Destruction and Mayhem and Irreparable Harm?

We're witnessing the destruction of a world order. Bound to happen sooner or later ,but I'd rather not have lived to see the US leading it.  Russia leading it? Sure. No brainer there. But the US? Heartbreaking,  wrenching, vomit-inducing. 

Not at the behest of the people of the world, that's for sure. At most, the US is less than 5% of the global population. And less than 30% of the total US electorate voted for the idiot that's leading the charge. I've called him all kinds of names - my faves being Felon47, Tangerine Twit and lately Donzilla, DimDon and Don the Destroyer. That 49% of the voters could vote for this will always enrage me. 

Just read a bit on Axios that describes DimDon the Destroyer of Worlds as a "realist" who sees "hard power" exercised by strong men. Turns my stomach. Headline on BBC was Idiot-in-Chief threatening Zelensky. Way to go, FoolFelon. Don't just kick an ally when it's being invaded and tortured, make it give you everything so you don't join in and steal what they have. That's what physical and moral cowards do, right? Side with the bully and... I can't go on. It's so damned ugly and cruel and vicious. And far too many other cowards and bullies are rooting him on. 

I hate it. I hate that what used to strive to be the House on the Hill, a beacon of liberty and justice (never attained but at least sometimes striven for), a voice for reason and peace... has become this. Stingy, bullying, vicious, malicious, conniving, petty, destructive, intentionally cruel, greedy - January 19, 2025 was our last day as even trying to be humane and caring. With F47, we seem to be embracing barbarism's worst instincts and gleefully oblivious to the misery we're causing around the world. He and his minders are literally taking food away from the hungry, inflicting horrific agony on millions needing food, medicine, care, and depriving thousands of their lawful and productive employment in order to further enrich the hyper-wealthy. 

And the venial Justices do nothing. They slow walk anything that might interfere with the wishes of their masters - Looking right at you Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh and Roberts. You're enabling this destruction, accepting bribes and blithely ignoring the Constitution. Paying back some of those favors for a more luxurious life, even as the rest of us are gasping for air and justice. Even rule of law would be nice. But no, you owe your buddies over at the Heritage Foundation too much. They are worth more than the rule of law, your honor or your souls. They likely own you, so you bow to their wishes and slimy dreams of power. May your god meet you and be sickened. And of course, may you rot in hell.

Over the past 40 years, I've watched and worked and voted for my country to evolve into a just society, where work and merit and justice were hallmarks of a good, caring and generous society. I've cheered when good people helped others devastated by natural or man-made disasters. I've winced when so-called leaders sent thoughts and prayers to victims of violence, injustice, hatred, longing for real leaders to be recognized and offer service to the rest of us. People like Kamala and Joe and Barack and Michelle. I've cringed as our society embraced "reality" entertainment that was openly and cravenly unrealistic.  I've called out the Bread and Circuses, tried to illuminate the workings and mechanics of the oligarchs to render us ignorant. I've cheered when real heroes tried, failed, got up and tried again and again. When real leaders took the hard road because it was the correct and humane one. 

And now I weep as American society stands by and cheers evil, as their sordid heroes cheat and bully and pardon the evils that tear at the social fabric that creates society itself. We've done this to ourselves - we've chosen to cheapen our own lives in the name of ease and entertainment.

May the good out there in our country and elsewhere keep working to fight this evil. May we who value justice, charity, compassion and kindness find the strength to prevail. Slava Ukraine! Free Tibet! Free the United States, and may we deliver ourselves from the greedy grasping fools!

Oh, The Horror! The Horror!

 I don't even know where to begin! When I first heard of the Tangerine Twit's imperialist aspirations, I laughed. Panama? Seriously? Because he thinks they are overcharging US ships? Greenland? Canada?? Ah, I thought, just another razzle-dazzle to distract his cult members. DOGE? Be real. You want to cut costs, eveybody in the country has suggestions on where to start. The problem is - and this is the crux - that everybody also has a personal Thing to exempt from various cuts. Muzi (Musk = Nazi-ish = Muzi) as some kind of genius outsider who can get in anywhere and cut willy-nilly! How clever (not). Muzi's first targets were those agencies with whom he was in trouble. Agency X has some questions? Cut it, kill it, fire everybody. Agency Q dares to question Muzi's motives? Cut, Kill, fire. Muzi doesn't like that research? Cut, kill, fire. In a way, it's kind of a typical Twit-ish move. Fire anybody that questions your authority, and then - right out of Project 2025 - about which DimDon knows nothing, remember? - build it with loyalists who put DimDon before even themselves, much less the country. 

Now there are quite of few of us that regard DimDon as... worse than dim. Obviously, he's still in Putin's pocket - that was obvious in his first term almost immediately. Now, while Russia's circumstances have changed, Putin can still pull the strings and TangerineTwit dances. My hunch is that Putin and Muzi had a meeting of the minds, and decided Felon47 was the right front man. Do you remember when the papers talked of Muzi's frequent calls with Vlad the Bad? When Muzi cut off Starlink because it would help the Russians in their imperialist projects? Can you imagine that Muzi and Vlad aren't having cozy chats now? Vlad's pretty transparent in his goals: he wants to stay in power, and he wants Ukraine back under his control. He's lost 800,000 men at this point (all are estimates, because Vlad doesn't want anyone to know how many killed or wounded as that would expose his lies). Now that Muzi is in the White House and directing traffic as well as destroying any semblance of a stable state, Putin has to be delighted. I imagine it won't be long before he instructs DimDon to withdraw from and kill NATO. That would be a huge coup for Vlad. Muzi would be delighted because then he can buy more candidates who will then dance to the Moscow-Muzi music.

Can NATO survive without the US? Probably. A united Europe would be in a vulnerable position, surely, with two hostile neighbors. If one believes that the US will survive this second Trumpian term (I have serious doubts), then one might hope for a return to stability and relative sanity. A future administration might be able to cobble together a new relationship with democratic Europe. If Muzi , the Heritage Foundation and Vlad have their way, the US as a global power will end altogether, and we'll all end up under authoritarian nationalist governments. All too plausible - my only real hope is that all these guys die. Soon. Tonight would be good. 

The Tangerine Twit is 78 and failing but has a coterie of fawning followers that prop him up. JD is a wannabe, but will be discarded for someone who doesn't have a terminal case of foot-in-mouth. He's just too pathetic to rally even cult members, much less get Muzi's ear. Vlad would swat him like a gnat. Vlad is 72, and while he's not as strong politically as he used to be, he's still too scary for his circle to mess with. They might end up falling out of windows, you know. Muzi, unfortunately, is only 53.  We might get lucky and he'd be stuck in a Tesla truck when it self-destructs. But he's got loads of money (378+ billion) and that buys a lot of political attention. He got The Twit for only a quarter of billion! And now he's basically in charge of what was a very powerful country! One source puts Vlad's wealth at a mere 70-200 billion! Twit? Well, let's see. Right off the bat, he's got a nearly 500 million debt that he has to wiggle out of... but guesstimates put him at a measly 7 billion. That will increase as right now Muzi's setting up a massive grift for Donnie, and Muzi will want a cut of that, as will Vlad. As we all know, the money for Putin and Muzi is secondary - but Donnie is dollar driven. So as long as the other two keep him going, Donnie will do nothing to stop or slow their group global grift project.

Muzi        53        378+ billion        unchallenged power over US government, independent

Vlad         72        70-200 billion    unchallenged power over Russian government, political

Twit          78        7 billion            controlled by external factors, dependent on those

Now, as DimDon is too dim and too sociopathic to realize he's been played and there are more than 77 million cultists are as well (apparently, but probably not all sociopaths), Muzi and Vlad seem to have an excellent hand. Of course, more people voted against the Tangerine Turd than for (out of 156, 302, 318, he got 77,284,118; 48%. 51% voted for somebody else and far too many didn't even bother to vote. (1) Don is dim, but the other two are conniving and canny, so I cannot imagine they are dumb enough to allow a real vote in 2028 - probably not even in 2026. 

It's all rather sad, really. Three crazed egomaniacs trying to dominate the world. Muzi's in the best position, of course, but it's easier when you have a puppet and a partner. All of them are counting on the rest of us feeling vulnerable, powerless and helpless. Not sure any of them have factored in the crazies here in the US, armed and eager to shoot people. There've been 2 attempts on Don and I have no doubt there will be attempts on Muzi, especially as he continues to slash and burn D.C. Were I he, I'd have a bunch of really big bodyguards around me. Like the Secret Service - ready to defend me with their lives. Not sure he doesn't have them anyway. Do senior advisors get Secret Service protection? Ask for that Muzi; Don will likely be happy to pick up that tab too. Guaranteed if you slip him a tip.

Ducking the Horrors of Trump 2.0

Oddly, while his recent actions horrify me, I'm not totally freaking out. Rather, I have a desire to shout to the heavens "I told you so!!"

I won't of course. But he's actually going slower than I expected. I really did expect him to formally and officially terminate the Constitution by Day 2. And he hasn't. Granted, he's given extraordinary power to Elon, and is doing everything by fiat, but he hasn't formally trashed the Constitution. Given Citizens United, the degradation of the electoral process since Nixon, the end of the Fairness Doctrine in the 1990s, none of this is a big surprise. At least to those who haven't been imbibing in the Republican kool-aid since the 60s. Maybe doing acid and heroin was actually better than the Republican kool-aid in the long term. 

I've been a big fan of Heather Cox Richardson since I found her (only in 2023, far too late). Her analyses are spot on, and so helpful right now. And since I agree with her and she's more articulate and has a far better foundation in US history than I do, I happily defer to her. There's a reason I didn't want to even look at American history past 1947: I simply didn't have the needed objectivity. She does. I knew it infuriated me to discover the malfeasance and misdeeds of this country that I loved, and that I wouldn't be able to be calm and scholarly about it. So I am very grateful to find a scholar of such distinction right now. 

I was a full blown adult in the 1980s, and doing both undergrad and MA work, and thus developing and honing my professional skills. And I was utterly thunderstruck that people actually listened to Reagan and bought his kool-aid. His elections were hard lessons in the gullibility of the American electorate. His campaigns were, to me, so patently & obviously manipulative that I simply gaped that so many chose him.  His second term, with his ever-so-obvious cognitive decline, was another painful lesson and I started to wonder how people could so eagerly overlook the evidence of his... craziness. 

Ultimately, I recognized that the responses to cognitive dissonance are far more powerful than we'd like to think (if that isn't a tautology...).  Lord knows how many studies have looked at this - including my own dissertation and much of my professional research since. Americans are taught from the cradle to embrace magical thinking, to regard evidence as unnecessary and likely false. We're not alone in that, but what continues to bemuse me is our insistence that any evidence we don't like on nearly everything is false and being presented maliciously. We might say we did x, y or z based on solid evidence, but we certainly don't act that way. Woe to those who might question anything that challenges our magical thinking fantasies. 

So I'm oddly calm as my country is destroyed around me. I'm not reading everything I can get my hands on about the travesties of Trump 2.0. Rather, I'm idly wondering who's going to archive the evidence away from the bastards who will 'clean' up our history and disappear the evidence of atrocities we've committed in our history (and present). That they intend to rewrite history is a given - they've said it again and again, and it's been going on forever. So whoever is around 200 years from now will look back at this period, this geographical spot and hopefully find an archive of scholarly work that doesn't argue the ends justify the means. Maybe they'll recognize the kool-aid histories as travesties and wonder how we let that happen. 

Maybe they'll have air to breathe. Trees to sit under. Oceans full of life. I hope so. But if the current path humanity is on continues, I'm sure the USA won't be around. Not as a democracy - more likely another historical example of hubris, arrogance and what happens to a culture raised on bread & circuses.