Impressions of the day:

     I watched a few minutes of the 1944 film Kismet, starring Marlene Dietrich and Ronald Colman.  It takes place when "Baghdad was new and shiny."  In Technicolor, the beautiful costumes look like the contents of a psychedelic clothing store.  Dietrich plays Jamilla, some kind of exotic love interest.  Colman and the other obviously European American actors and actresses, including cute Ann Blyth (who famously played Mildred Pierce's horrible daughter) in brown Arab girl body makeup, inhabit an artificial past in a film made when Iraq was Nazi Germany's ally, and if we had met Saddam Hussein, then five or six years old, we would've sympathized with his small innocence.  Kismet means fate, from the Arabic kismat, "division, portion, lot."  To my mind, it implies that Allah divides up what happens to people--this is yours, this is yours, do with your lot what can be done with it.  I don't know if that's what it means, but I guess, based on some education in religions.

     My friend Brian let me know last night in an e-mail that if one types "JebBush.com" the first thing popping up is "Make America Great Again!  Donald Trump for President."
     Death by a thousand cuts.
     Last night, Trump sat opposite Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, comporting himself as a simulacrum of a civilized human being.  Like with Kismet, I saw just a few minutes of the Town Hall, but Trump, often in suffocating close-ups, would listen patiently to his questioners, ordinary "folks," calling them by their Christian names.  I've noticed lately Trump's tendency to refer to unnamed friends, as in, "I have a friend in the dump truck business and he said--"  He does this so often I'm wondering how many friends he has.  At the most recent debate, he spoke volubly of his "hundreds of friends" who died in the World Trade Center destruction.  Hundreds?  Would he be willing to name just one?  I concede he probably knew some of the victims.  He probably also, like George W. Bush, knows people who knew Osama bin Laden.

     On C-Span, for more than a few minutes, I watched three women journalists on a panel, discussing their experiences covering the Guantanamo Bay detainee story.  It's a frustrating beat, due to military restrictions and the fact that journalists can't interview the detainees.  One of the journalists said that President Obama's desire to close Guantanamo Bay is really about relocation of prisoners to the United States.  America wants to be a fucking bastard when it comes to the issue of long-term incarceration of prisoners never charged with committing crimes in a war that will never end.

     Obama will travel to Cuba in March, the first U.S. president to go there since Calvin Coolidge made the trip in 1928.  Senator Rubio, running for president, said at the Town Hall last night he wouldn't go to Cuba, not as long as it's not a free country.  He calls it "an anti-American communist dictatorship."  Arguably, considering the frequency of cybercrime against the U.S., so is the People's Republic of China, a far more powerful nation than Cuba.  The Caribbean island also has opened itself up to America's overtures, a development long coming and predictable.  These new relations will include lucrative business deals that forward-thinking American corporate officials wouldn't want to give up if a retrograde idiot like Marco Rubio were to ever become president.
     I have mixed feelings about Cuba opening up to the United States, for it will get the bad with the good.

     The unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia makes me wonder what his mind-controlled bitch, Justice Clarence Thomas, is going to do, now that he has to think for himself.  Scalia was one of America's worst public figures.  A right wing Constitutional originalist who wouldn't embrace the vital idea that the Constitution evolves.  Obama's duty is to now nominate a replacement, but his opponents in Congress and on the campaign trail insist a new justice shouldn't be nominated until 2017.  Fuck you, Obama, in other words.  Their justification for this has no basis in legal history.  Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy during his final year in office.  Reagan, though, was an old white man.
     The prospect of a Trump Supreme Court nomination is, as yet, unimaginable--like so much associated with the man, until he acts and speaks, proving again and again his loathsome anti-charm as he seduces voters and news corporations.

                                                                             Vic Neptune