James M. Redwine

President Trump

Not the Valkyries

by 1 Comment

Armadillo with textured shell and long tail sniffing leaves on forest floor
A generated armadillo searches for food among leaves on the forest floor

Peg and I returned to our log cabin on our ranch and saw three large vultures just outside our front door vying over the carcass of a massive armadillo. They were so intent on rendering their share of the bounty they did not fly away until I got of our vehicle. My first impression was of President Trump, Prime Minister Netanyahu and some Ayatollah gnawing at the remains of Iran.

Armadillos are about as ugly a creature as nature has produced. They remind one of what a Congressional Committee might have produced had some generous pork producer asked their favorite House Member lackey to come up with a substitute for a hog to sell to the government for C-Rations. An armadillo is without any redeeming aesthetic value. They look the same from the front as the back; long, scaley and nasty grey from end to end with tuffs of hair dotted around for enhancement must be what other armadillos consider attractive.

Such attractiveness must work for them as the population of armadillos is growing exponentially as proven by all the dead ones on our roads. And for some reason, the Congressman who designed the armadillo provided that each pregnant female gutter-rat can produce four offspring at a time. It is as though the Armadillo Design Committee wanted to assure America has an alternate national symbol that is to the bald eagle as the U.S. Department of Transportation is to Roman highways. That is, roads that are built with planned obsolescence in mind versus two-thousand years of service.

Anyway, as I exited our pickup Peg screeched, “Jim, those vultures may attack you! That thing may still be alive.” We have plenty of experience with vultures, so I was fairly confident the already wafting putridness from the truly dead beast was what drew in the prairie vacuum sweepers.

I grabbed a pair of gloves and lifted the armadillo by its hairless, scaley tail. I was surprised at how heavy it was. It must have been a very pregnant female before somebody on the nearest state highway, two miles away, had run over it. I estimate it weighed twenty pounds based on my previous armadillo experience. I carried it out into the pasture and made sure it was visible from the sky. The vultures only waited about twenty minutes before hovering around the reeking mess. The pasture was armadillo-free by the next afternoon.

I wish to commend the vultures for somehow transporting the heavy helping of armadillo from what, I assume, was a two-mile flight. It looked like they had clung to their prize as long as they could before having to release it onto our lane. Mother Nature surely knows what She is doing even if our Congressional Committees do not. Vaya con dios mama armadillo, feel free to never return.

By the way, I do have a friend who swears the meat of an armadillo tastes like “sweet pork”. As I told him, he has my blessing to collect every dead armadillo he finds on the highway and serve them at Easter. He will have no competition from Peg and me, and that is even without the leprosy factor.

You can also “follow’ us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

A Re-Birth of Independence

by Leave a Comment

July 04, 1776 was the birth of the United States of America. Our Birth Certificate is the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure those rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Were the men who signed this document naïve? Did they not recognize that these words would ring hollow to slaves, indigenous peoples, women and minorities? Of course not! Our Founders are called founders not because they established the only government in world history that guaranteed these principles, but because they dreamed of building such a nation. And the first giant step was to separate America from the monarchy of Great Britain.

It has taken 250 years of blood, sweat and tears to free many whose rights were only words in 1776. But the Declaration was of an ideal towards which to struggle. Nothing was given; each element of the American Dream has been slowly, and by fits and starts, achieved through reliance on our Founders’ vision and great sacrifice. We have much left to accomplish, but we have steadily progressed toward our ideals of a nation based on true democratic government.

As President Abraham Lincoln declared at Gettysburg in 1863, the United States would have a new birth of freedom and that “…[G]overnment of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth”. The Civil War was the throes of our second birth of independence. It led our nation to those magnanimous ideals of “malice towards none and charity for all” that laid the foundation in the hearts of Americans that guided us to the Marshall Plan after WWII and leadership in humanitarian beneficence throughout the world from 1946 until we began to retreat from kindness into autocracy.

Immediately after WWII, thanks to trillions of dollars of U.S. aid and peaceful persuasion, America went from an isolationist self-centered nation to a beacon of hope across the earth. Then we began to lose our way so that now most of the planet sees us as simply a sycophant of the new country we helped establish in 1948, one we have supported without questioning its immoral hegemony and Zionism. The United States is now linked with Israel in aggressive wars of conquest and repeated genocides. How did we allow ourselves to go from a beacon of freedom to a symbol of oppression?

It began innocently enough with a desire to help Jewish minorities in Europe after WWI and especially WWII. Then Israel fell under the non-democratic Zionist government that took our foreign military and economic aid and repaid us by attacking our ship The Liberty in 1967 where Israel deliberately killed 34 of our sailors and wounded 171 more to hide their espionage upon America.

Next Israel used its Jewish American spy, Jonathon Pollard, to steal our nuclear secrets while we continued to supply Israel with diplomatic cover and aid. Ironically, Pollard is now a citizen of Israel who is running for a seat in the Knesset on a platform of Palestinian elimination from Gaza.

Just as our Declaration of Independence set forth King George III’s transgressions that justified our Revolution, we should acknowledge that Israel has repeatedly led America to engage in foreign wars in Iraq and elsewhere using false allegations that Saddam Hussein and others had weapons of mass destruction. Currently, Zionist Israel has falsely led us into repeatedly attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities while Israel controls the nuclear weapons that it stole from us.

However, the real damage that Israel has wreaked upon America is not just misapplication of the hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S. aid, but the damage to our democratic ideals and our hard-won place among nations as a beacon to equal rights for all. The United States was a light to the world, but now is seen as a threat to attack whatever countries Israel wants to conquer. The world now links us to the actions of Israel, which is seen by most of the United Nations as a pariah country.

It is time to remember our Founder’s guidance and return to that great wisdom of President George Washington who warned us in his Farewell Address not to become passionately attached to any other country for, as President Washington said in 1796:

“…[N]othing is more essential than that permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest.

It is long past time for the United States to “dissolve the political bands which have connected” America and Israel. We need not treat Israel as an enemy, but we can have a relationship with Israel just as we treat equally all the nations of the world. We need to have a new birth of our ideals and re-take our place as the world’s preeminent democracy. To do so we must cease enabling Zionist Israel to represent to the world we condone or, worse, promote unequal treatment of all humanity.

Should one have questions as to the seriousness of the harm to America from our government’s unqualified loyalty to Israel over loyalty to our ideals, our nation’s top counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, just resigned in protest of the danger posed by Israel’s power over America’s war making policies. The Trump-appointed former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center wrote in his letter of resignation of March 17, 2026:

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Over 60% of Americans oppose President Trump’s policy on Iran. However, according to President Trump, “Right now I’m at 99% in Israel. I could run for prime minister (of Israel)”. In the United States the President’s overall approval rating is 39% according to a new poll from FOX NEWS. And, President Trump publicly stated he might move to Israel and run for prime minister once his current term ends.

Our passionate attachment to Israel has cost us our hard-earned status as that “Shining City on the Hill” in world opinion. We have allowed ourselves to be misled from our ideals; it is past time for us to reclaim our rightful place among the true democracies of the earth and Declare our Independence from Israel. For although we are 250 years old, we are still too young to die, especially because we abdicated our core values.

For Reference Please See:

            The Passionate Attachment, America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present (1992) by George Ball, former Under Secretary of State and formally America’s Ambassador to the United Nations; and,

            Assault on the Liberty (1979) by James M. Ennes, Jr.

You can also follow us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavel gamut”

President Trump’s Avatar

by Leave a Comment

President Trump had to find a way out of the descent into Hades he had recklessly threatened for Iran. Not even his most fervent acolytes could justify his destruction of an entire civilization because some of its leaders refused to prostate their country to President Trump’s demands. One of the President’s most irrational statements was to announce to the world a 48-hour time limit. This removed all wiggle room and meant either the United States had to retreat from its unconditional conditions or Iran had to.

The President’s dilemma remains he has exterminated not just Iran’s hierarchy but, over several years, he has eliminated many of his own advisors he could have relied upon for trusted advice. However, someone is left standing who managed to convince Trump to connive what is for now an off-ramp from his unhinged behavior. Who is the Trump Whisperer who helped him to extract defeat from devastation; the Court Jester who was able to get the emperor to listen to reason; The Greek Chorus that foreshadowed Trump’s own hubris fueled self-immolation on the world stage?

We do not know, as yet. However, there is a Daniel Ellsberg somewhere in the Trump Administration who will someday divulge the facts behind President Trump’s total defeat by his own ego. History provides many examples of people who have had the courage to put principle over their own survival.

Hitler’s greatest general, Erwin Rommel, gave his own life to try to stop a maniac from ending civilization. Marcus Junius Brutus conspired to assassinate Julius Caesar to prevent Caesar from claiming the emperorship and destroying the Roman republican form of government. Both Rommel and Brutus committed suicide, but both tried to save their countries from narcissistic tyrants. Daniel Ellsberg released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to divulge to the world the false basis for America’s involvement in the Viet Nam War. He was charged with espionage and endured great contumely for his courage.

Someone in President Trump’s truly inner circle had the ability to speak truth to Trump about Trump’s seismic moral, political and diplomatic tirade that placed America in the position that Hitler’s Nazis and Netanyahu’s Zionists are known for, genocide. We are, for now, most known for President Trump’s threats to eliminate an entire civilization. If the President decides to eliminate the Cassandra who brought America back from the edge, doom may yet occur.

Here’s a big thank you to that Cassandra, whoever she or he is, and a caution that truth can be a dangerous thing, especially if whispered to megalomaniacs.

You can also find us on Facebook at “Jim Peg Redwine” or Substack “@gavelgamut”

The More Things Change

by Leave a Comment

Photo by Peg Redwine

President Trump gave his 2026 State of the Union address last night, 24 February 2026. He spoke for almost two hours on several topics. One of the most important was the survival of humanity as highlighted by his insistence that he would not allow Iran to develop nuclear weapons. After the world saw the destruction the United States rained down on Japan in 1945, rational people realized we humans had finally “progressed” to the ability to make ourselves extinct. Or as former mathematics professor turned folksong singer Tom Lehrer (1928-2025) wrote about WWIII during his stint on the television show That Was the Week That Was:

♫ So long Mom I’m off to drop the bomb
So don’t wait up for me
But while you swelter
Down there in your shelter
You can see me on your TV
….
I’ll look for you when the war is over
An hour and a half from now. ♫

Since our Manhattan Project, 1942-1947, the world has raced rapidly towards Armageddon. The Russians spied on us for nuclear secrets with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed, while the Israelis stole our nuclear bomb using Jonathan Pollard who was released by the USA and now lives the good life in Israel. Pollard’s Israeli handler, Aviem Sella, who recruited Pollard to spy against us was granted a full pardon by outgoing President Donald Trump on January 20, 2021.

Israel and Russia both have the bomb and the ability to deliver it anywhere in America, Russia by its own devices and Israel by our knowing enablement. Our traditional allies, Great Britain and France, possess nuclear weapons as do our traditional enemies, China and North Korea. Whether India and Pakistan are considered friends is a matter of debate, but both possess nuclear weapons. Other countries may have nuclear weapons programs also but in various stages of development. There is no doubt several nuclear bomb capable countries are already beyond Iran’s paper tiger status as far as being able to strike back at America if we were to try to disarm them.

So, Mr. President, why are we readying another military attack on Iran who, according to you, if it ever had a military nuclear program, you and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu obliterated it in 2025? Why are you so eager to take us to war with Iran which has no nuclear bomb program when we are not attacking countries we know have bombs and the means to drop them on America? How about concentrating on the real national threats, such as the economy and our health care? Instead, we are acting like a cowardly schoolyard bully when it comes to weak, feckless, and according to you, nuclear harmless Iran.

We know China and Russia and perhaps soon North Korea might gladly stand up to us, but that Iran could not land a punch on our homeland even with non-nuclear missiles. Iran is the weakling a bully uses to glorify its power. Why don’t we just do what a true hero would do, and bring our troops home until and unless they are needed, as our Constitution provides, to defend our homeland?

We have allowed Russia to invade Ukraine, China to threaten Taiwan, North Korea to bully South Korea and we enable and support Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians because those countries are capable of striking back at us. Also, you apparently have failed to consider our own military personnel who will have to do the killing and dying.

Mr. President, our military is not a Christmas toy for a spoiled child to play with. Please reconsider your rush to abuse our citizens and those of other countries. You tout yourself as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. To be truly worthy of it, please make peace, by not ordering our country into another unnecessary war. As General Norman Schwarzkopf said, “It doesn’t take a hero” to order others into combat.

In your State of the Union speech, you spoke of Christianity and how, in your opinion, religion is integral to our Union. Jesus might refer you to his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:9), “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” Mr. President, real service, not lip service is true leadership.

Richard Nixon

by Leave a Comment

It is 4:30 a.m. and I just spent the last three hours watching a PBS special on Richard Nixon. It may be that years of working the night shift followed by several hours of college classes makes normal sleep abnormal for me. At least I prefer that explanation to what my father told me when I asked him why he was up and down most nights, “Son, when you get old you just can’t stay asleep”. Regardless, I am awake and the PBS documentary reminded me of a Gavel Gamut article I wrote in about January of 2007 about Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. That article is set out below. Gentle Reader, I trust you remember it.

What almost twenty more years has done to my impressions of the turbulent Sixties and Seventies is soften some edges and made others more acute. Once again, just like my sleep habits, I prefer to ascribe those changes to factors other than my age. Anyway, I was intrigued by President Nixon’s self-imposed catastrophe wrought by a series of his seemingly inexplicable wrong decisions that changed Americans’ views of our own country and our role in the world. Most perplexing to me was how unnecessary and silly many of Nixon’s Watergate cover-up decisions were. Nixon was highly intelligent and disciplined. He was a tireless worker from a lower economic class family who knew right from wrong. Yet, he chose the easier wrong over the harder right at virtually every stage of the “Third-Rate Burglary” that brought about his own demise and our country’s imbroglio. It is a fairly obvious allegory of the old, “For want of a nail, a horseshoe was lost”.

One take away I got from the PBS special was how my view of Nixon’s frailties was softened by today’s events, such as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and President Trump’s comments about it or, perhaps, the bombing of Iran or the sinking of the Venezuelan drug boat. I kept watching President Nixon digging a deeper hole for himself and the rest of us as my thoughts conjured up President Trump. Nixon went from winning every state but Massachusetts to resigning in disgrace. As a side note, Nixon’s first Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, had resigned in disgrace only a year before.

I do not predict nor am I soliciting any contemporary resignations, but the lessons of history should be heeded by those who lead us. Maybe some type of epiphany is called for. I know I had to reevaluate what I thought I had learned when I lived through similar times. Perhaps President Trump who is about my age was up watching the special too.

PARDON ME, PRESIDENT FORD
(Week of January 8, 2007)

President Gerald Ford died December 26, 2006.  In a life filled with public service, he will always be best known for his pardon of President Nixon in 1974.

President Nixon personally chose Gerald Ford to replace the disgraced Vice-President Spiro Agnew who resigned in 1973 amid disclosures of bribery while Agnew was Governor of Maryland. Vice-President Ford served under President Nixon until Nixon resigned in August of 1974.  One month after President Nixon resigned, President Ford issued him a full pardon for any crimes he may have committed while president.

At the time, I and most Americans were calling for a complete investigation of the Watergate debacle and especially Nixon’s involvement in it.  It was a time of a media feeding frenzy and blood in the water.  President Ford took the unprecedented step of going personally before Congress and flatly stating that President Nixon and then Vice-President Ford had no deal to pardon Nixon if he would resign.

I recall how dubious I was when President Ford stated that he issued the pardon only to help our country to start healing from the loss of confidence caused by Watergate. Yet, after a few months I began to have second thoughts about my initial reaction to the pardon.  I began to see how much courage it took for President Ford to go straight into the anti-Nixon firestorm sweeping the United States.

As a country, we were almost paralyzed by the partisan fighting at home and the War in Viet Nam.  We needed a new direction and a renewed spirit. Surely President Ford with his twenty-two (22) years in Congress knew he was committing political suicide by not giving us our pound of flesh.  Still, he put his country first.  Of course, the country rewarded his sacrifice by booting him from office and electing President Jimmy Carter to replace him.

But during the campaign of 1976, when President Ford came to Evansville, Indiana on April the 23rd, I took my son, Jim, out of school and we went to the Downtown Walkway to cheer the man who put country above self. For while William Shakespeare may almost always get his character analysis right, when it came to President Ford, “The good he did lived after him.”   Julius Caesar, Act III, sc. ii.

Even President Carter, one of America’s most courageous and best former presidents said of President Ford:

“President Ford was one of the most admirable public servants I have ever known.”

And when it came to the pardon of President Nixon, Senator Ted Kennedy, while admitting that he had severely criticized the pardon in 1974, said that he had come to realize that:

“The pardon was an extraordinary act of courage that historians recognize was truly in the national interest.”

So, President Ford, since even your political opponents came to appreciate your courage and goodness, I am confident that you have long ago “pardoned” all of us who doubted you back when we needed your leadership.

Lessons From Moms

by Leave a Comment

President Trump announced his main goals during his second inaugural address on January 20, 2025:

“We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into. My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and a unifier.”

President Trump also declared:

“After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.”

President Trump’s stated goals are the bedrock of our fragile democracy. It takes very little to get mired in endless wars, especially when voices calling for peace and reason are silenced. History is littered with great societies who charged headlong into their own destruction for the silliest of causes.

The most famous war of ancient western civilization was the Trojan War between Greece and Troy. It lasted ten years, cost countless lives and treasure and was started over one woman, Helen, whose face, according to the poet Homer, “Launched a 1,000 ships”.

World War I was often called the “war about nothing”, cost the earth millions of human lives, including over 100,000 Americans, and was started over the assassination of the Arch Duke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand.

America’s Viet Nam War spanned over twenty years of conflict, but it was a questionable attack on a United States ship in the Tonkin Gulf in 1964 that was used to justify America’s involvement in the “endless war”.

The United States had no quarrel with Iraq but false intelligence alleging Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” got us involved in the costly military slog that has continued since 1990. In this pointless and endless war America has expended and is still expending countless lives and treasure. What President Trump recognized in his inaugural address is that war can be slid into easily but may result in catastrophic consequences and never end.

Since his inauguration, President Trump has frequently compared the fighting between Israel and its neighbors to a school yard dustup between boys. As President Trump has frequently said, America has no reason to be involved. U.S.A. involvement might lead to another world war but it could lead to a permanent Middle East Peace if we put into practice the lessons of history or simply those from our mothers.

When I was in the first grade, for some never fathomed reason, another first grader and I developed a routine of fighting every day after school. As do most schoolboy contests, they amounted to little damage to either of us but did result in the destruction of numerous tee shirts. Well, our mothers banged our heads together and ended our “endless war”. He and I, of course, became good friends and still are today. Neither of us has a clue what we fought about back then.

I respectfully suggest to President Trump that he tell Israel and Iran they should neither one have nuclear or atomic weapons and neither should attack the other or their neighbors. Instead of arming one country to attack the other, America should use its enormous motherly power and wisdom to sit Israel and Iran down with the stern warning that no more tee shirts will be lost by anyone, including us.