Eric Cheyfitz

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin' Strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP The irony of Donald Trump calling the Iranians “crazy bastards“ is profound.

It would make sense if TV culture warrior Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, in deep over his head with Iran, had fired three senior Army generals last week in a desperate attempt to deflect blame and turn around his disastrous war. But the real reason Hegseth is purging the ranks is much simpler: he appears to hate women and Black people and hopes to reshape the military in the image of the fascist, white supremacist Trump administration. Quoted from Zeteo

Regardless of the inspiration for Trump’s [Armegadon]post[of Easter Sunday], by itself it tells a very clear story. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s former assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi posted: “The American president has lost his mind.” Journalist Steven Beschloss wrote: “This is an actual post. This is not funny. This is beyond desperate. This is a deeply unwell man who doesn’t belong anywhere near the levers of power. Every member of his cabinet and Congress is complicit in not demanding his removal now.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) posted: “If I were in Trump’s Cabinet, I would spend Easter calling constitutional lawyers about the 25th Amendment. This is completely, utterly unhinged. He’s already killed thousands. He’s going to kill thousands more.” (an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson‘s blog)

250 years and we still haven’t gotten it right.

Trump is like a two year-old with a bazooka. He doesn’t give speeches he just rants for attention: mommy mommy look at me. This all would be funny and then boring except this child has weapons. and he has no aim.

I wrote The Disinformation Age: The Collapse of Liberal Democracy in the United States during the end of the Obama and the beginning  of the first Trump administration. The center of that book is Melville’s novel The Confidence Man (a prefiguring of Trump) and the last chapter “Thinking from a Different Place What Is A Just Society? A Brief Manifesto,” which looks to Indigenous theory and praxis for a foundation of social and economic justice. The Democrats can take their fair share of the responsibility for where we are now, without that foundation, in both foreign and domestic policy: their unequivocal support for Israel and It’s war crimes, their support for the bloated defense budget, their subversion of democracy (socialist democracy) around the world, and at home their failure to support Medicare for all , universal child care, which New Mexico just passed, and subsidized college (these just for starters). On these fronts, I have not heard them change direction. What does “affordability” mean then? In The Disinformation Age, I quote the French economist Thomas Piketty who told us clearly that vast discrepancies in wealth and democracy are incompatible, which is where the US has been for a long time. I also quote from Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), which argues convincingly that these vast discrepancies are the ground of the Constitution (see Federalist 10, in which Madison states bluntly that the “first object of government” is to protect these discrepancies). No wonder we are where we are. Here is the question: what does it say about the US that it has elected, twice, a pathological narcissist, who controls the largest arsenal of lethal weapons in the history of the world? We need to confront our history, our real history, and change its trajectory. I write this my first day of Passover . Peace.

While Marco Rubio rails against the religious fanaticism of the Iranian regime, Pete Hegseth practices religious fanaticism as Secretary of Defense: “Yesterday Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post reported that former high-ranking military officials, experts on religion and law, and veterans groups, as well as current Pentagon staff and officers, have expressed deep concern over Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s extremist evangelical worship services and his casting of the U.S. military as a force for Christian holy war. Last Wednesday he prayed for U.S. troops to assert ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,’ saying: ‘We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ’” (quoted in theHeather Cox Richardson blog). Everything Trump and friends say about their enemies is pure projection.

The Decline of the US Empire: “Now the U.S.’s own ability to exercise its will as a paramount hegemon is in question, according to Rosemary Kelanic, the director of the Middle East program at Defense Priorities, a Washington think tank that advocates policy restraint. Trump’s mistaken belief that the campaign against Iran could be done swiftly and neatly, Kelanic said, ‘shows that the United States doesn’t have the strategic advantages and power that it thought it had, and that it maybe previously did possess.’ Despite U.S.-Israeli military dominance, Trump is struggling to beat back Iranian reprisals and prevent the conflict from spiralling wider. Satellite imagery suggeststhat various U.S. bases in the Middle East have had to be evacuated in the face of Iranian strikes, and Tehran now appears to believe that it can effectively veto shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, even though it shares the channel with its Gulf neighbors. (In fact, Iran is now earning nearly twice as much from daily oil sales than it did before the war began, according to The Economist.) This raises troubling questions about the efficacy and role of U.S. forces in the region. As Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, put it: ‘What is the point of the entire U.S. military role in the Middle East? If it has any point, it should be to prevent something like the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet U.S. military action has only brought about the very problem it’s supposed to prevent.’… Countries that came to rely on American security guarantees—guarantees that expanded as the U.S. consolidated its singular-superpower status in the West in the aftermath of the Suez crisis—are reckoning with new realities. ‘This war is a violation of international law—there is little doubt about that,’ German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a speech to German diplomats last week. ‘It is also a politically fatal error.’ Vivian Balakrishnan, the foreign minister of Singapore, described the geopolitical shift underway, in a recent interview: ‘The underwriter of this world order has now become a revisionist power, and some people would even say a disruptor,’ he said. ‘But the larger point is that the erosion of norms, processes, and institutions that underpinned a remarkable period of peace and prosperity; that foundation has gone.’”Ishan Tharoor in The New Yorker

“New polling shared exclusively with Zeteo demonstrates just how delusional our president really is: Only 33% of Americans approve of the job he is doing, and 62% disapprove, according to the UMass Amherst national poll. This figure may well represent the worst approval rating of Trump’s political career.” if we lived in a democracy, these numbers would be enough to remove Trump from office because he is leading the US down the garden path to destruction.

I speak and write from the position of a Jew who has a daughter and three grandchildren as well as cousins who are Israeli citizens. We(the global “we”) are increasingly seeing a separation between Zionism and Judaism as Zionism departs increasingly from Judaism‘s origins in the prophets who preached social justice. While all Zionists are Jewish, the large majority of Jews are not Zionists. Present day Zionism has its origins in the iron wall philosophy of Vladimir Jabotinsky, which is grounded in militarism and racism, the idea that the Jews are the “Chosen People” entitled by God to all of Palestine. Israel’s invasion of Gaza the West Bank Lebanon and Iran is all part of this iron wall strategy. Indeed, the current IDF occupation of the West Bank is called “Operation Iron Wall.” You will notice that the groups and states opposing Israel, like Hamas and Iran, refer to it not as Jewish but as Zionist, thus recognising the distinction I am making and that needs to be made if we are to understand the current situation in the Middle East.

I watched the Oscars to see if there would be any political response, indeed, any response at all to what is going on in the world today, the genocide in Gaza, which continues; the forced annexation of the West Bank by Israel, which is unopposed; and the Iran war, which began with the US bombing of a girls school and the killing of well over 100 children ages 7 to 12. The only mention of Palestine at the Oscars was by Javier Bardem, who had who had the courage to say “free Palestine” which did meet with applause. Other than that, Conan O’Brien made a joke about the size of Trump’s penis, and Jimmy Kimmel, giving out the awards for documentaries, made some allusions to the authoritarianism of Trump. The film that won the Oscar was Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another. The film is a satire of both violence on the left and the right. The satirization of the white Christian right is contemporary. Its portrayal of the left, however, is a 60s version of of the sporadic violence of groups like SDS and the Black Panthers so there is an incoherence to the film, which vitiates any political impact. But the most disappointing moment in the evening came when Jesse Buckley won the best actress Oscar for her role of the grieving mother in Hamnet. She certainly deserves the Oscar. I admire her work overall, but this was a moment in which she spoke of motherhood and children .It was a moment when following Bardem, she could have mentioned the thousands of women and children who have been murdered by Israel in the Gaza genocide and/or the children murdered by the United States bombing of the girls school in Iran. Or even more generally about the wars against civilians around the world. But in speaking about motherhood abstractly all she noted at the end of her speech was that it was Mother’s Day in the UK. Life goes on as normal for those of us who have the luxury of leading normal lives.

Peter Beinart, writing in the Times, recently described Trump’s foreign policy as “imperialism.” Yet imperialism strives for empire—for control. Classic imperialism sought to bind disparate places together under a vast administrative structure, animated by a civilizing mission. It’s not hard to pin the “empire” charge on Trump’s predecessors, who have jealously guarded U.S. custody of the world system. But what’s striking about Trump is his shrugging indifference to overseas outcomes. You could call this regime-change nihilism; you can’t call it imperialism. (Daniel Immerwahr in The New Yorker) Google defines nihilism as “the philosophical viewpoint that traditional values, beliefs, and existence itself are baseless, meaningless, or useless.” The logical conclusion here is what difference does it make who or what I destroy.