Typed this up and forgot about it, or stuff that happens to Donald Trump

 

Well, things have gone to hell in an organic hand-basket here in the Vampire State, which is the norm hereabouts, just in case you did not know that, but this week has proven more norm than the week before that. A jury in the fifth-rate Gomorrah squatting at the mouth of the river that flows two ways has convicted Donald Trump, the erstwhile (or current, depending on who you talk to) President of this our Great Republic, of removing the tags from sheets, pillowcases, and mattresses at his hotels from one end of our amber waves of grain to another. This is a most shocking development, and if you are reading this in the presence of children, I would recommend that you send them out of the room quickly, lest you unwittingly corrupt their innocence forever.

The President manque cannot plead ignorance of the law; generations of Americans have known that the tags on bed linens and mattresses are inseparable from the mattress to which they are attached, and that the Federal government would fully prosecute all malefactors engaged in separating the tag from its pillow.. Sympathy for the ignorant, for the poor schnook just trying to get a good night’s sleep without that tag irritating his feet like a horsefly that keeps buzzing in his ears and won’t back off, even after the schnook’s 438^th attempt to commit blunt force trauma on the fly with a two-year old copy of Good Housekeeping magazine, is wasted on the likes of Mr. Trump, who knew what the law was and chose to play fast and loose with it (wow, you’d need a good pair of binoculars to see the verb from the subject in that sentence).

The jury was on to Mr. Trump’s desperate prevarications about those missing tags, thanks to the heroic police work of Officer S. Gregory, undercover bed inspector for the New York Police Department’s Tag Removal Squad. The Tag Removal Squad is an integral part of the NYPD’s Special Investigations Division, an elite group of detectives that investigates the city’s most sinister crimes. Officer Gregory, who plays the bass strumpet for the NYPD’s marching band when she is not prowling through the bedsheets of the Naked City looking for tag-rippers, spoon lickers, and various other members of the criminal classes, caught Mr. Trump colluding with Russian louts, thieves, and sundry other Slavic ne’er do wells to rip the tags off of the pillows at several Trump hotels in order to invalidate the warranties.  Why Mr. Trump would want to do this was not adequately explained at the trial, but the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case said that the crimes charged might have something to do with insurance fraud, unless they did not have anything to do with insurance fraud. You never can tell about these things, you know; it could be one way or another, unless you are not a Blondie fan.

The Economist says that Joe Biden was set up to fail...

John Lindsay, who was one of New York's worst mayors, used to say that the reason he was not a success as Mayor of New York City was that New York City was ungovernable. Ed Koch, who was one of New York's best mayors, said that the problem was not that New York City was ungovernable, but that John Lindsay could not govern it. Donald Trump had no trouble governing. Joe Biden does. Sleepy Joe was set up to fail by the very same people who rigged an election to get him into the job he's failing at. The Democrats should have listened to St. Teresa de Avila, who warned several centuries ago that there are more tears shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. The Dems wanted Trump gone by any means necessary and now he is, so now they own the disaster they replaced Trump with. Strange how life turns out, ain't it?

Why? Why? Why?

Mr. Mueller is going to Washington shortly, there to testify about the report he spent two years and several millions of dollars compiling.  I do not know why he is bothering; it will be hot and humid in Washington—it always is this time of year—and it is not as though Mueller will add anything new and significant to what the report says, but the Democrats want to hear this straight from him and Mueller will indulge them.  The Democrats want this more than Mueller does, I suspect.  Since the release of the Mueller Report, the Democrats have been acting like a little girl who wanted a pony for Christmas and is now livid that she did not get one. The little girl was so certain of her getting that pony that she simply dismissed any idea that it might not happen, despite her parents telling her over and over again that there was no room in the apartment for a pony. And then Christmas came and reality, as is its wont, came crashing in with it. Little girls, of course, can only throw tantrums and then sulk in their rooms for days over the crushing of their equine dreams; the House Democrats can throw a tantrum and then subpoena Mr. Mueller and anyone else the House Democrats deems necessary to appear in front of their committees. Someone must explain to Congressmen Schiff and Nadler why President Trump is still President of the United States.  After all, getting rid of President Trump was why Mr. Mueller and his staff got their jobs in the first place.  So why is he still occupying the White House and doing things that the House Democrats find distasteful in the extreme?  Inquiring minds in the House of Representatives want to know, dammit!

Donald Trump is literally Hitler

As anyone who knows me will be more than happy to tell you, I am easily confused. I didn’t start out to be easily confused—I was rather hoping to play centerfield for the Yankees someday, but that dream vanished when it became clear that the curveball was a permanent part of baseball and not some passing fad like Pet Rocks, Cabbage Patch dolls, and Clinton presidential campaigns, and that my inability to hit a curveball with any degree of regularity, or never, as it is sometimes called, would permanently keep me out of centerfield at Yankee Stadium, unless I was taking the tour the Yankee organization provides when the team is out of town—but I am easily confused today, which I ascribe to being old and out of it, and to my unfortunate habit of wearing unfashionable hats.

But be that as it may, I am confused because President Trump is literally Hitler.  Not a would be Hitler or a Hitler manqué, as if he were a literally French Hitler; one assumes that the food would improve in school cafeterias if he were; or a wannabe Hitler or an aspiring Hitler or a Hitler avatar, but literally Hitler, and being literally Hitler is not a good thing to be. Now, other people have been literally Hitler before Trump was literally Hitler; Ronald Reagan was literally Hitler and both President Bushes were literally Hitler as well, as was John McCain and Milt Romney. Barry Goldwater was almost literally Hitler, but apparently he either got over it or the people who were thinking about saying that Goldwater was literally Hitler decided that calling him literally Hitler just sounded silly and contented themselves with saying that Goldwater was literally loonier than Hitler at a hot dog eating contest. I do not recall if Richard Nixon was literally Hitler; I am old enough to remember Nixon very well and I just don’t remember if Nixon was literally Hitler or if he was just sort of vaguely Hitlerish, but not during the latter half of football season.  I find the idea of Mitt Romney being literally Hitler intriguing in a strange sort of way; being literally Hitler suggests the idea that Romney had literally Hitlerian powers as governor of Massachusetts, like the power to dispose of his enemies as he willed or the power to invade such nonthreatening neighbor states as New Hampshire or Connecticut or even to arrest all the New York Yankees fans in Massachusetts and send them to summer camps on Nantucket Island, as opposed to the not very literally Hitlerish power to raise everyone’s health insurance premiums, which is very not literally Hitler-type power at all. Any idiotic dolt of a politician can do that, you know, and do it without the really cool uniforms that being literally Hitler can get for you.

One thing is absolutely true, however: Donald Trump is literally Hitler. That is an undeniable historical fact like Christopher Columbus discovering the electric light bulb or Fiorello LaGuardia discovering that secondhand tobacco smoke can give you herpes. Here, however, is the part that confuses me: if Trump is literally Hitler and Romney was literally Hitler, how can Trump be literally Hitler if Romney was literally Hitler, and how can both men be literally Hitler when Hitler was literally Hitler, and Hitler, you might be interested to know, still has living relatives who might sue the people who keep saying that Trump is literally Hitler and Romney was literally Hitler for infringing on the family’s trademark of being literally Hitler, or, in their case, literally Hitlers.  This, to me, is a lot like People magazine declaring that some male movie star is the sexiest man alive last year and then declaring another male movie star the sexiest man alive this year. How can the latter be sexier than the former when the former is still living?  I could understand this if the sexiest man alive this year was competing, if that is what you do in this situation, with the sexiest man alive from 1937, but last year was only last year and it’s unlikely that last year’s winner has diminished in sexiness so much that anyone can notice an appreciable difference between this year and last, and how does anyone measure such a subjective quality anyway?  Is there a cellphone application that will do this for us nowadays?

Finally, there is the problem that no one seems to want to deal with here. In declaring that Trump is literally Hitler, how do we judge the case of Adolf Hitler, who was literally Hitler long before it became politically fashionable to be literally Hitler?[1] If Trump is literally Hitler, then it necessarily follows that Hitler can’t be literally Hitler, he has to be someone else, doesn’t he, but Alfred E. Newman and Bill Gates are already someone else, and no, I don't know what that means. This, in turn, leads to the problem of why would anyone care if Trump is literally Hitler when clearly Hitler could not be literally Hitler because Trump is literally Hitler?  If Hitler can’t be literally Hitler because Trump is literally Hitler, then accusing Trump of being literally Hitler is as meaningless a charge as accusing Trump of being a life insurance salesman, or worse, a Red Sox fan.  So, I am still confused and there doesn’t seem to be anyone around willing to untangle the mental knot this conundrum is causing me. I must give the whole matter much more thought, I think.

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[1] I should also point out that being literally Hitler did not keep Hitler from literally shooting Hitler in the head. So, since Hitler literally killed Hitler for being literally Hitler, is this literally a good thing or a bad thing vis-à-vis Trump, who is literally Hitler but is unlikely to do the same thing?  I am still confused.

Just another day in the neighborhood

Just in case you were wondering, and I am sure that most of you don’t care one way or the other, the answer is no, I did not watch Monday’s festivities. The Constitution of the United States requires that the President be sworn in at noon on January 20^th in the year following a Presidential election. This is what happened on Sunday. The former junior senator from Illinois took the oath of office in the White House’s Blue Room from the Chief Justice, who managed to get through the oath without interpreting it as a tax on anything other than my patience. The political lollapalooza on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday, on the other hand, was just a jumped up Chicago political hack’s tasteless attempt to turn the commemoration of a great man’s life into a celebration of Himself.  Yes, He is the one we’ve been waiting for all of our lives and don’t you ever forget it, you bitter clingers.