Trump: Promises Made, Promises Forgotten

 

In George Orwell's 1984 three warring states, Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia were constantly at war, but alliances and opponents kept shifting. If you lived in Oceania, one year you might see messages about the perfidy and evil of East Asia, but a few months later you saw that East Asia was a wonderful state, and now it was Eurasia which was bad. 

Memory was short in 1984.

In Animal Farm, the messages were written in chalk on a blackboard, which was convenient because it was easy to erase memory and change the message, and so "Four legs good, two legs bad" became "Four legs good, two legs better," when the ruling pigs learned to walk on two legs.

For the dystopian Orwell, memory manipulation was the sine qua non of dystopia, if you could control (change) the past, you could control the present and the future.

Nowhere is memory control more obvious and important than in our current dysptopic America, D.J. Trump has mastered memory control by the simple expedient of throwing so much up on the blackboard and changing it so often, nobody can really be sure what was true or how it changed.

Even in the information age, it's hard for the average citizen who does not have a research staff to dredge up Trump saying one thing and then just the opposite a little later.

"I will end the war in Ukraine Day One! I'm the only one who can do it!"

Mad Dog remembers it, and online "Facts First" shows 21 times Trump said he would end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. But somehow that promise, not kept, does not stick. The blackboard has been erased.

It was obvious it wasn't Trump who was the one man who could end the war in Ukraine; it was Putin who was the only one who could do this. What wasn't obvious is whether Trump could even remember what he had promised on Ukraine--he makes so many promises they all tend to wind up in some huge dumpster of history.

But, for a few moments at least, it did look pretty obvious Trump did have a  grand strategy for ending the war in Ukraine: to bludgeon Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into surrendering to Russia. "You don't hold any cards!" Trump shouted at Zelensky, who never asked for cards, or for a ride out of Kiev, only for "ammunition."

 

And, like most bullies, Trump arranged for his sidekicks to surround Zelensky in the Oval Office, to gang up on him and catcall insults about Zelensky's clothes--no Armani suit for Zelensky--and to shout him down for not thanking America for all it had done for him. The classic playground bullies. Let's all gang up on the little guy and none of us will get hurt. So Marjorie Taylor Greene's newest squeeze, Brian Glenn, who was present as a White House correspondent for Real America's Voice, got his line off on cue, "Hey why don't you wear a suit?" You see, Zelensky had disrespected the Oval Office, which Trump had done up in gold like a Parisian brothel.

One wonders whether Mr. Glenn would have had the balls to call out  Joseph Stalin for not wearing a suit. Actually, we don't have to wonder. We know. We can know a great deal about Mr. Glenn just from that incident. He is beyond an empty suit. He's clearly a coward, hiding behind a couch and group of playground bullies, lobbing his insults safely protected. He is not fit to carry Mr. Zelensky's shoes.

Zelensky, amazingly, had the presence of mind to reply, "I will wear a costume when this war will finish. Maybe after the war I will buy a suit, maybe better than yours."

Of course, we could all see this diminutive and besieged Ukrainian president was wearing battle fatigues, and was a giant among pygmies in that office. 

It was as revealing a video moment as Dr. Fauci slapping his head when Trump suggested from the podium that intravenous bleach might be the best way to kill COVID virus.

Playing Soldier

All those empty suits, with short memories, with heel spurs and not a one of them had ever faced a bullet fired in anger. Even Trump, who eventually did have a bullet fired in anger at him did not face that knowingly. He required no courage to be shot at because he couldn't be aware of the danger that day. So only Zelensky in that room had been in peril for his life and acted boldly in the face of violence aimed at him. J.D. Vance was in the Marines and he sat on a golden couch taunting Zelensky, but he was a military correspondent and he admitted in his book he never saw any real fighting.

So alone, among the boys in their splendid expensive suits, Zelensky had faced lethal fire and he never flinched. When he was offered a way out of Ukraine during the early onslaught, he famously replied, "I don't need a ride. I need ammunition."

Mad Dog cannot imagine Marco Rubio, Brian Glenn, J.D. Vance or Trump reacting that way. Trump has said soldiers are saps and fools. They work for peanuts and risk their lives for small salaries. "I don't like guys who get captured. I like the guys who don't get captured." That's Trump invoking the old Japanese bushido ethic, as if he ever would have the courage to even put himself in the position where he could be captured. 

But if he did get captured, he would deny it the next week and he would sue any newspaper which dared publish an account of his capture and he would direct the FCC to remove any TV news program and network from the airwaves which reported on it.

She Wears No Suit; She is Better Than That

So, now we have Mr. Trump, yesterday, saying maybe Ukraine should continue to fight on. Maybe the US will arrange a loan they will have to pay back, for new drones and missiles. But that is only the current line; tomorrow neither he nor his MAGA millions will remember whose side he is on this week.

Trump Goes All MAGA Weird at the UN

 It's All Trump, All the Time now. He's all anybody talks about, and what he talks about is all we talk about.

Here are some gems from Donald J. Trump to the world, extracted from his 90 minutes of world wide fame in the UN spotlight:

1/ He is the greatest peace maker in world history and has personally stopped 7 wars including wars you probably never heard of in places you never heard of. But he also ended Iran's war against Israel, which must have come to a great surprise to Iran, because last we heard, they had not surrendered to Israel.

And he deserves a Nobel Peace prize for that.

Everyone is saying so, Trump says. Well, at least he is saying so, so that's one person saying so, for sure.

And he deserves another Nobel prize in medicine for his Warp Speed program which brought you the COVID vaccine, which RFKJR says is the most dangerous vaccine ever made and which kills more people than it saves, but anyway, it saved millions, even before the government got around to giving intravenous bleach or Ivermectin, which was such a great idea, and which proved Mr. Trump knew more than all the doctors, but it never got a fair chance, because you know, Biden. Or maybe it was leftist ideology. Never mind--Trump deserves that gold medal. You know how he loves gold.

2/ London has a terrible mayor, who has a Middle Eastern name and London now looks like downtown Tehran or Beirut  and is home to a lot of Arabs who have replaced real Englishmen and that is just sad. "Now they want to go to Sharia law, but you're in a different country now and you can't do that."

3/ Migration is destroying the world by changing things and mixing races and only the United States has stopped it by arresting people for speaking Spanish or looking like they might speak Spanish, which is perfectly legal as the Supreme Court has said, but anyway, Spanish speaking people replacing English speakers is very bad, and we could really use some immigrants from Norway, which, for some reason nobody can understand, seems to send very few blond immigrants our way. Sure, Norway has healthcare for all, and the highest per Capita income in the world, or close to, and great tuition free university education, where they have not purged the faculties of professors who disagree with Mr. Trump, but hey, USA is #1!

4/ The global warming hoax is killing economies world wide, and clean coal and oil are the answer.  Strangely, having said this, he claims America is the "hottest country anywhere in the world," which is not exactly what you'd want to lay claim to if you don't believe in global warning, but he likely meant we are "hot" the way Melania is hot, or the way his daughter Ivanka is hot, so hot in fact he would date her if he weren't her father, which was another weird remark, but must have been reassuring to Ivanka

Hottest First Lady EVER!

One can only imagine the delegates eating at New York City restaurants, drinking their cocktails and saying, "It took two world wars to bring Britain down, but America has done it in just eight months, with free an fair elections."

Hottest Country Anywhere!

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All The Pieces Matter

"All the pieces matter," 

--Lester Freamon, "The Wire"

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others which have ever been tried."

--Winston Churchill

"Everything is consolidating" said Michael Socolow, a media historian at the University of Maine. "What makes these deals different is that they are across multiple platforms. To have the opportunity to establish an editorial line across TikTok, CBS News and CNN--that's a new world."

--The New York Times

George Orwell imagined a world where everyone had a TV screen in his home, which allowed Big Brother to speak directly to you, and which could see you in your living space. While Orwell could not imagine cell phones, or speaking to an electric device with a name like Siri who could turn your oven on or open your garage door, or a door bell which would allow you to speak to someone at the door while you sit on a beach in Cancun, he had the general idea down pretty well--consolidation of control by a powerful person or organization which executes control over every individual living in a country.

                                      Ellison

Hitler got pretty close to that by mind control, using much more primitive technology, but sophisticated psychology, with his coterie of vile accomplices. 

And now, we see the pieces coalescing for Trump, but more importantly for a small, obscure circle of very rich men, like what Vladimir Putin has effected in Russia. We can't know who-- or all--the members of this club, but we can occasionally get glimpses of it--as we see in the NYT report on the Ellison's who Mad Dog has never heard of until now, but they may soon control big airwaves, along with social media and influencers untold. 

It's almost enough to make you believe in "a vast conspiracy."

Trump is at least smart enough to know that businessmen control the world, or at least control the United States, and that government is bought and owned by money men, and that includes the institutions we once hoped to  insulate us from moneyed interests, like the Supreme Court, the Civil Service and the generators of new knowledge: the universities and the education systems which supported them.

But since at least the turn of the century, so much of new knowledge was not generated by universities, but by business, from social media, computer science, drug development. And profit poisons whatever it touches. Or at least it can poison vital organs in many cases.

We had the desktop computer, software, social media, small phones, APs, banking online, reservations and appointments on line, zoom meetings, airplanes flown mostly by computers, satellites linking a global economy, supertankers making local factories obsolete, interconnectedness unimagined in previous centuries and yet what lagged behind was our control and understanding of biology, so the whole shebang almost came crashing down owing to an invisible virus, a thing so elementary it might not even be called "living" but which threatened to undo the whole vast conglomerate.

As the controlling interests pieced together their plan--control of the Court, control of the media, control of the educational establishment, getting control of Congress and state governments fell into place. 

And now, we can see it all closing in on us, wrapping around the vital lungs of our nation, constricting, like a boa constrictor.

The wonder is: We did not see it coming.

Lions hunt that way: One young lion will circle wide, while another stays close to the quarry and a third goes directly at the prey, and by the time the wildebeest sees the threat right in front of it, it turns to look for an escape path, only to realize there is no way out.

In "The War of the Worlds,"earth is invaded by a technologically advanced alien force which shrugged off our primitive bullets and bombs but which, ultimately was undone by a virus, not a computer virus, but an earthly organic collection of amino acids.

Something like that nearly happened with Trump I, but we haven't seen the end of Trump II yet.

Trump To Speak On...Autism

For days, the (Failing) New York Times has been trumpeting a headline: "Trump To Speak On Autism!"

Mad Dog knew there was something odd about this. Other Presidents spoke on particular topics, like the economy or the need for changes in health care or about things like Civil Rights, but this made Mad Dog realize, Trump does not actually ever speak on anything. He bloviates. He rambles through his favorite topics, like how rich he is, or how smart he is or how other leaders fear and respect him, but speaking about a topic, "Autism," that is sort of new.

What can he say? We should treat it with Ivermectin and intravenous bleach? No, been there, done that. 

Or will he opine on the cause? Likely unhealthy diets bereft of raw milk and vitamin A and rife with processed foods and food dyes. We have some idea what sources he might use for that. 

Really, Mad Dog is all ears! Trump speaking on something substantive.

Will he begin by defining his terms? What, exactly, is autism? How is the diagnosis established? Is autism on the rise? How would we know? 

Is autism just a handy term for kids and adults who are somehow different or dysfunctional? Is the cause hereditary, genetic, or some toxin, or some dysfunction of the immune system? 

Where can we expect advances in treatment of this condition?

Is it a single disease or a family of diseases, like cancer?

What studies are in the works?

Mad Dog is trying to imagine Trump holding forth on this. 

He imagines something like Babe Ruth or Yogi Berra being interviewed on the cause of the Great Depression or on nuclear physics.

For sure, there will be no Dr. Fauci on stage, burying his face in his hands as Trump asks a very authentic question: "Why can't we just send all these kids to summer camp, Trump Camp, teach 'em to play golf, and they'll be fine? Right?"

One thing you can always count on with Trump: It will be entertaining...in the most excruciating way.

PS:

As predicted: Just look at these mopes...

Let Us Now Praise Famous People

Let us imagine a hero for the masses, or if not the masses, a part of the masses which is the MAGA crowd:

1/ Let him say that George Floyd was a "scumbag" who was not worth the attention lavished on his death, as if we should not condemn the murder of scumbags, but only the murder of virtuous people, saints or nice people.

2/ Give him a radio show on which he says that Jewish financiers have supported the replacement of white Americans by colored people. We might ponder why it would be important the financiers are Jewish, or even if there is a plot to replace white people, but never mind.

3/ Let him argue that gay rights are against God's will.

4/ Listen to him say that all the gun deaths we suffer in America are worth the right to bear arms because that guarantees our God given rights. We might ask him how your having a gun allows you to guarantee my right to free speech, but we can hold that thought. Or we might pause on that thought and consider how one might use arms to protect free speech: perhaps when someone rises to object to your free speech this paragon of virtue might shoot him.

5/ Nod your head when he calls Martin Luther King a "horrible person" whose death caused America to "fixate on race," rather than just accept that whites should remain the dominate race.

6/ And he might clarify that Islam is a religion bent on taking over land and societies and can only ever be a source of war and conflict, unlike Christianity, which sent armies to the Holy Land on things they called "crusades," in the name of the Prince of Peace--but that's ancient history and Islamic aggression is all NOW. So Islam is about a violent threat and Jewdaism is about financial threat via white replacement. That leaves Christianity as the one good religion, well, but never mind Buddhists and all the others. 

7/ And climate change: Well, that's an easy one--he would say it's all nonsense and he's totally against those bird Holocaust machines, I.e. windmills, because we don't need wind or solar power when we have clean coal and oil.

Now there's a man we should all embrace, because, you know, we'll miss him when he's gone.

Through the Looking Glass

 

Mad Dog readers: You heard it here first. 

Here's how this can/will play out: 

Jimmy Kimmel/Stephen Colbert run for President and start doing a tour, selling out packed stadiums in Washington state, Oregon and California.

The big networks, of course, fail to report it, but PBS does.

 The tour is hot stuff, with Kimmel/Colbert moving through huge sold out stadiums in Chicago and the Twin Cities, and then in Baltimore, , New York, Boston, finishing in Philadelphia, in front of the place where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed, and every event is covered extensively on PBS, YouTube and social media, except for Facebook, and X, where the tour is banned as unwoke.

The FCC shuts down PBS.

PBS tries to sue the FCC and  but the Court votes 5 to 3 in favor of Trump, (with Coney-Barret abstaining)--Alito/Thomas/Gorsuch/Kavanaugh/Roberts find that the  President has the right to silence anyone he does not like, and executive power allows the President to prevent anyone from using the airwaves. As originalists, they maintain that  the founding fathers clearly intended the airwaves, in particular airwaves carrying TV signals, to be the domain of the President alone. Madison, in particular did not like television comedians. Hamilton clearly favored big corporations exerting the will of the President. They decide against a narrow ruling and broadly find the First Amendment is unconstitutional.

Justice Alito explains in an interview on FOXNEWS that he recently communed with Justice Scalia , who told him that Presidential authority was never meant to be impeded and, in fact, elections pose a great risk to lifetime presidential tenure. 

Congress, by now firmly in the hands of the Gerrymander, votes Trump an enabling act to give him right to dissolve the Court outright. 

Trump considers his options: He is is furious that 3 justices (Sotomayor, Jackson and Kagan) have voted against him, and lodged stinging dissents. He could dissolve the Court, but he decides he may need Alito et. al. later, so he fires only the three liberals. 

But then FOXNEWS reports Tucker Carlson insists he should have been made Chief Justice, and is critical of undoing the Court, and Trump is thinking about that, when President Putin calls him, taunting, "A real man does not need  a Court," and so Trump dissolves the Court.

Justice Thomas realizes that with the Court dissolved, he'll have to return his mobile home because he no longer has a job he can sell to the highest bidder. Having been thus offended he changes his vote in Dobbs (which overturned Roe) just to spite Trump. Mitch McConnell says he is disappointed he cannot now become chief justice.

The New York Times editorial offices are torched. 

The Washington Post becomes "The Washington Post Storm Front" and X mergers with "Truth" to become TRUTHX. 

Congress passes a law which requires every university professor to sign a loyalty oath. All registered Democrats are summarily dismissed from faculties and from college administrations. 

Every civil servant must sign a loyalty oath.

Physicians who are registered Democrats must inform their patients they are Democrats at each office visit.

J.D. Vance tells the Democrats they can disband or they can take a loyalty oath to President Trump; Vance says, "We can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way."

The departments of Agriculture, Interior, Treasury, HHS and Commerce are subsumed into a single Department of Homeland Security. 

Secretary Noem fires RFKJR,  but Trump promises to find him a new job.

The Department of War federalizes all National Guard units and amalgamates this with ICE into a single Homeland Guard Force, and issues them spiffy black uniforms with red and white trim and lots of black leather accessories. They are under the command of Stephen Miller. 

Trump, true to his word, appoints Robert F. Kennedy, JR to run detention centers, which have been built in every former Confederate state in addition to the Mountain West states, with the biggest facilities in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Oklahoma and West Virginia. He makes sure inmates are humanely given lots of raw milk and vitamin A, but typhoid, Q fever, tuberculosis, measles, Covid and influenza quickly reduce the population of the camps and RFKJR quits, only to be appointed Surgeon General.

Trump's loyalists surprise him with a newly constructed mountain top retreat in Colorado, but he prefers Mar-a-Lago because there's not enough gold gilt in the Colorado place. Melania loves the place, however, which is accessible only by a solid gold elevator, and this means she can limit visitors to a list of people she wants to see and she can prevent visits from undesirables by not including them on the list.  President Trump is not on that list, but somehow Joe Rogan, Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone and Justin Trudeau make the cut. 

Putin visits Trump in Washington, and the next week Ukraine is overwhelmed by joint American/Russian forces and Trump remarks: "There really never was such a country as Ukraine."

Anyone caught flying a Ukrainian flag in America is arrested and sent to the Alligator Alcatraz.

New roads are built using coal powered earth movers. 

The word "Election" is removed from on line dictionaries.

Netanyahu declares there was never such a place as Palestine or Gaza and both of these names disappear from online sources. Netanyahu is defeated in Israeli elections and is named as the new American Secretary of War.

Everyone lives happily ever after.

Cancelling Jimmy Kimmel

 

There are things I was not fond of when it came to the Jimmy Kimmel show: I could never understand the role played by Guillermo, his Mexican/American foil, whose role seemed regulated to saying, "Yes, Jimmy," and appearing to never having had an actual thought.

His interviews with stupid people on the street grew old and discouraging: Stupid people can be really depressing.

But once he launched into his monologue, his criticisms of Donald Trump were just sublime.

And, even when you have Trump's people cancelling basic vaccines, pounding chests about the name "Department of War," blowing up boats off Venezuela because they look like they might be carrying drugs, defunding PBS and NPR, defunding universities, suing the New York Times for hurting Mr. Trump's feelings--  I figured, well, we still have dissent and public criticism, look at South Park; look at Colbert; look at Kimmel.

But now Trump has got to whoever those faceless, nameless corporate masters who sign the checks for Colbert and Kimmel. Trump understood better than the rest of us that everyone has a boss (except for him) and that you don't need to make your case in court or through a bureaucracy, you just need to threaten a big corporation's bottom line, and the billionaires who run that corporation will say, "Yes, sir."

The executives who displayed the broad yellow streak were, presumably, Robert Iger, CEO of Disney, and Fox Veteran, now Disney TV chief, Dana Walden, who Google says is an old friend of Kamala Harris. But these two--and who knows who else?--heard the FCC was fixing to make trouble for Disney and they showed all the morals of a cornered rat. 

What you really have to wonder is, suppose these two just said to Trump, "Go ahead and do your worst. Bring out the FCC. Sue us. Let's see what kind of trouble we can make for you?" What is the worst thing that could happen to them? They lose their jobs? Are they going to have to sell their homes or go on welfare?  

Really. So they retire and hang out at one of their four homes around the world. Or they get dumped by the Disney board of directors, and they get new jobs with Netflix or MGM or Dreamworks. What do they have to lose?

But now, for all time, they will be remembered as the Pontius Pilate and King Herod of American media. 

So, why did Iger and Walden surrender? Why the giant yellow streak? THAT is the real story here. 

Mr. Trump has played the Putin card.

One hopes we'll see the resistance rise again, but when you look at America, at who really rules America and what motivates them--i.e., the almighty dollar--you have to say that the exceptions to this rule are rare...the Civil Rights Movement; Martin Luther King; the election of Barack Obama; the Civil War which was fought for many reasons, but the sine qua non was slavery; the awarding of the right to vote to Blacks and women--those were movements and accomplishments with no clear financial motivation, but those are the exceptions to the rule.

For now, we have a scabrous state, ruled by venal men and women who care only for money and their own dominant fiscal position. 

Why We Fight

 

Band of Brothers," that Spielberg/Hanks series about Easy Company's World War II experiences was mostly accurate, sometimes just got things plain wrong, but overall, it provided a sense of what it was like for a group of men some of whom survived the war as a true band of brothers, to make their way through that trial by fire.

We can hear that from those who fought in Easy Company after they saw the series on TV. Each found some inaccuracy here and there--especially where Lt. Dike and Pvt. Blithe were concerned, but overall the veterans say the series got it mostly right. 

Mad Dog has never fought in a war.

His brother got shipped off to Vietnam and Mad Dog has heard his stories. One thing Mad Dog thinks is true is that once you are in war, you are in it, and you do what is required or seems like a good idea at the time.  Mad Dog's brother was a doctor on a Coast Guard cutter, bobbing in the waters off the coast of Vietnam, and the doctors on these cutters told each other just what Cook says in "Apocalypse Now," i.e., "NEVER GET OFF THE BOAT!" But Mad Dog's brother got off the boat, and on to a swift boat, so he could go up the river to the villages to bring medicine and the Great American way to the villagers, where American military doctors were busy winning the hearts and minds of the locals. He was rewarded with a rocket attack on his swift boat. Thankfully the rocket missed.

"Why did you do something that foolish?" Mad Dog asked him. "You didn't have to do that."

Mad Dog never got a really cogent answer to that question. People, apparently, do stuff in wartime for reasons which later may not make much sense. The answer to that "why" question is often not very satisfying.

Episode 9 of "Band of Brothers" is called "Why We Fight." It begins with a hard bitten veteran, Perconte,  who has been with the company since its inception, in a sandbag station with a machine gun, guarding the periphery of camp. He is on duty with O'Keffe, a new replacement to the company. O'Keefe is fiddling with the machine gun, saying he hopes he has not missed all the fighting, now that the Germans seem to be in retreat. Perconte explodes, telling O'Keefe he should only be so lucky to have missed all the fighting, that guys like O'Keefe wind up with their guts hanging out of their wounds crying for their mothers, because that's what combat is. As for Perconte, he is happy to have slept in a real bed with sheets and to have used toilet paper--both for the first time in months. That's what Perconte is fighting for, the pleasure of toilet paper.

Of course, it is Perconte who discovers the concentration camp on a patrol outside of the German town, and when he rushes back to tell Captain Winters, Perconte cannot even get the words out, he is so stunned. 

Gas Chamber At Mauthausen 

Walking through the concentration camp, the American soldiers look around, and cover their noses from the unbearable stench, and they discover the magnitude of the evil they have been fighting. 

So, the episode is called, "Why We Fight." But, of course, fighting to liberate that concentration camp was NOT why these soldiers were fighting. It was an unexpected revelation, not a reason for them to fight, a casus belli. They had no idea what evil lurked behind the lines of the Wehrmacht they had been facing. The Wehrmacht was nasty enough to concentrate the attention of these American soldiers. They were fighting for their own lives and that was enough.

Mauthausen Concentration Camp, Austria

But this is often the case in war. Soldiers fight to keep each other alive, without thinking about greater war aims, as Eric Maria Remarque so beautifully depicted in "All Quiet on the Western Front." The funniest scene has Kat, the squad's emotional center, being told that the war resulted from France having insulted Germany, and Kat says, "Oh, well I don't feel offended at all! So I guess I just be packing up and going home!"

Oath to Hitler, Not to Germany

Even the American Civil War, which turned out to be a war to free the slaves, was not fought by warriors determined to end slavery, in large measure. Many, if not most, of the northern troops had no sympathy for the slaves and were not fighting to free them. Even their best generals, like William T. Sherman, had no particular sympathy for the slaves. In fact, the rallying cry was "Union!" (Mad Dog has wondered why keeping South Carolina in the union would have motivated a farm boy in New Hampshire to joint up. And yet, there are cemeteries all over the state, in every little hamlet, with Civil War dead.)  Some of that changed, as the Federal troops marched through the South and slaves appeared with satchels, following the Union army to freedom.  Like Perconte discovering the concentration camp, those northern troops saw for the first time suffering they had not comprehended, nor imagined and the "why we fight" got added on later.

Lincoln tried to give an answer to the "why" question with his Gettysburg address, but he was reviled by even Northern newspapers for suggesting the Civil War was really a second American revolution, a fight to expunge the original sin of slavery. And when he tried again, in his Second Inaugural address to explain how the war came about, he admitted the war seemed propelled by a force of its own, "and so it came."

The Troubles in Ireland have a big "why" which concerns religion. Read "Say Nothing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) and be amazed at the depths and the breadth of hatred between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. They make the Hatfields and McCoys look like a disrupted tea party. And to Mad Dog's eye, there is so little that actually separates these people. ("Derry Girls," the TV show, does some amazing riffs on this issue. They are forever trying to figure out, from names or appearances, whether someone is Catholic or Protestant, and can't do it.)

It has been said that the most vicious internecine warfare occurs not between people who are very different, different races, from distant lands, but among people who, to outsiders, look very much alike. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict seems to be a case in point. Of course, there is the Muslim/Jewish difference, but watching Israeli TV shows, Mad Dog was struck by scenes where an Israeli store owner sees a customer enter, who to Mad Dog's eye looks like anyone else, but that person entering the store is immediately identified as a Palestinian by the owner, and treated most unfriendly. "Where did all that come from?", Mad Dog asks the screen. 

So, in that case, maybe the "why" is a little more obvious to the combatants. Of course, given the October 7 attack, the viciousness, the rapes, the kidnappings, which indicated how calculated that onslaught was, the casus belli is obvious. But, like many wars, the "why" seems to morph as time goes on.

She Knows Why She Fights

The "why" with respect to the war against Japan seemed pretty clear at the time: Pearl Harbor. 

But why did the Japanese attack Pear Harbor? 

It is only now decades later, with the advent of youtube and histories written at a distance that the Japanese rationale for the attack is now presented. To be sure, the Imperial Japanese, with their bushido culture, driving them to ravage Chinese and Korean populations as subhumans, provides plenty of "why." 

Of course, there are always "innocent" victims of war: the children who were immolated by Curtis LeMay's firebombing of Japanese cities and by the atomic bombs were hardly combatants--although slightly older children were taught with sharpened bamboo to prepare to kill the American invaders.

And, clearly, in Gaza today, innocent children are dying, just as innocent children died on October 7. 

So, in the end, Mad Dog suspects there is really often no single "why" war happens, or violence erupts. There may be a driving force, a climate set by people at the top, but there are as many reasons as there are people involved.

The Ox Blood Incident, Now Daily, And Brought to You by Your Masters

 

The Oxblood Incident was a book about due process, and it captured the perils of a rush to judgment, of acting before enough time is allowed to gather evidence, of simple "sweeps" to satiate a community's longing for immediate action to protect  property and sense of security.

Two cowboys arrive in a Nevada saloon to be told that cattle rustlers have killed a local cowboy named Kinkaid and made off with cattle belonging to Kinkaid's boss. 

Cattle rustling was rumored to be getting out of control in those parts, and the men who crowd the saloon decide to send a message to rustlers and to regain control of their part of the prairie, so they muster up a posse and leap on their horses, only to be briefly stopped by the town's judge who admonishes them to bring the men back to town for trial.

Shortly, three men are found sleeping around a campfire with cattle bearing the marks of Kinkaid's boss and they are seized. One of the men is Mexican. One, Martin, claims they bought the cattle but he cannot come up with documents to prove their legality and the posse hangs the men, only to meet the judge and sheriff on the way back to town and, wouldn't you know it, Kinkaid, very much alive. It turns out the cattle had been legally sold. The men were not illegals; they just didn't have the bill of sale.

Now, this, of course, is an allegory about the importance of due process, about the importance of taking the time to do the annoying, time consuming, important things we call due process to be sure we are not doing an injustice to those we have seized, over whom we have power.

It is about how easy it is to arouse passions, to coalesce around a perceived threat and to assemble a group with powers which overwhelm isolated individuals.

Governments can do this, especially if they have leaders who can sell a threat or who can sell a story about a victimized group to whom we must all ride to the rescue or commission others to ride to the rescue (better yet, so we don't have to get our own hands dirty.)

Courts, of course, have played the role of slowing this whole process down, because there can be no "law and order" without the "order" part. Sometimes, you need to shout "Whoa! Cowboy, just pause a moment."

But now, of course, our Supreme Court has said, "Go ahead. You don't need to worry about warrants, trials, probable cause or any of those inconveniences. Just act." In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh said it only made "common sense" to arrest men because they were speaking Spanish, doing jobs like roofing (which illegal immigrants are known to do) or because they look like "members of an ethnic group" known to have lots of illegal immigrants. 

Justice Kavanaugh thinks certain people ought to suffer, like the unfortunate trio of "The Oxbow Incident," if  they are heard speaking Spanish, or if they are Hispanic looking, low wage workers  ought to be arrested, deported to El Salvador or Sudan, without trial, without stopping to ask, "Did this guy actually violate any law?"

Kavanaugh writes (Noem v Vasquez) approvingly of mass arrests without warrants, 

"So it is in this particular case, particularly given the millions of individuals illegally in the United states, the myriad of 'significant economic and social problems' caused by illegal immigration," using race, language spoken, work sites raided as the criteria for arresting and abducting these Hispanic, Spanish speaking roofers and landscapers only makes "common sense."

Notice, of course, the justice cites no evidence we actually have millions of illegal immigrants, or if we do, that the vast majority are causing economic or social mayhem rather than working hard, furtively at backbreaking jobs no White Americans want. He doesn't have to. He's a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, for life and he can just drive off in his $100,000 camper and see you later. (Or was that Justice Thomas? Or Justice Alito? Mad Dog cannot keep those guys straight. Maybe Gorsuch? Well, part of the dirty half dozen. None of these guys has ever climbed up to do a roof. And, none of them even speak Spanish, so they are not at risk for being shoved into a van.)

Of course, Justice Sotomayor, the only Justice who does speak Spanish (ever),  calls this opinion "unconscionable" but no matter, she is only one of three justices offended.

So, rest easy, America, we may act precipitately; we may cut some corners; we may hang out to dry the wrong people, but they're not White people, so no foul, no harm.

 

And as for the Constitution--remember the Constitution?--"Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"

--you don't need three years in law school to notice it does not say the State cannot deprive any CITIZEN due process, it says any PERSON who is here is entitled to protection of due process? Why? Because when it was adapted in 1868, many states still had not granted former Black slaves citizenship. And it is  because you are entitled to due process for just being here, that America has located Gitmo offshore, where Constitutional protections do not apply, because those guys are not "here."

No matter, the Supreme Court can make up its own laws. 

And the only people who will be hurt will not be White. 

 

Watching the Train Wreck from My Porch

 The internist knows everything, but can do nothing; the surgeon knows nothing, but can do everything; the pathologist knows everything and can do everything, but too late.

--Old Housestaff proverb

Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost.

--H.D. Thoreau

It is a man's opinion of himself which determines his fate.

--H.D. Thoreau

Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that's what's ridiculous. Gettin' old.

--Sam the Lion, "The Last Picture Show."

In high school, Mad Dog could see there was no point asking his teachers any questions because they were, with some rare exceptions, only a page ahead of him in the textbook. Asking really interesting questions of these people was only likely to create embarrassment. That changed in college, where asking the professor a question elicited not only an enlightening answer, but often ignited a whole rocket launch of erudition, unexpected, delightful and taking Mad Dog into realms unanticipated and enriching. But that was only true for the humanities--in science classes, he was more or less back to high school, and the answers to his questions were evasive.  In medical school the most important questions were often answered: "I don't know. If you want to find out, here's the study you'd have to do." Often, the older doctors had seen things and they could tell you the important information that what you were seeing in a patient was either to be expected or unexpected, which was important. The professors in medical school knew more than the students. But so did the nurses. We were all told as interns to ask the nurses who knew way more medicine than we did as new medical school graduates, and boy did they ever.

On rounds one day, a man who had just been sent to the ward after a week in the cardiac care unit for a heart attack told us he was having a little tightness in his chest, and then he suddenly asked for a bed pan: the two nurses looked at each other in alarm--one rolled down the head of his bed and the other ran for the Crash Cart where all the medications and equipment for cardiac resuscitation were kept. Sure enough, before Mad Dog had time to even ask what all the fuss was about, the patient arrested and he was resuscitated successfully because the nurses were slapping all the Bristojets of lidocaine in our hands, and had the chest pads for the electric cardioverter in place within seconds. They knew that telltale signal of vagal release which preceded cardiac arrest.

Now, in his dotage, Mad Dog can see the signals: He has seen it all before. He knows that the Trumpish use of the word "antisemitism" has nothing to do with any desire to protect Jews from abuse, but is simply a replacement motif for anti-intellectualism, for resentment of professors at elite universities who think they are better than other people, and smarter and higher class. But rather than resorting to "effete intellectuals" or "nattering nabobs of negativism" like Spiro Agnew, Trump can do what autocrats do, he can find a victim to create and defend. So he is the champion of resistance to antisemitism, which gives him license to wreck universities, to dance on the graves of those smartass professors and university presidents. 

New Hampshire Howl, Obadiah Youngblood

Richard Hofstadter wrote about Anti Intellectualism in American Life in the 1960's. Then it was Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was pointing to the universities as the haven of Communists, elitists and people who thought they were better than everyone else.

So these are the hallmarks of the disease Mad Dog knows, has seen before. 

But, as Bill Clinton once observed about retirement: "When I was President, I had to be very careful about what I said; every word, every phrase I used was dissected, analyzed and often came back to haunt me. Now, out of office I can say whatever I want, what I really believe. Trouble is, nobody cares. Nobody even listens."

And so that's Mad Dog, sitting on his porch in New Hampshire, watching the slow motion train wreck, seeing masked men in bullet proof vests, abduct people for looking Hispanic, speaking Spanish or working on a roof or in a yard landscaping, and the Supreme Court says that's all just fine and reasonable. 

And now we have a national police, which the Germans called their Gestapo; we call it ICE. ICE, to Mad Dog's ear is way cooler. Cool as ICE. ICEMAN cometh. ICE in his veins. IIIIICE!

Oh, that's the disease all right. Get the crash cart. Get out the paddles. 

But no, Mad Dog is just an old decrepit bag of bones, watching the new generation rise, and he watches this with eyes which have had the youth bled from them by the hard sleet and snow winters, seeing the sham with well earned cynicism. But, like the elders of Peyton Place, sometimes, against all the warnings of better judgment, he turns his tired winter eyes toward heaven, to seek the first traces of a false softening. (Thanks, Ms. Metalious.)

Carleigh Bariont

Now, there is a youngster, full of hope, running in the Democratic primary for Congress, Carleigh Beriont. She has children in the Hampton public schools and she is a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College and holds several degrees including a PhD from Harvard. She is "running for the children," best as Mad Dog can discern. She is a "quality candidate."

Which is why Mad Dog thinks she doesn't have a chance.

Mad Dog holds three diplomas from Ivy League universities and he knows exactly what those degrees mean and what they do not mean.

Successful students, Mad Dog thinks are the Eddie Haskells of the world. Mad Dog realizes 99% of his readership has no idea who Eddie Haskell was, because they were too young to watch "Leave it to Beaver." But the Ivy League was filled with Eddie Haskell's. You can google it, thank God. (Even Bubbles, of The Wire, made Leave It to Beaver allusions, a complete anachronism, and a jarringly out of character reference, but not even David Simon could resist citing that generational/cultural touchstone. Basically, the crowd which remembers "All Shook Up," will not need to google. If you do, you are forgiven.)

***

Mad Dog has  observed elections, candidates and public opinion for 17 years in New Hampshire and he has formulated Rule One of Candidacy in this state: The most obvious, best choice for any office never wins. That is the one sure thing you can bet on.

Terence O'Rourke

When Terence O'Rourke ran for the same seat in a Congressional primary with eleven candidate some years ago, he was head and shoulders above everyone else in the crowd. He had enough educational bone fides (Marquette University BA, Tulane Law, JD) but he was also a combat veteran, an Army Ranger, winner of a bronze star (which he never mentioned, unless directly asked) and an all around stellar human being. He came in dead last by a country mile. People round here thought he was "too aggressive," not nice enough. 

Senator Klobuchar

When Amy Klobuchar came to New Hampshire during primary season, running for the Presidential nomination, Mad Dog looked at her resume`: Yale undergrad, University of Chicago Law. Uh-oh, he thought.

The thing about Ivy Leaguers is they tend to be company men. Which is to say, they tend to be careful not to offend. They have got into their prestigious places not by rebelling but by regurgitating, by playing the game, by pleasing people, by learning not to annoy those who have some power over their fates.

So Mad Dog asked Senator Klobuchar: "You have told us about all the programs and policies you hope to enact. But how do you propose to defeat a candidate of charisma with a campaign of policy?"

Mad Dog saw a brief flicker of incomprehension, then panic, flit across the Senator's face. Then she collected herself and she said, "Well, I think I have charisma!"

Clearly, not a question she had thought about or been prepared for, and she managed to dredge up a laugh line, but, nevertheless, telling.

Had Senator Klobuchar pulled Mad Dog aside and said, "I'll come by and sit on your porch and we'll chat about this," Mad Dog would have made the time. He would have told her what she was up against is a man who had made his public image over a decade, who rejected the carefully parsed, well formed paragraphs, who was not afraid to offend, who owned "authenticity" and if she wanted to beat that guy she'd need to start swinging for the fences and stop playing to simply not lose. She'd have to be outrageous. She might have replied, "Bernie is already doing that and getting nowhere." And Mad Dog would have said, "But he's not pretty or young or from the Midwest."

Senator Klobuchar never came  to sit on Mad Dog's porch. Neither will Carleigh Beriont. 

No loss for them.

Mad Dog will have no answers for them. 

But he believes he has, at least, managed to ask the right question.