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Treason, By Any Other Name

Treason, By Any Other Name

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I realize that what these people I’m going to discuss in this piece have done does not meet the technical Constitutional definition of treason, but call it by any other name you want — betrayal comes to mind — and what they have done has had the effect, if not the intent, of selling out their country in the quest for power.

With all the public and behind-the-scenes hand wringing going on within the Democratic Party and its handmaidens among the alleged Fourth Estate, better termed the state media, it’s time to look at the nefarious process that got us to where we are now.

The story begins and ends with Presidential debates. The Democratic Presidential debates of 2020, where it starts, and now the most recent Presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which doesn’t end the story, but which may be the beginning of the end.

It was in the Democratic debates of 2020 where the candidacies of both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were derailed by a combination of own-goal errors, on Biden’s part, sniping between those two over issues of race, and a scathing and well aimed attack by fellow candidate Tulsi Gabbard on Harris. Harris was so fatally wounded her candidacy didn’t even make it as far as New Hampshire. Biden limped into New Hampshire, finished dead last in a five-person field, and it looked for all intents and purposes that he was done. If only the Democratic Party lived up to its name. But democracy was the last thing on its mind in 2020, as it was in 2016, and as it is today.

With Socialist Bernie Sanders once more looking like he was on his way to securing the Democratic nomination, it was time for the big swapperoo. And in stepped the first character we can name on our black list of people who will put power before country, James Clyburn of South Carolina. Once a civil rights activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Clyburn, himself 80 years old in 2020, had risen to be the third most powerful person in the Democratic Congressional delegation and Chairman of the House Black Caucus.

Clyburn knew whomever he backed would get Dem votes in South Carolina, and a victory there could then be springboarded into victories in subsequent state primaries, counting on the sheep-like tendencies of most Dem voters to simply fall in line and vote as they’re told. One can wonder why Clyburn would settle on as weak and uncompelling candidate as Joe Biden, and the reason is clear. Biden has no core values, no overarching vision, and he is driven by power and self-aggrandizement. This was known to Clyburn, who also could see that Biden was already drifting into left field mentally, and this made Biden the perfect candidate. He’d do or say anything he was told, and he wouldn’t be running much of any substance as the country’s chief executive, anyway, so the Dem power brokers could have their way with him.

In earlier times, going back just half a century, the Dems had a conscience and put the well-being of the nation ahead of pure political power. It was in 1972 when Sen. Thomas Eagleton took himself off the ballot as George McGovern’s running mate when it came out that he had suffered from bouts of depression and received electroshock treatments. Eagleton’s story is more fully stated in the piece linked in the preceding paragraph. Eagleton could run rings around Biden, but he had the decency, and put the nation’s interest first, to do what Biden would not, and will not, do.

As I said in 2020, Biden’s real running mate was the coronavirus, which was used as the excuse to waive all sorts of electoral rules and laws in a number of states. It also was the basis for keeping him sequestered in his Delaware basement, obstructing any real scrutiny of him by the voters or even the complicit media. At that time I postulated that the real candidate was Kamala since Biden wouldn’t make it through his first term and the 25th Amendment would be invoked to remove him from office. Now I don’t want to seem overly prophetic, and it might be coming a little later in the term than I anticipated, but this is where we’re at today, three and a half years into Biden’s term.

I’m fairly confident that were Kamala not a blithering moron and even more unpopular than Biden, this game plan likely would have been implemented by now. Rather than being a surrogate for Biden she turned into a poison pill, with the dementia-ridden Biden seen as preferable to a President Harris.

Currently facing a crisis whether to keep a guy in office who wouldn’t be trusted to drive your kid’s school bus or replace him with a cackling VP who was clearly an affirmative action placement and who has shown herself incapable of carrying out even the few tasks assigned to her, the nation has arrived at an existential crisis. All thanks to the undemocratic process set in motion by Clyburn and a few other Dem power brokers, bolstered by a compliant and deliberately misinformed electorate, and covered over by the state media.

That was then, this is now

Jell-O Joe’s performance on June 27 was so piss poor even the complicit media and a range of Dem operatives couldn’t simply ignore it. I wonder how many of the sycophantic alleged journalists already had written their pieces or monologues lauding Biden’s performance as monumentally the greatest debate performance in the recorded history of the world, only to realize that not even the most gullible reader or viewer could be sold on that. And thus emerged the widespread wringing of hands and rending of garments. Quelle surprise, they would have you believe. In fact, these charlatans saw Biden’s deterioration every day they observed him and they, too, were willing to sell the country down the River Styx to further their partisan agenda. They are no better than traitors, both to the nation and to their profession, regardless how you want to term them.

There now exists a schism within the Dem Party. It exists between the few within the party honest enough to go public with their concerns — most driven as much by their own down-ballot electoral concerns, no doubt, as any kind of loyalty to the nation — and those who continue to ignore the fact that the emperor has no clothes. Or resident brain cells. Biden held a meeting, in person and by phone, with Democratic governors on July 3, and of the 22 governors who attended the meeting, only three had the chutzpah to maintain the fiction that Biden is on top of is game and merits staying on the ticket. The three include two of the mentally dullest members of the caucus, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, the third being the new governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, whose intellectual capabilities remain yet to be tested.

What of those other governors? One has to assume they don’t feel reassured enough to go public with their concerns, other than modest-by-too-far California Gov. Gavin Newsom, generally considered to be looking at being the pinch-hitter batter designee sent in to save the game, even given the dumpster fire he’s turned his state into. And with the sole exception of former First Lady Michelle Obama, who has no real political experience and claims she doesn’t want to run, the polls of likely voters show Newsom and Harris and all the the other possible replacements also lose to Trump.

Meanwhile, Biden has pulled his family close, including the power-hungry Doctah Jill Biden, his sister Valerie, and his crack-addled and convicted felon son, to take counsel. Hunter has even been reported to attend high meetings of state, and one wonders what security clearance he might hold, the preferred and likely answer being none. Zip. Zero. This family is willing to put the security of the nation at risk in pursuit of its own power-grabbing interests. Even many White House aides have expressed dismay at this.

This brings us to the large group of unnamed and unindicted parties who would put party politics above the good of the country: The voters who elected Biden and who still continue to support him. A Data for Progress post-debate poll found that 11 percent of voters who watched or read about the debate, and 24% of Democrats, thought Biden had done better than Trump in the debate. One has to wonder who these 11% or 24% are and whether they’re deaf, dumb, and blind, or are just horribly pro-Biden or anti-Trump partisans. At this point, these voters have to be classified as guilty of promoting this charade today as much as James Clyburn did in 2020. Even Clyburn is beginning to back away from Biden post-debate.

If most American voters were shocked by what they saw in the June 27 debate, imagine what America’s enemies are thinking. They now have a golden opportunity handed to them to take action against our interests between now and when, as appears likely, Trump resumes holding the reins of control on Jan. 20. If you don’t like the word treason for what these people who put and keep Joe Biden in office have done, please suggest an alternative. I’ll stick with the substance of their machinations, which is to undermine the country and put it at severe risk.

Featured image, Hear, Speak, and See no Evil, Hunter Leonard, Unsplash, used with permission.

Monkeys on a Branch, Klub Boks, Pexels, used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
It’s Nice To Be Right, But At What Cost?

It’s Nice To Be Right, But At What Cost?

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It’s nice to be right, and I’ve been right a lot in the past seven years since I started this blog. But after seeing President Joe Biden’s performance in last night’s presidential debate, I have to ask at what price has all this correctness come?

We saw, in vivid detail, how the sitting president is utterly incapable of serving in the office he holds, much less is capable of another four years as Leader of the Free World. I know his handlers and his unscrupulous wife will continue to prop him up so he gets through the next seven months, but what if — admittedly a long shot at this point — he should be reelected either by a fair vote or, as the Democratic Party has shown itself more than capable of doing, through some sort of dirty trick, staged crisis, or just plain old-fashioned corruption? Can this country sustain more of what it’s endured for the past three and a half years?

Before I get ahead of myself, let me point out just some, but by no means all, of the things I’ve been right about, giving the lie to the attacks I’ve sustained from denizens of the left during all that time:

— Joe Biden is saddled with growing dementia and is incapable of serving as President, something I’ve been saying since before his election in 2020  — right, as we clearly saw last night.

— We don’t know who is in charge in the White House, but it clearly is not Joe Biden — right, as we also saw last night.

— The Hunter Biden laptop is and was real, and it clearly ties Biden into an ongoing criminal enterprise, and Biden just blatantly lied about it — right.

— The state media has corruptly propped Biden up even in the face of the obvious, endangering both democracy and the country’s security — right again.

— This administration, with collusion by the state media, has peddled a raft of lies to the electorate. That includes a ploy they employed during the debate last night, and which can only be described as Soviet in its absurd level of dishonesty, that Biden had a cold, which accounted for his poor performance in the debate — right.

— That the government worked hand-in-glove with social media to suppress valuable information while promoting falsehoods the government supported — right.

— That the essential weakness and misguided policies of this administration led directly to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as well as the barbarism Hamas wreaked on innocent Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023 — right once more.

— That the Russia hoax foisted on the country by Hillary Clinton, Democrats, and the corrupt media, was just that: a hoax — right from the beginning on that one.

— That everything from an open border to rising crime and abuses committed by the administration are not the results of mere incompetence, but is deliberate — right.

— That Biden’s disgraceful exit from Afghanistan was the biggest disgrace in our nation’s history, and a line can be drawn directly from that to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the rising level of adventurism by America’s opponents — sadly, right.

I could go on, but I think the point is made. And so here we are today, a society and economy in disarray, in the midst of an unprecedented invasion by illegal aliens, facing growing wild fires around the world, and with a man supposedly at the helm of the country obviously incapable of steering the ship of state. If you had any doubt that I was using hyperbole when I said you wouldn’t trust this guy to drive your kid’s school bus, I’d think that doubt was dispelled last night.

It was clear, even to partisan observers, who was most physically and mentally prepared to hold the nuclear codes in his hand, and it wasn’t Joe Biden. Most of the post-debate talk, on both sides of the political divide, was how Biden could be eased out of the run he has envisaged and be replaced by someone more up to the job. And to beating Donald Trump. While the chatter among Dems was how shocked they were — why remains a mystery since Biden’s deterioration has been there for anyone to see all along — the best they could do to counter Donald Trump was accusing him of lying. Aside from the blatant lying done by the present incumbent, is that really the best they can offer? And in fact, most of their accusations were based on their own falsehoods.

It became so painful to watch Biden even Trump seemed to take compassion on him. At one point the men started arguing over their respective golf games and handicaps, and Trump finally said they should stop with the childishness. This coming from Trump, no less.

Where the Democratic Party will go from here remains an open question. It’s generally acknowledged that Biden will need to voluntarily step aside to allow his delegates to be free to vote for a new candidate at the party’s convention in Chicago in August. By then it will already be late in the game, with the first early voting in some states beginning in September. But if there was any doubt, Biden made it clear today while on the stump in North Carolina that he doesn’t intend to step aside. And clearly Doctah Jill, the First Lady and Chief Elder Abuser, isn’t encouraging her fading husband to step aside, regardless the cost to the country. Or, for that matter, to her husband.

That last part, about the cost to the country, is what concerns me most. What will be the country’s fate with another four years of this man? It’s hard to imagine, given how bad things already have become. When the country saw the damage done by Jimmy Carter it voted him out. But it is a different country today than it was in 1980, and will the country have the good sense and the courage to vote Joe Biden out? One hopes so, and the current polls show a majority are ready for a change, but there are so many unknown variables and wild cards that could be dealt between now and November, nothing can be assumed.

One wild card is the role third-party candidates — most notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr, — will have in pulling votes from one cadidate or the other. RFK Jr. is still working to get himself on more state ballots, fighting an uphill battle against the Dem power brokers. Many would have liked to see him on the stage last night as a counterpoint to both major candidates, but he narrowly missed meeting the guidelines set down by the debate organizers.

I will say, much to my surprise, the debate moderators — Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, both of CNN and both rabid Trump haters — did an amazingly balanced and measured job. Moderators of previous debates justifiably have come in for much criticism, but in all honesty, Tapper and Bash actually did a decent job, and they had some difficult questions for both candidates. Their fairness was at least in part responsible for leaving Biden to his own devices, which clearly proved insufficient.

All this said, I’m continuing with my plans to relocate out of the country. While I’m likely to implement those plans regardless who wins in November, the urgency will become much greater if it’s Biden. Nightly I see how we are sooooo fucked, but we’ll be even more fucked, exponentially so, should this shell of a president be reelected.

As I said in 2020, maybe you don’t like Trump’s tweets or some of this statements or his demeanor. I get it. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea. But I strongly urge people to get past their TDS and attitudes brewed by the unrelenting venom shot at him by the state media, and consider the good of the country. At this point, it’s borderline treasonous not to put that first. I’m happy to claim vindication for all the things I’ve reported and opined on in the past seven years, but the cost to the country has been enormous. I hope we can start to lessen that cost.

Featured Image, Bewildered Joe, CNN, used under Fair Use.

Trump and Biden Split Screen, MSNBC, used under Fair Use.

A Tale of Two Debaters, CNN, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
Who is really in charge in the White House?

Who is really in charge in the White House?

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The question of who is really in charge in the White House has been a lingering one throughout the three and a half years of the current administration. Anyone with reasonably functioning eyes and ears and who isn’t sold out either to what can safely be called the state media or is so ideologically impaired that they can’t see the truth knows it can’t possibly be Joe Biden. His mental impairment, already visible even prior to his election in 2020, grows more evident by the day, almost by the minute (though his handlers are sure that his exposure to public view is limited to just minutes a week, not a day).

Speculation has focused on Joe’s former boss, Barrack Obama, and clearly many of the same incompetents who were part of Obama’s administration, such as National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, haunt the current White House. Biden’s time in office has been called Obama’s Third Term, many of the similarities are so striking. Other speculation has focused on the power-hungry First Lady, Doctah Jill Biden, who has been so willing to engage in elder abuse of her own husband for the sake of power. And of course there is the cadre of faceless handlers who prop up Biden, write his speeches which he still manages to garble up, get him to wear shoes less likely to cause him to trip and fall, and surround him on walks out to Marine One so his stilted gait is less visible to the White House Press Corps.

Any of these explanations are plausible enough, but I think there is something larger and more sinister in play. I think there is a kind of ideological force, what I would term a kind of hive mind, that pervades the administration and has spread like a plague across the country. It has occupied college campuses for many years and increasingly has filtered down to the K-12 level, and it has found its way into the so-called justice system, into the military, into sports, and even into corporate board rooms.  It is this hive mind that thinks men can be women, women can be men, that the citizenry is too simple-minded to make its own decisions on everything from whether to own a gas-powered or electric vehicle, what kind of bulbs to screw into their lamps, to what kind of stove or dishwasher they put in their kitchen.

It is this same hive mind that believes open borders, allowing a dozen million unvetted aliens into the country and turning them lose on society, is a positive thing, and which will only further the objectives of the hive mind (the last part undoubtedly true). It is the hive mind that leads the administration to favor our natural enemies, such as Iran. And it is this hive mind that says criminals have more rights than law-abiding citizens and need to be treated with deference to undo centuries of supposed injustice, regardless the cost and injury to the rest of us.

Like bees in a hive, the hive mind governs everything these people think, do, and impose on the rest of us. It is a kind of mental affliction that puts its governing ideology above all else, which would accept having a doddering old fool who scares us domestically whenever he appears and who embarrasses us on the international stage, as Biden did recently at the G-7 gathering in Italy, and which would destroy our democracy on the false premise that it is saving it. It counts on the lack of awareness and good information, fostered by a corrupt media and the deaf-and-drunk show that is social media, to fend off questions about its premises. And we’re told to believe the fictions the bees weave and not our lying eyes.

As has been evident, and as I’ve said for a long time, the systematic destruction of the country and society cannot be explained by mere incompetence. It is clear that it is deliberate, and the seemingly benign phrase “to transform the country” embodies this hive mind’s intent to turn everything upside down and inside out. A more correct reading of that phrase would be “to destroy the country,” and that is embedded in the basic belief system behind the hive mind. Essentially stemming from a Marxist/leftist ideology, its intents and methodology mirror cultural and political revolutions from Russia to Cambodia, and stretching back to the French Revolution. We see it on the streets, in the courtrooms, on college campuses, and in the White House.

It is the blind ideology of the hive mind, further afflicted with the mental illness known as Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), that prevents the bees in the hive from seeing, much less understanding, why so many ordinary people want no part of the bogus honey it produces and does its utmost to peddle.

Saddled with a Chief Executive you wouldn’t trust to drive your kid’s school bus, much less fly your airliner, I keep returning to the point I’ve been at for some years now: We are soooo fucked. We really are. We have one chance and one chance only to turn this ship around before it grounds hopelessly on the rocks this hive mind has set its course for, and that is the election coming up in less than five months (and actually, due to the perversion known as early voting many states have adopted, in as little as three months). If we don’t make a firm statement that the goals of this hive mind are simply unacceptable for the country, the society, and our future, I see little hope. I think we all need to do what little or much as we can to grab hold of the wheel and change course. This is my small contribution to that effort.

Featured Image: Bee Hive, Mostafa Eissa, Pexels, used with permission.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.

 

 

 

 
Redux: The Wizard is still dead, but the world has fallen apart

Redux: The Wizard is still dead, but the world has fallen apart

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The piece below first ran four years ago tomorrow, January 4, 2020. Four years ago today, January 3, 2020, Donald Trump ordered a drone strike to take out the mastermind of Iranian terrorism in the Middle East, Maj. Gen. Qadam Soleimani. The dire predictions of the naysayers at the time never came to pass, and in recent decades the world has never been more secure than it was on January 4, 2020.

Compare the world on the day after Soleimani’s assassination with the world today. Afghanistan was not run by the Taliban terrorists. Putin’s Russia had not launched its murderous invasion of Ukraine. Hamas had not conducted its vile rape and slaughter of innocent Israelis, and Israel had not been forced to root out the Hamas terrorist leadership through a brutal war in Gaza. The Houti rebels in Yemen, inexplicably removed by Biden from the terrorist list, were not attacking civilian shipping or U.S. naval vessels in the Red Sea. The Abraham Accords were in process to bring peace to the Middle East. China was not openly talking about invading Taiwan. North Korea was talking more and flexing its threatening muscles less. And a villainous Iran was largely contained.

In the three years that the feckless Joe Biden has been in office, all that has been undone, and the world is arguably in a more perilous state than it has been since at least the end of the Cold War. Extending the weakness of the Obama years, with the same misguided so-called “security” team pushing Biden’s buttons, the U.S. has lost its hard-won position as the ornery bear the bad actors of the world were afraid to poke.

The bombings in Iran today that killed more than 100 and injured more than 200 of those going to pay their respects to the deceased Soleimani have all the marks of a terrorist attack. Ex-CIA officer Daniel Hoffman, in an interview earlier today with radio and TV personality Brian Kilmeade, expressed the view that it was probably either al Qaeda or ISIS, both Sunni terrorist groups, providing pay back to Shiite Iran. The internecine tit-for-tats go on as a subset of the bigger world conflicts. It’s not just the U.S. or the West that have legitimate scores to settle with Iran.

It’s more than sad, but extraordinarily tragic and costly in lives and peace, that the lessons of the Soleimani assassination have been forgotten or, more to the point, never learned by the appeasers of this administration. Sensible people can draw comparisons between what works and what doesn’t. But blinded by their ideology and a misguided world view, these people never learn.

Here is my piece from January 4, 2020:

Ding-Dong! The Wizard is Dead

In the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the East is killed when Dorothy’s house, spirited off to Oz from Kansas by a cyclone, lands on her. In 2020 real life, the Wicked Wizard of the East, Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasam Soleimani, was killed when he came into the crosshairs of an American drone flying over Baghdad’s international airport in Iraq. Ding-dong! The wizard is dead.

As the Munchkin Coroner states in the 1939 film, “As Coroner, I must aver I thoroughly examined her, and she’s not only merely dead, she’s really, most sincerely dead.”

Ditto for Soleimani.

Just as the Munchkins rejoiced at seeing the wicked witch’s stockinged feet protruding from under Dorothy’s transplanted house, there is grounds to celebrate the demise of Soleimani, the head of Iran’s deadly Quds Force. Unfortunately, the figurative kingdom is rife with naysayers and handwringers, and political divisiveness seems ever-ready in contemporary America to overcome any shared sense of victory.

While it is Pollyannish to expect that there won’t be some consequences in the targeting of Soleimani, regarded as the second most powerful figure in Iran’s arcane political structure, it is just as Pollyannish to think that there wouldn’t be consequences were he still alive and having breakfast this morning on Al Rasheed Street in downtown Baghdad.

The havoc and death wreaked by Soleimani stretches back four decades to when, in 1979, he joined the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) following the Iranian revolution and, beginning in the Iraq-Iran War of the early 1980s, he rapidly advanced within the hierarchy. In 1998 he took over command of the Quds Force, designated a terrorist organization by the State Department. Sometimes called “the world’s number one bad guy,” consider these feats of Soleimani and the Quds Force he headed:

Taking out Soleimani wasn’t just a random act. It followed an attack by Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on New Year’s Eve, in which the attackers had penetrated the entrance to the compound and burned a reception area. While no one was kllled in the attack, the U.S. responded by sending in 100 Marines to secure the compound, given the failure of the Iraqi government to meet its internationally mandated requirement to protect diplomatic facilities.

There was more involved than the embassy attack, though. Both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley made it clear that reliable intelligence indicated that a wave of Iranian-inspired terrorist attacks against U.S. assets in the region was being planned and was imminent. And, of course, Soleiman was brazen enough to show up at Baghdad’s international airport, exposing himself to the drone attack that killed him and also Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy head of the Iran-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces militia.

“I can’t talk too much about the nature of the threats. But the American people should know that the President’s decision to remove Soleimani from the battlefield saved American lives,” Pompeo told CNN. “The risk of doing nothing was enormous. Intelligence community made that assessment and President Trump acted decisively last night.”

Pompeo said hundreds of American lives had been at risk. He later told Fox’s Sean Hannity that the attack also had saved European lives, though he hadn’t gotten the kind of support he expected from European allies.

“The Brits, the French, the Germans all need to understand that what we did, what the Americans did, saved lives in Europe as well,” he said.

Milley said the U.S. had intelligence that was “clear, unambiguous” that Soleiman was planning a campaign of violence against the U.S., leading to the decision to attack him. Targets included American military outposts in Syria and diplomatic and financial targets in Lebanon.

“By the way, it still might happen,” Milley said.

Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and Qasem Soleiman
Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, left, deputy head of the Iranian-backed Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces, and Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, right, both killed in the U.S. strike.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei immediately appointed Maj. Gen. Ismail Qaani to replace Soleiman as head of the Quds Force and, predictably, pledged revenge. Qaani said the Quds agenda would remain unchanged.

As predictable as Khamenei’s reaction was, so was the response in Congress, which broke down along party lines. The anti-Trump Dems, for whom the President can do nothing right, were quick to criticize the action, going so far in some cases to say the strike on Soleimani was illegal, though reportedly legal departments at both State and Defense, as well as at Justice, approved the strike.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi complained that Congress hadn’t been consulted on the planned attack on Soleimani – no surprise there, given the tendency of Congress to leak like a rusty old sieve – and she had the temerity to call the killing of the man who had murdered hundreds of thousands of people, including hundreds of Americans, “provocative and disproportionate.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called the killing of Soleimani an “assassination” and introduced legislation to block funding of any military action in the region. Most of the other candidates in the race piled on with criticism of the attack.

There was some push back, though, even within the parties. Another Dem candidate, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was quick to strike back at Sanders, calling his “assassination” claim “outrageous.”

“If he was talking about killing the general . . . this is a guy who had an awful amount of American blood on his hands. I think that’s an outrageous thing to say,” Bloomberg said. “Nobody that I know of would think that we did something wrong in getting the general.”

While prominent Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. Marco Rubio, expressed strong words of support for the attack, another Republican, Sen. Rand Paul, expressing his libertarian view on foreign affairs, said the Trump administration should not embark on a war in the Middle East without Congressional approval.

As the naysaying and handwringing goes on, and will in the days and weeks and more to come, if there is one prediction that will always be correct it is forecasting violence in the Middle East. If that’s anyone’s prediction, they’d be right, with or without Soleimani. In anticipation of Iran’s reaction, the U.S. is sending an additional 3,500 troops to the region. Soleimani may be really, most sincerely dead, but the seething animosities of the region most certainly aren’t, and there are no ruby slippers, like the ones that passed to Dorothy from the deceased Wicked Witch of the East, to magically bring them to a close. So stand by. Film at 11.

Disclosure: The author was an intelligence analyst with the State Department covering the Middle East.

Featured image: Gargoyle, Donovan Reeves, Unsplash, used with permission.

Al-Muhandis and Soleimani images, AFP via Getty, used under Fair Use.

This piece also appears on my Substack, Issues That Matter. Comment, share, and subscribe, here, and there.
A Grey November Afternoon

A Grey November Afternoon

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This piece is a short story that initially appeared on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry. It is part of my Growing Up New Jersey collection. I am posting it now since today is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, with which the story opens. That was November 22, 1963. A day to remember.

The afternoon was grey in that penetrating, depressive sort of way that November afternoons in New Jersey can be, and if you’ve ever been in New Jersey on one of those November afternoons you know the kind of grey I’m talking about.

Well, that’s the kind of grey that November afternoon was, and we were let out of school early that particular Friday since that night was our school’s Military Ball, the big social event of the year. You got to understand that my high school wasn’t in New Jersey. It was in New York City on 15th Street and I commuted into the City every day, riding the PATH trains or the Erie-Lackawanna, which we called the Weary-Erie or the Weary-Lackatrains, wearing my uniform since it was a military school.

Anyway, we can talk about my high school later. The only important thing to know now was the afternoon was grey in that New Jersey November sort of way and I was home from school early. And I was locked out of my house because my parents were still at work and I didn’t have a key to the house. So here I was, locked out of my own house in my school military uniform, hanging out in the front yard on this November afternoon, when some of the local kids starting coming home from school. And they were coming home early, too, even though they didn’t have any Military Balls or anything to go to that night.

They were coming in groups of twos and threes, walking through the shortcut across the Laceys’ backyard, their school bags in hand, trooping along like kids let out of school do.

“What are you guys doing home so early?”

“Didn’ja hear about the President?”

“What about the President?”

“He’s been shot. They shot the President, and the Governor of Texas. The President’s dead. They told us about it at school and then they sent us home.”

“C’mon, really, what’s going on?”

“No, really. No kidding, President Kennedy was shot, and so was the Governor of Texas. No kidding. Kennedy’s dead.”

They say it’s one of those moments you always remember, like where you were when you heard about Pearl Harbor being attacked. Or where you were when Germany surrendered. Or, now, where you were and what you were doing when you learned that JFK had been assassinated. And I guess that’s true since I still remember it after all these years. And that’s where I was, in my front yard in Kearny, New Jersey, on a grey November afternoon, home early from school and locked out of my own house.

“Wow, man, I can’t believe it. That’s terrible. Do they know who did it?”

Little did I know that would be a question people would be asking for years after that grey November afternoon. But for the moment, I was in shock.

When John Kennedy ran for President, it was the first political campaign I took any interest in or probably was even aware of. Sure I knew we had a President, Ike and all. And Nixon was Vice President, Nixon who was running against Kennedy. But that was about it. Later on I learned my mother liked Adlai Stevenson, at least I think she did, but she never had any use for Truman after he dropped the Bomb on the Japanese. My Dad, who was a life-long Republican, didn’t adhere to that opinion, though, since he said it ended the war sooner and saved a lot of American lives.

Now even at the age of 10 I knew I wanted Kennedy to win. Part of it was that he was Catholic, the first Catholic to run for President, and of course the nuns in grade school all wanted him to win and told us why we should want him to win, which in the end came down to his being Catholic.

But for me it was more than that. He was young and appealing, and he had some good ideas, though I would have been hard-pressed to tell you exactly what they were. I even started wearing my hair like him, kind of puffy and combed over in front, in what was called “the Kennedy cut.”

And I actually got to see him, too. The March before the election I happened to be with my family in New York City when John Kennedy the candidate came out of Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and waved at the crowd gathered across the street from the enormous, staid, grey Cathedral, and got into a black Cadillac limousine waiting by the curb. I actually got to see him, even snapped some pictures with a little black box camera I had, and for a 10-year-old Catholic boy from New Jersey, that was like the biggest thing that ever could have happened. And of course he was “my candidate” – I called him that, “my candidate” – and he just had to win.

Now I had a kind of bad track record with famous people. I got to see Pope Pius XII at the Vatican in Rome when I was 8, and then he upped and died a few months later. So much for that claim to fame. And in later years I killed off more than one Pope, got to see them at the Vatican or out at Castel Gandolfo and, bang, they’d die shortly afterwards. And now John Kennedy, my candidate who became my President, was dead, too, and I had seen him that March day at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

So here I was out on the lawn on that grey November New Jersey afternoon as kid after kid trooped by, telling the same terrible story. The President, my President, was dead, and the Governor of Texas, Governor Connally, was wounded, and the Governor’s wife, too. Jackie wasn’t shot, though.

I was still in shock, and still locked out of my house, when Mrs. Allen came home. Mrs. Allen was our neighbor and her husband, Don, was our town clerk, which seemed like a very important office to me. And Mrs. Allen, Helen Allen, saw me out there and invited me into their house which was next door just up the hill from ours.

Mrs. Allen knew the gravity of the situation and must have thought how it was affecting me, and she turned on the TV in their living room and we both stood there and watched the news, both watched in silent disbelief, as Walter Cronkite related the details as they were known, in minute detail and in dribs and drabs as the reports came in from far-away Dallas.

Names that would become part of the history of that day began to filter in. Lee Harvey Oswald was believed to be the assassin. Officer Tippit was killed as he tried to apprehend Oswald outside some movie theater. Jackie Kennedy, alive but silenced, trying to flee the motorcade limousine as her husband was hit and slumped over. Lyndon Johnson, LBJ, who would become the next President to succeed JFK. There was little that Mrs. Allen and I said to one another or could say to one another as the reality came across the TV in black-and-white and tones of grey and sank into our consciousness.

And then suddenly my parents came home, late in the afternoon, while it was still light out. Both school teachers, they knew the news, had gotten out of school, and then went grocery shopping. Grocery shopping!

We heard the car arrive in our driveway, or they came to get me at the Allens’, I can’t really remember, but I was outside and in shock as much that they went grocery shopping as at what had just happened that afternoon in Dallas, Texas.

“Did’ja hear what happened? The President is dead and the Governor of Texas has been shot! Did’ja hear about it?”

I sounded like the kids who first broke the news to me, and I repeated the same unreal words.

“Grab a bag and help with the groceries!”

It was my father speaking, barking out an order in the annoyed, impatient way he had.

The groceries? The darned groceries? Is that what is important at this moment? More shock set it.

“Of course we heard about it. Now help get the groceries in the house.”

I don’t think I ever saw my father and mother the same way again after that, and a little later, the groceries in the house and the car trunk shut, that’s all I could think of as I stood there watching the news, this time in our living room, was how the groceries were more important to my father and my mother than that the President of the United States had just been shot and killed in Dallas. How could this be?

The big question now was whether the Military Ball would still be held tonight or canceled. And the decision, relayed through phone calls from the school and then from parent to parent, was made to go ahead with it since it was being held at the Waldorf-Astoria and the room and the entertainment had been reserved and paid for and it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to change everything now.

So now it was time to tear ourselves away from the somber news coming across the TV screen and to put on my dress uniform and get ready to pick up my date for the evening, my second cousin Patty Lynn.

I wasn’t much into girls yet, even at 13 and all, and as a freshman in an all-boys military commuter school I didn’t have anyone to ask to the Military Ball. So my parents came up with the idea of asking Patty Lynn to go with me to the Ball.

I actually hardly knew Patty Lynn, even though we lived in the same town, and it seemed a little odd to me to go out with my cousin, even a second cousin. She was okay, cute and nice enough and all that, but the real issue was that I was in the ninth grade, in high school, and Patty Lynn was still in the eighth grade, still in grade school. Or so my parents thought. As it turned out, Patty Lynn wasn’t in the eighth grade, which would have been bad enough. Oh, no. Patty Lynn, as I came to learn, was still in the seventh grade. I was going to my first high school Military Ball with a girl who wasn’t just my second cousin, but who was in the seventh grade!

And so we went, me in my dress blue uniform, Patty Lynn in her nice white dress-up gown, my parents and me in our car, Patty Lynn and her parents in their car, and we drove over to New York, through the long fluorescent tube of the Lincoln Tunnel, to Mid-Town Manhattan and the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and the Military Ball which was, as one might expect, all a-twitter with talk of what had happened that day in Dallas.

I don’t remember how or why it got out, but it did get out that Patty Lynn was in the seventh grade, and from then on all I heard from my classmates was, “Eh-heh, Yacenda went to the Military Ball with a seventh grader! Eh-heh!” Again and again and again, for weeks if not months afterward. Oh, the ignominy! Oh, the humanity!

Patty Lynn and I actually had a kinda nice time at the Military Ball, and we even got away from our parents, all of whom sat around the big round white table cloth-covered tables talking about what had happened in Dallas, who was behind the assassination, who this Lee Harvey Oswald was, did he act alone, how this could happen, what would happen to the country, and I got to put to use the dance lessons I had to take at the Cotillion, mostly the fox trot, and Patty Lynn and I got to hang out some and enjoy each other’s company. But overhanging everything, besides the shooting of the President, was the thought that I was at the Military Ball with a seventh grader who also happened to be my cousin. And that and the taunting of my classmates for weeks afterward meant that I would never ask Patty Lynn out again.

Patty Lynn eventually grew from a slightly reticent and okay seventh grader into something of a very cute and attractive young woman. But by then it was too late, and years later when I happened to be back visiting home and we went to see Patty Lynn and her parents she was still living in that same town, was married to a fireman, had kids of her own, and was living what to me was this totally boring, uninspired fixed life. And I felt bad that I had let the fact that she was a seventh grader stop me from asking her out again and, ultimately, saving her from this dull, boring life, married to a fireman and living in some cramped little place in her folks’ house in that dull, boring town. But by then Jimmy Carter or somebody was President and it all came too late.

Sorry, Patty Lynn. And sorry, JFK.

Featured Image: JFK shot, one-sixth of a second after. Mary Ann Moorman/Wikimedia Commons. Used under Fair Use.

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