​A felonious assault by sandwich

By Ed Raymond

fargogadfly@gmail.com

Trump: the new man for all seasons

Five hundred years ago, Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More of England refused to write a letter to Pope Clement VII of the Roman Catholic Church asking that he annul the marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon because she had failed to give him a son to succeed him to the throne. He wanted to marry the beautiful young Anne Boleyn so she could provide him with sons and fun. More also refused to take an oath declaring Henry as “The Supreme Head” of the Anglican Church which would become the state religion. As a result of his refusals to do both, More’s head ended up in a basket below the executioner’s sword at the Tower of London. These important historical events took place between 1529 and 1535.

Sir Thomas Was a hero to many English. Robert Whittington, a close contemporary of More’s, wrote the following about him in 1520: “More is a man of an angel’s wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness, and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvellous mirth and pastimes, and sometimes of sad gravity. A man for all seasons.”

Playwright Robert Bolt, convinced it was an important and fascinating time in English history, wrote a popular West End stage play and then directed and produced a 1966 film also titled “A Man For All Seasons.” It’s a fascinating historical movie and was a great box office success. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture of the Year at the 39th Academy Awards, the Best Director Award for Fred Zinneman and Best Actor Award for Paul Scofield. It also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture and the BAFTA Awards for Best Film and Best British Film. Corky and I always watch it if we have an opportunity. It is a remarkably historically accurate study of kings and queens, thieves and double-crossers and moral and immoral government agents.

We now have a Man for No Seasons who is an amoral and immoral leader, a direct opposite of the moral Sir Thomas More. The convicted felon of 34 counts Donald John Trump of the White House Mall & Mercantile thinks he is dictator-genius-president-CEO-general-admiral-CFO-mayor-Great Leader-police chief-king of the Divided States of America but is a jerk-prick-asshole-malignant narcissist-sexual predator-sociopath-psychopath completely ignorant of history and empathy.

Judge to prosecution: “Please list damages created by Subway sandwich”

When Trump finally leaves the Oval Office (which he remodeled to look like a thrift store) he will immediately make the history books — that is, if we still have a democracy and need books — as a candidate and a president who committed two assaults in Washington; one at the capitol on January 6, 2021 and the other in the capital city in August of 2025. In one of the most violent days in the history of D.C., his failed coup killed five capitol police and wounded 137. When starting his second term, he immediately pardoned 1,600 coup “troops” who participated in the six-hour assault wielding baseball bats, pipes, and stun guns, and he will be remembered for his loyal administration employees charging a man who threw a Subway sandwich, partially eaten, at a police officer while yelling a few obscenities.

Former Fox propagandist Jeanine Pirro, appointed by Trump to the post of U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, charged the Justice Department employee, later fired, with felonious assault: “assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers and employees of the United States.” The charge could result in a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of $25,000. People have always gotten a good laugh out of the old joke that a grand jury could indict a “ham sandwich.” I wonder if that means a Subway sandwich, partially eaten, can do felony damage to a police officer wearing tactical gear. Will the sandwich be weighed, checked for various poisons, and tested for one of 870,000 viruses we are threatened with each day? Stay tuned to Fox Lies, the show that paid $787 million in damages to keep lying. Remember that the Almighty Police Chief of Washington is also busy “restoring truth and sanity to American history.”

The other day when “The Chosen One” was “addressing” the leaders of Europe in the White House and lying, babbling and bloviating ignorance every time his lips moved, I suddenly thought of poor kids born with a cleft palate. Their handicap is terribly visible to everybody before they have cheiloplasty, the operation to repair the upper lip. Beautiful Donald was home and military schooled and developed a cleft brain by a white supremacist father. The Lyin’ King is a “beautiful” artificially tanned man with lighthouse blond hair always dominating in a crowd, but his brain suffers from millions of clefts. His brain has power outages, blown circuits and erratic synapses and signals creating a towering babble of bullshit.

Among his biggest “lyin’” words? “Won by landslide.” Fifty-three Trumplican senators represent 155 million Republicans; forty-five Democratic senators represent 181 million Democrats.

The Orange “Genius” is now fighting a “major crime wave” in Washington. The “major” problem is, deadly crimes are not making the streets dangerous; the serious crimes are taking place in his White House, in his Trumplican Congress and in his Republican Supreme Court. Perhaps he is using too much bleach internally.

Americans can learn how to stay democratic from Iran’s revolution

We have learned valuable lessons from Hitler’s failure to succeed in creating the thousand-year Third Reich, while the first-day dictator has learned nothing. There are also valuable lessons in the Iranian Revolution taught by Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, the Shah we supported for too many years. We liked him because he allowed a U.S. collection of corporations to make billions by selling off Iran’s oil. Americans should read The New Yorker article “Death to the Shah: Nobody Expected the Iranian Revolution, Not Even the Revolutionaries” by Daniel Immerwahr. It is history we can trust and need to know as long as we are a democracy.

However, our co-conspirator the Shah, like 90% of the world’s 1,500 billionaires, thought “greed was good” and used it to satisfy his yearnings. For his 48th birthday in 1967 he planned his own coronation. Standing before a gold chair on a gold throne, he wore a crown which contained 3,380 diamonds. His third wife, his Empress Farah, pranced about the stage in a bejeweled Christian Dior mink-edged cloak which required the assistance of eight attendants. After the stage celebration, the couple boarded a gold carriage specially crafted by a Vienna coach-maker, the last one in the world. They then traveled down the streets while an airplane dropped 17,532 red roses along their path, one for each day of his life! Meanwhile, the many poor in Iran did not have enough to eat. The Shah was a billionaire who never knew what was enough. The present billionaire class must have the longest, tallest yacht, the mansion with the most bathrooms and swimming pools, the biggest survival bunker, the biggest private jet and the most expensive vehicle.

The Shah loved military equipment, so he spent billions creating the fifth largest military in the world — and President Richard Nixon helped him. His precious toys were supersonic jets, laser-guided bombs and helicopter gunships. Meanwhile, Iran’s secret police under his charge (known as SAVAK) got to be known as the torture champions of the world, working on opposition leaders still in Iran. He allowed only one political party and all adults had to join up. He required his picture to be on all public buildings and homes to display his portrait. Iranians came up with a sick joke: “One cannot throw a stone without hitting one — and if you hit one, you were immediately arrested.”

The revolution in Iran: when a greedy criminal met a religious criminal

The Islamic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was the Shah’s toughest opposition. He stayed alive by attacking the Shah from the safety of Iraq. He opposed the Shah’s coronation in 1967 and refused to attend an expensive celebration sponsored by the Shah in 1971 to honor 2,500 years of monarchy in Iran. He said: “It’s an abominable festival celebrating the murder of the people of Iran.”

President Jimmy Carter reluctantly supported the Shah instead of Khomeini and pressed him about supporting human rights in Iran. But the Shah was dying of cancer and was inconsistent in his treatment of the people. He tolerated opposing demonstrations and then would order the killing of hundreds of protesters on the streets. His haphazard directives often made a real mess of things. He got some amazing advice from the happy-go-lucky Ronald Reagan in 1979: “Shoot the first man in front. The rest will fall in line.” September 8, 1978, became known as Black Friday in Iran when the Shah instituted martial law in the largest 12 cities. A total of up to 300 protesters were killed in the streets on that day.

This was the beginning of the end for the Shah and the ascent of Khomeini. In 1979 protesters called for the killing of the Shah. He decided to leave the country for a short time, telling one aide: “Don’t pack too much. It’s just for a short period of time.”

He was wrong. It was forever. Members of his world’s fifth largest army often joined protesters in the street yelling “Death to the Shah!!” Soldiers deserted by the hundreds. Millions of Iranians were shocked their revolution was over so quickly. Some asked the question: “Do you think we actually planned to have a revolution?”

Khomeini quickly took charge, forming the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which made arrests, confiscated property and executed many enemies of the revolution. Meanwhile, Jimmy Carter allowed the Shah to come to America for medical care in 1979. He died in 1980 and a form of liberalism died in Iran. Women were purged from any position of power and forced to wear hijabs and clothing indicating they were religious Muslims. Universities were closed. Authorities claimed music was like opium, so it was banned from private and public scenes. Thousands of political prisoners, estimated at 2,800 to 5,000, were put to death. Prisons and torture chambers were filled with Communists, liberals, feminists, homosexuals, Baha’is, and monarchists. Khomeini ruled for 36 years.

The article closes with a very thoughtful paragraph by the writer: “The larger instability today seems to be in the United States, not Iran. Norms here are shifting wildly, with the chaos centering on a single figure, our Napoleon on a golf cart. The usual questions arise: Is Donald Trump an accident or an inevitability? An erratic blunderer of the spray-tanned spirit of history? It may not ultimately matter. An event that is improbable can still be irreversible. A switch is thrown, the train hurtles down an alternate track, and it goes that way for a very long time.”

One might cut this short by saying: “There’s a lot of Trump in the Shah and a lot of the Shah in Trump.”