I was on the Blue Route last week, driving carefully to avoid being pulled over by the sort of sneaky cop who nailed me on Labor Day in a speed trap near Norristown, PA. All was well until a Chevy Suburban doing 90 mph blew past my ancient Acura.
“Motherfucker!” I shouted, dashing my New Year’s resolution.
“Your favorite word,” said my friend Swamp Rabbit, who was riding shotgun and laughing. “I knew you couldn’t give it up.”
My resolution had been to substitute the word ‘malefactor’ for the other mf-word every time I got angry . If some wise guy got on my case I would say, “What’s it to you, malefactor?” Same number of syllables, same hard consonants, but no sex with relatives.
“Where’d ya git that word, anyhow?” the rabbit said.
I told him ‘malefactor’ comes from the Latin and refers to one who breaks the law in a big way. Teddy Roosevelt famously used the word to criticize the greedy corporate chiefs who imperiled the economy in the early 20th century. “Malefactors of great wealth,” he called them.
“You can apply the word to all sorts of rotten people,” I explained. “It’s more polite than the dirty mf-word.”
The rabbit drank from his flask and said, “Tell it to that Congress lady who dissed Trump a few weeks back. She said ‘impeach the motherfucker,’ and she didn’t use no asterisks.”
“Trump bragged about grabbing women by the pussy,” I replied. “So I guess the Congresswoman figured it was okay to call him a dirty name.”
Swamp Rabbit took another drink and shook his head. “Talking like Trump just drags you down to his level, don’t you think?”
I pushed down on the gas pedal and stared into the dark up ahead. “The people who elected Trump dragged all of us down to his level. We’re stuck there till the motherfucker is gone.”
That was two f-bombs in ten minutes, and I figured there would be many more. It was going to be a very long year, and I was already out of resolutions.
“Every cloud has a silver lining,” and Trump has unwittingly turned over lots of rocks causing some very unusual “malefactors” to slithered out from underneath them.
In an October 2016 debate candidate Clinton called Trump a “Russian puppet.” Candidate Trump then called Clinton a “Russian puppet.” Most people blew off this exchange as silly campaign talk.
Yesterday Clinton tweeted “Like I said: A puppet,” in reference to Trump’s feelings about NATO.
This poor woman has lost her damn mind.
Also yesterday, the on screen crawl read “Bombshell: Trump hates NATO and how it’s funded” or some such nonsense.
Some bombshell. The media has lost its damn mind as well.
NATO went rogue under Bush “the Idiot,” and became even more aggressive under Obama. Especially during his first four years.
NATO’s expansion eastward which included the countries along the Russia’s western border was bad enough.
When those same NATO countries began to build up their armies, receive advanced weapons systems and weapons from the US (on credit), and deploy US missiles which they pointed at Russia, Putin and his military became nervous and unsettled.
But, the straw that broke Putin’s back was NATO’s invitation to Fascist Ukraine to become a NATO member.
Putin responded to what he perceived as a direct threat from the US by taking the Crimea back and starting a “small proxy war” with Ukraine, building up his military forces all along his western border, and entering the Syrian Civil War at Assad’s invitation.
NATO’s time may have come and gone just like the Warsaw Pact’s time came and went.
The neo-liberal, pro-Zionist, interventionists should rethink their extremist anti-Russian posture before we all die of radiation poisoning.