A Republic, If You Can Keep It.

A lady asked Dr. Franklin "Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?"

"A republic," replied the Doctor "if you can keep it.”   September 18, 1787

Let's look at where we are now, shall we? And I want to point out that I will skip over the Sydney Sweeny jeans ad business because it is perhaps the dumbest "controversy" ever.

Well OK, I won't skip it entirely. Firstly, I had to look up who the hell Sydney Sweeny is. Secondly, she is nice looking, but not exactly a femme fatale. But thirdly, the phrase "Sydney Sweeny has great jeans" is being interpreted as somehow white supremacist, taking the jeans/genes pun to absurd lengths.

The phrase "he/she has great genes" has been used forever to describe a pretty person. In that light, Halle Berry, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Salma Hayak, Jennifer Lopez and on and on have or had great genes. My wife would throw in Antonio Banderas, but I'll leave that to her. It's as silly as the old Brooke Shields Calvin Klein jeans ad that said "nothing comes between me and my Calvins" implying to horny male adolescents, that Brooke was going commando, I guess.

In short, please people. You are over-thinking this.

If you are looking for petty, childish insults and commentary, look no further than the first family.

Item one: We have been seeing the silly and disrespectful jackassery lately of tossing rubber sex toys onto the basketball court during WNBA games. It turns out it was some sort of moronic plea for attention by some crypto dudes for their company. And that was where it was limited, until one guy with a familiar name thought this internet post was a great idea...

Yep, Donald Trump Jr. thought this was hilarious. I tried to think of famous children of Presidents who might have done something this puerile. John Quincy Adams? Nope. Ulysses Grant Jr? No. Theodore Roosevelt Jr? Nah. JFK Jr? Uh-uh. George, Jeb or Neil Bush? Nope.

So, Don, it appears you are in a league of your own.

Item 2.: But then his dad, you know the actual President, said this publicly about the former Speaker of the House...

@realDonaldTrump via Truth Social

Crooked Nancy Pelosi, and her very “interesting” husband, beat ever Hedge Fund in 2024. In other words, these two very average “minds” beat ALL of the Super Geniuses on Wall Street, thousands of them. It’s all INSIDE iNFORMATION! Is anybody looking into this??? She is a disgusting degenerate, who Impeached me twice, on NO GROUNDS, and LOST! How are you feeling now, Nancy???

Again, for the life of me, I can't think of a President who would have called his one time opposition party Speaker a "disgusting degenerate." OK, not publicly, anyway.

And the comment about Paul Pelosi as her "interesting" husband is a tacky reference to the right wing internet meme going around then about the man who broke into the Pelosi home in San Francisco hoping to find Nancy there, and cracked Paul's head open with a hammer. The meme suggested that this crazy guy was somehow Paul's gay lover. Because, of course, most romantic evenings begin with breaking and entering and end with cranial surgery.

By the way, Paul Pelosi is also runs a venture capital firm so does indeed know the market fairly well.

In short, as I have mentioned, we have elected a glorified internet troll. And though I agree that any stock trading from elected officials should be limited, as Pelosi has voted for, the idea that the guy who started a crypto currency company, World Liberty Financial, and now wants the rules changed to allow crypto in your 401K is not out to enrich himself, is laughable.

And, of course, we can add Trump watches, sneakers, cologne, guitars and Bibles, for crying out loud. Hope you're happy about your tax money going to refurbish the Qatari 747 airliner for DJT, that he gets to keep when he leaves office.

Speaking of office, as I have mentioned before, the transformation of the White House into Mar a Lago north is complete...

He has paved over the White House Rose Garden, designed by Bunny Mellon at the request of Jack Kennedy...

Now it looks like a Florida patio...

He is also adding a 90,000 square foot ballroom covering what is now the East Room which will no doubt be as tastefully decorated as his apartment in New York.

And then there are the two, count 'em, two giant flagpoles on either side of the White House, making it look like a Ford dealership on the interstate.

But, that's just the surface stuff. The greater harm is that we no longer have 3 functioning branches of government. The power to declare tariff's belongs to Congress, unless the President declares some sort of emergency. And the emergency? According to the White House...

“President Trump is rightfully enlisting his emergency powers to quickly rectify four years of failure and fix the many catastrophes he inherited from Joe Biden — wide open borders, wars in Ukraine and Gaza, radical climate regulations, historic inflation, and economic and national security threats posed by trade deficits.”

Andrew Sullivan wondered in a recent piece...

Unpack that for a second. A failed previous presidency, wars fought by other countries in other countries, subsidies for green energy, 2.7 percent inflation, and a trade deficit not much different than in the past few decades: if this amounts to a “national emergency,” then an emergency is a permanent condition, and the president can rule by fiat from here on out. 

And Congress' reaction is...anyone? Bueller? Nothing. So craven and spineless are they that any Presidential whim, and we are being ruled by whim, is aces with them. Congressman Ralph Norman of South Carolina was asked about higher prices from tariffs.

“I think a lot of people are seeing higher prices,” said Norman. “Our family’s in the construction business, and we get a lot of our timber from Canada and other countries. Yes, it’s higher. Steel prices are up, but it’s for the good of the country.”

And again, for the umpteenth time since people can't seem to grasp this, foreign countries do not pay tariffs. We do. If you are a Volkswagen dealer, If you are Walmart, if you are in the construction or manufacturing business, you are paying the extra import tax. And sooner or later, you will absorb all you can and ultimately pass it on to we who buy your products. That is happening now.

And another result will be that your hiring decisions will be affected, as we saw in the jobs numbers this month. Well, we saw it and then the President decided he didn't like them so he fired the messenger. I'm sure they will be very accurate going forward.

But hey, it's for your own good, right?

We are seeing another Presidential whim here in Texas. Texas House Democrats are currently not doing much more than helping the bottom line of Hampton Inns in blue states as they left town to break a quorum in the legislature. The issue is, of course, President Trump's attempt to insure a congressional majority by redistricting Texas in the middle of the decade, unlike what is ordered in that Constitution thingy we all say we revere.

Governor Ironside and his loyal Barney Fife, Dan Patrick, are outraged and will call as many Special Legislative Sessions as necessary to fulfill the royal edict. The normally sane Senator John Cornyn has promised to call in the FBI in what is a simply Texas political dispute. But come on guys, he has to. He is in a tight race with the soon to be next "Golden Bachelor," the comically unscrupulous Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And why is it a tight race for the Republican senatorial nomination? Because Ken, for all that we sadly know about him, is considered more loyal to Il Duce. That's it. Never mind that Paxton would give perennial Democratic losers Beto O'Rourke or Colin Alred a much better shot in the general election.

And meanwhile, the Presidential Revenge Tour continues apace. This week, along with the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for those unforgiveable correct jobs figures, three longtime FBI agents were dismissed by the anti-Eliot Ness, Kash Patel. Why? They were involved in the January 6th riot investigation. Which, hold on, let me check my notes here...OK...is their job.

He also fired an agent who is a former Marine combat veteran and lost his wife to cancer last week. His crime? He was assigned to the Mueller Russian influence investigation. Key word? Assigned.

It was shocking enough that all the January 6th rioters were pardoned en masse, but he has appointed an eager participant in the January 6 riots to the Justice Department (a man who yelled, “Kill 'em! Kill 'em! Kill 'em” to encourage rioters attacking police officers at the Capitol building).

Emil Bove, who is proof that apparently even a Bond villain can be confirmed, was indeed given Senate approval for a federal judgeship, despite evidence that he, again according to Andrew Sullivan...

"...told prosecutors to be prepared to defy or evade court orders, such as the ones that would bar the administration from illegally deporting undocumented immigrants without due process; dismissed a corruption case against a sitting mayor not for sound legal reasons but for political leverage; targeted prosecutors under his command who refused to go along with his unethical instructions to drop cases for political reasons; fired federal prosecutors and oversaw purges of other officials who simply did their duty investigating crimes that happened to embarrass the president."

We can also throw in the President's campaign against DEI. I have mentioned before my wonderment about the anger toward this practice. The acronym stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. If you have a workforce that contains people from all races, genders and religions...you treat them all the same, and welcome any new member to the workplace family, I fail to see the problem. It seems like good management practice to me.

But the campaign against universities, public and private, law firms, and indeed anyone in government using this demonic formula is designed to bend society to his personal will. The immediate assumption is that any female or person of color is only in an important position by dint of favoritism.

No surprise that the astonishingly incompetent Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, kicked off his tenure by kicking off a black general and female admiral from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for no apparent reason. Well, I think we know the reason. It's all part of the campaign to MAWA.

The declaration of emergency also covers illegal immigration to this country, resulting in massive roundups and deportations often to 3rd countries in Africa for Spanish speakers, or swampy makeshift prisons in Florida. Will the Supreme Court have anything to say about all these things? Not if recent history is our guide.

So, it's obvious, as if there was any real question, we are being ruled by an autocrat. But could this be what people actually want? Perhaps we have entered the latter stages of the republic Ben Franklin spoke of where we are now thinking a king might not be so bad.

I was in Germany years ago covering the aftermath of reunification and found there were actually former East Germans who were nostalgic for the old communist rule. "At least then I had a job and an apartment guaranteed. OK, they sucked but still..." went the logic.

And in considering the temperament and acumen of the occupant of the now-glittery Oval Office, we are not reassured either. The former head of the Council of Economic Advisors, and one of the small cadre of actual sentient adults in the first term, Gary Cohn, wanted to stop the President from simply pulling the US out of the NAFTA trade agreement. How would he do it?

"I'll just take the paper off his desk," Cohn told staff secretary Rob Porter. And Trump forgot all about it. Cohn was quoted as being "astounded how dumb the President was."

The White House correspondent for the BBC in the first term, John Sopel, was in spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders' office for an interview, and he asked how she coped with the endless drama in the West Wing.

"Bourbon," she replied.

I think we all could use a shot right about now.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.