taking effective anti-inflationary measures to Make Food Affordable Again for working families—also fuel and housing; enacting rational tariffs (thus further lowering consumer costs) through Congress, as dictated by the U.S. Constitution; strengthening Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security; guaranteeing healthcare for all humans on American soil; lowering drug prices; raising corporate taxes; protecting women’s reproductive rights; funding noncollapsing bridges and non-vehicle-rattling transportation routes and a real air traffic control system; ending black-hole deportations and the breaking up of families and sacking the masked goons who execute both; instituting reasoned immigration policies which benefit businesses and farmers in need of workers; preventing the planet from melting; opposing genocide; being friendly to foreign friends; and returning the White House to acting as the seat of the U.S. presidency rather than allowing it to persist as the central hub of the sprawling, kleptocratic criminal syndicate of the party of the first part in this post with the kind and gentle blessing by the parties of the second part?

What do they call such Democratic advocacy?

Yes, it’s commie-chattered BAD THOUGHT, or, as Mr. Orwell’s Big Buffoon would call it, the Dems’ doubleplusungood think.

Seriously, can 2026 get any weirder? (The serious answer: You bet your ass it can—and will.)

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Apparent since the earliest days of this century is that Vladimir Putin, like Donald Trump, revels in inflicting monstrous cruelties on whole sweeps of harmless humans because of the unquenchable, blackhearted grievances he invents.

Only early this morning, however, did it become stunningly apparent to me—and, I should think, the world—that the grudges-filled Putin is not only a cruel thug like the resentments-fueled Trump; he is, to boot, every bit a Trumplike madman.

Such clarity arrived after I opened an article in The Kyiv Independent. It’s short, but long on crazy. A must-read.

Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked orcas [killer whales] “tearing polar bears apart” as a new analogy for Russia’s war against Ukraine while speaking [yesterday] to students and teachers at a Moscow university….

Putin’s remarks came as near-continuous air raid alerts across Ukraine stretched into a third consecutive day, with Russia launching continued waves of attacks. The attacks killed at least 37 people in Kyiv Oblast on Aug. 28 and killed a 14-year-old girl and a 2-year-old girl in separate attacks on Aug. 29.

The exchange began when Putin asked a teacher from Russia’s Belgorod region, who had visited the North Pole, whether he had seen polar bears there. After the teacher said he had seen two “enormous” bears, Putin replied that orcas live nearby and eat those bears.

“There are killer whales living nearby. They eat these bears up like small fry. Yes, they descend in packs — and then, boom, tear them apart,” he said.

“Yes, that’s the food chain. Children should be taught about this, so that they understand what kind of world we live in and why we are conducting the special military operation [in Ukraine],” Putin said….

"Maybe our bear should sit quietly, not chasing any piglets around, but just eating honey and berries. Maybe they should just leave him alone? They will not. They are trying to put it on a chain," Putin claimed.

The only rational portion of this mass-murdering butcher’s free-foaming rabidity is his notation of Russia’s historical simulacrum, the Bear. Otherwise, his “observations” are but a journey into the dark psychotic realm of clinical paranoia.

Putin is cognitively adrift, geographically disoriented, and, quite obviously, more than just standing on his head—at some point during the inversion process he banged the bejesus out of his close-cropped pate—a figurative assessment, of course—thus rendering himself as loony as Donald.

Singularly qualified to speak—if only they still could—of being “torn apart” would be the “piglets,” as Putin calls them: the 14- and 2-year-old girls, and the dozens of other harmless humans blown to pieces by the mad autocrat’s most recent bombings; merely two of the children among the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians he has slaughtered.

Every victim of the Putinesque Bear’s war-criminal air campaign was, before 24 February 2022, abundantly eager to “leave him alone” (as were all their regional and transatlantic friends). Not one saw the creature as a constituent in some ungodly “food chain.”

Nothing I’ve written here is fresh or insightful. The entire civilized world has for several years now seen Russian President Vladimir Putin as the bloodthirsty hooligan he is. But yesterday he unveiled a thumping twist to his inhuman cruelties; he revealed himself to be as mentally unhinged as his American counterpart.

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This just in, via The Independent, via NBC News, via Mediaite —

From the man who helped inspire Iran to choke the global economy and to further its nuclear aspirations:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been mulling a 2028 presidential bid, according to a new report.

Hegseth and his wife, who has been described as one of his most influential advisers, have discussed a potential White House run with friends and associates in recent months.

Speculation about his political ambitions ramped up when Hegseth earlier this month attended the Iowa State Fair, a traditional stop for presidential hopefuls.

Listen up, Donald: Give Pete a chance. After all, you, Mr. Trump, are looking to burnish your legacy, right? Well, who in the name of Himalayan incompetence could possibly put a finer point on yours?

Sure, “speculation has focused largely on” Vance and Rubio, notes The Independent, adding that Trump is leaning toward JD. (assuming obesity doesn’t get him before the close of 2027, thus posing yet another of his criminally psychotic frolics: trashing the 22nd Amendment.)

And sure, no argument, JD is an action figure of human blundering extraordinaire—why, his recidivist incompetence achieves near parity with Trump’s.

But, though both Vance and Hegseth order eyeliner by the crate—that being their alternative answer to meeting MAGA’s demand for a potus with effeminately coifed hair and unmanly spray-on skin—only Pete’s Iran blundering can make the credible argument of aping the Donald’s.

What’s more, I can already see it: an IRGC super PAC belching buku bucks in support of a Hegseth for President! campaign—tomorrow’s greatest benefactor of ghoulish Islamic hardliners since Donald, Bibi, and the Shah. Perfectly legal support, too, since Trump has gutted corrupt foreign-influence laws.

The Independent further notes that “after the report was published Friday, Hegseth took to X to deny it. ‘100% false,’” he wrote. Run that through the Trumpist-Hegsethian Linguistic Demanglement Machine and you get “100% true.” Hegseth also wrote that “his sole job is to make the Pentagon ‘Great Again.’ ” Leaving it would be a superb first step.

Last, observes the British outlet, the defense secretary “has frequently invoked Christian language in his official capacity.”

My dear Ms. Mr. Hegseth, Christ himself couldn’t dropkick you into the White House. But by God you have my full, inexhaustible endorsement. Now start dishing backchanneled dirt on JD (just in case those cheeseburgers fail to righteously catch up to you-know-who.)

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We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.

Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

I should note that rarely does a national leader include the word hydronym, whether singular or plural, in a statement addressing matters of such enormous importance as foreign affairs and international trade.

Indeed, I’d never run across the noun. Although its meaning is self-evident, I looked it up anyway: “the proper name of a body of water.” Emphasis on proper name.

Thus P.M. Carney prefaced his hydronymic comment with an etymological justification for the propriety of this particular body of water’s designation:

The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.

The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

What’s in a name? Would Lake Ontario by any other name sound as sweet? With apologies to Shakespeare, wrong question. Because again, the emphasis here is on the body of water’s proper name. Not a sad, silly name assigned to the lake by a sad, silly old man—especially one who happens to be the president of the United States.

Who yesterday declared that, by order of regal fiat, his lackeys had “filed all the necessary papers, documents,” and so “this is official, effective immediately”—from this day forward, Lake Ontario is Lake America.

On the other hand, explained the Times, “Like Mr. Trump’s order to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, Thursday’s order most likely requires only federal entities to recognize the change.”

That is to say, the change exists only in the sad, silly and yet fiercely unbalanced mind of Donald J. Trump.

When stacked against his grinding ruination of not only the American but world economy and his wholesale destruction of U.S. power and global admiration of the nation’s principles, the abject peurility of his “Lake America” shtick might seem just as insignificant.

And perhaps it is. Still, Trump’s sad, silly second act of an “official” redesignation strikes me as another exceptionally scary, tectonic shift in madness—another peak explosion within the inverted spiral of his whirling insanity.

For his abnormally focused obsession over the imaginary name of a Great Lake comes in the thick of his obliviousness to what Prime Minister Carney noted: “reality,” and in this case, merely “naming reality.”

Trump’s detachment from what’s unalterably real, however, further manifests in the playing of juvenile name games as his own country and the world he lit on fire burn all around him—the flames multiplying either altogether unnoticed by him or dismissed as what’s truly insignificant.

Historians of ancient Rome tend to see Nero as monstrously cruel but not really insane; historians of early 21st-century America will, I’m convinced, see Trump as both.

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Canada’s minister responsible for trade with the United States said on Thursday that a pledge from a Trump administration official to not challenge Canadian laws around French language and Canadian culture could provide an opening to renew negotiations.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said on Wednesday that laws and regulations to make it easier to find French content on streaming services had been “highlighted” by the American side, but he said that they were not a make-or-break issue.

However, later on Thursday, Mr. Trump may have undone any good will by signing an executive order to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”

Beats the hell out of this political historian, as it does any commentator lacking a medical degree and many, many years of clinical experience in the field of psychiatric disorders of the severest kind.

Over to you, Bellevue.

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PMC, 9” x 12”, oil on canvas, 2026

$220

Trumpism

PMC, 10” x 8”, oil on canvas, 2026

$175

Each, shipping included.

pmc.commentary@gmail.com

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Canada has been “Ripping Off” the U.S.A. for decades. They have been charging our Farmers 400% Tariffs.

There is another, more empirical way of putting that: “For decades, Canada charged our farmers zero percent.” (He was referring to a Canadian tariff that exists only on paper—an idle, “what if” in extremis tax.)

Over the last 10 years, the United States lost, on average, 60 Billion Dollars a year with Canada.

Boom! The bullshit hurts.

Because he’s an uneducable imbecile, he has yet to learn that the dollar volume of U.S. trade deficits represents the value of imported goods. We don’t lose billions of dollars; we acquire a bunch of stuff.

His understanding of trade deficits matches his bullshit explanation of tariff victimization, which is: Foreign nations exporting goods into the U.S. are the entities that pay our import tax.

No matter how often reality begs to differ—as heard in the pained shrieks of American consumers who do pay for his tariffs—his bullshit is like the Raven’s: evermore.

I would never interfere with Canadians speaking French! In fact, I have never even thought of doing such a stupid thing.

He is also never burdened by having to think about doing or saying stupid things of the finest bullshit grade. They just come to him naturally. Like this:

[I’m] giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America.

You know, another heap of tauntingly meaningless middle-school bullshit from … an 80-year-old man.

But now we come to the genuine Donald Trump. No bullshit here, which he reemphasized today by reposting it:

[I have a] very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.

That, he pointedly expressed just before noting his very poor relationship with Prime Minister Mark Carney, of Canada, the U.S.’ second-largest trading partner, NATO ally, and liberal democracy.

If only this president’s intentional juxtaposition of sentiments were not pure bullshit. And if only there lacked two more deeply pathological years in which the barbarian-loving president will strive to convert the United States into a massive North Korea.

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s trade negotiators today issued a counterproposal to the American pseudopresident’s doofuses charged with destroying the nation’s leading position in the global economy.

In reaction to the U.S.’s 11th-hour demand that Canada curtail promotion of Canadian and French-language “content in online streaming services and even mandatory [package] labeling in French,” Carney’s artful dealmakers said “Sure, why not?”—as long as America …

Bans public vocalization of the deep-South drawl, which Canadian practitioners of the Queen’s English say they can’t understand when spoken;

Ceases airing the linguistic and cultural abomination “Duck Dynasty,” and burns all warehoused videos thereof;

Adopts mandatory ballot labels which note that “Voting Republican is dangerous to your health.”

Commenting on Canada’s fresh offer, Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette stressed that “Our culture, our language was central to our identity and it was once important to exclude that from the negotiation table.”

“Yet,” added Fréchette, “the killing off of Duck Dynasty’s poisonous international syndication and establishing an official U.S. policy of ‘Just say no to Republicanism’ would be a radical but fair trade-off.”

Asked for its comment on Canada’s counterproposal, the White House said it would it would issue a statement as soon as someone reads the document to Trump.

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In anticipation of his 2027 speakership, Hakeem Jeffries “met privately in recent weeks with Jared Kushner [to discuss] potential areas of common ground,” reports the Times.

I hope the House minority leader prepped for the sit-down by asking Neville how lunching with Adolf worked out.

While many questionable comparisons of Hitler and Donald Trump have been made, one likeness is indisputable: POTUS’s gilded word mirrors the tinpot pledges of der Führer.

Such is a universal characteristic of the megalomaniacal sociopath, which also tends to bleed into the crime family. After all, rot attracts rot. Hence Kushner is to Trump what Joachim von Ribbentrop was to Hitler.

Which brings us back to the rancid son-in-law’s meeting with Mr. Jeffries, who said in a post-conclave statement (per the Times):

“The only way Democrats would cut deals with the authoritarian regime administration would be if Republicans were willing to seize only Sudetenland and shelve the rest of Czechoslovakia come their way on cost-of-living issues.”

Unreported is that Kushner agreed to Jeffries’s conditional posture (including strikeouts). Yet what the Times did report—that Jeffries met with Kushner—was in subtle error. Kushner met with Jeffries.

That much bubbled up in the private-discussion news from this additional bit of reportage:

“The meeting came as nearly all polls revealed Republicans to be at a disadvantage in the midterms, and showed how members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle were digesting what a Democratic majority next year could look like.”

Translated from Trumpism’s original German: We’re scheming to seem flexible, even agreeable, so that the cheap thrill of double-crossing your majority ass next year is accentuated—assuming we screw up by somehow failing to adequately butcher the midterms.

At some diseased stage, megalomaniacal sociopaths begin believing that their assorted depravities, like betrayal, loom unsuspected. But I’ve little doubt that the House minority leader did indeed prep for the in-law sit-down by asking Neville how lunching with Adolf worked out.

Bonus points to Jeffries if he then confirmed Chamberlain’s heads-up by consulting Vyacheslav Molotov. For when it comes to Trump’s genetic Hitlerian trait of a forked tongue, history does more than just rhyme.

But that gets us ahead of the story. Appreciating Trump and Kushner’s bullshit does Jeffries no good if they proceed in the only thing at which they’re competent: corruption. In this case, corrupting November’s elections.

And here, Jeffries appears to be behind the story. He recently told the Times that he’s “operating under the assumption that [Trump is] going to try to steal this election.” But he won’t succeed, added Jeffries, since Democrats control the state machinery where they hope to flip seats.

Rigging differs from stealing. Rigged elections needn’t be stolen. Megalomaniacally sociopathic autocrats rig in pre-election mode by corrupting the machinery that Jeffries referenced. Autocrats steal elections when voting produces unfavorable electoral results.

Then it’s time to send in gun-toting Marines or other little green men or nondescript federal agents, such as the goons Trump ordered to invade Election HQ, Fulton County, Georgia. Get me rewrite! And a recount. That damned voter fraud is pervasive.

Democrats controlled Atlanta’s electoral gears. Yet when under a desperate authoritarian’s thumb, the opposition’s “control” is but an illusion.

Just as the federal courts have no divisions—see: Stalin, Joseph—neither does Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

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It’s complicated.

For starters, the post’s title is almost criminally subjective, even though the list below is, for sure, quite conventional. By “10 Greatest Books” I mean the 10 greatest works of Western literature (and only literature) in my book, so to speak. Your list might include only some of those listed, or—an impossibility, I should think—none. At any rate, ranking the greatest of most anything is, in itself, a work of fiction.

Also, I lied. An aesthetically justifiable count of “the greatest” would far exceed 10. My intent was but to follow convention once more, however unastounding it may be. (To go the opposite arithmetic direction, greatest is a superlative, hence there can be only one, whether a book or boxer. But we’ll put that aside as a mere, lexiconic quibble.)

Yet another complication is that I slapped the number “10” in the title. Again, I lied. The undisputed champion of Western literature—the one, the authentically greatest, writer—was, and shall always be, William Shakespeare. Apart from 154 unsurpassable sonnets, his body of work consists of up to 38 plays (depending on how one counts them; a few are collaborations). And virtually every one of them is a consummate masterpiece. Thus I can no more rank Hamlet above King Lear than I can place King Lear over Measure for Measure, or a couple dozen other of his literary tours de force.

And so this 10-count list is rather fluid; in fact, it’s more of a downpour—30-something-plus-nine; in addition, #6 is a multiple of seven.

Excluding the first, no descending order of genius is implied. As you can see, the list is anything but idiosyncratic, excepting the last, which I’ve included because of its immense originality, and because it’s stuck in my head—only recently did I read it, and because … well, to be explained.

1. Shakespeare’s oeuvre

2. Don Quixote, Cervantes

3. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky

4. The Iliad, Homer, as it were

5. The Odyssey

6. Anna Karenina, Tolstoy

7. The Divine Comedy, Dante

8. In Search of Lost Time, Proust

9. The Magic Mountain, Mann

10. Orlando, Virginia Woolf

The tenth, as noted, is an eccentric choice. A purely conventional list would instead have contained Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Milton’s Paradise Lost—but with those, goodbye “10,” and I couldn’t bear cutting either. So I opted for a lone Woolf, my favorite woman writer. Otherwise I’ve confined the list to the hallowed Western canon. (Outside of that august body—though I’ll go Bob Uecker here and say juuust outside—is Patrick O’Brien’s indescribably brilliant Master and Commander series. For that transcendent pleasure I thank the recommendation of a friend, the poet Norm Sibum. And if you read it, you’ll thank me.)

It’s kinda funny. More than once I heard the polemicist Christopher Hitchens say he’d really rather be talking the singular beauty of literature than further engaging the commonplace monstrosities of politics. Ha! Hitch died in 2011. He possessed no concept of the bottomless, sickening ugliness ahead. His formal training lay outside of literature. As did mine. Nonetheless, also like Hitchens, I find myself reaching for eternal lit rather than wallowing one more minute in the sewer of quotidian politics, what with its capital T.

But, one does what one must. And so I can’t turn away. Today’s moments, though, their distraction from it all, quite nice.

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Whoever your MAGAneer may be, just know that this clinically untreated relative or wacko-reaffirming friend is today in a bad way, a miserable state, a terrible wash of troubled waters.

In short, happy days, a summer festivus for the rest of us. And we can thank Reuters/Ipsos for the good news — which, in the modern era, is singularly defined as anything shockingly awful and immensely disturbing to the MAGAsphere. To wit …

The Ipsos survey says the share of Americans that “strongly approves” of Donald Trump’s medieval fascist regime has, since February 2025, cut itself nearly in half.

Yes, the processional remnant still vowing robust fidelity to #47 and all his works has plunged to 14% of U.S. adults. A mere 18 months ago, they were at 26%.

(Alternative subtitles: By your wounds, O Lord. Grant them rest.)

However, the ever-pious 14% was, sadly, joyfully, again cut in half when the pollster asked how Trump is handling the cost of living; his 7% of mass strong approval has to be some kind of record. But take heart, Donald, for 16% of Americans strongly approve of your foreign policy. We the 84% would simply like to know what it is.

Perhaps as shockingly awful to the MAGA faithful (and spiritually uplifting for us the civilized) is that even among Republican novitiates, Trump’s strong approval rating has undergone, or is undergoing, a crash dive: 64% to 39%, same period.

The unknown option — undergone, or undergoing? — raises even larger questions. Reuters notes that Trump’s overall approval rating (33%) is now “lower than at any point in his current term.” Is that point elastic? That is, potentially lower? And by what degree?

Given that he considers himself messianically infallible, Trump is very unlikely to change course. That, in turn, is very unlikely to result in anything but more economic destruction and more foreign disasters.

So how at that point, one is likely to ask, could such colossally wretched circumstances render yet more good news from the perilous front?

For congressional Republicans, there must be some breaking point. True, it’s allusively, hellishly amorphous. But out there, somewhere, it exists. And given enough oppressive Trumpian force, it would manifest.

The core base’s increasing evaporation of strong approval accompanied by further collapses in blanket approval of this appalling White House would threaten not only many Republicans’ odds of reelection in 2028, the twin phenomena might well threaten the very existence of the Republican Party.

Which is to say, the upcoming presidential cycle could portend a ‘64 Goldwater explosion — times 10. Should Trump’s current allies foresee such a prospect, we’d be advised to watch for regicidal knives coming out.

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In fact, in the political realm, it’s not even close to death. Nor does it scurry in the underbrush of politics, where one must be finely discerning to spot it. Not at all.

Irony is best served coldly subtle. But Donald Trump, the principal object of our political attention, is as alien to subtlety as he is ignorant of [insert infinite list here; as noted, I haven’t the time].

The bluntness hurts.

His new shtick is to denounce Democrats as “communists.” Actually, the shtick is rather old, but he has cranked up its frequency from a bas-relief to a thundering Wagnerian theme. (Pardon the metaphor mixture; hey, I’m in a hurry here.)

And yet, Trump loves commies — the real ones, that is. As demonstrated of late: His dissing South Korea while snuggling, again, with Kim Jong-un.

Trump’s too stupid to realize (an ironic accompaniment) that his love is unrequited. But that’s beside the point. The blunt, towering irony of his communist Dems denunciations is the sorryass spectacle he makes of his commie-loving self by swooning that —

China’s Marxist dictator-for-life Xi Jinping is a “great leader,” a “tremendous guy,” a “fantastic” guy —

Vladimir Putin, who longs for those wonderful days of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is also a "great guy" (who last night murdered 15 people in a missile/drone strike on a Kyiv hospital and kindergarten) —

And of course the always lovable Kim … well, what can one say but what Trump says: Yes, that dude, too, is one “great leader.” And so “Kim Jong Un and I get along GREAT!” as he drooled on Saturday.

In Trump’s book of love, Communists + Communist Nostalgics = Great. Every goddamn time. Every orgasmic mention.

The final irony being that because, in Trump’s book, Democrats are anything but great, they can’t be communists.

Gotta run; my a.m. appt. is medical, which, in my book, means I’m always late.

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Ukrainian immigrant and retired Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman would be right to harbor grave reservations about his adopted country. For the third time, it has kicked him in the head: sacked from a national security post for courageously exposing a corrupt president; denied an Army promotion by the same, vindictive president; now, assaulted by his own political party.

But he’s a big boy. He’ll get over it. What lucid, levelheaded Democrats will never get over, though, is democratic socialist Angie Nixon’s Senate primary defeat of the moderate Vindman. And at that, Republicans will never stop laughing.

For one year, nine months and nearly two weeks America’s synaptically active population thought The World’s Daftest Voters were those who returned a convicted felon etc. etc. etc. to the White House. The neurons-firing folk stand corrected; the matter, updated; the madhouse, ascendant. The World’s Daftest Voters are, rather, Florida’s Democrats — the primary-ballot majority, anyway.

The Hill:

First elected to the Florida state House in 2020, [Nixon] received endorsements from Reps. Maxwell Frost, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

[War veteran and former director on the National Security Council] Vindman received endorsements from Sens. Mark Kelly, Jack Reed and Tammy Duckworth; also the Miami Herald.

The two Democrats were vying to serve the last two years of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s term, which is up in 2028. Whoever wins the November election will still need to run again in 2028.

On 15 July, Nixon told the Tampa Bay Times that Democrats are “chasing moderates who … don’t fight for working families.”

On 14 July, the Miami Herald wrote that Vindman “understands the main issues affecting the lives of Floridians” — working families.

The Herald added that Vindman’s “foreign-policy expertise would be crucial as a member of the Senate,” what with Trump running psychotically amuck across the globe. Sorry, globe. Instead you’ll get a political hack-election denying-naturally-Trump-endorsed Ashley Moody redux.

The simple, logical, incontrovertible choice laid before Democratic voters was so extraordinarily, almost embarrassingly obvious, the betting market odds of a Vindman primary victory ran as high as ninety-six percent.

For months, then, he ran a general election Senate campaign. Sure, thought the Vindman camp, the überprogressive activist types there shall be, come 18 August; but c’mon, ain’t no way a voting totality would be stupid enough to nominate a pink Democrat in red Florida.

Whereupon Ms. Nixon ginned up a solid ground game, and done thumped Mr. Vindman — who outspent her 16 times over, although his spending, too, was geared toward November. (Alex, you should not have listened to Satchel.)

Observed the Tampa Bay Times: “Get past the hyperbole and scaremongering” — to wit, Florida’s ghoulishly moronic Sen. Rick Scott: The Democrat party is run by AOC Mamdani … Some of them want all the capitalists killed — “much of what democratic socialists support is no more radical than expanding the safety net created by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.”

Which is true. Also true is that center-left Democratic pols like Vindman support the same safety-net expansions that democratic socialist pols and their supporters hysterically claim they’re against, indifferent to, or altogether ignore.

In short, the ever-virtuous D.S.A. practices sheer demagoguery. The very kind a Donald Trump could admire.

And so it goes. Such is politics. The much deeper problem with democratic socialism is … socialism — the word. It’s still a significant bugaboo in America’s moderate-to-conservative realms, which is to say, where the votes are.

Especially down there. “We won’t see [democratic socialism] in Florida,” said the chairwoman of the state’s Democratic Party to the Tampa Bay paper last month. “[We have] hundreds of thousands of Floridians who left their homelands fleeing socialism…. It won’t happen here.”

Said St. Petersburg councilman Richie Floyd, Florida’s sole democratic socialist in elected office: “We’re not making a play for the statewide races. We don’t have sway that way yet.”

Then, this gem. “Floyd said Democrats shouldn’t worry about democratic socialists.”

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Nate Silver recently titled a piece “12 questions for the center-left.” If you delved into the 3,000-word article in a linear fashion, odds are you never made it to even Question One. It appears only after roughly 2,000 extraneous words — a point far ahead of where you took flight, having by then (somewhere around the 600th word) forsaken all hope of ever arriving at the titled promised land.

I’m here to help. And my name is Brevity.

Silver’s 12 questions (each of which contains multiple questions, themselves consuming 900 words) can, without inflicting unforgivable injury on the topic, be enfolded into one. Which, as luck would have it, just happens to be Silver’s first question — that is, questions:

1. Should the center-left explicitly avow liberalism as opposed to centrism, moderation or compromise? Is it a separate third thing with distinctive characteristics, or a sort of a 70/30 blend of progressivism and conservatism? If the latter, how does the center-left address the critique that it doesn’t really stand for anything?

A 100,000-word volume would be required to address these inquiries comprehensively. And that, of course, would only create more questions, since there is no universally satisfactory guide if one is exploring the character and political sentiments of 50 differing states, 435 incomparable congressional districts, and millions of unique Americans.

So we must settle for what Metaphor calls broad strokes. This really is the best we can do when confronted by questions of impossibly confining specificity, such as whether the center-left should “explicitly avow liberalism,” but not the separate creatures of moderation and compromise.

All four, pretty much, mean the same thing. (We may safely remove “centrism” as either a redundancy or an element of internal contradiction.)

Yet Silver, I think, rather nicely provides the keystone of the center-left’s broadest philosophical architecture when he asks if it’s “sort of a 70/30 blend of progressivism and conservatism.”

Bingo. After striking “sort of.”

For with remarkable, if not ironic, precision, that was FDR’s expansive political formula — an approach that took the nation from deepest economic despair to a vast and still-growing middle class right up until the 1980s, when Republicans’ “populist” pseudoconservativism reset America’s trajectory.

Roosevelt’s progressive-conservative politics were resolutely non-ideological, oriented around pragmatism (America’s sole philosophical invention), experimental and — a now-dead but resurrectable art of public policy — open to admissions of failure, though damn it all, we would begin anew.

FDRism helps answer, as adequately as possible, Silver’s three other “Core questions” within the 12: “What is the center-left’s relationship with the Democratic Party ‘establishment’?”; “What is the center-left’s strategy for dealing with an increasingly angry electorate?”; “What is the center-left’s view on how capitalism is going?”

Under Roosevelt, the center-left was the Democratic Party, whose “establishment” moniker would have been something of a puzzling curiosity; it dealt with an angry electorate by being candid and honest and therefore — let’s get touchy-feely — vulnerable; and its view of capitalism was that to save it, regulatory straitjackets were indispensable.

As for Silver’s non-core questions, most can be answered with brutal succinctness. Say, #7: “Should the center-left … [regard] Trump as a 5-alarm, existential threat to American liberal democracy?” Well, yeah. Since Trumpism is indeed an existential threat, and to more than democracy.

Or #8: “Should the center-left regard the ‘DSA left’ as a threat to liberal values?” When it goes crazy illiberal, just grinning and bearing it would be an extraordinarily crazy alternative. The easiest, #12: “How does the center-left navigate Israel/Gaza?” In the same way it navigated South African apartheid and German fascism.

And there you have it, my nearly singular answer to Nate Silver’s 12 questions (in 598 words).

***

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Speaker on, volume up? Good. Let us proceed.

“It’s possible to read too much into this,” writes CNN’s Wapo refugee, Aaron Blake. The prophylactic advice seems remarkably odd, since nearly six years of Donald Trump’s in-office desecrations dictate the impossibility of reading too much into this:

Let me just say that stranger things have happened, OK? I’ll leave it at that — that being Trump’s cliff-hanging response to last week’s on-air suggestion of a self-coup redux:

“You have the right to declare a national security emergency for elections. If you declare a national security emergency … it can only be overturned by a two-thirds vote by both houses of Congress. So if you do this in the next month [because the SAVE Act failed to pass], we will get photo ID, proof of citizenship and a limit to mail-in ballots.”

This enabling option was posed by conspiracy theorist and surname-lover Wayne Allyn Root, host of “The ROOT Reaction” and “America’s Top Ten Countdown with Wayne Allyn Root.”

Whether Trump soldiers forth and declares a national emergency is quite irrelevant (as are SAVE’s particulars, which in themselves constitute something far less, of course, than a lookalike Third Reich regime).

Also irrelevant is that Trump might have been babbling nothing more than another of his childish lib-taunts as entertainment for parentally promiscuous MAGA, it being endlessly enchanted and so easily amused by his impish peurility.

Of far-reaching relevance, however, is that a president of the United States lent vocal legitimacy to the fascist option of proclaiming a national emergency when none exists — an Oval Office mirror image of Germany’s chancellery, March 1933.

The National Emergencies Act confers no unconstitutional authority on POTUSes. And since its 1976 passage, each has declared emergencies within its statutory boundaries.

Yet — and here we reach towering relevance — should trolling become invoking, Trump would almost certainly fubar the NEA, just as his lawless tariffs have repeatedly fubarred 1977’s IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Who’s to stop him? His agreeable congressional majority? The corrupt, gutless U.S. Supreme Court (whose nearly lone-disagreeing deportations order he breezily ignored)? Todd Blanche, DOJ’s Frank Nitti? Or perhaps, in extremis, Pete Hegseth’s winnowed corps of militarized MAGA brass?

Still-sentient, still-cognition-equipped beings can with ease envision a Trumpist transcendence of mere SAVE Act provisions — citizenship proofs and the like. Hark, yonder we foresee green-uniformed men swarming blue circles on maps, come Election Day.

And if that fails to return an agreeable congressional majority, Trump can always have those little green men seize voting machines — which he says he regrets not doing in 2020 — or deploy savage squads of ballot confiscators — as he did do in Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia.

Whereupon 2026’s midterm “results” would be, let’s say, somewhat less than a shocking surprise.

CNN’s Aaron Blake, he of splendid cognition, cannot possibly believe that “it’s possible to read too much into” the frightful possibilities of what lies ahead. He knows, as do we, that under the ghastly reign of Donald Trump, nothing is unthinkable, thus anything is possible.

So, perhaps … One more time? And this time, maybe sing along. (I, for one, enjoy replacing “Erika” with “Trumpism”; in vocalization, ”Eeer-i-ka” becomes “Truuum-pi-zuhm” — thump, thump, thump.)

***

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And there you have it: Everything You Have Always Wanted to Know About This Economy.

The outpatient’s inpatient screenwriter:

****

An addendum, an edit, by way of an afterthought.

A friend emailed me this morning asking if I thought “consequences” might be lurking in the wings because of the inpatient’s latest insanities: the U.S.S. Lincoln’s “not nearly long enough” deployment and the imminent designation of the Strait of Hormuz as U.S. territory.

My reply:

I still see Trump's derangement as a flat line — no peaks, no valleys — straight through from his 2015 golden escalator incoherence to Sharpie weather reports to the fallen as "suckers" to seizing Greenland and annexing Canada to floating a third term to waving his U.S. sceptre over the watery Kingdom of Hormuz. None of that, though, is nearly as stunning as what our Democratic pols aren't saying, which is what SNL's Michael Dukakis (Jon Lovitz) said about himself in relation to George HW Bush (Dana Carvey): "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy."

*****

Since we’re already wallowing in the unspeakably bizarre — another addendum. This just in, headline from Fortune magazine: “The ‘manosphere’ is a multibillion-dollar industry.”

Though I should have known that, I didn’t know that, but now that I know it, I’ll try this as an evidently appealing approach to boosting my number of subscriptions (although why this might appeal to the point of opening spherical wallets, I still know not): I am — that is to say, this man is — buffed; and better yet, I’m feeling really alienated from our cruel society. So,

***

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Former officials, security experts and corporate lawyers warn this could lead to provocations, heightened risks and escalating conflicts.

All of which would seem to be the objective of the national security memorandum.

After all, the person who signed it thrives on chaos and conflict — a mentality that psychiatrists see as but one diagnosable point in the wide-ranging spectrum of “Cluster B” disorders. We victims and enablers of the afflicted see them as “Cluster Bombs.”

What’s the full sweep of disorders embedded in — now here’s a bobbydazzler of an oxymoron — the national security memo’s unhinged, reptilian executor?

Therapeutic circles define said unhingement as Chaos Addiction, that being symptomatic of —

High-Conflict Personality Disorder: an inability to conceive constructive ideas; self-aggrandizement; paranoia; refusal to accept personal responsibility; scarcity of impulse control; rage; thin skin.

Borderline Personality Disorder: pleasure derived from high conflict and sustained instability; external chaos distracts from painful internal turmoil; “drama-queening” creates unpredictability and provides a false sense of its control.

Histrionic Personality Disorder: erratic behavior; a desperate need for unceasing attention; closely related to the drama-queen syndrome.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: a developmental flaw often prolonged into adulthood; characterized by disorganized cognition; difficulty staying on task; difficulty learning; inattentiveness; disruptive (erratic) behavior; fraught relationships; if medicinally untreated, dopamine-generation via chaos-creation; dismal job performance.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder: largely self-explanatory: an all-consuming sense of personal superiority yet accompanied by a need for constant, reassuring praise; lack of empathy.

Antisocial Personality Disorder: reinforces high-conflict personality disorder; thrill-seeking satisfied by creating high-risk chaos.

And the sitting president of the United States — the ultimate authority and final say in the nation’s security — is gravely afflicted by every last one of these bloody dreadful disorders.

His memorandum’s new cybersecurity approach poses a “novel” question, says Vanessa Le, a consultant to private firms on geopolitical perils. “Even if [publicly traded companies] engage in ‘hack back’ activities under U.S. government cover or direction, how,” she asks, “will they manage the increased operational risk to their business” — and you?

The answer: They won’t. Because the far-reaching unhingement sitting behind the Resolute Desk has swamped the federal government with like brains of frightful reptilian erraticism, scrambled cognition and dismal, unaccountable job performance marked by extreme inattentiveness.

Which means there will be no competent “U.S. government cover or direction.” There will be an even braver, and sicker, new world.

***

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I approached the Jacobin’s analysis of Francesca Hong’s primary loss with considerable trepidation. Although my politics are pragmatically center-left, in a conceptual long game they’re largely compatible with the magazine’s North Star of democratic socialism. Thus I feared columnist Paul Heideman’s “Five Takeways From Francesca Hong’s Near-Win” (not “loss”) would begin with a crackup and finish in an analytical train wreck.

Q.E.D.

The enumerated lines, including italics, are Heideman’s.

1. The polls were wrong.

More likely, the assertion is wrong. Marquette Law School’s July survey showed the broadest spread — Hong leading David Crowley by an astonishing 31 points — yet, as I noted in an Election-eve post, Marquette’s poll also found that 34% of respondents were undecided.

To a pol in the lead, that contingent can be a killer. Ask Hillary Clinton. Her rather consistent 2%-3% polling advantage in 2016 went up in flames once the aforementioned chimed in on Election Day.

Heideman writes that “The Democratic establishment in Wisconsin can hardly be thrilled that they were only able to defeat a novice candidate like Hong by the skin of their teeth. But the focus on polling obscures all of this.”

And his passage obscures this: While Hong’s campaign endured for 327 days, Crowley, who had suspended his, then stumped the trail for only 24 days. Yet even that narrow frame was sufficient to persuade the above 34%.

2. Subcultural leftism hurts socialists.

How peachy can a two-word euphemism be? As peachy as “subcultural leftism.” Disrobed, it means staggering stupidiities.

“It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that [Hong],” says Heideman, “could have accomplished much more if she hadn’t had to carry the load of past statements she made exemplifying insular leftist subcultures.” Uh, yeah, which is why in politics there’s a thing called vetting. About that, ask the early endorsers of one Graham Platner.

Heideman does valiantly earn, however, the priceless Understatement of the Week Award: “It’s at least plausible that all this” — i.e., subprefrontal cortex activity — “cost her the race.”

3. Socialists need to be able to make the case they’ll defeat Republicans.

Well, now that is rather the point of it all, is it not? Indeed, has that not always been the case? Not to the good folks at the Jacobin. “It should have been clear after Joe Biden’s victory over Bernie Sanders in 2020 that [winning] general elections is nonnegotiable for Democratic primary voters,” observes Heideman. Note “should have been clear.” In sum, throngs of “progressives” still haven’t grasped it.

4. Campaign on what matters to voters.

Even though that is stunningly self-evident as a campaign “strategy,” way too many lefties somehow overlook what is, quite possibly, the supreme argument made in Saul Alinsky’s leftist Bible, Rules for Radicals —

For every pol there is potentially a winning campaign on matters of highest local interest to voters. In other words, pols must conform to their district’s electorate; royal blue messaging is but cattle poop on purple ground.

Oh, and by the way, no matter how often a candidate attempts such an emphasis, it ain’t gonna work if he or she is corralled into answering endless questions about on-the-record staggering stupidities.

5. The space for socialist politics, even outside of major cities like New York, is massive.

Heideman exalts that “Hong’s campaign showed the potential that exists for the socialist left in purple states.” He omits that she lost in Wisconsin’s rural areas.

I agree with the columnist about such “space” — someday. For now, it seems to me, democratic socialism must confine itself to a “conceptual long game,” as worded in the opening paragraph. It’s been doing so, successfully, since 1933. Incrementalism is a haul, a real drag, I know. But revolutionary upheavals are catastrophically self-defeating.

The founder of modern progressivism, Franklin Roosevelt, understood that. And the latest iteration of progressivism, otherwise loosely characterized as democratic socialism, should learn it.

That its practitioners so consistently dismiss the empirically demonstrable is why, also in the opening, I anticipated a concluding train wreck in the Jacobin‘s “Five Takeaways.” There it was, and so it is.

***

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The state of Wisconsin joins Boswell’s Life of Johnson — see: page 849, Oxford University Press, paperback edition — as a setting for the gnomic man of letters’ finer point not of law, but of cognitive clarity:

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Thus were thousands of Badger minds concentrated throughout Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Crowley’s resurrected, extended-fortnight campaign.

For in his chief primary opponent, Francesca Hong, a Wisconsinite plurality envisioned their state — and possibly, the nation — propped on the gallows. The hangman: a November-victorious Republican named Tom Tiffany, he of incurable Trumpist derangement syndrome.

On Mr. Crowley’s behalf, I’d like to take this brow-wiped opportunity to thank Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for their conspicuously absent endorsement of Ms. Hong, bless her co-executioner DSA heart.

Whether their silence helped make the winning difference for Crowley, we can’t say. We can however say with high confidence that the two überprogressives’ absence made no Cheeseheaded hearts grow fonder of Hong.

“Her candidacy worried moderate Democrats,” asserts a NY Times trio of Manichean-minded journalists. They’re not wrong, just unpardonably narrow in assessment.

Yes of course Hong’s candidacy worried Dem moderates. But it worried as well the entire political spectrum outside its farthest reach to the right; those supporters of the contemporary, palpably pseudoconservative, distinctly Nationalsozialistische Americanische Partei, still known, both laughably and offensively, as the G.O.P.

At any rate, not long after midnight, “the Associated Press,” reported the Associated Press, “declared Crowley the winner once Hong’s concession removed the possibility of a recount.” The AP added that “Hong could have requested a recount since Crowley’s margin of victory was less than 1 percentage point. But because it was wider than 0.25 points, Hong’s campaign would have had to pay for it.”

Again, concerning the AP’s first sentence, it’s not really wrong, just overstated. The outlet’s “recount/possibility/removed” phrase gives the impression that once conceded, there’s no going back. Yet a candidate’s concession can be retracted, since mere words can’t override hard vote totals.

Hong, then, could still request a recount.

This compels me to make mention of my own membership in a political party, that of the Mencken-noted Exalted Pishposh of (Not So) Odd Fellows - in short, a gathering of cynics. Our partisan maturation was born of being burned once too often; one should always wait for the ink to dry before summoning the fat lady.

And by order of Wisconsin law, those inky vote totals will remain a bit wet until the end of the third business day after the board of canvassers’ last meeting. Only then — assuming Hong foregoes the “possibility,” which is likely, given the staggering cost of a recount to her campaign — shall I wipe that last, lonely bead of sweat from my brow.

(For wonks, I offer this piece of somewhat interesting frippery. Two years ago, the Wisconsin State Elections Board changed its 2006 directive, under which Hong qualified for a cost-free recount. In late 2024, the Board halved the percentage difference in vote totals for “the Aggrieved Candidate” — and, evidently, only if the aggrieved candidate is further identified by bizarro Trumpian caps.)

Until such formal time of Ms. Hong’s expired option, however wildly improbable, let us celebrate what’s become an even wilder idiosyncratic political approach on Mr. Crowley’s part. Says his campaign manager: “David is focused on bringing people together” — all people, not just those among his base — and then “working together and delivering results.”

What a by-now-unfuckingbelievable novel idea.

***

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Go rough into that monstrous night

Dylan Thomas, 1914-1953/2026

Go rough into that monstrous night,
Each age should burn and rave at the murder of day:
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wise men at their end know dark is might,
Because their words had forked lightning they
Go rough into that monstrous night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how light
Their frail deeds sank in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learned, too late, they misjudged its down way,
Go rough into that monstrous night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like warheads and soar to dismay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my friends, there on the mad height,
Curse us now with your fierce tears, if I may.
Go rough into that monstrous night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

***

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