PARIS — Back in America, that hapless adjective, incredible, sheds its beaten down cliché status to take back its original meaning: You can't freaking believe it. Spin the globe and point anywhere. Then just zero in on East Asia.

A Cloud-Cuckoo president embraces the wrong Korea, trashes crucial allies and chest-bumps China toward armed conflict. Yet he diverts America's lone aircraft carrier in Asian-Pacific waters toward a crippling war in Iran he spectacularly lost months ago.

It no longer matters whether Donald Trump is Hitler, Caligula or Bozo the Clown. He has exploited cupidity and stupidity to amass personal billions while reshaping America's 250-year-old democracy into his own despotic image.

And now he has lost his last marbles.

Robert Reich was probably America's best-ever labor secretary. Now 80, he is a gifted economist and an indefatigable educator. He just sounded an alarm that far too many Americans will ignore:

"Trump’s mind has gone. He is capable of doing almost anything, and evidently the people around him are unable to control him. (He) constitutes a clear and present danger to the United States. The 25th amendment must be invoked, or he needs to be impeached and convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors. Now."

Exactly. And both cabinet and Congress members who spurn their oaths of office must be held to account. The right to a fair vote is the only way a representative democracy can survive. Use it or lose it.

Late in 2004, Ukrainians stormed Kyiv streets and stayed three months in the bitter cold until they forced the declared winner of a corrupt election to back down. Look what they have suffered since February 2022, and they have no intention to back down.

Americans only need to stand up, inform themselves with observable hard facts from trusted sources and then herd persuadable people to the polls.

Nothing sways Trump's Kool-Aid cultists or rich people bent on increasing their fortunes while so many others suffer. They make up less than a third of the electorate. At least that many would walk barefoot over hot coals to thwart him.

Only a fraction of the remaining 40 percent would be enough to overwhelm Republican voter suppression, their gusher of money and their dirty tricks in an outmoded Electoral College. Then a new majority can begin depoliticizing the judiciary.

Congressional control by Democrats and Independents would prevent Republicans from declaring martial law before 2028 with some trumped up version of the Nazis' 1933 Reichstag fire.

Who should then run for president? I'd vote for Sarah Palin provided Tina Fey shows up to do the job. For, the focus is now on November midterms only weeks away.

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PARIS — Tommy Tuberville, a 71-year-old Alabama cracker elected to the U.S. Senate after too many hits to the head on football fields, recently told Fox "News" that Dr. Anthony Fauci "killed or was involved in the killings of nine million people."

An AI check helpfully called that "a claim the network said was unproven and lacked supporting evidence." Ya think? When people like that serve in Congress, a dis-United States is the polar opposite of a representative democracy.

For three hours, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky forced a man America should revere to invoke the Fifth Amendment 111 times lest some slip of the tongue — or any remark inquisitors could twist — enable faithless Republicans to burn him at the stake.

Every Republican on his committee echoed his bogus charges. Afterward, Paul skirted normal procedure to demand Fauci be prosecuted for contempt of Congress, possibly imprisoned. "One million died, and I think they deserve the truth," he said. 

The man is a pathetic little pissant. I've spent decades watching dipshits savage truth for self-glorification. Consider established fact and the wider implications of faithless lawmakers, then judge for yourself.

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DRAGUIGNAN, France — America is suddenly looking like itself again from across an ocean that over the past 16 months has widened into a forbidding moat. Different now, in a different world, but alive and kicking in a new coat of primary colors.

Earlier this summer my TV was at grave risk from flying objects. Each new day a plundering crime family, coldblooded profiteers and blind ideologues took another little piece of America's heart. A once-great nation was a loathed pariah.

But then World Cup fans from everywhere joined in the 250th birthday bash. They saw workaday Americans — as in, We, the People — take back celebrations from a mafia-don despot who tried to make it all about him.

Foreigners braved grilling at the borders and harsh security at the games. Yet crowds across the nation welcomed them like long-lost family. They ate barbeque with their hands, drank free beer, partied late and made lasting friendships.

Can-do ingenuity dazzled. Visitors were oddly smitten with ranch dressing, but TSA plucked bottles of it from their carry-on. Kraft swiftly came up with miniatures for them to take home where they spread the word about a big-hearted America.

They feted the Fourth under a blaze of pyrotechnics with joyous MAGA-averse music from Mill Valley to Valley Forge. The Boston Pops orchestra played backup to funk and jive near the harbor where colonials had dumped tea.

Trump struck a low note heard round the world. He strong-armed the games' organizers to reverse a penalty red card that would have kept America's star player from playing Belgium. Still, the Belgians won 4-1.

At the end, players did an awkward bump and grind to mock the little dance Trump does at rallies. In Brussels, team officials flipped a middle finger on social media: "Overturn this!"

Countless Americans who have shrugged off Trump's depredations, which by now amount to millions of needless deaths and incalculable human suffering, see their president for who he is. Whatever else, you don't fuck with football.

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PARIS — At 5 a.m., pastel hues reflect off the Seine. Stately stone buildings emerge against an Eiffel Tower backdrop. Just upriver, Notre Dame stands tall again, ready for 1,000 more years. All things considered, Paris is a jewel in a world worth protecting,

Yet today will be hotter than hell, even more than Baja Arizona, baking the paint on my floating home. Our port's mama ducks and their ducklings have moved elsewhere for breakfast. They take some explaining, so I'll start with the big picture.

Donald Trump belongs in a padded cell, if not behind bars. Certainly not the White House. The problem is as much who he is as what he does. Everyone with a half-open mind ought to know this. And yet.

The Mort Report began in 2016 when I recognized the same sort of coup-plotting malignant narcissists I've reported on since Mobutu in the Congo during the 1960s. Trump has excelled at it in ways I never imagined were possible in America.

He seems unfathomably ignorant, but we underestimate him at our peril. He masters any despot's basic skill: savaging truth while hammering away at easily debunked lies. Steve Bannon, America's Rasputin, puts it simply: he floods the zone with shit.

Most people react to each outrage only until the next ones. Nothing stirs up a critical mass — not even nearly a million needless Covid deaths, insurrection at the Capitol, blatant graft climbing fast into the billions or jury rulings of sexual abuse.

For the outside world, his senseless assault on Iran was the last straw. It broke that figurative camel's back with a sound that echoes to every part of the planet. Headlines focus on America's humiliation, but it is far more than that.

A nuclear attack on America would be murder-suicide for any country that tried it. Yet if the world's richest country remains addicted to fossil fuels, climate collapse is certain.

Because of a pathological obsession with Barack Obama, Trump trashed not only the 2015 agreement to curb Iran's nuclear designs but also the 2015 U.N. climate accords, which 195 countries signed here in Paris. That is why we are sweltering today.

As for those ducks, a grand plan to clean up the Seine for the Olympics altered its ecological balance. Much less natural organic matter in the water ruptured the food chain. A small part of a very big problem.

We need to understand the overall threat and what decent people with families and friends they cherish can do about it. Starting now. November is four months away.

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PARIS — Across Europe and beyond, old friends once smitten with America now view it with despairing contempt — an immigrant nation of warring "liberals" and "conservatives" that exceeds any théâtre de l'absurde playwright's imagination.

After a long look around in what was the United States, I found those catchall political labels so yesterday. Americans fall into two main categories: those who know about Shmoos and those who don't.

I'll get to them in a second. The top line here is that not nearly enough eligible voters realize the looming threat. If November elections go wrong, all the planned 250th anniversary hoopla will be for a country that no longer exists.

An unhinged madman backed by entrenched plutocrats could muzzle dissent, repress protesters with deadly force and paint "Fuck Off!" in big red letters on the Statue of Liberty that a once-admiring France gave to a different America.

Much of that is already happening fast.

Cartoonist Al Capp came up with Shmoos in 1948 — small, smiley blobs shaped like bowling pins that laid grade A eggs and gave milk. When anyone looked hungry, they happily expired to be fried like chicken or grilled like steak.

Their antics were so amusing that no one needed movies or other entertainment. But they bred quickly and consumed nothing, making them bad for business. Authorities hunted them into extinction.

Today, mutant Shmoos with human attributes vote uncritically for politicians in thrall of a malevolent Supreme Leader, who hammers away at whatever upbeat bald lies they want to hear. Others don't bother to vote at all.

Capp, a rapier-sharp political observer, explained why he came up with them:

"I was driving from New York City to my farm in New Hampshire. The top of my car was down, and on either side of me I could see the lush and lovely New England countryside... It was the good earth at its generous summertime best, offering gifts to all.

"And the thought that came to me was this: Here we have this great and good and generous thing—the Earth. It's eager to give us everything we need. All we have to do is just let it alone, just be happy with it."

I remembered Capp on Memorial Day, driving around from my Provence olive grove. The top of my old Peugeot was down. On either side I could see the lush and lovely French countryside. The good earth at its generous springtime best, offering gifts to all.

People are people. Borders are only lines on a map. We can still save what is left of a bounteous planet if we can just stop screwing it up.

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