11/5/2025

 Wednesday, November 5, 2025

1921 The Sturmabteilung or SA (the "Brown Shirts") is formally established by Adolf Hitler

1968  Richard Nixon was elected President of the United States, defeating Democrat  Hubert Humphrey and Independent George Wallace

1996 Bill Clinton was re-elected President of the United States, defeating Republican candidate Bob Dole

2017 Paradise Papers were leaked; 13.4 million documents from offshore investment firm Appleby, mentioning Queen Elizabeth and Wilbur Ross US Secretary of Commerce

2019 Actress Emma Watson interviewed in Vogue magazine said she was happy to be single "I call it being self-partnered" launching a worldwide discussion on the term

2021 NFL Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers admitted in an interview he was unvaccinated and taking unapproved treatment after testing positive for COVID-19.

2024 Donald Trump was re-elected, defeating Kamala Harris, becoming  the oldest elected president

In bed near 9, up at 3:30.  49°, 41° wind chill, 49° high, sunny and windy day ahead.   

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 7:05 a.m. with sourdough toast to calm nausea.  First day of Lasix at 7:45 a.m.  Kevlar injection around 1 p.m.

Old book title joke: Dash to the Outhouse, by Willie Makeit.

Donald Hall: Essays After Eighty

Death: "It is sensible of me to be aware that I will die one of these days.  I will not pass away.  Every day, millions of people pass away - in obituaries, death notices, cards of consolation  mails to the corpse's friends - but people don't die.  Sometimes they rest in peace, quit this world, go the way of all flesh, depart, give up the ghost, breathe a last breath . . . . At some point in my seventies, death stopped being interesting. . . In my eighties, my days have narrowed as they must. . . I try not to break my neck, I write letters, I take naps, I write essays. . . My goal in life is to make it to the bathroom."    

Making it to the bathroom has been a sometimes challenge for quite some time now.  I have a new variant on the experience starting today with the drug Lasix, another diuretic on top of the chlorthalidone I take each day.  Coping with an ancient plumbing system is one of the indignities of old age, one of a number, but high on the list.  I confess to some fear of taking Lasix because one of its possible side effects is nausea, and I am already feeling some nausea this morning, as I have for the last several days.  When did this start?  No surprise: I can't remember.  The worst of it was lying on the gurney during the EMG with needles in my neck, very dizzy and fearing I would vomit during the procedure.  I made my usual mistake of looking up the data on Lasix and discovering that it "interacts" with some other meds that I take, but no information on how it interacts.

De mortis nil nisi bonum?  Yesterday I wondered whether Dick Cheney set the table for Trump: "I wonder now whether Cheney's acts during the first Bush administration marked a turning point for the Republican Party and for the nation, whether it set the stage for Donald Trump, especially in this second regime."  It looks like I'm not the only one.  In this morning's NY Times, Ron Suskind wrote "The Tragedy of Dick Cheney", including:

Dick Cheney is now gone, but we will be living with his legacy for a long time to come. He wrote a playbook of how to exercise executive authority beyond constitutional boundaries and the rule of law. Donald Trump has added pages and is working on a sequel.

It was Vice President Cheney, guiding his under-experienced boss, George W. Bush, who brought unitary executive theory into view. Operating out of a parallel executive office, staffed with people loyal to Mr. Cheney directly, he unleashed the war on terror, justifying brutal new tactics, an ill-conceived invasion and a system of mass domestic surveillance. He declared his priorities to be national emergencies, obviating the need to work within the structures of democratic power. He went after those — Colin Powell, Christine Todd Whitman, Paul O’Neill — who stood in his path. And he prioritized the bank accounts of the wealthy by supporting tax cuts in wartime against the strongest of warnings.

Disastrous as all those actions were, Mr. Trump has undertaken even more significant expansions of power and illegality, often under even more dubious claims of emergency. Basically, it’s the war on terror model without the war. Mr. Cheney made it possible.

. . .  Mr. Cheney had done as much as anyone in history to undermine Americans’ trust in their institutions and leaders, including Mr. Cheney himself. 

As Mr. Trump bombs boats that may or may not be transporting drugs, concocts a pretext to invade Venezuela, constructs loyalty tests and viciously punishes those who fail them and declares vague emergencies and wars to justify his own partisan political ends, he should pause to thank the man who showed America how it could be done.

For all his belatedly discovered democratic principles, Mr. Cheney helped to create the world that Mr. Trump inhabits. The contempt he showed for any constraints on his power paved the way for Mr. Trump and the contempt he now shows for everything but his own naked interest. 

We ought not forget that Cheney had his enablers, principally his "boss," George W. Bush, and their Attorneys General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, and the DOJ's John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel.   All ended up on their feet and well rewarded after their government service.  "W" retired to Texas, took up painting, and led a quiet life while staying out of public view.  Ashcroft started a consulting and lobbying firm, sits on the board of directors for the private military company Academi (formerly the mercenary firm, Blackwater), and is a professor at the Regent University School of Law, founded by the late lunatic Pat Robertson.   Gonzales is the dean of Belmont University College of Law in Nashville, Tennessee, where he teaches National Security Law. He formerly taught at Texas Tech.  John Yoo, the author of the infamous DOJ "torture memos," is a distinguished professor at the University of California Law School at Berkeley.  All of these guys are arguably guilty of war crimes, as asserted by some European nations, but all live comfortably in the United States in positions of honor.  So it goes.  

This journal/blog actually started back in 2007 when I was a regular contributor of 'reader comments' to the Washington Post during the George W. Bush administration.  My contributions were invariably harsh, whether I was opining about Bush himself, or Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, or Rice, but perhaps my harshest comments were about Alberto Gonzales, witness this comment from 8/28/2007:

"Most Americans, I suspect, have long since concluded that Alberto Gonzales is a person with few if any moral values, the stuff that in the aggregate we call "character." Early on in his professional career he hitched his wagon to George W. Bush, a richer, more powerful, better connected version of himself, i.e., a man with few if any moral values. He succumbed to the fatal attraction that has brought many a lawyer to ruin: doing what a bad client wants him to do because the short-term payoff is so attractive. For some, the payoff is a big fee or lucrative retainer, for others others it can be sexual favors, for others, including Gonzales, it is power and prestige. For the attractive payoffs, the lawyer sacrifices his independent professional judgment and becomes a toadeater for his client. Gonzales' fall from grace was apparent at least from the time he was routinely giving the 'all clear' signs to Bush on death penalty cases during Bush's governorship. Despite the sometimes appalling lack of due process in some capital punishment cases in Texas during that time, Bush was more willing to have blood on his hands (as long as it was someone else's blood) than he was to be called 'soft on crime,' and Gonzales served as his willing toadie in these cases. As Bush rose to become president he got more blood on his hands (other people's blood, of course), this time on a wholesale level, in his catastrophic muscle-flexing misadventure in Iraq, and again Gonzales was there to do his bidding, which also meant doing the bidding of the aptly-named "Dick" Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Karl Rove and other amoral Bushie miscreants. Whatever was required in terms of legal opinions to justify anything these guys wanted to do, kidnappings, torture, ignoring treaty obligations, warrantless searches, and so on, Gonzales could be counted on to deliver. He was a guy who just couldn't say 'no.' Now his loyalty to Bush has finally brought him low. The poor sap continues to praise and thank the one man (other than himself) who has led to his disgrace, his patron, Bush. How much more clueless can a man be to say "I have led the American dream" as he resigns high government office in disgrace, his integrity, his character, his credibility, and his honor probably forever stained by his venal subservience to Bush. This is "the American dream" lived by Jay Gatsby, perhaps, pursuing unattainable and unworthy goals only to end up a tragic loser. Perhaps Gonzales' most revealing comment was that his worst day as Attorney General was better than his father's best day. I understand that his father was a construction worker who undoubtedly worked hard to earn an honest living for his family. That Gonzales thinks that occupying a position of high status and power is superior to earning an honest living with your hands and back, even if the more prestigious job costs you your reputation and your honor, tells us what kind of man he is. He and Bush deserved each other, and I, for one, hope Bush leaves office with his reputation and place in history as indelibly stained as Gonzales's."

Another comment from that era reveals how little I have changed in the last 23 years.  Good or bad?

Comment on: Bush Compares Iraq to Vietnam - washingtonpost.com on 8/23/2007 12:05 AM

Back in the waning days of the Nixon regime, I vividly remember becoming angrier and angrier with Nixon as the evidence of his criminality mounted and the country, or at least its national government, became increasingly paralyzed in a constitutional crisis. I thought I would never again see the day when an American president would trigger in me the same kind of deep disgust and anger and anxiety for the future of the nation. Alas, George Walker Bush has outdone Richard Milhous Nixon.

After using his Daddy’s clout to avoid service in Vietnam (where I served as a Marine in 1965-66), he now has the shameless audacity to argue that it was a terrible mistake to pull out of that country after losing only 58,000 American lives and many multiples of that number of Vietnamese lives. Yes, he now tells us that the American government should have sent even more thousands and thousands of young conscripts to be killed or brutalized in that country while he partied in Texas and played jet jockey in the Air National Guard. When I first heard this incredible charge on a cable news program, I was reminded of Attorney Joseph Welch’s famous words directed at Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the Army hearings: "Until this moment, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. . . Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" I would ask Bush “Have you no sense of shame, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of shame?” How many more thousands of lives would you squander in Iraq rather than admit that you made a catastrophic mistake in invading and occupying that country? Once again, you live in the lap of luxury, surrounded by suckbutts while others pay the price you’ve never been willing to pay yourself or with your privileged family and buddies. You are a total disgrace, especially to your father who (1) served honorably and at risk in the war of his youth, and (2) had the wisdom to eschew toppling Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq because doing so would lead to precisely the maelstrom his strutting chickenhawk son has brought about. You make Nixon look good. You surely must be the most disgusting president in the history of the country, as well as the most incompetent. God help the nation.

Phase I of the front sidewalk removal is today.  Phase II Friday, or Monday, or ? Weather dependent