Mitt Romney gets a revelation on the ski lift to Damascus

By Andrew Mellon
Tax Correspondent

Whatever happened to Mitt Romney, millions were not asking?

Last week, we found out: he landed on the terrible New York Times Op-Ed pages with a stirring call for...higher taxes on the rich!

Wait a minutes, this Mitt Romney?  The Mitt Romney who told his plutocratic funders in 2012:

Mitt Romney's back! 

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for [Obama] no matter what. [They] are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it....And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax....[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. 

It was hardly the first time that the Mittster showed his contempt for the lowly peons whose suffering had made a fortune for him in his career as a flipper and stripper of once-great enterprises.  He was one of the pioneers of the private-equity formula for success: find some old company, buy it with mostly-borrowed money, strip it of its assets, cash, and workers, and then flip the carcass to some other sucker.  Repeat as frequently as needed to amass $270,000,000.  

Don't believe us?  Here's what well known lefty Maureen Dowd said just before her retirement from journalism:

Romney may have been a Wall Street predator, looter and vulture gnawing at the carcasses of companies and plotting a White House bid in diapers to finish what his dad started, as his Republican rivals have portrayed him. “Make a profit,” a younger Romney laughingly says in the attack film financed by supporters of Newt Gingrich. “That’s what it’s all about, right?”  

Lighten up, Emma Goldman.

What caused Mitt Romney, surveying the world from atop his mountain of loot, to have a change of what we'll call for argument's sake heart?

It's not that he was moved by the plight of the less affluent 90% of America who, except for a brief period during the Biden Administration, enjoyed none of the huge gains in national income since oil prices stabilized in 1980.

No, he's worried about the projected shortfall in the Social Security Trust Fund, an artifact of Roosevelt's genius idea to prevent Republicans from slashing Social Security.  This 23% shortfall would have to be made up from general revenues.  Like the trillion-dollar defense budget.

This in turn, combined with the generations of tax cuts for the rich championed by plutocrats like the Mittster, would according to him lead to higher debt and hyperinflation.

Now we're getting somewhere.  If you've got a, to use the technical macroeconomics term, s***ton of money, nothing scares you more than the prospect that you money might become next to worthless.  And you can't eat car elevators.

This terrifying possibility (ridiculous according to anyone who actually knows economics) has led Romney to embrace the fearful alternative: higher taxes.

What's on his menu?

First, he wants to raise or remove the current limit on payroll taxes (currently $176,000).  This tax increase would fall most heavily on upper middle class professionals like doctors and lawyers.  But they vote Democratic anyway, so they deserve it!  The tax might not affect the ultra-rich plutocrats who don't rely on wage income, or if it does, it would be not even a grain of sand to the likes of Ketamine Leon Musk and his $500 billion hoard, on which he has paid precisely zero taxes.

Even a mind as clouded as Mitt's realizes this.  So he goes on to propose tax increases, not on plutocrats, but on their mouth-breathing offspring.  He points out that under the current tax regime, Ketamine Leon can pass on his $500 billion without ever paying even capital-gains tax due to an obscure loophole which provides that the basis of such windfalls is valued on the date of death.

This means that Ketamine Leon's 563 children, or whoever inherits his wealth, should they sell their $500 billion (or whatever its value on the holiday of Leon's demise) windfall for cash, would only owe taxes on the difference between $500 billion and what they sold it for (if higher).  If they got less than $500 billion, they pay nothing.

The ostensible rationale for this pro-Don Jr. windfall is that it is too difficult to apply the dead guy's basis to calculate tax due on sale.  We still remember brilliant tax lawyer Marty Ginsburg telling us some 40 years ago that this was, to use his hypertechnical jargon, “bullshit.” 

There's another tax though that might hit Leon's Master Race offspring: an estate tax which plutocrats have tried to repeal for decades.  This is a tax levied on the value of very large estates. Mitt doesn't mention it, although he knows about it.

We know this because he has avoided estate tax liability on untold millions through a loophole he pioneered.  Under this scheme, when Mitt or one of his fellow plutocrats sets up a new fund for flipping and stripping – excuse me, private equity, he takes one simple step on day one.

“A wealth tax?  On one million dollars?”

Although he expects the fund to raise billions of dollars and his own partnership interest to be worth tens if not hundreds of millions, on day 1 he and his co-conspirators “seed” the new fund with say $1,000.  He then contributes his, let's say, 30% partnership interest into an IRA for his kids.  The contribution limit for IRA's, intended for small savers, is $3,000.  On the day of contribution, his interest is nominally worth 30% of $1,000, or $300.  

He knows full well that it will be worth more like $50 million, but by then it's safely tucked into the IRA tax-free until his heirs many years from now take relatively small taxable distributions from it.

Funnily enough, he doesn't mention closing that loophole.

There's a similar scam involving putting interests in early-stage companies and funds into a Roth IRA with similar huge tax-dodging benefits for the truly greedy.

Romney also doesn't mention the straightforward wealth tax, which would require those with huge wealth (say at least $50 million) to pay a modest amount (between 2% and 5% of that total) as a wealth tax, in recognition of the outside rewards such plutocrats garner from a government that protects their property and their necks from the guillotine.

This proposal has garnered furious opposition from those subject to it, who have threatened to flee to Florida or Mars to avoid paying it.  We suspect they're not leaving their Woodside compounds anytime soon.

So while Mitt gets a caffeine-free cookie for admitting that he and his ilk need to pay more, he hasn't quite been able either to admit the reason: so that all Americans can enjoy some level of economic security without worrying about how to pay for fripperies like staying alive when they're sick.

He also hasn't been able to embrace the fairest solution: the wealth tax.

Finally, having written one column, Mitt seems content to rest on his skis.  He could go on to do the hard work of advocating for tax equity, and even funding that advocacy. You could call it “missionary work.”  Mitt knows about that too.

But we should applaud his baby steps. Maybe someday other New York Times hacks like David “My Dinner With Jeffrey” Brooks will be inspired to take a step into the light.

You'll pardon Mitt if he doesn't bet even a minuscule percentage of his $270,000,000 on it, though.

 

Good and Dead: bigot, warmonger, and self-proclaimed intellectual dead at 95

The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy

By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor

The front page of the December 18 New York Times announced the death of Norman Podhoretz at the age of 95.

The reaction was immediate, with almost all Times readers asking: “Who?”

Followed by “who cares?”

Both good questions.  By coincidence, both can be answered simply: “no one.”

Norman Podhoretz was known for being outspoken

While it’s true that he died in well-deserved obscurity, the terrible ideas, to use the term generously, that he articulated and tried to legitimate animate too much of today’s current discourse, especially among his beloved extremist Republicans, and for that reason alone cannot be dismissed so cavalierly.

The Times offered a few of Podhoretz’s intellectual gems in their obit:

One of his last publications was bluntly titled “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism” (2007). It was a book, according to a Times review, that “furiously hurls accusations of cowardice, anti-Americanism and sheer venality at any and all opponents of the Bush doctrine.” 

The Bush doctrine, you may recall in spite of the efforts of Podhoretz’s ideological (and biological) children to memory hole it, was that it was A-OK to invade a foreign country which had nothing to do with 9/11 if it was a dictatorship and the population were Muslim.

That’s the doctrine. There’s no more to it than that. By which we mean there’s nothing more intellectually to it, but there’s plenty more death, agony, suffering, torture, lying, and perversion of all American values to it, none of which bothered ol’ Norm.

The idea that over a billion Muslims, by virtue of their great ethical monotheistic religion, are somehow a monolithic threat to civilization (whatever that is) finds near unanimous support in today’s Republican Party, whose Mad King as recently as this week banned immigration (including by adoption) from mostly Moslem countries.

Another of Podhoretz’s spiritual children, a schondeh named Randy Fine, a Republican Congressman from the great state of Florida, recently said that mainstream Muslims should be “destroyed” and U.S. citizen and Muslim Ilhan Omar should be deported. Norman would be so proud. 

He also was a fervent supporter of the disastrous Vietnam War (until he realized in 1971 that the game was up) and an even more fervent opponent of those smarter and less bent than he, who pointed out correctly that it was a pointless effusion of blood and treasure that did nothing to make the world a better or safer place.

And most of all he was a wild if hypocritical Likudnik, blasting Labor-led Israeli governments who dared to consider peace with the millions of Palestinians living among them and under occupation. When Israel was governed by rejectionist Likudnik governments Norman turned his wrath on American Jews who dared to criticize Israeli government policies. No foolish consistency for great minds like his!

Today he’d surely be pleased at the Mad King’s addled endorsement of the Israeli Government’s illegal and autocratic rule over every Palestinian in the Occupied Territories and its depraved indifference to the lives and fates of Palestinian civilians.

His U.S. political judgments were equally acute:

“I hereby declare,” he said, hinting that he was deliberately needling some conservative intellectuals, “that I would rather be ruled by the Tea Party than by the Democratic Party, and I would rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.”

As the statement has no intellectual content, it is impossible to refute. It is worth pointing out though that he has precisely outlined the governing philosophy of today’s Republican Party: better an ignorant idiot in the Oval Office than a Democrat who might make things better for people in America and around the world.

We’ll get to the needling bit later.

He first attained fame, or at least notoriety, as a supposed literary critic. Here are two of his early judgments:

His anti-feminist views were well-received

He won notches on his critic’s belt by going after big reputations, disparaging Saul Bellow’s early novel “The Adventures of Augie March” in a 1953 review and writing off the Beats as “young men who can’t think straight and so hate anyone who can.”

That would be wrong and wrong. But Norman soon learned that you could go far by being angry and wrong, as long as what you wrote pleased the right powerful people, especially rich reactionary Jews. Like the board of the then-respectable American Jewish Committee, which published (and for all we know still publishes) a little read magazine called Commentary.

Norman became its editor in 1960 and over the years managed to run it into the ground. To celebrate his success, he published his first memoir in 1968, Making It. In between boasting of his college grades, he dropped a bunch of names and settled some of his many scores.

The reviews were, let’s just say, Nuzzi-esque:

Podhoretz, who has been where much of the action is for more than a decade, and has been editor of one of the country’s most serious journals of opinion for nearly that long, tells us very little about anything that has happened in his life except as it affects his self-esteem or concerns his quest for class, status, and power....But Making It may also be just what its author says it is: a bid for literary distinction, fame, and money all in one package. If it succeeds, we may surely hope that successive volumes will permit us to follow the career of this remarkable, still young man. And they may be more mellow; sometimes, as we age, memory softens our perceptions of reality. In Podhoretz Returns and Son of Podhoretz, the monster may turn out to have a heart of gold. 

Spoiler alert: nope.

In addition to his terrible ideas, he is survived by his one contribution to the art of rhetoric. Until he was turned loose in the marketplace of ideas, thinkers and writers used public fora to argue for their views, in the hope that listeners or readers would be persuaded by the cogency of the arguments.

Podhoretz’s unique contribution was to spout forth geysers of dumb s***, not to persuade, but to anger those he didn’t like (usually “liberals”). The point was not to convince but to outrage.

Making a jackass of yourself in public by churning out drivel was once thought pointless, if not self-destructive. Now it is an accepted and even respected mode of discourse, used to justify broadcasting ever stupid and more hateful crap. Outraging smarter, better people with your horrible, usually bigoted, ideas has become the principal, if not sole, offering of self-described “conservative intellectuals” (kind of like a married bachelor or a Dutch treat).

In fact getting savaged for stupid insulting ravings has become a point of great pride to today’s reactionary provocateurs. If you don’t believe us, ask Norman Podhoretz’s spiritual grandchild, Kevin Dowd.

So with Podhoretz’s long-overdue demise, we come to the end of a generation of loud boorish and wrong neoconservative gasbags who for reasons still unknown (although likely arising out of their ability to please rich powerful reactionaries who underwrote their “institutions” and “intellectual journals”) were accorded a level of respect their work did not merit. Irving Kristol, Bill Buckley, Pat “I’ll just take the bottle” Moynihan, Midge Decter, Diana Trilling, Hilton Kramer – the good news is that they all now sleep the sleep of the eternally remaindered. 

The bad news is that their hateful ignorant spiteful bigoted “thinking” lives on in today’s Republican Party and its apologists

Merry Christmas.  

U.S. foreign policy, RIP

 By Spy Diplomatic Correspondent Tess Harding

People may find this hard to believe, but for the 80 years ending in 2025, the United States had a foreign policy. 

After the Second World War and until 1990, the foreign policy was structured around the belief that the Soviet Union must be thwarted to the extent possible without blowing up the world.

This fundamental principle had a number of consequences.  Some aged pretty well, like supporting Marshall Plan aid to rebuild Europe while using massive US military might to backstop Europe via the NATO alliance.  It also led to a surprisingly lenient occupation of Japan, which created a powerful prosperous peaceful nation anchoring Northeast Asia.

Other times, the theology of a monolithic Communist enemy led us into disaster.  This led to a multi-decade (failed) effort to isolate what American white men of both political parties chose to call “Communist China.”

This demonization led directly to the pointless slaughter of Vietnam, on the (ludicrous) grounds that the indigenous Vietnam anti-colonial revolution was nothing more than an instrument of Chinese aggression. 

In 1969, the crooked Republican bastard who led the effort to demonize Democrats as “soft on China” decided to turn on a dime and embrace China as a counterweight to the USSR.  This obviously sound policy helped fracture the supposed Red Alliance, weaken the USSR, and build China up as an economic and political superpower.  Maybe that's bad and good. 

After the USSR collapsed of its own internal decay in 1990, U.S. foreign policy was guided by a more nuanced constellation of principles, from human rights to development to containing Iran to free trade.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

After 9/11 U.S. foreign policy pivoted again, inventing a Global War on Terrorism and then using that intellectual structure to justify attacking a country that had nothing to do with terrorist attacks in America.  Thank you George W. Bush and Dead-Eye Cheney. 

But however wise or idiotic the foreign policy was, there was an apparatus for creating and legitimating it, and various mechanisms, sometimes loud and angry, for providing some democratic oversight over it.

That ended on January 20, 2025, thanks to 77 million white and Hispanic voters.

Architects of US foreign policy: then...

Now we have no rational foreign policy and our political branches are incapable of producing one. The fact that one marginally qualified individual serves as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser (not to mention, as noted political scientist Stephen Colbert pointed out, while moonlighting as the National Archivist) is an admission that the process of formulating and executing foreign policy has collapsed.

What's replaced it?

There was a lot of supposedly hilarity generated by Rubio's bold path-breaking decision to return to use of Times New Roman in State Department documents (replacing the woke lefty Calibri), but that may have been among the more rational foreign affairs decisions made by the new regime.

It is now clear that U.S. foreign policy is really nothing more than the caprice, often corrupt and sadistic, of a demented vicious bigot who also seems to be acting as a Russian agent when he is not lusting after an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize as if it were another underaged pageant contestant.

We'll start in Europe, where the 75 year old alliance with European democracies has been destroyed and replaced by insult comedy and toadying to Russian aggression.  Why?  Who knows?

Speculation has it that the Mad King is either being blackmailed or paid off by Putin or both.  The evidence goes back to 2016, when Russian agent and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, then not in jail, first excised support for Ukraine from the Republican platform and then shared polling data with Russian agents.  There is but one reason why anyone would do that: so that Russian disinformation campaigners could use the data to target critical swing voters with lies about Trump's opponent.  It worked, and the Tangerine-Faced Traitor has, unusually for him, been grateful ever since.

To serve his boss Putin, the Mad King has bounced around various ridiculous surrender demands on the brave Ukrainians who have resisted Russian aggression for over a decade.  To the defeatists courtiers trying to justify Trump's insane, unworkable, and evil efforts to give in to Russian aggression on the grounds that a nation of 44 million cannot stand up to a much larger power, we remind them that once upon a time another nation of about that size stood up to a larger power most effectively.  It was called Vietnam. 

In the Middle East, where to be fair U.S. foreign policy has long been a confusing and often disastrous muddle, the Mad King launched a war on Iran apparently because he thought that Bibi Netanyahu was getting too much press coverage for Israel's own bombing campaign and then almost immediately stopped it, having achieved nothing except subverting careful diplomatic efforts to restrain the Iranian nuclear program (unleashed by the Mad King's disastrous first term decision to break the Iran nuclear agreement).

We give Trump a shred of credit for leaning on Bibi to halt his savage assault on Gaza in exchange for the release of all hostages.  But the Mad King's inability to focus and lack of competent diplomats have led to an uneasy non-peace in Gaza, continuing suffering for the millions living in tents in the cold winter, and no realistic plan to resolve the conflict by installing a responsible Palestinian government.

Instead, the Mad King with the support of his fellow despots has installed himself as the King of Peace, putting himself over another well-known Middle Eastern figure known as the Prince of Peace.  

The only other aspect of the Mad King's approach to the Middle East is to enrich himself and his miserable mouth-breathing family by trading U.S. national interests to local despots in exchange for naming rights to unbuilt resorts.  His unqualified stupid son-in-law is busily trousering millions from these desert plutocrats in exchange for influence over U.S. foreign policy, and, more recently, over what's left of the U.S. free media. 

Just today, The Guardian reported that the usual finaglers are trying to get rich with nonsensical plans to imprison Gazans:

The Guardian has learned that two former Doge officials – once assigned to Elon Musk’s effort to slash government and fire federal workers in bulk – are leading the group’s conversations about humanitarian assistance and the postwar reconstruction of Gaza. They have circulated slide decks with detailed plans for logistics operations, including prices, financial projections and the locations of potential warehouses.

US companies are gathering for the spoils. One contender, the Guardian has learned, is Gothams LLC, a politically connected contractor that won a $33m contract to help run the notorious south Florida detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”, where immigrants are housed in tents and trailers.

Documents and three people familiar with the plans say that the contractor had an “inside track” to secure what might be the most lucrative contract it’s ever had. But in an interview on Friday, after questions from the Guardian, the company’s founder, Matt Michelsen, said he had reconsidered his company’s participation and was pulling out, citing security concerns.   

That's not foreign policy; that's bank robbery.

In Asia, US foreign policy has been reduced to try to bulldoze China and when that doesn't work, give up.  Rinse, repeat.

...and now

But we save the hottest mess for last: Latin America.  Here we are told there is a foreign policy, in which “America First” (which means isolationism, an idiotic failed policy but at least a policy) now means Americas First, in which the United States gets to lord it over the entire Western Hemisphere (so isolationism plus its opposite).

In practice this has meant trying to bully powerful states, like Brazil, and when Brazil tells us to pound sand, pretend we were just joking.  It has also meant a campaign of high seas murder in violation of U.S. and international law.  We are told that this program of summary execution is aimed at Venezuela, although no one has yet explained how murdering mariners in the Pacific targets Venezuela, which, as many people (not working for the Mad King) know, has no access to the Pacific. 

The violent unprovoked attacks on boats that may or may not be involved in smuggling Don Jr.'s favorite marching powder, like the bombing of Iran, also satisfy the Mad King's sadistic lust for inflicting agonizing violence against those who cannot effectively resist. 

Lest you think that the regime has not put forward any document setting out its foreign policy, last week it released a lengthy statement of U.S. policy toward Europe.  The normally staid New York Times described it:

The Trump administration has not exactly kept its low regard for Europe secret. President Trump has long portrayed European allies as freeloaders that fail to pay enough for their own security and argued that the European Union was “formed to screw the United States.”

Now, that hostility is official White House policy.

Hostility to our most important allies is not really a policy.  It's more like a feeling, inspired by the Mad King's hatred and contempt of democratic states and his corresponding embrace of cruel dictators like his buddy Vladimir Putin. 

Another way to describe it, according to foreign affairs commentator Anne Appelbaum, is a “long suicide note.” 

In practice this so-called policy expresses itself in support for racist neo-Nazi European political parties and adopting Russian policies for ratifying its violent illegal aggression against Ukraine as if they were American.  The abandonment of Ukraine not only sucks up to Putin, it provides (once again) corrupt business opportunities to the Mad King's bumbling plutocrat courtiers, who have replaced professional diplomats in vital negotiations. 

Once we had a foreign policy.  Now we have a Mad King ruling by whim and indulging his insatiable greed and sadism to the detriment of American national interests.

Just a reminder: in this insanity he supported by every Republican and meaningfully opposed by none.

And in media outlets supposedly devoted to careful analysis of inter alia foreign policy you get trollbait like this:

It certainly is working for Vladimir Putin. 

Another reminder: all this is being done in our name.  As with so much of the Mad King's assault on democracy and civilization, silence equals consent.

What's really got everyone hot and bothered at Harvard?

By Larry Lowell
Yard Correspondent

This week The New York Times published its 925th story claiming that Harvard was so, so close to “settling” the Trump Regime's bogus allegations against it, which have been laughed out of court time and again, with the only sticking point being that the proposed $500,000,000 tribute to the Mad King be styled as a “fine.”

The story (per Spy policy, no link to pisspoor content), like all the other pos's, seems to be based largely on leaks from billionaire buttinski Steve Schwarzman's highly-paid flacks.  Schwarzman, desperate to ingratiate himself with his liege, has (according to his shills) been telling Harvard that paying half a billion in fines is no biggie, because finaglers like him do it all the time and they're still regarded as sages by the likes of The Times.

We doubt every f***in' word.  Harvard, notoriously tight with a buck, has no intention of blowing half a billion to ingratiate itself with a demented corrupt goon when it has gotten most of its grant money back through litigation.  Harvard knows that future grants, on the other hand, may be held back on the whim of the Tangerine-Faced Fascist, but may well wait for future legal action before it makes a revenue-maximizing decision.

With the fight between the University and the Regime still raging, we wondered what the undergraduates thought about the effort by a depraved Fascist regime to destroy Harvard and more generally academic inquiry and freedom of thought.

Here's what's on their minds:

 

What a surprise.

By the way, here's a quiz for all you little overachieving grinders, a/k/a Harvard undergraduates: how many of the objects in the drawing can you identify?  For extra credit (catnip to this crowd), identify the proper use of each object you name.

That Harvard undergraduates are more interested in poontang than the pronouncements of Steve Schwarzman should not come as any surprise to anyone who remembers college.  We'd only note that most of the objects drawn are generally intended for solo use.  That sounds about right for Harvard undergrads.

The actual contents of the issue are less salacious than the cover implies.   One notable omission though is the most recent sex scandal at Harvard involving University Professor, fired President, and Ladies' Man Larry Summers.  Summers, regarding as one of the most brilliant economists of his generation, at least by Larry Summers, was recently revealed to have sought the advice of his BFF, Jeffrey Epstein.

Summers had sought the wise counsel of his child rapist buddy because Faculty Lounge Lizard Larry was trying to bang a (much) younger economics professor whom he had mentored.  The younger less powerful academic apparently was not overwhelmed by the ruggedly handsome and charming 70-year-old senior professor for reasons unknown, at least to anyone who has never had to share a meal with this bulvon.

Perhaps the student editors of The Harvard Independent neglected to feature this hot story in their annual sex roundup because to all 20-year-olds, the idea of anyone over 30 having sex is risible, if not inconceivable.

So Summers has to comfort himself with his lucrative no-heavy-lifting University Professorship, his second wife, and perhaps some of the devices pictured on the Harvard Independent's cover.

But sex isn't what Harvard undergrads are getting hot and bothered about.   It's something much more important.

More important than sex to an undergraduate?  Hard to believe, amirite? 

Disgraced Harvard Prof. Larry Summers
and his mentees

But as every Harvard College student (which Larry Summers never was btw) knows, the point of going to Harvard is not to learn great truths or even how to use the devices on the cover of the Sex Issue; it's to get your ticket punched to some greater glory usually involving a graduate degree.  And that requires good grades.

But

“Our grading is too compressed and too inflated, as nearly all faculty recognize; it is also too inconsistent, as students have observed. More importantly, our grading no longer performs its primary functions and is undermining our academic mission,” the report reads. Data from the Office of Institutional Research showed that 60.2% of all College grades awarded in 2025 were As, compared to 24% in 2005.

“Students know that an ‘A’ can be awarded for anything from outstanding work to reasonably satisfactory work,” the report wrote. “It’s a farce.”  

Ruh-roh.

Now it's time for the midterm.  This one's an essay question: why is a 60% rate of A grades a farce as compared to 24%?  What is the proper level of non-farcical A grades?  Explain your reasoning.

It may come as a shock to Harvard undergrads and even administrators, but grade inflation, like sex, was not invented by current students.  Like sex, grade inflation has been a topic of enormous controversy for at least half a century (or at least since the days when the (white male goyische) children of the elite could go on to splendid graduate schools coincidentally also named Harvard just by being “clubabble.”)

The issue in 1975 was not too many A's; it was too few C's.  Then as now the professoriat sought to invent and then elevate an imaginary elite by whining about inflated grades.  Then as now the undergrads fretted about losing the futures they had imagined for themselves.

The reactionary professors imagined they were returning Harvard to the Platonic ideal of a small elite thinking great thoughts in the groves of academe.  Oddly enough, Socrates and Plato never felt the need to grade their students.  Anyone willing to listen and think was welcome.  Then and forever, that was an exceedingly small slice of the polis.

What would be so bad about returning to that grade-free Platonic ideal?  The only problem with abolishing grades is that consumers of Harvard graduates will always demand some way of sorting the little darlings.  If that's not grades, it's the subjective assessments of deeply flawed and often horny academics (like Summers!).  Abolishing grades would lead to even more sucking up to (or if Larry had his way, sucking)  professors and other generators of recommendations.

The issue of grading is a bottomless pit.  Any solution is going to be at best very imperfect.  Perhaps for that reason proponents of one position or another should stop pretending that they and they alone occupy the moral high ground from which they can gaze across at Plato, or at least University Professor Larry Summers attempting to buy some new toys to impress the ladies. 

Actually we have a suggestion for Harvard professors and administrators with time on their hands.  Instead of worrying about grading the students, how about worrying about grading undergraduate education?   In recent decades, Harvard has made some effort to improve the lamentable standard of teaching undergrads, which traditionally involved some old tosser reading from crumbling lecture notes in front of a thousand bored undergrads in Sanders Theater.

One incentive for reform is that the professors are cranky because they are not attracting an audience with formerly boffo ramblings.  Who wouldn't rush to attend lectures from a distinguished economics professor telling Ec. 10 students that the reason that Appalachia was poor was due to a depleted gene pool or a great philosophy professor opining that while most of ethics was worthless, he was “pretty sure” that intentional murder was wrong?

If you think that Harvard College will be like this,
boy will you be disappointed

These days, students are treating these entertainments like episodes of Stranger Things: to be streamed on demand:

“Some of the classes I’m taking have recorded lectures, so a lot of my classmates feel like there’s no need to attend lecture especially when they can watch the lecture back on 2x speed." 

Honestly, who can blame them?

Perhaps if Harvard, like colleges that actually focus on educating undergraduates, replaced its big lectures with small discussion groups led by professors (not by untrained and often weird grad students), Harvard students would show up.

The senior faculty, who regard College students as gnats, would be appalled at the idea that they would have to neglect their magnificent research in favor of wasting time teaching 19-year-olds.  But they should follow the example of University Professor Larry Summers who found time to teach undergrads while still conducting path-breaking research with his colleague Prof. Epstein on the separation of junior economics faculty from their gattkes. 

Maybe if Harvard College poo-bahs spent as much time worrying about undergraduate education as grading, they could actually someday earn an A.  At least for effort. 

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.