THAT OLD KENNEDY MAGIC.

Yeah, there was no 'Round-the-Horn last week -- apologies, the new-house stuff is still an enormous pain, as is trying to figure out where things are both in and around it. Yesterday I spent 45 minutes on a bus to Marshall's downtown in search of socks and underwear. Thanks to the new American retail "Wait Till Everything Runs Out to Restock" strategy, I got three pair of socks and counted myself lucky. 

(Also had occasion to revisit the comically insufficient Baltimore Metro. On my first trip I couldn't figure out how to use the CharmPass on my iPhone -- I waved it at the gate readers to no avail -- and there were no attendants to assist me, so I just walked in and rode; at the exit gate I found an MDOT MTA employee and asked her how to use the CharmPass; she said, "You just show it to us." Apparently they don't have any way to connect this digital pass to their system. Maybe they'll figure that out by the time the Red Line gets done.)

But don't worry, there's some stuff at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down for non-subscribers -- like today's thing about RFK Jr.'s peculiar theories on how the COVID virus was weaponized to attack "Caucasians and black people" but leave "Ashkenazi Jews and Asians" alone. 

I said this should be the end of the crackpot Kennedy's ridiculous campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but the sad fact is, even though he has no chance in hell even as a spoiler, the prestige press and Republican ratfuckers have too much at stake to let it go. So we're still getting stories about him as if he's viable. For example, some Washington Post editor gave Philip Bump's pretty good story about the consequences of Kennedy's mouth-fart the headline "Democratic Party rushes to disown Robert F. Kennedy Jr." -- as if the real news is that Democrats were abandoning the erstwhile RFK Jr. juggernaut instead of (as Bump's story shows) mainly ignoring it. 

And Rupert Murdoch's New York Post just goes on as if there's something else to discuss: "RFK Jr. shrugs off Biden family corruption allegations: Won't be a 'spear tip to my campaign,'" they report. Yeah, bold strategy, guy; more likely we'll just hear how Fauci mixed the COVID cauldron with Hillary's broomstick. Because RFK Jr. has nothing else - he's the anti-vaxxer candidate for people who are too misogynist to vote for Marianne Williamson, and all his other positions, such as his anti-Ukraine yak, are nothing you can't get from J.D. Vance or indeed from your average GOP chucklefuck -- pseudo-populism meant to sway the weak-minded. 

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. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: JUNE 23, 2023.

Ghana 1973. Wild! Lots of good music coming out of there still
but the hints of garage rock here especially send me.

Here we go, folks, a couple of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, and a reminder that a paid subscription (which is absurdly inexpensive) gets you five of these every week. First freebie is about a flight to the sun aboard the Icarus, the billionaires who burned up in it, and whether this is classic American heroism or the fault of Joe Biden. Ha ha, bet you caught on to what it’s really about! 

The OceanGate deathtrap submarine story is so shot through with stupidity that it was hard to choose among variants to satirize. There was, for example, the attempt to turn a crack by the CEO (a libertarian who thought safety rules were for littlebrains, and who perished in the sub-standard sub) about 50ish white guys into proof that the billionaires were killed by multiculturalism. Some exponents were cagey about it -- the end of the Free Beacon story’s URL is “ocean-gate-missing-titanic-submarine-diversity-woke” though the words “diversity” and “woke” appear nowhere in the story – while morons just said out loud stuff like “wokeness killed the people on that submarine.”

But ultimately the big laugh here is on libertarianism. It’s one thing when those guys simply tell their usual billionaire-approved story --  that “liberty” is the one true God, who chooses whether you deserve to be rich or poor, and whose judgment is unquestionable, so you peons shut up and shovel while we eat ortolans. But it’s another thing entirely when libertarians get high on their own supply and fantasize themselves immune to the consequences of their own actions. So long as they enjoy the protection of the powerful, like Sam Alito blubbering that reporters told mean (true) stories about him, even as the world recoils the malefactor may get off scot free; but the laws of nature are harder to bend. I do endorse more of these masters of the universe doing explorers-club stunts – maybe Elon Musk can send a few of them to Mars. 

Speaking of Musk, the other freebie is about the latest instance of celebrity anti-vaxx buffoons demanding an actual scientist debate them. It was interesting to see so many guys on Twitter laboriously simulating Maximum Reasonableness – “it would absolutely advance knowledge to go on [the Joe Rogan podcast]” – and then you look at their feeds and they’re obviously goons. I don’t they’re trying to fool us into thinking they’re reasonable, exactly; I think it’s more like they believe reasonableness is merely a pose (the way they think common decency is a pose, hence the “virtue signaling” insult), so if they affect the manner of a reasonable person/sea-lion it makes them just as reasonable as we are -- which is to say not really but faking it just as well as anyone else can. Modern conservatism is utterly post-truth, and to its adherents all values are fake except loyalty to the cause. 

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: JUNE 16, 2023.

Just in the mood lately.

It’s slowly feeling more like summer – hope y’all have plans for your Juneteenth weekend. (Remember when Republicans were yelling because Biden made it a federal holiday? I still think we should have given them Liberace Day to shut them up.)

Got two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies for you: First, a fun thing about the movie Slap Shot and why it’s a good intro to the 70s for such poor souls who missed that grubby golden era. And also fun, in its sinister way, is one of my patented “Throne Room at Mar-a-Lago” scenes, starring Tubby and a potential unindicted co-conspirator.  Enjoy! (And also, subscribe! Why miss out on five days a week of this?) 

Not that there isn’t plenty other folly to fool with. I think the Trump indictment has caused actual brain injuries to some of our top prestige press pundits. There’s Peggy Noonan, for example, declaring that hardcore MAGA disciples who have stuck with Tubby through crappy policies injurious to themselves, an attempted insurrection, and two impeachments will turn on him now because he stole government documents:

It is said Mr. Trump’s base never wavers and always rallies, and historically this has been true. When he’s accused of being a trickster in business they don’t care—it’s extraneous to presidential leadership. They don’t care if he’s an abusive predator of women—again, extraneous, old news. But endangering our national security, including our nuclear secrets? That is another matter.

What’s really loopy about this, besides the self-evident, is that Noonan begins the column by quoting herself at great length (so great that I assume she revived from a fugue state only a few hours before deadline and had to fill the page with whatever was handy) to the effect that Trump’s rise among the rabble “is not due to his supporters’ anger at government. It is a gesture of contempt for government, for the men and women in Congress, the White House, the agencies.”  [Emphasis hers.] 

Maybe Noonan has a different definition of contempt than I do, or maybe she thinks the Trumpkins’ contempt has limits based on – well, what, exactly? Respect for the Constitution, from which they only know two amendments, neither of which they understand?  Respect for the rule of law, when they watched Trump’s goon squad try to murder the Electoral College and all their sympathy was with the thwarted assassins? Maybe she doesn’t realize that no native-born American under 60 has ever had a social studies or citizenship class that might inculcate some strong beliefs about the country they live in, and that the people she expects to suddenly swell with patriotic pride and cry “hitherto thou shalt come, but no further!” actually prefer Vladimir Putin to the elected President of the United States. 

Yet someone has actually topped Noonan; Small-handed Times trimmer David Brooks, who in a bizarre “I Won’t Let Donald Trump Invade My Brain” column that actually begins, “I try to be a reasonable person. I try to be someone who looks out on the world with trusting eyes” – right off the bat, a self-contradiction! – brags that now that he realizes Donald Trump is not one of those trustworthy people (a realization to which he seems have come during the 2020 campaign!), he refuses to follow that revelation to anything resembling a logical conclusion:

And yet I can’t quite feel ashamed of my perpetual naïveté toward Donald Trump. I don’t want to be the kind of person who can easily enter the head of an amoral narcissist.

One wonders: What is the Times paying him for, then? Brooks tells us that if he allowed himself to pay close attention and learn the lesson of Trump, that would force him into a worldview in which “people are basically selfish; raw power runs the world. All that matters is winning and losing.” But this is just a childish cover for what the true lesson of Trump’s malevolence is: That it’s not all people, but a specific group of people – including not only Trump’s diehard voters but also the Republican officials and electeds who continue to excuse and defend him – who are indeed “basically selfish,” devoted to raw power and winning at all costs. This description certainly doesn’t apply to the gutless Dick Durbin Democrats, who actually rather resemble Brooks as he describes himself – which of course is the problem with them. God, between the pols and the pundits no wonder we're fucked. 

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: MEMORIAL DAY 2023 EDITION.

He had no one to fall on but me.

What was once a somber tribute of our fallen men is now, whee, a three-day holiday weekend! This strange dichotomy plays on my mind and I write about it now and then; here’s the latest iteration. Whatever it means to you, I hope you get to enjoy it.

Also unlocked from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (my premium site, and subscriptions make a lovely gift!) is another dispatch from Bolt Upright and Received Opinion, celebrating the Republican Vice-Presidential I Mean Presidential Candidates of Color. As I’ve said many times, the as yet unannounced Rep. Byron Donalds is only national-profile GOP POC who’d be an asset to the inevitable Trump ticket – he’s as evil as Scott, Haley, and Ramaswamy, but unlike them competently emulates normal human behavior. Scott in particular is a beaming, slow-witted goofus – exactly the sort of person Trump would hate too much to entertain – so naturally Peggy Noonan thinks he’s swell: 

“He is a breath of fresh air,” former Sen. Rob Portman told me by phone.

And he should know! 

…[Scott is] from South Carolina, a frisky conservative state, and watched his fellow senator, Lindsey Graham, be batted about for independence on various issues and early opposition to Mr. Trump. It left Mr. Scott cautious. 

Or “cowardly.” That works, too. Noonan on DeSantis is even worse:

On transgender issues, it is hard to resist a destructive ideology while maintaining, in public ways, respect and affection for those who are wrong. And who don’t necessarily want your respect and affection. But you have to try anyway. Because it’s right and nice, and we’re human beings, and people can see good faith, sometimes in time and often reluctantly. And because it keeps those you’re opposing from arguing, persuasively, that you’re just playing a culture-war card and they’re only road kill on your highway to victory.

Maybe I’m not giving the old bat enough credit – maybe she knows full well that DeSantis is definitely not going for “right and nice,” nor “human being” nor “good faith.” He has never said a good word about LGBTQ people and never will, because he believes that what the Republican base has been missing is overt permission to hate those people and slur them out loud. That’s what the whole trans thing was about, and why it segued so quickly and smoothly to attacks on drag queens (who are not by and large trans) and why MAGA shitheads are now smashing up Gay Pride displays at Target. Like smart people have long been saying, they were never going to stop with trans people. 

So it’s possible Noonan is trying to be ironic. Haha, who’m I kidding? Her real kung fu is describing the lives of trans people as a “destructive ideology” while insisting Republicans act nice to them. There’s the Riefenstahl of Reaganism in action. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 5/19/23.

I floated lonely down the street one day

Ugggh been a long hard week, my friends, let’s keep it short. First, let me hand around the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies – you already saw The Good Samurderer and Other Republican Bible Stories earlier this week, so how about the latest from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is almost as ridiculous in my imagining as she is real life? See, I’m obliged as one of America’s few remaining satirists – a profession going the way of cigar-factory lectors and human graphic artists -- to try and make the Georgia Congresswoman funny, but the laughs would curdle quick if I gave my Margie the mendacity of the real thing:

If you’re looking for a real point to this exchange [between Greene and Rep. Jamaal Bowman], you’re unlikely to find any. Both of them were playing for the cameras, repeatedly smiling as they made a minor scene.

But the next day, Greene’s comments about the exchange with Bowman suggested that something terrible had happened. At a news conference, she said Bowman was “yelling, shouting, raising his voice, he was aggressive, his physical mannerisms are aggressive,” and she added that “I feel threatened by him.”

I mean, most of us haven’t seen Ooga-Booga like that since Emmett Till. Greene further covered herself with glory this week by introducing what she describes as her “first set” of impeachment articles against President Joe Biden, though she has actually brought Biden impeachment resolutions before the House no fewer than five times before, and has at present such articles posted against four (count ‘em four) cabinet officials. 

Make no mistake, Speaker McCarthy isn’t letting this fool run riot because he’s naturally indulgent – he knows that the diseased rump of the GOP identifies more with her than with him, and he has to keep them on track or the whole racket explodes into dust like a disintegrated mummy. They’re all working to keep it together as hard as they can until all their voter-suppression, gerrymandering, and plain vote-rigging finally put them beyond the will of the voters for keeps. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 5/12/23.

Yeah, I know, the Supremes' vocals are phenomenal,
but it's also cool just hearing it like this.

Hell of a week, huh? I didn’t watch Tubby on TV – I already knew that he’s full of shit and that CNN is likewise, so what was I going to learn from it? How former Tucker Carlson employee Kaitlan Collins was going to mask her collaboration as incompetence? I understand J-schools frown on this approach, but for me a simple “I caught your act” will suffice. You’ll notice not even the rightwing press is talking about it as if Trump articulated any meaningful point or policy – it was all boo-yah theater reviews of his “characteristically spectacular” style etc.

Who needs it? And who the fuck does Anderson Cooper think he's fooling? This was no learning experience. Again, the whole shtick is just meant to keep the Republican rump excited – which doesn’t deliver a majority, but with gerrymandering, voter suppression, and bills like the one in Texas that allows the GOP to throw out Democratic Houston’s votes on a whim, the plan is to rule without one. 

Anyway, we have a freebie at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that continues a theme from last week on the Subway Strangler. Conservatives continue to champion Daniel Penny – now up on manslaughter charges for killing Jordan Neely – as a hero; they invariably refer to him as a Marine and/or a veteran to make him look admirable (notwithstanding their Congresscritters are currently fixing to screw veterans on benefits).

At The Federalist Jonathan S. Tobin laments that “someone who isn’t a ‘person of color’ is always going to be assumed to be in the wrong in any violent confrontation today,” refers to Penny as “the veteran who restrained the homeless man” -- rather hoping you'll miss, I suppose, that his “restraint” killed the guy -- and portrays the once-common argument that vigilante murder is not acceptable as an attempt by socialists to turn the dead homeless guy “the new George Floyd” and rekindle what Tobin describes as “the ‘mostly peaceful’ riots that shook the nation.” (No such thing has happened.) These guys really are, as my essay has it, killer nerds, desk jockeys baying for vicarious blood. 

And, you know what, this one was members-only but since it’s Friday I’m releasing it: a fun thing about the old days when people yelled things at the movie screen. (Ain't that just like a liberal -- winking at disorder!) Comments are open, have fun!

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 5/5/23.

Flow!

•  What a week, eh? It seems like the well of rightwing judiciary corruption stories is inexhaustible. The latest -- with the direct involvement of Federalist Society kingpin/nation-wrecker Leonard Leo, Trump lie diffuser Kellyanne Conway, and Clarence Thomas’ insurrectionist wife – is a humdinger: 

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

The “landmark voting rights” case was Shelby County v. Holder, the one in which Leo’s SCOTUS toadies shanked the Voting Rights Act. (It’s also worth mentioning Conway, Thomas, and Leo are all members of one of those DC fascist affinity groups to which such people flock.)

Man, they’re just crooks, right? And of course we’ve got the usual fash fluffers sputtering “how dare you” at anyone who dares to notice this crime spree. 

This was grist for my mill in one of this week’s two Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies: A scene in which some leading influence peddlers and their clients meet up at a billionaire mansion to conduct business with a longtime alicublog figure of fun.

•  The other free issue is a meditation on the latest object of rightwing hero worship: The man who murdered an obstreperous subway hustler in cold blood. Just when you think conservatives have bottomed out morally, they manage to saw through the floorboards and find another sub-basement. 

The Twitter creeps are vile enough, but the paper-trained pundits of the right who’ve gotten in on this are even worse. Abe Greenwald at Commentary may be the current nadir: He jerks off at length about how his pet murderer was a manly Marine, dammit (“courage is their defining trait… there aren’t many like them”) and fantasizes about having a Subway Strangler floor show of his own:

I’ve been on a few trains where “something was happening,” and if a Marine had suddenly appeared and taken matters into his own hands, I’d have bought him a steak dinner.

Eeeeyikes. The murderer, meanwhile, is alleged to be huddling with a prominent Republican lawyer politician-lawyer (anti-Bragg, just the way Trump likes 'em!), and the crew is preparing for Bernie Goetz redux for some electoral juice -- not in New York City, where such people are justly despised, but in the boondocks and Bumfucks where New York is hated and feared as the Land of Ooga Booga. Of course this ain’t 1984 and George Floyd is much fresher in the minds of potential jurors. Maybe the creeps' model will be Kyle Rittenhouse, with lots of burble about Big Scary Cities and Standing Your Ground. 

•  Finally, since I love a good callback, let me note this blubberfest at the Moonie Washington Times:

Conservatives excluded from 2023 commencement invites

Conservative speakers, already a rarity on college campuses in recent years, may be even more of an anomaly this spring as the nation’s universities hold commencement ceremonies featuring an array of educators, entertainers and politicians drawn from the left — and essentially devoid of anyone from the right.

Whether you’re a respected scholar, a Supreme Court justice or even a former president, the message from most of the country’s colleges is clear: No conservatives allowed.

Boo hoo, the mean college students won’t pay to listen to us bitch about uppity minorities and how no one wants to work! 

This is a return to form for conservatives – in fact it goes back to the days when they were retooling their “political correctness” shtick into “cancel culture” crybullying. I wrote about it for the Village Voice in 2014, when they were outraged that students didn’t want to be regaled by war criminal Condoleezza Rice. In the same column I found conservatives yelling because they weren’t getting the Hugo Award nominations to which they felt themselves entitled, and also this eerie harbinger of Wingnut Shtick To Come: 

For example, last week New Hampshire father William Baer was arrested for disrupting a school board meeting. He complained about the assignment of Jodi Picoult’s YA novel 19 Minutes in his teen daughter’s class because it had a sex scene in it. As the video shows, after Baer had finished his allotted two minutes, he refused to shut up, so the board called the cops, who took him away…

Some people might think the board overreacted; others may think they did right to keep Baer’s heckler’s veto from stomping everyone else’s right to speak. Rightbloggers, however, thought the board had infringed on an important Constitutional right: The right to take over a public meeting if you feel really strongly about it, and are right-wing.

This was, of course, before they invented “Moms for Liberty” to hide their totalitarian agenda behind apron strings. But the basic grift is the same.  

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/28/23.

But I think you know/That I can't let go

It’s the weekend – let’s be re-creative! One of the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down entries from this week that I’m unlocking is an open call for your favorite cover versions of songs – especially ones that go the extra mile to get something new out of the originals. I already posted my top pick (The Residents’ eerie “Viva Las Vegas”) but I have to admit the prize could as easily go to the tune up top here, Erasure doing “Take a Chance On Me.” It’s so breezy, so sweet, so gay! But your choices are at least as valid, let’s hear ‘em. 

The other REBID freebie is one of my scenes in the Catholic Conservative Rectory, with Mr. Justice Boof Kavanaugh sharing drinks and colloquy with the Elders of the Comedy Irish. Poor Boof is back in the news because some folks have noticed that back in 2018, as Above The Law bluntly states, “The Senate Fucked Up The Kavanaugh Investigation” by tossing credible testimony about the now-Associate Justice exposing himself at a party at Yale. Of course, most of us knew the Senate was bum’s-rushing the guy onto the Court at the time – what do you think the protests were about?

(Lagniappe: Here’s one of my White House scenes with Kavanaugh from the reign of the former guy. Lotta laughs if your sense of humor tends toward the mordant. You ought to subscribe.)

Speaking the shitshow that is the current SCOTUS, Jamelle Bouie is very good this week on how it’s rotting from the head. Polls show the rest of the country has some idea how bad it is, too. I can imagine Roberts putting a tail on Alito to make sure he doesn’t fuck up the mifepristone case like he probably did Dobbs, but I don’t see the trajectory turning around anytime soon and there’ll be plenty of opportunities (like Moore v. Harper) for them to speed the decline. Pack that shit already. 

UPDATE. No sooner do I mention how fucked up the SCOTUS cons are when...

Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination’
The author of the Dobbs abortion ruling answers attacks on the court’s ‘legitimacy.’ He says he thinks he knows who leaked the draft and is certain about the motive.

Yes, the guy who almost certainly muscled his fellow wingnuts by leaking his own draft decision on Dobbs is granted a high perch in the Wall Street Journal to say it musta been a lib:

He’s certain about the motive: “It was a part of an effort to prevent the Dobbs draft . . . from becoming the decision of the court. And that’s how it was used for those six weeks by people on the outside—as part of the campaign to try to intimidate the court.”

How brave he and his fellow wingnuts were to resist! But as the previously cited poll results show, that's not how Mr. and Mrs. America see it -- they find the Supremes, rather than their critics, untrustworthy. Rather than reason with these commoners -- ha ha I know; like they read the Wall Street Journal! -- Alito rages how unfair it all is:

“We’re being bombarded with this,” Justice Alito says, “and then those who are attacking us say, ‘Look how unpopular they are. Look how low their approval rating has sunk.’ Well, yeah, what do you expect when you’re—day in and day out, ‘They’re illegitimate. They’re engaging in all sorts of unethical conduct. They’re doing this, they’re doing that’?”

Alito cries about how no one defends him and his buddies -- even the bar associations (“if anything, they’ve participated to some degree in these attacks”) -- how he has to be "driven around in basically a tank, and I’m not really supposed to go anyplace by myself without the tank and my members of the police force," and how hard he has to work on his decisions, etc. Surely he doesn't sound like an old autocrat who need not answer to any authority and who is hated by the people he purports to serve, eh? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 4/21/23.

For me, a good cover makes you hear the original differently.
I never much liked this song before I heard this version.

I’m outta the hospital and back on my bullshit! As proof, have some Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies. First one’s about how other Republican officials might try to copy Ron “Three Fingers” DeSantis’ B-movie goon act. (I mentioned this a few days ago but what the hell, it’s news if it’s news to you.) I see Fingers has been having a hard week; apparently some donors (and voters!) notice his charmlessness and lunatic policies could be a liability in the general election. There is one super-rich guy pledging, hilariously, he would “go without food” to make this chunkhead President – increasingly this is becoming the age of the single rightwing billionaire patron, as shown by dedicated contributors to such as Rod Dreher and the Marble Freedom Trust – but it looks as if the closer we get to actual vote-counting time, the less people want a candidate who basically acts out neo-Nazi pamphlets in his governance. Once again, it seems Supercrook will be the GOP’s champion in the brief vote-show before the next insurrection attempt.

Speaking of big donors, the second freebie is mostly a monologue delivered by Clarence Thomas’ charming wife, explaining to the rabble why Supreme Court Justices of a certain political inclination aren’t bound by laws and norms to which we may, in our childishness, have expected them to attend. It has been grimly funny to see such frauds as Jonah Goldberg, David Brooks, Charles Murray and David French all rushing to defend Thomas’ Sugar Nazi as one hell of a guy who, on that basis, should be able to buy whatever unanswerable public official he wants. But they and the recalcitrant Thomas are part of the same imperturbable ruling class ethic: When the going gets tough, just act as if what the peons think doesn’t matter. It’s worked so far! 

Only other thing I really wanted to mention is Elmo’s blue-check purge. As expected, it’s already making it hard to identify real government agencies and public services from fakes. This doesn’t matter to Elmo and his incel army, who continue to portray the mass decertification as some sort of populist victory. But too little attention is paid to the real purpose behind it. 

Once upon a time Twitter was a good place to find, talk to, and sometimes yell at, people whose expertise and experience, attested to by Twitter, were valuable and meaningful. It was as close to a public forum with such people as most of us ever got.

Now it doesn’t matter whether you actually are, for example, an internationally-known forestry expert, or whether you’re just some guy who paid eight dollars so he can pretend he is one. In fact the phony may have an advantage over the real if he’s a Friend of Elmo – that is, the sort of right-wing troll he favors and amplifies. Where once a user’s achievements were significant, now all that matters is volume – how much one’s signal is boosted by the corrupt owner, and how many bots you can afford to muscle-up your tweets. This destroys Twitter as a resource, but promotes it as a propaganda tool – an alternative universe where the worst ideas are promoted, not because so many people even on the platform believe them, but because shitheels can rig it so it seems like they do. If these people lose again in 2024, count on them to say it’s impossible because Catturd2 has more followers than Biden got votes. 

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: 3/31/23.

I don't listen to this guy often enough.

Happy Tubby Got Fingered Day! As I mention in today’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down – released to general population as a commemorative gift – this indictment is no guarantee of justice; we haven’t even seen the full indictment yet, nor do we know what’s coming down the judicial pipe, and one never knows what a jury will do.  But it has shown, in a small way at least, that this alleged untouchable, the princeling of the putzes, is not utterly beyond the law. 

Which of course has the Trumpkins fully flipping out. Along with what you’ll find in the REBID piece, you’ve got U.S. Senator Rand Paul calling for D.A. Alvin Bragg’s arrest, and many other rightwingers, ranging from the Speaker of the House to the lowliest, tiniest-faced propagandists, calling for retaliatory prosecutions with no legal justification. Which just shows how strong their position is! You can find others on the internet crying that this indictment means America is a dictatorship, and soon the True Sons of Liberty will rise up and take down the Dusky Soros Hordes. In other words, Insurrection Attempt II – This Time It’s Hilarious! 

Even worse are the sober-sided Just-the-Tip Trumper types, like the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who call the indictment “a sad day for America,” sob sob, and insist that in such a case “the evidence should… be solid enough that a reasonable voter would find it persuasive,” which (though IANAL) seems to be a brand new standard for felony prosecutions. Eventually they get to a slightly more manicured version of the bald threats made by the goon squad:

Once a former President and current candidate is indicted, some local Republican prosecutor will look to make a name for himself by doing the same to a Democrat. U.S. democracy will be further abused and battered. Mr. Bragg, the provincial progressive, is unleashing forces that all of us may come to regret.

The cheaper the kooks, the gaudier the patter. 

UPDATE. I neglected to mention Erick Erickson's lulu. He advances the same tropes as the rest of them – the indictment “will help Trump immensely,” and “the case is so, so thin that Trump is very likely to get acquitted” (again, the indictment is as yet sealed) – and adds some nonsense of his own: For example, that “independents who don’t care for [Trump] but do not hate him could swing decisively and sympathetically in his direction just as a recession is breaking out. Alvin Bragg could very well have gotten Trump re-elected.” Apparently Erickson had a choice between polling data and his own ass and chose his ass. 

Most remarkably, Erickson also goes out of his way to insult D.A. Alvin Bragg -- and the grand jury: 

Alvin Bragg represents a wing of the Democrat Party that is on the short bus of the party. He’s not very bright. I suspect the grand jurors are just rabid progressives, too, and they are all in the wing of “let’s put the SOB behind bars.” They hate him. They call him vulgarities instead of the President. They just want him in prison, and they’ll do anything to get him there. 

They are not smart enough to consider the ramifications and too blinded by rage against Trump to care.

In a later post Erickson calls Bragg “a dim-witted county district attorney.” I’m sure Erickson’s constituents enjoy hearing the black lawyer and the New York City jurors (whom they probably imagine as the Central Park Five padded out with skels from Death Wish) called stupid, and that's why he's laying it on so thick. I wonder what he’ll do, though, as the wheels of justice slowly grind and he is obliged to up the ante. Maybe he’ll call in the AI that says racial slurs! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/24/23.

I love Roy Hamilton's original and most of the covers,
but today let's have it funky.

Only one Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie this week, folks – times is tough and I need a few more of you to subscribe. (Five days a week for $7/month – you’d be crazy not to subscribe!) As it happens it’s Monday’s action-show episode of The Proud Boys coming to New York to rescue Tubby from Alvin Bragg, and I’d say it hasn’t aged a bit, since here it is Friday and not only the overtly psycho conservatives but also the nominally normal ones have spent the week screaming their loyalty to the former President. 

Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board has felt it necessary to step in and explain to Kevin McCarthy that investigating Bragg for investigating Trump is making them look bad to the normies. Of course they cloak this concern with passive-aggressive bullshit – “Meantime, Democrats couldn’t be happier that House Republicans are helping them in their Trump obsession,” ha ha Murc’s Law strikes again! – but it still reveals the nervousness that the movement’s front men have to be feeling as the Mad King and his vassals pour over the GOP gunwales and threaten to scuttle their preferred candidate, the Florida Fash.

Speaking of the Journal and passive-aggressiveness, Peggy Noonan really breaks the bottle today, warming up first with a ladylike defense of her former meal ticket, recently accused by an eyewitness of tanking the Iran hostages’ chances of rescue to boost his electoral chances in 1980. Her primary argument is, basically, that Reagan was going to win anyway, and genteel witness impeachment (“As for Ben Barnes’s memories, I don’t think he was being untruthful. I think the old man was remembering what he came, in time, to interpret…”). But this bit is particularly rich:

But: Would Ronald Reagan OK a scheme to lengthen the imprisonment of American hostages in Iran to bolster his personal political prospects? He almost killed his own presidency a few years later in an attempt to free an American agent imprisoned by Islamic jihadists in the same place. Reagan’s preoccupation with the suffering of the CIA’s William Buckley resulted in a jerky, far-fetched scheme that would become known as the Iran-Contra affair.

Sure, that’s why he was making payoffs to death squads – he was such a softy he couldn’t stand the thought of a CIA agent squealing, I mean getting hurt. 

The second half of Noonan’s column is devoted to attacking Bragg’s prosecution on the grounds that it actually seems to be happening, as opposed to the many more justifiable prosecutions that are not happening. Get a load:

“But that’s how we got Al Capone—we couldn’t charge him for being a murderous gangster so we got his books and indicted him for tax evasion.” Yes, but Al Capone wasn’t president. We didn’t owe even a small civic courtesy to his supporters. 

Whereas we have to kiss the asses of the insurrectionist crackpots who would flip out if Trump were apprehended in the middle of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Good-taste conservatives like Noonan love that the country’s being radically remade by red-state revanchists and the Federalist Society into a rightwing totalitarian state, but when it looks like even ordinary processes of government will discomfit them they always plead for stasis.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/17/23.

Fun, city.

Got a couple of Roy Edroso Break It Down freebies for you. One takes off from the “woke” gibberish that’s sweeping conservative intellectual circles. Since Bethany Mandel’s embarrassment on live TV, you can’t swing a cat on Twitter without hitting a rightwing blowhard workshopping his own tendentious definition of the word. Between this and the campaign to portray wokeness as the cause of the Silicon Valley Bank failure (which is rich in several ways, not the least being that rightwing vampire Peter Thiel had $50 million in the allegedly woke SVB), it’s clear that conservatives have abandoned policy and politics for hermeneutics and its close cousin, bullshit. 

The other freebie is a fun little sketch based on Oklahoma’s apparent puzzlement that big companies don’t want to move there. “There is no reason for us to continuously lose out to another state in this country on major business developments,” the president pro tempore of the Oklahoma Senate writes; “…I am determined find the common denominator as to why we aren’t being chosen and figure out how we can become more attractive to businesses looking to expand or relocate.” 

Guy, I don’t mean to be rude, but educated people simply don’t want to live in places that are rapidly adopting the abortion-banning, gay-erasing, anti-education policies of the modern Republican Party. I mean, it’s getting so doctors don’t want to move there – soon enough they’re going to have to go back to letting barbers do operations. 

When red states brag about how so many people are moving from places like California and New York to Bumfuck, they always let you know those people are moving for economic reasons – yet they never seem to grasp what that means: That the emigrants could no longer afford their first choice and had to settle for less. It’s like saying, “Haw, more people are eatin’ margarine instead o’butter – must be because margarine is so much more delicious!”  

There's plenty of beauty and flavor out in the country, but it seems like the people who run those places are less interested in promoting that than in cursing the infernal cities and making their own jurisdictions meaner and dumber out of pure spite. (And because it makes their subjects easier to control, of course.) It's like they're having a race to the bottom and are mad that not everyone wants to compete. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/10/23.

I'm a late 20th-Century guy and this is my jam

Omigod it's almost the Oscars! And, as I have been doing for years now, I'm going to try and guess the winners, and as prep have seen nine of the ten Best Picture nominees (I will dutifully see the Tom Cruise thing this weekend and report on it here, though I regard the prospect much as Pee-Wee regarded the snakes in that pet shop fire.)  As a favor to you, my public, I have brought my reviews of those films out from behind the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down paywall so you can read them:  The Fabelmans, Tár, The Banshees of Inisherin, Women Talking, All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, Elvis, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. 

As to non-cultural REBID offerings released free of charge for this week, I have just the one, about a National Review author trying to hold aloft that publication’s Conservatives-with-Good-Taste banner while the actual conservatism outside NR’s castle walls grows increasingly vicious and feral. It’s good, of course, but there’s plenty where that came from if you have taste and $7/month (cheap!). 

The week brought more madness in the form of Tucker Carlson’s Selected Shorts from the Jan. 6 Tour-Group Visit to Our Nation’s Capitol. The grift is clear from the lunatic responses to this Dinesh D’Souza tweet: Wingnuts show brief video clips of quiet moments among the mob, then say that proves the hours of mob violence that day – notwithstanding that these are also documented on video – no longer mean anything because “MSM” “lied.”  

If it were an argument it’d be self-refuting -- as it is, it’s just more evidence that conservatism has descended even further: As it has abandoned policy for dumb culture-war stunts, it has also abandoned common sense for magical thinking -- literally looking reality in the face and calling it fantasy, and vice-versa. Which is why our politics now depends on standing up for reason as well as for specific political positions. Fortunately in my case these mostly coincide! 

I did get some encouragement, though, from a new USA Today/IPSOS poll that shows most Americans don’t see what’s so bad about being “woke.” Not sure what other differently-worded or -implemented polls would yield – as we’ve seen from ridiculously loaded polls, like the New York Times one that claimed “some Americans do not speak freely in everyday situations because of fear of retaliation or harsh criticism” as a sign of rampant cancelculture rather than of ordinary good manners, these things can be rigged or willfully misinterpreted. But it’s nice to know that however many bots and creeps pollute social media with claims that everything from M&Ms to the military is killing us with wokeness, some of us still have our heads on straight.

Another bonus: the poll enraged ham-faced pundit Erick Erickson, and sent him sputtering to his fanbase with this doozy:

What I find more telling about the country’s true view on the term woke comes from standup comedians who make a living saying out loud what their audience is thinking. From Chris Rock to Dave Chappelle to Bill Burr to Neal Brennan, almost every progressive comedian is ridiculing woke ideology on progressive platforms like Netflix and Hulu.

Yeah, who cares about a poll of normies when you can get vox populi straight from these rich comedians telling the boomers who paid $200+ a seat to listen to them that something the kids like is bad? 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 3/3/23.

Hey, it's happy hour and this is just nice.

Another hard week for America, folks, but at least some of us get the weekend off! Not me, though – I’ll be busy on the weekend getting a head start on next week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues. Speaking of which, let me unload the freebies for the week just passed – first, the Dilbert Diaries, the next logical step in Scott Adams’ career; I am convinced he’s convinced that the full fascist takeover is imminent, and he wants to be New Hitler's Court Jester. 

He may not be wrong! Ron DeSantis has been tearing it up, declaring himself Lord of Disneyland, and planning his destruction of the press and continuing his persecution of trans, gay, and educated people (the Democratic base!) in his mosquito-gator-and-mortgage-fraud kingdom. I half believe that he and Trump are working together, and the governor’s lunacy is meant to make the ex-president look less dangerous so when they nominate him some of the independent voters (the dumb ones who ruin everything) might say, well, he’s not so bad.  

Conservatives don’t see the downside, though, and except for a few apostates they’re all in for the full fash. I actually think they’re excited by it – I mean, Trump was a blast for them, but he only shat on Latinos and foreigners – this guy is a literal queer-basher!  (Fun project: Try to find any DeSantis assurance that he’s not attacking LGBTQ people with these programs. He simply doesn’t do it. What does that tell you?) 

I was directed to Hot Air, which had been an unremarkable wingnut site for so long that I hadn’t even looked at it for years. They got a guy there now called David Strom who has a post about gay and trans stuff called “The Hershey Highway to Hell.” OOOH HOW EDGY. Also he calls the trans woman Faye Johnstone “he,” always a sign of moral clarity/dorkism. (Imagine him among normal people; I put the time between his first deliberate misgendering and his ejection while shouting I’M BEING CANCELCULTURED at about two minutes.) At one point Strom gets after the trans lady’s non-profit:  

“Supporting youth-serving organizations across Canada.” Literally, the only phrase that makes sense in the entire business description is about getting access to children. On that point, alone, is the description comprehensible. Access to kids.

Ever notice how it’s always about the kids? These trans folks don’t like HAVING kids, but they apparently like being with them quite a lot. Preferably with as few clothes on as they can get away with.

There is nothing in fact or reason supporting this slur, but yelling groomer is what they do now instead of lectures on limited government. Oh, and elsewhere at the site addressing the DeSantis Don’t Say Gay bill is an old alicublog figure of fun:

This really, really bothers some people.

Most of the bill concerns the rights of parents, which really, really bothers some people, too.

Hint hint. There are all kinds of ways to call your enemies groomers, and Jim Lileks, being an old-fashioned type, really, really prefers the really, really eyebrow-waggle. 

Hey, but let’s lighten up – here’s another REBID bit, this one about movies you saw when you were younger that take on whole new resonances when you see them later in life. I did Night Moves, but you can do your own in the comments. It’s a community, see; you really ought to subscribe (cheap!).

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: 2/17/23.

While I produce five days a week of high-quality content at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (go over and have a look, subscribe if you like, it’s mighty good eating for the pennies it costs), productivity at the old alicublog plant has been down a while. I regret it, but between REBID and my other editorial work there’s not much room left for bodily functions, let alone the kind of funsies for which this site became known back in 1953, when “blogs” rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line and, due to their tendency to roll rather than locomote, wound up in the dustbin of history, a short distance down the road to oblivion and turn left. 

But sometimes a red flag can get this old bull to charge. Erick Erickson, a longtime figure of fun in the alicublog rep company, has an even more ridiculous than usual item up today. The headline is:

We Cannot Reject Sabotage On Rail Lines Just Yet

Let us tiptoe past Erickson’s long preliminary yammerings about how Joe Biden is trying to blame everything on Donald Trump (though given Trump’s rollback of rail freight safety features he’s certainly blameworthy) and Biden LIED about the CHINESE BALLOONS (“The Administration that lied repeatedly about the Chinese spy balloon wants us to trust them on it not being sabotage, just Trump”), and cut to the 19th graf:

The reality is these incidents are probably not sabotage. Buttigieg, for all his whining, has a point. There are many train derailments every year. We’re more sensitive to them now because of media exposure.

This is the next best thing to “it was all a dream.” 

So why was Erickson going on about sabotage? 

But the point is that this Administration regularly tries to blame Donald Trump for everything, has lied repeatedly in the past few weeks about the Chinese spy balloon, has done such a bad job dealing with these issues too many Americans now know the Transportation Secretary’s name, and we simply cannot believe them.

And if “we” (Erickson and his tapeworm, who I gotta say has his work cut out for him) can’t trust Joe Biden, maybe we’ll trust Erick Erickson’s self-refuting innuendos. Oh, and if you took the side-bet on “Hunter Biden’s laptop” being in the story? Collect your winnings. 

But the real prize this week is Peggy Noonan, who has been on fire (regrettably not literally) with her rambling silver-alert takes. This week’s starts with snipage at Nikki Haley, who recently launched her Vice-Presidential (whoops, I mean air-quotes Presidential) campaign:

On Wednesday Nikki Haley announced her presidential campaign in Charleston, S.C. I found myself thinking not about her candidacy but about the launch itself, which was creepily stuck in the past. A horrible, blaring song from a Sylvester Stallone sequel pumped her in as she strode out in the white suit and there were adoring fans on the rafters behind her, with whom she briefly interacted before turning toward the audience and doing the point—standing there and pointing to individual members of the cheering audience as if she knew them and was being natural. An introducer said she will “lead us into the future”; she added, “America is falling behind.” It was all so tired, clichéd, and phony. It was national politics as it has been done circa 1990-2023.

1990? How about the 80s, Peggy, when as Ronald Reagan’s handler you filled his mouth with uplifting bullshit and helped engineer spectacles like Nancy waving at Ronnie on the telescreen at the 1984 Republican Convention? That's when propaganda was propaganda, you young punks! 

Speaking of bullshit, this seems to be about the only thing Noonan likes about Haley: 

In her speech she said some nice things: “Take it from me, the first female minority governor in history: America is not a racist country.” Everyone who scrambles over our border knows that; it is good when elites say it.

…until said scramblers-over-the-border get driven back over by Greg Abbott’s vigilantes or dragged up north to use as pawns in a cruel culture-war stunt. Honestly, I can’t imagine even her Republican readers don’t immediately think this. 

Then there’s a long grumble about those horrible ads on the teevee during the Super Bowl – they made America look like “a nation of morons” (don’t bother waiting for the penny to drop, guys), whereas back in the day they had Mean Joe Greene being all nice and cuddly for Coke and that was the real America, real Ronnie-and-Nancy koochie-koo kitsch, not this nutty, noisy stuff:

I’m here to say I’ve met America and that’s not what they want. What they want is “Help me live, help my kids live, help me feel something true.” 

Sorry, lady, but would you like a new car, soft drink, or diabetes management app? These are the damn ads. I’m convinced Noonan was just turned off by all the rock and rap (“the music shifted, screamed, and the mood became discordance”). It's a miracle the Journal kept her from fulminating on Rihanna. Look, Grandma, they aren’t pitching this shit to me, either, but I know better than to Blame Society.

Oh, but her closing… man; she gets on Will Smith and starts pitching to write his Oscar 2023 speech:

Here is how to turn that moment into something helpful. It doesn’t involve “image rehab.” It involves constructive honesty. Will Smith should walk in and say this:

“It is painful in life when you embarrass yourself. It is horrifying when you do it in front of tens of millions of people. Last year I did something bad to a guy who was just doing his job, and I am here to acknowledge it from the same stage—to admit that in attempting to humiliate him, I humiliated myself. I showed a number of things, including sheer bad judgment…

Two more grafs of this! I give it five barf bags! I doubt Noonan is even expecting the call (though I love imagining her on the phone, pinching her nose, and droning “This is Miss Noonan’s answering service”); I expect the play is to wait for Smith to deliver what promises to be a perfectly anodyne and expected (though less white!) apology-like spew, and then sigh contentedly: “Ahhh, he took my advice!”

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: 2/10/23.

RIP Burt Bacharach. I love this one, which for all its
tricky syncopations is fresh and free and swinging.

The State of the Union is seldom intrinsically interesting; I do recall the first of Bill Clinton’s ass-breaking-long SOTUs showing his tendency to bury the opposition under an avalanche of proposals, but I have no memory of which if any of those proposals ever saw life. 

The same is true of the Biden 2023 edition, but it had a couple of amusing outcomes: First, it got the Republicans to scream (literally, in the case of the less well-bred Republicans in attendance) that Biden was lying when he said they wanted to fuck up Social Security and Medicare.  This was the easiest out in the world for Biden because every American, liberal and conservative alike, knows Republicans want to rip open both programs and spill their contents into the pockets of their major donors, and post-SOTU polls suggest they haven’t changed their minds.

Nonetheless conservatives sputtered like the parents in a 90s video that it was a dastardly ruse – “BS,” huffed Byron York at the Washington Examiner – notwithstanding the voluminous documentary evidence of Senators like Mike Lee, Rick Scott and Ron Johnson admitting as much, which the White House cleverly provided in an official “fact sheet.” Mitch McConnell effectively telling Scott to shut the fuck up was a sweet bit of lagniappe. 

But the weirder development, for me, is Peggy Noonan calling Biden’s speech “Trumpian” – which I wrote about in an essay at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down that I’m releasing to non-subscribers today. As it turns out, the Crazy Jesus Lady isn’t the only one trying that one. “Biden’s State of the Union address last night was conspicuously heavy on what could only be described as Trumpian economic themes,” said National Review’s Nate Hochman; Ross Douthat at the Times claims the speech’s “key themes and most enthusiastic riffs could have been lifted — albeit with more Bidenisms and fewer insults — from Trump’s populist campaign.”

These guys are all bought into the idea that Trump is a “populist” despite his never having achieved the support of a majority of voters. To them the term seems to mean “acting like a vicious dumbass and pretending to give a shit about the proles.” Trump was always great at the first part, but I doubt anyone outside the deranged yokels one used to see at his rallies ever believed the second part, and if they did the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, with its massive giveaways to the rich, convinced them otherwise. 

Conservatives seem to think that the damage they’ve done to American institutions over the past several years is all to their own benefit – that by ruining faith in education, for example, they’ve brought to life the Florida Golem with his Don’t Say Gay (or Black) Laws that they expect to sweep the nation. They don’t seem to realize that while chaos may inspire the feral types of the Republican base to tear down what’s left of the rubble, most of us -- old folks who remember and young folks who dream – want government to, at the very least, do what it used to and insulate us from the caprices of the rich and the insane. The main difference between Biden and Trump is the former can call up that vision and be believed.