Depraved new world

 

This bronze bust of Martin Luther King, Jr., was placed in the Oval Office by Barack Obama and removed by his successor.  Joe Biden brought it out of storage and it has again been removed, replaced with an image of Winston Churchill.  Let's pretend that was a way to thank Prime Minister Starmer for retrieving the papers that fell from Trump's failing fingers at the G7.  Why was King still there until this week?  Was the occupant distracted by all the gold-plated tchotchkes?  Perhaps he mistook it for Frederick Douglass, whom he still looks forward to meeting.  It couldn't be that he waited until now to make a particularly vile gesture of contempt for Juneteenth.  That would be the act of a monster.

Again, what are the side-effects of ketamine abuse?  No wonder he hasn't played golf for three weeks.

"Freedom is never cheap.  It's never free.  Freedom requires these subjugated people to rise up, and it's up to them."

Stirring words, right?  What if I told you they came from Benjamin Netanyahu?  Iran bombed a hospital in Beersheba, Israel, yesterday and Netanyahu is urging the Iranian people to overthrow their government.  Ignore the fact that every single hospital and clinic in Gaza has been reduced to rubble.  According to Defense Minister Israel Katz, Ali Khamenei "can no longer be allowed to exist" because "he personally gives the order to fire on hospitals."  

The State Department is evacuating embassy personnel from Jerusalem and Canada is organizing "commercial options" for people to leave Israel, Iran and the West Bank by way of neighboring countries.  It sounds like they expect the fighting to continue and escalate.  Trying to figure out what the US will do is frustrating because there is no plan except uncritical support for Israel.  Somebody asked Trump and got this:

"A lot of wars there was no reason for.  You look right up there, I don't know, you see the Declaration of Independence and I say, I wonder if, you know, the Civil War, it seemed to me, maybe that could have been solved without losing 600,000-plus people."

Clear?  He wants that Peace Prize but he also wants to get in on whatever violence is going on and goose his approval rating the way Bush did after 9/11.  So we look elsewhere.  For example, Tulsi Gabbard told Congress in March that Iran is not close to developing a nuclear weapon; the White House Rapid Response account edited the clip to remove those words after Trump said "I don't care" what she testified.  According to Newsweek the E-4B Nightwatch known as the "Doomsday Plane," the National Mobile Operations Center, has been parked at Joint Base Andrews (and stocked with Diet Coke and Big Macs?) for an "emergency or loss of ground command."  Trump supposedly approved a bomb-Iran plan on Tuesday but may have forgotten it by now.  Netanyahu has always been able to play him like a ten-dollar banjo, especially with his ambassador Mike Huckabee filling his deteriorating brain with apocalyptic nonsense ("You did not seek this moment.  This moment sought YOU!").  

It has become clear that the Minnesota MAGA targeted members of the state legislature with a view to changing the balance of power and has temporarily succeeded.  Now the US House of Representatives is finally taking its security seriously, more than four years after the January 6 insurrection.  We never did find out who ripped the "panic button" out of Ayanna Pressley's office, did we?  What Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA) calls "a perverse incentive for political violence through targeted killings designed to switch the majority party" is more incentivized than ever.  When the VA is told it can refuse care to Democrats, MAGA listens.   ("They're sick.  They hate America."  Yes, master.)

This upright citizen of Caroline County, Virginia, pleaded guilty to a federal hate crime, the shooting of two Latino men he decided were "illegal," and was sentenced to 24 years in prison.  I see no mention of state charges, so his pardon is probably in the mail.

Trenton Abston was arrested for stalking and planning the kidnapping of Paul Young, the Democratic mayor of Memphis.  Security cameras caught him climbing a wall of the subdivision where the mayor lives carrying a taser, rope, duct tape and gloves.

At this point we only have a National Endowment for the Humanities because Trump wants it to come up with 250 statues of white men for his risible Garden of American Heroes, but Daniel Kunitz, the editor of Sculpture magazine, calls it "not very serious."  The offer of $200,000 per hero doesn't leave much when you factor in the cost of materials, and most American sculptors don't make traditional figurative work.  Not to mention "low opinions of Trump in the artistic community" and the impossible one-year deadline.  We may never get that statue of Roy Cohn.

This is the sort of thing American artists are doing, although the sculptor prefers anonymity for obvious reasons.  "Dictator Approved" stands eight feet tall and contains gold plaques with encomia to Trump from Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un.  Yet Trump, who normally basks in praise, seems displeased.  "Ugly," one of his spokesmodels calls it.  The statue will be on the National Mall until June 22, guarded around the clock, of course.