CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 150th Edition. Why Karoline is departing. Donald Trump's Weird Obsession with monuments to himself. The Invincibly Ignorant.

Trump looking out of the window of Air Force One with Natalie Harp, Sunday, September 7, 2025, before landing at LaGuardia Airport in East Elmhurst, New York, to attend the U.S. Open Men’s Championship, a shocking waste of public money.

Yesterday we discussed the departure of Karoline Leavitt from the Trump Administration.  Also yesterday, two different articles appeared purporting to give her reasons, both of which are pretty interesting.  Between the two, the article in The New Republic struck me as a bit more credible.  It's here:

Karoline Leavitt Quit Because Trump Was Driving Her Crazy

Trump is a pathetic man baby pretty much and shows what happens with a privileged kid is raised to become a spoiled brat.  Of course, his parents realized that which is why they sent him to military school, but it didn't work to straighten him out.

What very well may have worked would have been a hitch in the service, but that, as is well known, didn't happen. That omission is probably part of the reason that the pathetic man has such an inferiority complex today.

Anyhow, TNR holds that Leavitt had been looking to depart her role as Big Liar for Der Fibber for some time and was burnt out from her role. The straw that broke the camel's back was Trump repeatedly calling her on her maternity leave to find out when she'd leave her children and come back to serving him.

If true, that makes Trump even more of an asshole than we already knew him to be, but it's pretty credible.

And it's also perfectly credible that Leavitt was burnt out.  Explaining the sea of lies would be a huge burden.  And, for normal people, having children is really sobering.  I've often said that's when you really become fully adult.  While I think Leavitt's role in the administration in particular and American society overall has been completely despicable, she may have made that leap.  She is Catholic and the burden of her sins for Trump may have just grown too large.

The Daily Beast, on the other hand, holds that Leavitt decided to leave when she was left on the "decoy" Air Force One when Trump was smuggled out on a lesser aircraft.  He took with him, apparently, Pete Hegseth, Natalie Harp, Dan Scavino, and Walt Nauta.  Marco Rubio and Bessent were left to go down in flames if Air Force One was actually targeted.

Unlike a lot of the commentary on this, I don't think it was  unreasonable for Trump to make the switch, although like the CIA I'm not crediting Israeli intelligence on this one much.  But if Leavitt was really left to die on the decoy, that's inexcusable.  But it's not really clear that she actually was.  You would think this would be easy to determine, but it hasn't been.  She may not have been on either plane.

Anyhow, the DB reports she was upset about being left on the decoy plane, and as a mother of two, she should have been.  And if true, and we don't know that it was, that would be a despicable thing for Trump to have done.  

This puts Executive Assistant to the President Natalie Harp back in the spotlight.  There's already piles of rumors about here which are unlikely to be true, but it doesn't help.

Trump just can't accept defeat on anything as he's a spoiled brat.  He also has surrounded himself with sycophants like flies surround shit, and much for the same reason.  Its not surprise therefore that the flies on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts voted on Thursday to add an inscription bearing President Donald Trump’s name to the building’s exterior,  It'll read:

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Restored and Renovated By President Donald J. Trump,’

The plaza where it's located will be outright named for Trump.

Well, maybe.

More likely the same court that told the administration to remove Trump's name from the building for being illegally pasted there will say "hold on, buckwheat" and stop it from occurring.

This does, however, bring up a topic that many people have been pondering and which was just discussed on NPR's Politics:

How Trump's focus on his legacy drives his decisions

NPR doesn't quite put it this way, but there's something downright weird about Trump's manic campaign of building crap, and it has been crap, and naming stuff for himself.

Trump's about to die.  It's a fact simply because of his age.  Around 15% of American men live to age 85.  He's 80.  He could literally die any day simply due to old age.  Having elected such an elderly man was foolish.  

While its purely speculation on my part, I strongly suspect that Trump is worried about his impending death, and I can see why.  He's lived a horrible life.  He openly worries about going to Hell, but he doesn't do anything to arrest that chance.  Reforming at age 80 isn't easy, particularly for a man whose on to his fourth wife, if you consider it a real marriage.  That's part of the reason, I'd guess, he's surrounded himself with people like Paula White, who believe in a diluted version of Christianity, or even one that's perverted the actual message of the Gospels.  There's almost nothing that Trump routinely does or says that are Christian in nature, but those religious figure surrounding him don't seem to rebuke him on his behavior to the extent that we can tell what hey do.

The people that Trump has surrounded himself with probably give him a modicum of assurance that his soul is A Ok, but he doesn't seem convinced.  He shouldn't be.  Anyhow, I wonder to some extent if he believes in the next world, in any form, at all.

His manic construction would suggest not.  He desperately wants to be remembered for something, and childish monstrous architecture seems to be what he's hit on.

It won't work.

Most of the things that the Romans built are gone.  The Coliseum is still around, but very few people know which Roman Emperor caused it to be built.  Most of the Trump crap will simply come down, and indeed it needs to.  The stuff he's pasting his name to will all be renamed.

It's vanity, and it's sad.  And expensive.

I've really gone after Trump on this site and people who voted for Trump and his sycophants. Just the other day I posted, in regard to Mike Lindell's bid for office:

Lindell had no chance of winning the primary as only the stupid and ignorant would vote for him.  That's what happened.  He's not accepting that however, claiming, in true Trump/MAGA style that there were "irregularities".

Lisa Demuth won the race with 43.4% of the vote.  Lindell did bring in 32.5% of the vote, which some have been shocked by.  One person asked if his supporters were stupid. 

Well, probably a lot of them are.

Let's be honest about stupidity, as the country has a real stupidity problem right now.

The United States has always had a strong anti intellectual streak, which endorsed the native intelligence of the common man. Frankly, it's been one of the problems the country's always been afflicted with. But at the same time, up until now, there's never been an era in which education was despised. Right now, we're seeing a lot of that. The reason is fairly simple. The really intelligent, through technology, have made it possible for the stupid to have a voice.

Which brings us to the bell curve.

Human intelligence it not really very well understood, even today.  Perhaps in some ways we don't know that much more about it than we ever did.  Btu what we do know is that in an average population, there's a mean.  Half the people are above it, and half below it.

More than that most of the people are somewhere on the middle part of the curve.  But if you divide it into thirds, 1/3d of it is considerably above the rest in terms of intelligence, and 1/3 considerably below.  Like Larry David's skit lampoons, we let the bottom third vote.

Therefore, it'd be somewhat fair to say that Lindell's 1/3d of the Minnesota vote represents "the stupid ones", and to some extent, it actually does.  While some of low intelligence would have voted for other candidates, Trump uniquely appeals to stupid.

He also uniquely appeals to the ignorant, which is not the same.  And that's where the story of intelligence gets complicated, particularly in voting.  I have a friend, for example, whose highly intelligent, but completely disinterested in politics.  He still votes.  A lot of rural people I know are big Trump supporters, not because they're dumb, but because they listen to their neighbors and they've all collectively bought off on BS Trump conspiracy theories.  As part of that, however, I'll note, that they're mostly poorly educated.

Anyhow, take the dumb, the ignorant, and the poorly educated together, you probably have at least 33% of the population.  Technology makes the difference.  In prior eras, those people were influenced by the smarter and the well educated around them.  Now, they're influenced by themselves.

After this, I got a first hand glimpse of how really intelligent people can be MAGA through ignorance.

A person I know, who is definitely highly intelligent, but very narrowly focused, and very focused on religious matters, sent me something on one of the millennialist religions that was influenced by Christianity, but which isn't Christian.  He follows stuff like that extremely closely.  This brought up in my mind something I just saw elsewhere on "post truth Christians".

The reason I note that is that I always find such statements to be sweepingly overbroad.  When people speak about "Christians" and societal, cultural or political matters, the mere use of the term is incorrect.  The MAGA Christians contain a strong element that doesn't regard we Catholics, the original Christian religion, as Christian at all.   The "post truth" Christians, in the article I saw, are Evangelical Christians. Well, informed Catholics have regarded them as post truth for their entire, and short, existence.

But my friend, who is alway studying what Muslims, Jews, the LDS, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists are doing, doesn't realize that and I should have appreciated that.  He frankly just assumes that all Christians have the same view on everything, for the most part, and by extension that the Christians around Donald Trump are all the same, and just like us.

Anyhow, I tried to explain to him how people like Johnson and the group are part of the New Apostolic Reformation and how Doug Wilson figures  the nation should be Calvinist.

He clearly doesn't believe that.

And that gets back to this.  Amongst those who loyally back Trump are a bunch of people who aren't dumb (there are  bunch who are dumb), but almost invincibly ignorant.  The really do think Reagan is just like Trump and people are worried about Trump because he's a "conservative".  Mike Johnson is just a religious guy.  Charlie Kirk just a zealous layman.  Doug Wilson just the tweed wearing vicar of some local Protestant church.

It's a view of the world like its portrayed on The Waltons, or if you want it a little racier, Spencer's Mountain.

It's dangerously naive, but nearly impossible to penetrate.

Some ignorance, and I suspect more than a little bit of that here, is wilful.  It's an example of the tail wagging the dog in quite a few people.  I suspect my friend knows that the Trump administration is a dumpster fire, for example, but he voted for it twice under a sincere conviction that it seeks to advance Christianity against the enemy of secular humanism and Islam.  When the war with Iran came he was ecstatic.  When Israel was decimating Gaza he was all in on it.  Now he's finding that even in his own family people don't hold these views.

Admitting that you're wrong is a hard thing to do. Trump can't do that.  Neither can a lot of his backers.

Speaking of ignorance:

That one speaks for itself.

In terms of really bad news, military student Phillips P. O'Brien, who has been warning that rot is setting into the U.S. military, is now at its worse shape since World War Two.

He cannot be discounted.

I noted in my entry yesterday that we haven't seen a sailor's rebellion since the last days of the Vietnam War.  As also noted, at that time, the military was in horrible shape.  I'd find it hard to believe that we are in worse shape now as opposed to then, frankly, but I am concerned that we're in bad shape.  We may be seeing an over bloated military in a state of advanced decay.  We're certainly losing the war against Iraq.

I'd note, on this, Trump wouldn't be the only one to blame, along with Hegseth.  I would go back to 2013 in regard to the acceleration of the decline in the U.S. Military, when women were first allowed into combat roles (yeah, that again).  Barack Obama was President at the time. He also was when transgendered troops were okayed, which was insane.  So here we can actually blame Obama for something.

But it isn't that alone.  As noted here recently, keeping a bloated, if shrunken, big military after the Cold War was a mistake.  That allowed the US to engage in quasi colonial wars, which was a mistake. Rather than fix things, Trump, via Hegseth, has given in fully to a bloated military and, while keeping women in combat roles openly, begun in backdoor sabotage on a cultural basis and started to try to convert it into the New Model Army.

Finally, as predicated, each day brings a flood of new mailers.

Yesterday had its usual crop.  Notable amongst them was a Chuck Gray one claiming he kept "men" out of "girls" sports.  A very non political female friend of mine had a fit over that as she views female sports as women's sports.

I've received that mailer before. The thing that's really odd about it is that it shows a great big fat dude with facial stubble winning something over female athletes, but the due looks oddly like the cartoon portrayal of J. D. Vance you see around sometimes.

Hmm. . . 

In my friends case, her 12 year old daughter picked up the mail and asked "what's that supposed to mean"?

We also received here, on the same day, a large flyer calling Gray "California Chuck Gray" and pointing out that he's from Los Angeles.  

Well, fair enough but the artful illustration of him wearing a short brimmed straw Fedora and a Hawaiian shirt, all done electronically I'm sure, was a bit much.  I'm sure that he doesn't have either.

Also, it oddly made him look like what Westerners imagine elderly men in Florida to look like.

Last edition:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

Labels: 1970s, 1972, 1973, 2020s, 2026, Chuck Gray, Donald Trump, Karoline Leavitt, Lies, Military, Personalities, The Madness of King Donald, The Second Trump Administration, U.S. Navy, Washington DC Vandalization, Zeitgeist

Saturday, August 14, 1926. More killings in Mexico.

The Mexican Government arrested Father Luis Bátiz Sainz at a private house.  He and three members of the Mexican Association for Catholic Youth would be driven out of town, and then shot, the following day.

Before the closure of the churches, he had spoken at a gathering where the topic of armed resistance to suppression of the Church had been discussed.

He was later canonized.

The USSR claimed Wrangel Island.

An Ethel Hays' cartoon for the day.

It was a Saturday

Last edition:

Tuesday, August 10, 1926. Executions in Mexico, Hurricane in Nova Scotia.

Labels: 1920s, 1926, boats and ships, Cartoons, Cristero War, Disaster, J.R. Williams, Mexico, Nova Scotia, Weather

Monday, August 14, 1911. Emiliano Zapata demands that Federal troops be withdrawn from Morelos.

Emiliano Zapata demanded that Federal troops be withdrawn from Morelos.

Last edition:

Saturday, August 12, 1911. African American Emigration to the Prairie Provinces.

Labels: 1910s, 1911, 1912, 1912 Olympics, Canada, Canada (Prairie Provinces), Ethnicities, Liberation Army of the South, Mexican Revolution, Mexico, Oklahoma, Personalities, Racism, Swimming, Victoriano Huerta

Wednesday, August 14, 2026. This Day in History: The Great Seal of the United States

 

This Day in History: The Great Seal of the United States

Last edition:

Friday, August 2, 1776. The Declaration of Independence signed.

Labels: 1770s, 1776, American Revolution, Declaration of Independence, John Hancock, New York, Quebec, Second Continental Congress

King Donald's War, Part 11. The worst defeat in American History. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

Israeli paratrooper near the Mitla Pass, 1958.  Read on, it'll make sense.

Donald Trump is about to become what he never wanted to be: Jimmy Carter. Held hostage by Iran. And it was all voluntary.

Chris Christie.

We've never seen anything like it.  It's an existential defeat.  We're never going to recover as a country from this.

This is our 1958 Suez Crisis.

We've lost wars before, of course, in spite of what Americans like to believe. The War of 1812 was a loss.  The Korean War ended in a stalemate, which certainly isn't a win, if it's not a loss.  The Vietnam War was a flat out loss. And the war in Afghanistan, which didn't have to be a loss, became one as Donald Trump surrendered to the Taliban.  So, we've lost wars before.

But not like this.

People may be tempted to draw parallels to Vietnam, which was a really bad loss.  It was touch and go if the country would recover from for about a decade, and with the complete failure of Operation Eagle Claw, the attempt to get the hostages out by force in 1980, it really looked like we'd faded beyond repair.

Importantly, however, the United States didn't lose any allied because of Vietnam, in no small part because it didn't ask for any to participate in the war.  Some did, such as South Korea.*

The Reagan Administration, which I frequently criticize here, turned things around.  It rebuilt the military and made a calculation that it could spend the Soviet Union to death in the Cold War, which it did.  The Soviets collapsed and the Cold War ended, a major American victory. . . without fighting.

The fighting we've done since Vietnam has been impressive, right up until now. And that's the military that Reagan built.  A military designed to take on the USSR.  It still basically is.  It's a big war military.  So was our military in Vietnam.  

In Vietnam the military learned that it wasn't good at asymmetric wars.  And it finally learned the lesson that should have been clear in 1945 that airpower can't win a war.

In came Trump, and Hegseth, who have proven incompetent.

In a few short months they've lost the war to a second rate power, destroyed our relationship with our allies, eliminated our position in the globe as a superpower, emboldened the Chinese and probably the Russians, and made war with China, which we now stand a good chance of losing, inevitable.

There were signs that we were in trouble already, but they were mostly economic.  Between 1945 and the 2000s the US had lost control of its budget.  When the Cold War ended we did not return to a rationally sized military, even though we did go to a smaller one.  We maintained quasi colonial connections with some countries, notably those in the Middle East, which we did not need to.  At home we let education decline.  

In short, we lost the self discipline and sense of purpose a democratic nation should have.  And that lead to the election of Donald Trump, twice.  And in his second term, Trump has so accelerated American decline it leads to rational questions on whether or not he's a foreign agent.

Whatever he is, Donald Trump and his defense secretary Pete Hegseth aren't students.  They're not smart people.  They certainly aren't students of history.

Indeed, if they had, they might have realized this has happened before.

Following the Second World War the United Kingdom and France retained claims to being wold powers, indeed superpowers.  But the end of that is now clear in retrospect.  Both were losing control of their colonial empires rapidly.  The United Kingdom retained food rationing until 1954.  Both nations still fought colonial wars, although the French could really only do it with American help, which was only reluctantly given, if given at all.

In 1956 Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal.  The UK, France and Israel, the latter of which had its own issues with Egypt, decided to militarily intervene.  Israel attacked first, on October 29, with the objective of re-opening the Straits of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba. The United Kingdom and France joined in on October 311 seeking to depose Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal.  France and the UK expected the Eisenhower Administration to support it, but it didn't.

The net result was that Israel gained in the war, although the US forced it to give back the parts of the Sinai it too.  The US and France proved incapable of carrying on without US support.

Israeli paratroopers near the Parker Memorial, Mitla Pass.  The paratroopers here are quipped with K98k rifles, likely Czechoslovakian built, although they could also be World War Two German production.  By אברהם ורד / IDF Spokesperson's Unit, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33261678

In short, Israel got what it wanted from the war.  France and the United Kingdom were shown to be impotent without the US, and their status as global powers was severely retarded.

Sound familiar?  A major power that has Allies acts without them, and loses.  Those Allies regard them as now being second rate.

Just what happened to us against Iran, except the fall is so much more severe.

So, where from here?

Trump can't get us out of Iran.  We can't build anti missile missiles quickly enough.  Iran won't open the strait.  We can't make the open it.

We have only two choices.

The first one is to mount a full-scale ground invasion of Iran.  Completely setting aside the immorality of the current war and the immorality of escalating an immoral war, militarily, that's actually the only thing that makes sense.  If you were playing (the nonexistent) Avalon Hill United States v. Iran hex and counter board game, that's what you'd do.  You'd marshal ground forces in Kuwait (and maybe Iraq), call up National Guard divisions, and launch a multi division invasion.  

We could still win such a war.  The casualties would be massive, 50,000 dead or more, and the net result would make us a colonial administrator in Iran for at least a decade.

And we have to do it, if we're going to, soon. Basically in no more than a month. After that, our supply of anti missile AAA will be so depleted we will not be able to marshal in the region.

It couldn't be ignored as a real war, however.

Trump would have to finally go to Congress for authorization.  If he didn't, he'd be successfully impeached without a doubt.  And Congress is not going to authorize such a war.  So he won't.

Probably.

He could, and as he has no regard for the law at all, muster the multi division strength force necessary and launch the invasion wholly illegally.  That's really risky for him, however, and he's very unlikely to take that sort of risk.  If he did it, he'd be impeached.

The other choice is to surrender.  At this point, with the Strait closed, that's a defeat.  Indeed, it's worse than a defeat as while it would end the fighting, it wouldn't repair the de facto state of war between the countries. 

So a formal surrender is the only option.

And that will be a political disaster for Trump.

It also cements the geopolitical disaster for the United States.

Just as France and the UK went into Egypt without support from the US, and went into decline thereafter, we've gone into Iran's skies without support from our allies, including the UK and France.  They've moved on without us. At one time, they looked to us. . . now we'll look to them.

For the time being, however, we're hostages to Iran.  Iran knows it. This will just drag on and on while we deplete our weapons stores.  It won't resolve at all until after the November election.  It won't be possible to ignore it after that.

Sic transit Gloria Mundi.  

The US as a superpower, 1945-2026.  Cause of death.  Neglect, hubris, and the vanity and stupidity of Donald J. Trump.

August 12, 2026

Headline in the CST:

Iran has said the Strait will remain closed u ntil the US accepts its terms.

August 14, 2026

The US and Iran both claimed to control the Straits of Hormuz yesterday, which means that the US doesn't control them.  Pete Hegseth claimed that the US can remain deployed in the region's waters indefinitely.

Iran has very clearly determined not to enter into any deal with Donny, at least one that isn't abject humiliating defeat.  And they don't have to. They're winning the war.  At this point, the only way the US can actually win would be a ground invasion, which appears unlikely so far.

The USS Abraham Lincoln is headed home to be replaced by the USS George Washington.  We wrote on this story yesterday:

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

There's more to this than meets the eye, but what it is we don't really know.  One sailor attempting to leap overboard, which is now acknowledged, would actually not be that unusual in a deployment.  It was two that we know of, but one was with a life vest.  It's clear that morale problems have become severe. The ship hasn't had a port call in over 200 days, and that appears to be part of it.  Ships have had long deployments before, however, which raises questions.

Part of the aspect of this is, however, that a nuclear submarine can stay out indefinitely.  Oil fired ships like those of the Second World War could deploy for extremely long times, but they would make port calls.

Footnotes:

*Australia and New Zealand fought in the war, but very rarely noted is that Australia had indicated it was going into Vietnam whether or not the US did and its somewhat responsible for the US going into the country.  New Zealand participated as it felt obligated to Australia.

Last edition:

King Donald's War, Part 10. "If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied." Donald Trump, the killer edition.

Labels: 2020s, 2026, Chris Christie, Iran, Israel, King Donald's War, Oman, Rudyard Kipling, Straits of Hormuz, The roles of men and women, The Second Trump Administration, United States, United States and Israel v. Iran, Wars

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 7. The jackass in a tin barn edition.

We weren't really ready to start a new one of these, but Chuck Gray has been in such rare form recently as it starts to look like he's going to lose in ten days and his dreams of a carpetbagging political career be crushed, that it mandates it.

Gray, as Secretary of State, sits on a variety of state boards and has been using that position to attempt to advance his campaign for higher office, any higher office, all along.  Generally in the global warming is a fib camp, he at one time was okay with development projects of all types but now is anti "woke wind".  Lots of people don't like the viewscape and land use aspect of wind and solar farms, and he's hoping to tap into that dislike, but he's such a disagreeable pissant he can't seem to say it that way.  Nor can he explain his prior positions.

The real gem in this is that he almost voted to preclude use of an access road to a power substation that provides power to farmers on the basis that it might receive electrical power from solar farms or wind farms or provide power to data centers.

When the State treasurer noted that this meant, he changed his vote, but had to blame the whole thing on somebody else.

Gordon: Gray Sounds Like 'Jackass In A Tin Barn' For Blaming Data Center Vote On Gov

Gray Changes Mind On Power Station Access After Spat With Curt Meier

Data centers are now big in the news around here, and for good reason.  Gray is opposing them as he figures it's good politics.  Put a gigantic strip mine in over the same area, and he'd be all for it.  It's difficult to tell from one moment to the next if Republican candidates this year are members of the Flat Earth Society or Greenpeace.

Gray is particularly disgusting.  He's consistently rude and nasty.  It's difficult to understand why anyone would vote for him, unless they're really duped.

I wonder how this news works for people like Gray:

Huge 500-MW Solar Project Wants To Build Natural Gas Power Plant Near Glenrock

Some other economic news:

Wyoming’s First Nickel Discovery Heads Into High-Tech, High-Stakes Drilling Phase

August 9, 2026.

Casper Couple Proves You Can Make Award-Winning Wine In Wyoming

August 14, 2026

Oil supply disruptions due to King Donny's war are predicated to last well into 2027 if not through it.

Diesel is up over $5.00/gallon here locally. There's no way on earth prices like that don't cause a rise in the price of everything else.

And, related to that:

Zoinks! Gas Is $6 A Gallon In Muddy Gap — That's 42% Higher Than Wyoming Average

And in another energy story:

Black Hills Energy wants to hike electric rates 32% in northeast Wyoming

Last edition:

Subsidiarity Economics 2026. The Times more or less locally, Part 6. The screwworm edition.

Labels: Animals, Artificial Intelligence, Canada, Disease, Distributism, Donald Trump, Economics, G7, inflation, Petroleum, Screwworms (Cochliomyia hominivorax), Taxes, United States and Israel v. Iran, Wyoming's boom and bust economy

And you wonder why Gen. X and Gen. Y flirt with Socialism? Mad King Donny, the Sun King, and his construction projects.

 $900,000,000.

Trump administration set to spend at least $900 million on White House construction

It'll be 1,000,000,000 when its done.

And you benefit not at all.

CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 149th Edition. Abandoning Ship.

The first significant administration departure.

Karoline Leavitt is leaving her post as White House Press Secretary.

There's going to be a lot of speculation as to why she did this, but let's credit what she said. She's 28 years old, and just had a baby.

Her second.

Her husband is 32 years her senior.

Leavitt is a Catholic, as am I, but she's completely ignored the Catholic injunction against lying.  Lying on serious matters is a serious sin.  Personally, while I can not know her mind, I think she knows she's a liar.

I think she likely knows at this point, at age 28, that she needs to reform and repent.  Her first child was born out of wedlock with her current husband, Nicholas Riccio.  The second was born within the union.  Her affiliation with Trump has locked her into a web of lies for which she'll always be remembered.  Indeed, while this blog entry is somewhat forgiving, most pundits will not be, witness:

Karoline Leavitt Will Soon Lie Somewhere Else

From The New Republic.

I bet she knows that, and that it's time to get out while she can.  Get out, confess, and get clear.  Even at that, the burden she has of repenting from such a public life of outright lying is a heavy one.

I bet she tackles that.  A tell all book will be forthcoming. . . it'll be out before Trump leaves office at the end of this term, if old age doesn't take him to his reward, or lack of one, before that.

Well, may she find a path to peace. She needs it. 

So do her two children.

It won't be easy, overall, we might note.  Lots of people eventually confront their sins and reform, but very few have to confront the public record of it, which in the modern age lasts forever.  Leavitt is, as The New Republic notes, an outrageous liar and that will follower her the rest of her life.

Indeed, if you look at people who had really vile roles serving really vile people, and Leavitt's role has been vile and Donald Trump is a vile person, it's really hard to find anyone who overcomes it.  Albert Speer probably came as close to it as anyone, but even he, as charming as he was, never really did.  Georgy Malenkov, part of Stalin's government, completely fell after Stalin and eventually became a Russian Orthodox Lector, a sort of clerical position in the Eastern Rite churches.

The American things, of course, is to try to convert your infamy into a sort of fame, which is always sort of pathetic.  Monica Lewinsky is the prime example.

Well, as noted, my guess is that Leavitt, while home raising her children, will start working on a tell all book.  By the time its released she's  reveal, I'm guessing, how she never loved Donald Trump.

I also bet that Trump, right now, lives in fear of what that book will reveal.

Mini Mutinies.

Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln have been trying to jump overboard to their deaths.  

At least those are the reports, confirmed in at least one case by the spouse of a sailor who tried to do just that.  "Big T" Pete Hegseth called the reports "fake news", with the Trump administration branding anything that is actually true as fake.

The ship, launched in 1988, has experienced food shortages, moldy showers, broken toilets, dead laundry facilities, and a lack of basics necessities such as soap and toothpaste during its ninth month deployment.

It's interesting in part because such conditions, while appalling, would not have been that much out of the norm in earlier eras.  Sailors just endured it.  But then, they endured a lot of similar conditions in daily life.  People were, in fact, tougher than they are now.

But it's also interesting as it might reveal something else going on.

The lats time the US Navy had really serious shipboard problems of this type was during the late stages of the Vietnam War, when the USS Kitty Hawk and the USS Constellation endured mutinies the Navy has refused to acknowledge as mutinies. These were serious events and they came at a point in time at which US military morale was at its lowest point since the Mexican War, during which time it had such low morale in some quarters that troops had deserted to join the Mexican Army.

The problem had expressed itself first in the Army, with the Army starting to experience everything from quiet disobedience in Vietnam to some outright revolts in the US.  The Kitty Hawk incident occured in 1972 with the Constellation event happening the following year.  Nothing like that has happened since.

The Kitty Hawk had a hard Vietnam War deployment of eight months before it was ordered back into combat and the event began.  That's notable, as the Abraham Lincoln has been out nine months.

Also notable for the 1972 and 1973 events is that everyone had completely lost faith in the Vietnam War by that time, and frankly in the military itself.  Rarely noted during the revision of the history of the war, the Vietnam War had destroyed the American Army as a combat effective force.  The US was lucky that none of our adversaries attempted any sort of additional war at the time. We likely could not have successfully contested one.

Servicemen who served in peacetime Navy before the Second World War were sort of their own breed.  A lot of them were tough careerist for whom the Navy itself was their home.  Set in that era, the movie The Sand Pebbles does a good job of showing what their view was like, and of course it came from a novel by a veteran who had served in that time.  A sort of oddly nostalgic look at the same thing, but set in 1973, is Cinderella Liberty, one of two sort of cynical Navy movies released that year, the other being The Last Detail.

During World War Two sailors, most of whom were wartime volunteers, knew what they were fighting for.  In the Cold War, for the most part, they did too.  Mutinies came when that was no longer clear.

It sure isn't clear now.  American servicemen aren't serving in a just cause and all of the military actions during the Second Trump Administration have been illegal, with one, the boat destruction off of South America, constituting murder of the targets.  The current war shows ever sign of being endless and pointless, and the men know it.

Some honorable commanders have simply resigned.  Enlisted men can't do that.  Serving in an illegal war on a ship that's a craphole, they're serving an administration in which many of them are not the right kind of people, as the administration sees it.  US resources are now really stretched on top of it.  All in all, what's going on board on the USS Abraham Lincoln isn't a good sign.

Toy boats

Part of what's not very honorable is the insane playing along which amounts to marking time until Trump is out of office. The Navy is doing that with the Trump Class of big missile cruisers which King Donny wants built.  Termed "battleships", because Trump knowns nothing about this topic and apparently thinks that battleships are nifty, rather than rendered obsolete decades ago, the CBO estimates that if built they'll cost the country $275B over 30 years.

They won't be built.

They are already costing the country money however.

Like the ballroom, this will keep dragging along until Trump is retired or falls face first in a Big Mac, at which time it'll be terminated.

Monuments to failure

On costs, it's now estimated that all of Trump's D.C. projects will cost nearly 1B.

The country doesn't have this kind of money and we know it.

Had Joe Biden proposed spending 1B on D.C. renovations, Republicans would be howling around the city crying "fiscal responsibility!" and people like Gray, Ranser, and Friess would be warning about the republic being on the verge of ending.  The Wyoming Freedom Caucus would be howling.

Not one Republican is going to say a word about this.

Part of the outrageous nature of the expense is what the administration is planning on.  Building is expensive and tearing down is expensive also.

The Democrats can be planned on to have angst about the expense of tearing things down as its expensive.  They already are.  Additionally, the Democrats remain dedicated to the law, whereas the GOP does not.  The GOP knows that as well and is no doubt planning that the process of tearing crap down will be tied up by worries about the expense and legalities of it.

Well, on this one, the next President should in fact take a page out of Trump's book.  Within an  hour after the inauguration the Corps of Engineers should be ordered to remove whatever has been constructed of the ballroom with in 24 hours, tear down what ever has been built of an arch within the same time frame, and de-guild the bronze statues, even if it means their destruction, with in six hours.  By the end of the 24 hours all the gold or gold appearing nicknacks in the White House ought to be removed to the bunker and the entire thing filled with cement. The reflecting pool should be drained and the Rhino Lining torn up.

Contracts with anyone who contributed to these atrocities should be cancelled and the entities barred from future government contracts.  

Radical reconstruction.

Replacement?

People are already wondering who will replace Leavitt as Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda.  Fortunately, Wyoming offers the perfect solution.

By Tony Webster - Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=169386648

Chuck Gray.

Chuck loves Donald Trump more than Karline Leavitt ever did.  Chuck would never leave.  And he already as experience as a spoken media figure, having had a radio show on his daddy's radio station, and he is a really experienced liar.

Leavitt said some really outrageous stuff while she was spokesman, but they don't hold a candle to the sting of accusations that Chuck retouinely hurls out. Why he'd be calling people communists, Marxist, fascist, abiogenist,dogmatist,lutist, prologistableist, dramatist, in no time.

His only disadvantage would be that he's not a woman.  Most of the recent ones have been.  On the other hand, he's not married and he can't get pregnant (shoot, he's never even seen with women, or men, or mammals) so he won't be going anywhere.

And this gets him out of having to pretend that he's a Wyomingite nad having to buy all that Westerware.

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CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist 148th Edition. The Aerodrome: Substitute. The C-32A and Donald Trump.