I actually had a couple of other contenders for my Gratitude Monday post yesterday. One was the African elephant that Texas GOPs trotted out over the weekend for some convention they were holding.
The elephant peed on the venue floor. And—let me say this—evidently
elephants have capacious bladders.
It was magnificent.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Yesterday I cast my early vote in the April special election here in the Old Dominion. The only thing on the ballot is a measure to redraw the state’s congressional districts. The new lines leave Republicans with only one “safe” seat, a strip along the south-western border of the state.
This is largely in response to Texas redrawing its
districts last year to dilute Democratic votes to send more RWNJs to the House.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Rs are real het up about this—they
went to court to cancel the election but a judge ruled it can go ahead. (They did
the same when California redrew its districts so that Republican safe zones lie
largely in the eastern desert and east-of-the-Sierras, along with lizards and
wood rot.)
Here’s a sample:
Opposing voices:
But I say they can piss up a rope. They fucked around; every time they do that they forget about the second part of that expression.
Here’s the find out.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Today is Election Day for several states, including the Commonwealth of Virginia. All the offices up for grabs are state and local, including governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. These positions are currently held by Republicans, who’ve done their best to return us to those halcyon days of a century ago, when certain people knew their places and did not dare to question their betters.
Governor Fleecebrains is banned from
re-election due to term limits, but his lieutenant governor is running for his
job and his AG is trying to repeat. I cast
my ballot three weeks ago, and I understand that—at
least in Fairfax County—there’s been a big turnout for early voting.
Still—I was pleased to see this reminder on the info sign on the W&OD Trail yesterday morning.
And this morning—more reminders:
Voting is what makes
it all happen and it’s your ticket to a democratic government.
©2025 Bas Bleu
I voted last Tuesday. This was early voting in an election for Virginia officeholders: governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and delegates. We’ve had four years of Governor Fleecevest and his toadies trying to move us back to the good old days when Richmond was the capital of the Confederacy, so we’re ready for a change.
Youngkin can’t run for re-election because of term limits,
but the current lieutenant governor is making her bid to move up, along with
the incumbent AG and some new mook (who evidently has a penchant for SoMe porn selfies) for the number two. This was their sign at
the polling place:
(Winsome is the LG’s first name; I assume “Earle-Sears” was
deemed too long to fit on a standard-sized sign. I really get a kick out of
their sense of irony with the completely fictional “good thing”.)
The right and the duty to cast my vote in all elections is my
gratitude today. As a historian, I have always been mindful (although perhaps
quite often in the back-of-mind) that there are tens of millions of people in
the world today who do not have even a modest say in their government. This
year I’m particularly and painfully aware how tenuous this right is in our own
country as members of one of the two major political parties do their best to
suppress, restrict and pervert the practice of free and open elections.
I got notification from the Commonwealth a while back that
I could vote by mail if I wanted to. That’s a turnaround—as recently as 20
years ago you had to show up on Election Day if you wanted to cast your ballot.
The only way you could vote early was to swear that you’d be out of the county
on the day—you actually had to fill out a form declaring the precise nature of
the impediment. Now they have voting for about six weeks before an election.
And vote-by-mail? Dang.
I decided against that, though, because one Republican
prong of voter suppression is to screech that mailed ballots are de facto
fraudulent ballots, and I want my goddamn vote counted. I don’t trust a
Republican-run state to not throw out mailed ballots for one cockamamy reason
or another. So I went in person.
The polling station was quite busy—staffed by volunteers
who make things work efficiently. Even with the line, I was out in maybe eight
minutes, thanking all the workers. Eight minutes to have my say in who’s going
to run the Commonwealth come January; that’s an amazing ROI.
I’m so grateful to have had this privilege my entire adult
life, but particularly now when I don’t know whether it’ll still be in place a
year from now. I’m grateful for everyone who has a part in it—the candidates,
the elections staff, the volunteers, the people who’ve been sending me
postcards.
I’m grateful that I did not have to pay a “poll tax” or
pass a “civics test” (which would have been triggered by skin color) at the
precinct. Nor did I walk a gauntlet of armed “watchers” (either government or
self-appointed) or face any obstacle due to perceived otherness, and that all I
had to do—at some point—was register, prove who I am and where I live to be
able to vote in election after election.
(I do have to show ID, which was not a requirement in
California or Washington, and that still gets up my nose. But I let it slide.)
Really—this is a tremendous thing and we should all give thanks for it, as well as work to ensure its continuation.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Folksinger and songwriter Malvina Reynolds wrote “What Have They Done to the Rain?” in 1962. She’d been active in anti-nuclear protests for a long time, and the song was her response to the dangers of above-ground testing (of a weapon designed to cause maximum destruction of life).
Given that we’re just two days past the 80th anniversary of the first use of an atomic bomb and that the Kleptocrat has in recent days hauled out his nuclear willie to wave wildly in an attempt to distract from the clamor over his connection to Jeffrey Epstein (he’s ordered the deployment of two submarines armed with nuclear missiles to “appropriate places” WRT Russia; his interim head of NASA is announcing that building a nuclear reactor on the moon is now a priority; on Tuesday TACOman was spotted wandering around the roof of the White House, gesticulating wildly and answered a question regarding what he was building there by yelling, “Nuclear missiles”), it seems appropriate to have “What Have They Done to the Rain?” today as a reminder that it is not a good thing to have a septuagenarian malevolent narcissist exhibiting clear signs of dementia in charge of the nuclear codes.
Here's Marianne Faithfull singing it.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Big, big gratitude today for the millions of people in the US (and around the world) who peacefully marched in the No Kings protests on Saturday. There were gatherings in around 2000 communities across the nation, in numbers even the completely Klepto-cowed media could not ignore.
In Minnesota, following the assassination of one Democratic lawmaker and her husband, and the attempted assassination of another, protest leaders called off the planned march, but people still showed up at the state capitol in their thousands.
Estimates for the flagship march in Philadelphia put the
number of marchers at 80,000.
My hometown of Pasadena put on a parade of 20,000.
LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, 60 cities in
Texas, Boston, NYC, West Palm Beach—all across the country, in Red and Blue
states and cities—people flooded the streets to declare their repugnance for
this administration and its enablers. Even on the streets of Washington, D.C.,
which pointedly had not scheduled a protest (because of Kleptocrat threats),
120,000 people showed up—without incident.
(Although the evening before, Capitol Police arrested about
60 veterans who’d parked themselves on the Supreme Court steps to protest cuts
to Veterans Administration services while hundreds of millions are being spent
on invading US cities and a pointless parade. This action provided visuals that
encapsulate the ethos of the regime: two cops handcuffing an 87-year-old vet
who uses a walker for ambulation.)
Except for the trigger-happy LA cops firing "less-than-lethal" rounds at a non-NK demonstration and a
couple of incidents involving people driving their cars into crowds of
protesters, the events of the day were peaceful, belying the Kleptocrat’s
rationale for nationalizing the militia to put down “insurrection” and “rebellion”
last week. It was delicious.
Meanwhile, his long-term wet-dream of a big military parade
that would put Macron’s Bastille Day effort in the shade and show his besties
Kim and Putin that he’s just as strong as them (and, NGL, one of the drivers
for “No Kings”), turned out to be…quite the damp squib. Putatively the
celebration of the US Army’s 250th anniversary, TACOman was ecstatic
that the day was also his 79th birthday, and what tinpot dictator
doesn’t love a lot of military hardware and big, manly men in uniforms marching
past—all for him?
The weather forecast had predicted the possibility of
thunderstorms, which would have probably ended with cancellation—rain okay, but
lightning is problematic for crowds. I confess I was praying for thunder,
lightning, tornados, frogs, locusts and possibly even a very localized
earthquake, but what we got was even better.
So much better.
Because it turns out that the big parade was pathetic in
every possible way. The systems set up to manage access and egress were amateur,
resulting in a huge bottleneck at one security point while another was utterly
empty. Fortunately, tho, not all that many people showed up. Maybe 20,000? A
far cry from the 250,000 confidently predicted. Those who actually showed up
were markedly listless; I suppose it could be the delta between what they’d
been led to expect and what they got. Turns out that Americans don’t get all
that revved up by military hardware and marching soldiers in cammies who don’t
appear to have mastered the basics of drill.
(Look—this is not representative on the US Army; we all
know they deliver the goods. But honestly—they’re going to be living this
fiasco down for generations, and it’s, sadly, a self-inflicted wound.)
If you think I’m exaggerating, watch this video; you can hear the tank creaking because the onlookers are silent. No cheers, no oohs. If the videographer had panned to the audience, you’d probably see them playing Candy Crush on their phones.
It was so bad that even TACO and his inner circle were dazed. I mean—look at these faces:
The contrast between the joy, energy and purpose of the No Kings rallies everywhere and this limp, ideas-above-its-station, amateur-hour narcissistic exercise is just stunning. And I’m grateful for it all.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Today is the day the suckers and losers—which is to say, everyone in the lower income brackets, who cannot engage in sheltering income offshore or writing off everything as a deduction—file and pay federal taxes.
I, personally, do not object to being taxed; I consider it
an entry fee for the life I’ve enjoyed in this country. I’m not wild about some
of the things my government chooses to spend its revenue on, but I figure it
mostly balances in the end. The construction and maintenance of physical and
social infrastructure, providing healthcare and education, a well-trained and
equipped military, foreign aid programs that support our strategic national
security interests, disaster relief here and abroad: if I have to subsidize the
naming of a community center in Alabama for some asshole ex-football coach in
exchange for these things, I’ll suck it up.
But I cannot tell you how much I resent paying taxes to
this administration—I hated doing it the first time around, but now I’m waiting
until the absolute last fucking minute to send my payment. Because not only is
the Kleptocrat finding ways to skim off public funds that even mafiosi haven’t
though of, but he, Musk and the Republicans are destroying enormous parts of
the government, in addition to ensuring that the billionaire boys club contributes
even less than it has in the past (and violating data privacy laws to enable
future lawlessness).
So my entry for National Poetry Month today is from Charles Bukowski, 20th Century German-American poet, rebel, novelist and subject of FBI surveillance (on account of his writing in an underground LA newspaper. The MAGA crowd would despise him.
ignore all possible concepts and
possibilities ---
ignore Beethoven, the spider, the damnation of Faust ---
just make it, babe, make it:
a house a car a belly full of beans
pay your taxes
fuck
and if you can't fuck
copulate.
make money but don't work too
hard --- make somebody else pay to
make it --- and
don't smoke too much but drink enough to
relax, and
stay off the streets
wipe your ass real good
use a lot of toilet paper
it's bad manners to let people know you shit or
could smell like it
if you weren't
careful
©2025 Bas Bleu
Can’t have National Poetry Month without e.e. cummings. And today I’m thinking of how he might describe our current leadership. Greedy, corrupt, cruel, criminal; this is what we're dealing with. And yep—he’s got us covered.
a salesman is an it that stinks Excuse
Me whether it’s president of the you were
say
or a jennelman name misder finger isn’t
important whether it’s millions of other punks
or just a handful absolutely doesn’t
matter and whether it’s in lonjewray
or shrouds is immaterial it stinks
but whether it please itself or someone
else
makes no more difference than if it sells
hate condoms education snakeoil vac
uumcleaners terror strawberries democ
ra(caveat emptor)cy superfluous hair
or Think We’ve Met subhuman rights Before
* * * * * * * *
Oh, indeed. Indeed we have met them.
And then there’s this one, which describes
Li'l Donnie Two-scoops, his aides, his entire Cabinet and every GOPig in
Congress:
a politician is an arse upon
which everyone has sat except a man
©2025 Bas Bleu
It’s been another week in kakistocracy hell, hasn’t it? Since Pillsbury Spock announced that he’s sending SpaceX engineers in to “fix” the FAA’s systems (including air traffic control), we’ve had two incidents (one in Toronto, one in Arizona). No one’s disputing the need to upgrade a system that was built in the last century, but the notion that a pod of spotty-faced brochachos can swarm in, survey a complex amalgamation of dependencies programmed in COBOL for mainframes and hawk up a “solution” in a week is risible.
Especially ones from SpaceX, a company whose rocket
launches more often end up in a fireball than orbit.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of federal workers in dozens of agencies across the country (including—kaching—the FAA!) have received termination notices via the electronic equivalent of scratchings on a cocktail napkin. You’re out, turn in your badge and laptop, take your crap; you have an hour. (No, I am not making that last bit up.) No further information, no process. No legality, actually.
This means that the work these people were doing was halted
suddenly, little to no chance of a handoff, so…there it sits. If they were managing
a contract or responding to a citizen’s inquiry, well, obviously the Muskrats
decided that they were superfluous to requirements so all the contractor or the
citizen will get is bounced emails and a phone that rings but is never
answered.
Yay.
So today’s earworm is “Which Side Are You On?”, a union
song written in 1931 by Florence Reece, activist wife of a United Mine Workers
organizer in Harlan County, Ky. The union was locked in a fight against mine
owners, who used every tool in their box, including intimidation by the local
sheriff. After her home was raided by deputies one night looking for her
husband, Reece sat down and wrote this, which has been a union anthem ever
since.
You can find plenty of recordings of Pete Seeger, God rest him, singing this, quite militant versions. But I’m giving you Natalie Merchant, because it’s more reflective. This is a time for everyone in this country to decide which side to take. Think about it.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Graham Nash’s “Chicago” has been in my head recently. He wrote it in response to the trial of the Chicago 7 (originally 8), but it seems so apt for what I’m seeing now. The emboldening of White racists, abandoning any kind of accountability for law enforcement thuggery, obliteration of regulations and dismissal of any pretense of the rule of law. And we can look forward to a whole lot more of binding and gagging.
Man—good times, eh?
Here’s Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young singing it. Crank up the volume.
©2025 Bas Bleu
As we approach the inauguration of a convicted felon, who—but for a slight majority of those who actually voted last year—would currently be either in court defending his criminal attempt to overturn the 2020 election, or in the process of appealing his conviction for that crime, I’ve been thinking a lot about Aesop’s fable about the frogs and their kings.
Here's the gist:
There was a pond with frogs who thought
very highly of themselves. Very important frogs in what was most likely the
most important pond in the universe. (Well—so, that made them the most
important frogs in the universe, innit?) But they had no ruler worthy of this amazingness,
so they petitioned Zeus to send them a king.
“O, mighty Zeus—give us a king to rule
over us! Send us someone befitting our status in the world.”
The king of the gods then dropped a log in
the pond, making a huge splash. Literally. It frightened the frogs, but after a
while some of them noticed that King Log wasn’t engaging in kingly activities,
or even, truth be told, any activities at all. Frogs started hopping on the
king and mocking him.
“Yah—proper king you are, I don’t
think!” they probably said.
Well, after a while, the frog chorus
appealed to Zeus again—“This isn’t the kind of king we deserve! We’re very
important frogs; send us a real king, who’ll do king things!”
And Zeus sent them a stork. Naturally, the
stork started scarfing down frogs, because that’s what storks do.
The frogs were terrorized as their numbers
were decimated. Those who escaped wept piteously and petitioned Zeus again to
take away this terrible monster.
But Zeus replied, “Nah—you should have
realized when you were well off instead of getting ideas above your station. You got what you asked for. Also—there’s this word, “hubris”. You
should look it up.”
I can see how some of the frogs in this
American pond might consider Joe Biden a do-nothing King Log. In contrast to
the Kleptocrat, Biden is muted; his decency and competence guided us through
the chaos left by the last Klepto administration. He controlled the pandemic;
he brought down inflation and enacted policies that built up business, spawned
jobs and invested in infrastructure. But he’s not a flashy guy and he didn’t
shit-talk immigrants, allies, neighbors or people who disagreed with him. Republicans
hopped all over him, deriding him as useless and unworthy to be our king.
The MAGA frogs, they want flash—they’re
very important frogs who haven’t been properly appreciated! And they want a
powerful king who’s going to hurt people, bigly! So they elected King Stork,
who is now completely unfettered by virtue of the willingness of legislators, the
federal judiciary and big corporations to prostrate themselves at his feet and
let him do as he pleases.
There is going to be such a slaughter of
the frogs as this country has never seen. In little clumps and great big
swaths, he will gobble them down without bothering to chew. And they will not
understand what has happened, and they’ll blame it on someone else.
Problem is, salamanders, newts,
dragonflies and other pond creatures are going to go into the maw, too.
Zeus is laughing his ass off.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Sorry, world—we fucked up. Big time.
Sorry, Ukraine; from the depths of my heart.
LGBQT+, I have no words.
Immigrants, my deepest apologies.
Economies—well, I guess you’re on your own. Better buckle
up.
Billionaires and autocrats: you got what you wanted. I hope
you choke on it.
©2024 Bas Bleu
Today I am trying to have no thoughts. The American people are at a crossroad and they’re choosing which way this country will proceed. All the doomscrolling and fretting in the world will not affect that.
So I’m focusing on beautiful things.
Iacta alea est.
©2024 Bas Bleu
NGL, my anxiety level is looking at Mercury in the rearview mirror and I’m terrified of what happens to the world if the Kleptocrat wins the election tomorrow. It is not hyperbole to state that putting an insane autocrat, backed up by authoritarian White Christian Nationalists at the head of the most powerful nation on earth—the strongest economy, the most effective military—spells disaster not only for the United States, but for everyone else. (As Sancho Panza says, “Whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.”)
Even if he loses, the prospect of all the crap we’ll have
to plough through for months just wears me out. I am so tired of his shit.
But today is Gratitude Monday, so I’m focusing on what’s
good.
We’ve had a good run—248 years of democracy. Even with the
blip from 1861 to 1865, that’s not nothing.
I note that we were founded on violence—colonization,
rebellion, expansion across the continent, human chattel slavery, racism,
systematic exploitation of labor—and yet we became a beacon to the world of
representative government, rule of law, and social and economic possibilities.
That’s not nothing.
We made education available for free (if you don’t count
taxes) to everyone and built some of the best universities in the world, where
astonishing advances in science were made. Our technologies have pioneered everything
from space exploration to crop yields, such that other nations devote whole
divisions to attempting to steal them. That’s not nothing.
We do stumble on a lot of the social and economic fronts. I
recognize that as a White, middle class woman I’ve mostly sat in the catbird seat.
But only in my own lifetime has the policy of “separate but equal” been
declared null, have women been given the right to open bank accounts without a
male relative approving and has a Black man been elected to the presidency. We
have a long way to go—especially with the legislative and judicial pushback of
the past eight years—but that’s still not nothing.
It shows we are conscious of our actions, and we can
improve. (Or go the other direction.)
The innate violence and societal worship of guns to the
contrary notwithstanding, we’ve mostly celebrated our holidays joyfully, with
homemade parades, homemade floats, barbecues and fireworks. And until 2021, we
enjoyed peaceful transfer of power from president to president. And that’s not
nothing.
So I’m grateful for how well we’ve done so far and the
willingness of most to keep moving forward. I’m grateful that I can cast my
vote as I chose, up and down the ballot—my mother was born before the
Nineteenth Amendment gave women that right. I’m grateful for everyone who’s
made this shining city upon a hill possible for nearly 250 years.
And I hope for another 250.
©2024 Bas Bleu
It's All Saints Day and we’re at the final Friday before the election. I confess that my anxiety level has been at Defcon4 for about the past month. There seems to be nothing—no act of indecency, no whackadoodle promise, no vulgarity—that will sway the Kleptocrat’s followers from the descent into insanity, so now it’s up to the non-cultists to set this train onto the track of reasonable, democratic government instead of the express to fascist autocracy that he’s openly declared he’ll install.
We the people have to get this done, despite our opponents
firebombing ballot dropboxes, culling voter rolls days before the election (we’ll
remember this, SCOTUS, as we do all the other rulings), engaging in voter intimidation
at the polling places and refusing to let DOJ monitors observe the process. If
they’re that terrified now, we have to give them the biggest scare ever: a
landslide victory for Democrats all up and down the ballot.
They'll still scream RIGGED and try to steal it, but it'll be much harder for them to succeed.
So my earworm today is “People Have the Power”, by Patti Smith. Crank up the volume.
©2024 Bas Bleu
The past week we’ve seen a lot more information come out about the Kleptocrat’s love of fascism. One of the primary sources is a piece in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg that lays out TFG’s fascination with all things Hitler—particularly his generals. (The guy who dodged military service refused to believe that eventually—when they started losing that war—those generals tried three times to kill the tyrant. In his Weltanshauung there were all these Prussians in really spiffy uniforms carrying out whatever crackbrained idea Hitler came up with. Go figure.)
Republicans up
and down the line are scrambling to show solidarity as they edge away from the
revelations. But, honestly—this is not really news. Even if the Kleptocrat’s
former Chief of Staff, former Secretary of Defense (both Marine Corps generals) and
former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Army general) are finally talking
about it, if you didn’t already know this, you should not be operating heavy
equipment.
Anyway, I
thought we should have something appropriate for the anti-fascism fight that we
have on our hands as we round the corner to 5 November. So here’s Woody
Guthrie, singing “All You Fascists (Gonna Lose). Guthrie famously put stickers
on his guitars proclaiming “This machine kills fascists.”
It’s not great music, but it gets the job done. Which is what we have to do now.
©2024 Bas Bleu
With just two more Fridays
between us and the election, this seems like a good piece to share with you. Stevie Nicks and friends, "The Lighthouse".
If you have not
yet voted, make a plan and execute on it.
If you have
voted, thank you.
©2024 Bas Bleu
Okay, look—I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but this has been knocking in my head since the Kiffness first uploaded it the day after the presidential debate. That’s two and a half weeks and it’s more than I can bear. It’s more relentless than “It’s a Small World.” I have to share it and dissipate its power over me.
The Kiffness
(stage name of David Scott) is a South African musician and parody artist. He
normally focuses on South African politics, but his YouTube channel also seems
to have right many songs about or by cats. So the Kleptocrat’s absolutely false
and utterly ridiculous geshrei about immigrants killing and eating pets in Ohio
must have been a godsend for him.
In his piece, the
Kiffness deftly melded the Kleptocrat—in his Cassandra-like desperation, trying
to convince a room of television cameras and sane people of the immigrant lie—with
his perfect musical takedown.
“Eating
the Cats” has become quite the global sensation. Earlier this week the Kiffness
was performing in Berlin. He tried to get the audience to focus on others in
his oeuvre, but they demanded it. It’ll probably be hanging around his neck for
a while.
Just like it’s rattling in my head.
I wasn’t going to comment on the attempted assassination of Cadet Bonespurs in July; I’m not really big on conspiracy theories. We actually did land on the moon—more than once, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and the hundreds of children and staff who have been murdered in mass shootings in the past two decades are not crisis actors.
But I have questions
about the shooting at Butler, Penn., on 13 July. Well—I have an array of facts
that I cannot seem to align.
When the news came
across social media that someone had shot at the Kleptocrat, I was dismayed.
Like most decent people, I don’t want him dead and martyred; I want him alive
to lose the election, spend months in courts fighting the numerous cases
brought against him and then serve his well-deserved prison time.
I also thought, “Well,
what’s up, Secret Service? This does not seem good.”
But when video,
photos and witness accounts started streaming, my spidey senses tingled. “Staged”
was the word that came to mind, even though that seemed very unlikely, unless
the USSS was in on it—and that seemed even less likely.
So I’m not going
to propose a theory; I’m just going to posit some thoughts both for and against
theatre.
Against:
The Kleptocrat is
a physical and moral coward. I flat out cannot see him agreeing to any stunt
for any purpose that involves someone firing live ammo anywhere in his vicinity.
We’ve seen the video of him dodging an eagle on his desk and fleeing a bird
that got into his rally. The guy dodged the Vietnam draft five times and has
not acquired any courage in the decades since.
I don’t think he’d
even agree to the notion of someone firing blanks because he might remember the
incident on the set of Rust and all the tsuris that brought Alec
Baldwin. We’ve never seen him firing a weapon of any type. He shills for the
NRA, but he’s not comfortable around guns. At all.
For:
(Yes, that’s all I’ve
got against.)
The Kleptocrat is
a coward, as noted above. Were he to believe he was actually being fired on, he
would collapse, fill his diaper and start crying. USSS would have to drag his whimpering
ass off the stage.
Seemed like it
took a while for his USSS detail to get on the stage and haul his ass down
behind the podium. Time is relative, of course, and I am not an expert. But I’ve
seen clips of real assassination attempts on Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan;
this was different. It was almost as though…they might have thought it wasn’t
urgent?
The alleged wound
Cadet Bonespurs suffered: meh. I get it—if a piece of shattered glass
Teleprompter or even the very edge of the bullet fired by the shooter nicked
his ear, there might not be a big hole, but you’d expect something he'd show off—especially out
of someone like him. There’d be close-up photos, which he would turn into NFTs
and hawk for $99 per.
We have no medical records or information from the ER doctors who treated him. Yeah—HIPAA; fair enough. But you'd think if the ER report indicated some kind of wound, he'd be waving the papers all over Fox. What they did release was a letter from ex-White House disgraced and demoted physician Ronny “Candy Man” Jackson. He saw Klepto later in the day and described “a 2 cm wide wound that extended down to the cartilaginous surface of the ear. There was initially significant bleeding, followed by marked swelling of the entire upper ear.”
Huh.
Klepto played
golf the next day and a photo of his right ear showed no indication of either a
1.75”-wide wound or marked swelling. However, by the time he showed up at the
Republican National Convention a few days later, his ear was covered by a white
mattress to signal his suffering. Once the convention ended, the mattress came
off and he was back on the golf course.
(Look—I get it:
there were actual bullets being fired at the man. You don’t need to be hit for
it to be an assassination attempt. But if you weren’t hit, why all the
performative nonsense? And if it was performative nonsense, I do not believe he
has the cognitive wherewithal to do this on the fly; he would have had to have
been coached ahead of time.)
Despite all signs
that there was at least one shooter getting off shots, the USSS detail allowed
the Kleptocrat to stand up above their protective huddle, adjust his hair and
stick his fist up in the air to shout, “Fight, fight, fight.” This is
completely counter to protocol—for an example of how it’s supposed to be done,
take a look at the video of how Reagan’s team reacted after he was shot by John
Hinkley. They tackled him and then practically threw him into the limo. No
letting head/chest above their body shields. The performance at Butler was just
bizarre. But the photo was great for the campaign; very “Raising the Flag at Mount
Suribachi”. And now I have to vomit in my mouth.
The Kleptocrat has
been remarkably quiet about that event—he mentioned it at the beginning of his
RNC speech, but then moved quickly on to other grievances and lies. In the past
week, he’d started to bring it up more, as a way to turn conversations away
from his disastrous debate performance against Kamala Harris. But given his
proclivities, I’d have thought that if he had really felt in danger you wouldn’t
be able to shut him up about how everyone’s out to get him. This really does seem
out of character.
Moreover, in
addition to not banging on about it, he’s been remarkably calm about it. Back
in the last century, I worked in an office near LAX that had a parking garage
for employees. One morning one of my office mates came in to recount an armed
man trying to mug people going to their cars the previous evening. “He has a gun,”
someone shouted. Jan and several other people ducked behind parked cars until
the guy jacked someone’s vehicle and crashed through the exit barrier to
escape.
I wasn’t even part
of that incident but for weeks afterward I was jittery. Any normal human can’t
help being visibly affected after being faced with violent crime—just the reality
that it’s part of our world is unsettling. But the Kleptocrat? He screams and
spits for weeks when someone laughs at him; do you really think that if
he believed someone were shooting at him he wouldn’t be freaky as hell?
Neutral:
The rounds fired
in his direction on 13 July were indeed live; one person was killed and two
wounded—actual wounds requiring real treatment. You might think this would be
an argument against the incident being staged, but that would be to ignore the
Kleptocrat’s narcissism. Any collateral damage is okay with him if it serves
his purpose. People hurt, people killed—actually, that helps prop up the narrative
of him as the Chosen One going in harm’s way on behalf of his MAGA. The lives
impacted and ended are immaterial to him. It’s just the cost of doing business,
which—as per usual—someone else pays.
The performance of
USSS and local law enforcement on the ground that day was, uh, suboptimal. I
mean—it was actually like the Keystone Kops. A guy with a long rifle gets into
the audience area, climbs up on a building, is pointed out to security and cops
by many attendees; the building he’s on is actually full of local cops. And…he
still gets off several shots before he is terminated by USSS snipers.
(I wonder if
Bonespurs rethought his demands on 6 January 2021 that his security team remove
the magnetometers that were screening the crowd for weapons. He didn’t like the
fact that it was keeping some people out—“They’re not going to hurt me,”
he whined. “Let them in.” Nah—no rethinking.)
Investigators have
found remarkably little information about the shooter—two months out and there’s
still no report on any motive for the 21-year-old registered Republican. That
latter fact may be one reason why Republicans aren’t foaming at the mouth,
although Senate Rs are planning an investigation to gin up turmoil in the
run-up to the election.
So that’s what I’ve
got: extraordinarily out-of-protocol performance by USSS, no documented sign of
wounding, most likely coached performative reaction, out-of-character silence
about it until recently. Versus him being a complete coward who’s extremely
unlikely to be involved in anything that involves firearms and live ammo.
I dunno.
Yes—we had a
second incident involving a Republican with a military-grade weapon that he
bought legally purportedly attempting to take out the Kleptocrat. This one is
harder to put in the “assassination” box, though.
First of all—saying it’s unusual for someone to be at a golf club in Florida with a long rifle is kind of silly. Given that state’s laws and politicians in the bag for the NRA, it’s not unusual. It’s actually mandatory. If you're going to start taking away White guys' guns before they play golf, the Kleptocrat's going to lose a lot of greens fees; maybe even members.
Second—there was
no press release that TFG would be golfing that day and the perp hung out at
the edge of the course for 12 hours. Now, I get it—it would be a good bet that
on any day when the weather is good, the Kleptocrat would be on the nearest of
his courses, cheating at golf and collecting cart fees from his protective
detail. But we’re not talking KGB assassin material here.
Third—Republicans are
getting shirty about people having guns taking pops at their leader. But not
worried enough to do anything about stopping nutjobs from getting military-grade
weapons and shooting up the landscape. Some things just never change.
Fourth—assuming actual
assassination attempts, Melania’s going to have to consider doing the job
herself if she wants it done.
©2024 Bas Bleu
