It's so peaceful in the country

 ...if the country is New Zealand.  For the rest of us, not so much.

What the hell is going on at LAX?  On Thursday a driver crashed a fence and drove across several runways with police in pursuit.  Friday evening a man decided he really didn't want to go to Salt Lake City, so he activated the emergency exit and jumped down the slide of a United Express plane as it prepared to take off.  I seem to remember that after 9/11 air marshals were assigned to random domestic flights.  It might be time to resume this practice.

"What's so funny 'bout peace, love and understanding?" Elvis Costello demanded in 1979.  I don't think he got, or expected, an answer.  Mark Milley's career has not dealt with peace or love but he's all in favor of understanding.  "What is wrong with understanding?  Having some situational understanding about the country which we are here to defend?" the general asked of Matt Gaetz, whose career has been dedicated to situational ignorance.  This enraged his good buddy Tucker Carlson who called Milley "not only a pig but stupid," which is how the post-Buckley right deploys language in the cut-and-thrust of debate.  Carlson in turn enraged Veterans for Responsible Leadership and other groups, who want United Services Automobile Association (USAA) to stop sponsoring Tuckums's White Power Hour.  To be continued, since Tuckums has no idea when to shut up.

It's just conceivable, of course, that he will apologize, or as they now say, "walk it back."  Normally this is dismissed as a sign of weakness, but then Marjorie T. Greene went to the Holocaust Memorial Museum and decided that making people wear masks during a pandemic is not especially similar to making people wear "gold stars" during a genocide.  "I have made a mistake.  And it's really bothered me for a couple of weeks now," she said afterwards, in a speech where her excuse was that "I'm a new member of Congress...about five and a half months now, it seems a lot longer than that."  (For us, too.)  And she's a really normal person, and her daddy died in April, etc.  I'm grateful to the HMM, because Margie's not much of a reader.  Now that they've straightened her out about Nazis she needs a museum to explain communism.  Last night she was calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "the little communist from New York City" who is "not an American" and echoing the mob, "Yeah, lock her up too, that's a good idea."

Margie was one of the opening acts at Save America!, the traveling Trump carnival that brought thousands of Trumpanzees to -- let me check -- Wellington, Ohio.  (Trump owes so much money to so many cities for past hate rallies that major cities won't rent him venues or provide security anymore.)  Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Rob Portman and Rep. Anthony Gonzalez, all Republicans, all had previous engagements, especially since The Big Liar was there to denounce Gonzalez for voting to impeach him the second time.  (Maybe he's also "not an American."  Last year he got 15,000 more votes in his district than Trump.)  Trump does not apologize; like Olive Oyl's father in the comics, he thinks the whole world owes him an apology for failing to recognize that he single-handedly created three different vaccines which saved all but 600,000 Americans.  Instead his electoral triumph was stolen and he has to rent a plane that doesn't even have its own surgical suite.  Patriot Takes sent a spy to Wellington and he posted video of bored attendees walking out during the rant.  Sad.  Serves him right for using Dolly Parton's music without (I'm sure) her permission.

Trump is even dumber and more aggressively ignorant than Greene, so he gets all his "information" from other eedjits like Pillow Mike.  What else could explain his whining about the Supreme Court, a third of whose members are his and Moscow Mitch's creatures?  Lindell tells him it's up to the Court to "overturn" the election and when they don't he's "ashamed" of their gutlessness.  Echoing Carlson, he raged at Mark Milley and other "woke" generals.  Unaware that states control public school curricula he wants a Republican Congress to ban critical race theory, which in his Adderall-addled mind looks like George Floyd and sounds like pre-hajj Malcolm X.  He's changed that mind about migrants, who used to be "murderers and rapists."  Now they're "wonder kids" reduced to feral suicides by Biden's "stupid policy" of taking them from their parents.  No wonder even the MAGAts walked out, probably quoting George W. Bush:  "That was some crazy shit."

In spite of useful idiots like Greene and Boebert, the Republican Party can't help denigrating and condescending to women, whose votes are slipping away.  The attacks on General Milley claim that understanding racism will "feminize" Our Troops and make them incapable of waging war, although a good many of those troops are actual women.  Today on Meet the Press Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) went a step farther, proclaiming infrastructure "a woman's problem" because women use the roads for shopping and taking children to school.  Opening his mouth wider and inserting the other foot, Cassidy went on, "The more time she spends on that road, the less time she spends doing things of higher value," like cooking and cleaning, I guess.  This fool, who is actually a physician, thinks infrastructure is nothing but highways and the occasional bridge, although the Biden administration is clear about including airports, high speed rail, dams, internet and power.  You should read the bill, doc.  And once again I call on the medical schools to stiffen their entrance requirements.

There are Pride Parades all over this week, New York's being the biggest, and the LGBTQ community is getting mixed signals from the Vatican.  Not long after affirming its doctrine that same-sex acts are "disordered" and gender identity immutable, Pope Francis sent a nice handwritten letter to Father James Martin thanking him for his ministry to gay Catholics.   This makes the pope, I'm sorry to say, no better than Rep. Kevin McCarthy.  For weeks DC Police officer Michael Fanone has walked the halls of the Capitol he nearly died defending on January 6, asking the Gutless Twenty-one why they voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to him and his colleagues.  Andrew "Cowardly" Clyde wouldn't even shake his hand.  He finally got an audience with McCarthy, who promised to speak privately to his caucus of cop-haters but refused to criticize them publicly.  McCarthy won't even deny the "False Flag/FBI" conspiracy theory first aired by Sean Hannity.  He's the perfect Republican moral leader.  I think the Catholic Church can do better, but who am I to judge?

Cheer up, it's nutty everywhere.  In Runcorn, Cheshire, a lone woman took her stand against the covid testing she knew to be happening in a white tent beside the Queen of Hearts pub.  She denounced the "scamdemic" and said she could hear children "crying and screaming" from across the parking lot as swabs were thrust into their little noses.  In fact, the tent was a marquee for pub patrons who wished to watch the Euro 2020 football and there wasn't a swab in the place.  Luckily for the football fans, the woman did not drive an SUV into the place while yelling "Stop the steal!"  An American would have been more proactive.