David McCague

All views my own, or those of others which I've stolen.

[Robert Wilkinson @robertwlk]

40 years ago today, l asked my childhood sweetheart, my best friend and the most gorgeous woman l know to marry me.

All three said no.

[David McCague @dmccague]

@DUALIPA Sabi Sands is heaven on earth...can't wait to go back

[Match of the Day @BBCMOTD]

Viktor Gyokeres says a dry pitch "didn't help" Arsenal with their chances today ⚽️❌

[Steven Connolly Impressionist @StevenPConnolly]

Republic of Ireland Football Impressions

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[David McCague @dmccague]

@Hayles_101 So basically you don't need someone who is particularly skilled, more someone who is going to not rip the arse out of it on a cost per hour basis...or do it yourself but it's soul destroying 😅

[David McCague @dmccague]

@Hayles_101 Depends how many layers of paint are on there... if there's decades worth, best to remove the spindles and replace them (as I did), or if it's not too bad you can get them dipped in acid to remove the paint. Nitromors or hot air gun and scraper for the rest, time intensive stuff!

[David McCague @dmccague]

@MrAndrewCotter Remember how your videos during COVID about the girls brought a smile to my face. Good to see that they're still fighting fit!

[David McCague @dmccague]

@ashotmagazine

[David McCague @dmccague]

@SwedishRumble @ronaldobrown_98 Wolves hunt in packs

[David McCague @dmccague]

@EBL2017 And none are top class forwards.

[David McCague @dmccague]

@AndyMitten @5liveSport A picture speaks a thousand words. Player ratings a little bit more enjoyable in the last two weeks Andy? 🔴⚫⚪

[Sarah Creighton 🍂 @Saraita101]

The most Ulster Protestant image you will ever see in your entire life

[David McCague @dmccague]

@Ankaman616 Co-Pilot is way behind ChatGPT even though they both use the same OpenAI models. It's just not very good.

[David McCague @dmccague]

@DFrankcom On the Trixie...to cash out or to hold, that's the question 😅

[The Athletic | Football @TheAthleticFC]

Mohamed Salah says he feels “thrown under the bus” by Liverpool as he revealed his relationship with head coach Arne Slot has broken down.

Salah believes he’s been made a scapegoat for Liverpool’s struggles this season, insisting “someone does not want me in the club”.

He also left the door open to a possible Anfield exit during the January transfer window.

“It seems like the club has thrown me under the bus,” Salah said. “That is how I am feeling. I think it is very clear that someone wanted me to get all of the blame.

He added: “I said many times before that I had a good relationship with the manager and all of a sudden, we don’t have any relationship.

“I don’t know why, but it seems to me, how I see it, that someone doesn’t want me in the club.”

More from @JamesPearceLFC ⤵️

🔗 https://t.co/Y6o1l7feIh

[Adam Crafton @AdamCrafton_]

This is Liverpool Football Club we are talking about

[David McCague @dmccague]

@FabrizioRomano

[David McCague @dmccague]

@ZarahConnolly Great work, fantastic video

[David McCague @dmccague]

@markjmcloughlin @Utdtruthful @Muppetiers @ManUtd Correct, Mark.