The Trump war on fake evil Canadian Fentanyl pushers and a f*cken nuts president, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

Wake up America. It’s clinical. Maybe you don’t need me to explain his various psychiatric diagnoses again and I should just say that he is fucken nuts. I say this as someone who worked as a psychotherapist for 40+ years and diagnosed countless patients.

Is this what a mentally stable person does in the evening?

"Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy. They are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels.

The Senate Bill is just a ploy of the Dems to show and expose the weakness of certain Republicans, namely these four, in that it is not going anywhere because the House will never approve it and I, as your President, will never sign it," he added on Wednesday. Why are they allowing Fentanyl to pour into our Country unchecked, and without penalty. What is wrong with them, other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly known as TDS? Who can want this to happen to our beautiful families, and why? To the people of the Great States of Kentucky, Alaska, and Maine, please contact these Senators and get them to FINALLY adhere to Republican Values and Ideals. They have been extremely difficult to deal with and, unbelievably disloyal to hardworking Majority Leader John Thune, and the Republican Party itself. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

The bill he is railing at the senators about would end the national emergency he has used to impose a 25-percent tariff on Canadian imports. The tarrifs are part of what Trump will announce today on what has dubbed shamefully and disgustingly "Liberation Day."  I wrote about this yesterday.

Trump manages to implicate Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins,Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul as accomplices to the make-believe evil Canadian Fentanyl traffickers just by including them in the same Truth Social rant. Whether deliberate or not it shows how Trump manages to be damn good at manufacturing a kind of guilt by association attack when there’s absolutely no association between these senators and Fentalyl coming in from Canada or anywhere else.

Aside from Trump’s usual raging at anyone who doesn’t kiss his ample royal posterior he may demonstrate his own delusions in posts like this, but he definitely insults the intelligence of the American people (and every Canadian) by trying to sell the idea that many proudly and affectionately call Canucks are evil drug trafficking gangsters.

There’s no doubt that Fentanyl is a drug of abuse and that it kills, however it should go without saying that it is an important part of the doctors arsenal to help patients, many of whom are dying, with pain so excruciating that even morphine doesn’t alleviate it. I know this from personal experience because it was the only medication (don’t call it a drug when it is used properly) which made the last few days of my wife’s life bearable. 

Trump has never spent four days sleeping on a cot next to a loved one like I did in the hospital who had a Fentanyl drip going into a vein making it possible for them to say goodby to all of their loved ones. Trump is incapable of empathizing both with these patients and those who love them.

Fentayl isn’t only used with dying patients. Consider this: No Longer a Scourge, Fentanyl Is Now Most-Needed Drug in COVID-19 War.

As far as Trump is concerned he would be thrilled to take credit for totally eliminating the abuse of Fentanyl in the county even if it meant that patients who really needed it couldn’’t get it.

Addendum: I got the idea for this Substack from 'Get on the bandwagon': Trump slams 'unbelievably disloyal' GOP senators in overnight rant in RawStory.

GG: From the comments to that article:
Why is it that NOBODY ever equated Canada with Fentanyl prior to Donald Trump's fever dream obsession?

• NellCote71

  I think less than 1 percent crosses the Canadian border.

  Stuart Underwood

  Because the claim is 99.999% bullshit.

  Most fentanyl still comes in through our ports, just like most heroin and cocaine. Intermodal shipping with mixed cargo containers is almost custom built to facilitate smuggling.

  And, of course, this is just a supply and demand issue. If there wasn't a demand, the supply would dry up. Want to stop fentanyl or heroin or whatever? You stop it at the user level. And that means messy treatment and recovery programs, and all those squishy liberal ideas that have actually worked to reduce rates of drug use over the years.

  50+ years of getting completely spanked in the "war on drugs" and these fucking GOPers still can't imagine it as anything but a law enforcement issue.

Related: 

Fentanyl compared with two less potent pain relievers.

There’s a pain reliever more powerful and dangerous than Fentayl. Most people, me included, never heard of it. It is used to anesthetize elephants.

Read my previous Substacks.

Another "how dare he from Trump," this one may be his most insensitive one yet, By Hal M. Brown Trump wants you to celebrate his Liberation Day. Let's remember the real liberation days when millions of lives were saved.

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The photo above shows Dutch civilians and Canadian Army troops celebrating the liberation of Utrecht, Netherlands, May 7, 1945. (Credit: Alexander M. Stirton/Canada. Dept. of National Defence/Library and Archives Canada/PA-134377). You can click this photo and the other photos below to go to the websites which featured them.

A good friend of mine experienced a true liberation day when she was a child. She lived in a small village in the Netherlands that had been occupied by the Nazis. Even though she was a young child at the time she has an indelible memory of the day that American paratroopers landed in the village square and people came out to greet them. 

Several American soldiers ended up in front of her house and her parents invited them inside and gave them a meal. 

Several years later some of those soldiers came back to visit them for a heartfelt reunion.

The Canadians played an outsized role in liberating the Netherlands. This is particularly both ironic and disgusting since Trump has turned Canada into an enemy he wants to basically invade.

The photo below is from “A Dutch Spy’s Photographs of the Liberation of the Netherlands – May 1945.”

We’ve all seen photos of concentration camp survivors which were taken by Allied liberators so I won’t include them in this Substack.

You’ve been hibernating if you have missed Trump’s hyping tomorrow as his Liberation Day.

I can’t imagine that Trump doesn’t know that this term has a deep meaning to millions of people. How warped and pathological can a person be to use these words to glorify himself for instituting a political policy? I don’t have to answer this.

It is hard to find words to express how insensitive and downright disgusting it is that he uses this term in reference to tarrifs, the word he says is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. He may not know that Trumpism is in the dictionary.

The liberation of Nazi occupied Europe began with D-Day, the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. There was an enormous number of Allied casualties on just D-Day itself. This is estimated at 4,900 Allied troops were killed, went missing, and were wounded during the assault.

The total number of casualties that occurred during Operation Overlord, from June 6 (the date of D-Day) to August 30 (when German forces retreated across the Seine) was over 425,000 Allied and German troops. This figure includes over 209,000 Allied casualties:

• Nearly 37,000 dead amongst the ground forces

• 16,714 deaths amongst the Allied air forces.

• Of the Allied casualties, 83,045 were from 21st Army Group (British, Canadian and Polish ground forces)

• 125,847 from the US ground forces.

Reference.

World War II took six years before the Allies achieved their final victory with the surrender of Japan. This was formalized on on the Battleship Missouri:

(Personal note” When I was a child the Missouri visited New York harbor and we went on a tour and saw where the capitulation was signed. I was amazed to see the inside of those gun turrets and the six inch thick armor protecting the ship.)

Addendum:

If you subscribe to The Washington Post this is well worth reading (here).

This is what Phillip Bump wrote:

I think the most likely scenario is a kind of careening between pretty dysfunctional democracy and an unconsolidated authoritarianism. A kind of back and forth in which the relative good guys win once in a while, they don’t perform well, they don’t last long and the bad guys win power occasionally and also don’t perform well and don’t last long. There’s not a really great comparative model, but countries like Ukraine and Ecuador have kind of broadly resembled that in the last 30 years. The United States is a much more high performance state in democracy than those two countries, so we’re not going to really look like Ukraine or Ecuador. But the idea of passing back and forth between governments that behave well but don’t perform well and more autocratic governments that also fail to consolidate power? I think that’s right now where I’d put my dollar.

You probaly know who Ruth Ben-Ghiat is. If not, she’s a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University who writes about fascism, authoritarianism, propaganda and democracy protection.

This is what she wrote in Phillip Bump’s Washington Post column “What America could look like a decade from now? Political scientists and historians weigh in on authoritarianism’s impact on the United States.”

If Trump and MAGA stayed in power for the long term, the U.S. would be acting in concert with authoritarian leaders and would have likely invaded some territories of democracy, as well as lending support to others’ autocratic aggressions, for example in Taiwan.

Domestically, you don’t need to abolish opposition parties today. You just engineer the electoral system to keep Democrats out of power.

However, I believe there will be a reckoning as the outcomes of the plunder operation on benefits and government and the costs of propping up Russian leader Vladimir Putin become clear to Americans. To stop that reckoning, recourse to repression may be necessary, and that will also be unpopular.

Of all the experts writing heir prediction her’s may be the most optimistic.

Consider: 

This is from Thomas Pepinsky, the Walter F. LaFeber professor of government and public policy at Cornell University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The long-term implications of the second Trump administration are sobering. The administration’s simultaneous attacks on the legal profession, the federal bureaucracy, higher education and the U.S. military are destroying the societal pillars of American greatness with blinding speed.

Basic government functions are being turned off, seemingly at random and illegally, by Elon Musk and his ragtag crew of coders. And U.S. alliances are fraying, as countries around the world are adjusting to an administration that publicly threatens to abandon its treaty commitments while beating a hasty retreat in the face of Russian aggression and Chinese power. For its part, Congress has abdicated its own responsibility to serve as a check on the presidency, with GOP members counting on Trump’s brashness and charisma to protect them from voters.

Back to the Nazis. It took six years for World War II to end. We don’t have to speculate as to what the world would look like 10 years later. Russia became a dictatorship and a superpower. Democracy won the day in Germany and Japan. The NATO alliance was established in 1949. The United States was the undisputed leader of the free world.

We do not know what Trump will turn the country into during his tenure at president. If it is the one or another form of authoritarian state we don’t know how long it will take for democracy to be restored or what it will take to achieve this outcome.

The war to undo what the Axis did took six years. The only efforts so far have been in courtrooms where despite victories against Trump as far as having an effect on stopping Trump’s blitzkrieg have been about as effective as shooting Nerf balls at a tank.

Read my previous Substacks here.

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With Trump's "off with their heads" revenge rage attacks we all could end up as the next Alice, By Hal M. Brown

 

Click here to read today's Substack.

This is my unformatted post. You can see that only one illustration came though. To see the post with illustrations please click above. These are the iages I used:

If you haven’t figured out why I put the ketchup bottle background in my AI illustration the following is from Politico:

After then-Attorney General William Barr gave an interview to The Associated Pressin December 2020 saying there was no widespread voter fraud, Trump was so enraged that he threw his plate of food at the wall, smearing it with ketchup, Hutchinson said.

“There was ketchup dripping down the wall and a shattered porcelain plate on the floor,” Hutchinson testified, noting that aides nearby conveyed the president was “extremely angry” at the Barr interview. She told the committee that she then grabbed a towel and started wiping the ketchup off the wall alongside a presidential valet.

Trump has a hair trigger for his rage when he doesn’t get his way. It would be better for the country if all he did when this happened was throw a Big Mac at the wall. Instead, he becomes the Queen of Hearts.

Emboldened as Trump is in his sadistic quest for revenge against his enemies, and with his intense need to exact punishment for disobedience, whether he is targeting an individual, group of people, or an institution, they all could be Alice.

While Trump has been compared to dictators like Hitler and Putin, he can also be compared to the Queen of Hearts.

Consider this from the BookBrio website:

The Queen of Hearts is one of the most iconic characters in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Known for her fierce temper and authoritarian demeanor, she embodies the chaotic and whimsical nature of Wonderland. Her character serves as a representation of the arbitrary nature of power and the absurdity of the rules that govern the fantastical world Alice finds herself in. The Queen’s catchphrase, “Off with their heads!” has become synonymous with her character, highlighting her quickness to anger and her ruthless approach to justice.

The Queen of Hearts symbolizes the arbitrary and often tyrannical nature of authority. Her character can be interpreted as a critique of the Victorian society’s rigid hierarchies and the often nonsensical rules that govern social interactions. The use of playing cards as characters in the story further emphasizes the theme of chance and unpredictability, with the Queen representing the highest rank in this chaotic deck. This symbolism invites readers to reflect on the nature of power and the absurdity that can arise when authority is unchecked.

I suggest you read the entire essay and compare Trump with the Queen of Hearts.

If only life would truly imitate the art of Lewis Carroll. Alice has the courage to defy the queen:

At the end of the book Alice prevailed. It was all a bad dream. From Wikipedia:

The Mock Turtle sings them "Beautiful Soup", during which the Gryphon drags Alice away for a trial, in which the Knave of Hearts stands accused of stealing the Queen's tarts. The trial is conducted by the King of Hearts, and the jury is composed of animals that Alice previously met. Alice gradually grows in size and confidence, allowing herself increasingly frequent remarks on the irrationality of the proceedings. The Queen eventually commands Alice's beheading, but Alice scoffs that the Queen's guard is only a pack of cards. Although Alice holds her own for a time, the guards soon gang up and start to swarm all over her. Alice's sister wakes her up from a dream, brushing what turns out to be leaves from Alice's face. Alice leaves her sister on the bank to imagine all the curious happenings for herself.

Would it be that we’d wake from this Trumpian nightmare and all would be well with the world.

Why am I doing this?

I write my essays on Substack because this platform has become the most popular way to post about politics. In fact web postings aren't even always called blogs anymore. It they are on Substacks they are called Substacks. 

Because of formatting issues like having to repost all my illustrations, it is time consuming to cross-post from there to this platform. 

This is about Substack from Wikipedia:

Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco.

History

Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, the co-founder of Kik Messenger; Jairaj Sethi, a head of platform and principal developer at Kik Messenger; and Hamish McKenzie, a former PandoDaily tech reporter. Best and McKenzie describe Ben Thompson's Stratechery, a subscription-based tech and media newsletter, as a major inspiration for their platform.Best is chief executive as of March 2019.

I began using Google Blogger years ago well before I began to write about politics. If you look at the archives and go back far enough you will see blogs that had numerous photos I took on road trips in Oregon.

There is also another issue with Google Blogger. I can never tell how accurate the statistics are. For some reason they have shown that I have had as many as 10,000 readers a month the United States ranked third or fourth behind other countries. At times the most readers came from India or Iran or even Russia. Then a few months later the top countries would change. This never made any sense. 

Readership here is down from a high of 10,000 a week to around 5,000. If this is accurate this is still a lot of people. However, I do not trust that it is accurate. Consider today's statistics:

I cannot believe I have this many international readers or even this many readers in the United States. I have asked readers from other countries to post comments explaining how they came across this blog but have never received a response in the comments. In fact, nobody ever uses the Disquis comment section which is on the bottom of every post. A benefit of Substack is that a few people do use the comment section.