It's just another Manic Monday...

So much crazy has occurred in the last few days it’s hard to know where to start, but I’m going begin with my late father, who passed away from Alzheimer’s in 2013. My dad was a Cold Warrior and a staunch Republican. Because of his influence, I started my political life as a registered Republican, but that didn’t last long as I soon realized that the GOP wanted to take away my right to bodily autonomy - something they achieved 40 years later when SCOTUS overturned Roe vs Wade.

In the early 2000’s, when I was a columnist for Hearst and criticizing the prosecution of the Iraq War, my dad told me “you shouldn’t criticize the President during wartime.” I disagreed. Given how long that war lasted, it would have been a failure of journalism not to criticize the president for the entire length of it.

We had loud, colorful arguments, until it became clear that Dad was slipping into the Alzheimer’s fog and I didn’t want to agitate him more.

I also realized, eventually, that part of his reasoning was parental protectiveness, triggered by the hate mail and abuse I got for being a woman expressing a critical opinion in print. When you’ve served your country proudly for so many years, having your daughter publicly excoriated for being an “unAmerican terrorist lover” who is “using the American Way of Life to Destroy The American Way of Life and the Rest of Western Civilization in the Process,”1 because she wrote a piece about Abu Ghraib and questioned our use of torture probably doesn’t feel great.

For the last two decades, both when we’d lost “real Dad” to Alzheimer’s and after we lost him physically, I’ve wished that I could get my father’s perspective on what is happening in our country. My son, who inherited his grandfather’s interest in history and geopolitics, has often asked me what Grandpa would have thought about one issue or another.

But as much as I miss my father, when I saw The Current Occupant of the Oval’s (COOTO) latest insane tweet, I was glad he wasn’t alive to see the degradation and destruction of our nation under the Republican party.

Yesterday morning around 8:30am, I’d had a Bluesky convo with my friend Jody, about the COOTO’s blatant denial of conditions on the USS Lincoln.2

She called my hope that this might penetrate the MAGA bubble, especially in the armed forces, “sunny optimism.”

I’m not sure my therapist would call me a “sunny optimist.” In my head, it’s more like “trying to stay sane while fearing the nuclear devastation we feared in our youth is going to happen because of a senile narcissistic, grifting, pedophile rapist, a complacent and cowardly Republican Congress and a deeply corrupt SCOTUS.”

(If you don’t like me calling the COOTO a pedophile rapist, just imagine listening to this creepy AF shit 3 coming out of the President’s mouth as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. (RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES)4)

Then, a mere eight hours after Jody and I discussed this, the COOTO posted his latest insanity:

“While somewhat unrelated (?)” Yeah right. And I have a nice bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Apparently, COOTO is so far gone in whatever health issues he’s got (having been down the Alzheimer’s road with Dad, my guess is dementia is among them) that he’s forgotten what his good buddy Kim Jung Un said about him in 2017.

I’m not a KJU fan, but the guy wasn’t wrong in his assessment. And now the COOTO is pissing on a long-time ally that American soldiers died for in favor of a dictator supported by Russian and China. Why? Because he’s made no secret of wanting to be a dictator himself and the Republican cowards in Congress have conveniently ditched their pocket constitutions to support him no matter what because for them it’s party over country. Hmmm, where does that remind you of?

So in addition to our kids having to have active shooter drills are we now going to start teaching them to “Duck and Cover”?

Journalist James Fallows expressed what many of us who pay attention to the world (not just “Murica!”) have been thinking:

Watching the utter incompetence of this government, and how the COOTO is focused on gilding the lily 5while the world literally burns 6 I’ve been reminded of Michael Lewis’s book The Fifth Risk, which I read when it came out during American Nero’s first term, and made my husband listen to because I was so freaked out by it.

The Fifth Risk focuses on the quiet heroes of our Republic - the folks Republicans and billionaires love to hate on - federal bureaucrats. The folks who work behind the scenes collecting and analyzing data to keep Americans safe and prevent catastrophe. Lewis focuses on The Department of Agriculture (food safety and feeding the poor) the Department of Energy (controlling nuclear waste) and Department of Commerce, (weather prediction).

Even under the COOTO’s first term, even before the Space Nazi went into government agencies with his chainsaw and wrought destruction without saving any money,7 data disappeared from government websites and it was triumph of the incompetent.

Lewis interviews John MacWilliams, who served as Chief Risk Officer at the DOE under President Obama, about the greatest risks facing our country. Read this from Joe Klein’s review of the book8 for the New York Times

MacWilliams’s job at the D.O.E. was risk assessment. Lewis is a risk assessment junkie — whether it’s the risk of investing in ballplayers (“Moneyball”) or mortgage-backed securities (“The Big Short”). At the D.O.E., the risks are potentially cataclysmic — preventing dirty bombs from exploding at the Super Bowl, tracking nuclear weapons so they don’t get lost or damaged (they’re called “Broken Arrows”), preventing plutonium waste at the government’s facility in Hanford, Wash., from leaking into the Columbia River. Lewis asks MacWilliams to list the top five risks. The first four are predictable: Broken Arrows. North Korea. Iran (that is, maintaining the agreement that prevents Iran from building a nuclear bomb). Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism. But the fifth, most important risk is a stunner: “program management.” Hence, the title of this book.

Lewis defines it this way: “The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”

Looking back on MacWilliams’s predictions makes me long for smart, competent people in government again. Because he nailed it. We can draw a line from the COOTO’s withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal in 20189 to his ill-conceived war in 2026. We’ve seen Iranian cyberattacks on U.S Water Systems10.

It’s almost like appointing people based on competence rather than loyalty keeps Americans of all political persuasions safer.

Who would have thought?