3 March—This is the Not-So-Great-Seal of the United States as devised by a clever cartoonist who, however, doesn’t remember his grade-school Latin, doesn’t read The Litchfield Monitor, or simply ignored the easy lesson on the second Latin declension in The cases of god. Because, as faithful Monitor readers doubtless don’t need and certainly don’t want to be reminded, DEI serves as three cases of DEUS: genitive singular, nominative plural, and vocative plural.

Likewise, attentive and patient readers know that the case that should have been used on the Not-So-Great-Seal of the United States is the dative, because DEUS is the indirect object receiving the implicit action of our trust. And of course the dative (and ablative) singular case of DEUS is DEO. Of course. Of course. Of course.

That’s not too hard, is it? Okay, it’s too hard. That’s why English rules and is on its way to becoming God’s (DEI, the genitive) favorite language. (More on that as it unfolds. The Monitor will have the scoop.) So it’s not unlikely the clever cartoonist got it wrong because he had to accommodate Diversity, Equity, Inclusion in order to depict DEI.

In that case, what about making it Diversity, Equity, Opportunity? That initialism would give us the grammatically correct dative DEO. And legislated opportunity is every bit as affirmatively actional and ridiculous as legislated inclusion, after all.

And the correctly declined DEO initialism would get one species of POP—Pedantic Old Prick—off the grammatical case and on the case of another species of POP—Perfidious Old Prick.

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On the subjects of declining and perfidious pricks (and hopefully declining perfidious pricks), then, Christopher Murphy, Connecticut’s junior U.S. senator and not in this instance the perfidious prick, only now regrets not having declined to confirm his former Senate colleague Marco Rubio as secretary of state. “It was a mistake,” Murphy admitted yesterday with 20-20 hindsight. “I think a lot of us thought that Marco Rubio was going to stand up to Donald Trump on an issue like this [Zelenskyy and Ukraine].”

Really? None of the pols who served in the Senate with Marco could see what was obvious to everybody else, that Rubio is a gutless Trumpky opportunist, no different from any of Trump’s other flunkies? All the Senate Dems voted with the GOP to confirm Rubio, so it wouldn’t have made a difference had any senators seen the light and/or followed their consciences. But it would have shown constituents that at least some of them thought seriously before voting.

And you can bet there’ll be other issues that will show Marco to be what he is.

Sen. Murphy has announced that he won’t be attending the American Führer’s non-State of the Union performance tomorrow night. Good move. Given all the bullshit Trump is bound to excrete when he opens his mouth, Chris would have a hard time not shouting out “Liar!” And he’s more civil, to say the least, than that blot on humanity Marjorie Taylor Greene, who did it to Joe Biden a couple of years ago . . .