Sure, fuck it, let's go back there.
Happy Easter weekend! Here is my favorite Easter joke, which I will render in all caps because it is meant to be told out loud -- proper capitalization rather spoils it.
Q: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN JESUS WENT TO MOUNT OLIVE?
A: POPEYE BEAT HIM UP.
Years later I’m still laughing. This past week was sort of a march up Calvary itself, but fortunately for you folks and the health of the nation I have a couple of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues to release free to non-subscribers. (I must remind you that I sling this hash FIVE TIMES A WEEK and that a subscription is absurdly cheap, about 35 cents an issue, so you really ought to pony up and not wait around for leavin’s every Friday.)
In the first one, an episode of our political talk show, Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, treats the Ronna McDaniel née Romney catastrophe obliquely – via an interview between Bolt and yet another high-born Republican who changed his name to show conformity with the new order, Trumpy Killthelibs. Much discussion of liberal unfairness commences, as it did when NBC paid off the former RNC chair to go away after even bothsider simps like Chuck Todd publicly blanched at having an insurrectionist at the news analysis desk.
Like I could give a shit about any of these people. But even when one of them does something resembling the right thing, the prestige press has to make it into a controversy rather than belated due diligence. The palace gossip angles taken by papers like Politico (“The staff revolt at NBC News underscores how the balance of power has shifted away from management”) is bad enough – some of the big rags were pushing the elderly Liberal Bias line. “NBC fires former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel after internal uproar and blatant anti-GOP bias,” squirts Ingrid Jacques at USA Today, as if there were no difference between a major GOP executive who actively tried to overturn the 2020 Presidential election on behalf of her crooked boss and straight-laced Republican Joes like, say, the Romney relatives McDaniel disowned.
Neither Jacques nor any other pundit taking this line even acknowledges what was considered so objectionable about McDaniel (“McDaniel's detractors insisted that she was a threat to democracy,” Jacques says, without revealing why), devolving instead into cancelculture crybaby tantrums. I understand why claiming persecution on behalf on rich Republicans who don’t get to be on the network of their choice appeals to the base, who are so addled by their own resentments and grudges they'll sing along with any bitch-and-moaner, but I can’t imagine normal people going for it – which I take as further proof that these people are counting on voter disenfranchisement, ballot tampering, and, when all else fails, January 6 Part II, rather than on the Will of the People, to get back into power.
The second freebie is my essay about the conservative reaction to Baltimore’s Key Bridge disaster – rehearsing some of the batshit conspiracy mongering and racist rants they offered instead of, I noticed, anything like compassion for the victims. Once upon a time they would have at least ginned up some thoughts-and-prayers – but no longer. American conservatives have always been advance men for wealthy interests, and as such they’ve always tried to claw back the gains that less-rich Americans made over the years and redistribute them to their rich donors; but in recent years this meanness has gotten less businesslike and become more like a deep soul sickness – like they’re more excited to see and revel in the suffering of their fellow Americans than they are to grab the cash. I think more than Tubby’s ravings it’s that sickness that makes people worried about them seizing back power.
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