At the speech he addressed to Russian ambassadors, Putin said he was going to help Trump fight against Democrats because Democrats are nasty, miserable people who feed stupid theories to voters. I can’t fully transmit the kind of slang he used but it was hardcore.

I’m at the opera with a long-time reader of this blog. We are seeing Nabucco, an opera I love because it contains my favorite “Va, pensiero.” It was long considered (maybe mistakenly, but who cares?) a hymn of hopeful nationalism. And we all know how I feel about nationalist, especially now that it’s agonizing.

Was sent by a cardinal of the Catholic Church. He’s now saying it was for his sister but given the climate in the church, who’s going to believe him?

Not only am I going to Germany and Prague, I’m going business. Obviously, I’m not asking the conference to pay for it. They are buying a regular ticket, and I’m upgrading it with points. N has been gathering points for years because he has a dream to send me to Europe business class. And bring me back. I’ve never traveled business class, so I’m starting to feel important already.

I’ve never been as consistently and relentlessly mistaken on any subject as I’ve been on Trump. I thought he’d start invading the second he was elected. I thought he’d immediately, well, eventually, well, now for sure, would recognize the Crimea as Russian. I thought he’d let Putin start another invasion of Ukraine or of somebody else. I thought he’d start a global economic crisis.

I was wrong. We were all wrong, many times over. This doesn’t mean he’s a good president, far from it. The fellow stinks. But we are all constantly wrong about what he will do. And to avoid recognizing that we can’t figure it out, we try to make a lot of hype over ridiculous, silly little things like payments to some Playboy prostitute or some sad Russian whore of zero import.

The question is: are we all constantly so wrong because we don’t get real information or real analysis? Are fake news a real thing, maybe?