Not gonna push it too hard here as this is only Friday 'Round-the-Horn technically -- it's after midnight but I ain't been to bed yet. Anyway the atrocities continue: Pam Bondi is the new Matt Gaetz, and if anything it's even worse because she's actually been an AG at the state level and a stupefyingly corrupt one at that -- as Charlie Pierce explains -- whereas Gaetz was never more than a stunt appointee, a bit of chum to keep the Prestige Press putzes bobbing and Republican elected officials trembling lest they be forced to show loyalty and embarrass themselves by praising an obvious freak. From the moment Tubby tapped a checked-out oil executive for Secretary of State in 2016, anyone who was paying attention would have seen the game: Trump chooses flunkies based on whims and chits rather than ability. So it's a trip to see reporters asking how his people could have failed to "vet" Gaetz and fellow sex criminal Pete Hegseth et alia when everyone knew they were shit going in. As Tom Tomorrow attests, this is not how things are done when you give a shit about the country you're gonna run:
Another week into the over-the-cliff phase of the death of democracy! The appointments Tubby’s trying to push through the lame duck are all insane, but the one that especially pisses me off is RFK Jr. I’m typing this from the National Institutes of Health, my long association with which has literally saved my life; the global importance of its research and its extraordinary care and treatment of its patients are something I’ve been seeing first-hand for decades. That the lunatic my fellow Americans are sending back into power intends, out of hatred for the very idea of good government, to install this insane, malign quack to destroy the NIH (and the FDA, and Medicare, etc.) is making me all First Reformed.
For the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, tell you what, let’s have the three-part “I Swear This Isn’t Like All The Other ‘What Is To Be Done’ Essays” with which I lay a path forward through Smarmageddon for the enlightened. Here they are in order: One. Two. Three. Best read in series, but you can mix and match. I’m told they’re brilliant, but maybe the smartest people in the world are all wrong! See for yourself and maybe subscribe while you’re at it.
What we are looking at is good and evil, right and wrong.
Hard week to feel good about! After a campaign in which the Republican candidate daily demonstrated himself not zero-fash nor 2% fash but 100% full fash (also stupid and crude), the voters returned him to office. This would lower my estimation of the sanity and decency of my fellow Americans if I weren’t such a goddamn little ray of sunshine.
Whatever I think about the hoi polloi, it’s nothing compared to what I think of most of the bigbrains telling us What The Democrats Must Do, especially the alleged liberals-or-whatever telling us to sell out minorities so straight white America will love us:
“PC police,” lol, why didn’t he throw in “feminazis” while he was at it. I guess the very concepts of morality and principle are vague to some people who see everything as some sort of bagatelle – like “exalting the humble and humbling the exalted” is just some added degree of difficulty they think Democrats perversely assumed, as one might tie one hand behind one’s back to show off, and must abandon to succeed at The Game.
As after a rainstorm, the brain worms have been out in force. Check out this guy:
He’s supposed to be some kind of progressive thinker, but apparently believes adopting the standard rightwing bullshit about cities in “chaos” that must be made “livable” represents some opportunity for the Democrats. A bunch of people to whom I showed this told me I had him all wrong, he just wants more housing and better transit; if so that was an interesting way to ask for it, because unless you’ve just arrived on this planet you know that when you say “What can we do to solve the chaos and unlivability of our cities” the voters, whom the Prestige Press have marinated in Crime Panic for decades even as actual crime plummets, will demand certain people (hint hint) be stopped and searched and locked up and put on Workfare Not Welfare. Miss me with that Clintonian bullshit.
This isn’t even to speak of the overtly-conservative side. Peggy Noonan is actually trying to sprinkle her Reagan dust on Tubby:
As for the Republicans, we always feel now we’re picking a government to manage our decline. But when Mr. Trump met with the Journal’s editors last month, he spoke for a moment with excitement about how America “can be so rich and so successful.” He described watching the arms come out and catch the SpaceX rocket. “It was good old Elon. It was him, he’s amazing.”
That chord he was trying to hit—and tried to hit in late rallies—is one America yearns to hear. They want the old sense that their kids are being launched into a society and culture that’s healthy and vital. Exuberance, expansion, Musk to Mars, drill, baby, drill—we’re going to be exciting again!
Ronald Reagan was a piece of shit, but compare his “Morning in America” routine to the ravings of Trump, whose signal promise (which he affirmed right after the election) is to deport millions of immigrants and whose goons are already vowing to arrest his enemies. I think Noonan has achieved peak wetbrain.
I'm old and I was old then too but how did I miss this?
The title comes from not-yet-governor-elect Mario Cuomo on election night 1982. And I doubt he was any more nervous than millions of your fellow Americans are in these closing hours of this campaign. My final thoughts about the closing and the outcome will be in Monday morning’s edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – which will be FREE to everyone on the mailing list, paying subscriber or not, so now is an excellent time to sign up!
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed tentative support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to order the removal of fluoride from water supplies during a potential second Trump term, saying that it “sounds OK to me.”
“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”
It’s really wild that in 2024 a major presidential candidate is giving the old okey-doke to a straight-up Cold War era, John Birch, General Jack D. Ripper conspiracy theory. I mean, I didn’t think this was a thing with even most of what I guess we have to call mainstream crackpots — the sort of anti-vaxx, Pizzagate nuts who are now a major part of the Republican coalition. I expect most of the people who were railing about fluoridation in the 1960s are dead. Maybe it’s their version of retro — you know, like That 70s Show.
But what’s even more depressing, in a way, is Trump’s sure-why-not response. We know he’s not at all interested in policy as such (any more than ordinary Republicans are, any more) and will say anything to rile his rubes. We expect him to, for example, spread racist and misogynist fables like Haitian pet-eaters and post-birth abortions; that’s standard operating procedure for conservatives, which he mainly just makes more lurid. But if he and his minions are going back eighty years to fish out crazy ideas we’d all forgotten about, what’s next? The theory of the Four Humours? Spontaneous generation of disease? Phlogiston? If it’s retro anything it’s the Dark Ages.
Part of why this is so important is there is literally no depth to which these people will not sink and take us with them.
Anyway, last week’s REBID freebies – well, events proceed so rapidly that the premises of these items might seem untimely to some; however, as the saying goes literature is news that stays news and literature is what I’m dishing out here, see!
So even though no one probably remembers the difference between Biden saying “garbage” and that dipshit at the Trump rally saying “garbage,” the Prestige Press rolling in it is still funny. And on a more serious tip, in my view the WaPo/Bezos bullshit is just about an isolated in-kind campaign contribution from a billionaire to a fascist, but about the way normal people – that is, not just rightwing soreheads -- are coming to view the press and what they may expect from it in the future. Meantime, good night and good luck!
I love Jill Scott and this song but had never before heard this live stretch-out. Nice!
It’s just barely Friday, still, but I’m coming in under the wire to tell you fuck that piece of shit Jeff Bezos. In a way, he and his fucked-up interference with the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement – that is, blocking it because the board wanted to endorse Harris and Bezos, as a client of the federal government (or is it vice-versa?), obviously felt it necessary to suck up to Trump because he knows if that fat fuck wins then sucking up is the whole game – is just a symptom of the parasitic hypercapitalist infection that is literally destroying our democracy.
But saying Bezos is “just a symptom” is like saying Hitler was just a symptom of fascism because there were other fascists running around and he was just one man. Sure, the problem is bigger than Bezos, but he’s a pretty fucking big problem all by himself. He’s the second richest person in America next to Musk, who is also a fascist piece of shit who should be taxed into oblivion, just as all these hyperrich democracy-hating supervillains should be taxed into oblivion. At least.
That we allow such a small group of freakish men whose primary qualification is luck (in the genetic lottery and/or investment decisions) to hoard so much wealth and the power that comes with it has had an absurdly distorting effect on democracy – as is ably shown by this one rich cunt smacking down the board of the newspaper he bought to prevent them from making their endorsement. No wonder FDR taxed their asses off. Not only did (and, God knows, does) America need the money, we have to stop allowing rich straight-up fascists to create power bases in direct opposition to democracy.
I mean look at these goddamn people – the deranged apartheid clinger Musk, the literal vampire Thiel, and Bezos who blows his incalculable wealth on trips to space (fawned over by his WaPo lickspittle Megan McArdle) and, we now see, collusion with the dark forces we thought we’d seen an end to in World War Two. They’re at least as much of a threat as Tubby and it’s about time the people who profess to speak for the rest of us did something about it.
I will only add: It's really something that the MAGA creeps who are forever yelling about "Big Tech" "Censorship" (like JD Vance) are getting the election handed to them by guys like Musk, Thiel, and Bezos.
Really barreling into the election now, as you can tell by the kind of crap rightwing papers are trying to put over. The Washington nee Moonie Times keeps shooting me “news alerts” like this:
It’s all Mad Libs at this point: Harris FLIP-FLOPPED on TRANS RIGHTS in BORDER CRISIS. Oh, and if you aren’t convinced Jill Stein is working to elect Trump, maybe you’ll notice that Trump supporters are sure working to promote Stein:
Friday ‘Round-the-Horn come on a Saturday this week, as the Pogo peeps used to say. Well, we’re all busy and deserve a smidge of slack.
Out of the five regular Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions this past week – yes, I’m there Monday through Friday, like Eyewitness News or Good Morning America, the hardest working man in Substack business – I’m releasing two to gen pop.
Some ragged guy was playing this on the train. Slaps, is that still the term?
Late again, Bullwinkle! And I’m busy and must be brief. I will only say in addition to the Free REBID Posts announcement (yes, soon, friends, be patient) that this has been a banner week for disinfo and misinfo, with dicks like Marco Rubio declaring the recent positive U.S. jobs report a fraud and, especially, Elmo and his bots claiming the administration isn’t sending help to the Helene-hit districts. It reminds me that, before the Crushing Boer took it over, Twitter was a valuable source of news and information, and now it’s just a perch to take pot-shots at the fakes and feebs who run rampant on it.
I hate to give vibes-based reasons for voting the right way, as there are plenty of more solid ones (like the other guys are fascists with a Nazi program), but a valid motivation for shoving all the way back on the MAGA bullshit is that, despite their self-portrayal as champions of the common people, they’re mobbed up with the most evil billionaires with the craziest dystopian plans for any of us who aren’t in their Big Club, and they’re so confident of their ultimate victory that they’re showing their asses even now.
OK, here you go: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down free issues for non-subscribers for the week – one, my debate notes from Tuesday. I can understand the people who are mad that Walz didn’t go after the asshole more aggressively; I myself would have been pleased to see the bark stripped off him. (I bet some of you would have preferred Al Franken to be the Minnesotan in charge of smacking up Vance.) Some say that’s just “not him,” and that may be true, but I’m guessing the Harris campaign wants Walz to be earnest old uncle Tim as a point of difference from the competition – vote for us if you don’t wish to be ruled by madman -- and coached him to preserve that equity rather than get mad and blur the distinction. I also share the doubters’ concern that, in playing Concern rather than Fuck You, Walz came over as less butch than Vance, and that risks turning off the knuckleheads. But you know what? They’re lost already – Harris needs to maximize the sane-people vote.
The other freebie is another episode of Received Opinion, where the pundits celebrate Trump’s New Leaf, yet again, in the nanosecond gap between I Will Help The Suffering Multitudes and I Will Kill All The Foreigners.
We had lunch at a Turkish restaurant and much of the pleasure was in the Turkish pop playing in the bakcground.
The mental disintegration of Tubby is getting harder for his enablers in the Prestige Press to normalize, but they keep trying. Yesterday when Zelensky had to meet with Trump to protect Ukraine’s interests, Trump ranted to reporters afterward that the beleaguered wartime leader – who had to maintain an embarrassed silence while standing next to him – had announced there was “absolutely nothing wrong” with Trump’s 2019 attempt to strong-arm him into incriminating Joe Biden (for which Trump was first impeached). This is not only untrue but nuts; Trump's behavior was more appropriate to a lunatic who thinks he’s president than someone who actually had the job and wants it back.
Hilariously the Murdoch propaganda sheet New York Post actually got closer to truthfully characterizing this event with their headline, “Trump praises Zelensky in Trump Tower after accusing him of ‘nasty little aspersions’” than the Washington Post, which soberly declared “Trump meets with Zelensky, opening new chapter in a fraught relationship.” The New York Post didn’t get religion – it just went for the soap-opera angle to sell papers. Thus in their crassness they at least gave a glimpse of the weird pettiness of Trump’s act, while people who read the classier paper could skim the news and think “Famous foreigner met with both world leaders, everything is normal,” which is of course the Prestige Press’ suicidal strategy for this election campaign.
We who have free souls, it touches us not – and that’s why one of the free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down posts this week is about pushing back on this fluffery and calling the MAGA philosophy and behavior just what it is – fascist, even Nazi. Yeah, I know there are simps out there who’ll cover their ears and wince when you do that, but they’re hopeless. You want people who are only getting the soft-soap to focus on the hard reality, and it makes more sense to tell them what’s Nazi about these guys – and it is puh-lenty – than to try and chase down every stupid obfuscation by the Access Annies.
The other freebie is about the Olivia Nuzzi nonsense and that, too, has to do with how people who – for reasons I can’t guess – chose a career in journalism cheerfully betray their craft by loudly defending the anti-ethics of one of their superstars. They act like they don’t know what’s unethical about a reporter having a romantic relationship with a candidate while slagging their opponent, though I’m sure they get drilled on this sort of thing at their expensive journalism schools. It’s as if the confusion is not over what behavior is wrong, but rather what right and wrong even are.
Hey greybeards! Sounds pretty good, huh? 2017. Modern stuff's hard to keep up with, but nice when you catch it.
I keep starting these F 'R-T-H posts with variations of "Wotta week, huh?" and I'm beginning to feel like I'm actually summoning the mayhem that inevitably escalates thereafter. Maybe it’s time to rechristen this feature “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up” in honor of our veterans.
Oh, and the Prestige Media Pantsing Proceeds Apace, with Maggie “Access Annie” Haberman blubbering that an “industry” (low-paying, believe me!) “on the left” that is “dedicated toward attacking the media,” and she wants everyone to know she and her fellow media swells are working darn hard not be Very Bias in their coverage of the guy who wants to deport millions of people and spreads racist lies to his millions of deranged followers.
Minutes later we all find out Olivia “Forget Sleepy Joe, RFK Jr. is Where It's At” Nuzzi got suspended by New York magazine because she’d been having a “relationship” (no tongues, she swears) with the man himself. Very “how it stated/how it’s going,” that.
And we haven’t even discussed that Mark Robinson shit! I’m not one to kink-shame, though as always with kinky conservatives there’s a big honking gap between the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s Death to Sexual Deviants policy and his pee-and-porn shadow life. Come on man, be free! As for the Black Nazi stuff, well, you have to remember it’s a significant part of his base.
It has been observed that it will be hard for Democrats to use this material against him because so much of it is unacceptable in family-friendly media, but I think if they play it right the long bleeped-out sections with do the job fine.
