Insurrectionists Must DIE: The Donald Calls for Arrest and Execution of Democrats

 

Oh, now we are getting somewhere.

President Donald J. Trump, who pardoned every last man convicted of insurrection on January 6, 2021, now is in high dudgeon because Six Democratic Congressmen/women released a video reminding members of the United States military that they have taken an oath to defend and follow the Constitution, and, without mentioning the Nuremberg trials where it was established that "just following orders" does not excuse you from crimes against humanity, like shooting down innocent mothers and children in My Lai, Vietnam; they made it pretty clear soldiers deployed to those chaotic, dangerous, nightmarish Democrat cities of Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles have to be willing to refuse to shoot unarmed women, children, men, even if they are Democrats, or Heaven forbid, Spanish speaking.

Trump went on Truth to say:

1/ These Democrats are traitors and insurrectionists.

2/ They should be arrested.

3/ They should all be hanged.

So, we have been told for years we are to take Mr. Trump seriously, but not literally. But what does that mean exactly? That when he calls for the execution of his enemies, of the opposition, we are just suppose to smile and say, "Oh, that's just Donald being Donald again. He doesn't really mean it." When he says, "Fight like hell!" to the crowd that turns and rushes down to the Capitol, he didn't really mean it? He's not really being serious, but we should take him seriously, although not literally. 

When Stalin said, "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic," as he signed the executive order for the purge of millions, was he just someone to take seriously, but not literally?

In Donald's case, when he calls a reporter "Piggy" we laugh, or we are supposed to. When he calls for executions, are we supposed to laugh?

Makes your head spin.

MAGAland is telling you to hear him, but not listen to him. 

Or something.

They Meant It: Hanging

Stephen Miller, who has never served in the military,  followed up by saying they were insurrectionists suborning insurrection in the military.  Mr. Miller has never sworn the oath the soldiers, sailors and airmen swear, has he? He is not a lawyer. Does he know what insurrection is? Why should we believe what he says about these veterans who are now serving in Congress? Has he ever sworn the oath they swore when they came to Congress? Does he have the faintest idea what he's talking about? Should we take him seriously? Literally? 

But, no question, Mr. Miller meant every word.

Maggie Goodlander
Trump Wants Her Hanged

Maggie In Uniform

Karoline Leavitt insisted these Congressmen and Congresswomen are terrible, horrible, no good, very bad terrorists, and none of them wears a gold cross on a necklace, not even the women:  Elissa Slotkin (a former CIA officer) , Chrissy Houlahan (no, not that Houlahan, not "hot lips" but she was in fact an Air Force officer) and New Hampshire's own Maggie Goodlander, a Naval officer and a lawyer who worked on one of Trump's impeachments, so you know she needs to be executed by Trump's criteria. Has Karoline Leavitt ever worn her country's uniform?

Chrissy Houlahan

As for the men, we've got an astronaut (Mark Kelly), a former Army Ranger, who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, (Jason Crow) and Chris Deluzio (Navy vet.)

Jason Crow

For the record, none of these folks Trump now calls traitors ever claimed exemption for heel spurs.

Trump's excuse

So, all of this is apparently no problem for MAGAworld, a President doing his Joe Stalin channeling thing. Purge the Congress of vexatious Democrats, especially those who were suckers, saps and fool enough to actually fight for their country in the military. 

You know Mr. Trump is famous for his malleability--he listens to the last person he talks to and that becomes his new belief--so he's been hanging out (forgive the expression) with MBS, the Saudi Prince of Princes, the guy who chops up journalists who annoy him, and now Mr. Trump is all about executing dissenters.  

Actually, considering the alternative offered by Prince MBS, Miss Piggy, the reporter, got off easy. She could have been pork chops by dinner, if she had said that as Air Force One landed in Saudi Arabia.

THEY really mean it

And, in related news, did you ever wonder how they ever found a grand jury willing to indict Letitia James on obviously Trumped up charges of lying on her mortgage application and James Comey for lying about something? 

Lindsey Helligan

Well, it turns out, in Comey's case, the grand jury never did indict him--Trump's leggy blonde prosecutor, Lindsey Helligan, who is not really a prosecutor but plays one on T.V., well Ms. Helligan had the foreman of the grand jury sign the indictment and one other juror signed it, but it takes 10 grand jurors, and they never did sign on, so the judge is faced with a trial for a man who was never actually indicted, because, for all her movie star looks, Ms. Helligan did not know how to indict someone before bringing him to trial. 

Ms. Bondi

Pam Bondi, another leggy blonde, (Helligan's boss and supervisor) signed off on this indictment, so she also lied to the court.

Can we take these ladies, these graduates of law schools, seriously? Mad Dog has not yet googled where these two went to law school, but he's betting it was the Kim Kardashian School of Law. Clearly, we cannot take them literally. 

Stormy: Are We Seeing a "type" here?

No worries, however: they are both blonde and wear those fetching gold crosses, which is all that matters to their boss, Mr. Trump. 

He was just following orders: Nuremberg

For that matter, can we take RFK JR or Kristi Noem, who is so in love with costumes, cowboy hats, cool bullet proof vests, and photo shoots of her riding a horse, seriously?

 

In fact, looking at those cringe worthy cabinet meetings, where they go around the big conference room table and each cabinet minister tell Mr. Trump how wonderful he is and how he is the best President EVER, how can we take any of these people seriously?

But maybe that's the point. This government is, really is, a joke. 

But who is the joke on? 

This America, man.

Trump's Next Attorney General 
You Heard It Here First!

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Gi2ZyMxXd9I

That Hellhole in Chaos: Charlotte, North Carolina

 

So MAGAland has to be ethnically cleansed.

Even in the former Confederacy. Even a red state that went 51% to 47.8% for Trump, it's not enough, because there are still parts of the state which have not declared loyalty to Trump, and so the masked, vested, anonymous storm troopers have shown up and arrested suspicious looking people who might not look like they are "from around here," and who might even speak Spanish, which is all Justice Kavanaugh says they need for probable cause. 

2024 Election Map: Charlotte is that Dark Blue Center, Bottom Border

And what has happened in response?

The Charlotte Observer interviewed the CEO of one of North Carolina's largest real estate development firms, one of its biggest builders, the CEO of Northwood, Inc.  He has projects from Charlotte all the way east to the seacoast. He reported that he has three large projects under  construction in Charlotte, and among the three his subcontractors would have 300 to 400 workers on site every day. Today, he said, there were 30.

He was quick to note the workers were all documented, at least as far as his subcontractors reported, but the workers did not show up because they believe they'll be arrested even if they are documented or even if they are citizens. This is not unreasonable, given that Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh opined that arresting Spanish speaking men at construction worksites--where many illegals have been found to work--without warrants, without asking for documentation is reasonable because that's where you often find illegals, even if the majority of individuals you haul off turn out to be citizens.

The Observer reporter noted that in Georgia 300 foreign workers, many with valid vistas were hauled off the Hyundai factory site in handcuffs. She did not have to say, "And, everyone round here heard about Georgia, so, Duh! Why should any of these guys show up for work?"

Masked Storm Troopers in Charlotte

Northwood's CEO went on to say, "If the labor force feels threatened and isn't coming in...that's an issue."

As one of the largest home and apartment builders, the CEO can be believed when he says that if his projects are halted or even delayed,  housing and rental costs will inevitable rise. 

The CEO is a Southern gentleman, socially prominent, but carefully apolitical. They named the school of architecture at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte,  after him. His resume might suggest he would lean Republican, given his wealth, stature and connections. But he is not pleased. 

"That's an issue," in Southern speak is a strong statement. It often comes after a set up of "Well, Bless your heart. I can certainly understand your point of view, but...THAT'S AN ISSUE, you dumb twat!" 

So "that's an issue" needs not just a translation, but an explication of the implication in this context:

As in "But if you keep this up, and shut down my businesses with this lunacy, then I just might contribute a few million to your opponent this next election."

For some reason, this all brought to mind that scene in "The Godfather," where Tessio, having betrayed the Corleone family, is being led away to his fate, and he tells Tom Hagen, "Tell Michael, I always liked him. This was all just business." Tom smiles back at him as if to say, "You do what you do, and we'll take care to protect our own business."

With Mr. Trump, sending his masked goons to smash the car windows of citizens who are trying to video the ICE mayhem, it's just business, nothing personal. We are just doing a little ethnic cleansing here, just doing  MAGA's business.  What matters to Mr. Trump is that he looks tough. 

Now Don't She Look Darling in Those Outfits, Honey? 

The South may be trying to rise again, to transform itself into an international hub of industry, but ICE and border patrol have other ideas. Because, you know, doing international business means you have to deal with foreigners. 

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_BXuTLk4auw

Losing Sight of the Mission

 

Mad Dog has been rapt lately, over Mark Mazower's description ("Dark Continent") of Stalin's effort to bring the Soviet Union into the industrial age by moving peasants, the masses of Russians and Ukrainians, off the farms and into the factories. Stalin was clear eyed enough to see that his country was "ten to one hundred years behind" in industrialization, and that it was vulnerable to invasion and subjugation until and unless it could build factories, and their products--airplanes, trains, munitions, telegraphy and telephone wires--at a scale to compete with rearming Germany, France and the rest of Europe, not to mention Japan and the United States.

As Lenin had before him, Stalin realized that achieving the ultimate communist goal of a classless society, a cooperative rather than competitive society could not be achieved in a single bound, and he was willing to allow a certain amount of private enterprise and private property to boost production and to move toward massive industrialization. If an elite class of technocrats, intellectuals and scientists emerged briefly to get to that Promised Land, he was practical enough to allow that to happen, at least in the short run, to gain long term goals. He did not allow ideology to distract him from his priorities.

Putting down Mazower's book, Mad Dog tuned into the PBS Newshour last night, and was fascinated to see a typically excellent Paul Solman story about a community college in North Carolina which was trying to expand its programs for educating young people in the trades--plumbing, machinists, construction, carpentry, auto mechanics, electricians, HVAC--and he watched fascinated as the head of the local chamber of commerce said that what was dragging down growth in the Durham, N.C. area was the dearth of trained workers. Investors who wanted to build a new furniture factory in town needed workers who could use the computer driven lathes and machinery.  Home builders, developers of "mixed use" construction projects needed workers who can put up the walls, wire, provide plumbing. 

What is needed in America right now is not a good five cent cigar or more college graduates with B.A.'s in English or medieval history but tradesmen, trained machinists, people who can build things, the president of the community college said.

Mad Dog found himself nodding along. Like the Soviet leaders of the past, community success depended on seeing the need and filling it. You want industry, you need trained workers. And industry cannot  or will not take on the task of teaching a population to read and write and to tie its shoes and to do sums and to use a ruler. Industry wants all that stuff provided so it can do what it knows how to do.

Much as Mad Dog loved Obama, he was disquieted by Obama's insistence that the way into the future ran only through college. In Obama's case, of course, success had in fact run through college. The son of a single mother of modest means, going to Columbia, an Ivy League college led to Harvard Law and he could catapult from the untouchable class to the upper class in a matter of seven years. 

But that story would not necessarily work for the White son of the Nebraska farmer or for the Ohio steelworker who just got laid off. 

As Portsmouth (NH) mayor Deaglan McEachern once asked, "How many of you in this audience today, raise your hand, could call a plumber or an electrician today and expect to see one show up within the week?" And he went on to add, "Plumbers, electricians, carpenters--these are workers who cannot be outsourced to China. We need them here, present and available."

So Obama and the Democrats were off trying to get everyone a B.A. degree and that struck many folks in Red States as an insult, not to mention impractical. 

And here, on PBS Newshour, were folks trying to solve the problem. And the President of the community college saw something in the demographics which he thought was part of the problem: No women were applying for spots in the trades training programs. His college was missing out on half the population when it came to filling spots in his trades program.

There may be many explanations for this absence of women, but one of them is not that women cannot do these jobs.

Mad Dog worked with a woman who was his medical assistant, making around $25,000 a year and he was surprised to learn she had graduated from the Lawrence Vocational Technical high school where she had learned HVAC skills, but after two years in the trade she told Mad Dog she got driven out by men who didn't want any women around, doing their male jobs. She had given up a job which paid three times what she was making as a medical assistant.

And here was the guy in North Carolina trying to provide a stream of women to the trades. But he was told by Trump officials he could apply for funding to recruit and train students but he had to eliminate the word "women" for his "Program for Recruiting and Teaching Women for the Trades" application.

He had found a private group of women entrepreneurs who wanted to funnel women to his program, but their application for federal funds was rejected because they wrote they were aiming to provide tradecraft training to "women and people of nonbinary genders." Strike out that language and reapply," they were told. 

And Mad Dog felt this slightly sea sick feeling rising within him--he found himself agreeing with the Trump MAGA mob on this one, which is disorienting and vertiginous. 

Sure, go out and recruit women, and people who are non binary, but not because they are women or non binary. Recruit them because they can do the job and you are interested in anyone who can do the job, not especially women or non binary folks. 

Women and non binary people will either be smart enough to see an opportunity for a career or they won't, but they shouldn't be encouraged, trained or hired for the irrelevant reason of their gender.

You might want to address the problems they will face once they are trained up for a male dominated profession, but the medical profession and legal profession have coped with this, and now more than half of medical school places are filled with women and not because they were recruited as women.

So we had the practical problem of getting more people into trades being contaminated with the problem of getting women and non binary people a benefit.

Once again, the success of the MAGA crowd may not derive from their better argument but from the weakness of their opposition's argument.

Not that long ago, a woman began her remarks to the local Hampton Democrats meeting with "My name is Sheila ___. My pronouns are she/her."

It was all Mad Dog could do to not erupt out of his chair and scream, "I don't care what your friggin pronouns are! My pronouns are 'Who Cares?" Luckily, for all involved and for the decorum of the meeting, which always teeters on the fractious, Mad Dog suffered a well aimed elbow into his ribs by his ever alert partner in crime, with whom he canvasses neighborhoods looking for voters every election cycle. She knew what Mad Dog springing to his feet would mean and she brought him down decisively.

Looking forward to the 2026 elections, maybe the Democratic Party ought to take a good look at itself and its priorities. Maybe cleaving to insistence on diversity is not the right thing to do. If diversity happens, wonderful. Should people be seen as equal before the law and the government? Of course. But should that result be the reason for admission into job training programs or universities? 

Maybe the rotten core of the Party is that blindness to what really matters. 

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=529yhXKDVFE

 

The Good Russian: Jana Bakunina

 

Aging depletes many of life's pleasures, as the sensory pleasures decline with cranial nerves (hearing, vision, smell, taste), and muscle mass slackens, and blood flow to the nether regions south of the border narrows--gradually things slip away.

Jana Bakunina

But one new pleasure in aging is the capacity to relish surprise. Once you get into your seventh decade, you start seeing things again and again, and the delight or despair which titillate the younger generations is ho-hum to the septuagenarian--seen it all before. So what? 

The American government embarking on foolish, disastrous adventures, (Korea, Vietnam), scoundrels ascending to control of positions of power with resulting disruption and unrest (1953, Joe McCarthy, then 1968, Nixon, 2024 Trump), stock markets crashing and the financial system teetering (1929, 1987, fill in the blanks). Been there. Done that. Wake me up when you've found something new under the sun. For the very young, everything is new, everything a surprise; for the simply callow, there are fewer but still frequent surprises. 

But for the old, an actual surprise is a real, piquant treat.

So, this morning, on his bike ride to North Beach, with his 21st century blue tooth ear plug plugged into his ear, connected to his new iphone,  streaming a podcast from the "Atlantic Monthly," Mad Dog found himself surprised, astonished even, lucky he did not ride right over the sea wall into the Atlantic. 

They were interviewing Jana Bakunina, a Russian expat, living in London, who has written a book with a startling premise: Russians are doing just fine, thriving even, delighted to be living in Russia and being Russian.

How many podcasts had Mad Dog listened to from the "Wall Street Journal," "The New York Times" and even the "New Yorker,"  mordant toned invocations of the approaching Russian apocalypse,  wherein the pundits were asked to expound on the terrible toll the war in Ukraine is having on the average long suffering Russian? But from Ms. Bakunina Mad Dog learns the average long suffering Russian is not suffering at all, but is having a wonderful time, and very happy, thank you.

Returning to Russia after years in London, Ms. Bakunina expected to find the same old dreary Russia she left, but she  is stunned by the clean streets, the new buildings, the dazzling cities and suburbs and the bustling restaurants, the wealth, the cars, the clothes, the good looking people all having a wonderful time.

Who knew? 

Mad Dog thought the poor Russians were struggling with the war against Ukraine. Runaway inflation. A collapsing economy. 

Apparently, not.

From their perch inside Russia, her Russian friends and family seemed hardly aware of Ukraine. It was no more part of their lives or concern than the next summer Olympics.

She Thinks She's Ukrainian

Russia is a big place, and its vastness has protected it from fires burning in the rest of the world.

Whatever Does Not Kill You...

As Julia Ioffe has documented, in "Motherland," the Russians are a people who march to the beat of their own drums. During the Second World War the Germans drove deep into Russia, conquering a territory the size of France, but, as Ioffe notes, the Russians could lose two Frances and still not be conquered. 

Mad Dog remembered his father's remark upon returning from Spain in 1970, where the fascist dictator Franco was still in power, "They all looked so prosperous and happy in Spain!" my father marveled, "Don't they know they're living under a dictatorship?" And Mad Dog had a similar experience in Hungary in 2024: Budapest was a happening place, filled with young, joyful people cruising the Danube and partying hard. Nobody seemed to mind Victor Orban.

                   If she weren't Russian, She'd be Irish

Ms. Bakunina tells a tale at once familiar and exotic to the American listener: Her father  loves Putin, and speaks of the forceful conquest of Crimea as "reunification," and her friends look around from their tables at the sumptuous restaurants and say, "We are doing great. Why worry about Ukraine?"

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oVaSpBiYb1A

                                

Ukraine hardly surfaces in the Russian consciousness, apart from an occasional recruitment poster plastered on some random wall, advertising for new recruits to some mercenary force. 

Ukrainians are hunkering down for the loss of heating infrastructure, owing to Russian bombardment; they've already adjusted to loss of electricity during many hours of the day. How long they can hold out is anyone's guess.

But nobody in Russia Ms. Bakunina found seemed any more  concerned about Ukraine than Americans are about those boats in the Caribbean which keep exploding because the American Navy keeps blowing them out of the water without warning. Who cares if a few fishermen are mistaken for narco traffickers? Our tough guys are blowing their bad guys to smithereens.

Churchill, of course, famously said, "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interests."

And why is it in the Russian national interest to subjugate Ukraine? Well, Vladimir Putin made no secret of it: He said the greatest disaster of the 20th century was the implosion of the Russian empire. Not World War II, mind you, because that came out fine in the end, despite 20 million dead. But the loss of all those subjugated states--that's what eats away at Putin. When Trump asked him why he invaded Ukraine, violated its borders, Putin reportedly replied, "Well, Ukraine isn't really a nation, you know."

Forebears

What other "nations" may be part of Russia--Hungary, Serbia, Slovakia, Poland, Georgia, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the former East Germany remains to be seen.

 Sharapova When She Was Good 

Mad Dog remembers a tennis match on TV his younger son made him watch. Maria Sharapova playing some young Eurasian woman, a quick, small woman, who was much more nimble, displaying a variety of shots Sharapova could not match. Mad Dog never much liked watching tennis on TV--it is just so monotonous, droning on, back and forth, a metronome without pitch-- but his son insisted he stay to watch this match. "Wait," he told Mad Dog, "Just watch Sharapova. Be patient, for once in your life." So Mad Dog, thus chastened, stayed put on the couch, hunkered down for the hour and a half it would take Sharapova to patiently, relentlessly, inelegantly grind her opponent down. No tricky shots. Nothing spinning, dropping, line hugging, just sheer power, as Sharapova--who looked like a plodding giant compared to her darting, balletic opponent on the other side of the net, a player who was far more skilled and dazzling--but Sharapova ground her down. 

Mad Dog was getting fidgety, angry, but never bored, because Sharapova was showing what Sharapova did best, which is to say just not giving up, not discouraged--she knew her size and remorseless tenacity would simply outlast her opponent, no matter how flashy or plucky or slashing that opponent may be.  Sharpova could lose a point, a game, a set, the entire territory of France, but she would not lose.

Let Napoleon or the Wehrmacht come. The Russian will outlast you. Or, as Khrushchev  once said, "We will bury you."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ov_tDoDsAQ&list=RD-Ov_tDoDsAQ&start_radio=1

As Julia Ioffe suggested in "Motherland," these folks are not going anywhere. They will still be there.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ech_a5WlgwA

Those Democrats Always Cheat on Their Mortgage Applications

 

In Russia, if you displease Mr. Putin, you'd best stay away from windows, especially those on the third floor or higher. People who displease Mr. Putin have a way of falling out of those windows. 

Gold Galore: Eat Your Heart Out Donald

Can't explain it. They must not have screens or safety latches in Russia.

In America, if you displease Donald Trumpery, you will discover you have cheated on your mortgage application. The Department of Justice will somehow dispatch an investigator to check out your application, and--wouldn't you know it--you will find you misrepresented something.

And Mr. Trump should know about misrepresenting things on real estate forms--He was convicted of 39 instances of representing that properties he owned were worth gazillions, until it came time to declare their worth to taxing authorities, at which point he said they were worth next to nothing.

Really odd, how that works.

But now, the game is finding Democrats always cheat on their mortgage applications. Just ask Letitia Jones, who prosecuted Mr. Trump, or Congressman Eric Swalwell, who criticizes him, and was just notified the DOJ is investigating his mortgage application.

It's the sort of American version of window mishaps.

Better, perhaps as far as the victim is concerned--less lethal, but annoying nevertheless.

Tricky Dick Nixon liked to sick the IRS on foes to find some improprieties in those incomprehensible forms, but since Trump has never released his IRS documents, going after others about their returns seems like less fun.

But Trump knows real estate, or so he claims, and those mortgages are just quicksand.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, we've heard, is developing retroactive mortgage deceptivitis. 

She'd better be careful. Those windows in her house may be beckoning.

Now, here's a little ditty with which we might all serenade Ms. Green: (To the Tune of "Anything Goes")

In Donald's days, a little too much carping

Is looked upon as deadly mocking

And now, Gods knows

Anything goes!

Good Congress women who once spoke better words

Now dare to let fly verbal turds

And now, who knows?

Anything goes!

If criticizing her former hero

Gets him fiddling like Emperor Nero

We all know better than to oppose

Because...

Anything goes!

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kX1WygwUGHs

War Consigliere vs The Surrender Caucus: Where You Been, Bro?

 

It was no accident that Texas Representative Chip Roy became the spokesman for the Defund Obamacare Republicans in the Congressional hearing yesterday. Roy fought to keep the government closed to force the Democrats to cave and defund Obamacare when the Democrats were in power. He was scathing in his criticism of fellow Republicans who caved in and voted to fund it, so the government could re-open. He called them the "surrender caucus" in 2013. 

Now, Roy finds himself on the winning side, watching the surrender caucus of Senate Democrats cave in, while moving on the House side to drive the dagger in the heart of Obamacare.

Roy is cunning enough to frame Obamacare as:

1/ A scheme to enrich insurance companies--a good villain to pick in these times

2/ A program which limits the choice of doctors and hospitals so the government dictates which doctor you can and cannot see.

Of course, Obamacare was criticized at the time of its passage as a scheme to enrich commercial insurance companies. The Democrats wanted, and tried, to pass Medicare for All but ran into a brick wall constructed by Republicans who called it socialized medicine and, of course, lobbyists for the insurance companies were all over Congress and so, as happens in democracies, a compromise was struck handing insurance companies the business, but at least insuring that ordinary folks could buy insurance, no matter what "pre-existing conditions" they had. 

In fact, if Representative Roy had not been in Congress when he got his Hodgkins lymphoma and then applied for insurance he would have been denied coverage for his pre-existing condition. But what he complains about is that Obamacare would not have covered his care at MD Anderson, which is not really the fault of Obamacare, but of MD Anderson's business model.

It is also particularly rich to hear Roy inveigh about the Democrats holding the country hostage to Obamacare for 45 days, when he did precisely that to deny the country Obamacare back in 2013, and when his party caved, he called them "the surrender caucus."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPUJOpB2_Qg&t=1546s

Across from him, Hakeem Jeffries rises to attack the Republican assault on Obamacare, and he  confronts Roy for having tried to kill Obamacare 70 times, and for having fled Capitol Hill for 7 weeks rather than engaging in any kind of debate. 

"He couldn't see fit to ask us a single question, to engage in a debate. Where you been, bro? You don't have the time to have a back and forth? You want to repeal and displace tens of millions of people. That's the Republican plan. What I don't understand why my colleague (Roy) cut and run. The absence of any plan to make life better for every day Americans. Republicans literally stole food from children, mothers and veterans, and all of that was literally done to enact massive tax breaks for billionaire donors. And as if that wasn't bad enough, they skyrocketed the debt by trillions of dollars a year. So we are not going to be lectured about fiscal responsibility by you when you did that because Donald Trump ordered you to do that."

All this brought to mind the difference between a war consigliere and a consigliere who counsels accommodation, surrender and moderation. 

Sometimes fiction can instruct us on real life; it can provide a reference story we can refer to, just as many find Bible stories allegories to help them with the troubles they face in daily life. 

For Mad Dog, one such story is the movie, "The Godfather." When Tom Hagen, the Corleones' consiglieri, assesses the family's position after the attempted assassination of the Don, he advises accommodation or some might say, surrender, because it makes business sense. It's cheaper than a war, and it means everyone can make money. 

Michael decides to reject that advice and chooses to assassinate the would be assassin who had already missed his chance. And later, when the Corleone family decides to go to war, he excludes Tom, who is stunned and asks, "Michael, why am I out?"

"You're a good consigliere, Tom. And I love you, but you're not a war consigliere and you're out."

There are times when you need to follow your gut, or, to put it another way, to do what is emotionally and possibly morally the required decision. 

Winston Churchill, whose bulldog visage is at Donald Trump's elbow in the Oval Office, took the war consigliere position. Churchill's  predecessor had conciliated Hitler, had appeased him. Not Churchill. "We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight them on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. And we shall fight them in the hills. We shall never surrender."

Now that is the sort of leader Democrats need today.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9uEy5RKz6uI

Raping The Girl On 5th Avenue

 

It is a measure of desperation on the part of Democrats they continue to cleave to the idea there will be some one thing, one deux ex machina event which will bring Trump down and rid the Republic of this vexatious idol without the Democrats having to actually beat him in battle.

But it doesn't matter if Jeffrey Epstein sent an email saying Trump had sex with a "victim," at his house. It wouldn't matter if a video of Trump having sex with a fourteen year old girl surfaced. Or with a fourteen year old boy. Or having sex and then shooting them on 5th Avenue.

Trump is occasionally correct: He said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and people would still elect him President. In fact, he wound up doing something very close to that: He exhorted his MAGA mob to attack the Capitol and then, after they did it, he can pardon those captured and nobody blinks an eye.

Any text message, email, video will be denied. Fake news. Deep fake. Black's white today. Good's bad today. Day's night today. 

His die hard MAGA fans will forgive him anything. He's an imperfect vessel doing God's work. Or he's just a man's man. He talks like us. Humble yourself before them and they will do anything you ask--Frank Underwood.

                         Behold, the Real Problem

This America, man.

CODA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pay3qgmi8E8&t=145s