By Bob Gaydos

Trump’s TruthSocial post

Boy, you take a couple days off from the news to do some weeding and cleaning up and it’s almost impossible to know where to start catching up on the craziness.

I guess the logical place to start is with my reading about Trump posting on his official social media page that Joe Biden was actually killed in 2020 and it’s been a robot parading around impersonating him ever since.

I had to go back and read that a couple of times just to be sure. Hard to top this one. Trump even repeated the revelation verbally to other real people later on. I guess the robot must have malfunctioned in that debate with Trump.

Qanon, where the story originated a few years back, must be thrilled, but I am at a loss for words.

I mean, you might as well have told me that the other stable genius and apparent no longer co-president Elon Musk was hooked on drugs and that he ran his whole DOGE scam while in a Ketamine cloud.

No way? Really? The guy who wants to single-handedly repopulate the Earth with as many willing partners as possible? The guy who recruited Steven Miller’s wife away from the White House to be his, umm assistant? The guy who bumped the Treasury Secretary in the hallway of the White House (not that he didn’t deserve it) and showed up for work the next day with a black left eye? That guy?

So Trump actually fired him because he found out Musk had no idea how government works and wasn’t actually saving any money in the budget? Oh, and the drugs story in the New York Times.

Well heck, turns out attention to detail hasn’t actually been a major requirement in this Oval Office. I also learned that Tulsi Gabbard, Director of Intelligence, is contemplating providing Fox News style daily briefings in the Oval Office instead of the normal written reports that every other president has always received. Apparently Trump “doesn’t read.” He’s actually only made 14 daily briefings since he took office. He’s golfed more than that. Shocking.

It’s probably safe to say that those daily reports did  not include mention of Sen.  Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, telling a constituent at a Town Hall meeting not to worry about someone dying because their Medicaid had been cut off because, “We are all going to die.” Touching.

The report also probably wouldn’t mention that Bobby Kennedy Junior over at the Health Department issued a report labeled Make America Healthy Again (MAHA, got it? ) that was written entirely by AI because all the researchers and scientists in the department have been fired. Also, it was totally false.

It seems actual scientists and doctors read the report and said none of the studies and reports, etc., listed in MAHA existed. Phony, like Bobby. C’mon, really?

The last surprise was a big one. Ukraine managed to pull off a massive drone attack inside Russia and destroy or disable about 40 strategic bombers as they sat at airfields. One-third of the Russian bomber fleet. No injuries for Ukraine. Huge. A plan a year in the making.

The big surprise? U.S. intelligence agencies knew nothing about it. That’s the kind of thing that’s not supposed to surprise them. Trump‘s response was that it wasn’t fair for Ukraine to attack those planes because they were “just sitting there not bothering anyone.” He said it would have been different if they were attacking someone in combat. “It’s like hitting someone who’s already down,” he said.

Keen sense of warfare there. Also, a strong suggestion of where his sympathies lie. Zelensky had this ace in the hole the whole time, including in his White House visit. Ukraine didn’t trust the U.S. with this big secret. Now the world knows.

It was just a couple of days off. This can’t survive.

By Bob Gaydos

    You know how sometimes there are things that happen, things people do, situations that occur that just stick in your craw?  Not just annoy or disturb or irritate, but really just stick there and bug the hell out of you? Well, I’ve got three of those right now. Didn’t realize it until I checked my notes looking for something to write about.

    — The top craw-sticker, not surprisingly, comes from Donald Trump.I’ve been trying to cough him up for eight years now. It has to do with his crudeness. The man is devoid of decency. He’s also a bully.

    The most recent examples of this are his insulting, illegal campaign photo op at Arlington National Cemetery and his public comments about his surprise opponent for the presidency, Kamala Harris.

      As has been well- documented, Trump’s staff not only bullied a female employee of the cemetery who tried to tell them that the national shrine to members of the armed forces was off-limits to political campaigning, Trump actually posed, smiling, next to graves with his stupid thumbs-up sign.

      Then he insulted the Army for calling him out and said the woman had mental problems. Then he said everyone lied about the whole thing, despite the photos. And he added insult to insult by blaming Joe Biden for the deaths being commemorated on that day, even though Trump created the conditions for their deaths when he was commander-in-chief.

    The other Trump craw sticker is his resort to personal insult, name-calling and just plain nastiness with regard to his opponent because he is too damn stupid to discuss any legitimate issue that might concern voters. 

     From The New York Times (surprisingly): “In a little over five weeks, in speeches, social media posts and interviews, Mr. Trump has called Ms. Harris a ‘wack job’; a ‘communist’; ‘dumb as a rock’; ‘real garbage’; ‘a bum’; and, employing a phrase he applies almost exclusively to women, ‘nasty.’ In early August, he reposted an image depicting Ms. Harris as a dung beetle with her face covered in what appears to be blackface while astride a coconut. And he has made or amplified innuendo-laden references to his opponent’s long-ago relationship with the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, suggesting she traded sexual favors to accelerate her political career.”

   The real craw sticker, of course, is not Trump. He can be spit out like all those phony schoolyard bullies. Full of fear and never read a book. No, the real problem is that so many Americans accept this kind of behavior as appropriate, not just for anyone, but to someone they want to see in the Oval Office. We are a nation crawling with dumb, racist bullies. I’m never going to get rid of this one.

    — This relatively new craw-stick comes courtesy of the Boeing Corporation and NASA. The space agency, when it put the extraterrestrial travel responsibility out to bid, chose Boeing as one of the contractors. Boeing, of course, has had a morbid history of just regular jet planes crashing and killing hundreds of people on Earth. It still has doors falling off planes in flight. 

     Yet NASA OK’d a Boeing Starliner to take two astronauts to the International Space Station, even after delays on the ground because of helium leaks. Well, they eventually got there. But NASA says it doesn’t trust Boeing to get the astronauts back to Earth on the Starliner because of, yes, leaks. And thruster problems.

   Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore were supposed to spend eight days in space, but have been there three months now. Apparently, there’s plenty of work to do. But Williams is a cause for concern. In space, red blood cells are destroyed faster than on Earth. Hers are apparently being destroyed at a troubling rate. But not to worry, NASA says. (See above: Boeing leaks.)

   The astronauts are now scheduled to return to Earth in February, 2025, aboard Elon Musk’s Space X spacecraft. Two astronauts got bumped from that mission to make room for the stranded astronauts.

    Meanwhile, the Boeing Starliner capsule is scheduled to return, empty, on September 6. Fingers crossed at NASA on the landing.

      No word on when Boeing figures out its flying problems or what NASA has in mind for the company’s future space missions. Hello, Congress?

      — And finally, for lowdown abuse of trust and profiting off people in dire need of help, there’s this: Matthew Perry’s personal assistant, two doctors and two others, including a woman known as “the Ketamine queen” of North Hollywood, were indicted last month and charged with providing the ketamine that caused the death of the star of the popular television show, “Friends.” 

Personal assistant. Two damn doctors! Tens of thousands of dollars of overpriced ketamine for Perry, who had a long history with substance abuse and addiction. 

  Perry, who was 54, was discovered floating face down in a hot tub at his home in Los Angeles last October. The Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office said he died of “acute effects of ketamine.”

  Ketamine is an anesthetic used to induce and maintain anesthesia and is also used as a treatment for depression and to manage pain. Lots of reasons for people prone to addiction to want it and to abuse it. Perry’s assistant knew, the doctors knew and the others knew, too.

   The case against them is apparently so strong that the assistant (who injected the fatal dose) and a drug dealer who helped him procure the drug have already pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute ketamine and one count of distribution of ketamine resulting in death. One of the doctors has reportedly also agreed to plead guilty to distribution of ketamine resulting in death and to surrender his medical license. He faces up to 10 years in prison.

  The other two have pleaded not guilty. Jasveen Sangha, who prosecutors said was known as “the Ketamine Queen,” and Dr. Salvador Plasencia, known as “Dr. P.” both saw Perry as a payday. She hobnobbed for years with Hollywood types who apparently knew her well. Plasencia sent a text to the other doctor saying, “Let’s see how much this moron will pay.”

      If there’s a Hell, I hope it has a special place for these people.

            *****

    There, glad I got that off my chest if not out of my craw.