Your Share and Mushrooms
POST 1268
DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT . . .
. . . let Trump’s war distract you from his culpability in the Epstein crimes. Trump is trying to cloud your eyes with this war. That’s what it’s all about. Instead, focus on the pedophilia.
Your Share
It’s a fool’s errand to calculate your individual share of our national debt. The total now stands at roughly $39 TRILLION.
Okay, I’m fool enough to do that. We divide the total debt by roughly 330 million Americans and your share is $118,000. Same for your infant son, Same for his big sister. Same for each of their grandparents. Same for every American. And Trump’s pet legislation, BBB, will add another $10 trillion to our debt which will pile another $30,000 onto everybody’s personal bill.
Let’s focus for a moment on just the additional $200 billion Trump wants for his blisteringly stupid and illegal war on Iran. That extra will add $606 to everyone’s tab, all 330 million of us. And you know that if he doesn’t go all TACO, he’ll be demanding still more money from us soon. He will tell us that throwing yet more money on that oil fire will be like nothing anyone has ever seen. He will almost be correct about that.
Note that the $200 billion is on top of our current military budget of between $901 billion and $1 trillion. That’s more than the defense spending of the next 9 or 10 countries combined. Got insight on why we need to spend that much? Help us out in the Comments section below.
That baseline defense spending equates to $2,730 of cost for each of us – just for the Defense Department – every year. Adding in the $606 supplementary cash grab each of us will owe for Trump’s Iran blue bomb special, if authorized, will bring your share of our military bill this year to $3,396. Feeling good about that?
Mushrooms
“If you look for mushrooms, you will find mushrooms.” – William Raspberry, Washington Post columnist.
The point is that we find what we are looking for, whether it’s there or not, and even as we might miss other things, like wild strawberries. Or the truth.
Our fact spurning president in 2003, George W. Bush,* looked for WMDs in Iraq and told us he was sure they were there. The United Nations weapons inspectors refuted the vague and unsubstantiated claims used by Bush to justify his call to war, as they came largely from an individual who was well known to be psychologically unstable. Plus, our own intelligence community told Bush that they were far from sure that Saddam had WMDs or was working to develop them. Read this Los Angeles Times post for detail.
Dubya and VP Cheney wanted to make war on Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein. Dubya told us he was a “bad guy” and a “cruel dictator” and to Bush that was enough reason for America to topple him. I recall thinking at the time that there are many bad guy leaders around the world. Were we going to make war on all of them?
Dubya’s war guy Donald Rumsfeld told us that Iraqis would welcome our troops, throwing flowers to them. When challenged by what such a war would cost, Rumsfeld told us that Iraqi oil would pay for the war, just as though it was ours to take. That made clear the reality of what that invasion was about. And they told us the cost was okay because it was an “off balance sheet” war. Somebody explain in the Comments section below what that means and how it makes any sense at all
In the process of that war thousands died and the entire region became even more chaotic, with fallout that continues today. That’s just some of the wages of myopic focus on what Bush wanted to find and, generally, what happens in regime change wars. It’s clear that we refused to learn our lesson then, since or now.
Now we are burdened by a president who doesn’t even look for metaphorical mushrooms. He just makes stuff up to suit his craziness, “finding” whatever “intelligence” will give him the “feeling” he wants. Indeed, Andy Borowitz wrote,
Confirming the suspicions of many in the international community, on Monday Donald J. Trump revealed that intelligence played “no role” in his decision to go to war with Iran.
“People keep asking me about intelligence,” he told reporters on Air Force One. “I made this call with no intelligence whatsoever.”
Trump has wanted to attack Iran for a very long time. We’ll leave it to the professional mental health experts to figure out his pre-dementia obsession that he’s now metastasized into a regional war.
Meanwhile, we live with the consequences of Trump finding reasons, like phantom WMDs, to make war and ignore truth. People are dying, like the 175 Iranian school girls and 13 of our military people. That’s happened without the benefit of truth that could easily have been found before the bombings began, had the people in charge been looking for it. Consider all that as the body count and your prices rise, as our allies refuse us and as Putin wins more and more.
If Trump goes after Iran’s infrastructure, as he’s promised he will, try to imagine what Iran will do. Terrorism is what Iran does best. What do you think Trump will do if they come after our infrastructure as a counter attack?
Quote Of The Week
- “Societies that adopt conspiratorial explanations for political, social and economic problems lose the ability to rationally redress them.”
- The Dangerous Logic of the Joe Kent Letter
- by Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic, March 17, 2026
Think: demonizing immigrants, non-European Whites, non-Christians, anybody Trump doesn’t like; etc. And attacking Iran.
Moral Inversion
By now you know both that Robert S. Mueller has died and that Trump has celebrated his death. You could brush that off as just another case of Trump neurotically making everything about himself and waving his victim flag, but it’s more than that.
True, once again Trump has portrayed himself as a poor victim where there is no victimization. He’s demanded that his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent call for sympathy for Trump as the victim, even as Mueller is the one who died and whose family is grieving. Steve Schmidt captured it this way:
This is not conservatism. It is not populism. It is not even politics. It is the normalization of moral inversion.
I implore you to fire the false victim. So . . .
Make Your Voice Heard This Saturday
Click here to find a No Kings rally near you. Then show up on March 28. Change our atmosphere that has been poisoned by our home grown fascists. Make it clear that they are the minority and that we are the majority and that this is designed to be a majority rule country. You know: by We The People.
The cure for hopelessness is action.
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* Shortly before 911 the CIA briefed Bush, warning of an al Qaeda attack that might use hijacked commercial aircraft (the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US”. In response to an earlier similar warning, Bush’s response was, “Alright, you’ve covered your ass.” I guess those reports weren’t the mushrooms Bush was looking for.
How many PDBs do you suppose Trump has ignored? Is ignoring intelligence a Republican Party thing?
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Time for action is dwindling
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Count-down Timer
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To The November 3, 2026
Mid-Term Election
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Copyright 2026 by Jack Altschuler
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