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. 

LATEST DREHER CATACLYSM.

Gotta thank Christopher Hooks for pointing this one out: Holy Rod Dreher hears from a data scientist that "roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT" and flips:

Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years. The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.

What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration...

As you may have guessed, Dreher didn't realize "B" means bisexual, and when it is pointed out to him he emits a can't-miss 2020 Jonah Goldberg Central To My Point winner:

This is probably true, but it doesn’t really change much. I’m not sure how many men would want to partner with a woman whose sexual desires are so unstable. I would never have wanted to date a woman who identified as bisexual. How many women would want to date men who identified as bisexual? 

Blink. Blink.

So, I will withdraw my “not interested in sex with men” claim, because “bisexual” could cover “open to sex with both sexes”....

Might could, huh. 

...but I maintain my point about this being a decadent and deeply destabilizing finding.

If it makes Rod feel bad it's bad for America/Christianitythe babbys. 

But let's go back to his blather about how non-het women are "anti-natalist." Set aside that not only bi but also gay women can have babies (and trans people too -- which Dreher should know because he frequently screams about it); why would it be anti-natalist if a lot of women (including straight women) didn't want to have babies? That doesn't mean they're against childbirth -- that just means they don't want to do it themselves, just like my lack of interest in downhill racing makes me anti-skiing. The difference, I guess, is that Dreher thinks it's these women's duty -- every woman's duty, it would seem -- to make themselves available for childbearing whether they want to or not. 

PS. In case you were wondering where Dreher, the prototypical JustTheTip Trumper, had come down after months of "I'm not Trump fan BUT" pee-dancing: In a separate full-body-fit over an Associated Press story that accurately portrays Amy Coney Barrett's support for anti-LGBTQ policies, he's taken a quintessentially Dreheresque route -- he probably won't sully himself with a vote for that Bad Man with the Good Judges, but he definitely wants other people to do it for him:

I have pretty much decided to vote third party for president (American Solidarity Party). Trump has my state locked up anyway, so I’m thinking that I would like to cast a vote in favor of a party whose platform I really believe in, as opposed to voting for the lesser of two evils, and choosing between the evil of two lessers. 

BUT:

Reading this AP story this morning, though, has reminded me again of the contempt the left has for people like me, and our institutions... I hope you Christian readers — especially those in swing states — will too. Though my vote really doesn’t matter in my state, this issue might move it to Trump anyway, given the quality of his judicial appointments. If I were in a swing state, this AP story, and what it symbolizes, would seal the deal for me.

There's an old gag about how if men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament, but if men could get pregnant Dreher would just find some other bullshit reason to get other humans to do the job for him. 

UPDATE. Just want to note for the historical record (I'm old-fashioned that way) that Dreher has updated again from his famous "reader" "mailbag." The alleged correspondent is a "Gen Z female reader" who says girls are saying they're gay or gayishe because of "increasing self-aggrandizement" among today's Fallen Youth "that surrounds this idea of identifying as any type of LGBTQ. It’s a social marker that puts you in the ‘in’ crowd. It makes you cool, it makes you one of the crowd." It's Queer Pressure! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 Out of the way, it's been standing too long.

•   I'm cautious to the point of superstition about these things but it looks as if we may be headed in the right direction election-wise. (Remember: They cheat! Vote and let no one stop you!) And I have to say I'm pleasantly surprised that after years of sluicing the most deranged rightwing bullshit, the press and social media seem finally to have decided not to cooperate with at least one obvious disinformation attack, the Hunter Biden Laptop Caper. Gizmodo has a nice rundown on how sketchy it is, as do others, but you hardly need it: What mentally complete person would buy that Biden fils left laptops full of incriminating emails -- look, screenshots! Impossible to fake! -- with a repairman who felt it was his patriotic duty to give them to RUDY GIULIANI AND STEVE BANNON? (Who then funneled them to the New York Post -- presumably because Rupert Murdoch was all the Trump gang had left after David Pecker outlived his usefulness.)

The indicted shitbag Bannon is already self-discredited, and I hope this helps convince people that the New York "chortle chortle gotta love the" Post is not the cute ragamuffin they keep kitchy-kooing and is instead a repulsive and dangerous propaganda outfit. And as for Giuliani, well, here's my latest newsletter item on Third-Act Rudy (Free even to those of you who haven't subscribed yet!), and how this latest humiliation is just a reminder that he was always shit, and in much the same way as the President he serves as bagman and butler. 

•   While we're on the subject of FREE items from my newsletter (no, don't believe I dropped it: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down) here's another: a conservative defense of SCOTUS nominee Goody Godlywench, on the grounds that of course she's not going to rule in favor of the things she and all her enablers desperately want. The whole caper reminds me of a story from the childhood of former Justice John Paul Stevens; the missus found it in a New York Review of Books essay on his autobiography:

A primary business of Stevens’s immediate family was running the upscale Stevens Hotel in Chicago. But when it faced insolvency during the Great Depression, the hotel “borrowed” more than $1 million from the Illinois Life Insurance Company, which was controlled by Stevens’s grandfather, uncle, and father. Illinois state prosecutors saw this transfer as a form of embezzlement and indicted the three family members. Upon hearing the news, Stevens’s grandfather suffered a stroke and his uncle committed suicide, leaving Stevens’s father to face trial alone. A Chicago jury convicted him, but the Illinois Supreme Court subsequently reversed the conviction and directed an acquittal, finding no evidence of criminal intent.

Although one suspects that these events were traumatic for Stevens, who was still in his early teens, he recounts them in a typically matter-of-fact way. But what he says he learned from the experience is revealing: “In recent years, my firsthand knowledge of the criminal justice system’s fallibility has reinforced my conviction that the death penalty should be abolished.”

It would be wonderful, wouldn't it, if more of our judges had some acquaintance of the cruelties and caprices found on the other side of the law,  instead of being bred in vats by the Federalist Society and religious maniac fringe groups. 

THE TRUMP YOU LOVED, THE TRUMP YOU KNEW, THE TRUMP WITH A SONG IN HIS HEART.

All proud MAGA choads know Joe Biden and all his voters are Antifa rioter-murderers who want to sell white America to Muslim Chinese Black Mexican rapists and deny Goody Godlywench her true place on the Supreme Court/under her husband's headship. But their worst crime is hiding from the American people what a swell guy President Trump is, and Lou Holtz (yes, that Lou Holtz) is here to set the record straight! 

Most voters only “know” President Trump through the lens of media coverage and public policy debates — but that doesn’t come close to capturing the true essence of a man who spends every hour of his working day fighting for the American people. 

 Whereas the president’s supporters tend to focus on defending him on substantive issues, such as making the case for his America First policy agenda, his critics gleefully assail him on a personal level, hoping to undercut the appeal of his message by demonizing the messenger.

The liberal media are always telling us how Trump mocks the disabled, calls for his opponents to be jailed and protestors to be beaten, calls veterans losers and suckers, loots the Treasury, cheats on his taxes, cheats on his wife etc. -- but they never talk about his winning personality. 

Predictably, the left employed the same strategy following the recent presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, launching a full-on smear operation as soon as the event was over designed to make the president seem like an aggressive bully rather than a confident, assertive leader compelled to forcefully defend himself against a tag-team effort by his opponent and the debate moderator.

"Make the president seem like an aggressive bully" -- boy, they must have used hypnosis. 

Unlike most politicians, President Trump doesn’t resort to fake displays of empathy such as kissing babies or crying on camera — but that doesn’t mean he is devoid of compassion or dislikes babies.

It's just that Trump's a simple guy doesn't know how to portray his feelings to the public -- it's not like he was in show business.

The American public doesn’t often get to see the human side of Donald Trump, and when that side does peek through his no-nonsense exterior, the media tend to ignore or misrepresent it.

Surely Holtz has a concrete example of the human side of Donald Trump to offer us, since the President himself is too shy to show it?

After I did some campaign appearances in 2016, President Trump was informed of how sick my wife, Beth, was and he called her and spoke with her for 10 minutes. 

I totally believe this. Also, Zappa took a crap onstage and ate it.

His conversation was to encourage Beth about how important she was to her family. It was a genuine concern for an American citizen.

Wait, actually now I do believe it. In fact I can hear it in my head: "So ya know, Lou's gonna do some campaigning for me, now how's he gonna do that without someone ironing his shirts and cooking his meals and whatever it is you frumpy housewives do, when you're not sick that is? So, lemme see, I got a few more minutes, whattaya like? You, you're a lady, you like flowers and soap operas, right? I was on a soap opera."

Whenever I spoke with him over the past few years, his focus was always on what he could do to help others. I have never seen him wallow in self pity when the media has been so unfair.

This... this is Donald Trump we're talking about, right.

When I played golf with him, he counted every stroke, never moved the ball…he was the most honest golfer that I have ever played with. 

LOL, the true measure of a man! I used to follow the AlwaysAction Twitter account, recently caught up in one of that platform's half-assed sweeps of spam accounts -- and contrary to the Washington Examiner's portrayal, it was indeed a spam account, endlessly recirculating a small numbers of aged wingnut propaganda clips, mostly calculated to inflame the rage and racism of its fans. One thing I noted in their stream was a clip, also endlessly recirculated, from the Trump campaign showing the candidate signing an autograph for a little girl; it stuck with me because it was the only clip they ever showed -- indeed one of the few I have ever seen anywhere -- of Trump showing anything even faintly resembling kindness toward another human being. And this was from a hardcore Trumpkin feed! 

Maybe the reason people don't see "the human side of Donald Trump" is not because it's been concealed from them, but because he and his handlers prefer to project a Mussolini image of dominance and capricious cruelty in order to maintain his thrall over his authoritarian followers. Or maybe he's just a scumbag. Or both! 

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.   

DON'T YOU FUCKING LOOK AT ME!

Here's my Veep debate wrap from last night. Harris did great by the standards of these things, never more so than when she was looking at the blowhard Pence in patient wonder at, as the feminist memes say, the confidence of a mediocre man. Conservatives in turn complained that she was conducting physiognomic warfare on God Boy. "Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris could be seen smirking, smiling, and laughing during Vice President Mike Pence’s answers during the vice presidential debate," sputtered the Washington Examiner, which enlisted "Republican committee member Harmeet Dhillon" to amplify the talking point by calling Harris a "smirking robot." "Her constant smiling and smirking didn’t work," claimed Joe Battenfield of the Boston Herald, who also claimed for Pence a "dominant" performance -- I'll show you headship, bitch! Roger L. Simon -- yes, The Man Who Created Moses Wine and one of the great buffoons of old blogging days, now writing for the Epoch "House Style 'Chinese Flu'" Times -- got it in the headline ("Kamala Loses Debate by Smirking") and if you think I'm gonna subscribe to read the rest you're crazy. 

These guys hate that women can speak without being spoken to at all, but when women give them insolent looks they go all Frank Booth (I mean, in a wimp propagandist way). 

UPDATE: Didn't post the link to my wrap-up before -- here it is! 

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:

Does Biden suspend his campaign as Trump is quarantined? Is the White House failure to observe protocols a reason for Biden to continue his campaigning?

— Jeff Greenfield (@greenfield64) October 2, 2020

•  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.  

STATE OF THE UNION.

 You can read my contemporaneous notes on the first debate here. I have very little to add. except to say that the 60% edge Biden got in the CNN poll is not super-meaningful, at least as regards the event itself; it seems close to where the voters are, debate or no debate. People who support Trump will support any loathsome thing he does, while people who support Biden are basically people who are sick of Trump, so any cavils about Biden's watery responses would be overridden by an existential desire to see the madman deposed and honor restored. Things have gotten weird, but America, not so much. Or so we hope. 

LETTERS FROM REPENTHOUSE GOES BIG-TIME!

 Here at alicublog we've been having fun for years with Rod Dreher's Letters to Repenthouse -- those too-good-to-be-true anonymous "reader" "letters" Dreher posts that have the same breathless I-never-thought-it-would-happen-to-me vibe that made lonely teenage boys hot and Bob Guccione a fortune. Through this shoddy journalistic device Dreher thrills and chills readers with honest-to-gosh you-bet real scenes of "obviously transgendered" he-shes grooming a child at a Dallas showing of a Captain America movie, "a 13 year old girl in his church who came to the pastor and asked innocently if it was worth it to give a boy a blow job in exchange for a meal at McDonalds," etc.  

A classic of the genre is the MAGA Gryphon -- a Liberal who has suddenly decided to turn right-wing, like a Letters to Repenthouse "reader" who said he was "anti-NRA, pro-Obamacare to an extent, and detest[s] the Republican Party generally" but was now ready to "vote for a sort of lower-key Trump (someone like Ben Shapiro)." JustTheTip Trumpers like Dreher love this bit, as it convinces them they're not alone in wanting those sweet, sweet Handmaid judges without the indignity of owing it to the thuggery of Trump Republicans. 

This has been a niche entertainment for years, but I guess us hipsters couldn't have it to ourselves forever: Bret Stephens is taking it mainstream --

Meet a Secret Trump Voter
‘Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.’

Gotta say, it's a clever twist on a classic formula; Dreher hates gay people, so he's unlikely to use them in his fantasy stories. And it's found money, because there's nothing rightwinger readers love more than a persecution narrative, and the idea that the MAGA Lesbian is forced to "come out again" for Trump (which must be painful, right? I mean we made coming out gay hell on earth!)  must tickle their innards.

Much of Stephens' script, though, is straight out of Dreherville:

It’s worth understanding where she’s coming from.

Start with the economy. “I haven’t seen double digit [gains] in my 401(k) since the internet boom of the late ’90s,” she says. “It went up 19.6 percent” in the year before the pandemic. 

That's like saying the car felt like it was flying before it plummeted to the ground. 

“Look at the stock market,” she says. (Up about 35 percent from four years ago.) “Look at gas prices.” (About the same as what they were when Trump took office, but well below the $3.31 per gallon at the midpoint of the Obama administration.)

That last part is great -- I wonder if Stephens went back and asked MAGA Lesbian if "the midpoint of the Obama administration" was what she meant. More:

"...I care about having a job. I care about having health care through my company."

Wow, normally you have to be in a Koch Brothers front-group ad to explicitly insist your health care come "through my company."

"I was out of a job a few years ago. Obamacare priced me out [of private insurance]. It was like, $560 a month. Then Obama’s website blew up. He can’t get the website right?”

How about that website, huh? I'm still thinking about that. And Obama with his Grey Poupon! As always when a conservative sets his scene the Big City, the topic turns to bums and poop: 

What worries her more are the effects of the response to the pandemic in a liberal city like New York. “Crime is in my neighborhood now. There’s a homeless encampment near me that’s growing and growing. They have a living room and a shower curtain and that’s where they go to the bathroom. I have a guy who walks in front of the store every day. In a diaper!"

Yeah, gay New Yorkers are shocked to the tits by this sort of thing. 

I ask Chris whether Trump’s behavior has ever come close to being a deal breaker for her. She asks me to name some of the lowlights.

“Grab ’em by the. …”: “Didn’t bother me at all. For every cad out there, there’s equally a gold digger who will let you do it.”

I imagine Stephens' readers in Fritters, Alabama smiling broadly: "I betcha that Anne Heche was a lesbeen gol'-digger. Whut's a 'cad'?" And they ain't seen nothin' yet:

The media as the enemy of the American people: “These days, yeah. Whenever I read a front-page story and I get to a disparaging adjective, I stop reading.”

Definite city slicker stuff. "I didn’t believe Christine Blasey Ford for one second," "“The Clintons’ fingerprints are all over this," etc. -- yeesh, at this point I bet even Dreher's going, "Whoa, tone it down, guy." And here comes the piece de Resistance:

You don’t have to agree with Chris on any of these points. You can note some of the inconsistencies in her views, most of all between her support for Sanders...

Stephens has never shown much talent for writing or argument, but I'll say this for him: He's sure got nerve.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Yeah, Aretha's is better I guess,

but I like the street-corner drums and the generally swing.

•  Another exciting week in the Death of the Republic! To celebrate I have unlocked two recent issues of my classy and au courant Substack newsletter (now celebrating its two-year anniversary, eat shit Andrew Sullivan) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down. First, there's the transcript of a high-level discussion with the President about which pretty lady should be on the Supreme Court, with all the sophisticated politesse you have come to expect from this administration; second, a scene from early American village life in which the Witchfinder General lets the sinners know who the real bigots are. Enjoy! 

•  As previously mentioned, the President has made it abundantly clear that he won't accept any election result that doesn't have him winning. The Wall Street Journal sees the real issue -- Democratic overreaction:

The media and intelligentsia have worked themselves into a frenzy over imaginary fears that Mr. Trump will somehow remain in office by force if he loses the 2020 election. 

Chortle, chortle, and look at the innocent statement that led them to this ridiculous conclusion:

“Well we’re going to have to see what happens,” [Trump] said when asked to disavow this fantasy. “I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster.”

Some nervous nellies think that's a threat, but you just have to know how seriously-but-not-literally listen: 

...Mr. Trump’s real point is that he wants to reserve the right to contest dubious election practices, such as post-election litigation to count disputed or late or unsigned ballots.

See, when our drooling monster goes GRRRAH KILL, he's only talking about a proportionate response to a theoretical clear provocation. Why do you liberals keep missing this? We keep explaining his incoherent roars to you, but you people just don't catch on!

WSJ leaves out Trump's "There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation" statement -- maybe because they figure it would further overexcite their Democratic readers -- but eventually they have to acknowledge Trump demands a new Supreme Court Justice pronto to help him steal the election, and this the Journal bemoans as yet another unfortunate opportunity for the Democrats to make mischief:

This answer hands Democrats a ready-made line of attack in Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Senate Democrats will charge that Mr. Trump’s nominee is being installed to help him steal the election. They’ll also demand that she recuse herself from election-related cases.

All the damage to our sacred institutions Democrats will do, and all because our poor, drooling monster made an "oopsie." The editorial is longer than it might be because the author is obliged to talk at length about the Democrats' shameless voting-by-mail, not to mention their "thirst to be vindicated" for their paranoia with a "Reichstag fire." And plus which, I know you are but what am I:

As for a peaceful transition, last month the New York Times reported that Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, participated in an election “war game” in which states threatened secession after a Trump electoral victory. No less an authority on defeat than Mrs. Clinton said recently that Joe Biden “should not concede under any circumstances,” in expectation of a drawn-out fight. Mr. Biden has predicted that Mr. Trump might try to steal the election. Who’s really plotting the coup?

Anticipating a coup and telling one's candidate not to concede if the head of government attempts one is, you see, the real coup. You can almost hear this poor editorial factotum wincing and wondering why they won't give her better material. At least Vince Foster was actually dead! 

AND THE STATESMAN BECAUSE HE'S SO GREAT/ THINKS HIS TRADE AS HONEST AS MINE.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but to me it's genuinely weird to see the President of the United States admitting that he's getting ready to steal the election.  

Oh, I don’t think so. I — we need nine justices. You need that. With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they’re sending, it’s a scam; it’s a hoax. Everybody knows that. And the Democrats know it better than anybody else.

So you’re going to need nine justices up there. 

"Hoax" and "scam" being words Trump uses for realities he does not wish his voters to acknowledge, it's clear he expects his shysters to push swing-state vote-rigging suits up to SCOTUS after the election, and he wants Amy Barrett Comey or some other reliable co-conspirator to rig it for him when they do. (Mike Pence has been doing the same thing, though in a less rough-and-tumble manner for the more delicate JustTheTip Trumpers.) (Update: Oh, yeah, there was also Trump's "get rid of the ballots" thing. Classy!)

Thanks to Barton Gellman at The Atlantic, we even have some idea of how they plan to do it:

According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

If you think they wouldn't try such a thing after the Supreme Court's recent ruling against the rights of faithless electors, you underestimate the ingenuity of their evil; anti-democratic efforts work best when they contradict common ideas of fairness, because they break the people's faith in their institutions. 

To prepare for this coup attempt, rightwing factota are already dressing the stage. Democrats have been bitching about the anti-majority nature of our Democracy -- two minority-vote Republican Presidencies since 2000, Dems getting played on the Supreme Court, etc. -- so Republicans are like, nah uh, it's you guys who are anti-democratic. James Antle from the Washington Examiner on 2004:

Literally in an election where some -- admittedly not all, not most, but not a trivial number -- of liberals were hoping Kerry could succeed in challenging Ohio's results, which would have resulted in him becoming president while losing the popular vote.

Who can forget Kerry's "Banana Republic Riot"! As it happened, Democratic objections in Congress to Ohio voting irregularities were dismissed by large bipartisan majorities, but Antle did his little to make it look like vote-stealing is the other guys' game and that's what counts -- to get enough of this stuff in the media bloodstream that Trumpkins can say "Oh yeah well Kerry said he should be president and that's the real fraud."  

And GOP Rep. Jim Jordan is pimping a House Judiciary Committee Republicans report called "HOW DEMOCRATS ARE ATTEMPTING TO SOW UNCERTAINTY, INACCURACY, AND DELAY IN THE 2020 ELECTION" that is utterly full of shit. For one thing, it refers repeatedly to "all-mail balloting" as if those of us in jurisdictions with expanded mail voting options can't vote in person. And it has howlers like this:

All-mail balloting -- not to be confused with time-tested and limited absentee balloting --...

Oh for fuck's sake. 

...raises serious questions about election integrity. To begin, states have notoriously inaccurate voter registration lists—one estimate suggests that voter registration rates exceed 100 percent of the eligible populations in 378 counties across the United States. 

Yeah, people on voter rolls die and don't bother to call the BOE from their deathbeds and ask to be taken off. Not sure what that has to do with voting by mail. 

As the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform found in 2005, voting by mail “remain[s] the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

"Potential"'s doing a lot of work there. That same 2005 report also says, "While there is little evidence of fraud in Oregon where the entire state votes by mail absentee balloting in other states has been one of the major sources of fraud." That would be the same "time-tested and limited absentee balloting" Jordan referred to earlier, and which Trump himself has praised -- a distinction without a difference on which the 2020 report leans heavily: We Republicans are not doing anarchistic mail voting, we're doing good Republican cloth coat absentee voting! 

The report does this kind of thing throughout: For example, it refers to the 2007 King County ACORN registration fraud case ("Prosecutors claimed the defendants submitted more than 1,800 false voter registration forms") without mentioning that none of the registrations the temp workers filled out led to ballots being submitted -- in other words, the system worked like it was supposed to and caught the problem. There's also a lot of guff like this: 

If states can allow violent left-wing extremists to riot and loot in person, then they should allow peaceful Americans to exercise their right to vote in person. If Speaker Pelosi can visit a hair salon without a mask in San Francisco, then Americans in North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania can visit their local polling places.

So it's not a scholarly document, to say the least -- it's basically GOP propaganda but with footnotes, so operatives like Byron York at the Examiner can talk about it as if it's -- well, I was going to say the Warren Report, but no one's believed in blue-ribbon reports for years,  so really it's more like Chariots of the Gods? or The Secret, and the rubes will eat it up. As I've said before: Were it not for motivated reasoning, they'd have no reasoning at all. 

UPDATE. They're still dismissing this overt-and-not-subtle threat from the President as something you should just pretend didn't happen. David Harsanyi at National Review:

Not a single journalist or politician in hysterics on the social media right now — most of them having spent four straight years delegitimizing the presidency and the attacking constitutional order — actually believes Trump won’t leave office peacefully if he loses the election. It’s all an act. Trump, of course, gives his opposition endless ammunition to engage in these group fantasies with his reckless answers.

Just because he's "reckless" enough to say he'll do these things doesn't mean he's reckless enough to do them. If only one of these con men had the nerve to say, "look, he keeps saying he'll got a health care plan, too, and he obviously doesn't!"

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 The Julie London version ain't bad either. 

Been busy and not on here much -- will try harder next week, but if you miss me, try my newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, wherein I'm contractually obliged to provide five (5) items every week and you only pay a party, miserly, seven (7) dollars a month for this cornucopia of content.  

Here's a freebie: Patriotic American History Education Module #1 from Trump Educational Industries. It's how I expect Trump will try to grift off his new Don't Tell Kids The Bad Things About America program. Until he can figure out how to get away with that, Betsy DeVos is peddling a "black history" thing called 1776 Unites, which has modules called "Living by the grace of God and the power of applying oneself" and "The Cult of Victimhood," which is probably how she sold it to Tubby. (Why they didn't call it Bootstraps U I'll never know.)

The first one is by Rev. Dean Nelson who, as a backwoods African-American lad, learned to shrug off incidents of racial prejudice like being called names and chased by a guy with a gun (!) but when he went to the Big City to study at Howard (cue sinister music) he got indoctrin-o-mated with "something like the thinking behind The 1619 Project narrative." As "a country boy, easily impressed by my more sophisticated urban peers," Nelson tried to get with the cool kids and "started viewing little slights in an entirely new way." Fortunately, as General Jack D. Ripper told Colonel Mandrake, he learned how to interpret these feelings correctly, and "decided that ignorant whites were no longer going to command my attention" and "I would do all I could to improve the situation of blacks in our country," which he now does by running "pregnancy centers" that browbeat "abortion-determined" women into bearing children. You can see why DeVos loves it.

Depressed? Hell, things ain't so bad as all that -- and here's another freebie with a bit of uplift to it. Toujours gai! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

 

 A treat.

•   For once 9/11 is your lucky day! There are a number of open-to-the-public issues of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down available this week (they're the ones without lock icons at the website), including today's 9/11 column. (The ending is almost upbeat!) 

On that subject, I have to say I was surprised by Paul Krugman's Twitter stream that starts with "Overall, Americans took 9/11 pretty calmly. Notably, there wasn't a mass outbreak of anti-Muslim sentiment and violence..." (The rest of it is unobjectionable and accurate about the Republican exploitation of the event.) I guess he figured, like the commentators who say police don't kill that many black people while ignoring all other forms of racist policing, that if there weren't public Muslim burnings things must have been chill. It's easy to forget that Krugman worked for Ronald Reagan and was speaking favorably of him even during the Obama Administration. This is not to suggest Krugman has been insincere in his conversion on Republican governance, but it shows that -- as with NeverTrump apostates like Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot who will occasionally remind us that they're still PNAC/glibertarian creeps under it all -- there is a distinct, clueless worldview shared by all accomplices in the last 40 years of misgovernment that in most cases persists even when the scales fall from their eyes in other respects. So of course Krugman would not think the anti-Muslim animus engendered by his old buddies -- and which persists today, not least in the form of a Muslim travel ban! -- was all that big a deal, really. It's kind of like people who say they're not racist who get pissed when you say Black Lives Matter. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN

 

Happy Labor Day weekend. Take it easy -- but take it! 

  •   I haven't unlocked one for a while so here's my Monday edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, on the evolution of conservatives' that traditional hate-on for New York City; whereas after 9/11 they briefly pretended to care what happened to the City, now that it's challenged by COVID-19 they exult in fantasies of its death. 

•   As we get closer to the election, conservatives and Republicans are getting increasingly obvious about what they really stand for, and it ain't Small Government and Sound Fiscal Management. Here's a Facebook ad from Majorie Taylor Greene, a racist QAnon lunatic who stands a good chance of winning election to Congress from Georgia: 

In case you can't make it out, she's holding an assault rifle. Democratic Congresswomen Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, and Omar earned their office by proposing new policies and advocacy to their constituents; Greene apparently seeks office by threatening to kill them. And it's equally clear that while the wave of the Democratic future is young, diverse, and Democratic-Socialist, the wave of the Republican future is white supremacist violence. Remember Ole Perfesser Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, the O.G. rightblogger? He's still at it, and here's what he had to say September 1st: 

Stalin said it doesn’t matter who votes, but who counts the votes. But people know that now, and the months of (Democrat-incited) civil unrest have moved the Overton Window on political violence. If this leads to Democrats being hanged from lampposts, it’s their own fault.

You can see why double-murderer Kyle Rittenhouse has become a hero to these guys. Rod Dreher, need you ask, slobbers all over the guy; here's a post in which Dreher suggests that, because one of the guys Rittenhouse killed, Joseph Rosenbaum, turned out upon investigation to be a pedophile, Rittenhouse's vigilantism was justified. "The world would be better off with more Kyles and fewer dirtbags than the child molester he shot," ran the story's teaser, and Dreher wrote, "After reading those court documents, though, I can say without fear of contradiction that the world was not diminished by the passing of Joseph Rosenbaum." (Dreher and The American Conservative removed the line and the teaser later, I guess to show how Christian Dreher can be when his social anxieties are engaged. Him and Jesus are still cool with Rosenbaum and the other guy getting iced, however.)

There's no need to sugarcoat it: These guys are fascists, and their fight for Trump's reelection is a fight to make America a fascist state. Plan accordingly.

IF IT WEREN'T FOR MOTIVATED REASONING, HE'D HAVE NO REASONING AT ALL.

I think Rod Dreher has no more to teach us about how bad Rod Dreher is -- that is, he does not show unplumbed depths of mendacity, bad faith, and derp, he just does them like usual but sometimes dumber. We've talked a lot about his "reader" "mailbag" shtick, where he blockquotes passages allegedly sent to him by people who he sometimes vouches for ("a reader of this blog writes as a decades-long resident of the New York Congressional district just won [effectively] by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez") and which are often from liberals who are disgusted with liberalism, which always gives Rod some prodigal-son pep, and which are obvious bullshit -- either made up by Dreher himself or sent to him by conservative operatives or possibly trolls playing a deep game.

Anyway here's his recent account of a Thing He Saw On The Internet:

This is both sad and infuriating. It’s from an anonymous academic who posted it on Twitter as @publicola17:

1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse.
My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably.
Let me explain
2/ I'm white, my wife's black. When we met, we "saw each other's race," but we didn't think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another.
3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America.
4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life...

I actually had to C&P this from elsewhere because Dreher only provides a screenshot of this thing, which goes on to detail the alleged destruction of this poor guy's family as his wife does things like "regularly explain to our kids that the police want to kill black people" because "NHJ [Nikole Hannah-Jones] and [Ta-Nehisi] Coates are always telling her how traumatized she should be just because she's black in America," while the husband -- I shit you not -- looks forward to the day when his tykes can read Thomas Chatterton Williams and get clear.

Are your bullshit detectors ringing? Not Rod's! (Even though the @publicola17 account has disappeared.) He goes on for hundreds of words about what's "bizarre and twisted" about the woman and how "this is what the identity-politics left is going to bring to all of society: ruin, hatred, endless suspicion" and the Bible story about "when Jesus frees a demoniac by casting the evil spirits out of him, and sending them into a herd of swine," etc.

Finally:

UPDATE: Some of you believe that the Publicola narrative is fake. You might be right. It resonated with me because, as I’ve said, I’ve known people in marriages like that...

More such gush; then --

Even if the anonymous man Publicola’s narrative is nothing but an exercise in creative writing, it still tells a truth.

 Punchline: Dreher's upcoming book, which he pimps endlessly, is called Live Not By Lies.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Dedicated to last night's festivities in DC.

•   A few days after a white LEO fetishist came to Kenosha and murdered two protestors, it's Rightwing Honky Ginned-Up Grievance Time:

Just got attacked by an angry mob of over 100, one block away from the White House. Thank you to @DCPoliceDept for literally saving our lives from a crazed mob.

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) August 28, 2020

The Washington Times blubbers:

'It was horrific': Sen. Rand Paul threatened by protesters after the RNC

What was the threat? Here's the most violent thing in the story:

Protesters knocked one of the officers, who had a bicycle, into Mr. Paul.

I hope the poor man was rushed to the ER.

Making this snowflakery even funnier: This video report from a Washington Post reporter. Looks like both Paul and the protestors were in serious danger of being overwhelmed by news photographers. The usual suspects are shrieking over it: rightwing rageclown Sara Carter portrays Paul's hecklers as "unstable protestors and rioters" -- man, they love to call people who are self-evidently not rioting rioters -- and expressed terror that today's Washington protest will devolve into chaos and anarchy:

As crowds begin to line up early this Friday morning in Washington D.C. protesting what they say is criminal justice reform and racial equality, we must remain vigilant. Innocent protestors, police officers, businesses and citizens going about their own business will get swept up in those that are sure to attempt to riot and destroy the city. 

Worse, the fear that the situation could escalate to the point that someone could lose their life is very real.

LOL. I'll try and get over there later (goddamn job is in the way, gripe mutter) but so far the "Take You Knee Off Our Necks" gathering looks like a sedate church-crowd event. I guess Carter only knew the attendees would be black. Ooga booga!

UPDATE. Took a long lunch to run down and get a look and take some snaps. Got there as CeCe Winans was singing! !Lots of people -- probably bigger than the last big Lincoln Memorial protest I attended in June -- and a great feelings of revival, remembrance, and resolution. Had to get back to work but wish them well on their March. And as for the fools like Sara Carter who are scared of this -- in a way, you should be.

THE GOING GOETZ TOUGH.

I'm releasing today's newsletter to the public: Another White House scene, in which the latest conservative hero is groomed for greater things.

A patrol of the fever swamps shows the Kenosha assassin is very popular with the folks who usually only get to attack protestors verbally (and who also like to play internet defense lawyers for the cops who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back as well as for Rittenhouse). That figures; given the popularity of Trump, anyone who just does what he pleases regardless of law or morality to kill people conservatives have been aching to kill for years will get a big thumbs-up from the people who have really made the term "law and order" completely meaningless.

Picture mobs of Bernie Goetzes -- who was a weaponized incel avant la lettre -- going out to kill, and you have some idea of what these guys want for America. We forget how popular Goetz was and how even decent people went along because there was a lot of crime and it felt good to them to see someone hit back. But Rittenhouse didn't go into the 1980s New York subway with a concealed weapon waiting for someone to Make His Day -- he went to a Black Lives Matter protest open-carrying, confident of (and receiving!) the approval and assistance of the police. That's the New Model Army of Trumpism.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Worth slowing down for.

•   I have said many times, and meant it too, that I hate seeing anyone go to prison, but the Trump Gang has really tested my resolve on that and I must admit the prospect of former presidential advisor and current Nazi Steve Bannon going away gives me some pleasure. But who am I kidding, he'll never taste justice -- he'll either treat with Trump for a pardon or make a deal with the feds. But at least we have the joy of knowing that in addition to being an active and evangelical fascist Bannon is also the cheapest sort of grifter, one who exploits the weak-mindedness of rubes to swindle them out of their savings. True, the rubes in this case are Trumpkins and sufficiently racist that they threw their money at an obvious scam just because they thought it would keep dark-skinned immigrants out of the country, so I can't feel too sorry for them. Indeed, the saga would have some of the picaresque air of a con game movie like The Sting, but that we have the gargoyle Bannon instead of Newman and Redford, and instead of ending with "You're right, it's not enough -- but it's close!" we'd probably get the 14 Words.

Still it's nice to see the bastard pantsed. From my newsletter (on which regular production was paused this week for vacation -- new stories starting Monday!) I offer you a fantasia on the We Build The Wall theme I wrote back when the story was fresh in December 2018, starring Trump and co-conspirator Brian Kolfage. (If Trump's relative clarity of self-expression in that episode surprises you, bear in mind his mental deterioration over the past year and a half has been swift and considerable.) And here's one of my more recent Bannon episodes.

•   I see Postmaster General DeJoy is taking the same who's-gonna-stop-me hard line as other Trump goons hauled before Congress, refusing to restore the mail-sorting machines he's trashed and claiming the mail slowdown in recent weeks has nothing to do with his boss' confessed intention to fuck up vote-by-mail and will be resolved in time for the election.

No one believes any of this, though conservatives have to pretend to. One popular take has been that the Post Office problems don't actually exist and Democrats are pretending they do to make The Leader look dishonest. It's a "wildly irresponsible and baseless conspiracy theory," says Rep. James Comer (R.-Ky.) at Fox News; Tucker Carlson claims the Democrats are trying to "make America even more paranoid and fearful than it already is" and are in fact the real vote-stealers, in furtherance of which stupid point he hauls out the usual discredited charges that voting by mail is easy to rig.

This routine probably only works on rightwing true believers, since many of us have experienced the slowdowns first-hand and DeJoy more or less admitted they've been happening, so the brethren will probably switch over to a deeper, more old-fashioned propaganda cut: That public services are trad, Dad, and privatized mail is where it's at.

This is the tack taken in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial on the subject that blames "Congress," which in their 80s-vintage interpretation means tax-and-spend Democrats coddling inefficient government services: The PO is "a Blockbuster service in a Netflix world" and "overall mail volume peaked in 2006" -- all the cool kids use email! (Yes, I know about the 2007 pension law that wrecked USPS' finances -- WSJ obviously hopes other readers don't.)

"A misalignment like this wouldn’t last in private business," says WSJ, "but the Postal Service answers to politicians." Also, what to bleeding hearts looks like DeJoy's conflict of interest (a $30 million stake in USPS contractor XPO Logistics) is to WSJ a Horatio Alger story: "Mr. DeJoy built a trucking company from 10 employees in 1983 to almost 7,000 in 2014," etc.

At the Wall Street Journal it's still 1984; everybody's wearing suspenders and smoking Macanudos and thinks Big Government should make way for awesome privatization -- or, if that's too scary for you (for the moment), more Reagan-era, hostile-takeover, cut-to-the-bone "reform" that heretofore and everywhere else has meant worse service for us peons and bigger dividends for the 1%, but this time for sure free-market pixie dust will do the trick:

...it isn’t credible to say the USPS merely needs pandemic relief. What it requires is reform. Privatization can’t pass Congress, so ignore that boogeyman. But lawmakers could give the USPS more freedom to act like a business: to raise prices if warranted; to close lonely, desolate post offices; to stop Saturday mail -- or Wednesday mail if it comes to that.

Or, if you're out on a rural route, maybe you'll get mail every couple of weeks -- it'll be your own fault for being too inefficient to make a profit on. If Biden's speech didn't convince you these guys need to be voted out of the known universe at the very least, think on that.

OUTTA TOWN.

Guess where I am! 

I have been on vacation, and missing the Democratic National Convention. Longtime readers know I love to cover these things, but I have to say the lockdown version didn't excite me much, and what I heard about them giving airtime to every Republican looking for an alibi for when Trump goes to the gallows for treason -- "I vas in Biden Switzerland!" -- didn't tempt me. Still, tonight I watched some of the show. I  appreciated Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton telling the folks, essentially, that their dying wish is that they vote Biden. I also appreciated the roll-call with all the black, gay, and otherwise cishet-exotic spokespeople -- a cunning plan, I am assuming, to get Republicans to run out on their lawns the next morning and describe the thing with fulsome slurs to their neighbors, who will think, "Well, I felt lukewarm about Joe Biden before but now my asshole neighbor has convinced me to look up vote-by-mail."  

Of course the wingnut response remains morbidly fascinating, like the Murdoch coverage of Billy Porter's and Stephen Stills' version of "For What It's Worth," characterizing it as "bizarre" and pointing out its "mixed reviews" [kudos to the photo editor for flouncing up the subtext!]. No doubt their dotard boomer Trumpkin fans are mad that one of their glory-days musical touchstones had to be ruined by actual relevance to current events -- not like when the song originally came out and it was all about how groovy it was to be young when the economy was doing great!

As for the Biden video with Springsteen's "The Rising" -- I'm constitutionally immune to this kind of thing. I've always thought pop songs made or repackaged for the DNC like Carly Simon's "Turn of the Tide" were weak and maudlin. And as a New Yorker I found the Boss' 9/11 stuff... well, a good effort; well-meaning, workmanlike uplift. But it never touched me the way it seemed to touch people who went in for disaster-themed group hugs and blue-collar hero talk. My hometown had just been bombed and America was invading countries that had nothing to do with it and Republicans were calling me and my friends traitors; I just wasn't into it.

But now, 19 years later, with 9/11 virtually the midpoint between Reagan's original hijack of the American dream and the Trump bust-out of the remainders, with the country being destroyed from within by a drug-addled Russian mobster and the rump of depraved shitheels who take pleasure in his brutality and racism, it hits, as they say, a little different. Der Alte in 2020! We can sweat the details later.