Was Valley Forge Necessary? Wednesday, May 3 2017 

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the Revolutionary War. A lot of good people got killed in it. I don’t know if anybody remembers Nathan Hale, but he was a real American patriot who got hanged in it. Sad.

Was it really necessary? I mean, it seems to me that something could have been worked out with the British about the tax on tea. All that good Lipton’s dumped into New Hampshire Harbor.

I think it was New Hampshire. Maybe Boston, but I carried New Hampshire big time and I know if they had any say in it, there wouldn’t have had to be a midnight raid by Paul what’s-his- name or good American boys freezing their asses off at Valley Forge. So unnecessary. Really horrible.

Sound bite to remember

The good thing about not knowing history is you can’t make the mistake of forgetting it.

– VG

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich (7) Wednesday, Mar 22 2017 

Headline, March 21, 2017:

IVANKA TRUMP TO GET TOP SECURITY CLEARANCE WITH OFFICE

The President’s son-in-law is empowered as a top-level White House adviser. Now his daughter, with national security clearance, is also in the executive inner circle. It’s official. The United States is now an oligarchical banana republic, and it’s fair to call his congressional lapdogs, in terms of both spine and political ideology, Banana Republicans.

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich (4) Thursday, Mar 2 2017 

About Van Jones’ fawning praise of Tuesday night’s congressional speech:
Good career move. He’ll now be invited to lunch at the White House, lock in his
contract at CNN, and join Ben Carson and Don King as one of the Madman of
Mar-a-Lago’s favorite members of “those people.”

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich Friday, Feb 17 2017 

I have just finished reading Volker Ullrich’s recent biography of Hitler and came away with the impression that any comparison between the Fuehrer and Donald Trump is faulty because:

1. Though Hitler, like Trump, was a megalomaniacal narcissist, he sought adoration and acclaim in order to gain power, whereas Trump sought power in order to gain adoration and acclaim.

2. In his speeches before the Reichstag, Hitler did not constantly refer to the size of his election victory and Nuremberg rally crowds.

3. Asked about the rise in anti-Semitism throughout the country, Hitler did not reply that his son-in-law was Jewish and some of his best friends were Jews.

Sound bite to remember

“I don’t carry a pistol. It would slow me down if I wanted to run.”

— Louisiana Governor Earl K. Long (circa 1957)

Report From Trump’s Alt-Reich (2) Saturday, Feb 4 2017 

Trump’s now claiming to be in the mold of the great populist Andrew Jackson. Really? If Jackson was Old Hickory, Trump must be Old Hackery.

Twittering Abe Lincoln Friday, Jan 20 2017 

Selected tweets from our 16th President (1860-64)

November 1860:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Election won, BIGTIME! Whipped Steve Douglas, two other losers. Second win over Lyin’ Steve though Illinois Senate vote in ’58 was stolen

*                                  *                                  *

in rigged election. What a phony!

January 1861:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Southern clown Jeff Davis claiming my election not legitimate. OUTRAGEOUS! Looks like war. But

*                                  *                                  *

best way to stop spread of slavery is build a wall across Mason-Dixon Line and make rebels pay for it!

November 1862:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
McClellan turns out to be low-energy general. Told him, “You’re fired.” Probably will run against me in ’64 but he’s all talk, talk, talk, no action.

February 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Stanton-Seward arguing again. Should never have hired team of rivals. Totally embarrassing.

November 1863:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Speech in Pennsylvania. Town called Gettysburg. Lousy staff work. Would draw bigger crowd in Philadelphia.

January 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Hired new general. Grant. Said to drink a lot but captured Vicksburg, wherever that is.

September 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Sherman marching through Georgia. He and Drunkie Grant claiming credit for winning war. RIDICULOUS! If I’d taken command myself

*                                  *                                  *

it would have been over two years sooner!

November 1864:

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Re-elected! HUGE win! Staff now talking about my legacy. Suggest face on five dollar bill and naming White House bedroom after me.

*                                  *                                  *

RailSplitter @railsplitter
Better idea. Face on Thousand Dollar bill, adding two floors and renaming building LINCOLN TOWER!

 

Sound Bite to Remember 

After a century and a half in business, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey will close down in May. They obviously decided they couldn’t compete with what’s going on in Washington the next four years.

–VG

PAGING JOE McCARTHY Tuesday, Dec 20 2016 

Official GuidePost of the Alt-Center (2017-2021)

 

At last count, Hillary Clinton’s popular vote margin over Donald Trump was upward of 2.8 million votes. It would have been twice that number except for the millions of votes stolen by Russian hackers in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin that would have made Clinton president-elect instead of Vladimir Putin’s Manchurian Candidate.

The second sentence of the above paragraph is untrue, the spurious kind of “fact” we’d be getting from Trump’s early morning tweets if the outcome on November 8 had been reversed. However, anyone who wants to pass it on through the internet is free to do so. There’s no point leaving the field of social media fabrication open to Michael Flynn’s pizza-porn crackpots.

Flynn, as you know, is the retired Army general picked by Trump to be his national security adviser. Among the general’s credentials for the job: He was the honored guest, seated next to Putin himself, at a Kremlin gala sponsored by the Russian propaganda channel RT, which Flynn gratuitously compared to CNN (much like George Patton’s 1945 equivalence of the Nazi party with the Democrats and Republicans, which got Patton removed as commander of the Third Army).

Leonid Brezhnev, Putin’s Communist boss when he served as a spymaster in the KGB, has to be chortling in his grave at the prospect of a White House national security advisor who takes luxury junkets to Moscow paid for by the Kremlin. And now, if the autocrat in Trump Tower has his way, we can look forward to a Secretary of State so much in bed with the Russian dictator he’s been bemedalled as a member of the Russian Order of Friendship.

And what exactly are Rex Tillerson’s diplomatic credentials? As CEO of ExxonMobil he’s spent the better part of recent years wheeler-dealing across the globe not on behalf of American interests but those of his multinational corporation. Not that the country’s interests and ExxonMobil’s coincide. But when they diverge – as when the State Department imposed sanctions on Russia after its takeover of Crimea – Tillerson earned his Order of Friendship medal by lobbying Congress and the State Department to lift those sanctions.

So we’ve come to this. Who would have thought, in the dim, distant days of the Cold War when Joe McCarthy was warning about Communist agents in the State Department, that it wouldn’t be a liberal Democrat but a Republican president who’d open the White House doors to a Russian dictator trained by the KGB?

And what would Tailgunner Joe be saying on the Senate floor at this point? I can see him railing about General Flynn’s dining with Putin (“a disgrace to the uniform”) and Rex Tillerson’s ties to Russian oligarchs (“an enemy within”). And on hearing the latest poll that shows no fewer than four out of 10 Republicans now have a “favorable” view of the Russian dictator, labeling them (as he did the Democrats at the GOP convention in 1952) “the party of treason.”

Sound bite to remember (by those gullible “anti-globalists” who voted for Putin’s poodle):

“There are no nations. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and ATT and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon.”

–from the motion picture “Network,” Arthur Jensen’s (played by Ned Beatty) corrective lecture to Howard Beale (Peter Finch)

 

 

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