Once Again, Donnie Trump is Right.

I've seen two versions of Kamala Harris.  The first one was when she was a Senator from California, and she was grilling SCOTUS nominees.  She was intense, focused, eminently knowledgeable, unwavering from the essential issues, and, if I had been a SCOTUS nominee whose record and qualifications she doubted, frankly terrifying.  She decided to run for president, and she was my first choice.

Then, I saw the other version of Kamala Harris.  She seemed more timid, cute and girly, and the whole vibe of being commanding and in charge was gone.  It's true the DNC had already decided to spotlight Biden, and give him any advantage they could, and he had the support of the voters, and maybe she was cleverly angling for the VP choice, which she got.  But I was very disappointed, and she wasn't my first choice any more.

But now, that prosecutor, that tiger, has been unleashed again.  She's all that, and everything else, too.  And everyone knows it.  Watch the video of Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, who gets warned by a Fox host (!)  GOP Senator Gets Called Out On Fox News Over 'Ding Dong' Insult | HuffPost Latest News.  Watch Brian Cohen and his video BREAKING: Trump FINALLY responds to Kamala’s debate challenge (youtube.com).  Someone asks Harris if she thinks Trump is afraid to debate her.  She says "he should be."

And Trump is hiding and running as scared as possible.  As Cohen points out, Trump is all about a two-dimensional image that isn't true.  He's not a tough guy.  If his mommy was still alive, he'd be hiding behind her skirt, holding on to her legs.  Debate Kamala Harris, who has come back to her powerful self?  Step into the cage with her?  Suicide is quicker and less painful.  And suicide is what little Donnie is working on.  He was dying for a piece of Joe Biden, and he'd take as many shots as anyone would give him.  Kamala Harris?  Um...no.

Everybody can see it, and everybody gets it.  Donnie is like whatever person puts comments on this blog, but insists upon calling him- or herself  "Anonymous."  Make moronic and irrelevant cracks, and know that everyone knows who you are, and is laughing at you?  It doesn't sound like a good plan.  "Uncle Donnie, what should I do?"  "Hide, kid.  Some places are very unsafe for weak people who got nothin'.  I wouldn't even debate other Republicans, because they're all smarter and stronger than I am.  I took a chance with Biden, because I had a sense he was weak. You make sure to keep calling yourself 'Anonymous,' and I'm staying way out of Kamala Harris' way.  If you and I are not careful, we're both going to get hurt.  I was lucky.  My ear got grazed by a gunshot wound from one of my own supporters.  Getting in the cage with Kamala Harris would be a lot worse.  I'd get laughed at for the rest of my life.  And so would you if you let people know who you are."

So, Donnie is absolutely right to give a very wide berth to dealing with Harris.  Unfortunately for him, it just cements the image of him as a meaningless child.  But the worst that can happen is he'll lose an election, again, and complain that he didn't really lose it, and was robbed.  Maybe he can find 65 more judges who will tell him again to knock it off.  At his age, it's way too late to tell him to grow up.  He's got a carefully chosen SCOTUS and Aileen Cannon to try to protect him, but that's about all he's got left.

I Wonder If What Went Around Will Come Around.

I grew up Jewish.  I gave it up for a number of reasons.  The glaring one was that I always knew there was no such thing as "god," or never believed there was.  So I didn't think I had the entry criterion to be part of any religion, if I wanted to, which I didn't.  (And if anyone thinks there is such a thing as "god," and considers him- or herself Jewish, why doesn't he or she accept the idea of the son of "god," or the Messiah -- there's a scripture for that, too -- and be Christian?  And if anyone thinks there's such a thing as "god," and further believes there's a son of "god," or a Messiah, why doesn't that person also accept that there's a prophet of "god" -- yup, a scripture for that, too -- and be Muslim?  And if they go that far, and accept that was a son of "god," but it didn't work out as promised, so they're waiting for a "second coming," why don't they agree to Haile Selassie, as the Rastafarians do?  How much picking and choosing do you get to do if you think you're dealing with an almighty creator and ruler of the universe?  It seems to me that once people make these decisions as to what exists, in what ways, and has to be followed how, and what doesn't exist, then it's people who are "god."

But another reason which had insidious importance was that it always seemed that the prominent topic in Hebrew school and Saturday school was the Holocaust.  It seemed that being victims of the Holocaust was not only the main thing Jews could talk about, but in effect, what defined them.  And for the purpose of perspective, my family were reform Jews.  So we didn't have all the rituals to distract us from the fundamental meaning of being Jewish (unless anyone thinks the rituals are the fundamental meaning of being Jewish).  But if anyone thinks that, then they have to account for the rituals that people like Orthodox Jews choose not to follow.  (The famous "Letter to Dr Laura" is funny, provocative, and instructive.)

And it wasn't just the Holocaust.  Many Jewish holidays are about the retellings and replayings of stories of having been victims of one group or another.  You quickly get the idea that being Jewish is all about being a victim.  In fact, if anyone reads the OT, it becomes clear that one of the victimizers is "god."  It's a helluva lot of unexplained and meaningless nonsense to put people through.  And "god" doesn't content him/her/itself with victimizing Jews (can you imagine telling a true believer to kill his own son, just to see if he'd take the bait, then telling him he doesn't have to once he's agreed to do it?  Maybe "god" was just working himself up to setting up his own son to be killed, which the son didn't even understand: "father, why have you forsaken me?")

And in the OT, "god" tells the Jews to conquer neighboring villages, kill the men, and take the women and children as slaves.  "God" turns out to be a pretty pervasively sadistic character.

So, back to the title of this post.  I don't disagree for an instant that Jews, and very many others, were horribly mistreated by the Nazis.  The Jews will say six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.  They don't talk about the six million victims who were not Jews.  But in any event, the world community decided Jews needed a safe homeland, and under heavy lobbying from Theodor Herztl, Palestine/Israel was chosen.  The Jews considered it their original homeland, and they wanted it back, even though they'd been run out of it and attacked and conquered there several times.  (Hence, those holidays.)

What Hertzl didn't take into account, or didn't care about, was that Palestine/Israel was not barren and lifeless land.  A million non-Jewish Palestinians were displaced to make room for the Jews.  The non-Jewish Palestinians were given the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a homeland of their own, since no one else wanted to absorb them.  The land for the Jews was thus just called Israel.  And to complicate matters, the Israelis won the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in a war with the Egyptians, but the settlement of that war included that they had to give it back to the Palestinians.  Except...

The Israelis/Jews began a relentless pattern of incursion into the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where they erected illegal settlements, and from those settlements, began attacking Palestinians.

It should be said that Palestinians don't particularly care about, or have anything against, Israelis/Jews.  The Israelis/Jews had Israel, the Palestinians had the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and absent Israeli incursion, and an unsatisfied ambition to control all of that part of the Middle East, "from the river to the sea," there was no problem.  But Israel did have that ambition, and they used as foundation for it the fact that some Arab countries, a number of which had been invented after WWII, did not accept Israel.  There were wars and treaties about that tension.

Part of the problem, though, was that the Israelis, having surrendered the West Bank and Gaza Strip, even though they did surrender them, and still having to deal with some Arabs who didn't accept them, hung onto their land grab ambition.  And they didn't treat common, civilian, innocent Palestinians well.  The word "apartheid" has been used.  Some of these Palestinians even worked in Israel.  (You can think, for a similarity, about Caucasian Americans and African Americans.)

Perhaps bizarrely, it was Benjamin Netanyahu who helped set up Hamas, in the interest, he thought, of splitting groups of Arabs who were, or were thought to be, hostile to Israel.  But neither he nor any other Israeli government ever stopped the illegal settlements or the attacks on Palestinians.  I don't know what was the final straw, but somehow, we got to October 7, 2023.

Back again to the title of this post, there was post-WWII German resistance to admitting how viciously and violently wrong they were to have decided to blame Jews and others for the condition of Germany after it lost WWI.  Blaming Jews and others, and victimizing 12M people with the Holocaust, was their way of reconstructing self-respect.  It worked until it didn't, they lost WWII, and not only did many of them get tried, convicted, and punished (including executed), but despite a certain amount of kicking and screaming, they paid reparations, at least to Jews, too.

Netanyahu is not a popular figure in Israeli politics, and he has some criminal issues, too.  He's doing a version of what George W Bush did, trying to distract the public by engaging in a war.  It's true that Hamas could not possibly have done him a greater favor than it did for him on 10/7, but important parts of this war are invented.  Netanyahu claims that Hamas are using Palestinian civilians as "human shields."  It's an assertion, and it's hard or impossible to disprove, unless you concede that newborn babies are not Hamas fighters in disguise.  Netanyahu and the Israeli military have claimed repeatedly that they are working carefully and strategically to spare innocent Palestinian lives.  About 2/3 of Palestinian casualties are what anyone would call innocent, and the Israelis have also assassinated aid workers and journalists.  They have also chosen to use bombs that result in lots of shrapnel (human injury), not destruction of the kinds of buildings where they claim to believe Hamas fighters are hiding.

The question, then, is if and when the Israelis will admit that Israel was wrong to conduct this extended war as they have, and if they will do some form of paying reparations, at the very least including rebuilding the many buildings, apartment complexes, schools, hospitals, etc, they have destroyed while they're still trying to annihilate the Palestinian people.  Somehow, I doubt it.  Although if they get rid of Netayahu, and install a decent human being, who knows?

Biden hasn't done the simple thing he could do -- cut the Israelis off -- and Netanyahu has bizarrely and unspeakably been invited to speak to the US Congress.  Any US Congressperson who shows up for that speech should be deeply and irretrievably ashamed of him- or herself.

Overpowering Campaign Strategy Advice

We have to start by taking a step, or three, back.  Donnie Trump originally claimed that had he been in office, Putin would never have attacked the Ukraine.  Later, he said we should leave the matter alone, stop helping the Ukraine, and let Putin win.  Now, he says that he can get the Russians out of the Ukraine.  We would clearly have to factor in that Donnie is an inveterate liar, which makes it impossible to know what, if anything, he ever has in mind, but two out of his three pronouncements are in favor of preserving the Ukraine, or never having had it attacked in the first place.  And his two civilized pronouncements depend on his influence with one of his boyfriends, Vlad Putin, who Donnie says will do whatever Donnie wants him to do.  Hey, that's what the best of boyfriends are for.

Then, there's the matter of Evan Gershkovich, a journalist no one believes is guilty of anything, but whom Vlad tried, convicted, and sentenced in private, and whom Donnie likewise says he can get sprung as soon as he gets elected.

But Donnie is handicapped by the self-inflicted problem of his continual lying, not to mention mind-numbing irrelevant rambling, and it's very likely that few, if any, people believe that he has the influence and magical powers he asserts.

So Donnie can end any doubt, and get real.  All he has to do is contact Vlad right now, tell him to knock off the invasion of the Ukraine, and release Gershkovich.

If Donnie does that, the public will see that Donnie's strutting and self-aggrandizement were real, and they'll be more likely to vote for him.

I could reach out to Donnie's campaign, and offer to accept a paid position as a campaign strategist (and then give Donnie this slam-dunk advice), but since Donnie is well known and infamous for hiring people, and then stiffing them, then I couldn't expect to get paid anyway.  So the advice might as well be free.  Which it is.  Donnie, be good for your wild bluster, and give the public a reason to believe you and your alleged superpowers, and trust you, and it will help you get elected.  If, on the other hand, you're still continually lying and full of shit, it's probably best for the public to know that about you.

You're welcome.

Eww!

A few days ago, I was at a cultural event sponsored by Fantasy Theatre Factory.  They had a sign that showed that they were originally supposed to get $127K in a grant from the state, but the state legislature halved it to $60K.  Ronnie DeSantis then canceled the $60K.

The next day, I was at another cultural event, and I was talking to the impresario, whom I consider a friend.  He told me that the reason that $32M in state cultural grants (that's all of them, as far as I know) were canceled was specifically because Ronnie either heard about or attended some cultural event in or near Tampa, and he decided it was somehow related to sex.

Ronnie is chronologically an adult.  He is married.  He has a child.  He is not entirely unfamiliar with sex.  My first thought was that he's been sexually active, at least once, but it scared him, and he didn't like it, so he decided that nothing that he considered related to sex should happen in Florida.

But I've rethought Ronnie's problem.  What Ronnie says is that sex and sexually-related things are predatory.  Or that people are so mindlessly suggestible that they can be seduced into behaviors and lifestyles that are not natural for them, because of what they see, or read.  I suspect he also thinks they're raunchy and perverted.  So it occurred to me that Ronnie's problem is that his preferred style of sexual activity is raunchy, perverted, and predatory, and he might think that most people, or everyone, is like that.  Presumably, he found a wife who likes his approach, or, for whatever reasons, has not told him to "go fuck himself," and left him.  Maybe he's hung up on crossdressing, too, but he's embarrassed about it.  Hence his aversion to drag shows.

If I was willing to talk to Ronnie, which I'm not, because he doesn't listen, I would give him my "sex talk."  Many of my patients, and probably all of my couples, have heard this talk.  It would help Ronnie greatly if he understood about sex, and it would also help him (and more so the rest of us) if he cared about the citizens of Florida.  Neither appears to be the case.  Instead, he imposes his fear of sex on all of us.  He even fears things that have nothing to do with sex, but he's terrified that they might.

My father was a lawyer, and for whatever reasons, he represented many people from the local Chinese community.  He told me that one client consulted him once, in great distress, because the client's son was homosexual, which the client thought was a horrible and shameful thing. He wanted my father somehow to persuade his son not to be homosexual.  My father said he asked his client what it would take for the client to be sexually active with other men.  The client recoiled, and said it would be completely out of the question.  My father told his client that the impossibility of the client's becoming homosexual is the same as his son's possibility of becoming heterosexual.

Ronnie needs to worry less, and stop trying to control other people's lives.  If Ronnie thinks homosexuality is somehow a bad thing, I would, if I would say anything to him, which I won't, tell him that heterosexuals who watch drag shows, or attend cultural events that Ronnie has persuaded himself have something to do with sex, are in no way going to make these people homosexual.  And homosexual men want to be intimate with other men.  But they don't want to be intimate with Ronnie.  Nobody's going to bother him.  He's offended because men aren't interested in him?  He should get over it, and go bother his wife.

My guess, frankly, is that Ronnie, or his wife, is/are not happily married.  One, the other, or both of them should see someone.

Now, Just a Doggone Minute!

Tiny, almost imperceptible, Donnie Trump was shot yesterday, and whoever shot him (how they could even see him without a microscope is a mystery) grazed his ear.  Donnie was fine, except he will probably need to wear a Band-Aid for a little while.  Boy, does this raise questions.

First of all, this occurred at one of Donnie's rallies?  Frankly, I'm not impressed with the level of security.

Second, Donnie was shot with a gun.  I thought we all loved guns, and thought that as many people as possible should carry them, for...security.  Maybe the person who shot Donnie thought Donnie was a threat.  Isn't this what we're always told to react against?  Threats?  In Florida, we're told to "Stand [Our] Ground."  If we feel threatened, we should shoot first, and ask questions later.  In the case of Donnie and his rally, the shooter, who walked into a rally carrying a gun, and was able to do this because there was no security, was then shot dead by Secret Service.  How...um...convenient.

Third, someone else at Donnie's rally, besides the shooter, was killed.  So the shooter was capable of shooting and killing someone.  And all he did was graze Donnie's ear?  What I know about anatomy includes that the ear is attached to the head.  The shooter could have done a lot more damage to Donnie than grazing his ear.

This puts me in mind of five Sherlock Holmes movie episodes.  One was from the 1940s, when Holmes (Basil Rathbone) notes that one member of the Security Council reported having suffered a gunshot injury to the back of the hand (it's minor; oh, that?; never mind, I'm fine), and Holmes later revealed that this injury was one of the early indicators that made him suspicious of this member of the Council (who was in fact guilty, and inflicted the injury on himself).  The second was also from the Rathbone movies, when Holmes is investigating the alleged deaths of a group of people -- the "Good Comrades" -- and he notes that one of the "Good Comrades" notices an impossible-to-see needle sticking up in the chair in which he was about to sit, and says, with noteworthy composure, that he thinks someone was trying to poison him.  (It turned out the "Good Comrades" were simulating their own deaths to get the life insurance money.)  In the third, from the 2000s, Watson (Martin Freeman) is thought by Col Shan, a Chinese crime syndicate leader looking for a valuable item that was stolen from Shan's criminal network, to be Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch), and Watson and his new girlfriend are kidnapped and threatened with death.  Shan points out to Watson that if the criminal network had wanted to kill him, they would already have done it.  "If an assassin can't kill you in three tries, what does that tell you?  That they're not really trying."  In a later episode, Watson is again assaulted and kidnapped, and put into a large collection of sticks to be burned.  Holmes rescues him, and in a still later episode, the person whose organization threatened Watson reassured that "I had people standing by, Dr Watson.  We would never have let you burn."  In that same episode, Holmes walks in on Watson's new wife while she was threatening to kill the ringleader who later reassured Watson.  She told Holmes that if he came a step further, she would shoot him.  He walked toward her, and she shot him in the lower chest.  Holmes later referred to Mrs Watson's shot not as an attempt to kill him, but as "surgery."  It was enough to get him hospitalized and out of her way (she called 911), but not enough to kill him.

So, we're left with the seemingly impossible curiosity about someone who brings a gun to a political rally, isn't detected, kills one person (but not the large person standing at a height at center stage), but grazes Trump's ear.  Something is wrong with this story.  My homepage adds that the shooter had explosives in his car.  It's further unclear what he expected to do with them.

If this story could be harder to understand, Ryan Grim of Drop Site News complicates it further.  The assailant, conveniently killed by Secret Service, was 20 year old Thomas Crooks of Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania is where the rally was.  Crooks was a registered Republican, and on 1/20/21, he donated $15 to the "Progressive Turnout Project PAC."  It turns out the "Progressive Turnout Project PAC" has nothing to do with Progressives or Democrats, or much to do with Republicans, and is what is now commonly referred to as "clickbait," the aim of which is to confuse people into donating.  Young Crooks was 17 (a minor) when he made the donation, so the donation was illegal, and Crooks either didn't read the requirements to donate, didn't understand them, or lied.  And the e-mail was to encourage people to tune in to the inauguration on 1/20/21.  Why anyone would pay $15 to watch something that's free on TV is...well...  It's unclear why Crooks donated ($15 once isn't much to many people, but maybe it is to a 17 year old), and he never donated again.

So, why did Crooks bring a gun to the rally?  People reported hearing shots before they saw anything.  Why did no one see this kid with an openly carried gun?  If the kid wanted to kill Donnie, who, under the circumstances, would have been easy to kill, why didn't he kill him?

Clearly, there are unanswered questions which the Secret Service has made it harder to answer.  But it is noteworthy that there's a contingent who say that Donnie's injury will benefit him.  Ronnie Reagan would pat him on the back, and encourage him to milk this thing.  Of course, Ronnie was more seriously injured, and Donnie got something a little worse than a shaving cut.  He'll get an extra sympathy vote.  It would be fair to wonder if this was what this shooting was all about.  Did Crooks sacrifice himself to help get Donnie elected?  He had to have known he wasn't going to walk out of there.  Although +/-20 is the common age for the onset of schizophrenia, but we don't know more about Crooks, I never evaluated him, and I never will.

Let's Be Honest

Benjamin Franklin famously said to someone that the Founding Fathers had given us a democracy/republic, "if [we could] keep it."

In the 1860s, this country fought a Civil War, because almost half the country didn't believe in universal freedom and democracy for all Americans.

It took until the early 20th C for women to be given the right to vote.  Until then, many Americans didn't want them to have that right.

Very recently, some right winger said we were about to have the "second Revolution," which would be bloodless, "if the left chose it to be."  This person was really saying that the result of the first Revolution, which gave us freedom and independence (from England) was not what the right wing wanted.  We need a "second Revolution," because the first Revolution turned out to be an unwanted mistake.  They realized that in their opinions, the US Constitution was wrong to have anticipated that democracy would be "perfected."  It's not much of a surprise that a number of them now want to dismantle the Constitution.  You can use Charmin, or you can use copies of the Constitution.

The issue was not that we couldn't keep the democracy/republic the Founding Fathers had given us.  It's that many of us don't want a democracy/republic.

The people who lost the Civil War, or the presidential election in November, 2020, don't accept the losses, because they don't believe in representative government where the representatives are chosen by election by all Americans, to represent the interests of the public.

We have recently been reminded how many Americans do not accept the idea that women have independent rights.  (Well, OK, it's not so many people, but they've mindlessly put in power people who do think women don't have independent rights.  And they don't think men have rights, either.  If a pregnancy results where no one wanted it, and both people made an effort to prevent it, they've still surrendered their right to make decisions.)

And whose idea was it that people from anywhere could just up and come here, and make a better life for themselves?  Well, yeah, the Pilgrims, the Irish, the Chinese, the Germans, the Cubans, and many other groups.  But we now appreciate much better what a messy din of people, many of whom have accents, that is.

We either made a mistake with these efforts at universal liberty, or some of us changed their minds.  And those of us who think a mistake was made, or who changed their minds, ought to admit it.  We can take all rights away from women, re-enslave Africans, and give ourselves back to England.  Although the latter is complicated, because the British wound up emulating us, and they now rely primarily on an elected representative government, instead of a monarchy, so maybe we'd do best giving ourselves to the most primitive Muslim country we can find: no rights for women, unflinching execution without fair trials, and an Imam to make all the rules.  And if we choose the right one, they can enslave us, too, as they do the Yemenis.  It gives us the added bonus of a crushing theocracy, which a number of us seem to crave anyway.  What difference does it make if school children (boys, of course) are required to learn the "ten commandments," or if they have to pray to "allah" five times a day?  It's all invented, but at least it provides the structure that a number of people prefer.  And you don't get reliable structure when anyone in society can have the freedom to do more or less whatever they want, and make their own decisions.  Somehow, in the headiness of it all, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

 

Be What You Tell Yourself You Are.

You tell yourself you're aware, right?  Smart, too, right?  A real American, with American values, yes?

If you have not seen Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 11/9,"* I very strongly encourage you to watch it.  I would suggest sooner rather than later.  And if you hear anything that you know is not a true fact, please leave a comment to clarify what's untrue about what Moore says, and what the true facts are.  It would be more persuasive if you also said how you know.

*Moore has made several documentaries, and I've either seen all of them, or all but "Roger and Me."  He has another documentary called "Fahrenheit 9/11," but that's a different documentary.  9/11 is about 9/11, and 11/9 is about Trump's "victory" in 2016.  Although it's about much more than that.

I realize this is a somewhat long and rambling documentary, and it covers some areas that are not the most germane to the overarching thesis.  But if you're the aware and smart person you tell yourself you are, you'll be able to figure out the connections.  And if you're the real American who cherishes American values you tell yourself you are, you'll understand the problem.

And if you think that because the documentary-maker is Michael Moore, then he probably just picks on Republicans, you're very wrong.  The problem he presents is widely systemic, and he makes clear that it corrupts people like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, too.  He features a number of other Democrats who "went along to get along."  At our expense, of course.  Moore doesn't use the recently common neologism "uniparty," but that's what he means.

Moore discusses more briefly than he probably should have the fact that "Americans" are liberal.  He lists many "liberal" positions, and points out that all of them are favored by a majority of Americans.  So he leaves us with the question as to how we fall into the trap of electing governments that apply themselves to frustrating what's important to us.  He's got a number of partially developed explanations, but they seem generally to involve group dynamics.  One of those dynamics amounts to the dumbing down of the public, which, I'm sorry to say, if you think of yourself as aware and smart, is very active right now.

An example he gives that has applied to various times and countries is the invention of emergencies where there are no emergencies.  Nefarious governments use this technique to distract the public from real issues, and to seize control.  Federal, state, and local governments in this country have done that.  And by the time the public realize they've been had, they're also overwhelmed, overpowered, and under attack.  From their own government.  That's the one they were led to think they elected to represent their interests and welfare.  But the people they elected actually worked assiduously in opposition to the public interest, but only in their own interest, which -- and Moore makes adequate mention of this -- was generally about money.

So, I hope you vote this year, especially if you're one of the aware and smart people whose interest is this country, and I hope you're careful, and not just reflexive, regarding for whom you vote.  I know it's more work for you, but you'll help your best decision-making if you ignore the Ds and the Rs that are associated with the names.  To give you some examples, Rick Scott, who is a Senator from Florida, is almost certainly running for re-election this year.  Scott is, to my knowledge, the richest or one of the richest of the US Senators.  In 1987, Scott co-founded Columbia Hospital Corporation, which eventually became the nation's largest for-profit health care company.  Scott was CEO, but was pushed out before the corporation was fined a record-setting $1.7B for defrauding Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal programs during his tenure as CEO.  This was the result of 14 felony convictions.  Scott then became a venture capitalist and founded "Conservatives for Patients' Rights."  What patients' rights have to do with political leanings is unclear, but it doesn't appear that Scott's interests were ever anything but himself, and he broke laws to achieve his goals.  During a 2000 deposition, Scott pled the 5th Amendment 75 times.  So you might wonder in whose interest and to whose benefit it would be to have Scott in the Senate again.  I mean apart from his.

And of course, there's Donnie Trump, already a convicted felon, who would be facing more trials for many more charges, except he appears to have judges and justices running interference for him.  And he's made no secret of his willingness to dismantle American government if he has another chance.  So, if you live in this country because you think it's a good country (Founding Fathers, Constitution, law and order, and that kind of stuff), you might want to consider the possible inadvisability of electing as president someone who appears to be allergic to following laws and who is very averse to the "melting pot" culture of which his own family were beneficiaries.  You'd at least want to see something that looks more like consistency and less like hypocrisy, right?  We did establish that you're aware, smart, and care about the United States, didn't we?

In any event, all of Moore's documentaries are excellent, and "Fahrenheit 11/9" happens to be timely, too.  If you want to borrow my DVD of it, or any others of Moore's documentaries, you're welcome to, but you have to promise to return it.

Who Has Less Self-Awareness, Insight, and Perspective Than Joe Biden?

Last night's interview with George Stephanopoulos wasn't as bad as the debate on Thursday of last week.  But it wasn't very good.  Biden realized the debate didn't go well, but he didn't seem to realize things weren't going well last night.  And he thinks he's "the guy" (who can make great things happen, and stabilize a treacherous world).  He seems to think he's all powerful, and can make good and adaptive things happen, by dint of his wonderful powers.

It was frankly a bad look, and the fact that Chapter 2 wasn't as bad as Chapter 1 isn't reassuring.  I and a number of other people thought he should have packed it in last week.  At one point, he tried to excuse himself by saying he just needs more sleep, and he should go to sleep at 8:00 PM.  If he stays up later than that, or is called upon to address an urgent middle-of-the-night situation, then what?  He's unreliable?

So, back to the question which is the title of this post: who's less self-aware, less insightful, and has less perspective than that?  And to make matters worse, who has less understanding, and at some level doesn't care about the outcome, the country, or the world (Stephanopoulos asked Biden how he would feel if he stayed in the race, and lost, and Biden said he'd be at peace, because he'd know he gave it his best shot, as if this was just about him), than Biden?

Who has even less self-awareness, less insight, less perspective, a more inflated self-concept, and cares even less about the outcome for everyone else, but himself?

It's not a remotely hard question to answer.  And as bad as Biden performed and looked, he's vastly better than the alternative.

More and more people with political weight and influence are now being more direct with Biden, and letting him know that he did a great job, but it's over.  I have no information as to what his family, advisors, and friends are telling him after last night.  But the clock is ticking, and if anyone is to replace Biden on the Democrat ticket, they're going to need time to establish themselves as the primary candidate, articulate a platform (will they be moderate, left of center, farther left, "Progressive?"), and campaign.  Obviously, the easiest replacement would be Harris, but only if she's the old Harris -- the former prosecutor, the Senator with the laser focus, the no fucking around -- and not the newer, cute/sweet girl, don't make too many waves Harris who emerged in the 2020 primaries.  The old Harris plus Newsom, Buttigieg, Raskin, Warren, Bennett, or a number of other possibilities?  Oh, yeah.

This country, and the world, are badly damaged by Trump, McConnell, and now the Supreme Court.  Four more years will finish us all off.

Donnie Trump Was Right.

He just needed more confidence in himself, and enough cognitive capacity to remember how right he'd been.

Obviously, there's been a ton of discussion about the recent debate between the two main presumed presidential candidates.  And there's been considerable criticism of each of them.

One sustained criticism of Donnie Trump has been that he lied continually.  That, in itself, is not a valuable criticism.  First of all, he always lies continually, and second, Biden fell down badly on the job, and did not call out Donnie on his continual lies.  Some people have criticized the moderators for not calling out Donnie on his non-stop lies, but this is unfair.  It wasn't their job to fact-check Donnie.  It was Biden's job, and Biden, for whatever array of proposed reasons, didn't do it.

But there was one question that people who complain about Donnie and his inveterate lying, and dodging, keep referencing.  They say, in a way which is not technically true, that Donnie did not answer the question about whether he would accept any election result that was determined.  Sometimes, they say he didn't answer the question, and sometimes, they admit that he did answer the question, but he qualified it by saying he would accept a result if it was fair and correct.  And that, in fact, is what he did say.

People pay so much attention to January 6, 2021, that they forget what preceded it.  The fact is that Donnie's pre-J6 theory was the same as the one he articulated last week.  Yeah, I know.  "Articulated" doesn't seem to be the right word to use when we're talking about Donnie Trump.  And even if we used the word said instead of articulated, the purists among us would point out that Donnie lies so continually that it doesn't matter what he says.  But the facts are that he was asked if he would accept a result, he tried to dodge the question, it was repeated for him in case he didn't hear, forgot, or was trying to weasel out of it, and he did grudgingly say he would accept any result as long as it was fair and correct.  No one, of course, would be criticized for asking how anyone would know if a result was fair and correct, and in whose estimation.

But coming back to how right Donnie was, we could start 20 years before that.  Al Gore ran against George W Bush, the vote-counting was manipulated to stop while Bush was ahead, and Gore's reflex was not to accept the loss.  He took the matter to court.  He took it to the Supreme Court.  The vote count had been stopped in Florida, where Bush's cousin was in charge of elections, and Bush's brother was governor, and the Supreme Court happened to be sympathetic (biased) to Republicans, so they agreed to let Florida decide.  So Gore lost, and he accepted his loss.

In 2020, Donnie lost an election (popular vote and Electoral College), and he, like Gore, didn't think this loss was fair and correct.  He had some theories.  They were unsupported, but they were his theories.  So he did what Gore did: he took the matter to court.  Over 60 times.  Some of the judges had themselves been appointed by Trump, but even so, he lost every attempt to get the result he thought was unfair and incorrect overturned.  But he did the right thing.

I do admit Donnie was wrong to have raged around claiming to have won an election he had already proven to himself over 60 times he lost, and to have encouraged people to invade and attack the Capitol to change a result he'd already correctly confirmed for himself (but didn't like).

But he was right to have agreed to accept an election result only on condition that it was fair and correct, and to have brought the matter to court when there was doubt in his...mind.