Baron Harkonnen, still from Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Warner Bros.

You can’t depend on no miracle
You can’t depend on the air
You can’t depend on a wise man
You can’t find ’em because they’re not there
You can depend on cruelty
Crudity of thought and sound
You can depend on the worst always happening
You need a busload of faith to get by, ha!

– Lou Reed, Busload of Faith

Rob Reiner used to call once every six months or so during Bush Time. I’d answer the phone.

“Rob Reiner’s office calling,” a pert but authoritative voice instructs. “Please hold for Mr. Reiner.”

Reiner comes on, “Alex, what are we…”

Me: “Jeffrey.”

Rob: “What?”

Me: “It’s Jeffrey, not Alex.” [Cockburn had stopped answering his calls after he couldn’t squeeze any money for CounterPunch out of him.]

Rob: “Ok, whatever. But what the hell are we going to do about these Bush fuckers, man…?” Then he’d laugh into a hilarious rant of expletives and invective about Cheney and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft, his voice rising in volume like an approaching tsunami. Concluding with, “Got any ideas? Huh? Do ya? Just send them down to me. You’ve got the address, right?” Click.

This ritual went on for eight years. Then, after we started laying into Obama for committing many of the same acts of governmental malfeasance as Bush, he stopped calling. And I never heard from him again.

Reiner was a liberal Democrat to the core. Blinded by party loyalty, he became a hardboiled Russiagater and offered excuses for many inexcusable acts by HRC and Biden.

But he was more passionate than most of the soulless post-Clinton suits who have run the party for the last three decades. Reiner was funny and had a sense of irony about himself, which few self-righteous Hollywood liberals seem to possess. I sensed that he genuinely cared about the poor and the marginalized and knew the system was rotten at its core and needed change, even if the only change he could envision was so incremental it was barely noticeable and easily erased once the Berserkers took power.

This is evidence of a sick mind: petty, petulant, crude and sadistic…but but also one that likely needed help writing this depraved attack on two people whose blood was still wet from having their throats slit by their own tormented son, since the words “tortured” “unyielding” and “affliction” don’t come naturally to Trump’s limited lexicon..

Given a few hours to reconsider his debased Truth Social post on the slaughter of the Reiners, Trump instead opted to double down on his bad bet and spew yet more corpse abuse: “He [Rob Reiner] was a deranged person…Trump derangement syndrome. I was not a fan. I thought he was very bad for our country.”

As evidence that Trump’s macho bombast may be losing some of its mesmeric mojo, the slurs and slanders didn’t land well with some of his own reactionary base…

“Regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered. I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”

– Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY)

“This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies.”

~ Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)

“The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”

– Jenna Ellis, Trump’s former hapless attorney and recipient of a Trump pardon for her conviction by guilty plea for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 elections.

“When people say horrible things about Rob right now, I find it, quite frankly, infuriating and distasteful. Did I agree with his politics? I did not. Did I love him as a friend, as an artist, as an icon of Hollywood and as a patriot? I most certainly did. And I am just absolutely devastated by this terrible event, especially for his family.”

– rightwing actor James Woods

Even MAGA actor and hyper-Zionist, Rob Schneider, not known for his political spine, called Trump’s post-mortem slurs on the Reiners “outrageous.”

Rarely has a president been caught in a more transparent lie and so viciously denied it…

Rachel Scott, ABC News, White House Correspondent, December 8: Mr. President, you said you would have “no problem” releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth said…

Trump: No, I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that. This is ABC Fake News.

Scott: You said you had no problem releasing the full video. Okay. Well, Secretary Hegseth says it’s now under review.

Trump: Whatever Hegseth wants to do is okay with me.

Scott: He now says it is under review. Are you now ordering the Secretary to release that video?

Trump: No. Whatever he decides to do is okay with me. So, every boat we knock out of the water. Every boat, we save 25,000 American lives. That was a boat loaded up with drugs–I saw the video–they were trying to turn that boat back to where it could float. And we didn’t want to see that because that boat was loaded up with drugs, just like everything else. Every boat we shoot down–and I don’t know if you know this, but we’re 92 to 94 percent down in drugs coming in by sea. And we’re trying to find the other six percent, because, I don’t know, people don’t like to drive boats right now loaded up with drugs. But think of that, on average, every drug boat we shoot down, we save 25,000 American lives.

Scott: But have you seen the full video?

Trump: Didn’t I just tell you that? You are one of the most obnoxious reporters in the whole place. Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious…actually, a terrible reporter. And it’s always the same with you. I told you whatever Pete Hegseth wants to do is okay with me.

Let’ go to the tape from December 3rd, Don…

Weijia Jiang, CBS News White House Correspondent: You released the first video, but will you release the second video from that strike on September 2nd, so that the American people can see for themselves what happened?

Trump: I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.

I’m pretty shaky at math, but 25,000 times 25 boat strikes equals something like 625,000, which means that Trump has already saved 9 times as many lives as the number of Americans who die in drug overdoses each year. That is miraculous! No wonder the Christian nationalists adore him.

Hegseth is now suddenly hesitant to show the snuff film of his “kill them all” drone strike on the two survivors, who clung for more than 30 minutes to the wreckage of the boat hit by the first strike, hiding behind the excuse that the footage, which he has been so eager to broadcast for the past four months, is now “top secret.”

Just put the link to the video on your Signal chat group, Chardonnay, and it’ll leak out. You know, having others watch the kill strikes excites you.

By the way, none of the “drug boats” the US has sunk off the coast of Venezuela were heading, at least directly, to the US. The drug boat hit in the double-tap strike that killed 11 people was heading to Suriname.

Presumably, as a legally dubious pretext for attacking Venezuela, Trump has designated “fentanyl” as a “weapon of mass destruction,” even though Venezuela is not a major producer of the drug and, according to his own DEA, “Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as an analgesic (pain relief) and anesthetic.”

Jesse Walker: “I hear the hospitals in Saddam’s Iraq had huge stockpiles of fentanyl. If only Dick Cheney had lived to see this.”

Jim Cooper: “So these are the unknown unknowns of Donny Rumsfeld…!?”

Spot the real weapon of mass destruction…

Number of yearly deaths in the US from tobacco: 440,000, including 40,000 from passive inhalation of tobacco smoke

Number of yearly deaths from fentanyl overdoses: 71,000

If the US can seize (illegally) an oil tanker, why can’t they seize (illegally) a small “drug” boat?

Trump on Venezuela: “They took all of our oil and we want it back. They illegally took it.” The jarring jump cut from drugs to oil was almost Godard-like in its abruptness.

“Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.” Stole from us!

Phillip II of Spain must’ve harbored similar fantasies of invincibility when his Armada of 122 ships entered the English Channel in June of 1588…

The sudden admission by Trump that it’s all about oil even caught the anti-Maduro liberals off-guard: “Mr Maduro’s claims that the US is solely motivated by oil. Those [claims] seem overblown.” – Guardian editorial board Dec 12. (H/t Adam Johnson)

AOC on the Trump administration’s classified briefing to Congress on Venezuela: “It was a joke….not a serious intelligence briefing…the communication of an opinion.”

Because Calibri is apparently too woke and girly, Marco Rubio ordered the testosterone-infused State Department to shift its official typeface to Times New Roman. “Times New Roman doesn’t fare very well on a screen. It’s too delicate to survive on that pixel grid, all those fine serifs,” Tobias Frere-Jones, a typeface designer, told the New York Times. “And it’s not surprising that it doesn’t fare so well on a screen because it was designed in the early part of the 20th century. No one was working on a screen. So it’s a bit like driving around in a Model T and wondering why you can’t go so fast.” Of course, at the Trump State Department, where sowing confusion and incomprehensibility is the goal, Times New Roman seems like the perfect choice, for once…

NEWSMAX: Your goal is 5,000 arrests in New Orleans. How did you come up with that figure?

That figure is something, um, that we talked about and it’s definitely something that’s attainable.

According to an analysis by Stateline, ICE is arresting more people, but few of them have violent records. By October, less than 5% had violent-crime convictions and 44% were detained only for immigration violations.

New data from DHS reveal that over 75,000 people with no criminal record were arrested by ICE during the first 9 months of the........

© CounterPunch