Things are now so confused that it is impossible to know what to do next. Other than putting your left foot in, I feel rather paralyzed. This post will be rather short – I have a busy day ahead. My choice was to ramble a bit now, or wait until late this afternoon. And who knows? By this afternoon, I may think that it’s time to put your right foot, not your left foot, in.

First, let me say that following the Caps and the Nationals is turning into a waste of time. The Caps will undoubtedly lose to the Hurricanes tonight in the NHL playoffs. The Caps had 11 more points than the Hurricanes did in the regular season, but they are down 3 games to 1 in a best of seven series and (no secret here), Carolina looks like a much better team during this series.

As to the Nats, where to start? Is it time to change managers? Martinez has been with the Nats as manager for seven years and the team has done very poorly since their World Series win in 2019. We have been told that the team is “rebuilding”: this means that they work hard to get young prospects who will set the league on fire and they trade away all of their better players in order to get those young prospects. We have traded away Bryce Harper, Juan Soto, Kyle Schwarber, Trey Turner, Victor Robles, and more and, yes, we have a very young and “promising” team. This year was to be the year that the rebuilding showed results and a week or so ago, when the team was 2 below .500, you could have some optimism that things were settling down and at least we would be competitive. But here we are, several days later, having endured a 7 games losing streak and finding ourselves 9 games below .500. The year looks like all our previous years when we dig ourselves into a big hole, and then do okay, but not okay enough to let us climb out of that hole. They need a spark. They need more than a spark. They need a managerial reset, perhaps. The Pirates and the Rockies have already changed managers this spring. Is DC next?

Now to the elephant in the room. Donald the Self-Declaimed Great. I must admit to total confusion. If you are not equally confused, you aren’t paying enough attention. Which leads me to a statistic that I saw the other day. Of sites viewed on the internet, only 4% of them could be described as political. Is that possible? I would say that 75% of what I look at is political. But if you don’t look at political sites on your computer or phone, and you don’t watch cable news, or listen to radio news when you are in your car, and if you certainly don’t read a newspaper, how do you know what is going on? And if you don’t know what is going on, how can you knowingly participate in a democracy? And if you can’t participate in a democracy, what good is a democracy?

We have a president who claims not to know if he is to follow the Constitution, when all you have to do is show him the oath of office he took at his inauguration. We have a president who claims he is following the courts, while he consciously ignores everything they say he must do. We have a president who thinks that “tariff” is the most beautiful word and who reverses most of the tariffs he puts on, causing chaos in the business circles world-wide. We have a president who believes that most immigrants should go back to the countries from which they came (even Afghans with temporary protected status should be kicked out of the country, because Afghanistan is safe again), unless they are white, Afrikaners from South Africa, whom we should welcome here with open arms. We have a president who favors Israel unconditionally, except that he is now in Saudi Arabia, meeting with leaders of all of the regional countries except for Israel. We have a president who wants to take over (militarily if necessary) Panama, Greenland, Gaza and Canada, although even he knows that is not going to happen. We have a president who is being bribed by Qatar to accept a plane (that probably won’t happen either), and who is minting cryptocoins to be sold to the highest bidders, who turn out to be either foreign countries looking for influence, or criminals looking for pardons (which they will probably get). We have a president who believes that his family business is clearly more important that the business of the United States.

In the meantime, his party controls Congress and is coming up with a bill (which they want to call something like The Most Beautiful Bill in the World) that will decrease Medicaid spending and may put an additional 7,000,000 Americans out of the health insurance market. This will of course put more pressure on our hospitals and urgent care centers, which are facing their own financial tightening, and will undoubtedly lead to the the US life span falling even further behind other advanced countries (of which we used to be one).

As I say too often, I could go on and on, but I won’t. We have no idea what is going to happen in any aspect of our lives. And when I say “we”, I include Donald, because he clearly doesn’t either. As my 10 year old granddaughter tells me when she thinks that I say something dumb: That’s not from the left side of your brain or the right side of your brain, that’s from the back of your brain. Everything from Donald comes from the back of his; that is all he seems to have.