Independence Day and the Notion of Pride

We can do better than this.

Curmie has posted here not infrequently on the 4th of July, usually with some commentary on the significance of Independence Day.  One of his personal favorites of the genre comes from 2020, when he riffed on the opening sequence of the Aaron Sorkin series “The Newsroom.”  Our hero, Will McEvoy (Jeff Daniels) is on a three-person panel in some sort of academic setting.  They are asked by “Jenny,” a sophomore at whatever university is hosting the event, to “say what makes America the greatest country in the world.” 

After the other two panelists respond with slogans—“diversity and opportunity” and “freedom and freedom, so let’s keep it that way”—McEvoy responds, “The New York Jets.”  Even a Jets fan like Curmie laughed at the absurdity of that one.  (At least back when that show was filmed, the Jets didn’t completely suck, which they have for most of Curmie’s adult life.) After another evasion, the camera cuts to a woman near the back of the auditorium.  We don’t know who she is yet, but it’s MacKenzie McHale, McEvoy’s ex-girlfriend and soon to be his new executive producer.  She holds up a sign that says, “It’s not.”  She then flips the sign over and writes something else: “But it can be.”

There are 11 seconds of silence, at least in terms of diegetic sound.  There’s another roundabout response, and the moderator demands “a human moment.”  The camera cuts back to McHale, holding the “It’s not” sign.  A moment later, McEvoy blurts out, “It’s not the greatest country in the world, professor.  That’s my answer.”  The follow-up goes on for three minutes.  You can check out the link above or read the transcript, but there are two things Curmie wants to highlight.  There’s the litany of rankings, addressed to “sorority girl”:

... there is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that we’re the greatest country in the world. We’re seventh in literacy, twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real, and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.

There are a couple of exaggerations in there, but no more than in the average political speech.  More importantly, this isn’t an indictment of America, simply a warning about allowing patriotism to morph into jingoism and what might now be called hallucinatory rhetoric.  

The other thing to point out is that the sign is both an insistence on truth and a symbol of hope.  “But it can be” is a rallying cry, a call to arms (in the metaphorical sense, at least).  

At the risk of sounding like a Monty Python routine, Curmie adds a third point: in the opening moments of a left-leaning series that aired during the Obama administration, the central character yearns for the days when “We sure used to be” the greatest country in the world.  True, the litany of attributes—“We waged wars on poverty, not poor people,” for example—bespeaks a liberal mindset.  But the desire to return to the glories of the past sure sounds a lot like a desire to “Make America Great Again.”

How sadly ironic, then, that the slogan is most associated with an octogenarian toddler with no impulse control, a pathological inability to accept responsibility for his own actions, and a track record that includes stealing from a charity, sexual assault, and wholesale financial shenanigans ranging from garden variety grift to de facto selling pardons to people who really are “the worst of the worst.”  All the things that any normal President from either party would have orchestrated for the country’s 250th anniversary celebration are gone, replaced by ultra-partisan posturing and a level of ego-centrism that would make Narcissus himself blush. 

Plus, of course, there’s the destruction of the East Wing of the White House, the paving over of the Rose Garden, the vulgar and frankly embarrassing UFC extravaganza that destroyed even more of the White House lawn, the totally botched reflecting pool project, that ridiculous “state fair” farce… Curmie would go on, but he’s trying to keep this essay shorter than the Mahābhārata.

None of what Curmie is discussing here comes under the heading of actual policy decisions.  Curmie has disagreed with virtually everything this POTUS has done, but he had plenty of reservations about the policies of a lot of 47’s predecessors, too.  Curmie grants, however, that all of those guys were at least trying to do the best thing for the country, however much he would have preferred a different approach.  Not so, Dear Leader.  He has never cared about anyone or anything but himself and perhaps a small circle of sycophantic admirers or fellow billionaire hucksters.  If saying any of this makes Curmie “deranged,” then so fucking be it. 

Curmie is angry that a celebration he’d been looking forward to—let’s face it, I’m not going to be around for #300—has been derailed by the hubristic and incompetent machinations of the worst President in the history of the country.  Yes, angry.  Curmie is not a nationalist, but he does think he qualifies as a patriot.  Having spent at least three months in each of three other countries, he’s still going to consider himself lucky to be from the US.  That would be, of course the real US, the one that countless World Cup fans have encountered to their amazement: the place where foreigners are welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the locals; where neighbors help each other out; where the question isn’t whether to give to charities, but to which ones. 

This is not the America inhabited by Donald Trump or Stephen Miller or Mike Johnson.  But it’s where most of us live, irrespective of where (or if) we worship, who our favorite basketball team is, or even who we voted for last time out.  There are those who want to take that America away from us, and they think they have defeated us, or soon will.  Curmie responds (with a tip of the hat to Johnny Carson): Not so fast, Semiquincentennial-Breath.  We are not our government.  The real America is out there, embodied in people like Major Jason Watson, like Leen Hijaz, like the citizens of Curmie’s much-beloved former hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, whose embrace of the Algerian World Cup team using their city as a home base made international headlines.

But that takes us to another point.  Curmie is proud of Lawrence, not because of the notoriety, but because they, my former neighbors, did something right.  Curmie was legitimately sad that Algerian team lost their elimination round game on the west coast Thursday night.  He may not be in Lawrence anymore, but Les Fennecs were his team, too (after the US). 

That notion of pride is intriguing, however.  Another video clip came across Curmie’s path this week.  It was of the late, great, George Carlin talking about, among other things, his problem with the slogan “proud to be an American.”  He suggests that “pride should be reserved for something you achieve or attain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth…. You wouldn’t say I’m proud to be 5’11”.  I’m proud to have a predisposition for colon cancer…. If you’re happy with it, that’s fine: put that on your car.”

Speaking of pride: the first Pride events happened in the early 1970s, but Curmie wasn’t aware of them, or especially of their designation as “Pride” until later: after, in fact, the release of the Tom Robinson Band’s “Power in the Darkness” LP, which featured a song called “Sing If You’re Glad to Be Gay.”  Chances are, you’ve never heard it, Gentle Reader, because the TRB never had much influence west of the Atlantic; Curmie was working on his Master’s in England when the song came out in 1978.  Whether the TRB consciously rejected the notion of “pride,” or whether they’d never heard it (as Curmie hadn’t at the time), the result was to center on being “glad” or “happy” rather than “proud” of one’s sexual orientation, which of course is another of those accidents of birth that Carlin was talking about.

Pride in one’s own accomplishments is perfectly reasonable, of course, at least in moderation.  That extends, in Curmie’s world, to pride in the achievements of his former students, because in some small way he helped prepare them for that success.  And there is the crux.  George Carlin notwithstanding, pride in the good things that one’s nation has done makes some sense.  (So too, of course, is embarrassment at its transgressions.)  Indeed, taking pride in literally anyone’s honest attainments makes some sense; we’re all fellow travelers here, after all.  But that emotion is usually only a variation on happiness.  Curmie is happy the Knicks won the NBA title this year, but he’s not proud of them except to the extent that they manifested admirable qualities along the way: teamwork, refusal to give up, etc.  A player who simply has a good jump shot: cause for celebration, but not for pride.

For pride to truly manifest, however, there needs to be a personal connection.  Curmie is proud of the two former students who are off to grad school in the fall, but their perhaps equally qualified friends who never took my classes, not so much.  It would be nice to actually be proud to be an American.  The solution is obvious, and it isn’t capitulation.  We, all of us, need to become personally invested in creating a nation worthy of our pride.  That will take resolve, work, perhaps even sacrifice.  But we must, we can, we will, do this.  Roll up your sleeves, Gentle Reader.  We’ve got work to do.

There Are Illegalities and Illegalities

The recent attacks on Iran raise multiple concerns: strategic, political, and legal.  Curmie thinks the raids were stupid and sincerely hopes they’ll prove as disastrous for the Trump regime as they already have for the nation’s standing as a promoter of peace.  But what he really wants to talk about is that last item: were they legal?

There are two independent facets to that question.  The first is the one that’s been noised about by a good share of the left-leaning press: that Trump lacked Congressional approval and that the assault was therefore illegal.  Curmie thinks so, but there’s a little wiggle room.  It all boils down to what the War Powers Act actually was intended to do… and to what it says, which may be different things.  Neither Congress nor SCOTUS has seen fit to clarify the terms.

The obvious intent was to allow the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to respond to exigencies: imminent threats, that sort of thing.  The Trump administration can’t seem to get its story straight about what prompted this particular action, which is why Curmie is more than a little suspicious that these shenanigans aren’t entirely on the up-and-up.  Did we go along with this because Israel was going to do it, anyway, as Marco Rubio first argued?  Or was it something else, since he subsequently denied saying what he’s on tape saying?  Was it to stop Iran’s nuclear program, the one that was supposedly “obliterated” last year?  Or to respond to an Iranian threat that’s presumably been imminent for <checks notes> 47 years?  Curmie raises a skeptical eyebrow.

Whatever squishiness there might be in the wording of the War Powers Act, Curmie is pretty much convinced that yes, this was illegal.  The response from Trumpian apologists has been to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy because they were perfectly willing to allow President Obama to bomb Libya back in 2011, casually omitting the fact the two incidents are pretty much parallel: a POTUS of one party uses what may or may not be legitimate authority to execute a military mission, and the other party starts screaming about illegality, even unconstitutionality.  Are the Democrats being two-faced?  Of course they are!  Are the Republicans just as bad?  Yep.

But Curmie hears the GOP sycophants wondering “where was all this liberal concern for restricting the power of the presidency in such cases when Obama was in office?”  Right here, is where.  Here’s the central paragraph of what Curmie wrote 15 years ago:

The administration’s case, one which ignored the objections of Jeh C. Johnson, the Pentagon general counsel, and of Caroline D. Krass, the acting head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, is founded on three independent premises, none of which stand up to much scrutiny. The first is that an offensive mission involving drone attacks, sustained bombing, and occasional casualties doesn’t really constitute “hostilities.” The second is that, despite the fact that participation in a NATO-run, UN-sanctioned, mission to protect civilians has morphed into an aggressive attack on Colonel Qaddafi’s compound, the military and geo-political missions have not merged. The third is the apparent assertion that since the mission has taken longer than expected (and that’s never happened before, right?), we should really only be looking at how long the campaign was supposed to last. Add to that the extreme rarity of any White House over-riding the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the Obama administration has a mess on its hands… or perhaps on its shoes, because they’ve really stepped in something.

Moving on to the second part of the critique of present-day hostilities.  Let’s talk about bombing that elementary school in Minab, killing scores of little girls aged 7-12, which according to the best information we have, was perpetrated by American forces.  This is about as clear a violation of international law, not to mention common decency, as it’s possible to imagine.  It is unmistakably a war crime.  Yes, Gentle Reader, mistakes happen: “fog of war” and all that.  Bullshit.  At best, this was a manifestation of breathtaking recklessness and incompetence.  At worst, it was such an intentional infliction of pain and suffering on young girls that you’d think it was ordered by one of those pervs whose name keeps appearing in the Epstein files.  Oh… wait…

What’s the excuse?  Why aren’t the so-called journalists asking how such an atrocity can happen?  Were we just lobbing bombs into populated areas with no regard for what or who might be on the receiving end?  Was the reported death of Ayatollah Khameini therefore just blind luck?  After all, if you can target a particular area to attack, you can similarly identify a different area not to attack.  Or did some idiot like Pete Hegseth decide to demonstrate his manliness by asserting his absolute authority over a bunch of elementary schoolers.  They might have been in math class, learning about Arabic numerals, after all.  Another explanation is that this was a “precise targeting”: the school building used to be an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base, you see.  Ya might wanna check that shit out next time...

When the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by American forces in 1999, President Clinton apologized to the Chinese President Jiang Zemin promptly and profusely, claiming that the incident was accidental.  Given that there was no rational reason to attack the embassy, Clinton was probably telling the truth, even if the Chinese tried to spin the story to their geopolitical advantage.  There’s no reason to bomb an elementary school in Iran in 2026, either.  The difference between the events is two-fold.  First, Clinton, unlike Trump, was willing to admit to a mistake, and even to take responsibility for something that is extremely unlikely to have been under his direct control.  Secondly, whereas Bill Clinton is hardly an exemplar of truth-telling, his sanity has never been in question.

There are reports that Iran was negotiating with the US when the attacks occurred.  Perhaps that’s true; perhaps it’s leftie spin (or worse).  But there is no question that the logistics of the mission, from choosing targets to strategies for removing Americans from sites likely to be struck by the inevitable retaliation (“get on a commercial plane at your own expense at an airport that’s closed” isn’t terribly helpful advice), were an absolute disaster.  That’s what happens when you choose cabinet members based on sycophancy rather than relevant experience, intelligence, or… you know… competence.

We can hope that the Iranian people will soon be better off, that the military exercise will achieve its purported goal.  It’s not likely, given the history of other attempts at regime change, but it’s not impossible.  It is also possible that new evidence will emerge that will exonerate the US military, but there is something of the boy who cried “wolf” at play here.  What reasonably intelligent person would believe anything this administration says after its serial prevarications about ICE operations?  

Indeed, the two things that will linger in Curmie’s mind for a very long time indeed are the loss of any remaining remnant of American honor or integrity in international relations… and the nagging feeling that de facto Commander-in-Chief of the US military is Bibi Netanyahu.

“First, They Came for…”

Two facts about Curmie:

1. He lived in Kansas for seven years, working on his doctorate and staying on for another year when a full-time teaching gig didn’t materialize.  At the time, the state legislature was more conservative than Curmie would have preferred, but it wasn’t controlled by wackadoodles. 

2. He’s friends with (at least) six trans people, one of whom is also his nephew.  None of them, thankfully, live in Kansas.

Yes, it’s true that the lead story of the past few days is yet another reckless act by the Sociopath-in-Chief.  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that killing little girls is a rather bizarre (and ineffective) means of trying to divert attention away from credible evidence that one has raped little girls.  But that was an act of desperation perpetrated by a single person (well, and his sycophantic minions) and whose victims committed the grievous ethical failing of being born in a different country.  What happened this week in Kansas was, in its own way, even worse.

No, there won’t be any Kansans buried under the rubble of their elementary school, but the level of bigotry disguised as piety and of quite intentional cruelty perpetrated for its own sake by the Kansas legislature is startling, even when compared to other examples of GOP malevolence towards their own constituents.  If you haven’t been following the story, Gentle Reader, Kansas Republicans overrode a gubernatorial veto and essentially disenfranchised trans voters, while causing the maximum amount of disruption in their lives in other ways, as well.  This was made easier for the bigots by circumventing the standard opportunity for the public to weigh in on an issue: a tactic called “gut and go,” by which the contents of a bill are “replaced” by, well, whatever the hell some jackass wants, thereby bypassing the public.  It’s now the “House Substitute for Senate Bill 244.”

A letter dated February 23 informed trans people that as of February 26, their state-issued driver’s licenses would no longer be valid because such identification, according to K.S.A. 77-207, must show the sex of the individual at birth.  Moreover, “the Legislature did not provide a grace period for updating credentials.  This means that once the law is officially enacted, your current credential will be invalid immediately, and you may be subject to additional penalties if you are operating a vehicle without a valid credential.”  Oh, bloody hell.

But wait!  That’s not all!  Recipients of that letter are “directed to surrender [their] current credential to the Kansas Division of Vehicles.”  A “new credential reflecting the gender identification consistent with statutory requirements” would then be issued.  OK, all this is annoying enough simply at face value.  But the real devil, and here Curmie really does mean the physical manifestation of evil, is in the details.

Where to begin?  First off, who cares whether that one letter on a license is an M or an F, since both are acceptable?  The best argument is that it helps identify the driver.  More than a photo does?  Anyway, the more important thing is that things change over time.  Curmie used to have a Kansas driver’s license.  It listed his hair color as brown and his weight at 155 pounds.  Both of those descriptions were accurate 30-something years ago when Curmie moved to Kansas.  Today, however, while there are still a few brown strands in there, the hair is grey (well, maybe “silver” if someone wanted to get on my good side) and the weight was about three inches of waist size ago.  More to the point, those things can change over just the duration of the license.  Other folks change their names: they get married or divorced, for example.  The world changes, except in what passes for a brain in a Republican pol, and we ought to try to keep up as best we can.

There are some areas in which reasonable people can disagree.  There are legitimate fairness arguments that trans women ought not to be playing women’s sports, for example.  Perhaps, although Curmie knows of not a single case in which a trans woman, or even someone pretending to be a trans woman, harassed cis women in a rest room, there’s a scintilla of honest, paranoia-free, argumentation in favor of bathroom bills.  (Needless to say, Curmie disagrees with that perspective, but at least there’s the potential for a rationale.)

But what the hell has “sex at birth” to do with ability to operate a car?  Men can drive; women can drive.  So can murderers, rapists, thieves… even (gasp!) “illegal aliens,” all legally.  Oh, and pedophiles, too; mustn’t forget them.  So even if being trans were to be regarded as unlawful (alas, there have been attempts, including in Curmie’s adopted state of Texas, to make it so), that shouldn’t prevent someone from having a driver’s license.  And there’s certainly nothing about being trans that translates (Curmie apologizes; he couldn’t resist) into being a danger on the road.  People who are, like those with multiple DUI convictions, can still have a driver’s license.  But trans folks who legally had their “M” changed to an “F” or vice versa: nope.

Oh, and if you’re trans, you need a new ID, even if your old one does show your sex at birth.  Andrea Ellis legally changed her name in December, then updated her driver’s license in January.  But, she “saw the writing on the wall after listening to [Attorney General] Kobach’s testimony for H.B. 2426” (the bill that would eventually morph into SB 244 and its demon spawn).  She therefore didn’t change the gender marker on her license, but got the same letter as other transgendered folks.  Yes, she had to change out her old license for one that was literally identical.  She’s trans, after all.

Then we add on the timing.  Apparently these letters were sent by mail no sooner than a Monday, and recipients had only until Wednesday to follow the dictates, as the law would go into effect on Thursday.  Of course, the morons on SCOTUS have decided that it’s OK for the postal service to intentionally not deliver mail, so that potentially complicates things even more.  Chances are very good that some people didn’t even know about what they were required to do until it was literally too late.  What if they were on vacation, for example?  

And then they were expected to turn in their old “credential.”  In person, of course, and you know damned well there will be no extended hours.  So that means taking time off work on short notice, finding a way to the office because you aren’t allowed to drive there, waiting in line, paying $46 (according to one source) for a new ID (poll tax, anyone?), and apparently waiting up to 45 days for a new license (N.B., Curmie isn’t completely convinced about the legitimacy of this claim), without which you’re not allowed to drive: not to work, not to the grocery store, not to visit a friend or relative in the hospital (or hospice), nowhere.

It is, of course, self-evident that new licenses could be created with considerably more alacrity than that—the technology exists to do so in no more than a few minutes—but the powers-that-be will slow-walk the process as much as they can, for no other reason than that, for them, cruelty is fun.  There is no rationality for this law, just bigotry and hatred.  Oh, and they’re handing out $1000 bounties for today’s variation on narcs, i.e., those who report folks they decide are peeing in the wrong restroom.  For a group that thinks “communists” (anyone to the left of Jesse Helms, in other words) are worse than, say, pedophiles, these asswipes sure do like to emulate the Stasi.

Well, actually, the disenfranchisement might be the rationale, as it obviously is for the SAVE Act: identify a group likely to oppose the Reich-wing zealots, and make it harder for them to vote.  That’s the argument raised by real-life Friend of Curmie Will Averill, in a Substack post that also suggests that GOP pols are particularly interested in “Bein’ Hicks and Checkin’ Dicks.”  Will doesn’t say this outright, but Curmie will: this obsession with examining specific body parts is perilously close to the prurient if not the perverse.  But that’s OK, you see, because they’re “protecting our women and children.”  <Sigh.>

There is no lack of posturing on this issue.  Lyft, for example hastened to the rescue, promising half-price rides… which are limited to $10 and expire early next week, long before there’s any reasonable solution.  That’s not help; that’s a scammy marketing campaign. 

The ACLU is filing suit on behalf of two transgendered Kansans, and it appears that there might be some other litigants, as well.  That’s a start, but the suit names only folks like the state Attorney General and Director of Vehicles, not the legislators who are directly responsible for this travesty.  Curmie’s no lawyer, so maybe that’s the appropriate tack, but it still seems insufficient.

Curmie is not, as a rule, given to “thin edge of the wedge” arguments, but with various federal agencies not merely admitting, but bragging about, compiling files on, say, people photographing ICE abuses with the goal of labeling such folks as domestic terrorists, the thought that one violation of Constitutional rights might lead to another becomes foregrounded.  And that famous passage by Martin Niemöller referenced in the title of this piece floats to the surface.

One thing is clear.  Even if we were to buy the spurious argument that trans women in particular are just pretending to be something they’re not, such a subterfuge would pale in qualitative significance in comparison to these… erm… individuals of Oedipal predilections masquerading as Christians.  Curmie has pondered whether every single pol who voted for this heinous bill should, in a just universe, be horse-whipped or sent to the stocks for a week to be pelted with rotten vegetables. 

¿Por Qué No Los Dos?

Well, One of Them Is Excusable

<Sigh.>

Curmie, as you might well imagine, Gentle Reader, sees a lot of political cartoons, memes, and brief commentary from (generally) like-minded folks.  Every once in a while, he sees something so absurd on its face that it couldn’t possibly be true.  Alas, it turns out to be true more often the not.  Curmie, however, is skeptical by nature, and he really does try to avoid re-posting stuff that isn’t true. 

This week, there were two stories that caught Curmie’s eye in this regard: an alleged quotation from Ted Cruz and a video supposedly posted to Donald Trump’s Truth Social account.  Both were in the “this couldn’t be true… could it?” category.  Well, they were both true.  Sort of. 

Let’s start there, with Senator Cruz’s line that we should “stop attacking pedophiles.”  Did he really say that?  Yes, he did.  But it’s clear that, unlike the host of politicians who get busted for saying something outrageous or an outright lie, the “he misspoke” follow-up really is true.  His spokesperson is absolutely justified in saying that Cruz was “rattling off a series of crimes we should unite in opposing, started a sentence about opposing pedophilia, and added a stray word while talking it out.”

This is the kind of thing that happens when speaking off the cuff.  Anyone who spends a lot of time talking is going to screw up, and might not even be aware of it.  Curmie is pretty certain he did that several times over the course of his career; it’s just that his students and colleagues were kind enough to know what he meant and to let it go at that.  And Barack Obama doesn’t really think there are 57 states. 

Even when there’s enough time to think, these mistakes can happen.  There’s a Modelo beer commercial that assures listeners that they are “not to be reckoned with.”  They mean “not to be trifled with,” but that’s the opposite of what they say.  A few years ago, Curmie’s hometown didn’t get any appreciable rain for several weeks.  The city (or the county, or whoever) posted a bunch of signs about “drought protection.”  One suspects they weren’t actually trying to protect the drought.  See?  This stuff happens.

Look, Curmie is no fan of Ted Cruz.  The guy is a liar, a coward, and possessed of less integrity than even a run-of-the-mill partisan hack like his fellow Texas Senator, John Cornyn.  But that’s really sort of the point: give him a day or two, and he’ll say or do something that really is worth of derision, and “our side” can be a little less disingenuous.  Things get complicated by the fact that in one sense Cruz is indeed protecting pedophiles, but it’s by more by craven inaction than by clear intentionality.  He’ll never not be an asshole, but he’s pretty much innocent this time, and we need to respond accordingly.

On the other hand, there’s that video posted to Dear Leader’s Truth Social page that includes an image of Barack and Michelle Obama’s faces superimposed onto the bodies of apes.  Needless to say, the cries of “racism” were prompt and loud.  And they came from virtually everywhere.  Sure, Democrats were at the forefront and the criticism.  Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries all weighed in.  But, unsurprisingly, it was firebrand Jasmine Crockett who pretty much led the charge: “Most of us already know who Donald Trump is. We already know there are no bounds to how low he’s willing to go. We know that he has no moral compass. We know that he is a disgrace. So while his behavior is not shocking, it is certainly disgusting and disturbing.”  That is not a subtle commentary.

That said, a lot of GOP pols weren’t far behind.  Representative Mike Turner (OH) wrote that “the release of racist images of former President Barack and First Lady Michelle Obama is offensive, heart breaking, and unacceptable. President Trump should apologize.”  Expressing similar sentiments were Senators Susan Collins (ME), John Curtis (UT), Pete Ricketts (NE), Tim Scott (SC), and Roger Wicker (MS), and Representative Mike Lawler (NY), among others, no doubt.

And it’s only fair to mention: last time out Curmie lamented Ethics Alarms’ Jack Marshall’s started allowing “excuses for inexcusable conduct by Dear Leader and his minions [to become] a significant part of the mix.”  But he writes “I regard that as about a half-step, maybe less, from the President calling the former First Couple ‘niggers,’ and subsequently adds that “this ugly episode fairly earns shame and criticism for the President, regardless of how it came about.” 

That last part is relevant.  The White House initially tried to pass the incident off as unworthy of consideration, and the response as “fake outrage.”  That strategy backfired, although J.D. Vance is still trying.  Their focus then shifted to placing the blame on… wait for it… an anonymous “staffer.”  Sigh.  Dear Leader sees no reason to apologize because, you see, he did nothing wrong.

Unfortunately, even if we believe what has now become the official line, things look bad.  First off, the best that can be said is that someone so stupid that they didn’t realize the racist overtones to the post was granted permission to post in POTUS’s name.  You know, that guy who hires only the best people.  The alternative is that the racism was intentional.  That’s certainly a possibility, especially given the comments by Lara Trump, who is trying to be as vile a creature as her father-in-law: “It's kinda like any good joke is rooted in truth.”  Ew.

Someone made that video, and, best case scenario, thought it relevant to… well… anything.  The full video shows Dear Leader as a lion, the king of the jungle, to whom a gaggle of leading Democrats as other animals ultimately bow down.  Frankly, it’s a stupid shtick, but its sycophancy is no doubt celebrated throughout Trumpistan.  But if it’s indeed supposed to be based on The Lion King, then it’s worth noting that there are no simians in that play or film.  The choice of apes for the Obamas, then, adds credence to the allegations of intentional racism.

The beginning of the reel is a standard whine about “stolen elections,” Trumpistan’s term for “it was completely fair, but our guy didn’t win.”  It then auto-advanced into the Lion King nonsense.  Curmie doesn’t know how that could happen accidentally, but he’s enough of a technological troglodyte that his ignorance doesn’t necessarily mean anything.  Perhaps there really is a perfectly innocent explanation.

But what if the worst we can say about the video is that it’s kinda dumb?  Now it becomes a variation on the familiar trope of the cover-up being worse than the crime.  All that needed to happen was a prompt removal, and a statement that the offending staffer has been fired.  People might still be suspicious, but the situation is reduced to the proverbial tempest in a teapot.  Of course, both transparency and admitting anything are verboten in Trumpistan.  So we get disingenuous commentary from the Usual Suspects.  They’re almost as incompetent as they are dishonest.  Alas.

Continuum Thinking, Disjunction, and ICE

Curmie doesn’t go this far, but...

Curmie was extremely fortunate throughout his career to have encountered a number of extraordinary university lecturers.  At, or at least very near, the top of the list was Ron Willis, who was the professor of record for an Intro to Theatre class for which Curmie was a Graduate Teaching Assistant for a couple of years in grad school.  Ron would lecture to a couple hundred undergrads on Mondays and Wednesdays, and then the GTAs would lead discussion groups of 20 or 25 students each on Fridays.

What made Ron special wasn’t merely his intellect, his grasp of the subject matter, or even his wit, all of which were on ample display every time he stepped up to the lectern.  Rather, it was his insistence on what is too often trivialized as “thinking outside the box.”  The phrase is cliché; Ron’s lectures never were.  One of the basic concepts Ron emphasized keeps coming back into Curmie’s consciousness: the difference between disjunctive and continuum thinking.  It is hardly a novel idea, but Curmie hadn’t seen it applied quite so self-consciously or specifically outside the realm of probability theory. 

If the local high school basketball team takes on an NBA team (that’s actually trying) and loses by 15 points, they’ve still lost by double digits (disjunctively) but played extraordinarily well (on a continuum for high school teams).  Of course, whereas continuum thinking is to be encouraged in general terms, many, even most, situations will eventually require a disjunctive solution: we watch this movie or that, we try to avoid traffic by going a little out of our way or we don’t, and so on.  You can’t cast 62% of your vote for Candidate X, 35% for Candidate Y, and 3% for that interesting third-party candidate who’s kinda crazy but has this one really cool idea.

Real-life problems, then, generally involve some level of… “compromise” isn’t quite the right word.  “Accommodation,” perhaps?  Back in the Dark Ages when Curmie was first of voting age, he sometimes found two candidates roughly equally appealing: X is better here, but Y is better there.  Now, of course, neither candidate is appealing, but they’re roughly equally unappealing. 

The key is getting the order right.  First the continuum, the weighing of all the pros and cons, then the disjunctive decision.  Reversing that process leads to confirmation bias.  That is, if we decide that a particular point of view is correct, we inevitably search out “evidence” that supports our conclusion and ignore that which might contradict that impression.  We must remember that pols and pundits lie.  All of them.  Even the ones on “our side.”

Which brings us to a discussion of ICE.  Curmie doesn’t purport to speak for everyone whose politics are somewhere to the left of those of Louis XIV or Francisco Franco (Curmie antiphrastically avoids mention of that dude with the bad haircut and the funny mustache).  That said, he understands two things: that in the modern age some form of border patrol that seeks to protect the nation from those who actually are “the worst of the worst” is a net positive, and that some of the testimonials coming out of Minneapolis right now (and elsewhere in weeks past) may well be exaggerated or even falsified.

Let’s take the second point first.  What we face here is the possibility that the anti-ICE faction might not be providing objectively accurate information.  Indeed, much of what we see and hear comes from neighbors (and therefore friends?) of victims of ICE brutality, and from left-leaning media outlets.  Does that make the reportage suspect?  Maybe.  But the alternative is to believe the stories ICE and the Trump administration are spinning.  

We saw the murder of Renee Good.  We saw ICE deny a doctor the opportunity to attend to her.  We saw the priest get pepper sprayed for no reason.  We saw the veteran dragged from her car.  We saw the invalid dragged from hers.  We saw the protester sprayed in the face when he was already in custody, face down on the ground.  We saw the 5-year-old kids (yes, plural) in custody.  We saw the old man get tackled in the hallway outside the office where he was checking in on his application for citizenship.  We heard the police chief tell us that his off-duty BIPOC officers were harassed by ICE.

And we’ve seen and heard Trump, Vance, Bondi, Noem, Bovino, Miller, et al., flat-out out lying about what happened.  Every.   Single.  Time.  And you know you we haven’t heard from?  Anyone on-site who witnessed these events live and can corroborate ICE’s narrative.  Anyone except ICE agents themselves, that is.  Is it possible that some of the specifics of some of the cases have been exaggerated or even fabricated by the left?  Curmie would say that’s not merely a possibility, but a likelihood.  Alas, that’s rather the way of the world.  And certainly the technology exists to make something appear to have happened when it didn’t.  It’s also true that people like Gavin Newsom seem much more interested in their prospective presidential runs in ’28 than in actually solving problems in the here and now.

So yes, there’s a continuum at play here.  We ought to be careful about what we believe.  One side might be lying.  The other side definitely is.  The only thing we should believe from anyone associated with ICE is when they say they “don’t care.”  Don’t care that you’ve done nothing illegal.  Don’t care that you’re a citizen.  Don’t care that you’re an asylum-seeker and can prove it.  Don’t care that you’re a doctor.  Don’t care that you’re a veteran.  Indeed, don’t care about literally anything but their presumed power.  They lack empathy, actual patriotism, humanity.  Oh, and courage.  Mustn’t forget that.

But let’s return to the other part of this analysis.  If, as those on the right would have it, ICE were detaining the “worst of the worst,” then the opposition would be significantly weakened.  And it is true, apparently, that a fair number of unsavory folks have indeed been apprehended: murderers, rapists, robbers, drug dealers, and the like.  But the percentage of detainees who fall into one of those categories is far too low.  It’s also important to remember that even accused murderers have 1st, 4th, 5th, and 14th amendment rights.  ICE doesn’t care.  Curmie does.

Curmie wrote about a variation on the theme back in 2012 when New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was all about stop-and-frisk measures despite the fact that they were “successful” only once in every 879 stops, and that young black or Hispanic males were more than eight times more likely to be stopped than their percentage of the population would indicate.  Curmie wrote, 

If you search literally everybody without any provocation, chances are pretty good you’ll catch someone with a gun or drugs or an outstanding warrant. But the price is too high except in the McCarthyite universe inhabited by arrogant buffoons like Mike Bloomberg. Really, if the price of “law and order” is a state in which the authorities can do whatever the hell they want, I’ll take a little risk.

That’s still true.  By the way, how does one prove citizenship?  You can get a driver’s license without citizenship, after all.  A voter ID card, I suppose?  Curmie has never carried his except literally on election day, or his passport except heading to or from an international airport.   And if you happen to be on the other side of the state (or the other side of the country) from where those documents are stored (in Curmie’s underwear drawer, for example), there’s not a lot to be done to establish your right to be in this country.  

Curmie, being white (well, there’s a little First Nations heritage in there, but not enough that anyone would even suspect that by looking at him) and having English as his native language, is less likely than some of his friends are to be hassled by a goon squad that is longer on testosterone than on brain cells.  But “less likely” isn’t good enough, and what other folks, especially those who “look Hispanic,” have to deal with is absurd… or, rather, it would be if it weren’t so real.  Curmie has been loath to say this, at least this frankly, for the past year, but cannot now come to any conclusion other than that ICE is not merely primarily about the racism, but indeed virtually exclusively so.

Curmie does not argue here that there should be “no raids, no detention, no deportations,” as that one protester’s poster in the photo above reads.  But it is unreasonable at best to allow anonymous, largely untrained, “agents” to be able to do whatever they want, without warrants, without even probable cause (or at least without what any reasonable definition of probable cause would be), without oversight.  Take away their masks, their guns, and their ability to commit violence.  Make them work with local police: N.B., this does NOT mean that they’re the ones in charge.  No one can be detained if they are in fact obeying the rules—applying for asylum, seeking work permits, etc.  Any arrest without a judicial warrant or demonstrable exigent circumstances is felony kidnapping.  Make ICE follow the law, and Curmie has no objection to their continued existence.  But the current structure and leadership cannot endure.

So…  Yes, there have been some violent criminals taken off the street by ICE.  Yes, some of the allegations against them are no doubt inflated.  But ultimately the choice is disjunctive: we fund and tolerate ICE or we don’t.  Captain Bonespurs and the Gravy Seals would make a pretty good band name, but it’s no way to run a free country.  Time to melt the ICE.

There's No 3-D Chess Here

Nope.

It had probably been months since Curmie had heard the term “3-D Chess” to describe someone so strategically brilliant as to leave the rest of us in the dust.  Then he encountered the metaphor twice on Wednesday of this week.  In both cases, Curmie’s response was, shall we say, skeptical.

The first occurrence was during the FIRE members-only webcast.  One of the viewers asked if it was possible that the administration at Texas A&M was in fact sympathetic with faculty who just want to teach their courses based on their professional expertise.  The argument, you see, was that censoring Plato in a Philosophy course was so remarkably stupid that it invites a lawsuit, which would, hypothetically, free the university from the grotesquerie that is SB37.  In other words, university policy-makers—the Regents and the administration—were hoping for a 1st Amendment challenge to an obviously unconstitutional law.  It would succeed, and control of the curriculum would thereby be wrested from idiot pols and returned to its rightful place, the university itself.

It was not an outrageous question, but FIRE’s General Counsel Ronnie London doubted that university officials were indeed “playing 3-D chess.”  He granted the possibility, but made it clear that such a scenario was unlikely.  Curmie agrees, not merely because he doubts that anyone would employ such a strategy, but because the Regents are appointed by ultra-right wing Governor Greg Abbott, whose fingerprints are all over the legislation in question… and they, in turn appoint the President.  The principal qualifications to be a Regent for a state university in Texas are simple: you must be a rich Republican who neither knows nor cares anything about higher education except as a means of advancing a political agenda.  Abbott certainly found his flock at A&M.

Remember, too, that last fall a young woman described by Curmie as “a single narcissistic and reactionary student” objected to a discussion topic because it violated an Executive Order from Dear Leader, and the professor, department chair, dean, and president all lost their jobs. 

By the way, it’s been reported that the reason that the department chair (and presumably those up the food chain) got in trouble was that they allowed the prof to teach something that wasn’t in the course description.  As a side note: when Curmie came to the university from which he is now retired, the catalog description for the second half of the Theatre History sequence said the course stopped chronologically at World War II.  Curmie said he was going to extend the timeline to the present, thereby including absurdism, the Angry Young Men, Off- and Off-Off Broadway, playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, feminist dramaturgy, deconstruction… well, you get the idea, Gentle Reader.  

And get this: Curmie’s boss agreed to it without any hesitation!  Such insubordination from a department chair!  We did, by the way, change the course description, but it took a couple of years to get the revisions through the system.  In the meantime, it would appear that Curmie and his boss were both very naughty, indeed.  Luckily, the statute of limitations has run out.

But revenons à nos moutons.  The powers-that-be had their chance to challenge or even circumvent the state’s censorial policy and passed on the opportunity.  If the Regents actually wanted to halt this unconstitutional idiocy, they would have done so.  Nope.  They’re absolutely complicit.

So now we turn to the other contender for “3-D chess” designation: 47’s stated intention of annexing Greenland through whatever means necessary.  Actually, the CNN story Curmie read references MAGA-dom’s belief that Dear Leader is playing 4-D chess, and similar inanities have apparently been uttered not infrequently for some time, especially with respect to events in Venezuela.  Curmie either just didn’t see them or succeeded in ignoring them.

Last Friday, Chris Cillizza’s YouTube post (which Curmie didn’t see until today) opened with some pretty open mockery of the idea that “Donald Trump is always playing 3- or maybe 4- or maybe 5-dimensional chess, while the Democrats, the reporters covering him, everyone else, is sort of playing checkers at best.  The essence of the argument is that Trump is so strategically smart that he’s always multiple moves ahead of everyone else.”  Cillizza proceeds to talk about the strategic stupidity involved in describing Susan Collins, the most vulnerable Republican Senator seeking re-election, as a “disaster” who “should never be elected to office again.”  Collins, of course, only votes against GOP directives when it won’t make any difference (a point Cillizza doesn’t raise), and of course her vote on a procedural matter that will lead to nothing substantive fits that description nicely.

So Cillizza has a point.  But the true coup de grâce came a couple days after Cillizza’s piece, when Greenland became the topic of conversation on Sunday and then again on Wednesday.  The apologists’ argument is that only by threatening to invade an ally could Trump get Western Europe to send troops to protect Greenland, even if the perceived enemy is… well… us.  Pursuing this policy is far stupider than attacking Susan Collins. 

Sure, Greenland has some strategic importance, and we’d rather not have it taken over by Russia or China.  But first of all, that isn’t going to happen, and secondly, the downside of 47’s bluster is enormous.  His recklessness on the international stage has already cost this country more than can be regained in a decade or more of actual diplomacy and ethical leadership.  What ally would possibly trust the US now?  The idea that there would actually be a US military operation against Greenland would be laughable if we had a sane President.  As it is, the possibility looms. 

And if such an invasion were to take place, the situation would change from bad to cataclysmic.  There’s commentary out there that has been attributed to Brent Molnar (although why it doesn’t appear on his Facebook or Bluesky pages is a mystery).  Regardless of who wrote it, it’s pretty scary.  Curmie suspects it may be a little alarmist (“the world as we know it ends” may be a bit much), but virtually everything mentioned in the piece is at least a possibility if not a probability: the destruction of NATO is virtually assured; closure of American military bases in Europe, economic retaliation from the EU resulting in staggering inflation, the expulsion of US corporations from European countries, cessation of trans-Atlantic travel: all well within the realm of possibility…  It’s not a pretty picture.  

More to the point, not only would the loss of status, economic stability, and the moral high ground be devastating, there would be no upside.  The only country to gain from this ill-begotten fever dream is Russia, since European powers would be distracted away from supporting Ukraine.  Curmie judiciously refrains from wondering if that was the whole point.

Curmie would like to think that military leaders would either talk Dear Leader out of doing something so suicidal to American interests, or that they would listen to Senator Kelly and refuse an illegal order.  But when the Generals and Admirals are our last line of defense against a sociopathic POTUS with the maturity of a pampered toddler, we are neck deep in the shit and sinking fast.  Suddenly, “Doctor Strangelove” doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

So, no.  Neither the folks at Texas A&M nor in the White House inner circle are playing 3-D chess.  They’d be lucky to handle the complexities of Go Fish.

George Orwell Had 47 Figured Out

 

George Orwell, 1903-1950

With all due respect to Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, et al., the keenest observer of the 47 regime has been dead for almost 76 years.  He was a fella named George Orwell, and his two best known books, Animal Farm and 1984, encapsulate the reign of the Mad King of Trumpistan.

The latter has been much quoted of late, and we’ll return to it in a moment, Gentle Reader, but Animal Farm hasn’t been given enough credit for its apt analysis.  The animals join together to revolt against the imperious Farmer Jones.  Their linkage is born of negativity: a sort of enemy-of-my-enemy bonding that leads to the overthrow of the shared adversary.  But, of course, the alliance begins to crumble as the pigs begin to assert absolute control.  One particular pig, Napoleon, becomes fully as megalomaniacal and indeed evil as Farmer Jones had been, and all the other animals—hens, horses, sheep, etc.—are in at least as bad shape as they had been before the revolution.  They work harder than ever, while the pigs in general and Napoleon in particular reap all the benefits, all the while proclaiming the glorious economic and political glories of the regime. 

Eventually, we see new slogans that are presented as dictates: “Napoleon is always right” and, ultimately adding an addendum to the rallying cry, “All animals are equal”: “…but some animals are more equal than others.”  The book may have been originally intended as a critique of communism, but it works just as well as a parable about the 47 regime.  The animals represent the MAGA horde, happily overturning the old order, but many are gradually realizing that the self-proclaimed “Mr. Tariff” is destroying their livelihood: making imports of raw materials more expensive and exports harder to sell because of reciprocal actions by other nations.  Health care costs are skyrocketing, especially for those on Medicaid, who are disproportionately… MAGAs.  Those tax cuts for billionaires are important, after all.

Napoleon… well, that’s pretty obvious.  The name suggests someone who wants to be emperor.  Think of someone remarkably porcine in appearance.  Someone who is the most piggish, in both senses of the term—greedy and vulgar—of any American politician Curmie can think of or even imagine.  And, of course, someone far more interested in consolidating power than in solving any problem, as demonstrated, hypothetically, of course, by scuttling a bi-partisan border bill for the sole purpose of not allowing the political opposition to get a victory: something to campaign on is deemed more important than making progress on an issue of concern.  Wonder who that could be…

There is one place where the analogy breaks down, of course.  Farmer Jones really was cruel and abusive.  The American political system and its leaders in early November of 2024 had plenty of faults, but the MAGA world wasn’t really oppressed; they just wanted to pretend they were.  They needed someone to blame for their problems, and their version of Napoleon supplied them with a list: Hispanics, Muslims, Queer folk, et al.  The great thing about the hate list is that it’s enormously flexible: any group (blacks, Asians, Jews, women…) that isn’t People Like Us can be construed as The Problem.

It’s 1984 that gets referenced more often of late, however, and for good reason.  Curmie lost track of how many of his FB friends recently posted one of the most famous lines from a book cluttered with memorable phrases: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”  We’ve certainly seen that scenario play out of late.  First (hardly really the first, but the first this week), there was (and still is, alas) the bizarre and utterly mendacious page on the official White House website blaming the Capitol Police, Nancy Pelosi (and Democrats in general), and Mike Pence for the debacle that was January 6, 2021.  (The New York Times analysis of this remarkable display of chutzpah is pretty good.)  It wasn’t outrageous enough, apparently, that the stack of pardons (almost certainly signed by autopen, by the way) wasn’t just for those who may indeed have been overcharged, but also for those who literally attacked law enforcement officers, injuring scores of them, some permanently. 

More importantly, we all saw and heard what happened.  Here’s the thing: if, Gentle Reader, you don’t think Trump’s speech that day rose to the level of incitement, Curmie will listen.  He’ll disagree, but he’ll listen.  At the very least, however, Trump could have done a lot to prevent things from getting out of hand and didn’t.  If you want to argue that the January 6 Committee was something of a partisan witch hunt and a waste of taxpayer money, Curmie will even agree.  But if you want to claim that the violence was initiated by the Capitol Police, he’ll call you a liar.  Why?  Because he refuses to reject the evidence of his own eyes and ears.

And that, of course, brings us to the events in Minneapolis, where an ICE goon killed Renee Nicole Good.  Curmie would say “murdered,” but of course just because that’s the accurate term doesn’t mean it can be used until and unless there’s an arrest, a trial, and a conviction.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty certain that will never happen.  The wagons have already been circled.  Minnesota police have been shut out of the investigation by Kash Patel’s incompetent and politically subservient FBI (murder is a state, not federal, crime, remember), potential evidence has been removed from Jonathan Ross’s house, and the three most incessant and unrepentant liars in the country—Trump, Vance, and Noem (yes, even worse than Hegseth)—have all declared Ms. Good a “domestic terrorist” or some variation on the theme.  Indeed, the most persuasive argument that Good was not, in fact, a violence-prone leftie insurgent is that that trio of sociopaths says she was.

Again, we’ve all seen the videos. 

Curmie, as you probably know, Gentle Reader, taught college-level theatre courses in six different decades, beginning in 1979.  For many years in Play Analysis class he used David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays.  One term Ball uses is grimly ironic in the current circumstances: “trigger.”  What he means is that every action is a response to another specific, immediate, action.  Thus Hamlet, who surely knows of Claudius’s treachery and has just watched his mother die from poison, does not act attack Claudius until Laertes declares, “The King, the King’s to blame.”  That’s the “trigger” for what happens next.

We know that Good seemed perfectly pleasant in uttering what turned out to be her last words, “I’m not mad at you.” There would be no reason to expect even the potential for violence on either side.  But we also know that Ross then tried and failed to intimidate Good’s partner (wife?); she responded “You want to come at us?  I say, go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”   And then he walked around to the front of the car, handgun already in hand.  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that a hypersensitive and cowardly asshole like Ross wasn’t really fearing for his life at all; he just wanted to show them fillies who’s boss.  Hence, the ever-so-endearing “Fucking bitch” line with which Ross (or perhaps one of his fellow goons) responded to the shooting.

We also see that Good was trying to steer away from him, which means that he had stepped into her path.  We know that it’s a violation of protocol to do so, that it’s illegal to use deadly force against someone merely fleeing, and, significantly, that there was a review a little over a dozen years ago that found that Border Control agents near the US/Mexico border were intentionally stepping into the path of moving cars in order to justify the use of deadly force.  Two questions: 1). How sick is that?  2). Guess where Jonathan Ross was at the time?

We also know that Ross walked away from the incident apparently uninjured, certainly not “lucky to be alive” or any of that bullshit spewed by POTUS and his minions.  And that also means that he was already out of the path of the vehicle when the car lurched forward after Good was shot.  We know also, from a different video that a doctor sought to examine Good—to render assistance if that was still relevant, or to pronounce her dead at the scene.  He was stopped by a different ICE asshole who proclaimed that “we have our own medics.”  According to one report, those medics didn’t arrive for another 15 minutes.  It’s certainly possible that Good was already dead, but getting her assistance immediately—which, by the way, is required in any officer-involved shooting—might conceivably have made the difference between life and death.  To suggest that ICE is unconcerned with the lives of anyone but themselves, that they’ll cheerfully defame an innocent person if it gets one of theirs off the hook: this is to be too kind to them.

A few other points, and this is where, once again Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, so if there’s someone out there who knows more about this stuff than he does, please comment.  No, Curmie is not a lawyer, but he’s read a lot of stuff from people who are (or at least purport to be).  According to several of those folks, ICE has jurisdiction over one thing and one thing only: people who are in the country illegally.  In other words, they had no authority to order Good out of her car (or to yell at her to move, which also happened).  One lawyer said that in matters involving traffic, they have less authority than a school crossing guard.  They have no right to detain anyone about whom they lack probable cause to believe is an illegal alien.  Yet they strut around like they don’t answer to any laws… unfortunately, they may be right about that.  And, of course, they’re real tough when they’re armed to the teeth and confronting an unarmed mom.  When they actually start going after the “worst of the worst,” give Curmie a call.

The good news here is that tens of millions of people saw those videos.  Irrespective of what anyone in the administration says, we know better.  They can cover up all they want at this point, but we all know what happened, and we’re not going to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.

But wait!  That’s not all!  Our lad George has been on this administration’s case for a long time.

The incursion into Venezuela prompted a Friend of Curmie to post, “I am deeply concerned that this action is going to draw resources away from our war in Eastasia.”  We have, after all, always been at war with Eastasia.

“War is Peace.  Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”  Well, we’ve got a POTUS who has ordered military strikes against three other nations and threatened at least three others, including a NATO ally… and thinks he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.  Curmie isn’t sure that anyone in the administration thinks freedom is slavery, but there are plenty that think (economic) slavery is freedom.  And ignorance is indeed the strength by which this regime maintains power.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”  Turning over private records of every American to the unvetted DOGE techbois wasn’t enough, apparently.  Now they’re breaking out the spyware to pry into the private conversations of people who… you know… attend the kind of protests protected by the 1st Amendment.

There’s more, but we’re approaching 2000 words, so it’s probably time to wrap this up.  We close with this, also from 1984: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Be careful out there, Gentle Reader.