Despised like nobody has ever been despised before

I have an out of town handbell event this weekend. I probably won’t post again until Wednesday. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos reported that while the US Agency for International Development, USAID, was shuttered, some of its aid to other countries was transferred to the State Department as a method of extortion. This was revealed in a State memorandum prepared for Secretary Marco Rubio. Here are some of the ideas proposed or some of the agreements already forced on African countries. Zambia was told to give the US better access to their copper, lithium, and cobalt or the US will withhold funds for HIV treatment for 1.3 million people. Several countries were forced to give patient data in exchange for health care funding. That is so Americans can detect disease outbreaks sooner and to give US companies first chance to develop vaccines. Nigeria was told they must address the alleged persecution of Christians.

These “deals” are not really deals, as none of the countries that are being pressed into this can effectively negotiate when their health care funding needs are so dire.

Kos of Kos wrote about why opening the Strait of Hormuz will be so difficult. While the Strait is 21 miles wide at its narrowest, the actual shipping channel is only 4 miles wide. Ships must go single file with no room to maneuver. Ships, and any escorts, are easy targets – they move at a predictable pace and can be reached by missiles from shore in seconds. Iran has put mines in the Strait, but minesweepers are slow and easy targets. Planes to protect shipping would also be easy targets. The US could have some great anti-drone equipment and tactics. Ukraine has been developing it over the last four years. But the nasty guy has refused Ukrainian offers.

What’s his problem? Acknowledging Ukrainian expertise would require acknowledging that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy actually does hold some cards—a fact Trump has spent over a year denying out of sheer personal pettiness and bizarre fealty to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

In Tuesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing for his Substack:

A stunning poll from Politico — just released, but taken last month — confirms what I and other observers strongly suspected: America is now widely despised, despised like nobody has ever been despised before. ... Why has America’s global reputation fallen so far, so fast? It’s not a mystery. After all, why would anyone consider America a trustworthy ally when Trump keeps insulting our neighbor and former closest ally, Canada, by insisting that it must become the 51st state and repeatedly calling its Prime Minister “governor”? Why trust us when Trump tried to bully NATO member Denmark into handing over Greenland? Beyond that, Trump’s tariffs aren’t just economically damaging. They aren’t just, as the Supreme Court finally ruled, illegal under our own laws. They are also in clear, overwhelming violation of international trade agreements solemnly signed by previous presidents. Given the way the current administration has casually ignored those agreements, why would anyone expect America to honor any future deals?

Beth Mole of Ars Technica reported on a ruling from a US District Court that blocked a lot of harm Robert Kennedy Jr. has been doing. The ruling says Kennedy illegally fired the vaccine advisors board. The replacement board, all of whom hold anti-vax views, did not go through standard vetting. So all of their changes to the vaccine guidance must be undone. In the comments exlrrp posted a meme of the nasty guy speaking, showing why we’re despised.

Then: NATO sucks! Canada sucks! UK leadership is stupid! Denmark sucks! Zelensky sucks! Now: I DEMAND these countries help us secure the Straits! They SHOULD BE HELPING! A voice in the corner: Guess he never heard, “What goes around...!

Globe Observer tweeted: “Trump calls on U.S. media to stop reporting on damage and losses caused by Iran, saying it harms the United States.” Proud Socialist responded: “This is how you know the U.S. isn’t winning the war.” Clay Bennett posted a cartoon of Uncle Sam in a War Room gazing up at the Exit door in the ceiling. Naked Pastor posted a cartoon of Jesus talking to a group of people holding Bibles:

The difference between you and me is you use scripture to determine what love means and I use love to determine what scripture means.

In Wednesday’s roundup Greg Dworkin quoted Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, appropriate with the comment above about minesweepers.

Mining the Strait of Hormuz is the single biggest danger America faced heading into any conflict with Iran. How did our commander-in-chief plan to deal with it? Six months ago the Navy decommissioned its four Avenger-class minesweepers that had been stationed in Bahrain precisely to deal with Iranian mines. It gets dumber: Those four final American minesweepers left the theater in mid-January—while war planning for the current operation must already have been underway. But wait, it gets even dumberer! Our minesweeping capability in the Gulf now relies on Littoral Combat Ships, whose abilities have never been tested in combat. Will the LCS be a suitable replacement for the Avenger-class ships? According to the Navy, um, no?

From NOTUS:

Six months before the Trump administration started bombing Iran, the Department of State fired its oil and gas experts. As the war in Iran stretches into its third week, and the Strait of Hormuz — through which 20% of the world’s oil supply usually flows — remains effectively closed, the U.S. government is without the resources it once had to handle such crises, former State Department employees tell NOTUS.

In the comments Jesse Duquette created a cartoon of Washington crossing the Delaware while an airport signalman guides it ashore. The caption is something the nasty guy apparently said. “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports.” Duquette added:

Whenever I screw up, I think of the time Trump opined about Revolutionary War airports and the brave patriots who gave their lives at the Battle of Baggage Claim and I’m like “sure I’m dumb but at least I’m not, like, Trump dumb”

Steven Camley posted a cartoon of the nasty guy sitting in a rowboat in the Strait of Hormuz. A sign labels the water, “Shi-ite Creek” and a paddle labeled “NATO” is out of reach. A meme posted by exlrrp shows a way of getting ships in and out of the Persian Gulf without going through the Strait – let godzilla carry the ships across the United Arab Emirates peninsula. In today’s roundup Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic discussing the nasty guy’s comment, after being rebuffed by NATO, that America doesn’t need anybody.

This fantasy of complete independence is a long-standing part of American culture. Thomas Jefferson, himself a relatively soft-handed gentleman farmer who left the hard labor to the people he had enslaved, extolled the virtues of the yeoman farmer. The political scientist Richard Hofstadter described this mythic figure as “the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being.” The irony, Hofstadter noted, was that it was really rich, educated men such as Jefferson who romanticized this extremely difficult lifestyle. The typical yeoman farmer wanted to be integrated into the market so that he could sell his crops at a profit and escape his hardscrabble circumstances. That romantic “self-sufficiency” was in fact “usually forced upon him by a lack of transportation or markets, or by the necessity to save cash.” [...] Too many Americans believed that Trump’s mass deportation could occur without forcing families into hiding, cutting into businesses’ profits, or shooting people dead in the street. They believed that tariffs could replace global trade and revive the manufacturing industry, making the U.S. self-sufficient, when instead the burden has fallen on American farms and firms. They couldn’t see that when people lose their jobs, or go sick or hungry, it becomes everyone’s problem eventually. This desire to be severed from others culminates in the trad fantasy of a wife who keeps the homestead clean while her husband runs a self-sufficient ranch, the whole family secure with their MREs, AR-15, and safe full of gold collectibles when the apocalypse comes.

In the comments is another cartoon by Naked Pastor. Jesus tells a crowd:

I was never recorded and never wrote a book. So when someone says, “Jesus said this!” they should mean “Someone said Jesus said this!”

BioGeneticsGirl of the Kos community asked the community to come up with slogans for the third No Kings protest, which is in a bit more than a week (I’m sure there’s one near you). Some of what they came up with: knowdaboom: “Top 0.1%’s wealth has doubled in the last 5 years. How’s your family doing?” karmsysback: “Can’t we fast-forward to where he takes cyanide in his bunker?” Sally DeLurks: “Whatever happened to ‘No more wars?’” slowthought: “Regime Change Begins At Home” Albion1 posted a few from a local Indivisible Facebook page. One of them: “Hey, Trump, nobody paid us, we all hate you for free!” Progressive Muse suggests we borrow from Bad Bunny’s Superbowl Halftime Show, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”