World Peace Is None Of Your Business

By the time that I’m through singin’

The bells of the schools of the wars will be ringin’

More confusions, blood tranfusions

The news of today will be the movies for tomorrow

And the water’s turned to blood, and if you don’t think so

Go turn on your tub

And if it’s mixed with mud

You’ll see it turned to gray

And you can call my name

I hear you calling my name

-Love, “A House Is Not A Motel”

Donald Trump, Russia’s Viceroy for North America, decided to start yet another war of choice, this time in Iran. (‘You can’t have Iran, Donnie, you haven’t finished your Venezuela.’) And apparently because “Operation Midnight Hammer”, the latest in a series of military missions named after straight-to-video action movies/gay porn videos, did NOT end Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity despite Our President bragging for days that it had, he decided to go along with Israel’s effort to take out Iran’s senior leadership, blanking out the point that they had junior leadership under them, such as the late Ayatollah’s son, who also lost his mother, wife and several other relatives in the strike.

This made a lot of people angry and was widely perceived as a bad move.

Because compared to Midnight Hammer, Iran now correctly perceives the attack as an existential struggle for the survival of their regime, and is attacking the US and its allies accordingly. Not only are the Iranians mining the Strait of Hormuz, which is basically their entire coast, they are bombing Israel. So Israel decided to bomb a major Iranian oil facility and Iran retaliated by bombing a Qatar oil facility. So Wednesday, Rex Mundi twitted “NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL” unless (of course) Iran retaliates, in which case we’re gonna hit back with “an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.” All of which is telling in that a, Trump is admitting that Israel acted independently of us (or that he knew what they were doing but will not admit it), b, Trump, as with Venezuela, is more concerned about saving the oil fields for future exploitation than any civilian or military costs, and c, making demands on Israel because they endangered Qatar means he has to choose between Israel and Qatar, his two favorite bribers.

It’s almost as if nobody has any idea what’s going on. Not as if anyone with half a brain (i.e. Most adults other than Trump) didn’t know that Iran always had the option to threaten the Strait if attacked. This week Trump actually whined that it was “unfair” that Iran continues to block the Strait of Hormuz, saying “you win a war, but they have no right to be doing what they’re doing.” (He keeps using this word ‘win’. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.) Apparently one of Trump’s favorite generals, Dan Caine (whom Trump had appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his loyalty) specifically told him that an attack on Iran could prompt them to block the Strait of Hormuz. But apparently Trump, based on his fluke success couping Venezuela, assumed that once he took out the head of state, everyone would just do what he said, and because they haven’t, he doesn’t know what to do next.

Why did Trump think this was going to be just like Venezuela when everybody was telling him otherwise?

Because he’s a moron.

Quad Erat Demonstrandum.

Meanwhile Secretary of Bombing Schoolgirls Pete Hegseth has been giving talks trying to prop up the war effort while denying that there’s been any blowback. Last Friday Hegseth told a press conference, “The only thing prohibiting transit in the straits right now is Iran shooting at shipping. It is open for transit should Iran not do that.”

A bit like saying, “the only thing prohibiting crossing the field is all the mines, barbed wire and drones.”
Or, “the swimming pool is perfectly safe, apart from all the loose razor blades.”
Or “there’s no reason you can’t drive across the Grand Canyon, you just have to watch out for all the potholes.”

Why does Hegseth actually seem to believe what comes out of his own mouth?
Because he’s a moron.

So now at least 20 percent of the world supply of oil is being cut off by a war of choice, that we don’t know how to get out of, and the production of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and others is threatened, and the cost of everything that depends on transport, that is, everything, will keep exploding, because Kamala Harris had girl cooties and Americans decided they would rather trust a retarded pigboy even knowing he wrecked his last “great” economy by giving us all Trump Virus. ™

And on the off chance that an actual Trumpnik is reading this, you might ask, “Hey, why you gotta insult Our President like that? Callin’ him a pigboy, when he’s the greatest president we ever had since Jesus Himself?”
There’s a reason why I call Trump a pigboy.

Because he’s a pigboy.

Squinty little eyes, looks like a pig, eats like a pig, his favorite environment is wallowing in mud and shit. AND, if you want to work with the pig, you have to get down in the shit with him.

For example, Marco Rubio. Nominally Trump’s Secretary of State, not like he had any say in the events leading up to this. Somebody who had a certain level of respect as a Senator from Florida, and for telling off Trump in the first part of the 2016 campaign. But we’re not taking about what Marco Rubio is planning for Cuba, or whether he’s going to run for president in 2028. No, the main Rubio news in March was when Trump gave all his men Florsheim shoes, without checking their size, and expected them all to wear them. And all the pictures of Rubio last week showed him wearing shoes that are clearly too big for him. Not like Rubio couldn’t have looked up that model and ordered the same shoes in his size. But he didn’t. Because then Trump would know. He wore the shoes Trump ordered so that Trump could see that he was wearing those specific shoes. Because Trump demands absolute loyalty, and the surest way to prove your loyalty is to let your Master absolutely humiliate you. Day in, and day out.

If Trump told his Cabinet to wear lipstick and lingerie on camera, they’d all look like the cast of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Why does Marco Rubio act like such a simp when the whole reason he’s there is supposed to be because he needs to provide the president expert advice that he may need?

Because Rubio is a moron.

You may be sensing a pattern here.

Well actually, it’s not like Rubio is mentally subnormal, unlike Trump or half his Cabinet, but he like JD Vance and other people who had brains and were able to think critically about Trump sold their egos and their minds to get proximity to him, cause they wanted to be on the side that’s winning. Or more likely, out of ingrained pathological hatred for Democrats, because what’s happening right now is the exact opposite of winning.

So now our bear of very little brain has his head stuck in the hunny jar. And it’s not like he’s ever going to get out by himself. Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times said we might be able to gracefully back out of this with concessions, but if there were reasonable people on either side, we wouldn’t be here. The whole premise of Donald Trump’s psychology is that he is perfect and can never make a mistake, therefore he will never admit to making a mistake. For example, Eric. Plus which, the Pars Gas Field attack indicates that Israel’s Prime Minister has at least as much say in the direction of things as Trump, and both Israel and Iran, with some reason, see the other as a threat to their existence. Beyond the collective threat, Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have one more thing in common: They need to keep their countries in a state of emergency in order to avoid prosecutions that could kick them out of office, which would almost certainly lead to them going to prison.

Surely the needs of the few, or the one, outweigh those of the tens of thousands?

But don’t worry. As Our God-Emperor says, “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen.

I saw somebody on YouTube, can’t remember exactly who, but they said that we need to make sure Trump’s motherfucking enablers do not get away with this when it is all over. And they mentioned the end of Inglourious Basterds. This was where SS man Hans Landa agreed to spill his secrets to the Allies to save his own skin, and commando leader Aldo Raine agreed to this, but then did something to make sure that he wouldn’t be able to just live a normal life from then on. So he took out a knife and carved a swastika into the Nazi’s forehead.

(Oh, sorry about the spoiler. By the way, in the movie, Hitler goes to a movie theater in France and the Resistance blows the place up and ends the war.)

Now, I don’t think we need to do anything that bloody. After all, Trumpniks are like vegans in one respect: You don’t have to ask their alignment, THEY WILL TELL YOU. Plus which, it’s not like The Daily Show hasn’t based much of its humor on the fact that videotape exists and Republicans seem blissfully unaware of it.

That being the case, these tweezer dicks might still try to blend into the background, in which case we all owe it to dig up their past and throw it in their faces every time they try to attain a respectable public position again. How long did the Hebrews have to wander the desert for defying God? Forty years? The Republicans can be at third-party status for at least that long. They should understand, they’re all Good Christians. Forty years or however long it takes until they, like the Democrats, figure out that white supremacy doesn’t work.

Speaking for myself, I don’t expect to live that long. So I will NEVER forget.

And I will never forgive.


REVIEW: Starfleet Academy (End of Season 1)

I had previously reviewed episodes 2 through 5 of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and this week the season finale came out, so I am going to review my impressions of episodes 6 to 10.

“Ko’Zeine” – Everyone gets to go on leave, but Caleb of course has no family and doesn’t want to live with a host family in Dakar, so Ake gives him dispensation to stay on the base by himself. Only he finds out that Genesis decided to stay behind too. And they spend time playing a bunch of games and pranks until Genesis puts Caleb up to hacking the Athena’s bridge. And while he doesn’t want to go too far with that, she takes the opportunity to try to purge her records of recommendations because she doesn’t think she’s ready for Pre-Command track as Chancellor Ake had suggested. But they get caught by Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) who rats them out to Ake, who puts them on extra work detail.

During all this Jay-Den was scheduled to go with Kyle to Ibiza on Earth, but he sees Darem getting kidnapped and follows their jump gate to end up on Darem’s home planet. It turns out that Darem is not only in a high muckety-muck family, he’s been arranged to be the Prince Consort of the planet’s heir apparent, whose parents have abdicated early and who thus has to become Queen, meaning she and Darem have to get married. But the Queen is sharp enough to realize that Darem’s heart isn’t in it, especially after Jay-Den gives a best-man toast celebrating how much he’s grown since joining Starfleet. So she tactfully annuls the marriage and lets Darem go back to Earth.

While the Caleb/Genesis story actually makes sense for those two characters (given that they’re both bundles of neurotic dysfunction) the character arc for Darem now seems to contradict itself. His whole reason for joining Starfleet was to be of better service to his government, and now he’s given up the position he was training for. So why is he back in Starfleet?

“The Life of the Stars” – after being out for one episode, Tarima (Zoe Steiner) returns to Earth after recovering from her injuries on Betazed. However because of her rogue psionic powers, medical staff have decided that she needs to be transferred from War College to Starfleet Academy, which not only goes against her choice, it puts her in proximity to Caleb. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) returns from Discovery because Ake realizes the kids are demoralized after the battle on the Miyazaki and Tilly has the perfect therapy: Community theater! Sam (Kerrice Brooks) volunteers to choose the play, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. This freaks out Tarima, especially since Sam chose her to play Emily, the female lead who spends the last act of the play observing from beyond the grave. And this stresses Sam, and it turns out that she is still glitching even though her injuries on the Miyazaki were supposedly repaired. The Doctor (Robert Picardo) and Chancellor Ake volunteer to take Sam back to her homeworld of Kasq while the other cadets ponder whether to continue running the play. On Kasq, Sam’s makers declare that she is “unrepairable” and The Doctor realizes that it’s because they made her as a near-adult without the life experience of a grown human, meaning she was unable to process her recent experiences. The only way to restore her would be to have her be born and grow like an organic human. And at that point the Doctor tearfully confesses that the reason he rejected Sam’s attempts to take him as a mentor is because he’d already created a holographic family program where he’d ended up losing his daughter. But he agrees to take up the responsibility of raising her in order to bring her back. (Which is possible because Kasq is apparently in a pocket dimension and the amount of time it took to bring Sam to adulthood was only a few weeks in real space, and The Doctor does not physically age.)

The device of using Wilder’s “play within a play” works very well and everyone in the cast really sells their scenes, in particular advancing the character arcs of The Doctor, Sam and Tarima. In fact, this episode was so effective in moving the larger story that the “Ko’Zeine” episode might as well be ignored.

“300th Night” – Starfleet Academy celebrates the end period of the term’s first year. The Athena is en route to Betazed, to celebrate moving the capital to that planet. Jay-Den asks his friends to join a ritual welcoming them into House Kraag, as he considers them part of his family. Caleb has another traumatic flashback to losing his Mom, and decides he doesn’t want to be part of another family. Moping in his room, he’s interrupted by Sam, who asks him if he’s tried searching his files to see if his Mom tried to contact him. Remembering a moon she pointed out to him as a child, he enters that as a password and sees two years worth of files. The last shows Anisha Mir (Tatiana Maslany) on a faraway planet that’s about to be invested by the Venari Ral criminal empire.

Meanwhile Admiral Vance (Oded Fehr) briefs Ake and Chancellor Kelrec of the War College about the raid that the Venari Ral did on their research base, and it turns out they’ve managed to weaponize “the Omega particle” which can warp both space and subspace in a region and destroy its capacity for warp travel for millions of years. And they’ve put it into mines. Vance tells the Chancellors that once the Athena reaches Betazed they’re going to hunker down and await further orders. Caleb overhears this and decides to bail by hijacking a shuttle to get to his Mom’s planet before lockdown. And of course Sam teleports in and points out that he can’t escape the Athena’s warp bubble without her calculations. And then both Genesis and Darem end up on the shuttle. Sam finds a warp tunnel allowing her to reach the planet in minutes, although the shuttle is damaged. They find a seedy underworld and split up while searching for repair supplies.

Caleb goes searching around only to have a knife put to his throat by the person he’s tailing. It turns out to be Anisha, and they have a tearful reunion. And there are subtle directorial cues to indicate that Anisha is even more traumatized by her family separation than Caleb is. As in, she might not be sane.

Ake figures out what’s going on, and Vance gives the “if I don’t see what you’re doing, I can’t tell you not to do it” hint, and Ake evacuates the ship, taking The Doctor and Reno as a skeleton crew, only to find out that Jay-Den and Tarima stowed away when they realized their friends left. Back on the planet, Caleb realizes that his Mom will react badly if she finds out his friends are Federation, so after Anisha agrees to help with repairs, she leaves and Caleb plans to leave with her. And this leads to a lot of anger and insults towards the other cadets and he runs off. But the cadets get captured by Venari Ral and Caleb tries to rescue them, and at the last second, Anisha comes to help. Violence ensues.

The Athena shows up and transports everybody, and against my suspicion all this episode, Caleb’s mom doesn’t die. But they’re ambushed by the Venari Ral, Ake performs an emergency saucer separation to escape, and when they check their sensors they realize that the Venari Ral haven’t just set up a few mines outside Federation space, they’ve created an entire mine network around its borders, effectively cutting them off from whatever the enemy wants to do outside it.

I have to admit, that’s a serious cliffhanger.

“Rubincon” – (which by the way is a stupid title, but they do explain it)

Now the upside to everyone in the main cast coincidentally deciding to play Captain Kirk and disobey orders in order to do the sentimental thing is they all ended up outside the minefield and they’re in position to do something about it. With one crippled ship. This ship immediately gets boarded by Nus Braka (Paul Giamatti), who seizes both Ake and Anisha Mir, after which he orders his crew to destroy the bridge. Reno and The Doctor manage to save the Athena by merging him with the ship’s mainframe and creating a holographic illusion that the ship is indeed destroyed by enemy fire. (Which leads to a great title sequence.) Braka meanwhile goes back to the Starfleet Academy section of the ship, and, being the scene-chewing master villain that he is, sets up a televised “trial” in which Anisha is cast as the judge and jury who has to decide the fate of Ake and the Federation that (apparently) killed her son Caleb.

Meanwhile on the command ship, The Doctor’s language functions have been scrambled by his experience, but using pidgin he is able to give the kids his theory on how to disable the Omega-47 mines using the gluons that were used to bind the original material. But while Tarima and Caleb re-establish their mind meld to help Caleb find his Mom (and thus Braka) the matrix is going to take time to figure out, so Caleb buys some time by taking a shuttle to crash Braka’s show trial. And in front of everybody, he tells his Mom that he was just as hurt by what Ake did as Anisha was, but he learned from it. And being in Starfleet and making friends, he learned the hope that comes from being part of something bigger than oneself. And then Ake walks up and goes over something that Braka said to her to explain his hate of the Federation. He told his audience he grew up on a mining colony producing strontium, and he could see Federation vessels on flyover but never sending any rescue missions. His father improvised a weapon to shoot at the Feds knowing they’d respond, but rather than simply kill or arrest him, they rained “red hellfire” on the colony, and Nus was one of only 8 survivors. But Caleb remembers that Federation weapons are blue or green, and he also remembers that strontium is normally not used because it is extremely volatile and prone to explosions. Ake then deduces that Braka’s father blew up the colony with his own actions and the Federation had nothing to do with it. Ake tells her audience and the people in the atrium, “Is this the person you want to follow into the future? An angry child with his finger on the trigger, whose entire worldview is based on a lie?”

(Oh of course, we’re not getting political.)

And that causes Braka’s holo-attending audience to blip out of the feed, leaving him abandoned. He reaches for his trigger device, and it fails to work as Sam activates the matrix and disables the mine network. The Feds mass warp in to surround the Venari Ral, Braka is arrested, and we have a serious happy ending where Caleb is reunited with his Mom and is able to finally grow up and move on from his abandonment issues.

So what did I think of Season 1? Cause I’ve seen a lot of feedback saying it outright sucks. I get that. I said before it was often cutesy. Some people didn’t like how “YA” it is in catering to the attitudes and culture of teens and college kids, which is odd given that that is the focus of the show.
But let me put it this way: I was of the generation that saw the original Star Trek in reruns. My friend Don was just old enough to see the original episodes on NBC. And we came of age watching The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine. And the fact is, most of these shows, for that matter Babylon 5, did not start off as masterpieces. Some of the scripts were awkward. Painfully awkward. And things started off slow. We kept watching because we liked the characters or some individual episodes, but as series, the ’80s/90s Trek shows didn’t really get good until they each hit Season 3, so from that point on we waited for them to get good. (And in the case of Enterprise, kept on waiting.) Well, recently the “nuTrek” live action stuff has been Picard, which ran three seasons that were basically: meh, outright bad, and pretty good, and the concurrent Discovery, which in my opinion only had two seasons (3 and 5) that had more good than bad. Then you have the ongoing Strange New Worlds, which has been really good so far although people have bitched about Season 3.

Given all this, I think it’s actually pretty impressive that Star Trek: Starfleet Academy had as many good episodes as it did, and given that they moved somewhere in between the episodic approach of SNW’s first two seasons and the season arc approach of Discovery, the overall storyline worked well and led to a very effective conclusion. So that’s good news for Season 1. The bad news for Starfleet Academy is that the already-filmed Season 2 may be the last. That’s partially because each episode takes millions to produce, and partially because the production is in flux because Paramount is owned by an Ellison son and the family is in negotiations to buy Warners/Discovery/CNN in addition to their conquest of Paramount/CBS, because their liege lord Donald Trump thinks that the political/media complex is a game of MONOPOLY. And Strange New Worlds is all but wrapped up, and while they were floating the idea of getting Paul Wesley to play James Kirk in a “Star Trek: Year One”, that’s also up in the air. So after next year, there’s a pretty good chance that the Alex Kurtzman era of Trek will come to an end just as the Rick Berman era ended with Star Trek: Nemesis. And even that doesn’t mean THE end. All Hollywood does these days is recycle intellectual property. If they can bring back The Running Man, they can bring back Trek.

The Epstein Administration

This Wednesday former Trumpnik Joe Walsh (no, not that one) did a comment on the Wall Street Journal article confirming that the Justice Department (a name it was given before Orwell was born) not only concealed Epstein Files mentioning Donald Trump, it did so specifically at his behest. “Do you understand—and I’m an old guy—but do you understand that there would have been a day where this alone, this story alone, that the President of the United States ordered the Justice Department to keep his name hidden from the Epstein files, would have been enough to remove a President from office back in the day?”

Well, that’s because Trump is so media savvy. He is an idiot savant of manipulation. Emphasis on the idiot. His strategy for avoiding consequences for one scandal is to create an even bigger and better one, which has worked on our superficial media time and time again. “Never mind that teenager I raped. Lookit here at all these kids I killed!”

Speaking of killing kids: Among the targets of last weekend’s “precision strike” on the Islamic Republic of Iran was an all-girls school near Tehran, cause apparently Republicans hate educating women even more than Islamic fundamentalists do. We did at least kill the loathsome theocrat Ali Khameini, who was 86 years old and probably ready to die from I’ve Fallen And Can’t Get Up. But as a result you’ve got Iran firing rockets all over the region, hitting Israel, threatening Cyprus (which is an EU country), and hitting our troops at a Gulf base, killing at least four. So the Straits of Hormuz, essentially the coast of Iran, are a no-go zone for oil shipping, and we have yet to see how much damage that’s going to do to the world economy.

Our bear of very little brain broke open a hornet’s nest cause Israel and Saudi Arabia told him it would be full of tasty hunny.

The problem is, Iran is way too big, way too mountainous and way too populated to take on in a land invasion. For similar reasons, just hoping that Iran’s people will rise up and overthrow the theocrats is very unlikely. We supposedly had a list of people under Khameini that we were willing to deal with in the event of his death, but according to Trump, we were SO successful in killing that they’re all eliminated. “It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” Making it that much less likely that we’re going to have a negotiated settlement. And the pretext for all this was that the regime which has been an “imminent” threat to the US since … 1979 … was just “a week away” from getting a nuke. Which is contradicted by the point that we staged a strike on the hierarchy of the government and declared our intent to destroy them, and they haven’t used nukes yet. If they had them, they would use them, and if they can’t reach us they would hit Israel or Europe. And, incidentally, making it less likely that they will ever stop trying to get a nuke because they know that’s the only way the US and Israel will stop bombing them.

All this does is make the situation worse. Of course making everything worse is the reason that Donald Trump was sent to Earth by God Almighty, whom as we know, hates us all and wants us to suffer.

Not only that, the missiles Iran has been using are causing so much damage that we’re actually running out of air-defense missiles, since Iran builds for cheapass quantity over quality and we build the most expensive stuff possible to pad somebody’s business contract. It’s actually gotten to where our military asked Ukraine’s government for help with defense tech, since they have a similar policy of building as many cheap drones as possible to counter Russia’s attacks, which are usually made with Iran-designed Shahed missiles.

Gee, Your Majesty, Ukraine seems like they might be able to help us out here. I hope nothing bad happens to them!

Of course now I see all the Alex Jones and Marjorie Taylor types posting that they oppose this war and “this isn’t what we voted for.” Kids: THIS IS WHAT YOU VOTED FOR. You voted for Clownboy cause he was going to do all the things the other presidents didn’t have the guts to do. And why didn’t they? Why didn’t anybody start a global tariff war before? Why didn’t they kill the Iranian command when they’ve been a “perennial” threat for years? Well, cause up till now, the American people hadn’t elected a president who had a two-digit IQ before dementia and the emotional control of a five-year old with rabies.

And of course when a War Powers resolution came up for a vote in the Senate, it got shot down on Party Lines, with all 47 Democrats but John Fetterman voting for it and all Republicans but Rand Paul voting against it. So, in effect, Republicans, you DID vote for this and YOU CONTINUE to vote for this. (Meanwhile, Mike Johnson’s House shut down a Congressional bill to release all internal sexual misconduct reports.)

We are in something of a limbo. We are certainly not a constitutional republic, not in the Founders’ sense and not even in the modern Beltway sense. We are a democracy only in the pejorative sense that the most irrational and emotional mobs get to anoint their favorite reality TV demagogue a tyrant in order to dunk on the people they hate (which is everybody, ultimately including themselves). We are still a free country in the sense that we are free – for now – to say publicly that the demagogue is not only an incompetent but a career criminal who is, if not an actual pedophile, clearly covering up for people who were convicted of such acts.

What we are not free to do is DO anything about it.

Why is this? Partially because the Democratic Party is as useless as an entire store full of left shoes. Part of that is that they are obliged to be “liberal” in the sense of both “free healthcare and gender transitions for everyone” and the more classical sense of liberal, like “maybe we should be under the rule of law and the president shouldn’t just get to treat an entire nation like he treated E. Jean Carroll”. So they’re not as focused and united as a Trump Party that is all in on “make liberals cry, even if we lose our jobs from Trumponomics.” And Democrats are not an effective party due to a combination of controlled opposition, learned helplessness and the fact that they ARE the conservative party in government. They just don’t seem like the conservatives because their Founding Father is not James Madison or Alexander Hamilton but Franklin Roosevelt. But they want to preserve the system they inherited. And they want to maintain the perks of the system and their offices. To preserve that access they will make any compromise to keep a seat at the table. Even if it’s the kids’ table. And ironically, their fecklessness is a big part of why they couldn’t get anybody to vote for them in 2024, which is why the Republicans have the majority that they have in Congress.

(Those downballot results are why I don’t believe the theory that Republicans stole the presidential election, though by the time all this is over, the idea that Trump cheated to win is going to be the received wisdom with most of the country, probably including Republicans)

But the real issue is that Trump Party, because they’re the ones in charge. Trump would be over in a second if 67 Senators agreed with an impeachment resolution, and that’s never going to happen as long as at least one third of the Senate is in Trump’s cult. As we know from Clinton, party loyalty always trumps loyalty to the Constitution. But this goes a lot deeper. A lot of these guys are operating on blind faith, and a lot of them are operating on fear. After all, before January 6, they only suspected that any disloyalty to their Messiah would cause him to send a mob of mouth-breathers into the Capitol to lynch them. But now they know.

It goes back to a debate that historians often have as to whether some figure like Napoleon or Hitler is a “Great Man of History” who shapes the world or whether he is simply a product of material circumstances like everybody else. I don’t think it’s either-or. I think it’s both. Look at what happened to Soviet communism once Lenin died and Stalin took over.

With Hitler, for instance, would somebody else have been able to turn Germany into the racist warmongering power that it became? Probably not. German parties of both the Left and the Right were fighting for control with little result for most of the 1920s. But would Nazism have happened somewhere else? When you consider that the Nazis took much of their inspiration for anti-Semitism from Henry Ford, and that in Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler praised the United States for keeping its White population mostly pure and segregated while Spanish America had colonials and natives merge into a mestizo population, it’s clear that the US pioneered such institutional racism a long time before Germany did. So why did Nazism happen there and not here?

In large part because we won the “Great War” (World War I) and they lost. From that point the German republic had to rebuild from disarmament and humiliation. It was a lot easier to push the idea that some terrible “they” were the reason for the country’s misfortune. So when the Great Depression ruined everybody Germany turned to Hitler and Jew-hatred where America decided to challenge capitalism not from the paranoid Right but from the center-left position of Roosevelt. And certainly the way things wound up here says a lot about both the character of America and Roosevelt in particular.

It isn’t just the (L)eader or the movement. One requires the other. One doesn’t really develop without the other.

The movement here is the paranoid, persecution complex strain of anti-liberalism thrown in a burlap sack with the Evangelicals and the elites who don’t care one way or another about civil rights or the Constitution as long as they don’t have to deal with taxes and regulations. Some of these groups overlap, but not always. And the one thing they had in common was Donald Trump, because he is a shameless flim-flam man who could pretend to be all things to all customers. He could be the racist for David Duke and the Israel supporter for the Adelsons. He could tell the farmers he would bring prices down and then start a trade war for the donor class, telling us that tariffs are going to replace progressive income tax. The fact that he was both tactless and a vulgarian convinced a lot of people on the fence that he really wasn’t going to go all in on the Religious Right while he was also going to do the “hard” stuff that conventional politicians weren’t going to do.

If it doesn’t seem to make any sense, that’s because it doesn’t. But marks are not known for their common sense, and the last thing they want to do is admit they were conned. So even after Trump gave us all Trump Virus ™ lots of people went to the polls to re-elect their Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man cause he was going to fix all our problems with his magic wand and his Patented All-Purpose Miracle Snake Oil.

Again, that reflects on the character of the movement as well as the leader. But the problem with the con scheme is that you run out of people to con while you build the list of people who get mad that they were conned. They may not admit it publicly, but they may not vote for you anymore either. And that seems to be an issue.

It was pointed out that in the Texas US Senate primary this week, both Jasmine Crockett and James Talarico in the Democratic race each got more votes than the top two finishers in the Republican race, challenger Ken Paxton and incumbent Senator John Cornyn. Daily Kos pointed out “if the state held a jungle primary like in California and Louisiana—where all candidates run on the same primary ballot and the top-two finishers advance to the general election—then Republicans would have been shut out of November’s election.”

Kos also reported on Wednesday that Utah Republican Congressman Burgess Owens is retiring as is Republican US Senator from Montana Steve Daines. Earlier this week Montana Republican Congressman Ryan Zinke announced he was retiring after this term.

It’s similar to how former House Speaker Paul Ryan didn’t run for re-election midway in Trump’s first term. His seat was safe. But however much you may think you gain by selling your soul to Trump, it raises the question of how long you can tolerate being under his eye. Even now, with Cornyn and Paxton set for a runoff, the Clownboy Caligula is trying to bully the result telling the country that “soon” he’s going to endorse one or the other and then the other one had better get out of the way. It must be hell, being so dependent on a tyrant who is less dependable than a teenage girl on her first period.

Of course the other reason Ryan didn’t run is because he figured his party would lose the House majority and he would no longer be Speaker. That’s the same calculus a lot of these other guys are making, even when their seats are safe. There’s just one problem: Their seats are not safe.

The famously one-eyed Republican Congressman from TX-2, Dan Crenshaw, lost in the primary round to former state representative Steve Toth, apparently cause Crenshaw wasn’t right-wing enough. In a special election this week for state District 70, Democrat Alex Holladay beat Republican Bo Renshaw. This is Arkansas. A state so redneck they had to add an “Ark” to “Kansas.” And to reiterate, neither Paxton nor incumbent Senator Cornyn got as many primary votes as Jasmine Crockett, who lost to Talarico.

And that’s in Texas. The stereotypically right-wing state that has spent damn near two generations using the legislature and judiciary to create a Venezuela-style permanent majority.

Oh, AND, just as of Thursday, Slayer of Canines Kristi “Garden” Noem got fired, excuse me, transferred, from her post as Secretary of Homeland Security because her adultery, corruption and mismanagement got too embarrassing for the Trump regime. Which at this point would be a contradiction of reality. And God-Emperor Trump decided that her replacement would be Markwayne Mullin (BR.-Oklahoma) sitting Senator and former Imperial Space Marine. So while Mullin resumes the fight to purge the Imperium of Chaos Mutants illegals, that means we have yet another formerly safe seat that is now going to be contested, meaning the Republican campaign fundraisers are going to need to spend that much more money.

So the good news is that all we have to do is wait this regime out. Of course victory is not guaranteed. Again: God is real, and He hates us all. More to the point, some of the Trumpniks have brains and know exactly how unpopular they are, which is why in Texas they’ve been ginning the system for years, and why they had their little district redistribution scheme that the Roberts Court kindly let them pursue. Just this primary, the previous system where voters got to use any legal polling place was effectively scrapped when Republicans refused to use it, which obliged Democrats to only use the polling place they were registered for, which (coincidentally) caused a great deal of confusion. Democrats had a court extend voting in a couple of places, and Ken Paxton, who is (coincidentally) the Attorney General, appealed to the state Supreme Court to suspend that order. So that’s what we’re dealing with, and in the general election the state is actually in charge of monitoring the systems. So any appeals go to Ken Paxton. Nice work if you can get it.

Things trending as they are, though, Republicans may need to cheat this much because the non-Trumpnik part of the country is that fucking pissed and they’re going to get that much more pissed as gas prices (and related prices) skyrocket over Iran and Americans and Israelis get killed by Iranian rockets. What’s more important, the movement or the leader? It doesn’t matter. You can’t get the leader until 2028, but you can get the movement in November.

Kill the body, and the head will die.

And have you seen Trump’s head lately?