Louisiana Voice

Remember how we were lied to about those weapons of mass destruction (WMD) squirreled away in Iraq, just waitin to be unleased against democracy, freedom and American football?

Well, maybe not football, per se, but certainly the ideals Americans held dear. So, it was off to war with an ill-timed “mission accomplished” boasted by George W. Bush in the first days of that incursion.

Except for two minor points, that is: First, W’s “mission accomplished” morphed into Afghanistan at an eventual cost of 20 years, $1.06 trillion and 4500 American military and 200,000 civilian dead. Second, it turned out there were no WMD. Another 32,300 American service members were wounded in Iraq—and we know what tends to happen to our wounded fighters these days: they’re conveniently forgotten and tossed aside. Could be a coincidence that an estimated 33,000 veterans in this country are homeless?

Can you wrap your brain around what $1.06 trillion could mean to those 33,000 and the other 740,000 American homeless?

Now, let’s fast-forward from May 20, 2003 (the day we invaded Iraq) to today. We’re being told by yet another Repugnantcan administration, one that is an inestimable number of times more dishonest and deceptive than that of George W. Bush, that Iran posed a threat to the U.S., that we-feared-they-might-strike-back-if-we-launched-the-first-strike- so-we-launched-a-preemptive-strike-as-a-precaution or we wanted to thwart Iran’s building nuclear capabilities (the latter reason after Trump tore up an Obama-era anti-nuke agreement with which Iran was in compliance at the time). Truth is, no one know why we’re at war—other than the fact that Cankle Ankes, Pete Hogsbreath and Little Marco acquiesced to the wishes of Yahoo Netanyahu.

As we enter into this special edition of Trumpian Diplomacy, it’s important to remember he was the candidate who harped for years on end—even before he ever ran for president—about the U.S. allowing itself to become entangled in “endless wars.”

It was Trump who proclaimed himself as the candidate for peace.

Likewise, it was Trump who initiated the so-called “Board of Peace” ($1 billion membership fee: please pay before entering) with himself as the chairman.

And it is that same Trump who continues to claim that he has “ended eight wars,” while simultaneously, he has literally attacked eight separate sovereign nations—all without the advice and consent of Congress which, constitutionally, is charged with approving all wars.

Yet, when Democrats and a couple of stray Repugnantcans attempted to force votes to enforce the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (a federal law intended to check the president’s power to commit the U.S. to armed conflict), votes failed this past week in both the House and Senate.

Now, this is the part I hope you will all remember. Of Louisiana’s six House members and two U.S. Senators, precisely two are Democrats. Both of them, Reps. Troy Carter of Louisiana’s 2^nd District and Cleo Fields of the 8^th District, voted in favor of enforcement of the resolution.

The rest, all Repugnantcans, voted against the measure, in effect, taking way their own power of checks and balances.

Here’s the House vote:

And the Senate:

Ten, twenty years and a couple trillion more dollars and an as yet unknown number of dead and injured American Gis, remember the names of U.S. Reps. Steve Scalise, Mike Johnson, Clay Higgins and Julia Letlow, along with Sens. John Neely Kennedy and Bill Cassidy for ceding their responsibility by bending over and greasing up for the Earl of Mar-A-Lardo.

Of course, Cassidy will be history by that time. So, too, will Agent Orange. But the sorry legacies of each of Louisiana’s Repugnantcan delegation will endure as the ones contributing to the plunging of the U.S. into yet another Viet Nam-Iraq-Afghanistan quagmire that only served to enrich the munitions manufacturers, war speculators and the oil companies while fueling further inflation back home.

Don’t believe me? Well, just sit back and see who gets rich–and who suffers–off Trump’s sweet little war.

There’s an old, time-worn expression that goes back to far no one knows its precise origins:

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

That is sage advice. Bert Lance, the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Jimmy Carter’s administration certainly embraced that philosophy when he said, “…That’s the trouble with government: fixing things that aren’t broken and not fixing thing that are broken.”

Perhaps, in the minds of some people, quoting someone from the Carter administration might not be the best example. He was, after all, the president of gas rationing, double-digit inflation and a failed rescue attempt in the Iranian desert. On the other hand, Carter never boasted about grabbing women by their genitals, he didn’t use his office to enrich himself or his family, he was married just once (though he did once admit to lust in his heart), and he held himself forth as the kind of leader who could be trusted. Yes, his presidency was not what Americans would’ve desired, but he was undercut by an actor named Reagan who had his own eye on the Oval Office.

Citizens for a New Louisiana, its director, Michael Lunsford, and a few library board around the state could certainly do well to adapt that slogan for themselves but like the typical bureaucratic paper shuffler, they just can’t seem to come to that realization.

Take the Livingston Parish Library Board of Control, for example. We had a functioning board until the Livingston Parish Council, goaded on by Lunsford and his organization, began to think they were better qualified to run a library system than those who obtain Master’s degrees to do just that.

So, with the subtly of elephants making baby elephants, the parish council and Lunsford waded into the fray, shook up the existing library board, replacing members with political hacks instead of dedicated public servants.

And to borrow another familiar phrase, no good deed goes unpunished. We now have a dysfunctional library board that is ruled by chaos and chaired by an individual who knows nothing about procedure and we are now looking for a fourth director of our library system in a three-year period because our third just resigned after being in the position just since the second week in January.

Parish councils and police juries also attempted to interfere with the operations of libraries, ostensibly over the availability of inappropriate books to children but really over a single word: control. That’s all the Lunsford crowd ever wanted.

And as for his organization: Citizens for a New Louisiana sounds suspiciously like a cleaned-up version of the old John Birch Society or a couple of other outfits from my high school and college days. They had nice names, too, like H.L. Hunt’s Lifeline and Billy James Hargis’s Christian Crusade. Of course, Hargis fell far and fast in 1976 when it was learned that a newlywed couple, students at his Tulsa-based American Christin College, decided confession was good for the soul and revealed to each other that each had had sex with the good minister.

But never mind all that. The objective is to keep those nasty books out of the hands of the children and to keep them damn crossdressing drag queens from grooming kids (though I could rattle off a couple hundred names of priests, Baptist preachers and church counselors who have been caught “grooming” kids for themselves).

There already has been speculation that Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, aka Kornpone, aka Foghorn Leghorn, was at most a co-conspirator with Dementia Don in some backroom plan to oust Kristi Noem, aka ICE Barbie, aka dog-killer, from her leadership post at Homeland Security or at least was complicit in his DUST-UP with her during this week’s hearings of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Do you think Kennedy set a trap for Noem?” one reader asked in an email to LouisianaVoice.

“Does This mean President Trump put Kornpone up to vigorously attacking her in the hearing day before yesterday or that he simply told Kornpone he planned to fire her before the hearing?” wrote another, adding, “In either case, that explains Kornpone’s willingness to grill her despite his fealty to President Trump and his appointees.”

My response was I don’t know the answers to those questions but it could well have been the consequences of her attempting to shift responsibility for her $200 million ad campaign that Kennedy questioned onto to Agent Orange his own self. You just don’t do something like that in this never-never land of wackadoodle. You just don’t blame the boss–especially this idiotic, paranoid, narcissistic boss.

But it’s important to remember Noem is just one cog in this grinding machine and it’s critical that we keep applying pressure until they’re all gone: Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, JD “Couch-boy” Vance, Pete Segseth, Trump himself and each and every single one of his cabal.

In politics, especially Louisiana politics, there is always a back-story. Always. And with the current administrations in Washington and Baton Rouge, one can also figure that Jeff Landry fits somewhere in the equation, a story line we’re reveal a little further down. But first:

As recently as last November, it was announced with no little fanfare that physician/veterinarian/pharmaceutical salesman/former congressman/former gubernatorial candidate/former Louisiana Surgeon General Ralph Abraham was being appointed PRINCIPAL DEPUTY DIRECTOR at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He actually assumed the post on Jan. 5 of this year.

Just what a principal deputy director’s responsibilities are was not clearly stated but in a federal government that loves long, strung-out, meaningless titles, I would assume the title carried the full weight of something akin to the Assistant Under Deputy to the Chief of Staff of the Supervisor of Broom Closets for the Subcommittee on Secondary Studies for Staff Inquiries of Chemtrail Reports.

Abraham cavalierly said the MEASLES OUTBREAK SPIKE was the “cost of doing the business” because of the “porous” borders allowing “global and international travel,” despite the fact that only about 10 percent of measles cases detected since Jan. 20, 2025—the date Dementia Don took the oath of office a second time—were from other countries. He somehow didn’t seem to be concerned that many of the outbreaks occurred in pockets of low-vaccination rates.

Regardless, barely two months down the road from taking over his prestigious appointment, he announced his departure from CDC, saying he was leaving to “address unforeseen family obligations.”

CDC was effusive in its praise of Abraham as he headed for the exit, saying in a formal statement that he led “with clarity and discipline, advancing the CDC’s mission to protect the health and safety of the American people.”

How could CDC possibly quantify such hogwash after only two months on the job?

And about those “unforeseen family obligations…” Well, I don’t know if U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow is immediately family, but it turns out he is stepping down to lead her embattled campaign in challenging another physician, Bill Cassidy, for the U.S. Senate seat Cassidy has held for 11 years. Cassidy, meanwhile, is seeking another six-year-term. The smart money says he won’t win.

Letlow’s late husband Luke, was once Abraham’s chief of staff and close advisor, so there’s that. Luke, of course, ran and was elected to succeed Abraham when he stepped down as 5^th District Representative to run for governor—but died of COVID-19 before he could take office.

It is of no little irony, given his former chief of staff’s death from COVID,  that Abraham has consistently been a critic of COVID vaccination mandates and of the requirement that citizens wear masks in public, going back to the 2020 pandemic’s peak. No matter, after Luke’s death, Julia, an earlier unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the University of Louisiana-Monroe, stepped up to run for the vacant office and, with Abraham’s assistance, won.

Now, about that back-story mentioned in the opening paragraph. But first, this warning: The current three-way race for the Repugnantcan nomination for Senate is conjuring up memories of a 1950 Democratic campaign down in Florida in which incumbent U.S. Rep. GEORGE SMATHERS won a close race by famously saying his opponent, Claude Pepper, was a “known extrovert” who practiced “celibacy” before marriage, who “matriculated” in college, who practiced “nepotism” with his sister-in-law, who had a sister who was a “thespian,” and a brother who was a “practicing homo sapien.”

But rather than telling the story myself, I’ll let State Treasurer John Fleming, himself a former U.S. Rep. and now Louisiana State Treasurer and (for now) a bitter opponent of Gov. Jeff Landry, yet another former member of Congress (boy, this is getting confusing) tell it in his own words:

Wait. What? Is Fleming saying that Abraham offered him a federal post in exchange for dropping out of the Senate race? People actually do that?

Well, in his 2015 campaign for attorney general against incumbent Buddy Caldwell, there was also, like Fleming, a third candidate, Geraldine “Geri” Broussard Baloney. She was eliminated in the first open primary and it was at that point that things started to get a little murky as they often tend to do in Louisiana.

Baloney, after meeting with Lendry, endorsed him. But was some kind of deal cut in exchange for her endorsement? Well, upon his win over Caldwell, he subsequently hired Baloney’s daughter, QUENDI BALONEY, in the AG’s fraud section despite her having previously been charged with 11 felony counts of credit card fraud and theft. She eventually pleaded guilty to three counts, according to court records from Henrico County, Virginia. She was sentenced to six years in prison, all of it suspended.

So, bottom line: an individual who pleaded guilty to fraud is placed in the fraud section of the attorney general’s office after her mother endorsed Landry in the runoff. Weird? Hell no, not in Louisiana; it’s just business as usual.

But there’s an added twist to the plot in this ongoing backroom saga.

The rumor mill has it that Letlow still wants to head up a Louisiana university (though Landry’s starting to run out of schools now that he’s already placed five political allies as university presidents).

Anyway, the plan, according to reports, is for Letlow to win (the odds of which are seeming to dwindle as the fight between her and Cassidy intensifies and Fleming appears to be gaining ground), immediately resign so that Landry can appoint her to head some college—and then appoint himself to the vacated Senate seat.

When you see the handwriting on the wall that says you’re in competition with Rhonda Santis and Greg Abbott for the title of WORST GOVERNOR IN AMERICA, dooming you to a single term as governor, that scenario suddenly doesn’t seem so far-fetched.