A Better Way To Say It

By Sniffles

We cats are irritated by Robert DeNiro. Not because we disagree with what he said at the Tonys on Sunday night — and not because we're prudes (although we kinda are) — but because it just wasn't clever. You resort to the "F" word when you don't have something more witty to say.

Pierre Trudeau said as much 47 years ago. (That's Pierre, Larry Kudlow, not Justin. No wonder you had that heart attack.) Except in the senior Trudeau's case, it was about the "A" word, plus "SOB," epithets with which Richard Nixon had rudely tagged him. "I've been called much worse things by better men," Pierre sniffed. Game over.

So: Nobody wins in battles of rudeness. Justin has proved that very well.

How so? Through his measured performance at his press conference, after the G7 had concluded and the ever-petulant Donald Trump was wheels-up for Singapore. "Canadians, we’re polite, we’re reasonable," he said. "But we also will not be pushed around." Trump, from his perch as the world's supreme pusher-arounder, was outraged. Trouble ensued.

But did you catch what happened after that? The Canadian House of Commons condemned the Trumpsters' attacks on their Prime Minister. Unanimously. Across party lines.

When was the last time Canadian MPs voted on something without a single dissent? We're glad you asked, because Trump won't like this, either: It was on the anti-Russian Magnitsky Act, in October 2017.

Justin, meanwhile, has lain low while his House of Commons eloquently speaks for an annoyed True North. Which kind of brings us back to DeNiro. If Canada hasn't just said "F you" to Donald Trump and his nightmare Presidency in the most civilized way, call us cats Chihuahuas. And of course we PURR.

Tidbits And Cat Treats: Charlevoix Edition

By Baxter

The joint was really jumpin' in Charlevoix on Friday and Saturday, and not in a good way. Donald Drumpf arrived late and left early, insulted our allies, including with hostile body language that said he'd rather be anywhere than there, and threw a tantrum after he left.

In between, Angela Merkel trolled him with a photo that made him look like a toddler who wouldn't use his potty chair.

Before we run and hide under the bed in anticipation of Singapore, here are a few of our own thoughts.

Re Trump's attack on Justin Trudeau: Remember that everything Trump says is projection. So accusing Trudeau of being "weak" is a telling move. Only somebody whose arguments — like his character — are as feeble as Trump's would do everything he could to avoid our allies and then bluster at them in cowardly tweets when they were no longer face-to-face. (P.S. Justin didn't say anything in his post-summit press conference that he hadn't already said to Trump in person.)

Also re Trump's attack on Trudeau: Trump is already in a deep, deep hole with women voters. This is going to drive him deeper — not just because Trudeau is young and handsome but because he's a feminist.

If a "gaffe" is defined as "accidentally telling the truth," we must report that Fox News has described the Singapore confab as a first-time meeting "between the two dictators."

Finally, a chilling reminder of where we're at, from our day trip to Hyde Park yesterday:

In a special exhibit of posters from World War II, the FDR Presidential museum was running the first chapter of Frank Capra's award-winning documentary, "Why We Fight." Capra pointed out that in each of the Axis countries — Germany, Italy and Japan — dictators rose to power in part because their respective legislatures abrogated their responsibility to serve as a check on executive aggression. As we've said before, November can't come soon enough. We cats HISS.

In Search Of A Real President

By Zamboni

Desperate to immerse ourselves in a Presidency with some true leadership, we cats visited the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum today. (And yes, we'll have plenty to say about today's G7 — oops, G6 — meeting that Donald Drumpf threw a stinkbomb into after he flounced out for Singapore. What a despicable coward he is.)

Anyway, here is the huge portrait that greets you when you walk into the Roosevelt museum. We chose this because we thought the FDR quote that accompanies it could not be more opposed to the dark, hateful spirit of the current Administration.

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Hanging on until happy days are here again, we cats PURR.

Willard Is Still The Worst

By Miss Kubelik

On the one hand, we cats need to thank Willard Mitt Romney for handing Democrats a great 2018 campaign ad today. What could drive more of us to the polls more effectively than a prediction that we're in for six more years of Donald Drumpf? (Mia Love, who has a tough re-election fight in her Utah Congressional district, must be furious.)

But Willard is still just a disgusting piece of you-know-what. His behavior lately has reminded us how spot-on we were in 2012 to despise him as a phony and a knave. Even when he was declaring back then that it was Russia that posed the greatest threat to the national security of the United States.

Turns out he was right about that. But we hesitate to give him any credit — because of his silence now.

Drumpf has just announced that he thinks his good buddy Vlad Putin should be let back into the G7. Mind you, the Western democracies kicked Russia out after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. But that doesn't matter to Drumpf: Putin has something on him that makes him do Russia's bidding.

And from the Republicans? Not a peep — not even from Willard.

It is very, very bad for the United States to be isolated from its allies, and very, very good for Russia to have us fighting with them. How fast is Ronald Reagan spinning in his grave? (And how quickly will Drumpf invite the Russian-born captain of the Washington Capitals and his Stanley Cup-winning teammates to the White House?) Until we hear the GOP and, especially, Willard Mitt Romney, speaking out about this — let's just say it — treason, we cats HISS.

Trump: A Portrait Of Idiocy

By Sniffles

On the day we found out that a Republican Congressman tweeted an image of Nazi soldiers to honor D-Day, we also learned that our faux President thinks — well, let us digress for a bit of history.

See this painting? It's one of five copies of a portrait that Gilbert Stuart did of George Washington. The most famous of these five hangs in the East Room of the White House this very day, and overall, it's one of the best-known images of the nation's first President.

The reason the White House is able to display its copy 222 years after it was painted is because First Lady Dolley Madison insisted on saving it before she fled the capital ahead of invasion.

"Our kind friend, Mr. Carroll, has come to hasten my departure," Mrs. Madison wrote to her sister that very night, "and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of General Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found to be too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvass taken out it is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York for safekeeping."

The guys from New York spirited the painting away, Mrs. Madison safely evacuated, and the White House was burned. BY THE BRITISH.

We put that in shouty all-caps because it's been reported that our Dear Leader, Donald Drumpf, told Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last month that the tariffs he was slapping on the True North were in the interest of national security because "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?"

We have no idea how Justin responded, but we're assuming he set the fool in the Oval Office straight. Perhaps he also reminded Drumpf that in the War of 1812, it was the United States that invaded Canada — not the other way around? We cats HISS.

RFK 50

We cats don't run on beaches — that's for dogs. But this photo is on our minds today because we're dreaming of things that never were and asking, "Why not?"

Make The Great American Songbook Great Again!

By Baxter

We cats are still trying to wrap our heads around the irony that Donald Trump, at a rally he staged to help prove his patriotism, couldn't sing the lyrics to a jingoistic song written by a Russian.

That's right, kids, Irving Berlin — composer of "God Bless America," which we hate him for, "White Christmas," which we're "meh" about, and "What'll I Do?", which we adore — was born Israel Beilin in the Russian Empire in 1888.

Funny, yes? Trump probably couldn't tell you that Berlin wrote Kate Smith's signature tune, let alone the words to it. And surely Trump's limited intellect couldn't grasp that a foreigner could be one of the pillars of the Great American Songbook. But if you look at the list of those venerated composers and lyricists, a number of them were not American by birth.

Frederick "I Could Have Danced All Night" Loewe? German. Jule "Time After Time" Styne? British. Jack "Happy Days Are Here Again" Yellen? Polish. And Vernon "April in Paris" Duke? Like Berlin, a Russky.

Which means that what these guys also had in common was that they were — GASP! — immigrants. And so, so many of their fellow American Songbook masters were the children of immigrants. (Jews, too.)

So that's the disturbing truth behind Trump's ridiculous performance today. Of course he couldn't sing "God Bless America," because every day he and his evil minions do something to destroy its soul. How many future creative artists are — thanks not to actual legislation but to Trump Administration policy — being held in cages at the border tonight? We cats hate to even think about it, and we HISS.

We Find This Decision As Nutty As A Fruitcake (But There's Still Hope)

By Zamboni

There's an awful lot to write about today that's disturbing: looming abuse of Presidential power, ICE ripping children from their parents at the border and Scott Pruitt's strange desire for a used Trump hotel mattress. But instead we're going to focus on cake.

As in, to our friends and loved ones in the gay community: If you want to get a wedding cake, don't order it from one lousy bakery in Colorado. But you'll probably be okay if you have it baked by somebody else.

If not, as the Supreme Court appeared to caution today, they may rule differently next time — because in this single instance, in the eyes of the court the Colorado Civil Rights Commission did not fairly consider the baker's religious views. The justices ruled on the minutiae of this particular case but punted on the larger question of discrimination against LGBTQ customers in the marketplace.

As much as we understand the details of it — we're not lawyers, but we try — we cats are still annoyed with today's decision. Because anything that gives religious freaks cause to celebrate is irritating. But at 7-2, it was not close, and we have resigned ourselves to the fact that these questions linger because we live in a country that was founded in part on the concept of religious freedom. (Unlike Canada, for instance, to which explorers and entrepreneurs flocked to make a buck.)

But it's still Pride Month. You guys can still get married. SCOTUS has not given a green light to businesses to discriminate against gay people, and nobody's going back. We cats HISS and PURR at the same time.

Addendum

By Miss Kubelik

We cats may have posted about the missing Melania just yesterday. But we find ourselves doing it again tonight, even though, let's be honest: We don't really care where she is. We are simply curious about the possibilities.

This weekend it's gotten even curiouser, because practically the entire loathsome Drumpf clan took off for Camp David. But no Melania. (We didn't see Lurch — oops, we mean Barron — either, so maybe he's with Mum? Wherever that may be.)

Our fellow tweeps are speculating madly that Trump punched or hit his wife and that she has gone under wraps with a slow-healing black eye. That could be, but we're doubtful. Trump is 71 and not in great shape, and she's a lithe 48-year-old. She strikes us as being somebody who could easily duck. (Although we know that accidents do happen: See Norman Maine and Vicki Lester, above.)

Well, perhaps sometime soon this mystery will be explained. It won't matter to us one way or the other, unless there's an alarmingly nefarious political angle to it. In the meantime, we're more worried about this Trump sociopath destroying our democracy. The midterms can't come soon enough. We cats HISS.

Melania, The Press, And Why It Matters

By Sniffles

Okay, there are probably more important stories to talk about tonight — but maybe there aren't.

Where is Melania? She hasn't been seen in public in three weeks, and the Interwebs are speculating like crazy. One tweeter has commented interestingly to us: Michael Ian Black, who has pointed out that the media are averting their eyes, demurring questions and coverage as they never have for previous First Ladies.

We cats think that the answer to this behavior lies in part with Black's solution: that Melania is a victim, and the press recognizes her as such. But the other piece of it, in our humble opinion, is that the source of any information about her — her marriage, her son, what she thinks about the White House, her husband's slimy adult children, the media, etc. — would be her closest friends who would be speaking on the record with the DC press.

Which means we cats don't think Melania has any friends. No one surfaced as a Melania advocate or spokeswoman during the campaign. We can only assume that that's a result of her wanting to keep her beautiful-people gal pals away from her adulterous spouse — and said spouse, tempestuous as he is, not wanting her to have any sounding boards he can't control.

But another reason Melania gets away with the eye-averting is that the nature of the White House coverage has changed so much since the old days of Mamie, Jackie and Lady Bird.

Back then, there was an entire press corps dedicated to Washington society. Heck, there was a Washington society, one of the leaders of which was the First Lady. That press corps, like that social scene, no longer exists. There's nobody whose job it is to check in with the East Wing 10 times a day to find out whether the President put Vermont or New York maple syrup on his pancakes that morning, and what color the dinner napkins were at the most recent State Dinner.

We're not saying we pine for those days — but even if the East Wing coverage was always, in the end, just blather, it matters today that we don't know what the story is with Melania and her alleged kidney ailment. Because in the age of Trump, the only truth is that which you believe to be the truth.

Therefore, why shouldn't we be asking after her health, and whether her five-day hospitalization for a routine outpatient procedure was the result of a Norman Maine-type punch or, worse, a beating? And why hasn't she been out in public since? As an alleged crusader against bullying, she should have gone to Santa Fe High with Trump to comfort the school shooting victims and to soften his presence. But she didn't. Inquiring minds want to know why.

As we said, it's not the most important issue hanging over this hideous Administration and the damage it's doing to our democracy. But the nation still deserves to know. We cats HISS.