Trump Is Destorying the Country We So Love…But First

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Oh, I am heartily tired of hearing about what Lee is going to do…Go back to your command and try to think what we are going to do ourselves instead of what Lee is going to do. General U. S. Grant (on the second day of The Battle of the Wilderness [I think]).

We want to hear what the plans are — are we just going to be sitting on our behinds, talking a lot? Or are we actually going to be doing something? Leanna Terrell, a 75-year-old retired Navy intelligence officer 

You are meant to feel powerless. That is what a strongman wants: to make you feel as if nothing can stop the takeover of your country. Ben Rhodes is a contributing writer for the New York Times Opinion.

Fox News and the right wing would have you believe that these American values are something out of The Communist Manifesto. But let me tell you, Fox News, I don’t believe in healthcare, labor, and human rights because I’m a Marxist. I believe it because I was a waitress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The But First part is my poor, broken hand. I am now wearing a half cast – which I guess is technically called a splint – that was given to me by the hand doctor at PAMF. BTW, PAMF’s real name is Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and it is part of Sutter Health, one of the three major groups that dominate medical care in our area (medicine and eldercare are very profitable). My hand and arm are wrapped in bandages and covered with what we used to call an Ace Bandage. Everything around my left hand, arm, and shoulder hurts, and it is hard for me to do almost anything more than watch TV or my computer monitor. I am not what I would call fine. (When I wrote this, it was true, but it no longer is; I feel much better.)

Still, much of why I’m not fine is because of President Trump. I knew he was going to be disruptive and would do a lot of damage; he has plans, such as eliminating DEI, that I think will hurt our country. What I didn’t expect was for Trump to be so mean to so many people. It didn’t occur to me that hurting random people was his goal. I thought it was only settling old, real or imagined, grievances. I didn’t expect The President of the United States to be such an asshole.

As an aside, what a miserable, petty, human being he must be, even though he won the presidency. And he did win the presidency, which raises a question in my mind: If Trump is so inept, and I think he is, how inept are the Democrats who lost to him? What are we doing wrong? End aside.

I’ve been going through the five stages of grief over the Presidential Election: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and, now, acceptance that Trump won. He even won the popular vote this time. I think he won because his understanding of the United States – paradoxically, especially the discontent – is closer to reality than what the Democratic establishment sees as reality. Trump sees that the government clearly doesn’t work for most people. I watched parts of Trump’s rallies, and he doesn’t talk to the crowd; he talks with the crowd, he dances with it, and he listens to it. I don’t want to give the impression that he will actually do anything. He won’t; he probably can’t. But he didn’t get elected for what he is actually going to do; he was elected for what he said he would do.

I think the Democratic establishment is reality-blind. And why shouldn’t it be? Most of its money – and don’t forget that in Washington, money equals influence – comes from well-read, socially concerned people who want to do good without hurting themselves. Unfortunately, that makes it very hard to pass laws like a minimum wage that reflects the cost of living or free medical care. I am still a Democrat; being a Democrat is rooted in my ancestral humus and it’s not my choice. Still, I think that most of the current Democratic lawmakers are not capable of bringing the much-needed change.

To be continued…

Well, That Was Unexpected

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To keep a short story short, yesterday, I slipped on our stairs while taking out the garbage. Sequoia Hospital’s Emergency Department Patient Discharge papers say that I have minor hand and elbow injuries, including a broken metacarpal. I had the garbage bag strap wrapped around my hand, and it tried to remove the skin from the back of my hand. The stairs did a pretty good job of removing skin from my elbow.

When I got to the hospital, the hospital x-rayed my hand and elbow, cleaned up the blood – on my hand and elbow only, Michele got the blood out of my jeans and sweater – glued the skin flap back down, put a splint on me, patted me on the popo, and sent me home.

Tomorrow, I am going to the hand specialist, and I expect to have an interesting scar.

Michele provided the documentation and reminded me five times to warn you, dear reader, not to scroll down if gore makes you uncomfortable.

A Post I’d Rather Not Make

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I was deeply sad and afraid after listening to—I’m tempted to say ambush, but let’s call it—the special meeting between President Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Little Marco Rubio, who was trying to disappear into his chair, assorted handpicked press, and the ambushee and begger, Ukrainian President Zelensky for the third time, I was sad more than angry. And I was disappointed. I was disappointed in my country, the country I thought I was too cynical to become disappointed in anymore. and disappointed in myself for being part of our country’s fall from grace.

Now, sitting at my keyboard on a beautiful but cold spring day, I am still sad. Maybe I was not cynical enough or maybe Trump is just being open about who we, The United States of America, really are. I am beginning to realize that Trump’s America is the real America, and that makes me deeply sad.

In 1991, Ukraine was the third largest nuclear power in the world. By 1994, Ukraine had no nukes; they had given them away for a guarantee that Russia, Great Britain, and the United States would protect them. It was called the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances. Russia was the first signer to break the Agreement when they invaded Crimea and part of Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Great Britain and the US, under President Obama, were next to break the Agreement when they didn’t protect Ukraine as promised (although we did instigate some sanctions against Russia).

Without going deep into the details, most of which I don’t know, by the time Joe Biden took office, Congress had voted some military aid to Ukraine. We increased that in 2022 by about $67B, in 2023 by $47B, and $61B in 2024. President Biden said “We are with you as long as it takes”, however, he refused to define “it”, for some reason not known to me, considering an undefined “it” a sign of good diplomacy. To quote U.S. Lieutenant General Ben Hodges “These statements that ‘we are with you for as long as it takes’ mean nothing to me.” We don’t want Russia to disappear Ukraine, but, seemingly, we also don’t want Ukraine to win the war, even though we carefully didn’t say that.

Now Trump has said we don’t want Ukraine to win. Well, Trump may not have said it, but he has certainly strongly implied it. All this preamble has led me to the realization that our actual reality will never match our shared, professed reality. I still believed that our shared, professed reality was a shared dream if not a reality. Now I am sad that we, much of the majority of our collective we anyway, really do not want our actual reality to ever match that professed reality.

I first realized we were not who we said we were when I was about 17, or 18, or 19, when I read Hiroshima by John Hersey. About the same time, we had a Black housekeeper, Cary, who cleaned our house every couple of weeks. One day, on her way to our place, her car was hit by a couple of young kids going the wrong way down a one-way street. The police were called and gave Cary a ticket. I wanted to fight the ticket, but we didn’t, we paid for the ticket and the damage to Cary’s car in a sort of “don’t make waves” way.

Sitting here, I remember that there were other clues, clubs we couldn’t join, hotels we couldn’t stay in because we were Jewish, cousins who were harassed by HUAC for essentially nothing, being treated as different when I changed schools in the seventh grade. I grew up being taught that White Europeans first brought civilization to California with the Missions; and the Jewish Holocaust survivors who had taken over Palestine and who were making the desert bloom. I was taught that we saved the world – for freedom and Democracy – in World War II.

I was not taught that the Missions were essentially slave camps that the Indians themselves were forced to build, or that Palestinians even existed, or that, months before the Atomic bomb, we set Tokyo on fire. I was not taught that the Tokyo firebombing was planned to kill as many people as possible, and that we set the record for the number of human beings killed by other human beings in one day.

But I was taught, OK, we’re not perfect but we are getting better. And we were. I could see it with my own eyes. What I didn’t see was that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, by far. What I didn’t see was the minimum wage stuck at $7.25 an hour as if anybody could live on that. But, even when I did, I believed that we aspired to be more perfect. More perfect in our acceptance of other people, more perfect in our national treatment of people, more perfect in acting out the Ideals we say we believe in. More perfect in acting in accordance with The Christ’s teachings. And all that’s true for the people in my life even though very few of them are Christians. It is true in the books, magazines, and papers I read, and the people I see on television or Instagram.

But that is what I believe, not what many Americans believe. We blame Trump, but it is not just Trump. That makes me deeply sad.

Cartoon by Michael de Adder

The Russo-Ukraine War: Three Horrifying Years In

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If I meet Putin, I’ll say to him: “So you’ve finally given us back our territory, how much more are you ready to give as compensation money for taking away our land and helping those who took part in the escalation in Crimea and Donbas?” President Volodymyr Zelensky

Think of it, a modestly successful comedian, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, talked the United States of America into spending 350 Billion Dollars to go into a War that couldn’t be won, that never had to start, but a War that he, without the U.S. and TRUMP, will never be able to settle, President Donald Trump during an address before a meeting in Miami of business executives hosted by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

I’ve been trying to ignore most of what I read about Trump. But it is rough; the SOB is everywhere. All the time. He has a three-year-old’s need to be the center of attention, and he is good at getting it. Part of Trump’s superpower is that he has no connection with the truth. The more outrageous he is, the more attention he gets. Now his Mexico will pay for building the wall. assertion is Ukraine started the war, and they will pay us for the equipment we gave them. They won’t, just like Mexico didn’t.

Years ago, I wanted to sue a guy. I don’t remember why, but I do know that it seemed like a slam dunk suit, but I do remember that my lawyer said it was an easy-to-win suit but that the guy I wanted to sue was Judgment-proof, meaning that when we won, he didn’t have enough assets to pay for the legal fees, let alone our damages. In other words, we could win, but it wouldn’t be worth it. I think, on a national level, judgment proof is equivalent to conquest proof. Just like Afghanistan – or Algeria, Vietnam – Ukraine is conquest-proof.

If Putin’s Special Military Operation had succeeded, Ukraine would have probably fallen in a short time, like France in 1940. But Putin’s Special Military Operation was stopped by a combination of extraordinary resistance by the Ukrainian military and Russian ineptitude. I keep reading that now this is a war of attrition, as if both sides had the same to lose. They don’t, of course. If Russia loses, they go home. There might be a forced regime change, but maybe not. On the other hand, If Ukraine loses, Ukraine will cease to exist.

Russia is not winning this war; they are losing it. They are losing combatants at unsubstainable rates that are increasing. According to The Institute for the Study of War, At the current rate of advance, it would take Russian forces over 83 years to capture the remaining 80 percent of Ukraine, assuming that they can sustain massive personnel losses indefinitely. Still, Ukraine is not winning, either. They are on the defense everywhere, and partially because of that, their combatants are being killed at a rate much lower than Russia’s. But, they are still being killed, and their cities and infrastructure are being thrashed.

To quote myself from a year ago: All this butchery because of a violent sociopath who is still intent on destroying the whole of Ukraine rather than what? being wrong? being embarrassed? Pretty much all Putin has left is to continue to push untrained, poorly led, and under-equipped troops into the Killing Zone, where tens of thousands are being slaughtered by the better-trained and superbly led Ukrainian Army. According to David Petraeus, former CIA director and US Army general, Putin thinks that Russia can outsuffer the West. He can’t. The West isn’t really suffering that much; Ukraine is providing the suffering, and Ukraine will suffer until the Russian troops go home.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

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Alexandria Ocasio Cortez being sworn in as a Representative in the House, 6 years ago.…A Getty Image

Nobody ever wins the first time they run for office. Nobody’s ever supposed to win their first bid for office. Nobody’s ever supposed to win without taking lobbyists’ money. No one’s ever supposed to defeat an incumbent. No one’s ever supposed to run a grassroots campaign without running any ads on television. We did all of those things. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

I’m not running “from the left.” I’m running from the bottom. I’m running in fierce advocacy of working-class Americans. A Tweet by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez after being elected as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at 29.

There is no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed. Mocking lower incomes is exactly how those who benefit from + promote wealth inequality the most keep everyday people silent about one of the worst threats to American society: that the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. A tweet by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in response to a tweeted criticism of her inability to afford an apartment in Washington DC when she first moved there in 2019.

I so want to write about Trump’s tariff threats or his bragging about his malicious immigration policies, or his giving everybody in the government a bonus if they quit. But what good does that do to anybody? I don’t know anything about tariffs except what I read in the New York Times or the Washington Post, and I’m not sure they really know anything about tariffs either. What I do know – or remember, at least – is that both papers got hysterical when Trump put tariffs on Chinese imports in 2017 and then didn’t even bother to mention it when President Biden continued them in 2021.

With Trump, like almost everything he does, tariffs seem to be a way to fill the public communication space. Trump says something seemingly outrageous about tariffs, and then the mainstream media reacts by telling us that what Trump said about tariffs is outrageous. Then we’re all talking about Trump and how outrageous he is. But, and it is a big but, while the papers say that Trump is acting outrageously over tariffs, other news, often more critical, is pushed to the back page where, especially today in the new media environment, it is ignored.

As an aside, one of the things pushed to the back pages is how Trump fills the communication space – or flooding the zone – and how the mainstream media helps him with constant attention. End aside.

We are in a new media environment, and Trump is one of the few people who understand how to prosper in that environment. Most of the Democrats, maybe all of them except about eight, are still following the old rule book. Look good, and don’t say anything controversial. Think about it, then think about it again. It is better not to be seen than being seen in the wrong place or saying something controversial. It was better to move cautiously. .

Ok, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I want to write about Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. What I really want to write about is that I think AOC will be our first female President. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, and then I thought I was wrong because I thought Vice President Harris would win. And I thought the Vice President had an excellent chance, too. I still think she could have won, but she lost her nerve and started playing it safe. Playing it safe is what the Democratic establishment wanted her to do, but when running against Trump in 2024, playing it safe is a losing strategy.

Playing it safe is not something that New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez does. She started her political career in 2018 by running against Joseph Crowley, who, according to the New York Times, was once seen as a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi because his seat was so safe.

I don’t know when I first became aware of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez or even why, but it was after she was elected and before she became AOC. I fell in love with her as a politician immediately, and I mean politician in the best possible sense, in a politics as public service way. The only two other times I have felt that way were with Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. I was sure that Carter and Obama would both become president even when all the evidence said they wouldn’t be. I feel the same way about AOC.

Our politics is changing because our media is changing. The old politics, the pre-2016 politics, television politics, rewarded looking professional and not making waves. That politics required immense amounts of money and rewarded non-controversial positions. Everything was well thought out, which made for slow reactions.

The new politics, the post-2016 politics, the internet politics, rewards being seen, being everywhere, filling the news space, getting attention, and it rewards authenticity. In this new political space, exposure is everything. In the television world, Harris’es handlers didn’t want her to go on FOX News, but in the post-2016 world, that just seems crazy. Trump is a master of the post-2016 political space. He is everywhere. When the Democrats come back at him for, say, renaming Denali National Park, they help Trump in two ways: they keep Trump’s name in the center of the political space, and they answer two days later, which is two days after Trump has moved on. They seem behind the times (and they are).

I’m sure that some Democrats understand the new media landscape, but most don’t. Watching Minority Leader Schumer rebutting Trump’s 25% tariff on anything from Mexico while holding an avocado like it was going to bite him was embarrassing. And then he said that the tariff would raise the price of our Super Bowl Quack. Why did he get the job of rebutting? Not because he was good at presenting a case but because he was the senior Democrat. Meanwhile, Trump had moved on to turning Gaza into a resort after the pesky Palestinians moved to Eygpt.

Of those few Democrats who do understand the new world, nobody is better at communication than AOC. Even her tag, a very recognizable AOC, which she got very early in her political career – before she took office. shows her awareness of the power of Social Media. She is sincere, not afraid to be unabashedly herself, and relatable. She is both staggeringly young and staggeringly self-confident.

Don’t take my word for it; watch the video below. It’s long but worth it (if you are into this kind of thing and, maybe, even if you are not).

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