ICE "DEFENDS LIBERTY" MAGA STYLE

 Historical analogies are never perfect, but history can instruct and lend perspective by allowing for some distancing--sometimes you can see the whole picture more clearly if you take a step or two back.

Defending Liberty, MAGA style/The Sanctimonious Goon Squad

So the analogy of today's ICE agents hustling off people to Alligator Alcatraz or worse, without due process to the internment of Japanese Americans during in 1942, at the outset of WWII is not perfect. The Japanese Americans were, in fact, for the most part citizens, or at least "legal" residents--they had not overstayed visas and had committed no misdemeanors, while ICE arrests, at least until recently are said to be directed against "criminals" (who are not, technically felons) who have jumped the line and overstayed their visas.

As I understand it, only a vanishingly small number of those now being arrested without warrant and hustled off by ICE are even known to have overstayed visas or come in without permission, but they are simply being rounded up for not looking like they come from here. Nothing much is known about them; they just look wrong.

But even if they have overstayed a visa, they would be guilty not of a felony, but of a misdemeanor, and so wrestling them off to a van would be like doing that to somebody with an unpaid parking ticket or even an overdue library book.

They are not the rapists and murderers Trump is always pointing to as the "illegals" he wants to arrest to protect white American womanhood.

What is appalling, then, is the indiscriminate nature, the complete disregard for due process and the obvious criterion for arrest: They are not white. You never, ever see an ICE agent hustling off a blond, blue eyed Norwegian, or, for that matter a blond South African.

And then we get to the self righteousness of the cowardly ICE agents, who mask themselves, not because they fear ultimate justice at the hands of some Nuremberg trial, but because they fear the "drug cartels" will seek retribution.

And that MAGA piety is summed up in that image of a MAGA ICE man who is wearing a mask, if you look closely, even though you see only the back of his head, but there is an ear loop, and his T shirt says, "We The People"  and "Defend Liberty" and "FREEDOM" as he manhandles a man toward the opposite of freedom: incarceration. 

That this round up is based on race (appearance) can hardly be denied.  Well, it is denied, but that is a bald faced (not a masked faced) lie, apparent to all who see it. 

In the case of the Japanese in 1942, there was panic after Pearl Harbor that the West Coast would be invaded and that unveiled the underlying fear of "people whose eyes are oddly made" and so anyone who looked Japanese was hustled off to a concentration camp. And as the signs show, this was, ultimately if not entirely based on racial animosity, it was surely fed by it.

The same is true today. Brown skin bad. White skin good. Blond best of all. And that's without even getting into who has the best genes/jeans.

The Vaccine Witches: Outlander Instructs

 Paul Offet posts on his "Beyond the Noise" substack/blog about RFKJR's plans to destroy vaccinations. 

It's a post worth reading, if only because it so succinctly describes just one of the maneuvers RFKJR and his MAGA  mob have used to cancel vaccinations.

Here is an excerpt:

"Despite his claim that anyone who wants vaccines can get them, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), is on the verge of eliminating vaccines from the United States. He believes that vaccines have replaced infectious diseases with chronic diseases. By eliminating vaccines, he believes he can eliminate all manner of chronic diseases, including autism. Here is how he plans to do it. On June 18, 2025, RFK Jr. directed his newly appointed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which he recently stocked with members who have a history of anti-vaccine activity, to evaluate aluminum-containing adjuvants in vaccines. What are aluminum adjuvants and why are they in some vaccines? Aluminum adjuvants have been used in vaccines since 1926 to enhance the immune response, allowing for fewer doses and lesser quantities of vaccine components. Live, attenuated viral vaccines (such as the measles-mumps-rubella [MMR], varicella, and rotavirus vaccines) don’t require adjuvants. But some vaccines, which aren’t live (such as the DTaP, pneumococcal, meningococcal, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, Haemophilus influenzae type b, and HPV vaccines) wouldn’t work well without an adjuvant. Are aluminum adjuvants dangerous? Aluminum is the third most abundant element on Earth. It’s in soil, water, air, plants, and food. Aluminum is literally everywhere, including in breast milk and infant formula. In the first 6 months of life, babies will be exposed to about 4.4 milligrams of aluminum from vaccines, 7 milligrams from breast milk, 38 milligrams from infant formula, and 117 milligrams from soy formula. Not surprisingly, researchers found that the level of aluminum contained in an infant’s hair and bloodstream didn’t correlate with receipt of vaccines. In other words, aluminum in vaccines is a trivial addition to what infants encounter and manage every day from the environment. Consistent with these findings, researchers in Denmark recently studied 1.2 million children between 1997 and 2020 who received different quantities of aluminum in vaccines. They found no evidence that aluminum adjuvants caused autoimmune, allergic, or neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and asthma. For RFK Jr., however, none of these reassuring facts or studies about aluminum matter. Sometime in the next few months, he will hold up a poorly done study claiming that aluminum adjuvants cause autism or diabetes or multiple sclerosis or asthma or eczema. Then he will do something that could eliminate vaccine manufacture in the United States. And, if you don’t believe that, just look at what happened in the United States in the early 1980s. On April 19, 1982, a local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a one-hour documentary titled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. The film featured children with withered arm and legs wearing bicycle helmets, seizing, drooling, and staring vacantly up at the ceiling. The cause of this apparent brain damage, according to the film, was the “P” in DPT: the pertussis or whooping cough vaccine. The film launched a flood of lawsuits against vaccine makers. In 1981, one year before Vaccine Roulette aired, three lawsuits were filed against vaccine makers. By the end of 1982, lawyers had filed 17 lawsuits; during the next four years, they filed 41, 73, 219, and 255. The amount of money requested by plaintiffs increased exponentially from $25 million in 1981 to $414 million in 1982, $655 million in 1983, $1.3 billion in 1984, and $3.2 billion in 1985. The cost of defending these lawsuits exceeded sales from the vaccine. Vaccine makers left the business. The number of companies making pertussis vaccine dropped from seven to one, measles vaccine makers from six to one and oral polio vaccine makers from three to one. Americans were on the verge of losing childhood vaccines. Then, in 1986, the Regan administration stepped in, creating the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act which included the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP). Now people could be compensated for vaccine injuries through this special vaccine court, which was funded by a federal excise tax on every dose of vaccine. The bleeding stopped. Nonetheless, whereas 18 companies made vaccines for American children in 1980, only four remained by the end of the decade. Subsequent studies found that the pertussis vaccine didn’t cause brain damage. But those studies came far too late to save vaccines. Ironically, 25 years later, Samuel Berkovic, an Australian researcher, found that the children featured in Vaccine Roulette had Dravet’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder characterized by a sodium channel transport defect in brain cells. In other words, the pertussis vaccine was blameless."

So, this is a classic story of true witch hunt--foment a fear with horrifying images; point to an occult culprit; destroy your witch, burn her at the stake. 

Last night, Mad Dog happened across, on youtube, the wonderful scene from "Outlander" where Jamie points to Claire's smallpox vaccination scar and asks if this is the mark of a witch? Is Claire a witch? Jamie is living in 1718, (when people believed in witches)  and Claire was born in 1918 and received a small pox vaccination as a child. Of course, nobody in 1718 had ever seen a smallpox vaccination scar, had ever had a vaccine of any sort. That would not happen until 1796.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB49rx_VFXE

Had Claire been born in 1982, she would not have had that telltale vaccine scar, because smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980 and vaccines for smallpox were discontinued. 

It was a canny choice to make Claire a nurse, then, later, a physician, because of all the accomplishments of humanity, the big leaps have nothing to do with empires, or even industrialization, but with medicine, and public health. The recognition of "germs" of micro organism, viruses, parasites and bacteria has led to an entirely different experience of life on Earth. Life today is vastly different, for every resident of advanced societies more owing to the freedom from devastating diseases and epidemics than because of railroads, airplanes or even steel plants. 

But RFKJR does not believe in the germ theory.

There is a chapter in an obscure novel Mad Dog recalls because it's called "Of Jonas Salk and the Real World," in which an old doctor tries to convince his younger colleague to forgo the wealth and affluent life style of a private practitioner in a wealthy suburb, and choose instead the life of a researcher in infectious disease at the dawn of the AIDS era. 

Dave Garroway

He tells the story of Dave Garroway, who was, in the 1960's a famous TV personality, who has to introduce Jonas Salk at some fancy dinner and Garroway says he could not think of what to say, but then his seven year old son, watching him put on his tuxedo, asks what's up, and Garroway says, 

"Well, tonight I'm going to introduce Dr. Salk, who cured polio," and the son asks, "But what's polio, Dad?" And Garroway looks out at the audience and says, "Can you imagine any seven year old of our generation or of any before ours, not knowing what polio is? That's the best introduction to Dr. Salk I can think of."

The old doctor says, 

"The history of man on this earth is, for the most part, pretty uninspiring. All those kings and dictators and strongmen: just a bunch of cavemen hitting each other over the head with clubs. I never could get very interested, you know? They were all doing pretty much the same thing, through the ages, for pretty much the same reasons, when you get right down to it. But there have been some men who've really made this world different. I'm not talking about changing some line on a map. I'm talking about guys who really changed life the way every little guy leads it. Jonas Salk was one of those men."

Dr. Salk

And RFKJR has decried the polio vaccine as doing more harm than good:

SV40 and Cancer: He has claimed that some polio vaccine batches between 1955 and 1963 were contaminated with Simian Virus 40 (SV40), which he alleges caused an increase in soft-tissue cancers that killed more people than polio itself.

--From Google AI

So now Mr. Kennedy has taken us on another time travel trip, back to the days before vaccines, when wards were filled with kids in iron lungs and limbs were withered and lives ruined.

Back to the time before vaccines.

Nobody has ever said vaccines are entirely without risk, but risk has to do with numbers and experience, and those are of no interest to the forces of darkness led by Mr. Kennedy.

He want's to take us back to times of superstition, before science.

Make America Great Again.

President Spoiled Seed Builds His Ballroom

 

Mad Dog can imagine having lunch with President Obama, or with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or with Theodore Roosevelt or even, with President Lincoln.

It's all in imagination, of course. Mad Dog reads lots of biography and history. Really the only stuff Mad Dog reads now--no fiction for Mad Dog.

History and biography are not really "non fiction;" they are not intentionally "fiction," but they are also imaginings.

The only President Mad Dog ever met was President George H.W. Bush, at a party, and as was true of every politician Mad Dog was ever introduced to, it was a shadow dance: you never had the sense you had actually been anything more than a shadow crossing the celebrity's face.

Mad Dog's wife met President Bill Clinton and he focused on her eyes and spoke with her about something she could not remember afterwards, but she said she had sexual fantasies for about a week. THAT, at least, was what most of us would call a "human connection."

But hard as he tries, Mad Dog cannot quite imagine what meeting Trump would be like. 

Well, Mad Dog CAN imagine it, because he thinks he grew up knowing guys like Trump. 

There was always a boy in one school or another, who wasn't really present, psychologically, among the cohort of students. We, who were a band of brothers, connected by some common experience--a baseball team, or a wrestling team--where we suffered defeats and exulted in victories together, we were important to each other. 

But there was always this one guy among us, who was physically present in the group, but not spiritually with us. We weren't important to him. His father, his family might have been important to him, but not us. And somehow, Mad Dog sensed, that boy was alone, even in his family.

In "Band of Brothers" that would have been Lt. Dyke, who asks Lipton about where he comes from, but before Lipton can even answer, Dyke has wandered off, uninterested.

And Mad Dog knew people like that--simply not present, not involved, not part of the group. And part of that was because he was never very good at whatever we were doing. If it was pickup football, he might have had a head to toe uniform, while we wore scraps of a helmet and shoulder pads, whatever we could assemble, but when the ball was snapped, he was just pushed to the ground while the play ran over him. He didn't care, because he wasn't really there, psychologically.

He usually didn't say much, and he was always hunched forward, as if he might be edging into a group where he didn't really belong.

Mad Dog would catch glimpses of characters in films who had glimmers of the essence of this bad seed:  Fredo, the hapless Corleone brother, who never had the steel of Michael, or the raw exuberance of Sonny, the brother who flitted on the periphery, the brother who could not even hold his gun well enough to get a shot off as assassins shot his father. He was part of the family, but alone in it.

Or King Joffrey, of Game of Thrones. A poltroon, whose sadism sprang from deep seated cowardice.

Donald J. Trump really, Mad Dog senses, is not interested in being President--he loves gold ornaments, gold embellishments, and he wants to throw parties where he is center of attention and, possibly, adulation. Thus Mar-a-largo and now the Grand Ballroom at the White House.

Mad Dog cannot imagine Donald Trump dreaming about moving a crowd to tears or exultation with rhetoric. Donald Trump would never dream of delivering a Gettysburg Address because Donald Trump could never appreciate what made that speech so great, or what such words could mean to other people.

Trump has never read enough to develop a sense of self--because that comes, at least in part, from a sense of other people. 

Would you have the exuberance of a Teddy Roosevelt, the fundamental, grounded decency of a Lincoln, born of a hard life of many sorrows? You cannot really become yourself unless you are willing to examine other people, to try to imagine yourself facing their challenges, imagine how you would like to think you would respond in their place.

Which is not to say Mr. Trump cannot read a room: He knows enough about other people to know what they resent, what buttons can be pushed.

But you cannot really hope to lead other men until you have seen in other men qualities you yourself can only emulate, but never achieve.

Mad Dog could never do what he saw cardiac surgeons do in the operating room. But, if Mad Dog were President, he'd know what qualities he'd be looking for in other people, because, over time, he's collected a full catalogue of things he can see and admire in others.

But Donald Trump has never done, never been able to do that. He looks out from his corner, from his dark table at the Washington Correspondents Dinner, and he does not learn, he only cowers and seethes. 

He does not know what good is. He burns with resentment, fear and loathing. He does not, fundamentally, really like other people. And, assuredly, he is no fan of himself.

He thought he had found something good in Jeffrey Epstein, Mad Dog is guessing, but, of course all Donald saw in Epstein was pathology masquerading as confidence, and possibly a sense of what it meant to have a good time.

Jeffrey made Donald feel valued, Mad Dog is thinking. They were "pals." And what "pals" meant Mad Dog must leave to the imagination of the reader.

 

It might have been like Mo Green and Fredo:  Mo Green provided Fredo with a playground, and treated him well, but that did not end well for Mo. And Fredo was left saying, "Well, isn't this swell? I have everything now. So why am I not happy? That is a secret I share with Mo."

It's possible you can never know another man's motivations completely. 

But sometimes, you can see enough of a man to know when you are staring through an empty vessel.

Kill the Messanger

 

So the news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics about unemployment was so bad Donald Trump fired the head of that agency.

The news could not be that bad, he reasoned.

So she must be a pinko, Commie, leftist, elitist, Trump hating civil servant and off with her head!

She also is not blonde and her hair is short, so what is she doing working for the government anyway?

Erika McEntarfer, former head of BLS

There are lots of government employees in the weather service (where their work can be corrected with a marker on a map), in the department of agriculture (where they occasionally have to give bad news to a farmer that his herd is infected with Mad Cow Disease, and it has to be slaughtered to prevent Americans who would eat the contaminated meat dying horrible deaths 20 years from now), at the CDC, where news of a pandemic might unsettle the American public, not to mention the markets.

So, Mr. Trump has learned his lesson: if bad news arrives, simply kill the messenger and deny the news.

Paul Krugman predicted some time ago there would be no bad news about the economy because Trump would simply fire everyone who could deliver any.

Paul Krugman

And maybe create your own good news: IV bleach beats COVID 19 every time and maybe horse worm medicine, too.

What? Me Worry?

No wonder Mr. Trump smiles so much. He never hears a bad word. Well, until he does, then he simply sues or fires someone.

Sydney Sweeney Goes All Eugenic? Or Is this Simply "Sweeney Erect?"

 

So, the 27 year old actress, Sydney Sweeney, writhes alluringly through an American Eagle ad for blue jeans, and rasps out in a voice which sounds almost post coital, or possibly pre-coital, "My jeans are blue," and the internet erupts that she is now advocating for eugenics (blue eyes good/brown eyes bad) and "Nazi propaganda!"

Mad Dog had never heard of the fetching Ms. Sweeney, but very much enjoyed the ad, and having nothing in particular against blue eyes, or genes for blue eyes, was gobsmacked that anyone could possibly see this arousing ad in any way political.

But, then again, we have a lunatic fringe of easily offended and shocked people who have access to the internet in this country. Apparently, this crowd is a powder keg waiting to explode with any spark, or simply, to embrace another metaphor, living on the edge of a cliff where even mild breezes may push them off.

But, after all, the ad WAS NOT inclusive (no brown eyes shown) nor was it equitable (no Black or Brown actresses) nor was it diverse (only one actress.)

Not only that, because it focused on, or at least gave a glimpse of Ms. Sweeney's decolletage, it was anti-feminist, as it objectified woman as simply mammary delights for unenlightened men who see women simply as sex objects.

AND she is blonde! (How Third Reich-ian!)

An Affront to DEI! But Gotta Love Her

Everyone knows blue eyed blondes are simply, ipso facto, Nazis!

Anyone who has ever read about the eugenics advocates of the 1920's would have to laugh at the outrage from those who find subtle messages in what was in, and what was not in, this commercial. If there was one thing eugenicists were not, they were not subtle.

New Hampshire (Blonde) Howl

Breeding human beings for the best traits to breed a population with superior traits was very much what eugenicists and their crowd (which included Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendel Holmes) were all about. 

They had "most beautiful baby" contests at town fairs to celebrate the best traits in babies--blonde blue eyed would not have been a disqualifier.

Blonde with a Cross

Google Francis Galton and J.H. Kellogg (yes, THAT Kellogg) and the Race Betterment Foundation--which, spoiler alert was not about improving the race by eating better cereals.

Blonde By Choice

So, once again, we have a whacko element on the left, well not really on the left because it is so far off the spectrum it has circled around to what might be called the space cadet rim,  which only makes Trump and the rabid MAGA crowd look less extreme.

Here's the ad:

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

                 

Trump's Free Qatar Lunch

 

So Qatar gave Donald Trump a "free airplane." 

It will belong to him--although it may be called "Air Force One" it will not pass on to his successor--it will somehow become part of his "presidential library." (Libraries really are spiffing up.)

It will first go to Texas where a top secret facility will strip it down to the joists and then rebuild it at a cost of...well, that's classified--the failing New York Times says $934 million--but apparently the money will come out of a government allotment meant for upgrading and repairing and maintaining nuclear missile silos--what could be more important than doing that work? Well, getting Mr. Trump an airplane for his private use.

And this is not a bribe from the Qatar government to Mr. Trump, you understand because, well, nothing Mr. Trump does while he is in the office of the President can be illegal or unethical or bribery because the Supreme Court Mr. Trump appointed says so. So Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett think it's just fine for Mr. Trump to take a bribe, oh, sorry, not a bribe, a gift which helps him conduct the business of his office, which is enriching himself, and setting up his post White House career.

This America, man.

Don't Take Him Literally. Don't take him Seriously. Don't Take Him At All

 So, it's come down to this.

Donald Trump is not just from Professional "Wrestling," where everyone understands the "wrestlers" are not really wrestling, where they are not really hitting each other or landing on each other--we can see all that. It's all just for fun. He IS that grotesque not to be thought of as real. He's simply the theater of the absurd. Just a spectacle. Nothing real.

As Peter Baker said in his Washington Post article:

"OK, so President Trump’s name is in the Jeffrey Epstein files. But who put it there? Could it possibly have been Barack Obama from his prison cell? Or a tranquilized Hillary Clinton? Oh wait, maybe it was etched onto the documents by Joe Biden’s magical autopen."

So, there's no there there.

It's a willful suspension of disbelief.

Even his most brain dead fans are in on the joke.

He calls the Chairman of the Federal Reserve "stupid," which manifestly Jerome Powell is not. He may be a lot of things, but the one thing Powell is not, is stupid. And in the next breath Mr. Trump asks, "Who was dumb enough to appoint that guy head of the Fed?"  Uh, (tug on Trump's sleeve) That was you who appointed Mr. Powell. 

Oh, well, don't take Trump literally.

Trump accuses a former President of treason, a former rival of being "crooked," or small or "sleepy" or "low energy."

Certainly, one thing you cannot accuse Mr. Trump of is being "low energy." He's always spewing. Nothing halting about him, but plenty that's lame. 

He has never really been anything different.

The wonder is not Trump. It's his fans. 

What is with his fans?

They see in him whatever they want to see: He is the champion of Israel, protector of the Jews, defender of the Evangelicals, thwarter of abortionists, the magician who transformed the Supreme Court from woke to Inquistion star chamber (true that), macho man who wants more concussions in the NFL, and wants the Redskins to be guilty but alive again, irresistible seducer of women,

They All Want Him!

 grinning good ol' boy, blonde Nordic Wagnerian hero of the Ring trilogy, champion of white trash, uneducated who was himself, a brilliant student at an Ivy League school who has "all the best words."

He is the ultimate American berserk. 

He is our dark demons, not our better angels. 

He is the king of devastation, master of mayhem, the Amazing Hulk. 

Oh, how we'll miss him when he's gone.