The Kremlin is Yellow, the White House is Orange

A well armed guard covering Putin's back

    Fifteen years ago I saw the Kremlin and remember thinking: It's yellow? I had grown up in the 70's occasionally glimpsing the building in news footage featuring calcified aparatchiks princess-waving to nuclear missiles as they trundled through Red Square. You may remember our own government recently considered throwing its own May Day parade.

    Russia's version of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is building complex painted a muted, sunny yellow. Like everything else I had seen in the city, the place was gigantic.  The Russian state, particularly after Stalin got a hold of it, may have been patient zero in the size matters epidemic. There is a statue of Peter the Great sitting in the in the middle of the Moskva river which is at least 4,000 feet tall. The Kremlin is one of the most imposing centers of government I had ever seen.

     And was painted in Sherwin Williams pale meyer lemon?

    The site of the Kremlin has been continually inhabited since before Jesus so I don't suppose it's been yellow the whole time. The White House, seldom whiter than today, is now trimmed in the carrot vomit orange favored by its current occupant.

You know, the guy de Tocqueville warned us about.

     Lil' Kim (as the rich and famous will) ran off with another man after stealing the heart of the President of the United States of America. Kim seldom leaves the DPRK but hopped on his "armored train" and high-tailed it to Vladivostok when Mr. Putin summoned him.

Who has an armored train? And how weird is it that a man who has ICBM's has to take a train anywhere? Is he scared of flying? He's certainly not scared of Donald "Fire-and-Fury" Trump. Bluster seldom works outside the schoolyard and Trump is renown fabulist even by his own telling (truthful hyperbole).  Trump is playing stupid New York City red power tie games with a guy who starved two million people to death in pursuit of a couple of tactical nukes. This is not just dangerous, it is almost uniquely stupid.

     Mr. Putin has plenty of airplanes and a number of them carry nuclear weapons. He and Kim are said to be discussing the possibility of trading Kim's Hiroshima style firecrackers for actual, functioning, hydrogen bombs. The catch will be that Putin will want to hold Kim's bombs for him. Behind those high yellow walls. Can Putin convince Kim to scrap his nuclear capabilities for a guarantee of continued survival?

     A guy dancing as hard to stay alive as Li'l Kim is the ultimate pragmatist.  As big a spectacle as he is making of himself, the US maximum-leader is only a paper dictator at this point and Putin can most likely offer, and more importantly deliver, a superior deal for North Korea. So Kim may chose to go to the nuclear bomb prom with Vladimir Putin. At the very least Putin is a much better liar than Trump.

    Probably one of a very few things I have in common w/ L'il Kim is that I too would think long and hard about whom I would entrust my survival to.

     Anyone looking for better example of the size of the bone stuck in Trump's head will not find one. It's easy for a guy like me to sit back and shoot holes in Trump's foreign policy strategy; I didn't exactly attend the Kennedy School. But I have a gut feeling that Kim's chances of seeing the inside of the Kremlin went from 1 in 1,000,000 in early 2017 to 1 in 2 after he and Trump had their lover's spat.

    At the risk of giving an out to pasture oligarch from some hick town in Texas more than might be his due, I want to credit (former) Sec. of State Rex Tillerson with the most accurate, succinct  summation of Donald Trump:

    He's a fucking moron.