FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: DeSANTISMANIA!
Not bad for movie music!
Over at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, our two freebies are DeSantis-centric. (Face it, the guy's just hot copy!) There’s the funny one, imagining what his strategy sessions must be, given not only his own fash politics but the congenial home he gave to the Nazi-riffic edgelord Nate Hochman. (You’d think Hochman having bylines in the New York Times and National Review would be a tip-off, but there is none so blind etc.)
There’s also the more serious one about DeSantis’ “Slavery: A Land of Contrasts” curriculum. It’s pretty clear to everyone what he and his racist buddies are up to, so I spent some time on the conservative propagandists who thought it was a good idea to pull the “me or your lying eyes” bit over it.
Today there was also a good opportunity for a REBID flashback: for not the first, nor the second, but the third time, the Wall Street Journal has given Supreme Court Justice/corrupt old hack Sam Alito space in the paper to cry that people misunderstand him just because he takes gifts from people who have business before his court – indeed, the first of the two journalistic cat’s-paws in this instance (the second being the longtime rightwing operative who got Alito in the first time, James Taranto) is David Rivkin, who himself has a case on the SCOTUS docket. Talk about balls!
Anyway, the routine is predictable – people who find his frequent Journal blowjobs improper “are really after ideologically congenial rulings,” though if that were the case it would seem more efficient to bribe rather than criticize the guy. Also Alito sometimes rules slightly differently than Clarence Thomas – and his jurisprudence is distinguished by “an emphasis on historical context,” i.e. homos can’t get married. All Alito’s findings that comport with the Federalist Society wish-list are explained as a product of his intellectual discipline, and those that don’t comport with it – just kidding, none of them don’t!
The authors rub their hands over the prospect of overturning Chevron, which they call “increasingly disputed” because Leonard Leo wants it dead, and Alito, nervy to the last, compares resistance to himself and his fellow SCOTUS wingnuts to the resistance to the Warren Court over Brown v. Board of Education – which would be your tip-off, if you hadn’t already figured it out, that Sam Shady isn’t trying to convince anyone – he’s just trying to show you how far beyond giving a shit he is that he’s been caught red-handed.
Anyway, as we used to say back in the day, I caught his act.
I will also add something I wrote elsewhere about the artist who recently left us:
Sinead O’Connor... was magnificent and died too young, but she lived and worked the way she wanted to, or rather the way her muse required, and you can’t say that about many. Whether that was worth all the hardships is not for me to say. What I will say is that she was done dirty after she ripped up that asshole pope’s picture — I always hated that son of a bitch — and I am pleased to see people acknowledging at this moment that she was right, and I bet the message carries better now that more people are educated about the savagery we’re all up against – or, to use the simple term, woke. There was a lot wrong with the 90s, and the general reflexive contempt for the weak and those who defended them was the worst of it. It took me a long time to get it myself.