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.