Lou Rawls had some jams, I tell you what.
A gruesome week all around! You follow the news and know about Tubby’s inaugural rampage; if you need a reminder, this tally by Olivia Troye hits the high points and I’m sure there are other such lists out there you may consult.
One thing Troye misses is Trump’s ongoing assault on the National Institutes of Health – freezing spending, communications, and really all their main work, leaving researchers and treating physicians “in limbo,” as Mother Jones puts it. The NIH is the most important medical research institution in the world. Also, as some of you may know, the NIH has been very good to me as a patient – and, I have observed over thirty-plus years of visits to the Clinical Center, it has been good to patients and families from every part of the nation and every walk of life. So I take this very personally and if it were possible for me to despise these people any more than I already do I would.
Since Troye wrote her roundup, there have been even more catastrophes – for example, there was this (in the Nixonian sense) Friday Night Massacre, as the New York Times reports:
President Trump fired 17 inspectors general, the internal watchdogs who monitor federal agencies, on Friday night, capping a week of dramatic shake-ups of the federal bureaucracy focused on loyalty to the president, three people with knowledge of the matter said.
As Chris Geidner points out, the Times does not mention that under the law Trump is required to give Congress 30 days notice to remove an IG. So, this is illegal – albeit, in the judgement of our Prestige Press, not as noteworthy as the Leader's “muscular” style of governance.
A shiny new dime for the first Congressional Democrat to say so! Alas, there seems to be a general agreement among most of them not to rock the boat because people might get mad at them for it.
As for the Prestige Press, ha ha ha, don’t get me started. We’ve already dispensed with Megan McArdle’s Musk-Hitlergruß apologism. (There's more in the first of two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies -- yes, I'm embedding these now; follow along for more!) Now let’s look in on David Brooks. The dainty Times conservative lures liberals with a “How Trump Will Fail” headline, but the column is really about how Democrats should surrender:
Democrats are mistaken if they think they can rebuff Trump by howling the words “fascism” or “authoritarianism,” or by clutching their pearls every time he does something vulgar or immoral. If they decide to continue the culture war between the snooty elitists and the masses, I think we know how that’s going to turn out.
Tubby didn’t even get a majority of the popular vote, but Brooks acts (as does most of the Prestige Press) as if he’s an unstoppable juggernaut strongly supported by Joe Microbrew as he destroys public health and proposes to do away with FEMA – real bread-and-butter issues wimpy Democrats eschew in favor of the so-called “rule of law”!
…If I were running the Democratic Party (God help them), I would tell the American people that Donald Trump is right about a lot of things. He’s accurately identified problems on issues like inflation, the border and the fallout from cultural condescension that members of the educated class have been too insular to anticipate. But when it comes to building structures to address those problems — well, the man is just hapless and incompetent.
In other words, get back to the previous forty years of neoliberal bullshit – we agree with your ends, comrade, it’s your means we question! It’s obviously worked out so well for America.
Feral conservatives who do not have the same social anxieties as Brooks, and therefore no reason to pretend, are in hog heaven, for their inner wreckers have been validated and unleashed. The only complaint I’ve seen them make, via Abe Greenwald and Erick Erickson, is about Tubby’s suspension of federal security details formerly afforded his erstwhile neocon advisors John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. (About his suspension of security for Anthony Fauci, who is at least as likely to be murdered by lunatics, they are silent and probably approving.) Imagine applauding a public official’s “muscular” actions against his enemies, then finding out that he’s also deliberately making your friends into sitting ducks for assassins, and not having the brains to figure out that the man is not your ally but a dangerous lunatic who could as easily turn his savagery on you. That’s American conservatism in the MAGA era.
Oh, yeah, one more REBID freebie -- this one's not so serious: Since the Oscar nominations are out, I did a Fun Friday soliciting readers' nominations for Worst Best Picture of All Time. I picked mine, though there are many other worthy contenders. Enjoy!
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