Late reporting by WaPo has indicated that the extraordinary step of raiding Mar-a-Lago was due to the presence of Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) regarding nuclear state secrets still in possession of TFG despite the fact that he promised he gave it all back to the National  Archives. But this is not the 1/6 call logs, or secret Space Force intel, or even transcripts of Putin meetings. This is not something that gives Trump any personal leverage or advances any political agenda. Why would Trump do this?

Let’s review Trump’s motivations, starting with his narcissism. The fragile construct of his ego in stark contrast to his actual attributes means that zero zero zero tolerance can be had for anything that makes him look like the loser he is. This supposed superiority is rooted in his belief in himself as the ne plus ultra of eugenics.

Then there’s money. Trump uses every means possible, other than hard work, to grub as much money as his tiny claws can catch onto. He ties this to the ego via selling his name as the avatar of luxury and quality when it’s really it’s the epitome of crass and tawdriness. To him, counting up money is how you determine who the “winners” are.

Money and Ego – that’s half of “MICE,” an acronym denoting the usual reasons someone commits espionage: Money, Ideology, Coercion and Ego.

And that’s what we’re discussing here – the pilfered documents include nuclear secrets. These are not call logs, or work product or Space Force doodles. These are to a spy what the crown jewels are to a cat burglar.

Ideology is unlikely to be his motivation, unless one counts an affinity towards strongman dictators and his desire to be like them.

Coercion is certainly a possibility – the “Pee Tape” is still a theoretically out there, and if not that, other forms of kompromat abound with TFG.

Even with a reason-challenged brain in a reality-challenged bubble, there is no motive for Trump to have stolen TS/SCI nuclear documents in order to win an election or own some libs or outwit the deep state or write his Mein Drumpf memoir.

He’s clearly broken the Presidential Records Act. It’s looking more and more like he broke the Espionage Act as well.

Code name: Reality Loser

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Since Monday, I’ve been cogitating on the FBI’s search of Mar a Lago and why TFG would’ve so stupidly taken potentially top secret documents from the WH to hide in his basement in Florida.  What was he doing?  What was he thinking?  As all of us have experienced, TFG does lots of things without thinking, and being a malignant narcissist, everything is always about him and his effort to gain some kind of advantage over his perceived enemies.  What was this about?

My first thought was that TFG was going to release documents throughout his next campaign trying to impugn his enemies and using them to back his false claims that there is an effort by the “deep state” to take him down.  But as more information comes out about this sorry episode, it now looks to me like he was intentionally trying to provoke the FBI into doing exactly what they did.  Since it was discovered that he stole secret documents when he finally vacated the WH, he and his lawyers have been playing games with the FBI which lead to a search back in June after he virtually ignored a subpoena to disgorge the documents they sought.  Since then, he and his lawyers have been slow-playing the agency, and they acted on Monday after apparently a TFG insider “ratted” him out by confirming the location of the documents.

“During the search on Monday, TFG took to Truth Social and public statements to rage about the “raid” and the FBI “breaking into” his safe.  The facts so far haven’t supported his claims, especially since the Secret Service let the agents in and one of Trump’s lawyers was present during the search.  Almost immediately, TFGland went to DEFCON 1 and started firing up the rage machine. One of the main accusations, lead by his allies in congress, was that the FBI was “planting evidence” to take him down.

Well, there it is.  It appears, and I believe that this is true, that TFG’s plan all along was to provoke the FBI to act against him personally so he could claim the “deep state” was out to get him.  I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised that the “rat” was someone TFG picked to be the informant.  We’ve all heard about Schedule F, TFG’s plan to unravel the federal government by firing thousands of career public servants and replacing them with his loyalists at all levels of the federal government.  Part of this plan is to empty out DC, moving agencies out into the heartland like he did the USDA, which he moved to Kansas City.  The agency has struggled to recover, having lost thousands of career employees who quit rather than move.

Call me cynical, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that all of this is TFG and his enablers creating a new reality for his supporters as part of his relentless campaign to take over the US government for himself.  It’s already working; thousands of his supporters are raging on social media and in their be-flagged jacked-up TFG Train trucks, and one nut has already been killed after trying to break in to the FBI field office in Cincinnati.  I can only hope that Merrick Garland is one step ahead of him; my fear is that he’s not.

“Patchy” turned 25 this month; he was a 35th birthday present to myself, born of a crisis of machismo.

While folks from the Encarnación side of the family tended away from body modification, male members of la familia Hachecristo had been inked from time immemorial.

Among my grandfather’s cohort, border-area back-room bar tattoos had faded to amorphous green blotches on leathery brown forearms. These were succeeded in the next generation by WWII- and Korea-era tats, especially the Eagle, Globe & Fouled Anchor of the Corps. My cousin, Jesus Hachecristo, is a gallery unto himself. But I resisted until my sister had two, and my machismo pitched a midlife crisis.

Patchy was inspired by Calico Jack Rackham’s flag, and a novelty Jolly Roger from a Wisconsin Dells gift shop. “No Quarter” is the equivalent cry of “No Mercy” or “Take No Prisoners! “No quarter asked! None Given!”

Kill the bloody bastards.

Machismo Intensifies! Crisis Averted!

The origin of the phrase is contested, but the word “quarter” was likely in reference to providing food and shelter for prisoners, much the same as the English government used to “quarter” troops on the American colonies.  The English, including the colonists, abhorred a standing army, considering it a threat to civil liberty. Rarely were soldiers quartered in anyone’s house, but the colonies were responsible for providing the facilities and the supplies to maintain the troops who were ostensibly there to protect them.

Quartered Troops Protect Bostonians

So abhorrent was this affront to every upstanding Englishman in America that they quit being Englishmen altogether. The Declaration specifically calls out the quartering of troops in its laundry list of King George’s tyrannical naughtiness. And the Third Amendment bans the practice of quartering troops. That’s 10% of the Bill of Rights!

Such was the civilian fear of professional soldiery in our nascent nation, that despite the English, Spanish and French actively in armed contention to steal the same dirt from the same original inhabitants as the US, we would not field a standing army.

Nope, we crowd-sourced our conquests. Hence, the Second Amendment.

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The people kept the arms because that’s defense on the cheap. They occupied an ever-expanding militarized border zone, parading with their local militia bros after church because no one had invented softball yet.

This naive romanticized view of the citizen soldier, the Sunday Cincinnatus, reached its climax when 600,000 local militiamen killed one another ushering in the birth of the modern army in the Civil War.

The need for the Third Amendment never arose. It’s never been the cause or remedy of a single Supreme Court case. The need for the Second Amendment is also past, because we have a standing Army now, and a Navy and a Marine Corps and an Air Force and a Coast Guard and gawdelpme a Space Force, all with their own tattoos.

Both Amendments are overdue for retirement, as well as several other provisions in the Constitution.

But don’t you dare touch the power of Congress to issue letters of marque and reprisal.  Because yes, I am a pirate…

Two hundred yadda yadda yadda

I’m sure she didn’t see that coming. Poor Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler. After years of voting pretty much the way her party wanted to, she crossed a line. I like to think she found her moral compass, but she probably just wanted to keep the Indy and D supporters happy by voting to impeach 45. After all, the rest of the gang would vote no, and give her cover, right? Hell hath no fury like Trumpers scorned. In a squeaker that dragged out over several days, because we have a most fabulous vote by mail process here in WA, she had to concede last night to Joe Kent, an America First anti-establishment former Green Beret endorsed by none other than TFG. The last few weeks before the primary were just awful for anyone watching regular old TV. The ads were absolutely disgusting. For a moment I thought I was back in Texas. The biggest evil music ads were those trying to prop up JHB by showing everyone in the area how deplorable Mr. Kent is. Even the ones tagged “I’m Jaime Herrera Beutler and I approve this message”. Sadly, we will be seeing a lot more of these between now and November.

The D’s got smart this time around and ran ONE candidate, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, auto shop co-owner with an economics degree and working class advocate. She walked away with the first place trophy in our top two dog fight primary. Now ‘all’ we need to do is raise a ton of $ (Kent has about 10 times as much on hand) and GOTV with all we’ve got. I hesitate to be optimistic. Our most excellent candidate the last 2 times around, who knocked on every damn door in the district, or close to it, and held hundreds of town halls IN PERSON (her opponent only musters phone in town halls and the occasional foray into very friendly territory), couldn’t fight the district demographics. I’ll miss her cheery newsletters highlighting fluff while she voted against just about anything that would really help her constituents (she had the nerve to vote against the infrastructure bill, then bragged about money coming to WA). We’ll see how many Rs hold their noses and vote for Kent, how many skip voting, and how many have any sense of country over party. The choice should be clear, but, you know…MAGA!

Oh Honey, Merrick Garland just called TFG’s bluff.  That sucker was cold as a snow cone in the Klondike.

It’s the OK Corrale and TFG blinked.  TFG doesn’t want his troops to see what was taken from his home.

And the good news is that TFG’s lawyers make Alex Jones’ lawyer look like a genius.