Poor Poor Pitiful U.S.

Warren Zevon

President Trump should have chosen Warren Zevon’s classic “Poor Poor Pitiful Me” as background music for his whiny "Liberation Day" speech.

He described the world’s most powerful nation as a country that has “been looted, pillaged, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike.”

Helpless Americans, who actually enjoy one of the world’s highest standards of living, “watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream,” according to the delusional Trump.

The president said hard-working Americans are tired of sitting on the sidelines while “other nations got rich and powerful, much of it at our expense, but now it’s our turn to prosper.”

Trump held up a poster of countries that would be slapped with tariffs so his administration can raise $600B a year to help pay for tax cuts for the rich.

Eswatini, a landlocked southern African nation of 1.3M poor souls is on that “hit list” for a 10 percent tariff. Sixty-nine percent of its people live below the poverty line.

The country already was reeling from Trump’s threat to cut the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) program to fight HIV epidemic. Eswatini has the world’s highest HIV prevalence, estimated at 27 percent among people 15 years and older.

In Trump’s mind, Eswatini is among the foreign cheaters who have brutalized poor, poor pitiful Americans.

Warren must be rolling over in his grave.

Nothing to see here… Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief at the Atlantic, told a webinar today that he was “most surprised” that nobody in the infamous Signal group chat even noticed that he was on, and then left the chat in the midst of the discussion about war plans about an attack on Yemen.

An “ordinary administration” would have noticed and summoned him to the White House.

Earlier in his career, Goldberg was involved in such discussions, where he was asked to hold a story until the operation was completed, or to not publicize secret information.

Goldberg heard “nothing” from Team Trump.

The e-i-c said Trump saying that Goldberg didn’t overhear secret or classified information was “absurd” or “silly.”

If getting information about an impending attack by American pilots, flying over anti-aircraft systems to bomb an ally of Iran is not secret, then what is, wondered Goldberg.

Is obtaining a list of CIA operatives secret, or getting info about where our nukes are located secret?

He called the Trump administration's reaction to the Signal crisis “nonsense.”

Goldberg also doesn’t mind that the Trump White House has been calling him “bad names.”

That builds our subscriber list, he quipped.

Democrats thank the White House... Trump’s Liberation Day (the influential Economist magazine calls “Ruination Day") tariffs are bound to wreck the US economy and bring on a recession.

That’s bad good news for the Republican Party that is desperate to hold onto to its slim control of the House in the mid-term elections.

The White House didn't help the beleagured GOP out, by publishing a list of supporters of its “bold trade action."

The roster includes 40 Republican Members of Congress including New York City’s Rep. Nicole Malliotakis.

She said: “President Trump is sticking up for American workers & farmers, repatriating our supply chain and protecting our national security.”

The farmers in her Brooklyn and Staten Island district thank Malliotakis for her concern about their welfare.

Those quotes will supply juicy grist for the Democrats in the upcoming election.

Shame in Annapolis... The US Naval Academy removed items commemorating female Jewish graduates from a display ahead of a visit by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, according to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

They were on view at the Commodore Uriah P. Levy Center and Jewish Chapel, which sounds like a logical location for such a display.

Of course, the Naval Academy now says it was a mistake, and is taking steps to correct the unauthorized removal.

Oddly, the Academy left items honoring male Jewish graduates on display. One assumes that the Academy thinks males are not under attack in Hegseth’s war on DEI.

Paranoia runs deep.