Friday, March 15, 2024

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: COME ON AND SUBSCRIBE ALREADY EDITION.

I admit it, I love music that you'd hear under a
"sinister dance club" scene in a movie.


A little late off the mark today -- Substack was down for a while so I couldn't set up the freebies for non-subscribers. (You know, an actual subscription is absurdly inexpensive - $7 a week month (whoops, I mistyped -- it's cheaper than I said!) even less when you do the annual plan, and that gets you five [5] issues every week. It's almost insane not to subscribe.)

Anyway: Freebie #1 is one of my Mar-a-Lago Throne Room sketches, this one speculating on what the next step might be after Tubby's total nepo-takeover of the GOP. Trump's yammerings, in real life as well as in my artistic renderings, just get weirder and more sinister every day, but democracy' loss is satire's gain. 

Speaking of which, Freebie #2 is a brief review of prestige press thumbsuckers that show how big a leg-up they're giving Trump, in part by concealing how openly racist and authoritarian he is, so voters just view the election as a couple of celebrities competing for a prize. This has become a popular topics in liberal circles, sometimes advanced by people who seem only to have acknowledged the problem very recently. Regard Lord Saletan:

Sounds miffed, doesn't he -- as if he'd thought: surely by now Republicans should be rising up and showing us all what good citizens they are! Tsk tsk, so disappointing; still, you have to admit Joe Biden is old.


Friday, March 08, 2024

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: BIDEN GETS THE FORMULA EDITION

Absence of Malice!

 I was too busy with work to watch the State of the Union, but from the clips I’ve seen Biden was far from the doddering dotard Republicans and the prestige press (but I repeat myself) have spent years painting him as. Apparently their “pivot” is that Biden was on drugs! 





Given that the Trump White House pharmacy under the leadership of Dr. Ronny “Feelgood” Jackson was throwing around uppers and downers like beads at Mardi Gras, and that Tubby himself is an obvious user, you might say it’s projection, but I begin to think it’s the only explanation they can fathom. For why, in their view, would anyone get so excited about traditional Democratic policies that help less fortunate Americans get ahead? It’s got to be drugs! 

UPDATE. All the rightwing talking heads are getting into the act. Erick Erickson claims Biden's speech was "supplement fuelled." And get this, from the Washington Times:

A psychiatrist who has worked with elderly dementia patients said President Biden exhibited signs of stimulant use to mask cognitive decline in his amped-up, aggressive State of the Union speech on Thursday.

Mr. Biden, 81, often raced through his remarks with the speed of an auctioneer, loudly shouting his words despite having a microphone in front of him.

Speed and volume of speech can be a sign of using Adderall or another amphetamine, said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist based in Beverly Hills, California.

You can find Lieberman elsewhere on the internet calling herself "America's Psychiatrist" and posting gibberish like this:

As Lorenzo Semple DuBois said in The Producers: They try... ok, how they try! 

Readers of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down know that for years I’ve been doing sketches in which “The Formula” – a mix of cocaine, Adderall, ketamine, and Lord knows what – is used by Trump’s handlers to keep him upright. (I’ve even got a few with Biden in them; here’s one I think you might enjoy under the circumstances.)

The cherry on the SOTU Sunday was Senator Tradwife’s rebuttal. As has been pointed out, her delivery is only bizarre if you’re unacquainted with the “fundie baby” voice with which evangelicals project winsomeness to cloak their theocratic intentions. But maybe now that ordinary Americans have gotten a load of it on national TV they’re starting to realize how fucking weird that whole crew is. 

I mentioned Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, which is a subscriber service – but as usual on Fridays I have a few free issues for you joy-poppers.  Feast your eyes! 

First, another of my recurring features – political talk show Received Opinion with your host Bolt Upright – in which Bolt asks whether Kyrsten Sinema’s departure from public life (the less-remunerative non-lobbyist part of it, anyway!) is yet another example of the sad death of comity and compromise in Washington, which in Bolt’s view and the view of all network chuckleheads are values to be treasured above democracy, equity, and everything else. 

Also: My annual Oscar predictions! Yes, once again I’m indulging my sick interest in this festival of glamour and hubris!  I’m already getting cold feet about my Adapted Screenplay pick, but by and large I think I’ve got something worth risking $5 in a pool. (That statement implies no responsibility if you lose the house! Wager responsibly!) 

Friday, March 01, 2024

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: ICE CREAM HEADACHE EDITION.

It's still funny to me that this kind of music can qualify
as "a tune that's been running through my head"
as if it were some pretty Tin Pan Alley number.

Happy March! The deeper we get into political campaign season (what, you didn’t know? It started after the consultants got back from their post-election vacations in 2023) the more fucked up things look. 

For example, you would think, nine months out from the general, that Republicans would try harder to tamp down the crazy. Didn’t at least the more politically exposed Republicans try to look normal about IVF after their lunacy was revealed by the Alabama Supreme Court decision – which, after all, merely followed their stated belief that life begins with the fertilized egg, even if it’s in a freezer? Sure, they also blocked a Senate vote to protect IVF, but one could read that as a tribute to the Grand Old Party’s grand old tradition of being obviously full of shit. 

But their shock troops are still going before the public with snakes flying out of their mouths:

Sorry, kid, our base demands child broodslaves! Either the smart Republicans can’t control these nuts or smart Republicans don’t exist. Or they think binding the small core of nutcakes who can be counted on to vote/insurrect on their behalf is so important that they have to back up whatever lunacies they demand, and count on voter suppression to carry the day for their candidates in elections. 

Anyway I understand some of you are here for Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies! OK, here’s the most recent edition of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, on the scandal of Joe Biden eating ice cream. I would have thought this a two-day story at best but the clown corps is still ON IT (“Joe Biden's awkward ice cream moment has only put the US president under more pressure,” etc). I guess it will never end and the Republican National Convention will include a ritual detonation of a big tub of Häagen-Dazs.  

I will also remind you aesthetic types that I’m doing my annual Oscar movie reviews – with my latest that’s all ten Best Picture nominees sorted, with all of those essays free to non-subscribers, so if you want to prep for the big show March 10 now’s your chance. I also intend to watch and report back on some of the other nominated films. Watch that space! 

Friday, February 23, 2024

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: FREEZE THEM KIDS EDITION.

Around all these years but I can't recall hearing them before. This'n's a banger!

Happy nearly almost spring, folks! Sunset’s more than an hour later than it was in the depths of winter, so have hope! 

Not that politics makes it easier, especially with all the bullshit being generated over the Alabama Supreme Court’s lunatic IVF ruling, which I covered in a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down item available to non-subscribers for free. Like I said, the outrage isn’t only about the fate of in-vitro for the people who need it to have children – it’s about the “fetal personhood” concept on which the ruling is based, which is exactly the concept on which Republicans base their drive to ban abortion nationwide – which is also why Republican “moderates” like Nikki Haley and Larry Hogan are doing such a tortured pee-dance over it: They know their bullshit ain’t getting over like it used to.

Now you see the Republican National Senatorial Committee rushing out talking points to convince voters that when they said life begins at fertilization they didn’t actually mean it – there’s a political-poison takeback clause! Funny, I don’t remember them taking this position in December 2022, when Republicans blocked a Senate bill to protect IVF:


Of course, back then their factota on the U.S. Supreme Court had just pushed Dobbs out and Republicans were feeling feisty – everything’s coming up Roeless! But after several state ballot ass-beatings showed that nobody is fooled, they’re shitting themselves and running for cover. We have to make sure they don’t get it. 

The other Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie is the one I talked about in the last post, about the Sad Truckers’ latest PR push: Claiming they’ll starve New York of groceries on behalf of Tubby. Though rightwing YouTubers and legacy drags like Jeffrey Lord try to keep it going, like all their previous chest-beating displays this one hasn’t panned out and even their more prominent spokesbuffoons are backing off. Guess it’s time to put Joe the Plumber on the case!   

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

MAGA TRUCKER-TYCOON COALITION NOT GOING SO WELL.

Hey, here’s a Humpday treat – a rare mid-week release of a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue FREE to gen pop. It’s the latest episode of our Washington Insider news talk show Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, this time focused on the Truckers Attack/Richies Forsake New York bullshit being spread by Republican operatives via credulous prestige-press journos. 

The casus bellow is Tubby’s $355 million fraud judgment, which allegedly has truckers threatening not to deliver goods to NYC stores. You might say this is a direct rip from the 2022 People’s Convoy grift, in which a sad gaggle of MAGA dopes rumbled their big rigs around DC claiming they were going to shut down the government, but left with dysentery and a few weeks of lost earnings. 

But it really goes back farther to what I call GOP Butch Cosplay – like the Hard Hat Riot of 1970 and the whole “Joe the Plumber” scam of 2008, it involves rightwingers acting all rough and tough and threatening to shut everything down if they don’t get their way. 

At least the hardhats actually beat up some hippies, though – these guys just yell and pose like WWE wrestlers and take selfies and expect the world to fall at their feet, but have to make do with dumb reporters and whatever half-wits believe them.

We also have rich guys claiming to withdraw their funds from New York City in protest of Tubby’s impending bankruptcy – e.g. today’s Fox News headline: “Real estate investor will ‘immediately discontinue’ working in NYC over Trump verdict, eying Florida, Texas.” It;s enough to make you miss the days when they got over on rubes by offering to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge. 

But, as I’ve also said before, MAGA types have been trained to despise New York as a symbol of everything they hate – different kinds of people living together, public services, culture, soap and toothpaste -- and will believe any crap they’re fed about how it’s all going to collapse any day now. I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t dangerous lunatics. 


Friday, February 16, 2024

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: TOO MUCH AIN'T ENOUGH EDITION.

Always liked these guys, glad they got back in the game.

Listen, I’ve never kept a dollar past sunset so I can be pretty tight-fisted, especially when it comes to giving out freebies to my bread-and-butter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down site. [Subscribe! Cheap!] But this week your cup runneth over – partly because I want you non-subscribers to get acquainted with some of that publication’s adorable features.

First, I’ve unlocked today’s installment of Fun Friday, which has become a regular week-ending post that prompts subscribers to talk about a specific type of pleasure in comments – for example, a moviegoing experience that the hecklers in the audience made memorable. Today’s edition is about things you love mainly or even simply because they’re old – or, rather, because their antiquity spurs nostalgia, either for your past or a past you never experienced. The real joy of these things – and this week is no exception – is our commenters, REBID’s secret weapon. Throw in your own comments if you like! 

Also, every year around this time I watch all the Oscar Best Picture nominees before the big show and write about them; this year I’m making all those essays available to non-subscribers. This week it’s on The Zone of Interest – and the post has links to the all my other open-access reviews as well. Nine down, one to go! 

This week’s final freebie is yet another in our series of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright episodes, in which political talk show clucks peck at the issues of the day. This week: How Joe Biden is oh so very old and disqualified while Trump is a dynamic imbecile. I know, it sounds just like the real thing, but you haven’t seen it chewed over by Bolt’s panel of pundits Peoni Doyenne, Chafe Dramaturgy, and Buff Toehold. Tune in! 

Friday, February 09, 2024

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: A GOOD SWIFT KICK EDITION.

Got their Mojo workin'.

RIP to a real one. I met Mojo back in the day, and he wasn't putting it on, that was really him. I told him that when I came down South for the Memphis Jazz Fest I ate so much barbecue I didn't take a shit for a day and a half. He referred to me thereafter exclusively as Hambone.  

I missed a ‘Round-the-Horn last week, sorry! But here, let me offer you a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie from that timeframe which is still good, or will be till after the Super Bowl: My as-usual behind-the-scenes look at how Tubby and his team plan to fight back against the Taylor Swift menace. I know, there’s been so much written already about the rightwing meltdown over the pretty white girl with a football hero boyfriend who for some reason doesn’t love enraged Nazi incels, but mine’s funny.  If you ain't read it yet, it's news to you! 

And look, it’s gotta be better than Ross Douthat’s plea for conservatives to embrace Taylor Swift because “the cultural valence of the Swift-Kelce romance... [is] normal and wholesome and mainstream in an explicitly conservative-coded way” – Ha! One images the wispy-bearded doofus trying to pitch that to a mob of howling conservabros and getting his ass hitched to a Ford F-30,000 and hauled out of Burlyman Camp in response. You can't reason with them, Father Ross!

Of more recent vintage is my other freebie, inspired by the latest in a series of prestige press Trump-wanks: A “guest essay” in the Good Grey Lady by Kellyanne Conway, the Trump bullshit firehose temporarily disguised as a disinterested observer of the American Scene, who asks, “Who Should Be Trump’s #2?” I expect the next such essay will be Stephen Miller asking, “Aren’t All You Regular Volk a Little Tired of Untermenschen Questioning Der Fuhrer?” We’ve gone way past the well-observed “working the refs” phenomenon, whereby rightwingers scream about “bias” until milquetoast liberal journalists are exhausted/intimidated into waving through all their bullshit; now it seems well-trained bigtime editors look at every single political event or issue and ask themselves, How is this good news for the John McCain Donald Trump?

Thus we have a former president who is very upfront about becoming a fascist dictator if he’s reelected, yet is portrayed in the prestige press as a victim because state officials interpret the Constitution as disqualifying insurrectionists from holding that office; also when a Republican investigator can't find evidence to charge the current president but takes the trouble to insert slurs about his mental state into his report, the pressies all run headlines like “Democrats’ Anxiety Over Biden’s Age Grows After Special Counsel Report.” I can only hope, as I wrote, that Americans have not yet lost the ability to smell bullshit. 


Wednesday, January 31, 2024

JUST WHAT MAGA V. TAYLOR SWIFT NEEDED: A LITTLE TOUCH OF DREHER!


It can’t last, so let’s all ride this MAGA Declares War on Taylor Swift thing to clicksville while the iron’s hot, shall we? Here’s a rare midweek freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, with a ripped-from-today’s-headlines account of the anti-Swift nerve center at Mar-a-Lago. Strictly for laffs! 

As I repeatedly remind you folks, conservative politicians and political writers have entirely abandoned policies and even normal constituent service in favor of lunatic culture war crap like this. Entertainers most of us think of as That Guy In that Movie or That Girl on Spotify are to them as demons sent to Make Everything Woke. This goes for the rightwing intelli-ma-lectuals like Victor Davis Hanson as well as humble clickbait farmers (“The Top 5 Most Overrated Liberal Comedians”), but also for bigtimers like the New York Times' David French, one of those conservatives who liberals simps think is OK, and author of a hair-raisingly weird Prince obituary (“For conservatives, Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture. He was notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience…”).

I didn’t think this Swift thing could get any nuttier but I hadn’t counted on Rod Dreher. I’d more or less stopped paying attention to him since his nervous breakdown and departure from The American Conservative, but my attention was called to his latest Substack item, “Among the Swifties” – and if you sense a reference of Bill Buford’s Among the Thugs there, claim your prize because Dreher does indeed compare the young female fans of Taylor Swift to the soccer hooligans in Buford’s book:

Here is Buford himself, reflecting on what he learned about crowd dynamics by watching a thug leader he calls “Mutton Chops” at work…

This is interesting. It says that we cannot entirely blame Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, or any other “leader” who holds sway over a crowd; the crowd’s latent desire for someone to create them manifested in those individual figures being propelled to leadership. Don’t misread Buford here; he’s not absolving crowd leaders of their actions…

Someone should ring Buford and ask him if he absolves Taylor Swift of her crimes. 

To put it in Buford’s terms: there was a huge crowd of young females who shared a common emotional experience (“the collective female unconscious”) that settled on Taylor Swift, a supremely gifted creator of pop songs, as their leader. Taylor Swift played her role, of course, but Buford would say that Swift was summoned by the latency within the crowd that would later become Swifties.

I bet Dreher imagines “Swifties” as rampaging Valkyries doing Wokeness to the innocent. The thing’s full of howlers, with patented Dreherisms like his regret that he cannot experience the “liberating pleasure of ego death” he imagines sports, Swift, and Trump fans enjoy – “The only time I’ve ever had that experience as part of a crowd was at the U2 concert in Baton Rouge…” The jokes just write themselves! Nonetheless I had a go at REBID, if you can use a chuckle, however mordant. 

UPDATE. Finally realizing that maybe this has all been a terrible mistake, some of the conservative Shuck Troopers are trying to turn it around. Washington Times:

We're not nuts, you're nuts! Well, on their readership it could work. Also Erick Erickson is trying his insufficient best:

Never mind that it hurts Donald Trump. Never mind that it makes the Republicans look deeply unserious. Never mind the political fallout. On a day that Cori Bush has been targeted by the Justice Department, a Democrat progressive targeted by Joe Biden's Justice Department, we're all having to talk about the Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce thing because of what these idiots have done online. 

Oh, I'm sure none of them will mind that the Swift Purge is distracting from the fact that the DOJ, which conservatives constantly accuse of being politically weaponized against Republicans just because they did some so-called "crimes," is investigating prominent Democrats like Bush and even charging Democratic Senator Robert Menendez as well. Screening out inconvenient facts is as important to their whole paranoid vision as the manufacture of lunatic fantasies.

UPDATE 2. Lol, I forgot that conservatives have been raging at Swift for at least ten years now. Here's my 2013 post on the Power Line proto-Catturd Hindrocket doing close analysis of Swift wearing a onesie -- is it a comment on Pajama Boy?? And get a load of all the anti-Swift articles at rightweing rat's nest The Federalist: Imagine going to an editor with a pitch like "Taylor Swift’s Disappointing Arc Is Generationally Representative" and having her slam the desk and cry, "THAT'S GOLD, JASHINSKY! GOLD!" Finally, lest we forget: Mark Hemingway's sad boomer review of Swift. Now that's funny! 

Saturday, January 27, 2024

SUNDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN, SMILIN' THROUGH EDITION.

Will write soon about Maestro, which I liked, not least because
it treated me to several minutes of Bernstein's Mass, which I really love.

Yep, two days later than usual, but bountiful: Since the Oscar nominations are out, I’m going to make all my reviews of the Best Picture nominees available to non-subscribers. So far I’ve gotten through seven of the 10: Barbie, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers, Poor Things, Past Lives, American Fiction, and Oppenheimer. Will get to the other three and, who knows, maybe some of the non-BP contenders (like May December, for which my review is also available). Enjoy – these are so much less depressing than the political stuff, at least for me.

Actually, that ain’t necessarily so – the first of our weekly Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies is about sort of a happy occasion: The ejection of Ron DeSantis from the ranks of the Republican presidential contenders. There is much joy in my farewell to Meatball Ron because  he was so strenuously evil that he repulsed even the pigs who vote in Republican primaries – though our joy must be tempered because those same voters yet cleave to Fat Hitler.
 
And there’s some fun, too, in my bagatelle about the Trump White House pharmacy scandal – whereby we learn Trump’s factota (not even licensed pharmacists!) were shoveling large quantities of opioids and commercial drugs like Ambien (yes, the expensive non-generic) to persons unknown. It reminds me of my many sketches about Trump's relaince on "the Formula," a snortable mixture that makes him seem almost normal on the stump. It also reminds me of the Norman Ohler book Blitzed, about the rampant drug abuse in the Third Reich – particularly of the methamphetamine called Pervitin that was dished out like candy to Nazi soldiers. When I look at MAGA freaks like Giuliani and the Trump lawyer/MAGA moll Alina Habba, raving incoherently in front of the press, I feel like a lot of that crew’s otherwise inexplicable behavior may be laid to speed-and-downers cycles gone out of control.

Friday, January 19, 2024

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: MLKING IT EDITION.

You believe this shit was 20 years ago?

We got a lot of snow here in the Northeast and today I went back and forth from my workdesk at intervals to shovel the stuff off our sidewalk, lest by storm’s end it got two feet deep and encrusted in ice. It was a nice change of pace from my accursed day job, though I imagine if public works were my day job I’d get as sick of it (or, more likely, seriously injured in the commission of it) pretty quickly. So kudos to our local DPW! (I am also grateful that, being on the side of truth and light, I am not even figuratively required to shovel shit at you good people.) 

One cool thing: We get on well with our neighbors, so I took a few minutes to do their walk as well. A while back I went out and found they’d shoveled a layer of our walk. Sometimes it’s nice living in Baltimore! 

But you must be impatient for the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies! Well, Martin Luther King Day – the one day when everyone trots out the One Quote Everyone Knows, Something About Contents – was Monday so is definitionally old news, I guess, but I have an essay that’s still fresh on why conservatives who usually try to suck up to (dead) MLK are starting to denounce him instead. I guess you could file this under Masks Coming Off. As mentioned in the post, the years of tedious “King was a conservative” posts have always been wearisome to folks like you and me, but now that the right is thoroughly MAGAfied, it seems they’ve gotten sick of it too, and are going back to their overtly racist roots. It’s a relief in a way! 

As for the second freebie, here, enjoy this accurate transcript of Vivek Ramaswamy lobbying Tubby for the VP gig. It’s a killer!