The summer is over, the Chili-Cook-off is finished, we’re all back in the real world and frankly, it’s grim. Normally, when leaders of nations make bellicose statements, it doesn’t mean that much. More often than not, it’s really just meant for domestic consumption and foreign governments are not expected to take those threats and grumblings literally—unless one leader is Donald Trump and the other Kim Jong Un. Two national leaders with the worst haircuts and the most fragile egos on the planet seemed to be locked in what started out as a semantic battle about “whose is bigger” and now seems to be escalating into something much more dangerous. Trump’s words are provocative and the rest of his team seems to be doubling down on them and talking about an end game which, though unsaid, is really nuclear war. Kim Jong Un appears to be almost delusional if he believes that somehow he can end up with any military result other than the total annihilation of his entire country’s population of 25 million people. But we’re not the only players in the game. Any kind of nuclear confrontation will engage the USA, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia most immediately, and then rapidly the rest of the world because the genie will be out of the bottle. This situation calls for diplomacy, and joint effort by all the nations impacted or it could get out of hand rapidly and end up in a confrontation that nobody wants.
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Congress is back in session and events that seemed so significant before the recess only a few weeks ago, like Obamacare and Trump’s Border Wall, have been overwhelmed by the enormity of Hurricane Harvey. The hurricane affects Texas and Louisiana most directly but the rest of us are pulled in when they come looking for $150 or $ 200 billion to dig themselves out of the financial hole the storm created. Coming up right behind Harvey is Irma, which is threatening the southern Atlantic coast, and Trump’s original budget, which was going to cut FEMA’s budget in half, suddenly seems almost comical considering what we’re going to need. The budget hawks who have screamed about offsetting budget cuts in the past are going to have trouble because most of this money required is going to go into red states, which were Trump’s base. It was easy to talk about fiscal caution when the states decimated by Hurricane Sandy were New York and New Jersey, reliably blue states, but now it’s their own kin and that’s different. There are also lots of blue congressman and blue senators who remember that just about every Texas congressman and both Texas senators voted “No” on aid to New York and New Jersey for Hurricane Sandy. Considering that Ted Cruz (the least beloved senator in the entire United States Senate), after trying to explain how this is really different than Hurricane Sandy aid, is now going to lead the charge asking for his Harvey money. Well, I wouldn’t put money on his chances. As if the congress didn’t have enough on its plate, the president decided to end the DACA program with a six-month delay. The decision was probably one of the coldest, least humane moves he’s ever made, which not only is nasty and unkind but goes against everything America stands for. He also didn’t have the courage to announce it himself. Instead, he sent out his little gnome, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who apparently is leading the legal march to take us back to the 1950s—or perhaps the 1850s.
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In one of the few upbeat things that happened in Los Angeles over the weekend, the UCLA football team, which was behind by 34 points in the beginning of the third quarter of the game against the Texas A&M, suddenly was struck by a lightning bolt or something and it all changed. A team that could do no right in the first half of the game suddenly could do no wrong in the second half. UCLA pulled it out in the last minutes and won, 45-44, so take that, Texas, who had just a bad time all around.
P.S. Karen and I are both loyal Bruin graduates and make no pretense about being either fair or objective.