It used to be called the School of the Americas, but now it’s the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. As before, it’s located at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.

By the time it closed in 2000, the School of the Americas had trained 60,428 officers, cadets, noncommissioned officers, and others from twenty-two Latin American countries and the US. It trained them in jungle warfare; and some 22,265 American soldiers were trained there as well; and LBJ was real proud of them so he could continue his war in Vietnam and prepare to force a change in government in Chile.

Because Donald Trump has a messiah complex and because he is so good at lying and self-delusion, he thinks he’s still entitled to be our Commander-in-Chief, and he knows that his close personal friend Jair Bolsonaro is temporarily staying in Florida as he readies himself and his election-denying team to parachute to Brasilia so he can, with his loyal Bolsonarios, retake Brazil and send President Lula to prison for the second time.

Brazil has been experiencing an assault by the Bolsonarios in close parallel to our January 6, all inspired by Trump.

Associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones was with Trump today as he and Bolsonaro touched base on their future plans.

“Jair,” Trump began, “first thing I’m gonna do when I get back in the White House, will be to bring the School of the Americas back.”

“That way, I can send my Marines down to Brasilia and help you get back in power.”

Bolsonaro immediately came alive. In near-perfect English, he said, “Donald, you and I are going to be True Historic Figures as we forever squash poor people and make them our slaves.”

Some politicians are more ambitious than others.

This is very true about Kevin McCarthy, a meretricious pol who led his Republican Party to victory in the House in the 2022 midterms, but with only a few votes to spare.

McCarthy is the third McCarthy we have written about recently. We wrote about senator Joe McCarthy, the demagogue from Wisconsin and a Republican who aroused the ire of President Eisenhower, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, a courageous Democrat from Minnesota; and about Kevin McCarthy, the highly opportunistic Republican congressman from California who has been striving to be Speaker of the House for many years, since 2015 when he lost out to Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan. And earlier today, in the wee hours, he achieved his lifetime goal of becoming Speaker after finally getting the support of twenty hardline republican members, nearly engaging in fisticuffs with congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. Gaetz was one of twenty republicans in the House who forced McCarthy to be nominated fifteen times in four days before his fellow republicans said yes (https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2023/01/05/boebert-resigns-because-of-today-s-mccarthyism/.) 

McCarthy got their votes by caving in to the demands of Gaetz, the most belligerent member of Congress; rep. Lauren Boebert; Chip Roy, and other members of the anti-government Freedom Caucus. As the Times’ David Brooks said yesterday during the PBS NewsHour, those twenty want to tear down the House and the federal government. Other Republicans in the House pretended to like  Donald Trump until they realized that Trump was the main instigator of the insurrection of January 6, 2021 (https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/07/how-kevin-mccarthy-got-to-house-speaker-00076874 and https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/07/politics/kevin-mccarthy-path-to-speakership/index.html).

So now that McCarthy has achieved his goal by doing a total cave-in to the Trumpistic Right, and substantially weakening the Speakership in the process, we can all look forward to McCarthy trying his best to walk the tightrope between Gaetz and Boebert and their ilk, when they will refuse, during the summer, to vote to increase the federal debt limit, thus causing total financial ruin all over the world.

And Trump will lose to President Biden for the second time, and Trump will retreat to Mar-a-Lago, and he won’t attend Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2025, all according to associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones, who hears all and sees all, and also according to our Chief International Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Larry Theis.

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January 5, 2023

Republican senator Joe McCarthy (1908-1957) from Wisconsin was largely responsible for the Red Scare.

He’s the one who persuaded the media that Communists had taken over the federal government.

The word McCarthyism, meaning a movement propagated by a demagogue who persuades people to distrust their government, was a direct result.

Your solitary reporter grew up during the 1950s McCarthyism and he has seen, many times, the superb movie "The Manchurian Candidate," starring, not Denzel Washington, but Frank Sinatra and Lawrence Harvey and Angela Lansbury and Janet Leigh, the world’s most beautiful woman at the time (1962). 

In the movie, based on the novel by John Frankenheimer, senator Johnny Iselin, played by James Gregory, is senator Joe McCarthy.

The next McCarthy who made a very substantial, and beneficial, contribution to our public discourse was Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota (1916-2005), a Democrat who, like Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, opposed President Johnson’s Vietnam War. Mansfield was a Democrat but he bucked LBJ and he was right.

In 1968 Senator Eugene McCarthy, the Democrat, ran for President because President Lyndon B Johnson, despite having done many good things, nevertheless got us into a grievous war in Vietnam that he could’t figure out how to get us out of.

In 1968, Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Horatio Humphrey (1911-1978), grabbed the nomination of the Democratic Party for President after Lyndon quit, only Hubert had not won a  single primary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Humphrey).

Hubert came very close to defeating Tricky Dick Nixon for President, but Hubert lost and Nixon won.

The next McCarthy is Kevin McCarthy, a Republican Congressman and Trump acolyte from California, still alive, who desperately wants to be Speaker of the House of Representatives, stridently opposed by twenty Republican Congressmembers, including Colorado’s Own Lauren Boebert, who have openly conspired to deprive Kevin McCarthy of the job which he has, true, earned, because he has travelled all over this exceptional nation raising money for Republican politicians. See https://www.politico.com/news/2023/01/05/mccarthy-bid-00076520.

Today, congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) nominated Donald Trump to be the Speaker of the House, and Trump promptly accepted, according to our Chief Congressional Correspondent, associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith and associate solitary reporter Johanna Jones (an unhoused African American journalist who has the ear of Trump; Johanna Jones’ fictional identity is based on John Jones, a former law clerk for the late, great Mary Mullarkey (1943-2021), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Colorado for twelve years and your solitary reporter’s widower. John Jones is a very funny guy and he did a great job as Mary’s clerk).

Trump got one vote for Speaker on the eleventh roll call, today.

Gaetz had an illegal sexual relationship with a 17-year old girl and he says he didn’t do it but he is an adamant supporter of Trump and Trumpism and nobody lies more blatantly than Trump and that’s why Gaetz is a Trumpie. So we say that Gaetz is guilty of that illicit relationship with the 17 year old.

ASR Smith is the first to report to us here at AP that Boebert has resigned from the Freedom Caucus and from the obdurate group of never Kevins. She’s gone back to her home in Silt, Colorado, so she can organize her own militia. Boebert’s resignation means, according to us here at AP, that Adam Frisch, her Democratic opponent in November, takes her seat.

AP lovers, stay tuned.

Yesterday, socialist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, a leftie and the newly re-inaugurated leader of Brazil, vowed to undo everything his immediate predecessor, extreme right-winger Jair Bollsonaro, did during his tempestuous rule.

Bolsonaro doesn’t like gays, and he placed his first priority on destroying the Amazon rain forest, which he enjoyed doing because it made the indigenous dwellers spit in his face, or woulda, if they coulda.

Bolsonaro, a close friend of Donald Trump, is vacationing in Florida — so he can be closer to Trump and associate solitary reporter

Johanna Jones — is plotting a coup to topple Lula, whom he hates.

But Jones has talked with Bolsonaro and has convinced him that Trump lost the 2020 election; but Jair is gonna stay in the Sunshine State til he can talk the Brazilian generals into taking necessary action against Lula, according to our Chief Brazilian Correspondent, Beatriz Bonifacia. Bonifacia is the newest of our large corps of associate solitary reporters, and she joins associate solitary reporter Sylvania Juguete, formerly our Chief Latin American Correspondent.

Last month, Judy Woodruff, the longtime host of the PBS NewsHour, announced that she will be leaving as host today, so we here at AP assembled our entire corps of associate solitary reporters, including ASR Shirley Kenwood, the unpaid Chair of the Denver Democratic Party, to watch the show. That included associate solitary reporter Eddie Cook, the Chair of the Denver Republican Party. Cook’s salary as a Republican ASR is $100,000 a year and he rarely even shows up here in our office. All our Democratic ASRs are volunteers.

There are many moving parts to any TV show, and the PBS NewsHour is no exception. So Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett, both people of color who seem headed to be cohosts succeeding Woodruff, for the time being, and an entire group of the backstage people whom we never see, were on stage and paid a special tribute to Woodruff, who is essentially the only adult in the news hosting business, taking account of Fox News and all that. 

Woodruff received a glowing tribute from everyone, especially standbys David Brooks of the Times and Jonathan Capehart of WaPo. Capehart, a Renaissance man if there ever was one, was in Italy in a Renaissance Era castle with a comfy looking fireplace.

As soon as DNC Chair Jamie Harrison, who does what President Biden wants done, and who is a man of color with a good heart, finished watching the NewsHour today, he consulted with all the Members of the Committee (which numbers in the hundreds) and they unanimously, including Harrison himself, decided on the spot that Biden, who is ready to announce that he’s running for re-election in 2024 despite his baggage and his age, has to go and should be thanked for his good heart and good deeds and his nice wife and be dumped as their nominee in 2024. 

Their unanimous choice: Judy Woodruff, who demurred, saying that she has loved being a journalist and keeping a poker face while doing it, to indicate her objectivity.

Though California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he will not run against Biden, the action of the DNC today has inevitably thrust him to the front of the pack.

All this is why we here at AP founded this apocryphal newspaper many years ago when your solitary reporter was still a hearing officer in Colorado for workers’ compensation, in the 1980s, a dreadful job which did, however, pay his bills.

In the past your Apocryphall Press has said that it is completely

free — but things might change next year with voluntary contributions being accepted to pay our computer expenses (you never can get away from those) as well as our monthly bills from MailChimp, the email marketing program we pay for but which, however, has never figured out how to let people resubscribe when they unsubscribe and don’t mean to — which most email marketing programs have long since figured out how to do, and that easily.

Any of our vast and ever-growing audience who feel like making contributions to defray our expenses only has to ask us how to do that.

In closing, in addition to wishing everybody good luck near year, we wish everybody on our subscription list who is interested in watching Kevin McCarthy squirm endlessly as he tries to satisfy his Conference, especially Marjorie Taylor Greene and Colorado’s own Lauren Boebert, to say nothing of Jim Jordan, who would love Donald Trump’s endorsement to run for president. McCarthy and his crowd are so hellbent on grilling Hunter Biden and investigating the January 6 Committee that they have no plan whatsoever to get things done for the American people. So next year, that should be a fun watch. Here at AP we try to make people laugh while pointing out the stupid stuff the GOP is so well known for doing.