Hispanic Fanatic

You might think that America, and perhaps the entire world, is in serious decline.

Is everything going downhill?

Well, fear not. Some aspects of the modern world are on a steady incline toward greater heights.

For example, did you know that the world added nearly a million new millionaires last year? And almost half of those are American, at “a pace exceeding 1,200 per day.” 

Wow — so many people getting fabulously wealthy and… what’s that? It seems that “median wealth — a figure more representative of typical adults than the mean — dropped across the majority of countries,” which is further “evidence of widening inequality.” Yes, even as we got more millionaires, “most people got poorer.”

OK, that’s not what we had in mind for a great surge upward. But here’s something else that’s on the rise.

It appears that “billionaires’ billions are increasing faster than ever.” Billionaires have a “combined wealth that is equivalent to nearly a fifth of the entire world’s total yearly output.”

We are now at in a situation where “the surging financial and political power of a few hundred individuals contributes to a growing inequality that is likely to persist for generations because most of that wealth escapes taxation, creating a self-perpetuating aristocracy.”

These insatiable oligarchs are the chief reason for the “shrinking slice of the economic pie that goes to workers” and the acceleration toward “a level of wealth concentration that will break society.”

OK, that is not what we had in mind when we clamored for more. But we can’t help ourselves.. We are Americans. Clamoring for more is kind of our thing.

In any case, there is one more aspect of modern life that is skyrocketing.

Last year witnessed “the highest number of conflicts between states since World War II, and the highest number of fatalities recorded since the Rwandan genocide.”

Yes, we’re getting more war. And if you thought 2025 was just an anomaly, “data this year so far shows the rise in conflicts globally is a trend that’s likely to continue.”

Researchers say that “the extremely high number of conflicts and wars … lends credence to the growing number of voices arguing that we are witnessing the end of Pax Americanaand the liberal world order.”

So if you’re feeling down, just remember that at least a few things are going up — like war, economic inequality, and the political power of trillionaires.

Truly, the sky is the limit.

I know. The terms of the ceasefire for the Iran debacle look, shall we say, rather underwhelming.

That’s being polite. You could also say that is the “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” which is what Republicans (yes, Republicans!) are calling it. I guess that would make it the biggest US fuck-up since the Iraq War, which was the last time a GOP president invaded the Middle East in a boneheaded, calamitous decision that let to disaster and death.

By the way, why does anyone vote Republican in the hope that the GOP will improve the economy and avoid warfare, when the exact opposite has been true this entire century? But let’s skip that conundrum for now.

Instead, let’s analyze the Trump Doctrine, which can be summarized as an approach that “combines amorality and incompetenceto empower enemies and betray allies, as it dilutes American power in a Dunning-Kruger stew of bluster, arrogance, and stupidity.”

Where’s the lie in that definition?

Everybody knew the Iran War (wait… are we calling it that?) would be a catastrophe. This geopolitical farce is “classic Donald Trump.”

After inflicting misery, this ace negotiator got bored, left the mess for someone else to clean up, declared victory, and wound up with a deal worse for America than before the war began. People who ask, “What was the point of the war?” are still inexplicably blind to the fact that there is no point to anything Trump does, because every decision he makes is based on his selfish, vile instincts and immediate needs.

There was never a point to the war, just like there is no point to all the needless suffering he is inflicting on America’s residents and the global population. He does it because he can and it sounded good at the time.

Now that this “humiliating comedown for him and the nation he leads” appears to be complete, he will move on to some fresh travesty, some other way to desecrate the nation for no good reason. 

There will be no lesson learned here. The guy doesn’t even understand the war he just lost. He has “confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran” while offering the “desperate rationalizations [of] a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat,” leading even the most impartial of observers to wonder if the president of the United States is “losing his grip on reality itself.”

However, there is one possible benefit to this idiotic fiasco. The resulting and completely predictable energy shock “is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power,” meaning that a right-wing administration of dullards and fabulists may have done more to jump start green technology than all the touchy-feely eco warriors ever have.

Wow — maybe that was the plan all along. 

Clearly, we are in the presence of a super genius. Yup.

You know that phrase “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”?

Our illustrious president has taken this advice to mean, “Piss off your friends and give people who want to destroy your country a big hug.”

You see, it’s bad enough that our butterfly-brained chief executive does pretty much whatever Putin wants him to do. But ever since he reclaimed the White House, this former best friend of Epstein has “gone out of his way to antagonize our allies and partners, warning them that the United States will act alone and working to undermine the international alliances the U.S. has shaped since World War II.” The twist is that ever since instigating “a regional war in the Middle East after ignoring what virtually everyone said would be the result of attacking Iran a second time, Trump is begging other countries to come to his aid.”

To the surprise of absolutely no one (except the Trump Administration, which is constantly surprised when their moronic plans explode into chaos), our allies are saying, “Not my problem.”

The president of the United States has been reduced to the status of a blubbering nine-year-old upset that nobody came to his party. 

“Fine, I didn’t want them to come anyway. It was just a test.”

Sure it was.

There is one key difference, however. The dysregulated kid can be given cake to soothe the pain. 

But a power-hungry narcissist with a bottomless pit of a black heart will not be happy until everybody suffers.

And the suffering is coming.

This botched excursion, unique in American history in that nobody can say exactly why we’re at war, has already killed thousands of people. Here in the well-insulated United States, this idiotic campaign could raise the price of food, gas, plane tickets, and those cheap toys you get your kids as stocking stuffers for Christmas.

Yeah, pretty much everything. But I guess inflation is patriotic now.

In any case, the “window for Donald Trump to end the Iran war by simply declaring victory and walking away is rapidly closing.” Soon, the man who cannot be bothered to read anything and rarely stays on one topic for more than a minute will have to “face a stark choice: He can take greater risks in pursuit of a decisive tactical success, prepare the country for a prolonged conflict that could last for many months, or seek a negotiated settlement that involves a real compromise with Tehran.”

It should be perfectly obvious to all but the most delusional that America’s reckless, childish leader “does not think strategically… historically, geographically, or even rationally.” The man “does not consider the wider implications of his decisions [or] take responsibility when these decisions go wrong.” This wildly unpopular president “acts on whim and impulse, and when he changes his mind—when he feels new whims and new impulses—he simply lies about whatever he said or did before.”

We are at the tipping point where the US will either get dragged into yet another horrific ground war in the Middle East, or we will slink away in embarrassment after unleashing death and destruction for no discernable reason.

How’s that for winning?

There is something mathematically pure about the Republican Party. For the past 30 years, they have insisted that once they have the presidency, everything will be great, but the exact opposite — i.e., massive chaos — always occurs.

This predictable political formula of A plus B equals C would be charming enough. But it’s the specifics that amaze and astound.

Consider that the last three GOP presidents (Bush Sr., Bush Jr., and Trump) all began their terms with solid economies and ended their terms with recessions. Although Jr.’s was the worst, Trump 2.0 has the potential to create a definite trend of economic downturns intensifying with each Republican administration.

However, the most amazing mathematical formula, too precise to be coincidence, is that the last three GOP presidents have waged an unnecessary war in the Middle East, with the rationale for each one becoming more ludicrous than the last.

We’ve gone from defending Kuwait to imaginary WMDs to… well, nobody really knows why we’re bombing Iran. It could be one of a dozen vague, contradictory reasons or no reason at all.

This latest round of GOP warmongering in the Middle East looks to end the trilogy with a full-blown scene of total Armageddon. Seriously, we have religious zealots who are eager to kill us all for the glory of Jesus (which theologians would tell you is not something Christ would actually want). But hey, if the apocalypse comes, at least we would be spared another GOP president.

In any case, I have long wondered about voters who insist that Republicans are better for the economy, despite a century of evidence that this is not true. However, now I have to ponder why any sane adult would look at Trump during the 2024 election, listen to the GOP’s shrieked bloodlust, and think “They are the party of peace.”

Yeah, Trump said he wouldn’t start any wars, but it was a minor miracle that he didn’t launch one during his first term. He was too busy golfing and denying Covid to attack anybody. Only a child would believe that our luck would last. Trump and his right-wing acolytes are happy only when Americans are dropping bombs on people.

Invading Venezuela was just too easy and didn’t deliver the carnage that conservatives love and the distraction that Trump needed. And that is why “the most powerful man on Earth is cavalierly bombing and reshaping one of the most geopolitically explosive regions in the world — and has offered nothing even approaching a coherent explanation for why he’s doing it or what he’s aiming to achieve.” We all know that it was horrific enough “for America to have a mad king, [but] now the world is seeing the rise of a mad emperor.”

Our lunatic president — who has really shot to hell his chances of winning that elusive Nobel Peace Prize — “is telling liesabout the war that not only contradict one another, but contradict themselves internally.” We have to ask if this misbegotten war is “about a nuclear program that doesn’t exist” or a regime change “that we haven’t thought through” or “an imaginary Iranian threat to elections.” Our befuddled commander in chief “has claimed both that he already destroyed Iran’s nuclear program and that he is now destroying it,” which makes it a Schrodinger’s cat of atomic weaponry.

This conflict — which has yet to gain a catchy name, so we will likely go with the Iran War — has been launched “without explanation, without Congress, without even an attempt to build public support, [and] without a coherent strategy.”

Of course, that’s not entirely true. Because according to the GOP ideology, “the dominance itself is the point; there is no other endgame.”

As for the war itself, at some point, America “may be forced to choose between an escalation or an embarrassing climbdown.”

Assuming that this campaign doesn’t end in a disaster that makes the Iraq War look like a mighty victory, our best hope is that our easily distracted president just gets bored with the war and impulsively calls it off. That would not be the first time he creates a cataclysm, leaves a mess for others to clean up, and declares victory.

If we tell him that America has won the war already, will he tweet himself congratulations and go back to ranting about paper straws?

Sounds like a coherent strategy to me.

I know. We had the audacity to celebrate Thanksgiving, treating ourselves to the briefest of respites from the nonstop clown-car shitshow that now makes up American government. And what happens?

Well, for starters, our possibly ailing, possible senile president openly admits to committing war crimes (but then tries to jettison the blame to someone else). 

Hey, remember that “controversial” video of Democratic leaders reminding military personnel that they should refuse to carry out illegal orders? Yeah, it looks like that was sound advice that has unfortunately gone unheeded. 

In other disturbing news, our nation’s centuries-long reputation as a beacon of freedom for oppressed people has been stomped into oblivion. We are kicking out refugees who helped us in a botched war because one of them is a homicidal lunatic. This is because we now judge whole groups of people based on their worst members, unless of course, they are white Americans who tried to overthrow the government, in which case we do not even judge the worst of them at all.

And while we’re at it, we’re expelling other immigrant groups because… well, there really is no good reason. Hell, even the most ardent Trump defender has to admit that referring to communities of black people as “garbage” and harassing them for a crime that they are not even remotely responsible for is not, as the kids say, a good look.

But don’t worry. Our government has made it clear that Afrikaners can get going on rebuilding their whites-only homeland right here. So we still love certain immigrants, and the reasons why are not glaring or obvious in the least. Nope.

Oh, one more thing. It is more than a little odd for a guy to threaten war (despite his boasting that he would never start a war) because he is so angry about the illegal drug trade, but then turn around and pardon a man who flooded America with those same illegal drugs.

Yes, it’s all very depressing, infuriating, and perplexing. So basically, it is another day in Trump’s America.

And we just can’t get a fucking break.

Everything is a distraction, but nothing is a distraction.

The president receiving a $400 million jet from a foreign nation in an overt display of greed, corruption, and potential bribery? That’s a distraction. Also the motherfucker really wants that jet.

Once again, everything that Trump says is true — in his mind at that moment. 

For example, that whole Gulf of America imbroglio wasn’t on anyone’s radar until it popped into the Dear Leader’s head, ex nihilo, after which it suddenly became a top priority. The guy wanted to do it, and the process was surprisingly easy. So now we have a cartographic catastrophe.

In contrast, taking over Gaza and building Trump hotels on the land is substantially more difficult. That means it isn’t going to happen. Again, our butterfly-brained chief executive meant it when he said it. But when the endeavor turned out to be a chore, he forgot about this particular desire and moved on to some other scattered, ill-conceived project.

This brings us to the most troubling aspect of the Trump administration’s constant flinging of bizarre ideas and psychotic master plans.

You see, even though this bloviating sack of lies “never mentioned taking over Greenland—or Canada, or Panama, or Mexico—during the 2024 campaign, he has made such takeovers a key objective of his administration.” The reason these absurd threats keep surfacing is because of “a historical truism: when one country invades another, it usually reflects the problems of the invader’s domestic politics, no matter what the justification for the invasion is.”

So if Trump’s poll numbers keep falling, and there is every reason to assume they will, the warmongers and lunatics who surround him will no doubt realize that “war seduces entire societies, creating fictions that the public believes and relies on to continue to support conflicts.”

It worked for George W. Bush, who likely would have lost reelection if not for the argument that he was a “wartime president.” Yeah, and that war, which he started, turned out great — didn’t it? And his second term was a raving success — right? 

But I digress. Let’s get back to our current Republican incompetent.

Now, we certainly aren’t going to pick a military fight with China. We can’t even win a trade war against them. 

But we can shoot it out with a smaller nation. Hey, didn’t you ever wonder why the Reagan administration invaded tiny Granada? 

The drive to dominate a smaller country is even stronger among conservatives than it was during Ronnie’s time. This is because “the reactionary patriotism we’re so familiar with is now infected with an apocalyptic mindset.” The Republican Party has morphed into “a toxic system of belief, capable of overriding material self-interest and logic because the main offering is revenge.” This goes way beyond “the shallow emotional fix of winning elections or sticking it to the libs.” At its core, Trumpism is “not so much a hatred for any one group … but a hatred of civilization itself.”

There’s a whole lot of civilization in the world that right-wingers want to vanquish. The hope is that we can white-knuckle it out for three years without bombs dropping. But it all depends on how easily we get distracted.

There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.

—Kurt Vonnegut

I know the basics about the Middle East. But that’s about it. I certainly can’t speak with any authority about the history, culture, or political issues that roil the place.

But I know America, and I see that antisemites are using the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians as a cover for how much they hate Jews. And I see that Islamaphobes are citing the grotesque actions of terrorists as a cover for how much they hate Muslims.

It doesn’t matter if you live in Jerusalem or New Jersey, we are all subjected to the violent whims of people who insist that their race, culture, or god is the best and far superior to those heathens living next door.

And there appears to be no end in sight to this sociopathic commonality among humans.

There is nothing intelligent to say about it.

If, for some horrific and highly implausible reason, you found yourself on the front line of a combat zone, ready to charge into battle, and you glanced over and saw me standing next to you, I doubt you would feel comforted. 

That’s because I believe in nonviolence, so I wouldn’t be there shrieking war cries and boasting how I was going to drink my enemies’ blood. I would more likely be trying to figure out how to avoid shooting myself or anybody else, and this is not the quality you want in a soldier.

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No doubt, you’ve heard about Trump’s proposed budget, which includes things like billions for a border wall that will never be constructed and, presumably, a million or two for hush money to porn stars and/or Russian operatives.

But setting aside the minor facts that this budget would completely fuck over poor people and, maybe, destroy the planet, there is something else that caught my attention.

Defense spending would rise by 10 percent.

This is not a huge surprise, of course, as Republicans have a bizarre fascination with warfare, and members of the GOP are constantly threatening to invade one country or another, even while distancing themselves from the last disastrous war (a campaign that was, of course, all their idea in the first place). Hell, Republicans are happy to spend $30 million on a damn parade just to show off our super-awesome military hardware.

But a fair question is whether all this military spending is making us any safer.

After all, we already spend more cash on the military than any other nation on Earth — by far, actually. In fact, we spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.

So when we will it be enough? Should we spend more than the next ten nations combined, or the next twenty? Should we spend more than the rest of the planet put together?

Because if it’s true — as Republicans have often said — that our military is in disrepair and needs to be rebuilt, I would ask, “Why can’t we get something decent for the 16 percent of our budget that we spend on defense?”

I mean, if the US military still sucks after all the hundreds of billions that have been thrown at it, maybe we should call off this whole defense idea and go the way of Costa Rica, a country that has no army. Incidentally, Costa Rica is never the target of terrorist cells and doesn’t get threatened by nutjobs with nuclear weapons.

Of course, that’s a bit of apples to oranges. But stay with me on this point.

You see, it appears that the more we spend on defense, the more likely we are to go to war. All those tanks and bombers and missiles apparently will themselves to be used.

Perhaps it is the same principle behind the fact that the states with the most firearms have the highest gun-death rates.

Just as having a gun in your house makes you more likely to get shot, maybe having more soldiers makes it more likely for a country to get into a war.

I don’t know whether than is true or not. But I do know this: We are the most fearful and paranoid nation in the industrialized world. No matter how much we spend on bombs and bullets, it will never make us feel safer.

Remember back when liberals were widely known as bleeding hearts and crybabies and hypersensitive wimps who would, if they could, create a Constitutional amendment that forbade anyone from getting their feelings hurt?

Yeah, those days are long gone. Because according to many conservatives, modern liberals are nothing but a bunch of heartless Antifa thugs who will crush your skull if you even mumble the words “free market.”

So liberals aren’t relying on emotions anymore, but you know who is? That’s right — Republicans. Much to our national shock, the GOP has become the party of feelings.

No, I don’t mean soft, useless feelings like empathy and compassion. I mean the manly, hardcore, non-cuck emotions like anger and contempt and hatred. They are very much in touch with those feelings.

This move to prioritizing emotions over thoughts has been prevalent in the Republican Party for at least a decade. Recall that George W. Bush, the loveable war criminal, famously led with his gut and eschewed scientific analysis or hard data in favor of whatever appealed to his intuition.

Yes, that’s how we got the Iraq War and truthiness and the idea that climate change was open to debate. Good times…

In any case, the current GOP has doubled down on the use of feelings over facts. During the presidential election, we heard that it didn’t matter if crime was down. All that mattered was that people felt crime was up. It didn’t matter that the economy had improved substantially under Obama. Conservatives felt that it hadn’t.

And now, during the reign of the most id-driven, unthinking rage-aholic in presidential history, we see the full effect of this approach.

We have an America that is not just illogical. It’s anti-logical.

I’m not just talking about conservative hostility toward higher education, scientific inquiry, and the very concept of facts. All that is proof enough of GOP’s preference for knee-jerk reaction over careful analysis.

No, I’m talking about our glorious leader himself. All rational Republicans should see that Trump has “every quality they described as a deal breaker under Obama” and withdraw their support immediately. But while there is “virtually no personality defect that conservatives accused Obama of possessing that Trump himself does not actually possess,” more than two-thirds of Republicans still back him.

And the reason is simple: the GOP, as a whole, feels like Trump is doing a great job, despite the fact that the man has startlingly few accomplishments. They feel it in their right-wing bones.

But of course, that leads us to the latest Republican triumph: the passage of massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

This panacea of conservative thought, this epitome of GOP dreams, is and has always been trickle-down economics writ large. There is no evidence, of course, that giving more money to rich people stimulates the economy. Republicans just feel like it should, and so now we’re going to do it, despite the fact that the vast majority of America thinks this is a terrible idea.

Of course, Republicans have a secondary objective (again, one based on pure emotion), which “is to screw over Democrats.” The GOP tax plan “will almost exclusively hurt residents of high-tax blue states like New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and California.”

This is the just the latest, most egregious example of what has become the bottom layer of the GOP’s pyramid of principles. It is clear that conservatism “as practiced by most Republicans is an ideology built on one single principle: pissing off the liberals.” And this motivation is based on the feeing, the gut-level revulsion that “liberals are subhuman scum, and that hating liberals… is far more important that minor concerns like preventing war or economic destruction.”

In such an environment, it doesn’t matter that most economists — including conservative ones — agree that the Republican tax plan will not have any beneficial effects on the economy.

It doesn’t matter that the CBO has calculated that the plan will add over a trillion dollars to the national debt, which was anathema to a political party (long gone) that billed itself as brimming over with “deficit hawks.” Instead, we have GOP leaders — not working-class Republican voters, but full-time leaders of the conservative movement — who look at these facts, glance at these numbers, and dismiss “the findings as an accounting gimmick.”

It is not possible to have a true debate with people who, when confronted with overwhelming statistics, verifiable facts, or irrefutable evidence about clear truths, will simply set their jaws and proclaim, “No, I don’t believe it,” just because that’s the way they feel.

The only proper response to such people is to say, “Well, fuck your feelings.”