'Blasphemous Rumors'

It is tempting to look away from the horrors of this moment. The lies and immorality coming out of this despicable administration at large, and most especially falling from the slippery lips of its despotic leader, are producing a veritable cascade of corruption and craven brutality.

An orgy of ignorance has fallen over our land - dressed up in red, white and BS.

Donald Trump presides over a fiefdom of the world’s most repugnant and greedy vultures cosplaying as Christians and patriots; from Corey Lewandowski’s ‘success fees’ to Trump’s soon-to-be-confirmed new DHS Director, Markwayne Mullin, who’s insider trading and self-enrichment fits right in with the grifting that has consumed the GOP.

You cannot work for Trump unless you are basically a criminal - or criminally adjacent enough to be willing to look the other way as a panoply of dysfunction and felonious thievery engulfs our body politic. POTUS has used the power of the presidency to pardon over seventy convicted fraudsters, relieving them of any attempt to atone and/or reimburse their victims.

The more egregious your personal life and audacious your crimes the better. DJT attracts the bottom feeders in our society like moths to a flame. They buff their suede boat loafers on the bottom rungs of his brass ladder, hoping they themselves will one day rise to the level of grift and fraud he has achieved. His moribund pallor has only increased their enthusiasm for proximity, knowing an heir to the throne may soon be anointed.

The most powerful man in the world is also the most venal and loathsome. Donald was always this way: I will never forgive the corporate media and financial institutions that afforded him such a wide avenue to run roughshod over all that was good and decent in our country. The man who presides over our State dinners has always served as a middle finger of sorts to taste and propriety.

POTUS likes predators and fools; he feels comfortable around conmen and cowards because that is all he has ever known in his own mediocre lineage. He is an abuser and an addict, a cheat and a scammer.

He not only condoned the actions of Jeffrey Epstein, he consumed and purveyed the trafficking and kompromat that existed for decades in plain sight of those that were supposed to care for and protect their many underage victims.

That acquiescence and cover up of their crimes and sexual predation still continues.

It is no accident that when Trump was looking for an Attorney General for is second term his first two choices were for Florida. The Sunshine State not only fostered a climate in which operations such as Epstein and Trump’s thrived - the powers that were at the time, such as former US Attorney Alex Acosta, went out of their way to protect and meekly prosecute the men who made it happen. The wealthy play by different rules in most, if not all, of the country, but in places like Florida they make the rules.

Trump knows this better than most; it is no surprise that he is behind the ‘members only’ walls of Mar-a-Lago for three day weekends most of the year.

He wanted someone who wouldn’t care about his victims; a vicious lack of empathy, actually contempt, for anyone beyond the privileged inner circle of MAGA - and he found that in the excruciatingly corrupt Pam Bondi. Matt Gaetz might have even been worse, himself an accused sexual predator, which made him miss out on the top spot at the DOJ - despite Trump’s best efforts, forcing Trump’s tiny hand into making a lateral move, much like replacing Kristi Noem with Markwayne Mullin at DHS.

This sordid history is now metastasizing into global destruction as a way to cover the same tracks Trump has been attempting to hide since Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in his first term; when Epstein conveniently died in federal custody, thanks to then AG Bill Barr, whose own father was a long standing associate of the world’s most famous pedophile and all-around freak.

The fact that covering up for a pedophile’s sex-trafficking ring to serve the powerful men who indulged in the depravity on offer, and collecting kompromat on those very same men to serve the interests of a global criminal enterprise with very deep ties to Vladimir Putin, has now been married with global warfare that will only weaken the U.S.A. is the culmination of years of both degradation and diligence.

The megachurchification of our armed services by Pete Hegseth and his Christofascist cronies is a greater threat to the peace and stability of this nation than any foreign adversaries we now face.

To win wars a country needs to be united in common cause. It’s a group effort when it is done right: the unity and sacrifice of the Allied Forces during World War II became the stuff of legend, and for good reason.

From ‘Rosie the Riveter’ stateside to the munition workers, mostly women, in the BSA factory in Manchester who bravely chose to show up for overnight shifts in the midst of Nazi Luftwaffe bombardments and paid with their lives. Battles are not won on the frontlines alone. It takes the strength, courage and resilience of a nation willing to sacrifice for victory to be achieved.

This is why no leader should lead his country into battle without first making his case to the people in whose name he goes to war and seeking the approval of their representatives in Congress.

The costs are borne by the common man so to speak, the men and women who will bear the brunt of the horror and shoulder the lion’s share of the burden cannot - and must not - be discounted.

Winston Churchill’s steely leadership was buttressed by the everyday folks he met down in the London tube stations and bomb shelters, who in the face of Hermann Göring’s air raids and Hitler’s maniacal march across Europe encouraged him to lead Great Britain to fight on. Of course the circumstances we now find ourselves in with regards to Iran bear only an ideological resemblance to the existential battles against tyranny and fascism European nations faced almost a century ago, but the echoes of war always carry a hard won wisdom.

The shared history of world wars certainly should not be the stuff of sophomoric and idiotic jokes about ‘surprise attacks’ like the one that Trump made to the Prime Minister of Japan this week in the Oval Office. A statement so beneath the dignity of his office he should have been evicted from the White House grounds just for thinking it, let alone saying it.

In times of great conflagration - and we are certainly in those times now - we need honesty and humility from our leaders. The fact that we have anything but that only serves to illuminate the dangers we all face, which in my opinion are much more alarming from a domestic standpoint than any external threat Iran, or any other country on Trump’s imperialist shopping list, poses to the United States or our NATO allies.

Allies we have shunned and punished over the last year for no other reason than they were decent and honest in their alliances with the U.S.A., and that sort of integrity always makes Trump react aggressively.

He is constitutionally incapable of meeting integrity with an even temper because he knows deep down he possesses neither integrity nor intelligence, and is offended by both morality and a sense of equanimity with our partners. POTUS has a pathological need to dominate. He seeks out the dark and demonic. He becomes smitten with fellow despots and so-called strongmen, while eschewing sober and cerebral leaders.

Trump is a fool’s fool and always has been. A weaker man this world has not known.

Donald is a man who only knows how to punch down because at heart he is a coward and a bully. His marriages have always been transactional because he knows he has to pay someone to pretend to love him. That includes his insufferable children.

We are a nation under one sun and many gods, whomever you chose to worship is your business alone. Your ability to express your religion freely is one of the most vaunted underpinnings in the evolution of our democracy.

It is literally a dominant factor in the genesis of our republic and among the prime motivations of our founding fathers, who sought to escape both the lash and burdensome taxation of King George III - and to live free from the Anglican leadership of the Church of England and their loyalty oath to the king.

Brave soldiers have given their lives to protect the right to worship freely over the two and half centuries of this republic. (Of course this ‘New World’ already belonged to Native Americans long before the settlers arrived and stole it from them). We should not be handing our liberties over to a bunch of Christofascist, Evangelical charlatans who are using religion as a way to cover up their own improprieties and aggressions.

The intolerance and bigotry of their beliefs have cause untold suffering in the past few years alone. Their attacks on the LGBTQ communities, and both migrants and the folks protesting their persecution, imprisonment and mass deportations, is the antithesis of any true doctrine of faith.

It is a bastardization of piety meant to appeal to the sort of young men and women who would find a repellant grifter like Charlie Kirk admirable. Kirk was paid by billionaires to brainwash white college students on behalf of oligarchs and a reactionary autocracy seeking a way to control their thoughts; exploiting their futures in the name of dogmatic religion and ethnocentricity, but with the added hustle of podcasts and pyrotechnics and the ‘Gish gallop’ of conservative debating tactics.

For this, Kirk obviously did not deserve to die - and while I was no fan of his, I probably spent longer speaking out against the gun violence that took his life, and has become the leading cause of death for children in the United States, than his own widow. What sort of religion aligns itself with the very weapons that cause the deaths of kids and the violence that so plagues our nation? A weak one - pretending to be strong.

Conservative Christianity of the sort he practiced and preached is a hustle more than it is anything resembling piety or providence.

Erika Kirk has now been charged with remaking the Air Force Academy into some sort of taxpayer-funded franchise of Turning Point USA. These are not just dangerous times, they are downright surreal; appointing a former beauty pageant contestant to lead a military academy is the sort of thing that would have been unthinkable a short time ago and is now almost commonplace in our broken society. I am sure she already has the TPUSAir Force merchandise for sale on her website.

Trump and his surrogates are leaning into the Christofascist dogma and its power base because this will be the only avenue that will allow the MAGA faithful to look past the hardship and calamity that is about to come their way as a result of his ineptitude, strategic blunders and economic destruction.

As the American dream dies or simply lies out of reach for the many, they will come up with a new way to offer unquestioning faith to the flock and keep fleecing the MAGA congregation. This is ‘jacked’ Jesus’s war. A cartoonish portrayal of bumper sticker-Bible thumpers and cosplay patriots.

That is precisely what Pete Hegseth attempts to do in his Pentagon briefings when he equates a strategically mismanaged and costly war abroad as some sort of holy crusade. Do not question us, as we are the anointed ones, is the gist of his rhetoric.

A ‘locked and loaded’ Christ ready to lead a purge of non-believers. In line with the unqualified for his position and very untreated alcoholic’s own ‘Deus Vult’ (God wills it) crusader tattoos. If Patrón Pete truly understood anything about will power, he would be turning his over to a higher power and a sponsor in a twelve step program.

Where by the way, atheism is welcomed and who you chose to worship or place your faith in is a personal choice. The genius of recovery is that we chose our own higher power rather than having one forced upon us. It is about deflating of the ego, overstimulated instinct and self-will run riot, in favor of humility and service to others - the opposite of what we see in Hegseth and much of Trump’s cabinet.

The ‘Secretary of War’s’ smarmy entreaties to the American people to go down on bended knee to pray for the success in battle of our troops fighting ‘God’s war’ and his lies about the families of the fallen imploring him to ‘finish the job’ are not only dangerous, they are obscene blasphemy and a slap in the face of the truly faithful.

It is so ghastly it is drawing the ire and commentary of Pope Leo XIV himself on a regular basis - and that alone should speak to both the audacious immorality of Hegseth’s attempts at invoking faith to cover folly, and the danger of combining such zealous Evangelicalism with military adventurism.

I am in no way devout to any particular religion, yet I feel an affinity and affection for any spiritual tradition that places love and empathy at its center. Caring for each other and nature seems to be the basis for any sane and compassionate practice.

I cannot find the love in the words these men speak, only domination and an exultation of violence - or worse, a reduction of its consequences into clinical terms of war that discount and diminish the violence involved and the human cost of unleashing American firepower.

For them battle is transactional, a way to line their pockets and do the bidding of their benefactors, such as Saudi Crown Prince MBS who has paid billions in bribes to Jared Kushner’s private equity fund. Which is to say Trump’s own children are benefitting financially from the outsourcing of the United States military to serve both foreign friends and personal financial interests.

Don Jr. and Eric Trump are backers of an Israeli owned tactical drone company, Xtend, to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars; one of several he and his brother have used to enrich themselves - the most egregious of these, Powerus, is merging with a publicly traded golf-course firm and seeking military contracts.

That the Pentagon is now seeking another 200 billion dollars to fund their barely month old war is probably just a coincidence. War with Iran may be terrible for the world’s economy but it is boom time for the Trumps.

Hegseth and Trump have both minimized and outright lied about the horrific toll of our country’s military actions, most especially with the killing of 175, mostly children, in the bombing of an Iranian girls school (in the opening hours of the war when intelligence and planning would presumably be at its best), and the follow up ‘double tap’ strike meant to kill rescuers and grieving parents who ran to the scene.

Hard to find the Christianity or charity in those actions.

The same POTUS who started this war (and is responsible for killing those Iranian children) without consulting our NATO allies or U.S. Congress, let alone informing the American people, when learning of the death of Robert Mueller on Saturday posted ‘Good, I’m glad he is dead. He can no longer hurt innocent people!’.

An empire can commit a lot of evil in God’s name - we are once again venturing down that well-trodden path.

These so-called Christians speak of war as if it was a video game or their latest sexual conquest. A crusade for the creatine supplement manosphere crowd. These stunted men are predators not protectors, and if they were dropping bombs on your children it would be hard not to view them as evil incarnate. Or dedicate your life to revenge.

I speak not of the soldiers charged with carrying out orders but their civilian chain of command who are communicating and conducting themselves like demons, not defenders of democracy.

Attempting to subvert the mainly ecumenical past of our military Chaplins’ traditions (which also allowed for Muslim, Hindu or whatever faith or non-faith you wanted to bring to your personal practice of worship or non-worship) into their own Evangelical fervor toward Jesus, whom they speak of with all the subtlety of a Bible Belt preacher who knows his flock just got paid on Friday.

Their version of Christianity includes a pro-Trump ‘locked and loaded’ Jesus because it is an extension of the lies and myth established in the MAGA movement.

The performance art of his Butler, PA ‘assassination attempt’ in which God spared our dear leader was in many ways an extension of the snake handling techniques of ‘Holy Ghost’ Pentecostal revival congregations in Appalachia, which began over a century ago. They are targeting the same folks with their false religion and lies.

Hegseth’s BS is a slicked-back hair version of speaking in tongues, to disguise the greed and grift that is the true motivator behind their spurious dogma.

They speak of sacrifice in their silk suits and private jets, sending young men and women into battle to die for Jared Kushner’s private equity fund and oil companies’ profit margins - and even those energy company beneficiaries are now rebelling, as the onslaught of financial chaos this misguided war has caused the world’s economies plays out.

They are playing with fire along with their brimstone.

We must stand up and stop them.

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