Presents for those you hate: The Spy's Christmas list of unreadable books

Editors' Note:  With the holiday shopping season beginning today, the Spy, committed as it is to reader service, today solves your most pressing holiday shopping query: what do you get for the person you hate but have to give a present to?  You know: your boss, your client, your neighbor whose lawnmower you keep borrowing, your frenemy, your Republican uncle and so many others.  It has to be something that no one would enjoy, value, or use but not so obviously contemptuous as to get you into hot water.   Our solution: just give them one of these unreadable books.  For our many new readers, an “unreadable” book is one that is not just terrible. It has to be a book that you don't actually have to read to, um, appreciate. Just imagine the look on their faces when they learn that you've stuffed their stockings with one of these tomes.

American Weirdo
by Olivia Nuzzi [Claude, check title – Ed.]
Simon & Schuster
$30, already marked down to $27.96

Have you ever wondered what goes on the mind of a young entitled narcissist who likes to bang, virtually and really, disgusting men much older than she?

And she sings, too!

Yeah, us neither. But for anyone on your Christmas list who wants to know what “felching” is, (our advice: don’t search it, or if you must turn off images) we have the perfect choice for them, and we also have to ask why they are on your list.

Nuzzi you may recall was once considered a bright young political reporter although no one seems to recall anything cogent she ever said about politics. Her career went up in flames when she crushed on Brainworm Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and confessed, or boasted, about the great video sex she had with him. In her defense, it’s got to be better, and healthier, than any other kind with a former heroin addict.

She retreated to the land of second chances for the nutty and passably attractive, Los Angeles, and proceeded to pen the memoir of her dirty and other deeds, which she chooses to call a “canto.” We think of a canto as a piece of a poem, but she’s good (she thinks) at getting men and words to do what she wants.

Anyway if you enjoy dirt about hideous old men in politics and media, do what Olivia always did around prominent men who could advance her career and grab it!

Unscripted
By Cheryl Hines
Skyhorse,
$32.99, already marked down to $29.99.

If you can’t get enough of the wit and wisdom of women willing to bone Bobby Kennedy, Jr. (a much larger group than you might have thought), Cheryl Hines has offered a memoir of her own thrilling life.

Cheryl remembers how she met Brainworm Bobby

We’re going to take a wild guess here: it’s the heartwarming story of an actress from the Florida boondocks who through luck and f*** [surely, pluck? – Ed.] made her way to the middle of Hollywood stardom and then married a demented creep who had enough money to support her in the style to which she would like to become accustomed.

Expect plenty of anecdotes about more famous and talented people she knows (like Larry David?) and her fabulous collection of snappy serapes (which she models on the cover).

She’s also willing to defend her odious husband. This is normally a good thing in a wife, but when hubby is intent on killing millions of Americans by spreading lies about vaccines and other proven forms of medical care while felching the corrupt demented sex offender he serves, maybe it’s time to cut your losses, sue for divorce, and open a yarn store back home in Florida or some other godforsaken place where superannuated actresses go to get the hell out of the way.

Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution
by Amy Coney Barrett 
Sentinel
$32.00, already marked down to $18.51

It turns out that Supreme Court Justices have a number of side hustles, not limited to vacationing on the private jets of billionaire reactionaries or sipping tea out of such billionaires’ collection of National Socialist bone china. They also can write (or put their names on) books and pocket a huge advance.

Sometimes the result is a moving memoir, like Lovely Girl by Ketanji Brown Jackson. And sometimes, when you need to finance that vacation home on the Maryland shore for you and your fellow handmaids, you get stuff like this.

Barrett is the poorly-qualified mediocrity installed on the bench at the catastrophic end of the Mad King’s first reign while the dirt was still being piled on the grave of her predecessor Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was put there to provide a vote to abolish abortion rights and generally sign on to the lawless Republican project of creating permanent Republican rule.

Which she has loyally done ever since.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the hypocritical disregard for the law displayed by Barrett and her five bent Republican colleagues, she has slapped together a book proclaiming her fealty to the rule of law and our Constitution.

We have a complete response in four words: Trump v. United States. Anyone who has even glanced at Article II of the Constitution or over two centuries of its interpretation has been struck by the care the Framers took to limit the authority of the Executive, reflecting their fear of creating a new tyranny.

How right they were! They probably didn’t expect the other two branches to aid and abet Executive tyranny but thanks to Barrett and her, um, brethren, that’s what happened, despite whatever despite drivel Barrett’s clerks were able to cobble together.

But don’t worry: even if our democracy didn’t survive Barrett, her royalties did, and that’s what counts. 

How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will―A Senator's Funny and Perceptive Takedown of Washington Politics
by John Kennedy
Broadside
$29.99, already marked down to $24  

One of the Mad King's many loyal Republican taint-polishers, Sen. John Kennedy (R – the Bayou) offers up his mind-bending meta-level take on the question no one is asking: is he an idiot or is he just pretending?

Sen. Kennedy, shown here without his Oxford robes

On the one hand, he certainly does his best to sound like a jackass just fished out of the swamps of Barataria with his affected Uncle Cornpone accent and homely anecdotes about the dog that wouldn't hunt because Kristi Noem shot him, before Sen. Kennedy confirmed her to a critical homeland-security job.

On the other, he has a law degree from the University of Virginia, has studied at Oxford (not the one in Mississippi), and displays a certain ruthless canniness that has made him what he is today: another pathetic spineless toady of the Mad King.

Now he's apparently trying to pass himself off as the plutocrat's Will Rogers, with homely aphorisms about how stupid everyone in Washington is (except him of course).

Stupidity in government is indeed is a problem, but not nearly as serious a problem as the ongoing subversion of the rule of law and American democracy, which Kennedy is happy to further as long as he can get a few live shots and presumably some royalties for pisspoor collections of his homilies.

It's part of the great Republican tradition going back at least to St. Ronald of Bitburg to sabotage any government program that actually helps people and then use the disastrous results to persuade the intended beneficiaries that government is inherently unable to help them.   

Perhaps by writing a book decrying the stupidity of Washington politics, he hopes that we will overlook his relentless support of a demented corrupt despot, not to mention said despot's un-American attack on our nations and its institutions.

The question the book doesn't answer though is: are we as stupid as this empty suit thinks we are?

So far the answer seems to be yes.

Men, are you having trouble with your love life despite your obvious superiority? Just ask Jeff!

We're hearing a lot these days about the crisis of American men.  Alone, adrift, unsure of how to navigate the complexities of modern life including how to score with their subordinates at work.  As always, the Spy is here to help!  That's why we're inaugurating our new advice column, Ask Jeff.  This column gives confused and lonely guys the chance to pick the brain of one of America's most successful and admired men, Jeffrey Epstein (you didn't really believe he was dead, did you?) 

If you've got a question, just email it to Jeff at funwithJeff@harvard.edu and send along $40 million or a Harvard fleece.  He'll set you straight!

Dear Jeff,

I'm a tall successful Jewish professional with a resumé that guys would kill for.  In addition, I'm ruggedly handsome and my wife doesn't care what I do in my spare time.  But I'm having trouble getting the ball into the hole, if you catch my drift.  I have mentored a number of smoking hot young women but none of them are willing to knock boots with me.  Now my boss has found out and lots of people in the Yard, um, my place of work are really angry with me.  I've tried the usual – empty apology, fake contrition, and lowering my public profile, and everyone is still busting my balls.  What else can you suggest?

–  Larry from Cambridge

Dear Larry,

I feel your pain.  It's getting so a normal guy can't hit on his subordinates even if he's super nice about it and agrees to review her slides first.  What happened?   And you have absolutely done the right thing with a bulls*** apology while holding on to your high paying no heavy lifting faculty appointment.  My advice is that you should get the hell out of Dodge for a while and find someplace warm and sunny out of the way.  Why not swing by the Island for a while and I can fix you up with some very bright young women who will ensure that Demand equals Supply, if you catch my drift, and I know you do.

Dear Jeff,

I am the world's most brilliant lawyer.  If you don't believe me just ask my grateful clients, at least the ones who are still alive.  Although I am brilliant, charming, rich, and convivial, I find that I am no longer invited to the right parties on Martha's Vineyard.  It used to be when I sunbathed in the nude on Lucy Vincent Beach, it would attract a crowd of admirers.  Now no one cares, and I can't even get a pierogi on the Island anymore.  What can I do to make these people feel guilty enough so that they will invite me to their parties again?  What about saying that ignoring me is just another example of rampant anti-Semitism?  Well, isn't it? 

– Alan from Chilmark

Dear Alan,

They're just jealous of your mind as well as your body.  I don't even know why you waste time with these losers (unless they are famous in which case you should introduce me to them).   Why not come on down to my Island?  We've brought in a number of new Burmese masseuses you can call “Olga” if you like.  I am sure that a few sessions with them will make you forget all your aches and pains.  This time, though, as we used to say at Dalton, drop the gattkes!

Dear Jeff,

I am a visionary genius with intelligence and powers far beyond the reach of mere mortals.  For months now, I have been trying to warn the rabble of the arrival of the anti-Christ and his plan to destroy New York City.  Yet, as further proof that the lower orders are incapable of governing themselves, my warnings are being ignored except for a few of my most enlightened followers.  What can I do to make the churls understand?

– St. Peter Afrikaner, Palo Alto

Dear Peter,

First of all, lighten the f up!  No one likes a Debbie Downer!  Second, don't let them know that you're frustrated.  The lower orders love that.  Instead, continue to reach out to your fellow overlords to pass along your message.  Speaking of passing along your message, I hear that CNN is for sale and for only $24 million I am willing to advise you how it could be yours for a relative pittance.  Just imagine – you and you alone will decide what the rabble hears on the Christ News Network!  You won't even have to change the sign!  Hmu!  In the meantime, book yourself on a podcast with a sympathetic host.  I'd go with Ross Douthat.

Dear Jeff,

Where is the life that late I led?  Where is now, totally dead?  Where is the fun I used to find?  Where has it gone?  Gone with the wine!

Get me out of here, Jeff! 

Now my loony brother has stuck me in some dreary hellhole in Scotland.  The only available rogering involves woolly creatures out in the fields.  I'm not there yet, but I can't go on like this much longer!

Worst yet, I don't have a brass farthing to my name.  Can you be a prince of a fellow and lend me a few million quid just so I can get back in the game?

Regally yours,

Andy, Crathie (wherever the f*** that is).

Dear Andy,

No.

Dear Jeff,

I'm a swinging charismatic big-city mayor soon to have a lot of time on my hands.  I was thinking maybe I could come down to your island and chill.  I'm lots of fun and a snappy dresser.  Maybe beginning the second week of January?

– Eric, Jersey City, NJ

Dear Eric,

Sure, as soon as you come across with the $40 million or the Harvard fleece.  Them's the rules.  As they say in Jersey, money talks and bulls*** walks!

Dear Jeff,

You probably don't get a lot of letters from super-hot women like me, but here goes!  I'm a tall blonde gal who likes to have a good time and also likes older men.  A lot (both the liking and the older part). I just wrote a book that everyone is talking about.  But now the mean girls who are jealous of my body and my body count are talking trash about me and how I'm an empty narcissistic gold-digger with nothing to say!  How should I respond?*  By the way, this is me at 16.  

 

That was 16 years ago but I still have it!  You're always giving great advice to guys on how they can improve their public image, so can you help me?  We can discuss on a Zoom call if you like!

- Livvy from Malibu 

Dear Livvy,

I used to teach math at the prestigious Dalton School so I can add 16 +16 and get the result = I'm not interested. 

Good and Dead: War criminal, liar, torture advocate, subverter of democracy, and mainstream Republican Dick Cheney

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor 

Although the recent obsequies for heartless warmonger Dick Cheney were restrained in their enthusiasm for the one of this century's leading war criminals, some of them did mention that at the end of his life he spoke out against the Mad King.

Thanks, Dick!

In fact his attack on the Tangerine-Faced Fascist was ignored by every single Republican, including those in his home state of Wyoming, who repudiated him and replaced his daughter with an insane Trump taint-polisher.

If only George W. Bush had shown the same resistance to Dead-eye Dick's nonsense, hundreds of thousands of dead Americans and Iraqis might be alive today and hundreds of thousands more, like Sen. Tammy Duckworth, might still have their arms and legs.

He died pretty much forgotten by a populace weary of neocon warmaking. It would be a mistake though not to mark his demise because, as others have noticed, his combination of lawlessness, bullying, corruption, and lies lives on in the party that rejected him in favor of more demonstrative bigots. There was also some sense that Cheney represented a great tradition of mainstream Republicanism that has sadly and surprisingly vanished in the era of the Mad King.

We'll agree with the first part, but as to the second we submit that the differences between the Cheney Regime and the current Fascist coup against America are at most ones of style and degree.

We're not alone:

“Dick Cheney is the godfather of the Trump presidency,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “Trump is unchained because Dick Cheney had been at war for half a century against the restraints put in place after Vietnam and Watergate. He believed that action was more important than following constitutional rules.” 

The only thing we'd quibble with is the implication that the restraints on an imperial Presidency only came into existence in the 1970's. In fact, they are contained in Article II of the Constitution, which grants surprisingly limited powers to what Dead-eye Dick's apologists called the “unitary Presidency.”

The Nation had a fair and balanced assessment of Dead-eye’s career: 

 

Trump now walks a red carpet of lawlessness, plutocracy, and bloodshed woven by Cheney. An uncharismatic Nixon functionary—someone who might never have risen to power had Texas Senator John Tower not drunk himself out of a Pentagon appointment that instead went to Cheney—decisively shaped the destruction of constitutional governance in 21st-century America.

That’s really the point: it’s not just that Dick Cheney was a monstrous human being – he was – it’s that he paved the way for today’s Republican coup against America by pulling out of his sagging ass an entirely invented doctrine about an all-powerful Presidency and then using that assumed power to commit unspeakable crimes.

We can skip over his formative years as a mainstream Republican functionary, when he apparently concocted the hallucination that Crooked Dick Nixon had gotten a bum rap and all this separation-of-powers and rule-of-law crap was just so much water under the board.

In 2000, he persuaded a credulous, stupid, inadequate Republican pol named George W. Bush that he could relieve him of the burden of working on or even comprehending national security and foreign policy matters in much the same way that George’s daddy had relieved him of the burden of serving his country in the Vietnam War.

After Bush won the election by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court, Cheney installed himself as the viceroy of the Bush Regime, aided immensely by his equally evil partner in crime, Don Rumsfeld, who served, so to speak, as Secretary of Defense.

His first goal was to unravel the policy of detente with Russia pioneered by his idol St. Ronald of Bitburg. He was so preoccupied with this pointless exercise that he utterly failed to appreciate the real threat to the United States.

Counter-terrorism expert Richard Clarke was so worried about al-Qaeda’s threats to strike in America, relayed to him by the CIA and other intelligence sources, that he desperately tried to bring their concerns to Dick Cheney’s attention. Cheney, too busy with humiliating Russia, avoided him as long he could. Finally, Clarke got a high level meeting: on September 4, 2001.  Nothing was done.

No torture here, said Dick

When confronted by his utter failure to protect America from al-Qaeda, Cheney lied, saying Clarke had never warned him. Seven email memos state otherwise.

On 9/11, in addition to cancelling his meeting with Clarke, Cheney assumed absolute power at the White House while the real President was being ferried around the country on Air Force One, copy of “My Pet Goat” in hand. In the fanciful account of that day in Cheney’s New York Times obit, the paper of record applauded his “steady hand” at the White House.

That wasn’t true either. In fact he tried to make a number of Bat Guano-like decisions, including one to shoot down civilian aircraft approaching Washington, which had to be countermanded by functionaries like Josh Bolten who gently reminded Dead-eye Dick that he wasn’t the President and that the real President was available by secure datalinks to make such momentous calls.

After bungling 9/11 and lying about it, Cheney realized that it provided an opportunity not only to aggrandize the U.S. by making wars on little countries supposedly too weak to fight back, like Iraq and Afghanistan, but also to dissolve the institutional and constitutional restraints on the exercise of Presidential power, like the supposed power to torture.

Another Cheney lie

Cheney and Rumsfeld unleashed their bent lawyers on the Department of Justice, who duly delivered a ridiculous justification of torture as being OK as long as the victim did not die or remain permanently crippled. 

There was and is a clear definition of torture in U.S. law: 

“torture” means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.

18 U.S.C. § 2340(1)

Despite these simple and clear words contained in black-letter law,

[Yoo] wrote the infamous Bush-era “Torture Memos.” Today, John Yoo and his work are — in the words of one source close to Donald Trump — seen as a “guiding light” by MAGA lawyers and other Trump lieutenants who are seeking to form the legal foundations necessary for making a second Trump administration as wrathful and as unchained as possible.

Based on this fraudulent memo, Cheney always insisted that the United States did not employ torture, despite perpetrating outrages like this:

Four such stories, based almost exclusively on information taken from the Senate torture report, are shared below. They don't include the detainees forced to stand on broken legs, endure ice water baths, or undergo "rectal rehydration" (in reality, rape) at the hands of interrogators, at least one of whom had anger management issues while another "reportedly admitted to sexual assault." These stories represent just a fraction of the prisoners profiled in the report, including at least 26 individuals wrongfully detained even according to the CIA's unlawful standards.

But together, they represent many of the worst elements of the program – the abuse itself, the breakdown in oversight, the preference for merciless brutality over credible intelligence gathering, and the complicity of the highest levels of government.

The other stories include a detainee who died from hypothermia after being shackled with no pants, a German national detained and mistreated by mistake, repeated beatings of a detainee, and beatings and 5 days of sleep deprivation of a detainee that yielded no useful intelligence.  

Which is of course our point: Cheney and his remorseless immoral sadistic campaign for unlimited Presidential power to bomb and abuse anyone he sees fit brought us to our current plight.

Fun fact, though: even Torture Guy Woo isn’t buying the Mad King’s current policy of murdering people in boats on the high seas whom someone says might be engaged in drug smuggling. But he helped build the legal foundation for such barbarism, so you can give Woo a cookie. I won’t.

As grisly and unlawful as Cheney and Rummy’s torture campaign was, it pales in the harm it caused next to their promotion of a terrible bloody and pointless war in Iraq, based on lies concocted by Cheney and Rumsfeld in part by bullying the bureaucracy to bend the facts to fit their lust for violence.

They manipulated and falsified intelligence to buttress their lies that Hussein was somehow involved in 9/11 and possessed weapons of mass destruction.  Then they selectively leaked those lies to credulous reporters who duly reprinted them in places like The New York Times, thus covering their bulls*** with a spray tan of credibility. The lies still stank though. 

And like Republicans ever since, Cheney not only lied repeatedly and unrepentantly; he tried to smear and destroy the lives of those who dared to speak the truth.  When Valerie Plame's husband dared to contradict his bulls*** story about Saddam supposedly buying uranium in Africa, Cheney ordered Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent leaked to a neocon columnist, endangering not only her but her network of spies, some working in harm's way.  And as noted above, he falsely tried to blame Clarke for his administration's failure to react to pre-9/11 intelligence.

Yeah, but if it's raining, who wants to go?

In so doing, he modeled the behavior of the current generation of lying Republican autocrats, who not only refuse to take responsibility for their failures but respond with personal smears (if not indictments) to demean their critics.

But on this Veteran's Day we recall one last parallel between dead Cheney and the current Mad King: like the cowardly bullies they were, they avoided any military service while glorifying violence and treating our troops as disposable props for their theater of cruelty.  Cheney sent hundreds of thousands of ill-trained ill-equipped National Guard troops into multiple bloody tours of duty in Iraq.

His successor the Mad King takes every opportunity to demean the military, from refusing to honor the fallen at a cemetery in France because it would muss his grotesque comb-over to telling his adviser, John Kelly, whose son fell in service to our country, that such brave souls were “suckers and losers.”

The neocon chorus who carried the bags for Dead-eye Dick want us to believe now that the rise of the Republican Mad King represents an inexplicable break from the great Republicans who preceded him. If you believe that, then you are just another one of the Republicans' “suckers and losers.”

White Man's Burden: the Republican advocacy of white European superiority

By Huntley Haverstock
Spy Foreign Correspondent

While Republicans claim to “know nothing” about trivial matters like starving families, unpaid air traffic controllers, covering up Presidential child rape, and corrupt pardons of convicted criminals who have bribed their Mad King, and thus are happy to do nothing, there's one critical matter that they believe deserves their full attention.

The matter: favoring white Christians of European descent over all other cat-eating scum, on the basis of the indisputable superiority of their white Christian European culture. 

The superior claim of Americans of European background over all others (including the Native Americans who were here first) to special privilege is obvious, at least according to that magnificent specimen of white male superiority, Vice President Jimmy Don Vontz:

In his speech this year, Mr. Vance identified “our ancestors” as the people who came to “tame a wild continent.” Americans, in this construction, are those people whose ancestors participated in the conquest of Indigenous America, a process that occurred primarily between 1604 and 1890, when the Census Bureau famously declared that the frontier was no more. If your ancestors include people who were Indigenous or enslaved or who immigrated to this country after 1890 — ancestors who, in all likelihood, are not British, German or French Protestants — you might not be equally American. 

If you have to ask whether Black Americans, whose ancestors also immigrated here before 1890, albeit in chains, are also entitled to special treatment, then you're not catching the drift here. 

Those in search of exemplars of the obviously superior specimens of white European genes or whatever need look no further than the forebears of Jimmy Don and the demented goon whose taint he polishes every day to a fine bronze sheen with his beard.

Jimmy Don's parents were a white junkie who stole pain meds from her own patients to feed her habit and abused her children and a baby daddy who shortly after JD arrived abandoned and neglected his children.  Doesn't get too much more superior than that.  

Not so fast.  The Mad King's grandfather ran a brothel in Canada and his father was a cold corrupt racist landlord in New York who passed along his immoral sociopathic world view to his limited son. 

But despite or perhaps because of the dubiety of the case for the superiority of white folks, this majestic blood and soil vision of what it means to be an American has come to dominate the Republican Party and its racist white base of support.

Consider neo-Na*i hatemonger Nick Fuentes, who enjoyed the Mad King's hospitality at Merde-a-Lardo three years ago and has unrepentantly spread the bizarro-Gospel of Christian white supremacy ever since:

It's nice that he's so chummy with mainstream Republican and former Fox 'News' anchor Tucker Carlson (who lost his job not because of his relentless advocacy of white racism but because he slagged off his boss Rupert Murdoch).  After offering up one antisemitic slur after another, Fuentes ended the jolly discussion on an upbeat note:

When asked to share his unfettered core beliefs with Carlson, Fuentes obliged, painting a vision of a future America that Jews did not have the right to inherit.

“We do need to be right-wing. We do need to be Christian. We do, on some level, need to be pro-white,” he said. “Not to the exclusion of everybody else, but recognizing that white people have a special heritage here, as Americans.” 

On some level? It sounds like the level of the Republican mainstream, who are increasingly fearful that neo-Na*i scum like Fuentes and his equally loathsome enablers like Carlson are in fact the current and future base of the Republican Party:

But there’s also a real fear that Fuentes can actually break through and become hegemonic in the Republican Party.

We wouldn’t be seeing this kind of anxiety in conservative circles if that weren’t the case. I’ve talked to a number of people who are sort of active in right-wing politics in D.C., and this is what they’re telling me—that, you know, Fuentes has a large audience, especially among conservative activists, the people who are actively involved in Republican politics. 

The speaker,  David Austin Smith, a Yale scholar, also pointed out that the white supremacist if not Fascist streak in the Republican Party goes back to Pat Buchanan, who believed the wrong side won World War II, and the Birchers and McCarthyites of the 1950's.

These are the Republicans that Jimmy Don Vontz wants to appeal to with his fearsome drivel about how white European Americans are better than those nasty other kinds (including, as Fuentes and Carlson are happy to point out, those demonic Jews).

Now we could point out that the record of these white European settlers is not without its blemishes, including matters like slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans.

But we'd like to take a step further and see how those white Europeans did on on their home ground – Europe – in the 20th Century.

Our first stop is Ypres, a medieval Flemish cloth-trading town.  It looks pretty nice at first glance:

  

That medieval looking building is the Cloth Hall. It only looks medieval because the real one was destroyed during the various Battles of Ypres between 1914 and 1918 when two sides of superior white Christianity slaughtered each other for reasons no one can now fathom.

The results of the carnage are all around you.  At the Menin Gate, a few blocks away, an enormous deep arch records the names of over 54,000 British and Commonwealth troops, most of them white Christians, who died in the battles around Ypres but whose bodies were never recovered:

Despite the size of the arch, it could not contain all the names of those missing in action.  The other 37,000 names are thus listed at a separate memorial a few kilometers up the road at the Tyne Cot Cemetery.  The 210,000 who fell but whose bodies were recovered are buried all over, including at Tyne Cot.

The 300,000 troops memorialized in and around Ypres constitute a full 1% of the 30 million men who died in action during that War, almost all of them white European Christians.  

But that carnage was only a part of the glorious history of superior white Christians in Europe during the 20th century.

A few hours away from Ypres lies the great German Hanseatic free port of Hamburg, a leading center of trade and culture for close to a millenium.  In 1943, its citizens, like the other good white Christian Germans, had enthusiastically embraced Nazi terror and conquest.

For its support, the white European Christians and their descendants in America decided that the city had to be firebombed and destroyed, thus causing the deaths of tens of thousands of Hamburg civilians.

So beginning on July 23, 1943, thousands of American and Royal Air Force bombers began their campaign to burn the venerable Free City. 

The former St. Michael's Church was preserved as a memorial:

By the time the bombers had finished their mission of annihilation, over 30,000 had died and 60% of Hamburg's homes had been destroyed.  The war went on for another 22 months, during which time millions more fell on the battlefield and another six million Jewish civilians were murdered in the Holocaust.

That's quite a score run up by white European Christians in the 31 years between 1914 and 1945.

It make you wonder who would look at this track record and conclude that the people responsible for the endless slaughter of the past century were somehow inherently superior to any other life form, mosses and lichens included.

You'd have to be as angry and stupid as pretty much every Republican to believe that your culture was superior and that you had the right to torment anyone who didn't fit your definition of the Master Race.

If you allow these racist Republicans to continue to impose their falsified views on your country, then you are scarcely better than they.

And you are much, much worse than the immigrants whom Americans of superior descent accuse of eating cats. 

West of Here: California's Long-Suffering Masters of the Universe

By California Correspondent Carmen Sternwood

California's high-tech Masters of the Universe just can't help themselves.  It's not their fault that every time they open the mouths they embarrass themselves in public.  It's just that because when you had one idea that netted you billions and are now surrounded by sycophants who tell you that every word that comes out of your mouth is brilliant, you can't help believing it. 

Today's exhibit is a lump named Marc Benioff.  A number of years ago, he had a good idea: what if you used web-based spreadsheets to keep track of your sales force? That's it.  That's the idea.  

It worked, allowing CEO's to axe the layers of middle management who devoted themselves to making sure that their salesmen were out there selling and not just drinking and whoring on the company dime.

As a result of this one good idea, Benioff is now worth more than $8,000,000,000.  Now other people have good ideas too.  Last night at Mass. General Hospital, a nurse had a good idea about a medication problem with a critically ill patient, possibly saving their life.  Last week a teacher in the Boston Public Schools had a good idea about reaching a disaffected student, putting them on track for a successful future.

Those yucky homeless ruin Marc Benioff's day

Notice that, unlike Benioff, the teacher and the nurse didn't haul in $8 billion for their good ideas, despite the positive effects they had.

The reason for this is, according to centibillionaire Jeff “Which Way to Muscle Beach?” Bezos's house organ The Washington Post, “freedom.”

That may sound nonsensical to you but to a narrow plurality of white racists and the thousand or so plutocrats who stir them up, it makes perfect sense.

No self-respecting Master of the Universe thinks they only have one good idea in them, so recently Benioff has uncorked two new ones for public delectation:

First, the Mad King should call out the National Guard to bulldoze homeless people into the Pacific Ocean so Marc doesn't have to look at them.

Second, he is willing to share his salesman-tracking application with ICE, to help them keep track of their body snatchers.  After all, you don't want either your salesmen or your masked secret policy twiddling their thumbs when they could be making their numbers, either in sales or lives destroyed.

We'll start with homeless people.  To the Masters of the Universe their existence in California is the worse failing of government, because (1) sometimes the Masters have to see them should they choose to walk to a three-star dinner in San Fransisco and (2) being insanely rich, they have no other pressing need that government could fulfill (unlike everyone else).

Which is why Benioff came out in favor of calling out the National Guard and the police to rid him of this menace:

Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to “re-fund” the police.

The city never actually “defunded” its police force, and San Francisco’s violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.

But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers,... It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it needs another thousand.

“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he continued. “That’s how it used to be.” ...

Since the pandemic, he has mostly lived on the Big Island of Hawaii, where he has bought up numerous parcels of land. He said that he wasn’t sure how many days he spends each year in San Francisco, but that he is never in one place for more than a day or two.

We've been to San Francisco numerous time since about 1972.  That's never how it used to be.

The outcry to his call for lynching the homeless eventually caused this Master to do something that Masters never do, at least in public: back down.

But Hawaii Man had other ideas too:

This makes sense: the same web-based technology that allows a few bosses to track hundreds of salesmen to make sure they are making enough sales calls also allows Kristie Noem and her boyfriend to track thousands of ICE agents to make sure they are snatching enough women and children most of whom are seeking various lawful forms of immigration relief.

You don't want your salesmen or your body snatchers just running around town drunk and stupid, like this:

An ICE agent, who is being arrested for drunk driving and nearly killing his little kids & others, tries to stop the arrest by racially profiling the officers arresting him. Amazing to watch the courtesy given to him as he is belligerent and uncooperative

[image or embed]

— David Bier (@davidjbier.bsky.social) October 17, 2025 at 11:11 AM

Benioff's goons prepared a wide variety of BS pitches to immigration enforcement agencies:

Other Salesforce documents included a spreadsheet of ICE “opportunities,” the company’s term for possible contracts, as well as an internal brainstorming slide deck about how artificial intelligence agents might help ICE evaluate information sent to the agency’s tip line and improve investigations. 

Yes, Benioff, great salesman that he is, promises to unleash the full power of AI, most recently seen generating crude animations of the Mad King poop-bombing protesters, to help the body snatchers figure which schools, churches, bus stops, and other public places will lead them to the largest number of helpless families. Genius! 

It's not yet clear how happy Benioff's fellow Masters of the Universe are with his pitch, given their reliance on immigrant labor to write their code and mow their lawns.

Salesforce can double your yield of crying toddlers!

Possibly it's unfair to single out Benioff for special obloquy.  Really he's only one among many insufferable Masters of the Universe who have devoted themselves to polishing the Mad King's taint (like Jeff Bezos or Tim Apple) or more ominously spending billions to bring fascist dictatorship to America, like Peter Thiel.

They are more alike than different in their insufferable arrogance and depraved indifference to the lives of the peons who toil for them and dare to breath the same air.

Their endless whining about having to encounter homeless human beings while being chauffeured to their private jet is a common theme.

The public existence of the homeless to the Masters of Woodside is taken as a telling critique of California state and local government, who have failed to “solve” this problem to their satisfaction.

Now many thinking people who are poorer than these Silicon Valley plutocrats have noted that homelessness is a complex problem.  Some of it relates to mental health and drug and alcohol addiction.

But a lot of homelessness arises from the inability of the homeless to – afford housing.  Smart people without private Hawaiian islands have looked at the data:

A new analysis of rent prices and homelessness in American cities demonstrates the strong connection between the two: homelessness is high in urban areas where rents are high, and homelessness rises when rents rise.

It so happens, as Californians never cease to tell you, that some of the highest real estate prices can be found in the great metropolitan regions of San Francisco and Los Angeles.  This is because lots of people want to live there (demand) and it's difficult and expensive to build housing (supply).  

The obvious solution to this market failure would be for the government to build more affordable housing, not to mention offering more and better residential mental health and addiction programs.

All this takes money.  Lots of it. And it's not as if California's political leaders are oblivious.  The state has spent over $1.6 billion to build over 12,000 units of affordable housing in the past five years.  But California probably needs ten times that much.

Where's the money to build hundreds of thousands of new affordable homes going to come from?

Funny you should ask.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, almost all the gains from 1980 to 2021 have gone to the richest:

And the proportion of those gains which have flowed to the Masters of the Universe in the top 0.01% is insane:

Maybe the solution to the homeless problem that so afflicts our beloved Masters of the Universe when they are not ensconced on their private Hawaiian islands would be for these billionaire plutocrats to pay more in taxes to build more affordable and supported housing.  

Maybe it's not the fault of those feckless California Democrats.  Maybe the fault lies with the insane greed of a handful of billionaires.

We'll let you know the Masters' response as soon as their Gulfstreams land. 

War - Whom is it good for? Absolutely the Mad King!

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur with Legal Editor Saori Shiroseki

We’ve always been interested in the thoughts of national security expert and former FBI official Asha Rangappa on the situation we now face in the regime of the Mad King, because we know we can count on her for a moderate, cool-headed assessment based upon her hard-won expertise from years toiling in the law enforcement Establishment.

Here’s what she had to say last week:

As we continue our free fall into autocracy, there still appears to be no rock bottom in sight. 

Hoo boy. That sounds bad.

But wait -- it gets worse!

Trump needs a reason to escalate his takeover of blue states and cities. If he can provoke confrontation between civilians and the military — perhaps one where there is open gunfire or anything that he can use to claim that our military is under attack or in harm’s way — he can then justify arbitrarily designating Americans as military targets. We are already seeing this with his executive order declaring Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization” (this is not a real thing). ...Notice how [Hegseth] states that they struck people of a “Designated Terrorist Organization” (again, not a real thing)…but he doesn’t say which organization. This is a move to begin conflating ordinary crime, and even ideological beliefs, with “terrorism,” and then using the “terrorist” label as an excuse to use military force.... To bring [America] under his total control and target Americans using military force under the guise of combating “terrorism,” Trump would need a military that is willing to follow illegal orders and commit war crimes.

And illegally blonde Attorney General Pam “What Epstein Files?” Bondi made the connection between supposed foreign drug smugglers and her fellow citizens explicit: 

Although the regime has provided exactly zero evidence proving the dead sailors were in fact smuggling drugs into the United States, it boasts about their murders and now threatens to issue the same license to kill Americans:

“This ain't St. Mere Eglise!”

Bondi said the administration intended to “take the same approach” to antifa as it did with foreign drug cartels — an unsettling vow in light of a series of deadly military strikes against civilian boats in international waters that Trump has ordered as part of a formal “armed conflict.” 

The regime policy of using the military to attack random boats on the high seas and kill their unarmed crews is, to use a highly technical term, a huge f**king crime, both under international and U.S. law. Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, explains:

There is simply no credible argument that an armed conflict exists involving the United States and whoever was on that boat. Nor is there any credible argument that those on the boat presented an imminent threat of armed attack against the United States that could have triggered the initiation of an armed conflict. With neither of these facts being present, we are left with the premeditated killing of human beings, not in armed conflict and not in self-defense. Although the criminal liability of individuals is a matter for the courts, Americans engaging in such conduct would normally risk very serious charges.

Crime and war are different? Who knew?

To sum up where we are as a country, the Attorney General of the United States, with the endorsement of the President (to the extent he is still able to comprehend such things) has vowed to use the U.S. military to kill Americans with the same impunity that is now illegally used against foreigners on boats. The excuse is that something called Antifa is a terrorist organization, like those guys trying to fish in the Caribbean, and therefore [?} the military can mow them down in the absence of anything resembling armed conflict.

Conveniently for the regime and its lickspittles, there is no such entity as Antifa. You can’t head over to the Tony Stark building to visit their headquarters. You can’t donate to their cause and get a nifty tote bag in return. You won’t get plaintive texts from the President of Antifa telling you the triple match on your donation expires at midnight. Antifa doesn’t exist. Therefore apparatchiks like Bondi and confessed puppy killer and Botox abuser Kristi Noem can lie their lifted asses off and declare anyone opposing the regime is Antifa, thereby subjecting them to immediate summary execution. 

We're looking forward to this fall's Supreme Court summary docket,when such executions will be justified by Supreme Lord Brett Kavanaugh and his five fellow doges as a trivial inconvenience by whipping out arguments like this:

The interests of Antifa individuals who are illegally interfering with the enforcement of immigration law is ultimately an interest in evading the law. That is not an especially weighty legal interest.

To add some exciting footage to this nonsense, the regime is considering calling out a crack military detachment: the 82d Airborne, into the raging cauldron of war that is Portland, Oregon. 

This 82nd Airborne? 

 

Like John Wayne in The Longest Day? Or Ryan O’Neal and Robert Redford in A Bridge Too Far? That’s a lot of A-listers for a stint in Portland, Oregon.

You would think that a plan to use deadly force on unarmed Americans opposing government action by dressing up as frogs in front of ICE buildings would shock and appall every single one of us. You'd be wrong,

Just this week, 51 of 53 Republicans voted to give the regime a blank check to carry out such murders including lovable moderate Sen. Susan “Troubled” Collins.

You're following orders from this guy?

If it were us, we wouldn’t vote to reopen the government without a prohibition on invoking the Insurrection Act or using military forces against U.S. citizens without a new authorization from Congress, but we don’t have the keen insights into the popular will of a Hakeem Jeffries or a Sen. Amy “Hot Mess” Klobuchar. 

The public reaction to treating protesters like the Wehrmacht has not been especially positive.  According to recent polling, only 39% (including 79% of Republicans) approve of sending active-duty military forces into American cities.

It's good that the Mad King's latest war on America is opposed by most Americans.  And yet, after watching the madness, chaos, cruelty, and illegality of the Mad King Restoration almost 40% of your fellow citizens approve the destruction of American democracy.  So no one should underestimate the challenge before us.  But no one should despair either. 

And just a reminder to our military: while the Supreme Court has extended immunity to any Republican President committing a crime in office and to any Supreme Court Justice who has committed sexual assault or harassment, they have thus far not extended such immunity to all members of the armed forces. 

Restorations of absolute monarchies tend not to last.  If this one falls, any legitimate government will (or at least should) investigate the crimes committed on its orders. 

So the military (and their civilians enablers) should keep in mind what happens to those who commit crimes to please the Mad King.  Among other indignities, Botox and fillers aren't available to federal prisoners.  If you don't believe us, ask Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Siege of Chicago II

 

By Chicago Correspondent Walter Burns

On the list of things that didn't really need to be revived, right up there with Baywatch, is the Siege of Chicago, a wonderful metropolis which over the years has earned infamy as the site of some of the most brutal battles waged by armed forces against their imagined enemies.

The latest episode occurred this week, when an entire apartment block on the South Side of Chicago was invaded and its occupants taken prisoner by unidentified forces claiming to be acting on behalf of the United States.

According to battlefield dispatches,

A massive immigration raid at an apartment in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago tormented residents in the early hours of Tuesday morning. 

Some 300 federal agents, per NewsNation, raided the building, arresting 37 people, with the Department of Homeland Security alleging that “some of the targeted subjects are believed to be involved in drug trafficking and distribution, weapons crimes, and immigration violators.”

Agents rappelled in from helicopters, broke down doors, used flash bangs, tore tenants from their units, and detained several people—including numerous U.S. citizens—for hours before leaving the building ravaged, according to multiple reports.

Pertissue Fisher, who lives in the building, told ABC7 Chicago that ICE agents forced everyone out and only asked questions later. Fisher said she was handcuffed and questioned before being released at around 3 a.m. The officers, she noted, “just treated us like we were nothing,” and, “It was scary, because I had never had a gun in my face.”

Another ABC7 interviewee ducked upon hearing flash bangs detonate, and was then distressed by the sight of children detained. “They was bringing the kids down too, had them zip-tied to each other,” she said. “That’s all I kept asking. What is the morality? Where’s the human? One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘f*** them kids.’” 

Prior to the January 20, 2025 coup against America, armed police and federal agents were prohibited by the Fourth Amendment from rousing peaceful inhabitants out of their apartments solely on the suspicion that in at least one of those apartments there might be an immigrant subject to removal.

Not anymore. 

Now it is something that the regime boasts about and executes with apparent impunity:

Although the federal goons claimed the operation was aimed at supposed members of a Venezuelan gang, exactly two were arrested on suspicion of being gang members.

 Is it really true that Gov. J.B. Pritzker can do nothing to stop these assaults because of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, which has generally been construed to immunize federal officers acting within their authority from state law? 

From CBS News Chicago

Consider the case of a federal official shooting someone on Fifth Avenue.  If that official is the President, John Roberts and his fellow Lords have immunized him.  But if a federal official out for coffee decides to gun down say his ex, there's no immunity because there was no action under color of federal law.

Was there immunity here?  The conduct was clearly unconstitutional and therefore outside the scope of the federal agents' lawful authority.  If only there were courts in Chicago that Gov. Pritzker could turn to for a definitive resolution of this question. 

And that's not the only violent lawless actions that VD Amin's goons have undertaken in poor suffering Chicago over the past week.   A few days earlier, a CBS Chicago correspondent lawfully carrying out her duties was assaulted by apparent federal officers:

Illinois State Police and the Broadview Police Department are investigating after a pepper ball was shot at a CBS News Chicago reporter over the weekend.

It was around late morning Sunday when reporter Asal Rezaei visited the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Broadview, Illinois, to see if there was any activity near the 25th Street entrance. There were no protests or protesters at the scene, except for a person with the Broadview Fire Department.

"It's not really clear why that officer took a shot at me. My car has been here several times, although I did not identify myself verbally as a member of the press," she said in a report.

Rezaei said she was not close to the ICE facility nor the fencing surrounding the building, adding she was alone in her truck with the driver's side window down.

As reported to police, she was leaving the area when she said a masked ICE agent shot a pepper ball about 50 feet from the inside of the fence, hitting her truck's driver's side panel. The chemicals then engulfed the inside of her truck.

"An ICE agent who was masked shot directly at my car," Rezaei recounted on camera after the incident. "He saw my window was open."

The chemicals from the shot caused burning to her face, leading to her vomiting outside her truck.... 

It wasn't the first battle of Chicago.

Rezaei captured a picture the moment right before the pepper ball was fired, showing a nearly empty parking lot and two federal agents standing dozens of feet away. One of them appeared to have been readying his weapon. She said she believes that it was the agent who fired at her car. 

Note that state officials are at least investigating whether they have jurisdiction over the lawless attack on a known journalist driving on an open public street.

There are many other battles being waged by federal agents against unarmed civilians on the otherwise-peaceful streets of Chicago, but we wanted to look back at the history of such assaults along Lake Michigan.

This is usually when we draw connections between past Republican attacks on democracy and human rights (like the murder of unarmed students at Kent State in 1970) and today's outrages.

The reality is violence in the service of white supremacy has been a bipartisan affair depending mostly on which party embodies it. In 1968, that honor was split between the declining white Democratic racist base in the South and big Northern cities (like Chicago!) and the nascent Southern strategy of Tricky Dick Nixon.

Norman Mailer termed the police assault on unarmed protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention the “siege of Chicago,” and for once in his sordid empty life he was right:

The violence was spurred by a young man attempting to climb a flagpole in the park and lower the American flag. Police grabbed the man down and began to beat him, according to witness interviews. ...

In response, protesters began to throw sticks, paint and bricks at the officers. Organizers were eventually able to regain control of the crowd and calm them down. But the police advanced on the crowd anyway.

According to the Walker Report, one St. Louis journalist later observed: “In the wink of an eye, the police appeared to have lost all control.” ...  

Officers chased demonstrators and beat them, hitting them in the head. Women were knocked over and trampled by the fleeing crowd. Bystanders, including both the young and the elderly, were beaten too. Some officers even threw tear gas directly in the faces of demonstrators. Photojournalists stood bloodied. ...

Upon its completion three months later, the Walker Report noted that most officers faced no disciplinary action, and argued that this could weaken police ties with the community. “There has been no condemnation of these violators of sound police procedures and common decency by either their commanding officers or city officials,” the report said.  

The violent cops were in fact lionized as heroes by the forces of white reaction, thus insulating them and their violent successors from accountability:

The country certainly appeared to sympathize with the police more than the protestors. In a Gallup poll, 56% approved of the police response to anti-war protestors and 31% did not. In a Harris survey, 66% agreed that Daley was right in the way he used police against the demonstrators, against only 20% who disagreed. 

Read all about it.  While you can.

That level of public support gave the Chicago Police all the, um, ammunition they needed to execute Black Panther activist Fred Hampton the following year.

At the time, the reaction of all the wise pundits was not shock and outrage over police murder of a young activist. Instead, it was to make fun of white people who cared enough to support besieged Black Panthers like Hampton.  Tom Wolfe's insult comedy targeting a fundraiser held by Leonard Bernstein in his magnificent apartment with his rich famous friends led to the adoption of the term “Radical Chic”.

In Wolfe's telling, adopted by all right-thinking persons, nothing was more hilarious than rich upper-class people meeting to aid oppressed Black Panthers because – well, it was just funny.

Perhaps Wolfe would have been more respectful if the fundraiser were held in the rec room of dentist Lenny Bernstein's split level in Woodmere and the assembled guests were served pigs in blankets and Schaefer beer, but we doubt it. The point was to mock white people, especially the rich Jewish ones, for the crime of daring to care about anyone less fortunate than themselves.

Humiliating anyone who opposes the Republican agenda of white supremacy, bigotry, and plutocracy has been a staple of conservative hilarity ever since.  We point you to the Presidential meme of mocking Hakeen Jeffries' concern over the denial of health care by adorning him with a stereotyped Frito-bandito mustache and sombrero. 

The point, then as now, was to change the focus from murdered activists and poor people consigned to agony and death to those wacky liberals who dare to take up those causes. 

And it won't stop until we call it out and demand that our supine media (including Bari Weiss's new toy, CBS News) stop distracting us from the true horrors at hand.

No we don't have a glib solution. But we do know that the first step in fighting a battle is to know the enemy.  In this case, we need to understand how deep police violence against dissenters and other marginalized folks runs in American culture and the relentless crude mockery of those who dare to oppose it.

Our old buddy Dwight D. Eisenhower spent months before D-Day gathering intelligence on the German defenses in France.  It was his relentless focus on preparation that led to victory, even though history does not record that Ike spent even one minute worried about the beards and waistlines of his Army.  Nor, since Tom Wolfe wasn't there to focus on what was really important, do we know what delectable tidbits his elite staff enjoyed in May and June, 1944.

Right now there's a war in Chicago and other American cities, which is itself part of a larger assault on what's left of American democracy.  You can hear it all around you if you don't let the mariachi music drown it out.