SUNDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: CHAMPAGNE OR HEMLOCK EDITION.

I'm old and I was old then too but how did I miss this?

The title comes from not-yet-governor-elect Mario Cuomo on election night 1982. And I doubt he was any more nervous than millions of your fellow Americans are in these closing hours of this campaign. My final thoughts about the closing and the outcome will be in Monday morning’s edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – which will be FREE to everyone on the mailing list, paying subscriber or not, so now is an excellent time to sign up! 

I won’t say too much about that here and now. But I will say that in a campaign full of totally insane moments – can you believe “they’re eating the dogs… they’re eating the cats” was less than two months ago? – Tubby’s reaction to RFK Jr.’s plan to take fluoride out of drinking water is kind of a watershed:

Former President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed tentative support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to order the removal of fluoride from water supplies during a potential second Trump term, saying that it “sounds OK to me.”

“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”

It’s really wild that in 2024 a major presidential candidate is giving the old okey-doke to a straight-up Cold War era, John Birch, General Jack D. Ripper conspiracy theory. I mean, I didn’t think this was a thing with even most of what I guess we have to call mainstream crackpots — the sort of anti-vaxx, Pizzagate nuts who are now a major part of the Republican coalition. I expect most of the people who were railing about fluoridation in the 1960s are dead. Maybe it’s their version of retro — you know, like That 70s Show. 

But what’s even more depressing, in a way, is Trump’s sure-why-not response. We know he’s not at all interested in policy as such (any more than ordinary Republicans are, any more) and will say anything to rile his rubes. We expect him to, for example, spread racist and misogynist fables like Haitian pet-eaters and post-birth abortions; that’s standard operating procedure for conservatives, which he mainly just makes more lurid. But if he and his minions are going back eighty years to fish out crazy ideas we’d all forgotten about, what’s next? The theory of the Four Humours? Spontaneous generation of disease? Phlogiston? If it’s retro anything it’s the Dark Ages.

Part of why this is so important is there is literally no depth to which these people will not sink and take us with them. 

Anyway, last week’s REBID freebies – well, events proceed so rapidly that the premises of these items might seem untimely to some; however, as the saying goes literature is news that stays news and literature is what I’m dishing out here, see! 

So even though no one probably remembers the difference between Biden saying “garbage” and that dipshit at the Trump rally saying “garbage,” the Prestige Press rolling in it is still funny. And on a more serious tip, in my view the WaPo/Bezos bullshit is just about an isolated in-kind campaign contribution from a billionaire to a fascist, but about the way normal people – that is, not just rightwing soreheads -- are coming to view the press and what they may expect from it in the future. Meantime, good night and good luck!  

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: JEFF BEZOS IS A PARASITIC PIECE OF SHIT WHO SHOULD BE TAXED INTO OBLIVION EDITION.

I love Jill Scott and this song but had never before heard this live stretch-out. Nice!

It’s just barely Friday, still, but I’m coming in under the wire to tell you fuck that piece of shit Jeff Bezos. In a way, he and his fucked-up interference with the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement – that is, blocking it because the board wanted to endorse Harris and Bezos, as a client of the federal government (or is it vice-versa?), obviously felt it necessary to suck up to Trump because he knows if that fat fuck wins then sucking up is the whole game – is just a symptom of the parasitic hypercapitalist infection that is literally destroying our democracy.

But saying Bezos is “just a symptom” is like saying Hitler was just a symptom of fascism because there were other fascists running around and he was just one man. Sure, the problem is bigger than Bezos, but he’s a pretty fucking big problem all by himself. He’s the second richest person in America next to Musk, who is also a fascist piece of shit who should be taxed into oblivion, just as all these hyperrich democracy-hating supervillains should be taxed into oblivion. At least. 

That we allow such a small group of freakish men whose primary qualification is luck (in the genetic lottery and/or investment decisions) to hoard so much wealth and the power that comes with it has had an absurdly distorting effect on democracy – as is ably shown by this one rich cunt smacking down the board of the newspaper he bought to prevent them from making their endorsement. No wonder FDR taxed their asses off. Not only did (and, God knows, does) America need the money, we have to stop allowing rich straight-up fascists to create power bases in direct opposition to democracy. 

I mean look at these goddamn people – the deranged apartheid clinger Musk, the literal vampire Thiel, and Bezos who blows his incalculable wealth on trips to space (fawned over by his WaPo lickspittle Megan McArdle) and, we now see, collusion with the dark forces we thought we’d seen an end to in World War Two. They’re at least as much of a threat as Tubby and it’s about time the people who profess to speak for the rest of us did something about it. 

I will only add: It's really something that the MAGA creeps who are forever yelling about "Big Tech" "Censorship" (like JD Vance) are getting the election handed to them by guys like Musk, Thiel, and Bezos.

Anyway, here’s this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies (yes, only one – quit being such cheap bastards and pony up the $7/month for a full subscription to this FIVE DAY A WEEK SERVICE -- unlike fucking Bezos I can use it!): The hot new trend among serious people who were just recently telling us not to call a fascist – namely calling Trump a fascist!  If anything I think I was late in applying the f-word, myself, but if anything can make a man look prescient it’s being surrounded by idiots.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: T-MINUS-18 DAYS AND COUNTING EDITION.

The pride of Cabo Verde.

Really barreling into the election now, as you can tell by the kind of crap rightwing papers are trying to put over. The Washington nee Moonie Times keeps shooting me “news alerts” like this:

It’s all Mad Libs at this point: Harris FLIP-FLOPPED on TRANS RIGHTS in BORDER CRISIS.  Oh, and if you aren’t convinced Jill Stein is working to elect Trump, maybe you’ll notice that Trump supporters are sure working to promote Stein: 

All more or less normal ratfuckery, and neither as important nor as sinister as the GOP’s push to suppress Democratic votes by any means necessary. Meanwhile Tubby is visibly off his nut, yammering like some escaped mental patient; his handlers are trying to get him out of the public eye, and it figures that his own people are more aware of his decline than our Prestige Press, which barely acknowledges it.

Anyway, it’s late, so here are the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: Two fun scenes – first, Bari Weiss piloting her fake university through seas of donor money; and second, a peek at how things are going with Trump and the gang in the Eagle’s Nest. Look, if we can’t laugh, what’s the point?

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL EDITION.

Heard this one at the taco place.

Friday ‘Round-the-Horn come on a Saturday this week, as the Pogo peeps used to say. Well, we’re all busy and deserve a smidge of slack.

Out of the five regular Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions this past week – yes, I’m there Monday through Friday, like Eyewitness News or Good Morning America, the hardest working man in Substack business – I’m releasing two to gen pop.

First is my latest Elon Musk at The Office sketch. In this case he’s working on a counter-attack to Kamala Harris’ Medicare Long-Term Care Benefit proposal. Yeah, I know Democrats don’t put over everything they promise, usually because Republicans block them (though it’s notable that the Obama-era LTC proposal, the CLASS Act, was withdrawn by the Obama administration – though it was a Republican who gave it the poison pill. The Dems should have fought harder for it then. Blame neo-liberalism! It’s usually a good guess). Still, I like putting LTC back on the table and daring the GOP to block it and think it's a winner. Musk’s solution runs true to his repulsive nature. 

The second is my home-stretch piece on why, despite the threats, a Harris victory is at least probable. It’s an optimistic read but not an unreasonable one, based on past electoral results, human nature, and Trump’s own behavior. I know it may not look so good at the moment but, it has been noted elsewhere, both sides have good reasons to underestimate the Democrats’ hope of victory. It doesn’t address the certainty of post-election MAGA mayhem – with Vance’s continuing refusal to accept the 2020 election results and Tubby’s demand for military hardware (allegedly for “security,” obviously for purposes of insurrection) the latest chilling harbingers – but if that’s only an issue if we win. Dare to dream! 

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM REDUX.

Some ragged guy was playing this on the train. Slaps, is that still the term?

Late again, Bullwinkle! And I’m busy and must be brief. I will only say in addition to the Free REBID Posts announcement (yes, soon, friends, be patient) that this has been a banner week for disinfo and misinfo, with dicks like Marco Rubio declaring the recent positive U.S. jobs report a fraud and, especially, Elmo and his bots claiming the administration isn’t sending help to the Helene-hit districts. It reminds me that, before the Crushing Boer took it over, Twitter was a valuable source of news and information, and now it’s just a perch to take pot-shots at the fakes and feebs who run rampant on it. 

I hate to give vibes-based reasons for voting the right way, as there are plenty of more solid ones (like the other guys are fascists with a Nazi program), but a valid motivation for shoving all the way back on the MAGA bullshit is that, despite their self-portrayal as champions of the common people, they’re mobbed up with the most evil billionaires with the craziest dystopian plans for any of us who aren’t in their Big Club, and they’re so confident of their ultimate victory that they’re showing their asses even now.

OK, here you go: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down free issues for non-subscribers for the week – one, my debate notes from Tuesday. I can understand the people who are mad that Walz didn’t go after the asshole more aggressively; I myself would have been pleased to see the bark stripped off him. (I bet some of you would have preferred Al Franken to be the Minnesotan in charge of smacking up Vance.) Some say that’s just “not him,” and that may be true, but I’m guessing the Harris campaign wants Walz to be earnest old uncle Tim as a point of difference from the competition – vote for us if you don’t wish to be ruled by madman -- and coached him to preserve that equity rather than get mad and blur the distinction. I also share the doubters’ concern that, in playing Concern rather than Fuck You, Walz came over as less butch than Vance, and that risks turning off the knuckleheads. But you know what? They’re lost already – Harris needs to maximize the sane-people vote. 

The other freebie is another episode of Received Opinion, where the pundits celebrate Trump’s New Leaf, yet again, in the nanosecond gap between I Will Help The Suffering Multitudes and I Will Kill All The Foreigners.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: IF THEY'RE HITLER AND YOU KNOW IT EDITION.

We had lunch at a Turkish restaurant and much of the pleasure
was in the Turkish pop playing in the bakcground.

The mental disintegration of Tubby is getting harder for his enablers in the Prestige Press to normalize, but they keep trying. Yesterday when Zelensky had to meet with Trump to protect Ukraine’s interests, Trump ranted to reporters afterward that the beleaguered wartime leader – who had to maintain an embarrassed silence while standing next to him – had announced there was “absolutely nothing wrong” with Trump’s 2019 attempt to strong-arm him into incriminating Joe Biden (for which Trump was first impeached). This is not only untrue but nuts; Trump's behavior was more appropriate to a lunatic who thinks he’s president than someone who actually had the job and wants it back. 

Hilariously the Murdoch propaganda sheet New York Post actually got closer to truthfully characterizing this event with their headline, “Trump praises Zelensky in Trump Tower after accusing him of ‘nasty little aspersions’” than the Washington Post, which soberly declared “Trump meets with Zelensky, opening new chapter in a fraught relationship.” The New York Post didn’t get religion – it just went for the soap-opera angle to sell papers. Thus in their crassness they at least gave a glimpse of the weird pettiness of Trump’s act, while people who read the classier paper could skim the news and think “Famous foreigner met with both world leaders, everything is normal,” which is of course the Prestige Press’ suicidal strategy for this election campaign.

We who have free souls, it touches us not – and that’s why one of the free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down posts this week is about pushing back on this fluffery and calling the MAGA philosophy and behavior just what it is – fascist, even Nazi. Yeah, I know there are simps out there who’ll cover their ears and wince when you do that, but they’re hopeless. You want people who are only getting the soft-soap to focus on the hard reality, and it makes more sense to tell them what’s Nazi about these guys – and it is puh-lenty – than to try and chase down every stupid obfuscation by the Access Annies. 

The other freebie is about the Olivia Nuzzi nonsense and that, too, has to do with how people who – for reasons I can’t guess – chose a career in journalism cheerfully betray their craft by loudly defending the anti-ethics of one of their superstars. They act like they don’t know what’s unethical about a reporter having a romantic relationship with a candidate while slagging their opponent, though I’m sure they get drilled on this sort of thing at their expensive journalism schools. It’s as if the confusion is not over what behavior is wrong, but rather what right and wrong even are.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: ...AND FUBAR, TOO, EDITION.

Hey greybeards! Sounds pretty good, huh? 2017. 
Modern stuff's hard to keep up with, but nice when you catch it.

I keep starting these F 'R-T-H posts with variations of "Wotta week, huh?" and I'm beginning to feel like I'm actually summoning the mayhem that inevitably escalates thereafter. Maybe it’s time to rechristen this feature “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up” in honor of our veterans. 

I see someone wanted to kill Tubby again, this time while he was golfing, and his fans are mad because no one gives a shit. I have two responses to this: First, the Secret Service and FBI et alia are running down assassination threats to Biden, Harris, et alia all the damn time; second, I was alive when President Gerald Ford, of all people, fielded not one but two actual attempts on his life (one involving Squeaky Fromme!) and we all just rolled with it because FOLKS WAS TOUGHER IN THEM DAYS. The late underground comics author Willy Murphy did a hilarious Arnold Peck strip inspired by that, showing Ford manning a mounted machine gun to help the Secret Service defend him from multiple assailants – here and here. So lighten up, Fanatics. (Willy Murphy was the greatest.)

Oh, and the Prestige Media Pantsing Proceeds Apace, with Maggie “Access Annie” Haberman blubbering that an “industry” (low-paying, believe me!) “on the left” that is “dedicated toward attacking the media,” and she wants everyone to know she and her fellow media swells are working darn hard not be Very Bias in their coverage of the guy who wants to deport millions of people and spreads racist lies to his millions of deranged followers. 

Minutes later we all find out Olivia “Forget Sleepy Joe, RFK Jr. is Where It's At” Nuzzi got suspended by New York magazine because she’d been having a “relationship” (no tongues, she swears) with the man himself. Very “how it stated/how it’s going,” that. 

And we haven’t even discussed that Mark Robinson shit! I’m not one to kink-shame, though as always with kinky conservatives there’s a big honking gap between the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s Death to Sexual Deviants policy and his pee-and-porn shadow life. Come on man, be free! As for the Black Nazi stuff, well, you have to remember it’s a significant part of his base. 

It has been observed that it will be hard for Democrats to use this material against him because so much of it is unacceptable in family-friendly media, but I think if they play it right the long bleeped-out sections with do the job fine. 

Oh, yeah, the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – this week we have two: One, a meditation (wait, come back! It’s good!) on why conservatives seem to love AI "art." Two, another scene from the villain’s-lair of Elon Musk. Eat it up, and subscribe so you never miss an issue! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: DOG SOLDIERS EDITION.

Ha ha, get it. Cool tune tho.

Helluva week, huh? I know, I said that last week, but it’s still true. I guess the highlight was Tubby’s wipeout in the debate on Tuesday – and my near-contemporaneous account thereof is our first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie for the week. I’m not a positive-thinking kind of guy but I could see right away Trump had made a mess of it – I’d say he shit the bed, except with him I suppose that’s literally an everyday thing. Suffice to say any normal person viewing his ravings will have figured out he’s lost his mind, and even a few MAGA joy-poppers may have gotten sick of his malignant Billy Madison routine, too.

One proof-point of the catastrophe is the hysterical post-facto attempt by rightwing media outlets to convince viewers not to believe their lying eyes. You’d think that’d be a tough sell after wingnuts like Karl Rove and Andrew C. McCarthy threw in the towel, but here’s PJ Media (yep, still in business, God knows why) claiming “ABC whistleblower to reveal Harris campaign was given SAMPLE QUESTIONS” – which, number one, lol as if, and number two, if you need a mole to tell you the moderators will ask questions like “when it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off now than they were four years ago?” you’re in the wrong business. 

Of course the more intense and disgusting MAGA cope is their doubling-down on Trump’s insane racist tirade about pet-eating Haitians in Springfield. JD Vance laid that groundwork (after the Ohio neo-Nazis shoveled it to him), as chronicled in our other REBID freebie.

While there’ve been a lot of funny jokes about this online, I find it ominous that the Republicans haven’t ditched it for some newer outrage. The story has been thoroughly debunked, but I don’t think these guys are even trying to convince people that it’s real anymore – they just want to keep the image of black foreigners eating dogs in front of white voters, in hopes that it will circumvent their frontal lobes and panic them into defending their race by voting for the Head Bigot in Charge. 

You remember when they were telling voters that Obama ate dogs, right? Their act doesn’t change much decade to decade, apart from getting wormier.

For our last freebie please enjoy my latest Mar-a-Lago Throne Room scene set directly after the ass-whipping, starring Tubby and the new glimmer twins, MTG and Laura Loomer. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GET ME REWRITE (FOR TRUMP) EDITION.

My local coffee shop plays a lot of neo-soul.

I missed ‘Round-the-Horn last week, sorry! I was on an extended Labor Day break, during which I visited New York, which was partially the subject of my first return post at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (yes, let’s get right to the freebies, shall we? No point in making you wait like kids at a rec center poverty Christmas event). The main subject is actual age and wisdom, but you may find it interesting even if you are neither old nor wise.

The second freebie imagines the logical next step in J.D. Vance’s self-humiliation campaign. The guy is amazingly bad; every few days it seems new clips are unearthed of him talking about how much he hates women and wishes to see them reduced to broodsows and unpaid domestic help. People blame his nomination on lazy vetting by the Trump brain trust, but I think it was a purposeful choice that events have proven useful. You may have noticed Tubby tergiversates a lot these days on political issues – as with his vague and inconsistent yammerings about reproductive health care. Some of the anti-abortion groups have complained about it, though I’m sure nearly all of them know he’s lying to confuse the suckers, and approve of it as pro-life taqiyyah; still, some MAGA creeps are mad that he sort of admitted he lost the 2020 election, and he's bound to piss more of them off as he blunders into November.

So Trump needs to send signals to the faithful that, despite all the bullshit, he's still the same cruel rightwing scumbag he’s always been. That’s where Vance comes in: Even when he tries to temporize and glad-hand he can’t help but reveal his hatefulness and contempt toward anyone different from himself, and this keeps the hardcore incels happy.

In other news: One of the many ways our Prestige Press coddles and enables Trump is by restating his increasingly weird gibberish as something resembling coherent statements.  This “sane-washing” has of late been addressed by press critics like Parker Molloy and others, especially since Trump’s recent mouthfarts at the Economics Club of New York were treated like Delphic wisdom by the New York Times. While some Prestige Press-adjacent commentators like Rachel Maddow and Philip Bump are hip to this, their newsdesks decidedly are not (e.g. AP: “Trump suggests tariffs can help solve rising child care costs in a major economic speech”). I think an under-appreciated effect of this presidential election – especially since all the journos’ obsession with presidential age vanished with the end of Biden’s candidacy, despite Tubby’s increasingly obvious mental deterioration – is that the media is losing the trust of its last constituency – liberals who long defended it out of a sentimental feeling for the Fourth Estate that its actual practitioners stopped living up to a long time ago. I’d like to think some reform might come out of it – but then I look around at all the other institutions of which I could say the same, and think again. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: STEALIN' YOUR GALL EDITION.

No easy way to be free.

Hey Democrats: Nice save! I started the week “too busy” to watch but I figured I’d catch the Obamas and, well, I got hooked. There was the usual convention cheese, and I don’t mean that unkindly: You can’t have a convention without, for example, dull speeches by replacement-level up-and-comers (boy, we dodged a bullet with Shapiro, huh?). But there was real top-shelf oratory (very much not excluding that of the nominees!), genuinely clever bits like having the Harris nieces give America (and Tubby) a Kamala-pronunciation lesson, and even some decent music. 

Something about the convention clicked for me during what I think of as the victim impact statement portion of the proceedings. I certainly sympathize with anyone affected by gun violence, bigotry, reproductive tyranny etc., and I know the testimony works because there are so many viewers who not only sympathize but also relate. I also know that the DNC have brought out victims of Republican policies and politics before – my God, I remember James and Sarah Brady at the 1996 Democratic Convention and Khizr and Ghazala Khan throwing their son’s sacrifice in Donald Trump’s Islamophobic face in 2016. 

But this time it seemed less like an answer to a specific Republican outrage and more programmatic, like the Democrats were carefully laying out a case for, as the nominee says, not going back. And I have to say it reminded me of the Republicans’ Trump-era habit of bringing out relatives of people killed by immigrants. Obviously it’s better to employ the suffering of loved ones to advocate for gun control and reproductive rights than to use it to promote racist MAGA fantasies. But it seemed as if the Democrats were consciously taking a GOP shtick and turning it against them.

Which is OK with me! And it wasn’t the only march the Democrats stole on them – there was the sea of flags, the chants of “USA,” the misapprehending sing-along to “Born In The USA” (very Republican!) and, especially and spectacularly, the general appropriation of patriotic equities like pride in the military, love of family, high school football for crying out loud, and all the other stuff in which Republicans used to drape themselves, but had to abandon because these things made their conman king look and feel as cheap and shoddy as he is. 

Others have noted that the Democrats got the opportunity to employ “joy” as a campaign theme because the Republicans have embraced of fear and misery. But it’s too little noted, I think, that most of what Republicans gave up for Trump and left for Dems were actually among the best things about being American – and they had taken them mainly by subterfuge in the first place, and will have a hell of a time getting them back. Turnabout is fair play and – let the fat fuck think on this, since he likes the B word so much – payback is a bitch. 

Two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies this week: First, a fantasy of Tubby workshopping his act at Gary’s G Spot; and second, today’s Fun Friday convention special, in which you’re invited to share what you saw at the DNC. Enjoy!