At the risk of seem­ing to mix the sub­lime and the ridicu­lous, a kid’s tee shirt and a 18th cen­tu­ry philoso­pher sum up the lat­est fias­co  — or maybe farce is a bet­ter word — of this week in the World of Trump.

The tee shirt, which I spot­ted some years ago, was intend­ed for pre-teen boys with a predilec­tion for things that got them in trou­ble. On the front, in large let­ters, it read: WHATEVER IT IS I DIDN’T DO IT (UNLESS YOU REALLY LIKED IT)”.
An ide­al gift for mem­bers of  U.S. Defence Sec­re­tary Pete Hegseth’s Sig­nal Chat Group if ever there was one.
Far more informed peo­ple than me will ulti­mate­ly decide the lev­els of incom­pe­tence, care­less­ness and arro­gance of the par­tic­i­pants, espe­cial­ly Hegseth’s stag­ger­ing naivete of online spy­ing with the assur­ance: “We are cur­rent­ly clean on OPSEC.”
Their stage of matu­ri­ty and intel­lec­tu­al devel­op­ment, how­ev­er, is excru­ci­at­ing­ly obvious. 
Stri­dent­ly refus­ing to acknowl­edge they may have, at the very least, fall­en short of adher­ing to secu­ri­ty, resem­bled noth­ing so much as a kid whack­ing a base­ball into a win­dow, then stand­ing with the bat in his hand claim­ing he had noth­ing to do with it. 
At the risk of being charged with pro­mot­ing “tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty,” it’s high time for the admo­ni­tion: “Admit when you did wrong and take your pun­ish­ment like a man” to be applied. 
At the moment, invec­tive sub­sti­tutes for accountability.
Which brings us to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s obser­va­tion: “Insults are the argu­ments employed by those who are in the wrong.”

                NYAH NYAH TAKE THIS

In what sound­ed like a com­pe­ti­tion for picayune insult of the week, Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Advi­sor Michael Waltz called Jef­frey Gold­berg, the reporter he added to the group chat, “the bot­tom scum of jour­nal­ists”, which gave the oth­er­wise hap­less advis­er a slight edge over Trump’s label of “sleaze­bag.”
White House Press Sec­re­tary Karo­line Leavitt’s sneer that Gold­berg is “an anti-Trump hater” didn’t make the cut, how­ev­er. Strict­ly speak­ing, as uttered it would make him some­one who oppos­es Trump haters.
But maybe the lady can be for­giv­en the lapse. It must be hard work find­ing ways to ignore and/or dis­tort facts and avoid answer­ing ques­tions from real jour­nal­ists on a dai­ly basis.
Almost as hard as being a com­men­ta­tor on the right wing (to put it mild­ly) out­let News­max, cur­rent­ly the 31st most pop­u­lar chan­nel on TV, with a view­er­ship of 275,000 .
One of them com­plained Gold­berg was “a squin­ty lib­er­al writer” because he used “a word I had to look up” in a piece in The Atlantic about how he got the sto­ry.
The word in ques­tion was verisimil­i­tude, which I grant could be con­sid­ered a tad pretentious, 
Even so, that the edi­tor-in-chief of a 150 year-old jour­nal that has pub­lished the work of Hen­ry James, Ralph Wal­do Emmer­son, Emi­ly Dick­in­son and Robert Frost (to name but a few of many of their cal­iber) used  a word that sent a News­max expert to a dic­tio­nary, doesn’t come close to negat­ing the accu­ra­cy (unlib­er­al enough word, News­max?) of his report­ing. It could be argued he did the fel­low a favour.
The insults and epi­thets FOX News has come up with for the Atlantic sto­ry and edi­tor are too numer­ous to chronicle. 
Being a fan of tee shirts, I sug­gest send­ing their pun­dits one that reads: WHATEVER JOURNALISM IS, I DIDN’T DO IT (UNLESS PERAMBULATING AROUND THE PERIPHERY COUNTS).
Or, every­one could take heed of what seems to be the dis­used adage many of us learned at our prover­bial ‘mother’s knee’: “If you can’t say some­thing nice, don’t say any­thing at all”

                 AND IN THAT VEIN

In a mid­dle of the night post on his Truth Social plat­form threat­en­ing Cana­da and the Euro­pean Union, Pres­i­dent Trump referred to “…each of those two countries…”.
Just FYI, Mr Tar­iff-Appli­er-in-Chief: the Euro­pean Union isn’t  a coun­try. It is  — and the clue is in the name by the way — 27 coun­tries, with a com­bined pop­u­la­tion of more than 449-mil­lion peo­ple. Add in Cana­da and that ris­es to near­ly half a billion. 
And you’re cer­tain­ly not “.. the best friend that each of those two coun­tries (sic) has ever had!”.
Friends do not spit at their friends, or will­ful­ly do them harm. You, not we, opt­ed out of our cen­turies-old friendship. 
Speak­ing as a Cana­di­an, if you think for a sec­ond you can make us bend or bow to become your friend again, you’re as delu­sion­al as your secu­ri­ty team.
Maybe you need to get a lit­tle more rest.
And one last thing: I think that if noth­ing else, recent events jus­ti­fy expand­ing the 19^th cen­tu­ry Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich Nietzsche‘s advice: “Dis­trust all in whom the impulse to pun­ish is pow­er­ful.” to include “..and those who wal­low in lies and will­ful igno­rance and think it’s a virtue”.

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