Today's Substack goes from humor to horror in a country gone crazy. By Hal M. Brown

 

In an alternate universe where Trump lost the election the ony publications bothering to waste cyber-ink on him would be those covering the entertainment industry like Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and WWE Online, the latter current paying homage to Trump’s darling:

Still we have to try to get some satisfaction from Trump suffering from the persistent pox of Epsteinitis the itchy rash that won’t go away. 

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South Park’s making the news with their micropenis Trump also provided a moment of welcome comic releif. They managed to hit him below the belt and despite their network, Comic Central, being owned by Paramount they not only got away with it but the show was renewed for 50 epidoses. Literally, the phase “stay tuned” is applicable here. Consider this article in Variety:

South Park airs on Comedy Central which is owned by Paramount. That network just merged with CBS. South Park makes so much money that, despite their skewering Trump with biting satire, there’s no way they will be censored or forced off the air.

It is telling that while Trump has been on a rampage attacking Stephen Colbert and other late night TV hosts so far he’s avoided going after South Park like they are The Plague. Trump doesn’t care a whit that when he attacks a late night comic he only piques the curiosity of the public and may actually lead to more people tuning in to their shows. Whether or not he will attack cartoon characters like Cartman and Kenny remains to be seen. He could go after SP creators Andy Samberg, Mike Judge, Matt Stone and Trey Parker. I’m familar with the first two but most people who aren’t fans don’t know who they are.

Meanwhile, on the subject of fantasy images, there’s this (see article):

This leads me to ask the question “which depictions of Trump are are more realistic, a cartoonish Trump or a lousy photoshop?” 

Then in a nauseating but not unexpected development we have the Emil Bove’s appointment to the Third Circuit confirmed by the Senate. 

This shows that the Republicans in the Senate would confirm a Magic Eight Ball to make decisions on any court as long as they always favored Trump.

I don’t know why I bother writing about such trivial matters, even the Bove vote, is trivial when we have stories like this: 

Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.

Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.

Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place. Continued.

More proof that Trump has Epsteinitis came late last night when he reposted this post from a QAnon believer who describes herself as a “Proud American, born and raised, a Woman for Trump. I believe in Q, The Great Awakening and Holding the Line!❤️ WWG1WGA!.” The initials stand for “where we go one, we go all” which is a slogan of QAnon believers. (Read article in RawStory)

It’s possible, perhaps likely, that Trump doesn’t know that "the storm" refers to what conspiracy theorists believe will be a day of reckoning when the "Deep State" will be brought to justice and imprisoned and possibly executed at Guantanamo Bay. He may just have liked the AI image of himself and the text.

You have to scroll down the Fox News wesbite to find this story, middle right below, about Epstein: Schumer calls on FBI to conduct counterintelligence threat assessment on Epstein files.

If Trump watches MSNBC there is unrelenting coverage of the story.

They show how close he was with Ghislaine Maxwell. 

I wrote about this here:

They also report on the so-far missing minute of video surveillance of Epstein, supposedly dead by suicide, was found. This led to the conspiracy theory that someone had him killed.

He does not look like a happy camper:

That’s it for today. It’s a mixed bag of Halloween candy which includes some tasty treats and apples with razor blades in them. Remember how that story broke? 

Updates:

I wrote about Trump not being able to sue actual cartoon characters. Now South Park has a new episode about him suing the town of South Park. Excerpt:

One of the episode's main plot lines was Trump suing the town of South Park.

"By the end of the episode, the town agrees to do pro-Trump messaging as part of a settlement. The show then cut to a faux public service announcement showing a live-action depiction of Trump taking off his clothes and crawling through a desert."

White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers told USA Today that the show by creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, "hasn't been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention."

 While I don’t like using X I did post this there:

Then I looked up Epsteinitis and saw that a large number of people are using that term (see link to X) They are both anti-Trump and pro-Trump accusing Democrats of having it.

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Mindboggling: Trump's going to start a MUTHAFORKEN STRIKE FORCE to punish Obama officials. If only this was merely a Marvel movie or video game. By Hal M. Brown

 

No shit, they are calling it a “strike force.” They didn’t have to use the term in the first sentence or to have it in blue as a link to jump off the page when I read the article in The Hill:

Holy fucken hot pile of stinking shit, they are going to call this exercise in revenge a “strike force.” As far as I can tell the term has been only used for actual crime fighting groups like the Federal Strike Force Program against organized crime (reference). Now we are supposed to see Tulsi Gabbard and the Trump crew as a modern day Elliot Ness Untouchables.

Could this be a more transparent attempt to distract from the Epstein scandal? 

Obama’s name is being bandied about as someone who may also be indicted in an actual attempt to try him for something illegal. In fact, as I write this it is being discussed on Morning Joe. Note the chyron about living on “Planet Trump.”

One of the panelists noted that thanks to the Supreme Court decision protecting Trump from being prosecuted from anything he did while in office, Obama is likewise protected.

The use of the word “strike force” is meant to be theatrical. 

This is not a Marvel video game staring righteous superheros like Captain America, the Incredible Hulk (the good Hulk, not Hogan) and Spiderman.

It’s also not an old movie or TV series about fighting crime.

This is real life America. 

Perhaps looking at fiction we should change the spelling and say it is real life Amerika since it is more like the movie about a Russian takeover of the country.

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My comment to Thom Hartmann became my Substack for today.

 

If you’ve never heard of Thom Hartmann, here’s his Wikipedia profile.

I spent so much time writing a comment on Thom Hartmann’s Substack this morning that I never came up with a topic to write about. There are so many things about Trump I could write about. However I have nothing new to say. Certainly his outrageous behavior in Scotland is being discussed in the liberal media.

As a therapist I’d be inclined to write about this story:

Then, really what could I say about how unhinged Trump is that isn’t it obvious?

This is why I am taking the lazy way out and using what I wrote earlier as my Substack.

I didn’t react to everything Hartmann wrote in his Substack, “This Is Not a Drill: Infiltrate Your Local Dems Before It’s Too Late.”

This is what I wrote:

I saw you on Ali Velshi and was glad to see you mention E.Lansing and SDS (when my partner and I had lunch with you we talked about our both being at Michigan State and involved in the anti-Vietnam War protests in different ways at the time). I knew several SDS activists but wasn't a member at the time. I was in Social Work grad school and ended up as the leader of our protests. We were the second department to go on strike (after the Psychology Dept) following the Kent State massacre. Nursing was the third, thus all of Baker Hall had departments close so we put an "on strike" banner on the building. I had the heady experiencing of announcing our demands (along with other student leaders) to an overflow audience in the jam packed auditorium. We never met but were in the very same march to the state capitol building. 

By the way, my partner is still in touch with the woman who came from Chicago with her husband to visit you and your team. I expect she is reading this.

As I refect back on those protest days and think about the protests against Trump and his dictatorship I am heartened in some ways and frightened in another. 

What inspires me is that the student protests were a major factor (along with the U.S. losing) that led to the country getting out of Vietnam. While at the time we had high hopes we'd make a difference we didn't know that we would. However, LBJ wasn't a dictator. When the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State the outrage resonated across the country and LBJ cared about this. He responded to public opinion. 

Currently we have the closest thing to a dictator in American history. Now we have Trump's Gestapo thugs going after immigrants. The outrage coming from the liberal media and, to varying degrees, the public is like water off a duck's back for Trump, Homan, Bondi, Miller and his Hitlerian psychopaths. Trump not only doesn't care, but as a paradigm of someone in the Dark Tetrad (the Dark Triad plus sadism) he feels good about being able to terrify and hurt his enemies.

While Trump's Gestapo hasn't gunned down anybody, at least not yet, yesterday I went into what I hope was hyperbole mode about the chance Trump would deport his victims to a country where they could be killed. They'd be dropped off in a desert in a host country like South Sudan that Trump would pay big money to, and then it would be out of sight and out of mind as far anyone knew. Their fate would never be known. 

There are people like a guy who said his name was Ryan who called in to a CSPAN show who support the shooting of immigrants. Trump has expressed fantasies of alligators in the Rio Grande and shooting people trying to cross in the legs. We have a sadistic president and sadists who support him. Now alligators come up again in his Alligator Alcatraz where his fantasy is them eating people who try to escape.

I agree that Democrats have to get their act together. But I despair that even if they do and take back both houses of Congress and win state and local races we may not even have a "next election" because Trump will have cemented his dictatorship and been able to establish total control. When I think of this happening, I don't think engaging in tradtional politics (and protests) can save us. The only hope I have is that if Trump comes close to pulling this off, declares martial law, and activates the armed forces against citizens, is that the true patriots in the military will effect a coup to depose him.

Update:

There was one reply to my comment on Hartmann’s Sunstack:

Hal, I am aware that those who protested that war like to pat themselves on the back for ending it, but in reality the protests evoked a reaction, reverse psychology, among middle America and they demanded victory and f...k them damned commie hippies.

What finally did the job Hal, is middle America watching aluminum coffins being unloaded , the daily body count and the 58,000 military funerals of their sons, brothers, uncles and cousins.

Middle America tired of the war Hal that is why it ended.

Middle Russia would tire of that war also, had they freedom of press and freedom of speech, and not the threat of prison or falling out of windows.

This is was answer:

I don't see this as "a pat on the back" as if I want to glorify what we did. You are correct that there was pro-war blowback and that it coincided with the Hippie Era (sometime called the counter-culture) didn't help our cause. In fact, however some of us looked like Hippies (Thom with long hair, for example), but we weren't. I don't think so-called Hippies were a major part of the anti-war campus movement, nor were the Yippies ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_International_Party ) for that matter. It wasn't even SDS. It was ordinary middle class students that comprised the majority of the movement.

I don't think the impact of the student protests should be minimized. We did have an impact on the eventual end, but so did everything you say.

The looming threat of the draft was another reason people turned against the war. Those of draft age and their parents didn't wanrt anything to do with a war which had nothing to do with saving democracy in America. The growing death count couldn't be hidden.

Any history of how and the war ended must include what Walter Cronkite said and LBJ's reaction to losing his support. ( https://mediamythalert.com/2009/12/06/cronkite-moment-what-johnson-supposedly-said/ )

It also wasn't the protesting students but also how they impacted their families. Pro-war parents in many cases had to have been educated by their children.

By the way, Michigan State was one of the universities described in "Campus Wars: The Peace Movement At American State Universities in the Vietnam Era " ( https://www.amazon.com/Campus-Wars-Movement-American-Universities/dp/0814735126 )

From Amazon:

"At the same time that the dangerous war was being fought in the jungles of Vietnam, Campus Wars were being fought in the United States by antiwar protesters. Kenneth J. Heineman found that the campus peace campaign was first spurred at state universities rather than at the big-name colleges. His useful book examines the outside forces, like military contracts and local communities, that led to antiwar protests on campus."

—Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
"Shedding light on the drastic change in the social and cultural roles of campus life, Campus Wars looks at the way in which the campus peace campaign took hold and became a national movement."

—History Today
"Heineman's prodigious research in a variety of sources allows him to deal with matters of class, gender, and religion, as well as ideology. He convincingly demonstrates that, just as state universities represented the heartland of America, so their student protest movements illustrated the real depth of the anguish over US involvement in Vietnam. Highly recommended."

—Choice
"Represents an enormous amount of labor and fills many gaps in our knowledge of the anti-war movement and the student left."
—Irwin Unger, author of These United States
The 1960s left us with some striking images of American universities: Berkeley activists orating about free speech atop a surrounded police car; Harvard SDSers waylaying then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Columbia student radicals occupying campus buildings; and black militant Cornell students brandishing rifles, to name just a few. Tellingly, the most powerful and notorious image of campus protest is that of a teenage runaway, arms outstretched in anguish, kneeling beside the bloodied corpse of Jeff Miller at Kent State University.

While much attention has been paid to the role of elite schools in fomenting student radicalism, it was actually at state institutions, such as Kent State, Michigan State, SUNY, and Penn State, where anti-Vietnam war protest blossomed. Kenneth Heineman has pored over dozens of student newspapers, government documents, and personal archives, interviewed scores of activists, and attended activist reunions in an effort to recreate the origins of this historic movement. In Campus Wars, he presents his findings, examining the involvement of state universities in military research — and the attitudes of students, faculty, clergy, and administrators thereto — and the manner in which the campus peace campaign took hold and spread to become a national movement. 

Recreating watershed moments in dramatic narrative fashion, this engaging book is both a revisionist history and an important addition to the chronicle of the Vietnam War era.

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Who the hell is Ryan and why should we hope Trump never finds out about his solution for dealing with immigrants?

 Last night, precisely at midnight as it happened, I woke up and thought that Trump’s final solution about what to do with the immigrants his Gestapo rounded up could result in his paying a country like South Sudan to take all of them and then secretly do whatever they damn well wanted to in order to deal with them. They could be dropped at a remote airstrip far from prying eyes.

I thought that a specially selected military unit of whatever country that took them could shoot them as soon as the transport plane left. Out of sight, out of mind, as far as the American’s flying them to their ultimate fate would be concerned.

Dead men tell no tales. My morbid imagination told me how easy it would be for the story of these victims to be figuratively and literally buried in the desert.

Then this morning I saw this article on RawStory:

Excerpt:

During Sunday's Washington Journal program on C-SPAN, a man named Ryan called in to urge the president to be tougher on immigration.

"I like what the Trump administration's doing, but I think they could be doing a little bit more," the caller said. "Number one, they could militarize the border and shoot illegals coming into the country."

Then Ryan went on to say that “they could also process them like a military combatant, putting them in a military tribunal, finding them guilty, and then shipping them the hell out of the country.”

You can listen to Ryan here and watch the moderator manage not to react to what he is saying here.

I doubt Trump ever checks in on RawStory, let alone watches live CSPAN shows. I sure hope he doesn’t. If he does he may have heard what Ryan had to say. If he did, he just might think he could get away with eliminating the pesky problem of what to do with immigrants once ICE grabs them up with this drastic solution.

I won’t go down the road where this could lead if Trump ended up turning his ICE Gestapo into a force at his beck and call to deal with his political enemies and regular citizens who dare to opose him.

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