FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE GULLED MINE.

Keep it simple, stupid.

The two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week (sure, let’s get right to them, it’s a busy weekend with Artscape and all) are related. 

First one is about the now-widespread reference to conservatives as “weird.” As I say in the essay, I’ve been on this beat for a while, and while the post speaks for itself I would add this: 

All political actors are gonna be at least a bit weird (though some, like Obama and Reagan, are particularly good at masking it), but conservatives have a head start, both generally and specifically in 2024. Generally, for the last 50 years at least American conservatism has been about scaring Americans out of asking for what they want (and have a right to expect as citizens of a big rich nation) with a variety of boogeymen – communists, hippies, Black Panthers, Bill Clinton’s penis, Arab terrorists et alia – and into accepting, in place of their birthright, a false sense of moral superiority. Since this is an intrinsically negative approach (sometime papered over with propaganda like “Morning in America,” sometimes amplified with propaganda like “American Carnage,” but always based on fear and self-righteousness), it requires its operatives to employ a version of the Camp Counselor with a Flashlight Under Their Chin routine to keep the bad vibes coming. 

This is exhausting for perpetrator and audience alike, and every so often the act gets stale enough that their opposition gets the chance to call bullshit and reverse the flow. But conservatives soon rev up the hate machine again and summon the voters back.

Th “weird” campaign is meta in that, instead of directly confronting the rightwing panic of the day – in this case, so near as I can tell, trans women and migrant caravans – which may or may not work but would be in any case very tiresome, the Democrats have decided instead to call attention to what years of pulling this act has done to the people who pull it – that is, made them sour, brain-damaged freaks like Trump, Vance, and whoever steps up on any given day to be the Bugfuck Crazy Republican of the Moment --  and to ask Americans if they want to be associated, never mind led, by people like this. The approach has its upsides and downsides, and I’ll be writing more about it in weeks to come, but for now the cries of hit dogs hollering across the nation shows it’s at least a provisional success. 

The second freebie is another episode of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, showing how the Prestige Press reacts to Trump vomiting racist bile in front of cameras – that is, protectively, since 1.) the PP has been trained from years of ref-working to excuse every Republican lunacy as something they couldn’t have possibly meant and 2.) Trump is their ticket to clicks and engagement so they want him to win. Whether these chucklefucks will be able to drag Tubby across the finish line like they did in 2016 remains to seen. He sure isn’t making it easy for them. (Maybe this is the demented old bastard’s final power play – making himself fatally obnoxious so that his dedicated media enablers finally make themselves look so foolish caping for him that nobody, not even the legacy liberals who haven’t gotten the message, can trust them anymore.)