I am quite tired of commentary that talks about objectives — met or unmet — for this war. This war was about where Trump fits in the Epstein files. Trump’s objective was to make us look away. Trump was willing to use the military might of the United States, meaning he was willing to use each and every one of us American citizens, without telling Congress or allies, because Epstein was reaching high volume once again. A world war to change one man’s subject. And when facts finally emerge, I don’t think it will be sex crimes that he worried about most, it will be corruption, money laundering and what I expect to be a treasonous arrangement with Putin. (MBS won’t be far behind) Everything he’s done, in both terms, has propped up Russia and Putin. Imagine what the money and military might spent on Iran would have accomplished if spent on Ukraine. This Iran war is a diversion for one man’s purposes that has upended and rearranged the whole world. So when people say the President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world, I think that sentence now belongs in the past tense, but it also has been proved true this past month by this one president’s vulnerable treachery. And of course, James Madison was right and we have a war-making dictator that we did to ourselves — and to the world.
As it stands the only way to rid us of the orange menace and MAGA is for the whole system to self destruct, Yeh it will hurt, and no we weren't issued hair shirts, but no pain no gain. I don't see any other way.
The stock market must crumble, inflation reach new highs, unemployment skyrocket, hunger and starvation for lack of fertilizers. The spot price of oil is over $100 a barrel with the gold standard being West Texas Intermediary at over $112, a barrel, and the whole world is feeling the pain, except Putin which is experiencing a windfall. (Partof the plan?) https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/
Yeh it is obvious that Trump has lost it, but so what, Who is going to do anything about it. 25th Amendment section 4 requires a written declaration from the VP and a majority of the Cabinet to Congress, or by a body designated by Congress, to declare the President Rots of Ruck on that one.
So you get rid of Trump and you get Vance, twice as dangerous, definitely a tool of the broligarchy focused and able to stay on target.
Sorry Daniel, the only way out is to feel pain. No pain no gain.
I don't believe that Trump has "lost it," or become "unravelled" or senile, but that he's saying and doing what he always wanted to say and do, but didn't feel ready until he had gained a second term - which proved to him that he had the backing to do those things....and so far, except for a few court losses (which are important but haven't slowed him a bit,) he's been right.
If Weiss would have a chance, it already would have worked. This is not the political environment of your or Jerry's past. The old rules, the old order no longer exist or work.
And how are we prepared to deal with voter suppression laws, MAGA election commissions, movement or restriction of ballot boxes, voting booths, armed poll watchers. mail in voting restrictions, voter caging, and voting machines owned by Republican activists.
Yesterdays solutions to yesterdays problems. For Gawd sake live in the present reality, not the past.
If any president required an expedited removal from office, it would be this one. Too bad we had to wait for his brain-rot to become unavoidably obvious before we could get even a few right-wing influencers to give their orange Jesus a side-long glance. In a righteous and healthy republic, he would have been removed in his first term, or more properly, never elected in the first place. We have a lot of work to do as a nation to resurrect our ideals.
The Russians did to America what the staff did to Randle Patrick McMurphy — a/k/a R.P. McMurphy or Mac, the rebellious protagonist in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest."
Vladdie gave America a figurative, transorbital (ice pick-like probe through the eye socket, swizzle brain till mushified), pre-frontal lobotomy. By so doing, he knocked off about 132 IQ points.
We have a visibly rotting vegetable in the Oval Office. Sad for our nation, the once brilliant (mostly) U.S. Great for the former U.S.S.R.
The globe lives in an expanding pool of Trump-Drool, while Miller and Rubio dance a homoerotic tango in clown-sized Florshiem shoes.
Nice.
VOTE out Putin's Puppet. #Send Boron and Eric to Hormuz.
47 is a malignant, metastacizing tumor on planet earth. IMO he needs to be surgically removed before he destroys life on earth. I only hope this is still even a possibility.
Well, two have already tried, unsuccessfully, so a surgical strike may be possible, but is unlikely. In the mean time, his commanding officers can hopefully be convinced that he is on the wrong track and will disobey his orders.
His "bomb them back to the Stone Age" phrase comes from a famous though misquoted statement by General Curtis LeMay. A very tough SOB who led the strategic bombing of Japan, he was talking about what the U.S. could do to North Vietnam if the war continued. LeMay was also George Wallace's running mate in 1968. Trump sounds like an armchair warrior who dreams of being a hero.
That sounds a bit like the proposal, which has been around since 1945, to disrupt hurricanes with atomic bombs. Allegedly Trump suggested it too. That this might not work but would certainly spread radiation around the world seems to have escaped it proponents. It’s easy to make suggestions and pronouncements when you think you know a subject, but really have no idea what you are doing.
The documented chronology of Trump's statements are really, really helpful Thom. I think we need more of this quasi bullet point style reporting. Contrasts in contradiction are very powerful when made in a simple, short format. I would like to see the same template used to cover other openly chaotic or escalatory policies - economy, "antifa", immigration, healthcare, tariffs, American manufacturing, narrative on voting, wealth giveaways, etc..
Also, I would like to emphasize this statement from your piece:
"The echoes of World War I are too loud to ignore any longer."
Trumps speech last night brought on the strange feeling, that of, looking through a window into a geriatric ward of a mental hospital. Seeing words pouring out of a orange clay dummy head in a flow of semi-consciousness. Gross lies, contradictions, threats, self congratulation all detached from reality. Thom's right its time for intervention to remove him. As time passes his incapacity to deal with a situation of his own making can only get worse. Will the GOP allow the world economy to devolve into recession maybe depression? There is no magic here, no deep economic sophistry - as long as Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz oil prices will rise and cost of everything will rise correspondingly. FUBAR
"Republicans in Congress and the cabinet must decide whether their loyalty is to an aging, mentally ill, demonstrably incompetent man or to the nation and world he’s put at risk."
That has been the essential problem for at least the last two years. But there are real questions about whether the Republicans have been pushed, shamed, and castigated appreciably by the Democrats in leadership. Every Democrat in both houses should be refusing to allow the business of the government to be conducted and walking out in livid protest until the freaks and fanatics of the administration, starting with Trump are removed. Impeachment is the better of the two alternatives suggested. Failure on the part of the Republicans must be acknowledged and officially certified.
The issue is that the Big Money Boys who put their money on DT to take them to the promised land have ridden him so far down this road will be hard put to easily transition to someone who can carry the weight -- DANGER DANGER corporate Democrat believers!!!
Further, the architects of the mentally infected, morally corrupted MAGAites will be competing to ascend to the No. 1 position. This means rallying their pet segments of the vermin that have crawled out from under all those rocks.
DANGER DANGER everyone who gets in the way of the gang wars.
A sane, structured transition via government rule??? The above mentioned stakeholders will determine if this is possible. They have known for some time, now, that this is a knife fight.
So many of us have been singing it's a small world, after all, thinking it will make a difference.
If you read, I mentioned TWO stakeholders... BIG MONEY BOYS (BMB) and the architects of the MAGA infection. Of course the former financed the later mouthpieces.
BMB includes the boys in the fossil fuel business.
Yes, this branch of BMB would like to privatize the oil under IRAN. But it is not really on their 'to do' list. There is more than enough supply, and too much lowers the price, so I doubt fossil guys are really behind attacking Iran, other than, perhaps, their butt-body Saudis want Iran out of the picture.
But that doesn't have much to do with oil... It is a thousand years plus of history.
I've long thought that the strategy of Republicans and their power backers is to play for time, to string out the 25th Amendment until 2027. At that time, JD can take over and, subsequently, can legally run for two more terms, potentially giving him a full 10 years in office. If JD is sworn in in 2026, he would be limited to running only once again.
Call 202-224-3121. Time to Act! We are maybe one cheese burger away from more death and destruction at the whim of a unraveling POTUS. The NO KINGS Rally historical. Everybody with a clear mind can see it. Break the log jam, release all the Epstein/Trump files and documents! This is a gangster regime and billionaires running our government. SCOTUS barely functional. The seven mountains kool aid drinking cult. We need to shut them down.
Are you reading my Substack? Welcome to sanity. My latest is to make him an offer he can’t refuse, to resign. No prosecutions. Keep grift. Honorable after diagnosis of sleep disorders. Fires his hires and resigns. State dinner with medal for such grace. What else? Have a national conversation. Just get him gone now! Thom, you could start that.
I am quite tired of commentary that talks about objectives — met or unmet — for this war. This war was about where Trump fits in the Epstein files. Trump’s objective was to make us look away. Trump was willing to use the military might of the United States, meaning he was willing to use each and every one of us American citizens, without telling Congress or allies, because Epstein was reaching high volume once again. A world war to change one man’s subject. And when facts finally emerge, I don’t think it will be sex crimes that he worried about most, it will be corruption, money laundering and what I expect to be a treasonous arrangement with Putin. (MBS won’t be far behind) Everything he’s done, in both terms, has propped up Russia and Putin. Imagine what the money and military might spent on Iran would have accomplished if spent on Ukraine. This Iran war is a diversion for one man’s purposes that has upended and rearranged the whole world. So when people say the President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world, I think that sentence now belongs in the past tense, but it also has been proved true this past month by this one president’s vulnerable treachery. And of course, James Madison was right and we have a war-making dictator that we did to ourselves — and to the world.
Correct. And obviously, we the people so far are powerless to rid ourselves, our nation, from this horror.
As it stands the only way to rid us of the orange menace and MAGA is for the whole system to self destruct, Yeh it will hurt, and no we weren't issued hair shirts, but no pain no gain. I don't see any other way.
The stock market must crumble, inflation reach new highs, unemployment skyrocket, hunger and starvation for lack of fertilizers. The spot price of oil is over $100 a barrel with the gold standard being West Texas Intermediary at over $112, a barrel, and the whole world is feeling the pain, except Putin which is experiencing a windfall. (Partof the plan?) https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/
We may be close. It's obvious that Trump has lost it.
Shakespeare....need one Brutus.
Hopefully we will withstand all that doomsday bullshit.
Wishful thinking, nit a solution
Yeh it is obvious that Trump has lost it, but so what, Who is going to do anything about it. 25th Amendment section 4 requires a written declaration from the VP and a majority of the Cabinet to Congress, or by a body designated by Congress, to declare the President Rots of Ruck on that one.
So you get rid of Trump and you get Vance, twice as dangerous, definitely a tool of the broligarchy focused and able to stay on target.
Sorry Daniel, the only way out is to feel pain. No pain no gain.
I don't believe that Trump has "lost it," or become "unravelled" or senile, but that he's saying and doing what he always wanted to say and do, but didn't feel ready until he had gained a second term - which proved to him that he had the backing to do those things....and so far, except for a few court losses (which are important but haven't slowed him a bit,) he's been right.
Interesting perspective. Very possible. Trump is indeed being Trump. One thing is for certain is that he doesn't have any filters. Nor a conductor
What he's lost, by all accounts is the base.
As I type, specualtion is that Bondi is out..... Not loyal enough for Der Fuehrer....
Not gym class. Jerry Weiss scenario. Shared government.
If Weiss would have a chance, it already would have worked. This is not the political environment of your or Jerry's past. The old rules, the old order no longer exist or work.
And how are we prepared to deal with voter suppression laws, MAGA election commissions, movement or restriction of ballot boxes, voting booths, armed poll watchers. mail in voting restrictions, voter caging, and voting machines owned by Republican activists.
Yesterdays solutions to yesterdays problems. For Gawd sake live in the present reality, not the past.
That's why we need a Brutus.....
Brutus was a Caesar supporter......
If any president required an expedited removal from office, it would be this one. Too bad we had to wait for his brain-rot to become unavoidably obvious before we could get even a few right-wing influencers to give their orange Jesus a side-long glance. In a righteous and healthy republic, he would have been removed in his first term, or more properly, never elected in the first place. We have a lot of work to do as a nation to resurrect our ideals.
Every comment regarding Trump should end with, "It is time for Trump to resign or be removed from office".
"
The Russians did to America what the staff did to Randle Patrick McMurphy — a/k/a R.P. McMurphy or Mac, the rebellious protagonist in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest."
Vladdie gave America a figurative, transorbital (ice pick-like probe through the eye socket, swizzle brain till mushified), pre-frontal lobotomy. By so doing, he knocked off about 132 IQ points.
We have a visibly rotting vegetable in the Oval Office. Sad for our nation, the once brilliant (mostly) U.S. Great for the former U.S.S.R.
The globe lives in an expanding pool of Trump-Drool, while Miller and Rubio dance a homoerotic tango in clown-sized Florshiem shoes.
Nice.
VOTE out Putin's Puppet. #Send Boron and Eric to Hormuz.
Call him Krasnov.
It took a while ,but many of his former allies are having an epiphany. Yesterday, Thom highlighted Alex Jones.
IMHO the magic word is still EPSTEIN for enablers like Rand Paul, Thomas Massie.
47 is a malignant, metastacizing tumor on planet earth. IMO he needs to be surgically removed before he destroys life on earth. I only hope this is still even a possibility.
Well, two have already tried, unsuccessfully, so a surgical strike may be possible, but is unlikely. In the mean time, his commanding officers can hopefully be convinced that he is on the wrong track and will disobey his orders.
His "bomb them back to the Stone Age" phrase comes from a famous though misquoted statement by General Curtis LeMay. A very tough SOB who led the strategic bombing of Japan, he was talking about what the U.S. could do to North Vietnam if the war continued. LeMay was also George Wallace's running mate in 1968. Trump sounds like an armchair warrior who dreams of being a hero.
Mac Arthur wanted to use nuclear bombs and one reason Truman dismissed him was he proposed laying a cobalt strip across the center of Korea.
Google: MacArthur's Cobalt Strip Proposal
In interviews published after his death, MacArthur detailed a plan to win the Korean War in 10 days by using "30 to 50 atomic bombs".
Location: The radioactive belt was intended to stretch from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea across the Korean-Manchurian border.
Purpose: He believed this "radiated collar" would prevent any land invasion of Korea from the North for 60 to 120 years.
Method: He suggested the cobalt could be spread using "wagons, carts, trucks and planes".
That sounds a bit like the proposal, which has been around since 1945, to disrupt hurricanes with atomic bombs. Allegedly Trump suggested it too. That this might not work but would certainly spread radiation around the world seems to have escaped it proponents. It’s easy to make suggestions and pronouncements when you think you know a subject, but really have no idea what you are doing.
The documented chronology of Trump's statements are really, really helpful Thom. I think we need more of this quasi bullet point style reporting. Contrasts in contradiction are very powerful when made in a simple, short format. I would like to see the same template used to cover other openly chaotic or escalatory policies - economy, "antifa", immigration, healthcare, tariffs, American manufacturing, narrative on voting, wealth giveaways, etc..
Also, I would like to emphasize this statement from your piece:
"The echoes of World War I are too loud to ignore any longer."
Trumps speech last night brought on the strange feeling, that of, looking through a window into a geriatric ward of a mental hospital. Seeing words pouring out of a orange clay dummy head in a flow of semi-consciousness. Gross lies, contradictions, threats, self congratulation all detached from reality. Thom's right its time for intervention to remove him. As time passes his incapacity to deal with a situation of his own making can only get worse. Will the GOP allow the world economy to devolve into recession maybe depression? There is no magic here, no deep economic sophistry - as long as Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz oil prices will rise and cost of everything will rise correspondingly. FUBAR
"Republicans in Congress and the cabinet must decide whether their loyalty is to an aging, mentally ill, demonstrably incompetent man or to the nation and world he’s put at risk."
That has been the essential problem for at least the last two years. But there are real questions about whether the Republicans have been pushed, shamed, and castigated appreciably by the Democrats in leadership. Every Democrat in both houses should be refusing to allow the business of the government to be conducted and walking out in livid protest until the freaks and fanatics of the administration, starting with Trump are removed. Impeachment is the better of the two alternatives suggested. Failure on the part of the Republicans must be acknowledged and officially certified.
There is a time factor...the "Z" scale. Even a MAGAT Congressional Repiublican can see that there is little hope if their options expire.
Yes, the final act is always the most dangerous.
The issue is that the Big Money Boys who put their money on DT to take them to the promised land have ridden him so far down this road will be hard put to easily transition to someone who can carry the weight -- DANGER DANGER corporate Democrat believers!!!
Further, the architects of the mentally infected, morally corrupted MAGAites will be competing to ascend to the No. 1 position. This means rallying their pet segments of the vermin that have crawled out from under all those rocks.
DANGER DANGER everyone who gets in the way of the gang wars.
A sane, structured transition via government rule??? The above mentioned stakeholders will determine if this is possible. They have known for some time, now, that this is a knife fight.
So many of us have been singing it's a small world, after all, thinking it will make a difference.
DL
Not just MAGA. If you were in the energy business, Iran would be the competiotion.
I do not think you understood what I wrote.
D.
Stakeholders, pal.
Going deep, who controls our energy companies?
If you read, I mentioned TWO stakeholders... BIG MONEY BOYS (BMB) and the architects of the MAGA infection. Of course the former financed the later mouthpieces.
BMB includes the boys in the fossil fuel business.
Yes, this branch of BMB would like to privatize the oil under IRAN. But it is not really on their 'to do' list. There is more than enough supply, and too much lowers the price, so I doubt fossil guys are really behind attacking Iran, other than, perhaps, their butt-body Saudis want Iran out of the picture.
But that doesn't have much to do with oil... It is a thousand years plus of history.
D.
I've long thought that the strategy of Republicans and their power backers is to play for time, to string out the 25th Amendment until 2027. At that time, JD can take over and, subsequently, can legally run for two more terms, potentially giving him a full 10 years in office. If JD is sworn in in 2026, he would be limited to running only once again.
God help us!
Could flip the House and make Jeffries president, as JD has "unclean hands" using the same scenario.
The problem is the entire cabinet are co-dependents.
Call 202-224-3121. Time to Act! We are maybe one cheese burger away from more death and destruction at the whim of a unraveling POTUS. The NO KINGS Rally historical. Everybody with a clear mind can see it. Break the log jam, release all the Epstein/Trump files and documents! This is a gangster regime and billionaires running our government. SCOTUS barely functional. The seven mountains kool aid drinking cult. We need to shut them down.
Are you reading my Substack? Welcome to sanity. My latest is to make him an offer he can’t refuse, to resign. No prosecutions. Keep grift. Honorable after diagnosis of sleep disorders. Fires his hires and resigns. State dinner with medal for such grace. What else? Have a national conversation. Just get him gone now! Thom, you could start that.