Burning

When you burn a book, when you burn a Jew, literally or figuratively, you burn the truth, you burn both.

Nothing could be more calculated to cause anti-semitism than this now phony defense of Jews by Trump, which is being used to attack freedom of thought, of expression, free uninhibited reserch, scientific knowledge and good.

Those are all the things modern, enlightened Jewish communities have stood for over long years. We know our friends and they are the great universities and the people who make them.

The real anti-semites here are Trump and self-hating Jews like his chief Kapo, Stephen Miller. 

And yes, I am a Jew, an American Jew who valued what until now, until this deadly passage in American life and politics, had been a given – our inclusion and immersion in American life and society.

I lived my life knowing, absolutely knowing it could not and would not happen here. Expressions of it throughout American history? Yes, of course, it is always present, witness Father Coughlin or today friends of Trump like the man West.

But until Trump and his maga hordes, it would not achieve what it has, because he is the revenge filled and driven mental hater that he is.

Sept. 1, 1939, world population 2.2 billion people, of whom 17 million were Jews.

Not a lot, right? But wait.

May 8, 1945, Germany surrenders in a world still of nearly 2.2. billion people, of whom but 11 million were Jews. The other 6 million Jews? Where were they? Germans keep meticulous records, so we know.

And now? Now, infiniitessimal.

Today in a world of 8 billion people, nearly four times as many as in 1939, Jewish world population is back to 16 million to 17 million, about 7 milion each here in the U.S. and 7 million in Israel with the rest scattered across Europe, Latin America, and the remainder of the world.

You can’t do that math without a calculator that will take you to a lot of places – all on the right side of the decimal point.

And yet,and yet when anyone wants to make a point, Jews are the point.

It gets, it becomes – it is tiresome, so, so tiresome.

Across 2,000 years of the ancient Christian blood libel, expulsions of Jews like those in 1290 by King Edward I from England and 200 years later in 1492 by Isabella and Ferdinand from Spain; and then ultimately “the Final Solution” by Germany -which really at some point became inevitabile given two centuries of hate – it gets so very tiresome.

Why are we doing it again.It persists, doesn’t it? To be used for its malodorous purposes by the malodorous like Trump, the thing that occupies the now tastelessly, garrishly gold plated Oval Office.

He knows as he sinisterly uses anti-semitism and proclaims against it that he is one of its foremost proponents (if you are a Jew and don’t know that, you may not be redeemable and you have learned nothing and are incapable of learning anything from history.).

What else is beyond tiresome is the meglomaniacal criminality of the Israeli Trump. – Netanyahu – who uses and has used the IDF to kill 50,000 Palestinian non-combattants (we are told with some verification) inlcuding a third of. them who are children, including thousands of infants and toddlers.

Children died in Nazi gas chambers or at the edges of Nazi shooting pits or of starvation in Nazi ghettos. Children are dying now and have under a reign of IDF bombs and missiles.

Every murdered child is equivalence, is an equivalence. There is no ledger that weighs differently whether he or she died in 1942 at Treblinka, at the pit’s edge in September 1941 at Babi Yar ravine near Kyiv; or this year or last year in Gaza City or Khan Yunis in an open street, while sheltering at a hospital or crowding into what was once a school.

It is where hate takes you, takes us. Israelis found and founded a nation but they also found others with whom to refine misunderstanding into hate and are received in the same way by those people..

But the one, the ancient hatred that goes on and on and on is anti-semitism, partly because it so easily used against so small a part of the fractured human collection.

Screaming anti-semitism is the way the Nazis burned books, which by the way Trump and his ill-begotten creatiures have done at the USNA at Annapolis and across the nation.

The history of this time will be the ugliest, most sordid chapter of and about the United States of America – if we survive, can survive as the U.S.A. and that is more than arguable.

But what kind of real crimials here? Look no farther than the Treasury Secretary, Bessent.

Bessent is a man who is the worst of the worst because they say he knows better. Clearly, Bessent does not know better. He would have quit yesterday if he did. He would never have swooned for the job or taken it at all.

So, expect nothing good from these people. Just like them, like all of them, there will be nothing but evil – pure, cruel, wicked, unadulturated evil.

Yesterday they cut the legs out from under the Meals on Wheels program. Who does such a thing except a sadist, a lunatic sadist? Well, they’ve done it. Put that in your pipes and choke on it Trump voters. Or are you that well fed?

Books, Jews, Meals on Wheels, decency, the idea of a common good, all the rest of the good trampled by these people. Do all burn at the same temperature?

Rhetorical questions. At what temperatures do despair but also white hot anger burn?

We are still finding out.

Meanwhile, Trump puts another lie on the fire and another and another, like the one about anti-semitism infecting higher learning.

The hotter the lie, the more chiling the result.

Beware

The death of a pope commands world attention as does the selection of the new pope in the weeks to follow.

But the monster in the White House cannot stand not being all the news all the time, which is why when you go online to read a paper or news site, there are two dozen stories about him.

With a real president on a given day, there might be one or two pertinent articles, not insane ones about cruelty, ignorance, fear, loathing, and about the abject stupidity throughout the regime that has torn the United States to pieces in bu 90 daysl

Can it, can this thing in the WhIte House, share Page 1 with a deceased pope, with speculation about a successor and, ultimately, a with focus on the new pope when he is chosen?

No, he cannot. He cannot in the diseased, warped, narcissistic goo that spreads from his head to his feet, that is him – he cannot stand for anyone else to receive attention, much less more attention.

Beware, world, what this sick creature in the White House will do to make sure no one can look away while the world looks to the Vatican.

Hallelujah

Oh, right, a third term.

Oh, the Constitution?

What Constitution?

OH, THAT Constitution?

We have no Constitution any longer.

Oh, but there could be other outcomes.

He could die. Would that he did.

He could be like “to decrease the excess population” and die.

If he does, the day he does, then:

Let’s hope we sing as soon as today.

Hallelujah Hallelujah Hallelujah

The Buck

That buck, the one that stopped at and with Harry Truman?

It doesn’t stop anywhere in the Trump regime.

No one did it. No one is responsible.

And they are all one or more of these, mostly many more:

Imbeciles, idiots, screwups, screwballs, drunks, criminals, gangsters, magamaniacs, trumpers, liars, cowards, bullies, toadies, sycophants, bootlickers, incompetents, losers.

Watch the bouncing buck. It is not stopping anywhere for the next 3 years, 43 weeks, and 62 days.

Regime

It’s the same extreme nativist scare used forever in this country to move public opinion to the right edge of the world.

1798, 1854, 1917-20, 1947-54, now, right now.

It is to ask, to say, “Are you now or have you ever been?” with all the terror that implies, means, and is brought home with massive bullying, lying, and cheating. Cheating who? You.

It is the old filth from what Magacans, the former Republicans who now rule through this cowardly, ignorant regime. They own the White House. They own the Congress.

Mark it well. There are no longer any Republicans.

There are only Magacans.

And, mark you, this is not an administration. No, it is not.

It is a regime.

Fascist Italy, The Third Reich, Bolshevik Russia/the U.S.S.R., Russia, and the Chinese People’s Republic today are not/were not administrations. In history, or now, they were regimes. They were, they are regimes.

Now one asserts itself in the United States of America as a Congress in March 2025 as compliant as the Reichstag made itself in March 1933, rolls over, submitting like a mangy dog.

This is why the opposition is flailing and failing. It still fails to understand that this is not an administration but what it intended, a regime, the only one to be allowed.

Like all such, this is a dark, evil, regime of the criminal, the wicked, the ignorant, and emotionally crippled like Musk spreading its/ stain across the present; spreading its stain across the map of America, across international boundaries, charters, and treaties, across decency, kindness and against, over and over and over again, wickedly and cruelly against “…a decent respect to the opinions of mankind…”

What’s In a Name?

What’s in a name? What’s in these names? Terror, arbitrary terror, the absence of law, lawlessness, the gulag, injustice, hate, fear, late night knocks, brutality, roundups, camps, brutality, injustice, no justice, the road to man made hell.

Nazi Germany

The Gestapo

Sicherheitsdienst

Tsarist Russia

The Ohkrana

Bolshevik Russia

The Cheka

Soviet Union

The Cheka, later the

GPU

OGPU

NKVD

KGB

Putin’s Russia

The FSB

East German Democratic Republic

The Stassi

The United States Trump Regime

The FBI

INS

ICE

The Department of Justice

The Department of Homeland Security

Murder, Mayhem and Resorts

So we are now negotiating directly with Hamas, perpetrators of Oct. 7. Sure, why not.

Except the U.S. does not negotiate with terrorists. Except sometimes now we do. Because it’s all a deal.

Want something from us, name your price? Like the show, “The Price is Right,” because hey, it’s all TV, life is TV, you learn that as a kid watching it in the 1950s.

Conqueror of the World, chief Magaman, Potentate of the East, Kraken of the Kremlin, Tsar of All Tarrrifs Trump warns Hamas, cooperate, release all hostages or suffer consequences “or it’s over for you.”

So what’s he going to do to Hamaas and Gaza and Gazans that Israel hasn’t done?

Well, we do have nukes. Oh right, Israel does too.

Did you know there are nine nations with nukes: the U.S., Russia, China, the UK, France, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea, and Iran wants them.

Reassuring list isn’t it?

Oh, but now let’t clear out those pesky Gazans with their 1 million kids so we can get on to what is really needed here: A string of resorts and casinos on that glorious, lovely Mediterranean coast -not far from where your writer picked wild grapes in the dunes during a more bucolic/ time in 1963—all named Trump.

Right, you can’t make it up.

You can’t make up yesterday, you can’t make up tomorrow, and who knows what today will be about.

But, hey it’s ok, as long as Pete Hegseth has a bottle of Tequila, Lady Bug Grham has a microphone, and Rubio has the sinking middle seat on a couch, what could go wrong? What could possibly go wrong?

Blowing Things Up

There is at least one reason for the explosion in the Oval Office Feb. 28 when Trump and his quisling, Vance, pounced on President Zelensky.

It is the Nobel Peace Prize, the most famous of the annual prizes endowed permanently in 1895 by Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite and other explosives so often used in war.

Trump has said repeatedly he should get it. His lickspittle staff, cabinet, and Magas constantly promote him for the prize.

All of them point to his obsession with promoting on his terms, and Russia’s, a cease-fire in Ukraine

When President Zelensky came to the White House Friday, to sign another phony Trump deal – signing away supposed mineral mining rights in Ukraine for a formless cease fire – things went south in what was so clearly a set up – a do what I say or suffer the consequences ruse.

That deal is about as real as the notion that Mexico would pay for the supposed wall or that for over/ 400 years map makers and maps have called that body of water what it is, the Gulf of Mexico.

But Trump wants his pretense of a cease-fire in Ukraine and wants it badly so he can be nominated for the peace prize.

Why? Well, for one thing, it was awarded to President Obama in 2009.

Trump hates Obama, really hates him. So he wants Nobel Peace Prize equivalence and then he can say his peace is the biggest thing in the history of the prize.

Zelensky balked and the attack went forward.

Whatever else is in play, Trump in thrall to Putin, Russia and the FSB, Maga politics, his naked hatred of Obama,his lust for the Nobel peace prize is an underlying cause of this deliberate breach with Ukraine.

The Road from Nuremberg

At Nuremberg, November 21, 945:

On that date, the chief prosecutor for the International Military Tribunal, Justice Robert Jackson of the United States Supreme Court, delivered in his opening statement one of the most important statements of fact, law, philosophy, decency, and fundamental morality ever made in any court of law in human history.

It had to be. He was there as principal agent for prosecution of the gravest, greatest, most awful crimes in the entire history of the human race, in the case brought before judges assembled from the United States of America, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France – underscore the United States of America.

Toward the conclusion of the long statement of charges against the vast criminal regime being tried, Justice Jackson told the hushed court:

“The real complaining party at your bar is civilization.”

It was then, it is now.

We can, we must adopt those words, those thoughts, and look to them not in the context of the revealed crimes of that Germany, but in the revealed abandonment of all that has been, in its best sense, for 249 years, American.

No litany here and none can capture the nihilistic hatred and animosity for people, decency, kindness, fairness, well-being, civility, and charity in every word, thought, deed, ambition, desire and want of a decent society being demonstrated by the new regime.

All that has been and is being torn asunder by it day in and day out.

Add that abandoned now is the very idea from which came the United States of America, a revolution by, for, and about democracy.

A revolution resolved “four score and seven years later” so that “…government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

In the total experience of humankind, nothing, no matter how terrible, compares yet to Germany and its deeds between Jan. 30, 1933 and May 8, 1945. Even in the awful history of what mankind does to mankind, historically or now, nothing is equal to that wickedness of that Germany.

But now – now we are at the precipice of government metastasized into evil, into an uncontrolled and uncontrollable impulse to do harm, only harm at every turn, in every way – to do as much harm as can be done in every and all ways.

How much harm will be done? The toll is being counted every day, the wickedness, defying description, gathered on display at the American White House, February 28 in a scene right from the German Chancellery in March 1939.

Then what can we say and what must be said now?

This is what must be said to the same risen, rising malevolent force for it has never been said better.

“The real complaining party at your bar is civilization..”

The real complaining party at our bar – us – is civilization – American democratic civilization.

Uber Alles

At Nuremberg, Hans Franck, Governor General of the General Government of Poland, as the Nazis named it (Warsaw and most of pre-war Poland with 2.9 million dead Jews) said before he was hung for crimes against humanity:

“A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany shall not be erased.”

He was wrong, 920 years short.

Eighty years later 20 percent of Germans, aided and abetted by Vance and Musk, voted for the Nazis.

If you think that was anything less than yesterday, then you have learned nothing since.

The world is there again. This time it includes us.

Explain that to the 9,000 Americans buried in a cemetery overlooking Normandy. You can’t.

Uber Alles

At Nuremberg, Hans Franck, Governor General of the General Government of Poland, as the Nazis named it (Warsaw and most of pre-war Poland with 2.9 million dead Jews) said before he was hung for crimes against humanity:

“A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany shall not be erased.”

He was wrong, 920 years short.

Eighty years later 20 percent of Germans, aided and abetted by Vance and Musk, voted for the Nazis.

If you think that was anything less than yesterday, then you have learned nothing since.

The world is there again. This time it includes us.

Explain that to the 9,000 Americans buried in a cemetery overlooking Normandy. You can’t.

Prediction

In the event there is a world-affecting death in Rome the creature from beyond sanity and basic human decency in the White House will not be able to tolerate being a secondary story.

It will do something meaner, crazier, more vicious, and more wicked than anything yet to stay ahead in the headlines.

Gaza

Why is this being treated as if it is, was or could ever be a serious thought?

Because an American president said it.

Another shot from the Nazi, nuts who can’t aim straight. Oh, I meant to say Republicans.

Sorry! What was I thinking about?

Firing the FBI, disclosing CIA agent identities, calling for mass federal resignations, closing down USAID, tearing up the 14th Amendment, handing the government and all its information and secrets to a South African racist, putting RFK Jr. in charge of anything or anyone or ditto Pam Bondi, or Patel, or Gabbard or Stephen Miller, or ANY OF THEM AND ALL OF THEM.

The United States was a good idea for 236 years.

It’s over, all over and done.