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.

Good Friday. By this point in the annual Lenten slog, I was usually running on fumes, summoning the energy to handle one more service–the subdued Tenebrae that would end in darkness and silence– and then trying to leave the building before members of the Altar Guild saved themselves a trip on Saturday, ruining the mood and scurrying about, prepping the nave for Easter morning.

Good Friday is not a misnomer or even a play on words. It’s a faith-filled reflection of how we came to feel about and understand what happened that day. It was, one might think, a bad Friday for Jesus. But it was a good day for those who believe, since Jesus carried the world’s sin on his shoulders all the way to the cross. As you might have heard, he died for us.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt the full impact of what that is supposed to mean. I’m not sure it ever happened. I so hope it did, but I have my doubts anymore.

For the faithful or the habitual attendee, one might think that one time through the church year would be enough to get the gist of the story. But we pastors had to always be taking closer looks, hoping for new slants and discoveries that took their time morphing into revelation that we could bend without breaking and turn into metaphors and allegories and timely stories that conveyed different ways of saying the same thing.

In other words, faithful churchgoers and even casual observers know how the story ends, but our lives tend to be a reflection of that passage from Mark 9: I do believe; help my unbelief.

The ritual doesn’t captivate the way it once did. It doesn’t even feel comfortably familiar anymore. Sadly, it feels more like a crutch, even a ruse. We’re always waiting, as the world burns and people suffer horribly. Adapting to God’s timetable– weathering the storms and striving toward peace until a Second Coming that could happen tomorrow or ten thousand years from now– feels more and more like a fool’s errand.

It’s only a TV show, but after watching the first episode in which the ER team and other hospital staff on The Pitt dealt with a mass shooting, I was moved to opine on the depravity of anyone who decides a viable option for expressing anger or making a name for themselves is by unleashing high-powered weaponry on unsuspecting victims and wreaking absolute carnage.

It was the part most of us never see—the victims brought in by ambulance and police cruiser and family vehicles; some trampled in the rush for cover, others hit by cars, but most with varying degrees of gunshot wound ranging from grazing to fatal shots that reduced a human body to a target for projectiles that rip through human flesh and bone with unimaginable force and horrific result.

Lives instantaneously ended or permanently scarred; the purposeful chaos of triage and an urban ER that turns into a MASH unit, the focused attention and expertise of a hospital staff that has to compartmentalize their revulsion and anger so they can function and tend to the massive needs at hand.

It’s only a TV show, but one surely must sense that what unfolded on the screen was not excessively dramatized, not wildly different from real life. In fact, as bad as we might imagine these incidents to be, the reality has to be much worse.

But, well, thoughts and prayers, right?