A head full of mush…

It’s always weird when you find yourself agreeing with people you detest. Case in point: John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser and arch-enemy of pinko-liberals everywhere. Like I say, I’ve got very little love for the man. As in none.

Yet…late last month he said bluntly that his former boss was basically dumb as a brick (okay, dumber) and has, in effect, a “mind…full of mush.”

Colorful. I like it.

Okay, I still don’t care for him much. But, well, just this once, I’m willing to make an exception. He does have a good turn of phrase.

John Bolton: All American Chump

So John Bolton is finally just about ready to publish his kiss-and-tell book about the Trump Administration. According to news media reports, in it, he says that not only should Trump have been impeached for his role in Ukraine, but also he could have been removed for similar offenses in incidents all over the world. Ukraine was just one of many.

But, Bolton elected not to co-operate with the investigation into his boss, and waited to reveal the good stuff in his book, long after the impeachment process was dead and buried in the GOP-controlled Senate.

In a word, WTF?

Now he tells us?

Well, that’s three words, actually, but you get the point. If Bolton is telling the truth, and there’s no reason to doubt him, and if he had spoken up sooner, and helped remove Trump from the White House, then he might well have spared the country untold suffering. Who knows? Maybe he would even have saved lives. If competent authorities had been running things, maybe we wouldn’t have had so terribly, terribly many people die of Covid-19.

But Bolton didn’t act. And the country suffered. And many thousands died.

Which brings up an interesting question. To wit, where does being a witness leave off, and being an accessory to murder begin?

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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Bolton's Thunderbolt

Interesting article in the Washington Post the other day, Blumenthal calls Bolton book manuscript ‘a thunderbolt’ by Mike DeBonis. It seems that Senator Richard Blumenthal (a Democrat from Connecticut) has seen a report of what’s in John Bolton’s upcoming book. He claims that tit will shake the Trump presidency right down to it foundations.

The specific quote from Blumenthal which interests me the most is, “It simply dramatizes that eventually a lot of truth is going to come out, and my Republican colleagues are going to be held accountable for blocking it from this trial...It is a bombshell that really has seismic reverberations for any Republican who cares about their place in history.”

I am enough of a cynic to not quite believe that. Or, rather, I believe that Bolton’s book could, indeed, be a “thunderbolt” (Blumenthal’s term), but I’m not sure it would make any difference. Trump’s Senate and Trump’s supporters will behave pretty much as they have all along, in spite of anything they might learn from Bolton’s texts.

Still, we can hope that Bolton’s book will at least reveal more dreadful stuff about the Trump Administration, and maybe nudge a few of Trump’s voters into the Blue camp.

In which case, Bolton, whose time in government both before and during Trump’s administration was rather a disaster, may actually do something of value.

That would be a nice change, don’t you think?

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Want a free book? Check out With Luther, Tourists, and God in Santa Fe. It's partly a travel log and partly a meditation on people who actually make a difference in life.

Oh, and it is lavishly illustrated by yours truly.

It’s on Gumroad as a PDF about 52 pages long.

How to download: look at the image of the book and the text below. Scroll down until you see the words “Name A Fair Price.” In the blank space below that, type “0” — that is, a zero, because the book is free. Then click on the button below that which is marked “I want this!” After that, you should be given the option of either downloading the book and reading it at your leisure, or reading it on the Gumroad site. Either way, I hope you enjoy it!

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Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.