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America has a number of Federal Holidays: the 4th of July, where we celebrate the American arrogance to tell the greatest empire at the time in the world to stuff it, and the only time we slip back into a European style of notating dates; Labor Day, when we celebrate the people that work hard to make everything function; Memorial Day, when we pay respects to the fallen in all our wars and conflicts we dare not call wars; Veterans Day, to honor those that served and survived; Juneteenth, to acknowledge the end of that horrific institution, slavery; and Thanksgiving, where we give thanks just for surviving at all, either the terrible New England winters or the crushing masses storming the department stores. We also have a few to recognize particular people: Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and of course Christmas.

There are also crowding the calendar a number of Recognized Days where events and concepts are honored, but not so much as to interfere with capitalist commerce with time away from laboring: Groundhog Day, which spurred a film and endless copycats of that movie; Flag Day; Pearl Harbor Day; and far too many to enumerate here, but there is one that slipped by this week that is scarcely noted, not called out in popular culture with a comedic movie, and certainly not used to generate an excuse to leave work or bash each other at football: September 17th, Constitution Day.

September 17th, 1787, the U.S. Congress achieved enough signatures to send its newly crafted Constitution out to the states for ratification, and nine months later it birthed the United States government as we know it today.

The document, like all things made by human hands, is not perfect. Far from it: there have been more than two dozen amendments to the document, and more need to be performed, but for more than two centuries it has guided this imperfect nation towards a more perfect union.

Fallible and flawed people have ignored it, twisted it, misinterpreted it, and outright violated it, but it remains one of the most brilliant governing ideas in history, inspiring countless other nations to follow in our footsteps, and today, at this critical moment in history, its fate and our future are in our hands.

A vote is coming in a few short weeks, a vote that will determine the future of that precious document, that dream made real. Vote carefully.

Kash Patel, our incompetent director of the FBI — good god where is Gordon Cale when you really need him — sat before Congress, grilled on his stewardship of that organization and faced questions that before this administration wouldn’t have survived a Saturday Night Live sketch.

Senator Kennedy of Louisiana, play-acting his ‘simple country boy’ persona, zeroed in on the FBI’s loosening of standards for applicants, specifically that now, under Patel’s direction, the Bureau would no longer automatically disqualify for employment anyone who had engaged in bestiality.

Patel maintained that the purpose of the change in qualification was to ensure that victims of bestiality were not wrongfully excluded from services while Senator Kennedy seemed unable to process anything as a victim of bestiality except the animal that had been sexually abused. With blinders provided by the patriarchy, it appeared that both men could either not envision applicants to the FBI that were not men or that only men engaged in the terrible practice under discussion.

I have no idea if the urban legends have any basis in factual history, but for decades there has persisted the myth that in hidden and secret clubs in foreign lands — it is always in foreign lands — audiences can ‘enjoy’ watching women have sexual intercourse with animals. Mentioned most often in these tall tales are donkeys and horses. This urban legend is so well known that it appears as a plot point in the celebrated film The Godfather Part II.

Apparently, Kash Patel is so addled-brained that not only was he unprepared for this sort of questioning, he could not even muster the defense that this relaxing of qualifications on this point was to protect women who had been abused in precisely the manner depicted in the myth. Nope, that was beyond him because no one in the administration has any real intelligence and we are all paying the price for 70 million Americans who placed such idiots in positions of power.

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It is a near certainty that after the November ballots are cast and fairly counted the Democratic Party will be in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. There is a better than even chance that they will also have a majority in the Senate.

Should this come to pass, the most active elements of the Democratic party will be hungry for the political blood in the water and the numerous corruptions and crimes of the administration will drive them into a frenzy. There will be a nearly irresistible and terrible temptation to impeach the President.

They Must Not Do This!

The Republican party showed that even after a blatant and violent attempt to illegally seize the office of President that they would still not remove Trump. The process of impeachment is a dead letter, unattainable for any reason and only theatrically possible if one party controls more than two-thirds of the Senate. Even under the wildest of political fantasies the Democratic party will not have that level of control over the U.S. Senate.

Beyond that pure practicality there is another powerful strategic reason why attempting to impeach this president for a third time would be a catastrophic mistake.

The Republican party, as it is currently constituted, is a one that is a cult of personality with its focus entirely on Trump. The die-hards that continue to support the Party are doing so because of their devotion to Trump. The wishy-washy voters that lean Republican have abandoned the party this election cycle but they have not in any manner become members of the resistance. If Trump himself is subjected to intense and unending proceedings, hearings, investigation, and impeachments not only will such a course not yield the removal of this demented, vain, greedy, and erratic man from the levers of power it will reenergize those Republican-leaning voters back into active support for their party that they see as ‘under attack.’ This is the power of a cult of personality, the personality drives everything and direct attacks there only stiffen the resistance and engages an immune-like response.

What should the Democratic Party do with the power that they are likely to acquire next year?

Oh, they should definitely impeach, just not Trump himself, but his officers and his cabinet. The economy will continue to worsen, both nationally and globally with more and more of the electorate willing to blame, justly, the administration for their woes. The political environment will be right for the impeachment of this corrupt and sycophantic cabinet.

Marco Rubio, Scott Bessent, Pete Hegseth, Todd Blanche, Doug Burgum, and the rest command no cult of personality. Hearings, proceedings, and impeachments of these individuals will not provoke an activation of Trump’s remaining and fanatical base. The Republican senators responsible for voting either for or against these officers will feel far less terror at ‘breaking ranks’ on these matters and Trump, never one to show any shred of loyalty to anyone outside of his family, will easily abandon his cabinet to save his own diseased skin.

Removing these officers will degrade the administration’s ability to act and strengthen the opposition for future elections. It is the best course and the best attacks to launch in the new year.

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July 9th of this year, President Trump returning from an overseas trip secretly switched aircraft due to what the Secret Service believed to be a credible threat against the vehicle. Utilizing a catering truck, the President, after visibly boarding Air Force One, left the most famous aircraft in the world and boarded another military airplane for his return to the United States. While the Secretary of Defense and Trump’s personal assistant flew with him to the military aircraft, Secretary of State Rubio and Secretary of the Treasury Bessent, along with the White House Press Pool remained aboard the identified Airforce One, returning to the United States ignorant that they now rode in an aircraft that the Secret Service believed to be a target of a credible threat.

When the day arrives that Donald J. Trump assumes room temperature, you will see no tears shed by me, in fact, it is quite likely that the corners of my lips will curl upwards in a satisfied smile. Paraphrasing The Manchurian Candidate’s fictitious Senator Jordan Trump “Could not do more damage to this nation if he were a paid communist agent.” Despite my feelings of utter horror and contempt for the man currently holding the awesome office of President of the United States, his assassination would , perhaps at this time, be the worst fate that could befall this nation. Myths are born of such events and this nation does not need more myths but more truth, so if the Secret Service feels that the threat is real enough that a game of Three-Card-Monty with official aircraft are required to keep the President safe, then that game needs to played, and played well.

With that said it was not needed to fly the decoy aircraft with innocent and ignorant people aboard who may have lost their lives had the threat materialized. All that was required was that the world at large, and presumably the actors threatening the presidency, continued to believe that Trump was aboard the official Air Force One until he was safely beyond the scope of the danger. While the President flew to the United Kingdom aboard the other military aircraft the press and the world could have been told that he was business conferring in the meeting space aboard his aircraft and would not depart until the conference had concluded.

Rank and rampant speculation about the ‘meeting’ would erupt; what could it be with the Secretary of State and treasury aboard but not Defense? No word, no further official statements would fuel the theorizing and once the President was safe in the UK the ruse could be revealed with a flourish nodding towards the expertise and skill of America’s Secret service, without endangering any innocent lives.

But, of course, this is not what happened.

Trump, a narcissist incapable of thinking of anyone but himself, not only contemptuously, casually, and with utter indifference endangered the lives of senior officers of the U.S. Government and the reporters aboard the decoy aircraft, but once the deception came to light, insisted that it was himself that remained in the great danger. For Trump, at all times and in all situations everything, everywhere is about him and only him. No other person has any value at all except in their servitude to the mad king.

And what of Secretaries Rubio and Bessent?

They are men so thoroughly broken that they continue to bend the knee, kiss the ring, and lick the boots of the man who so dismissively endangered them. History will remember them as cowards that abandoned their former beliefs for the momentary glare of a spotlight whose edges they shared with an egotist that cared for them not at all.

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 When political commentator and trained psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer proclaimed for the first time that someone suffered from ‘Bush Derangement Syndrome,’ he was not entirely wrong. Democratic presidential contender Howard Dean had suggested, without coming right out and saying it, that President George W. Bush had, due to his connections with the Saudi royal family, advance knowledge of the terrible 9/11 terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3000 people and hurtled this nation to war in the Middle East. As with any major event in the media (the Moon Landing, the Kennedy assassination, Bruce Lee’s untimely death, and so on), there invariably follow flocks of conspiracy theories seeking to give secret but understandable reasons for the events, and 9/11 was no different. G.W. Bush, who had come to the office while losing the popular vote, through methods and decisions that were, for many, very easy to question, was a ripe target for such thinking, but suggesting such things without evidence for political gain is, at the very least, distasteful. As such, calling Dean ‘deranged’ for this level of antipathy towards Bush is not entirely without some justification; however, it did not stop there, with that one column, that one instance, but became for the conservatives of America the rallying cry and universal shield against all criticisms of the Bush presidency as, over the years, support for the man plummeted. By the end of his second term in office, scarcely a third of the nation supported the man and yet the right continued its assertion that attacks against him and his policies were evidence of Bush Derangement Syndrome.

Of course, the vitriol hurled at his successor, questioning his birth, the endless coded and not-so-coded racial attacks, controversies over such insignificant issues as wearing a tan suit, ‘terrorist’ fist bumps, and the like were never considered a symptom of derangement. The phrase was not retired but merely put away for safekeeping, like an assault rifle in a safe, ready to be wielded when the times changed.

And times they did change.

In 2016, the Republicans nominated and elected a man who embodied every insult that they had hurled at Democratic presidents: the lying, the sexual degeneracy, and the financial corruption they saw in Bill Clinton, Trump exceeded by every measure; the ‘cult of personality,’ the political inexperience, the irreverence for the institutions, the domineering, authoritarian, free-speech-quashing behavior that they accused Obama of, Trump trumpeted at every turn. Even with Trump’s successor, Biden, whom they accused of mental incompetency, Trump, with his limited intelligence and willful ignorance, is the living example of those insults, but to say such things, to point out what is obvious to the most casual observer, is only heralded by the right as proof of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome.’

Well, if acknowledging reality makes me ‘deranged,’ then I have no need to be cured.

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Anyone who listens to the wise, educated, and informed opinions of right-wing podcasts and revisionist historians, who possess the courage to dismiss all the collective judgment and scholarship of their peers, knows that it is an unquestioned fact that communism and fascism are two very similar branches of the same tree firmly rooted in the politics of the left.

What is surprising is that the people of 1941, who were living with the active and expanding aggressive wars of both the fascists of Italy and Germany, were so ill-informed as to make the same blundering error as the woke-infested historians of our days and see communists and fascists as somehow opposites, as left vs right. This shallow understanding of true political knowledge is perfectly displayed in what many scholars of cinema call the finest motion picture ever produced, Citizen Kane.

The film opens, after the on-screen death of Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles), with a newsreel covering the man’s public life. (In the days before television, short films of the nation’s and world’s news played in theaters before the cartoons and movies.) To dramatize how the fictional character was seen so differently and in directly opposite natures by so many millions across the nation two clips are used, one from a banker and one from a labor leader. Here is that clip.

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The filmmakers, the screenwriters, and the audience were far too ignorant to understand that communists and fascists were the very same thing, even as they watched the events of the Second World War unfold around them; they remained dumb to the reality of those events which only a few very special people today can perceive accurately.

Of course, it is not even remotely possible that these conservative posters and revisionist historians have their own self-motivated reasoning that draws them down this path of equating the two philosophies. They are far too noble, too objective to fall prey to such human frailties. This forgotten relationship between communism and fascism is not the product of conservatives trying in dire desperation to distance themselves from the mass murderous thugs that populate their history. The postings and tweets from real Americans sharing the depictions that make it plain that the images of the hammer and sickle and of the swastika are in fact completely equivalent are not convoluted rationalizations.