What Was the Wonderful Secret?

 When Donald Trump was beating the drum about his own "investigation" of Barack Obama's birth certificate, he said, "Oh, you'd be surprised the things we are finding."

Of course, we were not surprised, because they were finding absolutely nothing.

Obama responded at the Washington Correspondents' Dinner by playing the scene from the Lion King showing the birth of the new young lion king being held aloft by a baboon, and saying this was even better than a birth certificate: This was his birth video.

Brought the house down. 

If Mad Dog recalls correctly, Donald Trump was there as people laughed at him.

But now, we have, under the "you'd be surprised by the things we're finding" rubric this letter published by the Wall Street Journal, which Trump purportedly wrote to Epstein which got put into a birthday book for Epstein:

It takes the form of an  imagined conversation between the two as imagined by Trump:

"There must be more to life than having everything. 

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is. 

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is. 

Donald: We have certain things in common, 

Jeffrey. 

Jeffrey: Yes, we do. Come to think of it. 

Donald: Enigmas never age. Have you noticed that?

 Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you. 

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret. "

So, is it just Mad Dog's ice age sensibility, or does this sound homoerotic? You are my wonderful secret, etc., etc.

Trump's public persona, in which he revels is a playboy who loves women and, as he says, particularly young women. He does not deny that. He promotes that. He's a womanizer who grabs women by the pussy. MAGATs love it. He's authentic!

One does wonder, Mad Dog admits, about men who "protest too much" about their own attraction to women. 

It's that thing from "Avenue Q" about the puppet who everyone suspects is gay, because they never have seen him with a girl, but he sings about his girlfriend who nobody ever sees visit him, because she lives in Alberta, Canada. 

"Her name is Alberta
She live in Vancouver
She cooks like my mother
And sucks like a Hoover.

I e-mail her every single day
Just to make sure that everything's okay.
It's a pity she lives so far away, in Canada!

Last week she was here, but she had the flu.
Too bad
'Cause I wanted to introduce her to you
It's so sad
There wasn't a thing that she could do
But stay in bed with her legs up over her head!
Oh!

I wish you could meet my girlfriend,
But you can't because she is in Canada.
I love her, I miss her, I can't wait to kiss her,
So soon I'll be off to Alberta!
I mean Vancouver!
Shit! Her name is Alberta, she lives in Vancou-"

So why should his association with Epstein be so vexing?

Nobody has called Trump a pederast, even though everyone calls Epstein that. 

So, what is it about this letter that would make Trump sue the WSJ for a gazillion dollars?

Maybe Mad Dog's imagination is limited, but somehow he would not be surprised to see a headline on the National Enquirer tomorrow:

"TRUMP AND EPSTEIN SECRET LOVERS!!!!!!!"

"MELANIA SAYS: THEIR AFFAIR NEARLY WRECKED OUR MARRIAGE!!!!!"

But why would that be such a problem?

Being gay is no longer a problem in America, far as Mad Dog can see.

But among the uber masculine, testosterone driven crowd which comprises the MAGA world, maybe this would be a problem.

As Jonathan Capehart (who is gay) and David Brooks (who is not) remarked on the PBS News Hour (which Trump is defunding): Who cares about Epstein? We have vaccine denial, defunding weather services, ICE goon squads to talk about. But what is everyone talking about? Epstein!

Go figure.

The Message Sent

Locked out of power at the federal level, Democrats are struggling to show that they have taken to heart the message that voters sent in November and are well suited to regain power in future elections.

--The New York Times articles about autopsy conducted by the Democratic National Committee of the 2024 election

"Political Science" was a popular college major when Mad Dog was at university, but Mad Dog could not see then, nor since, where the "science" was in that.

Donald Trump ran on a very canny slogan: Kamala is for they/them; I'm for you.

Didn't that just say it all? Kamala is for those colored people from South of the Border. Kamala is for making your kids into transgenders, putting transgenders into your daughter's locker rooms and toilets, allowing some transgender male to run over your daughter at her field hockey game. Kamala is for giving away your money to them. It's us against them.

And Democrats walked right into that.

So that is Mad Dog's analysis. Is there any science to it?

None whatsoever. This is all drawn from field work, sampling opinions while knocking on doors in Hampton. Listening to blue collar workers in his offices and conversations around town.

But when Mad Dog suggested the Hampton Dems put people outside the polls on Election Day and conduct exit interviews to see how people voted and why, his fellow Dems scowled and snorted and said that was a ridiculous and misguided suggestion.

Granted, exit polling done right has to be randomized and done according to rules of surveying to be scientific.

Mad Dog was proposing to forget all that: rather than interviewing every 8th voter (to get a random sample) Mad Dog wanted to simply open up 10 desks with a sign: Tell Us Why You Voted the Way You Did!"

You would certainly not get a random sample that way; you'd get people who were not hurrying off to take children to school, people who were not trying to get to work. You'd get people with an axe to grind. But that might be revealing. And if you never try it, how do you know what you'll actually hear?

At any rate, if the Democrats really were interested in doing an "autopsy" that implies science, as an autopsy is very scientific, methodical and eyes wide open.

But, it sounds like the Democrats are not going to spend their time and money looking for uncomfortable truths.

 They'll just spend money.

Soothing Hot Toddy of White Trash

 When you're weary, feeling blue, 

When tears are in your eyes, 

History can pull you through.

That's the way it is for Mad Dog, reading things like "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg, for the umpteenth time.  When you look at Trump next to Andrew Johnson, or Andrew Jackson, or Woodrow Wilson, or Jefferson Davis, you realize as loathsome, as fatuous as he is, we've had Presidents every bit as bad and somehow, the nation survived because the United States is not a porcelain trophy on someone's mantle, but it is a swampy thing, which periodically floods, then desiccates, then flowers again, then returns to some other part of a long cycle.

Trump has given us RFK JR and Kristi Noem, but Teddy Roosevelt was in bed with Charles Davenport and Francis Galton, who thought the white race supreme over all others, who thought intelligence and poor character could be inherited, who believed in sterilizing or even killing imbeciles and morons for purposes of breeding a superior race of human beings as you breed race horses. 

And Oliver Wendel Holmes wrote the famous Buck decision approving the sterilization of a woman thought to be mentally retarded and ended his opinion with "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!" These "defectives" breed and either commit crimes or starve or become dependent on the state and so it is only a matter of self defense for the United States government to get rid of them. This opinion was cited by the defense of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.  The defense counsel was quite correct, if maddeningly sly, to point out that much of the racial theory and justification for extermination camps of the Nazis was drawn from American (and British) writers and theorists. 

There was a reason Adolph Hitler had a photo of Henry Ford hung on his office wall--Ford the author of the polemic, "The International Jew."

It is actually a relatively recent phenomenon--dating back only 60 years really, that the idea really took hold, that people of all races are capable of equal intellectual attainment, that our laws really should embrace the idea that all men, all races are or should be considered equal in the eyes of the law and the government.

Even Lincoln spoke of "very intelligent Negroes" and his solution to the slave problem would have been to deport them all to Liberia, to reverse the history of having brought them here in slave ships. He knew the African American was the cause of the Civil War and he wanted to avoid that catastrophic, heroic and defining epic.

Wilson was an out and out white supremacist and even Teddy Roosevelt believed in Kipling's white man's burden and while he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner--inflaming the South into a near second insurrection --he really made Booker T the exception. For the most part he believed allowing lower forms of human beings to immigrate into the United States was racial suicide.

For the most part, until the 20th century--1924 to be exact--the United States had open borders. (The Chinese Exclusion Act being the exception that proved the rule.) But in 1924 "eugenicists" like Davenport convinced the Congress that allowing people from Italy, Ireland, the Slavic countries, Africa, to freely immigrate would poison the blood and the purity of White, Christian America.

Trump likely did not know it, but he was echoing these racial purity/racial improvement types when he lamented that the only people who seem to want to immigrate to America are from "shithole  countries," and why couldn't we be getting some nice, blonde people from Norway? Or, as it turned out, from South Africa, which was the only country with some affluent white people who wanted to actually leave their country an come to America.

Of course, those blondes in Scandinavia, Germany and even Ireland were laughing at Trump: Why should we want to leave our free healthcare, free education, supportive governments and open societies for the United States, with its mass shootings, its "culture of death" and its President Donald Trump who calls climate change a Chinese hoax and who thinks vaccines cause autism and worse.

Right now, the mentally impaired have nothing to fear from Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Buck decision: They are, in fact, in charge. 

Stephen Colbert

 Not much knowledge of the Third Reich is needed to hear the echos of how that regime went after its critics, and the firing of Stephen Colbert as the big corporation bent over for Trump and supplicated. 

Corporations are, of course, not about conscience, as Milton Friedman gleefully told us, but about profit.

But, in  the case of certain public figures, they simply are bigger than the Lilliputians. Bob Dylan was bigger than the Nobel prize, and Steve Colbert is bigger than Paramount. He doesn't need Paramount and will land elsewhere and leave the corporate suits behind him. 

He has exposed the naked emperor mercilessly and effectively and he'll find a new place to reach his nearly 2 million loyal fans. 

But one thing is obvious: This was not a decision driven by profits, dollars from advertising, and decline in late night viewership as other forms of media eclipse the Old Johnny Carson model. This was a sheer cave in by corporate suits intent on keeping a merger on track. Like Columbia University, the suits caved to Trump.  CBS was no Harvard. No guts. 

Colbert may not be a Zelensky, but he is good enough for America's purposes.  When Lincoln first saw Philip Sheridan he remarked to Grant that Sheridan looked very small to be a general. "When the fighting starts, he will be big enough for the purpose," Grant remarked. Sheridan, of course, proved him more than right, and that remark became the understatement of the century.

The relentless scouring of America's resistance, whether it be comedians, police, local government office holders, scientists, teachers is not new in American history--if you look back carefully.

It will take a while to undo the corrosion Trump will cause, but eventually, the mighty pendulum of history will swing back the other way, and we'll laugh at the absurdity that is Trump, as we now laugh at Teddy Roosevelt for buying into the idea of "race suicide" and of all the eugenicists like Davenport who thought fecklessness could be genetically inherited, and Woodrow Wilson who thought women unfit for the vote.

They were all dinosaurs slated for extinction. Well, not extinction actually, because they proved to be zombies: reborn every several generations to re emerge like those cicadas from underground, from under rocks, to claim only White males of the proper heritage can be entrusted to run the world.

Trump likens himself to Andrew Jackson, who was hideous in his own way, but Trump is actually more like Andrew Johnson, who had some instincts in the direction of the common man, but who could not get past the idea there are superior white men who should run the world, and all the others should be ignored or shunted aside.

The 14th amendment, insuring birthright citizenship, voting rights for Black men and which denied the right to hold office or vote to former traitors (i.e. Confederates) was passed to thwart Andrew Johnson's attempts to undo the outcome of the Civil War, to deny Black people real freedom. 

Trump, of course, believes traitors and insurrectionists should be pardoned, especially if they they are invading the Capitol to protest his electoral loss.

Trump, of course, is a simple buffoon, and the real creepy crawly,  slithy toves are those like Steven Miller, who pullulate in the slimy swamps from which they all emanate. 

But, as Lincoln said, "This, too,shall pass."

ICE on the Seacoast

 The July 14, 2025 meeting of the Select Board was an exercise in the New Hampshire version of democracy in action. Which is to say members of the public were allowed to speak, to voice their opinions but this is not exactly a redress of grievances. The Board does not engage in "back and forth." Once elected, apparently you may, as with gods, pray to them but do not expect an answer. Live Free or Die.

Actual Patriot

Governor Ayotte had just signed a law requiring local town police departments to cooperate, aide and abet masked ICE agents as they abduct people from Hampton streets for the crime of not looking like they come from here.

We should all feel much safer for this cooperative police action, we were told by Representative to the State House Linda McGrath, who also let everyone in on a little secret apparently only she knows about: There are row houses just across the Piscataqua River in Maine, filled with Chinese Mafia, and they are just ever so eager to launch an attack on New Hampshire Seacoast towns. No cat or dog will be safe in Hampton, unless we allow our police to cooperate with ICE.

Regina Barnes excoriated those objecting to this melding of town police with ICE agents as people who are taking a simple matter of law enforcement and turning it into something it is not: POLITICS!

Imagine that! Making immigration political!

As if neither Ms. Barnes nor Ms. McGrath are not political down to their MAGA undergarments.

As if this whole law is not simply MAGA agency invading the statehouse and then washing downstream to drown the liberties of Hampton citizens.

As noted in previous posts, Chris Muns and others spoke at the meeting but one speaker particularly caught Mad Dog's attention for her power and brevity.

Brevity can sometimes be a power in itself. Before Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, the speaker who preceded him spoke for 2 hours. Lincoln spoke for less than 5 minutes and his predecessor told him afterwards: "I wish I had managed to say in 2 hours anything close to the importance of what you said in a few minutes."

Something of the sort obtains with the remarks of Cybele Grier:

"The ICE raids we see being carried out in American communities across this country are nothing short of state sponsored terror. ICE raids do not make neighborhoods or our communities safer. In fact, they make them more dangerous for all of us.

This is not who we are as Americans. I do not want us living in a police state like Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey. This is not who we are. These are not our values. It is un-American!

Select Board, I urge you, say No to our Police Chief signing any cooperative agreement with ICE. Our police officers should be focused on making our community safer. I want them to stay focused on Hamton's issues and not do the federal government's job with our tax paying dollars."

******

Five cheers for Ms. Grier!

The fact is, we have seen things like this before in America. We corralled Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII while their sons died fighting for America in Italy. IWW "Wobblies" were rounded up in Western towns and deported out of state. Emma Goldman was deported for saying unkind things about Woodrow Wilson and J. Edgar Hoover. 

America has always been berserk. We have occasionally managed to do astonishing and unique things: We are the only country in the planet's history to fight a Civil War on behalf of an underclass, trying to liberate from above those who could not do it for themselves. We created Social Security and Medicare and we put up a statue in New York Harbor with a poem by Emma Lazurus which said, "Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." 

But we have also elected Donald Trump twice. And now he is here in Hampton. 

This is what Ms. Grier reminded us.

July 16

 July 16th has longstanding bleak resonance in Mad Dog's life, for personal reasons.

But in cosmic terms, July 16, 1945 is the day the world ended, in Kurt Vonnegut's words, the day Robert Oppenheimer's Trinity test in New Mexico exploded the first atomic bomb. 

That sword of Damocles is still hovering over our heads.

Vladimir Putin continues to snarl about using nuclear weapons whenever he feels particularly threatened in his rat cage. 

We still have people with their fingers on the button who are men who are determined to prove they are real men, not cowards.

As Adlai Stevenson once said, "Maybe what the world needs when it comes to nuclear extinction is a man who is willing to be a coward."

What the world needs is another Mickhail Gorbachev.

 

Hasn't been one since him.

Oddly, it took a President likely in early dementia, a man who race baited, who invented the "Welfare Queen" a man who said that there will always be poor and implied the poor deserve to be poor and if they worked harder they wouldn't be poor--that same President was able to say, having 1500 missiles armed with multiple warheads is enough.  And so we came down from 70,000 on each side to simply enough missiles to annihilate both countries but maybe leave a sliver of habitable planet.

Having read two of Gorbachev's memoirs, Mad Dog wound up thinking: Too bad we didn't have an American Gorbachev. Never have. Never will.

And Gorbachev was overthrown, dismissed and ostracized for his humanity. But while he lasted he was a world figure who may just have saved humanity from itself.

Surely, Harry Truman was nothing close. He never lost a wink of sleep about dropping atom bombs. To his credit he resisted dropping them in Korea or elsewhere.

During Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson went down the road of trying to prove his masculinity with bombs, but he resisted the advice from his Dr. Strangelove generals to drop atomic bombs on North Vietnam.

For all the existential threats we face today: climate change, pandemics, nuclear Armageddon is the game ender.  

That is the legacy of July 16.

Who Believes Jeffrey Epstein Committed Suicide?

 Not me.