The Boy Who Could Do No Wrong

     Donald Trump, himself an accused rapist, picked for the Supreme Court an accused rapist, Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  This symmetry suggests the President's boasts about picking "the right people, the best, the incredible, the fantastic," applies also to his many failures.  Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, Omarosa Manigault-Newman, all of them exuberantly described by Trump as "great, incredible people," have resigned or been fired by a lifelong businessman priding himself in his decision-making abilities, which include, presumably, the skill of selecting the best people for various jobs.  Except that Trump, being Trump, is a terrible judge of character.

     Brett Kavanaugh now faces a week-long FBI investigation into whether or not he, at seventeen, sexually assaulted a fifteen year old girl in 1982.  The girl grew up to be Doctor of Psychology Christine Blasey Ford at Palo Alto University in California.  At a party during the summer of 1982, she claims, convincingly, that an acquaintance of hers, drunken Brett Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge, shoved her onto a bed.  Kavanaugh then, according to Ford, got on top of her, groped her private parts, ground his crotch against her, tried to undress her, put his hand over her mouth to prevent her from screaming.  Judge joined in, there was a tussle and Ford managed to escape from the inebriated pair.  She hid in a bathroom until she heard her attackers go downstairs.  She made her way outside and wasn't followed.

     She confided this story after many years to a therapist and to her husband.  She contacted her Senator, Dianne Feinstein, giving the latter a letter detailing the assault.  This happened when Kavanaugh was on President Trump's short list for the next Supreme Court Justice.  Ford, concerned that her attacker may serve on the Supreme Court, wished at first to remain anonymous, but investigative reporters, once the letter went national, found out her identity and confronted her with the information.  Her life, turned upside down like Kavanaugh's, entered the bizarre alternate reality of politically based celebrity.  

     She received death threats from people lacking the ability to consider the possibility that someone Donald Trump might admire enough to nominate to the Supreme Court might be a criminal.

     Ambitious Kavanaugh, seeking fame, became infamous, but also, to the Right Wing, a martyr.  This became quite evident when the eleven Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the body that will decide the outcome of his appointment, used their time in "questioning" Kavanaugh mostly praising him and apologizing for all the inconveniences and spiritually crushing difficulties he's had to endure.  He's a victim, the idea goes.  

     "Dr. Ford's a victim, you're a victim."

     Satan's Sock Puppet Senator Ted Cruz stated, like many of his colleagues, that Dr. Ford's victimization had to do with "the last few weeks," during which she's become a household name, has received death threats, has had her life exposed for all to see, an excruciating and grueling process Judge Kavanaugh can, of course, relate to.  Kavanaugh said in his opening remarks that "my life and that of my family have been ruined by this!"  My inclusion of the exclamation point is accurate.  Most of his opening remarks were characterized by vehemence, anger, self-pity, shrillness, aggressiveness, open contempt for the Committee's Democratic Senators.  He blamed, among others, Bill and Hillary Clinton, suggesting a left-wing conspiracy (not his words but that's what he meant) was responsible for Dr. Ford's allegations.  

     As much as I loathe Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, it's preposterous that they or anyone within the Democratic establishment orchestrated this mess, especially when considering Dr. Ford's "compelling" (Trump's own word) testimony.  The real conspiracy lies with the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, led by its Chairman Chuck Grassley, the man who in 2009 coined the term, "Death Panels" to speak out against the not yet passed Obamacare.  Grassley, who, as he listened to Dr. Ford's emotional and terrifying testimony, resembled a lizard looking down its nose at something to eat.

     It's obvious what was going on.  Orrin Hatch, Grassley, John Cornyn, Lindsay Graham, fossils of the GOP establishment, against women's choices regarding their own bodies, the old boys' network, the lingering sickness of rich old creeps who won't surrender power, plus their younger allies, willing to overlook the credible accusations against their desired Supreme Court candidate just so they can see the Court swing decisively rightward--it's a disgrace and every woman who's been violated in America knows it.  These proceedings triggered millions of women, causing a massive wave of personal stories and support for Dr. Ford.  Something shifted in America yesterday.  As Kavanaugh's belligerence betrayed his dry drunk personality, his tone, something so important to the Washington establishment, sounded unbefitting a Supreme Court Justice.  I hold in disdain Justices like Samuel Alito but I've never heard him raise his voice and I'll go so far as to say that he wouldn't even get upset if you spilled a drink on his couch.  

     Kavanaugh, though, with his life and name getting "dragged through the mud," seemed like a man holding onto a cliffside by his fingernails.  It's rumored that Trump wanted him belligerent, "fighting."  Donald Trump, Jr., during the hearing, tweeted that "I like [Kavanaugh's] tone."  Young Trump, who likes to kill large mammals in Africa and poses for victory shots with the carcasses of lifeless beautiful animals, is a Kavanaugh fan.  He likes his Supreme Court Justices pissed.  This one sentence in his tweet suggests Donald Trump, Jr.'s unfitness for society.

     Leave it to a novelist, a student of human nature in other words, to make one of the best observations.  Stephen King, alarmed especially by Dr. Ford's account of Brett Kavanaugh's and Mark Judge's laughter as they violated her, tweeted:

 

     "Ask yourself who has more motivation for lying: the professor who's had her whole life turned upside down, or the judge who stands to land a lifetime job at a quarter-mill a year, plus [benefits] the ordinary Joe can only dream about?"

     The Republican Eleven decided to allow their brains to not accept reality, to ignore the obvious.  One of them even said that while he believes that Dr. Ford was a sexual assault victim, he didn't believe it was Kavanaugh who did it.  He had to twist his mind into a plate of spaghetti to make his argument achieve mere speciousness, instead of commit himself to intellectual honesty.  

     Senator Jeff Flake, Republican from Arizona, finally, today at the last minute, stopped Kavanaugh from being a sure thing when he requested a one week FBI investigation into the matter, a process the Democrats have been asking for to no avail.  Since one Senator can postpone the process, Grassley had to concede, so the FBI will interview and work on the case, tracking down witnesses, bringing in the elusive Mark Judge, we can hope, for questioning.  Kavanaugh may yet be the next Justice.  After all, America has become increasingly insane, but this process that looked like it was all wrapped up turns out to involve, of all people, a Republican Senator who may actually have a conscience; plus, he's not up for re-election.

                                                                               Vic Neptune

                                        

     The First Fungus

     Donald Trump should not have fucked Stormy Daniels.  Apart from the trouble it's caused in his marriage to Melania Trump, who's living proof that marrying for money may be a dumb thing to do, the then game show host's one-nighter with the pornstar in 2006 returns to embarrass him at a time of numerous other pressures in his life.
     There's the ongoing Mueller investigation; Paul Manafort has pled guilty to a string of crimes having nothing to do with Russiagate; Bob Woodward's book, Fear, has produced a desired result--making Trump reportedly distrust everyone around him, except for family members.  His pick for Supreme Court Justice, Brett Kavanaugh, has been accused of attempted rape at a party when he was seventeen.  Hurricane Florence, though it lessened to a storm later on, wreaked the usual watery havoc on the Carolinas.  Trump went there today "to survey the damage."  He assured survivors that "you're going to be all right," that "we're going to fix this."
     Puerto Rico and Houston, meanwhile, are still dealing with the devastation caused by their Trump administration era hurricanes.  A new study of Puerto Rico's death toll sets it at nearly 3,000 (approximately the same as 9/11).  Trump disputes this, blames the estimate on Democrats wanting him to look bad.

     "When I left the island," Trump tweeted, "AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths."

     Is he ashamed to be this stupid?  I have no idea.  Does he not realize that the low death toll was an estimate relevant only to the very beginning of the reckoning of how many people died?  Isn't this something that everybody who isn't a complete fucking moron would realize--that the death toll was bound to rise, especially given conditions on the island, with many communities cut off, meaning, no reports of casualties coming to news media right away?
     Trump shaking hands and giving reassurances to people who've lost their homes in North Carolina doesn't inspire confidence in my government's ability to handle natural disasters.  Trump's administration is a disaster.  He gripes about his former attorney, Michael Cohen, now in deep shit with the law.  He complains about Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from any investigation relating to Trump's presidential campaign.  He's pissed at Gary Cohn for stealing papers off his desk.  Kavanaugh might be a sexual assaulter.  All of these men are people Trump has had the utmost confidence in, calling them "great, fantastic, incredible, wonderful people."  His ability to hire good and trustworthy underlings is, evidently, suspect.
     Michael Avenatti, Stormy Daniels' lawyer and cable news pundit, a darling of the Democratic establishment/anti-Trump #Resistance people who also push the Russiagate conspiracy theory, wants to run for president in 2020.  He claims he's not interested in running if Trump and Pence aren't running in 2020.  He thus sets himself firmly against Trump, a one-issue presidential candidate.  This is so much the case that Avenatti also claims that the next president doesn't have to be the best candidate, but should be the one most capable of defeating Trump.  Hmm.
     That leaves a lot of room for some really shitty politicians and non-politicians being regarded by Avenatti as worthy of the presidency.  Avenatti's convinced he can take on Trump.  His experience as an attorney will make him such a battler in the arena that Trump will stagger from the bruises.
     In my view, putting Avenatti against Trump would be no choice at all--I wouldn't vote for either of those egotists.  A reality game show host became president in 2016.  A man who became famous for being a pornstar's lawyer wants to run the country.  Avenatti, like Trump, is a reality TV phenomenon with no political experience.  He made a speaking trip to Iowa.  He'll probably compete for the nomination with the likes of Joe Biden and John Kerry.  Kerry, who, when interviewed in connection with his new book, can't speak like a normal person but sounds like the dry boring multi-millionaire lawyer that he is.
     I skimmed a piece Hillary Clinton wrote in The Atlantic, something connected to the trade paperback reprint of her book What Happened.  She outlined why Trump is so dangerous.  She writes:

     "On the day after [the election], in my concession speech, I said, 'We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.'  I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.  They were not."

     We owed the close-minded Donald Trump an open mind, for fuck's sake?  Hillary Clinton actually thought it possible that Trump would be a good president?  I never thought that for a second; consequently, Trump hasn't disappointed me, I knew he would suck.  I knew well in advance of 2016 that Donald Trump is a degenerate; that becoming the most powerful man in the world wouldn't change him for the better, but would actually accelerate his descent into a moral sewer occupied also by lying power-hogs like Hillary Clinton.
     What shall we do with a psychopathic megalomaniac billionaire?  Give him power!  What a great idea, America!
     Our unlovable tendency to vote for utterly inappropriate candidates for high office may give us President Avenatti, and then we will see how this egomaniacal attorney who signs his correspondence with the pretentious, "Esquire," fulfills the Democratic establishment's continuing goal to enrich itself at the expense of ordinary Americans, the surveillance state intact and strengthened further with new technologies, the war continuing its debasement of everything good this country stands for.
     Trump is not the worst we can do.  Edward Snowden said a few years ago that the machinery for a totalitarian state in the U.S. is in place.  It's a matter of the "right" group of people coming along to implement it.  This future group, if it does manifest, may very well be Democrats offering the apparently benign solution of doing away with "threats to our democracy" like Trump, by overthrowing him from within a la Russiagate, or some other method.  Whoever does this, if it happens, will not be doing it for the American people, certainly not for democracy.  Being democratic by subverting democracy is an oxymoron.  Intelligence agencies opposed to Trump are not our friends, either.
     Hillary Clinton in her essay spoke out against Trump's "assault on the rule of law," made an endorsement of the idea that Russia "attacked" our electoral process, called Trump's corruption "breathtaking," forgetting her role in facilitating huge donations to the Clinton Global Initiative when she was Secretary of State. Trump "undermines national unity."  Here, I guess, she's criticizing the fractious personality that for some reason didn't bother her when she and Bill were friends with him in the "old days" of the last decade.
     A dark spot missing from her anti-Trump essay and thoughts is the war.  She doesn't mention it even once.  This means she has no problem with Trump's war-making.  She also has no trouble with Trump's pick of the war criminal and torturer Gina Haspel for CIA Director.  She doesn't give a shit that the U.S. is meddling in Venezuela and Nicaragua, seeking to overthrow two foreign governments   put into place by vote of their peoples, i.e. democratically.  Hillary Clinton doesn't give a shit about democracy except as it applies to her own career.  She'll probably run for president in 2020.  She just won't go away.
     Another person who won't go away is Stormy Daniels.  She has a book coming out in October.  An excerpt receiving the most attention pertains, of course, to her night twelve years ago with Mr. Trump.

     "I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart...It may have been the least impressive sex I'd ever had, but clearly, he didn't share that opinion."

     "He knows he has an unusual penis," Daniels continues.  "It has a huge mushroom head.  Like a toadstool..."

     We know that Thomas Jefferson fucked at least one of his slaves, but we don't know what his cock looked like, so this is a great advance in presidential history.

                                                                               Vic Neptune

   


 
     








   

     

     Watch Out, He's a Dirty Fighter

     Gary Cohn, former Director of the National Economic Council under President Trump, received a severance package of approximately $285 million from Goldman Sachs before joining the Executive Branch as an unelected government official.  Bob Woodward, of Watergate scandal reporting fame, has a new book out, Fear, detailing life and work-hell inside the Trump White House.  A much-reported story from that book has Cohn saving a South Korea-U.S. trade agreement by removing a paper from Trump's desk, preventing the President from signing an order ending the deal.  Cohn claimed, too, that he could do the same thing if Trump would try to end the North American Free Trade Agreement.
     On the POW comedy show, Hogan's Heroes, Colonel Hogan and his men often managed to hoodwink Camp Commandant Colonel Klink, making him sign papers without understanding their contents.  In M*A*S*H, Corporal "Radar" O'Reilly did the same with his commanding officer.
     Has the business of the White House become a sitcom?
     Gary Cohn and other Executive Branch officials featured in Woodward's book appear to have a low opinion of President Trump.  Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly called his boss "an idiot."  Secretary of Defense Mattis ignored Trump's tirade about assassinating Bashar al-Assad.  In some respects, it's good that not all of Trump's whims are being heeded.  The so-called "Resistance," which ironically consists of the Democratic establishment (hardly a Progressive group and a gang of Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Military Industrial Complex-connected individuals as well) and Intelligence Community rogues seeking Trump's removal from office, but also many Hollywood celebrities, celebrates news that Trump is being fucked with by his own people in the West Wing.
     Trump, regarded by the "Left" as something close to a tyrant, is apparently being messed with by unelected officials, as evidenced by Cohn's behavior, in the name of keeping him in line; yet, their methods are hardly democratic.  Trump, whether you're for him or not, is the legitimate President of the United States.  To have a group of power players in the White House acting against the President is dangerous, for we are supposed to trust money-pigs like Gary Cohn to look out for our best interests.  I don't trust Trump, but I also don't trust the Intelligence Community seeking to ruin him.
     Uncritical and stupid commentary by mainstream news media journalists and pundits suggests that they, like the so-called "adults in the room" at the White House who've taken it upon themselves to run the Executive Branch (if it really has gone that far), are hellbent on the removal of Donald Trump and the installment of the sane and steady Mike Pence, who, in my view, is as bad or worse than Trump.  Pence doesn't tweet, he's polite, but he's also a fundamentalist Christian loon.  He's anti-abortion to the extreme.  It's true that Trump's latest Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, is also anti-abortion, suggesting that Trump feels the same way (although I think he doesn't really care one way or the other).  Kavanaugh, however, is likely to be the next Supreme Court Justice, in spite of having worked for Bush's Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez at a time when lawyers in the Bush Adminstration conjured up the torture programs used by the U.S. military and CIA.  If he had something to do with the "enhanced interrogation techniques" thing, Kavanaugh is set to become America's first Supreme Court Justice who's also a war criminal.  Democrats, given their nature these past many years, will probably cave, Kavanaugh will wear a black robe.
     This touches on how Donald Trump really does serve the interests of Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, the Oil Industry, Polluting industries, in short, Capitalism.  For his service to these concerns, he won't lose his job before 2021.  He may lose his next election, but every rich politician benefits from his tax bill.  Gary Cohn, despite his theft of important government documents from the President's desk (is that a crime?  If if it isn't, why not?) has done fine with Trump's view of taxes.  Cohn is the same man who expressed his displeasure when Trump, right after the neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville last year, said there was "blame on both sides," equating Nazis with protestors of fascism.  Cohn later said he wanted to resign right then, but didn't, waiting evidently until the tax bill became law.  Cohn is a Jew--he used his religion as a way of getting others to sympathize with his plight as an advisor to a racist President.  I suggest that Gary Cohn doesn't give a fuck about Jews, Nazis, people killed in America's wars, the poor, but he does care about money.
     Someone from inside the White House wrote an anonymous op-ed published in the New York Times.  This person claims that Trump is being prevented from following his destructive impulses, that this is not an example of the Deep State, but of "the Steady State."  The op-ed's author praised Trump's noteworthy accomplishments, such as the tax bill and his beefing up of the military budget.  Whoever wrote this piece is as much of a pile of shit as Donald Trump.  This person loves our wars, loves helping out millionaires and billionaires at the expense of the good of the country.  This person also boasted of being part of the "Resistance," which now consists of White House insiders committing acts of duplicity against the President of the United States.  Whoever this person is, journalist Glenn Greenwald called him or her a coward, and I agree.
     All of this anti-Trump hysteria will help him get re-elected in 2020.  If I'm wrong about that I'll admit my error in judgment.

                                                                            Vic Neptune