It just really sank in yesterday (six days ago for you readers) that King Charles and I are the same age. We’re both 73. I knew we were the same age when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, but lately it’s slipped my mind.
Everybody has been saying how great it was that his mother hung in there until death, but now Charles is king at 73 and there are calls for him to abdicate because he’s too old already. Maybe not so much in the United Kingdom, but someone at The Atlantic thinks so. Specifically, they think he should retire by his 75th birthday.
Well that’s a fine message to send to me, isn’t it? You know, everybody gets old eventually, if they’re lucky and all the dumptrucks miss them and they aren’t trampled and gored by bulls.
Isn’t that the way of it? You spend 73 years training to do one job, the job finally kicks in, and people tell you you’ve been in it too long even before one week is up. At least let’s give him a run of five years. What’s the harm in that?
The guy who should just quit now is Trump. He had his four years of being president and at the end tried to end democracy so he could illegally remain in office. Then he snuck out all sorts of secret and classified documents, including some that he was not supposed to ever remove from where they were kept. Some guard had to disobey his orders to let Trump take the stuff. I wish the Department of Justice (DOJ) could find that guard and ask why.
One theory I have is that Trump never read any of those documents while he was president. At first I thought the idea was to catch up on his homework while not having to pretend to tend to the office of the presidency, but now I think he was planning to have his lawyers read them and see if there was anything in them he could use to claw his way back to the White House. There’s good reason to think Trump doesn’t read well.
Special Master Dearie has a nice ring to it. I approve the choice of the special master, the person who’s supposed to sort through all of these files and see what’s what. I would have also approved a Special Master Darling or a Special Master Sweetheart. I’m looking forward to some great headlines.
Why hasn’t Julian Assange been assigned a special master? Different laws for demagogues?
Getting a special master installed might be a strategic error for Trump because his support is shrinking, and Dearie’s work can only delay any upcoming indictments. Trump has made it clear that he intends to whip up his followers into rebellion if indicted, just the same way he got them to march on the Capitol building. I don’t think prolonging the DOJ’s process is going to make that go better for him.
It all seems to be a big game to Trump. I think he watched too many old newsreels of Hitler speaking to huge crowds. He evidently identified.
Speaking of games Republicans play, Ron DeSantis — who would really like to succeed Trump as head of the party — has come up with a new, cynical way to exploit immigrants to win points with the people who support Trump.
Through an agent, he convinced 50 Latin American immigrants in Texas that they would be better off if they allowed Florida to transfer them to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts.
Martha’s Vineyard is an upscale Democratic stronghold where housing prices are too high, and the island is already having trouble keeping service workers because of the shortage of affordable housing. The immigrants are not likely to be able to find ways to work and live there. But that’s OK to DeSantis. They’re in Massachusetts now; Massachusetts can deal with any problems that may result.
Texas and Arizona have previously done similar tricks, sending immigrants to Democrat-run cities. DeSantis has just stepped the game up by dropping immigrants off on an island where the Obamas have a home. Take that, Dems. DeSantis is so funny, isn’t he?
It seems that no one told the immigrants that they were going to be dropped off on an island in the Atlantic. They were put up in hotel rooms, but whoever did it disappeared, so the immigrants could be homeless by now.
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the Sept. 21-27, 2022 issue.