I’m thrilled to see the law move even incrementally against this career criminal, and I find the most interesting aspect to be trying to figure out who flipped: Meadows? Someone else?
That’s the interesting part. The silliest part is the idea we should back off lest we rile up the GOP base. Literally laugh out loud. These goobers managed to incite *themselves* to rage because Cracker Barrel is offering meat substitutes now. That’s right, they are infuriated because OTHER PEOPLE in the restaurant are able to make vegetarian choices. In other words, Trump’s base is self-inciting, we just have to be alive to get them mad.
I have to admit that I am often amazed at what gets the wingers ticked off. The Cracker Barrel thing was just so typical--expanded consumer choice that has zero impact on Joe Average Trumper, but its mere existence is somehow a grievous insult.
Like their object of worship, these people are all toddlers at heart.
Well, I also wonder why they didn't lose their minds when Burger King, McDonald, and Wendy's added their plant base burgers? Well, it will be time to start the war on Xmas soon anyway.
Exactly. And I reserve judgement on the idea that CB is actively pursuing vegans as a potential consumer category. Because CB WANTS to be the RW safe space.
Are these meat substitutes really vegan? Or are people using vegan and vegetarian interchangeably? I’ve read several comments where this has left me unsure.
Answering my own stupid question, which answer was readily available by googlization, both Impossible and Beyond claim to be vegan. There is a lawsuit against BK for their claim the Impossible Burgers are vegan because they are prepared on the same grill as the beef patties.
Well you got me there, pal. Actually traveling to a CB and trying the cuisine sounds to me sorta like trying to pry quote-worthy comments outta denizens of midwestern diners (ie why?).
But your comment reminds me of our recent Newfoundland trip during which we wandered into a restaurant that was closed for service but when the guy saw there were 10 of us he talked the cook into opening. Hilarity ensued as we each ordered something not on the menu including some vegan things, plus an egg on the side, to which the guy responded "What sort of vegan are you?" Which, fair enough.
Anyway, turned into a great meal and we cheered the staff and tipped accordingly.
Someone made that point recently, either here or at LGM. They got particularly enraged about Cracker Barrel because it’s their safe space, where they can retreat to a sort of Good Old Days theme park version of a restaurant. Any change to that ruins the whole thing—like if you were going to a 1950s themed soda shop and they were selling Red Bull and mochaccinos.
I honestly believe it's an addiction loop at this point. Sort of like gamblers become addicted to the adrenaline rush of games of chance. If the wingers don't get an external reason to feel rage, they induce the rage hit themselves because they need the fix.
Being outraged is good for a few moments of moral superiority, but if it goes beyond that you're probably outraged for the wrong reasons. If people would stop being assholes, I would cheerfully stop being outraged at them. Even I have better things to do.
By the same token, someone should point out to Trump that we did our best to not prosecute him. At this point, if he'd have just gone the fuck away, I think he'd be fine by now. With a pension and lots of former president perks. But that's not *fun*, is it? He's gotta taunt the police, like a common serial killer. I expect less pettiness out of a guy who will turn out to be responsible for millions of deaths due to global warming.
That’s an interesting point. Relatedly, my line of social work isn’t involved with the mental health field, but over the years through work with clients I’ve crossed professional paths with a number of diagnostic psychiatrists/psychologists, and three of them have become friends.
During Trump’s first year in office, I said to all of them something like “wow, what a narcissist, huh?” Their replies were all disturbingly similar. I’m paraphrasing, but I could sum up all their responses as “yeah, he LOOKS like a classic exhibitionist narcissist but the actual reality is we’d be lucky if that is the case. Narcissists are difficult people but they can be reasoned with, flattered, and cajoled into doing the right thing. I’m much more worried he may be a psychopath, in which case all bets could be off. We may be fortunate to get out intact with everyone still alive.”
They were hardly unique in calling Trump’s mental health into question, but needless to say I’ve been thinking about their assessments a lot during the J6 committee hearings.
It's another one of those cases where I think he's less mentally ill than selfish and greedy and hateful. The driving factor of his personality is spite, though if you want to feel sorry for him, insecurity seems to be a close second.
They say psychopathy can be an acquired trait, and I suspect most of the people we publicly identify as psychopaths aren't, really, they're just people who have realized being unreasonable and punishing other people when you don't get your way is the kind of life they want to lead.
Most of them are too rational about the harm they want to do for me to consider them actually mentally ill rather than evil.
Anyway, I dunno. I know psychopaths and sociopaths, and most of them spend a lot of time trying *not* to act like that.
I still can't get over how stupid it all is. He's not some criminal mastermind who cleverly smuggled the key documents out of the White House, the ones with CONCLUSIVE PROOF of his wrongdoing, this is a guy who does his insurrectioning on stage, in front of live cameras. More likely he just took 30 boxes of stuff because somebody told him he couldn't, and like an angry teenager, he shouted "You're not the boss of me!" And so here we are, it's like getting Capone for tax evasion.
I know what you mean. And non only is he not a mastermind, but It often seems less like the banality of evil and more like the sheer, dumb pettiness of evil.
Ginni Thomas warned us that if Biden became President, America would be DESTROYED, and here we are, nearly two years later with America NOT DESTROYED, so they make do with whatever outrage fuel they can scrape up.
Well, from her (and her followers) standpoint, it IS destroyed (or might as well be, what with people still canoodling indiscriminately, and Y-chromosome-deficient sorts still takin' up space in the workforce reserved for their betters, and the like...)
Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
I think an accepted tenent of their conventional wisdom is some tree-hugging flounce is working night and day to take their steak and cheeseburgers to save the world from global warming. I think they see plant-based substitutes as the first step down that long slippery slope.( You know how they are about those slippery slopes. You never see them snow skiing. )
This is especially worrisome coming from a Temple of White Gravy like Cracker Barrel.
Planetary destruction will progress to the point where we're all eating Soylent Green, and then Charleton Heston comes in screaming, "It's people!" and they'll chew thoughtfully on their cracker and say, "Well, sure, but WHICH people? Tell me it's ground-up BLM activists salted with liberal tears, and I'll order another box."
How could it be otherwise? These people get out of bed every morning asking themselves (and each other), "How am I being victimized today?" That's why they love Trump. He affirms their sense of grievance, and tells them whose fault it is. And that's all they want--no solutions, no understanding of themselves or of the world. All they want is agreement and validation that they're being screwed, by those above them (the "elite") and beneath them (minorities, immigrants). By everyone, in fact, except those who really *are* screwing them, i.e., Trump and the GOP.
The next question is why are they always aggrieved? Clearly tRump appealed with almost magical allure to an angry lot. Now they're angry with a vengeance. But until it's understood why so many Murkans in the richest nation are so utterly upset, we remain in tRumpland.
They're (justifiably) aggrieved because modern capitalism has ridden roughshod over them. America has become a country of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, and they're not wrong in their sense of grievance. But they're manipulated by the paid spokespeople of the rich, who say, 'Yes, you're being screwed. By liberals, Blacks, gays, feminists, etc."
Trump's rabble are promising violence, with some proclaiming themselves ready for genocide against their fellow Americans. The GOP and Rightwing media are solidly in line with this being nothing more than weaponizing the DoJ. And given Trump's history of never having to face even minor inconvenience for his criminal acts, I do not hold great hope for someday seeing the Orange Turd wearing an orange jumpsuit.
But I still believe that Trump must be investigated, indicted, and tried. If his lunatic followers begin carrying out their murderous fantasies, they too must be arrested or destroyed by government forces. We're at a crossroads here: We can either arrest Trump and any of his law-breaking followers, or we can just give up on American democracy. If there are no consequences for Trump and the GOP's attempts to overthrow the government, then it is guaranteed that they will do so at their next opportunity.
I read that there have been thousands of threats against members of Congress in the past year, how many have been prosecuted? I think the number must be in the single digits, I haven't heard of any recently.
So there you are, threaten to murder a member of Congress, it's literally a thousand-to-one shot you'll be prosecuted.
Back in high school, we had an assignment to research a POTUS and answer the question of, as I remember is, Statesman or Corrupt Thug?
I chose Harding and no shit concluded he was a statesman because he was too stupid to be a corrupt thug. Let's say hands on-wise, Warren was closer to Reagan or GW Bush-class than FDR or LBJ-class. Too, I believe the record's pretty unclear how involved with or knowledgeable about the corruption in his administration. So in my defense, besides that, I pretty much just did a process of elimination thing; if he wasn't a corrupt putz, that could only leave statesman. No, I don't remember the grade on the paper. Listen, I'm going to defend Harding til I pass on. I'd submit that he got elected because the US of 1920 was seriously fucked up. Too, he was a horny thing so respect.
And as for the MAGAts freak out over the FBI getting an executing a search warrant to get materials from a life long thug well done not to otherwise comply with lesser, less formal requests, well, put like that, I can't, or maybe don't want to accept that this would get Crooked Donnie more votes instead of fewer. I mean, I'd like to think the majority of voters still support the rule of law and holding bad actors accountable. Can be wrong but, you know, that would only trigger huge denial.
That said, I'm also well on record as certain that the 2024 GOP POTUS is already as good as elected because reasons so whether or not I'm correct on the search warrant thing, it doesn't matter.
Yes, and lost the popular vote by significant amounts both times, yet he and his followers insist that he actually won the popular vote. That is one of the many things that really scares me. You know that whole Big Lie thing. Repeat it often enough, etc., etc., etc.
I wasn’t disagreeing with what Mark, said, just that IMO the Republican candidate for POTUS gets elected whether or not he gets the most votes. In other words, I don’t foresee the vote count mattering.
In my younger days I did a little Hoovering in similar context to your Harding...uh...ing...and my outre sources (cool library in our little town!) pointed to him losing maybe a $Billion in Russki mining opportunities when the revolution came. Was a fun paper I turned in, and the teacher was not expert in Hooveriana, so at least did not fail me on the spot.
These days I can easily imagine the sources I quoted then are of the sort we now would think aligned with Russki trolls...
Coolidge wasn't particularly great, either. My evidence partially being that the idiot Amity Schlaes wrote a book about him. Schlaes spoke at a graduation at my University and pretty much solely spoke about Coolidge and his trips to the Black Hills
Reminder that the Department of the Interior used to stock the streams in the Black Hills with big, hand-fed trout before Coolidge came to fish. No one except Coolidge liked eating the fish he caught.
Hoover did a great job getting food to Europeans after WW1. Evidently, he listened a little too closely to his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon and started mouthing crap like "Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury", well except when the raid was for business people
As was his definitive translation of De Re Metallica. I tried to buy a Hoover signed copy for my PhD advisors 60th birthday, but had to drop out when the price exceeded the amount of money I had available, probably about $1000
My now-feeble recollection is that Harding was not exactly respected by anyone and got the nomination as some sort of compromise or something. More politics than anyone thought highly of him.
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." - H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding
Mr. Burnette is Chester Arthur Burnette, aka Howlin' Wolfe. SCOTUS ruled for it to be bribery it had to be more than giving money to a Government official with the result that the GO did what the money giver wanted, which they likely would have done anyway. Instead there needed to be an explicit quid pro quo arrangement for it to be bribery.
Therefore bribery still is illegal, just the scope of what counts as bribery was severely restricted to essentially writing "this is a bribe" on the money
We can only hope that no Democrats get nervous over this predictable Republican reaction to “no man is above the law” and start equivocating. All signs point to evidence of crime(s) at Marm-a-Duka, enough to convince a judge to issue the warrant. My personal take (no more informed than anyone else’s) is that the press has swallowed a story put out by the DOJ to keep them off the scent of what the real plan is. I won’t be surprised to hear Republicans going “Oh, he was fucking goats? That’s different!” a few weeks from now.
I have to hope you are right, doc -- with a target this large, they are never going to come out & say everything. They just need a public broadside to encourage the side players & lower-level conspirators to get nervous & flip on El Tangelo.
Also, I hear the accidental release of Alex Jones' texts contained much about Jan 6th -- probably a bit soon for that info to be actionable directly.
Mrs. Jones opined that her husband may have done it to show Stone what a hot wife he had. Here in reality, though, one has to wonder about the kind of woman would marry someone like Jones.
Mrs. Jones also opined that she had unspecified bigger problems to worry about that her porcine husband sharing a nude photo of her. Likely, that!
If, six years ago, the Justice Department had handed every Republican a small plastic rectangle with the instructions, "Please carry this wherever you go and please record all your activities on it, thanks" what would have been their response? "Will I get likes and retweets out of the deal? Why, sure, I'd be happy to!"
I won’t be surprised to hear Republicans going “Oh, he was importing Ukrainian teenage girls and molesting them? But what about Hunter Biden's laptop, huh?” a few weeks from now.
He probably doesn't even know what the words mean, they're just words that sound big and rich to him. I guarantee you he still thinks the name means "more and larger".
Odds are that the materials at issue were the unreturned materials Crooked Donnie took with him on vacating the White House. I base that on the meeting between DOJ and some of Donnie’s lawyers which presumably did not result in Donnie providing sufficient cooperation.
Let’s say I’m correct and that is in fact pretty much what happened. What’s potentially interesting is that they can, on the spot, extend the search parameters beyond the warrant if they see signs of legal funkiness. And I mean, Donnie, what are the odds of that? Bonus: Can also explain why executing the warrant required ~100 agents. That number says more than the materials incentivized in the warrant were expected to be removed.
Could well be Donnie’s formula as frequently reported at this fine site or other such controlled substance.
I've seen some handwringing on MSNBC (but I repeat myself) about how the spotlight has been taken off Joe Biden's Big Week by this. Pass a major piece of legislation that you've been working on for nearly two years, and you've got ONE week to talk about it. Which, come to think of it, is kinda how it worked for the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Bill.
Aug 10, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022Liked by Roy Edroso
So the rubes are all riled up.
They're always riled about something.
I always wonder who's going to pay the new Confederate Army.
Gomer P.Justice gets 10 paid days off from the parts department down to the John Deere dealership. He used four of them last month on that trip to Myrtle Beach . They're supposed to take Memaw to Branson right after Labor Day. That's three days off. They got to go to that one, the Vrbo is paid for and so are the tickets to see The Statler Brothers. There be no living with Memaw if she misses out on The Statler Brothers. So that leaves three days and two of those go to deer hunting They'll probably use another one when they go tailgating to the Ravens game in October. So somebody needs to come up off of paycheck if they expect Gomer you go out and save America. Those title loan bastard's ain't playing around. Be late three days on that note and you can kiss the Ram. goodbye. And somebody is definitely going to have to pay for some ammunition. That's shit's worth more than gold. Good column! Thanks for the MacArthur analogy.
Yep. Playin' with the vocals (the baritone "Kang", the slightly hysterical tenor), the chord changes, the rhythm...it all came together. A defining crossover hit.
Would be kind of funny if the New Confederate Gummint announced the way it'd pay soldiers is taking over debt. You owe $12k on that Ram? No problem, our Gold and Bitcoin Treasury, which supports capitalism unlike the Socialist U.S., will take that debt over if you serve! What a deal! Then of course the U.S. wins the war and says oh well, guess you better get back on those Dodge payments, vet.
If the FBI raiding Trump's Sandals-by-way-of-Motel-6 resort does even 1/3 of the damage that Comey's 2016 *announcement* did to Hillary, then I will sign up for that right now.
I wonder how many ex wives he can bury on his various golf courses. I mean, he's not even supposed to be living at MaL, why not plant an ex in the yard?
MacArthur had always been a political animal; he'd tried to secretly have his name put forth at the 1944 Republican National Convention. Dewey's people stomped it immediately. "Douglas," FDR had told him about ten years earlier, "I believe you might be our greatest general, but I also believe you might be our worst politician."
I think second only to the "If X [insane accusation] is true then blah blah [insane awfulness]" right-wing formula that can spawn an entire column of speculative fascist fantasies, is the string of "what if" questions as a cheap rhetorical device. To paraphrase Rothman, he might as well have written: "What if I expanded this series of hypotheticals based on nothing more than speculation and partisanship?" He could have ended up at some kind of Bowling Green massacre and the death of Jared Kushner.
The scary ones, of course, are the provincial Trump gauleiters of social media who scream for civil war and ask "When does the shooting start?" They're just itching for -any- reason that will inflame some other nutjob to start pulling his AR-15 trigger on the Deep State. A federal building or a pizza place, it doesn't matter as long as it's the shot heard round the loony bin, i.e., Twitter.
Yeah, "civil war" is just checking the permission box the random gun-fondler needs to go on a murder spree. They're not going to form up in ranks and march up a hill towards a stone wall, like they did last time (unfortunately).
I have no interest in checking but I'm gonna bet Slippery Slope Rothman is on record somewhere as assuring all us little ladies that Roe is perfectly safe. "What if they're right" only works for white dudes in power, I guess.
Also, I shared to twitter, so be on your best behavior.
As I was saying to POTUS just the other day, "You know, JB, once you get the climate thing done you're sittin' pretty. Then the wanna-be prez mob will hafta kneel at your feet for a nod." We had a good laugh. Then we went for a couple laps around the grounds in his Vette while the secret service guys tried to keep up...
I think I can understand why Christian fundamentalists believe he was chosen by God, if any normal person had done half the shit he's done, they'd be in prison right now, and not getting out soon. He skates on everything, surely that is a sign of God's favor? So yeah, maybe if he was brought down to Earth a bit through our creaky legal system, they might take it as an indication that God now smiles on Ron DeSantis instead? They're always pretty clever at finding out that God just happens to want exactly what they want.
Bear in mind that the salutary effect is on the ~= 10% of voters not completely lost in the white christian grievance swamp. This includes people like my family, who have been on the "sure, he's kind of gross, but he's Not A Politician, and that's what matters" train from the beginning. They enjoy the "outrageous" behavior, because as Dennis Miller said "it pisses off the right kind of people", people who want to tell you what you can say, and raise your taxes.
But even if that boot in the ass has the desired effect, out of that reliable 40% there's a solid 27% itching to start Takin' It To The Streets, and are literally begging for some authority figure to tell them it's time to start huntin' liberals. Those people aren't giving up and going away, and if Trump believes he's in danger of facing time in prison, hoo boy. All the cards are on all the tables. It's not over if they indict or even convict Trump, it's just getting started.
That is the key to Trump’s feral genius. Our broken press just doesn’t know how to not both-sides the proverbial 5th Ave murder. He knows it and performs his stochastic terrorism right in front of a goggling Maggie and Peter knowing it will refocus the newsroom’s efforts to find something wrong with the Biden’s 💯 boring, normie approach.
Trump steals attention away from Biden's historic accomplishments with an actual FBI raid on his home, and somehow the press gets "Good week for Trump" out of it.
I’m thrilled to see the law move even incrementally against this career criminal, and I find the most interesting aspect to be trying to figure out who flipped: Meadows? Someone else?
That’s the interesting part. The silliest part is the idea we should back off lest we rile up the GOP base. Literally laugh out loud. These goobers managed to incite *themselves* to rage because Cracker Barrel is offering meat substitutes now. That’s right, they are infuriated because OTHER PEOPLE in the restaurant are able to make vegetarian choices. In other words, Trump’s base is self-inciting, we just have to be alive to get them mad.
I have to admit that I am often amazed at what gets the wingers ticked off. The Cracker Barrel thing was just so typical--expanded consumer choice that has zero impact on Joe Average Trumper, but its mere existence is somehow a grievous insult.
Like their object of worship, these people are all toddlers at heart.
Well, I also wonder why they didn't lose their minds when Burger King, McDonald, and Wendy's added their plant base burgers? Well, it will be time to start the war on Xmas soon anyway.
The Barrel was their safe space, ya know
Exactly. And I reserve judgement on the idea that CB is actively pursuing vegans as a potential consumer category. Because CB WANTS to be the RW safe space.
Are these meat substitutes really vegan? Or are people using vegan and vegetarian interchangeably? I’ve read several comments where this has left me unsure.
Answering my own stupid question, which answer was readily available by googlization, both Impossible and Beyond claim to be vegan. There is a lawsuit against BK for their claim the Impossible Burgers are vegan because they are prepared on the same grill as the beef patties.
Well you got me there, pal. Actually traveling to a CB and trying the cuisine sounds to me sorta like trying to pry quote-worthy comments outta denizens of midwestern diners (ie why?).
But your comment reminds me of our recent Newfoundland trip during which we wandered into a restaurant that was closed for service but when the guy saw there were 10 of us he talked the cook into opening. Hilarity ensued as we each ordered something not on the menu including some vegan things, plus an egg on the side, to which the guy responded "What sort of vegan are you?" Which, fair enough.
Anyway, turned into a great meal and we cheered the staff and tipped accordingly.
"Cracker" is right there in the name!
No Lies Detected
Whew!
Someone made that point recently, either here or at LGM. They got particularly enraged about Cracker Barrel because it’s their safe space, where they can retreat to a sort of Good Old Days theme park version of a restaurant. Any change to that ruins the whole thing—like if you were going to a 1950s themed soda shop and they were selling Red Bull and mochaccinos.
Git this goddam sneeze guard outta here!
They did. I promise you. I watched a lot of Alpha Males declare they'd never darken Burger King's doors again. They wouldn't miss a chance to whine.
I'm guessing that didn't hurt BK's business much.
This particular activity of yours seems kinda, I dunno, de-productive...but I assume you had yer reasons, so, carry on.
I am easily amused.
I aim to please!
I honestly believe it's an addiction loop at this point. Sort of like gamblers become addicted to the adrenaline rush of games of chance. If the wingers don't get an external reason to feel rage, they induce the rage hit themselves because they need the fix.
Being outraged is good for a few moments of moral superiority, but if it goes beyond that you're probably outraged for the wrong reasons. If people would stop being assholes, I would cheerfully stop being outraged at them. Even I have better things to do.
By the same token, someone should point out to Trump that we did our best to not prosecute him. At this point, if he'd have just gone the fuck away, I think he'd be fine by now. With a pension and lots of former president perks. But that's not *fun*, is it? He's gotta taunt the police, like a common serial killer. I expect less pettiness out of a guy who will turn out to be responsible for millions of deaths due to global warming.
That’s an interesting point. Relatedly, my line of social work isn’t involved with the mental health field, but over the years through work with clients I’ve crossed professional paths with a number of diagnostic psychiatrists/psychologists, and three of them have become friends.
During Trump’s first year in office, I said to all of them something like “wow, what a narcissist, huh?” Their replies were all disturbingly similar. I’m paraphrasing, but I could sum up all their responses as “yeah, he LOOKS like a classic exhibitionist narcissist but the actual reality is we’d be lucky if that is the case. Narcissists are difficult people but they can be reasoned with, flattered, and cajoled into doing the right thing. I’m much more worried he may be a psychopath, in which case all bets could be off. We may be fortunate to get out intact with everyone still alive.”
They were hardly unique in calling Trump’s mental health into question, but needless to say I’ve been thinking about their assessments a lot during the J6 committee hearings.
It's another one of those cases where I think he's less mentally ill than selfish and greedy and hateful. The driving factor of his personality is spite, though if you want to feel sorry for him, insecurity seems to be a close second.
They say psychopathy can be an acquired trait, and I suspect most of the people we publicly identify as psychopaths aren't, really, they're just people who have realized being unreasonable and punishing other people when you don't get your way is the kind of life they want to lead.
Most of them are too rational about the harm they want to do for me to consider them actually mentally ill rather than evil.
Anyway, I dunno. I know psychopaths and sociopaths, and most of them spend a lot of time trying *not* to act like that.
You don't have to be selfish, greedy and hateful to be mentally ill, but it helps.
All the loons I know have disowned the guy.
The Canadian geese were on to him from the get.
I still can't get over how stupid it all is. He's not some criminal mastermind who cleverly smuggled the key documents out of the White House, the ones with CONCLUSIVE PROOF of his wrongdoing, this is a guy who does his insurrectioning on stage, in front of live cameras. More likely he just took 30 boxes of stuff because somebody told him he couldn't, and like an angry teenager, he shouted "You're not the boss of me!" And so here we are, it's like getting Capone for tax evasion.
I know what you mean. And non only is he not a mastermind, but It often seems less like the banality of evil and more like the sheer, dumb pettiness of evil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUrhdIxTJSA
"I expect less pettiness out of a guy who will turn out to be responsible for millions of deaths due to global warming." Really? Me, the opposite.
I use "expect" aspirationally here, not predictionally.
Anyway, with Trump, my sense is that he's overcompensating on the taunting because he doesn't think those people count.
Ginni Thomas warned us that if Biden became President, America would be DESTROYED, and here we are, nearly two years later with America NOT DESTROYED, so they make do with whatever outrage fuel they can scrape up.
Well, from her (and her followers) standpoint, it IS destroyed (or might as well be, what with people still canoodling indiscriminately, and Y-chromosome-deficient sorts still takin' up space in the workforce reserved for their betters, and the like...)
I think an accepted tenent of their conventional wisdom is some tree-hugging flounce is working night and day to take their steak and cheeseburgers to save the world from global warming. I think they see plant-based substitutes as the first step down that long slippery slope.( You know how they are about those slippery slopes. You never see them snow skiing. )
This is especially worrisome coming from a Temple of White Gravy like Cracker Barrel.
Planetary destruction will progress to the point where we're all eating Soylent Green, and then Charleton Heston comes in screaming, "It's people!" and they'll chew thoughtfully on their cracker and say, "Well, sure, but WHICH people? Tell me it's ground-up BLM activists salted with liberal tears, and I'll order another box."
There is that scene near the end where the scoop trucks descend upon a street riot & scoop up rioters probably to be made into more Soylent.
Do NOT go dissin' Aunt Penny's White Sauce, boyo!
Edit to add: "tree-hugging flounce" – 2 marks!
That there phrase is poetically pure.
How could it be otherwise? These people get out of bed every morning asking themselves (and each other), "How am I being victimized today?" That's why they love Trump. He affirms their sense of grievance, and tells them whose fault it is. And that's all they want--no solutions, no understanding of themselves or of the world. All they want is agreement and validation that they're being screwed, by those above them (the "elite") and beneath them (minorities, immigrants). By everyone, in fact, except those who really *are* screwing them, i.e., Trump and the GOP.
Every day is Festivus!
Would somebody crack a window? These grievances need airing out.
It's true!
The next question is why are they always aggrieved? Clearly tRump appealed with almost magical allure to an angry lot. Now they're angry with a vengeance. But until it's understood why so many Murkans in the richest nation are so utterly upset, we remain in tRumpland.
They're (justifiably) aggrieved because modern capitalism has ridden roughshod over them. America has become a country of the rich, by the rich, for the rich, and they're not wrong in their sense of grievance. But they're manipulated by the paid spokespeople of the rich, who say, 'Yes, you're being screwed. By liberals, Blacks, gays, feminists, etc."
Trump's rabble are promising violence, with some proclaiming themselves ready for genocide against their fellow Americans. The GOP and Rightwing media are solidly in line with this being nothing more than weaponizing the DoJ. And given Trump's history of never having to face even minor inconvenience for his criminal acts, I do not hold great hope for someday seeing the Orange Turd wearing an orange jumpsuit.
But I still believe that Trump must be investigated, indicted, and tried. If his lunatic followers begin carrying out their murderous fantasies, they too must be arrested or destroyed by government forces. We're at a crossroads here: We can either arrest Trump and any of his law-breaking followers, or we can just give up on American democracy. If there are no consequences for Trump and the GOP's attempts to overthrow the government, then it is guaranteed that they will do so at their next opportunity.
I read that there have been thousands of threats against members of Congress in the past year, how many have been prosecuted? I think the number must be in the single digits, I haven't heard of any recently.
So there you are, threaten to murder a member of Congress, it's literally a thousand-to-one shot you'll be prosecuted.
The GOP and Rightwing media are solidly in line with this being nothing more than weaponizing the DoJ.
I have a word and an acronym for this:
Projection, EAIAC
I confess.
Back in high school, we had an assignment to research a POTUS and answer the question of, as I remember is, Statesman or Corrupt Thug?
I chose Harding and no shit concluded he was a statesman because he was too stupid to be a corrupt thug. Let's say hands on-wise, Warren was closer to Reagan or GW Bush-class than FDR or LBJ-class. Too, I believe the record's pretty unclear how involved with or knowledgeable about the corruption in his administration. So in my defense, besides that, I pretty much just did a process of elimination thing; if he wasn't a corrupt putz, that could only leave statesman. No, I don't remember the grade on the paper. Listen, I'm going to defend Harding til I pass on. I'd submit that he got elected because the US of 1920 was seriously fucked up. Too, he was a horny thing so respect.
And as for the MAGAts freak out over the FBI getting an executing a search warrant to get materials from a life long thug well done not to otherwise comply with lesser, less formal requests, well, put like that, I can't, or maybe don't want to accept that this would get Crooked Donnie more votes instead of fewer. I mean, I'd like to think the majority of voters still support the rule of law and holding bad actors accountable. Can be wrong but, you know, that would only trigger huge denial.
That said, I'm also well on record as certain that the 2024 GOP POTUS is already as good as elected because reasons so whether or not I'm correct on the search warrant thing, it doesn't matter.
Remember, Trump lost the popular vote twice. "The majority of voters" have never supported him.
Yes, and lost the popular vote by significant amounts both times, yet he and his followers insist that he actually won the popular vote. That is one of the many things that really scares me. You know that whole Big Lie thing. Repeat it often enough, etc., etc., etc.
I worry too, but it's not a sign of strength when you're a Republican and you need a plan to steal Arizona and Georgia.
Why my confidence that the Republican POTUS candidate is assured of being elected has nothing to do with the popular vote. It’ll be irrelevant.
But some dude quoted in the OP said what Mark Lungo quoted
I wasn’t disagreeing with what Mark, said, just that IMO the Republican candidate for POTUS gets elected whether or not he gets the most votes. In other words, I don’t foresee the vote count mattering.
Squaring the circle, Harry S Truman on statesmanship: "A statesman is a politician that has been dead for fifteen years."
My man Warren did that one better by dying in office.
Oo! Oo! Do Hoover next!
In my younger days I did a little Hoovering in similar context to your Harding...uh...ing...and my outre sources (cool library in our little town!) pointed to him losing maybe a $Billion in Russki mining opportunities when the revolution came. Was a fun paper I turned in, and the teacher was not expert in Hooveriana, so at least did not fail me on the spot.
These days I can easily imagine the sources I quoted then are of the sort we now would think aligned with Russki trolls...
Bernie was apparently a decent enough person. But the next POS POTUS after Harding, and an actual documented grifter, is Truman.
Nearly everything good he did was performative, nearly all he acts were god awful.
A POS.
Memo to auto-correct: Not Bernie, stupid. Herbie.
Ah, and here I was agreeing with you, momentarily.
Coolidge wasn't particularly great, either. My evidence partially being that the idiot Amity Schlaes wrote a book about him. Schlaes spoke at a graduation at my University and pretty much solely spoke about Coolidge and his trips to the Black Hills
Reminder that the Department of the Interior used to stock the streams in the Black Hills with big, hand-fed trout before Coolidge came to fish. No one except Coolidge liked eating the fish he caught.
Hoover did a great job getting food to Europeans after WW1. Evidently, he listened a little too closely to his Treasury Secretary, Andrew Mellon and started mouthing crap like "Prosperity cannot be restored by raids upon the public Treasury", well except when the raid was for business people
Yeah. Maybe shoulda stuck to geology, but his humanitarian work was impressive...
As was his definitive translation of De Re Metallica. I tried to buy a Hoover signed copy for my PhD advisors 60th birthday, but had to drop out when the price exceeded the amount of money I had available, probably about $1000
Whaddabout Teapot Dome? A huge scandal that today would be known as "Business as Usual."
My man Warren’s involvement with Teapot Dome is believed to be minimal and, yes, by modern standards it’s something of a nothing burger.
It doesn't say much for Harding that his administration was historically corrupt but he himself was not.
Well, that was my position at the time.
My now-feeble recollection is that Harding was not exactly respected by anyone and got the nomination as some sort of compromise or something. More politics than anyone thought highly of him.
“He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash." - H.L. Mencken on Warren G. Harding
Right. Today the grift money would have to be bags of cash labeled “Bribe $$”, or written in the memo line of a canceled check.
Nah, bribery is now an official part of the system. SCOTUS has ruled it as good as legal.
Good try though!
SCOTUS ruled pretty much exactly what Mr. Burnette wrote
You lost me, sorry.
Mr. Burnette is Chester Arthur Burnette, aka Howlin' Wolfe. SCOTUS ruled for it to be bribery it had to be more than giving money to a Government official with the result that the GO did what the money giver wanted, which they likely would have done anyway. Instead there needed to be an explicit quid pro quo arrangement for it to be bribery.
Therefore bribery still is illegal, just the scope of what counts as bribery was severely restricted to essentially writing "this is a bribe" on the money
We can only hope that no Democrats get nervous over this predictable Republican reaction to “no man is above the law” and start equivocating. All signs point to evidence of crime(s) at Marm-a-Duka, enough to convince a judge to issue the warrant. My personal take (no more informed than anyone else’s) is that the press has swallowed a story put out by the DOJ to keep them off the scent of what the real plan is. I won’t be surprised to hear Republicans going “Oh, he was fucking goats? That’s different!” a few weeks from now.
I have to hope you are right, doc -- with a target this large, they are never going to come out & say everything. They just need a public broadside to encourage the side players & lower-level conspirators to get nervous & flip on El Tangelo.
Also, I hear the accidental release of Alex Jones' texts contained much about Jan 6th -- probably a bit soon for that info to be actionable directly.
Apparently, the texts terminate in mid-2020. Don’t remember the source and TBH I’m not convinced.
But among the texts was one to Roger Stone of a nude photo of Mrs. Jones:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/09/alex-jones-nude-photo-wife-roger-stone?utm_term=Autofeed&CMP=edit_2221&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1660054755
Mrs. Jones opined that her husband may have done it to show Stone what a hot wife he had. Here in reality, though, one has to wonder about the kind of woman would marry someone like Jones.
Mrs. Jones also opined that she had unspecified bigger problems to worry about that her porcine husband sharing a nude photo of her. Likely, that!
Also Scott Perry’s phone - coincidence?
If what the objects of the search warrant were improperly removed documents from the White House then yeah, coinky-dinky.
If my runner-up theory that it’s 1/6-related, then yes, something of a coincidence.
If, six years ago, the Justice Department had handed every Republican a small plastic rectangle with the instructions, "Please carry this wherever you go and please record all your activities on it, thanks" what would have been their response? "Will I get likes and retweets out of the deal? Why, sure, I'd be happy to!"
I won’t be surprised to hear Republicans going “Oh, he was importing Ukrainian teenage girls and molesting them? But what about Hunter Biden's laptop, huh?” a few weeks from now.
There is some particularly damning footage of Hunter Biden's laptop dancing with some Ukrainian teenagers...
Lol Marm-a-Duka. Sometimes I forget how funny Sea on the Lake is.
That's just bog standard Florida saltwater intrusion. EVERYBODY has that...
He probably doesn't even know what the words mean, they're just words that sound big and rich to him. I guarantee you he still thinks the name means "more and larger".
I always assumed it meant Marjorie-on-the-Lake. Which is also a dumb name, but there's a sort of logic to it.
Marge-a-Lago would have been AWESOME (also Marge-a-bagel, because I'm trying to cut down on the cream cheese.)
https://www.williamsonrealty.com/vacation/all/detailpage/14/ocean-isle-west-blvd-125-mar-a-lego
Because there's always a wise guy...
Disappointed to see it wasn't made of actual Legos. Take it all the way or get out.
Still a wide open opportunity for an enterprising dude such as yourself.
I'm gonna one-up him and name my estate Mar-a-Lago del Rio.
Mar-a-Lago del Rio Bahia Laguna del Agua
Well, you can't get any wetter than that.
"Say! What did you put in this drink?!"
It has all the dumbass “charm” of those 1950s marketing names like “Tite-Seal” and “Sav-Mor.”
More Salve! Buy More Salve!
We lathered ourselves with petro-carbo salve, and we liked it!
Don’t dis goats. I’m in love with one.
Odds are that the materials at issue were the unreturned materials Crooked Donnie took with him on vacating the White House. I base that on the meeting between DOJ and some of Donnie’s lawyers which presumably did not result in Donnie providing sufficient cooperation.
Let’s say I’m correct and that is in fact pretty much what happened. What’s potentially interesting is that they can, on the spot, extend the search parameters beyond the warrant if they see signs of legal funkiness. And I mean, Donnie, what are the odds of that? Bonus: Can also explain why executing the warrant required ~100 agents. That number says more than the materials incentivized in the warrant were expected to be removed.
Could well be Donnie’s formula as frequently reported at this fine site or other such controlled substance.
I've seen some handwringing on MSNBC (but I repeat myself) about how the spotlight has been taken off Joe Biden's Big Week by this. Pass a major piece of legislation that you've been working on for nearly two years, and you've got ONE week to talk about it. Which, come to think of it, is kinda how it worked for the American Rescue Plan and the Infrastructure Bill.
So the rubes are all riled up.
They're always riled about something.
I always wonder who's going to pay the new Confederate Army.
Gomer P.Justice gets 10 paid days off from the parts department down to the John Deere dealership. He used four of them last month on that trip to Myrtle Beach . They're supposed to take Memaw to Branson right after Labor Day. That's three days off. They got to go to that one, the Vrbo is paid for and so are the tickets to see The Statler Brothers. There be no living with Memaw if she misses out on The Statler Brothers. So that leaves three days and two of those go to deer hunting They'll probably use another one when they go tailgating to the Ravens game in October. So somebody needs to come up off of paycheck if they expect Gomer you go out and save America. Those title loan bastard's ain't playing around. Be late three days on that note and you can kiss the Ram. goodbye. And somebody is definitely going to have to pay for some ammunition. That's shit's worth more than gold. Good column! Thanks for the MacArthur analogy.
He'll just skip deer hunting this year and go liberal hunting instead. He already has the license--it's right there in the back window of the truck.
That's as maybe but the West Side of Chicago might be a bad place to go huntin' liberals.
Where Thoughts and Prayers get a workout!
2 marks for Statler Bros.
Smokin’ cigarettes and watchin’ Captain Kang Kangaroo - Don’t tell me I’ve nothin’ to do!
I love that song.
Yep. Playin' with the vocals (the baritone "Kang", the slightly hysterical tenor), the chord changes, the rhythm...it all came together. A defining crossover hit.
Would be kind of funny if the New Confederate Gummint announced the way it'd pay soldiers is taking over debt. You owe $12k on that Ram? No problem, our Gold and Bitcoin Treasury, which supports capitalism unlike the Socialist U.S., will take that debt over if you serve! What a deal! Then of course the U.S. wins the war and says oh well, guess you better get back on those Dodge payments, vet.
Love that subhead.
If the FBI raiding Trump's Sandals-by-way-of-Motel-6 resort does even 1/3 of the damage that Comey's 2016 *announcement* did to Hillary, then I will sign up for that right now.
Marjorie Merriweather Post would chide you on that characterization of Swamp Thang's abode. But the National Park Service might agree with you.
I wonder how many ex wives he can bury on his various golf courses. I mean, he's not even supposed to be living at MaL, why not plant an ex in the yard?
Currently he could do Maples, when she dies, and divorce Melania, but barring MAGA nuts, she will outlive him, so I go with 1
"Yeah, and if my uncle had tits he’d be my aunt."
Well what if he WAS??!! No wait...
Sorry, I'll come in again.
Well what if she WAS??!! Huh??!!
HUH??!!
There is nothing in RW rhetoric that can be debated because the debate process depends on coherent arguments from all sides.
Define "aunt!" Did Unkie ever have his/her chromosomes checked? Got ya there!
He/him/she/her/they
Who/me?
MacArthur had always been a political animal; he'd tried to secretly have his name put forth at the 1944 Republican National Convention. Dewey's people stomped it immediately. "Douglas," FDR had told him about ten years earlier, "I believe you might be our greatest general, but I also believe you might be our worst politician."
I think second only to the "If X [insane accusation] is true then blah blah [insane awfulness]" right-wing formula that can spawn an entire column of speculative fascist fantasies, is the string of "what if" questions as a cheap rhetorical device. To paraphrase Rothman, he might as well have written: "What if I expanded this series of hypotheticals based on nothing more than speculation and partisanship?" He could have ended up at some kind of Bowling Green massacre and the death of Jared Kushner.
The scary ones, of course, are the provincial Trump gauleiters of social media who scream for civil war and ask "When does the shooting start?" They're just itching for -any- reason that will inflame some other nutjob to start pulling his AR-15 trigger on the Deep State. A federal building or a pizza place, it doesn't matter as long as it's the shot heard round the loony bin, i.e., Twitter.
Yeah, "civil war" is just checking the permission box the random gun-fondler needs to go on a murder spree. They're not going to form up in ranks and march up a hill towards a stone wall, like they did last time (unfortunately).
Morning dose of schadenfreude.
I have no interest in checking but I'm gonna bet Slippery Slope Rothman is on record somewhere as assuring all us little ladies that Roe is perfectly safe. "What if they're right" only works for white dudes in power, I guess.
Also, I shared to twitter, so be on your best behavior.
Sounds like a dare....
It is. Be interesting, and maybe Roy will get some new subscribers.
As I was saying to POTUS just the other day, "You know, JB, once you get the climate thing done you're sittin' pretty. Then the wanna-be prez mob will hafta kneel at your feet for a nod." We had a good laugh. Then we went for a couple laps around the grounds in his Vette while the secret service guys tried to keep up...
How'm I doin'?
I think I can understand why Christian fundamentalists believe he was chosen by God, if any normal person had done half the shit he's done, they'd be in prison right now, and not getting out soon. He skates on everything, surely that is a sign of God's favor? So yeah, maybe if he was brought down to Earth a bit through our creaky legal system, they might take it as an indication that God now smiles on Ron DeSantis instead? They're always pretty clever at finding out that God just happens to want exactly what they want.
Yeah, he's a vessel alright. Horst Wessel.
He's the wurst.
About which t'is best one not know how t'was made
You're the wurst,
You're the big bologna,
You're the wurst,
You're a bankrupt phoney
The shit you pull,
my brain's about to burst,
But baby, I'm not foolin'
You're the wurst
(apologies to Cole Porter)
Cole says OOF.
Or they could, and apparently do, see it as the martyrdom phase of their baby Jeebus. A post at LGM called it “The Twelve Stations of the Grift”.
Good point, the first time around they didn't say, "Hey, if he's really the Son of God, how come he's lettin' those Romans nail him to that cross?"
So you're saying Trumpism is like grifting Calvinism?
Bear in mind that the salutary effect is on the ~= 10% of voters not completely lost in the white christian grievance swamp. This includes people like my family, who have been on the "sure, he's kind of gross, but he's Not A Politician, and that's what matters" train from the beginning. They enjoy the "outrageous" behavior, because as Dennis Miller said "it pisses off the right kind of people", people who want to tell you what you can say, and raise your taxes.
But even if that boot in the ass has the desired effect, out of that reliable 40% there's a solid 27% itching to start Takin' It To The Streets, and are literally begging for some authority figure to tell them it's time to start huntin' liberals. Those people aren't giving up and going away, and if Trump believes he's in danger of facing time in prison, hoo boy. All the cards are on all the tables. It's not over if they indict or even convict Trump, it's just getting started.
"convict Trump"
I'm rather hoping that the correct moniker will be "convict 18437B"
I can hear Bernie now, "Eugene Debs was a friend of mine, and you, sir, are no Eugene Debs"
That is the key to Trump’s feral genius. Our broken press just doesn’t know how to not both-sides the proverbial 5th Ave murder. He knows it and performs his stochastic terrorism right in front of a goggling Maggie and Peter knowing it will refocus the newsroom’s efforts to find something wrong with the Biden’s 💯 boring, normie approach.
Trump steals attention away from Biden's historic accomplishments with an actual FBI raid on his home, and somehow the press gets "Good week for Trump" out of it.