5 June—It’s come to our attention yet again that the email link to the Daily Disquisition isn’t—not just may not be—getting to all Monitor readers who expect and should be getting it every day. Whatever the reason, it’s beyond our control and has never been because the link hasn’t been sent to all the subscribers, as has been our practice from the start.

The bottom line, yet again, is that (even) if you don’t get a daily link in your email, you should go to LitchfieldMonitor.com because there’s been a Daily Disquisition every single day since creation and will continue to be one until Armageddon. And The Monitor is always a good read.

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Need a laugh or two? Briefly, then, Hearst’s Waterbury and other rags actually followed up yesterday on Sunday morning’s Piper Cherokee ditching. “Landing on the water in a plane not designed to do so typically is a matter of last resort,” readers were assured. Who’d a thunk? And then a history lesson: “Former President and Connecticut resident George H.W. Bush survived a water landing during World War II, as did Eddie Rickenbacker, an ace American pilot from the first world war. The most famous example in recent history was the landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009, known as the ‘miracle on the Hudson.’ All of the passengers and crew onboard survived.”

Wow. It was irrelevant to the “staff writer” that Bush bailed out in the Pacific after his airplane had been hit by enemy fire and Rickenbacker, a Medal of Honor winner among other achievements, was a passenger on but wasn’t piloting a B-17 when it ditched in the South Pacific during World War II, but not from enemy fire. Inter alia.

Today, the Hearst Waterbury rag ran a short perfunctory piece on the Region 20 referendum and some out-of-date stories on failed referendums in other regions, as well as lots of other late—i.e., untimely—news.

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But here’s a really big laugh. A few days after his inauguration, Donald Trump, speaking from this side of the Atlantic, told the World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland (as usual), “America will become a merit-based country.” And he repeated it.

Three months later, in a 23 April White House press release called “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Signs Landmark Order to Restore Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” we learn that “President Trump is a champion of individual merit and fairness.”

The fact sheet hammers us with hype like “President Trump: ‘Our country is going to be based on merit again.’”

“In his first week in office, President Trump signed an Executive Order to restore merit-based opportunity in the federal workforce.”

Blah blah and blah.

And the fact sheet concludes:

“ADVANCING A MERIT-BASED AMERICA: President Trump is a champion of individual merit and fairness.  

• President Trump: ‘Our country is going to be based on merit again.’
• In his first week in office, President Trump signed an Executive Order to restore merit-based opportunity in the federal workforce.
• President Trump also signed an Executive Order to restore merit and mission focus to America’s armed forces.”

So we laugh so hard that we shed tears because merit applies everywhere except the White House, where from the president on down we’ve seen merit doesn’t mean a goddamn thing.

And how can we take seriously that merit and mission focus (whatever that means) have been restored to America’s armed forces after what Trump’s nitwit toady defense secretary has been doing to mold them into MAGA brownshirts?