From pettiness to mass malignity

Yesterday a friend sent me a Stephen Rand article titled "America: the empire that texted itself to death." It's a first-rate piece whose intelligence pierces the darkness of its theme — the Trump regime's inexpressible ignorance bundled up in extraordinary stupidity, topped off by a wholesale inabilty to understand the world as it was — which wasn't so bad, really, until they got hold of it.

Having rejected the American-led world order as an insufferable tangle of uncomprehended priorities — individual liberty, international trade, regulated capitalism — which by and large also kept the peace and generated unprecedented prosperity, our new statesmen of

geopolitical illiteracy are making a general mess of things. Rand observes that they're "so ignorant in their stupidity, they operate in bliss."

And it is that, he says, their Elysium of "cheerful, unthinking ignorance that allows them to attack their own judges, undermine their own courts, and dismantle the institutions of liberal democracy."

The columnist goes on while making a sharp turn: The blissful do these things "because they are children in the midst of a tantrum, smashing the furniture with no concept of what it means." Goodbye paradise and, Simon says, hello darkness my old friend? I'd bloody well say so. They detest "intellect," expertise and enlightened independent minds — precisely because of what Rands writes they are not: "hideous, Nazi-esque authoritarians bent on crushing dissent." But I suspect he knows all too well our statesmen of paradise lost, and figures furniture smashing is their hideous authoritarian fun.

The deathly texting to which The Article's title refers was of course the "novel way" in which the Trump regime chose to declare America's latest desert war — a war blueprinted not by "war plans" but by "attack plans," insisted the supervising statesmen. Attack plans for war must be differentiated from war plans. And the plans that called for attack "merely involved a military strike against a designated foreign enemy," as The Atlantic's Jonathan Chait illuminated.

Journalist, renowned designator of plans, "enemy of the people" and "sleazebag" Jeffrey Goldberg, you see, used "war" in his messaging-app exposé and so the intellect-detesting regime would not. That gives us more than just a rough idea of the prodigiously infantile silliness infesting the delicate psyches of America's fave new world politicos who enjoy busting up old-world incomprehensibilities.

[Please excuse the interruption, this is important. I loathe writing requests for financial support because a) the point of these things is self-evident, and b) I loathe writing requests for financial suuport. This is enough, right? I mean, I had to fill some space with something, and that I have done. But really, your help is much needed. It's been quite a while since I asked, too long, and now the site needs your financial support more than ever. Just scroll to the bottom of this page to make a contribution. I thank you in advance, —PM]

Be not deceived by their childish banalities and whining, whimpering, ultimately deadend intolerance of their Constitutional equals in Congress and that other whatchamacallit branch of government. It's their full-grown adult lack of impulse control killing not only the concept of the atypically benevolent American empire, but their murderous indifference to millions of vulnerable people around the globe — just one of the sociopathy-induced byproducts of America Firstism — that makes these cretins "genuinely worrying," says Rand.

"I woke up one day to find Elon Musk tweeting that this was a criminal enterprise, that this was money laundering, that this was corruption," said the Harvard-trained surgeion Atul Gawande to The New Yorker's David Remnick earlier this month about the death of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Dr. Gawande worked until 20 January for USAID's Bureau of Global Health, where he helped improve healthcare systems in 65 countries and, as a consequence, reduced the danger of contagious diseases spreading to the United States.

Yet to the Trumpism-fevered, conspiracy-boiling-over brain of adolescent Elon, USAID was a monstrous villian of bureaucratic skulduggery and fiscal insanity. So the sitting despot's sidekick set about asphixiating the humanitarian agency's good and productive works. "It has been dismantled. It is dying. I mean ... people with H.I.V., for example—including five-hundred-thousand children who had received medicines that keep them alive have now been cut off for six weeks."

Gawande reeled off more statistics of human lives imperiled — or doomed — by Trump's tantrum-throwing, furniture-smashing thugs, such as one-hundred-sixty-thousand people who will perish from malaria each year, and "on [the] immunization side, you’re talking about more than a million estimated deaths." On the day of Gawande's New Yorker interview a minister of health told him he never thought America would "simply abandon people in the midst of treatments, in the midst of clinical trials, in the midst of partnership—and not even talk to me, not even have a discussion so that we could plan together."

"America: the empire that texted itself to death" — because the emperor was busy handwriting love letters to a psychopathic North Korean dictator, because he never understood that America needs the world as much as the world needs America, and because he's an idiot.