Week of Trump Tirades and Troubles
Trump/MAGA Weakened, Economy Chokes, Lawful Now Illegal, Epstein/Trump Files, Racist Rant, War Crimes, Hernandez Begs Your Pardon, Kelly Climbs, Hegseth Sinks

Anybody see what’s wrong with this?
Almost everybody! Good. All…
   …except one.
Basic math must not be part of the curriculum at Wharton.

So let’s pause while I explain this to little Donny:

If you lower something by 100%, it becomes zero.
Scientists tell us we can’t lower something by more than 100% unless we go below zero.

Let’s illustrate, shall we?

If my neighbor says my new fence is too high and it obstructs his view, and I feel real friendly, I might cut it down by half.
Half would be 50%. So then he and I can see each other over the top, plus he gets the view he loves of the horizon.

Sometimes, you go along to get along.

If I cut it down 100%, there is no longer a fence. It’s gone, having been cut down to the ground.

If I cut it by 500%, my neighbor and I are now looking at each other way underground.
So we’re buried alive, right?
Not that great a view, by the way.

And that’s not all, folks!

Even in TariffLand, Most Favored Nation Status means you give a special deal on trade to whatever country you’re trading with. It won’t mean much to give Most Favored Nation Status to yourself.

So what Trump is saying is pretty much this:
The US will take away tariffs on anything the US ships to the US from the US. This should excite folks in the US who want to ship something out to the Atlantic or Pacific. In technical terms this is called the boomerang deal. Yes, Donny, it can also be an echo chamber tradeoff.

So whatever you buy from yourself will now go under your lawn.
You dig?

Such is the level of thinking in this madcap administration.

And, being the proud American that I am, it’s that kind of insight from our leadership that makes this great country what it’s … rapidly becoming.

To be completely fair, increasing the size of the Supreme Court to twenty‑one Justices will be a radical change.

One problem is in planning the plan: I’m fairly certain Democrats have not considered all the consequences. But they do have a good reason for that neglect.

Which brings us to News Corpse, pointing out the other problem:

There is no such plan. It does not exist. It never has existed, is not likely to exist in the future.
Not Now!
Not ever!
Never!

Well…
    …to be more specific:

It does not exist outside the fevered imagination of Donald Trump.
Such is the state of our current madcap leadership.

A couple reasons for the Trump slump might be that most folks see the economy getting worse and don’t want programs cut.

Another could be that, overwhelmingly, they want the Epstein files released, but anticipate the Trumpers in charge will delay, get suspiciously selective, or completely refuse.

Buckley is so often seen as the founder of modern conservatism it has become a cliché. James sees Buckley as the source of his personal political outlook.

He suggests Buckley would have felt triumphant about the eventual successes of conservatism, but disappointed in what the movement subsequently became.

Buckley on a conservative’s duty to democracy:
In other ages, one paid court to the king. Now we pay court to the people. In the final analysis, just as the king might look down with terminal disdain upon a courtier whose hypocrisy repelled him, so we have no substitute for relying on the voter to exercise a quiet veto when it becomes more necessary to discourage cynical demagogy, than to advance free health for the kids. That can come later, in another venue; the resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority.

Buckley on Trump:
Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America.

James speculates, quite reasonably, that Bill Buckley would oppose today’s MAGA.

From James:
We are now in that period of the post-Buckley right. It echoes the condition of the right that Buckley found when he decided to launch National Review. The right has become a movement of cranks, charlatans, bigots, nativists, isolationists, and statists.

Although he doesn’t bring it up in this piece, one bit of history supports James: William F. Buckley is said to have almost single‑handedly destroyed the extremist John Birch Society.

I do see the leadership of the MAGA movement as the ideological descendants of that early fanaticism.
Membership itself varies. But those at the top are real sons of Birchers.

Lilly Gaddis announced that YouTube has demonetized her for being too pro‑White.
Those ruthless cruds even went so far as to white‑out her use of the ‘N word’ at the end of her brief announcement.

And Nick Fuentes is just fed up at the persecution that he is pretty sure is funded by George Soros. Apparently, we on the left have been smearing him by videotaping his words.

Yeah, I’ll admit it. We are pretty ruthless in playing back some pretty bad moments, seconds, minutes, hours.

Part of the discussion centers on her role as real life Texas immigration lawyer Thelma Garcia in the movie Torn from Her Arms.

Sometimes, telling an individual story carries more weight than the aggregate of many thousands of tragedies. A large number becomes a statistic. A well told story can become emotionally real.

A complete transcript is also available (PDF).

ICE gone wild:
In her 233-page opinion, Ellis wrote that, over and over, body-worn camera footage from the agents undermined what was eventually put in their use-of-force reports, rendering their statements unreliable.
 
The reports also misidentified “neighborhood moms and dads, Chicago Bears fans, people dressed in Halloween costumes, and the lawyer who lives on the block” as professional agitators, Ellis wrote, while the body cameras at times captured the agents’ apparent glee in deploying tear gas and other munitions on residential streets.

What judicial restraint seems to have kept Judge Ellis from saying outright:
ICE lies… and lies, and lies.

Journalist Arturo Dominguez finds a study by the Center for Economic Policy and Research that makes it easier.

Turns out that when Trump was President the first time, his policies of putting the economic squeeze on Latin American countries pushed mass migration by desperate people to the United States.

Juliet’s podcast version is even better.

Except that the US has a history of prosecuting those who follow illegal orders. And there were those Nuremberg trials.

There is also this, posted at West Point.

Still, our Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth (ready for modified repeat) wants to prosecute Senator Mark Kelly for promoting insurrection in the military by producing a video urging those serving to refuse to follow orders, and alleging that illegal orders could ever have been given by current authorities!
Since, under Trump, no illegal orders had ever been given, Kelly was indeed urging disobedience to legal, completely legal, orders.

There!
That oughta do it!

One of those completely legal, can’t be questioned, orders reportedly comes from Hegseth himself. Seems one of those Venezuelan boats Hegseth ordered blown up (rather than captured) had left a couple of survivors clinging to the wreckage.

Hegseth had said that all on board must be killed, which meant no survivors. So subordinates took that to be a clear order for a second strike which then killed those flailing survivors. Hegseth himself later promoted it as part of his get tough policy.

Our favorite Earth-Bound Misfit knows her Nuremberg trials, and produces a remarkably similar case from 80 years ago this week.

Seems German officers sank a US submarine, then ordered the survivors machine‑gunned to death rather than taken prisoner. Orders, you know.
The German officers were captured after World War II, tried for war crimes, and executed by the Allies for following that illegal order.

One commenter points to specific US military law, dating back to the Civil War, imposing severe penalties for ordering wounding or killing a wholly disabled adversary or carrying out that order.

Which may suggest to our War Defense Secretary the person he ought to be placing on trial.

Author and educator Amanda Nelson explains the practical consequence if it turns out Pete Hegseth can be shown to have ordered something that parallels:

…while the White House is astonished as Pete Hegseth reads the Franklin book all by himself.

At The Moderate Voice Kathy Gill looks at Trump’s employment of the US Navy to demolish small boats off the coast of Venezuela in the name of battling drugs, while simultaneously pardoning former President of Honduras, and massive drug trafficker, Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Trump thought was treated unfairly.

Key first words:
Right hand, meet left hand.

My favorite link leads to ever more angelic praise to his lordship’s face:

The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

Julian Sanchez on a previous, almost forgotten one:

Oh my.
At least she isn’t the target of Jewish satellite lasers.

One answer could be that God forgives, but does not exempt us from earthly accountability.

Still, Bruce does hit on a spiritual vulnerability shared by thoughtful Christians:

Most, perhaps all, of our sins are not just against God, but against actual people.
Are we to exempt ourselves from accountability, or at least regret, to them?

Is our inner response Sorry about that or even Don’t blame me, I’m saved?

She asks:
Have we grown as a society to see Black Friday madness as…kinda gross? Or not?

She invites opinions:

Things looked pretty good, until famine, sickness, and war.
In Germany, Hildegard of Bingen combined what was known of science with her knowledge of math, philosophy, and religion into song and writing.

Here is how Wikipedia begins its description:
…a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner…

Vincent at A Wayfarer’s Notes brings us a little of her work, describing how God combined the four known scientific elements into Adam and Eve, and how that determines the physical makeup of men and women. She goes into some poetic detail, what may have been erotic in that era.

 
And so, because a man still feels this great sweetness in himself, and is like a stag thirsting for the fountain, he races swiftly to the woman and she to him — she like a threshing-floor pounded by his many strokes and brought to heat when the grains are threshed inside her.

Well… maybe you had to be there…

Not the best of many phrases (but describes me):
That kitchen drawer is my brain. There’s a LOT of clutter in there, most of it from the previous millennium. But there has always been enough leftover memory space for me to function on at least a primitive intellectual level.
 
Until now.

Also not the best phrase (but describes me):
I have crossed that fine line between being “absent-minded” and having the cognitive functionality of a Hostess Ding Dong.