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........

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