Jimmy Kimmel may have his name become a verb. It could be the new word of the year. So far Trump is killing democracy by kimmelling it.

Tue, Aug 26 at 5:23 AM

 

In 2024 the Oxford new word of the year was term, not a word. It was brain rot (click here). Now we have a possible 2025 word of the year thanks to Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel.

Kimmelled, to be kimmelled, and kimmelling arent listed as newly coined words in the Oxford English Dictionary, at least not yet. However, they may very well be added before long. The defintion of “to be kimmelled” barely needs to be spelled out. Starting now Trump has a list of people, TV personalities and shows, and organizations he wants to be kimmelled.

What Trump said on Air Force One as he departed from the UK is making the news:

The word itself sounds ominous. Take out three letters in the middle…

and we see what it spells.

Being kimmelled will end up meaning something short of being literally killed. Trump’s psychopathy (pronounced as "sigh-KOP-uh-thee) isn’t at the level of those of despots who order enemies actually killed whether formally or clandestinely by their agents. He is “merely” content to ruin lives.

If the word gains traction I can see someone who was fired because of their criticizing Trump saying “I’ve been kimmelled” or those involved in a TV show like, for example, The View” saying “we’ve been kimmelled.”

This is far more than an assault on the First Amendment. This is an assault on the entire US Constitution. It makes sense to begin with the amendment the Founders thought important enough to put as number one before moving onto the other nine in The Bill of Rights. 

Above is actually still on this US government website for children called Ben’s Guide. Ben of course, is Ben Franklin.

Trump has used coercion and lawsuits to try to impose his will. Trump has only employed hard force in his anti-immigrant mania. He has used ICE and other armed agents, including soldiers, rather than the equivalent of the Nazi Gestapo. He is wearing velvet gloves to keep the blood of his victims off his hands. He has a sanitized version of a blitzkrieg.

What Trump and his toadie enablers are doing is killing democracy and replacing it incrementally with a dictatorial autocracy. Ben, in Heaven, would not be happy if he could see what was happening.

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Trump keeps trying to convince people that radical flag burning leftists are the danger to the country. He's beating a horse that doesn't exist. By Hal M. Brown

 

Yesterday Trump told the White House pool reporters the following: 

“If you look at the problem, the problem is on the left. It's not on the right, like some people like to share the right, the problem we have is on the left. And when you look at the agitator, you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burning all over the place, that's the left. That's not the right.”

I was struck by his bringing up flag burning. “Who the holy hell is burning the flag?” I asked myself.

When I read his remark I thought of the aphorism about the futility of beating a dead horse. This means to continue discussing or trying to pursue a topic or issue that has already been decided or is pointless to revisit. It implies wasting time and effort on something that cannot be changed or resolved (From AI). 

I thought I could use this in my title, but then I realized that the particular horse he’s beating, blaming the left for behavior like flag burning just isn’t happening. In fact, flag burning hasn’t been a common form of protest recently, at least not to the extent it was years ago.

Trump has tried to make this an issue before. In August he signed an excutive order mandating prosecution of those who burn the American flag (here). 

I found the following about whether this order had any validity:

David Cole, a professor at Georgetown Law who has represented flag burners in several high-profile cases, said people can legally use the American flag as they see fit….

Cole also said the provision of the executive order threatening to deny or revoke visas and other immigration benefits to non-citizens who burn flags fails to recognize that the First Amendment protects everyone in the U.S.

“Just as you cannot throw someone in jail for burning an American flag, you can’t deport someone for burning an American flag,” he said. “So, at the end of the day, this executive order is symbolism and theater. It is not a realistic attempt to respond to any real world problem.” Reference: “Flag burning has a long history in the U.S. — and legal protections from the Supreme Court.”

I haven’t seen any photos of people burning flags in protest of Trump. What I do see is photos of people flying flags upside-down as a sign of a nation in distress. Below is one of my protest signs:

I have a flag (below) which I fly upside-down at protests above a Pride flag:

You can bet that if there was one photo or video of someone burning an American flag at an anti-Trump protest Trump would be showing it and it would be all over the right-wing media.

I doubt Trump will address using the flag upside-down. It just isn’t dramatic enough and doing so would open a discussion about why people are saying that because of Trump the nation, democracy itself, is in distress.

Still, Trump being Trump, or Stephen Miller being Stephen Miller, we may see an executive order banning flying the upside-down flag.

Trump won’t let this radical left lunatic narrative go whether referring to the murder of Charlie Kirk or anyone who dares to protest against what he is doing. 

He has to be salivating over the prospect of revelations coming out about Tyler Robinson being the bloodthirsty radical left lunatic he wants him to be. So far the only good news coming out about him is that his motivations are nuanced and complex and don’t fit neatly into the MAGA narrative. 

Kash Patel is saying (above) that there is an email Robinson sent to a friend saying he was going to target Kirk because he hated what he stood for. 

So far there’s no explanation as to just what it is he hated about what Kirk stood for. Considering that Robinson’s partner was a male transitioning to female (see article) this could be what he hated. 

For all we know he admired everything about Trump with the exception of his demonization of trans people. On the other hand he could be like any young person who defies their parents politics and/or religion, as a way to rebel. 

We don’t know anything about how Robinson grew up except that he had Mormon parents who were conservative. We don’t know how strict they were. Adolsecents and young people often rebel against overly strict parents. 

At present there is a great deal we don’t know about why Robinson did what he did. I can offer very tentative speculation which is hopefully well-grounded in my being a mental health professional, but I am not the president. Trump should keep his mouth shut. If Trump had a better angel this is what they’d be telling him. But Trump doesn’t even have an angel trying to compete with the Devil when he considers what to do.

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…

Col. Kilgore and Donald Trump, By Hal M. Brown

 

By now you’ve read about the reaction to Trump’s posting the “Chipocalapse Now” image of himself as Col. Kilgore with an under attack Chicago burning in the background (see HUFFPOST article). Here’s how Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, reacted:

Aside from uttering one of the two most memorable lines in “Apocolapse Now,” “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” (the other being Col. Kutz’s “the horror, the horror”) it is instructive to consider the character of the character.

The following (from the FanDom website) should suffice as a “nuff said” when trying to explain why Trump admires him so much he liked his own face being superimposed over Kilgore’s in the now infamous Truth Social post. Bold emphasis mine:

Lieutenant Colonel William "Bill" Kilgore is the secondary antagonist of the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. He is an amoral warmonger who actually enjoys the war and calls it home.

He is introduced in the movie when Willard and his allies ask him for help in getting up to the Nùng. Kilgore scoffs but befriends Lance after discovering his surfing experience and agrees to escort them through the Nùng's Viet Cong–held coastal mouth. They successfully raid at dawn, with Kilgore ordering a napalm sortie on the local cadres. He and his men then proceed to mercilessly kill, shoot and blow up numerous innocent civilians, showing a complete and utter disregard for civilian and human life, and showing Kilgore as what he is, a bloodthirsty, sadistic and amoral warmonger. This arguably makes him eviler than the film's main antagonist, Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, as he is willing to involve innocent civilians in his reign of mass murder and destruction, and shows no guilt for his deeds.

This is in stark contrast to Col. Kutz who when, as he was dying, uttered “the horror, the horror.” He was reflecting on the darkness and brutality of the war and humanity in general.

We also have stories about waging war on Venezuela and articles like “Trump’s Venezuela gunboat diplomacy: sabre-rattling or prelude to invasion?”

It is only a bit of my being lazy that I won’t expand on what makes Trump admire the Kilgore character. Hopefully it is obvious that Trump is one very sick excuse for a human being.

I have to wonder whether the opinions of the majority even matter. Consider the most recent poll:

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Who among the Trump toadies believes the shite they spout in praise of Dear Leader? Really, if they're in their right minds, who among the people we see surrounding Trump just about every day believes he is as great as he says he is?

 

Substack (here) is the best place to read this. It is where I post updates.

Two things struck me watching the news last night. One was a video of the Trump Cabinet meeting a few days where Steve Witkoff, United States Special Envoy to the Middle East, pitched Trump as the “single finest candidate” ever for the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Watch the 30 most embarrassing 30 seconds ever to come from the White House here.

Trump and everyone in the room wants us to belieive he deserves the honor awarded to people who have "done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."

One might wonder what Nobel would have thought about the army Turmp has been building under the guise of fighting crime and illegal immigration. He also might wonder about Trump trying to run roughshod over the fraternity between free nations by cozying up to authoritarian counties.

Witkoff made his Nobel Peace Prize statement with a straight face. There was no hint of irony. Nobody in the room showed any indication of cracking a smile, let alone falling on the floor beset with a sudden attack of the giggles.

I wonder how a Cabinet room full of people not beholden to Trump who also were sane would have reacted to the Nobel Peace Prize shite. Probably like shown below:

Then there was the clip of Stephen Miller praising RJK Jr. See 'Crazy': Trump aide Stephen Miller buried in mockery after wild claim about RFK Jr.

Last night in an update to my Substack I wrote:

If you think Epstein and Ukraine are the stories Trump, if he’s got a semblance of sensibility, ought to be fitfully fretting about in the wee hours of the morning it has to be what he’s going to do with RFK Jr. How can he, the man who’s never wrong and has never admitted he was wrong admit he was wrong about Kennedy? All I can come up with is something to do with Trump claming that nobody told him how bad having brain worms were.

I added these illustrations:

These are merely two examples of how Trump has surrounded himself with toadies.

If only these were real amphibians. At least most toads play an important beneficial role in the ecosystem (read article). They are more like the exception, cane toads which have toxic skins and a voracious appetites. They are now considered a pest and an invasive species in many of its introduced regions. You can chose your synonym for these human toadies (click below to enlarge): 

Here’s the question I pose to you:

Shit or shite, we say it the the first way and the Brits say it the second. Either way you say it, in reality what we see before us on a daily basis is an exaggerated version of the only dirty joke my father ever told me. 

He told it as if it really happened to him when he was in the Army. He set it up by explaining how the mess hall cook was not someone to trifle with because, as a master sergeant, he could order troops to do the most boring repetitious KP like peeling potatoes for weeks at a time. 

I knew about KP because I’d read Beetle Bailey comics.

Cookie (Cornelius) Jowls, was known for his questionable cooking and his lack of sanitary food preparation measures. He expected his soldiers to show that they thought his cooking was always fantastic and for them to praise every meal effusively.

In my father’s story one day the mess sergeant became suspicious that his soldiers were faking their compliments so he baked cakes, and instead of his usual chocolate icing from a can, he got his icing from another can, also known as the latrine.

When desert came, the soldiers could immediately smell what was what, but they knew they had to eat the cake. Each and every one of them did their best not to throw up and managed to swallow a few forkfuls. Then the only brave soldier in the group summoned the courage to exclaim “master sergeant, this cake tastes like shit!” 

It was like everyone in the mess hall held their breath for what seemed like an eternity, but it was only seconds before this brave soul succumbed and said…

…. check back on Substack later to see what news I have comments about.

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