If you are an alleged anti-Trump Republican or Independent who supported the disastrous policies and war crimes of the George W. Bush Administration, moved on to the Tea Party and/or other toxic rightwing klans to attack Barack Obama, and now want to haughtily lecture the Left about anything, kindly shut up and do the serious introspection you so badly owe yourself and your country.

I’ve heard more than enough from you.

You have done an enormous amount of damage to America, and rather than apologizing for it, have pivoted directly to running your big mouths and admonishing the people who have stood by this country for decades about the electoral decisions they are making during these truly scary times.

Because make no mistake about it: You and YOUR pathetic, anti-American party gave us Trump, and the one-after-another list of lowlife Republicans like W. before him. Let me be precise here: You are cowards, and double-talkers, who feast on fear to pad your pockets, while endlessly pedaling your rotten goods on behalf of the monied lowlifes who hide in the shadows of the corporate establishment which owns you.

I was reading a column by David Frum in The Atlantic Thursday that was so condescending that it’s amazing he didn’t break a hip writing it while standing on all his faulty premises. Frum is one of the chief instigators of this collection of know-it-all Republicans, who never owned their part in our nation’s decline, and worse want to blame it on the good and decent people they have been pissing on for years — the ones who were smart enough to vote for people like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Obama.

History has proven these people were right about all of it, and guys like Frum were 100-percent wrong. Frum used to write speeches for W., for God’s sake. By October, 2008, Bush had a 25-percent approval rating among the American public, which makes Trump’s current 33-percent seem Lincolnesque by contrast.

And he’s going to tell US how to deal with the mess HE created?

Seriously …

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In fact, The Atlantic has recently become a clearing house for these phonies and all their unmitigated garbage— mostly old, white guys who want to have everything both ways, because they lack the enlightenment to understand that it was white, male privilege that has given them their creaky pulpit to talk down to the rest of us in the first place.

The Atlantic is hardly the only place you’ll find these parasites … I try to avoid the 24/7 drama of TV news at all costs, but when I click in on occasion I see that MS NOW and CNN are positively littered with these very people.

It’s insane, it really is.

Nothing scares these so-called “Never-Trumpers” more than a person who sees right through the polluted Republican system they operated in, and ultimately gave us the very thing they are now warning us about: Trump.

These are the people who to this day are more scared of Democratic Socialists than they are Mitch McConnell Republicans, who they supported with gusto for years, AND STILL DO.

The damage guys like McConnell did to America with their help is catastrophic.

And what about all the truly disastrous programs they have endorsed with words and treasure through the years that have led to the greatest inequality in personal income since the turn of the 20th Century? What about all these horrid wars they gave their stamp of approval and eagerly endorsed? What about the sizzling bigotry of their party for the past 75 years? What about the zealots of the radical, dangerous Christian Right that so many of them cut their crooked teeth on? Do they even believe in climate change? And has anything scared them more than the landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation that was passed in the 1960s, and their party has been quietly setting fire to for decades, which ultimately gave us the most corrupt Supreme Court in history? That’s also the court that extinguished women’s rights, and allowed corporate raiders to buy politicians and presumably them with their Citizens United ruling.

So now they are going to lecture the Left about their tactics as they fight against the most a horrid man in American history?

How truly rich.

What are your qualifications other than doing literally the most minimal thing possible by voting against a woman-abusing bigot? Are we supposed to fall all over ourselves, because you showed you are capable of doing just one half-decent thing?

Please. Spare us with this.

Congratulations, you have passed the easiest litmus test in the world, and now sound a lot like Trump after he has allegedly passed one of his monthly cognitive exams.

Person-Woman-Man-Camera-TV …

It’s no wonder you supported the pathetic Bush family, which has done generations worth of evil to this country, resulting in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and mental and physical damage amid the wreckage of the illegal wars you supported.

And forget W., if you possibly can … I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody cut and run from a fight faster than his stupid brother, Jeb, after the weakling, Trump, chased him off the stages of those insane 2016 GOP presidential debates.

Has anybody heard from this guy in the past decade? While the country he lied that he cared about burns, he is most likely in some yacht off the coast of Maine counting his money and sipping 200-year-old Scotch, with both pinkies out.

So where is that revolting family you hold so dear during this time of peril?

I mean if you really want to do some good (you don’t), you’d be calling them out regularly with the zeal that you attack Democrats.

But you won’t because the way I figure it, the very minute Trump is finally dead and gone, you will be right back on the right-wing gravy train talking down to everybody, but this time from a comfy perch on Fox News with all your old buddies.

You are just hanging on until that blessed day, and if you can make a little scratch doing it, all the better. I see you trying to make a profit from your phony enlightenment, and condescending bullshit.

What I really don’t get is why anybody on the Left would put up with you.

You are doing more damage to this country than anybody I can think of, because you allege to know better. You are grifters who have somehow convinced people you have all the answers, when you’ve been wrong about everything for your entire miserable lives.

You are a helluva lot like Trump in that regard.

Instead of standing up for something, you appease and criticize both sides, which truly is the coward’s way out. You risk nothing, and hold up your crooked right index finger to see which way the political wind is blowing and slither in that direction.

Anybody can do it, which is what makes you so uninteresting, and shallow.

History is full of phonies like you. Hell, our nation is full of phonies like you. Consider these self-righteous universities, who couldn’t surrender to Trump fast enough after he was elected. Ironically, I’ll bet many of you attended these pompous places.

You disgust me you really do, and it’s about time I let you know it.

If you really want to help, you will just fold up your wallets, go away, stop dividing us, and let the real patriots in America handle this, because right now, you are nothing but the problem.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider becoming one. If you are, please consider upgrading to paid. I keep the rates about as cheap as the Substack gods will allow. Either way, thank you for your support, and for being here. Together, we are the power, and we will be heard from. -Earl

(*I could not find the source of this photo of George W. Bush.)

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Like rising prices, political polls are impossible to avoid right now, and I reckon I am as sick and tired of both of them as you are.

While those escalating prices do nothing but break our budgets, those polls do offer a barometer of how the asinine American electorate is thinking about things, and tend to be more accurate than we generally want to admit. They will also be particularly important this year, when a wildly unpopular and demented Donald Trump continues to overstate his sinking popularity to justify his attack on America by mitigating the importance and accuracy of our elections like so many dangerous dictators in history have done before him.

Yesterday, I took a few minutes to look in on what little social media I still use to scream out loud about things (Bluesky and Notes) and posted news of the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll that has Trump at an all-time low 33-percent approval rating.

Then I waited for the predictable responses.

Namely, HOW can his approvals STILL be that high?!

HOW can a president fighting multiple, illegal wars with an overextended, suicidal military, that is running out of key, strategic weapons and moral high ground have ANY backing? How can a maniac who has driven myriad companies into bankruptcy, and is now presiding over a failing economy featuring rising interest rates, soaring inflation, escalating gas and food prices, and skyrocketing government and private debt get the approval of ANYBODY?

Our air, water, animals and people are under vicious attack. What is there to like?

To answer that, let’s accept as painful as it is, that the guy won the 2024 election with roughly 49 percent of the vote, so a drop-off of 16 percent since then is significant. But I sense that maybe even that explanation is lacking, so perhaps it’s worth a try to put Trump’s appeal to the most tasteless and racist people in America in some historical context.

Seven years ago, and a year before his death, my dad dumped a book on me. My father was the most voracious reader I have ever known, and consumed books by the shelf-full. I bet he read three books a week without breaking a sweat. So when that guy endorsed a book by saying “it was one of the most fascinating things (he’d) ever read,” I knew I was in for a treat.

From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership on the 20th Century didn’t get much attention when it was penned by Michael Blumenthal in 2013, which is a high crime.

Blumenthal might be the greatest, inspirational American success story that most people have never heard of. As a 13-year-old boy he barely escaped Nazi Germany in 1939, only to end up living in the barbaric Japanese-occupied ghettos in Shanghai just months later.

Inside his underrated book, he tells the story of how he ascended from those ghettos to go onto serve in both the Kennedy and Carter administrations, and was actually the Secretary of the Treasury in the latter.

For the purposes of this write and brevity, I want to break out a story in the book in which Blumenthal writes of returning to Germany in 1954, in his capacity as a rising professor at Princeton University, where he was putting together a thesis on “Labor-management relations in the German steel industry, 1947-54.”

Maybe not the most fascinating prose in history, but I hope it makes the point that the man had a lot on his mind, and nobody was going to stop him from fleshing those things out.

He was also perhaps the most optimistic man I have ever come across, but even he was taken aback by what he found during his return to Germany 15 years after his escape, and a decade after Hitler’s death, and heinous crimes on humanity had been exposed.

By Blumenthal’s estimates, fully 40 percent of Germany was still under Hitler’s spell in the 1950s, and it was understandably hard for him to bear. How, knowing what they did, were they still in the tank for arguably the most gruesome monster in history?

And a quick personal exit before returning to my point: I actually stopped reading this book that I have been bragging about three-quarters through it — something I never do — because it pained me to see the all good this man (and so many others) have done for their country so willfully destroyed by the worst man on Earth since Hitler. Instead of being an aspirational nation in 2017 when I was reading it, we had officially become an ignorant, mean and greedy one that was in the state of massive regression. Instead of feeling inspiration, I just felt terribly sad.

Today, even Measles are making a comeback in Trump’s rapidly diminishing 2026 America.

I plan to finish the book, but only if I can be convinced that America is on its way out of this mess, which I will touch on before turning you loose today.

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That fully 33 percent of America still supports this ghastly, racist lowlife is hardly surprising when we look at what Blumenthal encountered during his trip back to Germany in the 1950s.

Human beings are easily the most evil living things on the planet.

As for the way out of this current-day mess? Well, you don’t need me to tell you how bad and truly scary things are right now. As I’ve typed to you before, if you aren’t aware of this, you either aren’t paying attention, are dangerously stupid, are willingly ignorant, or most likely all of the above.

It takes guts and bravery to keep up with what is happening in America, and I salute anybody who is.

The midterm elections are but 76 days away and they really might be our last chance to save ourselves from the authoritarian monster in our White House, and his abhorrent supporters who live among us.

Trump will continue to try to attack these elections because it is what dictators like Hitler do. How much success he will have is open to question.

So here’s what is going to happen:

When November 3rd rolls around Democrats will sweep to historic victories all over the map. Despite Republicans’ anti-American gerrymandering, and voter suppression tactics, the Democratic Party will win a solid majority in the Congress and slim one in the Senate. They will win important governors races, and will make tremendous gains in hundreds and hundreds of state, and local races throughout the country.

All these victories will not end the Republican attack on America, but they will be an important victory in this long war to save America from itself.

I know these things will happen because these things have been happening. There hasn’t been one important contested election since 2024 that Democrats have failed to win over Republicans. Turnout has been robust, and the energy is with the Left and blowing hard against the Right.

Nothing motivates people more than fear, and the smart and decent people in America are scared to death right now.

When the November tsunami hits, and all the votes are counted, the battle will have been joined by the real patriots in America, and that’s when hope returns.

And when that hope returns, and we are giving as well as we have been getting, who knows? I might even feel optimistic enough to return to reading the rest of Blumenthal’s sensational book.

Oh, and one final tidbit on Blumenthal before I go: In researching this piece today, I learned that he is still alive and living in Princeton, New Jersey.

He is 100 years old.

If this man, and all he has been through can stick with America that long, then so can we.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider becoming one. If you are, please consider upgrading to paid. I keep the rates about as cheap as the Substack gods will allow. Either way, thank you for your support, and for being here. Together, we are the power, and we will be heard from. -Earl

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Margo Howard bombed into my life, rattled me in all the best ways, and then had the gall to leave me just two years later.

I’ve been traveling, and learned this weekend that the saucy daughter of a legend, and an author, prodigious writer and reporter of her own repute died two weeks ago.

Howard was 86, and a woman of all times.

Terrible thing when the bright lights in our lives fall from the sky, and are buried behind the mountains for good.

Margo was irreverent, but mostly smart as a whip, and straight-line direct, so when she introduced herself this way, shortly before Thanksgiving of 2024, my holiday weekend was made.

Earl,

My mother was Ann Landers. She had the largest client list of any text column. (1200 papers. Only a few of the comic strip guys had more papers.)

What I wanted you to know was that it meant a great deal to her to be in Stars and Stripes. I’m guessing that may have been your call. She cared so much about our servicemen and women that she went to visit the military hospitals in Vietnam. (That’s a whole other story.)

Anyway, I know your work because other Stack people print it. I subscribed when I saw you had your own Stack. You are really good.

A new reader, and fan.

Margo

As the one-time Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes, I had little to nothing to do with the decision to run her mother’s legendary work. It was the readers who had everything to do with that. In survey after survey, Ann Landers was popular, so we kept her on to help sell newspapers.

Simple as that.

The bit about me, however, hit right at the warm spot toward the center of my ego, because I knew exactly who Margo was. I had come across her here and there on the perimeter of the publishing world, and occasionally rifled through her clever Dear Prudence advice columns in Slate, and Dear Margo offerings at the Boston Globe.

I knew little about her besides, because she lived one helluva full life, and I wondered how even she kept track of it all.

So we were off, and fairly steady penpals for the next 20 months. I’ve been reading through our many exchanges over the weekend, and they have given me life amid the news of her death.

Many of our give-and-takes were brief and newsy, and discussed the endless bile coming out of Mar-a-Lago. For all her savvy and wit, she had no good answers for America’s second-greatest sin.

She did keep me straight on things, though, and I appreciated that. Like the time I went off on a verbal pity party about the stress of an impending move across the country.

She had just nine words for all of that:

Moving is hell, but that's why there are wives.

As usual that was the jolt I needed, because she was exactly right. While I was whining to Margo, my wife was quietly and doggedly doing the 127 things that needed doing to get us from Wisconsin to North Carolina.

Like me, Margo was married more than twice. She kept the name Howard, after a divorce from the actor Ken Howard, who coincidentally was a favorite of mine and the star of the ‘70s TV series, White Shadow.

She seemed to know everybody who was anybody in the publishing world, and dropped some first-class gossip in my lap, which I won’t repeat here.

Sorry.

I do like how NPR’s Scott Simon put it in his lede mentioning Margo’s death:

Margo Howard was the person you’d hope to be seated next to at a dinner party, to hear her purr anecdotes and observations about all the other guests.

I’m at that age where friends and family are starting to leave me forever. And because I am a cynic, and an animal-lover, most people endlessly disappoint me.

It just feels like it’s always the wrong ones like Margo, who go first.

When an email I typed her went unanswered for a couple of days last week, I just knew …

I also know what Margo would tell me right now as I grieve her loss:

“Life’s too short, Earl, get over it. Celebrate the memories, and what you still have.”

OK … but life still won’t be the same without you, Margo.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider becoming one. If you are, please consider upgrading to paid. I keep the rates about as cheap as the Substack gods will allow. Either way, thank you for your support, and for being here. Together, we are the power, and we will be heard from.

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Dear Mainstream Media,

Please sit down and shut up, while I have a word with you.

Today in America, tired, desperate sailors are jumping off aircraft carriers, masked government agents armed with guns and cattle prods are murdering and caging innocent people, proverbial and real wrecking balls are battering our government offices and landmarks; our national parks are being mauled by bulldozers, our air and water is intentionally being poisoned, and our endangered wildlife is being slaughtered; life-saving vaccines are being shelved, while measles are making a comeback, science is under mass attack, wars and more wars are cropping up with no end in sight, OUR so-called Justice Department, aided and abetted by a bought-and-paid-for Radical Right Supreme Court is torching the rule of law, while protecting the very worst among us; voting rights are being assaulted right out in the open, a money-laundering operation is underway in OUR White House, bigotry and more bigotry is being heaped upon our children, and the torrent of lies coming from that White House is drowning out what is left of the truth.

Oh, and everything costs too much in America these days. EVERYTHING.

So let me stop there, while my keyboard cools, my readers wipe the sweat from their worried brows, and I ask you this:

WHY can’t you take a day off — JUST ONE STINKING DAY — from your sheer incompetence and report these things, and JUST THESE THINGS? It is absolutely staggering what the good people of America are being forced to endure on an hourly basis right now.

Are you even living in the same country we are???

We are a nation under siege by an authoritarian regime with the most powerful — albeit abused — military in the world, and it is almost impossible to see how we survive it unless everybody is clear-eyed about what we are up against.

That is your job.

How is it the most serious homegrown attack on America since the Civil War STILL isn’t grabbing every headline, every day???

Because here’s the thing, you self-important clowns, if this attack continues apace, we are done. Those are the stakes right now.

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If your job is to report on the stories that most affect your readership, listeners and viewers (it is), how is it that this attack isn’t getting every bit of your attention?

What in God’s name are you talking about in your editorial meetings each day?

And I don’t need to hear breathless reporting about what Democrats are doing or aren’t doing right now (that is merely a sidebar), only what has been done by the most lawless administration (regime) in American history by far.

Go ahead, point to one administration that is even remotely comparable to this one. They are battering America into dust. And they aren’t apologizing for it, they are doubling down on it.

WHEN will you, our free press, provide the necessary situational awareness and information our citizenry so desperately needs, so that they can properly arm themselves against an authoritarian monster, who doesn't give a damn about them?

And if you are already trying to dismiss this as nothing but a scalding rant from an old, cranky newspaperman who needs more sleep, go right ahead, but I am right about all of this, and you would do well to listen to it, because millions of people out there are scared to death, and have been waiting years for these things to be said.

So what the hell is wrong with you?

Are you really being paid off by the regime to ignore this story?

Is it greed?

Do they own you?

Are you scared? Is that it, you’re scared …?

Are you simply incompetent, and don’t know how to prosecute journalism, and how to order and play stories based on importance?

My God, it has gotten so bad, just weeks ago you were actually wining and dining the guy who wants to end you.

Do you see how terrible that looks?

You are coming off right now as pathetic failures, and slobbering all over a profession many of us gave our lives to.

You need to get it together right now — RIGHT NOW, because we are out of time.

Donald Trump is a rotting, sick old man who can’t even stay awake anymore. He’s exhausted to the point where he isn’t even pretending to care about the country and people he is openly raping each day.

His only remaining goal in what remains of his miserable, destructive life is to make as much money as he can, and destroy everything and everybody around him, who won’t help him do it.

I want you to read that again, too, because it is indisputable that this is what is happening right now.

Are you going to report this at all — much less with the urgency it demands? Because if Joe Biden or Barack Obama, our ANY president in America’s history, had pulled this, you’d be reporting it as a national emergency, and you’d be right to do so.

You’d be calling for their immediate removal.

It would be 24/7 news, because there isn’t a bigger story than this man’s attack on America.

Trump is a sick, rabid dog who when not spending his waking hours counting his money, playing golf and hiding in food trucks, is marking his territory all over Washington. What is happening at the Kennedy Center right now is just obscenely demented.

Who does this?

Dictators, that’s who.

Are you going to start calling him one, or are you hellbent on tucking the word “president” in front of the name of this ignorant, stupid man, who I guarantee you has never read the Bill of the Rights, and couldn’t name more than a handful of Amendments in our Constitution.

He is literally attacking museums, and rewriting our history right out in the open.

Hell, it’s gotten so bad that this sickly old man has even given up on caring what he looks like. I mean he used to shove his ugly face in the oven each morning, so it got that certain orange sheen he likes, and made sure the dead ferret on his head was puffed up just so.

Now he just looks like his mother shortly before her death. Are you seeing this? He looks absolutely ridiculous.

His health is abysmal. You know that, right?

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His ankles are grotesquely swollen, his little, chubby black and blue hands look like they are going to fall off his wrists, and he spends more time at the hospital than an emergency room nurse.

If you think I am being petty right now, go back and read what you were saying about Joe Biden, particularly in the wake of his debate performance. Trump gives these types of performances DAILY.

And at the end of each day of his pontificating, lying, attacking, and taking whatever he can, he heads off to his empty bedroom in the White House where guys like Marco Rubio, JD Vance and Stephen Miller towel him off, so he can be alone with his happy meal and nuclear-powered cell phone, and type absolutely insane things to the world that barely even get a mention by you guys anymore, because you’ve made the editorial decision to normalize it.

And speaking of normalizing … why aren’t you spending time holding the feckless, abhorrent, mouth-breathing Republicans to account for their cover of all this treason, because at the end of the day, that is what it is.

It’s that bad in America right now, and we won’t survive two more years of this. I assure you that many of the people reading this often wonder if we will survive two more hours of it.

The traitor, Trump, has only been in power for 19 months, has 29 to go, and for anybody who truly loves their country, it is almost impossible to process. The damage he has done has already been catastrophic.

This means the opposition better have one humdinger of an election in November that Trump will most assuredly continue to attack, or the next 29 months might as well be the next 290 months, because America as we used to know it — a decent but flawed place — will be long gone, and replaced by something you’d see in Moscow, which was probably the plan all along.

And still I read things that insinuate that both parties are basically the same, while you do your stupid horse race thing. Here’s where I really want to grab you, and shake you until your eyeballs rattle.

I’ll be the first to tell you, and have, that the Democratic Party is flawed, and hasn’t done enough in their own right, to fight off this attack. But they have never openly attacked our country and done this kind of damage. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every good thing that has come along in my long lifetime is thanks to those hapless Democrats, who actually fix economies and don’t break them.

Go ahead, look that up. Then do something crazy like report it.

Democrats fight for people’s rights, instead of attacking them.

You need to start doing your damn jobs, MSM. If you need more suggestions, call me. I’d be glad to talk, and if necessary slap some sense into you, because right now I’d fire 80 percent of you if I could.

To those of you who are doing the good work, thank you. To the rest of you who are quietly working away for chump change in our local communities and keeping an eye on the town hall, the schools and the ball fields, you rock. I’ve been there, and you are doing vitally important work.

To the rest of you so-called journalists suffocating the news inside our Beltway, stop being so pathetic, and start doing your damn jobs.

Because if you don’t, when this teetering country falls, there will only be one word left to describe you: COMPLICIT.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

Thank you for reading this. If you want it to make an impact, please consider sharing it.

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If you aren’t a subscriber, please consider becoming one. If you are, please consider upgrading to paid. I keep the rates about as cheap as the Substack gods will allow. Either way, thank you for your support, and for being here. Together, we are the power, and we will be heard from. -Earl

You can take the boy out of Wisconsin, but you can’t take the Wisconsin out of the boy, I guess …

I couldn’t pass on quickly touching on Tuesday’s key primaries in that state with the emphasis on the Democratic race for governor, and its national implications. Since moving to North Carolina in March, this was the first race I haven’t been directly involved with in the Cheese State for 15 years, and it felt a bit odd — er, you-betcha it did.

When David Crowley, a moderate Milwaukee County Executive roared back in the final days and hours to defeat upstart Francesca Hong, a Democratic Socialist from Madison, it completed the end of a remarkable campaign even by Wisconsin’s standards, where races are nail-biters as a rule.

A lot of noise has has come from the cloud-to-ground lightning being produced by friction in the Democratic Party between the socialist and moderate wings.

While some see this as problematic, I see it all as an extraordinarily healthy sign that a party that has grown stale aging in place, is finally dealing with the often uncomfortable growing pains that are necessary for a party to stand up and march forward, instead of dining on the past.

Long way of saying: both moderates and progressives serve a vital function in the party, and both were heard from in Wisconsin by their two solid candidates in Tuesday’s primary.

Crowley, 40, grew up in one of the toughest places in America in Milwaukee’s 53206 zip code. His family didn't have money, but did have the wherewithal to raise a son who became the youngest leader ever to be elected as a Milwaukee County Executive in 2020.

Now, six years later, he will be vying to become Wisconsin’s first Black Governor. Crowley is an impressive dude, and the sky’s the limit on his political career.

And as impressive as Crowley is, in my mind the night belonged to the man who endorsed him just weeks ago, the state’s popular current governor, the unassuming Tony Evers, who once again quietly flexed his extraordinary political power to help get Crowley, who was far behind in the polls just weeks ago, past the finish line.

Evers has run two scandal-free terms in Wisconsin, after coming out of nowhere himself to beat the GOP’s Scott Walker in another blindingly close race eight years ago. It was a huge win, and a turning point for Democrats at the time, who had little to no power in the state before that election.

In a state that has produced many political heavy-hitters, like Joe McCarthy, Tommy Thompson, Paul Ryan, and Tammy Baldwin, Evers might be the most powerful Wisconsin politician of all time.

And I’ll bet most of you have never heard of him.

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Because Wisconsin does not have term limits for governor, Evers, 74, could have run again, but decided not to. His polling is solid, and has consistently been far ahead of Donald Trump, who won the state by a hair in 2024. I believe he would have won again had he run, but Evers saw an opportunity to link the present with the future and took it.

Man, I wish more politicians would do this.

Evers is a career educator and as bookish as he is unassuming. I attended many rallies where Evers appeared over the years. He is uncomfortably comfortable with attention, and has no trouble dealing his hokey charm in exchange for votes. He sees boring as a strength, and you underestimate him at your own peril, as he proved yet again last night.

Evers had vowed to stay out of the race, until he felt he no longer could and endorsed Crowley on July 18, because he feared Hong would “probably lose” to the revolting Republican, Tom Tiffany, in November.

Apparently, Republicans felt the same way and actually spent millions on outside ads in hopes of boosting Hong’s chances. Such is the state of America thanks to the odious Citizens United ruling.

When the Associated Press called the race for Crowley in the early morning hours Tuesday, Evers went hog-wild crazy tweeting this:

“I am so proud of David — he’s the future of our Party, and I can’t wait for him to be our next governor. For now, we polka. Tomorrow, we’re back at work to win.”

Trust me this was a rip-roaring celebration in the Evers’ household ...

Now comes the hard part.

Crowley’s opponent, Tiffany, is a truly gruesome man, and a toxic election-denier. There isn’t a thing he won’t do to curry favor with the repellent Trump, who has proven himself to be the most notorious traitor in U.S history.

Both of these men treat elections like Trump treats women.

Tiffany needs to be beaten and beaten badly in November in this battleground state, and I believe he will be, under ONE condition:

Democrats MUST coalesce and get behind Crowley. I typed about this extensively on Monday, and just one day later Wisconsin has provided one of the most important challenges yet.

Voters on the Left must put aside their differences for America’s greater good.

Hong ran a spirited campaign, and talked about many things more Democrats need to be hammering home like universal healthcare and childcare, paid leave, and a drastic increase in minimum wage. She knows the billionaires are stealing and eating all our lunches, and need to be stopped dead in their tracks.

This is not a drill.

I hope she stays active in politics and never stops talking. She’s got a gift, and like Crowley, is the future of the Democratic Party.

She’s off to a good start and has fully thrown her support behind Crowley, because she knows that if Democrats can stay together for once, they will win, and win big everywhere.

So congratulations to Crowley, well done to Hong, and a really keen and neato nod to Tony Evers, the mild-mannered kingmaker in Wisconsin …

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

In one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, The Paper, the late, great Robert Duvall is playing the role of Executive Editor Bernie White at an upstart tabloid in New York City back when newspapers were still king, and all this 24/7 BREAKING NEWS!!! on TV was slightly less polluted hot air than it is today.

Bernie’s having a particularly bad day because one of his opinion writers is grinding his gears, so he offers up an opinion of his own about all his damn columnists to his troublemaking metro editor, Henry Hackett, played by the equally incomparable, Michael Keaton.

White pulls hard on a cigarette he shouldn’t be smoking and blows at Hackett with a nicotine-laced gust:

“I hate columnists! Why do I have all these columnists? I got political columnists, guest columnists... celebrity columnists — the only thing I don't have is a dead columnist. That's the kind I could really use. We reek of opinions. What every columnist at this paper needs to do is SHUT-THE-FUCK-UP!!!!”

Perfection …

It’s probably not the smartest thing to attack blowhard columnists when I have pretty much devolved into one since my newspaper days, but lately I am feeling very much the same way when it comes to all these opinions about the the two chief factions of the Democratic Party: the Centrists and the Progressives, or Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). And if you tell me that DSA and Progressives are somehow different please shut up, and thank you, because I could care less.

Here’s what I really care about: BEATING REPUBLICANS.

That’s it.

Look, I don’t care if you are a liberal Democrat, or a centrist Democrat. I don’t care if you are a socialist, or a moderate. I don’t care if you are a Blue Dog, or a Third Way … I don’t even care if you are the devil himself. If you can beat Republicans I will ride with you to hell and back.

The Republican Party is a racist cult that has disgracefully fallen at the fat, little feet of a convicted felon, and serial woman-abuser — a man who has never seen a fascist or authoritarian government he doesn't like, and has enriched himself with OUR tax dollars, while battering our White House with a wrecking ball, and starting illegal wars and disastrous tariffs he refuses to end.

He has attacked our air, water and endangered animals. He has attacked our press, and our allies. He even violently attacked our vote and nation while trying to overthrow our government.

Prices are spiraling out of control, and even the gas he and his billionaire buddies chug by the gallon is becoming too expensive to pump.

The Republican Party is the enemy of America and Americans, and I swear to God, I can’t hear another word about what kind of Democrat can beat these grotesque people, except that they have to be beaten.

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If a Democrat in Iowa, who starts his speeches with a prayer, can beat his heathen Republican opponent I say, amen. If a Democrat in Michigan, who believes we all deserve affordable healthcare, can beat his Trump-loving opponent who wants to take vaccines away and keep spreading the measles, I say good health to you, my man.

We have but one job to do this November: Get behind every Democratic candidate we can vote for, and hold on tight.

This stupid media-generated horse race between centrists and the DSA needs to stop, pronto. To borrow from Duvall’s, Bernie White: I wish they would all shut the fuck up!

And look, if you are sickened by the state of our politics in the United States, congratulations you are not alone. Probably the only thing everybody on every side of the political spectrum can agree on is that our two-party system is flat busted.

You can mostly thank the cancerous Citizens United ruling for this, which was given to us by our bought-off, Radical Right Supreme Court, who see it as their No. 1 priority to appease billionaires, and keep us fighting with one another for the scraps, while they eat us whole.

We got that Supreme Court, because as Bill Clinton once put it: “Democrats want to fall in love; Republicans just fall in line.”

Republicans are ruthlessly disciplined, and gave us Trump, the most dangerous man on Earth, not once, but twice, and he rewarded them by appointing three of the nine Supreme Court Justices, and currently has a Republican House and Senate he can batter into submission, so that they can keep hammering us.

So sure, Democrats, let’s keep kicking the crap out of each other, and make good and damn sure we never win anything again.

And before you tell me it isn’t this easy, let me stop you right there and tell you that it is.

Understand: There is not one candidate out there who will ring all your bells. Not ONE.

If you are reading this and telling me you have found a candidate who agrees on your positions on everything, I am calling you a liar, or a dreaded political operative, which is worse — FAR worse — than even a political columnist.

Point is there will be Democratic candidates who align closely to what you believe, and others who are to the left or right of perfect, but every one of them will be far, far superior to anything Trump is telling his subservient Republicans to run on, which is mainly kissing his ample ass, and keeping him power.

It should be no surprise to you that I am not a fan of Chuck Schumer and his Centrist Democrats, and probably align more with the progressive wing of the party, though when DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer brags about not endorsing Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, to protect her organization’s credibility, I have to snort at that absurd level of privilege.

Millions of people have been hurt, and in some instances killed, because one, or both, of those women didn’t win their elections, so maybe try showing some humility, woman. Or better yet, listen to Bernie’s advice above ...

All this is to say again, that while I have some issues with every candidate on the Left, when the primary season is blessedly over next month, I will endorse every Democrat who won their race.

Like I said: This isn’t hard.

You want hard?

See what happens if you don’t vote, and embolden a MAGA-led House and/or Senate to align with their Supreme Court and hideous dictator to make it so you can never vote again.

Because THAT’S what’s on the line right now.

(D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)

Dear Readers,

If your email has been suspiciously quiet this week, it could be in part because I have been on the road dining out, and not filling you up. I have sprinkled in a side helping of work, while feasting on a main course of restorative hikes, hearty deep breaths, and the reward of good company, and ice-cold beer at the end of the trail each day.

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It was 43 Augusts ago …

My future- and now ex-wife, Kathy, and I were heading to one of those backyard parties where a sweating keg of beer was the center of attention, but the grimiest star of the night had yet to rise as dusk spilled toward darkness.

The 1980s were a weird time. After getting everything possible both right and wrong in the ‘60s, and pay…

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On Tuesday afternoon, I clocked into my Facebook page and it proceeded to pester me about things I was going on about 10 years ago to the day — or about the time Donald Trump began taking up space in my life.

I still wasn’t taking him seriously as a man, much less a presidential candidate, because I lived comfortably i…

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Dear Readers,

Way back in February, and what seems like 10 years ago, I spent a snowy Monday morning in Wisconsin typing to you about the importance of the word inevitable to describe two things I saw coming in November’s monumental elections in the United States of America pitting freedom vs. fascism.

1. It is inevitable Democrats will smash Republicans in…

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We are less than 100 days before early voting starts in America’s crucial midterm elections, and there will be two certainties during and after the vote is counted:

1. The Democrats will win back the House of Representatives convincingly.

2. The anti-American Donald Trump will once again do whatever he can to throw out our vote so he can get on with finishing o…

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Donald John Trump has done more damage to the United States of America than any foreign adversary in history.

As sure as I am typing this, Trump is a traitor to his country, the most dangerous man in the world, and any person in government who is still supporting this wreck of a human being is aiding and abetting the most sustained attack on this nation …

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On November 3, 2020, American voters elected Democrat Joe Biden to be the next President of the United States, temporarily inoculating us from the awful Trump Virus that had ravaged the country the four previous years, culminating with his violent attack on the country just two months later.

Tragically, we learned but four years after that election, that…

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I was going to avoid any meaty comment on the passing of Lindsey Graham, because for the most part my thunder has been stolen by people who chose their words wisely, while still others dug into their keyboards in the immediate aftermath of his death Sunday and beat me to the punch.

Then I started reading what two of our most venerable news organizations …

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I learned long ago as a cub reporter at a weekly newspaper in New Jersey that there are realities in this world, and there are political realities. Realities are, well, real. Political realities are shaped by people in little rooms Inside the Beltway who live in a world detached from reality.

“They’re eating the dogs…

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Readers,

As we stand on earth that shakes under our feet, and head toward the most important election in our lifetime, I want to be clear about what I am, what I am not, and what you will find here at Enough Already.

Coul…

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Well, the dog finally caught the car in Maine.

Since Graham Platner burst on the scene a year ago announcing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, he has crisscrossed the Pine Tree State telling uncomfortable truths about America’s broken political system, and making enemies on both sides of the spectrum doing it.

Controversy has followed the combat vet for…

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I will keep today’s missive brief.

I would like to tip you to a piece today on CBS Sunday Morning about the Pentagon’s ongoing attack on Stars and Stripes newspaper, the congressionally mandated, editorially independent newspaper that covers the troops and their families overseas and in theaters of war.

(And yes, I get the irony of CBS, a once-proud news …

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We are but 123 days from the most important elections of our lifetime, and on the day before our nation’s 250th birthday, those elections are under attack by the anti-American Republican Party and their wannabe king who already violently attacked us once.

As a type this on a steaming hot day across much of America, our clean air and water are also under …

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After many decades of inspiring exploration, the development of life-saving vaccines, social progress, and righteous wars against genocide and hate, America the not-so-beautiful is celebrating her 250th birthday Saturday with a lying, orange 80-year-old bigot in our White House, who hates science and reading, and is losing a w…

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