Here Comes Peter Cottontail
(And He's Hungry)
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” --Said by Donald J. Trump on April 6, during the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, attended by children aged 13 and under.
Hard to imagine a more apt picture of what our country has become than the image of a floppy eared rabbit--or pooka--standing alongside an American president while he casually talks of committing mass murder.
In Irish mythology, the pooka is a shapeshifting troublemaker that appears in the guise of various creatures--horses, goats, wolves, dogs, cats or hares. All known for their unpredictable behavior. Some, though mischievous, are quite harmless. In the play, Harvey, Elwood P. Dowd’s friend--invisible to all but him--comes to mind. But other pookas are thought to be evil and bloodthirsty--they hunt and kill humans. So, in the case of our orange-haired psychopath, this particular wild-eyed grinning Easter bunny may well be the perfect match.
Some days later at a White House presser, Trump stated: “We can’t take care of daycare.” He included Medicare and Medicaid in those remarks, referring to programs on which millions of Americans depend, as “scams.”
“We can take care of one thing,” he concluded: “military protection.” . . .War.
And there you have it. Straight talk from Jabba The Hutt. Well, why should we give a shit about children in our country? We’ve been killing other peoples’ children by the thousands in Gaza, and we’re now on track to spend years of daycare money killing more small fry in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Mexico, Cuba, and God knows where else.
Almost in the same breath, Trump bragged about doing away with the Department of Education. “We have all these buildings empty,” he boasted. As if vacant education buildings are considered a triumph in a civilized country.
Trump, of course, operates almost entirely on the fictitious level. Lies casually drop from his mouth like caramel coated corn from a Cracker Jack box. The country he’s in charge of seems to think it’s better than that, that it at least possesses a moral compass. The truth is it has never possessed a moral compass, it simply prefers its lies told by a more polished representative dressed up in designer suits. Biden at least had the sense not to talk of genocide within earshot of the children. He did it behind closed doors—quietly, with some dignity.
Such was the level of brilliance the Iranians recently faced in Islamabad. No wonder the peace negotiation failed. The Vance/Kushner/Witkoff team was a joke. Steve Witcoff and Jared Kushner are avowed Zionists, and J.D. Vance, who is running for president, has already pocketed $167,000 from AIPAC, the powerful Israel lobby that basically has the balls of every U.S. congressman locked in a vault. That goes for the women, as well; whatever passes for their version of guts, rest assured AIPAC’s captured them, too.
It’s a wonder the Iranians bothered to show up. They probably won’t in the future. Speaking in his basso-Darth Vader voice, Netanyahu said the Americans reported to him during every phase of the negotiations. Vance and Trump are like two failing school children groveling before the principal, or--might as well say it--the de facto president of the United States. (Hey, all you “No Kings” protesters--YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE WRONG KING!!)
Trump rejected the intel of his own country, which told him this war couldn’t be won, in favor of the shoddy intel--lies, actually--of Netanyahu who told him he would emerge victorious in 96 hours.
Yep, the Israeli prez surely knows a fool when he sees one. And a fellow ego-maniac. But Netanyahu is far more intelligent. An icy smooth neckless gangster who’s been thirsting to destroy Iran for forty years--it’s a deep running blood-thirst. Every U.S. president over that period has passed on this lunacy, and then this knucklehead pops up. Trump, who thinks of himself as a he-man, is soft warm puddy in Netanyahu’s pudgy fingers. The Israeli strong man can mold him into whatever he wants. Sit, stay, fetch, roll over, Trump does it all. As does our Congress.
To be fair, Trump is a killer by mere happenstance; he just sort of fell into it, as most other U.S. presidents have before him. True, some are better than others, brighter, perhaps, a little more polished, but sooner or later, they all wake up in the house once occupied by Abraham Lincoln knowing full well what they’re mostly there to do--massacre, maim and kill people around the world--men, women, children who are mostly innocent. So it is with Trump—a simple, conscienceless goofball who just does what he’s told, who when he lies awake at night in his big empty bed (Melania preferring a hot night-life in the Big Apple over a sleepless one next to an oafish slug) probably dreams of selling used cars, or who, when he looks out on a decimated Gaza, envisions twenty-five miles of glittering waterfront hotels and condos—oodles of cash rolling into his account—instead of thousands of bodies buried under tons of rubble.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, is a stone pure mass murderer for whom 75,000 dead Palestinians are mere appetizers.
The so-called peace talks therefore yielded nothing. The American spoiled brats treated the Iranians like dirt, as if they were the losers instead of the winners. A quarter century ago, Noam Chomsky likened U.S. diplomacy to a Mafia godfather: “Do what we say or we’ll kill you!” The Iranians now know--if they didn’t before--that the Americans can’t be trusted, that, in fact, they’re probably incapable of operating in the real world. The peace seekers might have had better luck with ten-year-olds rolling Easter eggs on the South Lawn.
And so the wars will continue. Israel is committed to tearing apart both Iran and Lebanon. But they’ve got a voracious appetite. Their ultimate goal could well include all the Middle East. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, US ambassador to Israel and Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee appeared to support the Biblical premise that Israel should have dominion over all the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates in Iraq—an empire that encompasses all or part of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
“It would be fine if they took it all,” Huckabee told Carlson. From this casually stupid remark some of those countries, ostensibly our allies, may have gleaned the true nature of their relationship—that they were never anything to us but expendable. Useful until they’re not. Well, they wouldn’t be the first by a long shot.
As for Iranians, Trump refers to them as “crazy bastards,” and “animals.” In the words of reporter Max Blumenthal, the “U.S./Israeli terror coalition” is bombing bridges across Iran, it’s bombed a UNESCO heritage site, it is bombing hospitals, power plants, petrochemical plants, it’s bombed whole apartment blocks--entire civilian neighborhoods blasted to ruin. The Rafi-Nia Synagogue in Tehran was reportedly destroyed, with officials noting Torah scrolls were buried under the rubble.
In a recent speech before the U.S. Senate, Bernie Sanders angrily noted that Israel now occupies about 14% of Lebanese territory; that the defense minister, Israel Katz, ordered all Lebanese border villages be demolished, “following the model in Gaza”; that Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, has declared that Dahiyeh, a suburb of south Beirut, “will look like Khan Yunis,” a suburb in Gaza reduced to rubble.
Indeed, as of this moment, southern Lebanon, a region with some 5-million people—is about 70% destroyed, with 1.2 million refugees.
Sanders concluded his remarks, calling for an end to military aid and support to the extremist Israeli government. Poor Bernie. He always seems to find his spine, along with his willingness to close the barn door, long after the horses have fled.
Well, that proposal is dead on arrival. Bernie might as well spit into a hurricane. Trump and Netanyahu are joined at the hip. They’re like Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the two killers in Truman Capote’s bestseller who in 1959 walked into the house of a Kansas farmer, killing him and his whole family. Perry later admitted he did all the killing while Hickock watched. Neither could act alone; they fed off each other.
So, it is with the sly Israeli who keeps egging Trump on, pumping up his massive ego, calling him “Israel’s best friend,” “a savior,” and all that horseshit. Anything to keep this witless wonder sending more bombs, more carriers, and a generous supply of ripe, young, brainwashed, American boys, willing to die for a country not even their own, for a feckless thug who gives them no more thought than he does the hordes of blowflies feeding off dead Palestinians.
Meanwhile, as they departed Islamabad, the Iran peace delegation said: “If the U.S. wishes to crater its economy by letting Netanyahu kill diplomacy, that would ultimately be its choice. We think that would be dumb but are prepared for it.”
