I find it such a mistake to have lived on -- when like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not into this unspeakable give-away of the whole fool's paradise of our past. It throws back so livid a light – this was what we were so fondly working for! My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can.
Amen, Hank! Looks like I should have hitched a ride into oblivion with David Bowie. The country’s headed for the crapper so fast we can barely make out the milestones as we go.
This is not to speak of Trump’s usual stupid yammering outrages, as when he blamed the recent National Airport crash on black people and “dwarfism.” We’re often told that Tubby is working some kind of elaborate mind-game when he does shit like this, but I think it’s more simple: He’s a bigoted piece of shit from way back who long ago became adept at veiling his prejudices just enough to not get thrown off talk shows, but in his dotage he’s aware that new work-arounds have emerged and he wants to get in on them. So when the rightwing clowns who are really running his show report to him, all he really pays attention to, besides (of course) opportunities for grift, are the modish new disguises for slurs they’ve cooked up. He uses the DEI bullshit guys like Chris Rufo dish out the way Archie Bunker used to use Affirmative Action and Welfare Mothers – as humorous cover for his own stupidity.
A gruesome week all around! You follow the news and know about Tubby’s inaugural rampage; if you need a reminder, this tally by Olivia Troye hits the high points and I’m sure there are other such lists out there you may consult.
One thing Troye misses is Trump’s ongoing assault on the National Institutes of Health – freezing spending, communications, and really all their main work, leaving researchers and treating physicians “in limbo,” as Mother Jones puts it. The NIH is the most important medical research institution in the world. Also, as some of you may know, the NIH has been very good to me as a patient – and, I have observed over thirty-plus years of visits to the Clinical Center, it has been good to patients and families from every part of the nation and every walk of life. So I take this very personally and if it were possible for me to despise these people any more than I already do I would.
Since Troye wrote her roundup, there have been even more catastrophes – for example, there was this (in the Nixonian sense) Friday Night Massacre, as the New York Times reports:
President Trump fired 17 inspectors general, the internal watchdogs who monitor federal agencies, on Friday night, capping a week of dramatic shake-ups of the federal bureaucracy focused on loyalty to the president, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
As Chris Geidner points out, the Times does not mention that under the law Trump is required to give Congress 30 days notice to remove an IG. So, this is illegal – albeit, in the judgement of our Prestige Press, not as noteworthy as the Leader's “muscular” style of governance.
A shiny new dime for the first Congressional Democrat to say so! Alas, there seems to be a general agreement among most of them not to rock the boat because people might get mad at them for it.
Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the snooty elitists and the masses, I think we know how that’s going to turn out.
Tubby didn’t even get a majority of the popular vote, but Brooks acts (as does most of the Prestige Press) as if he’s an unstoppable juggernaut strongly supported by Joe Microbrew as he destroys public health and proposes to do away with FEMA – real bread-and-butter issues wimpy Democrats eschew in favor of the so-called “rule of law”!
…If I were running the Democratic Party (God help them), I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.
In other words, get back to the previous forty years of neoliberal bullshit – we agree with your ends, comrade, it’s your means we question! It’s obviously worked out so well for America.
Feral conservatives who do not have the same social anxieties as Brooks, and therefore no reason to pretend, are in hog heaven, for their inner wreckers have been validated and unleashed. The only complaint I’ve seen them make, via Abe Greenwald and Erick Erickson (UPDATE: And the Wall Street Journal editorial board), is about Tubby’s suspension of federal security details formerly afforded his erstwhile neocon advisors John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. (About his suspension of security for Anthony Fauci, who is at least as likely to be murdered by lunatics, they are silent and probably approving.) Imagine applauding a public official’s “muscular” actions against his enemies, then finding out that he’s also deliberately making your friends into sitting ducks for assassins, and not having the brains to figure out that the man is not your ally but a dangerous lunatic who could as easily turn his savagery on you. That’s American conservatism in the MAGA era.
Oh, yeah, one more REBID freebie -- this one's not so serious: Since the Oscar nominations are out, I did a Fun Friday soliciting readers' nominations for Worst Best Picture of All Time. I picked mine, though there are many other worthy contenders. Enjoy!
I know for a while I haven't been doing this more than weekly as a round-up for Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (SUBSCRIBE, by the way -- what are ya saving your money for, think of what you're about to save on eggs!), but Reign of Tubby II is a target-rich environment so you may see more of me here in days to come, at least until I get thrown in a concentration camp.
There are plenty of horrors, Lord knows, like Trump following through on his promises to viciously attack his enemies -- e.g. immigrant families and the Constitution -- and playing Henry II to Bishop Mariann Budde's Thomas à Becket, etc. While Elon Musk doing his Nazi salute is horrifying in its own way, you have to admit it's also funny -- this buffoon has all the money in the world, and still feels his best chance at having a lasting political impact is to make the President he paid for more obviously like Hitler.
Take a decidedly nonracist acquaintance who was throwing a last-minute Halloween costume together from materials he had handy: a new white sheet set. Eschewing the cliché toga, he decided to dress up as a ghost. Only the sheet wasn't quite long enough when it was draped over his head, so he reached for the pillowcase ... and belatedly discovered, from the stunned silence of his fellow partygoers, that he had inadvertently dressed up as a Klansman.
This is how I can believe that Musk made a similar cognitive error.
Similarly, I tripped on a rock while naked and my penis just happened to enter this lady's vagina. These things happen! (Also I don't believe attendees of a McArdle party would be shocked by a klansman outfit, at least not if they knew one of their fellow chucklekfucks was inside it instead of, like, a poor person.)
Not gonna link but here's another gem from the trove:
As a general principle, when there is a plausible innocent explanation, I err on the side of believing it. This will strike many readers as willfully naive or perhaps a sign of my own Nazi tendencies.
Which is exactly what's wrong with our politics today.
If only you liberals were more generous about people, like Little Megan Sunshine! I suppose the only reason she didn't use "tolerant," the usual go-to for rightwingers trying to make lefties look mean, is that it would imply there was something to tolerate, when Musk was just being, you know, cognitively erroneous.
Between this and McArdle's reliable defenses of her boss, her service to billionaires in need of an ego-stroke (and when are they not, these days?) assures that she'll have that Washington Post job until Peggy Noonan croaks and the Passive-Aggressive Conservative crown passes to her.
Have we done this one before? Hell with it, it's nice.
Just a few words on David Lynch: Aside from the statements his films make, it may be his biggest achievement was breaking up our idea of movie time. All film directors play with time – film is almost like music that way – but when people talk about Lynch as “weird,” while they may be talking about the freakish people and creatures (rabbits, swaddled monster baby, whiteface Robert Blake and so on) I think they’re mostly responding to how his movies spool out rather than tell stories. Most of them barely have stories. They rely on tropes that we recognize from other movies -- the damsel in distress, the murder mystery, the haunted building, the couple on the run – on which Lynch hangs his visions and obsessions, and not on narrative as such. We hope to see the main characters elude or emerge from danger, but it’s seldom their heroic drive that gets them out, and often they just stay on that lost highway. And despite all the websites hunting down clues, his mysteries are never really solved. It’s very possible Lynch may not have even known who killed Laura Palmer when he set out on Twin Peaks. Many foreign directors had played around like this before, but Lynch had his own method and, more to the point, sold it to American audiences. (Part of the credit for that goes to another genius who’s still with us.)
Coffee break over, everyone back on your heads! Tubby grabs the wheel Monday, but like many of us I’ve been pre-gaming dread pretty heavily so it ought not to land so bad. (Also I won’t watch. Who needs it? I can read his yammerings later if the judgment of Clio demands.) Trump himself has been pretty quiet, but we already know from the statements of his flunkies and factota what a fash shambles to expect – as may be seen in the first of today’s FREE Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions, covering the cabinet nomination hearings for one of REBID’s stock characters, Fox News star Poopmouth. Look, after Hegseth anything’s possible.
For the second freebie here’s a more serious-like essay on our feral billionaires, whose recent antics make Andrew Carnegie look like Francis of Assisi (and Carnegie was no Francis of Assisi). Everything bad about America has gotten worse, and the most obvious cause is rampaging capital; Reagan took the leashes off forty-five years ago and the moneyed went mad – though you may miss that they’re mad because, by the standard of self-enrichment, the only one they and our Prestige Press recognize, they’re perfectly rational. But if a man felt a chill and set fire to the whole neighborhood to warm himself you’d recognize the problem.
OH, AND: I neglected to mention when it came out, but the great Batocchio of Vagabond Scholar wrapped 2024 with his usual Jon Swift Roundup -- a tradition begun by a late lamented comrade -- of several bloggers' favorite posts of the past year. They're all winners, of course, by some of the sharpest folks around, and if you haven't looked in on bloggers like Driftglass and Yastreblyansky and Mad Kane for a while, might I suggest you take the opportunity? And check your old rolodex -- hell, I just noticed Kip Manley is still in business! Now that vinyl and cassettes are back, maybe it's time blogs got on the retro rotation -- after all, the last time we were a hot commodity was when the country was in the grip of a madman -- if anyone's prepped for the coming catastrophe it's us!
SPEAKING OF WHICH: In case you’re following me on social: Having abandoned Twitter months ago, this weekend I’m decommissioning my Meta accounts, i.e. Facebook and Instagram. (I may keep Messenger.) It’s not really a moral decision, though Zuckerberg's a moral disaster – I’m just sick of this shit. If you want to keep up I’m on Bluesky, and I’ve started to dabble in Spoutable and Pixelfed, all under @edroso. But I'm not sure how they'll pan out. You can always track my movements at edroso.com. Who knows what’s next. Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks, they won't help me survive.
I keep filing these weekly dispatches late, due to my absurdly crowded work schedule; if you come across any of those liberal billionaires people keep asking to fund a Countervailing Noise Machine of the Left, tell them to send some o’ them sweet Sorosbucks my way -- my signal-to-noise ratio may be a little high for pure-propaganda purposes but just think of the cachet: “Yes, we fund Edroso. Doesn’t take much; poor fellow never had chance to develop a taste for luxury.” “What! Edroso’s still alive? I heard he perished from cirrhosis and a surfeit of bile.” “Good for you, keeping the old clown afloat. You know we ought to establish some sort of assisted-living for these bloggers – it reflects poorly on our Cause whenever one of them dies in a snowdrift.”
Reciprocating this imaginary generosity, I bring you some freebies from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, my famous five-day-a-week Substack (subscriptions for which, by the way, are absurdly cheap and make great if puzzling “thinking of you” gifts). Here are two Scenes We’d Like To See: one, Jeff Bezos in Caligula mode, lamenting that his billions have not brought him fulfillment and seeking to fill the void with the corpse of democracy; and two, last week’s Tubby sketch, sort of “The Emperor’s New Depends.” If these don’t épater la bourgeoisie I daresay they can’t be épatered.
If the satires seem a little nervier than usual, it’s because I look at the news, a filthy habit I can’t seem to shake. (Though I have fucked off from Twitter and will soon fuck off from Facebook as well – these days, the “long march through the institutions” is made mainly to sever connections with the most toxic ones, media-wise. Thankfully there are alternatives.) Many people have pointed out that Tubby’s stated plans of foreign conquest are nuts, and that the Prestige Press is sanewashing them in a manner that would be inexplicable if you hadn’t seen (and hasn’t everyone seen it, by now?) that they’re sucking up for access and protection, and (this is the worst part) out of belated recognition that fascism suits their business model better than truth-telling. The shittier ones are just full-on jingo cheering, while the polite ones are doing “analysis” like NPR’s “Is Trump's rhetoric on Greenland, Canada and Panama Canal a 'Madman Strategy'?” which I expect to see followed by “Trump Biting Head Off Rat Sends a Signal: Experts.”
Still more disgusting is Trump’s claim that California didn’t handle their UNPRECEDENTED CLIMATE-RELATED FIRE EMERGENCY correctly and promise to make it worse when he’s in power. I trust I don’t have to explain that this has nothing to do with any desire to help the people of that state and everything to do with his dark disinformation campaign to enrich himself by destroying the country; as I’ve been saying for years (and see Laura Jedeed for a newer, related angle), demonizing a state that actually generates economic growth and uses it to provide services to its people is necessary to the MAGA goal of making shitty, parsimonious Alabama-style governance the only kind his minions will ever know. I will also add that Steve Bannon bitching about Elon Musk is just fash fan-magazine bullshit and should not be taken seriously as anything but a further example of how stupid things have gotten.
I say my say there, with a few examples of the Jan. 6 gaslighting at overtly MAGA press outlets. (The Prestige Press outlets are mostly taking an “Ah! Well. Nevertheless” approach; NBC News lards some Jan. 6 facts into its report on today’s electoral college tally, but under the headline “Capitol heavily secured for election certification as Trump's Jan. 6 pardon plans remain largely a mystery” -- which is probably all most people will read, and which suggests that the event needs “heavy” protection in case of an attack by ravening mobs of Kamala Harris supporters, since, you know, Everything is Bothsides now.)
Speaking of Bothsides, I will mention this lulu I found today, from Minnesota Public Radio: “Jan. 6 still divides people. Is there a productive way to move past it?” If you smell professional difference-splitters, collect your winnings: in this case, it’s Bill Doherty from Braver Angels (formerly Better Angels), and his response to the question “why is this issue so fraught?” is… well, have a look:
If you believe that the election was stolen and that there were people there to protest … you’re sympathetic with them. You’re thinking that this is what democracy is about. You say, “Well, 90 percent of the people were perfectly fine.” On the other hand, if you think their cause was not just, you understandably focus not on the folks who just went home, but on the people who attacked the Capitol.
A few bad apples! The solution, says Doherty, is “not to argue about the past when people’s minds are made up” – let’s not bicker and argue about who insurrected who! – “but to talk about how would we go forward.” Of course “we” in this case is a bunch of people meeting in gyms and conference rooms that are nowhere near the levers of power, which in a few weeks will be in the tight grip of people who think insurrection is great when they do it and ever better if it works – and, having gotten away with their last attempt, will not scruple to try another if things aren’t going their way; JD Vance ain’t Mike Pence. Stay strong, y’all, and don't let them tell you shit is Shinola.
Yeah, it’s normally Friday ‘Round-the-Horn – but I am told on social media that the period between Christmas and New Year’s is a sort of a collective fugue state, so I’ll cut myself some slack and you’re welcome to join me. (In truth I felt the fugue more keenly this year than previously because I had nearly all of last week off from work, and for whatever reason it pushed me right the hell out of my everyday reality. I didn’t go anywhere, I just dissociated. This week I had to go back and it was wrenching, like being caught by the marshals after an escape. When will my goddamn Living National Treasure status come through?)
Anyway, not much to offer in the way of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – last week was short rations, though we did have a year-end Received Opinion with Bolt Upright that I think is funny, anyway. Speaking of Prestige Press putzes, maybe you saw Semafor got a bunch of them to talk about “The things we got wrong in 2024,” and as you would expect if you share my poisonous cynicism it’s a chortlefest: Fascism won, whoopsie! But I still have a six-figure job so fuck it:
Young white women, that is – but really, is there any other kind? As an apparently intentional worsener Semafor also includes Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, and Bari Weiss:
Reader demand? So long she keeps stroking fascists (“Join Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon as they sit down with guests including Michael Knowles, Rod Dreher, and Geoffrey Cain”) the funding will keep rolling in and her media pals will keep pimping The Free Press, attracting soft-brained people who can sort of read and don’t like he-shes or blue-hairs nohow.
A few words about the late Jimmy Carter: Like everyone else except total scumbags, I greatly admire his post-presidency. But while his term of office had some admirable features, you can’t just ignore its many foreign and domestic fiascos. The most charitable interpretation is that he was trying to split the difference between what seemed like unsustainable legacy policies, such as client statism and a heavy regulatory state, and new ones that were challenging to sell to voters, such as energy conservation and “human rights” (which from our current perspective, and undoubtedly that of many Central Americans, Southeast Asians, and Iranians at the time, was pretty selective). It didn’t work, and his successor simply ran full-tilt in the direction of evil, which struck voters as energetic and virile even as his goons looted the treasury and their future. A lot of people act as if neoliberalism has only recently come a-cropper, but it’s been a loser for a long time and I hope we find another way to go before our mortal enemies make it impossible to change course. Meantime it is something to consider that Carter may be the last POTUS who had human qualities worth mourning.
Oh yeah, today I review A Complete Unknown, which has the traditional biopic limitations but works fine within them.
For a long time I could only find a weird remix of this, so I stopped looking. But it's here!
It’s the last month without Tubby for a while – though in an important sense (namely the inability of the Prestige Press to ignore that piece of shit) we’re not without him now, because he continues to yap orders at his toadies in Congress. In the case of the current funding legislation, he didn’t get what he allegedly wanted – but from his perspective that doesn’t matter at all, because it kept his blustering presence in front of the public and also got people used to seeing his Nazi asshole buddy Musk treated like a fourth branch of the U.S. Government.
I don’t think I’m particularly perceptive, really, but these days a lot of people seem incredibly invested in misreading what’s going on. Like, for example: why would coverage in the paper owned by Jeff Bezos be tilted heavily against the union striking the company also owned by Jeff Bezos? HMMMMM IT’S A PUZZLER ALRIGHT. It's as if the shock of the election got the Prestige Press peeps clinging to their ancient templates as a coping mechanism and they just can't let them go. (I mean apart from the ones that are just straight-up bought off, which probably accounts for all of them over a certain stock valuation.)
Fooey. Nonetheless, this is the last Friday ‘Round-the-Horn before Xmas so as my gift to you all here are two recent editions of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that I’m making free to non-subscribers…
… but not before this advertisement:
Now’s a great time to give the gift of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down! Click here.
OK, now the freebies: First, what to expect as the follow-up to that drone bullshit. You didn’t think that was going to be the last stupid panic Republicans would use to rile their rubes? The next four years are gonna be like Green Acres except without Oliver to sputter in protest as Mr. Haney delivers him an unwanted fascist dictatorship. Second, if you heard about the New York governor’s announced plans to soothe frightened execs after the UnitedHeathcare hit, and wondered what that might look like… wonder no more!
I'm an old crank but you know what? This is Xmas music I can get with.
To paraphrase the old Chinese, we are now Living In Interesting Times every goddamn day. One of the latest wacky bits is the lawyer/accomplice of HHS-Secretary-nominee RFK Jr. petitioning the U.S. Government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine. It’s something I’ve joked about over the years and now it’s – well, still a joke, though obviously the lunatics promoting it don’t know that. This would seem to be a nadir in the epic insanity of Tubby’s appointments, though I’m sure they’ll find a way to dig deeper.
By the way, do you wonder what mainstream conservatives (you know, Conservatives with Good Taste) think about this? You will be unsurprised to learn that Kimberly Strassel at the Wall Street Journal absolves Tubby of all blame, and pins it on other people who aren’t working hard enough to make him look good. Doesn’t make sense? Here, read it yourself:
It seems not to have occurred to Senate Republicans—who ought to have learned a little bit about Mr. Trump by now—that he needs a rescue here. No insider believes this is a heartfelt pick. Even political naïfs understand what happened: This agreement was entirely transactional. Mr. Trump saw an opportunity to gain RFK’s endorsement. The price was a promise of a big post. The president-elect is holding true to that deal as a businessman, so he won’t dare whisper misgivings for fear of leaks.
“Holding true to that deal as a businessman” yeah, that’s Trump, alright – his word is his bond!
Instead Senate Republicans are playing monkey-see-monkey-do to an extent that even Mr. Trump must be exasperated.
“Why is no one wiping my ass? They must have smelt it by now!”
Nearly every GOP senator looks at Mr. Kennedy with wincing concern—knowing the havoc the anticapitalist big-government regulator can and will wreak on a Trump agenda.
(Oh, yeah, the problem isn’t that Worm-Brain will kill us all – the problem is he’s against capitalism.)
Yet no one steps up to save the president. If Joe Biden chose Hulk Hogan to be Treasury secretary, does anyone think Democrats would have let him step into that trap?
Maybe there was an upside to electing a President you can’t imagine doing any such thing. (Oh, right, Biden was supposed to be senile!)
But so desperate right now are Republicans to nod along that they are abdicating the real job of advice and consent—and protection.
Normally I’d say that sounds like a “you” problem except the “you” problem has been made an “all of us” problem by the shitheels and grifters, Strassel not excepted, who condemned us to this madman’s whims and wiles.
Sorry I missed you last week! Holidays are frickin' rough around here. But I pledge that if I live I'll deliver through Christmas. That's the alicublog pledge!
It’s pretty weird watching the death of democracy roar down the track, its glowing Sauron eye getting bigger by the moment and Tubby's fat face darkly looming in the cab, while most of the information on the bearing-down is coming from a completelybought-off Prestige Press that talks about it as if it’s a fun TV drama like “Succession” that we can switch off when we’re bored.
The other news-related item has to do with the death of a health insurance CEO and why a lot of people aren’t crying over it. I was raised a Christian (well, Catholic, close enough) and I don’t like to take pleasure in the death and suffering of others. Nonetheless I’m a lot more angry about our fucked-up health care system, and how it depraves us -- so much so that this murder puts us less in mind of the victim's bereaved family and friends than of the bereaved family and friends of “beneficiaries” whose suffering and death his parsimonious policies hastened along. I would also mention that the incoming administration promises to heavily promote the fraud-rich Medicare Advantage program, UnitedHealthcare’s primary scam, by appointing one of its shills as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and (as outlined in Project 2025) making MA the default choice for new Medicare enrollees.
Normally we only have two freebies but I’m also opening up this week’s Fun Friday because it’s about old-school bloggers (my classmates, as it were!) who are still stoking the boilers. (This has also served as a reminder to refresh my blogroll here. Shadowproof, which had taken over from Firedoglake, is discontinued and its slack picked up by The Dissenter; Gin and Tacos has turned into a podcast; I don’t know what happened to ThinkProgress. The “Forget About Politics” section has several discontinued sites, but that’s OK, because they’re mostly not about current events and worth a peek. Also, I’m sentimental about Lance Mannion and Terry Teachout.)
In this edition I mention Atrios, Blue Gal, Driftglass, Vagabond Scholar, and Sheila O’Malley in the body copy; commenters have kindly added the Grade-A work of Digby at Hullabaloo, Nancy Nall, Joe My God, Lawyers Guns & Money, Nuclear Diner, Scripting News, The Daily Howler, et alia. It’s good to be reminded that, as the Prestige Press gets shittier by the minute at their job, we can rely on them just for the basic facts and then offload the analysis to guys like these. If only America would take the hint! (Note: Some of these blogs don’t even user Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, that’s how old-school they are, so be careful!)
