Prequel to a form letter

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

I get a lot of junk email, much of it — hell, MOST of it — political in nature, and I’m sure you do too, if we are both living in the same century. Today, one piece of it was from the National Campaign For Justice, warning of the permanent connection of the USA military, widely regarded as the only army in WW2 that didn’t rape (as a matter of policy, at least), with the Israelis under the recently-ended regime of Benjamin Netanyahu, who, IMHO, have committed a massive, modern genocide against the Palestinians. It remains to be seen whether a government now led by Isaac Herzog, himself a notorious conservative, and do any better… at any rate, if you’re interested (and you should be, particularly if you have served in any branch of the military or know someone who has), you can read the full pitch for signatures on a petition and donations to the Campaign here.

Since these letters are all the same, they don’t count for much in the minds of the MAGA-idiots-who-pretend- to-be-politicians-instead-of-Fascists unless you PERSONALIZE THEM in some way, and that usually means writing a little something, perhaps at the beginning or the end of the form letter, to express your opinions. Politicians don’t count emails any more, they just look at how much memory they occupy, and base their policy decisions on that.

Now, it just so happens that I have a dog in this here fight, and I spent about an hour writing the following prequel to the three MAGA stooges who represent me — Ashley Moody, Greg Steube, and the infamous bat-baby Rick Scott, none of them worth a bucket of warm spit, as Teddy Roosevelt said of the vice-presidency. So here it is below, spontaneous and unchanged from what they are now reading. Let me know what you think!

TO ASHLEY MOODY, RICK SCOTT AND GREG STEUBE:

A relevant personal message: My father was a New York Jew who used his degree from MIT, and his experiences running vital radar units in Great Britain and on Iwo Jima, together with his brilliant mind, to design the radars for the Missile Master system, the first radar-guided anti-aircraft missile battery, installed at Ft. Monmouth New Jersey, near where we lived in Red Bank, in the early 1950’s. There is absolutely no question of his loyalty and service to the USA. Also, as an anti-racist, he was at least 10 years ahead of his times.

And do you know what? I never once heard him say ANYTHING about the state of Israel, and my older sister and my younger brother agree! He was a patriotic, secular Jew who acknowledged his Jewish heritage with pride, but thought the Old Testament was a book of mostly superstitions, and had no use in his work or life for the New Testament. He was pretty much agnostic.

Now, to me: The slaughter of 1200 innocent, unarmed Israeli civilians is so horrible, repulsive and evil a deed that I could vomit. And some justice is warranted… but what warrants the killing of +70,000 innocent, unarmed Palestinians, mostly women and children? Revenge? The desire to claim their territory? Remaking Gaza into a beach resort? Justice is not served, folks, and the violence that Israel has used against the Palestinian people, denied their own state since 1948, with mostly American-supplied weapons, can never, ever be condoned by any civilized human with a shred of conscience. Even the math doesn’t work out: 70,000 dead Palestinians divided by 1,200 dead Israelis is a kill ratio of 58.3 to 1, and the decimal 3 repeats endlessly. Don’t both the Pentateuch and the Old Testament say something like (as a female Rabbi once revealed to me), “ONLY an eye for an eye, and ONLY a tooth for a tooth”?

Lady and gentlemen, genocide is a pardoxical social disease that is contagious. We thought we’d stamped it out at the end of WW2, but it has reared its horrifying head yet again, this time in the form of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

And you want to link our military, now totally independent, with this kind of madness? Mass murder? At what point do we sink to the level of a Third World nation?

Thank you for your attention to these matters. We now return you to our regular form letter.

Copyright 2026 Malcolm J. Brenner. All rights reserved.

An Open Letter to El T.A.C.O. Presidente

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

(Image from YouTube by MINT. I don’t own the copyright, but I did just give you a free plug, MINT, for which I won’t charge you! Express your thanks later.)

Dear TACO Presidente,

If you join Israel’s war against Iran, you are a bigger idiot than I thought, and I didn’t think you could be a bigger idiot than you already are!

Since it was founded on land stolen from the Palestinians in 1948, Israel has been the tail that wags the American dog, and the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty, an American intelligence-gathering ship that was off the coast of Egypt at the time, proves it! The Liberty was flying a HUGE-HUGE!-HUGE US flag, and was repeatedly strafed by Israeli jets and torpedoed by Israeli gunboats! The Israeli government claimed “misidentification” and has never satifactorilly explained why or how.

Further evidence: In spite of the fact that NO IRAQIS were among the Sept. 9, 2001 highjackers, the US lied about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” and the US Army threw Iraq out of Kuwait largely so no Israelis would have to die doing the same dirty work!

Lest you think I am anti-Semitic, I am not, my father was a Jew who changed his last name from Cohen to Brenner on the advice of his teachers at MIT, so he could find a job in the electronics field! Although suffering tuberculosis, he served in the Signal Corps, operating a radar set on Iwo Jima shortly after the Marines took it. Likewise, my mother served in the Royal Air Force, helping Hurricane and Spitfire pilots recover from their wounds so they could go on and win the Battle of Britain!

I am loyal to the Constitution of the USA, and the values of my country, and YOU, PRESIDENTE LOSER NUMERO UNO, ARE NOT! If you involve us in another war halfway around the world, even by just dropping the MOAB on lranian nuclear plants, you will infuriate your MAGA “America First!” base, enrage the American public at large, unify the Iranian people behind their illegitimate Islamo-Fascist leadership, which was about to topple, and contaminate a HUGE-HUGE!-HUGE (I know how much you like that word, even though you drop the H like my Yorkshire mother did when she got mad) sector of the Middle East with nuclear radiation the will make Chernobyl look like a mud puddle in comparison!

Not to mention that we had a fine, anti-nuclear-weapons treaty with Iran from 2015 until May 8, 2018, when you, Bobblehead, took the US out, SOLELY BECAUSE THE DEAL HAD BEEN NEGOTIATED BY A DEMOCRAT, and the accords COLLAPSED! That led directly to Iran re-starting their nuclear enrichment program, and this mess which ISRAEL IS BEGGING US TO JOIN, NOW!

DON’T DO IT, DONALD, unless YOU want to be REMEMBERED as the Lyndon Johnson of the 21st Century! Future generations will curse you if you get us ensnarled in this mess, let the Israelis do their own fighting, for once! They can drop a small atomic bomb on those plants any time they want to, but they don’t want to tip their hand that they can destroy all their Arab neighbors in the time it takes an Israeli fighter jet to reach their capital cities! Could you live with that existential threat hanging over you?

NOW, show some discipline over your ICE thugs, or that the only recruits you get for those jobs will be thugs, degenerates or sadists — although maybe that’s what you want! I’d like to get you alone behind a closed door for just two minutes, Donny Boy. I’m 74 and have three chronic conditions, but in just two minutes, I’d show you what “getting your comeuppance” means! You are a sick, cruel, utterly vapid and dangerous person to have with your thumb on the Big Red Button, and the sooner you exit the White House the better, on your feet or feet first, I NO LONGER CARE! And take your pet rat, Shady Vance, with you, or the next inhabitant will have to call Truly Nolan Pest Control!

Very Truly Yours, Malcolm J. Brenner, BA

8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647! 8647!

(Another Iraqi nuclear scientist bites the dust at home. AP photo by Tom Neuberger, all rights reserved.)

Unsolicited Advice, to a Brute, to be Ignored…

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

Today, inspired by current events, I sat down and wrote a slightly — OK, somewhat — sarcastic letter to our 47th president, who could use a little advice about how to handle all the difficult, complex problems swirling around him, at home and abroad. Here it is! Go forth, Donny, and sin no more! Oh, BTW — your diaper needs changing! I can smell it from here.

Unloved King Shitzfurbranez,

Ye gods, you are an unholy fuckup! Even a little schmuck like me can still give you advice, so here’s a bulleted list:

  • Get rid of Elon! You need him, but does he need you? NO! His net income is bigger than some countries’ GDPs! He’s bought you, but how long will it be before he runs out of Special K and gets bored? My advice: Do him on a bridge, like Teddy Kennedy did it with that little bitch Mary Jo Kopechne! You can say you dove into the frigid, swirling water dozens of times trying to rescue Musky, and emerge for the news cameras a sopping wet HERO! Once again, you, Donnybrook, WIN!
  • Social Security, which I depend on for a meager $1,005 a month — pardon me, I had a checkered career — is headed for insolvency, and Medicare, which keeps me from dying of treatable illness and pays for my hospital stays and doctor care, appears to be on the chopping block. Oh, the government spent too much, we can’t afford to help the POOR any more! Besides, they must’ve somehow earned their poorness, because that’s where they are, right? POOR! BUT, I have come up with an amazing solution, completely unthought-of by anyone in your cabinet, Musk Ox or extended advisory council! Want to hear it? OK, and I won’t even charge you! HERE IT IS:
    TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH!
    TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH!
    TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH!
    TAX THE MOTHERFUCKING RICH!
    There! Did you get that? And let me tell you why that’s GOOD economics, GOOD for America and GOOD for YOU: because if you tax the RICH, there aren’t enough of them to form a big mob, like you did on Jan. 6, 2021, pick up pitchforks and light torches, block the exits of the White House so you can’t get out, and burn it down AROUND YOU! That’s what happens, even to kings and queens, when they try to shift the tax burden from the nobles to the peasants. The peasants BURN you ALIVE! NOTE: This is not a threat, so don’t call whatever crook you have running the Secret Service. It’s merely a historical observation. But take my advice & AGAIN, YOU WIN!
  • Gazans have had at least 46,000 people, 2/3 of them (30,360) women and children, killed in the recent Israeli-committed genocide. I know you don’t give shit about them, but that was state-sponsored payback for the horrifying Oct. 7, 2023 HAMAS attacks where about 1,200 Israelis were killed. Now, you say you, or we, or somebody, is going to OWN GAZA and develop it into beautiful beachfront property, like Siesta Key, Sarasota, FL, where I used to live. But NOBODY ASKED THE PALESTINIANS! Because they’re poor, and poor people don’t vote, not for you, unless they’re white and dumb! I know the Navajo (Nation) pretty well, and they were relocated by the 7th Cavalry around 1862. They tried to scrape a living out of the sorry piece of sand they were forced to live on for 3 years, then gave up and WALKED 300 MILES back to their FORMER home! So I don’t think the Gazans, who have been living in PALESTINE for centuries, if not millennia, are going to leave that easily. My solution? Most Israelis are ASHKENAZI JEWS, which means their ancestry is European! WOULDN’T IT BE EASIER TO SEND THEM BACK TO EUROPE, GIVE GAZA BACK TO THE PALESTINIANS, and shake your buddy Netanyahu’s hand as he gets on the last train out of Jerusalem? Problem solved, and again, YOU WIN, DONNY! And don’t say I’m anti-Semitic, my dad was a Jew, served with the U.S. Army Signal Corps in WW2, and was a fine man. I loved him dearly. (My mother also served, as a nurse in the Royal Air Force, but with her, not so much.)
    Don’t worry, I’m approaching the end!
    •What I said about the Navajo loving their land also applies to Ukrainians. They like their own land just fine. And if that Jewish Fascist Zelenskyy started the war, did the Russian tank commanders have compasses? I ask, because all the Russian tanks I saw (you can tell, they had Russian flags on them) WERE HEADING WEST! I know that Putin is a fellow oligarch-cum-dictator, but just drop a small nuclear weapon, say 1 KT, on the Kremlin while he’s in it! Never mind the fallout, it’s just collateral damage, after all, you will have the heartfelt thanks and prayers of every Russian (I have friends there)! And the Ukrainians can go back to what they enjoy, being servile slaves of that horrible despot Zelenskyy! AGAIN YOU WIN!
  • The economy still sucks, worse than under Biden! That egg for your McMuffin cost $1! FORGET IT, YOU LOSE, KING SHITZFURBRANEZ! LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, you know who will inherit your throne? Not your children, but a man named ELON! LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOSER, LOERLOSERLOSERLOSER!

Most sincerely yours, Malcolm J. Brenner

P.S. — Just one question, Donald (you never did like that name, did you? What a shit your father was, to name you that!): I had to fill out a long and rather complex form to be able to send this email to the White House, and answer some personal questions to do so. BUT WHY DO YOU NEED TO KNOW MY BLOOD TYPE? It is, for the record, B negative, which I am. Only towards you!

But what, Donnie, can I do? IT’S IN MY BLOOD! — MJB

(Image generated by AI. All you graphic artists out there, from the bottom of my flinty, cheap little heart, I apologize! This time, AI did what I asked, and I don’t have any money to pay you, anyway. And if I offered you my daughter’s hand in marriage, her husband might object, although that’s not a sure thing, they live in San Francisco, after all. So there!)