FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: SICK, SICK, SICK EDITION.

Five, four shots, I be ready to splash.

Sorry I missed you last week! Holidays are frickin' rough around here. But I pledge that if I live I'll deliver through Christmas. That's the alicublog pledge! 

It’s pretty weird watching the death of democracy roar down the track, its glowing Sauron eye getting bigger by the moment and Tubby's fat face darkly looming in the cab, while most of the information on the bearing-down is coming from a completely bought-off Prestige Press that talks about it as if it’s a fun TV drama like “Succession” that we can switch off when we’re bored. 

This weirdness is informing my “Received Opinion with Bolt Upright” sketches at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (my Substack newsletter! Surely you’re heard of it!). This week’s is one of three (3) REBID editions released to nonsubscribers.  In this one, the gang considers the latest Trump appointment: Fox News celebrity Poopmouth to chair the National Endowment for the Arts. A lively discussion ensues! 

The other news-related item has to do with the death of a health insurance CEO and why a lot of people aren’t crying over it. I was raised a Christian (well, Catholic, close enough) and I don’t like to take pleasure in the death and suffering of others. Nonetheless I’m a lot more angry about our fucked-up health care system, and how it depraves us -- so much so that this murder puts us less in mind of the victim's bereaved family and friends than of the bereaved family and friends of “beneficiaries” whose suffering and death his parsimonious policies hastened along. I would also mention that the incoming administration promises to heavily promote the fraud-rich Medicare Advantage program, UnitedHealthcare’s primary scam, by appointing one of its shills as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and (as outlined in Project 2025) making MA the default choice for new Medicare enrollees.  

Normally we only have two freebies but I’m also opening up this week’s Fun Friday because it’s about old-school bloggers (my classmates, as it were!) who are still stoking the boilers. (This has also served as a reminder to refresh my blogroll here. Shadowproof, which had taken over from Firedoglake, is discontinued and its slack picked up by The Dissenter; Gin and Tacos has turned into a podcast; I don’t know what happened to ThinkProgress. The “Forget About Politics” section has several discontinued sites, but that’s OK, because they’re mostly not about current events and worth a peek. Also, I’m sentimental about Lance Mannion and Terry Teachout.) 

In this edition I mention Atrios, Blue Gal, Driftglass, Vagabond Scholar, and Sheila O’Malley in the body copy; commenters have kindly added the Grade-A work of Digby at Hullabaloo, Nancy Nall, Joe My God, Lawyers Guns & Money, Nuclear Diner, Scripting News, The Daily Howler, et alia. It’s good to be reminded that, as the Prestige Press gets shittier by the minute at their job, we can rely on them just for the basic facts and then offload the analysis to guys like these.  If only America would take the hint! (Note: Some of these blogs don’t even user Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, that’s how old-school they are, so be careful!)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: AN AGE OF CLODS AND MONSTERS EDITION.

I have never heard a bad Desmond Dekker record.

Not gonna push it too hard here as this is only Friday 'Round-the-Horn technically -- it's after midnight but I ain't been to bed yet. Anyway the atrocities continue: Pam Bondi is the new Matt Gaetz, and if anything it's even worse because she's actually been an AG at the state level and a stupefyingly corrupt one at that -- as Charlie Pierce explains -- whereas Gaetz was never more than a stunt appointee, a bit of chum to keep the Prestige Press putzes bobbing and Republican elected officials trembling lest they be forced to show loyalty and embarrass themselves by praising an obvious freak. From the moment Tubby tapped a checked-out oil executive for Secretary of State in 2016, anyone who was paying attention would have seen the game: Trump chooses flunkies based on whims and chits rather than ability. So it's a trip to see reporters asking how his people could have failed to "vet" Gaetz and fellow sex criminal Pete Hegseth et alia when everyone knew they were shit going in.  As Tom Tomorrow attests, this is not how things are done when you give a shit about the country you're gonna run:

Time for the REBID freebies! I'm very pro-Bluesky these days so go see me there and also read this about what got me to stop lurking and go whole-Alfhog. (It's at least partly because fash fucks get no traction there.)  And here's my most recent episode of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, in which Peoni, Chafe and the gang are, like their real-life counterparts, obeying-in-advance to beat the band. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: BRINGIN' IT ALL BACK HOME EDITION.

Never out of fashion.

Another week into the over-the-cliff phase of the death of democracy! The appointments Tubby’s trying to push through the lame duck are all insane, but the one that especially pisses me off is RFK Jr. I’m typing this from the National Institutes of Health, my long association with which has literally saved my life; the global importance of its research and its extraordinary care and treatment of its patients are something I’ve been seeing first-hand for decades. That the lunatic my fellow Americans are sending back into power intends, out of hatred for the very idea of good government, to install this insane, malign quack to destroy the NIH (and the FDA, and Medicare, etc.) is making me all First Reformed. 

For the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, tell you what, let’s have the three-part “I Swear This Isn’t Like All The Other ‘What Is To Be Done’ Essays” with which I lay a path forward through Smarmageddon for the enlightened. Here they are in order: One. Two. Three. Best read in series, but you can mix and match. I’m told they’re brilliant, but maybe the smartest people in the world are all wrong! See for yourself and maybe subscribe while you’re at it. 

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: PEOPLE JUST GET UGLIER AND I HAVE NO SENSE OF TIME EDITION.

What we are looking at is good and evil, right and wrong.

Hard week to feel good about! After a campaign in which the Republican candidate daily demonstrated himself not zero-fash nor 2% fash but 100% full fash (also stupid and crude), the voters returned him to office. This would lower my estimation of the sanity and decency of my fellow Americans if I weren’t such a goddamn little ray of sunshine. 

Whatever I think about the hoi polloi, it’s nothing compared to what I think of most of the bigbrains telling us What The Democrats Must Do, especially the alleged liberals-or-whatever telling us to sell out minorities so straight white America will love us:

“PC police,” lol, why didn’t he throw in “feminazis” while he was at it. I guess the very concepts of morality and principle are vague to some people who see everything as some sort of bagatelle – like “exalting the humble and humbling the exalted” is just some added degree of difficulty they think Democrats perversely assumed, as one might tie one hand behind one’s back to show off, and must abandon to succeed at The Game.

As after a rainstorm, the brain worms have been out in force. Check out this guy:

He’s supposed to be some kind of progressive thinker, but apparently believes adopting the standard rightwing bullshit about cities in “chaos” that must be made “livable” represents some opportunity for the Democrats. A bunch of people to whom I showed this told me I had him all wrong, he just wants more housing and better transit; if so that was an interesting way to ask for it, because unless you’ve just arrived on this planet you know that when you say “What can we do to solve the chaos and unlivability of our cities” the voters, whom the Prestige Press have marinated in Crime Panic for decades even as actual crime plummets, will demand certain people (hint hint) be stopped and searched and locked up and put on Workfare Not Welfare. Miss me with that Clintonian bullshit.

This isn’t even to speak of the overtly-conservative side. Peggy Noonan is actually trying to sprinkle her Reagan dust on Tubby:

As for the Republicans, we always feel now we’re picking a government to manage our decline. But when Mr. Trump met with the Journal’s editors last month, he spoke for a moment with excitement about how America “can be so rich and so successful.” He described watching the arms come out and catch the SpaceX rocket. “It was good old Elon. It was him, he’s amazing.”

That chord he was trying to hit—and tried to hit in late rallies—is one America yearns to hear. They want the old sense that their kids are being launched into a society and culture that’s healthy and vital. Exuberance, expansion, Musk to Mars, drill, baby, drill—we’re going to be exciting again!

Ronald Reagan was a piece of shit, but compare his “Morning in America” routine to the ravings of Trump, whose signal promise (which he affirmed right after the election) is to deport millions of immigrants and whose goons are already vowing to arrest his enemies.  I think Noonan has achieved peak wetbrain. 

Anyway. Most of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entries I could release to gen pop would probably depress you, so here’s one serious-but-not-superbleak one – about how we might yet save America by showing its young citizens how to tell shit from Shinola – and today’s Fun Friday, in which we talk about tech innovations, from ARAPNET to the present, that readers, when they first found them, really felt were, as Arthur C. Clarke said, indistinguishable from magic. Hang in there, babies, Monday’s comin’! 

SUNDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: CHAMPAGNE OR HEMLOCK EDITION.

I'm old and I was old then too but how did I miss this?

The title comes from not-yet-governor-elect Mario Cuomo on election night 1982. And I doubt he was any more nervous than millions of your fellow Americans are in these closing hours of this campaign. My final thoughts about the closing and the outcome will be in Monday morning’s edition of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – which will be FREE to everyone on the mailing list, paying subscriber or not, so now is an excellent time to sign up! 

I won’t say too much about that here and now. But I will say that in a campaign full of totally insane moments – can you believe “they’re eating the dogs… they’re eating the cats” was less than two months ago? – Tubby’s reaction to RFK Jr.’s plan to take fluoride out of drinking water is kind of a watershed:

Former President Donald Trump on Sunday expressed tentative support for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to order the removal of fluoride from water supplies during a potential second Trump term, saying that it “sounds OK to me.”

“Well, I haven’t talked to him about it yet, but it sounds OK to me,” Trump told NBC News. “You know, it’s possible.”

It’s really wild that in 2024 a major presidential candidate is giving the old okey-doke to a straight-up Cold War era, John Birch, General Jack D. Ripper conspiracy theory. I mean, I didn’t think this was a thing with even most of what I guess we have to call mainstream crackpots — the sort of anti-vaxx, Pizzagate nuts who are now a major part of the Republican coalition. I expect most of the people who were railing about fluoridation in the 1960s are dead. Maybe it’s their version of retro — you know, like That 70s Show. 

But what’s even more depressing, in a way, is Trump’s sure-why-not response. We know he’s not at all interested in policy as such (any more than ordinary Republicans are, any more) and will say anything to rile his rubes. We expect him to, for example, spread racist and misogynist fables like Haitian pet-eaters and post-birth abortions; that’s standard operating procedure for conservatives, which he mainly just makes more lurid. But if he and his minions are going back eighty years to fish out crazy ideas we’d all forgotten about, what’s next? The theory of the Four Humours? Spontaneous generation of disease? Phlogiston? If it’s retro anything it’s the Dark Ages.

Part of why this is so important is there is literally no depth to which these people will not sink and take us with them. 

Anyway, last week’s REBID freebies – well, events proceed so rapidly that the premises of these items might seem untimely to some; however, as the saying goes literature is news that stays news and literature is what I’m dishing out here, see! 

So even though no one probably remembers the difference between Biden saying “garbage” and that dipshit at the Trump rally saying “garbage,” the Prestige Press rolling in it is still funny. And on a more serious tip, in my view the WaPo/Bezos bullshit is just about an isolated in-kind campaign contribution from a billionaire to a fascist, but about the way normal people – that is, not just rightwing soreheads -- are coming to view the press and what they may expect from it in the future. Meantime, good night and good luck!  

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: JEFF BEZOS IS A PARASITIC PIECE OF SHIT WHO SHOULD BE TAXED INTO OBLIVION EDITION.

I love Jill Scott and this song but had never before heard this live stretch-out. Nice!

It’s just barely Friday, still, but I’m coming in under the wire to tell you fuck that piece of shit Jeff Bezos. In a way, he and his fucked-up interference with the Washington Post’s presidential endorsement – that is, blocking it because the board wanted to endorse Harris and Bezos, as a client of the federal government (or is it vice-versa?), obviously felt it necessary to suck up to Trump because he knows if that fat fuck wins then sucking up is the whole game – is just a symptom of the parasitic hypercapitalist infection that is literally destroying our democracy.

But saying Bezos is “just a symptom” is like saying Hitler was just a symptom of fascism because there were other fascists running around and he was just one man. Sure, the problem is bigger than Bezos, but he’s a pretty fucking big problem all by himself. He’s the second richest person in America next to Musk, who is also a fascist piece of shit who should be taxed into oblivion, just as all these hyperrich democracy-hating supervillains should be taxed into oblivion. At least. 

That we allow such a small group of freakish men whose primary qualification is luck (in the genetic lottery and/or investment decisions) to hoard so much wealth and the power that comes with it has had an absurdly distorting effect on democracy – as is ably shown by this one rich cunt smacking down the board of the newspaper he bought to prevent them from making their endorsement. No wonder FDR taxed their asses off. Not only did (and, God knows, does) America need the money, we have to stop allowing rich straight-up fascists to create power bases in direct opposition to democracy. 

I mean look at these goddamn people – the deranged apartheid clinger Musk, the literal vampire Thiel, and Bezos who blows his incalculable wealth on trips to space (fawned over by his WaPo lickspittle Megan McArdle) and, we now see, collusion with the dark forces we thought we’d seen an end to in World War Two. They’re at least as much of a threat as Tubby and it’s about time the people who profess to speak for the rest of us did something about it. 

I will only add: It's really something that the MAGA creeps who are forever yelling about "Big Tech" "Censorship" (like JD Vance) are getting the election handed to them by guys like Musk, Thiel, and Bezos.

Anyway, here’s this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies (yes, only one – quit being such cheap bastards and pony up the $7/month for a full subscription to this FIVE DAY A WEEK SERVICE -- unlike fucking Bezos I can use it!): The hot new trend among serious people who were just recently telling us not to call a fascist – namely calling Trump a fascist!  If anything I think I was late in applying the f-word, myself, but if anything can make a man look prescient it’s being surrounded by idiots.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: T-MINUS-18 DAYS AND COUNTING EDITION.

The pride of Cabo Verde.

Really barreling into the election now, as you can tell by the kind of crap rightwing papers are trying to put over. The Washington nee Moonie Times keeps shooting me “news alerts” like this:

It’s all Mad Libs at this point: Harris FLIP-FLOPPED on TRANS RIGHTS in BORDER CRISIS.  Oh, and if you aren’t convinced Jill Stein is working to elect Trump, maybe you’ll notice that Trump supporters are sure working to promote Stein: 

All more or less normal ratfuckery, and neither as important nor as sinister as the GOP’s push to suppress Democratic votes by any means necessary. Meanwhile Tubby is visibly off his nut, yammering like some escaped mental patient; his handlers are trying to get him out of the public eye, and it figures that his own people are more aware of his decline than our Prestige Press, which barely acknowledges it.

Anyway, it’s late, so here are the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: Two fun scenes – first, Bari Weiss piloting her fake university through seas of donor money; and second, a peek at how things are going with Trump and the gang in the Eagle’s Nest. Look, if we can’t laugh, what’s the point?

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL EDITION.

Heard this one at the taco place.

Friday ‘Round-the-Horn come on a Saturday this week, as the Pogo peeps used to say. Well, we’re all busy and deserve a smidge of slack.

Out of the five regular Roy Edroso Breaks It Down editions this past week – yes, I’m there Monday through Friday, like Eyewitness News or Good Morning America, the hardest working man in Substack business – I’m releasing two to gen pop.

First is my latest Elon Musk at The Office sketch. In this case he’s working on a counter-attack to Kamala Harris’ Medicare Long-Term Care Benefit proposal. Yeah, I know Democrats don’t put over everything they promise, usually because Republicans block them (though it’s notable that the Obama-era LTC proposal, the CLASS Act, was withdrawn by the Obama administration – though it was a Republican who gave it the poison pill. The Dems should have fought harder for it then. Blame neo-liberalism! It’s usually a good guess). Still, I like putting LTC back on the table and daring the GOP to block it and think it's a winner. Musk’s solution runs true to his repulsive nature. 

The second is my home-stretch piece on why, despite the threats, a Harris victory is at least probable. It’s an optimistic read but not an unreasonable one, based on past electoral results, human nature, and Trump’s own behavior. I know it may not look so good at the moment but, it has been noted elsewhere, both sides have good reasons to underestimate the Democrats’ hope of victory. It doesn’t address the certainty of post-election MAGA mayhem – with Vance’s continuing refusal to accept the 2020 election results and Tubby’s demand for military hardware (allegedly for “security,” obviously for purposes of insurrection) the latest chilling harbingers – but if that’s only an issue if we win. Dare to dream! 

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: LIES AND THE LYING LIARS WHO TELL THEM REDUX.

Some ragged guy was playing this on the train. Slaps, is that still the term?

Late again, Bullwinkle! And I’m busy and must be brief. I will only say in addition to the Free REBID Posts announcement (yes, soon, friends, be patient) that this has been a banner week for disinfo and misinfo, with dicks like Marco Rubio declaring the recent positive U.S. jobs report a fraud and, especially, Elmo and his bots claiming the administration isn’t sending help to the Helene-hit districts. It reminds me that, before the Crushing Boer took it over, Twitter was a valuable source of news and information, and now it’s just a perch to take pot-shots at the fakes and feebs who run rampant on it. 

I hate to give vibes-based reasons for voting the right way, as there are plenty of more solid ones (like the other guys are fascists with a Nazi program), but a valid motivation for shoving all the way back on the MAGA bullshit is that, despite their self-portrayal as champions of the common people, they’re mobbed up with the most evil billionaires with the craziest dystopian plans for any of us who aren’t in their Big Club, and they’re so confident of their ultimate victory that they’re showing their asses even now.

OK, here you go: Roy Edroso Breaks It Down free issues for non-subscribers for the week – one, my debate notes from Tuesday. I can understand the people who are mad that Walz didn’t go after the asshole more aggressively; I myself would have been pleased to see the bark stripped off him. (I bet some of you would have preferred Al Franken to be the Minnesotan in charge of smacking up Vance.) Some say that’s just “not him,” and that may be true, but I’m guessing the Harris campaign wants Walz to be earnest old uncle Tim as a point of difference from the competition – vote for us if you don’t wish to be ruled by madman -- and coached him to preserve that equity rather than get mad and blur the distinction. I also share the doubters’ concern that, in playing Concern rather than Fuck You, Walz came over as less butch than Vance, and that risks turning off the knuckleheads. But you know what? They’re lost already – Harris needs to maximize the sane-people vote. 

The other freebie is another episode of Received Opinion, where the pundits celebrate Trump’s New Leaf, yet again, in the nanosecond gap between I Will Help The Suffering Multitudes and I Will Kill All The Foreigners.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: IF THEY'RE HITLER AND YOU KNOW IT EDITION.

We had lunch at a Turkish restaurant and much of the pleasure
was in the Turkish pop playing in the bakcground.

The mental disintegration of Tubby is getting harder for his enablers in the Prestige Press to normalize, but they keep trying. Yesterday when Zelensky had to meet with Trump to protect Ukraine’s interests, Trump ranted to reporters afterward that the beleaguered wartime leader – who had to maintain an embarrassed silence while standing next to him – had announced there was “absolutely nothing wrong” with Trump’s 2019 attempt to strong-arm him into incriminating Joe Biden (for which Trump was first impeached). This is not only untrue but nuts; Trump's behavior was more appropriate to a lunatic who thinks he’s president than someone who actually had the job and wants it back. 

Hilariously the Murdoch propaganda sheet New York Post actually got closer to truthfully characterizing this event with their headline, “Trump praises Zelensky in Trump Tower after accusing him of ‘nasty little aspersions’” than the Washington Post, which soberly declared “Trump meets with Zelensky, opening new chapter in a fraught relationship.” The New York Post didn’t get religion – it just went for the soap-opera angle to sell papers. Thus in their crassness they at least gave a glimpse of the weird pettiness of Trump’s act, while people who read the classier paper could skim the news and think “Famous foreigner met with both world leaders, everything is normal,” which is of course the Prestige Press’ suicidal strategy for this election campaign.

We who have free souls, it touches us not – and that’s why one of the free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down posts this week is about pushing back on this fluffery and calling the MAGA philosophy and behavior just what it is – fascist, even Nazi. Yeah, I know there are simps out there who’ll cover their ears and wince when you do that, but they’re hopeless. You want people who are only getting the soft-soap to focus on the hard reality, and it makes more sense to tell them what’s Nazi about these guys – and it is puh-lenty – than to try and chase down every stupid obfuscation by the Access Annies. 

The other freebie is about the Olivia Nuzzi nonsense and that, too, has to do with how people who – for reasons I can’t guess – chose a career in journalism cheerfully betray their craft by loudly defending the anti-ethics of one of their superstars. They act like they don’t know what’s unethical about a reporter having a romantic relationship with a candidate while slagging their opponent, though I’m sure they get drilled on this sort of thing at their expensive journalism schools. It’s as if the confusion is not over what behavior is wrong, but rather what right and wrong even are.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: ...AND FUBAR, TOO, EDITION.

Hey greybeards! Sounds pretty good, huh? 2017. 
Modern stuff's hard to keep up with, but nice when you catch it.

I keep starting these F 'R-T-H posts with variations of "Wotta week, huh?" and I'm beginning to feel like I'm actually summoning the mayhem that inevitably escalates thereafter. Maybe it’s time to rechristen this feature “Situation Normal: All Fucked Up” in honor of our veterans. 

I see someone wanted to kill Tubby again, this time while he was golfing, and his fans are mad because no one gives a shit. I have two responses to this: First, the Secret Service and FBI et alia are running down assassination threats to Biden, Harris, et alia all the damn time; second, I was alive when President Gerald Ford, of all people, fielded not one but two actual attempts on his life (one involving Squeaky Fromme!) and we all just rolled with it because FOLKS WAS TOUGHER IN THEM DAYS. The late underground comics author Willy Murphy did a hilarious Arnold Peck strip inspired by that, showing Ford manning a mounted machine gun to help the Secret Service defend him from multiple assailants – here and here. So lighten up, Fanatics. (Willy Murphy was the greatest.)

Oh, and the Prestige Media Pantsing Proceeds Apace, with Maggie “Access Annie” Haberman blubbering that an “industry” (low-paying, believe me!) “on the left” that is “dedicated toward attacking the media,” and she wants everyone to know she and her fellow media swells are working darn hard not be Very Bias in their coverage of the guy who wants to deport millions of people and spreads racist lies to his millions of deranged followers. 

Minutes later we all find out Olivia “Forget Sleepy Joe, RFK Jr. is Where It's At” Nuzzi got suspended by New York magazine because she’d been having a “relationship” (no tongues, she swears) with the man himself. Very “how it stated/how it’s going,” that. 

And we haven’t even discussed that Mark Robinson shit! I’m not one to kink-shame, though as always with kinky conservatives there’s a big honking gap between the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s Death to Sexual Deviants policy and his pee-and-porn shadow life. Come on man, be free! As for the Black Nazi stuff, well, you have to remember it’s a significant part of his base. 

It has been observed that it will be hard for Democrats to use this material against him because so much of it is unacceptable in family-friendly media, but I think if they play it right the long bleeped-out sections with do the job fine. 

Oh, yeah, the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – this week we have two: One, a meditation (wait, come back! It’s good!) on why conservatives seem to love AI "art." Two, another scene from the villain’s-lair of Elon Musk. Eat it up, and subscribe so you never miss an issue! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: DOG SOLDIERS EDITION.

Ha ha, get it. Cool tune tho.

Helluva week, huh? I know, I said that last week, but it’s still true. I guess the highlight was Tubby’s wipeout in the debate on Tuesday – and my near-contemporaneous account thereof is our first Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie for the week. I’m not a positive-thinking kind of guy but I could see right away Trump had made a mess of it – I’d say he shit the bed, except with him I suppose that’s literally an everyday thing. Suffice to say any normal person viewing his ravings will have figured out he’s lost his mind, and even a few MAGA joy-poppers may have gotten sick of his malignant Billy Madison routine, too.

One proof-point of the catastrophe is the hysterical post-facto attempt by rightwing media outlets to convince viewers not to believe their lying eyes. You’d think that’d be a tough sell after wingnuts like Karl Rove and Andrew C. McCarthy threw in the towel, but here’s PJ Media (yep, still in business, God knows why) claiming “ABC whistleblower to reveal Harris campaign was given SAMPLE QUESTIONS” – which, number one, lol as if, and number two, if you need a mole to tell you the moderators will ask questions like “when it comes to the economy, do you believe Americans are better off now than they were four years ago?” you’re in the wrong business. 

Of course the more intense and disgusting MAGA cope is their doubling-down on Trump’s insane racist tirade about pet-eating Haitians in Springfield. JD Vance laid that groundwork (after the Ohio neo-Nazis shoveled it to him), as chronicled in our other REBID freebie.

While there’ve been a lot of funny jokes about this online, I find it ominous that the Republicans haven’t ditched it for some newer outrage. The story has been thoroughly debunked, but I don’t think these guys are even trying to convince people that it’s real anymore – they just want to keep the image of black foreigners eating dogs in front of white voters, in hopes that it will circumvent their frontal lobes and panic them into defending their race by voting for the Head Bigot in Charge. 

You remember when they were telling voters that Obama ate dogs, right? Their act doesn’t change much decade to decade, apart from getting wormier.

For our last freebie please enjoy my latest Mar-a-Lago Throne Room scene set directly after the ass-whipping, starring Tubby and the new glimmer twins, MTG and Laura Loomer. 

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: STEALIN' YOUR GALL EDITION.

No easy way to be free.

Hey Democrats: Nice save! I started the week “too busy” to watch but I figured I’d catch the Obamas and, well, I got hooked. There was the usual convention cheese, and I don’t mean that unkindly: You can’t have a convention without, for example, dull speeches by replacement-level up-and-comers (boy, we dodged a bullet with Shapiro, huh?). But there was real top-shelf oratory (very much not excluding that of the nominees!), genuinely clever bits like having the Harris nieces give America (and Tubby) a Kamala-pronunciation lesson, and even some decent music. 

Something about the convention clicked for me during what I think of as the victim impact statement portion of the proceedings. I certainly sympathize with anyone affected by gun violence, bigotry, reproductive tyranny etc., and I know the testimony works because there are so many viewers who not only sympathize but also relate. I also know that the DNC have brought out victims of Republican policies and politics before – my God, I remember James and Sarah Brady at the 1996 Democratic Convention and Khizr and Ghazala Khan throwing their son’s sacrifice in Donald Trump’s Islamophobic face in 2016. 

But this time it seemed less like an answer to a specific Republican outrage and more programmatic, like the Democrats were carefully laying out a case for, as the nominee says, not going back. And I have to say it reminded me of the Republicans’ Trump-era habit of bringing out relatives of people killed by immigrants. Obviously it’s better to employ the suffering of loved ones to advocate for gun control and reproductive rights than to use it to promote racist MAGA fantasies. But it seemed as if the Democrats were consciously taking a GOP shtick and turning it against them.

Which is OK with me! And it wasn’t the only march the Democrats stole on them – there was the sea of flags, the chants of “USA,” the misapprehending sing-along to “Born In The USA” (very Republican!) and, especially and spectacularly, the general appropriation of patriotic equities like pride in the military, love of family, high school football for crying out loud, and all the other stuff in which Republicans used to drape themselves, but had to abandon because these things made their conman king look and feel as cheap and shoddy as he is. 

Others have noted that the Democrats got the opportunity to employ “joy” as a campaign theme because the Republicans have embraced of fear and misery. But it’s too little noted, I think, that most of what Republicans gave up for Trump and left for Dems were actually among the best things about being American – and they had taken them mainly by subterfuge in the first place, and will have a hell of a time getting them back. Turnabout is fair play and – let the fat fuck think on this, since he likes the B word so much – payback is a bitch. 

Two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies this week: First, a fantasy of Tubby workshopping his act at Gary’s G Spot; and second, today’s Fun Friday convention special, in which you’re invited to share what you saw at the DNC. Enjoy!   

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: THROUPLE FOR THE NON-SUBSCRIBERS EDITION.

This is a dopey song but you know what, Ruth Brown could sell "Mairzy Doats."

It’s a pretty reliable subscriber boost every four years, I’ll give it that, but still there are all kinds of things about presidential election season that I hate. For one thing, everyone who talks on the subject turns into a little campaign advisor, and 99% of their recommendations are some variant of the “savvy” menace that has afflicted our politics – like, how can we bamboozle Americans into voting for our candidate? Case in point (this guy’s talking about Trump):

It’s the M.K. Brown “Whistle Stop” cartoon all over again (“Do you suppose actually seeing the candidate eat the rat could cost us the election?”). They seem to think you just have to fiddle with the diopters until the candidate looks good to the electorate, notwithstanding the candidate is a demented gorilla. They seem to forget that the purpose of the election is to choose leadership in pursuit of a direction for the country. 

I know, I should talk – but here’s my two cents: I love that the Harris people are running like they’re proud of what Democrats are supposed to stand for instead of trying to safe-legal-and-rare it like a bunch of candy-ass neo-libs. Don’t act apologetic about inflation – cap food prices! Let the GOP holler about communism — even their own voters don’t know anything about it except it has something to do with their Beloved Leader’s Russian boss.

Well, as Marty Di Bergi said, enough of my yakkin’. Or rather, on to my yakkin’ at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – and get this: after last week’s parsimonious one-freebie serving, this week you get three! That’s like three-fifths of what regular subscribers get in a week! And at $7/month, which is $1.75/week, that’s $0.70 worth of copy. OK, it doesn’t sound like much but what I’m telling you is a subscription is cheap and you should buy one, in fact buy two in case the first one breaks.

First one is a bagatelle in the “how would it be different if Trump were trying (and failing) to get bad coverage from the Prestige Press?” category. Doesn’t it seem that way, though? It’s like Trump’s “economic” address, in which he put a bunch of groceries on a table and then proceeded to yammer about Mexican rapists, and the papers all acted like it made sense. “Trump Lays Out Economic Plan,” the Prestige Press reports from an alternate universe.

Second is “It’s a Wonderful Life” as reimagined by the Wall Street Journal. I know it’s an old rightwing shtick to riff on capitalism-skeptic classics like that movie and A Christmas Carol as if pre-conversion Scrooge and Henry Potter were the heroes, but this one is inspired by a WSJ piece about how Opinions Vary as to whether it’s good that Tim Walz doesn’t own stocks and bonds and is not (by modern political standards anyway) a rich fuck like his opponent. One of the Journal’s interviewees says a Vice-President should be “someone who’s dipped his or her toes into all different elements of the financial world that Americans have to navigate” – which makes it sound as if most of the 61% of Americans who own some form of stocks (including retirement savings accounts) are living off compound interest rather than working people who have an IRA. I suppose some people so strongly identify with their economic masters that when the market dips they go, “what’s the matter, boss, we sick?” But speaking for myself I think it’s great that for once we may get a normal guy in high office.

Last, we have J.D. Vance taking lessons in how to woo the lay-deez. Special guest appearances from the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down stock company! Even this creep’s fellow he-man woman-haters are trying to explain him away — “JD Vance’s demeaning remarks don’t help this valid cause,” moans Ramesh Ponnuru at the Washington Post, who like all old-line “pronatalist” conservative frauds believes in limited government except when it comes to making women pump out more babies. (Ponnuru is also an anti-abortion absolutist, you will not be surprised to hear.) “In an individualistic country such as ours, [pronatalism] risks coming across as bossy, or just plain weird — which is what Democrats have started saying about the Republican ticket since Vance was chosen,” Ponnuru notices, so the obvious solution is to get guys like Vance to “stay far away from demeaning adults who have not had children” – that is, to disguise the contempt they clearly feel and reflexively express for them, perhaps by some variant of the Ludovico Technique. Good luck moving those diopters, guys! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: MY FATHER'S WALZ.

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing.

The days are discernibly shorter; summer begins its swoon; soon comes the harvest, and maybe some of us will also be stripped from the vines. Catch those rays while you can – after the spectacular late Democratic bloom we’re heading into the dogshit days, with Republicans reaching deep in the bag for old Swift Boat dirt clots to throw at Tim Walz. Will that sway our fellow Americans? If they know any among the tiny percentage who serve in the National Guard, will they just thank Walz for his service, or buy J.D. Vance’s argument that he didn’t serve it right? My guess is these answers are predetermined for most people, who either want fascism or don’t, and we have to hope the minority who can still be persuaded – democracy’s saving remnant, as it were – will see though it. I think normal people are sick of Tubby and the fake outrage of his transparently phony fash sidekick isn’t enough to change that, but maybe that’s just me trying to wring some more cheer from the summer wine. We’ll see! 

Here’s the week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie. (Yes, just one – come on, subscribe, what are you saving that seven bucks a month for, your grandchildren?) It’s Bolt Upright and the Received Opinion crew trying to make sense of the Walz appointment – though, by the look of things, they’re way behind the curve. (Again, maybe it's just me having a hopium cascade but it could be that, after the Prestige Press' latest self-abasement before Trump and the pushback it has inspired, people are starting to catch on.)

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.)

SATURDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: HARRIS 'N' PARIS EDITION.

A Nugget.

What a week, huh?

I’ve been relieved since I heard the news. The main reasons are obvious: Biden was weak on the trail and the Prestige Press was making it worse, whereas his logical replacement, the VPOTUS, has the jam and charisma to do a better job of it and also offers the PP a fresh enough story that maybe they’ll lay off a bit. Also, the Democratic message is a winner (and not just the Stop Trump part -- but, to paraphrase Sam Spade, if all that doesn’t mean anything to you then forget it and we’ll make it just that), but it was getting obscured before and now it’ll be clearer. 

There are other advantages. Kamala Harris for President is driving Republicans nuts. Despite what their capos are telling them, any astute observer can sense their racist and misogynist instincts seething under the surface – and a few of the MAGA made men are already letting it all hang out. I think it’s already helping: In the absence of Tubby himself, who has gone to ground, J.D. Vance is getting smacked around on his sexist bullshit and he can’t help but make it worse because, as a Republican he-man woman-hater, he can’t let himself be seen to back down for the sake of women’s feelings no matter how many votes he flushes in the process. It’s great when you can make them soil themselves just by existing. 

Plus there’s the couch thing. 

On that note, this week’s two freebies from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down: First, Monday’s episode of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, in which the Prestige Pressies sputter as the Kamala Express breezes past them; and, second, my essay on why the Harris nomination is really and truly good news.

There’s plenty else worth remarking on – like the shitfit Christers are throwing over the spectacular épater-les-bourgeoisie Paris Olympics opening ceremonies. They’ve been digging up nonsense to be mad about forever, but social media just makes it worse – it's like a million windows on a madhouse. I’m especially touched by all the backwoodsmen saying they’ll never visit the City of Light now. 

I don’t drop Dreher as much as I used to but his sputterfest on the occasion, “The Paris Olympics Go To Hell,” has some choice bits:

This is all satanic. You know that, right? Straight-up satanic. Remember how you read in this space two weeks ago about a conversation I had in Paris with a young man whose former girlfriend is a Paris artist, and through whom he got drawn into the Paris art scene. He told me that it is deeply and widely occult. If memory serves, the darkness he witnessed caused him to break up with his girlfriend and turn to Catholicism.

Well, that’s solid proof right there! No need to cite any actual occultism (has Beetlejuice The Musical opened in Paris yet?). Dreher presents himself as an aesthete yet I doubt there’s an arts scene anywhere in the world that wouldn’t qualify as “widely occult” in his view, possibly barring the Eureka Springs Passion Play. In this post he also cites his buddy who called an exorcist on his wife, a welcome reminder of this classic. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: CHEST-BEATER BLUES EDITION.

Who says it has to mean anything at all?

Another shitty week! The fash mob in Milwaukee seems to have achieved its purpose of getting the Prestige Press dummies to yap about Trump the unifier/healer while ignoring the MAGA crews' repulsive rhetoric and election denialism. The brethren are stroking hard for post-convention buzz, but I doubt it will mean much to normal people; the Trump vote is already topped out. Consider conservatives’ enthusiasm for Hulk Hogan’s embarrassing Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho routine:

The commenters seem to think Hogan telling the turkeynecks to do the hammerlock will draw new voters to MAGA and away from stoopid libs with their faggy social justice: 

But, really, what fan of geriatric fake macho display isn’t already voting for Trump? It's like they misread the famous salesman's advice as hunting where the dicks are. 

But let’s stop horsing around, I know you’re all here for the Roy Edroso Break It Down freebies so without further ado: Another episode of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, about the press pleas for Democrats to be civil about the Republican who shot another Republican (about which no one other than credentialed flame-fanners appears to give a shit); and the latest of my celebrated segments on “Hardcore” (our term of art for ragebait emails that lure your senile relatives to rightwing garbage sites), this time focusing on the brethren’s excitement over J.D. Vance and rage at those who would attempt to unfairly smear him with his own words.  Enjoy! 

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERLY BIDEN EDITION.

The AC/DC cover is sweet but I like this whole album.

Sorry I missed you last week; I actually had a bit of a July 4 long weekend, which, I know, it’s out of character for your hard-working boy but Editor Martin got me away from the desk and onto a sailboat. We knocked around Boston and P-town and if you get up that way before September 2 see the Firelei Báez show at the ICA and thank me later. She can draw, she can paint, she can assemble, she can smash colonialism. Massive! 

Now I’m back at my accursed post and see the country is still going down the drain: Joe Biden remains Old, and the Prestige Press putzes have abandoned all attention to Trump’s ravings (ha ha, just kidding they weren’t paying attention anyway) for the death watch. Like all true sons of liberty I’d vote for a corpse before ushering in Tubby’s Terror II but I’m not sure that’s a majority view (though it’s close!). 

Which brings me to the first of my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down releases to the general population: The latest installment of my “Hardcore” series, in which, as regular readers know, I survey ragebait emails that lure your senile relatives to rightwing garbage sites. Many of these low-end content mills have jumped on the AlteBiden beat, and with their limited English skills are ineptly working it. This edition features an appearance by Waxy Jim Rickards, who has made a habit of predicting Biden’s impending resignation as part of a conspiracy to destroy America – and then showing you how you can profit from it! 

Swindle, comrade! 

Higher up the chain, the grifts of the Prestige Pressies are slicker but no more noble. But I have to give Megan McArdle credit: A conservatarian claiming she wants Biden out because his sad plight reminds her of her own family’s struggles with aging – and that she would “like it to end” despite tweeting non-stop about it for weeks -- is such a breathtaking display of chutzpah that one can only applaud, regardless of politics. Speaking of aging, when Peggy Noonan finally keels off her perch you know McArdle will be right there with a ladder. 

The other freebie (I tell ya, subscribe! It’s so cheap it’s silly not to) is about the coalition victory in France and the pants-pissing among the usual suspects over the “radical left” implications – though if you showed the program of the allegedly fringe coalition partners to your average American I’m pretty sure they’d prefer it to what our own parties are offering. It’s getting so when you see the world “chaos” in a Prestige Press headline you know someone’s trying to run a con on you.