Showing posts sorted by date for query "normal people". Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query "normal people". Sort by relevance Show all posts

Friday, April 01, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


 Sure, insistent bass and jangly guitars, why not, still cool 

Here’s a freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, about the new thing on the right wing, which is GROOMERS -- that is, yelling it at people who oppose anti-gay laws like the Don’t Say Gay mess in Florida, or at Disney for having cartoons with gay characters. 

If you’re a normal person you understand this to be an accusation that the person or company is trying to get children to have sex with adults. This is a very serious charge indeed, and one that normal people would be unlikely to believe without substantial proof -- that is, something considerably more than registration in the Democratic Party and a belief that gay people are normal and what’s actually perverse is acting like their very existence is a threat to children. In fact, normal people would probably find making such charges absent proof to be a repulsive act, and wonder what the hell is wrong with the accuser. 

If, however, you are a QAnon type, as about a quarter of Republicans are, you believe all Democrats are part of the Spirit Cooking Pizzagate Sex Perv Conspiracy, and these accusations will excite you to vote and march and perhaps commit violent crimes

This is why you’ve seen conservatives spreading the accusation in weird stories like the Fox News testimonial of one Kristan Hawkins -- a concerned mom and, coincidentally, president of Students for Life of America -- that the cartoon Turning Red, with its symbolic allusion to a girl’s first period and its tween crushes (it's rated PG, for parental guidance), “grooms children for abortions and sexual promiscuity… Disney leadership is actively pushing children out of Neverland and directly into an adult’s sexualized world, where they can be groomed for others enjoyment.”

As you might imagine, Rod Dreher is totally out of control on this -- here are some of his allusions to grooming from just the past week:

Mickey Mouse is a groomer...

Most people are uncomfortable with gender ideology now, but a generation or two raised on woke Disney, and all of woke Disney’s allies in the Cathedral, will likely have been tamed, co-opted, and groomed...

Most Americans do not want their little kids groomed by woke classroom ideologues to embrace a queer identity...

Americans are broadly tolerant of trans people, but they correctly draw the line at grooming children. I hope that the suits at the Walt Disney Company, the leading corporate groomer of children, are soiling their pants over these poll numbers...

If we as a country and as a society cannot protect our children from having their minds colonized by these groomers, what use are we?...

UPDATE: Groomers. They are all groomers...

Etc. Perhaps the most rancid thing about this is the way the slur-throwers insist they’re not really saying what they’re clearly saying and hoping their loony followers will believe -- Dreher, again, in his story (I’m not even kidding) “Democrats: Party of Groomers”:

About the term “groomers”: it’s usually used to describe pedophiles who are preparing innocent kids for sexual exploitation. I think it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning: an adult who wants to separate children from a normative sexual and gender identity, to inspire confusion in them, and to turn them against their parents and all the normative traditions and institutions in society. It may not specifically be to groom them for sexual activity, but it is certainly to groom them to take on a sexual/gender identity at odds with the norm. And it’s working…

The passive locution “it is coming to have a somewhat broader meaning” suggests Dreher believes he has Humpty Dumpty power over the general understanding of common English words, which given his ineptitude as a wordsmith is rich. But you don’t have to be particularly skilled to throw shit, though it does help if you can keep people from noticing that your hands are covered with it. 

Thursday, March 24, 2022

COURT AND STARK.

I have released today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, which manages to convey all the thrills and much of the bullshit of the Ketanji Jackson Brown hearings in just a few minutes. 

As I mentioned earlier on Twitter, Republicans have brought culture war gibberish to SCOTUS confirmation hearings before, but the level of it in these hearings is off the charts, and I know why: Because if conservatives revealed in these hearings what they really want out of the Court, normal Americans would recoil in horror. (In fact, outside the chambers, Republican Senator Mike Braun denounced Loving v Virginia and Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn denounced Griswold v Connecticut; it was as if they compelled to expose themselves -- or to test the waters.)

Thus they wave children’s books and quiz the judge on female anatomy to distract from their malicious judicial agenda. Their rubes, instead of complaining that their Senators didn’t stop this black lady from furthering darkening the Court, will feel satisfied that they made a big stink against Wokemob Cancelculture, and (they hope) ordinary people will only notice that the usual dull yammering noise about the usual stupid topics is going on, and ignore their more sinister purpose.

Thursday, March 17, 2022

THE RUSH-HOUR REENACTORS: STILL HERE, STILL DOUCHEBAGS.

Today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie (and there’s plenty more where it came from, and cheap, so subscribe today!) is an update on the Freedom Convoy that’s become a minor nuisance in the city of Washington but major fantasy object for wingnut crackpots across America. 

The convoy is, as I’ve mentioned previously, political cosplay on the order of the Hard Hats, the Tea Party, Duck Dynasty, and Joe the Plumber, meant to make a bunch of well-funded political operatives look like the Voice of the People -- or, rather, of people who are more salt-of-the-earth than you because they dress like Sons of Anarchy extras. 

Normal people don’t seem to be going for it, though, which has led some of the brethren to claim the Deep State killed their spotlight by making Russia invade Ukraine, like this bluecheck clown with 18.5K followers:


This delusional level of self-regard is, as you'll see in the report, general among convoy participants and supporters alike.

It just gets more surreal: In its latest report, the Washington Post talks to a convoy guy who came into town to stroll around the Mall with his granddaughter, who was wearing a Let’s Go Brandon shirt to “spread the word.” That's doing your part, citizen! (The Post mentions that this cowboy "drives a F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup truck" -- you may have missed that the majority of the convoyers are not big rigs at all.)

The Post also had this from the nightly peroration from one of the Head Cosplayers In Charge:

At the group’s evening rally Tuesday night, co-organizer Mike Landis referenced Washington residents in saying the group will “keep going back every day and just annoying the crap out of them.” 

The convoy people really think their hatred of “Washington” as a synecdoche for Big Gummint gives them cause and the right to play “I’m Not Touching You” with normal people going to work and living their lives. If a bunch of art directors camped out in Alabama and went into Mobile every day to “annoy the crap” out of the residents, of course, you’d hear the screams of outrage in Antarctica.  

Thursday, March 03, 2022

TRUCK NUTS.


I have un-paywalled an issue of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down about two aspects of the Freedom Convoy thing: 1.) How the press has been talking up their alleged truck invasion of Washington, D.C. for weeks, but only a few alleged Freedom Convoyeurs have as yet visited our nation's capital, and 2.) the fondness of conservatives for protest movement that are basically cosplay -- the Tea Party, the Hardhats, the Bundys, etc. (The dress-up is always hyper-masculine, though they make occasional exceptions such as the Brooks Brothers Riot.)

At this writing the Washington Post, which has been flogging the thing at least as much as any other media outlet, reports that 

Despite organizers touting numbers in the thousands, Indiana State Police spokesman Captain Ron Galaviz said the convoy amounted to fewer than 300 vehicles when it was in Indiana this week, and a majority were passenger vehicles, not large trucks.

Now, as a normal American, you might look at that and think the thing is not so much brave Pigpen and the Rubber Duck running a Breaker 1-9 Braveheart juggernaut of big rigs to smash through the toll gate into the DC Swamp and kick some libtard ass, and more like convoy of campers coming to act like assholes for a few hours and take in the Air & Space Museum. 

But rightwing sites want you to think it's clobberin' time: "ON THE HIGHWAY, Okla.," datelines the wingnut Epoch Times, "—The largest truck convoy in the United States has grown in size since departing California and is attracting thousands of supporters as it makes its way toward the East Coast." "Liberals thought the U.S Trucker convoy is going nowhere," snarls 2020 Conservative (warning: site is mostly pop-ups), "well, they just got pranked. 'The People’s Convoy' is getting big and the D.C. swamp continues to struggle with their plans to counter the convoy." 

"Struggle with their plans" apparently means "put the National Guard on standby," so if any of these cowboys has been hypnotized by the hype into trying Jan. 6 II they're going to be hilariously disappointed. I expect some light MAGA tourist action and then the usual Great Forgotting -- just like after the "Ride For The Constitution" convoy that wingnuts claimed was going the paralyze the capital during the budget shutdown fight in 2013, and which also turned out to be bullshit. As I reported at the time

Anyway the Ride was breathlessly covered by rightbloggers such as Susan Duclos, who informed readers that “already one report has come out about cops pulling over portions of the convoy” and ran a picture of trucks on a highway as evidence that the protest was in full effect.

The great thing about Ride for the Constitution, Moonbattery said, was that “you don’t have to drive a truck to take part.” This was apparently how the overwhelming majority of supporters chose to participate.

Plus ça change, huh?

Friday, January 07, 2022

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Boy, that must have been some party.

I noticed a bunch of liberals objecting on Twitter to this John F. Harris/Politico story, “We Are In a New Civil War … About What Exactly?” Sample:

If this is a 21st century version of 19th century disunion, shouldn’t it be more obvious what the war, at bottom, is all about?...

Only in recent years have we seen foundation-shaking political conflict — both sides believing the other would turn the United States into something unrecognizable — with no obvious and easily summarized root cause. What is the fundamental question that hangs in the balance between the people who hate Trump and what he stands for and the people who love Trump and hate those who hate him? This is less an ideological conflict than a psychological one.

Now, this is Politico so I guess one has to be sensitive to its bothsidesing agenda (“the Trump phenomenon defies explanation,” Harris says -- ha, yeah, if your first acquaintance with the GOP was Romney 2012!) But I take his point to this extent: that all the yap about civil war -- and despite all claims to the contrary, including Harris’, as I have written before “civil war” really is overwhelmingly a rightwing thing -- it’s just ridiculous. 

And I’m not calling it ridiculous because I don’t think these guys wouldn’t do it if they could -- on the contrary, as polling and experience show, conservatives are now extremely comfortable with violence against liberals. I call it ridiculous because they have no actual complaint even remotely worth having a civil war over. Here’s the top of an email I got from one of the many rightwing mailing lists to which I subscribe:

Now, I ask you: What normal American would read something like that without wondering: What the fuck is this guy talking about, America is a "dystopian, tyrannical state"? 

It’s like when Rod Dreher goes on about “soft totalitarianism” and constantly invokes non-soft totalitarianism when talking about it (e.g., “There is no Stalin of the Social Justice Warriors, but that in no way means they are not dangerous”), but when someone (someone who’s not a mark, I mean) takes him to mean what he seems to mean, he weasels, “do I say that the libs are ‘just like’ the Bolsheviks? No, not at all,” and then explains that the liberalism “seeks domination and conformity not by imposing pain and terror on people, but rather by manipulating their access to status and comfort.” Which sounds like a pretty weak kind of “totalitarianism” in the first place, and when explicated it  turns out to mean a bunch of just-so stories about how everyone’s too scared to say trans women are men because they might lose their jobs -- which is 99 44/100% Pure Bullshit -- or that a racist getting kicked off a social media platform for flouting its terms of service is the Coming of the Camps.

The next time one of these nuts tells you about the intolerable tyranny under which Americans live, ask him what he means, specifically. Watch his hands, though. 

Want a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie? This week, along with the January 6 anniversary one I mentioned yesterday, there’s also Amy Wax’s talk radio audition. That leaves three very fine issues you could have read with a subscription, and more where that came from. Sign up and treat yourself

Wednesday, September 15, 2021

SO HOW COULD I EVER REFUSE/ I FEEL LIKE I WIN WHEN I LOSE.

Republicans are addicted to feeling like winners even when they lose -- witness their never-ending claims that the 2020 presidential election, which Tubby lost by seven million votes, was stolen -- and this is evident in their reaction to Gavin Newsom’s lopsided victory in last night’s California recall, which challenger/lunatic Larry Elder preemptively claimed would be stolen from him as well (though since his 2-to-1 trouncing he’s been pretty quiet about that). Jordan Davidson at The Federalist:

Multiple outlets officially called the referendum on removing the governor a failure on Tuesday night, less than one hour after polls closed. Some California residents were stunned…

Coulda used some corroboration for the “stunned” claim, Jordan.

…but others said they are determined to use the power they amassed to create the recall to keep fighting to hold the governor accountable for his tyranny.

So Californians either were literally stunned that the guy who led all the polls won the election, or they were freshly committed to resistance to the tyrant Newsom. Given this consensus I don’t know how Republicans keep losing out there. 

At National Review, Philip Klein said the problem was “Larry Elder Peaked Too Early” -- that is, Californians knew who would be governor if they ousted Newsom and their blood ran cold (“That was plenty of time for Newsom to turn the race from a referendum on him, to a more conventional governor’s race between him and Elder… that was the sort of race that Elder had no chance of winning” LOL). 

Klein’s colleague Kyle Smith took a similar tack: “A recall election that was a referendum on Newsom had a chance to succeed, but, not unreasonably, once the possibility of ejecting Newsom entered the imagination, voters started to wonder who might succeed him.” 

I wonder if these guys ever consider what the effect might be on normal people who stumble upon their stories and read how the Republicans could totally win if only the voters had no idea who and what they are. 

Then again, what do they care: conservatives can afford to cruise with this lazy and absurd shit because the prestige press keeps backing them up. When it’s all tallied Newsom stands to take two-thirds of the vote, yet look at all the headlines today that say he “survived.” 65% looks more like thriving to me. And with spectacularly bothsider coverage from the likes of CNN’s Chris Cillizza (“Tuesday night was, weirdly, a very good night for Larry Elder's political future”) and Kasie Hunt (“Democrats have a tough needle to thread both in California & nationwide… Democrats need to prove they can govern for EVERYBODY"), Republicans need never leave their bubble of contentment except to scream “fraud” and do insurrection.  

Friday, September 03, 2021

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Living in one’s own world has its advantages,
but you do miss a lot of good pop music.
Were these guys as big as they sound like they should have been?

I have two freebies from the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter for non-subscribers (who really ought to be subscribig and getting this primo content on the regular!): Republicans explaining their inexplicable outrage that we got out of Afghanistan, and the one I showed you yesterday about the Texas abortion law

Speaking of the latter, I have to say I’m astonished by folks online telling me not to use the term “American Taliban” because they consider it Islamophobic. I don’t get it. I don’t associate Islam as practiced by Muslims in America, or even in most of the world, with the Taliban. Insofar as I understand them, it seems the complainants object to using foreign Islamic monsters to shame American Christian monsters. But this is the entire point of analogies, particularly in political discourse. If I compare Texas lawmakers to, for example, the Stasi because their system similarly relies on fear and informants, I’m not unfairly shaming the East German people -- I’m showing up the similarities between past events that we all know are bad and current events propagandists are busily trying to whitewash, to help you see how things really are. And normal people understand analogies, whereas lefties saying "don’t say bad things about the Taliban" may be, uh, misconstrued. What am I missing?

Wednesday, August 11, 2021

BLAST FROM THE PAST.

The man we call Ole Perfesser 'round these here parts (Glenn Reynolds, for those blessedly unaware of our old routines) is still in the blog game. I don't look in on him much anymore -- but I don't mean that as some back-handed way of saying he's irrelevant. On the contrary: He remains very relevant to modern conservatism, which makes sense as he is one of the people who made it what it is today, as was evident in the last post of his that I mentioned here, just before the 2020 election, in which he wrote:  

What is going on in media now is not normal. It is, in fact, a species of coup. Should Biden win, many will regard his victory as essentially illegitimate because of this, and they will have a good argument.

This is the sort of thing that can, and did, encourage insurrection. And that's why I don't usually read him -- his sentiments, considered unique and bracing back in the day, are now carried by a thousand MAGA grift sites that your senile relatives devour (as seen in the "Hardcore" series at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, a project from an old blog guy to which you definitely should subscribe). 

Anyway the Perfesser is in the New York Post today, telling his followers that he saw some snooty liberals making snotty comments about the unvaccinated, and that proves snooty snotty liberals, aka the "laptop-class 'meritocrats,'" are not trying to get conservatives to wear masks and take vaccines because they actually want to halt the spread of COVID-19 and its variants that are raging through red strongholds, but as a way of actin' like they're somethin' better'n them and "garnering high-fives from people who agree and, ultimately, creating an ideological veneer for unquestioned elite rule." So why should you comply? Better to reign in a disease-ridden hellhole America than serve in Wokeistan! No, really, read his closing:

It’s also easy for politicians to capitalize on. They thrive on division, and on passions that distract people from what they’re actually doing. But if you’re making the country worse to feel good about yourself, maybe you’re not such a good person after all. And if you’re falling for politicians’ tricks, maybe you’re not as smart as you think.

So if you're considering wearing a mask in the grocery store just because some liberal told you to, Perfesser Reynolds is here to tell you it's just another "politicians' trick." And to think you almost fell for it! 

(And don't even ask about Godlstein.)

UPDATE. Elsewhere in the Perfesser's home state:


The message is getting around! 

Friday, June 04, 2021

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


Local radio was playing a bunch of power-to-the-people tunes.
I know this one's cheese, but I love it.

•   OK, kids, here are the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week -- this scene at Mar-a-Lago, in which Tubby talks turkey with his least favorite in-law; and today's fresh-as-daisies ripped-from-today's-headlines item on how the wingnut handling of the Lab Leak story fits with their Rigged Election fantasy -- and the part played in it by éminence Grey Goose Peggy Noonan. Yes, it's not just the Brown Shirts and the von Papens anymore -- even the little von Hindenburgs are getting into the act now. Exciting times!

Precisely why you should subscribe. I actually withdrew one story that had been made public because I'm through being Mr. Goodbar, people. It's not like I'm making Andrew Sullivan money, because unlike Captain Caliper's Substack mine does not flatter the imaginary grievances of honky douchebags, but tells the hard truth to a uncomprehending and contemptuous world with the satire and exegesis it, alas, is too depraved to know it needs. Get in on the ground floor of my lost cause and subscribe!

•   Couldn't we all use a little good news? Of course, that any one of these gruesome specimens will probably be an Ohio Senator is not good news, but it's nice to see that even Buckeye Republicans can apparently smell the fraudulence of Thiel-backed fascist J.D. Vance:


I've had this guy's number from jump (a Rod Dreher endorsement is usually as much warning as you need). And while I can sort of understand the appeal of some GOP assholes -- I've read enough Nick Fury comics to get why a certain kind of guy would like the insufferable Dan Crenshaw, for example -- so many of the media's favorite rightwing grifters are so obviously repulsive that I can't imagine normal people cottoning to them, whatever their politics. Ron DeSantis, for instance, seems to me a replacement-level 50s B-movie goon whom Lee J. Cobb told to get a manicure and a nice suit and try and look gubernatorial. Mike Pence is a wet sack of nothing and Greg Abbott is a pig-eyed creep. If any of these people tried to sell you an encyclopedia, tell me you wouldn't shut the door in his face! So it's encouraging to know that people see through at least one of these wet noodles.

Friday, May 07, 2021

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.


James Chance plays James Brown.

•   There are a few unlocked Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stories on the site, but I warn you, I'll be scaling way back on these in the future in order to keep the flow of Soup For My Family going. So subscribe, ya cheap bastards! Meantime here's the newest: An announcement we may expect at any moment from the latest vacant rightwing celebrity candidate, Caitlyn Jenner. I note most of the rightwing news coverage of her absurd candidacy has been heavy on embarrassed silence -- even Rod Dreher, who's been pitching a full-body fit about trans people for years, has yet to weigh in. I see tradcath National Review writer Michael Brendan Dougherty has a paywalled thing up dek'd thus: "Caitlyn Jenner’s campaign has an undeniable, if corrupting, allure that leaves viewers — ahem, voters — wondering what will happen next." You know who else had undeniable if corrupting allure! I won't sully my conscience with a subscription, but if someone sent me the text I'd indulge my morbid curiosity. 

UPDATE -- Ugh I got to see Dougherty's first graf:
When Caitlyn Jenner said to Sean Hannity, “I love California,” I totally bought it. Despite my reservations and curled lip. The words were breathy, nostalgic, and weird, especially in that nerdy voice coming from behind that dishy hairdo. But I believed it in a way I’ve never believed anything that Sean Hannity has said. And if the Wheaties-box-Olympian-turned-reality-TV-star is going to upend California politics — a prospect about which I have my doubts and dreads — it is because, unlike the normal Republican pols, there is a real emotion behind the artificial appearance.
Or to paraphrase the old joke about Moses:  You know it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit, but business is business! NR cuts it off there, but I was actually able to hear the rest via audio version. It's too stupid to call for a thorough, diligent transcription, but here's the "best" line: "With Jenner, the organs may have been misplaced, but the glands are still pumping hormones in there somewhere." Otherwise it's the usual snarls against liberal Cali -- there's "human excrement in the street," plus, Dougherty complains, the houses cost too much! -- and ends with a half-hearted nag about gender activism, but in general he approves because lol, owned much libs. Wait'll he and the rest of them find out Jerry Brown isn't immortal and can't be called back to rebalance the books after Jenner fucks it all up. 

•   One of the most infuriating things I've seen from the alleged "Party of the Working Class" GOP is the draconian measures employed by some of its governors (more on the way, I'm sure) to force their unemployed to fill the shit-paying jobs that have gone begging pronto or get kicked into the street. Apparently the many assholes blubbering that you just can't get a good dishwasher for pocket change anymore have jerked the Republicans' chains and they in turn are putting the whip to their less-fortunate citizens.  

South Carolina governor Henry McMaster and Montana governor Greg Gianforte are actually going to deny their people the extra federal unemployment benefits they've been getting, and Florida's Ron DeSantis -- or as I like to call him, Chunky Scott Walker -- says he's re-instituting work-search documentation requirements for Floridians on the dole, so if they can't prove they hit all the fast-food joints in town looking for a sub-living-wage, they're cut off. 

I'm sure these assholes are also against the $15 federal minimum wage. And all of them sing the same refrain from the wingnut donor-class hymnal: "Employers can't find workers."  The right of their citizens to a decent job doesn't exist, but the right of their donors to an involuntary cheap labor force does.  

Naturally scumbags like Paul Mirengoff at Power Line ("ANOTHER SENSIBLE DECISION FROM RON DESANTIS") are all in favor. I can hardly think of more to say about it, except that if Dante's underworld actually existed they'd need several more circles to handle all the traffic. 

Friday, April 30, 2021

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Ah, that's the stuff. I miss noise.
(Can you believe they did this in 2003? The ex-kids are alright!) 

•   Biden's speech appears to have gone down a treat among normal people -- naturally, as it was delivered by an avuncular old man who already did a good job of delivering COVID vaccinations and is now promising to similarly fix other fucked-up shit. The brethren are furiously spinning it. Ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson first tried "Republicans Should Be Encouraged By The Biden Speech," on the grounds that it was "a desperate grab for control" that's "going to cause more inflation and that's going to hurt Biden" (Gasp! Not inflation! Someone get out the old WIN pins!) and anyway "the Democrats are headed into disarray... Joe Biden's days are numbered and he knows it."

Erickson must have looked at the polls, because the next day he was claiming "two days after Joe Biden’s first address to Congress, more people are talking about Tim Scott’s response than Joe Biden’s speech." If this were true, since Erickson thinks Biden's speech was a dog I don't see how that's supposed to be bad for Democrats; also, to the extent people are talking about Scott, it's certainly attributable to fascination that there's still a black Republican in Congress, and that he claims liberals called him the n-word. (Didn't say who, though! Maybe he's saving it for his autobiography.) This routine is catnip to Erickson, who praises Scott for "exposing how must [sic] the progressive wokes really hate this country" and "reminding Americans how out of touch the elite tastemakers and opinion setters are." Candace Owens, Sheriff David Clark, and Ali Alexander must be pissed, all their dreams of joining Ron DeSantis on a You're The Real Racist GOP Unity Ticket having crumbled. (I wonder whether Scott's speech moved the 47% of Republicans who think Derek Chauvin is innocent.)

Peggy Noonan does her bit, and it's a chef's casserole of rightwing received opinion. Being smarter than Erickson she knows she'd better acknowledge that Biden seems nice, but then it's Coffee Break Over Everyone Back On Their Heads: After the snottiness that has become the new GOP SOP on Biden's social distancing and masking ("playacting Pandemic Theatre" -- guess she thinks gin kills the germs before they can get to her lungs), and some How Will You Pay for It posturing, it's time to Reacharound Across The Aisle:

The president said again he is eager to negotiate with Republicans. There isn’t much evidence of this, but here are the reasons he should be treating them with respect and as equal partners. It would be good for the country to see the Senate actually working—negotiating, making deals, representing constituencies. It would be good for the Democrats to show they’re not just playing steamroller and flattening the Republicans; they’re reasoning because they’re reasonable. Also they need Republicans to co-own legislative outcomes because whatever they are they’ll be very liberal. Negotiation and compromise...

I'm seriously asking: Does anyone believe this shit anymore? After Tubby paid off Republican donors with his trillion-dollar-plus Tax and Jobs Act, and all the pandemic spending, people have started losing their fear of deficit spending; also, they know economically things are fucked up and bullshit and even Republican voters want a higher minimum wage -- but the Republican Party is still blubbering about deficits and bootstraps, preaching Reaganism to generations who weren't around to be bamboozled by it and who probably look upon the artifacts of the Age of Alex P. Keaton with horror and disgust. How are Democrats supposed to negotiate with that?

Noonan alludes to this shift in the vaguest way possible  -- she sees "a deep reconsideration" and Americans "questioning that oldest American tradition: ambition" and seeking "something new, less driven, more communal." That could mean what the left is proposing with anti-racism and mutual aid -- or it could be evangelical home-school Bible rule. I think she sees a replay of the 1970s, when social and political upheavals led to the Reagan reactionary wave on which she built her career. But it's interesting that she won't say out loud where it will go; a true careerist always leaves the door open for a heel-turn. 

•   This week's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies include this one about the stupid Biden Bans Red Meat thing that conservatives were spreading a week ago but you know what? Better you should just go in the front door and look at all the stories that don't have locks next to their descriptors. And then subscribe! I know some of you can afford it. 


Friday, March 05, 2021

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Pure joy.

Here's the end of yet another week of dumbassery, what with Republicans going to great lengths to sabotage the COVID bill and trying to play off the Capitol attack as harmless patriotic hijinx, and especially with the "cancel culture" guff they're using to make themselves look like victims. (Speaking of that, have some free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues on the subject -- one about a boys' adventure series done in by the woke mob, another revealing the talking points for rightwing news outlets covering such stories.)

Even dumber than the Mr. Potato Head and Dr. Seuss bullshit, for my money, was the scandalette these guys tried to cook up about Biden calling the latest anti-masking crazes -- like Greg Abbott's transparent attempt to distract from his Texas power disaster -- "Neanderthal thinking." Wingnuts raised such a stink about it Biden had to send Jen Psaki out to explain it as if the complaint had been made in good faith rather than as howlingly obvious victimization shtick:

Asked whether it was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals while trying to convince state officials to get on board with the White House public health message, Psaki clarified the president was likening the decision to Neanderthal "behavior." 

"The behavior of a Neanderthal, just to be very clear, the behavior of," she said, adding that it was a "reflection of his frustration and exasperation" over some people flouting COVID-19 guidance to help curb the spread of the virus. 

"Whether is was productive to compare governors to Neanderthals" -- get the fuck out of here, less than two months ago your shock-troops were trying to murder Democratic office-holders in the Capitol;  "Neanderthal" is about the most polite thing one could call your cynical and potentially lethal stunts. Yet, at Forbes

Then candidate Joe Biden ran on a campaign to bring back civility to politics, and in his inauguration speech called for unity and an end to our nation's "uncivil war." Yet, President Biden's tone and more importantly the words he used on Wednesday were in stark contrast.

Author Peter Suciu then reproduces a series of incredibly stupid rightwing reactors, some of whom even attempt to make "Neanderthal" the new "deplorable," an insult in which they take pride, as if it were the name of their prison gang. If only Biden had called them douchebags! 

The worst of the lot is Noah Rothman at Commentary. He starts out with standard-issue So Much For The Tolerant Left ordnance ("But the president was never the 'good cop' he pretended to be"). Then he tries to defend Abbott's mask-free decree:

It would have been foolish if, for example, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told his constituents that “everything’s fine” and Texans should “take off your mask” and “forget” about the pandemic. But that wasn’t what he said, nor is that likely to be the outcome of his state’s policies.

What Abbott announced was that “all businesses of any type are allowed to open 100 percent.” The executive orders put in place during the pandemic, including masking requirements, would be rescinded because “people and businesses don’t need the state telling them how to operate.” It would have been a premature declaration of victory over the pandemic if Abbott had stopped there. But he didn’t.

Abbott also urged Texans to exercise “personal vigilance.” “Removing statewide mandates does not end personal responsibility,” the governor added. While his orders will foreclose on criminal penalties for people who do not wear masks, businesses can still impose masking requirements on their patrons and deny them service if they do not comply...

I am confident of two things: First, that thanks to COVID-19, most normal people understand (as polls show that they do) that government has to take a major role in combating epidemics; and second, that as soon as the curse is seen to have lifted, conservatives will get busy trying to portray government's role as a total disaster and saying that everything would have been hunky dory in March 2020 if only the Free Market and Trump had been allowed to kill even more people so that the survivors could have instant herd immunity  -- you know, the same way they talk about the New Deal.

In fact the latter half of Rothman's column is devoted to groundwork for such an effort: He cites people who think Abbott's making a big mistake, and shrugs "They might be right, and it would be terrible if they were. But..."

...the way is littered with predictions about how this virus would operate that mercifully failed to materialize. The innumerable “super spreader events” that weren’t and unfounded fears that states without masking mandates, like Florida, would be overrun with pestilence should lead Texas’ critics to be more cautious. Likewise, the suboptimal performance of states with onerous restrictions on individuals and enterprise alike, including New York and California, have led even the most zealous COVID hawks to throw up their hands in confusion. Uncertainty is the lesson here.

How can we really know anything? Like this mask thing -- sure, flu infections are massively down year-over-year, but can you prove it was masks, libs? Maybe Jesus has something to do with it! 

But there is certainty about one thing: Lifting restrictions now undermines what seems to be the Biden administration’s central objective, which is to assume credit for the pandemic’s decline. 

A lifelong public servant actually getting vaccines into people's arms vs. a thuggish grifter getting his own shot and them making a bunch of everyone else's disappear mysteriously -- sure, let's go with door #2. God, if only our education system taught even a little critical thinking. 

Friday, December 25, 2020

CHRISTMAS 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

It has been noticed elsewhere that the assholes at the Wall Street Journal opinion section have run another of those Defenses of Christmas Villains with which conservatives like to blight our holidays, in this instance pre-redemption Scrooge. Phil Gramm and Mike Solon write "In Defense of Scrooge, Whose Thrift Blessed the World" that the grasping old sinner did well to deprive Bob Cratchit of a living wage and a heated office, and local paupers of handouts, because his capital was instead invested in financial institutions, and thus created prosperity -- "Wages, stagnant for more than 600 years, exploded during the Victorian era—rising from less than $567 a year in 1840 to $1,216 in 1900 (expressed in 1970 dollars)." In 1970, and its dollars, the U.S. median wage was $9,870, so $1,216 ain't so hot, but there were prisons and workhouses so it's all good. 

Columbia's Karl Jacoby debunked a bunch of Gramm's and Solon's bullshit, but the fact is normal people hardly need it; we know by instinct and upbringing what Dickens' message is: it's that of Jesus Christ, and not the phony Christ of corrupt and vicious megachuches but the Christ of Bethlehem and the Sermon on the Mount. Conservatives write and publish atrocities like "In Defense of Scrooge" as in-jokes and taunts, really; look, we can paint this trickle-down bullshit on any subject, even one of your most venerable social-justice stories! You may blanch at this, but elsewhere we'll tell you $2,000 after nine months of pandemic lockdown is too much to spare Because Capitalism, and a bunch of you will swallow that!  

But after all we've been through, I expect the ranks of the gullible are a little thinner than once they were, and will get thinner still especially among the young, and these people will soon enough find the joke getting turned on them.

Normally on Christmas I put Big Star's "Jesus Christ" up top -- big, heroic-in-an-altrock-way music -- but as we leave 2020 and burn the bridge behind us let us have Nilssonesque nostalgia, because just as we cannot and will not let the sour example of the recent unpleasantness rob us of a better future, so we cannot and will not let it rob us of our better past. Let us bring forward all that was wonderful in our history -- in art and social progress -- and add to it, or rather build on it, new triumphs.

Friday, November 20, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 Dunno if the '68 Catch My Soul was any good (anyone see it?)
but Jerry Lee is always worth a listen

•   Hey, don't you wish you knew what Tubby was up to behind the fortifications? Here are some White House scenes from my newsletter, unlocked for non-subscribers: Trump with the vaccine team, and Trump giving Mike Pence some news. Plenty more where that came from, so subscribe: It's one of the few Substacks that aren't about how cancelled the author is! 

•   Conservatives continue their Edgeplay of Trump's attempted coup. At the Examiner Edgelord Byron York explains what's really bad about this straight-up assault on democracy:

Thursday's news conference by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis marked a turning point of sorts in the way some Republicans view the president's challenge to election results around the country. Among those Republicans -- Trump supporters all -- there is concern that the attorneys' sensational theories of election fraud are hurting the president's cause rather than helping it. [Emphasis added]

I mean, it's like Seven Days in May meets the "It's a Good Life" episode of The Twilight Zone, but the main thing for York is, how does this get us to 270+1? The rest of the cabal are only slightly further along the road to "Donald Who?" Rod Dreher feels compelled to tell readers, "if Team Trump can produce meaningful evidence, then we have to take it seriously, no matter how much that ticks off Democrats," before admitting -- convinced, apparently, by his hero Tucker Carlson -- that the Giuliani-Powell stuff is Looney Tunes and Trump lost. But no need for too much soul-searching because bothsides:  

I talk about the Left and its crazy beliefs about the founding of America (e.g., The 1619 Project). But we are seeing the same kind of thing on the Right with this post-election psychodrama. 
Leftists have opinions about historical events; Republicans try to overthrow the will of the people. Same diff! At the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan laments what might have been if only Trump had "acted even remotely normal in his first term, if he’d had the intellectual, emotional and spiritual resources to moderate himself, to act respectably." And if my uncle had tits he'd be my aunt. Clearly these guys are hoping everyone will pull themselves together and get back to electing duller, less volatile authoritarians such as Josh Hawley or Tom Cotton -- unless they won't and choose to stick with Trump, in which case they'll get back to forgetting what was dangerous about him in the first place. 

Friday, October 30, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

When are people going to catch on to Sabrina Chap?

It's the homestretch, boys and girls, and as we might have known the Republicans and their operatives on the courts are trying to steal it. The Boof Kavanaugh opinion on the Supreme Court's Wisconsin election order, the Court's ominous segregation of post-Election-Day mail ballot returns in Pennsylvania, and the Minnesota switcheroo suddenly requiring all mail ballots to be received by Nov. 3 rather than merely postmarked by then -- with Tubby yelling that votes must not be counted after Election Day -- all point to at least an attempted Bush v. Gore 2 and a straight-up gank. The only way around it I can see is to run up the score so much they can't cheat successfully. America expects that every citizen will do their duty. 

On the other hand, Mr. Jonathan Miller points me to  an encouraging sign -- Ole Perfesser Glenn Harlan Beauregard Jubilation T. Reynolds preparing his troops for defeat

What is going on in media now is not normal. It is, in fact, a species of coup. Should Biden win, many will regard his victory as essentially illegitimate because of this, and they will have a good argument.

This is in relation to Glenn Greenwald's "I Been Censored" hissy fit. (Boy, if only I'd still had the Voice gig when I started my Substack; I could have got in on this bullshit.) Can't say I can see the Perfesser's Threepers, Neo-Confederates and Militiamen rallying to the defense of Greenwald -- wait'll they find out he's gay, and that his husband's last name is Miranda!

But most of the brethren express faith in an imminent Red Wave -- based on truck parades, which have replaced boat parades since the unfortunate Lake Travis incident, and other nonsense like this from "Illicit Info" (I warn again clicking their link, it's spammy as hell):

‘Can I Change My Vote’ Trends On Google As Biden Campaign Goes Into Tailspin, Hunter’s Laundry Aired, Debate Lashing [Opinion]

...What if, hypothetically, someone voted early for candidate ‘D’ only to learn that the person they cast their ballot for was … for argument’s sake, … is being blackmailed by a hostile foreign power?  That would be a serious problem IF that were to occur.

Well, apparently there are an increasing number of Americans who have voted early (as nearly 60,000,000 Americans have already done) want to know if they can change their vote.

They then link to a Fox News story and suggest it says "Google searches of the phrase 'can I change my vote' peaked" right after the last Presidential debate and the first wave of Giuliani-Hunter Biden bullshit. Not only is there nothing in the story about whose voters were searching the question -- Illicit Info and Fox News both wait a good long while before revealing that the spike actually happened five days after the debate.  They close:

That fact of the matter is that we do not know, and we will never know, but we will have a much better idea when the election is over and all the votes are counted.

They're as bad at covering their asses as they are getting people to look when they show them. They are right, however, that we do not know. So vote! It ain't illegal yet. 

Friday, October 23, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 
 Locals. They're good.

•    I did a thing for the newsletter (this issue free even to non-subscribers! How can I do it? Low overhead!) about last night's debate. The only way you can paint it as a victory for Tubby is if you grade it solely on yelling, posturing, and other alpha-ape displays of dominance. I certainly don't understand all the people saying, as "Access Maggie" Haberman did, that he "heeded the pleas of his advisers to tone it down." As I observed in the newsletter, that lasted maybe ten minutes. Perhaps Haberman means he sometimes resorted his baby-whisper voice between bellows, but on my TV he was mostly his usual self -- and, as I observed much further back than this, his is not an act that wears well over time, let alone during a pandemic. And who on God's green earth thinks hollering "I'm the least racist person here" over and over again is a winning strategy -- except for total racists, and he's already got them locked up? For the election, I am cautiously optimistic, which is to say frightened rather than despairing. 

•   Speaking of white supremacists, Republican golden boy Madison Cawthorn -- Good looking! Young! Disabled, but charismatically so like Greg Abbott! Running for a safe seat in the South! -- keeps outing himself as a Nazi, and the media keeps outing itself as unable to accept the evidence. Candidate Cawthorn first became famous for his effusions over a visit to "the Fuhrer"'s house in Germany. One could have interpreted his remark charitably, and conservatives did: My very favorite of these attempts is National Review's "Madison Cawthorn Is Not a Nazi." There's a headline that doesn't arouse suspicion! Cawthorn's also been accused of prevaricating about his career and military intention, and of sexual harassment, and of still more fash weirdness:

Cawthorn oddly follows precisely 88 people on Twitter. (88 is white supremacist numerical code for “Heil Hitler.”) He posed for a photo wearing a gun holster emblazoned with a Spartan soldier’s helmet, a symbol associated with far-right gun culture in general and the Oath Keepers specifically.

Also he called his no-work company "SPQR."  But, ho ho, maybe he just doesn't know what he's saying! "It would surprise me if Cawthorn knew that these have become alt-right symbols," tut-tutted Reason's Robby Soave, "just as it would surprise most people to learn that making the OK gesture will get them branded as white nationalists by hate-group watchers." (Not if they're paying attention, it wouldn't.) Regular old newsies cut Cawthorn slack, too; even stories that point out more dumb shit he did refer to him affectionately as a "a 25-year-old in a potentially historic bid for Congress."

Anyway, a few months pass, and now we find Cawthorn's website accused a critical reporter of working "for non-white males, like Cory Booker, who aims to ruin white males running for office.” (Cawthorn took it down but the internet is forever.) Suddenly all Cawthorn's weird fascist tells look a lot harder to excuse away. Not that the Republicans won't try (Ben Shapiro's already covering for him, posting a Cawthorn op-ed that's light on the Nazism) because they want that seat badly. But the next time they and the press back up one of these guys and say, "I can explain everything," we ought to tell them not to bother.  

•   I see Peggy Noonan's making her late push for a Trump comeback ("Did he? Could he?"), claiming he won the debate and achieved the important goal: 

If you wanted or needed an excuse, an out, to vote for Mr. Trump, if you wanted an argument that justified your decision in a conversation in the office, he probably gave you what you need.

First of all, what's with this persistent rightwing theme that Trump can win by giving his followers an excuse rather than a reason? Isn't that a disqualification rather than a recommendation? Secondly, what would "justify your decision in a conversation in the office"? Sheets and pillows? "Russia Russia Russia"? "ACO plus three"? If you're using this gibberish to excuse your vote to your colleagues, you were voting for him already. No leaner, if such a sad creature exists, was waiting for Trump to yell that he was the least racist person in the room to make the leap.

Mr. Trump’s power, recovered Thursday night, is to speak like normal people, so you can understand him without having to translate what he’s saying in your head. 

"Oh, I get it -- he says Blacks Lives Matter is all about killing cops!" 

Trump supporters believe he will win because of his special magic, Trump foes fear he will win because of his dark magic. Pollsters and pundits stare at the data and wonder how to quantify his unfathomable magic.

Pollsters are looking at polls that overwhelmingly show Trump losing and musing upon his "unfathomable magic"?  If it were anyone else I'd say Noonan was counting on Republican election fraud to make her prediction sensible ex post facto (which it could! So defend your vote, people!), but with her I guess it's the leprechaun telling her to burn her credibility.  

•  Oh, I have one more thing to say about this awful Noonan column:

It’s only a poll, but after Gallup, a New York Times/Siena poll asked the same question, and 49% said they were better off.

What’s interesting, though, is that when Siena asked respondents if the country was better off than it was four years ago, only 39% said yes.

What does this mean? No one knows. If the polling is more or less correct, you wonder: Will people vote on their own circumstances or what they perceive to be the country’s?

This is very, very reminiscent of something longtime rightwing buffoon Jeff Godlstein (old-timers will understand why I spelled it that way) claimed in 2006 as a reason why, despite the "good" economy, "the health of the economy has not polled well among the American public." To Godlstein, it started with Paul Krugman telling them (perniciously!) that some people were suffering, and the American public, which was doing great, taking it too much to heart: 

...the result is Americans -- a compassionate people -- are often concerned about this phantom suffering of others in the abstract, and will react less confidently to the current state of the economy based on how they believe others are suffering under it, even while they themselves note (often with some degree of secret shame) that they seem to be doing just fine.

That was January 2006. Remember the 2006 midterms? Kinda like the 2018 midterms. Americans are prey to all kinds of bugbears and prejudices, but most of us know when we're being conned. 

Friday, October 09, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

Singer/songwriter stuff, like back in the old days. I like it.
 

•  The otherwise inexplicable decision by White House osteopath Sean Conley to clear Tubby to start infecting the masses tomorrow makes sense if you realize that, as recent American political history and my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down White House sketches show, Trump is a mob boss who has surrounded himself with weak incompetents, not because he doesn't know from quality, but because he prefers wash-outs he can threaten into doing his most deranged bidding. Like, who would hire Wilbur Ross -- voted Most Likely to Fall Asleep in Cabinet Meetings by Factotum Magazine -- except someone who wants a senile old crook whose discernment is so enfeebled that he would go in front of TV cameras and make a fool of himself in defense of Trump's tariffs? Likewise, who here thinks their own doctor would tell them, sure, you've had COVID-19 a week, why not go give an unmasked speech to thousands of umasked people and tell 'em I said it's okay? 

•  Speaking of pitchmen and Roy Edroso Breaks It Down -- subscriptions to which are still available and cheap! -- allow me to share today's White House sketch, "Key Mar-a-Lago," as My Free Gift To You. Things are no doubt grim at the White House, and don't think it hasn't had an effect here in the District -- Kia and I biked around Capitol Hill the other day, and the line at the Engine Company 8 firehouse for after-work COVID-19 testing went around the block. Not that Tubby gives a shit, but normal people know the virus gets around. But go ahead and enjoy the thing -- what can we do but laugh? (Besides vote in unprecedented numbers.)

•  The week has been so full of garbage takes it's hard to pick favorites, but David Brooks' mewling that "America Is Having a Moral Convulsion" in The Atlantic is pretty rich. This bit in particular is classic Brooks:

When Americans were confronted with the extremely hard task of locking down for months without any of the collective resources that would have made it easier -- habits of deference to group needs; a dense network of community bonds to help hold each other accountable; a history of trust that if you do the right thing, others will too; preexisting patterns of cooperation; a sense of shame if you deviate from the group—they couldn’t do it. America failed.

Yes, in Brooksland they're always spiritual and communitarian, these things that make up ideal American life and its traditional "habits of deference to group needs," huh? But in the real world, you know what helps? MONEY. Because you can't live without it, and the U.S. sent us a pittance months ago. Later Brooks mopes:

By August, most Americans understood the failure. Seventy-two percent of Danes said they felt more united after the COVID-19 outbreak. Only 18 percent of Americans felt the same.=

Guess why? Here's Denmark's action plan:

A total of DKK 285 billion (US $42 billion) has been appropriated in a number of “relief packages” to support businesses and workers until June. This spending represents almost 13 percent of the Danish GDP, making the Danish plan one of the most expansive in the world...

The government will support 90 percent of wages of hourly workers who are sent home up to DKK 26,000 ($3,800) a month and salaried workers will get 75 percent covered up to DKK 23,000 ($3,350). The salary guarantee program is organized through the Danish three-party-negotiation system, which consists of the government, unions, and employer organizations. Small independent companies outside the system will also be eligible...

It's amazing that in this country the top commentators on social conditions are people who've apparently never had to pay for a bounced check.   

Friday, October 02, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 
Billy was the real thing. 

•   They say Tubby got the virus but since they're completely untrustworthy we have to consider alternatives: 1.) It's the truth; there were too many leaks and loose ends to keep it quiet; like what would they tell his next audience of virus-targets if he's too sick to show up? 2.) They're just plain lying, using a get-well-soon story as a distraction from his disastrous campaign week; 3.) They're mixing truth with lies -- like maybe he just hit a serious cognitive drop and they're calling it COVID as a cover. Well, whatever it is, the guy will be low-key for a little while his goons do the talking. Byron York at the Washington Examiner:
Then there is Trump's role as candidate. Remember that the president, and a lot of Republicans, too, have mocked rival Joe Biden for "hiding in his basement" and appearing mostly in virtual events. Well, it now appears that coronavirus will force President Trump to adopt a Biden-style campaign, at least for the next 10 to 14 days. The Trump campaign can still gather big crowds, which he can address via video. But there will be an undeniably different dynamic to those events, because the president always feeds off the energy from a big crowd, and he can't get the same effect sitting in front of a camera.
LOL yeah, let's schedule big rallies where Trump's loyalists can watch him on TV! How heartwarming. It'll be like the GOP Death Cult version of Spartacus, or Stone Soup: The President can't give you the King's Virus himself, but several of you are probably teeming with COVID-19, so you can give each other coronavirus in his name! It's a Trumpmas miracle! 

If you prefer your idiocy mainstream, here you go:

•  Meanwhile, from slightly before Corona Don time, here's Rod Dreher:
Here’s why Donald Trump is not out of the game yet. It’s a ruling from two months ago, by the federal 11th Circuit, brought to my attention just now by a reader:
A Florida school board’s refusal to allow a transgender boy to use the bathroom matching his gender identity was unconstitutional, the 11th Circuit ruled Friday...
Dreher actually thinks his frothing hatred of trans people is shared by normal people and will be a game-changer in the election.
Like I said earlier, Trump was a crazy man in last night’s debate, and was a disgrace. It says something terrible about our country that this is how our president behaves. But we should also keep in mind that the kindly, respectable Joe Biden represents something truly barbaric — in fact, believes that there can be no compromise on the issue.
This is about what it means to be a male, a female, a human being. And Joe Biden is on the wrong side of the issue. 
[Hysteria Bold in the original.] This reminds me of this previous bit of Dreher electoral analysis:
UPDATE: New CBS News poll finds no Kenosha bump for Trump, even in Wisconsin. People who want the situation calmed trust Biden more.

UPDATE 2: A friend who read this told me on the phone, as we were talking, that he finds it impossible to believe that there was no Trump bump from the rioting — but easy to believe that people who intend to vote for Trump would not admit it to a pollster. He’s probably right. I wouldn’t tell a pollster if I was going to vote for Trump. Is that paranoid? Maybe. But I don’t think people are wrong to fear that this information is being recorded, and might be used against them one day.
Not too paranoid, huh? Then he added one of his Letters to Repenthouse "from" someone who feels exactly the same way. I have my own feel-good ideas about how this election could go right, but it seems weird to me to watch the guy say over and over again that maybe fear and hatred will pull it out for the Party of God. Well, I guess it's better than admitting that voter suppression is their only real hope

•  Sorry, I can't let the subject alone -- it's too rich. I see the Washington Times is trying to stir shit by sending out a Breaking News alert about this:


It's very obvious UUURGK BAD BROWN LADY TALK BAD ABOUT LEADER stuff, but stop and think: Why would an appeal to sympathy toward Trump work on his fans? They always talk and think about him as superhuman -- an impression supported by his pointed cruelty and brutality, which proves his disdain for human weakness. He doesn't get coronavirus, he gives it! Think about those crazy Ben Garrison cartoons (and the weird Trump-as-Rocky Photoshop sent out by Trump himself) portraying this flabby tub-o-guts as a buff he-man. Can they even imagine Trump suffering from a mere disease? Maybe if it were cancer, that would work -- people "fight" cancer, so the image of a Swole Trump battering the Grim Reaper might play. But a flu virus? That's like a Rocky movie in which the boxer plans a comeback against Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Boring! I expect that when and if Trump pulls through his factota will tell the rubes thrilling stories of how he refused the wheelchair as he lumbered heroically to the snack machine in the lobby.  

Friday, August 14, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.




It's just nice, isn't it?

•   I have released another freebie from the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter (though why you're not subscribing at the low low price of $7/month I can't guess). It's an editorial note from a very serious magazine about how their very serious op-ed wasn't a birther stinkbomb.

Actually, as has been pointed out by many observers, that Eastman essay suggesting Kamala Harris, though born in the U.S.A., isn't eligible for high office on the grounds that her parents were legal immigrants rather than Mayflower descendants, is worse in a way than the birtherism aimed at Obama in the early part of the last decade. Birtherism was just a clumsy conspiracy theory to discredit an elected official, while Eastman uses Harris as a shoehorn for his crackpot blood-and-soil theory that Section 1 of the 14th Amendment doesn't mean what it plainly says about who's a citizen. (To give you some idea of what animates his "scholarship," he finds a way to work in "braceros.")

Newsweek's editorial note is just funny/sad. I'm actually very sympathetic to senior editors at publications because, however much they may have come down in the world, they are still like giant ocean liners that are difficult to pilot even under the best circumstances.  But I assume adding that editorial note was just a raw pitch for more ink and clicks; nobody could possibly believe it's the editors' place to defend this bullshit from the contempt of their own readers.

I don't care about journalism so much, but there's a reason why one of our major parties is so infested with QAnon nutcakes that it has begun nominating them for high office: Because lies that soothe and appeal to enraged honkies who see the world passing them by are no longer peddled on mimeographed sheets or scrawls on a bum's cardboard sign, but on classy-looking websites.

•   The tendency of the mainstream press to sometimes (not always, obviously, and never often enough!) let on when Trump is lying his ass off or delusional can seem weird and pathetic sometimes, like Dangerous Dan McFoo going "Mr. Wefewee, I'm not one to complain but he's got something in his glove." But a moment's reflection should remind anyone with functional medium-to-long-term memory that there's no way back from it, and if anything the press is still too kind to him. Here's a pretty good reminder: a pretend-this-is-normal, remember-who-signs-the-checks account from the New York Post:
Trump says spike in crime, high taxes could help him win New York in 2020 election
The Post regularly covers Republican campaign bullshit as if it's news, and this claim that New York, which went for Clinton 59% to 36% in 2016, will flip because New Yorkers got hit first and hardest by the pandemic and has experienced a concomitant crime surge (and has high taxes! Wow, that's a new one!) is just more of the same, GOP operatives' guff ornamented with Trump's senile ramblings ("I’ll solve the crime problem. I’ll solve their tax problem. I’ll solve all their problems. Who would not vote for me?").

But here's something from it that brought me back:
Trump brandished a map of New York’s 2016 presidential election results. 
The map showed most counties in red, meaning he won them, despite losing the state by 22 points to Democrat Hillary Clinton. 
Trump tossed the paper across the Resolute Desk toward reporters from The Post. Aides also had copies of the map and handed them out too.
Remember? It's the same thing he did after the 2016 election, handing out red-tinged maps to reporters to demonstrate that, though he got a minority of actual votes, it looks like he got a majority on a map if you don't know the difference between people and real estate. The fact that, as Trump plummets in the polls, they're still pulling this routine suggests that they have one hope: That the press, eternally terrified of giving offense to bellicose rightwingers, will help them put it over one more time. And they will. Even the Murdoch employees, who seem to handle the thing with tweezers, are doing their part by circulating it, and that's why the Trumpkins will never stop pitching it, knowing that even if reporters imply or point out that it doesn't make any sense, that will just make some voters -- the kind they depend on -- think, oh that liberal media, spreading lies about our beloved President again! Also too: Lying is all they have.

Friday, July 17, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.



Extended version!

•   I know it must seem like old news by now but there are still Confederate statue defenders out there in Conservativeland. And I'm not talking about the bullshit variants invented recently, like when someone tears down a non-Confederate statue and they blame liberals. I'm talking about straight-up hell-yeah-Robert E. Lee at National Review by Bruce Westrate, who "teaches history at a prep school in Dallas."

It's got all the hits. First, the usual Harper's-letter bellyaching about being ganged up on: "I find myself consigned by the media to the ranks of would-be Nazis... simply because I’ve always enjoyed such venues [as Civil War memorials], along with the commemorative Civil War art that abounds among them." I can't find any evidence of a Twitter or web kerfuffle over Westrate's love of Civil War stuff, so I assume he means people who know him think he's a jerk.

Westrate goes on about "young people, abetted by the feckless opportunism of politicians, turning to the likes of the Taliban" and decides "it's all about safe spaces," "all complexity is lost, and context is rendered subservient to a cleansing," etc. and similar sentiments set adrift in a river of high-flown gush. Also, "Shall the FDR monument be removed to appease the descendants of interned Nisei Japanese," ha ha shall it not answer me libs. The guy really loves him some Lee; since he's a historian he must know the General was a slaver and not an especially kindly one either, but he never mentions that, and even defends the Jim Crow era vintage of many Confederate monuments as a misunderstanding:
And while the erection of commemorative statues unfortunately coincided with the emergence of the “Jim Crow” South, there are more understandable motivations that, I would argue, took precedence. These were martial creations, after all, intended to commemorate battlefield feats. Historians have long observed that veterans typically (and understandably) avoid public remembrance and consecration of battlefield combat until decades after the event. The erection of these statues coincides with the dedication of most of the larger American battlefield parks and cemeteries. So, they were aimed less at betrayed freedmen then at kindling popular remembrance of the slain, along with the suffering wounded Confederate veterans had endured.
There, now, black folks, now let's have Jeb Stuart back on his pedestal in Richmond so you can see him on your way to work every day. Also, did you know black people were involved in the slave trade?

If you can't imagine anyone who isn't brain-damaged or already a Neo-Confederate going for this, you must remember that the salvation of the statues is a new Lost Cause, something normal people increasingly abhor, which wingnuts lament in the sort of hurt tones with which they also used to lament that America was not Great anymore before they decided to fix that by electing a senile criminal President. And now that the U.S. military has just banned the Stars 'n' Bars, I guess Westrate and his fellow Rebs have a lot more to cry about. 

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