Very Bad Men And Sour Grapes: Trump, Netanyahu, Mullin and the Wine Wars

From the Middle East to the Hudson Valley - We've no shortage of self-dealing corrupt men young and old alike. It's been, as always, a week.

There is a kind of man who never takes no for an answer. He carries himself like the outcome is already settled. He has the air of confidence and the stink of arrogance.

This week I wrote about a few of them. A copper-haired twenty-something in a deposition room, mildly inconvenienced by accountability. A prime minister, a president, and a son-in-law, each running the same play: light something on fire and hope the smoke holds. An unstable Pennsylvania senator handing the keys to Homeland Security to a man who removed his wedding ring on the Senate floor and offered his fists as an argument. And a plastic surgeon in Chatham, NY, on the record: telling him no is like waving a red flag in front of a bull — with the Town Supervisor carrying his water. Different sizes. Same animal.

The DOGE Boy: A Family Business

Nate Cavanaugh used AI and Google searches to cancel millions in federal research funding. When deposed, he said his justification was an executive order. When pressed, he admitted he was just following orders. When asked if he had regrets, he said no.

As a teen, he declared in a high school essay that he planned to drop out of college once he could support himself. He enrolled at Indiana University because Mark Cuban had gone there, left after a year, sold a startup, and filed the experience away as complete. College was never about an education. It was a parking space. Money was the singular goal.

He learned, if you can call it learning, at his father’s knee.

Pat Cavanaugh — Dad — sports drink founder —Pittsburgh entrepreneur, and keeper of a fictional bootstrap origin story that doesn’t survive close reading. Dad was never the walk-on Rudy he claims nor is his claim of nutricianal expertise real.

It’s no shock that Nick, the “DOGE Kid” is all arrogance and termarity. His father is the template: a man who taught his son that credentials are decorative, confidence is currency, and a well-told story rarely gets checked.

Nate’s deposition was so reveiling in of his recklessness, arrogance and entittlment that a federal judge ordered it clawed back from the internet, citing threats to his safety. The government system Nick and Muskiphites tried to dismantle became his knight in shining armor. America seems to save it’s snot nosed brats more than it should. Click here to read the article.

The Distraction War: Smoke as Strategy

Benjamin Netanyahu has been under active criminal indictment for fraud, breach of trust, and bribery, charged by his own Attorney General. And that is only his domestic legal exposure. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare and the deliberate targeting of civilians in Gaza. He now shares that distinction with Vladimir Putin and Slobodan Milosevic. The proceedings, on both fronts, have not gone away. But a prime minister managing a live war can’t be expected to answer to a courtroom. Every time he draws close to trial, another violent Israeli conflict erupts, and whatever the cause, what follows is always the same: unmeasured, bloody, and prolonged. The conflicts are never his mission. They’re his alibi.

Credible sources have raised serious questions about Netanyahu maneuvering Trump into a war with no defined objective and no clear exit. Trump, who promised no new wars, appears to have been told what he wanted to hear: that he alone could do what no other president had done. That flattery, according to these accounts, landed in fertile ground. A man who needed his own distractions from starring in the Epstein files walked straight into a war designed by someone who needed to stay out of a courtroom.

And quietly slithering through all of it: Jared Kushner who holds no government title, answers to no oversight committee, and is bound by none of the rules that govern the people he works alongside moves through the region like a diplomat, brokers like an envoy, and profits like an investor, cashing in on the reconstruction of a landscape he helped destroy.

Fetterman the Fool: The Vote That Finished Him

From my syndicated NewsBreak column

MarkWayne Mullin arrived at his own confirmation hearing having already disqualified himself, not through scandal, but through his own loud mouth. In 2023, he stood up in a Senate hearing room, removed his wedding ring, and invited a witness outside for a fistfight. When questioned about this and his remarks after ICE officers executed Alex Pretti and Nicole Goode he refused to apologize. Instead he offered a smirk and a shrug. In a strange defense and on the record, he said that consenting adults could be permitted to duel. Pistols at dawn. Off the beam nuts and ignorant. All of this should have landed his nomination into a trash bin. But no. Enter the hoodie senator from Pennsylvania.

John Fetterman cast the deciding vote, eight to seven, to send Mullin’s nomination to the full Senate.

It showed that Fetterman, who is tanking in the polls, to be what many have begun to realize: he is a man of few convictions, a very poor work ethic and unrelenting entitlement. Not even a slacker costume can hide his Washington politician ethos.

Desperate for a constituency, the goon is hoping for MAGA-adjacent relevance: it’s his only political hope.

The tragedy is not that he sold out his party. It’s unleashing Mullin on the world. Click here to read the article.

The Wine Wars: Abi Oakley Draws, Shoots, and Hits Her Own Foot

What was a slow burn is now a brush fire. New evidence of irregularities keeps surfacing in the Wine Wars, and the county and town boards whose job it is to address exactly this remain conspicuously, almost defiantly, silent.

Into that silence stepped Donal’s partner, armed with confidence she hadn’t earned and a trigger finger she can’t control. She drew. She fired.

Former town board member Abi Mesick shot herself in the foot and grazed Donal Collins with what just might be more than collateral damage. These details are coming out tomorrow after the town board’s promised and overdue response to FOIL requests.

The town has also dumped piles of files and documents on their website proving, if even in a small way, the power of government remains in the hands of the people and that the press continues to have a role, or maybe just a backstop, to corruption.

So it goes… a young man who learned from his father that confidence is currency. An Israeli prime minister and a demented US president desperate to avoid domestic peril start a war. A senator who decided any camera angle beats none. A local politician's partner is learning, too late, that drawing fast means nothing if you don't know where you're pointing.

All variations on the same story. People who decided that the rules are for other people.

Until it isn’t.

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