Malice for all, charity for none

 I feel as if I've read Jeffrey Goldberg's article in The Atlantic at least once before.  General John Kelly's account of his conversation with Trump about the superiority of Hitler's generals was reported in somebody's bombshell book or on somebody's bombshell podcast.  Goldberg may have elicited more detail (Kelly:  "'Do you mean Bismarck's generals?'  I mean, I knew he didn't know who Bismarck was...")* but the admiration for all things Nazi will not jolt anyone, least of all those MAGAs who share it.  The story of Private Vanessa Guillen seems new but it's just Trump 101 -- fake generosity for maximum credit, with a side order of racism.

Private Guillen was murdered at Fort Hood, Texas, in April 2020, and Trump decided to treat her death as a campaign opportunity.  He invited her family to the White House and offered to pay the funeral expenses for this "spectacular person" -- until he got the bill.  "It doesn't cost $60,000 to bury a fucking Mexican!" he yelled at Mark Meadows.  "Don't pay it!"  That's the Trump we know.  He was also displeased when his Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy announced the re-assignment of senior officers at Fort Hood for "leadership failures," when after all it was just a "Mexican."  (Other women had found Hood to be a dangerous posting, but who told them to join the Army?  They knew what they were getting into.)

That's our Trump!  The only virtue he prized in generals was loyalty to him, not the Constitution.  On the occasion of the George Floyd protests he longed for an army like China's ("the Chinese generals would know what to do").  To Bob Woodward -- that must be one of the books I remembered -- he whined, "My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies.  They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals."  Hitler didn't think much of the Prussian military class, either -- especially those with von in front of their names, like Claus von Stauffenberg.

There's more detail, if you can stand it, of his contempt for John McCain.  When McCain died Trump was enraged that flags at the White House were lowered to half-staff.  "What the fuck are we doing that for?  Guy was a fucking loser," he seethed, until Kelly suggested he'd be "killed in the press."  He even disparaged George H.W. Bush because he was shot down in the Pacific.  But his real beef was that generals were willing to serve for as little as $200,000 a year.  Losers.  Goldberg has written most of this before, with Trump branding him a "horrible radical-left lunatic" and predicting the imminent demise of the Atlantic (founded 1857).

The article is essentially a compilation of the reasons all veterans, active service members and Americans with any connection to them or to history should spit at the mention of Trump's name.  They don't come any worse, and this we have from no less an authority than Jared Kushner.  Over lunch in his White House office Goldberg reminded him of Trump's McCain Derangement Syndrome and what it says about his "character."  Kushner seemed amused:  "No one can go as low as the president.  You shouldn't even try."  Goldberg writes, "Kushner wasn't insulting his father-in-law.  He was paying him a compliment.  In Trump's mind traditional values...have no merit, no relevance and no meaning."  Or in Kushner's.  

For nine years we have been forced to look into this abyss.  I don't think we will recover.   May as well get down and roll around in it.

Have you ordered your free (apart from shipping and handling) Steve Bannon Liberation Day MyPillow?  The "one man leper colony" get sprung on Tuesday and resumes his shit-zoning just in time to claim the election was rigged.  If you always wanted a lumpy pillow with an eagle on it, better hurry, they won't last.

Eric Swalwell released an ad called "A Place for Trump," showing the confused elderly man surrendering his car keys and classified documents and receiving care from attendants while he yells about people eating cats and windmills making whales "batty."  No cognitive!  No cognitive!  You're the cognitive!

Although the Trump-Hitler stories have been out there for years, Bret Baier (who is, too, a Real Journalist) insists the Atlantic article was somehow planted by the Harris-Walz campaign.  Brian Kilmeade, in no sense a journalist, agrees that it's No Big Deal.  But the weirdest everybody-calm-down advice came from the would-be Fuhrer's national security adviser John Bolton.  "To be a fascist you have to have a philosophy," he told Kaitlan Collins.  "Trump's not capable of that."  Trump couldn't even read Mein Kampf let along write something like it.  Sorry, but I don't think being a published author is what Hitler is remembered for.  Bolton quoted former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to the effect that Trump is "a fucking moron."  With the royal powers granted him by the Supreme Court, he doesn't need a Mensa membership card.

Royal powers, inside information and mystical vision -- how could anyone not support Trump?  He told Al Arabiya (the state-owned Saudi news channel) that most if not all the October 7 hostages are dead; that he has seen "tapes that other people haven't seen;" that he ordered Hamas to release all hostages "before I reach the White House;" that Biden is responsible because Iran had "no money" until he gave them billions; that Israel cannot be blamed ("they send the missiles in and they were all knocked down"); and the dead were all young ("Life was a bowl of cherries").  It sounds like the illegal shadow government he's running goes beyond regular chats with Netanyahu, Putin, Xi and anyone else who flatters him.  Should we send someone out to look for Merrick Garland?  

Speaking of whom, Trump is said to favor Aileen Cannon, the incredible bendable judge, to replace Garland after his dictatorship begins.  So that's one immigrant who won't be deported (Cannon was born in Colombia).  Jack Smith would probably be deported in her place.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the extremely rich owner of the Los Angeles Times, must be one of those oddball undecided voters.  The paper has endorsed every Democratic candidate for president since 2008 but this year -- "the most consequential election in a generation," according to the editorial board -- nada.  It did manage to endorse Adam Schiff for the Senate, leading Steve Garvey by ten points.  Times subscribers are becoming unsubscribers, but Soon-Shiong has fuck-you money and doesn't care.  This is the problem with newspapers that become rich people's hobbies and tax write-offs, and this is why they're going away.

* Apparently he never heard of Rommel either.  "You magnificent bastard, I read your book!"