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.
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