Rule by Decree: It Worked Great Before!

By Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki
with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

Ninety plus years ago, readers of The Massachusetts Spy were greeted at their breakfast table on March 24, 1933 by the following dispatch:

GERMAN CHANCELLOR
TO RULE BY DECREE

Reichstag Adjourns Indefinitely;
Gives Schickelgruber Dictatorial Powers

Some Critics Say This Could Be Bad for Reich Opponents Like the Jews and Other Aliens! 

By Cable from Berlin Correspondent Charlotte Ritter
with further information from The New York Times Wire Service and the Associated Press

BERLIN, March 23 – Bending to the unstoppable will of Germany's new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, the German Reichstag voted to hand over to him and his gang of Nazi goons unlimited power and then adjourned itself, likely forever.

The move followed days of fundamental changes in Germany, including mass pardons of Nazis who attacked Americans, that in effect ended German democracy and introduced a new era of total one-man rule in which any and all laws could be enacted or repealed simply by Executive Order of the Chancellor.

In his address to the Reichstag, Herr Hitler ran through a familiar litany of grudges and animosities, and vowed retribution on Communists, Jews, and others whom he said were poisoning the blood of Germany.  Many observers doubted however that Hitler would be able to carry out his more extreme ideas which face opposition from prominent German businessmen.

But so far Germany's powerful business tycoons have rushed to support the new regime, whether out of fear or belief that Hitler's inflationary pro-growth policies could revive the moribund German economy.

Hitler's right-hand man, Reichstag Speaker Hermann Goering, said that reports of beatings and imprisonment of political opponents was nothing more than “fake news” and that those who published such stories would be treated with “barbarity,” and their publications banned from the German mails.

Continued on page 8

ADV'T – Why pay rent when you could blow it all on nine big races at Wonderland?  Take East Boston El!

How'd it turn out?  Like this:

Speaking of rule by decree, the week that he was inaugurated, President Donald Trump announced that he had the power to repeal the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship by decree.  The guarantee is contained in the first sentence of that post-Civil War amendment.  See if you can figure out from the obscure legal jargon used by its drafters what they intended to accomplish:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The provision was drafted to ensure that the recently freed slaves (and their children) would enjoy the rights of citizenship denied to them by a bent Supreme Court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

When America's new Leader tried to undo that promise by Executive Order, it did not take long for a judge appointed by St. Ronald Reagan of Bitburg to reach his conclusion:

In a hearing held three days after Mr. Trump issued his executive order, a Federal District Court judge, John C. Coughenour...sign[ed] a restraining order that blocks Mr. Trump’s executive order for 14 days, renewable upon expiration. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” he said.

“Frankly,” he continued, challenging Trump administration lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” 

The blatant assertion of a Presidential right to repeal sections of the Constitution he didn't like provoked intense outrage from all Americans with a vested interest in protecting Constitutional rights, like the press, which the normally authoritative New York Times summarized as follows:

Yeah, that should protect our sacred Constitutional rights.

Similarly, a well-known geyser of Washington conventional wisdom, Leigh Anne Caldwell, reviewing Trump's first week on NPR's Here and Now, thought the biggest news of the week was that Republicans were “euphoric” over the barrage of decrees, including the unconstitutional ones.

Over at The New York Times, the maestro of hot takes, Peter Baker, told us that the key takeaway of the new President's first days is that he is ruling like a king, without trifling to explain why that's a bad thing.  Maybe someone could have explained to him the difference between monarchy and tyranny.  Too bad he doesn't have our old buddy Will Shakespeare in his contact list.

For some reason, the geniuses at the Times seem to take comfort in the idea that the Tangerine-Faced Fascist is a lame duck, because he can't run again under the 22d Amendment.   That amendment clearly and unequivocally limits Presidents to two terms.  As clearly as 14th Amendment protects birthright citizenship.

Life after the First Amendment is repealed by decree

Which lead us to ask: if the Tangerine-Faced Fascist can repeal the 14th Amendment by executive order, why can't he do the same with the 22d? Who would stop him?  Can you imagine a single Republican Secretary of State who would refused to put him on the ballot on 22d Amendment grounds?  And who would have standing to challenge in court his quest for a third term?  Are you confident that the Republican-bent Supreme Court would stop him?

If the Tiny Toadstool can get away with repealing the 14th Amendment by Sharpie, what provision of the Constitution is safe?

Already his hard right supporters are targeting the First Amendment prohibition on establishment of a state religion by asking the Supreme Court to allow public funding of religious charter schools.  It was a religious school that taught Brett “It's locked!” Kavanaugh how to treat women, so that's going to be one vote in favor.

Pretty much everything we hold dear in the Constitution is up for grabs.  Already Clarence “Leaving on a Jet Plane” Thomas has questioned First Amendment protection for a free press, by wondering if the time has come to reverse Times v. Sullivan, because he is mightily aggrieved over the press coverage of his many ethical lapses.  

There's nothing keeping the Tangerine-Faced Traitor from promulgating an executive order repealing First Amendment limits on libel.  Given his own record of filing frivolous suits to suppress press coverage he doesn't like, some of which have resulted in big-ass settlements by cowardly media barons like Disney, we think the chances are better than even.

Or he could issue a decree repealing the portions of the Sullivan ruling applying the First Amendment to the states, which would in this era of the Intertubes permit any state to throttle free speech nationwide.

Once you acclimate the press and the public to the idea of repealing the Constitution by Executive Order, there's no telling how far you can go. 

In the past, others have gotten as far as Stalingrad.

Broken News: We Won't Survive "Journalism" Like This

By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling with
Spy Chicago Bureau Chief Walter Burns

As America prepares to inaugurate a new era of lawless kakistocracy on Monday, what institutions can we rely on to help us fight back?

If you said our free press, we've got two $250 face value Trump Inauguration Tickets for you.

With 48 hours to go, the front page of today's New York Times platformed two stories about the transition that sent us to the vape pen.  

Let's start with their valedictory for Joe Biden.  It will be recalled that Biden inherited a country from the first term of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist ravaged by a pandemic that would eventually claim over 1,000,000 lives, a death toll inflated by the incompetent self-serving response of the TFF and his minions.

In four years, Biden crushed the pandemic and restored the economy.  During his term,  more than 16 million jobs were created and the world-wide post-COVID inflation tamed.  Despite narrow legislative majorities, he pushed through legislation that helped millions recover from the twin plagues, authorized a massive reconstruction of the nation's wretched infrastructure (a fact obvious to anyone who travels someplace like Europe or Asia), and took meaningful steps towards limiting the imminent threat of climate catastrophe, on display in Los Angeles and Florida.

In the realm of foreign affairs, Biden rebuilt our nation's reputation and credibility, ended an insanely prolonged war in Afghanistan hindered by his predecessor's inept peacemaking that released thousands of Taliban fighters, rallied the world to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine and just this month finally achieved a cease fire in Gaza that will relieve at least for a while the immense suffering of Gazans while returning many hostages to their families.

Quite the record for a man who turned 80 in office.

Two days before ending his term with honor and dignity, Biden was treated to the following on page A1 of The New York Times: 

The story turns out be a nothingburger about how Biden's aides were worried that he looked old on television: his gait had slowed due to age and injury, his voice was soft, his lifelong stutter sometimes caused him to mix up words, and he looked pale because he wouldn't slather on drugstore browser.  We were going to quote some of its most disturbing findings but that was all there was.

Absent from this account was how this stumbling old fool managed to rack up all of the legislative and foreign policy achievement we just listed.  Maybe they had to cut that for space.

On that very same front page Times readers were treated, if that's the right word, to a profile of The Tangerine-Faced Fascist's senior immigration adviser: deranged hatemonger Stephen Miller, who turned his anger about the failings of his own family into in an insane lust to torment immigrants who never did anything to him except mow his lawn:

 He's got plenty of clout and he's set to use it as an attack dog.  Kinda like Heinrich Himmler.  

As evidence for how wonderful and powerful Miller is, the Times reported that Miller forced megalomaniac Harvard weakling nerd Mark Zuckerberg to grovel at Miller's jackbooted feet to ensure that the Tangerine-Faced Fascist would not bring the hammer down on the dorkmeister's pisspoor social media networks.  Zuckerberg duly turned over his lunch money, just like he did every day in high school and college, and promised to allow disinformation and hate speech to flow like hog waste from his sites.  

To some this appears to be a horror story about the misuse of government power to bully a rich dick into abandoning efforts to keep hateful s*** off his websites.  To the Times, it's “clout.” 

The story continues for hundreds of words about how powerful Miller has become, by sucking up to a corrupt subversive sex offender about to become President, while building his own network of like-minded shills and toadies to enable him to carry out his reign of terror against immigrants.  We'll skip the fulsome praise about how Miller, unlike the Tangerine-Faced Grifter and his family, has not cashed in on his supposed influence.  Yet.

Since the obvious purpose of this crapcan story was to get on Miller's good side with the hope that he will continue to blab to the Times (a process ambitious but oddly credulous Times reporters embrace in lieu of real reporting), there was no room in the story to tell us who Miller is and what he wants. 

Which is:

Tell us, more, Atlantic:

Of course, if the goal were simply to draw voters’ attention to the border, there are plenty of ways to do it that are less controversial (not to mention, less cruel) than ripping young children from the arms of asylum seekers and sticking them in dystopian-looking detention centers. But for Miller, the public outrage and anger elicited by policies like forced family separation are a feature, not a bug. 

What do you call someone who revels inflicting pain and suffering on others because of who they are?  We can think of a number of epithets but none of them involve clout.  Even an attack dog bites only on command, not because he enjoys chomping on people.

Congratulations, New York Times.  You lead the mainstream media pledge class.  And Mr. Bezos and his Washington Post?

After realizing that the future of his vanity bomb shvantz-in-space project depends on him being on the good side of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, Bezos decided, totally not in a 'roid rage, to muzzle the Post's endorsement of Harris-Walz, bring in a former Rupert Murdoch taint-polisher to crush the staff, and then when the staff and Post readers revolted, bring in a new marketing genius to make things right again:

A slide deck [marketing executive Suzi] Watford presented to executives this week explained the origins of The Post’s new mission statement in greater detail. “Storytelling,” the deck says, should “bring a relentless investigative spirit, backed by credible sources, to deliver impactful stories in formats the world wants,...” Reaching all of America will require The Post to “understand and represent interests across the country,” it says, and “provide a forum for viewpoints, expert perspectives and conversation.”

Ms. Watford, who joined The Post in May, also laid out big-picture goals for the company. Among them: reach 200 million paying users, which the slide deck described as a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal,” or “B.H.A.G.”

The slide deck compares the 200 million target with efforts to land a man on the moon — and it is an ambitious goal: The Post currently has fewer than three million digital subscribers.

But it's not just bog-standard empty marketing bull****.  There are results.  The Post has announced a new columnist sure to draw in 197 million new users stat: long time Democratic hack, fixer, and bully Rahm Emanuel, whose commitment to free and open information is legendary:

WaPo went from winning a Pulitzer for documenting, quantifying, and contextualizing the American epidemic of racist and fatal police violence (for which they owe Wesley Lowery an enormous debt of gratitude) to the paper that hired the man who covered up such violence as mayor of Chicago. Neat.

[image or embed]

— Soraya Nadia McDonald (@sorayanadiamcdonald.com) January 18, 2025 at 9:39 AM

If Democracy dies in Darkness, as someone once said atop their website, it doesnn't get any darker than Emanuel's cover-up of a Chicago police murder of an unarmed Black teenager.

And it only gets worse.  The Los Angeles Times, once credibly regarded as America's number 3 newspaper, has been crushed by its reactionary owner, who also suppressed a Harris-Walz endorsement and has committed to providing metering of and compensatory praise in response to any negative thoughts about the Tangerine-Faced Fascist.

There are a few newspapers left doing something that resembles independent journalism, like the Philadelphia Inquirer (home to the great Will Bunch) and The Boston Globe (which features columnists who are almost always right, like Reneé Graham and Kimberly Atkins Stohr with columnists who are almost always wrong, like Dan Shaughnessy), but it's hard to expect them to have national influence.  And you could do worse than take the money you saved cancelling the Bezos Post and make a monthly subvention to The Guardian.

The Post's new columnist suppressed this evidence of police murder

On the air, the situation is if anything worse.  ABC, owned by media behemoth Disney, settled a worthless defamation claim against it for a $15,000,000 payment to the depraved adjudicated rapist.  CBS is planning to settle an even more ridiculous claim based on the supposed editing of Kamala Harris's 60 Minutes interview for big bucks, to make sure that the Tangerine-Faced Fascist doesn't try to block its sale to an entity controlled by David “Thanks Dad” Ellison, son of reactionary oligarch Larry Ellison.  Any guess as to what will happen to CBS News thereafter?

And poor CNN, owned by a conglomerate run by a clueless marketing master of the universe but under the influence of another reactionary oligarch, John Malone, is trying to placate the TFF by moving high-rated host Jim Acosta to the coveted midnight to 2 a.m. shift.

That leaves MSNBC, whose parent conglomerate Comcast has announced plans to dump it and other decaying cable channels into a spinoff likely to become bait for a private equity vulture to swoop in, strip out its cash and other assets, and leave a weakened remnant behind to collapse into its own debt.  Which is what they did to the Chicago Tribune.

And this media-centric overview ignores where most Americans get what they think is news: social-media giants already run by TFF supplicants who seem to regard prostrating themselves at where his feet would be were it not for his two-inch lifts as the height of, wait for it, masculinity.

Which leaves the reality based community left with precious little, including many new and not-so-new web-based outlets whose output is often excellent but whose reach we fear is limited to the faithful.

We all know that without reliable information and an honest press it is impossible for democracy to sustain itself.  We saw this as recently as November 2024.

What's the road back?  Friends, we don't know.  But we do know that before solving a problem we have to be clear about it.   The problem is that our mainstream media lack the courage and integrity to tell us what is happening all around us.  

And, despite what idiots are telling you every day in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and even The Boston Globe, we have to fight back.

It's the least we can do for Laquon Mcdonald, who never had a shot at raking in the bucks as a columnist for The Washington Postbecause he was murdered and the crime covered up by a white man who got the job.  This is known among the white men who uniformly run our mainstream and social media as “meritocracy.”

Treadmill to Political Oblivion: Democrats plot comeback by caving on locking up children!

By Immigration Correspondent Emma Goldman

For months, a few brave souls have warned that the inauguration of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist on January 20 would mark the beginning of the destruction of our constitutional democracy.

What they failed to warn us about, though, was that the demolition project would begin even earlier.  And the punch line: this descent into madness was made possible by, wait for it, your fellow Democrats.

Just last week, the House passed and the Senate opened debate on a terrible bill that would lead to the indefinite detention of anyone, including kids, including Dreamers, including parents of U.S. citizen children, possibly including permanent residents, who have been accused (not convicted) of any crime, no matter how minor.   Shoplifting shampoo (the bane of Pamela Pill's sheltered life)?  Lock 'em up and deport 'em!   

Hard to believe, we know.  Except, according to Slate:

This cross-party support might create the impression that this legislation really is what Republicans claim: a common-sense fix to a broken system that will keep undocumented criminals off the streets. But that is a gross mischaracterization. Rather, the Laken Riley Act would impose sweeping changes to the immigration system that raise serious constitutional concerns. It would penalize immigrants who live and work in the U.S. legally, subjecting them to indefinite detention without being convicted or even charged with a crime. And it would transfer a massive amount of power to state attorneys general and district court judges, who could effectively wrest control over immigration enforcement from the executive branch. These judges could, upon a state’s request, ban the issuance of all visas to residents of entire countries like India.

In short, under the guise of punishing a small number of lawbreaking undocumented immigrants, the act would curtail legal immigration and subject law-abiding immigrants to detention and deportation. It is baffling that so many Democrats would sign on to such a cruel and constitutionally dubious scheme.

Kids in cages: they're back...thanks to Democrats!

Even harder to believe, 48 Democratic House members and even more shameful 38 Democratic Senators voted in favor of the bill or at least letting it go forward.

Why?  Ask Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman, both elected with massive support, financial and otherwise, from the progressive Democratic base:

Gallego has declared that the bill would exempt Dreamers brought here illegally as children, which is not true. He has asserted that it’s necessary because the Biden administration took “no action” on the border after the Covid-related Title 42 asylum ban lifted, which is simply false. Fetterman has suggested that the bill is “giving authorities the tools” to prevent killings like Riley’s. But that’s misleading, obscuring the fact that they already have those “tools.” And Fetterman has trafficked in the same distortions of immigration data that Trump does to portray a system more out of control than it is.

Fetterman and Gallego are both seen by pundits as having the magic key to winning working-class voters. So is such misleading public conduct OK in their eyes as a means for Democrats to reconnect with the working class?

The more cynical explanation, which is also what the untutored would call bulls***, is that acquiescing in this bill would allow Democrats to oppose even worse bills going forward.  Even worse?  Like what?  Firing squads? Waterboarding refugees?  How could things get worse?

Who knows, given the alleged source, if there's anything to this explanation, although it sounds wimpy enough to explain Democratic behavior.  If it really comes from one of Stephen Miller's stooges then it represents a warning that caving on this enormity won't help the Democrats with later, more horrible, proposals.

It sounds as if Democrats feel unable to resist because of the pressure to do something about immigration.  There's also pressure to do something about the price of eggs, but that wouldn't justify a bill authorizing looting supermarkets.  Or would it?

And without billions of new dollars for detention, the bill requiring detention of accused shampoo swipers would actually hurt public safety by forcing the body snatchers to release far more dangerous detainees:

There are a lot more people accused of shoplifting than of violent crimes. Since the Laken Riley Act requires ICE to prioritize shoplifters, ICE is telling legislators it would force them to fill detention beds with shoplifters and release others — even those accused of far more serious offenses.

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) January 11, 2025 at 11:58 AM

Part of the pressure is that Republicans have named, with Democratic acquiescence, the bill after a woman killed by an undocumented immigrant who had been arrested for shoplifting.

Sure that makes sense.  He also had two eyes; maybe lock up all immigrants who match that description.  The logical extension of this line of, um, thought is that the only way to protect Americans from any crime ever committed by any immigrant is to catapult them all over the border.  And that might not work, because they could just sneak back in again.  So the only solution is mass execution.  Which would certainly be the final solution.

Of course the Republicans will use the death of a young woman, especially a white one, to demonize all immigrants, even though their crime rate is below that of native-born Americans and well below that of the incoming Trump Administration.  

But Democrats don't have to play along.  Adopting Republican framing hands them victory even before shots are fired.  Just call the bill the Secession Bill or even the Family Separation Promotion Act of 2025 because Republicans know that framing is toxic to them (which is why they are already trying to get out ahead of it on the Sunday softball games):

JD Vance: "This term is something you're gonna hear a lot in the next couple of months, the next couple of years -- family separation."

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 12, 2025 at 10:05 AM

Or just say that we need real immigration reform and this bill is just a worthless Republican stunt that will do nothing to solve the “problem” of immigration, whatever that problem is.  Or to bring down the prices of eggs and apples that were the supposed calamities fatal to Democrats last year.

Such craven acquiescence is consistent with the view of appalling number of Democrats, like Gallego and even bigger idiot Seth Moulton, who seem to think that the best response to the recrudescence of corrupt Fascist rule is try to find its good parts.

Interestingly, although Democrats have been told for decades that finding common ground is a political winner, Republicans never feel any pressure to do the same when Democrats are in the White House.  And no pundit has ever chided them for their policy of adamantine opposition.

We know how failing to act as an honest opposition party has worked before.  Let's turn the clock back to 2002 when Democrats went along with George W. Bush's insane ideas to cover up the fact that he had failed to protect the nation from terrorism, despite ample credible warnings.

So Democrats went along with two wars, one based on lies, torture, illegal detention, and all sorts of other outrages.

And what did it get them?

They got wiped out at the next two elections.  Their base was demoralized by their failure to stand up to Bush-Cheney insanity and they did not persuade anyone in the supposed great independent middle of the electorate.

Does anyone think this time it will be any different?  No matter what Democrats agree to, the Republicans will ensure it is never enough and hang every misbehaving undocumented immigrant around their necks in the 21st century equivalent of Who Lost China.

A better approach would be to say Democrats are happy to work on real solutions, but not insane crap that punishes immigrants, increases family separation,  undermines our systems of government, and fails to provide economic opportunity to anyone other than those bribing Kristi “Woof! Bang!” Noem to build private jails.

On their current course of craven surrender,  Democrats are poised to alienate the progressive base of the party.  Speaking of which, analysis of 2024 election shows that Harris-Walz lost not because of a huge burst of enthusiasm for the Tangerine-Faced Racist.  They lost because Democrats didn't show up the way they did in 2020:  

Voters in liberal strongholds across the country, from city centers to suburban stretches, failed to show up to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris at the levels they had for Joseph R. Biden Jr. four years earlier, contributing significantly to her defeat by Donald J. Trump, according to a New York Times analysis of preliminary election data....

The decline in key cities, including Detroit and Philadelphia, made it exceptionally difficult for Ms. Harris to win the battlegrounds of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

You would think the moral of this tale is make sure you are motivating your base, in part by opposing Republican insanity,

You would be right.

But then again you wouldn't be getting all those sweet, sweet live shots and interviews in the great tradition of craven Republican-aping Democrats like Holy Joe Lieberman.

A reminder to Gallego, Moulton, and the rest of the sellouts:  You could say a lot of things about Holy Joe.  One thing you could never say was that he was the Democratic nominee for President.

Yet More Dispatches From the War Fronts: Greenland vs. Da Mook of the North

The prize

Dispatches from the War Fronts

Editors' Note: We have been reporting on the Dear Leader's empire-building for weeks now, but there's yet another war he's planning from his Gold Flushing Throne at Merde-y-Lardo, in addition to the invasions of Canada, Mexico, and Panama.  This time the Great White Dope has once again turned his attention to the frozen north, where it fell on the strategically vital Gateway to Iceland: Greenland.  It actually happens to be a part of another country and its inhabitants want nothing to do with the Tangerine-Faced Fascist.  But when has that ever stopped him before?  

By War Correspondent Douglas MacArthur with
Special Greenland Correspondent Katrine Fønsmark in Greenland City [That's not the capital of Greenland, you idiots – K.F.]
 

Having already lost the Battle of Bacon and Eggs before it started, the Tangerine-Faced Fascist  is casting his insatiable eye at bright shiny objects to distract his base of racist poltroons.  His latest: Greenland.

Greenland?

It's a big island in the, um, Arctic.  That means it's basically cold and empty and covered with ice.  So why would the incoming President-for-Life want it?

We have a few guesses.  First, on the 99 cent Mercator projection he looks at from his Throne of Gold (only partly obscured by the classified documents stacked in front of it), it seems enormous:

When you're packing a tiny toadstool, according to Stormy Daniels (who should know), ginormous is good.

On such a map, Greenland looks bigger than the entire continent of South America.  There's only one problem: reality.  In fact, Greenland is half the size of South America.  On a map that compensates for the fact that the circumference of the Earth near the poles is far smaller than at the Equator (as predicted by the “Round Ball” hypothesis), the reality looks like this:

This Goode projection, in addition to having a cool '60s vibe, shows the true size of Greenland, albeit chopped in half.  But it's fair to assume that the niceties of topology are lost on the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, unless the globes being mapped are attached to a porn star.

Another theory is that Greenland is full of minerals that could be exploited to make the TFF and his cronies rich, which as as 49.87% of the voting public has declared is the only point of the U.S. Government.

But perhaps the stupidest and most dishonest explanation is that the U.S. must take over Greenland to protect us from the threat of – well, we're honestly not quite sure:

👀 🌍 WATCH: Trump’s former National Security Advisor now admits climate change is real to justify Trump’s threats to take over Greenland— “a highway from the arctic to the United States… a critical battleground of the future as the climate gets warmer…”

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— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) December 29, 2024 at 11:20 AM

Sure, turning Greenland over to climate change deniers and drill baby drillers will definitely protect us all from the imminent threat of the collapse of Greenland's ice shelf.  That makes sense.

In fact, the threat of global warming on the Greenland ice shelf and thus anyone who lives on a coast is all too real.  As sanewashed by the New York Times, it's not a threat, it's an opportunity:

Because of warming temperatures, an estimated 11,000 square miles of Greenland’s ice sheets and glaciers have melted over the past three decades, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Massachusetts. That has huge implications for the entire world. If the ice melts completely, Greenland could cause sea levels to rise as much as 23 feet, according to NASA.

Greenland’s retreating ice could open up areas to drill for oil and gas and places to mine critical minerals, a fact that has already attracted international interest and raised concerns about environmental harms.

Such an event would also inundate places like New York City and Miami, but just think of the money to be made by drilling after the catastrophe!  And that's why the appropriate response to the imminent climate cataclysm is to seize Greenland.

The national security argument has been propounded by the Tangerine-Faced Fascist's hacks and shills, who insist that Denmark, who has lawful sovereignty over the place, cannot possibly defend it:

[Former TFF national security adviser Robert] O’Brien got the ball rolling on Saturday with a thread published to social media, insisting that Trump is “100% right again,” this time about Greenland. “If our great ally Denmark can’t commit to defending the Island, the US will have to step in, as [the president-elect] said,” he added. 

The idea that Greenland is a undefended frozen peach, ripe for the plucking, is bats*** crazy for so many reasons, beyond the lack of any current threat to the frozen wasteland.

Point one: there is a U.S. military presence on Greenland today, which seems more than adequate to the task of defense of the island:

 

The base is currently part of Steve Carrell's Space Force but we're sure that big golf ball will protect Greenland from all foes, extraterrestrial and otherwise.

Point two: the United States is already committed to defend Greenland from attack by a third party by the NATO Treaty, until such time (probably the next six months) as the disloyal Tiny Toadstool blows up that alliance, handing Putin a victory 80 years in the making.

Inexplicably, our mainstream media is reporting this insane futile land grab as if it were both rational and part of a great national tradition:

Over the past two days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has made clear that he has designs for American territorial expansion, declaring that the United States has both security concerns and commercial interests that can best be addressed by bringing the Panama Canal and Greenland under American control or outright ownership....

But the president-elect’s statements — and the not-so-subtle threats behind them — were another reminder that his version of “America First” is not an isolationist creed.

Colonialism: what could go wrong?

His aggressive interpretation of the phrase evokes the expansionism, or colonialism, of President Theodore Roosevelt, who cemented control of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. And it reflects the instincts of a real estate developer who suddenly has the power of the world’s largest military to back up his negotiating strategy.

Mr. Trump has often suggested that he does not always see the sovereignty of other nations’ borders as sacrosanct. When Russia invaded Ukraine, his first response was not a condemnation of the blatant land grab, but rather the observation that President Vladimir V. Putin’s move was an act of “genius.”

We will concede that taking land that belonged to others is a great American tradition.  But we can think of other traditions that prevailed in 1803 and we fought a Civil War that claimed 400,000 lives to make sure they wouldn't come back.  Except in Alabama.

We knew Teddy Roosevelt.  Teddy Roosevelt was a friend of ours.  The Tangerine-Faced Traitor is no Teddy Roosevelt and it's not an act of journalism to compare the two.

What might constitute reporting would be to delve into what's behind the TFT's expansionism.  To be fair, the Times piece hinted at a couple, like money and in the case of Panama, revenge for their government's cracking down on his crooked empire there.

But there are many other explanations the Times won't touch.  The TFT's dementia could be so far advanced that he sees the entire world as a bucket of fried chicken, whose pieces he can devour at leisure.

A more sanguine view of his mental status would be that he knows he can't deliver on his oft-repeated promise to lower the prices of eggs and bacon and apples, which he said would be very easy before the election.  Now he's got to come up with lots of flashy trinkets to distract his voters from his failure to do anything to actually improve their lives.  But, hey, look over there, Greenland!

With the end of constitutional government only two weeks away, the most disturbing question is what else he will launch to entertain his angry racist base.

And when he unleashes the U.S. military under the Insurrection Act to round up undocumented (or other) immigrants and send them to desolate camps in the desert, look for our thoughtful mainstream media to tell us he is acting in the great tradition of President Franklin Roosevelt, who did the same thing to Japanese-Americans, many of whom were citizens, back in 1942.