WAR IS RAW SPELLED BACKWARDS. – CD

Borrowed: My advice to Volodymyr Zelenskyy comes from my dad: "Don’t read your own press and never drink your own tubwater." Jim Croce said it best: "You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit in the wind, you don’t pull the mask off the Ol’ Lone Ranger . . . " and you don’t mess around with Trump!

YOU WOULD THINK that everyone would prefer peace, but that's not the case. The following is from "Eisenhower in War and Peace," by Jean Edward Smith:

After the death of Stalin, President Eisenhower told speech writer Emmet Hughes he didn't want to make a speech with the standard criticism of the USSR. The slate is clean. Let's begin talking to each other. Hughes said he had just talked to Secretary of State Dulles and he says he would hate to see peace in Korea until we had given the Chinese "one hell of a licking."

Ike was angry. He said, "It's WAR we're talking about. I know people who can give me advice on that, and they aren't the sophisticated advisors in the State Department. Now we can quit all this fooling around and make a bid for peace – or we can forget the whole thing." This is approximately where President Trump is on Ukraine.

As a realist, he knows Ukraine can never give Russia "one hell of a licking," and as a deal maker, he has some in mind and he's going to play his hand. And it's not always the hand you've been dealt that counts, but how well you play your hand. THE ART OF THE DEAL.

P.S. I missed the Oscars again, the usual red carpet, complete with men who look like they're just accessories. And the "gowns"? As they say down South, "I've seen more fabric in a roll of gauze than in what you've got on." Calipornia! And the film that won Best Picture is one I never heard of.

PPS: Wouldn't ya know it – now that I'm in my 80s, the gals start calling me Honey? But I guess these days one can identify as anything your heart desires, so I'm going to identify as a 30 year old James Bond. Maybe l can identify as a former MLB player. Why not make it a Hall of Famer? A Pete Rose? There's no use identifying as Superman because there are no phone booths. As an arborist, l climbed trees for a living, and played some baseball, so maybe l should identify as Batman. Hope to be back next week, "folks."