His Big Beautiful Birthday Parade!

 

It's become difficult to avoid comparing The Don Donald to Adolph Hitler because...well, there's just no one who so closely fits.

It was Hitler who insisted that instead of taking an oath of loyalty to the German state, soldiers of the Wehrmacht took an oath to him, personally. They held up their fingers in a funky hand sign and pledge loyalty to him above all else. Uber Alles!

So when Mr. Trump gave his little talk to the soldiers at Ft. Bragg, which Donnie Dumpling thought was named after him, he enjoyed himself immensely. If the fort had been named for Trump it would have been Fort Braggadicio, but, in fact, it was named after another traitor who sought to destroy the United States, Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general.

Braxton Bragg owned a sugar plantation and 106 slaves in Louisiana before the war.  He was one of the 5% of Confederates who actually owned more than a dozen slaves.  So, he was like our modern day billionaires--a tiny percentage at the top who have the other 95% doing their bidding. At the battle of Missionary ridge, Union soldiers scaling what was thought to be an impregnable mountain, simply swept forward over Bragg's army and routed him and he had to virtually evacuate Tennessee and left the South open to Sherman and his march to the sea. The South had many effective and daring generals--Longstreet, Stonewall Jackson, Forrest--but, for reasons known only to the army and the Trump mob, they named a fort after one of the worst.

The Don mused that the loyal soldiers shown behind him on the stage would never have rallied to hear President Biden, but they loved President Trump and all the neo Waffen SS cheered wildly.  These boys in their snazzy maroon berets were Trump's boys. They loved him personally, not Biden, not the country, not the Constitution: They loved Donnie Dilatory. 

So, there you have it, Mr. Trump has got his own personal army just like Mr. Hitler.

Now, the Trumpster is throwing himself a massive birthday bash on June 14 and he has invited all his soldier fans to attend.  Mr. Trump, who famously dismissed soldiers as saps and suckers and fools for joining the military, now loves the adulation coming his way from the be-all-you-can-be guys at Fort Braxton Bragg.  

And then there is the phenomenon which Mr. Trump leads, and all his sycophants fall all over themselves trying to emulate. When a journalist asks Karoline Leavitt an embarrassing question, Ms. Leavitt responds "that is a stupid question," just like Mr. Trump who spends minutes attacking any journalist who asks embarrassing questions before not answering the question, telling them they are terrible reporters, have no business in the White House, work for a failing fake news network and all like that.

Because there is a long tradition of "civility" in American government--even Nixon fielded questions from journalists, who occasionally prefaced "with all due respect" and Nixon quipped, "That would be refreshing, coming from you,"--the slap in the face, the ad hominin attack on the appearance, intelligence, family history and purloined soul of any opponent has its appeal. It's fresh. It's authentic. It's titillating. It's so very Trumpish.

And it gets to be a fad among his fans--Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan all pose as fearless fighters not afraid to "tell it like it is."

He famously said, "The only difference between me and [the others] is I'm more honest and my women are more beautiful." Christopher Hitchens suggested the best man to beat Trump would have been Warren Beatty, who had even more beautiful women, and he did not have to buy them.

As for the Trumpster, he is forever threatening violence--he would not risk his heel spurs himself, but he exhorts the crowd to do it for him. 

And the trumpery of rejecting actual argument or debate means, eventually, the only thing left when anyone in the government or the press disagrees is personal invective, and we've been there. 

In the run up the the last Civil War, Charles Sumner attacked the institution of slavery and the slave masters on the floor of the U.S. Senate, and Senator Preston Brooks, having no words or clever phrases or cerebral matter of his own, responded in the only way he knew how--by beating Sumner into a bloody pulp on the floor of the U.S. Senate with a brass headed cane for a bludgeon. 

Confederate sympathizers were so delighted, they sent Brooks dozens of canes to use on any other Yankee abolitionist who dared try to engage in debate using words only.

Of course, not all Southerners abjured rhetoric and debate. When John Randolph, who likely lost testicular function owing to adolescent mumps, found himself derided by another Congressman for his eunuchoid appearance, he replied: "You pride yourself on an animal masculinity, in which the Negro is your equal and the jackass infinitely your superior." Those White plantation owners made the Trump nursery look like school boys.

Now, of course, Trump sends in his FBI and assorted goons to take down a United States Senator challenging the Barbie Doll Noem at her "press conference."

Of course, Mr. Trump will accuse the Senator of defending rapists, illegals and MS13  and will threaten similar treatment for any other US Senator who dares defy him. The only thing missing is the brass headed cane.

Churchill, who was sufficiently pugnacious to appeal to Trump, who installed a bust of him in the Oval Office, was pugnacious in a way Trump never could be: cleverly.

The closest he got to attacking opponents ad hominin was to address their oratory: Of one unfortunate object of derision he said the man had "the gift of compressing the largest number of words into the smallest amount of thought." That, of course describes Mr. Trump succinctly.

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxyqZ0XSDeoHo99NAZOgbl4OJ3ds0W_bEG?si=EGZKJf7mwGmVRFLU

Trump Declares War on Blue States: Invades California!

 

If there was ever any doubt about what the MAGAT crowd found in Donald Trumpling, it has got be be clear now with a massive $45 million military parade in Washington, for Trump's birthday.

Oh well, what's $45 million? Just the cost of Trump's Tesla coughed up by Qatar. 

 So we'll have tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue, where once the Grand Army of the Republic marched in review to adoring crowds, the soldiers having crushed the armies and banners of slavery, having won what was until that day the most righteous war ever fought--a war fought by free men and freed slaves on behalf of those who could not fight because they were enslaved.

Not until the Third Reich and Hitler had a more odious enemy been vanquished.

But now, what will the American army be celebrating?

Stalin held a big parade in Red Square to rally patriotic fervor before sending out the Red Army to defend against the invading Nazi horde, but ever since then, the goose stepping soldiers in Red Square have simply celebrated might and projected intimidation.

Now, Mr. Trump rallies his Lost Cause hordes, renaming forts in honor of Confederate Generals, who fought to keep people enslaved. These Generals, Braxton Bragg, A.P. Hill, were by any definition, traitors. But now they have MAGA forts named after them, because they are, you know part of our "heritage," like lynching and Wounded Knee and My Lai. 

Personally, some parts of our national heritage, I could do without, or at least would prefer to see examined with eyes wide open rather than wide shut.

It's no secret, those who fought to destroy a free and fair election on January 6, 2021, fought to start another Civil War. These men who Trump calls freedom fighters were fighting for a renewal of the Confederacy and for the "Lost Cause," of white supremacy, and the stars and bars and slaves in the fields singing "Swing Lo Sweet Chariot" before it was all gone with the wind.

As Heather Cox Richardson has noted, the South lost the Civil War on the battlefields, but a hard core of Southern white nationalists has never abandoned the idea of reasserting White control over what are now known as the Red states, from the old Confederacy west to the Mountain states where White Supremacy rules. And they are no longer satisfied with a White supremacist Red state America; they want to bring their creed to every state in America.

And now, a man living in the same house where Lincoln once  lived and worked is sending in the Marines and a federalized national guard to crush democracy and to raise the flag of despotism and racial animus in California.

The MAGA mob has its man now. 

What the rest of us have, remains to be seen.

P.S.

(Clip from Kimmel)

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxyqZ0XSDeoHo99NAZOgbl4OJ3ds0W_bEG?si=EGZKJf7mwGmVRFLU

Round Them Up!

 Getting people on the trains and deporting the multitudes requires some organizational skills.

First you have to set goals: And Stephen Miller has set a goal of 3,000 arrests a day to capture that 11 million estimated illegal alien rapist/murderer/infesting population.

Adolph Eichmann only did 6 million, so Mr. Miller is even more ambitious.

And then you have to set up railroad transportation or airplanes or something, for deportations. And holding facilities, preferably outside the borders of your own state, say Poland, or Austria or El Salvador.

KAPO

And finding them: Mr. Miller has excoriated Homeland Security and ICE agents for not raiding every 7/11 and Home Depot. They are not meeting their QUOTAS!

You know, if you're dealing with an infestation, you have to scrub them out.

And we looked from one to another and could not tell them apart

And while all this is going on, we've got to organize an Einsatzgruppen to sweep up and collect large numbers and deal with them. Und if da ordinary Wehrmacht is not doing a good enough job, ve get the Marines to go in und do it! Einsatzgruppen!

Sieg! Heil!

Somewhere down the line, one can imagine Mr. Miller in the docket at a Nuremberg trial or a Washington, D.C. trial, but no, that is not likely. As was observed at the time: such trials happen only when the victors meet out justice, and where do you see the impending victory and by whom?

Stephen Colbert showed an interview with some random guy in Los Angeles last night. The reporter asked him if he had seen the protests or the arrests and he said he was not close enough to actually see much--he was just walking by, but he got tear gas drifting into his mouth. 

"What was that like?"

"It tasted like," he said, pausing to find a word, "Fascism."

https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxyqZ0XSDeoHo99NAZOgbl4OJ3ds0W_bEG?si=EGZKJf7mwGmVRFLU

The Name Game: Scum and Dumber

 

So now Mr. Trump has delighted in his new name for Governor Gavin Newsome, as Governor Newscum. Get it? New--Scum. As in "scum of the earth"?

Oh, the playground outside the grade school classroom must be just in stiches!

It may not be quite "Little Marco," or "Crooked Hillary" or "Pocahontas" Warren, but it's pretty good, right?

So, thinking about it, Mad Dog thought we need to collect a quiver of arrows to sling back: 

Donald Dump

The Dumpling

President Gump

President Donald Lump

Donald Rump

The President Sump Pump Trump

Which is just a quick run through the alphabet.

The trouble is, nobody can work up quite the delight the Trumpling can when it comes to using scurrilous nicknames because, you know, it's so puerile and inane. But for Mr. Trump, it's just so much fun and he uses one of  these epithets and sits up grinning as if he's just demolished Winston ("Winnie the Pooh") Churchill in a debate about democracy.

Because he is incapable of understanding when he's lost an argument based on logic, evidence and presentation, he thinks he's won when he burps up a hopefully demeaning ad hominem. 

But his fan base agrees with him and they're having fun, so what could possibly go wrong?

Send in the Clowns!

 One thing you got to say for Trump: He is an entertainer.

Calls Governor Newsom Governor New-scum and all like that. 

Says California is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad state over run by raping, pillaging, infesting immigrants and he is riding to the rescue, which, of course, came as a surprise to Californians, who like their immigrants very much thank you, and appreciate them rebuilding all the houses that got burned down by wildfires, which, of course had nothing to do with climate change but were all the fault of the governor not turning on the water spickets or those Jewish space lasers we have heard so much about, but which the leftist elite media derides as comic book fantasy, when, of course, we know its all SO true.

National Guard Time

You know Mr. Trump will blame that first fatality wrought by his federalized National Guard on Governor New-scum, the elite leftist failing New York Times and the swamp men of Washington, D.C. 

Meanwhile, in case you haven't noticed the war in Ukraine which Mr. Trump promised to stop with a single phone call Day One is un-stopped. 

Also Gaza is still raging, another thing he forgot to keep his promise about. 

In fact, when he flew to Qatar to collect his $400 million  bobble, he never bothered to stop in Israel, which might mean something, but probably he was just in a hurry to get home because he wanted to be sure the sale of his red Tesla, which he bought from that guy whose name nobody can remember now, he just sold to the Qatari's for, you can guess what got for that, but I'll spot you the "40."

Meanwhile, Harvard still refuses to award Kristi Noem an honorary degree, so she is going to build a new brutalist building in Harvard yard to house her immigrant tracking facility and to train Harvard freshmen in HVAC, electrician and plumbing skills, which would, in fact be one reform all of us can cheer, but we are waiting to hear from MAGATs about what they think of the idea. Harvard, of course, is digging in its heels about Noem's honorary degree, because, you know: ANTISEMITISM!  

And more good news: no more scientific articles in peer reviewed journals--the "peers" reviewing articles on cancer drugs, diabetes medications and heart medicines will be relatives of RFK JR or Alex Jones, who has been in the pharmaceutical business for years.

There's a reason Cannonball Express was such a big hit in America. 

An American Gestapo

 During the Red Scare of the 1950's Senator Joseph McCarthy proclaimed the American government was rife with Communists, especially in the State Department, but beyond that, the whole government riddled with Reds.

Herblock's McCarthy

And that wasn't all: there were "fellow travelers" who were, if not card carrying members of the Party, were in sympathy, a nasty secret "fifth column" of evil doers wishing the American nation ill.

Today, we would call them "terrorists."

All this, of course, was the way Senator McCarthy sought attention, presumably to position himself to run for President eventually.

But that was more than 70 years ago, and Americans forget, do not follow history, or get their history from QAnon.

Now, we have the Trumplings in power going after the opposition as a disloyal opposition, trying to take down a U.S. Senator, Jeanne Shaheen, and trying to get to her by suggesting her husband and a family friend and lawyer, Celine Atalah, are fellow travelers with Muslim terrorists.

Both Atalah and Shaheen have been pulled out of TSA checkpoints for searches at airports.

"New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen's Husband Traveled with a Known or Suspected Terrorist Three Times in a Single Year," a June 4 Department of Homeland Security press release said. 

And, of course, in Ms. Noem's world, there is really no difference between "known" and "suspected."

Prostrate-tution

So now we have Kristi Noem going after the loyal opposition and accusing it of being disloyal.

Trump World

During the McCarthy era, it was a single loud mouthed Senator in the legislative branch trying to scapegoat targets, and he had little more than the media to help him. But now, we have the executive branch, with all its departments abducting people, searching them at airports, and claiming that well, it's all Biden's fault.

Trump World: Nice Red

You see, Biden weaponized the Silent Partners Quiet Skies program and targeted people like Tulsi Gabbard (now chief spy for Trump) and so this is, well, payback.

So whether it's using the IRS to harass political opponents or dissenters, or using the TSA to strip search them at airports, the Trumpland willing accomplices have organized to shut down or imprison any opposition.

Straight Out of Central Casting

From the point of view of those MAGA hat wearing fans, this is all fair play, and, well, they deserve it. The images of brown men, heads shaven, linked with handcuffs been whisked off to prison in El Salvador makes the MAGATs grin and cheer. Finally! Somebody's getting tough on all those murderers and rapists! And just look at the photo of that guy Trump abducted to the prison in El Salvador with MS13 "tattooed" on his knuckles! Yes, look at that photo in the hands of Mr. Trump. As Jon Oliver pointed out, the MS 13 part did not even conform to the knuckle hills and valleys and is such an obvious fake it is embarrassing to even contemplate Mr. Trump trying to sell this as a sort of Trump steak or Trump University diploma.

So we are in the fantasy phase of Trump World. Whatever the Trumplings say, it must be true because there are all those voters in the 40% out there who will nod their heads and shout, "Right on!" Beat up those swamp dwelling Deep State woke suckers!

Trump World

Daniel Goldhagen wrote a book in 1996 called "Hitler's Willing Accomplices," the thesis therein was Hitler could not have succeeded without the enthusiasm and support of the German public. That caused a storm in 1996, as Germans protested that to smear the entire German nation for an aberration like Hitler was outrageous. But, no. It was not. For years after the end of WWII, photos of Hitler on the covers of magazines in Germany were outlawed: It was thought too many would be framed and hung in homes and pubs and beer gardens.

Isn't She Just So HOT?

Right now, in the U.S., the idea of being tough, of meting out retribution in the most brutal way possible is the central feature of the ruling party. The brutality is the point. It means we are tough. 

Don't Let Your Daughters Grow Up to Be Cowboys

We'll find out in 2026 how many willing accomplices Mr. Trump has in America.

The Public Intellectual

 

Chicago Times, "The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances"

Daily Patriot (Harrisburg, PA), "Silly remarks. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of."

--Reaction to President Lincoln's address at the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 19, 1863.

David Brooks

Even before there was television, before the internet, before X, there were people who could convey their thoughts to millions of people and have those thoughts considered, who could mold opinion, instigate discussion. Henry David Thoreau could sit in his cabin and write "Civil Disobedience" and "Walden" and his mind could touch the imperfect body politic.

Then came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who could reach people in their living rooms via radio.

And then Walter Cronkite came into millions of homes with his carefully apolitical "CBS Evening News."

Mad Dog has to admit, he is as suspectable as anyone, more than most, as he now watches PBS News nightly, reads, actually reads not just the cartoons but articles, every week in the "New Yorker" and lately has added "The Atlantic."

More often that not, Mad Dog finds himself flinging a magazine across the room, shouting, "What piffle! What trumpery! What sophistry!"

And yet, with each new issue arriving at his door, with every evening the TV beckons, and Mad Dog looks with hopeful eyes toward an epiphany which never comes.

Dudley Dudley, Hero of the NH Seacoast

There are some public figures who have been given a spot on national TV, in newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal which have massive, expensive, extensive distribution. They have the stage and the spotlight. From some occult process a select few have been chosen by some powers to speak to the masses. 

For years, I've watched David Brooks, with whom I have a love/hate relationship, but I can't say our relationship has grown old. It's simply aged.

Why I still read him, I cannot say. Maybe a large part of it is he is still there. I don't care if he is widely read or influential--I care whether I agree with him when I read him and whether I find myself saying, "True that. Finally, someone has put into words my own inchoate thoughts."

That is rare, nowadays, with David or with anyone else.

The American Dream

Jill Lepore, George Packer get it right more often than not, but they too often meander away from the salient point.

Evan Osnos reports more than he tries to elucidate or persuade, and his recent piece on "The Oligarch in Chief" mentions a woman named Erica Payne, who has organized a group called "Patriotic Millionaires" who says its the mission of her group to avoid the mistakes of the intolerant left: "We're not going to talk about all this stuff that everybody else wants to talk about...transgender, L.G.B.T.Q, guns--everything that makes everybody mad."

I read that and said, "Finally!"

But then there is David saying stuff like this: "Nations that hang together through crisis have a strong national identity--they return to their roots. They have a leader who replaces the amoralism of the nihilists, or, say, the immorality of slavery, with a strong redefinition of the nation's moral mission, the way Lincoln redefined America at Gettysburg."

Back to Our National  Roots

And that's where Mad Dog goes into orbit. 

The fact is, Brooks is not revealing a forgotten or unappreciated past; he is creating a myth of a world which never existed and which is the sort of Disney history we teach children in some public schools. Brooks is engaging in that dreamworld of Stephen Speilberg, who, in a typically Spielberg moment in his movie "Lincoln" he has two Union soldiers, one Black, reciting back to Lincoln his words from the Gettysburg Address, as if that wonderful coda actually reached and was taken to heart by the vast armies of the Union. As if that dramatic moment at Gettysburg, which actually, was not so dramatic, in the days before public address systems and sound amplification, but which did get recorded in some manner and eventually some people heard about it. 

But in a Spielberg-esque/Brooks telling, these soldiers now knew what they were fighting for, and would go out singing the Gettysburg address, like Onward Christian soldiers, and take it to the battlefield trampling out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored. 

Yikes.

There was no one, unified nation in 1863. Most of the soldiers who died at Gettysburg had no desire to free Negro slaves. The armies that fought for the Union were often comprised of coerced soldiers who wanted to leave and go back home.  For all that has been said about Lincoln's extraordinary sermon at Gettysburg, it was just that, a wish for what he hoped the nation could be, not what it was.  He was trying to lead a second American revolution, but until Grant ground down the Army of Northern Virginia, there was no such entity. And when the war was finally about to be concluded, Lincoln looked back over it and tried to make sense of it in his immortal Second Inaugural Address, and that, as Frederick Douglass (a frequent critic of Lincoln) said, was a "sacred effort."

And what is that "strong national identity" Brooks speaks of? Drive around the states of the old Confederacy, or the Mountain West or the Southwest from Arizona to Texas to Oklahoma and tell me what that national identity is.

Sherman, Obadiah Youngblood

And what does he mean by a nation returning to its roots? What are the American roots? No discussion of roots can occur without examining the slave culture of the South, or of the ongoing insurrection of Jim Crow, that guerilla warfare employing the Ku Klux Klan and lynching, the ruthless suppression of unions from Washington State to Pittsburgh to Chicago. 

Read American history as written by Howard Zinn or even Oliver Stone, or Emma Goldman, and find us some common roots. 

What Brooks, and what so many other public intellectuals give us is nothing better than the typical Sunday sermon about a fantasy he wants to believe in, which he wants us to embrace as reality, but which is a history blind to reality.

And there, my friends, you have the true art of the Public Intellectual.