Amendment 25: It's how we stay alive

Trump's tweets are often nutty, but yesterday he attained transcendental wackiness. The spectacle reminded me of Crispin Glover's appearance on Letterman, or perhaps Bimbo's Initiation.

Just when North Korea was being lured to the negotiating table, Trump made the truly insane decision to compare nuclear "penises" with Kim Jong-Un. That tweet will go down in the history books, if anyone is left to write history books.

Before that, Trump needlessly (and deeply) insulted Pakistan, a nation which, for all its faults, is important to this country. Trump advertised some sort of anti-media game show, then accused the Department of Justice of being part of the so-called "Deep State," a.k.a. the Illuminati. He also took credit for airline safety, not realizing that there hasn't been a major airliner accident since 2009.

And there was more.

The Palmer Report revived Carrie Fisher's claim that Trump may be doing coke. At first, I dismissed this idea as just another jolly Palmeresque exercise in hyperbole -- but the theory is starting to worm its way into my more serious contemplations. Could it be?

In a way, it is comforting to think that Trump is doing drugs. If he's not, then the most powerful man in the world seems to be experiencing a mental breakdown.

Many of you know that Guy de Maupassant went mad from syphilis. You probably don't know that his valet wrote one of the first tell-all books in which he chronicled how The Crazy began to manifest itself in the great writer's life.

Right now, someone must be in a position to write a similar book about Trump. But who...?

And will we be around to read it? A tweet from Mike Signorile:

I think it’s not far-fetched to believe that if Trump is going to go down he’s taking the entire planet with him. Horrifying. 25th amendment time, if we could only get these greedy GOPers to worry about their own children’s lives.

Some months back, the theory that Trump himself has syphilis made the rounds. At the time, I dismissed the notion. Right now, I'm not sure that we can dismiss any theory out of hand.

Maybe it's time to re-read that book about de Maupassant, who developed Trumpian delusions of grandeur and persecution. Disappointingly, he convinced himself that he was Jesus Christ. A literary genius really ought to come up with a less-cliched way to go crazy.

The truth about the Deep State. While researching the "Deep State" meme, I ran across this nicely-drawn cartoon from Ben Garrison, a well-known figure on the Breitbart right...

This cartoon gives us one more piece of evidence that when the conspiracy-crazed right talks about the Deep State, they are really just offering up a new version of older theories involving the Bilderbergers, the CFR, and the Rothschilds.

Take a look at the Rothschild imagery in Garrison's work. I believe that the face is supposed to represent Nat Rothschild, although I may be wrong about that. (If I am, please correct me!) He's holding up a Star of David [see note at end of post] and a slice of Pizza -- a clear reference to Pizzagate, which we're supposed to think is A) real and B) Jewish. I don't know what the hot dog symbolizes. But I do know that the Jewish Octopus adorned many editions of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

Now see this Daily Beast article: "Why Trump’s Jewish Backers Love the Alt-Right."

No amount of cognitive dissonance is too great for Trump’s Jewish backers, from high-profile ones like embattled lawyer Michael “Says Who?” Cohen to everyday Jews in the pews. Why? It’s not just Israel, although that’s a big part of it. Nor is it just about Jared and Ivanka. Nor is it blindness to the anti-Semitism and racism rampant among Trump’s hard core base.

Quite the contrary. Trump’s Jewish supporters are well aware of the alt-right, and in a perverse way, they thrive on it. The shocking mainstreaming of anti-Semitism reinforces their worldview, their political ideology, and their support of Israel’s hard-right fringe.

Unbelievable. Jewish rightwingers actually support a movement that has resurrected the freakin' Protocols. That's what our culture has come to.

Let's get back to Garrison. From his Wikipedia page:

Since then, a legitimate Garrison cartoon in 2017 was criticized as anti-Semitic for depicting the monstrous green hand of the Rothschilds, as well as George Soros, controlling U.S. generals H. R. McMaster and David Petraeus as puppets. The cartoon was commissioned by Mike Cernovich as part of the his campaign against McMaster. Cernovich later cropped the work to remove the Rothschilds.

Wow. His cartoon was considered too extreme for Cernovich.

Garrison is the spiritual heir to the cartoonists employed by Julius Streicher, and the above cartoon exemplifies the madness that Donald Trump endorses when he talks about the "Deep State." When Trump uses that phrase, he does not address actual abuses committed by the FBI and the intelligence community in decades past. I've discussed that history in many previous posts. Trump has not. He doesn't give a shit about anything except his own struggle for absolute power. Under the guise of combating the Deep State, Donald Trump hopes to annihilate Democracy.

Note at end of post: Several readers, privately and in comments, have told me that the Rothschild octopus is holding up a pentagram, not a Star of David. This is correct.

When I went back to bed after publishing the first version of this post, I could have sworn that I saw the Jewish symbol in this cartoon. But anger can blind us to the evidence in front of our own eyes. I've chided others after they fell into this trap; now, I have fallen.

Apologies. But my comments about this drawing still stand. Even when re-studied the next morning, it remains infuriating. I won't withdraw the comparison to the cartoons published by Streicher.