FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS EDITION.

You still need a drugstore to cure my cough.

Getting this Friday ‘Round-the-Horn (which often turns into Saturday ‘Round-the-Horn or even Sunday ‘Round-the-Horn) in just under the wire, but I hustled to do so because I want to wish you all a timely Happy No Kings Day. Baltimore’s daytime festivities have been cramped by the city’s annual marathon, so I’m going over to DC to survey the turnout, but will drop by an advertised Dance Party in the hometown that evening. 

For a minute I thought the angry ravings by Tubby and his minions about the rallies (“hate America,” “pro-terrorist,” yadda yadda) must be some sort of weird double-reverse strategy to inflate turnout -- they certainly got people talking about it! Maybe, I mused, the plan was to get everyone who hates Trump outdoors at the same time, then murder us! But no, I finally decided, most likely they were just reacting the way they do to any negative stimulus -- hissing like frightened kittens, except way less cute. 

I can see why they’re nervous. People are beginning to catch on to how bad Tubby’s fucking up -- grocery prices and health insurance premiums are skyrocketing, and ICE is so out of control that in addition to kidnapping U.S. citizens they’re now also kidnapping police officers. The Trumpkins are trying to bull their way past it with new rabid-dog-and-lame-pony shows, but those are increasingly bizarre and not in a way that people like. Did you hear Garglin' Bob Kennedy yammering at the IVF policy thing about teenage sperm counts? 

Today, the average teenager in this country has 50 per cent of the sperm count, 50 per cent of the testosterone as a 65-year-old man... Our girls are hitting puberty six years earlier, and that’s bad, but also our parents aren’t having children.

When I heard that shit it reminded me of when he said he could tell kids were fucked up with "mitochondrial challenges" from antidepressants by looking at them "in airports." Now he's doing sperm counts. I expect to see him on camera in the Oval Office conducting taste tests on semen samples. "Ptui! This is obviously from a troubled young person who should be hauled in for conversion therapy."

Maybe the tide is turning. Democrats like JB Pritzker and even Hakeem Jeffries are beginning to talk about Tubby’s crimes as crimes, and even warn that the statute of limitations on those may outlast Republican control of Congress. I know we’re all worried about Trump being our Mussolini, but maybe we’ll get to the gas station part of the story faster than anticipated.

Hey, have two (2) ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN free issues! First, another scene from Bari Weiss’ tenure at CBS News. Got this one out too early to catch Weiss putting her sister on TV -- dare we hope she’ll do the same with her Intellectual Dork Web friends? Will we get commentary from Jordan Peterson’s latest deathbed? And finally, a rejoinder to all the trimmers and feebs who say Democrats shouldn’t talk about Tubby’s fascism and should instead talk about the price of eggs. For one thing, I should hope these guys can walk and chew gum at the same time; for another, I’d say if Democrats pretended not to notice the secret police and extrajudicial killings, that wouldn’t make people think they were moderate, it’d make them think they were blind. But read the whole thing. See ya on the streets! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/7/23.

Getting some good music recs lately.

Lord, what a week. First there was Tubby going to court – the inspiration for one of my renowned satirical fantasia and the first of two (2!) Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for the week.

(By the way, as I have told my paid subscribers, I’ll be off the clock next week, so there will probably be no ‘Round-the-Horn on the 14th and certainly no freebies before the week to follow. All the more reason to subscribe and get these treats on the regular. It’s cheap!)

Funny as the embittered and indicted Trump is, I must say his defenders are even funnier – none more so than the Just-the-Tip Trumpers who weep over What Their Movement Has Become under the rule of Tubby but have nonetheless and predictably rushed to defend him from the indignity of criminal charges. (Michael Powell: "Trump's behavior Immoral? Sleazy? [David French] says Yes and Yes. But..." lol)

National Review is currently half given over to the Trump Defense, including this spectacular angle from Rich Lowry:

Yes, Trump Was Extorted
Let’s acknowledge what Stormy Daniels did.

This hed and dek, and the whole ridiculous thing, posits Tubby as victim, which is hilarious, so as a propagandist must when tasked with peddling absurdities Lowry denies he’s doing what he’s clearly doing, and right out of the gate:

It’s not as though he was the innocent victim, but when Donald Trump and his legal team say that Stormy Daniels extorted him, they are right.

From one perspective, this is another perversity of the case — Stormy Daniels engaged in a kind of extortion, and yet Trump is the one the authorities have tried their utmost to nail to the wall.

He should be indicting her! Lowry then lists a bunch of other similarly victimized men who were called to stand and deliver merely because they had paid for sex in violation of their marriage vows – and, really, who among us hasn’t been there, fellow conservatives? Lowry includes among Trump’s fellow victims former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, which has to be a first at National Review.

Eventually:

It takes two to tango — the women made the demands, and Trump paid up because it was worth it to him to make these stories go away.

Again, he was no victim, but the women who cashed in were no victims, or saints, either.

I’m sure the conservative audience Lowry accurately envisions would see any man-woman conflict, such as a rape accusation, as something in which the man may look like the sole guilty party – BUT! 

The other REBID item on the arm is today’s, about the pile-up of rightwing outrages including the expulsion of those two Tennessee reps by Republican assholes and why it may all come out alright. Dare to dream! 

UPDATE: Speaking of rightwing outrages and Just-the-Tip Types, I see the Wall Street Journal's Kimberly Strassel is nervous that the loony abortion bans feral Republicans are shoving through their state legislatures is costing them votes:

Conservatives cheered mightily last year when the Supreme Court returned abortion to the states with Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. And rightly so. Yet that was a legal victory. The political question is something else entirely, and it’s the left cheering now. In race after race, state after state, Democrats are pummeling conservative candidates on abortion, drowning out every other topic, stoking fearful centrists, suburbanites and women to turn out and elect them to office.

Even with the smell of the coffee strong in her nose, Strassel spins: It's about the Democrats' "pummeling," not the voters rebelling. Also, overturning Roe was wonderful, Strassel says, but they're not selling it right:

The GOP’s problem is muddle and inaction. Fearful of getting crosswise with the pro-life right, Republicans have failed to land on a consensus position.

LOL, bullshit: It's not "muddle and inaction," it's the gleeful misogynistic id of the conservative movement reveling in its victory over bitches. Why would they act all sober and compromising when the Wingnut SCOTUS gave them the keys to the kingdom? Strassel misses that, while her constituents believe in the same terrible things she does, unlike her they aren't obliged to try and make it look good for the manicured readers of the WSJ. They do lie, but not to cover their tracks -- they lie because, and for the same reason, their idol Trump lies: Contradicting reality makes them feel powerful. They're not gonna pretend to care about what people they despise think because they believe themselves beyond the reach of voter consent. It's up to her enemies to show them they are not. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: HATE RALLY 'ROUND THE FLAG EDITION.

No, actually, I like cheeseball electropop.

Another exhausting week but at least I’ve managed to do a proper Friday ‘Round-the-Horn! Or I will have when I follow this paragraph with several others, put in the links, pick a video header, think of a clever dek… you know what, sounds like too much work, forget it. (No, Roy! Think of the chirren!) Speaking of which:

Why you trollin' like a bitch? Ain't you tired?
Tryna strike a chord and it's probably A-Minor

I hear a lot of weak comparisons of popular music to venerable artistic forms but if you ask me some diss tracks are up there with British poets’ feuds. 

Anyway, for immortality (because if you take care of the present, immortality takes care of itself): 

Before I get to the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, I have to touch on a subject I was not able to treat at that venue because it came in too late: The absolutely bugfuck crazy story of Mrs. Sam Alito and the Upside-Down Flag.  Three things make it even crazier: First, that Justice Alito ratted out (or passed the blame onto) his own wife to the Times; second, that per Sidney Powell’s testimony Alito was lined up to assist the Jan. 6 insurrection that his distress flag portended; and third, that Alito ran back to the Times to bitch that his wife had to wave the insurrection flag because one of his neighbors put up a sign with a swear word on it.

I mean this one has everything we’ve come to expect from wingnuts: Evasion of responsibility; butch he-man woman-hater guys hiding behind ladyskirts; snowflakey sob stories about how liberal incivility forced them to go nuts; and treason. 

Anyway, on to the REBID gifts. First is Yet Another NYT Editorial Version of Am I Out of Touch, No, It’s the Students Who Are Wrong. These fuckfaces annoy me for infinite reasons but the real craw-sticker in the crap essay that inspired my parody was the implication that, while it’s bad (they guess) that colleges and their donors/cat’s-paws are punishing the speech of their students, we should all remember caaaancel cullllture woo woo woo. Brother, no one believes that bullshit anymore; Bill Maher couldn’t even get Bill Burr to pretend he believes it and that’s the subtext of half his shtick. It belongs in the basement pantry with “CRT” and “groomer” and all the other gibberish viruses these idiots have tried to transmit to normal people via their rubes, but as long as Bari Weiss draws breath I guess we have to put up with its irrelevant intrusion in every First Amendment discussion.

The other freebie is Unwoken Comedy Caveman Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t get it – why are these old comedians so pissy that the kids don’t like them? When I was in college you didn’t hear Georgie Jessel complaining that the Student Activity Boards weren’t booking him. Why can’t he just relax on his piles of money with a cocaine diffuser like the rest of them?  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GOP RETURN TO RELIGIOUS MANIA EDITION.

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

For the weekend of the glorious Fourth, the obligatory.
• At The New Criterion James Bowman is mad that obituaries of the recently departed Michael Herr often refer to Herr's Dispatches as "the definitive account of the war in Vietnam." Stuff and nonsense, huffs Bowman; it was instead a definitive liberal media put-up, as was Herr's contribution to Apocalypse Now. Says Bowman:

Neither the book nor the movie tells us anything about the war that the media, echoing the anti-war movement, hadn’t already told us. On the contrary, both existed to confirm our prejudices about the war as senseless, savage, insane, and criminal.

How else would people get a negative impression of war, if not from mendacious liberals? Bowman also laughs at Herr for having a nervous breakdown over the war, which Herr saw close up as a correspondent ("[we] were all 'traumatized' by Vietnam just like poor Mr. Herr..."]. Bowman is "well known for his writing on honor," according to his bio, which mentions no military experience. I'm pretty well accustomed to conservative culture-war gibberish, but it's always something of a surprise to find it in their actual cultural journals; it's as if Film Comment contained nothing but YouTube comments.

• Good old Nancy Nall reminded me about Jim Lileks the other day and I realized I hadn't read him in a while. So I pulled up a 2016 Bleat more or less at random and there he is complaining that the Oxford American had chosen to write about Terry Southern:

But the hangers-on - who had limited talent, if any, and whose purpose was to flatter the guy who Did That One Thing, would somehow believe that they were part of a great creative era because they had gotten high with the writer while he talked about Mick Jagger, who was interested in this project. Mick Jagger, man! He knows Mick! And the people to whom he's telling the story think then his dope must be really good.

There's a deadness at the heart of the period. Endless hours of unlistenable psychedelic music, endless pages of unreadable prose, cheap movies...

This from a guy who apotheosizes old matchbooks. Here's part of a more recent one:

Lest you think all Traders Joe clerk-customer interactions are a model of sparkling wit and bright banter, I had a disconcerting exchange the other day...

Yes, it's another in Lileks' endless series of insufficiently understanding service workers. They're still letting him down! He told that rapscallion about "Halt and Catch Fire" all right. Then on to Brexit:

The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there's one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they'd love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.

You should see those gulags where they sent people who wouldn't use metric! Well, that visit will do for a few years.

• I have Monday off, so like many of my fellow citizens of this wretched neofeudal society I am being crushed with work to make up for that tiny respite, so that does it for this week's 'round-the-horn. This weekend celebrate your country as you see fit: as something to be seized by the dictatorship of the proletariat, by radical Islam, by the glorious sexual revolution or whatever -- remember, it's our dreams that make us Americans!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN ON A SUNDAY: 2/26/23.

Yum.

•  Sure, why can't "Friday 'Round-the-Horn" happen on a Sunday? We had one on a Saturday once, remember? Wasn't that crazy? We're pretty quirky and unpredictable here. Sky's the limit! 

•  Anywho: The major freebie from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down from last week is this one about a Zoom meeting between the GOP leadership and their policy chief. I notice that in recent weeks the alignment of the Republicans with Russia is getting tighter. Maybe you saw Matt Gaetz's House resolution calling for the U.S. to stop helping Ukraine repel its invaders. (It's actually called the "Ukraine Fatigue Resolution," as if their House propagandists didn't bother to change the name from the talking point that inspired it.) And you may have seen that preeminent conservative intellectual CatTurd2 advanced the theory that he Ukraine war is actually some sort of false flag operation ("Biden fake air raid sirens and one famous actor or politician a day happily prancing around Kiev with Zelenskyy with no helmets"), to the approbation of his millions of fans. 

And last week the Head Defenestrator in Charge himself, in announcing his withdrawal from the START Treaty, gave what amounts to a 2023-style U.S. Republican campaign speech:

Look what [Western nations] are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including pedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages...

But here is what I would like to tell them: look at the holy scripture and the main books of other world religions. They say it all, including that family is the union of a man and a woman, but these sacred texts are now being questioned. Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning, just planning, to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Ron DeSantis couldn't have done it better! And the rubes are eating it up: the account in the hard-right Trumpist Christian Post, for example, tells the story from the Putinist POV ("Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a stark warning over what he called religious attacks from Western culture Tuesday...") I keep making jokes about Putin following Orban to CPAC, but at this point I'm expecting him to speak at their next National Convention. 

•  Whew, that's depressing. So here, here's a straight-up fun thing from REBID, about books you don't read so much as graze. Got any like that? Tell it to the comments box! (And subscribe -- it's cheap!)

•  Finally I want to thank the universe for the gift of laughter, courtesy of Scott Adams telling the world what he thinks about those pesky black people and getting his "Dilbert" thrown out of a bunch of newspapers. Guess he decided 2023 was a good time to go full racist -- the Bund will remember and reward him comes Der Tag. 

Adding cream to the jest are all the cancelculture crybabies like Thomas Chatterton Williams and Cathy Young rushing to tell us that oh, no, Adams getting chucked for his beliefs isn't cancelculture because race hatred is something we all condemn -- you know, like trans health care. I predict Bari Weiss' next scam will be a guide to which firings and dismissals qualify as cancelculture and which don't -- and no one will realize it's just the Republican national platform. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN (ON A SATURDAY): 11/26/22.

I'm developing a taste for these
Low-impact Led Zep tunes.

Another Friday ‘Round-the-Horn on a Saturday! If you must know, I was so relaxed by the Thanksgiving break that I absolutely could not rouse myself to perform my usual duties on Friday. Normally I’m a two-fisted, copy-churnin’ machine, but once I lose momentum it’s hard to kick the engine back into gear.

I did fulfill my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down duties, though – how could I not, with paying customers waiting on their shipment! I can let you free-riders can have a little taste – here from Monday is Alex P. Keaton transported to the Trump Age! 

And, you know what, let’s pull one out of the vault that, thanks to my deathless prose, remains daisy-fresh – a Hallmark movie for the MAGA set. I was reminded of it by the recent contretemps over Candace Cameron Bure, the lady who -- near as I can figure from the reporting, which seems to rely on readers having more knowledge of the Holiday Movie Industry than I can boast – was a star of Hallmark Channel Lessons in Life and Love Machine and is now the centerpiece of Great American Family (formerly Great American Country) Lessons in Life and Love and Jesus Machine. Since Jesus, in this context, means No Gay People, Bure was able to generate some prestige-media controversy on the subject, thus increasing her and GAF’s media attention in time for the holidays. 

Well, it’s all in the game, but it does make me wonder how Ben Shapiro, who keeps promising us his own family-entertainment conglomerate, was taking the increased competition. With homo-hating Christianity dying off in the West, GAF leaves an even smaller slice of the pie for Half-Pint; the MAGAsaurs aren’t going to want more than a few such streaming services, though maybe the “continuing to charge aging customers after they die” strategy may keep such a venture afloat. 

Speaking of which, here’s another old REBID episode on the Shapiro Network! Yet another reason to subscribe: deep content reserves! 

Meanwhile the news is full of dumbness to keep up with, but let us spare a thought for the latest Cancelculture Crybaby, in the Washington Post:

Former surgeon general faces his wife’s cancer — and the ‘Trump Effect’

Jerome Adams, M.D. was SG under Trump and now people don’t seem to want to hire him. It’s so unfair! High-level White House posts are supposed to lead to lavish sinecures! Also, “Adams and his wife, Lacey, want to tell a personal story about melanoma and cancer prevention,” so if you don’t give him six figures at least it’s like you’re pro-cancer.

Former surgeon general Jerome Adams and his wife, Lacey, often find themselves talking about what they have named the “Trump Effect.”

It followed them from Washington to their home in the Indianapolis suburbs. They felt it when he was exploring jobs in academia, where he would receive polite rejections from university officials who worried that someone who served in the administration of the former president would be badly received by their left-leaning student bodies. They felt it when corporations decided he was too tainted to employ.

And all because he chose to work for a famous scumbag. But get this: Adams is also a victim of Trump: 

As Donald Trump announced this month that he will run for president again, [the Adamses] had hoped it all would have faded away by now. 

They would rather talk about public health, in a very personal way... But the stigma of his association with Trump, even though neither of them is a supporter of his political campaign, remains.

Oh wait, it gets better:

Whether indicted or shunned or marginalized, a cavalcade of former Trump World figures have foundered in the aftermath of one of the more chaotic presidencies in modern American history.

Eichmann, Mengele – you know they’re bitching in hell that no one gave them this kind of treatment. Hey, Jerome Adams is kind of a common name – couldn’t this guy just say it was a different Jerome Adams who was Surgeon General, and then claim he was in Switzerland the whole time?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: RAY OF LIGHT EDITION.

Heard this in a restaurant -- you remember this?
I don’t and I don’t know how I missed it.

I missed ‘Round-The-Horn last week, and I’ll let you know in advance that this one isn’t going to be an all-timer. But like Groucho says in one of my favorite bits from Animal Crackers, they can’t all be good, folks,  you've got to expect that once in a while.

But the news is good (sorta) even if I’m not! On Tuesday the Republicans got slapped around, hard enough to strongly suggest a trend beyond the electoral. The Democratic Virginia Governor and legislature margins beat the spread; ditto in New Jersey and points west. Voters just piled on the repudiation. One of my favorite accounts is Popular Information’s “Six election results that didn’t make the headlines,” which tells stories like… 

In Bucks County — Pennsylvania’s largest swing county, which Trump narrowly won in 2024 — Democrat Danny Ceisler was elected county sheriff after the Republican incumbent signed a deal to collaborate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this year…

For the first time in 13 years, Democrats in Mississippi have broken up a GOP supermajority in the state Senate…

Etc. Apart from the political power shifts, the wipeout had the effect of forcing the Prestige Press to relent for a few minutes from their usual Dems in Disarray routine. The press lords have been talking about Trump and his Republicans ass-lickers as if they were invulnerable, even as polls show general violent disapproval of their misgovernance. A lot of what people call “doomerism” is really the effect of the media’s failure to acknowledge the reality we all observe, like Trump’s lunatic economic policy driving up prices and throwing small businesses into chaos while his rich asshole friends prosper.  Hell, they don’t even seem to notice his swift, steep mental decline, even as they point cameras and microphones at it. No wonder a lot of people came to think resistance was futile! But the election broke the spell. 

Of course the big news is Mamdani getting elected Mayor of New York despite the unified opposition of the Prestige Press -- or maybe in part due to it, because his victory was a massive refutation of several kinds of stand-pat bullshit. Cuomo’s ham-handed campaign, and the refusal of many major New York Democrats to endorse him -- and Cuomo’s attempt to threaten the city with Trump’s wrath unless they voted for him -- really hit every New Yorker’s fuck-you button. And I’m guessing the unusually literate New York electorate also noticed the press’ hard-on for Mamdani and didn’t like that either. No wonder he got a majority! 

And in honor of that great victory, this week’s two (2) ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebies are on that theme: First, the election-night summary, and second, an add-on about the continuing self-embarrassment of his enemies in Pundit- and Poobah-land. Enjoy!

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 1/14/23.

I know there are a lot of great versions;
I just like this one.

Look, you’ve been busy, I’ve been busy – sometimes a Friday ‘Round-the-Horn is out of the question. I have found a moment on Saturday, and it’s all yours! 

There are two free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stories for you from this past week. (Reminder: Subscribers, who pay an absurdly low $7/month, get this stuff five days a week.) The first is a fanciful meeting of the minds between two of the nation’s worst people, cancelculture crybaby queen Bari Weiss and Florida Minister of Propaganda Christopher Rufo, on the campus of the freshly wingnuttified New College of Florida in the not-distant future.

Michelle Goldberg recently interviewed Rufo and he’s even more inclined to say the quiet parts out loud than most conservatives these days – probably because he’s not elected, and so doesn't have to pretend that the consent of the governed, not to mention common sense, means shit anymore. Rufo expresses an intention, in his political-correcting of New College and whatever other schools his confederates can get their hands on, to “steal the strategies and the principles of the Gramscian left, and then to organize a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions.” I remember when conservatives thought there was a marketplace of ideas, and were pretty triumphalist about conservative capitalism’s victory therein (in part because they had a well-funded marketing campaign). But when it became apparent people were no longer buying their bullshit, they decided outside agitators led by long-dead boogeymen like Antonio Gramsci had made that marketplace obsolete and that it was now time for a command economy of ideas instead. As Adam Serwer has pointed out, this tracks with their current conception of democracy in general: it's OK to be free so long as their preferred result wins; otherwise it's time for the boot and truncheon. 

The second freebie is straight from the Congressional Record (in my mind!): Marjorie Taylor Greene, now a respectable elder stateswoman of the GOP, demanding an investigation into an ancient menace and this time it’s not The Jews (not directly, anyway). The House GOP has gotten crazier quicker than even I predicted – they’ve even jumped directly on the “Joe Biden Try’n Steal Mah Gas Stove” bandwagon with – this I am not making up – “H.R. 263, the Stop Trying to Obsessively Vilify Energy (STOVE) Act.” 

Again pointing back to former conservative talking points,  I remember when they all chortled along with P.J. O’Rourke that Congress was a “Parliament of Whores” because Dan Rostenkowski got free stamps; now, as we have seen from the spreading George Santos tsimmis, the House is even more corrupt than before but, unlike in the old days, its members can’t even serve the nation’s interests properly and indeed seem hell-bent on sabotaging them even as they play at culture war. It’s still funny but this ringside seat on the Death of the Republic is getting a tad uncomfortable. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JULY 7, 2023.

Let's class the joint up a little!

Last week I skipped ‘Round-the-Horn – AGAIN. Apologies. The move that never ends formally finished with the clearance of our last effects from our previous home, but the house remains unsettled as the missus applies the Klotski method to her goods and chattels, plus we still have in-laws aboard. Leisure is at a premium. And they told me old age would be mainly a matter of finding ways to fill my time! 

But though I come late I also come laden with free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions. For one, there is the resumption of Sam Alito’s Wall Street Journal column, answering the complaints the thin-skinned old bastard, in my imagining, could not help but notice after the shit decisions he and his fellow wingnuts lately foisted on America. I expect to see him on Joe Rogan one of these days, sputtering over the loss of respect SCOTUS has suffered, and how unfair it is, when all he and his mates have done is rule so that, were the 18th-Century slaveholding plantocrats who founded this nation to come back from the dead, they would feel right at home.  

The next is inspired by the coke cache found in the White House, and how a certain onetime habitué might interpret its meaning. (Fans of the “Formula” series may appreciate the callback.)

On to other outrages. I’ve been telling you people for years that David French is a fraud, a rightwing religious maniac whose winsome NeverTrumper act has fooled many centrists including the ones who hire columnists for the New York Times, and his latest column runs true to form. He inveigles non-MAGA readers by agreeing once again that Trump is no good, but then goes on about how his deluded fans feel not merely “rage” but also “joy” at Trump's events, in his presence, and even gazing upon the insane videos and memes that celebrate him as a buff avenging American Messiah. The dread-and-circuses “give MAGA devotees a sense of belonging,” French says. 

This may seem to some of you like a clever angle – we talk about how crazy they are, but let’s bothsides this, can’t we just admit that they’re also full of joy! (And let’s not refer to it as “mania” or a “mood swing” because that would be Very Bias. Also, these are French’s neighbors and friends back in old Tennessee, so it would also be impolite.) 

But as usual with French this is just a sneaky way to pitch liberals on giving in to the obnoxious ideas that he and the Trumpkins actually share (i.e. most of them, stripped of the unpleasant frankness of MAGA viciousness), and ends with something resembling a plea for understanding and more: 

During the Trump years, I’ve received countless email messages from distraught readers that echo a similar theme: My father (or mother or uncle or cousin) is lost to MAGA. They can seem normal, but they’re not, at least not any longer. It’s hard for me to know what to say in response, but one thing is clear: You can’t replace something with nothing. And until we fully understand what that “something” is — and that it includes not only passionate anger but also very real joy and a deep sense of belonging — then our efforts to persuade are doomed to fail.

What “something” are we supposed to offer these people? The lives of one of our more vulnerable minorities? A do-over in states where he loses next time? Furthermore, why should we offer them anything? They advocate terror, treason, and bigotry. They represent a third of the country and demand violent reprisals against the other two-thirds. Fuck those guys. They want to kill me. There's nothing to discuss. 

SATURDAY ‘ROUND THE HORN: I REFUSE TO LET THE NEIGHBORS RUN MY COURT EDITION.

Pure pop for now-and-then people.

Holy moley, I’m eight days late! (That’s what she said, fnar!) Yes, ‘Round-the-Horn is supposed to be a weekly event, apologies. Fortunately Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, the acclaimed publication which this serves as a feeder stream, is still bumping hard five days a week; with a subscription you get emails (on the regular for paying subs, on free-issue days only for easy riders), so if I forget to remind you here at alicublog you’ll still be in the loop. Come on, you gave your email to CVS! 

As it happens, there were no free issues that previous week -- I can’t be giving it away all the time, folks, this is how I keep body and soul together with a minimum of leakage along the seams. But this week we have two very good specimens, still fresh:

1. Part II of the Sam & Martha-Ann Alito vs. The Neighbors! If you missed Part One, it’s still available, though as with The Godfather Part II and all great sequels it’s unnecessary for enjoyment of this one. While the Alitos’ insurrectionary sentiments are not fun at all, there’s plenty of laughs in the fact that their neighbors hate them so much that, despite the traditional viciousness of wingnuts when crossed, the people forced to live near them decided it was worth the risk to rat them out. Grim Fascists don’t Make Good Neighbors, apparently. 

Part II comes after the surreptitious taping of these worthies at a conservative event appeared to confirm Mr. Alito’s extremism and Mrs. Alito’s lunacy. Naturally the tribunes of the rightwing press were enraged that anyone should stoop so low as to record the yammerings of these public figures supported by taxpayers dollars and whatever bribes Clarence Thomas hasn’t already hoovered up. “A political activist infiltrated a gala to try provoking Justice Alito and his wife,” sputters The Wall Street Journal, who would much prefer you only hear about the Alitos via Sam himself in the op-ed space the paper so generously extends to him from time to time. 

2. Yet another David French “why are my fellow conservatives so mean to me, a conservative?” blubberfest. Longtime readers know of my contempt for this pious fraud – a complete rightwing evangelical, anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and anti-LGBTQ, with all the pathologies pertaining thereunto, but because he’s mastered a winsome can’t-we-all-get-along shtick, he’s promoted by prestige media saps like the New York Times’ leadership. Now the MAGA majority in his own movement are coming at him hotter than usual – not only slurring him for adopting a black child, but getting him kicked off a Christian event – and once again he complains that the leopards he fed and nurtured for so many years continue to find his face delicious.  

So why is he still a conservative (acceptable media version)? As everyone should know by now, the key to conservative success is that its adherents will endure no end of neglect or punishment so long as the people they really hate get it even worse. I’m sure this con artist prays every day for a Trump victory so that gay and trans people and women who choose not to serve as broodslaves will suffer. A true Christian martyr, he’ll endure a few harsh words for that!

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GLIMMERS IN THE GLOOM EDITION.

Still hits.

A day late on ‘Round-the-Horn, sorry, had to hang some cup hooks. (Many years ago I did a newsletter for the Ogivy ad agency and got to look through the alumni newsletters that one of the copywriters put together. The cup hook thing was one of the reasons that members of the firm reportedly gave for not coming in to work. Always liked it.)

Well, since we were here last it looks as though things haven’t gotten much better for America. Along with its other, ever-escalating outrages, ICE has started shooting people in Chicago. (You don’t believe their bullshit about the victim and 10 cars attacking them, do you? You’ve read several complex sentences to get this far, so I assume you know better.) 

Also Kristi Noem is talking about sending ICE to the Super Bowl because Bad Bunny will be the half-time entertainment -- either she anticipates something like the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 because BB’s Latino, or else the botox has reached her amygdala. 

The administration clearly isn’t looking to win hearts and minds -- except maybe among the mouth-breathers who constitute their small hardcore base -- and rather wants to terrify us all into compliance with what I guess no serious person will at this point mind my calling his fascist regime. I hope our nation still has a bit of the moxie for which it was once known. “There are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade.” We’ll find out soon enough. 

But not everything’s going the wrong way -- for example, the Tubby-and-Hegseth show for which the hapless SecDef (‘scuse me, Secretary of WAR, oooooh) commanded the senior officers to gather was a travesty, and this time the audience wasn't made up of complaisant reporters or brain-injured redhats accustomed to call their MAGA bollocks brilliant. It is impossible to imagine any self-respecting military careerist (and those guys are nothing if not self-respecting) listening to Posturing Pete and Wheezy Tubby and approving.

So I don’t think the boss was pleased, and that’s what the first of this week’s free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down episodes is about: How Trump may try to recover his dignity with the troops. Spoiler: It is not very dignified. 

(If Trump thinks declaring war on Venezuela for allegedly attacking America with drugs -- which, if such an assault has occurred, I’d say the U.S. lost the engagement years ago -- and getting the troops to murder even more fisherman to make it look good, I doubt the brass will take it well. They don’t make ‘em like General Westmoreland anymore!) 

For our second free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down episode, I’m going to do something new and exciting and let non-subscribers take part in a Fun Friday -- a long-standing REBID tradition whereby I throw out a prompt and readers give responses in comments. Try it, it’s fun! Can’t all be gloom and doom with a side of satire, you know.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JUNE 9, 2023.

Was just thinking about it.

If you follow alicublog’s Friday ‘Round-the-Horn sessions, you may have noticed I didn’t manage one last week. Apologies; I was moving house, and interstate, and with a spouse who, unlike me, hangs onto every goddamn thing. 

So it was agony, and it’s not over, which brings us to our first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie of the week, about that very thing. But if that’s too personal-essay for you, here’s another freebie – which is personal too, in that it’s based on my own actual dealings with what I’m sure is a new frontier in AI horseshit, but, you know, full of complaints about the state of the nation, as the public has come to expect under the Roy Edroso byline. 

Not sure how much this will move you now that Tubby’s under federal indictment. Like many of us I’m cynical about these things – after “Mueller Time” (not to mention “Fitzmas”) how can you not be? It’s times like these that make one sympathetic, if not forgiving, toward the crazies whose whole politics is conspiracy-based – I mean how hard can it be to nail this crook, anyway, unless The System is not so interested in justice as it is in titrating tension-and-release with these slow-moving prosecutions toward some nefarious, Bilderbergian end? Best to stay cool and see how Aileen Cannon fucks it up. 

Far greater entertainment value can be had from that daft bint Peggy Noonan, who squints at the carnage that is national politics and says, you know what, maybe a third party candidate can win it all in ’24! This is of course the sort of bullshit that got Trump elected in 2016 and Bush the Lesser elected in 2000, but Noonan doesn’t mention Jill Stein or Ralph Nader (nor the crackpot RFK Jr.) – though she does fawn over the No Labels fraudsters, and Ross Perot is her beau ideal:

Perot was a business visionary, the founder of a great company, Electronic Data Systems. He was public-spirited and blunt-talking. In June 1992 he was leading both George Bush and Bill Clinton. But his campaign was hapless and gaffe-filled, and he was unpredictable.

That’s putting it mildly; Perot was a Musk of the machine age, an ego freak who thought himself a world-beater. To this day I suspect he was in it just to fuck Bush over some obscure Texas beef, and so he did. Noonan marvels Perot got 19% of the vote even though voters “thought he might be a little nuts” – which to a normally observant person would suggest a comparison with the berserker Trump, rather than a smoldering, decades-old hunger for a third party candidate, but that’s a road Republican Peg doesn’t want to go on. So she weakly essays: 

… I can quite imagine a competent third party now getting 35% of the vote to the other guys’ 32% and 33%, say. What would happen then? Most likely, no candidate would receive a sufficient Electoral College vote. The election would go to the House, causing uncertainty that would at some point be resolved.

“would at some point be resolved” ho ho ho – I guess Noonan scared herself there, but gamely tries to wrench the fantasy back into focus:

It would be real edge-of-the-seat stuff in a nation that already has too much edge-of-the-seat stuff, but also seems to like it. 

A short while ago America elected the ancient trimmer Joe Biden because it was sick of Trumpian whoop-de-doo, and the only reason Noonan is pretending that didn’t happen is because her party’s prescription for victory is to act like trans people in beer ads constitute a screaming emergency requiring drastic measures like Mystery President. She knows as well as you do that RFK Jr. and No Labels are just cons to siphon off enough votes to put the Republicans back in power. But she made her bones peddling the Reagan fantasy, which was no less ridiculous until it happened, and I suppose she figures lightning can strike twice. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: GET ME REWRITE (FOR TRUMP) EDITION.

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. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: A GOOD SWIFT KICK EDITION.

Got their Mojo workin'.

RIP to a real one. I met Mojo back in the day, and he wasn't putting it on, that was really him. I told him that when I came down South for the Memphis Jazz Fest I ate so much barbecue I didn't take a shit for a day and a half. He referred to me thereafter exclusively as Hambone.  

I missed a ‘Round-the-Horn last week, sorry! But here, let me offer you a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie from that timeframe which is still good, or will be till after the Super Bowl: My as-usual behind-the-scenes look at how Tubby and his team plan to fight back against the Taylor Swift menace. I know, there’s been so much written already about the rightwing meltdown over the pretty white girl with a football hero boyfriend who for some reason doesn’t love enraged Nazi incels, but mine’s funny.  If you ain't read it yet, it's news to you! 

And look, it’s gotta be better than Ross Douthat’s plea for conservatives to embrace Taylor Swift because “the cultural valence of the Swift-Kelce romance... [is] normal and wholesome and mainstream in an explicitly conservative-coded way” – Ha! One images the wispy-bearded doofus trying to pitch that to a mob of howling conservabros and getting his ass hitched to a Ford F-30,000 and hauled out of Burlyman Camp in response. You can't reason with them, Father Ross!

Of more recent vintage is my other freebie, inspired by the latest in a series of prestige press Trump-wanks: A “guest essay” in the Good Grey Lady by Kellyanne Conway, the Trump bullshit firehose temporarily disguised as a disinterested observer of the American Scene, who asks, “Who Should Be Trump’s #2?” I expect the next such essay will be Stephen Miller asking, “Aren’t All You Regular Volk a Little Tired of Untermenschen Questioning Der Fuhrer?” We’ve gone way past the well-observed “working the refs” phenomenon, whereby rightwingers scream about “bias” until milquetoast liberal journalists are exhausted/intimidated into waving through all their bullshit; now it seems well-trained bigtime editors look at every single political event or issue and ask themselves, How is this good news for the John McCain Donald Trump?

Thus we have a former president who is very upfront about becoming a fascist dictator if he’s reelected, yet is portrayed in the prestige press as a victim because state officials interpret the Constitution as disqualifying insurrectionists from holding that office; also when a Republican investigator can't find evidence to charge the current president but takes the trouble to insert slurs about his mental state into his report, the pressies all run headlines like “Democrats’ Anxiety Over Biden’s Age Grows After Special Counsel Report.” I can only hope, as I wrote, that Americans have not yet lost the ability to smell bullshit. 

MONDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: LIKE YOU NEVER MISS A DEADLINE EDITION.

Local neo-soul cafe filling me in on what I've been missing.

Look, I’m busy, OK??? So Friday ‘Round-the-Horn is atrociously late, and I am lashing out rather than admitting fault as usual. Consider this post my shoddy amends! (See, this is why I can’t do AA – most of the people I hurt when I was drunk had it coming.)

Anyway, another wild-ass week with some silver linings. First, the sad news that JD Vance murdered the Pope. OK maybe not but I’m not ruling it out. It chaps my ass just to imagine Francis trying to teach some Jesus to the Catholic-come-lately Vice-President Fuckface and V-PF smiling insincerely while his brain goes When we get our own Pope in here he’s gonna be more like an Inquisition Pope instead of this love-one-another bullshit. I may have bailed years ago but I was born into the faith and I can smell a poser.

Elsewise it was the usual carnage but we had a couple of breaks: Like Chris Van Hollen (MARYLAND’S OWN!) not only going down to El Salvador to shine a light on Tubby’s insanely vicious and illegal rendition of Kilmar Garcia – and explaining, in terms that even Fox News dopes might understand, that if the goons can send Garcia to torture camp they can send you, too --  but also going on the Sunday shows and calling out trimmer dipshits like Gavin Newsom who think we should keep our Constitutional crisis on the downlow lest we scare voters. 

I also appreciated most of the Supreme Court not only blocking the illegal renditions of Venezuelan residents but also implicitly telling Sam Alito they’re sick of his shit and rushing out their decision so he couldn’t stall until Tubby and his moll Bondi sneaked the Venezuelans out of the country.  I enjoyed Alito’s crybaby act afterwards, too. “The papers before us, while alleging that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, provided little concrete support for that allegation.” THEY WERE ON A BUS ON THE WAY TO THE AIRPORT. I hope the other justices start putting Visine in Alito’s coffee.  

Also we had some protests on Saturday. I went to the DC one. It was all good but I especially liked when we marched past the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, where unionized employees were demonstrating against the (again, illegal) DOGE cuts (which a court recently stayed), and got a big cheer:

Solidarity, motherfuckers. You could read my account of the march if you were a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down subscriber and why aren’t you? But until you get it together here are two (2) recent freebies: One, an explanation as to why Tubby and his crime syndicate are stumblin’ and fumblin’ now, and another episode of Bolt Upright and the Decision Desk at Received Opinion trying to figure out this due process thing everyone’s talking about and doing the usual shitty job, Enjoy! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: POST-THANKSGIVING INGRATITUDE EDITION.

Drive that pile.

Hope your Thanksgiving was good! Mine was fine and now that I’ve had my gratitude I’m ready to move back into my usual ingratitude mode. (But not into ungraciousness -- no, I think we can fail to appreciate the bullshit we’re being handed by our leaders and bosses and assholigarchs without losing the grace to appreciate our fellow man. In fact that’s what my Thanksgiving edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down is about -- have a FREE look thanks to my Friday ‘Round-the-Horn policy!)

Mostly I'm ungrateful that Tubby remains in what’s left of the White House. He keeps snarling and raving in press conferences barely challenged by Prestige Press reporters -- not even to chide him when he lashes out at their colleagues. And he keeps giving deranged commands, like cancelling Biden’s orders because they were signed with an autopen (which Trump has used himself). The Prestige Pressies report these as if they're legitimate differences of opinion instead of the ravings of a tertiary syphilis case. 

(It's like the world's stupidest hostage situation -- this guy is ruining institutions and lives, yet reporters and administrators and other people with public platforms keep their mouths shut about it because they're a-scared of losing their phony-baloney jobs. C'mon, fellas, everybody dies!)

His most despicable recent action (most recent despicable action may be a better way to put it) is the order to send 500 Guardsmen to DC because two of the Guard stationed there were shot. Yeah, that'll help. "People hate living under military occupation -- let's make it worse! They're bound to calm down."

This is of a piece with Tubby's original order to send the Guard to DC because DOGE asshole Edward “Big Balls” Coristine allegedly got beat up there: If anything happens anywhere that makes him mad -- shootings, protests, a fake ass-kicking -- he sends troops and talks tough. He’s not trying to protect anybody or anything except his own hyperinflated self-regard. 

I’m glad more people are catching on -- though a 36% approval rate still seems high to me -- but I wish someone would tell the Democratic leadership and kick them in the ass while they’re at it. We can’t count on clogged arteries to do it all for us, and JD Vance ought to be given advance word by the opposition that we’re not gonna take any shit from him either.

As for the allegedly fun media story about Robert Fucking Kennedy Junior and the scumbag journalists who covered for him until it was too late, I see the humor but my enjoyment is limited by the wreckage Garglin’ Bob is making of our public health. Thanks to the alt-med garbage he peddles and the idiot parents who believe it, children are dying of once-dormant children diseases and I have a hunch his regimen of raw milk and pull-ups isn’t going to stop it. I begin to think Kennedy is a more dangerous lunatic than Trump, and may do even more damage to the country in the long run. We can roll back most of Trump’s idiotic orders but when the U.S. is ravaged by once-rare diseases spread by right wing hippie dipshits who’ll blame it all on bad chi or feng shui or some shit, the counter-counter-enlightenment could take generations.

Whew, harsh, huh? Let’s go out on a light note with a REBID freebie about one of Tubby’s less damaging idiocies: Notes for his desired Rush Hour sequel! Contrary to Garglin' Bob, laughter really is the best medicine. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JUST GOT BACK FROM LOST WAGES EDITION.

I stopped paying attention to this guy early. That was a mistake.

I skipped last week’s “’Round-the-Horn” because I was rushing into a much-needed holiday, which is not yet quite ended but I figured I’d just pop in and let you know I’m still part of the warp and woof of American life. (“Norma Desmond? I thought she was dead!”)  

As Roy Edroso Breaks It Down was also on hiatus last week, I have no free samples to give away. I did read the papers, though, and like (I’m sure) many of you I noticed how heedlessly many institutions of higher learning showed their ass during the recent student demonstrations on behalf of the persecuted Gazans, and how conservatives all ran the “durr hurr ‘mostly peaceful’ protests” routine when it was self-evidently the cops and Proud Boys (but I repeat myself) who did 99% of the violence (as often). I hardly need to supply links but Luke O’Neill says it well: 

Hey check this out: Protesting for good causes is good and protesting for bad causes is bad. Simple as. Occupying a campus building to pressure your school to divest from the military industrial complex and to register your horror over our country's dogged complicity in an ongoing genocide is an unequivocal good. Reasonable people can disagree about this you might be thinking? No they can't! Finding moral clarity on this matter is one of the easiest things a person could ever do.

Being an elderly Democratic simp I understand why Biden is doing his pro-Israel difference-splitting bit: He knows if he loses in November we’re all cooked, and believes this is the politically expedient path out of the crisis as by the election most voters will have forgotten it and Tubby’s troops will be screaming about Messicans and tranny-sexuals and (because they can’t help themselves) describing in lurid detail how they will murder their enemies, which Biden reasonably thinks may invigorate his base. Not how I would do it, of course, but then my own presidency would probably end like The Phantom of the Opera and be no good to anyone. 

It’s sad and infuriating that we even have to deal with an influential-out-of-all-proportion minority of American voters (and a majority of rich fucks) who have the temperament (we can’t really call what they have “politics”) of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. If you see a way out, please provide in comments.

Well, at least some recent news is hilarious:

But alas, the hilarity is not unmixed – and I don’t refer to the execution of Cricket, which I’m not sure even happened. Going back to Romney’s rooftop dog gambit, Noem’s story was obviously meant to show what passes for toughness in the sick word of conservatism, but as often happens the promulgators of the shtick had no idea how normal people would react to it. I’m afraid it’s Judge Holdens all the way down. 

Oh well. Back on the job Monday. Subscribe, why don’t you? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: SITUATION NOT-NORMAL BUT STILL ALL F***ED UP

For a long time I could only find a weird remix of this, so I stopped looking. 
But it's here!

It’s the last month without Tubby for a while – though in an important sense (namely the inability of the Prestige Press to ignore that piece of shit) we’re not without him now, because he continues to yap orders at his toadies in Congress. In the case of the current funding legislation, he didn’t get what he allegedly wanted – but from his perspective that doesn’t matter at all, because it kept his blustering presence in front of the public and also got people used to seeing his Nazi asshole buddy Musk treated like a fourth branch of the U.S. Government. 

I don’t think I’m particularly perceptive, really, but these days a lot of people seem incredibly invested in misreading what’s going on. Like, for example: why would coverage in the paper owned by Jeff Bezos be tilted heavily against the union striking the company also owned by Jeff Bezos? HMMMMM IT’S A PUZZLER ALRIGHT. It's as if the shock of the election got the Prestige Press peeps clinging to their ancient templates as a coping mechanism and they just can't let them go.  (I mean apart from the ones that are just straight-up bought off, which probably accounts for all of them over a certain stock valuation.)  

Fooey. Nonetheless, this is the last Friday ‘Round-the-Horn before Xmas so as my gift to you all here are two recent editions of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that I’m making free to non-subscribers…

… but not before this advertisement:

Now’s a great time to give the gift of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down! Click here.

OK, now the freebies: First, what to expect as the follow-up to that drone bullshit. You didn’t think that was going to be the last stupid panic Republicans would use to rile their rubes? The next four years are gonna be like Green Acres except without Oliver to sputter in protest as Mr. Haney delivers him an unwanted fascist dictatorship. Second, if you heard about the New York governor’s announced plans to soothe frightened execs after the UnitedHeathcare hit, and wondered what that might look like… wonder no more! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Just in the mood.

•   Weird what whets the wingnuts these days: They're cheering Putin's challenge to Biden, exultant that Biden tripped on some stairs, and their new intellectual excitement is a Republican judge's dissent in a defamation case, in which he says New York Times v. Sullivan (the "absence of malice" case*) and other protections of the freedom of the press should be done away with. From Slate:

[U.S. District Court Judge Laurence] Silberman accused the American media of “bias against the Republican Party,” calling the putative phenomenon “a long-term, secular trend going back at least to the ’70s.” He continued:

Two of the three most influential papers (at least historically), The New York Times and The Washington Post, are virtually Democratic Party broadsheets. And the news section of The Wall Street Journal leans in the same direction. The orientation of these three papers is followed by The Associated Press and most large papers across the country (such as the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Boston Globe). Nearly all television—network and cable—is a Democratic Party trumpet. Even the government-supported National Public Radio follows along.

Silberman also explicitly condemned “Candy Crowley’s debate moderation” of the second debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on CNN, which took place nine years ago...

On and on the Reagan-appointee goes, bringing in Hunter Biden's laptop and other such wingnut totems. 

To me the most interesting part of the thing is Silberman's moan over the alleged embattled isolation of the American conservative press in the person of one non-American man:

To be sure, there are a few notable exceptions to Democratic Party ideological control [of the media]: Fox News, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. It should be sobering for those concerned about news bias that these institutions are controlled by a single man and his son. Will a lone holdout remain in what is otherwise a frighteningly orthodox media culture? After all, there are serious efforts to muzzle Fox News. And although upstart (mainly online)] conservative networks have emerged in recent years, their visibility has been decidedly curtailed by Social Media, either by direct bans or content-based censorship...

The woe-is-me blubbering that is now common among the Right aside, this is remarkable in that it suggests that conservative ideas have no intrinsic value that would be recognized and promoted by the American people unless they were propagandized specifically by Rupert Murdoch and his major properties. Silberman claims the "upstart (mainly online) conservative networks" cannot pick up the standard from Murdoch because they're suppressed by "censorship," but that's obvious nonsense -- the almost exclusively conservative makeup of Facebook's weekly top ten stories and the gigantic Twitter followings of people like Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro are some of the evidence against that claim.  

If we may impute any instinct to Silberman beyond a desire to rile up the rightwing press  -- and he sure has done that, with celebratory coverage seen at Glenn Beck's The Blaze ("In incredible dissent, federal judge launches broadside attack on SCOTUS precedent protecting left-wing press") and the Washington Times ("Judge calls on Supreme Court to revoke news media protections," of which I was informed in an email "news alert") already coming over the transom -- it may be that he realizes the traditional conservative strategy of flooding the media with old-fashioned look-out-here-come-the-minorities boob bait, as practiced for decades by Murdoch, is no longer moving the needle the way it used to, and that the alternative is not to pump the new breed of conservative outlets -- which for some reason ("censorship"? LOL, c'mon) isn't as effective -- but to cry "bias" and call on Republican legislators and the reliably rightwing Supreme Court to fix it for them by silencing the opposition. 

This is, I keep telling you, what's always at the back of their "cancel culture" bullshit: they want the road leveled and paved for themselves, and you under it. 

•  BTW WTF:

VIRTUAL EVENT: The Crown Under Fire: Why the Left’s Campaign to Cancel the Monarchy and Undermine a Cornerstone of Western Democracy Will Fail

Please join the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom and Simon Center for American Studies for an insightful discussion about defending conservative institutions and uniting to preserve the special UK-US Relationship.

Sponsored by the Heritage Foundation! With a link to an article by (I believe the expression is) limey cunt Niles Gardiner, "Meghan Markle Oprah Interview an Insult to the Queen and the British People." which is so entirely royalty-fan gossip ("Alas, the fairy-tale wedding of 2018 in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle is now a distant memory...") I'm actually embarrassed for them. National Review also carries the message that the ingrate prince and his non-white strumpet are part of a liberal conspiracy to destroy that great American institution, the British Monarchy, in several articles including this one by (I believe the expression is) jammy twat Joseph Loconte: 

The radical Left has seized upon Oprah Winfrey’s televised spectacle with Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex in a crusade to invalidate one of the most consequential conservative institutions on the world stage.

Accusations of racism within the royal family are not the point. The aim of modern liberalism can be symbolically discerned in William Walcutt’s painting,Pulling Down the Statue of George III at Bowling Green, July 9, 1776. It is to tear down everything the monarchy represents: tradition, authority, virtue, duty, love of country, and biblical religion.

LOL, go drink some tea, bitch.

*Update: Originally had this as the Pentagon Papers case, which was actually New York Times Company v. United States. Duh, me stoopid.