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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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!
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.
The first of our Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies this week is Thursday morning’s sketch on how the debate might go – which, I am told (too busy working to watch), was not how Thursday night’s actual debate turned out.
I’ve also seen a lot of panic over Biden’s performance -- which may be warranted! But I absent myself. For one thing, the sudden seemingly-bipartisan groundswell on social media for a Biden replacement has united Matthew Yglesias and Megan McArdle, and they both suck shit and always have. For another, the Democratic Party has for decades been deaf to my excellent recommendations and I doubt they’re taking requests at the moment (the moment being June of an election year and the request being the defenestration of the incumbent) from me or anyone else.
Anyway, cope how you will, but I fall back on the counsel of literature, specifically Terry Southern’s fanciful Texas Rangers motto: “Little man whip a big man every time if the little man's in the right and keeps a'comin.” In the final analysis your only weapon is the truth, and the truth is a Trump victory would be catastrophic and render today’s Supreme Court outrages the least of our worries. If you can’t get that across to voters, it won’t be because they’re ineducable, nor because Biden Is Old – it’ll be because they don’t think fascism is a hard no, and if that’s what they think there’s nothing you or our system can do about it. Back to the classics, again: Courage will not save you, but it will show that your souls are still alive.
Speaking of the ineducable, Jonathan Chait this week actually published something entitled, I shit you not, “Why conservatives should vote for Joe Biden.” In our second freebie I treat this nonsense as it deserves, but Chait’s yap is useful if you want to know at least one way things have gone so wrong: Intelligent and well-meaning people trying to recruit defenders of democracy from among its mortal enemies instead of from "the Left."
I think they beat-corrected these? Or maybe I'm just shocked that it still kicks so hard.
This past week at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down we had plenty of the usual political stuff, but our two freebies today for the non-subscribing public (Stop crowding! They’re coming! There’s plenty for everyone!) are about two dead guys. First my reminiscence of the now-late James Chance and the shows he played with the Contortions back when New York City was better because I was young and living in it (and really, is there any other reason people say so? Well, I’ve discoursed on that in one of my evergreens).
The second is for the newly-departed Donald Sutherland and an invitation to comment on your favorite of his performances, and we’ve already gotten great ones from our regular commenters (who are subscribers, get the hint – come on, $7/month is ridiculously cheap!).
It’s too little noted, as Trump tries to convince credulous reporters that he’s reaching out successfully to African-American voters, every single MAGA media outlet like the Examiner keeps giving evidence that they have absolutely no black readers.
Anyway:
The headline suggests typical rightwing Limousine Liberals in Hollyweird Kulturkampf crap, but the dek promises a twist. One wonders: Is he talking about Ron Schneider and Kevin Sorbo? But no, it’s worse than that! After a typically gratuitous swipe at Kamala Harris (these guys never do any other kind; Vice-Presidents don’t do anything to be criticized for, but Henninger’s readers certainly know what party, gender and color KH is, and that’s enough), he gets after Biden making $30 mil at a Hollywood fundraiser rather than stroking the oil industry for a billion dollars like a real American.
Henninger also repeats the latest cheapfake bullshit about Biden looking ga-ga, but unlike the usual lie diffusers he deflects with some pretended sympathy: “We’ll give Mr. Biden a pass on this one. Who wouldn’t be zonked after flying across nine time zones, even for $30 million?” That’s how the prestige-press pros do it, folks!
But then we get to the nub:
Less easy to duck was the impression of a Democratic Party drowning in Hollywood glitz. The party’s public image is almost wholly defined by celebrities, and that’s not good for winning general elections.
As opposed to being almost wholly defined by enraged insurrectionists storming the Capitol and Rudolph Giuliani. At least Rudy’s hair dye runs down his face, not like the fancy stays-in-the-hair dye favored by effete showbiz liberals! After listing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Gavin Newsom as “celebrities,” or at least celebrity-adjacent, Henninger again affects to be reasonable:
The Democrats’ rejoinder is: Give us a break! Donald Trump is the most unalloyed celebrity ever associated with the presidency, or politics. True, but that isn’t the Democrats’ problem.
The list of celebrities joined to the Democratic hip runs forever. But the Republicans? Once past Mr. Trump, no one associates the GOP with shiny people. In the popular telling among sophisticates, the Republicans—whether their elected politicians or followers—could hardly be more out of it.
George W. Bush, elected twice, was derided as a Republican doofus from Texas. Ronald Reagan? A “minor” actor. The traditional Republican set of beliefs is dismissed as beyond the pale on pretty much everything—the culture, race, social values, fashion, even culinary preferences. Can a foodie be a Republican?
See, Democrats are associated with “shiny” people while Republicans are associated with a President so toxic he was never invited to a post-presidency GOP convention and a famous movie actor some unnamed person called “minor.” Even casual readers may begin to smell a rat, so Henninger tries a curveball:
The assaults on Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas may be about legal outcomes, but make no mistake, these attacks originate in the belief that they aren’t our kind of people.
I’ve been trying to puzzle this one out and the only thing I can figure is these judges’ corruption and batshit wingnut wives are supposed to be relatable to the Average Joe. Duck, here comes another feint!
Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing made that clear.
I can’t even guess.
The Democratic Party’s celebrity dependency has been background noise for decades and not a problem . . . until now.
These people have been associating Democrats with celebrities for decades (remember this McCain ad?). I guess Henninger means it hasn’t been working… but this time for sure!
This presidential election remains closely contested. With the cost of living the No. 1 issue, each swing-state vote deserves attention. In this high-stakes context, the spectacle of the incumbent president jetting from Europe to Hollywood is the kind of look Mr. Biden and his party don’t need. He’s Hollywood Joe.
I thought he was supposed to be Sleepy Joe, even Senile Joe. Suddenly he’s one of the beautiful people? Several grafs of GOP boilerplate ensue (Did you know Trump went to a black church, and there were even a few black people there?) before this whopper:
Mr. Trump himself could help by running off the rails, but he’s been almost disconcertingly pragmatic recently, shaking hands with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and endorsing former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Trump critic, for the U.S. Senate. However improbable, a Trump turn to self-discipline could dilute the Biden campaign’s decision to run overwhelmingly against Mr. Trump rather than on the Biden record.
We’ve been hearing some version of a “Trump turn to self-discipline” since he came down the escalator and even his fans mainly like that he’s obviously deranged and might get mad enough to actually murder some people they don’t like. Normally I’d admire a bullshit parfait with as many layers as Henninger gives this, yet it’s such a slovenly job that I begin to suspect that he isn’t even using real bullshit.
Holy moley, I’m eight days late! (That’s what she said, fnar!) Yes, ‘Round-the-Horn is supposed to be a weekly event, apologies. Fortunately Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, the acclaimed publication which this serves as a feeder stream, is still bumping hard five days a week; with a subscription you get emails (on the regular for paying subs, on free-issue days only for easy riders), so if I forget to remind you here at alicublog you’ll still be in the loop. Come on, you gave your email to CVS!
As it happens, there were no free issues that previous week -- I can’t be giving it away all the time, folks, this is how I keep body and soul together with a minimum of leakage along the seams. But this week we have two very good specimens, still fresh:
1. Part II of the Sam & Martha-Ann Alito vs. The Neighbors!If you missed Part One, it’s still available, though as with The Godfather Part II and all great sequels it’s unnecessary for enjoyment of this one. While the Alitos’ insurrectionary sentiments are not fun at all, there’s plenty of laughs in the fact that their neighbors hate them so much that, despite the traditional viciousness of wingnuts when crossed, the people forced to live near them decided it was worth the risk to rat them out. Grim Fascists don’t Make Good Neighbors, apparently.
Part II comes after the surreptitious taping of these worthies at a conservative event appeared to confirm Mr. Alito’s extremism and Mrs. Alito’s lunacy. Naturally the tribunes of the rightwing press were enraged that anyone should stoop so low as to record the yammerings of these public figures supported by taxpayers dollars and whatever bribes Clarence Thomas hasn’t already hoovered up. “A political activist infiltrated a gala to try provoking Justice Alito and his wife,” sputters The Wall Street Journal, who would much prefer you only hear about the Alitos via Sam himself in the op-ed space the paper so generously extends to him from time to time.
So why is he still a conservative (acceptable media version)? As everyone should know by now, the key to conservative success is that its adherents will endure no end of neglect or punishment so long as the people they really hate get it even worse. I’m sure this con artist prays every day for a Trump victory so that gay and trans people and women who choose not to serve as broodslaves will suffer. A true Christian martyr, he’ll endure a few harsh words for that!
Normally I don’t release “Fun Friday” editions of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down to gen pop, because they’re meant as downtime for REBID regulars after each long week of satire and analysis. (Yes, it’s a five-day-a-week operation, with subscriptions available at the ridiculously low price of $7/month! Sign up now!)
But this week is something special as Tubby got fingered, so here is the latest. For me the best part of the verdict is this: Usually, when wingnuts rage and threaten after a Trump-related reversal (as they do frequently, since rage and threats are mainly what they’ve got), I confess to feeling at least a little dread; but since a normal process has yielded a normal result that did not magically exonerate the piece of shit, today they seem completely laughable. Clowns can be frightening, but in the final analysis they're just clowns.
I usually imagine McMegan’s gunning for Peggy Noonan’s job, but now I think she may aspire to be the next Senator Susan Collins. There are no good Republicans, people, and that goes double for libertarians.
Sliding into Memorial Day weekend, hurrah! I’d like to ignore political stuff for a while, but I can’t let pass the Prestige Press’ latest Trump in-kind contribution: Tubby gave a speech in The Bronx, which the PP takes to mean New York is in play. Some of them just echo Trump’s bullshit:
You’ll still get nudniks on social media (and of course at Fox) going “there were a lot more when I was there nice try libs” but there have been so many fake Trump rally shots they can’t even back it up with Photoshop.
Another exhausting week but at least I’ve managed to do a proper Friday ‘Round-the-Horn! Or I will have when I follow this paragraph with several others, put in the links, pick a video header, think of a clever dek… you know what, sounds like too much work, forget it. (No, Roy! Think of the chirren!) Speaking of which:
Why you trollin' like a bitch? Ain't you tired? Tryna strike a chord and it's probably A-Minor
I hear a lot of weak comparisons of popular music to venerable artistic forms but if you ask me some diss tracks are up there with British poets’ feuds.
Anyway, for immortality (because if you take care of the present, immortality takes care of itself):
Before I get to the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, I have to touch on a subject I was not able to treat at that venue because it came in too late: The absolutely bugfuck crazy story of Mrs. Sam Alito and the Upside-Down Flag. Three things make it even crazier: First, that Justice Alito ratted out (or passed the blame onto) his own wife to the Times; second, that per Sidney Powell’s testimony Alito was lined up to assist the Jan. 6 insurrection that his distress flag portended; and third, that Alito ran back to the Times to bitch that his wife had to wave the insurrection flag because one of his neighbors put up a sign with a swear word on it.
I mean this one has everything we’ve come to expect from wingnuts: Evasion of responsibility; butch he-man woman-hater guys hiding behind ladyskirts; snowflakey sob stories about how liberal incivility forced them to go nuts; and treason.
Anyway, on to the REBID gifts. First is Yet Another NYT Editorial Version of Am I Out of Touch, No, It’s the Students Who Are Wrong. These fuckfaces annoy me for infinite reasons but the real craw-sticker in the crap essay that inspired my parody was the implication that, while it’s bad (they guess) that colleges and their donors/cat’s-paws are punishing the speech of their students, we should all remember caaaancel cullllture woo woo woo. Brother, no one believes that bullshit anymore; Bill Maher couldn’t even get Bill Burr to pretend he believes it and that’s the subtext of half his shtick. It belongs in the basement pantry with “CRT” and “groomer” and all the other gibberish viruses these idiots have tried to transmit to normal people via their rubes, but as long as Bari Weiss draws breath I guess we have to put up with its irrelevant intrusion in every First Amendment discussion.
The other freebie is Unwoken Comedy Caveman Jerry Seinfeld. I don’t get it – why are these old comedians so pissy that the kids don’t like them? When I was in college you didn’t hear Georgie Jessel complaining that the Student Activity Boards weren’t booking him. Why can’t he just relax on his piles of money with a cocaine diffuser like the rest of them?
UGGGH guys, I know, I’ve blown another deadline but you have to understand I was just on a (far too brief!) vacation back in the homeland, and it was glorious – saw friends and familiar faces and places, and absorbed the life-giving 220V jolt of big city living -- but my first week back here was so nerve-shattering I couldn’t manage a Friday post or even a Saturday one. So Friday-‘Round-the-Horn is two days late. Please forgive me.
Anyway my Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies, despite the hectic pace of national news, are still worth a look! First, we have my essay on Peter Baker laying the tattered credibility of the New York Times over a blood-puddle and helping Peggy Noonan to step over it – as fitting an image of the complete collapse of the prestige press as any I can think of: a NYT made man and a venerable WSJ received-opinion diffuser collaborating to tsk-tsk-tsk college kids for having the nerve to denounce senseless mass slaughter of Palestinians by an American client state. I'm not sure what Pete ‘n’ Peggy are thinking -- maybe they fantasize themselves representatives of U.S. interests (or U.S.-based business interests, anyway) and may, indeed must, justify any sins committed on those interests' behalf, like Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg’s Lincoln, when he thunders, “I am the President of the United States, clothed in immense power!” – though their version, whatever their imaginings, is prissy and passive-aggressive, and supports a thuggish foreign belligerent rather than emancipation and American liberty. Well, as long as they feel they've done their bit.
And speaking of received opinion, here’s the second freebie, in which our Sunday morning political TV talk show tackles (or rather dutifully if ineffectually gums) the subject of pathetic Veep-spot scrambler Kristi Noem of South Dakota and her puppy-murder. Noem, like all these fuckers, is so full of shit I doubt she even had a puppy, but whatever the backstory I do believe she meant her lurid tale to pique the interest of King Shit with its pseudo-countrified cruelty. (Her last-minute “You city slickers don’t know what it’s like on the farm!” gambit suggests she hoped newspaper dummies would buy that real rustics shoot coon hounds and barn cats like they was a-swattin’ flies. Sadly, for her, no one thinks that.) I still believe Tubby will go for a black man who can call Kamala Harris a bitch and a ho and set a few million Cletuses howling with delight. But who knows? Maybe he'll just nominate one of his kids, or a horse. It's not like his rubes give a shit.
I stopped paying attention to this guy early. That was a mistake.
I skipped last week’s “’Round-the-Horn” because I was rushing into a much-needed holiday, which is not yet quite ended but I figured I’d just pop in and let you know I’m still part of the warp and woof of American life. (“Norma Desmond? I thought she was dead!”)
Hey check this out: Protesting for good causes is good and protesting for bad causes is bad. Simple as. Occupying a campus building to pressure your school to divest from the military industrial complex and to register your horror over our country's dogged complicity in an ongoing genocide is an unequivocal good. Reasonable people can disagree about this you might be thinking? No they can't! Finding moral clarity on this matter is one of the easiest things a person could ever do.
Being an elderly Democratic simp I understand why Biden is doing his pro-Israel difference-splitting bit: He knows if he loses in November we’re all cooked, and believes this is the politically expedient path out of the crisis as by the election most voters will have forgotten it and Tubby’s troops will be screaming about Messicans and tranny-sexuals and (because they can’t help themselves) describing in lurid detail how they will murder their enemies, which Biden reasonably thinks may invigorate his base. Not how I would do it, of course, but then my own presidency would probably end like The Phantom of the Opera and be no good to anyone.
It’s sad and infuriating that we even have to deal with an influential-out-of-all-proportion minority of American voters (and a majority of rich fucks) who have the temperament (we can’t really call what they have “politics”) of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian. If you see a way out, please provide in comments.
But alas, the hilarity is not unmixed – and I don’t refer to the execution of Cricket, which I’m not sure even happened. Going back to Romney’s rooftop dog gambit, Noem’s story was obviously meant to show what passes for toughness in the sick word of conservatism, but as often happens the promulgators of the shtick had no idea how normal people would react to it. I’m afraid it’s Judge Holdens all the way down.
I have said more than once that the New York Post is Rupert Murdoch’s primary stateside lie-diffuser – more than even the Wall Street Journal, since people who can barely read can still comprehend and consume the Post’s retrograde and racist bullshit -- and the tendency of journalists to laugh it off just because it has funny headlines (“Headless Body in Topless Bar, chortle chortle gotta love the Post”) is a key example of the profession’ disgusting dereliction in the face of far-right institutional capture.
But the trial is also funny because Trump lacks impulse control and indeed any sense of decorum other than that which he believes is owed to himself; so even on trial, with his freedom at risk and the eyes of the world upon him, he farts and mutters and nods off.
Our other freebie is a parable, if you will, of the NeverTrumpers and JustTheTipTrumpers drifting down the Amazon in fading expectation of, any moment now, reviving the Good Republican Party. The inspiration here is a ridiculous Times op-ed proposing that non-MAGA conservatives “create a Republican Party in exile, a counterestablishment dedicated to recapturing the party from the outside,” the possibility of which falls somewhere between the return of Bonnie Prince Charlie and a Carlist revival. One want to say, “face it, guys – this Id Monster is of your own devising, and if you won’t own up and help get rid of it you’re complicit” -- but that suggests some kind of involuntary false consciousness (like that targeted by the 60s slogan “if you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the problem”); the reality is these guys know they’re full of shit and wish to play both sides against the middle. If Tubby II is not effectuated, Bill Barr, who just ended a long run of Trump criticism by endorsing the man he said “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” will just shrug and quietly reseat himself among the Good Conservatives who expect to be treated as the Loyal Opposition. I say let’s not.
Friend of mine alerted me. This is the kind of goofy shit I love.
Yeah, I missed last week’s edition. I offer no apologies. It’s been a long time between vacations – last time I got four nights of rest was my pancreatectomy a year ago – and between the straight job and the five days of week dishing out premium copy at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down I’m to' up and worn out.
And speaking of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, I know some of you missed the free issues I usually hand out on Fridays like NutraSweet gumballs. Well, a got a couple for you today.
The other freebie is a brief bit of counsel on Tubby’s attempt to back away from his own anti-abortion record – namely, don’t get caught up in his bullshit, just say “he’s lying like always” and walk away. I wrote it before the Arizona Supreme Court shit the bed with its pre-civil-war forced-birth cosplay, but the basic message not only still applies to Trump, it self-evidently also applies to all the panic-stricken wingnuts who mired themselves in that policy. Kari Lake’s mealy-mouthed pro-choice turnaround is hilarious – like Franz Liebkind trying to distract from his Nazism by singing “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” in The Producers – but even better are the hardcore anti-abortionists trying to make their panicked troops hold the line, like the editors of National Review:
Republicans can put [Democrats] back on the defensive for their extremism on abortion and make a case that the law should protect life at some stage of pregnancy — but only if they put old grievances aside and offer voters a practical alternative.
“Look, we’ll let you subhumans murder your preborn angel-babies for a couple of weeks, tops, but after that we lock you in the birthin’ sheds. C’mon, bitches, we’re meeting you halfway!” One is tempted not to tell them how badly they’re fucking up, but I actually think they know and can’t help themselves, which just makes it funnier.
