking exactly what it is they are calling for," notes Sibum. In answer: "There is the matter of their own immense fortunes and the skill sets required to grow them along hothouse lines. In other words, these titans are in the market for something other than a moronic work force; they require mercenaries of a kind." 

About that passage, I'll defy Wittgenstein by observing the usefulness of language. In this case, an obsolete definition of "hothouse" is brothel, workers in which are a definite sort of mercenaries — ladies of fortune whose skill sets are among the most treasured by men. Ergo (since philosophic lingo be on our minds), Musk's mercenaries are whores; highly educated, fancyass whores but whores nonetheless. They'd have to be to service that jerk.

Nevertheless, I'll upend Shakespeare and say I come not to bury Elon in vituperation, but to praise him. He helped ignite the civil war that Trump now has on his hands. And if that joy is not sizable enough to get you through this period, the one in which "we're just days away from Elon Musk's presidency," I just don't know what else to say. 

The wonders of Elon Musk

I was late to the latest, as always, this particular latest being Elon Musk's twitted exhortation that his fascist followers be kinder, gentler fascists. I had read this secondhand, hence I believed it to be a joke. But, being the researching corroborationist that I am, I took to Mr. Musk's fascist site to see for myself. And by God there it was. 

Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform

— Kekius Maximus (@elonmusk) December 29, 2024

I'll not squander your time and insult your intelligence by noting in any detail the irony of that post following his other post, "Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face."

In truth I found that one rather comical, quite aside from Elon's unintended, everyman wish: If only we could fuck ourselves in the face.    

No, what disturbed and annoyed me about Elon's F.Y. i. t.f. post was the wretched English which trailed immediately after: "I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend."

Never mind its Trump imitation, but lawdy lawd did he ever butcher the predicate. Elon meant to say we cannot possibly comprehend the übermanly way in which he would go to war — we can; daily he comes across as a pantywaist crybaby — but he botched it by referring instead to "this issue."

Hundreds of billions of dollars and he can't write an intelligible sentence in his mother tongue. Worse, with all that money he could hire an editor, yet hasn't. 

An especially powerful blow to the brain from history, plus a note for its buffs

On the outskirts of Branson, Missouri — an Ozarkian showcase of nature's prodigies mortgaged circa 1990 to piratical commercialization — there at least lies one gem of civilization's crowding, a Books-A-Million store. While browsing there last week I bought Volker Ullrich's second volume of his biographical study, Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945.

Being abysmally backlogged on the subject's historiography I was unfamiliar with Ullrich's work, so before buying I sought assurance by doing some spying: a thumbs-up consult with the much-respected Jennifer Szalai, The NY Times' 2020 reviewer of Downfall. 

And that's when things got weird. As I stood in the bookstore aisle reading the review, the names, personalities and potential downfalls of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump began to blend into one; by the time I finished reading, my imminent purchase seemed more a biography of the latter.

No cynicism implied when I note this likely was the reviewer's intent: The bio's English translation appeared three months before Election Day 2020. Nor do I overlook the stacks of Trump-cum-Hitler books already in existence — whether directly or indirectly, those which reveal the frightening similarities of the two men's innermost persons and outermost ugliness.  

Yet Hitler: Downfall struck me as the most aggressive mirror to-date. I should qualify that; my assessment is based more on the Times review than the book itself, only a slim portion of which I've had time to read so far. On the other hand, book reviewers know how to read and they know how to compress what they've read into its most salient themes.      

Biographer Ullrich, then, could assert only with a great deal of giggling that when he wrote that Hitler's "impulsiveness and grandiosity" and "bullying and vulgarity ... accounted for [his] anti-establishment appeal" (the reviewer's words), it just never crossed his mind that Trump fits that bill to a T. 

The doppelgänging tale soldiers on commensurately. Only fools believed that "Hitler would rise to the occasion" of national leadership and become "a dignified statesman"; that older-school conservatives could control him; that "purge[s]" wouldn't ensue; that although clever in "seizing power," he was in no way "too restless and reckless to govern."

Hitler's mammothly disqualifying traits were no secret. And that's what makes both the historical and contemporary so infinitely distressing. All that was known and once again known notwithstanding, "An utter impossibility had become the indomitable reality," wrote Salzai. Hitler then undertook his "standard approach" — "lying" and "blaming others" for any failures, the one "option" he always "preserved."  

Whenever Hitler felt "boxed in" he "lashed out — compulsively, destructively." He "was a scattershot, undisciplined leader, prone to tardiness and meandering monologues." And if none of that bangs a gong in the reader's mind, this should: "He had the instinct of a crude social-Darwinist..., experiencing the world only in terms of winning and losing."

More than the features of the past comes through in Ullrich's bio. (Again, I proceed largely from its review.) The thunderbolts being: "Hitler had peddled so many lies that the fantasy he created was stretched impossibly thin" — from there, "the very qualities that accounted for the dictator’s astonishing rise were also what brought about his ultimate ruin."

His ruin was celebrated universally, yet the horror preceding his downfall was that humanity's ruin was universal as well. The hellishly global circumstances of Hitler's end will see no replication in Trump's (the odds otherwise, a million to one), and even better, Der Führer's thousand-year Reich of 12 years survived, we might guess, roughly eight or 10 years longer than Trump's upcoming blunderfest.

Still, I anticipate that some rather precise replication will come to pass. Take, for instance, these joyful words by Szalai about Hitler's final days: "For all his pretensions to invincibility, he ended up a broken, sickly man." Her sentence continued but at the stopping point of our joy: "[The führer] confronted the reality bearing down on him by killing himself in his bunker."

We can't have it all.

***

For those of you now inclined to buy Ullrich's biography I'll add this note about what in particular intrigued me enough to buy it (the overriding themes we've covered), which, I suppose, could be called a kind of inside-baseball historiographical thing. Or maybe not; depends on how much one is interested in, and has read on, the vast subject of Nazi Germany. 

As I looked around for information on Ullrich's professional background, I noticed this observation in a review of his short biography of Germany's 19th-century unifier (Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor): "Ullrich has a mildly revisionist point to make." From what I could see in the Times review of Downfall, he had another bit of revisionism in mind.

This one perhaps not so mild, but I can't say, I've not yet read the entire book. Szalai quoted Ullrich quoting Hitler: "I have overcome the chaos in Germany, restored order and hugely increased productivity in all areas of our national economy." Szalai followed with, "he bragged [this] to the Reichstag, even if the actual situation was considerably less stellar than he proclaimed."  

That's an indispensable point. Among today's Americans there exists something of a vague, gossamer belief in Hitler having made Germany's trains run on time, and from that the belief extends into Naziism's economic vitality throughout most of the 1930s. In short, it took a strongman.

The longer, accurate version is that the belief is baloney. It's been a while since I read R. Gellately's Hitler's True Believers, but as I recall, the work effectively disabuses the notion of happy German workers, by and large, in the 1930s.

Ullrich's second volume, Downfall, begins by addressing the immediate prewar period, about whose "actual situation" Szalai wrote: "Years of enormous military expenditures had pushed Germany to the brink of economic collapse. Hitler had made a mess, and a war would clean it up."

That may indeed have been a factor in the führer's mulling over the launch of war and its timing, but not one essentially comparable to his geopolitical objectives — not, anyway, one I've encountered in recent, uncommonly fine treatments such as M. Hastings' Inferno and A. Roberts' The Storm of War.

So I'll be interested in reading how Ullrich makes his case. Otherwise, intended as strong subtext or not, his linkage of Hitler and Trump's freakish personalities and destructive "leadership" styles is impossible to refute.

And still damn near impossible for me to accept is that we the God-blessed and singularly exceptional people of these United States of America just voted to put that monstrous linkage right back in the White House.  

 

 

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