Nothing makes sense, we know.

So, why should this picture (make sense)?

What we have to say about Donald Trump

Well, we're too stunned to say anything about Donald Trump at this point, so let's revert to Franz Kafka, the obvious choice under the circumstances. Here, the opening paragraph of Kafka's best-known novella, The Metamorphosis (scroll down): 

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.


(And the rainbow colors? That's sheer coincidence, of course, but we do have a fragment---written last week---before the elections---written a few days ago, from Chapter 43 of our hopeless novel This is Heaven:) 


There’s a short story by Franz Kafka about Gregor, a traveling salesman waking up one fine morning mysteriously transformed into a “humongous bug,” “monstrous vermin,” or “giant insect” (depending on the translation from the German ungeheures Ungeziefer). This gets him into a lot of trouble, but the dude had at least the good fortune never to visit Georgia Beach, GA, and wake up there in the hospital’s emergency room under the merciless eyes of Dr. Alice Sandeman, a person who absolutely despises bugs, vermin, and insects, especially large ones.

Are you still there? Still clinging to your sense of extremely dark humor in these trumpled times? Then you may like the GREEN EYES. The first part is out, available as Kindle book on Amazon, under this link:

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The rising tide lifts all boats (2)

What you could do to Donald Trump

Find a caption (Glenn)

Fragment, fragment...sure, here, from Chapter 30 ("The Knights of Malta") of This Is Heaven:


The debate has apparently started since Godehart is lying supine on the floor while the FOX-woman---one knee on his chest, one hand in mud-wrestling style locked between his legs---slaps his face and yells: “Liar, loser, liar, loser, liar, loser.” There’s a iambic rhythm to her thrusts that’s really catching on and the crowd is inspired---clapping, jeering, gesticulating, honing in: Liar, loser, liar, loser, liar, loser. Somebody has managed to program a decibel dial onto the LED scoreboard above the proscenium which is moving off the charts as we speak (the dial). Harrell up there in the control box must be getting help from somebody (Jack Horn, we’ll learn later). Godehart has apparently tried to be his old-school self and let the FOX-woman do her thing, but the situation is getting out of hand with blood potentially flowing and the FOX-woman about to turn her plastic fangs to good use on Godehart’s neck. “Hilfe, Hilfe, Hilfe,” yells the Wagner---choking and crying---and the scoreboard flips to asci code and translates, as if this were an opera house: “Help, help, help.” 

________________________

The foreign candidate asking for welfare---that really hits a chord with an audience steeped in self-reliance

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The foreign candidate asking for welfare---that really hits a chord with an audience steeped in self-reliance, and we have to fear for the survival of the bleachers squeaking under the pulsing stampede of too many real Americans. The mayor, ever responsible, gets up and makes a token attempt to becalm the crowd. Eventually he succeeds, however, because Elsa---who has also been on the stage, idling in the wings for unclear reasons---Elsa is courageously taking Godehart’s side by rushing to the scene of rational discourse and pulling on the blond anchor hair and other parts of the FOX-woman’s body. And now female solidarity kicks in and Vivian Leigh, or whatever her name, has joined and---having failed to pull on Godehart’s feet---undertakes to restrain the FOX-woman in ways that defy any political correctness---if you’ve ever seen a classical production of a Wagner opera with all-blond Valkyries fighting mano-a-mano for Das Rheingold while intoning the high C and the audience going nuts---along those lines.


One little comment: Trump's position is often defended by tweets with spelling mistakes pointing out that nobody's respecting America and that Trump will make the world respect her again. One wonders how, and on which terms.

Silence of the lambs (Glenn)

Italian for beginners

"Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate!"

Hillary, can you hear us?... (reposted)

After disappointing debate performance, Trump "threatens" to make Bill Clinton's marital infidelity a campaign issue. So, let's re-post this:

We're keenly following the US election campaign, including Hillary Clinton's preparations for the televised debates between her and Donald Trump. The communis opinio appears to be that Trump will throw any conceivable dirt at her, including Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Levinsky. What should be her answer? 

We're gonna build a henhouse. I build the best henhouses. And we're gonna make the foxes pay for it! (Glenn)

What we like about Ted Cruz

Lets get this in briefly. We hated Ted Cruz, and still do. But now we've found something we like about him. His reasons for not endorsing Donald Trump. He's not going to endorse a person, he said, who's insulting his father, or his wife. I wouldn't do so either, by the way. And the Republican Party---the party of family values---is all aflutter. Of course.

Trump Trump

Here are a few lines from Frank Rich, our favorite we-told-you-so artiste, about Donald Trump, in a Q&A:

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Donald Trump's renewed call for a ban on Muslim immigration after the Orlando shooting not only drew condemnation from President Obama and Hillary Clinton, but appears to have deepened the gap between Trump and Establishment Republicans: Paul Ryan responded with a statement of support for Muslims, while Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn have refused to talk about their party's candidate to the press. Will there be any fallout for Trump within the GOP?

No. We’ve just passed the first anniversary of Trump’s declaration of his presidential campaign, and the dynamic within the GOP has never changed. We know the drill: Trump says something outrageous or hateful. A few GOP leaders timidly say that what he’s said is racist, misogynistic, “not what the Party of Lincoln stands for,” whatever. Then those leaders fall back in line. The dynamic will not change now, and for a simple reason. The GOP elites are frightened of Trump and frightened of their own party’s voters, who overwhelmingly supported Trump in the GOP primary.

What Trump has been saying post-Orlando, it should be added, is not inconsistent with what many other Republican politicians have been saying for years. When he claims that Obama is secretly allied with terrorists, he is echoing Sarah Palin’s charge that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” when she was on the GOP ticket in 2008. When Trump purports that failing to use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” is tantamount to surrender, he is following a time-honored Republican script. (I would hope that when he trots it out in a debate Clinton will ask him whether “radical Christian terrorism” should be applied to the fringe Christians who have, among other acts of terrorism, murdered abortion doctors or bombed abortion clinics.) Trump’s hate campaign against all Muslims, smearing an entire religion for its fanatics, is also nothing new in the GOP. It’s of a piece with the 2010 Rudy Giuliani–Fox News–led campaign against the so-called “Ground Zero mosque” (which was, in fact,a proposed cultural center, and not at Ground Zero).

Even so, Trump doesn’t care that his Muslim ban wouldn’t have stopped Omar Mateen, an American citizen born in New York. Nor did it matter to him that his Mexican wall would not have thwarted the Indiana-born federal judge Gonzalo Curiel. Spewing bigotry is its own reward for Trump. We have to hope that the American electorate will end his political career in November. But surely, a year in, there’s no point in hoping that feckless Republican elites can or will do anything to stop him.

Continues here: Frank Rich

Lets get into the act

Donald Trump claiming today that President Obama should resign because he failed to use the words "Radical Islam."

If you are listening, Donald: How about using the words "fraudulent bankruptcy."

NYC (3) --- History in the making

Exploring NYC, we're walking down 5th Av, unsuspectingly...

...and history strikes.

Reality beats fiction...

...as usual.

And here's just one line from Politico:

Cruz woke up on the morning of the Indiana primary to rain and the news that Trump was touting a National Enquirer story that claimed, without evidence, that his father was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination.

Guess who...

Lucifer in the flesh --- that's how John Boehner, former Speaker of the American House of Representatives, a staunch Republican, called him during an event at Stanford University yesterday.

And Boehner continued: I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.

What America has come to

This is real folks, this is not a bad dream

"The Producers" do Donald Trump

The Donald --- The first 100 days

The rising tide lifts all boats