FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

She's cool.

•   It's been a hell of a 2021 so far, eh?  Well, the upside of seeing the neighborhood overrun by National Guard is that I strongly doubt under the circumstances even the most committed Nazi/Proud Boy fucks are going to try it this weekend or on the 20th. Lauren Boebert (R.-Crazyland) or some other Qball Rep may whip out a gun in an effort to fulfill the Nutcake Prophecy, but I expect the feds have a couple marksmen properly assigned. 

And it seems Tubby's approval rating has sunk considerably -- which, to me, doesn't necessarily mean his hardcore minority of yahoos has shrunk too much: rather, it means some of them are getting less of a kick professing their love for him than they used to. Which is still good, even though they've begged off less out of shame and more because the one thing they could never admit has become incontrovertible -- that Trump is a loser. It still saps his power. It's fun for some people to back a bully when he's beating up nerds, but when he finally gets his ass kicked who's gonna sympathize with him? 

All he was able to do in the last ditch was try a putsch and come up with a figurative bloody nose. Hitler came back from a putsch, true. So the Democrats have gotta start acting like they know that: give the people their two grand (I know I know), whip this vaccine delivery into shape, and in general govern like they want people to vote them back in, not like they want their donors to keep it coming. 

Tall order, I know, but that's what it will take. And it can be done! Seriously, who knew even a couple of years ago this was coming:

The National Rifle Association on Friday filed petitions with a U.S. bankruptcy court seeking protection from creditors by restructuring, the gun rights advocacy group announced.

The NRA filed the Chapter 11 petitions in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas, it said in a news release.

The NRA said it would restructure as a Texas nonprofit to exit what it said was a “a corrupt political and regulatory environment in New York” state, where it is currently registered.

The “corrupt political and regulatory environment in New York” to which they refer is one in which they apparently got caught doing massive fraud by New York Attorney General Letitia James. From August 6:

Sean Delany, a former head of the charities bureau in the office of the attorney general — the same division now handling the case — said, “I think the facts are very strong, but I think the remedy of dissolution is a stretch, because the A.G. would have to prove that the organization is so rife with fraud that there isn’t anything sufficiently substantial in the organization’s charitable programs to make it worth saving.”

WELP.  And James is currently gunning for Tubby. Courage, my friends, with God all things are possible. 

•  Oh yeah, in case you want some funsies here's a bagatelle from the newsletter. Ripped from today's headlines! 

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE.

I've unlocked today's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue reviewing the steps that brought us to our current situation, where the inauguration of an exceedingly moderate Democrat as President must be prepared for as if he were Lincoln on the cusp of civil war. 

Unlike a surprising number of commentators, I don't think this country is on the verge of civil war -- I think rather that the sane people of America are being harassed by a bunch of nuts who want such a war, notwithstanding that if they really tried it they would get their asses kicked even worse and much more quickly than their Confederate predecessors. 

Part of the insurrectionist Right's shtick is to talk about the 73 million Trump voters as if they're all waiting for Ted Cruz to drop his handkerchief and will come rebel-yelling over the ridge when he does. That's what Peter Navarro is doing here:

This is part of the Trumpian con-manner, whereby everything you do is colossal, stupendous, the greatest, and can't fail. Thus the Trumpkins enlist Republican voters as co-conspirators in their imaginary uprising. 

Not bloody likely. There's a lot of madness afoot, but if all or even most Republican voters were as crazy as the Republicans who are screaming sedition, this country would  have ground completely to a halt years ago as they all tried to figure out how to pour piss out of a boot.

The ones who actually are that crazy are finding out quick that federal law enforcement is not going to wave them through this gate. Their elected nutcakes, and their unwillingness to go the whole hog and eject Tubby to prevent more miscief, remain a problem. And it bears remembering that in addition to the five dead at the Capitol they are at least partly responsible for the mounting COVID death toll and a lot of other lethal and just plain stupid shit.

For that we only have the tedious remedy of politics. So on to the Biden Administration and all the cruel disappointments that await us there! But as for the MAGA Mob, the prescription is simpler: Play stupid games and win stupid prizes.  

ROD DREHER FASCISM WATCH CONT.

The great volume of work required by my God Damn Job and Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (a classic, only Substack newsletter not devoted to cancelculture blubbering, subscribe!) is part of what keeps me from following Rod Dreher as closely as I used to. But most of it is just fatigue and disgust. As with another of my longtime figures of fun, Jonah Goldberg, their idiocies that once tickled me have palled; neither Dreher nor Goldberg ever improves or even becomes memorably worse, and all they seem to learn are new scholarly references to stick to their same old, shitty ideas. 

Dreher is mainly noteworthy for the increasing obviousness of his fascist beliefs.  Last week I mentioned his latest expression of fondness for Generalissimo Franco (one in a series). This week, as you may expect, he has been disgusted that the awful man whose manners he excoriates (but who he nonetheless had hoped would be reelected) spurred the mob to violence, but did you know the attempted coup was actually "The Left’s Reichstag Fire"? No, he's not saying the Left actually did the attempted coup (at least not yet) but that they stand to benefit from it -- that is, sure, Trump's goons tried to murder Congress, but now liberals will treat this "as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people." Which is so much worse! 

Then, in another post, Dreher goes further: 

Anyway, I anticipate that rightist radicals will now begin to undertake campaigns of low-level violent actions — bombings and other forms of domestic terrorism. It won’t amount to anything, but it will give the Establishment (= not just the state, but corporations too) even more excuses to crack down. 

So "rightist radicals" are going to do "bombings" and "other forms of domestic terrorism" but "it won’t amount to anything" -- besides, I guess, the murder of a bunch of people, but Rod's not really concerned about them because really, what's some dead terror victims that probably don't go to his church compared with cancel culture victims? You may have lost your life but I got a 12-hour Twitter time-out! And my beloved horrible president [sniff] lost his Twitter entirely! ALL GAVE SOME, SOME GAVE ALL!    

Guy's a fascist.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Kia's still on a Carol Burnett kick, and we saw one where Gentry did this number.

Pretty cool, no?

Funny thing -- I was on way late Wednesday morning to the Mall to take some pictures, as I am accustomed to do at local protests, when I ran into a disabled neighbor who needed help; by the time I got through with that, I had to go back home to do job-work. Thus I missed the helter-skelter at the Capitol, though like everyone else I had a few hours' worry about how it was going to come out.

I'm still worried. After a wave of bipartisan calls for Tubby to be removed by impeachment or 25th Amendment -- including from Peggy Noonan, of all people! -- the energy seems to be flowing the other way; Nancy Pelosi is holding firm, but Lindsay Graham has tweeted, "As President @realDonaldTrump stated last night, it is time to heal and move on" -- as if Trump's word for anything could be trusted, except when it is employed -- as it has been from “I would like you to do us a favor though" through "We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you... you have to show strength" -- in the commission of a crime.   

I hope not only our electeds but also the FBI and whoever actually countermanded Trump on National Guard deployment are getting busy, because the nuts who rampaged on Wednesday are as accustomed to a lack of consequences as their leader, and unless they see some consequences pronto they'll be back with worse. Count on it. 

TIME TO GET SERIOUS.

I understand from people who spend time on Facebook and Brit Hume's Twitter feed that a lot of MAGA zombies are saying today's obvious, red-hatted, incited-by-Tubby attempted MAGA coup was the work of Antifa provocateurs pretending to be Trump supporters. 

Somebody should have told that to the current and former Republican office-holders who joined the vandals at the Capitol! Not to mention such notorious MAGA chunkheads as Baked Alaska who sent selfies out from the coup to their social media streams and law enforcement officials who, I hope, will start doing something about it as soon as we wrench control of this government away from Tubby's bund.

The people who refuse to believe what is happening even while it's happening are a sad testament to our shitty public school system and perhaps lead-based paint, but even worse are the rightwing shysters who sort of admit that it's terrible but the real crime is the left using it to cast aspersions on Trump and his devoted followers. Here's Scott Johnson, one of the assholes at remember-when blog Power Line:

President Trump seems determined to leave office in a manner that vindicates the vile accusations hurled at him by his opponents over the past four years.

If only he behaved like the true gentleman we know him to be! Alas, now our years of tongue-bathing him will come to naught, as evil liberals exploit his actual behavior to diminish him and our cause! 

Worse, predictably, is Rod Dreher:

Nevertheless, I believe that these MAGA fools have provided those on the Left — in the government and within corporations, universities and other institutions — who wish to suppress conservatives and religious dissidents with a Reichstag-fire excuse to crack down (except in the case of the Reichstag fire, that didn’t happen; this abomination in Washington today really occurred). The soft totalitarianism I’ve been warning about: the MAGA mob today accelerated its arrival.

It's like the Reichstag fire -- except we totally did it!

I'm glad to see some Democratic officials invoking the 25th Amendment -- not because I expect the gutless shits in Tubby's cabinet to do the right thing, but because it has to be said, loudly, that this shit is so unacceptable we have to do something drastic -- or it'll keep happening and maybe next time they'll get lucky.

As for the oh it must be antifa types, it's time for some serious de-Nazification. Make 'em look at the evidence, like the Allies did to German citizens after the war, and see what they did. 

THE LAST CHOPPER OUT OF SAIGON.

[Note: This is part of an upcoming item in Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, the Substack for smart people with a sense of humor. Most items are paywalled but some, like today's lookback at the 2020 election, are open to the public.]

While low-rent rightwingers howl for a coup, most top-ranked conservative outlets are at this point slightly abashed, maybe even scared, at the unseemly spectacle of their hero trying mob boss tactics to overturn the election. At National Review the longtime utter fraud and heretofore reliable defender of Trump Andrew C. McCarthy was originally willing to go along with the gag in post-election stories like "Michigan Certification of Biden Win Is a Step Toward the End — But It’s Not the End" and "As Time Is Running Out, Trump Campaign Files Stronger Lawsuit in Georgia." 

But now McCarthy seems to caught nerves; In "The Risky Wager of Betting on Trump" he even begins "Were the anti-Trumpers right all along?" before deciding, like Principal Skinner, that no, it's the children who are wrong:

The Trump fanatics notwithstanding, the case for Trump, in 2020 as in 2016, was never based on the comparative merits and demerits of the man. It was Trump as opposed to whom? That’s still the most sensible way to look at it.

This is like the argument made by Russian and Polish Nazis who argued after the war that Hitler was, on balance, a better guy than Stalin and that's why they killed those Jews.

Even the damage now being done, the trail being blazed for the next Democratic administration to subvert future Republican electoral victories, has to be weighed against, say, what the Supreme Court would look like for the next 30 years if Mrs. Clinton had been president for the last four, and what that would portend for our constitutional republic.

Like other Republicans, when this is all over, whether they boldly defend their Trumpism or pretend they were in Switzerland for the entire war, McCarthy will comfort himself that he may have put American democracy at risk but oooooh those reactionary young judges! (And, of course, the traditional confidence of the hypocrite that his opponents would do just as badly in his shoes.) 

One imagines McCarthy wouldn't be too sad if Tubby actually did blow it all up, but apparently he expects that won't happen and he doesn't want to look too Trumpist when the smoke clears. So he talks about how the threat was never so bad because we were always bound to be saved by either the bureaucracy ("the quotidian details of governance are handled by an administration, now grown to thousands of bureaucrats") or the Constitution ("the real genius of the Framers was to plan for the inevitability of crises"). 

Also, ho ho, Trump himself isn't a real threat because he's too silly; "in reality, his lust is more for pomp than power... his fatal flaws have little to do with coveting power and everything to do with vanity..." He's just a clown, not a serious man like Hitler or Mussolini! 

Then McCarthy goes on to slag the just-as-bad Democrats and to hope, like many other conservatives-with-good-taste, that what he's heard about the ever-shrinking attention spans of our citizens is not a myth, and in a few weeks at most they can pretend to care once again about the deficit and "rule by pen and phone" and the dignity of the office without too many of them going Hey, wait a minute!  When do you suppose they'll accuse the absurdly moderate President Biden of posing a greater threat to the stability of the country than the much-maligned Donald Trump ever did? I give 'em two months. 

JUST FOR THE RECORD.

Rod Dreher, who we know from his previous posts is glad the fascist Francisco Franco overthrew the Spanish government and ruled as a dictator for 39 years -- "I didn’t intend to argue about who was right and who was wrong in that war. Personally I believe the better side won" -- recently put up a post about how bad the Spanish leftists Franco defeated were, and how this reminds him that today "the cultural left really is marching through the institutions" and of the "costly stand against the mob" taken by, get this, Bari Weiss. Also, Dreher explains he can't back the Trump "Stop the Steal" crew because they're not doing it right:

It’s all performative with that crowd. They satisfy themselves with, “But he fights!” — ignoring that at best, Trump has only slowed down the takeover. There’s no strategy there, only emoting about God, the flag, and pillows. Instead of a Gen. Franco, a leader who seriously and effectively fought the radical left, they have produced a Gen. Flynn, the crackpot who is now openly promoting the QAnon cult. 

The Right needs leadership. Desperately. [Emphasis added]

This guys gets loved up by David Brooks, the New Yorker and lots of other mainstream types, and he's a straight-up fascist. That's all I came here to say. Happy new year!