By Bob Gaydos

Hades … too much to pray for?

     Had breakfast with a friend the other day, trying out a new coffee shop in town. Nice addition.

      The conversation touched on the usual stuff. Too much rain. What’s planted in the garden, the hummingbird count, the challenges in living in a house with another person. Living on a planet with certain other people.

      That last proved provocative. With regard to those certain other people, my friend offered that, if he were a praying man, he would pray for The Rapture.

      I got his intent, but I suggested that I thought he had it backwards. Having read “Left Behind,“ I knew it was the good, caring, kind, faithful humans who were transported off the planet to Heaven, I believe, leaving their clothing and loved ones behind.

      The others, the nasty ones, the ones my friend wanted to be rid of, stayed and, through a series of books, fended for and against themselves and other non-believers. So I suggested that, assuming we wanted to remain in whatever state this is for a while longer, what we needed was a Reverse Rapture.

   We needed someplace we could pray for all those You Know Whats to be sent to, without any get-out-of-jail card in the form of an Orpheus, if I may be allowed to mix my miracles.

     Hades. Yes, Hades. The Underworld would do.

     So, who would we want to go? Personally, I’d start with Trump and his immediate family. The whole crew. Every member of his Cabinet and White House staff. Every lawyer who ever worked for him, except for Michael Cohen. Elon Musk. Every current Republican member of Congress, except for Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. The authors of Project 2025. Anyone who wears a Maga T-shirt or hat. Anyone who identifies as a journalist but works and lies for Fox News. Putin. Kim. Hamas and all the other terrorists. The pushers of fentanyl. Lara Loomer. (Speaking of Loomer and Kristi Noem and the Barbi press contact and the attorney general and all the other Trumpettes, Hades will come with no cosmetic amenities, including plastic surgeons. Zero. Just saying.)

    Also, all those mask-wearing ICE employees who’ve been enjoying grabbing people off the street, out of their homes, wherever, with no warrants or concern for the people or the law. And Clarence Thomas, to fulfill Hades’ DEI requirements.

     And, really, anyone who voted for Trump three times. What were they thinking? They get a special wing in Hades where The Apprentice plays on big screens constantly. In Spanish. And they have to use their bitcoin to buy English subtitles, but they already gave it all to Trump, who gave it all to the Saudi royal family (they’re there, too), who promised to build a Hades Trump Tower using white South African immigrants for labor. It could take a while, but who really cares?

     Now, all that cosmic deportation would obviously leave behind a whole lot of room, especially in this big, beautiful country, and a lot of available work for good, caring, reliable, nice, talented, decent, tolerant human beings, maybe from Venezuela or Mexico or Greenland or Panama or El Salvador.

      Too much to ask for, you say? Especially over breakfast? Hell, if you’re going to pray for anything, especially a Reverse Rapture, I say why not go all in?

       Besides, checks and balances seems to be broken.

                                     ***

Additions to the prayer chain are welcome.

By Bob Gaydos

“I don’t know.“

No, that wasn’t a multiple choice question that Donald Trump had just been asked by an ABC News reporter. He was asked if he thought it was his duty as president to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America.

Pretty simple and straightforward, most Americans would think. Instead of giving us choice A (yes) or B (no), Trump gave us C (I don’t know).

He expanded: “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are obviously going to follow what the Supreme Court said.”

Despite his sworn oath, it has become Trump’s standard answer to questions about following the law upholding the Constitution. Blame it on his lawyers. The only ones left who are going to represent him in court. They know the answer. They’re just not saying. Not if they want to keep their jobs. A Justice Department lawyer who goes into court and admits there is no constitutional basis for the argument he or she is making is volunteering for a pink slip.

But then, one can say they should’ve known better when they took the job to represent Trump in the first place. It’s not as if there’s no track record to check.

But honestly, “I don’t know” seems to be the mantra for Trump with regard to just about anything that comes up. He just doesn’t always say it out loud.

Like, I shouldn’t be so friendly with a Saudi prince who had a journalist who worked for an American newspaper killed and dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey because he didn’t like what the reporter wrote. Who knew? Or, I shouldn’t speak highly of an “attractive” Syrian president who once delighted in killing American soldiers in Iraq as part of Al Qaeda. Or, I shouldn’t take $400 million gift airplanes from a Mideastern country that supports terrorists. Or, actually, I shouldn’t take gifts from anyone. Emoluments, y’know? Beautiful word.

Stuff like that. Someone should tell him if he really doesn’t know because it’s infuriating and, frankly, embarrassing to have someone holding the office of president to be so, umm, ill-informed.

On the other hand, there’s such a thing as knowing too much. Or rather, thinking you do.

Take the case of Bobby Junior, better known as RFK Jr., who is now in charge of the health needs, issues and concerns of every American, allegedly.

Kennedy clatters around the Health Department like a know-it-all who once had a worm in his brain. Like a guy who might pick up a dead bear cub off the road, stick it in his car trunk, drive to Central Park and dump it on a walking path. For kicks. That kind of health savant.

Kennedy “knows” that vaccines cause autism and has chosen to ignore the research that dismissed that theory. He wants a new study to figure out why there are so many new cases, aside from the fact that we know so much more about identifying the behavioral disorder today. Gotta be vaccines.

He also “knows” that vaccines do not protect against measles, even though the MMR vaccine has done an excellent job of that for decades. So he’s cut off a lot of congressionally approved spending for vaccines and is promoting  more “natural” protections. Meanwhile, measles cases are multiplying nationwide because some people are following his advice not to use the vaccine. Because he “knows,” right?

Oh, and the man who  took his grandchildren for a Mother’s Day dip in a D.C. watering hole condemned because of the presence of a whole lot of bacteria, including E. coli, now wants to eliminate fluoride in water supplies so that kids and adults can once again get lots of cavities.

I have a local rooting interest in this one. The study that established fluoride as a safe cavity preventive when used in tiny amounts was conducted in 1945 in Newburgh and Kingston, two Hudson River cities in New York. My stomping grounds.

Newburgh got the fluoride. Kids got fewer cavities and their parents got lower dental bills. Kingston was the control group. No fluoride. Kids there got the usual amount of cavities. Since that groundbreaking study 80 years ago, thousands of communities around the country, including New York City, have added EPA-prescribed small doses of fluoride to their water supply to help residents avoid dental problems. It’s worked.

But Kennedy, also a one-time Hudson River denizen, is a longtime opponent of fluoride. He says it is a dangerous chemical with potentially harmful effects (which no one denies, but in much higher doses) and shouldn’t be added to drinking water.

How does he know? Well, he doesn’t, really, but he’s ordered the CDC to stop recommending fluoride as a dental decay preventive and to conduct new studies on the subject. Because, what does science know?

By the way, Utah was the first state to follow Junior’s advice and ban fluoride in its drinking water, under a decree by Gov. Spencer Cox, who happens to be a Mormon. Cause and effect has not yet been determined.

By Bob Gaydos

History.

Synchronicity thy name is Robert Francis Prevost, native son of Chicago. Bob to his friends. Otherwise known as Pope Leo XIV, Bishop of Rome, leader of the Roman Catholic Church, the first U.S.-born citizen to hold that position.

A missionary and longtime advocate for migrants and “ordinary people,” his elevation to the Holy See comes at a time when an American president has waged war on migrants, created unnecessary pain for ordinary people and mused about being pope, even posting an image of himself on a throne in such a role only days after the death of Pope Francis and bragging that he not only “runs America,” but runs the world.

But an American pope now has a voice and a pulpit to challenge that of Donald Trump and an audience that is arguably farther reaching. Pope Leo, 69, also is fluent in five languages. Trump, 78, struggles through English. Trump sells Bibles. Pope Leo quotes from them. Furthermore, in a contest of character, the pontiff is the clear favorite.

And he’s black. Or not purely Caucasian. The pope’s mother was the daughter of a mixed-race landowner, Joseph Martinez, born in Haiti, and Louise Baquiet (also Baquiex) a mixed-race Black Creole from New Orleans. The couple were listed as Black in census records from 1900, a family historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection, shared on Facebook and with CNN.

There are no coincidences. The powers that guide such things clearly knew what they were doing when Bob, from Chicago by way of Peru, was elevated to pope quickly on the second ballot of the College of Cardinals. No time to waste. A speedy, much-needed puff of white smoke in a time of gathering darkness.

MAGA hates him already. They call him “woke.”

The president’s muse, Laura Loomer, the far-right loony who persuaded Trump to fire some of his aides for not being loyal enough, said on X of Pope Leo, “He is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open Borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.”

Well, hallelujah and amen.

By Bob Gaydos

Trump as pope. SeriouslyPart of my morning routine, after tea and a friendly word game to get the brain cells active, is to scroll through my Facebook feed to get a handle on the news of the day.

Yeah, I check The Times, AP, etc. but for in-your-face-they-must-be-kidding stuff, Facebook gets it to me quicker and without the cautious prose of today’s major media. If You Know Who did something dumb, illegal or outright insane, I’ll know in a couple of minutes and from trusted sources.

Saturday was no exception. The hands down winner of the  “They-must-be-kidding, but-I-know-they’re-not” Award goes to the social media posting from the White House no less of Trump sitting on a throne dressed as the pope, crown and all. Seriously.

Disgusting. Crude. Callous. Ignorant. Egotistical. Obscene. Incredibly stupid. One hundred percent Trump. On the day Pope Francis was being laid to rest. After Trump having previously fallen asleep at the funeral service. An insult to every Catholic on the planet and a message to all Americans. Trump wants to be pope. Seriously.

The rest of the feed included what had to be the most obsequious cabinet meeting in history, as each member of the Trump team, seated around him with their red Maga hats on the table facing him, competed with each other to offer the most ingratiating, devoid of facts compliments to their leader, who was sitting self-satisfied in the middle. Pam Bondi and Marco Rubio duked it out for the coveted comfy knee cushion award. No one, apparently, was embarrassed, except for millions of Americans who saw this cult video and at first mistook it for a Monty Python movie.

There was also a post about, of course, Pete Hegseth installing a dressing room next to his office in the Pentagon, presumably so his eyeliner could be on straight when he has unprotected group chats on his phone with family and friends about U.S. military attacks in the Middle East. No Republican in Congress expressed any displeasure with the defense secretary spending taxpayer dollars in this manner. Because of course.

Then there was an item about RFK Junior, secretary of health, asking the Centers for Disease Control to look for some alternative treatments for measles because Kennedy believes the vaccine that has prevented the disease for  decades contains “aborted fetus debris” as well as “DNA particles” and doesn’t work. This, as the measles outbreak in the country reaches 900 cases as he bad mouths the vaccine. And, the man who says he once had a dead worm in his brain, also still insists that vaccines are causing autism and wants to conduct new testing on this theory even though it has been done and disproven.

Finally, one unrelated item on my feed informed me that May is mental health month.

Sign me up.

By Bob Gaydos

Trump snoozing at the pope’s funeral.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Someone once told us that. Either a Chinese or Japanese philosopher, playwright Henrik Ibsen or some advertising mogul named Fred Barnard back in 1921. Barnard credited the Japanese. I’m going with Confucius. Whoever was first, they all knew what they were talking about.

Of all the words written about Donald Trump’s appearance at the funeral of Pope Francis — how he tastelessly wore a shiny blue suit and blue tie to stand out in the field of black mourners, ignoring the dress protocol issued by the Vatican, how he staged a photo op with Ukrainian president  Volodymyr Zelinsky, surely pretending to broker a peace plan in Ukraine — none was more informative and symbolic of the Trump presidency than the image of him sitting there in the front row, next to an impeccably dressed Melania, sound asleep

At the funeral. Of the pope.

Make America embarrassed again.

Of course, if you depended on major newspapers in this country to inform you about that little bit of clumsy protocol, you’d be out of luck. No pictures. Not even words. No nothing.

But someone had the pictures because they were all over social media and YouTube and there he was, “Dozing Donald,” snoozing in the front row at the pope’s funeral. Of course, even here the bets were hedged. With the steady media normalizing of his erratic behavior, Trump only “seemed“ to be sleeping. That’s what everyone seemed to say. Well, it seemed to me that there was no doubt the dotard was dozing.

Just look at the photos. There he is front and center, all in shiny blue, chin dropped to his chest, eyes comfortably closed, mouth dropped wide open. Been there, done that. That’s the picture of a man deep in sleep, not in thoughts about the death of a beloved spiritual leader. In fact, not even able to fake it

But the New York Times, while taking pains to point out Donald’s attire and Melania’s, didn’t bother with a Sleepy Don. Too normal apparently. Nothing strange about that. That’s Trump.

Yet I seem to remember not so long ago when the public behavior of a president was all over the front pages of the daily newspapers in this country. Joe Biden, the president who rescued America from the depths of insanity and economic chaos of the Trump presidency, the man who served honorably as vice president of this country before that and decades as a United States Senator before that — that Joe Biden — the one with a stutter, wound up being called Sleepy Joe thanks to much of the press following the lead of Trump.

Biden was pressured not to run for reelection. Too old. Can’t handle it. That Joe Biden had the grace to step aside and let someone else run against Trump, who thought he could win the election if Elon Musk could steal enough votes from Democrats in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, which he could. That Joe Biden managed to stay awake through the entire funeral of Pope Francis because he has empathy and compassion and respect for other people’s feelings. Trump does not. But we all know that, right? So it’s no big deal, right?

Wrong.

You know, looking at the photo of Dozing Donald, I wondered what was going through Melania’s mind. As far as I know, she never once threw an elbow into his ribs, as the wife in any normal marriage might, and whisper, “Wake up, stupid!” Maybe she thought that with all the cameras around it might draw attention to him. Or maybe, she just really didn’t care at this point. The second seems more likely to me.

Heck, most of the major media didn’t seem to care. That’s Trump, they say. He’s 78 years old. He’s weird. He rambles on and on nonsensically because he doesn’t understand questions. He lies compulsively. He’s a convicted felon and apparently a racist. He almost crashed the stock market and blames Ukraine for Russia invading it. He’s forbidden to be associated with any charitable organization in New York State and ran a phony college. A judge said that what Trump did to a woman in the dressing room of a fancy Manhattan clothing store amounted to rape. He incited an attack on the United States Capitol and encouraged the hanging of his vice president. He was handed the most powerful military and most vibrant economy on the planet when he took office in January and has proceeded to make a mess of both. He insists that windmills kill whales and thinks Hannibal Lecter is a real person.

So he fell asleep at the funeral of the pope. That’s Trump. Who cares?

I care, dammit, that’s who.

Words, words, words.

By Bob Gaydos
Way back when Donald Trump first descended into the political arena, I wrote a column that I headlined “A Vocabulary for the Trump Era.” It featured a bunch of words that had not been a regular part of Americans’ daily conversations. Words such as: emoluments, quisling, sycophant, misogynist, oligarchy. Common fodder these days.

Well, it seems Trump continues to have an impact on our vocabulary. The question is whether it’s now a positive one or not. The other day, as the TV wandered through YouTube, it stopped on a channel featuring an obviously angry young woman launching into a discussion of something Trump had recently done. I forget what.

Her intro was masterfully focused and seemed to go on forever. I was impressed with both her energy and her comprehensive use of adjectives to describe Trump.

The following was inspired by the introduction, using as many of her words I can remember and, in the spirit of improving vocabulary, expanding on it.

***

“Here’s what that lying, groping, grifting, greedy, dumb, fat, weak, narcissistic, phony, racist, lazy, cheating, callous, uncouth, grandiose, selfish, perverted, arrogant, evil, disloyal, cruel, crude, manipulative, malicious, bigoted, corrupt, disgusting, foolish, filthy, gross, hateful, horrible, ignorant, jealous, lecherous, malicious, negligent, obtuse, abhorrent, incompetent, opportunistic, petty, pathetic, rapist, reckless, ridiculous, rotten, sleazy, slimy, terrible, ugly, quarrelsome, querulous, quaggy, embarrassing, angry, juvenile, spoiled, scared, shameless, traitorous, toxic, useless, unfit, uncaring, unstable, quick-tempered, vengeful, immature, immoral, ridiculous, boastful, vain, vapid, wicked, wasteful, xenophobic, yucky, felonious zero did yesterday.”

I could not find one adjective that did not apply. If you’d like to add to the list, feel free to do so, but keep it clean so I don’t get banned from some social media site.

One word stumped me.

Quaggy: Soft, boggy, or spongy; lacking firmness or stability. For example, “The quaggy ground made it difficult to walk steadily.”

It’s always good to improve your vocabulary.

Pope Francis

By Bob Gaydos

  While millions of Americans marched to protest Trump policies on Saturday, millions more paused and prayed around the world on Easter Sunday, gathering with family and, perhaps, pondering the meaning of life.

   The weekend over, Monday brought some sad news and “Can you believe it?” news featuring familiar names.

    — Pope Francis died Monday of a cerebral stroke. The 88-year-old pontiff had recently been released from a hospital and had just avoided a meeting with J.D. Vance, the putative vice president, who apparently wanted to try to convince the pope on Easter weekend that the way America was treating immigrants was, well, what Jesus would do.

      Francis wasn’t buying it. An Argentinian, who in his 12 years as pope spoke out relentlessly in support of migrants and marginalized people, he altered the focus of the Catholic Church, not to the liking of many conservative Catholics, including bishops and cardinals. How that will affect the selection of a new pope is uncertain. There is no doubt, however, that his voice of courage, compassion and humility will not be easy to replace. And no, that’s not something that can be said about all popes. Francis asked that his tomb be inscribed simply with: “Franciscus.”

     — Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, taking a break from posing as an ICE agent, took her family out for Easter dinner at a restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C. While she and her family were eating dinner, a thief stole her purse, which contained Noem’s driver’s license, medication, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, makeup bag, blank checks, and about $3,000 in cash.

    The Secret Service, which provides security for Noem, reviewed security camera footage at the Capital Burger restaurant and saw an unknown white male wearing a medical mask steal her bag. The key words here are “National Security Director” and “Secret Service.” Don’t you feel more secure? Noem said the cash was to pay for dinner and Easter gifts. Really? A burger restaurant? Easter dinner? Nobody’s watching her purse? You’re not in South Dakota anymore, Madam Secretary.

    — Pete Hegseth (yup, him again), was reported to have shared details of that surprise March 15 military strike against Houthis in Yemen on a second group chat on Signal, a group including his wife, brother and personal lawyer. The details were reportedly the same as those contained in another group chat on the same day over the same unsecure site. This group, unlike the first group, which was created by the White House security advisor and mistakenly included the editor of the Atlantic magazine, was created by Hegseth himself. In addition to his wife, it included about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary and was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” according to a report in The New York Times.

     The Defense Secretary reportedly used his private phone to set up the chat. No, his wife, a former producer for Fox News who has also accompanied Hegseth in meetings with foreign officials, does not work for the Defense Department. His brother and lawyer do, but not in jobs that require them to know about surprise attacks against Houthis in Yemen.

   Trump, of course, immediately attacked the source of the information. Not denying it, or expressing concern about a possible security leak that could jeopardize a military operation, just railing about leaks. However, there were some reports that Trump was wearying of mistakes by his fun-loving Defense Secretary. And Trump is well-known to be only too happy to tell those who cause him embarrassment or require him to do his actual job, “You’re fired.“ Hegseth’s career may soon be where he apparently likes it — on the rocks.

rjgaydos@gmail.com

By Bob Gaydos

Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary, posing as an ICE agent.

  Item: Sept. 9, 2016. “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Applause. Laughter.) Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.” — Statement by Hillary Clinton, Democratic Party candidate for president. Thought by many to have cost Clinton the presidency.

  Item: March 27, 2025. Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, wearing long hair extensions and a $50,000 watch, delivers a video declaring how tough the U.S. will be on immigrants while standing in front of imprisoned immigrants rounded up and shipped to a hellhole prison in El Salvador without any charges being placed against them or any due process offered as required under the law. She says they should “stay there forever.”

   Item: April 7, 2025. Wearing full combat gear and carelessly pointing a rifle at the head of an ICE agent standing next to her, Noem declares she’s joining an immigrant roundup in Arizona. Boem is not an ICE agent, she is a government bureaucrat. When she was governor of South Dakota she shot and killed her dog just because.

    Item: Attorney General Pam Bondi fires a Justice Department lawyer because he couldn’t provide a federal judge some legal justification for the U.S. mistakenly deporting an El Salvadoran immigrant legally here to a hellhole prison in El Salvador or evidence of steps being taken to return the man to the U.S., as ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court. This, even though she admits the man’s deportation was a “bureaucratic  error” and no one in the Justice Department has yet to provide any proof of attempts made to return the man that a Justice Department lawyer could actually present in court in response to the judge’s order.

    Item: Bondi accuses another federal judge, presiding over the case challenging whether any of the several hundred Venezuelan immigrants sent to that prison in El Salvador received due process (you know, proof of crimes, etc.), of “meddling in our government” because the judge asked for proof.

     Item: Too many to list. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt merely lies or makes stuff up at every press briefing in defense of her boss. Leavitt, 27, is married to Nicholas Riccio, a 59-year-old multi-millionaire real estate developer who helped finance her unsuccessful campaign for Congress in New Hampshire in 2022. They have a nine-month-old son. Riccio also is a contributor to the Project 2025 manual for expanding presidential power. Leavitt still has not paid back more than a quarter million dollars in campaign contributions that were ruled to have exceeded legal limits. She is alleged to have altered every filing with the Federal Elections Commission. 

     Item: Laura Loomer, right-wing conspiracy theorist, has a 30-minute meeting with Trump in the Oval Office in which she bad mouths six officials of the National Security Council, by name, accusing them of being disloyal to Trump. Trump fires all six after the meeting. Trump later says the meeting had nothing to do with the firings and calls Loomer a “great patriot.”

       … So, I’ve often said that when one writes editorials or columns on various issues, a primary function is to help readers connect the dots. Anybody want to help me connect these?

                                    ***

PS: I deny ever saying anything about bad nose jobs.

By Bob Gaydos

Trump announcers tariffs.

    I’ve been listening to and reading all sorts of analyses of the Trump tariffs for three days now and it’s pretty clear that anyone with any sense of how economics works thinks they’re the dumbest thing since way back the last time this country had a Depression. The numbers make no sense.

    They’re going to hurt a lot of ordinary people and some say that’s the point.

     They’re probably going to make some really rich people richer and some say that’s the point.

      They’re certainly a way for Trump to try to extort concessions from weaker nations to make himself richer and some say that’s the point.

      Some also say that they will severely weaken America to the benefit of Russia, which has miraculously escaped being on the tariffs list, and some (not nearly enough if you ask me) say that is the primary point and, ever since Trump slumped out of that private meeting with a grinning Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, I agree with this assessment. Trump’s in Putin’s pocket.

     But whatever motivation the experts have attributed to the Trump tariffs, they all seem to be surprised by one thing — the reaction of other nations.

      Airwaves and the Internet have been full of commentary expressing surprise that European nations haven’t just rolled over. The European Union, after strongly criticizing the tariffs, immediately began working on countermeasures, “should negotiations not work.” France and Germany especially encouraged a strong response.

   Across the other ocean, China, Japan and South Korea formed a trade alliance to counter Trump. It takes some doing to get those three together, but Trump managed. China also slapped a 34 percent tariffs on all U.S. imports, matching Trump’s latest tariffs on Chinese imports.

      Maybe it’s just me, and I know America’s been strutting around like the big gun in town for some time, but this isn’t Europe’s first rodeo, people. Remember Ancient Greece and Rome? France, Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, heck Denmark, which told Trump to keep the hell out of Greenland, have all been around a lot longer than the good old USA. They’ve been through a lot of stuff and figured it out. Centuries of history is on their side.

    Which, of course, goes in spades for China and Japan. If those two ancient enemies can figure out a way to work together with the collective centuries of wisdom of the Far East, Trump, the shlump from Queens, hasn’t got a chance, whatever the point.

By Bob Gaydos

Elise Stefanik … pondering her future

  Poor Elise Stefanik. She just got Trumpified out of the dream job of her young lifetime, the crowning glory if you will of all that scraping, bowing, butt-kissing, lying, conniving, scheming and surrendering of personal dignity required to become the Orange One’s nominee as Ambassador to the United Nations, and no one noticed because the rest of the Trump cabinet shared classified war plans on a private chat line that they are forbidden to use for such purposes and somehow managed to include a bonafide — as in ethical and trained — journalist on the chat, which has the Trump team all in distract, lie and point fingers mode because many average Americans can understand a breach of national security even when their Social Security office is closed and a lot of people want Trump to fire Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth even though Trump said he was told no classified information was included in the unsecure chat of the bombing of Yemen’s Houthis, which, it being a warlike act, one might expect the chief executive to be in on the action, and the group was caught with their collective pants down when the journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic magazine, followed up his original story on being mysteriously included on the chat by publishing the entire thread since Trump said it wasn’t classified, although having the sense to redact the name of an undercover CIA agent that Tulsi Gabbard, director of intelligence, happened to drop into the chat, although she couldn’t remember much of anything when members of Congress asked her about it, which was reminiscent of Trump’s response when he couldn’t remember signing an order citing an old wartime act to justify shipping a couple of hundred migrants, who may or may not be members of a Venezuelan gang, to a brutal prison in El Salvador, despite the order of a federal judge not to do so, said judge now serendipitously being the one also assigned to a case in which a private watchdog group, American Oversight, is accusing the Trump Administration of breaking the law, because all intergovernmental communications are required to be preserved, while the beauty of the Signal chat app the war group used is that it eventually deletes all conversations, making it hard to be held accountable, which is why, of course, the aforesaid judge has ordered all members of the chat to preserve everything on their phones and as he is already ticked at being given the runaround by Trump’s lawyers on the deportation matter, was in no mood for any more nonsense on a serious national security issue, which is why hardly anybody knows that poor Elise Stefanik of upstate New York, who did a victory tour of the Adirondacks and fired most of her congressional staff to become part of Trump’s cabinet, is now being told to be patient, go back to Congress even though you’ve lost your leadership position, be a good soldier  and run again for Congress in two years, because we are afraid that we can lose your seat, even though you and Trump carried the district easily, if somebody new runs for the Republican Party, and we only have a couple of seats to spare to control the House of Representatives and heck, you understand it’s all politics, and if we lose control in two years, we can’t do any of the neat crap we’ve been doing — firing people, threatening Greenland — and then you’ll probably never get to be UN ambassador anyway, so please and thank you, Elise.

                    ***

PS: You think it’s easy covering these people?