Aquarian Weekly
12/13/17

ROY MOORE + ALABAMA = SENATE

I think they’re afraid I’m going to take Alabama values to Washington and I can’t wait.
– Republican Senate Candidate Roy Moore Tweet, 12/5/17

You betcha.

Aside from Mississippi, which is one of the great jokes in the history of the human experiment known as the United States of America, Alabama’s abominable track record of civil rights abuses and cultural dumbness, usually backed by some hayseed reading of the Bible, is unprecedented. If you have half a brain you are embarrassed by it and most of the American south, which was allowed to rise from its ignominious beating after the Civil War only to predictably send horrid goons like Judge Roy Moore to the U.S. Senate.

Assuming the nine or ten or twelve (I’ve lost count) non-coordinated accusations of at least sexual misconduct and worse rape of underage girls for years – so bad he was banned from a fucking mall – is a fabricated Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, the fact that a man twice removed from the bench for criminal behavior, who states proudly that no Muslim should be allowed to serve as a civil servant and that homosexuals should be incarcerated, is considered a fair Republican candidate for one of only 100 jobs in the highest levels of our federal government is all you need to know about Ala-fucking-bama.

When Richard Nixon began his Southern Strategy in 1968, peeling off the racist vote from the Dixie-crats, who abandoned the party that fought vehemently against emancipation in the 19th century to pass the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, the fate of the GOP was forever linked with lunacy. And this past week it has been sealed. The RNC, after first abandoning the criminally defiant Moore, is back on board, as is those who tried to save face, like the bottom-feeding Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who initially asked for Moore to quit the race only to tell a national TV audience to “let the citizens of Alabama decide.”

And we know what Alabama will decide.

Roy Moore is going to the U.S. senate.

Why?

Because he is running in a state that would vote for the corpse of Charles Manson if he had an R in front of his name.

Think I’m being Jokey McJoke-Joke?

There is not one statewide Democrat in any level of office in the entire god-forsaken place.

No shit.

It’s a fixed game in stupid-ville. Believe me.

This is because Alabama is easily suckered by slack-jawed, religious morons who like to wave guns around to act like macho (latently gay) cowboys (spectacularly queer) while telling everyone that anyone above the Mason Dixon line is a godless sexually promiscuous Communist baby-killing dope-heads.

And although most of us are, the real problem is not that there are imbeciles who vote in Alabama, it is that one of only two of our nation’s major parties support and benefit from this weird shit, while telling us who to have sex with, what women can do with their bodies, who should get tax relief, and what constitutes an “American”.

Now, to be fair, the overwhelming support of Moore from our game show president, who himself has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by a dozen women and was caught on tape bragging about doing it for fun, is understandable. Donald Trump, I get. He’s a serial sex fiend and an unrepentant deviant and America elected him president, and really, how can he actually believe abused women accusing another sexual predator is sane behavior? Trump backing this shit-stain makes perfect sense.

What I don’t get is Roy Moore. Isn’t he supposed to be some kind evangelical religious nut, who was sacked from a state gig forcing the Ten Commandants down everyone’s throat? Even when apparently breaking one – adultery – as he was fucking his eventual wife whilst she was married. I mean, I get Trump. He was having hookers pee on him while sitting in a hot tub with teenage beauty contestants in the 90s. Moore was apparently being born again five times and thanking Jesus for his guns. Where is the consistency here?

Judge Moore is right about one thing; Alabama “values” are coming to Washington, as they have for nearly 250 years.

Hell, some of my heroes liked them young; Charlie Chaplin, J.D. Salinger, Chuck Berry, Woody Allen. It’s not my thing, but it’s Roy Moore’s thing, and aside from the rape allegations, if he gets his “virgin/whore” kicks trolling young girls in malls and signing their high school yearbooks after taking moonlit strolls and stealing kisses, it’s his thing, and I have no comment, but you know who always seems to have a comment on people’s sexual activates and is quick to judge the morals of every breathing human? Roy Moore.

But, okay, so Moore is a lying hypocrite. There are plenty of them in congress and certainly Alabama. But while in the last few months in Hollywood (producer, Harvey Weinstein, actor, Kevin Spacey), television (NBC and ABC morning show hosts, Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose) and even politics (Minnesota Senator Al Franken) when similar cases were revealed, the accused were either ostracized, fired or forced to quit. Roy Moore is going to the U.S. Senate.

And one more parting note to Moore’s fellow evangelists, whatever the fuck that is, who have crawled from their ideological quagmire to rush to this cretin’s aid, I say, the jig is up. After the whole Trump thing and now this, there is no point any longer hiding behind the charade of God. There is not a single God in any monotheistic framework that would find Donald Trump or Roy Moore amenable to its edict.

Evangelists, like any salesmen, are opportunists. And like any sale, their whole phony god thing is mere exploitation, and worse yet, politically motivated. And next to child molestation, which could also be on Moore’s resume, political motivation is as low as it gets.

But more sympathetic, I could not be. I get that your time is nearly over, and this is your act of desperation, your last breath, the death rattle to all your Moral Majority crap that has been discredited and rightly ignored as we move the species into the twenty-first century without you.

My hope, nay, my prayer, if you will, is that soon, when you’re all rotting in your graves, this great, damaged nation, and humanity as a whole, will share chuckle that we ever considered anything you stood for real and binding.

Judge Moore is right about one thing; Alabama “values” are coming to Washington, as they have for nearly 250 years.

Welcome back.

Aquarian Weekly
12/6/17

THE TAX REFORM SHUFFLE

The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation found that the tax cuts would not pay for themselves by generating enough revenue through economic growth to offset the tax cuts, as Republicans have claimed, but would instead add $1 trillion to budget deficits over the next 10 years. Projections estimate that the bill would lead to additional economic growth of 0.8 percent over a decade, well short of the acceleration needed for the tax cuts to pay for themselves over that time. The analysis said the tax cuts would generate about $458 billion in revenue over a decade, but would also require about $51 billion in additional interest costs. That would leave the bill with a $1 trillion price tag.
– NY Times 11/29/17

Yeah, this ain’t good.

Senate Republicans, because Senate Democrats are now playing the Mitch McConnell/Ted Cruz two-step of not being involved in anything the opposition party proposes, are sending to the floor, or are trying to send to the floor – as of this writing it has stalled due to concerns by some about the above analysis that projects a massive increase in the national debt, a tax reform bill that sucks ass. Remember when bloated deficits used to be an anathema to most Republicans, unless of course there is a Republican in the White House – Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, who both ballooned the debt with unpaid-for massive tax cuts. But a budget deficit and the national debt is only part of the problem with this gigantic boondoggle.

Firstly, this type of massive legislation overhaul happens maybe once a generation, but because Donald Trump has appeared to have now gone completely off the rails – which is a step or two above the rails he careened off of long before he became president – with his picking name-calling fights with a lunatic in North Korea, retweeting three messages from what amounts to the British KKK, supporting a senate candidate from Alabama who has been accused at least eight times of weird illegal sexual shit with children, telling staffers that it was not his voice on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, despite admitting to it and apologizing for it in October, 2016, and his incessant ranting about how he is the greatest president of all time and all of the press except some brainless wind-fart called FOX & Friends, the font of American journalism, is not representing the country well abroad, they are rushing to get something done before either he ends up in a fetal position sucking his thumb and asking for daddy, gets impeached for the mounting evidence of obstruction of justice, or 2017 ends with zero legislation.

The last time the government reformed the tax code was 27 years ago. Two parties held power and there were ten months filled with committee presentations and debates and caucuses and compromise. This time a single party, in relative secret, whipped together a baked fiasco in a month on the whim of fantasy numbers about job growth and higher wages and middle-class blah blah blah. In contrast, the humongous Affordable Care Act was debated in three House committees and two Senate committees, and subject to hours of bipartisan debate that allowed for the introduction of amendments. Interestingly enough (if you find the height of hypocrisy of interest, which I most certainly do), the architect of this shit-show, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rightfully fought against the construction of the 2010 bill that no one seemed to know its contents, and now he makes an even more egregious maneuver for the same reason – do something…anything… NOW!

McConnell and the Republicans keep rolling out this myth that because they run things and Trump was elected that this is the will of the American people. Turns out only 29 percent of people polled approve this bill – not tax cuts, everyone loves those, just this particular bill, which we have established sucks ass – and although the president has zero mandate, having lost the popular vote by three-million and nearly all the Republicans are really in congress to halt the ACA, which they have spectacularly failed to do, they forge ahead.

And why do people overwhelming hate this thing?

Well, despite not knowing all the details of the current tax reform bill, both the House and the Senate versions, which kicks the mandate for the ACA off of the rule book, completely eliminates the valuable tax break, which allows taxpayers to deduct state and local income, sales and property taxes, and strikes down a 1954 law that keeps freeloading religious groups, who pay zero taxes while they dumb down the human collective spreading hate and voodoo nonsense, from spending their windfall on political lobbying, what we know of the suck-ass bill is that by 2027, according to the aforementioned Joint Committee on Taxation and the Congressional Budget Office, people making $40,000 to $50,000 would pay a combined $5.3 billion more in taxes, while the group earning $1 million or more would get a $5.8 billion cut.

Wha…?

Yeah…it ain’t good.

a budget deficit and the national debt is only part of the problem with this gigantic boondoggle.

Now, authors of and voters for this monstrosity will tell you (AGAIN – these assholes never learn) that these numbers are needlessly dire, because, well, all these tax breaks on the rich and corporations, such as a 20 percent corporate tax rate, down from 34 percent, will provide funds for businesses to re-invest in America and American workers, the flag, Jesus and apple pie, Babe Ruth and the rotting skull of George Washington. In other words, the oft discredited “Trickle Down Economics”.

This, as always, is a steaming pile of horseshit. Never mind this type of thinking failed in the 1920s, leading to the great depression, or the 1980s, leading to an exploding deficit that began the exodus of American businesses aboard, but as recent as 2004 when congress invited American corporations to bring home overseas earnings at a sharply reduced rate, pitching it as a means of bolstering investment. But according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis research, these corporations spent as much as 90 percent of their windfall buying back their shares and giving giant bonuses to their CEOs.

This just in: Corporations are not in the patriotism business. They rightfully answer to their shareholders and bow to profits. Period. Any thought other than that is so painfully naïve it begs to question the mental capacity of those believing otherwise.

The painfully naïve will also try and sell you that these are also dire numbers, like the painfully naive who tried to tell you that young people would buy into the ACA and well, didn’t. Projections to pay for government stuff are like things Trump blurts out daily; not true, ever. They are based on nothing and very silly and at times downright demented.

For instance, the administration’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has been on record since April stating that “a hundred people in my staff have been working around the clock on running scenarios for us.” He said it again earlier this month, assuring congress and the American people that the suck-ass bill would “pay for itself”. Republican Senator from South Carolina Bob Corker now says there is no such analysis available or forthcoming, which is leading to an investigation. Seems then that this last-ditch, phony effort to refute the “dire numbers” was, as all things in this Trump Administration disaster of a first year, made-up. Totally. Doesn’t exist.

Yeah…this ain’t good.

Meanwhile Mnuchin’s boss keeps stating this farce is “the biggest tax cut in history.” But guess what? Trump is lying. It is not.

According to The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget it would be “the eight largest as a percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since 1918 and the fourth largest in inflation-adjusted dollars.” The latest report shows that the “largest tax cut in history” designation would go to either President Ronald Reagan’s 1981 tax cut or President Barack Obama’s 2012 extension of most of the George W. Bush-era income tax cuts, depending on how the size of the tax cut is measured.

Now, all of this can be assuaged if the senate were to say, raise the proposed corporate tax rate to 22-percent. But then the rich donors would go away, as Senator Lindsey Graham admitted last week. This cannot happen. The senate works for them, not you.

So, we get the suck-ass bill.

Remember when Citizen Trump was going to “drain the swamp” and work for the “little guy” and go after Wall Street and big banks? Remember the populist that got 70,000 votes in the Rust Belt that allowed him to run things?

Yeah…this ain’t good.

Aquarian Weekly
11/15/17

MIXED MESSAGES – ELECTION DAY 2017

My dear friend of 28 years now, Rob Astorino, the current Republican County Executive of Westchester County, a highly expensive and mostly bucolic enclave in the hub of the Hudson Valley, New York, was seeking his third term this past Tuesday and was slaughtered by Democrat State Senator George Latimer. Rob was a popular public servant, whose career was on an incline from the time he told me in a Manhattan restaurant sometime in the early years of the prior decade that he wished to head into politics to “make a difference in my neighborhood” – something I tried to talk him out of, by the way. But he went in just the same, very successfully, until this year, the year of Donald Trump, or as the man whom my friend lost to in the 2014 New York gubernatorial race, Andrew Cuomo told the NY Post the next day, “This is bigger than just the county executive’s race, Rob Astorino is a fully financed subsidiary of Donald Trump.”

Of course none of the facts presented in that sentence are true. The president, now toxic to his party at an historically low 34-percent approval rating, had nothing to do with Rob Astorino. Without divulging things that are between me and my friends – many of Rob’s staff were instrumental in making me understand Trump within the party structure when the game show host was seeking the Republican nomination – I can tell you there wasn’t anything close to enthusiastic support for or from El Douche. But many of these same people made it clear to me that if Hillary Clinton had been president, their man would be heading back to a job he loved.

Now to be fair these are the deep cuts of losing an election, and boy was it gloomy in that room election night at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in White Plains, where I had seen Rob take home two victories in 2009 and 2013, but lose by a narrower margin than anyone could conceive in the 2014 governor race. Even that night there was a sense that Rob was headed somewhere. But Tuesday he was headed home.

There is no denying the Republican Party was trounced on every level all across this nation on Election Day 2017, one year removed from the titular start of the wildly goofy presidency of Donald Trump, but I think while the political-climate message in clear, I’m not sure we can determine unequivocally that what transpired Tuesday is any indication that the GOP was not looking at the normal backlash of a first-year presidency.

Although comparing the clown show going on right now on Pennsylvania Avenue to any previous president is silly, every chief executive in my lifetime had to endure a first-year and in some cases a first-half-of-the-first-term hit in the polls and in statewide elections. And it can rightfully be pointed out that despite the unexpectedly rousing victory enjoyed by Democrat Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam, who was polling at a dead heat that morning and won by ten points, the Commonwealth of Virginia can now be considered a “blue state” – Barrack Obama won it twice, and even Hillary Clinton claimed it last year. In fact, three of the last four governors have been Democrats. Of course when you look at the victories of the first elected Latinas to the state house, the first LGBT candidate, who beat a man who called himself the state’s “chief homophobe” while failing to get a crazy anti-LBGT bathroom bill afloat, and a guy who lost his wife in a shooting beating an NRA lackey, there is more than Trump-hate going on here.

For instance, health care was cited, by a lot, as the most important issue among Virginia voters, many of which live just outside Washington DC. In fact, since Trump has been president and congress has thrice failed to nix it, the Affordable Care Act is on an incredible upswing in sign-ups and its approval rating has gone from well under 50 percent to nearly 65. This is an amazing turnaround and gives the Democratic Party, which seems to stand for nothing beyond “Trump sucks” – a winner right now, I grant you, but not a platform – something to run on in 2018.

But the Democrats have a bigger problem beyond no plan or direction; they are powerless.

Here in New Jersey, it was simply a slam-dunk. Exiting Governor Chris Christie’s approval rating is the lowest of any governor in the history of the United States – or at least since they began polling these things. Christie was at 15 percent on Election Day, which is just a tick above people who burn dogs for the Fourth of July and the guy who massacred those people in Vegas. His beleaguered Lt. governor was predictably shellacked and now a pro-pot, anti-bear-hunt Wall Street Irishman progressive takes charge. That sounds about right. This is some crazy state and we love it, no matter what dink is in Washington DC mucking up the works.

The Republicans do have a Trump Problem, which we will now call it – both politically and in the important public relations realm. The president’s cult of personality – the old, angry, rich white guy who thinks everything sucks except him thing appears to have a shelf life, and seeing how nearly every day someone from his campaign is either revealed to have ties to Russia or is indicted for a crime, circumstances don’t look to get any sunnier. But the Democrats have a bigger problem beyond no plan or direction; they are powerless.

Republicans still have the lion’s share of governorships and state legislatures throughout the republic, many of which have gerrymandered things to kind of queer the results. And the party does run things in DC, where the action would be if they can pass any kind of legislation in the upcoming year, because they have accomplished nada thus far in 2017. Nevertheless, Tuesday’s results do not swing the national balance, if anything it should embolden congress to try and do something if Republicans think a reckoning is coming in 2018.

I am truly saddened for my friend, Rob Astorino. He deserved a better fate. But things have gone sideways right now and inner fighting inside both major political parties means that although today it looks a lot like a spectacular repudiation of something the incorrigible Steve Bannon has taken to calling “Trumpism”, it is no clear indication that it means a hill of beans going forward, now or by the mid-terms elections.

Aquarian Weekly
11/1/17

ELECT PHIL MURPHY – LEGALIZE MARIJUANA IN NJ
Become 9th State in the Union to Move into 21st Century

Time to get what Doctor Hunter S. Thompson once called the “rock and roll vote” out of mothballs and get to the polls this November 7 to elect Democrat Phil Murphy the next governor of New Jersey and move this state out of the dark ages and cease this nearly century-old nonsense of criminalizing a plant; a movement started to save the original Fake News maven, William Randolph Hearst, the author of the Marijuana Tax Act legislation passed by Congress in August of 1937, from having his hemp industry wiped out. This law, strengthened by the idiotic Controlled Substances Act of 1970, was the genesis of the modern day drug war that is directly responsible for a booming black market for cannabis – much like the previously stupid Volstead Act (or Prohibition) created organized crime – and the incarceration of millions of pot smokers. It is failed nonsense, and if this country is going to have lunatics running it at the federal level we need to control our state and give voice to a new generation of voter.

This is not a drug issue. This is a new-voice issue. This is wiping out ignorance and bullshit moral proselytizing to keep something illegal that is less harmful than every ounce of liquor you can buy right now legally. It is a joke, and when you are young you know this. For some reason when people get older and maybe have kids and don’t want them buying shitty pot from scumbag street vendors, they tend to sway the other way on this issue. I am no longer young and have a kid and have not budged, but if you read this paper you probably are and you need to get off your ass and vote for Murphy to end this ridiculous charade.

Give me a man who can handle his high, not some whining ass that forces everyone else into tea-totaling

This isn’t even a generational thing. People have been smoking marijuana for centuries. It is fabricated demonization, filled with the kind puritanical moralization that kept minorities and women down for decades; all of it built and sold on false pretenses. There is far more evidence that hamburgers and sugar drinks are destroying the fabric of this nation (environmentally, physically and mentally) than this natural, completely organic substance that has been secretly making billions of drug cartels and asshole dealers selling substandard product with no regulation and worse-still no money for our tax coffers. Never mind the billions lost on farming, tendering and manufacturing. A 2016 New Jersey United for Marijuana Reform study estimates a legal marijuana market is worth $1.3 billion in New Jersey and could generate $300 million in state tax revenue, which is why now six out of ten state residents support legalization.

But we shan’t waste any more space telling you something you already know. If you think marijuana is evil or somehow more dangerous than whiskey, well then, enjoy your fantasy land. There are still people who will tell you the earth is flat. But right now we are a week from expunging the worst governor this state has seen in this reporter’s lifetime as our state congress is poised with a bill (S3195) to legalize weed to 1) Immediately decriminalize marijuana possession of up to 50 grams and allow people who have been arrested for pot possession to expunge their records, 2) Establish a Division of Marijuana Enforcement in the state Attorney General’s Office which would create the rules used to govern the legal market of growers and sellers, 3) Allow people to possess up to one ounce of dried marijuana, 16 ounces of edible products infused with cannabis, 72 ounces in liquid form and seven grams of marijuana concentrate, 3) Impose a sales tax on recreational sales beginning at seven-percent in the first year, climbing to ten percent in the second year and jumping five percent more each year until it reaches 25 percent, 4) Abolish taxes on medical marijuana, 5) Give the five existing medical marijuana dispensary nonprofit groups the first crack at selling recreational pot.

It’s sensible, entrepreneurial and constitutional, and I will gladly suspend my “never vote for a major party candidate, much less endorse one” to add this fully-throated endorsement for Murphy, who has bravely stated more than once that he will stand with state’s rights over the draconian big-government machine of Donald Trump, Mike Pence and AG Jeff Sessions to allow New Jersey to become the ninth state in our great nation to legalize something that never should have been illegal in the first place.

Of course it is impossible to see Murphy losing to Chris Christie’s lackey, Kim Guadagno even if he endorsed legalizing the use of bazookas by ten-year-olds. Voting for Guadagno after eight years of Christie horrors will give you more of what this state has already deemed a complete and utter clusterfuck. Christie’s approval ratings, covered here in length in past columns, are at a record low for anyone above dog-catcher and despite his “fiscal conservative” claims and his “strong against crime” boasts my property taxes have gone up every year since he’s been in office and there are parts of this state (I’m looking at you Camden) that are still high-crime havens. Not to mention Christie standing on a debate stage during the Republican primaries last year and saying he would trample state’s rights by using his power if he were president to send in the national guard to make arrests against marijuana smokers. Another so-called smaller-government, freedom-first phony who wants the giant federal government bashing in your doors to implement their “Christian” clap-trap – see marriage equality, women’s reproductive rights.

Don’t tread on me, indeed.

But never mind all of that, this needs to be a statement, our statement, the Jersey statement; we will not be cowed by bleating fossils like Sessions and his new “drug crackdowns” or the game-show president’s retro “Just Say No” silliness. If anything, this gaggle of simpletons proves that being anti-drug is actually a detriment. Give me a man who can handle his high, not some whining ass that forces everyone else into tea-totaling because he’s afraid of mother nature.

I put a call into the Murphy campaign during the writing of this piece and I made it clear to them if I go to the mat for this Irishman, I expect results. None of this Trumpian “get Mexico to pay for the wall”, “repeal Obamacare”, “hold China accountable for currency manipulation” or even “calling a state of emergency against opioid abuse”, none of which he has done or will do. Murphy needs to know that if we cast this vote, this will get done. Right away.

Vote Murphy.

Legalize weed.

Aquarian Weekly
10/17/17

CAVEAT EMPTOR
Or How Facebook, Russia and The American Voter Equal Freedom

Except for the president of the United States and a few FOX News shut-ins, it has been long established that the Russian government had an effect on the 2016 presidential election. Whether this included the Donald Trump campaign directly or not, seeing how the infiltration all seemed to be aimed at getting him elected, still has to be determined. We have no less than three major criminal investigations happening in two branches of government and a special council on it. However you wish to see this, overrated or a threat to our democracy, is up to you, but it is real and it is starting to look like it was endemic. But I wish to discuss none of that today. What I wish to dissect is why it’s such a big deal.

I get why it’s a big deal to Democrats. It looks like their candidate got skunked by all of this. And I get why some Republicans and a preponderance of Americans care: How dare a foreign government, especially a hostile one run by a despot, be so brazen as to meddle in our political process!

Of course many of these people either don’t know or don’t care about the history of our incessant meddling in other country’s political affairs for decades. Our meddling went further than posting fake new articles over social media and the hacking into and leaking of private emails. Ours included silent and bloody coups, assassinations, massive propaganda campaigns, and the funding, abetting, and direct involvement of insurrections and terrorism. Oh, we were good, everywhere – the Middle East, Central America, Europe, Africa, shit we even fucked with elections within the continental U.S.; which may indeed include but was not limited to intimidation, more assassinations, bugging, ballot-stuffing, illegal redistricting, racketeering, crazy amounts of insane propaganda, and my favorite; voter suppression. Hell, political parties have been gerrymandering all over the joint for decades. It’s going on right now and the Supreme Court is actually considering this legal, which on its face would be hilarious if it didn’t shed a glaring light on our point here.

See what the Democratic Party did with the Bernie Sanders campaign last year and you have a pretty good idea why fucking with elections is as American as fast food and dumb TV.

Facebook, the internet’s version of fast food/dumb TV, which is only now mostly used by people over forty, has been under some heat during these aforementioned investigations because it is finally coming clean on taking millions of dollars from Russian entities to post absolute nonsense that posed as news stories, which convinced people to vote for a goofball. All of these things made Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton – already carrying the weight of self-inflicted trust issues – into some kind of godless, murdering psychopath.

Again, I get why people who falsely believe in the integrity of the nation are upset at this, but I think what is more important is our democracy, which is not just a concept for radio talk show hosts, protestors and professors to toss around in an ideological circle-jerk. Democracy, as the saying goes, is only as good as the people in it.

And so I ask; if said people, many of them having the experience of over four decades on this planet, choose to mostly get their news from Facebook or immediately believe something they get from a dubious source they never heard of that merely adds to their paranoia about the subject at hand – visa vie Hillary Clinton is bad so I will believe the absolute worst shit about her – then what’s the legal issue here?

I think I have stated about a billion times in this space over the past twenty years that being stupid is not a crime. If this were the case, many of us would have been locked up a long time ago. Shit, I would have a wing in Rahway. Where indeed does the responsibility fall? Are we not culpable, in fact, are we not completely at fault here?

There has been a weird trend in this country, already filled with intellectually lazy and pointlessly angry people, to heap their strange ideas about how perfect their lives and their country would be if only fill-in-the-blank. We claim we love freedom until we get “duped” by something; politicians, lobbyists, the media, advertising, agenda-driven content splashed all over place every second of every day. But being duped is what freedom is all about; the freedom to choose whether to be duped or not. This freedom also includes Facebook or Twitter or even FOX News to blurt crap all over the joint and take money from sponsors or Russians or whatever.

Are we not culpable, in fact, are we not completely at fault here?

When I listen to all of these allegations of Russian infiltration I keep coming back to one key question: Did the Russian government hack into voting booths and make the game show guy president against the will of the people? If not, then I don’t get it. If the people (read democracy) were duly influenced by this crap then my next question is what is the difference between that and attack ads, super-pack ads or even candidates, like our current president, who has statistically now puked up about 1,200 falsehoods in eight months, making shit up? Aren’t we supposed to take the time to fact-check and hold the information intellectually accountable?

I hear people say all the time now, “The truth is under attack!” Really? It is only under attack if you let it be under attack. It’s like this stupid argument against “political correctness”. If you don’t want to be politically correct, don’t. If you don’t want “fake news” to influence you then make the effort to go to different sources and cross-check info. And if you don’t have time for this or don’t care enough to do it, then please don’t cry foul and please let’s not spend any more tax payer dollars “investigating” it.

I would like to see NFL players, bus drivers, mechanics, teachers, hedge fund managers, cops, rappers, celebrities, feminists, conservatives, progressives, you name it, take a knee to protest irresponsibility; the failure to blame the public if they refuse to pay attention to the veracity of information and gather it with serious measure of alacrity and stop looking to hang the fallout on someone or something else; Russians, Mexicans, China, race, religion, social media, congress, Obama, Trump for our inability to understand the basic concepts of being a citizen.

Aquarian Weekly
9/27/17

JIMMY KIMMEL & THE NEW AGE OF CELEBRITY POLITICS

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.

– Mark Twain

We have a steadfast rule around here that makes it easy to base all of our opinions upon: If Mark Twain approves, we do. Samuel L. Clemens is the patriarch of all that is true and fair in the construct of American commentary. Without him, we have virtually nothing as far as modern satire in this country. He was, by all accounts and by his own admission, a man who despised politics, but he could not help himself from opining on it. And this happened often. Twain was indeed the first true American novelist, our first comedic essayist and by far the finest public speaker of his or any time. To put it bluntly; Twain kicked ass. And Twain expected that as a citizen of these Untied States he was provided the right to form and express his opinion and he would doubtless believe this is the right and even the duty of those who maintain any level of celebrity, if they feel the need. And so this space has never begrudged celebrities, whether Meryl Streep or Ted Nugent or Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore, or even our celebrity president, from pontificating all over the joint.

This past week late-night talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel got into a public donnybrook with the co-author of the latest attempt by some level of congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (what does this make 438? I am losing count and interest in this, like the NFL, which is a joke now and I finally cut it out of my life two years ago and do not miss it one iota). Senator William Cassidy from Louisiana made the mistake of going on network television and telling Kimmel a few months ago he would do something completely opposite of what his bill says; he would make sure that pre-existing conditions were supported by the federal government in any potential law he supports – in other words mandate that states not allow insurance companies to kick people off health care, which the ACA now protects. Kimmel called him on this. He tried to senate-speak it away with semantics about actually having it be part of a bill with his name on it when it actually kicks the responsibility of oversight to the states, many of which have Republican governors who have no interest in this (You know, “depending on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” or “you get to keep your doctor” stuff). He is technically correct, but really, he fucking lied to Kimmel and Kimmel used network air time to bash him for it.

This got on the Internet and all over Twitter and the usual wig-out vehicles and boy has it become the story.

Now, again, I am not here to argue whether it is good that our national debate happens on a comedy/variety show. How could I with Donald Trump, Game Show Host President in charge? And to be fair the Republicans have completely given up on any semblance of senate procedure to debate, council, hold hearings and get outside fiscal approbation from the CBO for this, so someone has to take it to the public forum and debate it, why not the 49 year-old guy who took over for the guy who wasn’t Letterman or Leno?

Kimmel, it should be known, has a son with a congenital heart condition who has endured several procedures on this since his birth this past April. In May during the first of at least sixty attempts since the 2016 presidential election by congress to wipe out the ACA Kimmel tearfully shared his story making the salient point that since his kid has a pre-existing condition from birth and that prior to the 2010 law (that has mysteriously gone from anathema to championed) he would never be able to get health insurance and would likely die. Since the debate, such as it is, on Capitol Hill has added “Does it pass the Jimmy Kimmel test” to its rhetoric.

Senator William Cassidy… lied to Kimmel and Kimmel used network air time to bash him for it.

As terrible as all of that is and as thrilling as Republicans repeatedly failing to repeal the ACA may be, I still had no interest in writing about this until I watched New Jersey Governor Chris Christie appear on some banal cable news show and blurt, “I’m not going to comment on Jimmy Kimmel, he is not a serious person.” This struck me as funny, actually goddamn fucking doubled-over, red-faced, piss-pants hilarious, considering Christie was the first politician to back our mostly non-serious Game Show President, and the delicious nugget that while Kimmel is a mostly successful entertainer Christie has been arguably the worst governor of this state in my lifetime.

As the weeks dwindle on this Chris Christie suck-fest his approval ratings have now plummeted to an astounding 15 percent. It is hard to believe that there are actually one-out-of-ten people in this state who do not think Christie is a useless sack of feces. I personally have not met one Republican who supports anything he has done in an astonishing eight years in office, never mind Democrats and Independents. The current Democratic candidate, whoever the hell that is, leads his lieutenant governor by something like 60 points, and not even Hillary Clinton can blow that.

And I want to be clear, none of this is to deride Trump as a president, I think I am on record thus far on this goofy atrocity, but if you support someone whose previous credentials is destroying the USFL and fondling beauty pageant contestants for president then your credibility on commenting on who is serious and not is pretty much nil.

When Kanye West is president I wonder if he’ll take issue with Taylor Swift’s commentary.

Chris Christie might.

We will not.

You go girl.

Aquarian Weekly
9/20/17

REALITY CHECK

James Campion

THE HILLARY DELUSION
Loser’s Lament – A Commentary

Guess who has a new book out?

Guess what it’s called?

Hillary Clinton’s What Happened has hit the shelves (or hit the Amazon shipping boxes since bookstores are disappearing daily) and it provides us with whatever excuses the losing 2016 Democratic presidential candidate can conjure to wipe this mess of Donald J. Trump from her soul, which of course sounds like a page-turning pile of horseshit. Aside from Trump himself and about 70,000 suckers in the Rust Belt he conned by promising to bring back the 1950s, this is the fault of Hillary Clinton. And no amount of book tours can strike this nightmare from her ledger. She will be known as the lousy candidate that lost to the stupidest human who ever ran for anything.

In fact, for those who were no fan of the previous president, you can also blame Madam Shoo-in, who twice lost to overwhelming historical underdogs. Only the doomed candidacies of Hillary Rodham could possibly usher in the first African American president and the first Game Show host commander-in-chief. Both times she was all-but positively going to win with big poll numbers, millions in campaign coffers, and a groundswell of demographic support. Except she did not win, she lost, badly and embarrassingly…twice!

She made history, all right.

And to be fair this is not my wheelhouse. I do not dog-pile on losing candidates. In two decades this has only happened three times in this space; Al Gore in 2000 (this was personal for reasons covered too many times to recount here), Andrew Spano (because my dear friend, Rob Astorino vanquished him for Westchester County Executive in 2009 and because he is a bottom-feeding scum sucker) and the recent ousting of uber-bigot Scott Garrett for my district’s congressional representative this past year (we were due to fistfight, but he backed out and put the cops on me, for which I got the law to almost agree to pistols at dawn – again, covered extensively in previous columns). But Hillary will not go away, nor will her apologists, who turned her defeat into some kind of feminist cause that is misguided and wrong. And so I write…

This would not be an issue even if Clinton continued to invade the vox populi. Cable news is littered with bitter losers who wish to throw grenades at a system that spit them out like sludge. Newt Gingrich immediately comes to mind. This guy is like gum on your shoe. His “Hey, I’m an asshole, please look at me because otherwise I’d have to actually spend time with my third wife, who wishes I would just croak so she can spend my money and marry someone who isn’t abominable” got old in 1998. Now it’s just sad. And this is where Hillary Clinton is going, accept for some reason her act is taken as heroic. This is partly because her “victim show”, which ironically her opponent who actually won the election has turned into an art form, is tethered to her like a cloak of sympathy, when it should look like a gurney of shame and degradation.

Clinton continues to book-tour this nonsense about Russians and the FBI director and personal attacks as excuses to why she lost a general election in this growing demographic era of progressives to a knuckle-dragging, man-child goofball. She wishes in the book she just whisked around and demanded Trump “Back off, creep” during the debates in which the Republican candidate appeared to stalk her like most of the women he’s embarrassingly fondled since the mid-1980s. But that is also a lie, because Clinton was never human enough to do this. She was busy playing a part, trying to be “above the fray” in a campaign season of low-brow street fights that failed miserably for a record-large Republican field of candidates who tried to get in the gutter with Trump and were sent packing.

She will be known as the lousy candidate that lost to the stupidest human who ever ran for anything.

But this was strategy, not authenticity; a concept lost on Clinton. Trump was authentic. He told people what he was loudly and crassly. Those who now claim buyer’s remorse or are shocked by his pardoning of racist criminals and half-defending Nazis is silly; like that dumb-ass Ann Coulter, who wrote a book titled In Trump We Trust and is now calling for him to impeached. Trump said he would wreck shit and he is wrecking shit. Good for him. Clinton didn’t say anything, except that she wasn’t Trump, and that really should have been enough for this wacky Internet-obsessed, porn-addled, overly-medicated country of celebrity sniffers, but it is no excuse for being beaten, and as a veteran of the tussle she should know that, but so many sycophants have blown this vacuous wind up her skirt it has apparently reached a saturation point.

Clinton, like Trump, the two most vilified and unpopular people to actually gain major party support, are one in the same to the people who defend them; they are symbols. And no matter what layers of nonsense you apply to their failures it will never end; and this is not new. This happens with symbols. But they are not really symbols, they are politicians, and politicians have records; some lose and some win, and some govern poorly and some govern terribly and some even manage to stay afloat, but the perception is never what the reality says. But alas that is a malady for the fanatics. Things get queer when the politician believes this lie and then puts it in a book and tries to sell it as a weak explanation for humiliating defeat.

Hillary Clinton will never say she lost because she sucked, that she was a bad candidate who stood for nothing and who a spectacular number people did not like. I don’t expect this to be an easy thing to say or even accept, but why spend months writing a book trying to salve this wound and then run around the country hitting up media outlets selling this delusion to sate a damaged ego? This is why so many people flat-out hated Hillary Clinton and held their nose to vote for a neophyte, who has shown to be even worse than anyone could have possibly imagined at this. Clinton sold this delusion every time she hit the stump; in 2008 and 2016, and I blame her for upsetting my then eight year-old daughter, who just wanted to see a woman become president but instead got the crap of all crap; the email thing not-withstanding, what about 80 days of no press conferences and never visiting the aforementioned Rust Belt states and all that inside-baseball nefarious maneuverings with her buddy, Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who rigged the debate system against Bernie Sanders and alienated an entire generation of politically-motivated kids who stayed home or voted Independent rather than cast a vote for her?

The real story of November 2016 remains the same as the somewhat stunned analysis of this space the week following its fallout: 70,000 displaced and frightened people who hated trade deals and believed in their hearts that foreigners were stealing their American Dream buried Hillary Clinton, and because she stood with President Barack Obama, her husband, Bill Clinton, 80-percent of the Republican Party, and the reality of 21st century global economic realities by supporting the massive trade deals and refused to travel to those places to argue this point, sunk an abjectly flawed and mostly unelectable candidate.

When Hillary Clinton writes that book I might never read it, but I will not waste nearly 1,400 words slamming it.

Aquarian Weekly
8/23/17

RADICAL CAUCASIAN TERRORISM
& The President Who Defends It

From 2008 to 2016 violent White Nationalist incidents in U.S. totaled 115. In the same time frame there were 63 Islamic Radical Terrorists incidents.
– The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund and the Center for Investigative Reporting

Fight the real enemy.
– Sinéad O’Connor, October 3, 1992

Donald J. Trump is the gift that keeps on giving. Our game-show president has become this nation’s ipecac. He extracts the poison from the body politic through our social esophagus inducing needed projectile vomiting. And an astonishing pile of puke was on display this past week during a white nationalist coming-out party in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which dozens were injured and a young woman was run down by a car, and then later in the lobby of Trump Tower when El Douche went off the rails to defend it in what will forever be known as the Tuesday Afternoon Meltdown. But without his gift for ignorant revelation, the poisons that flooded the streets of the otherwise sleepy southern town would have continued to sit undetected in our system and slowly rot it from the inside.

Thanks to a few hundred pasty bigots and our dung-brained president it has now bubbled to the surface where we can no longer ignore or explain it away. Trump’s spectacular streak of stupidity mixed with the world’s most effective promotional tool for abortion has revealed much about America.

Admittedly, up until the most unhinged press conference by a major politician since Richard Nixon’s “You won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore” diatribe against the press, the Eastern Liberal Establishment and Martians, I had planned to write that as usual the response to this president’s “role” or “non-role” in the insane events in Charlottesville was a bit hyperbolic. Beyond his faux tough-guy approach and a preternatural inability to knock anyone who digs him (Vladimir Putin, David Duke, etc) the issue at hand should have been Neo-Nazis, the Klu Klux Klan, something called white nationalists, the city’s day-late-dollar-short police force and the genius who issued a permit for these nuts to openly threaten everyone who was not in the WASP club.

But it was hard to ignore that for days afterwards, Trump repeatedly placed treasonous marauders on the same moral plain as those who admittedly fought back violently against them; symbolically ringing the opening bell for an all-out street fight for the soul of a nation.

Of course, to be fair, a bunch of privileged and lazy Duck Dynasty fans deciding to whip out the Swastika flags they ordered on alt-right.com so they can get on TV to shout “Jews will not replace us!” does not a war make. But it is refreshing to see the kind of monsters in broad daylight that usually hide behind the vagaries of “those people are tearing down our culture” and “those people are diluting our history” while usually lounging around dinner tables or hosting Fox News shows or skulking through the halls of congress or acting all tough masked in fake names on blogs and Facebook posts and spitting banal propaganda in Breitbart News or the Drudge Report.

This is why the First Amendment is first, bubba, and is the niftiest part of our Constitution; it provides those the blessed right to get it all out there, unfiltered, so we can take better aim at picking them off one by one.

As the ugly rise to the surface, we can now know their names and see their faces; the same cretins who attempted to halt marriage equality and deny women reproductive rights, blame their personal failures on outside forces and press voter suppression laws under the ambiguously self-righteous guise of God, tradition, national security, and all the other well-worn buzz words that have been used as oppressive weapons for decades.

We already knew icky things about Trump’s dealings with race from his outlandishly pathetic public performance in the 1980s Central Park Five case to the really weird birther shit against our first African American president, and it is noteworthy that Trump’s daddy, for whom he yearns to please even in death, was busted at a 1925 Klan rally in Queens. It was Fred Trump’s real estate practices of keeping people of color and Jews from queering deals over the “lowering of property values” that trained his son to think that anything that aides Trump business is fine and anything that threatens is bad. Thus those he blithely calls the “alt-left” would be in the bad category and the white nationalists, well, his supporters.

To wit: I can confidently state that if a mob of hate mongers were running around the street in broad daylight evoking my name as inspiration, wearing hats with my name while carrying Confederate and Nazi flags and telling news organizations that they were fulfilling my promises, I would immediately run out onto the White House lawn to push out a statement that gets me as far away from that as possible. Trump did not.

But what Trump did accomplish was to inadvertently reveal the undercurrent of fear that leads to statements like “these people are trying to erode our way of life”; the same theory that convinced generations of politicians to decide that the African American uprising against oppression (more recently Black Lives Matter) and the campus marches against Viet Nam (more recently marches against asinine foreign wars) must be the product of communist intervention (more recently radical leftist political figures like George Soros) and not a deeper problem within American culture and our damaged institutions.

You see the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, for which the thugs in Charlottesville were (wink-wink) “protesting”, represents to these people, and the people who defend them, which the president clearly did in both his original remarks and his wig-out at Trump Tower, is a classic American “save the culture” argument that is at the root of our tarnished history. It helped lead to the Watts Riots (more recently Ferguson), the violent horrors of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention (see Ferguson again), Kent State (recent militaristic police presence in black neighborhoods), the flaccid War on Drugs (Attorney General Jeff Sessions recent return to Draconian drug sentencing), the Religious Right (Trump pandering on LGBT military ban), and on and on and on and on and on.

Trump’s spectacular streak of stupidity mixed with the world’s most effective promotional tool for abortion has revealed much about America.

It is this kind of “thinking” at the core of this nation’s original sin and what prompts the “nice people protesting a statue” commentary from a man who cannot tell the difference between Thomas Jefferson and an institutional insurrectionist that led an army to over-throw the United States to perpetuate the owning of human beings (which they masked – and still do – in a weak “states’ rights” argument).

And as for Trump’s specious defense of “peaceful protesters”; if I decided I loved statues and felt it unfair to take them down and joined a rally that eventually puts me in the middle of that putrid rabble, I might re-think things before continuing or risk guilt by association. You see, a “peaceful Nazi” exists in the same mystic Trumpian netherworld as the wall Mexico is paying for.

But this all pales in comparison to Trump’s most telling and teachable-moment when he blurted; “They want to change our culture and alter our history.”

This phrase is the tipping point for a new and more direct and far overdue street fight on the irrational resentment of progress, intellect and evolution that has permeated the first years of this twenty-first century; what this space has been writing about for twenty years now this month. (No kidding. It will be twenty years next week I started this lunacy! I have never done anything for this long. And for that I need to be committed.)

But I digress.

No one is altering history. Here’s the history: The Confederacy was wiped out and so were the Nazi’s. They lost. And you know who beat them? The United States of America. They had their shot, they were crushed. That’s the history. The reconstruction of this history is erecting monuments to the vanquished that were strategically placed in public places like parks and in front of government buildings for intimidation during the birth of the Jim Crow South during the turn of the century. Look it up, history buffs. This kind of nonsense is the age-old loser’s lament. If someone tried to erect a statue of the treasonous Robert E. Lee in 1864, instead of 1964 during the Civil Rights movement (another period where these abominations were erected) they would have been taken to a firing squad. Imagine a statue of Osama bin Laden put in your town square next week and you get the picture; except 600,000 people died during the Civil War, the equivalent of 200 9/11’s.

Also culture is change. That is what cultures do; otherwise they go the way of the Confederacy or the Nazis. Trying to preserve an aborted, self-aggrandizing myth is not preserving culture. It is madness. Madness leads to things like Civil and World Wars. I get it, the movement of culture is scary, and for the uneducated it is threatening. Sorry. We have therapists and fancy drugs for that now. Put down the comic adaption of The Turner Diaries and go get laid.

Trump has done us all a big favor and taken this bile and poison, hidden under a cloak of innocuous posturing, and puked it everywhere this week. As it should be – out in the open, to get the best view, to see and smell and understand fully what we’re dealing with, instead of dressing it up in the drag of patriotism and religion and statue fetishes.

Yet, there was one thing that puzzled me about the Tuesday Meltdown; Trump’s ridiculous assertion that people fighting back against treasonous rhetoric makes them equally guilty; as if he would be affronted by this. It has long been obvious that this president advocates violence when he feels he or his followers are being provoked. Remember the most heinous outburst of his provocative campaign rallies in Chicago when he pointed out, quite rightly, that agitators had provoked his people to physically fight back and oft times openly asked his audience to beat on protesters?

Now he’s all politically correct.

Screw that.

Everyone knows who reads this space that when it comes to bigots we openly advocate beatings. Last year I personally challenged my congressman (now ex-congressman thanks to the brave Americans of the fifth district of New Jersey), the ultra-bigot, Scott Garrett to a fist-fight. He refused. This is because bigots are wimps. But that still does not mean that Garrett did not need a beating, as Nazis and the KKK need beatings; several and varied. Why? Because they want it.

You don’t get to be in a terrorist organization like the KKK and bitch about getting a beating. By their very nature, beatings are mandatory. I fully and confidently support dragging David Duke and Richard Spence from their homes to provide them a helping of the stuff they claim to openly support; a little of those fancy Gestapo tactics they’re so fond of. Let’s see if they’re serious about their “radical agenda” and if they’re more than chants and Hitler tee shirts and “Make America Great” hats. You want old-fashioned justice, sirs? Okay, let’s see if you can handle it.

Time to call this what it is and face it and wipe it out; Radical Caucasian Terrorism, because like Radical Islamic Terrorism, which according to statistics has outperformed the former two-to-one, once you take up arms and rhetoric against the rule of law and mark your territory as a combatant, then you abdicate your rights and call for violent retribution.

My guess is these posers would beg for mercy once the hell-rain they want comes a-callin’, like terrorists who want to destroy the system suddenly finding civil rights and asking for lawyers. Well, I say, they trade in all that and take the beatings they have coming.

And so I praise Donald Trump’s idiocy, for it placed on the table what is really wrong with this country and where its real enemies lie; from within. They used to bloat the police force and run states and fill our churches, but it’s getting more difficult to see them. Now we do, and they must be rooted out and dealt with.

Stick that in your jack-boot and kick it.

Aquarian Weekly
8/16/17

THE “DADDY LOVE ME” NUCLEAR STAND-OFF – 2017

Who didn’t see this coming?

The second Donald Trump took the oath of office, all of it; wildly manic Tweet storms about TV hosts and obsessions with fabricated inner demons and spastic firings and institutional in-fighting and ill-advised bluster about seemingly innocuous and mostly delusional self-congratulatory nonsense, and now, most likely crimes, was inevitable. It is the Trump branding. This is what we voted for, or at least enough people voted for, and it has been damn fun. Half the administration is going to jail and the rest to hell, and as we continue to celebrate the chaotic dismantling of all of the myths of the American consciousness with delinquent glee there has always been the distinct possibility that all this stumbling around would result in serious consequences.

We might be there this week with the purported nuclear stand-off between our El Douche and North Korea’s impishly wacky Supreme Leader Kim Jung-un. We’re now witness to another in a long line of powerful and insecure man-children putting at risk millions of lives to impress dead fathers who tortured their sons with bullshit machismo to hide their own fear of penis size.

And at some point you’d figure petty knee-jerk imbeciles whose whole point of existing is to find enemies, particularly weaker ones in which to hammer, would move our game show president from the media to congress to a nation across the globe which has a ready-made villain with just as many psychological issues as him. This is science; pure natural selection and the biological attraction of crazy-finds-crazy eventually. This is a duet ready-made. Call Stan “The Man” Lee, we got ourselves a comic book!

You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung or even Dr. Phil to see the damaged souls at work here. Trump and Jung-un have made global their severe mental issues exacerbated by cold and domineering fathers who by their mere nature were predatory lunatics likely hiding latent homosexual desires and violent tendencies of paranoia, bigotry and self-loathing. Or to simplify, what we have here are two assholes created by two assholes and now there is “fire and fury” and “die American dogs” and the usual mindless machismo that begs for the ghosts of their fathers to recognize they exist.

If only the fat little Korean kid with bad eyesight and the pasty monosyllabic rich boy had been loved, maybe we wouldn’t have to wonder if Guam will be around next week.

Look, since both Jung-un and Trump are entirely full of shit and like their pathetic fathers are merely big-mouth posers creating fantasy worlds in which they’re John Wayne or Al Capone, nothing is going to occur close to the Cuban Missile Crisis, commandeered by two men (John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev) whose daddy issues were through the roof. But the fact that it has come this far and trust me it will not be the last time that men with small peckers and zero self-esteem piss-fight to fell the demons hatched by their horrible patriarchs, is both sad and eminently intriguing.

We’re now witness to another in a long line of powerful and insecure man-children putting at risk millions of lives to impress dead fathers.

It is also fascinating to watch two men who have little to no idea what they’re doing play this thing out – one a neophyte from an early age thrown into some ancient dynasty of madness and the other a game show host via the World Wrestling Federation who ran for president to expand his family’s international real estate holdings and because he was bored. It is hardly Roosevelt, Hitler and Churchill, all of whom had severe daddy issues but formed an unholy bond in a vacuum of ideology and nation building, world war and cultural divides that spanned the entire earth’s surface. Comparing these idiots to those lunatics is like saying your backyard pond is the Indian Ocean. This is a roly-poly pompadour shuffling like a cartoon character from one half-assed missile test to the other, never leaving his cocoon of sycophants, spitting at the rapidly aging hair-hat golfing nut who needs Fox & Friends to tell him he’s okay to sleep at night.

Not sure what will happen in North Korea, I was certain that by now one of Jung-un’s doomed generals – he kills about a dozen a year – would find a way to assassinate him, but that is an ancient problem this country has been trying to “solve” for nearly seventy years with spectacularly bad results. As for the United States, this whole Trump ranting has been nicely curtailed by congress, which two weeks ago quietly wrested control from the commander-in-chief on any semblance of foreign policy in Eastern Europe due to his by now patently obvious (to say the very least) conflict of interest with Russia. And the Pentagon, who completely refuted and will never implement the president’s goofy LGBT military ban, and the Department of Defense, who routinely walks back the president’s shoot-from-the-hip schoolyard nonsense as “posturing”, have several fail-safes against the inevitably hissy fit.

Which brings us back to Trump and Jung-un’s duel working out of their daddy issues in public with access to powerful weaponry. They serve each other well, a ying/yang thing that will never cure them but allows for a healthy valve in which to decompress. And since our president is at the service of a leader with clear mommy issues, Vladimir Putin (men who continuously have themselves photographed in public shirtless and need to have their chests shaved are absolutely putting on make-up and trying on lingerie in private), it is important he has someone who understands him.