Target

I know how it feels to be the Kremlin's target.

After establishing that I'm a homosexual (although I'm straight), the Kremlin engineered my lifetime erasure on LinkedIn. All because I spoke in favor of limited gun ownership.

Don't cross these boys, as Nina Jankowicz also learned this week.

A graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, a Fulbright scholar, a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and a noted author, Jankowicz was removed Wednesday by Homeland Security from its new Disinformation Governance Board.

The Kremlin doesn't care for her, because she served while a Fulbright scholar in the foreign ministry of Ukraine in Kiev in 2017 and wrote a book in 2020 titled How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict.

Worse yet, Jankowicz advised Volodymyr Zelenskyy on matters of Russian disinformation.

So when President Biden announced in April that she would head the new board, the Kremlin went into overdrive, deploying all its favorite mouthpieces (including Tucker Carlson and Senator Ron Johnson) to belittle Jankowicz.

These Kremlin mouthpieces threatened to rape her, kill her, and murder her family members. They called her mentally ill, a whore, a propogandist for the "great replacement," and—worst of all—a "nasty Jew" (Jankowicz isn't nasty or Jewish, just as I'm not homosexual).

They pulled out all the stops and the hatchet job worked in under three weeks.

One thing you can say about the Kremlin and its American mouthpieces: they may be effective, but they're not terribly original.

Love It or Leave It

Most Western multinational companies have paused operations in Russia.

But not McDonalds. 

Junk-food retailers don't always own their stores in Russia (they're franchises out of the parent company's control), but McDonalds does.

The company has yet to make a public statement about the invasion of Ukraine by Putin, because Russia accounts for nearly 10% of its revenue.

I'm not lovin' it.

I'm leavin' it.

Boycott McDonalds. 

Because eating at McDonalds kills kids in Ukraine.

POSTCRIPT: Dump MCD, too. 

Closer Than Ever

In the threatening situation of the world today, it would not be at all surprising if sections of the community who ask themselves nothing were visited by "visions." 

— Carl Jung

CNN reports that the Pentagon has acknowledged the existence of UFOs, after classified videos of flying saucers were leaked. The generals will report their findings to Congress in June.

Why this announcement isn't the lead of the day mystifies me. Perhaps, thanks to decades of lying, the federal government no longer has credibility.

Steven Spielberg in fact had Watergate in mind when in 1975 he pitched the script for a political thriller he eventually entitled "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Much different than the final cut of the film, Spielberg’s first draft followed Claude Lacombe, a Pentagon contractor who blows the whistle on a coverup. Lacombe's employer knows aliens visit Earth, but doesn't want the public to know.

Lacombe was based in part on Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the civilian advisor to Project Blue Book who developed the "scale" for alien encounters.

According to Hynek, a "close encounter of the first kind" was a UFO sighting; a "close encounter of the second kind" was the discovery of hard evidence; a "close encounter of the third kind" was contact.

Hynek—who served as Spielberg's technical advisor and enjoyed a cameo in the film—believed UFOs were real. He called them "M&Ms."

"I hold it entirely possible", Hynek said, "that a technology exists which encompasses both the physical and the psychic. There are stars that are millions of years older than the sun. There may be a civilization that is millions of years more advanced than man's. 

"I hypothesize an 'M&M' technology encompassing the mental and material realms. The psychic realms, so mysterious to us today, may be an ordinary part of an advanced technology."

Shake Your Booty

The filibuster is an effort to talk something to death.

— Sen. Dick Durbin

The filibuster is a Senate procedure invoked by the minority party to "pirate" a popular bill.

This act of piracy used to be difficult, but no longer. 

Until 1975, senators could block a bill only through the “talking filibuster.” Today, they can call for a "virtual" one. No one need talk. 

Joe Biden wants Senators to filibuster like they did "in the old days," talking until they're exhausted. Republicans disagree.

Hard or easy, piracy lies at the very heart of the filibuster.

Filibuster derives from flibustier, the 17th century French word for "pirate." A 1684 memoir by buccaneer John Oexmelin popularized the word in America.

By the 1850s—when Manifest Destiny was on everyone's mind—militia leaders like William Walker were called filibusters. (If there's something strange in your neighborhood who you gonna call?) To filibuster meant to wage a private war; a filibuster was an insurrectionist.

Three decades later, the filibuster was formally introduced in the Senate. Southern obstructionists would use it to "pirate" debates over civil rights bills, spurring ruthless, minority-led "insurrections."

Filibuster is closely related to freebooter, derived from the 16th century Dutch vrijbuiter, meaning "plunderer." Vrijbuit meant "free booty." Booty derived from the 14th century French butin, meaning "plunder taken from an enemy in war." And boot derived from the 11th century German busse, meaning "penance."

Today we call pirates "freebooters."

Keynes Reigns

The rich, to be blunt, are shitting bricks.

Democrats' American Rescue Plan will jazz the economy by putting $2 trillion into the hands of peasants.

The rich aren't used to such unfair treatment. Pish posh.

What's it mean? 

Reaganomics is dead. Keynes again reigns.

Keynes claimed spending—by households, businesses, and the government—is the driver of the economy. That's spending, not siphoning, accumulating, banking, or hoarding. When households and businesses don't spend, government must.

Prepare for the brainless lackeys of the rich—the GOP—to begin recycling their three foundational cracker-barrel wisdoms:

• The government is a family. Families must not deficit-spend. Just think what would have happened had June spent more than Ward's salary. Wally and the Beaver would have lived their entire adult lives in poverty. (Don't bring up the fact that the Cleavers couldn't print money, set interest rates, or levy taxes.)
  
  
• Government only builds "bridges to nowhere." All government spending is wasteful. (Don't you dare mention the national highway system, space exploration, or the Internet. They were fake news!)
  
  
• Peasants are your moral inferiors. The rich shoulder the weight of the whole world, while peasants just loot from them. Handouts will only incent the latter to laze all day, sipping wine, texting, and birthing more brown babies. (Don't remind us the Kardashians do those things, too.)

Don't listen to the GOP's stale and quite stupid malarkey. 

Celebrate, instead, the triumphant return from exile of John Maynard Keynes.

The Cure

The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country—and we haven't seen them since.

— Gore Vidal

History—and Americans' ignorance thereof—keeps coming up in post-January 6 discussions. For good reason. Research by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni finds Americans know little about the subject. To wit:

• 33% of adult Americans do not know when the American Revolution took place
  
  
• 50% believe the Civil War occurred before the Revolution
  
  
• 78% cannot name the source of the phrase “government of the people, by the people, for the people”
  
  
• 80% cannot describe the effect of the Emancipation Proclamation
  
  
• 71% do not know what the Reconstruction was
  
  
• 33% do not know FDR introduced the New Deal
  
  
• 58% do not know when the Battle of the Bulge took place
  
  
• 41% cannot identify the name Auschwitz
  
  
• 29% do not know the title of the national anthem

"The knowledge of all American history has become a wasteland," the researchers said. "The reason is that we are no longer teaching it."

Ordinarily I complain about society's problems, without offering solutions; but today you're in for a treat. I know the way to restore our national knowledge deficit, and it isn't some billon-dollar program. Teachers merely have to assign their students the seven novels composing Gore Vidal's "Empire Chronicles."

Vidal liked to call our country, aptly, the "United States of Amnesia." We can cure that disease for only $25 per person—the cost of a farting Donald Trump doll. Call it the $25 cure for amnesia.

The novels composing Vidal's series are Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. and The Golden Age. 

I've read each one more more than once and would best describe the novels as suspenseful, tapestry-like, and deliciously lurid.

• Burr recounts the life of the roguish Aaron Burr as he's caught up in the struggle between the power-hungry planter Thomas Jefferson and the craven financier Alexander Hamilton.

• Lincoln follows our greatest president through his entire time in the White House as he battles ruthlessly to preserve the Union and curtail the damage wrought by a crazy wife.

• 1876 recounts "America's worst year," when the winner of the popular vote in the presidential election—Democrat Samuel Tilden—loses the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes.

• Empire takes you through the era of the egomaniacal expansionists William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.

• Hollywood provides a behind-the-scenes look at Woodrow Wilson's time in office, with walk-on appearances by Charlie Chaplin, James Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Fatty Arbuckle.

• Washington, D.C. portrays real-world politics during the Great Depression and World War II through the eyes of a political family not unlike the novelist's own.

• The Golden Age delves even deeper into the era, providing an inside look at the political machinations of FDR and the dawning of the Cold War.

Should you doubt the importance of my inexpensive cure for amnesia—and many of the nation's other ills—consider the words of JFK:

“There is little that is more important for an American citizen to know than the history and traditions of his country. Without such knowledge, he stands uncertain and defenseless before the world."

Time to Abridge Bullshit

The people shall not be deprived of their right to speak, write or publish their sentiments.

— James Madison

Although the Senate rewrote Madison's draft of the First Amendment before its ratification, no one questioned that free speech is a natural right in 1789.

Six decades earlier, a young Philadelphia printer, Ben Franklin, had said as much. "When men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard," he wrote.

Franklin didn't worry that some opinions are wrong, because "when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter."

Free speech is a bedrock principle, as American as apple pie. Or is it?

The Founding Fathers never watched reality TV, where falsehoods trump the truth. Had they, the First Amendment might read: 

Congress shall abridge the freedom to bullshit.

I hate to say it, but our reality TV-star president has forced America to abridge bullshit. As we've seen—like raw milk, angel dust, and flammable pajamas—bullshit is bad for you. It ought to be outlawed.

Liberals will flinch at this suggestion, I know; perhaps some conservatives, as well. Tough. We're neck deep in a national emergency, brought on Trump and his despotic stooges and abetted by the traditional and new media's addiction to fair play.

It's time Trump's league of bullshit artists were muzzled.

And not only muzzled. 

It's time—lest we forget—they were tarred for their chronic bullshit.

If they're not branded as liars and propagandists, they'll resort to "communicative silence" (kommunikatives Beschweigen)—the convenient path closet Nazis took after World War II, when these German "patriots" permitted Hitler's narrative to persist, albeit in the shadows.

To Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Navarro, McEnany, Limbaugh, Hannity, Carlson, Graham, McConnell, Jordan, Cruz, Gaetz, Johnson, Hawley and the rest of your ruthless, insurrectionary gang: It's time to shut up, time to fade away. 

Before we're trampled by your herd of incels, we will repress you and tar you, because you pollute public discourse with your unrelenting bullshit.

The Late Hunter S. Thompson Answers My Question

NOTE: I awoke today to find this mysterious note on my bathroom sink.

Bob,

You addled bastard, you approached me in your fetid dream last night and asked my advice. 

At least, I think you did—I had the Cowboys game on at the time, and Washington was stomping them, like they were a gang of sick junkies.

My attention wasn't fully yours. 

If I grasped your question, you asked what America should do with 45, now that the maddened crowds—like Bond in the grand finale—have dispatched his fat diapered ass.

The Ephedrine supply is practically nonexistent here, so I must keep my answer brief.

America doesn't have to do anything about 45. 

Come mid-December—too chilly for tubby to golf in Virginia—45 will depart DC permanently for his rat-hole in Florida, announcing by Tweet a "hard-earned" Christmas vacation. 

From there, Snowden-like, 45 will flee to Moscow, requesting permanent asylum.

Putin will grant the asylum, glad for yet another thing to lord over fatso. 

But when Putin learns 45 is broke and knows no Top Secrets the Kremlin doesn't, he'll graciously deliver one of his infamous gifts.

The only question for America: where to dispose of the remains?

I suggest the ruins of Reactor 4 in Chernobyl.

— Hunter

Anything You Want

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.

— Arlo Guthrie

Last year, my wife and I spent three late-summer days in leafy Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the home of the now-derelict Alice's Restaurant. The restaurant's front door was padlocked, but I managed to sneak inside through the adjoining building (another greasy spoon, this in full operation). Not much to see of Alice's Restaurant except dust, cobwebs, and a few splintery tables and counters.

This year, I'm grateful for many things, not the least of which include the annual airplay of Arlo Guthrie's anti-war song—the only song about Thanksgiving that isn't insufferably schmaltzy. I'm also grateful Covid-19 hasn't ripped family members and friends from my life or denied me a cozy, if crimped, lifestyle.

Millions of other Americans can't say that.

Behavioral scientists believe gratitude, the "affirmation of goodness," survives from our primate-days, when we thrived by helping others and being helped in return.

Psychotherapists believe gratitude is as much a "practice" as an inborn emotion. Counting your blessings makes you upbeat, sociable and generous; combats depression; and wards off many unhealthy emotions, including envy, resentment, anger and contempt. AA calls the practice an "attitude of gratitude."

Although few Americans know or care, Gettysburg is the reason we celebrate Thanksgiving every year. The holiday—intended by Lincoln as a "day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficient Father who dwelleth in the Heavens"—was instituted by executive order three months after the Federal government's Pyrrhic victory outside the Pennsylvania town. 

Seven score and seventeen years later, we mark the holiday not by thanksgiving and prayer, but by overeating, watching football, and avoiding any mention of the "party of Lincoln."

Quite the comedown.

So let's set things aright.

This week, I challenge you to write down three good things that have come your way in 2020, and imagine your life without them. The items you list are up to you: they can be can be people, ideas, objects, or events. Anything you want.

A Confederacy of Crepehangers

All events are linked together in the best of all possible worlds.

— Voltaire

Most of the 78 million Americans who voted for Joe Biden—myself included—are chirpy this morning, now that the election has been called.

But whether their pleasure will last more than a morning I doubt.

Most liberals I know are Cassandras. Cassandras seem to prevail under our tent and, often, I feel awash in them.

Cassandra, of course, was the fusspot daughter of the king of Troy. Apollo made her a seer in exchange for a toss in the hay. She used that power to warn the Trojans the city would be invaded by Greeks hiding in the belly of a wooden horse. No one listened to her; but, gosh darn it, she was right.

Other liberals I know are Doubting Thomases. There are plenty of them under the tent, too.

Doubting Thomas, you'll recall, was the Apostle who refused to buy into Jesus's resurrection. "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were I will not believe," he told the disciples. But unlike Cassandra, Thomas had to eat crow.

Because I'm a cock-eyed optimist, I prefer liberals who are Pollyannas.

Pollyanna was the character in a 1913 eponymous novel whose father taught her the "glad game." The game demands that, so you'll never be disappointed, you "find something about everything to be glad about." When you shower in saccharinity, the novel preaches, you're never disappointed.

Speaking for myself, I'm a Pangloss.

Pangloss was the talkative tutor in Voltaire's 1759 novel Candide. He is a baseless, feelgood optimist and follower of the Enlightenment philosopher Leibniz, who insisted we live in "the best of all possible worlds."

While crepehanging liberals lament the future of  America—cursed as it was by the shameless slaver, germ-spreader and colonizer Christopher Columbus—I'm content like James Brown to say: I feel good.

America's an okay place.

And I'll point out, like Pangloss did, that without Columbus we wouldn't have Mallomars.

NOTE: Writer Robert Brault said it right: "You can look at optimism and pessimism as two different outfits in your closet, and you decide each morning which one you're going to wear."

Winner

Joe Biden won the election by more votes than any challenger to an incumbent president since 1932, when FDR beat Herbert Hoover.

I finally predicted something correctly!

Suckers

Never give a sucker an even break.

— W.C. Fields

Broke, Trump is fleecing the dopes who worship him.

Don't be deceived. 

The challenge to President-elect Biden is all about Trump's pockets.

POSTSCRIPT, NOVEMBER 15: Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen has predicted the windbag will soon flee Washington and start the "Trump Network." I predict he will flee not to Mar-a-Lago, but Moscow.

Repudiation

This summer, I volunteered to help a primary-election challenger to one of Delaware's two Democratic senators. 

The experience reminded me why I don't fit into the unworldly organizations run by progressives. The longer I had a view into the candidate's, the faster darkened my view of her chances of winning. 

No sucker for lost causes, four weeks out from the primary, I quit.

The trouble with the campaign, as I saw it, was two-fold:

• The candidate. Cast in the image of AOC, she was a bright, brassy outsider who championed progressive talk. But she had no strategy for getting elected and put most of her efforts into landing endorsements from disgruntled community organizers and sketchy, far-left websites.
  
  
• The staff. All twenty-somethings, the campaign staffers were sincere, but overbearing, and lacked all understanding of Delaware's centrist electorate. 

Neither the candidate's nor her staff's enthusiasm contributed much in the end. 

She captured only 27 percent of Democrats' votes in the primary—a measurably worse showing than that of the progressive candidate for the Senate in the 2018 primary. Her campaign was deemed by the media to be a flop and a death toll for the progressive movement in Delaware.

Democrats everywhere should heed the lesson: lean center.

Despite Biden's victory, last week's election was another consummate flop, failing to capture the US Senate for Democrats and dramatically thinning the party's majority in the US House of Representatives. It also left statehouses around the country in GOP hands.

Prudently, House leaders are warning fellow Democrats to shun leftist messages. “If we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, and socialized medicine, we’re not going to win,” Rep. Jim Clyburn said on a phone call Thursday.

And so are pundits. "This election for the most part was an absolute repudiation of the Democratic Party as a brand," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough told Fox News yesterday.

How Can They Believe This Crap? Episode V

Fifth in a series wondering why Trump still has adherents

In Episode I, I suggested Trump's supporters have been brainwashed by their betters; in Episode II, that they simply find him entertaining; in Episode III, that they sympathize with him; in Episode IV, that they believe he's a useful idiot.

I have one more theory.

The 70 million Americans who voted for Trump this week don't believe in Trump, because they don't believe in anything.

Like Trump, they're narcissistic solipsists. They believe nothing exists outside their own minds.

NOTE: It's tempting to ask. "What's wrong with America?" But realize only 2 in 10 Americans voted for Trump. The rest of the population—80% of Americans—did not. 

Herbert Hoover 2.0

In America today we are nearer a final triumph over
poverty than in any land.

— Herbert Hoover

We’re turning the corner. Look at this, it’s perfect.

— Donald Trump

In a campaign speech in October 1932, Herbert Hoover celebrated America's triumph over poverty, even though 15 million citizens were jobless and 1.2 million homeless.

In a campaign speech in October 2020, Donald Trump celebrated America's triumph over Covid-19, even though 12 million citizens were jobless, 34 million faced homelessness, and 225 thousand lay in fresh graves.

And Hoover's campaign slogan in 1932?

"We are turning the corner."

Nihil novi sub sole.

UPDATE, JANUARY 8, 2021:  This week, Trump has joined Hoover in losing the presidency and both chambers of Congress. No president since Hoover has done that.

The Week Whataboutism Wore Out

You're a criminal for not reporting it.

— Donald Trump 

Historians will describe this as the week the American press rediscovered its cajones.

It refused, at long last, to dignify another piece of Kremlin-backed propaganda, in the process causing Trump to go ballistic.

The reason for refusing?

The story stinks. So much so, Facebook and Twitter both blocked it. Even Fox won't cover it.

It stinks because: (1) the story's principal character is a computer repairman and QAnon follower with a history of lying to the public; (2) the story's source is the Kremlin's own Rudy Giuliani; and (3) the one reporter in America vile enough to touch the story is a Trumpster and former Hannity producer, now working at the New York Post (fish-wrap for morons).

The story is so obviously Kremlin-backed, the FBI is birddogging it.

Today, an IT guy reports on Facebook that, on a hunch, he traced the serial numbers of Hunter Biden's laptops—if they are his laptops—and learned the machines were manufactured four days after the date on the "receipt" produced by the computer repairman (the repairman's alleged "proof" they belonged to Biden).

The story's pure poppycock, from Russia with love. Over 50 former senior intelligence officers have signed a joint letter warning it's so.

Historians will also pronounce this the week whataboutism wore out.

A Russian invention, whataboutism lets propagandists divert our attention from an inconvenient truth by equating it—falsely—with something else. The Soviets perfected the tactic during the Cold War.

Whataboutism is Trump's go-to ruse when faced with criticism:

Yes, 400,000 Americans will likely die from Covid-19 before year's end, but what about Hunter Biden's laptop?

The press is done with Trump's whataboutism. 

And so is the American public.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 23: The Wall Street Journal asserts Hunter Biden’s former business partner—a sketchy investor in Chinese startups—has supplied the paper emails that "corroborate and expand on emails recently published by the New York Post, which says they come from a Hunter laptop.” Likely, reports NBC, a white-nationalist website named Revolver News is behind the effort to hornswaggle America. Meanwhile, deaths from Covid-19 in America as of today has reached 228,423.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 25: Politico reports Giuliani's "evidence" originated in the Kremlin, in all probability. The Atlantic muses that we're not supposed to understand the Hunter Biden's actions—but only fear them.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 27: The Hill reports that a White House lawyer pitched the story about Hunter Biden's laptop—without success—to the Wall Street Journal before Giuliani took it to the New York Post.

POSTSCRIPT, OCTOBER 29, 2020: Rudy Giuliani turned apoplectic on Fox Business yesterday when a host suggested the Hunter Biden laptop story originated in Eastern Europe. Fox News' Tucker Carlson also claimed he had “real, authentic and damning” documents proving Hunter Biden had committed crimes, but they had mysteriously disappeared. And NBC reported that a month before the purported discovery of Hunter Biden's laptop, right-wingers circulated a phony document asserting Biden was enmeshed in an elaborate conspiracy. The document is pure fiction and its alleged source a fake "intelligence firm" named Typhoon. Somebody's a windbag, for certain.

October Surprise

Get ready for Trump's October Surprise.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder claims it's hardly beneath the president to burn the Reichstag—or at least its American equivalent.

To cement his political power, Hitler did that in February 1933.

Germany’s Weimar Constitution, written in 1919, after the nation's surrender in World War I, included Article 48, a clause that gave its president dictatorial powers in cases of national emergency.

By the early 1930s, the civil unrest triggered by the Depression had thrust Hitler's new "law and order" Nazi Party from obscurity to the second-most rank among Germany's 40 political parties. 

While unable to reach the uppermost rank among the 40 parties—earning a full majority—by January 1933 the Nazis' strength was such that they could demand Hitler be installed as Germany's chancellor. He was.

As chancellor, Hitler immediately set out to make his the majority party. He announced that his largest rival, the Communist Party, was planning to attack public buildings.

On the night of February 27, a suspicious fire broke out in the Reichstag.

"This is a God-given signal,” Hitler told the president. “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the Communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

The president believed him, and the following morning invoked Article 48, abolishing free speech, assembly, privacy and the press; legalizing wire tapping and censoring mail; suspending the autonomy of Germany's 22 states; and assigning all legislative power to the chancellor, Adolph Hitler. 

That night, Hitler arrested and tortured 4,000 German citizens, mostly Communists.

Later that year, the German government tried, convicted and guillotined a jobless bricklayer and Communist Party member for setting the Reichstag Fire. But suppressed evidence indicates Hitler in fact arranged the blaze (Germany exonerated the wrongly convicted bricklayer 75 years after his execution).

Okay, I know what you're thinking: Trump is incapable of setting fires. But he's not incapable of blaming his enemies for doing so, as he did last month.

Beware the October Surprise.

Nonsense

Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.

― Robert Frost

A high-school history teacher outside Paris was beheaded yesterday by an angry Islamist.

The teacher's sin? 

He showed his class Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

French president Emmanuel Macron responded by declaring that Islamists are at war with "the Republic and its values."

"This battle is ours and it is existential. They will not pass. Obscurantism and the violence that goes with it will not win."

Imagine an American teacher beheaded by a Proud Boy for showing his class the cover of Mad, and you'd have the picture. 

Obscurantism has an obscure history.

The term derives from Letters of Obscure Men, a 16th century book lampooning the argument between a humanist and a monk over whether every copy of the Talmud—being heretical—should be burned (the pope favored burning the books).

Two centuries later, philosophers called all enemies of the Enlightenment obscurantists.

Obscurantism, as Macron means the word, assumes the hoi polloi are morons and seeks to restrict knowledge—especially knowledge about the workings of government—to rulers.

It was obscurantism that provoked the French Revolution, when Louis XVI's clumsy efforts to cover up famines cost him his head.

Obscurantism is alive today, not only in the Paris suburbs, but in the White House.

Trump's effort to cover up Covid-19, disclosed last month by Bob Woodward, is a costly example. Over 225,000 Americans have already died from the virus. Another 175,000 are soon to follow.

“I wanted to always play it down," Trump boasted. "I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Plato called that sort of nonsense a "noble lie." 

I call it obscurantism—and eagerly await our revolution on November 3.

Breathing Together

Everyone loves a conspiracy.

― Dan Brown

While not every Trumpster insists Barack Obama is a Muslim or Hilary Clinton a cannibal, every Trumpster demands we acknowledge the "deep state."

You cannot find one that doesn't.

Conspiracy-thinking is the Trumpster's oxygen.

But after spending 40 years in Washington, and watching close up a succession of nine administrations—Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, George W., Obama and Trump—I can assure you there is no deep state.

There are only deep pockets—the ones rattled by fat-cat donors of every stripe. Their goal is not world dominion, but control over the various industries that produce their massive wealth.

But Trumpsters must have their deep-state conspiracy, that octopean treachery they long to "unmask."

Conspiracy (meaning "plot") entered English in the 14th century from the Latin conspiratio, noun-form of the verb conspirare, meaning—literally—"to breathe together."

So you could say Trumpsters' romance with conspiracies is a deep fondness for breathing together.

They demonstrate that love at every maskless rally the president holds.

If there's a conspiracy afoot, it's theirs: the confederacy of dunces.

Commander in Cheap

The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.

― Dashiell Hammett

As The New York Times reports, Donald Trump has been cashing in.

Sixty lobbyists, corporate men and foreign agents have put over $12 million in  Trump's pockets by buying memberships and booking events at his properties.

Trump has responded in kind, granting favors that can only be fulfilled by a sitting president.

If you pay Trump $250 thousand for a Mar-a-Lago membership, according to the Times, you get to meet him and ask a favor. It's likely he'll respond by summoning one of his stooges and directing them to take care of you.

Vice versa, if you see him outside the golf club and mention you want a favor, Trump will point out you'd better reup your Mar-a-Lago membership pronto.

Trump has proven he doesn't want to govern, only rob the Treasury.

But a penny-ante $12 million?

Trump claims he's worth billions but, instead of combating Covid-19 or joblessness, he spends his time making phone calls to dun members. 

What a cheap crook.

"He's corrupting the presidency for peanuts," writes Daily Kos. 

"The world at his fingertips, the man spends most of his time obsessing over how he can use the presidency to boost golf club memberships."