It’s really shocking to recall insurrectionists stormed the Capitol at the urging of Trump only a little over one month ago, but literally the only window when the GOP might have acknowledged the severity of what happened was *maybe* during the following week. After that, it’s been denialism and minimization the whole way.
Because I’m at bottom as heartsick as Roy about all this, and tend to take refuge in the darkest of humor, I find it both hilarious and intensely depressing that McConnell would refuse to hold an impeachment trial while Trump was still in office, and then blithely proclaim impeachment is unconstitutional now that Trump is gone. I mean, the sheer, naked shamelessness of it, it’s distilled “heads I win, tails you lose” quality is so pure it would almost be admirable if it weren’t so despicable and the stakes weren’t so high.
For the first 2 years of the Trump presidency, impeaching him was impossible because the people had spoken and impeaching him would have been to overturn the election.
For the last 2 years of the Trump presidency, impeaching him was impossible because what's the point there's an election coming up and let the people decide.
Somewhere between those periods there must have been a window of about 15 minutes in which he could have been impeached. We need to get scientists working on this for future reference.
I'm not heartsick because I was raised on Jewish history and so learned that corrupt, hateful, hate-filled, murderous, arseholes often die happy and are lauded for centuries after by other arseholes.
—though 'used to it' is very different to 'o.k. with it'.
My 7 or 8 year old journal is about 3000 pages now. I write to process, too. The difference is that you are a *wonderful* writer, and once again your words offer me comfort, which I deeply appreciate. And need at least a little.
Permission to share with my <200 FB audience? I haven't decided if I want to stir that nest up yet, but just in case...it would be prefaced with something like "What Roy said" or "Roy can speak for me on this topic..."
Roy can speak for himself, but Iout of respect for the precarity of freelance journalism of a leftward/reality-based bent I might advise that you accompany any quotes with a strong plug to subscribe to this site. He ain't giving this stuff away
Sadly, my "audience" besides being small is both old and poor-ish for the most part, and they often wonder why I care about this stuff in the first place. Not the kind to subscribe.
Heck, Roy is MY only subscription. But I appreciate what you're saying.
The new subscription model of information dissemination will only aggravate the natural human tendency to hear only and best what we want to, and ignore the rest, as the old song goes.
I worry about this a lot. I don't know if there's a solution. People have to make a living. Maybe nonprofit press as utility? It also means that once you get started with a source that you like a lot, you'll be going in a certain direction and getting more of that. It's important to look carefully at your first choice or you can end up in a bad place that takes over your whole worldview. And nobody's really aware of how important that first step is.
Lout of Respect? Pat! Costume jewelry! You fine people are deserving of a truly august honor, like the Vulgarian of Veneration, or even...dare I say it?... the Oaf of Obeisance.
Thanks for this. (Sheer anger means I can't properly put into words what the "Sturm und Verrat" on behalf of The Ultimate White Male Entitlement has done to our present and future.)
Due to my defects and limitations, I can barely begin to understand how no one ever really ever resisted him sufficiently.
I understand how he was a gift to the tabloid press, producing scads of material allegedly attracting an audience. So the local media had no incentive to call him out on anything -- even after the Central Park 5 obscenity in '89.
Too, there was the TV show. Granted, I had a sufficiently sized antipathy for Donnie since the mid-70s but I'd watch the show and just not get it. The intro was near-complete bullshit. The concept was disgusting -- the core, of course, was all about getting his dick sucked -- and he sounded like what he is: a fucking moron. (Of course, ignored is tat he has a genius for pandering albeit without any care for irresponsibly going too far.)
As I say, I just don't get it. Me, I find him a rank stinking turd yet a huge number of people either can't smell or ignore the stench.
I see Our Gracious Host's caligulation (by way of Suetonius) and raise by one of the best minutes from the BBC's "I, Claudius":
Sejanus: There will be no trial. I have no need of a trial to prove your guilt.
Gallus: A song sung by every small-town corrupt policeman, which is what you are and what you should have stayed. I've watched your career with fascination, Sejanus. It's been a revelation to me. I never fully realized before how a small mind, allied to unlimited ambition, and without scruple can destroy a country full of clever men. I've seen how frail is the structure of a civilization before the onslaught of a gust of really bad breath! ... Yes. But I suppose you're not really the destroyer. We must look elsewhere for that. You're merely the putrefaction that spreads after death - the outward and visible sign of its presence. ... You're a lesson in history to me, Sejanus. Proving that above all.. mankind needs... its sense... of smell.
What I keep thinking of is Caligula’s German Guards (“blond brutes”, necessary because you sure couldn’t trust the Praetorian Guard), who, Graves tells us, when confronted with some bit of the God Emperor’s madness, no matter how appalling, was to shrug and say, “ yeah, the Gods do stuff like that...”
"I guess that’s really what made my gorge rise: The thought that even this extraordinary ugliness is just a symptom of something so dishearteningly huge that my voice can’t possibly make a dent in it."
"....the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president." Hillary Clinton. - 1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vast_right-wing_conspiracy
The Civil War didn’t end. It continued through the 1870’s and US Grant, who countenanced killing as many Confederate soldiers as necessary to end the hot war, could not order Federal troops to open fire on those same Southerners once they were citizens. That and the decision to reconcile with former traitors throughout the next 50 years left us primed for the Republican Southern Strategy that has solidified white supremacy as a dominant political movement in America. That so worthless a human being as Trump could seize control of that movement doesn’t diminish its power but does make normal, moral people wonder what could possibly turn its adherents away from its hatred and embrace those liberal virtues of compassion, empathy, and brotherhood.
Yes, indeed. If I still smoked I'd have one right now. "I find myself clogged with outrage." Yeah, there's not enough of that clogging. Imagine reading in a history book about when the plague came to visit the land of Moronia and how King Donald the Greatest declared any mention of it was criticism of his glorious self and therefore proceeded to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Moronians to it. Then, clogged with outraged, the Moronians rose up and stormed the palace and executed King Donald for treating their lives with such contempt. At least that would have been an insurrection that made sense. Outrage? I'm continually amazed that the people of this benighted country aren't even angry enough to put President Piece of Shit on trial for half a million dead Americans.
This, a thousand times over. I've been a lefty for more than 50 years, and with each day I get more lefty, but over the years I've cultivated a Buddhist-style detachment to keep me from going insane. Every once in a while something gets through and I find myself with anger that could swallow the world.
Indeed you're not. I was going to ask if you'd ever seen the PBS "American EXperience" about William Lloyd Garrison? Several yrs old now - there may be a full-episode version floating around somewhere that's accessible for y'all down in DC, tho not up here in the NY area. It's so good that it's worth buying from PBS if you haven't seen it. Produced by WGBH in Boston; they even found an excellent actor who looks startlingly like Garrison.
Jesus, Roy, amen. The singsongy voice thing was awful. I was not expecting it. It's the voice men use when they know (or at least assume, because they think of women as playthings to use and break) that they can easily overpower you, that you can't escape them, and that they're gonna have some fun making you suffer. It's a rape threat and a death threat and a notice that you are nothing, and there will be no mercy for you or consequences for them. That if you escape alive, it's because you weren't worth killing. It's the sound of someone who owns the world and is so used to getting their own way they can't even imagine not anymore. It's the voice of The Purge if you want to be less personal about it, but I've heard that voice in my life and my nightmares for years, I think a lot of women have.
Roy noted a while back that these guys were doing this out in the open, because they knew there would be no consequences. That they couldn't even imagine anyone stopping them or prosecuting them or finding them guilty, they thought it was perfectly aboveboard. They were *entitled* to do this.
The women in your life, and the men who were abused as children, are suffering today. Be kind to them. I'm watching seven women on MSNBC this morning function at a very high level, and I wonder how many of them are fighting through it.
What happened was extraordinary in some ways, but as Roy notes mostly not. These men are this way in their home lives and their communities too. I haven't been able to explain this before, and now I feel like maybe we can just point and say See? Don't make us have to explain it again. Don't let it happen again.
Men use it on men, too. We are notionally and often really better able to defend ourselves than women, and sheer homophobia _sometimes_ restrains (for example) the Masculinity Police squads from actually raping us instead of just 'fucking [us] up', but—without ever forgetting that it's routinely worse for women—it's no picnic.
Yeah, I was being really tunnel-visioned there. I am admittedly an asshole about men, and I need to be called out on it. I assume you guys have never been afraid, maybe that's jealousy? It's certainly not true and I know that. I'm mostly thinking of cishet men with normal childhoods, but even that's not fair. All I can say in my defense is that it's like my hatred of people, I know it's based on stereotypes and make exceptions for all the individuals I meet because everyone's different. That's not good enough, and I'm sorry.
But of course, that would have left Nancy Pelosi alive and the point of the assault on the Capitol as to decapitate congress and leave the order of presidential succession in tatters.
Trump didn't plan that shit - his Republican friends did. The Republican Party should be declared a terrorist organization. It's leaders arrested, shipped out to Gitmo. But that would lead to civil war so I guess we get to put up with the ugly little fascist party in our midst and pretend that they aren't a bunch of Nazis just like the 11 or so my uncle Louis killed in a WWII action around Monte Cassino.
Being god's gift to women (self-proclaimed) or at least to gold diggers of limited intelligence and questionable decency, Donnie deserves Mussolini's end. Let's keep our fascists' ends correct.
Thank you.
Thanks for this, Roy.
It’s really shocking to recall insurrectionists stormed the Capitol at the urging of Trump only a little over one month ago, but literally the only window when the GOP might have acknowledged the severity of what happened was *maybe* during the following week. After that, it’s been denialism and minimization the whole way.
Because I’m at bottom as heartsick as Roy about all this, and tend to take refuge in the darkest of humor, I find it both hilarious and intensely depressing that McConnell would refuse to hold an impeachment trial while Trump was still in office, and then blithely proclaim impeachment is unconstitutional now that Trump is gone. I mean, the sheer, naked shamelessness of it, it’s distilled “heads I win, tails you lose” quality is so pure it would almost be admirable if it weren’t so despicable and the stakes weren’t so high.
For the first 2 years of the Trump presidency, impeaching him was impossible because the people had spoken and impeaching him would have been to overturn the election.
For the last 2 years of the Trump presidency, impeaching him was impossible because what's the point there's an election coming up and let the people decide.
Somewhere between those periods there must have been a window of about 15 minutes in which he could have been impeached. We need to get scientists working on this for future reference.
Maybe "The Over-It Window"?
I saw what you did there. Good job.
What can I say? I love my woik
Now you're just showing off, LOL. Well done.
You can't build a fire with just one stick*... we had a good thing going yesterday.
* Unless it's a boom stick
I'm not heartsick because I was raised on Jewish history and so learned that corrupt, hateful, hate-filled, murderous, arseholes often die happy and are lauded for centuries after by other arseholes.
—though 'used to it' is very different to 'o.k. with it'.
Never is the right time to impeach a Republican POTUS. Or always in the case of a Democrat POTUS. Because both sides, I think.
That's both SOP and feature-not-bug with McConnell, a craven shitheel from the get.
My 7 or 8 year old journal is about 3000 pages now. I write to process, too. The difference is that you are a *wonderful* writer, and once again your words offer me comfort, which I deeply appreciate. And need at least a little.
Permission to share with my <200 FB audience? I haven't decided if I want to stir that nest up yet, but just in case...it would be prefaced with something like "What Roy said" or "Roy can speak for me on this topic..."
Thanks again.
Roy can speak for himself, but Iout of respect for the precarity of freelance journalism of a leftward/reality-based bent I might advise that you accompany any quotes with a strong plug to subscribe to this site. He ain't giving this stuff away
Understood.
Sadly, my "audience" besides being small is both old and poor-ish for the most part, and they often wonder why I care about this stuff in the first place. Not the kind to subscribe.
Heck, Roy is MY only subscription. But I appreciate what you're saying.
I aint calling you out, my friend. So much respect to you & your crew. I just wish truth didn't have to cost so damn much.
Me too.
The new subscription model of information dissemination will only aggravate the natural human tendency to hear only and best what we want to, and ignore the rest, as the old song goes.
My only regret is that I have but one upvote to give to this comment, sir
I worry about this a lot. I don't know if there's a solution. People have to make a living. Maybe nonprofit press as utility? It also means that once you get started with a source that you like a lot, you'll be going in a certain direction and getting more of that. It's important to look carefully at your first choice or you can end up in a bad place that takes over your whole worldview. And nobody's really aware of how important that first step is.
I do offer bulk rates!
Oooh -- like gummi bears! 8)
Or Silly Putty. Did you know you can buy a five pound chunk of Silly Putty? Imagine the smell!
"lout of respect" is an odd typo -- too bad Freud wasn't alive when we had typewriters & computers. These "accidents" can be downright Gothic
I think the Lout of Respect ought to be the highest honor any of us Edrosoians can earn here in the comments section.
Lout of Respect? Pat! Costume jewelry! You fine people are deserving of a truly august honor, like the Vulgarian of Veneration, or even...dare I say it?... the Oaf of Obeisance.
Thanks very much, John, and sure, feel free to share with your friends. Tell ‘em there’s plenty more where that came from, and some of it has jokes.
Thanks for this. (Sheer anger means I can't properly put into words what the "Sturm und Verrat" on behalf of The Ultimate White Male Entitlement has done to our present and future.)
"Strum and Dang"
I'm with E. Jean.
Due to my defects and limitations, I can barely begin to understand how no one ever really ever resisted him sufficiently.
I understand how he was a gift to the tabloid press, producing scads of material allegedly attracting an audience. So the local media had no incentive to call him out on anything -- even after the Central Park 5 obscenity in '89.
Too, there was the TV show. Granted, I had a sufficiently sized antipathy for Donnie since the mid-70s but I'd watch the show and just not get it. The intro was near-complete bullshit. The concept was disgusting -- the core, of course, was all about getting his dick sucked -- and he sounded like what he is: a fucking moron. (Of course, ignored is tat he has a genius for pandering albeit without any care for irresponsibly going too far.)
As I say, I just don't get it. Me, I find him a rank stinking turd yet a huge number of people either can't smell or ignore the stench.
I see Our Gracious Host's caligulation (by way of Suetonius) and raise by one of the best minutes from the BBC's "I, Claudius":
Sejanus: There will be no trial. I have no need of a trial to prove your guilt.
Gallus: A song sung by every small-town corrupt policeman, which is what you are and what you should have stayed. I've watched your career with fascination, Sejanus. It's been a revelation to me. I never fully realized before how a small mind, allied to unlimited ambition, and without scruple can destroy a country full of clever men. I've seen how frail is the structure of a civilization before the onslaught of a gust of really bad breath! ... Yes. But I suppose you're not really the destroyer. We must look elsewhere for that. You're merely the putrefaction that spreads after death - the outward and visible sign of its presence. ... You're a lesson in history to me, Sejanus. Proving that above all.. mankind needs... its sense... of smell.
What I keep thinking of is Caligula’s German Guards (“blond brutes”, necessary because you sure couldn’t trust the Praetorian Guard), who, Graves tells us, when confronted with some bit of the God Emperor’s madness, no matter how appalling, was to shrug and say, “ yeah, the Gods do stuff like that...”
"I guess that’s really what made my gorge rise: The thought that even this extraordinary ugliness is just a symptom of something so dishearteningly huge that my voice can’t possibly make a dent in it."
"....the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president." Hillary Clinton. - 1998 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vast_right-wing_conspiracy
The Civil War didn’t end. It continued through the 1870’s and US Grant, who countenanced killing as many Confederate soldiers as necessary to end the hot war, could not order Federal troops to open fire on those same Southerners once they were citizens. That and the decision to reconcile with former traitors throughout the next 50 years left us primed for the Republican Southern Strategy that has solidified white supremacy as a dominant political movement in America. That so worthless a human being as Trump could seize control of that movement doesn’t diminish its power but does make normal, moral people wonder what could possibly turn its adherents away from its hatred and embrace those liberal virtues of compassion, empathy, and brotherhood.
The South lost the war but won the peace. Indeed, Donnie ran in 2020 for President of the CSA.
Yes, indeed. If I still smoked I'd have one right now. "I find myself clogged with outrage." Yeah, there's not enough of that clogging. Imagine reading in a history book about when the plague came to visit the land of Moronia and how King Donald the Greatest declared any mention of it was criticism of his glorious self and therefore proceeded to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Moronians to it. Then, clogged with outraged, the Moronians rose up and stormed the palace and executed King Donald for treating their lives with such contempt. At least that would have been an insurrection that made sense. Outrage? I'm continually amazed that the people of this benighted country aren't even angry enough to put President Piece of Shit on trial for half a million dead Americans.
This, a thousand times over. I've been a lefty for more than 50 years, and with each day I get more lefty, but over the years I've cultivated a Buddhist-style detachment to keep me from going insane. Every once in a while something gets through and I find myself with anger that could swallow the world.
Believe me, Roy, your voice does indeed make a dent in it.
All of our gorges rise as one.
Roy, I love you, but . . . you're not wrong.
Indeed you're not. I was going to ask if you'd ever seen the PBS "American EXperience" about William Lloyd Garrison? Several yrs old now - there may be a full-episode version floating around somewhere that's accessible for y'all down in DC, tho not up here in the NY area. It's so good that it's worth buying from PBS if you haven't seen it. Produced by WGBH in Boston; they even found an excellent actor who looks startlingly like Garrison.
Thanks, no I haven't! Will look for it.
Jesus, Roy, amen. The singsongy voice thing was awful. I was not expecting it. It's the voice men use when they know (or at least assume, because they think of women as playthings to use and break) that they can easily overpower you, that you can't escape them, and that they're gonna have some fun making you suffer. It's a rape threat and a death threat and a notice that you are nothing, and there will be no mercy for you or consequences for them. That if you escape alive, it's because you weren't worth killing. It's the sound of someone who owns the world and is so used to getting their own way they can't even imagine not anymore. It's the voice of The Purge if you want to be less personal about it, but I've heard that voice in my life and my nightmares for years, I think a lot of women have.
Roy noted a while back that these guys were doing this out in the open, because they knew there would be no consequences. That they couldn't even imagine anyone stopping them or prosecuting them or finding them guilty, they thought it was perfectly aboveboard. They were *entitled* to do this.
The women in your life, and the men who were abused as children, are suffering today. Be kind to them. I'm watching seven women on MSNBC this morning function at a very high level, and I wonder how many of them are fighting through it.
What happened was extraordinary in some ways, but as Roy notes mostly not. These men are this way in their home lives and their communities too. I haven't been able to explain this before, and now I feel like maybe we can just point and say See? Don't make us have to explain it again. Don't let it happen again.
Men use it on men, too. We are notionally and often really better able to defend ourselves than women, and sheer homophobia _sometimes_ restrains (for example) the Masculinity Police squads from actually raping us instead of just 'fucking [us] up', but—without ever forgetting that it's routinely worse for women—it's no picnic.
Yeah, I was being really tunnel-visioned there. I am admittedly an asshole about men, and I need to be called out on it. I assume you guys have never been afraid, maybe that's jealousy? It's certainly not true and I know that. I'm mostly thinking of cishet men with normal childhoods, but even that's not fair. All I can say in my defense is that it's like my hatred of people, I know it's based on stereotypes and make exceptions for all the individuals I meet because everyone's different. That's not good enough, and I'm sorry.
No, men are terrible.
You aren’t wrong. Keep up the fight.
All I can add is that when I heard the asshole calling for Nancy, I was reminded of this. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeEbtiruH2Q
Yes!
Trump shoulda shot Mike Pence on 5th Ave. That would have at least been entertaining.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-and-pence/
But of course, that would have left Nancy Pelosi alive and the point of the assault on the Capitol as to decapitate congress and leave the order of presidential succession in tatters.
Trump didn't plan that shit - his Republican friends did. The Republican Party should be declared a terrorist organization. It's leaders arrested, shipped out to Gitmo. But that would lead to civil war so I guess we get to put up with the ugly little fascist party in our midst and pretend that they aren't a bunch of Nazis just like the 11 or so my uncle Louis killed in a WWII action around Monte Cassino.
But the Nazi treatment is what they deserve.
"But the Nazi treatment is what they deserve."
Being god's gift to women (self-proclaimed) or at least to gold diggers of limited intelligence and questionable decency, Donnie deserves Mussolini's end. Let's keep our fascists' ends correct.
When you're right you're right! ;)