PMC Commentary

For Americans who say they had a bad year ...

In June of this now fading year, the BBC managed to interview several North Korean citizens — a supremely rare event in Kim Jong Un's workers paradise. I've reproduced their comments about living conditions there. At the bottom of this post you can read how Kim intends to respond to workers' needs.

"One woman living in the capital Pyongyang told us she knew a family of three who had starved to death at home."

"A construction worker who lives near the Chinese border ... told us food supplies were so low that five people in his village had already died from starvation."

"A market trader from the north of the country ... told us her family has never had so little to eat, and that recently people had been knocking on her door asking for food because they were so hungry."

"From Pyongyang, Ji Yeon told us she had heard of people who had killed themselves at home or disappeared into the mountains to die, because they could no longer make a living."

"'Normal, middle-class people are seeing starvation in their neighbourhoods,' said the North Korea economist Peter Ward."

"In the late 1990s, North Korea experienced a devastating famine which killed as many as three million people. Recent rumours of starvation ... have prompted fears the country could be on the brink of another catastrophe."

"[A] construction worker ... said 'We are stuck here waiting to die.'"

My note: Even unluckier North Koreans are political prisoners, numbering around a quarter-million, one-third of them children but all of whom must perform slave labor — when they're not being tortured and raped, that is.

"North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to launch three additional military spy satellites, produce more nuclear materials and introduce modern attack drones in 2024." (AP)

(Last year Kim "test[ed] a record 63 ballistic missiles.... One estimate puts the total cost of these tests at more than $500m (£398m) - more than the amount needed to make up for North Korea's annual grain shortfall.")

"We put our findings to the North Korean government, which told us 'the people's well-being is our foremost priority.'"

Marge learns an adverb

Ms. Greene prepped for a Hill interview about God's vicar by expanding her vocabulary beyond bitch, little bitch, and bullshit:

"[Mike Johnson] went from having a voting record to literally a month later … going against his own voting record and being Speaker of the House. Literally all of a sudden talking about doing things that he had literally voted against only a month before that."

You will also note her keen syntactic insight into how "a month later" becomes A MONTH LATER! and "voted against" becomes VOTED AGAINST! merely by deploying her one new word — an exhausted, and exhausting, adverb.

Fortunately, it was up to The Hill reporter to spell the word for her. 

Exactly when, and more important, why, did this country spawn so many congressional districts represented, so to speak, by imbeciles like Marjorie Taylor Greene? Not a bad New Year's Eve question for each of us to ponder into 2024 — and then help to collectively put us out of our misery toward next year's end. 

The Supreme Court has a states' rights problem. A big one.

To ask this Supreme Court to be philosophically consistent is to ask the court to act in a way that the law defines as an admission against interest. The six Republican-appointed justices commonly decide cases on the basis of partisan interest alone, which they'll never admit. To gain a seat on the highest bench first requires them to commit repeated instances of perjury at their confirmation hearings, but once that minor hurdle is bounded they're free to impose on others what they selectively and often politically decide is the law.

If, however, this Supreme Court does in fact embrace at least one philosophical consistency (more or less), it is that of states' rights. The best and most egregious example of this Republican hobbyhorse is and shall forever remain Dobbs v. Jackson. Permitting 50 different states to decide women's rights permits the 27 to 28 paleolithic states to decide misogynistic inanities. Which they promptly did.

And so here's the thing, the point of this post. Since Dobbs was birthed by the court's rather consistent allegiance to the legal philosophy of states' rights, should the court not also apply that philosophy to the matter of a state's right to decide if an insurrectionist should be ballot-listed as a presidential candidate? Fair is fair.   

Shan Wu, a former federal prosecutor and counsel to Attorney General Janet Reno, wrote an opinion piece on the issue for the Daily Beast. Somehow he managed to entirely avoid writing the phrase "states' rights," which I found astonishing. Nevertheless, he concluded:

"The U.S. Supreme Court needs to understand that the disqualification of former President Donald J. Trump ... is going exactly as it should. The Maine Secretary of State ruled in an administrative proceeding that Trump is disqualified, and the Colorado Supreme Court ruled similarly. Both states followed the law set forth in the U.S. Constitution [as they read it, Wu should have added].

"Under the Constitution, the states have primary power over administering federal elections with Congress also possessing authority to regulate how the elections are run—voter registration being an example. So, the fact that who can run, who can vote and the 'time place and manner' in which voting takes place varies from state to state is normal—and, arguably, the high court need not concern itself with these issues."

Is this a fair, sane, intelligent way to run federal elections? Of course not. It's as idiotic to permit states to run elections however they choose — the Civil War has not yet been won — just as it's idiotic to allow different state decisions on what constitutes a woman's human rights. Despite himself, Wu agrees to a certain extent: "This sets up a potential crazy quilt map of states where Trump is on the ballot in some states but not in others."

That's nothing less than electoral anarchy, and both parties would eventually suffer from majority opposition skulduggery. But Wu then writes: "There is nothing wrong with this. It’s federalism at work." No, it's sheer lunacy at work. To guarantee fairness to all, all states should be subject to the same election laws. (If you live in a blue state and its legislature later morphs red, would you still want it deciding how your elections are run?)

Thus we swing back to the point of this post. Notwithstanding the madness of Dobbs, it was, in large part, the Supreme Court's consistency on states' rights that enshrined it in law. And if states' rights apply to women's rights, they should continue applying to elections as well, on principle, no matter how crazy that principle is. And that would mean Trump gets bumped in some yet-unknown number of states. 

Now for the final question. How many here believe the Supreme Court will remain faithful to states' rights when it comes to the partisan issue of Trump's 50-state candidacy? Anyone?

Dear Rep. Dingell, please don't make Trump's day

Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, wife of the late John Dingell, a congressional Democratic institution in his day, took to the op-ed page of The NY Times today with a piece titled "How to Stand Up to Trump." Naturally most of her remarks addressed just that — Ms. Dingell is a frequent target of Trump — but she also included a few comments about the effect of his vitriol and vindictiveness on her emotions. I wish she hadn't. Peppered throughout her op-ed, she wrote:

"Being in Mr. Trump’s tunnel of hate is not enjoyable. Frankly, it’s often frightening."

And,

"When I expressed my thoughts about his [rot in hell] Christmas message, Mr. Trump took to Truth Social to go after me once again as a 'loser.' Unfortunately, he also brought John into his rant. I can deal with being called names and subjected to the standard venom that we’ve all become familiar with in Mr. Trump’s social media attacks. But when he brings up John, it’s one of the things that hit me hardest. It would be easy to say his words don’t hurt, but they do. And I am sure he knows it."

And,

"Months after his death, when I voted for the first articles of impeachment against President Trump, he launched into a brutal attack saying that John was 'looking up' at me (implying he was in hell). That’s the Trump way — the cruelty is the point, yet that awareness doesn’t make it any less painful. We're human. He knows that, and he thrives on it."

He does indeed thrive on it. And for that reason the last thing I would do as one his targets is to give the son of a bitch the satisfaction of acknowledging the hurt. 

Honestly, coming from the stench and the slime that he is, I doubt it would hurt me at all. But either way, I'd let him know that his "tunnel of hate" is always amusing and never the least bit frightening. Donald, I'd reply, how could I not be humored by the clownish sight and childish sound of a sagging, grossly overweight, mentally unbalanced, ignorant old P.O.S. such as yourself? By all means, amuse me some more, until you become as tedious and tiresome as most of America finds you. 

And Donald, when you bring up my late spouse, it’s one of the things that hits me the funniest. Because every time you do it, I think of how horrified Melania must be when she sees your sagging, grossly overweight, one-time male form heading to her bed at night — whenever she forgot to lock the door on you, that is. (I'm curious. Can she call her Secret Service protection in those dreaded moments?)

Finally, Donald, when you say that my dear, departed spouse was "looking up" at me, implying that she was in hell, what really strikes me is this: I know that were she given the option of some really warm, downstairs time or having to listen to your infantile gibberish and watch your huge belly jiggling over what everyone knows is your teensy-weensy penis, she would in a flash choose the former — plus be evermore grateful that she had me for a mate rather than a narcissistic, sociopathic, profoundly bloated, emotionally thin-skinned, cerebrally vacuous pig like you.    

Back to you, Deb. I do regret that you'll almost certainly never see my recommendations on How To Stand Up to Trump. All your other advice was spot on (except for that of attemping to reason with Trumpers). But you're in serious need of a stout reeducation when it comes to returning personal barbs from a big, fat, stupid bully like Trump.

Vivek ventures on, with a plan for the future

Via email, the latest from Vivek Ramaswamy, the man who won't give up in the face of 2023's crushing calamity of a presidential candidacy. In fact, he'll never give up.

PM,

Thank you for an amazing year. The end of 2023 is fast approaching; in fact, it’s less than 72 hours away now, and our opportunity to launch into the 2024 Election Year full-swing is here.

Why I’m writing: I’m bringing you the TRUTH. My campaign is ready to head into 2024 stronger than ever and I have one more goal I’d like to hit before the clock strikes midnight on Sunday.

Vivek, my man, we all know what that "one more goal" is that you'd "like to hit before the clock strikes" your erratic, populist ass from the GOP debates: national polling somewhere north of the nearly undetectable 3.5% you have, according to 538's average.

If your hysterical rabble-rousing can't perform better than that ... well, it won't be long, my dear Mr. Ramaswamy, before you likely become a footnote to tomorrow's political historians.

(For the morbidly curious, his actual beggary concerned his claim of "267,000 small dollar contributions [that] have come in since the start of this campaign." Which I don't doubt. In a population of 332 million, it just ain't all that hard to find a quarter-million suckers. Anyway, Vivek is on the hunt for 33,000 more of them — at this lost-cause stage, the true crème de la crème of suckerdom — to round things out to 300k. A noble cause.)

Two paragraphs above I wrote that he likely would become a footnote. But I also don't doubt that Vivek's brain is going "clickety clickety click," as hoodlum Humphrey Bogart observed of family man Frederick March in The Desperate Hours. And yet while those may seem the very hours in which Vivek finds himself — pshaw.   

His mind, I'd wager as a sure bet, is whirling around thoughts of 2028. Should America's greatest blight fail to achieve his dreams of an authoritarian clusterfuck like the world has never seen, Vivek, at a minimum, will have built some name recognition in 2023 and 2024. That will have been the first step in his mad Despicable Me strategy of global domination.

The second step, beginning 2025, will be to assure all the despondent Trumpers that there's still a premium knock-off of the blight, every bit as crazy as the original, sitting out there for the taking, three years hence. His next step will be to email me — and virtually everyone else — for money.      

All this assumes that Trump, for one reason or another, isn't around for 2028, politically or physically. But Vivek Ramaswamy will have picked up the Republican field's relay baton, tightly wrapped in every kind of ignorant lunacy to which we have already been treated.

So you go, V.R. just as you're planning, though I will offer this helpful note: I suggest you change your surname to Ramaswamapocalypse. That would have significant emotional appeal to Trumpian voters' most fundamental wish in a presidency.

The U.S. has its own two-front war - with its values

Russia hit several Ukrainian cities yesterday morning with a massive barrage of 150 missiles, part of the 7,400 missiles it has launched since the war's beginning. 

In addition to industrial, military and power facilities, Russian forces deployed hypersonic, cruise and air defense missiles as well as drones at civilian targets, including a shopping mall, hospitals, schools, and a maternity ward. 

Russia also violated NATO airspace in the attack — again. One of its rockets flew over Polish ground near Lviv, Ukraine, yet Vladimir Putin seems to enjoy impunity from the West for such acts. 

Friday's air assault was especially damaging for Ukraine because of its shortage of surface-to-air missiles. The shortage is so severe Ukrainian troops are having to shuffle the nation's air defense capabilities to and from the front line and major cities.

Meanwhile U.S. military aid for Ukraine remains stalled. A new security package is sitting in Congress, blocked by Republicans demanding draconian immigration restrictions at the southern border in return for passage. No doubt you can see the relevant connection of the latter to the former.   

Israel, however, is faring much better, even though its aid package is also being held up. For the second time this month the White House has bypassed Congress by approving an emergency weapons deal that will help to push the Gazan death toll to 22,000 — mostly women and children — within another day or two.  

The State Department explained the aid's necessity as one of urgency for "Israel’s defensive needs." The department added that "it is vital to U.S. national interests to ensure Israel is able to defend itself against the threats it faces." 

Ukraine is struggling to retain its freedom, democracy and sovereignty against a monstrous neighbor that is pounding it daily. Its cities are increasingly exposed to air attacks and its eastern offensive has foundered because of ammunition scarcities. Ukraine's armed forces are battling an imperialistic threat to all of Eastern and Central Europe plus the Baltic states, and therefore the U.S., too. Yet Ukraine is receiving no Israel-like emergency weapons aid. 

At least Ukraine is not facing a charge filed by South Africa with the International Court of Justice as Israel is, for having committed actions in Gaza that are "genocidal in character." Ukraine is merely trying to defend itself, while Israel, said South Africa's petition, is trying "to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group."

Yesterday the Israeli military again announced that it is "stepping up operations in the southern Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of people had fled to safety, while hospital officials said Israel bombed an area in the south where it had ordered civilians to seek shelter." 

Those hundreds of thousands of people in southern Gaza, principally the city of Rafah, are also being starved and deprived of water and medical treatment because of Israeli air assaults that are severely interfering with the delivery of humanitarian aid.  

The unrelenting bombardment of Gaza is possible chiefly because of the weapons supplied by the U.S. But after all, "Israel's defensive needs" — as manifested in the massacre of thousands of Gazan women and children — are "vital to U.S. national interests." 

On a personal note, I find it impossible to articulate with any real precision the abject outrage I feel toward the Biden administration's general policy approach: unceasing floods of military aid to a genocidal nation while a peace-loving country in true defense against a barbaric invader has been effectively abandoned all along. Our Ukraine assistance has always been one of drips. 

I cannot recall a historical period in which U.S. foreign policy was as fundamentally incongruent with American "values" while simultaneously being so horribly misaligned in the protection of its national interests. Our heavy arming of a war-crimes friend certainly fails to serve those interests, and in the ugliest way, as does our undersupplying of a guiltless friend.

Simply put, the U.S. is fostering the murder of innocents in both Gaza and Ukraine.

I need to cut this day short. Health emergency. I trust I'll return tomorrow.

It's a riot all right

USA Today discovered in film footage of the 6 Jan. riot a certain Oliver Krvaric, a staff member of the Trump administration, further described by the paper as a "young Republican star and scion of a powerful GOP family from San Diego." 

So naturally the paper asked Mr. Krvaric about his whereabouts that day. And this is what the paper got, which is so classic of Trumpism's incremental story-shifting — a little here, a little more there, but never quite achieving reality or the truth: 

"Krvaric initially told USA TODAY he was not [at the riot]. Pressed about the photos that online researchers say show him that day, Krvaric acknowledged he attended former President Donald Trump’s speech, but said he didn’t go inside the Capitol. Asked about images that appear to show him inside the Capitol, he then said he didn’t remember whether he went inside. Sent copies and links to the footage, he stopped responding."

Seriously, if I couldn't recall having been at the center of my country's most disruptive day this century, I'd race to the nearest neurologist for a brain scan. 

There's more. It seems Krvaric was also once a social media enthusiast who harbored some rather peculiar ideas. "An email address in Krvaric’s first and middle names was used in 2016 to create a profile on a neo-Nazi website," reports USA Today. "That user praised Adolf Hitler, backed deportation of non-white people and expressed disgust of the LGBTQ+ population."

If Trump wins, Stephen Miller has a top deputy waiting for him, the president a loyal lieutenant, and the U.S. another fascistic scourge. The potential administration is looking more each day like Hitler's close inner circle of dimwits, failures, sycophants and the clinically disturbed.      

Christie's New Hampshire ad. Love for a bully.

It has some punch.

If only, a few years back, he hadn't said "we do not need reality TV in the Oval Office right now," and "I just don’t think that he’s suited to be president of the United States," and "always beware of the candidate for public office who has the quick and easy answer to a complicated problem," and that Trump acts like a "13-year-old," so "what’s that tell you about what we can expect if things go sideways when you go into the Oval Office?"

There was nothing at all wrong with those statements, every one of them was true and every one was validated once Trump took office.

But Christie made them a problem when, once he was out of the 2016 running, he not only endorsed the 13-year-old, he went on to take the job of heading up Trump's transition team.

Christie is a conundrum. He's a bully, braggart and blowhard who nevertheless stands out among Trump's competitors as the sole truth-teller, and yet his actions of 2015-2016 showed that he, too, was as "inauthentic" as any one of those competitors. 

What now makes him even more of a conundrum, for me at least, is that I've never so loved such a bully, braggart and blowhard.

Bibi's troubles are piling up

Israel’s Channel 12 reported this week that Israel's Supreme Court is preparing to overturn Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's pet legislation passed in July — a law that ended the court's power to overturn government acts and appointments it considers "unreasonable."

The ruling could come in mid-January, which, notes The Times, "could upend the emergency government formed by Mr. Netanyahu and some of his opponents after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attacks."

This couldn't happen to a nicer authoritarian. Bibi has argued that the law was needed so that the court could not overturn "the will of the majority." But Bibi had another reason for pushing the law through against mobs of Israelis angered by his high-handedness: He could seee that criminal charges pending against him are dropped.

Should he defy the court's ruling, a constitutional crisis would follow, which in turn would likely destroy the unity of Netanyahu's wartime government.

The wolves are circling. Many Israelis are irate because he's privileging the war and the massacre of Palestinians over retrieving hostages held by Hamas; many others are still seething over his power grab in July; and there's the war itself, in Gaza, for which the world has turned on him.

Now the war may expand to the north, which the U.S. has opposed — yet another rupture in bilateral relations.

On Wednesday, a leading opponent of Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, head of the opposition National Unity party and member of his war cabinet, threatened a second front. "If the world and the Lebanese government don’t act in order to prevent the firing on Israel’s northern residents, and to distance Hezbollah from the border, the I.D.F. will do it," said Gantz. "The next stages in fighting will also be deep, forceful, and surprising. The campaign will continue and expand, according to necessity, to more foci or fronts."

Gantz also opposed Netanyahu's judicial overhaul. So political battles over the rule of law could undermine the precarious unity of Netanyahu's government — and potentially change the face of this war in ways we cannot yet know. 

How proud is Trump of his intent to kill "America"? That's not the question.

I'll give him this much. He's openly adverting to the electorate how he means to proceed in a second term. He's not attempting to trick voters into thinking he'll be but the 47th in the 235-year line of traditional presidencies, he's not attempting to "trim." He's overt in saying he'll rule as a dictator; that he'll persecute as well as prosecute his enemies, who in person contain Whitman's vast multitudes; that "freedom" and "democracy" are scarcely among his priorities, hell they're not even second thoughts. Indeed, under his dictatorship, they'll be the first to go. He's proud of this. And voters recognize that.

But again, to his credit he wants them to be sure of it before they head to November's booth. More than a few dictators in fact were initially dictators only in mind. They smooth-talked their electorates into believing they'd be heroic defenders of that which their nations cherished, or perhaps wished to regain, such as freedom and the right to select their leaders. And it was all a lie. Instead they persecuted, prosecuted and vanquished every element of liberty and democracy.   

Yesterday, on Truth Social, Trump posted this word salad drawn from a J.L. Partners survey of 1,000 likely voters asked to describe in one word what they believe Trump is seeking in a second term. Not one of our White House occupants or candidates for such would have done anything but see that these results, in their unfortunate case, were to be buried in the very deepest nuclear waste facility. Not Trump. He advertised it.

Of course not one of our White House occupants or candidates for such, excepting Trump, this year and next, would have espoused this obscenity. His is an earth-shattering first, and he's asking voters to endorse it in November.

Which is, when you stop to think about it, rather refreshing. As noted, many dictators sort of sneak their way into dictatorship. Trump is offering it up as nakedly promised as can be.

Should Trump win legitimately, American voters will have spoken — and what America will have said, quite obviously, is that it's mad as a hatter; that it democratically and voluntarily went mad. America will have further shown that its usually thoughtful, conscientious voters were too goddamn lazy or indifferent or insanely discontented with one nominee who was merely three-years older than the other to easily avoid what became a national catastrophe. In short, that would be democracy for you, in all its much-touted glory.      

Which leads us to this. To its supporters, the grandest of all dictatorial benefits is that America will have answered a question long put by historians of politics; it will have proven correct its skeptical founders and the Europeans monarchs who laughed at our "experiment"; it will have vindicated all those who argued that democracy cannot last, for invariably, sooner or later, an ill-informed, inattentive, self-destructive electorate would not permit it to last. 

The only relevant question at this point is: Were they right? 

Nikki Haley and Sarah Palin, scholars of American history

Politico: "Hours after declining to do so, Nikki Haley said on Thursday morning that she believed slavery was, indeed, the cause of the Civil War." Well that was thoughtful of her. Especially since there's not an American historian alive who would say anything but.

What she said originally, though, was this: "I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are. And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people."

Aside from that mishmash of gobbledygook that said nothing, her answer was precisely what the base enjoys not hearing — that the Civil War was about slavery. They refuse to hear it because it points to America's original sin and reminds us Americans of our continuing race problem, which the right very much wants to ignore.

I once knew a high school history teacher who was, shall we say, a bit to the right. On her desk computer at school she had links to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and all the other usual suspects. And guess what? No surprise. She didn't teach her students that the Civil War was caused by slavery. It was all about states' rights, she insisted. It's like some sort of weird tic on the right, this not-slavery thing, and anti-intellectual to the bone.   

Still, you have to admire Nikki's chutzpah in complaining that the town hall question was asked by a "Democratic plant." Did the plant prevent her from acknowledging what is well known? In GOP politics, there's always an utterly irrelevant distraction to be had to please the base. In this case, Nikki's boneheadedness was all a Democrat's fault. 

The 75 Year War

So begins a NY Times story on Gaza: "Standing before a gray backdrop decorated with Hamas logos and emblems of a gunman that commemorate the bloody Oct. 7 attack on Israel, [was] Osama Hamdan, the organization’s representative in Lebanon."

I believe we all agree that it takes a certain kind of malevolent mind to preen over the slaughter of 1,200 innocent Israelis, or any other ethnicity. Terrorism is an evil force in that it targets the least responsible or entirely guiltless for the grievances held by the terrorists.   

He went on, "profess[ing] no concern about his Palestinian faction being dislodged from Gaza." In his words, "We are not worried about the future of the Gaza Strip. The decision maker is the Palestinian people alone.”

His faction may not be dislodged, but the decision maker for Gaza's future most decidedly will not be the Palestinian people. That's in the hands of Prime Minister Netanyahu and his bloodthirsty band of Israel's far-right war cabinet. Whither that future?  

"I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is," said France's President Emmanuel Macron this month. "The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years."

But the war has already lasted 10 years. In fact it has lasted 75 years, since the Arab-Israeli war of 1948, when Jews were a minority in Palestine and the war's violence caused a quarter-million Arab Palestinians to flee, either that or they were expelled.

Over the ensuing decades, successive Israeli governments impoverished Gaza, finally blockading it, causing its poverty to deepen, and in violation of international law have steadily chewed up Palestinian lands in the West Bank, closing their eyes to often savage illegal settlers.

Few are willing to be honest about this history. But it's real and it's ineradicable.

I began this post with a reference to the Lebanon-based Hamas representative and the Times' reference to his association with the "bloody Oct. 7 attack on Israeli." No one disputes the attack's sickening reality. And very few dispute that Hamas should be condemned and blown away; the world would be better for it. 

Yet the Netanyahu government has justified and perhaps rationalized its far greater, much-bloodier vengeance on Gazans as a result of that attack, when in truth it's been warring on Palestinians since 1948. 

Israel is going nowhere; no endless Hamasian attacks will remove Israel from the world's host of nations. Thus Netanyahu's fear-mongering to Israelis that their government is fighting for the state's very existence is but unmitigated horseshit. Israel is here to stay, not even its surrounding Arab states are any longer trying to kill it. 

But Israel has also become a much fiercer rogue state. It ignores its chief benefactor, the U.S., and thumbs its nose at the world. We'll do what we damn well please with the Palestinians, it's saying, and no one can stop us. And what it's now doing is nothing short of committing genocide on Gazans. The same might well be in store for Palestinians in the West Bank.

This, believes Netanyahu & Co., is their one chance to either exterminate those pesky people or see that they're forced into exile. And then Gaza will be ours. What the Israeli military has done is clear evidence of that: crowding roughly 2 million Palestinians into extreme southern Gaza, starving them, dropping hellish bombs on them. And some Israeli commentators are now openly suggesting that the crowded would be better off in Egypt. All of them.    

Hamas' 7 Oct. attack is Netanyahu's excuse for this ghastly war. It's a pretty good one, too. It's believable. But it's a lie. He and other far-right Israelis have wanted to destroy Palestinians' presence in Palestine since way before that awful attack. This should not be known as the 2023-2024 Israel-Hamas war. It should be known as the Israel-Palestine Seventy-Five Year War.

If you fear Elon's "X" readers, you have good reason

FFS, as X-heads like to say, there's a site on the platform that does nothing but ask trick questions — they are manifestly a trick — and yet its 600,000+ follower have yet to figure this out. Here's one of its latest little teasers. 

pic.twitter.com/QJgGv3Qgod

— Art of Thinking (@Art0fThinking) December 27, 2023

Now open the tweet, if you can, and you'll see a stream of about 600 answers (and counting), and pretty much every one of them is wrong. The participants are laughing at the site because the answers are many and they are so easy, a child could post them: there's "kick," "knock," "knack" and so forth. But only an X child could be so proud.  

Take a good look at the postulation. I'll even give you a hint. Read it literally, which of course is the trick; that's always the site's trick but you're new to this and the regulars, the Xers, are not. Frightfully, they probably vote, too. 

***

To show you how stupid I can be, I have no idea. How in hell do I rid myself of a spam virus notification that pops onto my computer screen every 3 minutes? Two days ago I inadvertently clicked on a spam site, and it's relentless. Suggestions welcome (but they must be in English, third-grade English). 

Is this the best the Lincoln Project can do?

Is seems you boys are running low on funds for professional media consultants and scriptwriters. Well, fellas, I'll do your ads for half-price and I'll do them a helluva lot better than this, which ... smells.