"...and also Black crime at Walgreens" is pitch-perfect, lol.
Really, Hunter Biden's laptop/the Twitter Files is the perfect next phase for Q-Anon types, because nobody really understands it, the villains keep shifting (FBI? Deep State? Tech Elites? Democratic Establishment?), the Big Reveals turn out to be Big Nothings, but there's always the *NEXT* Big Reveal coming, so everybody tune in and keep the faith.
Kind of the same way the great Iraqi dinar / Zimbabwe dollar revaluation is happening ANY DAY NOW so you should "invest" right away, only the revaluation doesn't happen because argle bargle yadda yadda, but, trust me, it's SOON!
It's exciting, isn't it? You're not some poor schmuck who works at a tire store, you're a PLAYER, you know how the world REALLY works, and you're gonna make that inside dope work in YOUR favor, and never have to smell rubber fumes again!
This has always been the appeal of conspiracy theories in addition to monetary fraud, which explains a lot.
It sucks, because clearly there *is* shit they're hiding from us, and the entire financial system is rigged. But part of not letting this shit ruin your life is knowing that you will never actually be in on the scam except as a mark.
Desperation was the natural condition of man for centuries; we developed our way out of it, and now there's a whole political movement that relies on bringing it back.
I've been thinking that the monarchism and anti-egalitarianism in those circles is to some extent due to the limited but real success of centuries' opposition to them, such that plenty of people have no visceral conception of how bad it was to be born with no hope of improving one's station, or to be told that you just couldn't do something because you were female.
Add-in the normal bias in taught history that (e.g.) makes people who believe they've had past lives assume they _weren't_ serfs in 96% of such, and the typical rightist assumption that they're John Galt, and the net is that they're sure that the Heldenwelt they think they want would never eat _their_ face.
(Or maybe, because all they _really_ want is racism and sexism, they're sure they'd be safe. See: John Rawl's 'Veil of Ignorance'.)
Hey, isn't Trump supposed to be back in the White House by now? I remember something last year about how he was going to be back by August, then it got pushed back to December, I think, and then I lost track.
I find the mentality fascinating in a way. It's like the religious cults who predict the end of the world will occur on such and such a date, but then pick a new date when it doesn't happen. I mean, how many times do predictions have to be wrong before you start stroking your chin, thinking, "I wonder if I'm being had?" Apparently there's no limit.
To some extent, it's the basic "suspension of disbelief in return for entertainment" deal we all make when we go to the movies. Their only confusion is that life isn't a movie. (OK, they have more confusions than that, but I'm trying to make a point.)
There’s something about apocalyptic cults that requires The End to the world they find unbearable to be imminent. When it doesn’t happen, well, the world is still unbearable to them, so your choices are either to end it all or just reset the date.
Listen, Christianity knew what it was doing when it made suicide a sin. If you make life that unbearable for so many people and tell them it's cool because paradise awaits, you do not want them skipping the bullshit.
An ex-boss from a prominent L.D.S. family was ejected bodily from Sunday School when he asked why we shouldn't kill all children before the age at which they're to lose their guarantied admission to the Celestial Kingdom.
Well, 0.) things have to be that bad to justify all the shite we're doing to ourselves and anyone else we can, and 1.) since they're that bad, thinking their end imminent is reässuring.
That Ship with Eight Sails and Fifty Cannon _better_ get here soon….
That might not be fair of me to her, but I wanted to steal Edward Alexander'Aleister' Crowley's response to 'Why do you call yourself "The Great Beast 666"?': 'It was what my mother called me.' and he might not have been joking.
(The Crowleys were Plymouth Brethren, as was Gary Edward "Garrison" Keiller. Both, as children, came home, saw noöne else there, and decided the rest of their family had been Raptured, leaving them to suffer under the Antichrist during the Tribulations and then eternally in hellfire.) EDIT: Then again, Keillor might have looked-up the lives of famous Brethren and borrowed the story from Crowley.
Did Thomas Aquinas (or Maimonides) rule on where the dividing line between the two were ? (I know only that on some occasions the line between a dildo and a butt-plug is the perineal raphe.) [EDIT:](I include unsafe butt-plugs without flared bases in {butt-plugs}, just as I include Joss Whedon and J.K. Rowling in {feminists}.)
("Weeds", season 1, episode 5?: Two guys, one played by Kevin Nealon, are sitting in a living-room, getting high and arguing about perineal terminology. One asks the long-suffering maid 'Lupita! What do you call the thing between the dick and the asshole?' to which she looks hard at the two of them and replies 'The coffee-table.'.) (LATER: Found it, and corrected the above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwIxkzQxppg )
Here it's mostly missing cats, and because we don't have that many coyote, mostly they're found. That preponderance may be because we don't have enough black neighbours to report as 'likely burglar's.
I mean, they hustle their asses. Obstruction, corruption, and ratfucking are a full time job, and then there's the "fundraising". They hardly have time for harassing the interns. But man, they make time. The Grand Old Party is all about tradition, after all.
Santos is really giving The Donald a run for the Liar of the Year award. Where are all the NYT goober safari reporters asking New Yorkers how they feel about being duped into voting for the world’s biggest fraud? I know it’s all AOC’s fault, somehow, and also Hochhul’s, but at some point the suckers have to wonder if they aren’t a little too gullible, thanks to years of excusing Trump’s prevaricating.
Republican voters in Long Island already know that "But what about..." trick that's used to deflect any and all criticism, so interviewing them is likely to be a waste of time, unless you want to hear a LOT more about Hunter's Laptop.
GOP voters in Long Island want to know everything about Hunter's laptop, but don't seem very concerned that "George Santos" doesn't seem to be a real person...
The incompetent hacks who did that and lost seats in New York can shut the eff up and stop lecturing us outnumbered Dems in red-state “flyover country.”
“Those dumb hicks! The legislators they elect are absolutely *deplorable*!” [hi-fives crowd] “How can they be such inbred idiots?”
[shakes head]
[loses House seat to a walking, talking Jerky Boys character]
Apparently so. But any Democrat who trusts the media to get the story out is a little foolish, let's say. Certainly, actual aggression-in-campaigning was possible. At the end of the day, there was inexcusable reticence from Zimmerman's side.
Ten again, I should know by now now little's black and white. This, though, is a very dark gray; unlikely anything more will be coming out to lighten it. To the contrary, may find part of the problem was indeed DNC/DCCC direction or influence.
And yet no one can explain the failure to get the message out to the voters, apparently trusting the media to do that.
No surprise coming from me but maybe any candidate so trusting in the media that are loath criticize any Republican to report, let alone hammer, that point maybe doesn’t even deserve to be elected much more than a fraudulent POS like Santos.
At the same time Team Zimmerman was failing, up here in the district in which Maloney was running, we were bombed on the TV with a commercial (from a PAC) doing the anti-bail/pro-crime riff. Which is to say if we could be bombed here with one commercial, NY-3 could be bombed with one calling Santos out.
But clearly, there seems to be a matter of lack of will.
And however crumby the media reportage was — which is to say the media acted as one should have expected them to act — ultimately responsibility is on the candidate. Or maybe my ex-congressperson, Mondaire Jones should have tried to run in NY-3 instead of NY-10 after Maloney kicked him out of my district. Couldn’t have done worse, may have done better.
I imagine the NYT (and other media outlets such as NPR) self-regarding journos who play their hardball game against Democrats in power think they’re punching up, speaking truth to power with a firmly set jaw and steely resolve, holding the slippery pol to account. That mentality seeps down to even local media; here in Frostbite Falls our public radio did Cletus safaris in the hinterlands after Trump’s “election” shamelessly prostrating themselves in unquestioning deference to whatever common clay moron they were interviewing; one morning host took the mayor of MPLS to task for replying to one of Tubby’s tweets with a promise to hold Tubby’s campaign liable for security during one his rallies. She had this slightly disapproving tone to her voice when she asked the mayor if he thought it was a good idea to get into a Twitter war with the Donald. Y’know, not about the issue underlying said tweets. It’s all a manifestation of Murc’s Law.
They don’t have the sliver of self-awareness to know how normal people see them, so they never add I AM NOT A CRANK. They’re the brave truth tellers, don’tcha know!
I admit I find the Santos story inspiring, that the Republican party can be a home where all Americans, regardless of ethnic heritage, regardless even of sexual orientation, can come together as one, unified by their shared love of grifting.
That construction always seems weird to me. Like the British calling Argentina “the Argentine.” It’s like, I dunno, calling Drumpf “the Donald”, onle without the comedic intent.
I heard it meant 'The Borderlands'…what confuses me is that neither Russian nor Ukrainian has a definite article 'the', so from where do we get it?—did Russian aristocrats insert it when using their native French?
The British 'The Lebanon' (anyone remember Christopher Lee as Death [and Laraine Newman as a little girl] on NBC's "Saturday Night"?) I assume comes directly from the Biblical Hebrew 'ha-Liban', 'the white [mountain-peaks]'.
Two days ago, Kevin McCarthy threatened that, should Democrats release Donald Trump's tax returns, Republicans will BY GOD demand Joe Biden's tax returns. But then someone pulled Kevin aside and told him that Biden has released his returns every year for the last 30 years, so . . .
. . . the following day, another Republican congressman threatened that should Democrats release Trump's returns, Republicans may have no choice but to release the tax returns of Supreme Court justices. But then someone pulled this cretin aside and explained that the Supreme Court is 6-3 conservatives, so . . .
. . . today it's on to trying to explain why we should actually hate the Ukrainian guy who spoke to Congress last night.
I was struck by the complete dislocation between the vacuity of new mooks and the One True Thing that McCarthy's cohort learned in the last round. Indeed, this OTT stands shoulder to shoulder with era-defining slogans of the past and quite possibly the future. Even as "We hold these truths to be self-evident", "We having nothing to fear but fear itself" and "Ask not what your country can do for you", so too does this evergreen serve to define the glorious half-decade of the DC Local chapter of Swamp Drainers International. To wit and as follows:
“Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great F’ing criminal defense lawyer, you’re going to need it”
I'm starting to think that nearly every thing they do is a response to their massive and humiliating loss in the fight over gay marriage. They perceive, dimly, that gay folks gettin' hitched doesn't provoke the outrage they'd like, so let's move on to... lesseee... PEDOS maybe? Yeah, that'll get people worked up! But it's all just an effort to relitigate the very existence of gay people, because they still can't accept that we're done arguing about that and they lost.
This. And they pile on trans folk in an attempt to link that phobia to gay pride and rights via the drag queen brouhaha and the “groomer” slander of teachers. It fails spectacularly, most recently when the MO congresswoman shed crocodile tears over the Protection of Marriage Act and she was roundly mocked and ridiculed, owned when her gay nephew attended the signing ceremony of the very bill she opposed.
They are the Wile E. Coyote of political strategy.
And to get right down to it: sex. They cannot cope. Their own, others...
And they get the emotional glopped all over the biological (they are not the only ones – probly happens to everyone on occasion) but they can't reason out a way to back off. Just let it go is not within their scope of work.
I think I've posited before that it must be hard to be them.
It must feed their paranoia that there was a time in recent memory most people agreed with them that gay marriage was icky and bad, and now most people don't. They're not able to change their minds, ever, so the spectacle of millions of people all changing their minds about something is incomprehensible to them. What trickery and magic can explain it? Surely it must be the work of SATAN.
Maybe the notion of disgusting gay sex used to ring a lot more bells in the past has lost many of its pullropes because our society and culture is way more open about sex in general one of a few good things about the sexual revolution. Since many details of physical aspects of sexual activity of humans, on a basic level, are disgusting, whether it be straight or gay sex. What we value (if we’re normal, loving people) is the feeling of sex. The physical details don’t matter much if the feeling is there. As Bern points out, it’s sex in general they are at war with and seek to control. But going ooga booga about teh Gheys and “do you know what they do? I do, and I can’t stop thinking about it! It must be destroyed!!!” has no traction because, thanks to the openness re: sexual practices, what non-straight people do sexually ain’t much different from what straight people do.
Most people just have overwhelmingly positive associations with the word "marriage" (yes, I know, the triumph of hope over experience and all that) and those feelings were able to overpower and replace the bigotry they had been raised with.
In a way, our nation was millions and millions of Tevyes, trying to hold to Tradition!, but seeing two people in love and not being able to say no (in Tevye's case, two out of three times). Have I mentioned that Fiddler on the Roof is a source of wisdom applicable in all situations?
I remember, back when same-sex marriage appeared to be losing, hearing one of the more rambunctious opponents opine 'Next weʼre coming for* heterosexual sodomy!, itʼs all the same issue.', to which I thought 'Please please _please_ repeat that as loudly and as often as possible, especially around younger voters.'.
*not 'from'…stop that, I'm having a serious monologue. Shame!
There's a story in Chuck Jones' book "Chuck Amuk" (great book BTW) about how the skinflint who owned the studio had figured out exactly how many frames a cartoon should have, based on the minimum number of minutes he was contractually obligated to provide to the distributors, and no cartoon was allowed to have more (or fewer) frames than that.
True, "they still can't accept that we're done arguing about that and they lost" can be applied to many, many things, including maybe Jacques? (looked him up in The Google, is he the guy who made the boneheaded decision to put their golden falcon statuette on a ship where if could be easily stolen by pirates, leading to hundreds of years of intrigue and one really good movie?)
Interesting how his lying often takes the form of "Yes, people close to me have experienced this thing you speak of" whether it's the holocaust or the Pulse nightclub shooting. Basic human empathy, something normal people have, allows us to feel for victims of genocide or mass-shootings even when we DON'T know anyone personally who's experienced these things. Republicans (as opposed to normal humans) generally don't experience empathy until the bad thing happens to them and theirs, like with Nancy Reagan's sudden concern about AIDS, which came only after her old friend Rock Hudson came down the the disease.
He's a Republican attempting to fake the empathy that normal humans have, but failing and replacing it with a Republican version of empathy, which always requires "Yes, this happened to me too" even when it didn't.
Like how their EVERY comment on women's rights has to be prefaced with "I too have owned - er, known - women, some of them in my own family!"
Or, "As the father of two daughters, I deplore sexism as much as anyone else." Because it only registers when it happens to you and yours. (Implicit is, "Otherwise, fuck it.")
I am having a lousy holiday season thank you very much, but I have to say the George Santos story is bringing me joy. Twists and turns several times a day! Best of all is knowing with all my heart that Kevin McCarthy, whose life is already just a carousel of shit, is going to have a fucked up holiday, er, I mean Christmas season. Who knows where it's going. Likely in the felony direction.
"...and also Black crime at Walgreens" is pitch-perfect, lol.
Really, Hunter Biden's laptop/the Twitter Files is the perfect next phase for Q-Anon types, because nobody really understands it, the villains keep shifting (FBI? Deep State? Tech Elites? Democratic Establishment?), the Big Reveals turn out to be Big Nothings, but there's always the *NEXT* Big Reveal coming, so everybody tune in and keep the faith.
Kind of the same way the great Iraqi dinar / Zimbabwe dollar revaluation is happening ANY DAY NOW so you should "invest" right away, only the revaluation doesn't happen because argle bargle yadda yadda, but, trust me, it's SOON!
It's exciting, isn't it? You're not some poor schmuck who works at a tire store, you're a PLAYER, you know how the world REALLY works, and you're gonna make that inside dope work in YOUR favor, and never have to smell rubber fumes again!
This has always been the appeal of conspiracy theories in addition to monetary fraud, which explains a lot.
It sucks, because clearly there *is* shit they're hiding from us, and the entire financial system is rigged. But part of not letting this shit ruin your life is knowing that you will never actually be in on the scam except as a mark.
Desperation was the natural condition of man for centuries; we developed our way out of it, and now there's a whole political movement that relies on bringing it back.
Nasty, Brutish and Short '24!
Don't talk about Ron DeSantis that way, you'll hurt his feelings lmao
Oh. Yeah, I see what you're saying.
I was thinking that the ticket had expanded due to inflation or something. Maybe 2 to govern and one to scape, goat-wise...
Ron The Malevolent Duck
Not just a fitting campaign slogan, but finally a platform the Republican Party can really get behind!
'…running against Solitary and Poor' I'd say, but I don't want to both-sides it.
D.C. punk club line-up:
Solitary&Poor
Veil of Ignorance
The Voluptuous Horror of Hunter Biden's Laptop
Nasty,Brutish,and Short
Fugazi
I've been thinking that the monarchism and anti-egalitarianism in those circles is to some extent due to the limited but real success of centuries' opposition to them, such that plenty of people have no visceral conception of how bad it was to be born with no hope of improving one's station, or to be told that you just couldn't do something because you were female.
Add-in the normal bias in taught history that (e.g.) makes people who believe they've had past lives assume they _weren't_ serfs in 96% of such, and the typical rightist assumption that they're John Galt, and the net is that they're sure that the Heldenwelt they think they want would never eat _their_ face.
(Or maybe, because all they _really_ want is racism and sexism, they're sure they'd be safe. See: John Rawl's 'Veil of Ignorance'.)
They took something away from being forced to read “Walden” in 7th grade but missed that Thoreau despised that desperate mass of men.
Huh.
When I wander into a bike shop and the staff asks if they can help find anything I tell them I'm just there to smell the tires.
Hey, isn't Trump supposed to be back in the White House by now? I remember something last year about how he was going to be back by August, then it got pushed back to December, I think, and then I lost track.
I find the mentality fascinating in a way. It's like the religious cults who predict the end of the world will occur on such and such a date, but then pick a new date when it doesn't happen. I mean, how many times do predictions have to be wrong before you start stroking your chin, thinking, "I wonder if I'm being had?" Apparently there's no limit.
If you can't ID the mark at the table...then you are self-marking...
Very true. There are two *active* participants in every con, the conman AND the mark.
Don't forget that Damon Runyon guy slouching in the corner...
To some extent, it's the basic "suspension of disbelief in return for entertainment" deal we all make when we go to the movies. Their only confusion is that life isn't a movie. (OK, they have more confusions than that, but I'm trying to make a point.)
In the words of Homer Simpson, “Remember, Marge, it takes two to lie, one to lie and one to listen!”
Hey, self-mark all you like as long no one's hurt
"more than they wanted to be."
Oof, but in a good way...
Hearted not for the hurting but for the affirmation.
Self-Mark To Market
There’s something about apocalyptic cults that requires The End to the world they find unbearable to be imminent. When it doesn’t happen, well, the world is still unbearable to them, so your choices are either to end it all or just reset the date.
Listen, Christianity knew what it was doing when it made suicide a sin. If you make life that unbearable for so many people and tell them it's cool because paradise awaits, you do not want them skipping the bullshit.
Whoosh. Not oof, but oof-adjacent.
An ex-boss from a prominent L.D.S. family was ejected bodily from Sunday School when he asked why we shouldn't kill all children before the age at which they're to lose their guarantied admission to the Celestial Kingdom.
Engineer, getting straight to the solution, finally.
Well, 0.) things have to be that bad to justify all the shite we're doing to ourselves and anyone else we can, and 1.) since they're that bad, thinking their end imminent is reässuring.
That Ship with Eight Sails and Fifty Cannon _better_ get here soon….
Where's Nina Simone when we need her?
And has anyone ever got within shouting distance of her version?
Lotte Lenya in 1928.
I can't even set my damn clock back an hour!
Confirmation bias, sunk costs, faux de mieux.
I always figured they were secretly relieved.
Hey, the Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists are still going nearly two centuries after The Great Disappointment*.
*(which I gather was my mother's pet-name for me)
Hearted for Dear Old Ma!
That might not be fair of me to her, but I wanted to steal Edward Alexander'Aleister' Crowley's response to 'Why do you call yourself "The Great Beast 666"?': 'It was what my mother called me.' and he might not have been joking.
(The Crowleys were Plymouth Brethren, as was Gary Edward "Garrison" Keiller. Both, as children, came home, saw noöne else there, and decided the rest of their family had been Raptured, leaving them to suffer under the Antichrist during the Tribulations and then eternally in hellfire.) EDIT: Then again, Keillor might have looked-up the lives of famous Brethren and borrowed the story from Crowley.
It ain't easy bein' a kid with burdens. Second-hand experience of such is more than enough for me...
Things-that-are-locked-up-at-Walgreens-that-didn't-used-to-be-locked-up has taken NextDoor by storm.
Ha, like they'd leave their butt plugs and dildos out on a shelf where anyone can grab 'em.
Did Thomas Aquinas (or Maimonides) rule on where the dividing line between the two were ? (I know only that on some occasions the line between a dildo and a butt-plug is the perineal raphe.) [EDIT:](I include unsafe butt-plugs without flared bases in {butt-plugs}, just as I include Joss Whedon and J.K. Rowling in {feminists}.)
("Weeds", season 1, episode 5?: Two guys, one played by Kevin Nealon, are sitting in a living-room, getting high and arguing about perineal terminology. One asks the long-suffering maid 'Lupita! What do you call the thing between the dick and the asshole?' to which she looks hard at the two of them and replies 'The coffee-table.'.) (LATER: Found it, and corrected the above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwIxkzQxppg )
Here it's mostly missing cats, and because we don't have that many coyote, mostly they're found. That preponderance may be because we don't have enough black neighbours to report as 'likely burglar's.
Well, they used to think that they could dine off "Roe v. Wade" forever…this what they've got left.
We pay these people $140000 a year and give them many times that as a budget for staff and communications to spread their message far and wide.
This doesn't seem like a very good investment especially considering they
accept many many times that in ""contributions" They should spread the lies and ignorance on their own dime.
And you know what's on the reverse of THEIR dime...
They hate the EEEVIL EEEVIL government so much they make the sign of the cross every time they cash their paycheck.
They feel the best legislators do the least amount of work. Then they say to themselves " That 's the job for
me !"
They suck.
The Senate is like this only ten times worse, and with a tacky faux House of Lords patina laid over it.
World's Greatest Deliberative Body! ™
This may have been the one tagline George Clinton did not exploit:
Parliament-Funkadelic: World's Greatest Deliberative Booty!
Oh my. I do SO wish I'd thought of that...
I do NOT want to see Mitch McConnell and Susan Collins grinding to “Do Fries Come With That Shake?”.
Well, you certainly tore the roof off that sucka.
This is some vintage Norse Snark. Hearted for the patina.
Have you tried Icelandic fermented snark?
Somebody's dottir tried to slip some in the punch but I cottir.
I mean, they hustle their asses. Obstruction, corruption, and ratfucking are a full time job, and then there's the "fundraising". They hardly have time for harassing the interns. But man, they make time. The Grand Old Party is all about tradition, after all.
See Maddow's "Ultra" podcast for when Nazi Germany's government wrote speeches to be read into the Congressional Record and franked to constituents.
(I knew as soon as the first ten minutes of the podcast that George Sylvester Viereck was going to be involved, and I was right.)
I'd known nothing about him.
Was he, aside from all the actually bad stuff, also semi-publically bisexual, as the Wikipedia article on him hints?
Santos is really giving The Donald a run for the Liar of the Year award. Where are all the NYT goober safari reporters asking New Yorkers how they feel about being duped into voting for the world’s biggest fraud? I know it’s all AOC’s fault, somehow, and also Hochhul’s, but at some point the suckers have to wonder if they aren’t a little too gullible, thanks to years of excusing Trump’s prevaricating.
First fault is the schmucks who chose not to do oppo research.
Next question is when did the Times do its investigating.
But yes, that would be an awesome goober safari, notwithstanding it's in a part of Long Island the safari team doesn't know exists.
Republican voters in Long Island already know that "But what about..." trick that's used to deflect any and all criticism, so interviewing them is likely to be a waste of time, unless you want to hear a LOT more about Hunter's Laptop.
GOP voters in Long Island want to know everything about Hunter's laptop, but don't seem very concerned that "George Santos" doesn't seem to be a real person...
They believe in Santos with a childlike faith that warms our hearts this holiday season.
A Herschel Walker for everyone!
I assert that Herschel Walker is the typical Republican's canonical black man.
"Oh yeah, Libs, you just can't believe that a gay Jewish Catholic financier Republican who loves animals exists, so you have to deny everything!"
Oddly enough, I can imagine that. And I'm happy to let them fund raise for the new dog park we need, but I'm not voting for them.
They did the oppo research, and handed it over to the newspapers, including Newsday. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/12/house-republicans-george-santos-democrats-ethics. Who chose to sit on it. Because CRIME CRIME CRIME WHY ISN'T HOCHUL DOING ANYTHING ABOUT CRIME CRIME CRIME CRIME THE N*****S ARE RIOTING IN THE STREETS CRIME CRIME CRIME.
If anybody needs to lose his job, it's the head of the state Democratic Party, Jay Jacobs.
The incompetent hacks who did that and lost seats in New York can shut the eff up and stop lecturing us outnumbered Dems in red-state “flyover country.”
“Those dumb hicks! The legislators they elect are absolutely *deplorable*!” [hi-fives crowd] “How can they be such inbred idiots?”
[shakes head]
[loses House seat to a walking, talking Jerky Boys character]
Apparently so. But any Democrat who trusts the media to get the story out is a little foolish, let's say. Certainly, actual aggression-in-campaigning was possible. At the end of the day, there was inexcusable reticence from Zimmerman's side.
Ten again, I should know by now now little's black and white. This, though, is a very dark gray; unlikely anything more will be coming out to lighten it. To the contrary, may find part of the problem was indeed DNC/DCCC direction or influence.
And yet no one can explain the failure to get the message out to the voters, apparently trusting the media to do that.
No surprise coming from me but maybe any candidate so trusting in the media that are loath criticize any Republican to report, let alone hammer, that point maybe doesn’t even deserve to be elected much more than a fraudulent POS like Santos.
At the same time Team Zimmerman was failing, up here in the district in which Maloney was running, we were bombed on the TV with a commercial (from a PAC) doing the anti-bail/pro-crime riff. Which is to say if we could be bombed here with one commercial, NY-3 could be bombed with one calling Santos out.
But clearly, there seems to be a matter of lack of will.
And however crumby the media reportage was — which is to say the media acted as one should have expected them to act — ultimately responsibility is on the candidate. Or maybe my ex-congressperson, Mondaire Jones should have tried to run in NY-3 instead of NY-10 after Maloney kicked him out of my district. Couldn’t have done worse, may have done better.
I imagine the NYT (and other media outlets such as NPR) self-regarding journos who play their hardball game against Democrats in power think they’re punching up, speaking truth to power with a firmly set jaw and steely resolve, holding the slippery pol to account. That mentality seeps down to even local media; here in Frostbite Falls our public radio did Cletus safaris in the hinterlands after Trump’s “election” shamelessly prostrating themselves in unquestioning deference to whatever common clay moron they were interviewing; one morning host took the mayor of MPLS to task for replying to one of Tubby’s tweets with a promise to hold Tubby’s campaign liable for security during one his rallies. She had this slightly disapproving tone to her voice when she asked the mayor if he thought it was a good idea to get into a Twitter war with the Donald. Y’know, not about the issue underlying said tweets. It’s all a manifestation of Murc’s Law.
Goober Safari. Heh heh.
Sort of cute in a way. Sort of like Teacher asking the first graders a question and they all shout out answers, all wrong. Something like that.
I have such hope for the incoming House, entertainment-wise, as I keep saying.
Of course, between that and the prayed-for GOP POTUS primary, Roy's surely will be stresed to keep up. Still.
Roy is used to being high atop the tightrope...the question is: "Where the hell did we put the net??"
The first question is 'Did we remember to tie both ends?' otherwise it gets embarrassing quickly.
I'm just gonna assume the "I AM NOT A CRANK" after all those speeches.
Or, for the Firesign-adjacent, "Now, I'm not a drinking man, Mr. Cox!"
They don’t have the sliver of self-awareness to know how normal people see them, so they never add I AM NOT A CRANK. They’re the brave truth tellers, don’tcha know!
I admit I find the Santos story inspiring, that the Republican party can be a home where all Americans, regardless of ethnic heritage, regardless even of sexual orientation, can come together as one, unified by their shared love of grifting.
Pretending to be gay and Jewish to appeal to MAGAs is an unexpected twist. Props where due.
Juan Luis Felipe Pipino De Cuevas Epstein (R, NY)
Come for the sartorial regalia, stay for "Ukraine-without-the-The"!
To misquote Gertrude Stein, "There's no The there."
There, there...<insert gentle pat on head>
That construction always seems weird to me. Like the British calling Argentina “the Argentine.” It’s like, I dunno, calling Drumpf “the Donald”, onle without the comedic intent.
I assume it implies “The Ukraine” is just a region of Mother Russia and not independent, sort of like “The Plains” or “The Intermountain West.”
"The territories."
And yeah, that's exactly why. Even second generation immigrants get a little grim. It's like deadnaming someone but with ongoing war crimes.
"I identify as an independent country!" It's the ONE joke conservatives have left.
Also a sign that the culture war has progressed from a fight over pronouns to a fight over definite articles. Let me know when we get to prepositions.
I heard it meant 'The Borderlands'…what confuses me is that neither Russian nor Ukrainian has a definite article 'the', so from where do we get it?—did Russian aristocrats insert it when using their native French?
The Tsar was "Tsar of All The Russias" --Great (Russia), Little (Ukraine) and White (Belarus)
Collect the full set!
The British 'The Lebanon' (anyone remember Christopher Lee as Death [and Laraine Newman as a little girl] on NBC's "Saturday Night"?) I assume comes directly from the Biblical Hebrew 'ha-Liban', 'the white [mountain-peaks]'.
That Walter Pikk sounds like a nice young man.
By the shine of their teeth shall ye know them
He won in a landslide over his Democratic opponent, Denny Floss.
I have not oofed in awhile, but...
I'm embarrassed how long it took me to get this.
Fret not. I missed the original reference til I saw it in Larry's comment.
Poe's Law once again being a harsh mistress . . .
Two days ago, Kevin McCarthy threatened that, should Democrats release Donald Trump's tax returns, Republicans will BY GOD demand Joe Biden's tax returns. But then someone pulled Kevin aside and told him that Biden has released his returns every year for the last 30 years, so . . .
. . . the following day, another Republican congressman threatened that should Democrats release Trump's returns, Republicans may have no choice but to release the tax returns of Supreme Court justices. But then someone pulled this cretin aside and explained that the Supreme Court is 6-3 conservatives, so . . .
. . . today it's on to trying to explain why we should actually hate the Ukrainian guy who spoke to Congress last night.
"He pronounced 'naive' "NAVE"!!!"
Naifs And Knaves In The Nave
I was struck by the complete dislocation between the vacuity of new mooks and the One True Thing that McCarthy's cohort learned in the last round. Indeed, this OTT stands shoulder to shoulder with era-defining slogans of the past and quite possibly the future. Even as "We hold these truths to be self-evident", "We having nothing to fear but fear itself" and "Ask not what your country can do for you", so too does this evergreen serve to define the glorious half-decade of the DC Local chapter of Swamp Drainers International. To wit and as follows:
“Now I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life. Get a great F’ing criminal defense lawyer, you’re going to need it”
"Because where we go one —
MOST OF THE ROOM: — WE GO ALL! "
One problem with conservatism is that norms, and hence normies, change. Stand athwart the shifting sands of your own base yelling stop why don'tcha
I'm starting to think that nearly every thing they do is a response to their massive and humiliating loss in the fight over gay marriage. They perceive, dimly, that gay folks gettin' hitched doesn't provoke the outrage they'd like, so let's move on to... lesseee... PEDOS maybe? Yeah, that'll get people worked up! But it's all just an effort to relitigate the very existence of gay people, because they still can't accept that we're done arguing about that and they lost.
This. And they pile on trans folk in an attempt to link that phobia to gay pride and rights via the drag queen brouhaha and the “groomer” slander of teachers. It fails spectacularly, most recently when the MO congresswoman shed crocodile tears over the Protection of Marriage Act and she was roundly mocked and ridiculed, owned when her gay nephew attended the signing ceremony of the very bill she opposed.
They are the Wile E. Coyote of political strategy.
And to get right down to it: sex. They cannot cope. Their own, others...
And they get the emotional glopped all over the biological (they are not the only ones – probly happens to everyone on occasion) but they can't reason out a way to back off. Just let it go is not within their scope of work.
I think I've posited before that it must be hard to be them.
It must feed their paranoia that there was a time in recent memory most people agreed with them that gay marriage was icky and bad, and now most people don't. They're not able to change their minds, ever, so the spectacle of millions of people all changing their minds about something is incomprehensible to them. What trickery and magic can explain it? Surely it must be the work of SATAN.
Maybe SANTA too? SANTANA?
Can't be too careful...
Worse than that, EL SANTO, snuck across the border WEARING A MASK.
Maybe the notion of disgusting gay sex used to ring a lot more bells in the past has lost many of its pullropes because our society and culture is way more open about sex in general one of a few good things about the sexual revolution. Since many details of physical aspects of sexual activity of humans, on a basic level, are disgusting, whether it be straight or gay sex. What we value (if we’re normal, loving people) is the feeling of sex. The physical details don’t matter much if the feeling is there. As Bern points out, it’s sex in general they are at war with and seek to control. But going ooga booga about teh Gheys and “do you know what they do? I do, and I can’t stop thinking about it! It must be destroyed!!!” has no traction because, thanks to the openness re: sexual practices, what non-straight people do sexually ain’t much different from what straight people do.
Most people just have overwhelmingly positive associations with the word "marriage" (yes, I know, the triumph of hope over experience and all that) and those feelings were able to overpower and replace the bigotry they had been raised with.
In a way, our nation was millions and millions of Tevyes, trying to hold to Tradition!, but seeing two people in love and not being able to say no (in Tevye's case, two out of three times). Have I mentioned that Fiddler on the Roof is a source of wisdom applicable in all situations?
I remember, back when same-sex marriage appeared to be losing, hearing one of the more rambunctious opponents opine 'Next weʼre coming for* heterosexual sodomy!, itʼs all the same issue.', to which I thought 'Please please _please_ repeat that as loudly and as often as possible, especially around younger voters.'.
*not 'from'…stop that, I'm having a serious monologue. Shame!
Senator Toomuchporn to the rescue!
Sending their $99 in to the ACME Corporation, not for a pair of rocket-powered roller skates, but for a PICTURE of some rocket-powered roller skates.
And yet how long did they make Roadrunner cartoons?
Not long enough. These fucking canids still haven’t learned.
About 7 minutes.
There's a story in Chuck Jones' book "Chuck Amuk" (great book BTW) about how the skinflint who owned the studio had figured out exactly how many frames a cartoon should have, based on the minimum number of minutes he was contractually obligated to provide to the distributors, and no cartoon was allowed to have more (or fewer) frames than that.
"I'm starting to think that nearly every thing they do is a response to their massive and humiliating loss in the fight over gay marriage."
Except also desegregation
And women's suffrage
And the civil war
And probably Jacques de Molay?
True, "they still can't accept that we're done arguing about that and they lost" can be applied to many, many things, including maybe Jacques? (looked him up in The Google, is he the guy who made the boneheaded decision to put their golden falcon statuette on a ship where if could be easily stolen by pirates, leading to hundreds of years of intrigue and one really good movie?)
Last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, but what matters is that he is not sufficiently aveng'd! (Illuminatus Trilogy running joke)
When you are a conservative, the running list of grievances can, and to be ideologically consistent, must stretch back far indeed...
Well, when you consider that a scary percentage of their base still seems to be going on about that "Christ killers" thing...
We had Demolays at our school and I never bothered to find out the what or the why...
Explains a lot, now's I know...the creepy 7th grade science teacher...[shudder]...
When We Go a'One
They Go a'Two, a'One, Two, Three, Four!
They're now pushing the 'Thereʼs nothing left worth conserving' line…and so back to Brecht:
https://allpoetry.com/The-Solution
"Eu sou Brasileiro." Irmao! (The first "Hunter Biden's Laptop" made me convulse for a full 20 seconds.)
Latest on the supposedly gay Santos is that he has an "undisclosed divorce"--from a woman, no less.
Interesting how his lying often takes the form of "Yes, people close to me have experienced this thing you speak of" whether it's the holocaust or the Pulse nightclub shooting. Basic human empathy, something normal people have, allows us to feel for victims of genocide or mass-shootings even when we DON'T know anyone personally who's experienced these things. Republicans (as opposed to normal humans) generally don't experience empathy until the bad thing happens to them and theirs, like with Nancy Reagan's sudden concern about AIDS, which came only after her old friend Rock Hudson came down the the disease.
He's a Republican attempting to fake the empathy that normal humans have, but failing and replacing it with a Republican version of empathy, which always requires "Yes, this happened to me too" even when it didn't.
Like how their EVERY comment on women's rights has to be prefaced with "I too have owned - er, known - women, some of them in my own family!"
Or, "As the father of two daughters, I deplore sexism as much as anyone else." Because it only registers when it happens to you and yours. (Implicit is, "Otherwise, fuck it.")
Exactly, so if you're a Republican not fortunate enough to have some daughters of your own to point to, you have only two choices:
1) Lie about having daughters
2) Just learn to be a fucking normal human being who doesn't need to have daughters to feel empathy for women.
The choice is clear.
What about option 3) Date women young enough to be your daughter?
I'm sorry, do you mean "Republican outreach to women", sometimes in situations that get your hands slapped?
If you're a celebrity they let you
Republican Outgrope
When you say Hunter Biden's Laptop
I think Sonya Henie's tutu!
I am having a lousy holiday season thank you very much, but I have to say the George Santos story is bringing me joy. Twists and turns several times a day! Best of all is knowing with all my heart that Kevin McCarthy, whose life is already just a carousel of shit, is going to have a fucked up holiday, er, I mean Christmas season. Who knows where it's going. Likely in the felony direction.
'Needs more "Hunter Biden's Laptop".'
"Really explore the space!"
Vacuum Foooooooooorce!