dumbest president ever wants to party like it’s 1912

when the rich got richer, and the poor got shit on

hey folks — I need to crank out a quick one today. I’ve got to take Ms. Spouse to an earlyish doctor appointment. (it’s all good, don’t worry.) so here I am, typing as fast as I can.
— jeff t.

hey everyone, Mad King Donny has finally figured out exactly when America was great — and he’s going to drag all of us back there, kicking and screaming.

“you know in uh 1913 they traded to the income tax system. we used to be all tariff. and we had no income tax and we had the wealthiest country we ever had proportionately from about 1870 to 1913, it was all tariffs, and we did— we had more money than anybody.”

who do you mean ‘we,’ white man? pro tip: when Donny says ‘we,’ he’s not talking about you and me. he’s talking about his own greedy self, and his oligarch buddies: the Space Nazi, Granny-Starvin’ Howie Lutnick, Dick-Rocket Jeff Bezos, and all the tax-cut-seeking gazillionaires who have been funneling multi-million dollar nod-nod-wink-wink ‘donations’ into Dear Leader’s pockets.

1870 to 1913 was indeed an excellent era — for the obscenely wealthy robber barons. they paid no taxes, and had no checks on the vast amounts of riches they could hoard.

the rest of us? not so much.

if you were disabled, or too old to work — or simply got fired from your job — the government cordially invited you to go fuck yourself. it wasn’t their problem.

oh, I’m sorry, did your hand get mangled in a factory accident? there’s the street corner, pal. go beg for nickels.

there wasn’t any Social Security. no Medicare. no Medicaid. no food stamps. no unemployment insurance. so social safety net of any kind — and life expectancy for working class men was about 57 years.

unless you were born into obscene wealth, your lot in life was to work yourself into an early grave.

sounds totally great, doesn’t it?

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one of the things I find totally fucking galling about Signalgate is the who gives a shit attitude that Plastered Pete Kegstand brings to safeguarding our nation’s secrets. protect the lives of soldiers? fuck that. national security takes a back seat to impressing one’s wife and lawyer. look at the cool stuff I know.

same goes for Donny. he swiped thousands of classified documents — and he didn’t give a shit who knew about it. he bragged about war plans to his golf cronies. he waved them in the faces of randos who showed up at his New Jersey golf-motel-slash-ex-wife-cemetery. he fucking wrote to-do lists on them and handed them to underlings.

here’s a fragment from a post I wrote on October 20, 2023 — back in those naive days when we actually thought Donny would face consequences for pilfering classified intel. in it, I quoted a dude who handled our nation’s nuclear secrets, and the schooling he got in why you treat this shit with the utmost fucking respect.

read on:

over at the Palmer Report, Robert Harrington has written a piece called “Donald Trump, foreign spy.” in it, he speaks of his own experience handling classified nuclear secrets for the Department of Energy:

I found this all very amusing and said so, with what I imagined to be sophisticated and world-weary ennui. I was quickly disabused of my conceit by my usually relaxed and irreverent boss. He told me that those documents contained secrets upon which people’s lives depended. They were real people, not theoretical people, people with mothers and wives and kids.

I was to treat my clearance with all due solemnity, he said, as if my very own mother’s life depended on it. Because, I could rest assured, that somewhere someone’s mother’s or father’s or son’s or daughter’s life really would depend on it some day.

That shook me up and woke me up. I never underestimated the human value of intelligence again. I never scoffed at the awesome responsibility with which I was entrusted, however briefly. Those of us given charge over America’s secrets formed a human chain around this thing called national security, and at the center of that chain were other human beings who hoped we wouldn’t screw it up. So we didn’t. We took our responsibility seriously.

Robert Harrington took his responsibility seriously. Donald Trump did not.

do you think that Trump gives one microscopic fuck about the real lives that he has put in danger by divulging exactly how close American submarines can get to a Russian sub without being detected?

no, he absolutely does not.

Donald Trump only gives a fuck about Donald Trump.

and Plastered Pete Kegstand only gives a fuck about Plastered Pete Kegstand.

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seriously, fuck that respecting national security shit. Kegstand is going to focus on what’s really important: a makeup studio for the Pentagon.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently ordered modifications to a room next to the Pentagon press briefing room to retrofit it with a makeup studio that can be used to prepare for television appearances, multiple sources told CBS News.

because nothing says efficiency in government more than wasting resources on an entire room devoted to making sure Pete’s nose isn’t all shiny when he goes on TV.

this, from the guy who never shuts up about the manly art of warfighting — because America needs to stand ready to warfight at the drop of a helmet.

Pete’s going to turn every soldier into some super-jacked G.I. Fucking Warfighter Joe who’s going to warfight the shit out of all the namby-pamby nations that need to be warfought, post-haste.

but enough of that for now — SecDef Kegstand needs to get glammed up so he can go on Fox News.

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here’s your hero of the day: good old Al Fucking Gore.

I don’t know where Al’s been keeping himself these days, but I’m glad he’s back.

check out the fiery speech Al gave Monday at a climate week event in San Francisco.

“we’ve already seen how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power, and power-seeking is what this is all about. our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump — someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power.”

“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. it was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. but there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential: in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler’s murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. the most famous of the so-called Frankfort School of Philosophers was a man named Jürgen Habermas. best known, I would say. but it was Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation’s descent into hell, was, and I quote, ‘the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.’ he described how the Nazis, and I quote again, ‘attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false,’ end quote. the Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. they say Ukraine attacked Russia, instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it.”

don’t just read the words I’ve transcribed. play the clip, and listen to the passion with which Gore speaks.

Al Gore gets it.

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here’s your daily reminder that I can be found on Blue Sky at this link.

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this is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means you need to disengage with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.