In 1996, having achieved some good fortune, I bought a case of Dom Perignon champagne. There is one bottle left. I’ve been waiting for the right time to drink it. Whenever this election is decided, I am either going to pop the cork and celebrate, or return it to the shelf it has occupied for these last 28 years.

Until then, here are a few thoughts for your consideration while the champagne chills.

Once again — It’s the economy, stupid!

The U.S. economy grew 2.8% in the third quarter of 2024, initial U.S. government estimates showed.

Since the Biden-Harris Administration took office, GDP has increased a cumulative 12.6%, and this month, consumer confidence is up 11% — the biggest monthly increase since March 2021.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the economy grew also, but only at the rate of 0.4%. The U.S. continues to dwarf Europe in growing its economy and rebounding from the COVID pandemic.

If, as all reputable polls show, the economy is the number one concern for American voters, you would think this latest news would seal the deal for Kamala Harris. But in this wacky election, the good news might not move the needle one bit.

Donald Trump says we have “the worst economy ever.”

That is his biggest lie of this election cycle.

After adjusting for inflation, the economy overall is 11.5% larger now than it was at the end of 2019, when, prior to the pandemic, output under Trump reached its peak.

Even the Wall Street Journal agrees. Its headline today reads, “The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy.”

More good economic news

Apparently the result of a push into artificial intelligence and AI-related services, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Meta (Facebook’s parent), and Microsoft all reported third quarter earnings that exceeded the expectations of economists.

Meta gained 19%, year over year; Microsoft gained 16%, and Alphabet was up 15%.

In Meta’s earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, said, “We had a good quarter driven by AI progress across our apps and business. We also have strong momentum with Meta AI, Llama adoption, and AI-powered glasses.”

All three companies pointed to their Cloud Divisions as the primary driver in revenue growth. Experts say Cloud services can help better integrate AI into daily tasks, as cloud computing enables smaller businesses to capitalize on the technology without needing to invest in their own (expensive) equipment.

Donald Trump says he would “ban the use of AI to censor the speech of American citizens on day one.” Whatever that means.

Ten years in, what’s the prognosis for the Affordable Care Act?

Donald Trump wants to replace the ACA with “concepts of a plan.”

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation and Econofact.org, although the percentage of Americans without health insurance has dropped from 16.8% to 9.4% since passage of the Affordable Care Act, almost 26 million people in the United States still lack health insurance. This is far more than in peer nations. where nearly all have universal coverage. Writing for Econofact.org, Mark Sheppard, of the Harvard Kennedy School, reports, “[P]rogress on expanding insurance coverage among the non-elderly has largely stalled since 2016. Meanwhile, economists’ understanding of health insurance has advanced considerably, with a decade of new research elucidating both the clear benefits of insurance but also its surprising tradeoffs that show the thorny challenge of getting to universal coverage within the U.S.’s current system.”

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, at a closed door Republican event in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Speaker Mike Johnson, throwing a little more red meat to the Republican base, zeroed in on President Obama’s signature health care legislation that has cut the number of uninsured by 44%, by promising a Pennsylvania voter that “massive reform” to the ACA would be “a big part of the agenda” if Republicans win.

“No Obamacare?” the attendee asked Johnson. “No Obamacare,” Johnson responded.

While not offering specifics at his Pennsylvania event (you didn’t think he would, did you?), Speaker Johnson said physician members in the House Republican caucus had “a menu of options” for how to revise the system and “take government bureaucrats out of the health care equation.”

Maybe he should tell that to the women whose reproductive health care rights have been taken away by “government bureaucrats” in the 23 red states that have banned all, or most, abortions.

Donald Trump wants to let each state decide for itself what to do about abortion. That is not exactly going smoothly.

More evidence of our planet’s warming

Japan’s iconic Mount Fuji remains snowless this season, breaking a 130-year-old record. The country’s highest and most sacred mountain usually has a dusting of snow by early October. The Japanese meteorological office has announced the first snowfall each year since its founding in 1894.

But high temperatures and continued rainfall have kept the peak clear as of yesterday, CNN reported.  And, although it rained today, 31 October, no snow fell. The previous record for latest snowfall was 26 October.

Japan saw its hottest summer ever recorded  this year, and remains unseasonably warm, a result of increasing global temperatures as well as the recent El Niño warm-weather phenomenon.

Donald Trump says global warming “is a hoax” and wants to “drill, baby, drill.”

What about the judiciary?

In his first term, Donald Trump reshaped our federal judiciary by appointing young (many in their 30s and 40s), conservative judges, especially to the Appeals courts, which are one step below the Supreme Court.

Over eight years, President Barack Obama confirmed 55 appellate picks. Trump managed to  install 53 in just four years. This was part of his Faustian bargain, made with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell wouldn’t object to Trump’s salacious craziness, and he didn’t, in return for Trump nominating the judges McConnell wanted, and he did.

One big result of that bargain was the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But there were many more, most notably this year’s ruling that presidents are immune from prosecution for “official acts,” no matter how heinous. Sort of describes Donald Trump, doesn’t it?

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have vastly different views of what our nation’s courts should look like. This election will determine which view prevails.

Many people voting for Trump abhor his character and hate his cruel and demeaning nature. But they’ll vote for him because of what they believe he’ll  do to the judiciary with four more years of opportunity.

Then again, there are people (like me) who do not want to see that happen.

Presented without comment

Speaking of judges and big Tech, on Tuesday a Russian court fined Google $20 decillion — that’s a 20 with 33 zeros behind it — for removing Russian TV channels from YouTube. The symbolic penalty, more than the world’s total GDP, is another indication that courts around the world, including here in the U.S., are becoming more nationalistic, with global companies caught in the crosshairs.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Secretary of War James McHenry recorded in the journal he kept during the Convention that politically and socially prominent Philadelphian Elizabeth Willing Powel had asked Benjamin Franklin, “Well Doctor what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”  McHenry wrote that Franklin replied, “A republic . . . if you can keep it.”

A republic is representative government without a monarchy. In a republic, a written constitution limits the majority and provides safeguards for individuals and minorities, which is what America’s Founders wanted.

As we close in on the most consequential election of my life, representative rule is threatened. It’s been threatened before, most notably during the Civil War. At that time our “better angels” triumphed.

Today, we face a different kind of threat: authoritarian nationalism, or fascism.

We have faced fascism before, of course. In the 1930s, the German American Bund dragged itself out of the muck to genuflect to Adolph Hitler. On 20 February 1939, more than twenty-thousand of them gathered in Madison Square Garden to hear Bundesfuhrer Fritz Kuhn wax eloquent about the benefits of Nazism. At this biggest Nazi rally ever held on American soil, he told them, “The Bund is open to you, provided you are sincere, of good character, of White Gentile Stock, and an American Citizen imbued with patriotic zeal. Therefore: Join!” The Nazi-loving Garden crowd consistently booed President Franklin D. Roosevelt and chanted, “Heil Hitler.”

Fritz Kuhn proved to be a non-entity. The German American Bund imploded on itself, and after Pearl Harbor, was heard no more. But other fascist groups consistently popped up over time. All of them lacked one important element — a galvanizing, charismatic leader.

Enter Donald Trump.

Trump replicated the German American Bund’s 1939 rally when he held his own version on Sunday evening in the same place — the storied Madison Square Garden.

This was a disgusting exhibition of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and just plain crazy cruelty guaranteed to bring out the worst in the MAGA universe. And it did.

One of Trump’s warm-up act speakers was alleged comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who delivered vile and racist attacks on Puerto Rican and Black Americans.

“There’s a lot going on. Like I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico,” Hinchcliffe said.

He went on to say, “And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.”

Not everyone in the crowd liked that, especially Hispanics. But the fact that he was allowed to say it — no improv here; Trump’s team vetted his repulsive screed, and he read it from the teleprompter — tells you all you need to know.

It is more than interesting to note Hinchcliffe’s depravity came as Vice President Harris was at that very moment in Philadelphia speaking at Freddy & Tony’s Puerto Rican restaurant, where she detailed her plans to assist the island and bolster its electrical grid.

Also from the teleprompter, Hinchcliff suggested that Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce “might be the next O.J. Simpson,” the former NFL star, who was accused and later acquitted of murdering his ex-wife (but most people thought he really did it). Kelce and singer Taylor Swift are a couple, and earlier this year, Swift said she would vote for Harris. The crowd liked that one.

In another racist trope, Hinchcliffe  described  “carving watermelons, instead of pumpkins” with a Black audience member.

Later on in the appalling show, we got this: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” That echoed what Adolph Hitler said in a speech on 30 January 1939: “Germany is for Germans, and Germans alone.” This time it was said by one of Trump’s closest and most hard-right advisors, Stephen Miller, to a sea of roaring supporters in trademark red “Make America Great Again” hats. Of all Trump’s sycophants, Miller is the one who reminds me most of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s master propagandist.

And, never one to miss a chance to bilk some schmucks out of a few bucks, Trump turned the event into a fundraiser. Top donors were given backstage access or special skybox seating. The top tier “Ultra MAGA experience” was priced at $924,600 — the maximum an individual can donate to the former President’s joint fundraising committee by law — according to an invitation from the campaign. Such a deal.

The event lasted seven hours. For the first five, before Trump spoke, speaker after speaker, 17 of them, made a mockery of what democracy is all about. One after another, they threw MAGA red meat to the cheering crowd.

Businessman Grant Cardone told the crowd that Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.”

Trump’s childhood friend David Rem called Harris “the anti-Christ.”

Former wrestler Hulk Hogan, who embodies the atavistic demeanor Trump values so very highly, used a crude, sexist gesture and told the crowd Harris had slept her way to the top.

Tucker Carlson, with his usual generosity and grace, riffed about Harris’s potential victory marking “the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.”

And, of all people, ultra Christian, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson spoke. He was caustic, fawning, and lied about Harris and her plans, but at least he wasn’t nasty about it. He lied in a reverent monotone.

On and on it went.

When Trump finally took the stage after all the bread and circuses, he gave the audience his usual stump speech with all its insults and deprecations. But after what had gone before, the wanna-be dictator seemed almost tame.

More and more, Trump and his Republican allies are willing to display their inner selves for all to see. It’s not a pretty sight. But it is revealing.

The election is now seven days away. Will America’s “better angels” once again appear?

“A republic…if you can keep it.”

The British did it. So did the Germans. Add to that Sri Lanka, Iceland, Pakistan, Norway, Ireland, France, Canada, and Israel. And there are more, many more.

What do these countries have in common? They have all democratically elected women to be heads of state, Prime Ministers.

What country has not done this? Well, you know which one. Ours.

In every reputable Poll, and there are 17 of them gathered by RealClear Polling, Americans view Donald Trump unfavorably. His highest “favorable” rating is 49%—from Fox News’s poll conducted between 10 and 16 October. His average “spread” between favorable and unfavorable is a negative 7.2%.

This is not to suggest his opponent, Kamala Harris is viewed favorably in the same polls. but her spread is only a negative 0.6%.

You would think  from that, alone, Harris would be torching the king-of-sleaze, convicted felon Trump. But, as we all know, she’s not.

I can only surmise from this that misogyny runs deeper in the American soul than anywhere else on the globe. Why is that? Is it a deciding factor in this year’s election? And why does the misogyny disease seem to afflict women as much, or more, than men?

Writing for the Washington Post over the last weekend, Maeve Reston and Ashley Parker tried to answer those questions.

In their head-scratching column, they quote 38-year-old Nevada resident Sarah White, who said, “I don’t think I would ever vote for a woman to be president. Women are kinda all over the place.”

In an interview with the reporters, White added about Kamala Harris, “She seems pretty tough. I don’t know, though, if she’s breakable. Women — we have emotions, we have compassion and we have all these other feelings that men don’t have. You know?”

How typical is White’s opinion?

Reston and Parker suggest four challenges Harris faces that a man, even Donald Trump, doesn’t:

The likability tightrope — where a woman must constantly demonstrate she is strong enough to be commander in chief, but she can’t appear too tough for fear that she will come off as unlikable.

The résumé bar — where it is often enough for a male candidate to have potential, but his female counterpart must have already met hers.

The motherhood bias — where if a female candidate has young children, voters question how she will care for them while serving.

Of all the myriad gaping holes in the soul of Donald Trump — holes that have sucked in and  swallowed up so many millions of gullible people — none makes me angrier than his constant and repeated denigration of soldiers, especially those who have died, or been wounded and disabled, in the service of their country.

Consider his disparagement of the late Senator, John McCain.

McCain, the son and grandson of Navy Admirals, was shot down over Hanoi, captured, and imprisoned for five years in North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese knew who he was and his heritage. Repeatedly tortured — so much so that he had upper body mobility issues for the rest of his life — he refused over and over to be freed unless the men captured before him were released first.

Most people who are paying attention know that, while campaigning in 2015, Trump famously, and cruelly, dismissed McCain’s wartime horror and heroism, saying, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

What most people don’t know, or have forgotten, is that the first recorded instance of this callous disregard happened during a Dan Rather 60 Minutes interview 16 years earlier, in 1999, when Trump briefly toyed with running for President on Ross Perot’s Reform Party ticket. Then, as now, Trump advanced no serious policy positions, but displayed an easy felicity for bad-mouthing candidates already in the race. Particularly John McCain.

Rather: What about John McCain?

Trump: He was captured.

Rather: But he flew 22 combat missions.

Trump: Does being captured make you a hero? I don’t know. I’m not sure.

When Trump, inexplicably (at least, to me), became President in 2016, he often found himself in the company of soldiers, mostly generals. Two Joint Chiefs of Staff, Generals Joseph Dunford and Mark Milley, reported to him, sequentially. His fourth White House Chief of Staff was retired four-star Marine General John Kelly. His Secretary of Defense was another four-star, James Mattis. And there were others.

None, not a single one has endorsed his current candidacy, and most have publicly come out, scathingly, against it.

None more so than John Kelly, for it was he, with his daily White House exposure, who heard Trump’s repeated deprecations concerning dead and disabled soldiers.

When Kelly was full up to the brim with Trump, he would leave the office, walk across the Potomac to Arlington National cemetery, and visit the grave of his son, who had died in combat in Afghanistan in 2010.

In particular, Kelly endured the fiasco of Trump’s trip to Normandy in 2018 to tour battlegrounds and soldier cemeteries.

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, described that incident in a 2020 article that gained great attention, not least because of its headline — “Trump: Americans Who Died in War Are ‘Losers’ and ‘Suckers.’”

Writing in The Atlantic yesterday, Goldberg described that incident:

The story concerned a visit Trump made to France in 2018, during which the president called Americans buried in a World War I cemetery “losers.” He said, in the presence of aides, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” At another moment during this trip, he referred to the more than 1,800 Marines who had lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for dying for their country.

Trump had already been scheduled to visit one cemetery, and he did not understand why his team was scheduling a second cemetery visit, especially considering that the rain would be hard on his hair. “Why two cemeteries?” Trump asked. “What the fuck?”  Kelly subsequently canceled the second visit, and attended a ceremony there himself with General Dunford and their wives.

Needless to say, the Trump organization took exception to Goldberg’s well-sourced 2020 article, and will likely do the same with yesterday’s.

When Goldberg spoke with Kelly recently, Kelly told him, “President Trump used the terms suckers and losers to describe soldiers who gave their lives in the defense of our country. There are many, many people who have heard him say these things. The visit to France wasn’t the first time he said this.”

This week, General Kelly, who until recently has said he’d remain silent unless Trump said or did something unforgiveable regarding the military, signaling that his red line had been crossed, sat for three interviews with the New York Times’s Michael Schmidt.

In the interviews, Kelly, who previously has called Trump “the most flawed person I have ever met in my life,”  said that, in his opinion, Trump met the definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if allowed, and had no understanding of the Constitution or the concept of the rule of law.

In describing the interviews, Schmidt wrote:

He discussed and confirmed previous reports that Mr. Trump had made admiring statements about Hitler, had expressed contempt for disabled veterans and had characterized those who died on the battlefield for the United States as “losers” and “suckers” — comments first reported in 2020 by The Atlantic.

Both Kelly and former Joint Chief Milley characterize dealing with Trump as “entirely transactional.” That is, everything Trump does, or even thinks, has to be in the form of a deal.

In one discussion Kelly recounted to Goldberg, Kelly asked Trump to make a guess as to the salary of Joint Chiefs Chair Milley. Trump replied, “About $5 million.” The president became stupefied when Kelly told him it was less than $200 thousand.

That is why Trump asked Kelly the following question when discussing soldiers who had given their lives for their country, “What’s in it for them?”

And that is why, when discussing Vietnam veterans with David Shulkin, his first Secretary of Veterans Administration, Trump said, “Vietnam would have been a waste of time for me. Only suckers went to Vietnam.”

And that is why, when describing his Vietnam deferment for an alleged case of bone spurs — which don’t seem to have affected his golf game — Trump said, “I had a doctor that gave me a letter—a very strong letter on the heels.”

All of this is bad — and there’s more, so much more, about Trump’s loathing of the very idea of serving your country without thought of personal gain — but there is one other element that absolutely mystifies me. Why would any veteran support Donald Trump? He seems to think all of them, all of us, are beyond contempt.

Thinking about this, I came upon the website, Veterans for Trump. Yup. There is one. Here is its mission statement:

Veterans and Military Families for Trump is unified around the fact that with President Trump, our nation has a leader who has fought to ensure that the sacrifices of our veterans and their families are honored, not forgotten. Unlike Biden, President Trump has consistently proven he cares deeply about the unbelievable sacrifices made by our nation’s veterans and their wonderful families. While Biden looks at his watch during the dignified transfer of our fallen heroes, President Trump salutes the ongoing service and ultimate sacrifice this community makes every day to protect our communities. Together we have an incredible opportunity to help President Trump finish the job he began during his first term as our nation’s Commander-in-Chief, and once again secure dignity and respect for our service members and their families who have selflessly risked it all to defend this nation.

This drivel, my friends, is chock full up to the top with that smelly fecal stuff that makes grass grow green and tall.

You might be interested to learn who the leaders of Veterans for Trump are. So would I. But none are listed on the site. What is listed, if you look way down to the bottom on the far right in tiny print is the following:

Trump, being Trump, must think there’s something in it for him.

We are all trying to make  sense, where sense cannot be made, but still we try, out of the horrific tragedy in the Gaza Strip, an area of 140 square miles now reduced to rubble with more than 40,000 innocent civilians dead.

This week, Israeli Defense Forces killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who orchestrated the terrorist barbarism that started it all on 7 October 2023. Tom Friedman, writing in the New York Times, suggests there seems to be a decent chance Sinwar’s death will create an opportunity to end the war in Gaza and create a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians if Middle Eastern and U.S. leaders actively engage in the extraordinary diplomacy required for such an outcome.

Personally, I am highly doubtful.

For nearly a year, we have been repeatedly treated to an American President strongly telling our long-time ally to pull back, slow down, end the bloodshed, only to get a sharp stick in the eye for his trouble from Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is happy to keep taking boatloads of money from U.S. taxpayers, because he knows we’re not about to turn off the spigot. We need Israel as much as it needs us.

I think it is impossible to appreciate this all-out horrendoma if one does not examine the history that got us here — and I’m not talking about recent history.

Jews and Arabs have lived in Palestine more or less collegially for more than 2,000 years. At the time of Jesus, Palestine, then Judea, was part of the Roman Empire, although Rome left governance of the area to its “client kings,” who were Jewish. Herod the Great is a good example. He ruled a stable Judea, as did his sons following him.

Then, in CE66, the Jews revolted and drove the Romans out of Jerusalem. They set up a new government and stabilized the country. In 69, the Roman Emperor Vespasian sent his son Titus, himself to become Emperor following his father, to quell the revolt and destroy Jewish opposition. In the year 70 Titus captured Jerusalem and burned the Temple, and the Jewish state collapsed, although the fortress of Masada was not conquered by the Roman general Flavius Silva until April 73.

Titus returned to Rome, a bona fide hero. His father gave him a victory celebration through the city, where Titus paraded the spoils from his conquest, including captured Jews, now Roman slaves, and the Temple’s Holy Menorah. If you visit the Roman Forum you will see the Arch of Titus, one of the three major surviving arches. The interior of this arch shows the humiliation of the Jews. The Jewish defeat of 70 begins the Jewish diaspora that lasted until 1948 and the creation of the state of Israel.

In 1516, the Ottoman Turkish Empire invaded, captured, and occupied Palestine for the next 402 years. This was a time the Middle East, and Palestine, was relatively stable, and it lasted  until the end of the first World War.

Arabs who had helped win the war (remember Lawrence of Arabia?), had been promised the land by double-talking British generals. However, in May 1916, Great Britain, France, and Russia reached a secret agreement (the Sykes-Picot Agreement), under which after the war the victors would divide the former Ottoman territories between British and French control, effectively creating mandates over regions like modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine.

In April 1920, at a peace conference held in San Remo, Italy, the Allies followed through and  divided the former territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire. The San Remo conference awarded the British government a mandate to control Palestine. The League of Nations formally approved the mandate in 1922.

A crucial piece of the British Mandate was its incorporation of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which provided for both the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine and the preservation of the civil and religious (but not the political or national) rights of the indigenous Arab Palestinian communities.  In part, the Balfour Declaration  states, “… it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” 

From that point on, Jewish immigrants, about 18,000 of them, and Palestinian Arabs were at each others’ throats, with the British in the middle.

By 1937, the British concluded nothing was working and formed the Peel Commission to find a way out. The Commission recommended what everyone is agonizing over today: that Palestine be partitioned into three zones: an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a neutral territory containing the holy places. Unfortunately, the British government rejected this proposal.

And so the fighting continued. The University of Central Arkansas has compiled a chronology of the hundreds of attacks by both sides, which shows how turbulent and vicious the battle was for the land that is now Israel.

Unable to stand it anymore, the British left in 1948, and Israel became an independent state, whereupon, under the agreement that created Israel, Egypt took control of Gaza and Jordan got the West Bank. However, Palestinians in what was the new State of Israel revolted, and a civil war, the first of many such battles, ensued. Palestinians, 750,00 of them, made the long march to Gaza under the protection of Egypt. And there they stayed. But they never forgot.

In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza, and it has held them ever since.

If you study the history carefully, you will not be the least surprised at the ferocity of the current war. It is an extension of the long, dark night that is Judea, Palestine, and now Israel.

The only way out of this calamity is for Palestinians and Israelis to stop fighting and negotiate a two-state agreement, along the lines that was recommended 86 years ago by the Peel Commission. Both sides have to give, but we seem to have reached the point where the immovable object has encountered the irresistible force.

A two-state solution would likely cede all of the West Bank, as well as Gaza, to the Palestinians. But there are 144 Israeli settlements in the West Bank, 12 of them is East Jerusalem. They are strategically placed with roadblocks and checkpoints that deny Palestinians easy access to anywhere in the territory. Visiting neighbors can be problematic. The settler population has grown to more than 600,000 people among 3 million Arabs. Here is a map of Israeli settlements in the West Bank:

Clearly, when one looks at the map above, which was prepared in the spring of 2015 for President Obama by Frank Lowenstein, a senior State Department official, one has a hard time imagining how a two-state solution could ever happen. Since 2015, the settler population has nearly doubled, according to Israel’s Ministry of the Interior. And more are on the way.

“We’ve reached a huge hallmark,” said Baruch Gordon, the director of a settler organization and a resident of the Beit El settlement. “We’re here to stay.”

In Gaza, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu says he will not stop until total victory. This, by the way, is the same Netanyahu who has done all in his power over the last 15 years, both publicly and privately, to ensure there will never be an independent state of Palestine.  This is the same Netanyahu who is currently wading through three separate trials for corruption in which he’s charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust; continuing this war has delayed the trials, as he does his best to assume Churchillian importance. This is the same Netanyahu who cut a deal with Qatar to send hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas to use in its governance of the Strip, thereby weakening the Palestinian Authority, which, as part of the 2003 Oslo Accords, had renounced terrorism and recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace. Much of the money that reached Hamas went to its military wing, enabled the building of hundreds of miles of tunnels by which to move armaments and soldiers, and led to the horror of October 7th.

If you think this can ever end well, I want some of whatever it is you’re smoking.

On 19 September 1796, Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser published George Washington’s Farewell Address to the nation. The Farewell Address was not meant to be given as a speech, but rather to be distributed to and read by Washington’s fellow citizens.

Washington’s Farewell Address, all 7,641 words of it, was in two parts. The first part was one of gratitude to his fellow citizens for entrusting him with with the immense responsibility of guiding their new nation. It was also a heartfelt explanation for why it was important now, at that moment, for him to retire from public life and pass on the torch of governance.

In the second part of the address, Washington offered advice for the future. In addition to avoiding foreign entanglements, he was particularly concerned about “designing men” who sought to divide the nation into geographic and internecine warring factions. About these, he wrote:

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels and modified by mutual interests.

However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

“Destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” Those words are the very definition of how fascism prevails.

Washington warned in his Farewell Address that some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually an “unprincipled man” would exploit that sentiment. Sound familiar?

Every year since 1896, the U.S. Senate has observed Washington’s birthday by selecting one of its members, alternating parties, to read the Farewell Address, George Washington’s Letter to “Friends and Citizens.” This year, on 22 February, the address was read by Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD), the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It took only four years for Washington’s fears about “unprincipled men” to become fact.

The fourth American presidential election, known as the Revolution of 1800, marked a turning point in our 12-year-old democracy experiment. Jeffersonian Republicans triumphed over Hamiltonian Federalists, and John Adams became a one-term President. Power shifted from the elite wealthy to the middle of America. Along the way to Jefferson’s election, however, calumny and outright lying were rife through word of mouth,  pamphleteering, and newspaper opinionating.

For example, not unlike current mud-slinging, the dirty work, back in the earliest days of the nation, was left to surrogates. One such surrogate was the influential President of Yale College, Timothy Dwight IV, a John Adams supporter, who wrote that were Jefferson to become president, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.”

This concern was amplified by the Connecticut Courant (now the Hartford Courant), an influential and highly partisan newspaper. The Courant warned that electing Jefferson would create a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”

Firing back, the Scottish James Callender, an influential journalist, “scandalmonger,” and Jefferson ally, wrote that Adams was a “rageful, lying, warmongering fellow;” a “repulsive pedant” and “gross hypocrite” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”

And that was the soft stuff.

When the election of 1800 was over, Republicans, for the first time, had won control of both the House and Senate. However, both 57-year-old Thomas Jefferson and 44-year-old Aaron Burr, known for his political “flexibility,” had each amassed 73 electoral votes. The soon to be former President, John Adams, had 65, and Charles Pinckney, 64.

The Federalists would control the House of Representatives until the coming inauguration, and the young Constitution required the tie to be settled there. Consequently the defeated Federalists would get to decide between Jefferson and Burr, with each state delegation having one vote to cast as soon as congress officially received the electoral votes in February 1801, so a president could be elected before inauguration day, set for 4 March 1801.

The Federalists sincerely thought they should have won, never could understand why they hadn’t, and agonized over the prospect of turning over power to what they considered the illiterate rabble. So, horse-trading began.

The Federalists wanted their policies, Hamilton’s really, established under Washington and Adams, to continue, but  they feared Jefferson would defang them. Consequently, they thought a viable arrangement might be made with the Virginian.

Aaron Burr was made of different fiber. He was “flexible.” Although a Republican, many Federalists thought they could deal with him. However, Burr was not a principled, virtuous republican politician. Hamilton called him (among other things) an “embryonic Caesar” and was horrified at the idea of the House Federalists making him president.

Hamilton did everything he could to get Congress to change the rules in order for Adams to be re-elected. He wrote to John Jay that any “scruples of delicacy and propriety ought to yield to the extraordinary nature of the crisis.” Everything possible should be done to prevent Jefferson, “a fanatic in politics,” from taking over “the helm of the state.”

Although the Federalists sincerely believed the country had nothing to gain from a peaceful transfer of power to Jefferson, and much to lose, after consideration of the terrible consequences, they did not pursue the idea, prevalent among some, of declaring the presidential election invalid. That would have brought out the state militias and created armed conflict. Their better angels prevailed. In reality, they were too divided among themselves to do anything but let the voting begin.

Partisan divisions in the state delegations of the House of Representatives were such that it took six days and thirty-six ballots to choose Jefferson as president (which automatically made the remaining candidate with the most votes—Aaron Burr—vice president).

Everything George Washington had warned about in his Farewell Address regarding factions and partisanship had exploded in the election of 1800. There would be other presidential elections that would descend to vicious levels; 1828, 1860, and 1876 come to mind. But 1800 set the tone for the future.

This year’s election, now 20 days away, has been the most vicious in my lifetime. Perhaps it will also become the most infamous, eclipsing 1972’s Watergate affair.

If Donald Trump wins, which I fear he will, but hope he won’t, will he attempt to implement the Project 2025 American makeover he says he knows nothing about? Recall, if you will, he also said he didn’t even know the document’s authors, although 140 of them served high up in his administration.

Will he surround himself with pliable sycophants who will help him become the “dictator for a day” he said he wants to be?

Will he immediately launch into what he—and the unknown Project 2025—have said will be the “greatest mass deportation in history”

Will he and his allies begin “Destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion?”

Will he?

There are many Americans who, not taking him seriously, believe him to be nothing more than a showman, an entertainer.

If you believe that, allow me to suggest you have not been paying attention.

As we close in on the final weeks of what has been the strangest election of my life, I find myself sifting through all the lies and deceptions Americans have had to endure for the last eight years ever since Donald Trump came down the faux-gold, like him, escalator in Trump Tower. If history is a guide, we will one day exit this vice-filled hellscape and emerge to better days. Humanity has a way of, as William Faulkner put it in his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech — ‘prevailing.’ That is the prize for our eyes.

Until that blessed time, we’re forced to endure lies and deceptions from creatures of the “dark side.” Here are a couple for your consideration.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” – Vladimir Lenin

Of all the lies told during this presidential campaign, which do you think set the standard for all the others? Which has done the most damage? Which is the most believed, or, in Lenin’s parlance, which has become the truth?

I suggest the gold medal for lying goes to “illegal immigration.”

Everything Donald Trump has said and continues to say in ever more unhinged and strident ways about immigration at our southern border has been a lie. Over the weekend, for example, he claimed more than 600,000 immigrants, all convicted of violent crime, had been released around the country to do more damage.

First, he inflated the number by nearly 50%. It’s really 425,000. Second, he neglected to mention that the data is over a 40-year period, that the government follows these people, and that the numbers include many who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.

Moreover, the former president asserts he was far more vigilant in rounding up the undocumented than either Barack Obama before him or Joe Biden after.

Trump and his sycophants would have you believe he is now the only thing standing between you and the millions of murderers and rapists pouring over the southern border heading for your home with plunder in their eyes. If Americans elect him, he will fix it all, and he’ll do it even before he’s inaugurated.

Just like he did in his first term.

Permit me to peel that noxious onion a bit.

According to the right-leaning Cato Institute, Trump did a terrible job removing/deporting illegal immigrants to the U.S. during his first term. He compares woefully to Barack Obama’s eight-year record before him, as seen below. If stopping illegal immigration is your yardstick, Obama’s first four years compared with Trump’s four years are a hands down win. And Obama kept it up in his second term.

Moving on, how does Trump’s immigration record stack up to Joe Biden’s? Not well. Once again, according to another Cato Institute paper, Trump released a greater percentage of immigrants crossing the border into the U.S. interior, and removed/deported a smaller percentage than has the Biden Administration, as seen in this Cato chart.

Yet, the main issue Republicans have latched onto for the battle for the White House is the Biden/Harris Administration’s awful performance on immigration.

Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” once again are on full display.

What about the charge (well, lie) that undocumented immigrants coming over the southern border are doing so much raping and murdering?

The truth is entirely different.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) released a study two weeks ago that examined crime in Texas, the entry point for immigrants coming over the border. The study encompassed the period from 2012 through 2018 and used Texas Department of Public Safety data. The studies first paragraph said:

An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.

But that didn’t stop Texas Senator Ted Cruz from doing his best to capitalize on the grief of a Texas mother whose 12-year-old daughter was killed by two illegal immigrants from Venezuela.

In a 60-second emotional Cruz campaign ad playing on TV stations across the state, the mother, Alexis Nungaray, says her heart would break again if U.S. Rep. Colin Allred beats Cruz in November.

Cruz continues to milk Jocelyn Nungaray’s tragedy as an example of how “every day, Americans are dying — murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants,” as he put it during a primetime speech at the Republican National Convention this summer.

The MAGA messaging has grown especially loud, even desperate, in recent months as border crossings fell to their lowest point since February 2021.

And before we leave the immigration issue, I would be remiss if I failed to mention the lying and vile cruelty inflicted on the people of Springfield, Ohio, by JD Vance and his mentor.

During the one and only presidential debate with Kamala Harris, Trump asserted that in Springfield, Ohio, illegal Haitian migrants, the ones he insists are murderers and rapists, were stealing and eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs.  When ABC Moderator David Muir told him ABC had verified with Springfield’s City Manager that no such stealing and eating had happened, Trump said he “saw it on TV.”

This ridiculous story was completely debunked by every reputable news organization in the country, but Vance continued to push it, encouraging supporters to “keep the cat memes flowing.”

Nearly 40 bomb threats have been made against schools, government buildings and city officials’ homes since this malignity started, forcing evacuations and closures. In an irony-defining moment, Springfield was forced to cancel its annual celebration of diversity, arts and culture in response to the threats, and state police have been deployed to city schools. Citizens and their Haitian neighbors have been living in dread about what could come next.

Keeping in mind that Vance is the junior Senator from Ohio, have either he or Trump shown any remorse for putting the VP candidate’s constituents through this hell?

What a stupid question.

“Deception, deception, deception”¹

One of the things that characterizes politicians of the less upright variety is their ability to deceive, and to do it with utmost sincerity.

Such is the case with Republican Derrick Anderson, who is running in a competitive race for an open seat in Virginia’s Seventh District  against Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman (D), a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, former ethics officer for the National Security Counsel (NSC), and twin brother of Alexander Vindman, also of the NSC, who testified during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial about Trump’s infamous phone call with Ukraine’s President Zelenskii.

The Vindman/Anderson race is highly competitive with polls giving a slight edge to the democrat. Early voting began ten days ago on 20 September.

The mudslinging in this contest, both real and imagined, has been getting more ferocious by the day.

When not firing both barrels at each other, the two candidates are doing whatever they can to be seen in the best light. You know, family men of high character. Which is why Derrick Anderson’s team released an ad last week with this photo.

And that’s not the only photo. Another has the loving group sitting around a dinner table. Very homey.

There’s only one problem. Derrick Anderson is not married to this woman or any other and has no children. He’s JD Vance’s “childless” father.

Right now, you may be asking, “Well, who is the lovely lady with the big smile and the three kids?”

They are the mother and three children of an Anderson friend.

Anderson’s ad did not say that. It said nothing, leaving voters to infer, even assume, this was a picture of the happy Anderson clan.

In this day and age, you can’t hide this stuff, and so, in short order, the truth emerged with predictable results. The social media universe eviscerated the Republican candidate just as early voting was underway.

The Anderson campaign did not have to give the Vindman campaign this kind of ammunition. But it did.

Deception, when discovered, can have severe consequences. Maybe in this case it won’t. But in a race as tight as this with such voter polarity, little things, like faking a family, can reverberate in loud ways.

_________________

¹Amanda, to her daughter Laura, upon learning Laura dropped out of secretarial school weeks ago, but has left the house every day since, pretending to attend. From The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, 1944.