How did this happen?

February 17, 2023

“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American Public”

- H. L. Mencken


The end is near; Trump is exiting stage right in an ignominious testament to greed, narcissism, mendacity and ignorance. The very idea of this Richard III presidency is something I have been trying to figure out for the past 4 years. The enigma is a mystery, wrapped inside a riddle, as the Winston Churchill coinage goes.


Arguments range from Trump preying on the gullibility of the American public, to the intense rationalization that he was even able to convince intelligent people that he would “drain the swamp,” and clean up the fetid mess of corruption that is Washington, DC, a slog of lobbyists in Gucci loafers and congressmen in a never-ending rotating door, stuffing their pockets with cash in brown envelopes at the expense of the taxpayer. Also, “job creating” plutocrats thinking Trump would improve their portfolios, keeping the stock market high and their taxes low. Only 20% of Americans own stocks.


The grift continues, Trump having raised hundreds of millions of dollars, ostensibly for a 2024 run, but which will certainly be diverted to his legal defense as he is pursued by numerous district attorneys, the justice department, and attorneys general. Not to mention his multitudinous oligarchical Deutche Bank creditors in Russia (Putin) and Saudi Arabia. And let’s not forget the rape and defamation suits by various women such as E. Jean Carol.


This week, a mob of insurrectionists invaded the Capitol, believing the lies promulgated by Trump, nakedly at a podium, lying to them, that he would march along with them toward the palace of our republic. Instead, he got into his hermetically sealed limo and skulked back to the White House to view the spectacle he had created and delighted in viewing an enraged mob ransacking the place.  Trump probably entered nirvana when one of the invaders sat with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, almost like his voyeuristic leering at the disrobed Miss Universe contestants in their dressing room.


While CNN pundits screeched outrage, “treason and sedition,” Laura Ingraham’s pallid, raspy imitation of Tallulah Bankhead’s voice discussed how the Democrats were trying to impeach Trump “never having given him the benefit of the doubt,” saying nothing about the desecration of the Capitol which Abraham Lincoln rushed to complete during the Civil War, emphasizing the strength of the Union. Where Franklin D. Roosevelt requested a declaration of war upon Japan on December 8, 1941. Where Winston Churchill spoke during a joint session of congress in December 1941, shortly after the United States entered the war against Germany and Japan. Where Woodrow Wilson advocated for the League of Nations after the bloodletting of World War I. Where Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy, John Lewis, and other great statesman had lain in state. Our historic Capitol, the seat of our government, the triumph of our democracy, where notables, and the framers enjoy memorialization and statuary, invaded by a mob of rabid rioters stoked by a deranged and deluded president, falsely alleging the election had been stolen.


Earlier, Ted Cruz, described as a “serpent covered in Vaseline,” and Josh Hawley, his fist held mob-high, disgraced themselves, turning a ceremonial procedure registering the electoral votes, to their own political benefit, sending fund raising emails. History will not look kindly upon this sordid spectacle.  They should apologize and resign.


We saw Lindsey Graham, jumping over the side of the sinking Titanic, pushing women and children out of the way, securing his seat on the lifeboat. This, after his demonstrated hypocrisy during the Merick Garland episode, the about face on Amy Barrett, and two switches from Trump denigrator to admirer. Calling Graham a prostitute insults the world’s oldest profession. The power-hungry Mitch McConnell, now minority leader, forgive the cliché, had also sowed the wind and now reaps the whirlwind. His enablement of Trump over the last four years will not sit well with historians, excepting perhaps the example of how power corrupts.


Responsibility for this abounds. Fox news hosts and Rupert Murdoch have contributed mightily to the lying and false narrative presented to the public. News used to be a nonprofit enterprise of the major networks, CBS, NBC and ABC, presented as a public service, now transmogrified into a greedy crucible determined by marketers and audience demographics. Ratings avarice on Tucker and Laura and Hannity clearly do not help our country. Orwellian presentation of the news divides the public and shames its progenitors.



Republican house members now see their ranks riven with mutual accusations of who bears the burden for the nation’s disheartening catastrophe.  A split of Republicans of principle and those of amoral self-interest dwells on the horizon.  Elected acolytes of Trumpian amorality should know that their day of reckoning has arrived. 

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Why the West is allowing Ukrainians to Bleed and Die

By Engage Team • February 17, 2025
During his “wilderness years,” Churchill understood Adolf Hitler’s ambitions, presciently shouting to a deaf world the dangers ahead. The Rhineland. Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia gobbled up while appeasers twiddled. England and France could have sent Hitler packing. Instead, they gave him three more years to arm. It was too late. Fifty million died. Stalin, double-crossed by his former Poland-dividing German friend, decided too late that he had to fight. Millions of Soviets soldiers and civilians died because of his dithering. FDR had to contend with America Firsters and could have entered the war sooner; he had third term political considerations in in 1940; but he knew he had to fight, too. Eventually. WE RELIVE THE MISTAKES OF HISTORY AT OUR OWN PERIL, LIKE WILEY CAYOTE CHASING THE ROAD RUNNER. PUTIN INVADED A SOVEREIGN COUNTRY. STOP HIM, GERMANS. STOP HIM, FRENCHMEN. STOP HIM, NATO. STOP HIM, AMERICA. UKRAINIAN CHILDREN ARE FREEZING AND STARVING. PEOPLE ARE LOSING THEIR LIVES TO A RUSSIAN BLOODTHIRSTY PYROMANIAC, A HANNIBAL LECTER. Here’s the rub: using time as his weapon, like Hitler, Putin is conscripting, propagandizing, and gradually conscripting massive manpower—constructing his war machine, gaslighting his people, building support, slowly, craftily, cunningly, odiously. Russians believe his lies about Ukraine as a Nazi haven, a virtual pizza parlor filled with basement dwelling pedophiles, or in this case, jackbooted storm troopers. Despite President Zelensky’s Churchillian appearance before congress, we must move swiftly, because time is on Putin’s side. A war of attrition is not on Ukraine’s side. Even with US Ordinance, rockets, drones, artillery. Western fear is Putin’s ally. Time is Putin’s ally. Wars start slowly but inevitably spiral out of control; aid the west provides the Ukrainians resembles aid the US gave to England in 1940, followed by exponential materiel increase from the great American “arsenal of democracy.” It was not enough. Not in 1940 and not enough in 2022; it will not be enough in 2023, 2024, 2025 as this war drags on. Too many Russians, too much manpower. Too much time. Victory requires a credible threat of NATO mobilization—an army ready to do battle. And an ultimatum. But that will not happen, I fear. Billions of dollars for weapons in a proxy war with Ukrainians fighting Russians has been impactful. Americans can watch Netflix war movies while Ukrainians bleed. They can watch Tom Hanks storm the beach at Normandy. Much less dangerous. Let’s just ship some more rockets to Ukraine instead. Yellowstone is on. Even so, it was heartening to see the bipartisan support for Ukraine in the Congress. Military planners in the Pentagon and in Western European capitals should be preparing for a wider war. It would be malfeasant for them not to do. We just don’t realize it yet. NATO is obliged to tell Putin to get out of Ukraine or face an allied army to evict him. Putin must be given an ultimatum to get out or face military force. Germans and French, British and American, Canadian and Australian. Putin understands naked power. The west must mobilize. He does not understand anything else. Lenin said, “push forward the bayonet. If you find soft flesh, push. If you find steel, retreat.” Putin learned Lenin in school; Lenin is in his DNA. He learned it in the KGB. He learned it in Mother Russia. He wants it all. He is Czar Nicholas, Comrade Stalin, Comrade Lenin all rolled into a painting in the Hermitage, his hometown museum, where he went as a schoolboy, where his parents took him, where he learned of the greatness of Russia. Where the Czar had palaces. Russians never had democratic traditions. Ask Nicholas II and his family, brutally executed by Bolsheviks. Ask the millions starved by Stalin in the Ukraine during his communized agriculture plan. Ask the people sent to the Gulag, or the Hungarians who dared to revolt against the Soviet hammer and sickle. Ask the subjugated Poles carved up by Stalin and Hitler. Ask all of the subjugated and terrorized people who suffered behind the iron curtain. Ask Alexi Navalny, a political prisoner, poisoned once, and now jailed in a Russian gulag. A delusional revanchist KGB agent in the Kremlin tries to raise the Soviet corpse by terrorizing a sovereign nation. A nation which had its own history before Lenin and his desciples created a dark Bolshevik empire. NATO, led by Germany and France and then the United States, face the eventual inevitability of mobilizing an army to kick Putin out of Ukraine and Crimea. The alternative is too grim to contemplate. Trench warfare. Stalemate. Ukrainians under siege. Massive Russian armies. Possibly being defeated. World economic disruption. Continued war crimes. A war of attrition, cold and misery. I hope I am wrong about this.  Western ambitions about this outrageous war ending through negotiation are delusional. If Putin sees that we are serious about the sovereignty of nations, he must face a serious military threat-- mobilization of NATO forces. Only then he will likely back down. Until then brave Ukrainians will bleed, freeze and die bearing the brunt of our fear.

George Bush has His New Book Out.....

By Engage Team • February 17, 2025
George Bush has his new book out. I have not yet read it, but I have heard him interviewed on TV and have read reviews of the book. This frat boy, this pious peddler of religious virtue, this hypocrite now wants to sell his writing (if he wrote it at all) as though he would be regarded kindly by history. He will not. He lacks no chutzpah. Ignorance surely is bliss. His absence of remorse for sending our young service men and women to fight and die or have a leg or an arm blown off, is an exemplar of hubris and rationalization with which history will be able to evaluate his Presidency for its true worthlessness. Claiming to "protect Americans," he invaded a country that did not present an existential threat to our national security, violating his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the constitution. Arguably he is a war criminal, having authorized torture and assuming responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of thousands of American youths, as well as around 100,000 innocent civilian Iraqis. Speaking of audacity, the current occupant of the White House could use some. His potential compromise of the Bush tax cuts, favoring the richest of Americans threatens to perpetuate a growing disparity between the super rich and the rest of us. Imposing taxes to implement social policy, despite Republican protestations, is not a new phenomenon. Seems that the American people have been fed and are voraciously consuming the malarkey of the conservatives who, despite evidence to the contrary, still believe that these rich folk are benefactors who create more jobs when they fail to pay their fair share of taxes. These are the same people who spent two trillion dollars on two wars and insist that we need a fleet of warplanes and billion dollar aircraft carriers to fight an amorphous band of illiterate religious fundamentalist terrorist thugs who have to smuggle explosive-laden printer cartridges onto airplanes or fill a truck with explosives to attack us. Now we need to get spending under control, they say. No present day politician, Republican, Democrat or Tea Partier seems to have the courage to tell us exactly what they will cut. Social Security? The defense budget? Veterans Benefits? Medicare? The truth be told, no one dares. It must be the fault of the lawyers

Thank Goodness the Election is Over

By Engage Team • February 17, 2025
This is my first blog entry, and a fine time it is for it, if I must say so myself. Florida has now elected an ethically challenged Republican governor, who essentially flooded the airwaves with negative ads about Alex Sink, the democratic candidate. People who have voted for him will not be surprised if he disappoints by trying to shut the door to the courthouse to "protect" businesses which despoil the environment, drill for oil in pristine seas off the coast, or manufacture harmful products. On the national scene, people are amazed that tea partiers have gained so many seats in the House of Representatives, by mouthing standard platitudes of how they are going to slash spending. But where? They do not say. Elected to the United States Senate is Marco Rubio, a 39 year old tea party conservative, who has railed against a woman's right to choose, waffled on global warming, and thinks that America is moving in the wrong direction. He expects to cure this problem by slashing the budget and making "hard choices," but has failed to specify which choices. Not social security because his 80 something mother is a beneficiary, but more likely because he fears the wrath of Florida's seniors. He is supposedly a rising star in the Republican party and since the other tea partiers are pretty crazy, he probably won't be around for his full term, unless he keeps his seat while running for higher office a la Joe Lieberman. The selling of candidates like bars of soap continues, and the insulting, demeaning ads are over, but the consequences of the electorate not having to think too much about the candidates or listen seriously to debates about complex issues should be troublesome to any thoughtful person. People in Florida should not be discouraged, however. Now that the GOP has some power, they will be held responsible by the punditry, including yours truly in the next election.