Connect the dots

The president is a pedophile.

That's the first thing that came to mind when I heard a week or so ago after The Wall Street Journal (now my favorite newspaper. Who saw that coming?) ran a story that said Attorney General Pam Bondi informed convicted felon President Donald Trump that his name appeared "numerous times" in the Epstein files.

You, too? 

Jeffrey Epstein, we know, was the high falutin' financier who was convicted of child prostitution. He then mysteriously died in prison of suicide while awaiting trial for sex trafficking underage females to the rich and famous on a U.S. Virgin (oh, the ugly irony here) Island he owned called Little Saint James.

Suddenly, after years of MAGA world screaming for the Epstein files to be released, because, you know, high profile names of liberals like Clinton, Gates, Hanks, et al, would be revealed, embarrassed and prosecuted, we're now told there's nothing to see here.

Except for maybe Trump's involvement. For the first time ever, MAGA is furious with Trump. What? You mean you're the deep state? You lied to us? Release the files! What are you afraid of?

Trump's name appearing in the files is no proof of guilt of anything, and on the surface, that's true.

But when you start connecting the dots of his character...

• Like Trump's 34 convictions stemming from his attempt to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn star (Stormy Daniels) who said they had sex. Dot connected.

• Like accusations of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by at least 25 women. Dot connected.

• Like being declared an adjudicated rapist by a federal judge. Dot connected.

• Like the hot mic capturing Trump telling interviewer Billy Bush that women like to be grabbed by their genitals when you are a star. That was during the 2016 presidential campaign, and why that wasn't a disqualifier for the presidency is beyond me. Trump got elected. Bush got divorced. Dot connected.

•  Like owning the Miss Universe pageant franchise, which he felt allowed him to walk into women's dressing rooms while they were changing clothes. Dot connected.

• Like Trump's early associations with Jeffrey Epstein that goes back to at least 1990. At one point, Trump is quoted as saying "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." Dot really connected. Holy crap.

There's more. I could fill today's blog with this stuff. but you get the point.

Trump, for his part, is predictably denying any of this because he is God's chosen angel and can do no wrong. In the past few weeks, sometimes on consecutive days, he's tried his favorite deflection tactics: like telling us that President Obama committed treason, or that Obama rigged elections (sounds like projection), the releasing of 200,000 pages of Martin Luther King Jr. files (but not the Epstein files?), Rosie O'Donnell, Harvard, tariffs, NPR and PBS, and even changing back the names of sports teams like the Guardians and Commanders back to their original Indians and Redskins. Please, lookit this and not this Epstein stuff. You still taking about him? He's been dead a long time.

It sounds like he doth protest too much. Dot connected. 

There are too many dots for me. There are too many connections. I could be wrong about where the dots lead me, but so far, Trump's not been able to talk himself out of the disgusting and distasteful deep-state swamp that he's created here. So for now, I have it in the back of my head: the president is a pedophile.

 

 

 

Epstein

I never saw the backlash coming. And when it did come, I never expected its fury.

Finally. A cry for accountability.

In case I'm being too opaque, I'm talking about the Jeffrey Epstein situation here. Epstein, of course, was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and who allegedly invited the privileged elite to his private Caribbean island for romps with underage females. Epstein supposedly kept an incriminating list of client names and flight logs that had everybody from Prince Andrew to Bill Clinton to Tom Hanks shaking in their boots.

And now perhaps even Donald Trump – himself a convicted felon as well as an adjudicated rapist, famous party boy and somehow the current president of the United States with that résumé – might be connected.

After all, Trump and Epstein were once close friends. There's video of Trump doing his fist-pumping white-boy boogie next to Epstein at a party, which kind of documents their friendship from more than 20 years ago.

Epstein was arrested again for sex trafficking of minors and was in prison in July 2019. A month later, he was found dead in his cell, apparently a suicide. But the circumstances of his death remain murky.

Meanwhile, since Epstein's death, MAGA has been clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, no doubt in hopes of embarrassing (and perhaps convicting) the privileged elite. Everything appeared to be headed in that direction until a couple weeks ago when Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi told MAGA world there was nothing in the files, that there's nothing to see here.

And thus the current outrage from Trump supporters who suddenly feel betrayed by their idol and are now screaming about a deep state cover up. "This is not what I voted for!" bellows MAGA. Given ICE arrests and deportation of immigrants, passage of the Big Bad Bill that will take health care away from millions, the deconstruction of the Department of Education that will send millions of children into poverty if not hunger, illegal tariffs that are just now raising inflation numbers, just what the hell did you vote for?

How Trump deals with the schism within MAGA could be the actual measure of his accountability, even if his name never shows up in the Epstein files. 

An interesting side note in the Epstein case is what is to become of Ghislaine Maxwell? She is Epstein's associate who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex trafficking. With Trump claiming the Epstein files are fake and a hoax, can Maxwell now ask Trump for a pardon, or at the very least, a retrial? Trump, of course, wants her to stay quiet.

Trump is asking Bondi to release "pertinent" aspects of the Epstein grand jury testimony, but that's not a simple thing to do – not even for a president. By law, grand jury testimony can only be released by a judge and a court order, and that will take time. If it happens at all. Grand jury testimony is almost never revealed.

It's a freaking mess. But the MAGA monster seems to be eating its own over this. I don't know. Trump has wriggled out of accountability so often before that we've come to expect it to happen again.

Maybe this time it will be different.

 

  

 

Review

Last month I participated in my second political protest since my college days in 1970 – 55 years ago – when I joined about 300 other demonstrators for the "No Kings" rally on the Square by the Old Courthouse.

I was holding a hand-crafted cardboard sign that said "Hands Off Our Democracy" when a fellow came up to me and asked me point blank, with more than a little reproach in his voice, "Do you think we're a republic or are we a democracy?"

The question caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to attend a Q and A event. But without giving it much thought, I responded with a smile, "A little bit of both, I think." It's what I was taught in civics class back in high school, when civics was an actual subject and public schools were not considered a platform for leftist propaganda.

"You're wrong," he replied. "We are not a democracy. We're a republic," and then he stormed off to stand behind me, where he promptly gave a smart military salute to the American flag waving proudly on the tall pole in the Square.

I swear to God he did. 

Several thoughts raced through my head at once. I'm pretty sure his earnest salute to the flag was a protest to my (our) protest and that possibly he thought he was the only patriot in the crowd that day. I told myself, "Wait a minute. I'm exercising my First Amendment right to free speech here. I'm as much a patriot as you think you are. It's because I love this country that I protest against a president who sends brown-skinned people to detention camps in an overt act of racial prejudice and without due process, who places the Marines in American streets to intimidate protesters, who fosters an enforcement agency (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) whose members wear masks and no identification, and who does all of this without the consent of Congress and through executive decisions that are probably illegal and can be challenged in court.

I want this country that I love to be better than this. 

In retrospect, I should have stepped next to this fellow and saluted the flag with him. All my best thoughts come after the fact.

I bring this up because I recently heard a conversation on TV where this Trump supporter tried to explain why this country is a republic and not a democracy. OK, I get it now. That's where I've heard this argument before. It's a MAGA talking point. If you take democracy out of the equation, you can justify to yourself that a president is all powerful. A monarch. A king. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers tried to avoid and why presidents were given limited powers in the Constitution.

Originally, a president was commander-in-chief of the armed forces; he could negotiate treaties (with Senate approval); he could appoint ambassadors and other officials (with Senate approval); he could grant reprieves and pardons, and he had the power to veto legislation. There's nothing there about suspending due process or building inhumane detention camps in the Florida swamp.

So what kind of government are we supposed to be? 

I see us as a constitutional federal democratic republic.

It is constitutional because we follow the  U.S. Constitution; it's federal because power is divided between national and state governments; it's a democracy because its citizens (We The People) have a voice through free and fair elections, and it's a republic because we elect a representative government.

There's not a lot I remember from high school. I do remember slow dances with Peggy, running cross country in the fall, chess club on Fridays. And all those civics and history classes. 

That was the good stuff worth remembering. 

 

 

 

 

1776

Every Fourth of July, I treat myself to a viewing of the Broadway musical 1776. I taped the show off TCM about seven or eight years ago and tucked it away in my video library, so I always have access to it. I can watch it any time I want to.

But mostly, I like to watch it on the Fourth.

As you might expect by the title, it's a Broadway rendition of the birth of or country. And while many aspects of the film (and the musical) are either composites or half-truths to move the narrative along (for example, Martha Jefferson never came to Philadelphia to be with her horny husband), it's still an inspiring film – especially given that the Second Continental Congress was held in secrecy and the nascent nation was in the midst of a shooting revolution.

If nothing else, the movie reflects the sense of purpose the Founding Fathers had in breaking away from England and the tyranny of King George III and thus drafting the Declaration of Independence. The half-truths and composites are not only entertaining, but they feel real. At least they do to me.

Anyway, the signing of the Declaration ultimately led to the creation of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 – just seven years after the end of the Revolutionary War. I tend to tie those two incredible documents together. The Revolution was fought to separate the colonies from a monarchy and the Constitution was designed and created by We the People to prevent the rise of another King George III.

The Founding Fathers were aware of this problem as they grappled with the danger of a strong president who could become a tyrant. That's why they created a bicameral Congress with three branches of government that is empowered with checks and balances to reign in a rogue president. 

It works when everybody does their jobs. 

Fast forward 237 years...

Somehow, some way, the Supreme Court has granted a felonious president with 34 criminal indictments complete immunity for the length and duration of his term. Where is the logic in that? Where is the logic of removing 50 years of settled law to prevent a woman from having control of her own body? How do detention camps exits in America after what we saw in World War II?

On this Fourth of July, felon president Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill (who comes up with these stupid names anyway? Alligator Alcatraz. Really? It sounds like we're getting our government from out of a comic book) that will add $3.3 trillion to the nation debt over 10 years. It will cut $930 billion from Medicaid, thus endangering the existence of possibly 300 or more rural hospitals and perhaps 25 percent of the country's nursing homes. A total of $170 billion will be cut from Medicare. Another 12 million people could lose their health care. How about a $285 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? All of this in order to pay for a tax break for billionaires in what is amounting to be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. How does this help the American people? All it does is make us hungrier, poorer and sicker. Many of us will die before our time because of this immoral bill, but, hey, we all die anyway, right Sen. Joni Ernst?

Meanwhile, $10 billion is earmarked for missions to Mars (what?) and another $150 billion to immigration enforcement (those masked men from ICE who don't bother with piddly stuff like due process). You know all those criminals they're supposed to be deporting? Turns out less than 10 percent have committed violent crimes, and that is from ICE's own data. Another 65 percent have committed no crimes at all except, apparently, for the color of their skin. And to meet a quota.

I have a feeling this type of paranoid, fear-mongering government isn't what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they penned We the People. I might be wrong, but I assumed their concept of government was a bit loftier. Perhaps more idealistic. Certainly kinder.

I guess I might have to wait for the musical 2025 to find out.