Air Qatar

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (right) and Qatari Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Sheikh Saoud bin Abdulrahman al-Thani announced at the Pentagon that Qatar will build a new training facility for its air force - in the United States.  Specifically, Qatar will have its new training facility at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho.

This marks the first time a foreign country has had a military presence in the continental United States since the British maintained forts in present-day Michigan and Ohio in the twenty years following the Declaration of Independence, and the first time a foreign air force has had any presence in the continental United States.  Given that the Qataris bribed Trump with a free jet airliner and have enabled Trump to pursue his business interests in their country - a polyp-shaped sand-dune peninsula the Size of Connecticut in the Persian Gulf - this is the biggest scandal to rock America since Tuesday.

Hegseth insists that the Qatari facility is not a separate base but is merely a facility to allow Americans and Qataris to train side by side.  But Qatar has also been been identified as a supporter of terrorism, and even Trump himself, in 2017, once accused Qatar of supporting Islamist terror commando groups.  And now, with a Qatari presence in the U.S.  - perversely, an accused supporter of Islamist terrorists stationed in Christian-nationalist Idaho - terrorists no longer have to hijack planes in America to fly them into buildings.  They'll have their own air base right here!

Incoming!  

A Turkey of a Mayor

Eric Adams assumed the position of Mayor of the City of New York promising to do something about crime.

And he did.  It seems he got involved it. 

The federal government indicted Mayor Adams for seeking and accepting improper gifts, including luxury travel and illegal campaign contributions from wealthy foreigners.  Some of those foreigners were from Turkey, who bribed him an enormous sum of money to get a large building in Manhattan approved for the new Turkish consulate in New York.  And the mayor was even accused of overruling the Fire Department of New York - who know a thing or two about the dangers of fire in large buildings, particularly two very tell buildings in the Financial District - when the building the Turks wanted to set up shop in failed fire-code inspection.  

Oh yeah, this had been going on since Adams was Brooklyn borough president. His alleged undisclosed travel dates back to 2016, totaling more than $100,000.

Mayor Adams deserves the presumption of innocence until he's proven guilty in a court of law.  But with so many issues besetting New York - an affordable-housing shortage, a larger migrant population, education - how can Adams serve effectively as mayor and still seek his vindication in a court of law at the same time? 

Robert Menendez Must Go

I have long been resigned to the fact that New Jersey is one of the least cool states in the Union, what with its run-down industrial cities, its loudmouth proles, a state turnpike that has wracked the nerves of many a hardened driver, and once-bucolic farmland developed into plastic-jive housing shopping malls (and Muzak fills the air from Livingston to Little Falls).  In other words, we're like Ohio.  But at least, I thought, we don't have a scumbag like James David Vance representing us as the voice and conscience of the state.

And of course, I was wrong.

Robert Menendez and his wife Nadine - who is his second wife, not his first wife, his first wife being the mother of his daughter Alicia - have been indicted on bribery charges.  He was discovered to have cash in his suits and gold bars in his house.  Menendez has been accused of attempting to sway the President Biden's choice of the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey to benefit a businessman and attempting to pressure the Department of Agriculture to protect a contact's monopoly on supplying halal (the Islamic equivalent of kosher) meat to the United States.

Despite the fact that Senator Menendez, a Democrat, is innocent until proven guilty, the evidence pretty much proves it in the court of public opinion.  The evidence is so overwhelming that U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (Ohio). John Fetterman (Pennsylvania), and Peter Welch (Vermont) have called for his resignation.  Plus several other Democratic senators, including New Jersey's other Senator, Cory Booker.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer, however, won't call for Menendez to resign, apparently because he thinks that a tainted and disgraced Menendez is the best bet to keep his Senate seat in New Jersey Democratic. 

Uh, Chuck?  This is New Jersey!  We have qualified Democrats for the Senate coming out of our ears! 

It's over for Bob.  The sooner he gets out of the Senate and stops disgracing the senate with his gross indiscretions, the better.  Because you know it doesn't look good for him when his daughter - a regular MSNBC host of a program about Hispanic issues - suddenly disappears from the airwaves.

By the way, did you know that only thirteen U.S. Senators have been indicted in the chamber's 234-year history, and Menendez is the only U.S. Senator to be indicted twice?

Down For the Eight Counts

Michael Cohen.  Guilty on eight counts including fraud, bribery, and campaign finance violations.  Guilty plea.

Paul Manafort.  Found guilty on eight counts - five tax fraud charges, one charge of hiding foreign bank accounts, two counts of bank fraud. A ,mistrial on ten more counts that could be retried later, with another criminal case slated to be tried in a Washington, D.C. court after this trial in Alexandria, Virginia.

Good guys, both, says Donald J. Trump.

I got news for you.  A Democrat will not be elected the 46th President of the United States in 2020.  A Democrat will be elected the 47th President of the United States in 2020 because Mike Pence will become the 46th President of the United States after Trump is gone . . . and become only the second accidental President since Chester A. Arthur to be denied a term in his own right (Gerald Ford was the first).

Don't waste your time trying to impeach Trump, though, Democrats.  He'll resign first.  And he'll know when to leave - unlike Nixon, who had to be told to quit.

And when this is all over, we should take the advice of Al Czervik, Rodney Dangerfield's character in Caddyshack:

"Hey, everybody - let's all take a shower!"