This isn't to say we aren't annoyed, but we cats are going to sit out the current brouhaha on Capitol Hill for now. We want to see where things go from here before we jump into the blame game. For example, if Mike Johnson finally reconvenes the House, what happens? Adelita Grijalva will be right there, ready to be sworn in and cast the last necessary vote to release the Epstein Files. Mikey can't stall her forever.
It'll be interesting to watch. Meanwhile, if you have the chance, grab three hours and settle in for the new Nuremberg movie. Our first thought on seeing it this weekend was that Russell Crowe must have watched Gary Oldman win an Oscar under all that Churchill makeup in Darkest Hour and said, "Hold my beer." (Crowe plays Reichsmarschall Hermann Göering. There might be nothing he can't do.)
Donald Trump and his minions will probably hate Nuremberg, which is the story of the Army psychiatrist who analyzed the first group of Nazi defendants tried for war crimes after World War II. Dr. Douglas Kelley was trying to figure out not just if Göering and his pals were competent to stand trial, but also whether they were singularly predisposed to commit evil acts — and not representative of humanity as a whole.
Well, you can guess what he decided. "Kelley argued that the defendants were simply opportunists," Smithsonian magazine reports, "people 'who exist in every country of the world,' as he said during a lecture in the fall of 1946, 'who would willingly climb over the corpses of half of the public if they could gain control of the other half.'
"Kelley likened white supremacists in the US to Hitler and his followers, emphasizing their use of 'racism as a method of obtaining power, political aggrandizement or individual wealth.'
"Without checks on the antidemocratic ideologies he'd witnessed in America, such as placing restrictions on voting rights and perpetuating anti-minority feeling,' the psychiatrist believed that the US could easily transform into a Nazi-like state."
Douglas Kelley could point to precedent in making his argument: Just a few years earlier, the German American Bund had held a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. Still, his warnings fell on deaf ears. Americans had just won the war, and were in no mood to be told their country could be a breeding ground for fascists.
But it was, and it is. Famously, a second Nazi rally starring Donald Trump and Stephen Miller was held at Madison Square Garden in 2024. And now those guys are the ones in charge. We cats HISS.
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