It’s time for The Masters golf tournament. “A tradition like no other,” goes the byline. It is often a great tournament to watch, since Augusta National is a beautiful course, all decked out with blooming azaleas and Amen Corner, and the players themselves rise to the occasion and play some great golf. For the casual observer, it might all seem like so much hokum, unduly refined, steeped in more tradition and reverence than any golf tournament deserves.

A few things surprise me about the event– a four-day pass, if one is lucky enough to secure one via a lottery, is only $140. But the secondary market, i.e. resale value for such a coveted ticket, is through the roof, the highest margin of any sport– thousands of dollars. Concessions are remarkably inexpensive– sandwiches at $1.50, some at $3, a beer for $5. Souvenirs are sold only on site, no e-commerce. So if one is lucky enough to get in, the costs for certain items aren’t at all steep. All that being said, the clientele for this tournament includes a high percentage of high income movers and shakers who fly in on private jets and pay $10,000 a day for access to their own facilities that include food, beverages, a separate souvenir shop, and other perks.

The people who attend are never referred to as “fans,” but rather “patrons.” They are the guests of Augusta National and are treated as such. It is said that once you find a spot to sit, you can leave your chair for hours, come back, and it will be empty, waiting for you.

It takes an army of volunteers and staff to pull this off every year– from groundskeepers to security to vendors. The course itself conceals a network of underground electrical and mechanical technology, and the famed bloom of azaleas behind the 12th green is intentionally managed to be at its height during tournament week.

Despite its checkered history with regard to admission of non-white and female members, Augusta National puts on its best face for The Masters– a unique event, with its own traditions that people appear to appreciate and honor, year after year.

At some point, many wake up to the deception.

The motivation, for example, for heading back to the moon isn’t as much about the indomitable human spirit as it is a fear of placing second to a political and cultural rival– China, or maybe Russia.

The verbal combativeness, misdirection, and creepily slanted patriotic vomit spilling from Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, J.D. Vance, Fox News, Newsmax and the rest isn’t really about loving America and doing what’s in the best interest of most Americans as much as it is emotional blackmail and gaslighting and subversive efforts to bring the country to its knees—all in order to secure a consolidation of power, white privilege, and a ghastly, dystopian restoration of “Christian” values.

Donald Trump, I imagine, has been only too happy about the seeming fact that enough of us are still acting like we were born yesterday. Enough of us are still eating out of his hand, still viewing him as a refreshing, even messianic, take-no-prisoners straight talker who bad-mouths people who support heinous programs like SNAP and Social Security and school lunches and solar energy and scientific research that leads to vaccines and other life-saving innovations.

The Republican party is full of smooth-talking word gymnasts and groupies who can influence outcomes and distract and confuse and deceive, who don’t think twice about lying and doing whatever they can to get us to doubt our own intentions and second-guess America’s goodness, or disparage it as pie-in-the-sky idealism.

It may be the most insidious aspect of this anomalous, aberrant occurrence we’ve come to know as the Trump years: that lying is acceptable, having grown so commonplace as to be mistaken for authenticity.

May we live to see a renaissance of the concept of consensus, and a rebirth of trust born of genuinely honorable intentions.

Epstein.

Okay. So, two weeks it is.

Classic Donald. He’s probably breathing a sigh of relief, though The Base will interpret this as Badass Orange Jesus working his magic with threats and ultimatums and apocalyptic language, playing jokes on a frazzled Left who has no sense of humor.

I want to believe that even DJT was hesitant to give the OK to destroy an entire civilization, or however he worded it in another deranged post on Truth Social (how and why did they come up with that name, by the way?!).

Then what? Will it be Armageddon at that point, or in another two weeks after that? It’s a page right out of Putin’s playbook. I can see it already: the stock market might have its best day in a while today, all sides will take a breather, then reload.

A question that has come up is What about Israel? Are they part of this ceasefire, or whatever it is, or are they just going to continue to go rogue and keep bombing and retaliating for October 7? What must it feel like for the people of Israel to always be on a war footing, to always need to know where the nearest bomb shelter is?

Anyway, in a YouTube video from PoliticsGirl, she got to talking about the finer points of the 25^th Amendment and how unlikely it would be for that to come into play because the Republican party is no longer a party that works for its constituents or in the best interest of America, but is instead a cult of personality beholden to Donald Trump.

The takeaway was, What’s left as a means of recourse for most of us who realize Trump isn’t well, that he left moral standards and maybe even concern about committing war crimes in the rear view mirror a long time ago, and needs to be relieved of his duties? The answer seems to be to vote the bastards out in November, which assumes elections aren’t tampered with or even canceled because Trump and Co. manufacture a national emergency, he floats another EO, and GETS HIS WAY YET AGAIN.

It’s no secret that we can’t go on like this. As Senator Mark Kelly commented recently, it’s amazing that Republicans can get out of bed in the morning, seeing that they have no spine. They really need to grow one.

Epstein.

Daily writing prompt

If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?

View all responses

A savvy negotiator who finds a way to avoid calamity. Not sure who that would be or what book or movie it would come from.

Rachel Maddow is always presenting some aspect of current events that makes one wonder how much longer we can survive as a nation, but now Paul Krugman is sounding the alarm. We’ve fallen quite far, and if Trump follows through on his threats to destroy the Iranian power grid and other infrastructure, as Krugman reminds, the USA will become one of the top villains in the world. And the once proud US military will become an accessory to this villainy.

When Donald rolled out the red carpet for Vladimir a while back, I imagine them talking about the finer points of what it means to be a despot: international law means nothing, and committing war crimes gets you a spot in an elite category of goons and monsters. Donald must have sat at the master’s feet and taken it all in and decided that’s the route he would go.

Dark days ahead, unless TACO Don emerges once again and the goalposts just continue moving. Either way, Donnie’s in trouble and the rest of us deal with the fallout.

It’s powerfully sad that there are entire TV networks and voting blocs rooting for him to be a real-life Snidely Whiplash. What we need is for Congress to finally say enough is enough, but what are the chances of that happening?

Imagine the time and energy and billion$ that have been wasted tending to this cauldron of lunacy and grift and misplaced priorities, this puppet regime that has had its head up its ass since Day 1. In 2017.

“Where’s Trump?” has been a theme of late.

Based on the obscenity-laced threat toward Iran that somehow passes as Presidential messaging, he’s still around somewhere, but nobody’s actually seen him for a few days. He’s getting up there in years, and the pressure must be relentless, so maybe it’s time we start anticipating the next-in-line hilarity (kidding) that would be J.D. Vance.

One might figure there’d be some infighting before Vance just gets the nod, but isn’t this the reason he was picked in the first place? Hasn’t he been angling for the top job all along? Scary to think about, but this is where we are. Frying pan to fire.

One might sense that things are bad when the private hope is that Trump in all his inflated ego and bombastic idiocy will soon emerge, ready to rejoin the fray, or whatever it is he thinks he’s doing.

Why does it seem like the war in Iran isn’t going to end anytime soon? Trump talks about it like it’s as easy as an ON/OFF switch. Pete Hegseth is talking big and strutting like a peacock and treating it as a pay-per-view WWF event. But these people must realize that, especially given the locale and their own glaring ineptitude, it’s probably not going to be that straightforward…

Iran is proving to be a pesky foe, maybe because it’s getting help from Russia and China and other area sympathizers and proxies, or maybe because it’s had decades to chart a course and stockpile weaponry and prepare for this very scenario.

Trump got sucked into Bibi’s fight, and of course it’s a distraction from Epstein and everything else that’s always on the verge of going to shit at home. So our military is commanded to enter harm’s way and a moral wasteland, and enter a fray that needed not be started.

Just another broken feather in Trump’s MAGA cap.