Just saying....

He and his despicable Nazified language are appalling in extremis. Revolting.

I cannot imagine even one of these radicals being in my family or proximal to me or my family's existence. But there were dozens now displaced out of office and what's more, several of the Chairmen of the Committees and many of the members are and were right out of the early 1930's German Playbook. I'm sorry, I lived through the tail end of the McCarthy era and this is worse in many respects.


Thoughts for A Saturday morning...

In my middle-60's I have become curiously reflective upon what was as opposed to what is. The Christmases of my youth were filled with anticipation, festivity, decorations, music, excitement, parties, and a moderate increase in general good-will-toward-all-(wo)men. The radio and TV were filled with "heartwarming" Christmas specials featuring families like Bing Crosby's (yes we later found out that he was abusive to his family), Bob Hope, The King Family, Andy Williams, and many many other celebrities who "came into our homes" and imparted the Joy of the Holiday. There were many many children's books about preparing for the Holiday...my favorite one was Mrs. Coverlet's Magicians, a Weekly Reader Children's Book Club book about three children left with a mean housekeeper/guardian over the season and their truly fun adventures following the witch's spell they placed on the housekeeper to keep her passive and bedridden - they were the "good kids" of the Fifties despite their behavior as kidnappers.

Anyway, we as Jews watched and partook of the excitement as much as possible: going to stores, watching the shows, here in Philadelphia we had spectacular Christmas shows at John Wanamaker's Department Store and the Christmas Village a Lit Brothers. Every storefront was decorated with Christmas greenery, fake spray-on snow on the windows (which had this really peculiar smell), and Christmas carols being played through a speaker either in the doorway or inside the store. It was festive and the spirits of all seemed to be lifted: people said "please" and "thank you", and although we weren't included in the family celebration, the goodwill, at least in my circles, was manifest by many who were normally standoffish.

Christmas Day for us was one of quiet reflection and reading or playing games at homes with friends: no, most of us did not go to Chinese restaurants and movies then. We let the day pass and watched the homes of the people hosting the Holiday fill up with visitors early: for it was one of the two days of the year where dinner is eaten traditionally in the afternoon hours. Later, we would see people leave and realize that starting the next day, it was back to business as usual, except for the hiccup of New Years Eve and Day, which many people found "strangely" depressing.

As I have come to realize later in life: Christmas has lost the acute societal joy and celebration which it had. There is no break in the rising line of anger and tensions which the society has as a part of its fabric, and so people are operating on a rising line of tensions which, during the past say twenty years, has evolved into a nearly full-scale Civil War of ideas and opinions. There is no longer any room for "the other side", and I blame the radical Right wing for this. Their phony War on Christmas, their phony fears that people of color are going to "destroy their way of life" (as though their lives revolve around anything but alcohol, football, and stealthily watching pornography), and their phony patriotism have undermined the fabric of America and thus the enjoyment of the Holiday. I for one loved the Season for all the positives stated above but it has become a depressing landmark in a troubled landscape which is increasingly desolate and barren.

When I was in junior high and high school I had six long years of Latin, taught by a fairly intellectual British man, who assigned many treatises to translate from the end of the Roman Empire. I must say that you could change a few names and dates and publish them now and they would have verisimilitude and be entirely accurate. On this Christmas Eve, I do believe that the barbarians are at the gate. God help us.

If you are a fan of “Everything wrong with (fill in the blank) film” on YouTube then you’ll know what I’m talking about. The film is condensed into clips wherein the narrator amusingly points out issues with realism or mistakes. Each one gives one bell and there’s a tally in the upper left corner and there’s a total at the end, usually between 80 and 200. In the one dedicated to Home Alone 2 the video is marching along as per usual and then Trump appears in a cameo. The tally runs up from 56 up to 1,000,056 in five seconds. You have to watch it to get it:

This nation has as its President someone who has almost reached the nadir of what might be described as a miscreant. In literature, villains are described as evil but invariably they are described as something: genius, handsome/beautiful, devious, brave, glib, charismatic, thoroughly schooled in an academic subject, intellectual, well-read, insightful in the extreme, chess-master in the figurative sense, physically intimidating, creatively sadistic....you get the idea.

This man is nothing....none of those...he is a two-bit actor who would have had trouble keeping his job in middle-management at McDonald's or Wendy's. The America of the 1980's was looking for larger-than-life "heroes", thus Reagan who was also an actor and a pathological liar who (to his slight credit) actually couldn't tell fact from fiction, Chuck Norris and his ilk, all the Wall Street billionaires, and along came this utterly vapid individual who had a big mouth and was a carnival barker living in New York and playing with his daddy's money. Sufficient numbers of people bought into the confidence game of course, and the name became part of the landscape such that it was easy for the masses to embrace this neo-Nazified "populism".

And why not? The tactic worked well in Germany, whose populace was better educated and much more aware than Americans....of COURSE it would work here. The idiot Republican candidates stood on the stage and obligingly waited to be picked off one by one by this ne'er do well phony liar and simply smiled when he tossed his barbed nicknames at them, rather than standing up on their hind legs and blasting him with both barrels. All anyone had to do was walk over to him, stand "too close" to him and excoriate him and he'd have been done for good. But they passively allowed him to punch them without any retribution and so this is what we all received in return. I have no doubt that many of them are scared into submission by the kompromat he and his master Putin have on them. This is and has been an invasion by the Russians, a la Red Dawn without the paratroopers, and we have so far succumbed.

What we need now is a strong, liberal, charismatic, intellectual candidate who is a true patriot who will defend us from within, since the enemy is here, and reestablish the United States of America and state unequivocally what has happened here and overcome this renegade force which has taken power here. We have a chance to begin in a few days but it must be a full-court press, no mercy, no halfway measures will suffice. We want unconditional surrender of these radicals or our days as a so-called Democracy, and you all know what I'm saying, are over.

Among my patients is a lady who was married at the time to a significant booster for Syracuse University. They had accompanied the thirty-five students to Europe where they were studying and were due to take the flight back to the US.

But fascinatingly and remarkably, my patient is an Italian lady of great class and style, brought up among the wealthiest and most influential and well-educated of that country and of course...OF COURSE...she had her own tailor in Milan. During the trip she noticed that she had been gaining a little weight after her son was born and decided on the spur of the moment to journey instead to Milan to have her clothes mannequin altered to fit her new shape in order that her tailor could style her suits to perfection so the alterations, once shipped to America, would be minimal.

So they were not on board the jet as it was blown out of the sky and she and her husband survived. He went on to be the president of the mortgage bankers association of Philadelphia and rise up through the ranks to be one of the most significant people in real estate in the Delaware Valley. His decisions affected the lives of many thousands of people over the years. His wife is still a patron of the arts and literature and even into her late eighties is somewhat influential here.

So the decision at the last minute to change plans altered thousands of people's lives as a result of not being on board the ill-fated aircraft. And yes, she had much survivors-guilt and always, near tears, referred to those passengers and crew as "those poor poor souls".

Just thought I'd pass this along...

He is cleaning house at the Joint Chiefs and replacing them with the casts from McHale's Navy, Hogan's Heroes, F Troop, and Blazing Saddles.

Except for the fact that almost everyone who was associated with those shows is deceased is irrelevant of course. Reports of their demise are Fake News. In addition, assertions that these individuals were fictional individuals has been roundly denied by Kellyanne Conway, who states that she saw Colonel Hogan coming out of a sex shop last week and Corporal Agarn slamming his hat on the ground.

While having some great folk like Rachel and Lawrence, and Ali, and some others, has some sleeper agents like Pete Williams, Andrea Mitchell, Tweety (to an extent), and some others as well.

Williams’ feigned shock at the outrage of the judge today is indicative of the Jack Welch Superego which still pervades the network. The normalization of the Joe and Mika clown car show wherein they portray the Trumpan Show as utterly ridiculous, this again, normalizing guys like Jeb, Marco, and the like as “more than acceptable” is not the hallmark of a supposedly tolerably center-left network.

Just saying...

He was executed for far less than passing secrets to a hostile foreign government. These guys betrayed the trust placed in them in extremis and are being considered for probation or very short jail terms in minimum security establishments.

What the Hell?

Oh. I forgot. They’re Republicans -they are without sin.

“You’re gonna need a bigger courtroom” - Robert Mueller starring in Jaws 2019.

There is no telling how far the tentacles of sedition go. If House of Cards is any indication of how the process works, then it descends down to the Coffee Boys.

But we shall see what they allow to be exposed. The crimes of Watergate far exceeded that which was made public and similarly with Iran-Contra.