Random Observations on Another Weird Attempted "Assassination"

1. The quotation marks around "assassination" in the title are not because I believe in any of the conspiracy bullshit about the attempt by Cole Tomas Allen to kill someone at the White House Correspondents' Dinner last night. It's comforting to think that our enemies are so competent that they can stage shootings with ease any time they think it might bolster Donald Trump's low approval ratings. But always remember: the more people needed for a conspiracy means the less likely a conspiracy is real. No, the reason for implying it was a so-called assassination attempt is because Allen never got anywhere near close enough to actually attempt to kill Trump or a member of his administration. Even Trump said this. Allen made it to the metal detectors near the stairs leading to the Hilton ballroom. Besides, we live in the goddamn United States. We're never far away from someone shooting a gun. It's what we are debased enough to call "freedom."

2. However, if I were inclined towards conspiracies, it sure as fuck seems like the real reason would be to get Trump's goddamn golden ballroom/Hitler bunker built. Probably that's more "never let a crisis go to waste" than anything else. But, still, it's fucking weird how the quickly coordinated reaction on the right was that the violence meant that courts and historical preservation groups and Democrats and, well, most of the general public should back the fuck off and let the ballroom be finished. Rep. Tim Sheehy, a Republican scumfucker from Montana, said he's introducing legislation to approve the ballroom construction. They are fucking shameless. 

2a. What's the point here in saying that events like this should take place in the fortress ballroom? The WHCD is not a White House-sponsored thing. Trump was a guest of the association running the dinner. The implication is that Trump will rent out the ballroom like the White House is another one of his shitty hotels (and there's no doubt that he'd keep at least a taste of that money, if not the whole thing). The entire effort, the unrelenting push for and hype about the ballroom, is not simply unseemly. It's shady. It's skeevy. It's got grift and graft written all over it, and, you know, we're at war in a sinking economy and how the fuck is this even a thing.

2b. And fuck John Fetterman again and forever for jumping on the ballroom bandwagon. 

2c. Trump keeps saying that presidents have been wanting a giant-ass ballroom for "150 years." I don't recall any president in my lifetime mentioning it at all. Was Chester Arthur hot for one? Or Grover Cleveland, non-consecutively? And Teddy Roosevelt did whatever the fuck he wanted to the White House. If he wanted a ballroom, he'd have had one fucking well built.

2d. Maybe someone could spend a few minutes talking about how gun control would make the president and everyone else safer. Maybe spare a thought or two for all the people fucking shot and killed in mass shootings recently. Maybe think about how to make life easier for kids at schools so they don't have to worry about getting slaughtered in their classrooms. Maybe stop to consider how, in a country flooded with guns, this shit was inevitable.

3. The shooter's "manifesto" (if by "manifesto," you mean, "a friendly letter that is weirdly well thought-out") was pretty fucking clear about what he thought of Trump. He said, "I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." And of the attendees at the dinner, "[M]ost people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit." I'm not handing it to Allen or excusing his violence, but I will say that a fuck of a lot of people really and truly believe this about Trump (me included). And by the Department of Justice refusing to release the Epstein files, by refusing to name anyone else involved, by never investigating the allegations against Trump, then it's pretty easy and logical to reach the conclusion that something is being hidden. This isn't conspiracy thinking. There's tons of evidence, with witnesses and victims who have gone on the record, under oath, to law enforcement and Congress. Again, I'm not supporting violence, but, again, in a country filled to the tits with guns and people who think, not without cause, that the president is a pedophile? It's frankly surprising that there isn't more violence trying to get the answers. 

4. I'm not saying everyone who attended deserved to think they were going to die. (I'm not saying no one deserved to think that, either.) Save for the White House press pool, which is there to write about events as news, if you went to the dinner, you were taking part in a complete whitewashing of Trump's disdain for you, and, after Allen was captured, you were laughing with the targets of the shooter, taking selfies for your Instas, making dramatic TikToks about your trauma. You were giving aid and comfort to the people who want you imprisoned if you dare to speak against them. If you believe in signs that maybe you should do things differently in the future, dear, sweet, profit-driven, craven media whores and your corporate pimps, this would be it. God, don't fucking take a mulligan and try to do the dinner again.

4a. And fuck off if you're saying that Democrats and progressive media figures should "turn down the rhetoric" against Trump or whatever the fuck. Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech where he implied that progressives should be killed or kicked out of the country. Stephen Miller regularly rails against Americans who oppose the administration, calling them "traitors" and implying they need to be executed. Trump and his cabal of crypto cons and cockscabs are murdering people without trial, imprisoning families for months for no reason, trying to strip Americans of citizenship, murdering protesters, and threatening genocide. It's impossible to reach that level of actual violence with rhetoric. 

4b. Man, that was a shitty mentalist.

5. As Will Bunch wrote, this is our country now. We are so numb to gun violence that we roll our eyes at someone even getting somewhat close to being able to make an assassination attempt. We are numb to the constant barrage of hatefulness. We are so bereft of anything approaching a unifying leader that the media is willing to treat Trump with kid gloves if he pretends for a few minutes to not be an inflamed asshole. In the two days prior to last night's events, Trump made racist attacks on Hakeem Jeffries and Candace Owen, reposted calls for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to be arrested, celebrated committing more war crimes, and that's just to start. We don't have to pretend that a motherfucker isn't a motherfucker just because someone wanted to kill him. 

A Short Exegesis on Jesus Trump

We can tell a great deal about President Donald Trump from the "art" he hangs on his walls or posts on social media. Mostly, what it says is "I have absolutely no taste, and if you put my face on it, it's awesome." His recent repost, later deleted, was, as I'm sure you've seen by now, an AI-generated image featuring Trump as Jesus Christ, ostensibly there to heal someone who looks like Jeffrey Epstein but probably is not Jeffrey Epstein because you wouldn't heal someone you had killed. Then you have to kill them all over again and who knows if you can get the timing of the cameras being off just right a second time.

Yes, this upset many "Christians," who apparently had no issue with an adulterer and rapist who shits on the poor until he defiled the image of Christ, which is totally how Jesus would have reacted. But this image deserves a bit more discussion before it gets flushed down the memory hole, and, unfortunately, that means I need to post it.

As with most things Trump, this is really about his dick. Or, more precisely, this is about his semen, or, in this case, his Jesus jizz. Trump is obviously ejaculating - that's the burst of light coming from his groin area - and he's cumming on the head of the elderly man because nothing gives him more pleasure than watching people die. In fact, Trump's rubbing the jizz into the man's head not because he think it will comfort the man, but because Trump thinks it's hilarious to get some spunk on the dude. Notice the little smile. Trump's left hand holds some extra semen, likely because he accidentally brushed his hand against his cock during orgasm and he's wondering where to wipe it. Probably the soldier because Trump thinks that will show how much he supports the troops.

The two females on the sides stare at his prick, the one on the left looking concerned, as if she recognizes that it's probably not good for the urethra to spew glowing jizz. The one on the right, in the nurse's uniform, looks unfazed. As a medical professional, she has seen all kinds of jizz. However, the age of the two females is concerning. Both definitely look like teenagers. The nurse seems 13 and the praying girl seems 16, both well within Trump's age range for sexually abusing children. 

In fact, one way to see this image is as a representation of Trump's sex crimes, with the men looking on in quiet awe and appreciation because they themselves wish to fuck underage girls. The white-bearded man with a hat that says, "Petunia" is ready to drink more Trump cum because he's downed so much of it already the last ten years. Now, the heavenly figures could be seen as Democrats pursuing him, but you'd think even AI would know that demons come from hell. No, I think the floating men in outfits ranging from dimestore devil to early 20th-century diver actually represent right-wing media giving approval for Trump jizzing on an old man and making girls on their knees watch his dick. 

As for the fireworks and eagles and jets, those were sent out by Stephen Miller in order to announce a Trump orgasm. If Trump had his way, it would be a national holiday every time he achieved one, but since he can't just declare that (yet), he has free rein to make the military scramble some fighters. Those aren't chemtrails. They're cumtrails.

So, frankly, I was shocked when Trump gave in to demands by Mike Johnson and others to take down the image. What more perfect way is there to represent how he sees himself and how most of the MAGA cretins see him, even if some are mildly protesting. Most, by the way, are saying you can't take a joke if you find this offensive. They worship him. He may as well cut out the other savior.

Now, if they follow through on the rest of the Jesus stuff, that'll be worth orgasming over.

It Should Be a Bigger Story That the President of the United States Is Fucking Insane

I have the feeling we'll remember where we were when we saw or heard about rapist and President Donald Trump's Easter morning dropping in his Truth Toilet. I saw it embedded as an image on BlueSky and my first thought was "No way that's real." So I went over to Truth Toilet, where I maintain a secret stall to spy on the bastards, and, as we know now, I saw that, yup, that shit was real. Here's what it said, in case you didn't see it in all its glory (and I won't link to it because fuck Truth Toilet): "Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

Now, yes, this is a threat of war crimes to force Iran to allow cargo ships and oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz without being attacked, something that wasn't an issue until the United States started bombing Iran. But look at the psychopathic rage there from Trump (or whoever was writing this for him, but it's posted in his name, so, fuck it, yeah, Trump). You can see him wailing and gnashing about his stupid, worthless war not going the way he was told it would go by those hanging onto the hairs on his nutsack, like savage racist moron Pete Hegseth and evil, greedy worm Jared Kushner. And then to end it with "Praise be to Allah"? Putting aside that it's fucking Easter, one of the holiest days in his supposed Christian faith, it just seems like an extra dickish thing to add after saying he's going to mass murder Muslims and then force those not killed to live in misery. 

Look, we know that Trump is an extravagant, inveterate, unapologetic liar. We also know that he's a giant piece of shit, a miserable fuck who treats everyone as terrible as he feels. But liars and pieces of shit at least have one foot in reality. The real key to understanding how and why we are where we are as a nation (and as a world) is to acknowledge that Trump is fucking insane and to demand more reporting on that fact. Instead, we get some combination of glossing over his madness, dismissing it as just his personality, and rolling one's eyes as if he's a child. None of these reactions has ever worked, and his madness has gotten worse. 

Let's not go through all the ways and times that Trump has acted or expressed something insane. That would be like going through a porn star's oeuvre to see all the places he has jizzed on another human being. Just accept that it's everywhere and move on to the next point.  Instead, let's focus in on that last line there, the "Praise be to Allah," and not for the weird slide into Islam's DMs. 

As his war failure (and let's be clear: the war is a failure and was always going to be a failure) causes him to spiral, as events that he has no control over once again take over his administration (like Covid in his first cursed term), he has gotten more and more freaky about spouting religious shit, desperately humping Jesus for clout with the evangelicals and support from the crazed Christian nationalists who have turned this shambles into a Holy War. On Saturday, for instance, he ended one Truth Toilet dropping about blowing up Iran with "Glory be to GOD!" which is just embarrassing and weird on top of being worrying. 

Meanwhile, at a Holy Week event, he gave a speech that wasn't supposed to be posted and kept making comparisons between himself and Jesus and random religious shit. "On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem as crowds welcomed him with praise, honoring him as king. They call me king now, do you believe it? No, king. I'm such a king I can't get a ballroom approved," he said, interrupting the build up to the crucifixion. He continued, "And Thursday, the disciples gathered with Jesus as their teacher and stood in fear as he was arrested and betrayed. He was really betrayed. We know the feeling. Many of the people in this room know that feeling. Many of the people in this room went through hell." In case you're keeping track, Trump's saying that the legal difficulties of the pedophiles and thieves gathered for lunch are analogous to Christ's torture.

Then he started to riff, saying, "I've often said that to be a great nation, you have to have religion. I believe that's so strongly. You have to have religion and you have to have God. That's why this Easter we are bringing back religion to America. We have when I started, you know, if you think about it so we went through four years of purgatory." After a few minutes of this, after comparing the supposed growth of Christianity to the growth in Nvidia stocks, after blathering about how he brought back Christmas when no one was talking about Christmas anymore, he shifted to trans women in sports and imitated a trans woman boxing and mocked other trans women and, no, really, this fucking happened. 

Donald Trump is a fundamentally broken man. He was never stable or sane, and his need for wealth and desire to wield his power have taken on a mania. Like so many broken men in leadership before, he believes he is the thing that he's leading. He sees himself as the United States, that what's good for him is what's good for Americans, and that if you claim otherwise, you are his enemy and the country's enemy and the country needs to destroy you. But on top of that, he might really believe (and he is told this repeatedly by the deranged and/or grifting religious leaders who surround him and lay hands on him) that he is God's instrument on earth and that everything he does is sanctified through his connection to an invisible sky wizard who looked out for him to prevent him from being assassinated. No, I don't think Trump's a religious zealot. But he has said he's worried about his soul after death, and that's driven him even crazier as he seems to actually be thinking about whether or not he's going to Hell (and, to be sure, for those of us who are atheists, this is all psycho shit). Or who knows what he's really thinking? That's what it means to have such severe mental decay, to be delusional on top of being narcissistic. 

This is unsustainable. Democrats need to be asking every day why Republicans won't remove him from office. Fuck it - come at it from a compassionate direction: Why won't they make an obviously sick and crazed man get help? Don't Republicans care about him? The president of the United States, who is threatening an apocalypse against a country that didn't attack us or even legitimately threaten us, is fucking insane. The world demands that that be the biggest goddamn story anywhere. The nation needs leaders to make it end before he sits in his ballroom bunker and blows the whole goddamn earth up. He never should have been president. That he is is a crime against humanity. That he could be removed and isn't is an epic tragedy.

It Should Be a Bigger Story That the President of the United States Is a Lying Motherfucker

Noted rapist and warmonger Donald Trump lies to everyone. For his entire life, he has lied. To list his lies would be to write his biography because it is merely a series of lies, from his personal relationships to his business deals to his contracts with others to his image on his stupid TV show to his campaigns for president to his press conferences to his dealings with other countries. Every single thing is a fucking lie. He lies so much he can't keep track of what he lied about and when someone says he said one thing but now says another, he waves it off and tells a third lie and just plows ahead, ready to lie again. That's how he discusses the war in Iran, declaring victory, declaring that the rest of the world needs to open up the Strait of Hormuz, sending more troops, declaring victory again, saying that Iran is 100% contained militarily, and threatening an invasion before declaring victory one more time. 

You can't trust a word out of his lying motherfucker mouth, so attempting to parse meaning from his statements or his droppings on Truth Toilet or, anything, really, is a fool's game, like trying to get a sociopathic child to tell you how the cat ended up in the washing machine. You know goddamn well what happened, but that little shit is never gonna admit it. That's because there is no meaning beyond whatever makes Trump look the best, the strongest, and the most right in any given moment. Or makes him money, one of those constants in his cursed life. It's some insidious shit, and it's a huge story that the media covers generally only as fact checks and not as "Holy fuck, how do we operate as a country when you can't trust the president to be honest about literally anything?" 

But, as I said last week about his lies about the 2020 election, if Trump and his lackeys keep repeating the same shit over and over, eventually no one challenges it and it starts to seem like established truth when it's not. Some of them have overwhelmed our discourse, and it almost seems as if the reality of recent history, or, you know, the factual record, is being subsumed in the Trumpian bullshit tsunami and then he and the craven scumfucks in the GOP make policy based on those lies. 

For instance, it's an article of MAGA faith that President Joe Biden left behind a decimated ruin of a country that Trump had to fix like a Servpro guy taking care of a flooded basement. Trump loves shitting on Biden as much as possible. If he's in front of a mic, at some point, he's gonna drop his pants and take a shit on Joe Biden's photo. On Friday, in remarks to...fuck, who really cares?...he said, "Biden and his allies wrecked our country. They wreaked havoc on our economy" and then called him "Sleepy Joe" and "stupid." On the same say, talking a farmers' group, he said, "For four disastrous years before I took office, Sleepy Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress crushed America's farmers with the worst inflation in the history of our country." And, again, same day, Trump said to reporters, unprompted, "the Biden open border" allowed criminals in. The day before, at one of his weekly testicle tongue baths from his cabinet, Trump said that Iran "had free rein under Biden, Sleepy Joe, worst president in the history of our country, what he allowed it to happen to our country at the borders and even with a thing like this." 

There's hardly an occasion, a moment when he's talking to an audience or reporter, when he won't shit on Biden. When he dragged his stupid ass tp Graceland, he was signing a guitar when, apropos of nothing, Trump said, "Now Biden couldn't do this. He'd have to send it out to be signed." It's just fucking weird.

But the thing is, as anyone who was even a little cognizant of what was actually happening way, way back in 2024, Biden didn't wreck the country. There are many things to criticize Biden on, but when he left office, by every objective measure, the economy and much else domestically was in pretty goddamn great shape. I hate to repeat myself, but, come the fuck on, The Economist declared the American economy under Biden "the envy of the world" in that we recovered better, faster, and more strongly than anyone else post-pandemic. The inflation rate, which had gone up to 9% in 2022 due to high demand for goods after Covid (which is basic finance stuff), along with supply chain issues and other shit, was pretty much the same as it is now by mid-2024. The Inflation Reduction Act had worked its magic; job creation was still going well, even if it had slowed after the incredible highs in 2022; the unemployment rate was lower than it is now, and the CHIPS Act was creating more tech opportunities in the US. Farmers got a bailout and tons of support. There's so much more, like the subsidies to help people pay for Affordable Care Act policies. I mean, this isn't some fucking fantasy. It's what was really going on. Oh, and Biden didn't have an "open borders" policy. But the pent up demand to get into the US after the pandemic sure as shit sent the numbers up on people coming into the country, something else that was under control by the time Kamala Harris lost the election (and, frankly, I'd argue that large-scale immigration is a good thing for a country that needs workers and that Democrats should stop playing along with the Republican bullshit on immigrants). 

But Trump took the high price of eggs and exaggerated that to mean the entire nation was collapsing into a dystopian hellscape while Joe Biden slept through it. Then Trump got elected and shitcanned a good many things that were working (like much of the IRA), started a trade war with China that fucked farmers, and claimed he made it all better when it is objectively worse. So when Trump says all these things about Biden and the way the country was before he was forced on us all again as president, he's fucking lying. You can call it "gaslighting," if you're so inclined, in that he's trying to convince us that something is real that isn't but it's a fucking lie. 

If the media is not willing to call that out at every opportunity to his face, asking him about the lies, then he gets to lie with impunity about the shit going on now, like Iran and his economy and immigrants and everything else. And, again, if the president is a fucking liar all the time, then that pulls the rug out from us and from the rest of the world. It shows how broken we are as a country.

It Should Be a Bigger Story That the President of the United States Is a Giant Piece of Shit

President Donald Trump, a rapist who increasingly looks like a particularly pustulent hemorrhoid, loves to say that he won the 2024 election in a "landslide." He says it a lot. No, wait, that undersells it. He says it all the fucking time, like every time it bubbles up in the moldy pudding where his brain once was. On March 16, at a luncheon for the Kennedy Center board, Trump said, "We won in a landslide." On March 17, while meeting with Ireland's Taoiseach Micheal Martin in the enshittified fake gold Oval Office, Trump said that he's "a popular President of the United States that won in a landslide that won all seven swing states that got record numbers of votes." On March 20, while presenting the Commander-in-Chief's Trophy to the US Naval Academy for being good at football, he pondered, like a Temu Arthur Miller character, "When a man can get elected in a landslide, winning every -- think of it, seven swing states, win them all..." Honestly, Trump says it on an almost daily basis, like he says many things. 

This kind of constant repetition is the con man's ploy: if you keep saying it, if you have other people saying it (and Trump's cabinet members and advisors and media lackeys do it all the time), then it will seem like the truth, even if it's a lie, especially if no one challenges that lie. We've reached that point with the landslide assertion. Trump did not, in actual fact, win in a landslide. Far from it. No one bothers pushing back against it anymore because, well, fuck, what about the lies about the Iran war or trans people or voting or the 2020 election or...you get it. It's also an idiotic lie because he won, but that's not enough. It's gotta be the biggest win or the biggest crowd or the biggest tax cut. 

Like other lies in the manic tsunami of lies that he's constantly crashing over the American public, it's one that should be questioned every time he brings it up: "Why do you keep saying you won in a 'landslide' when, in fact, you narrowly defeated Vice President Harris?" Not that he'd answer it. Because, see, the lies are all he has, and that's part of makes him a giant piece of shit.

And, frankly, that should be a bigger story, indeed, perhaps, the only story: We are living in a time period where the president of the United States is a giant piece of shit, and that has an effect on everything around us. If the president can get away with being a piece of shit, if no one calls him on it, if the media acts like being a giant piece of shit is normal, then, well, fuck it. Let's all be pieces of shit, too. 

This weekend, when former FBI Director and Special Counsel Robert Mueller died, over at Truth Toilet, Trump diarrheaed, "Good, I’m glad he’s dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!" Sure, you can say, as many of the pieces of shit around Trump have said, that Mueller treated Trump "badly," and thus we should have "empathy" for Trump. It shouldn't surprise us that Trump couldn't shut the fuck up and gloated over Mueller's corpse, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't anger us. Frankly, Trump should be thanking Mueller for every goddamn day of freedom that he has because of how Mueller wrote his report on Trump colluding with Russia in 2016 and because of how Mueller kept quiet publicly when then-Attorney General Bill Barr completely dicked Mueller over by mischaracterizing its findings and keeping it secret. 

Today, Sunday, Trump posted on the Texas Senate race, where he has refused to endorse a Republican, thus helping to force a prolonged primary battle between two fucking awful human beings, John Cornyn and Ken Paxton. Really, it's like choosing herpes or chlamydia. The herpes isn't ever really going away, and you can cure the chlamydia, but it's way worse for you.

Trump said (and I'm gonna quote in full because I don't fuckin' want to link to his garbage site), "The Democrat running in Texas, James Talarico, turns out to be a FRAUD! It showed after the Election when he beat Low IQ Candidate Jasmine Crockett (No relation to Davy Crockett!). He’s got six Genders, insults to Jesus, only vegan food, was wearing a mask in 2023 and 2024, and is a weak, ineffective guy who we 'allowed' to win prior to releasing the avalanche of information we had on him because, as bad as Crockett was as a Candidate, this guy is worse! I believe that any human being running against him, sick, incompetent, close to death or, even a child, would win. He may be the Worst Candidate I have ever seen, other than, of course, Gavin Newscum who admitted that he suffers from mental incapacity, is unable to read a speech, and is dumb but, in saying 'the dumb comment,' referred to his audience, and therefore became, in the eyes of African Americans, A TOTAL RACIST — which is probably true! Gavin admits that he’s a Low IQ individual, which typically is not good for winning the Presidency. His interview may have been the worst ever given by a 'professional' politician. I believe, it takes him OUT OF THE RACE. Kamala is back!"

There is so much shittiness in there that it's like wading through the pig field at a factory farm. Putting aside the effort to emasculate Talarico using barely coded language to queer him up (and, for the record, he's not a vegan, not that there's anything wrong with that, but you can guarantee that it's all you'll hear about for weeks), as well as the gratuitously racist and sexist slams against Jasmine Crockett, look at this idea that Trump "allowed" Talarico to win. He's implying that the GOP manipulated the release of information on Talarico because they thought Crockett would be harder to beat. The fucking ego of that shit belies the fact that poll after poll shows Talarico winning against either Republican STD. 

But the peak of being a piece of shit is Trump's ongoing degradation of California Governor Gavin Newsom for speaking openly about his struggles with dyslexia. For Trump, this is "mental incapacity," openly insulting millions of people who are dealing with it. It's repulsive for anyone to be saying that shit, but this is the goddamned president of the United States. His dismissal of a learning disability that can be dealt with opens the door for others to attack dyslexics. And the repetition of "Low IQ" as an insult kind of shows the insulter is a fucking dumbass who can't come up with a new negative comment.

As Trump layers lies upon bullshit like a fraud parfait, the corporate media is missing out on how this is degrading the entire country. We can't become numb and bored with his abject shittiness. That's what lets him get away with every fucking crime. Every single piece on him should open with "President Donald Trump, a rapist" and then it should be about how he's a giant piece of shit who can't be trusted on anything. And how having a president like this is gutting this country.

The Only Way to Talk About the Iran War Is to Say the US Needs to Stop

Over in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the always smart Will Bunch has a column out this week that warns that our current Iran clusterfuck is already reminiscent of our Vietnam clusterfuck and is already a lost cause: "We should still take one lesson from Vietnam. We should face the honest, painful truth. It took America 20 tortured years, an unspeakable death toll, and finally the image of desperate people climbing toward helicopters on an embassy roof to acknowledge the bitter reality that our nation had lost a war. Today, it’s clear after less than two weeks there won’t even be a premature 'Mission Accomplished' banner for Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s irrational gambit in Iran. Victory is unattainable, and arguably we have lost a war." It's a harsh acknowledgement, something anyone without their head stuck up the asses of Fox "news" bullshitters and craven right-wing podcasters already sensed from the frantic spinning of this colossal fuckup by Trump and his administration spokesworms. 

We know that one thing that turned the tide in this country against the Vietnam War was mainstream media finally stating the clear fact that this was a losing cause and American soldiers were dying for no reason. Yes, it took 7 years from when Walter Cronkite made his post-Tet Offensive commentary in 1968 for the war to finally end with the chaos of the fall of Saigon in 1975, but it set the tone for media coverage from then on. And while we no longer have a unifying news figure like Cronkite in our exploded information ecosystem, it would fucking well help if legacy (or corporate or mainstream or whatever goddamn adjective you wanna use) media didn't act in any way like this is some normal shit going on right now. 

Look at the New York Times, for instance. Yes, they have opinion pieces condemning (and supporting) the war and reporting on how Trump just bumblefucked into Iran with no idea what the fuck he was doing. But then there will be articles that simply treat this like it's a justified war and not the ego trip of a madman who doesn't give a shit about soldiers dying. Like this one: "How a Marine Unit in the Middle East Could Open New Phase of Iran War." It's mostly Pentagon propaganda about how the Marines would be used, quoting one defense expert explaining that "the Pentagon will be able to quickly launch raids onto the islands with infantry Marines who will have logistics and air support," and fuck that. Another way to frame the article is to say that Trump is putting Americans into a deadly situation for no reason. For nothing. That the entire "excursion" is a futile use of funding and lives and it's wrong to even contemplate escalating and not withdrawing. 

Even seemingly critical reporting is in the context that this war is somehow justified. Over on NBC News, an article titled "Trump wants other countries to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That might not be so easy" lays out how other countries are feeling about joining the war effort. Only once does the piece mention the easiest fucking way to reopen the strait: the United States can end the fucking war. And that's from a quote from the Energy Secretary of the UK: "the best and most conclusive way to get the Strait reopened is to get this conflict to come to an end," which leaves open who is responsible and who could stop it now. It's like you're burning down a forest with a flamethrower while trying to put out the blaze, and a reporter talks about how it's doubtful anyone is going to help you without saying, "Oh, hey, shut off the goddamn flamethrower. That's an option, too."

Democrats are falling into the trap, too, of being opposed to Trump but not firmly saying to fucking leave and try to put out all leftover fires and flareups before the whole forest is burnt down. Instead of having a unified call to cease operations for, again, another war based on lies that most everyone knows are lies, Democratic members of Congress are criticizing Trump and masturbating shitheel Pete Hegseth for not having "a plan." If you ask for a plan, that means you think a plan is possible. If you think a plan is possible, that infers that the war is, in some way, justified when it fucking well isn't. Or they call for an investigation and that "we need answers." No. What we fucking need, what well over half of the American public wants is no war. I mean, they took a vote on trying to stop it without congressional authorization. It failed, but they're on record against the war, so act like it.

Some Democrats, like AOC and Sen. Chris Murphy, are being crystal clear on the need to bring the troops home and stop attacking Iran. One high point of stupidity here was when Murphy was talking to CNN's Jake "Resting sneer face" Tapper. Last Sunday, Tapper asked Murphy about voting against an expected $50 billion in funding for the war. Murphy said he wouldn't support it, and Tapper said that might be seen as "voting against the troops." To his credit, Murphy didn't bite on the old canard that not supporting the killing of troops for maniacal reasons is the same as not supporting the troops. He said, "If you support the troops, then you should vote against this war so that we get our troops out of harm’s way. Virtually nothing good happened from sending thousands of Americans to die in Iraq in the 2000s and if we don’t learn that lesson then shame on every single one of us." 

See, we don't have to go all the way back to Vietnam for the lesson, although it was a much, much bloodier one for the US. We were just fucking here, in a quagmire, pretending like we knew what we were doing, with leaders who thought it would be a cakewalk and learning too late that those who counseled caution were right. We were just fucking here 15 years ago. I know memories are short and attention spans are fading, but, fucking hell, our media and our Democratic leaders need to be clear that this is an insultingly worthless waste of lives (American and Iranian and Lebanese and...), of money, and it's going to fuck things up for another generation.

But, hell, it'll give Democrats something else to run on. And with FCC dickscab Brendan Carr threatening the licenses of broadcasters who speak ill of the war, maybe it's time to tell this administration to go fuck itself with its threats. Hell, it's not like they've gamed out the consequences of any of their actions. And opposing a war is more patriotic than being a simp for it.

(I just wanna add one thing: I'm pushing 60 years on this goddamned planet. There has not been a single fucking war or military intervention in my lifetime that wasn't based on lies or exaggerated bullshit. Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again, and now Iran, none of them were worth a single life. None of them were about protecting the United States or defending an ally who was attacked. It's pathetic that we keep doing this. It's pathetic that people still support leaders who do this.)

Living in and Paying for Trump's Fake World

This week, we got word that the Justice Department is finding it impossible to move forward on the autopen case against former President Joe Biden. See, current President Donald Trump thinks Biden didn't use the autopen correctly. Specifically, Trump believes that Biden was so out of it that the autopen was used to sign pardons that he was unaware of. Trump wants those pardons rescinded and people punished for this "crime." 

It should go without saying that Biden wasn't actually completely brain dead and still isn't; Biden's alleged mental incapacity is just a basic belief of the MAGA mob at this point, something that apparently every cabinet member is required to say at every appearance. Also, all those pardons, like for Gen. Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and Biden's son, Hunter, are of people that Trump wants to hurt because he thinks they made him look bad or just because, and the pardon is in the way. 

The reason the DOJ is having such a problem is that prosecutors can't find a crime to charge Biden or his aides with. And, when it comes to President Biden, the Supreme Court's utter disgrace of a decision granting presidents immunity from prosecution for things done in office doesn't just apply to Trump, even if it always seems that way with this court. But, of course, there was never anything there, just like there was never anything there with the case against six Democratic members of Congress who made the video that told soldiers not to follow illegal orders, just like there's no case against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell or James Comey or Letitia James. None of these are legitimate. They are merely vehicles for Trump to get vengeance on or harm people who don't go along with everything he wants or who want to hold him to account for breaking the law.

Think for a moment about the amount of time and money wasted on these investigations: the work hours, the use of materials, and, in some cases, the time of the grand juries. It's not simply that MAGA cretins support Trump in contorting the DOJ into his own private legal army to go after heretics and unbelievers. It's that they believe that all of those people have committed crimes worthy of prosecution by the federal government because Trump has told them they have. 

That's how we live now. So much of what the government does is because it's responding to Trump's warped delusions or to affirm the lies that he needs people to believe. Take the 2020 election, for instance.  Essentially the first tenet of the MAGA faith is that Trump won the 2020 election and it was stolen from him due to some combination of foreign interference, Democratic cheating, outright fraud, and possibly the devil. There is no evidence for this and it has been adjudicated literally dozens of times. But the federal government is currently spending millions of dollars "investigating" the election, including the FBI seizing the records of Fulton County, Georgia, to look for this alleged fraud. That's for a state where the election was run by Republicans, just not Republicans willing to throw their workers under the Trumpian bus. It's a lie, it's an illusion, and it's now the agenda of several agencies to "prove" this fantasy. 

Every major thing being done by this administration is happening because Trump wants to force us to exist in his fake world, the one where he's always right, anyone who opposes him is an enemy seeking his destruction, and everyone needs to be grateful that he's taking care of the joint. When I talk about the sheer amount of money being wasted on this effort, I'm not including the corruption that has enriched Trump and his family and other close to him. I'm talking about all the funds being wasted in our name.

The heartbreaking death and destruction of our "war" on Iran is part of this. It's all based on lies and delusions, delusions that go back to 1979, when Trump, like many wannabe hawks, reacted to the Islamic Revolution and the kidnapping of Americans by demanding that the US bomb Tehran into oblivion. Everything around the evolving reasoning for the war is an extension of this fake reality. Iran wasn't remotely close to building a nuclear weapon. Iran wasn't on the verge of bombing Israel. Everything is nonsense, but we're at war because Trump believes in it all. Or makes a good enough show at believing it.

Like I said, this is how we live now. We exist at this nexus between actual reality and a false MAGA reality. The problem is that the latter is where we're forced to fight. So it might be in actual reality that virtually all immigrants, documented or not, are hard-working members of communities who make the nation a better place and deserve the chance to become citizens. But in MAGA reality, most are violent criminals who want to cut white teenage girls to pieces. In order to get to act on what's really at stake, the fake stuff needs to be defeated. So we can't even get to immigration reform until we get over the mass deportations and ICE insanity. False reality is wrecking actual reality.

If you want a measure of how far we've slipped, there's this: On Saturday, at 4 in the morning, a plaque was installed near an entrance to the Capitol in DC. That plaque honors the members of law enforcement who defended the building during the insurrection of January 6, 2021. A law was passed by Congress in March 2022 mandating the installation of the plaque by March 2023 (Republicans took back the House in November 2022). Instead, the thing sat in the basement as Trump and the GOP contorted the reality of January 6, turning a violent riot by marauding idiots determined to keep their racist/rapist president in power into, as Trump puts it, "a day of love." The police who were there, getting beaten and maced, with over 140 injured and 4 committing suicide because of injuries and effects of that day, became seen not as the heroes they were, but as traitors to the MAGA reality, condemned, threatened, and demeaned. 

It points to something else that is chilling about all this policy based on unreality; it's as chilling as an HHS policy that will kill children, it's as chilling as the end of USAID causing deaths by the hundreds of thousands, it's as chilling as the war with Iran where the goal seems to be mass murder and suffering, and it's as chilling as the cruel and callous version of reality that the MAGA movement wants to impose on us. It's that Trump and the MAGA cretins don't care who gets hurt in order to make the world to fit their warped vision, and that includes children at a school in Iran and it includes us. In fact, Trump, the odious Pete Hegseth, their manosphere lackeys, all seem to thrill at the deaths that have happened and the potential for many more. 

This is beyond the fact that Republicans make policies based on lies. This is about forcing a certain kind of thinking, a faith as delusional as the followers of the Supreme Leader in Iran have. The question is how the fantasists will react when actual reality comes crashing in, as it will. Wars never go how you think. Court cases can keep maintaining some adherence to facts. But as long as Trump keeps forcing the entire operation of the government to act and react according to whatever beliefs he pulls out of his aggrieved, diseased brain or the phantoms that plague him, like his 2020 loss, we will not be free of the fake reality. And we'll have to keep paying for its continued existence.

(Note: I'm not saying that "both sides lies" because I can't think of a single lie or delusion that Democrats have believed while in power that so contorted the operation of the government.)