Let’s Go, Brandon! No, Seriously, Brandon. Please. Go.

Before I get to the other stuff, I’m going to briefly go over the hilarity with Viceroy Trump having his little mugshot when he was arraigned in Atlanta. One Internet character had the brilliant idea of casting all the 18 lieutenants who had to take mugshots (like Mark Meadows and Rudy Guiliani) as Batman ’66 villains with the final assembly, naturally, centered on Donnie Clownboy as The Joker. (Giving him the Cesar Romero mustache was a great touch.)

I also think not only that Trump actually rehearsed his pose for the shot, I agree with whoever said that Trump leaned over, not just to make that LookitmeI’msoangryGRRRRR face, but because the further out he projects his jaw, the harder it is to see his other chins.

It’s actually a little sad that because the mugshot was taken after Trump’s time in office (NEWS FLASH: Trump is no longer president) that it can’t be used as his official presidential portrait, since the picture that is actually used, while professional, fails for that very reason: Posing Trump at his desk at the Oval Office almost makes it look like he’s working. Even so, not even the Trump mugshot is as fucked up as the ACTUAL Chuck Close painting of Bill Clinton that is his official portrait in the national gallery. Yes, this is REAL.

But again, Trump staged his little pout very deliberately, and to present an image of being a lot more forceful and powerful than he has proven to be against actual dictators. And while to people like me, the effort is so obvious as to be comical, it actually seems to work with a large section of the public. And that gets to a matter that is a lot more relevant right now.

While The Lamestream Media seems to be focusing a lot on Trump’s malice and malfeasance, and (yet again) giving him a respectable platform for his lying, the main focus of national news seems to be how everyone in the Democratic Party, with the possible exception of President Biden’s own people, doesn’t want Joe Biden to run again.

And this shows that Trump’s emphasis on superficial branding actually works, even on people who aren’t brain-dead Trumpniks. It’s why people think that Trump is a financial genius because he inherited money and played a billionaire on “reality” TV. And they think that Trump is more young and vital than Biden because Biden actually looks his age whereas Trump uses a bronzer that the makeup department on the Original Star Trek would have rejected as too garish and cheap-looking.

But maybe because everybody knows Trump for what he is and some people accept it anyway, they’re more prone to judge Joe Biden in terms of his objective qualifications and circumstances, whereas Trump fans don’t believe in bourgeois conceits like “objectivity.” So “reasonable” and “moderate” people will look at all of Joe Biden’s gaffes and think he’s not fit to be president while a Trumpnik will still think Trump ha sempre ragione even when he says Biden wants to get us in World War II.

(I mean, isn’t that where we WON? Sign me up!)

It’s nevertheless true that whatever the Biden Administration’s real accomplishments on paper, inflation is still too damn high for most people to feel secure, so whatever the statistics are on the economy, a lot of voters just don’t care. That same economy is a lot of the reason why Biden and Democrats are losing support with the young and non-white voters that the party needs and traditionally relies on. It doesn’t help that the same policies that liberals credit the Biden Administration for are also the ones that spur inflation, at least in the short term.

To say nothing of the fact that Biden’s physical and verbal stumbles are of a piece with [the late] Senator Dianne Feinstein (D.-California) losing her train of speech and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Kentucky) staring into space for several seconds, on multiple occasions. Here I again point out that the etymology of the word “Senate” traces directly from the Roman Republic, where the Latin senatus is taken from the singular senex, meaning “old man”, which means a senate is literally a group of old men.

Fact is, the Establishment is a mess. That’s why Republicans have been able to capitalize to the extent that they have. But this isn’t 2016, when it was easy to critique Hillary Clinton and the Republicans had been out of power, so they didn’t seem so bad. Back then, Trump’s strongest argument was “Whaddya got to lose?” Well… now we know. And that was all before January 6, and the trials, and Trump saying that General Mark Milley should have been hanged for talking with a foreign power, not to mention being found guilty of fraud in a New York case where evidence was so overwhelming the judge saw no need for a jury trial.

The other issue again is that prior to Trump taking over, the “MAGA” mentality hadn’t been quite so dominant in political life, whereas even with Democrats controlling the White House and the Senate, the Trumpniks are increasingly overbearing in their attempts to impose themselves in state government and to the extent that they can in the Federal government.

This is why we, yet again have Republicans, mostly in the House of Representatives shutting down the government if they don’t get their way. In this case it’s largely because of SINO (Speaker in Name Only) Kevin McCarthy (BR.-California), whom journalists frequently describe as “feckless.” He is totally lacking in feck. Having given up all the authority of his office for the mere privilege of having it, McCarthy is obliged to go along with every childish whim of Matt Gaetz (BR.-Florida) and Marjorie Taylor (BR.-Georgia), for instance, stripping Ukraine aid out of a provision to keep the Department of Defense funded (because their Master’s Master thinks it’s a lot more fun to shoot Ukrainians when they can’t shoot back). Meanwhile in the Senate, Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville (the name is French for ‘village of tubers’) has been on a long-standing crusade to stop any government promotions of military personnel, including the heads of the Army, Navy and USMC, because the Pentagon allows women personnel to take leave for abortions after the Alito Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade.

You certainly can’t shame right-wingers by saying that government bureaucrats won’t be paid for having to work. But what’s telling is that we’re expecting members of the military to go without pay (while the Republicans who created this mess get paid on schedule, of course). It may seem remarkable how hostile the “pro-military” “conservatives” are to our military and global position, and that not even an appeal to patriotism works on the Party of Trump.

Democrats still haven’t figured out that shamelessness is the Republican superpower. Republicans don’t care. What the real issue is is that you can’t even hit them with appeals to patriotism because they see this country and its government in proprietary terms. That is, unless they OWN this country, it’s not theirs, and until they own this country, this country is their ENEMY. If they were honest – or in some cases, just blabbermouth enough – they’d admit that they’re undermining our defense posture because they’re not patriots for this country, but rather for the country that their Leader does so much to emulate.

And they think that if they can make everybody hate the Democrats as much as they do, they’ll win. There’s just one problem. Everyone already DOES hate the Democrats, and they’re still winning elections against Republicans, which is why Republicans do everything they can to discourage voting and making sure votes don’t count.

So everybody hates the Democrats. Everybody hates the economy. What do Republicans propose to do about that? Shut down the government if Democrats don’t submit to blackmail, no matter HOW MANY TIMES the public sees whose fault it is.

And everybody IN the Democratic Party is the opposite of enthused with Joe Biden. Just like Bill Clinton was already getting to be a liability for his party and Al Gore even before Monicagate. And then Republicans impeached him and the Democrats rallied around their guy. Just like Donald Trump was increasingly unpopular even in his own party for his erratic behavior, and then he got impeached, and everybody in the Republican Party had to rally around him. And because actual conviction in impeachment requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate and there’s going to be at least one-third of the Senate in the sitting President’s party (were that not the case, that party almost certainly wouldn’t have elected the president), impeachment is damn useless for its constitutional purpose and by now both parties should know it. In the short term at least it only serves to boost a president’s support with his own party at the lowest ebb when he needs it most.

So what is Kevin McCarthy going to do?
What are you going to do, Kevin?
That’s right! Impeach the President!

Reeeeal Men of Geeeeniuus….

And in the midst of all this, I forgot about the second (non-Trump) Republican presidential debate Wednesday September 27. But I guess so did everyone else. For one thing, it was held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, an institution which now has as much influence on the Republican Party as any of the candidates. I gave up watching around halfway through when I couldn’t get past all the shouting and everyone talking over each other. When I could hear one individual speak uninterrupted, it was either lame jokes or more political hack sloganeering than any Amy Klobuchar or Kamala Harris speech, except Democrats are campaigning for a welfare state and Republicans want a place that makes Gilead look like Ibiza. As with the last show, Nikki Haley made the best impression, especially when she told Vivek Ramaswamy, “Every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber.” So say we all.

So it made even more sense than last time for Trump to skip this whole thing (even though he IS a chicken for avoiding debate) because none of these guys are real competition and they’re not worth the effort. What then did he do Wednesday? Well, there was a lot of noise in the media about how Trump stole Biden’s thunder by using debate night to make a speech to auto workers instead, which is why the Biden Administration decided to counter by having the president join a UAW picket line Tuesday. But then it turned out Trump was scheduled by management to speak at a non-union shop for parts manufacturing, a shop which staffs 150 people even though the event drew 500, and told his massively huge crowd that because Biden was pressing to make all cars electric, “It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference what (wage) you get because in two years you’re all going to be out of business.”

Donald Trump: It’s Morning in America.

I’m sure there’s lots of Republicans who would rather vote for somebody, ANYBODY, besides Donald Trump, but they’re not going to vote for somebody else, they’re going to vote for Trump. Likewise, Democrats may say they want somebody else besides Joe Biden, but they’re not going to vote for somebody else. Why? Because this is America, where we have freedom of choice.

Among Joe Biden’s many, many Dad cliches in speech is saying “Don’t compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative.” And like much of what Biden says, it’s bland, it’s obvious, and it’s absolutely correct. Yes, he’s old, he’s slow, he was never that smooth on his best days, and if people had any confidence in Kamala Harris, people wouldn’t be so scared that he’d die in office. But then compare him to the guy who talks about starting World War II, then compare him to the various ankle-biters still running in what used to be the Party of Reagan, hoping maybe Trump will choke on a steak or something. Biden may not be Almighty God, but God Almighty, the alternative is a shit volcano.

The Elephant Not In The Room

OK, so reviewing the Republican candidates’ debate on Fox Wednesday, let’s go back to the Republican Debate Bingo Card: “Pledge to Pardon Trump” – Yes, actually brought up by the debate hosts, and answers were kind of a blur. “Crooked Joe Biden” “Radical Left” “Two-Tiered Justice System” – not really brought up, though every time people were obliged to admit Trump tried to stop the election verification, they acted like it was Democrats’ fault for doing something about it. “Drag Queens” – not that I recall. “Hillary Clinton Mention” – they MUST have mentioned Hillary, but I can’t recall where. “Child Indoctrination” – yeah, that was DeSantis. “Prosecute Dr. Fauci” – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he’d fire Fauci. Even though he’s already resigned. “Biden Crime Family” – not that I recall. “Crime infested blue cities” – not in so many words, but they talked about crime a lot. “WOKE!” -Not specifically. “Climate ‘Hoax'” – actually, nobody other than Vivek Ramaswamy said climate change is a hoax (and he got BOOED), and he was basically taking the “Drill, Baby, Drill!” position. “Mainstream Media” – you had Ramaswamy telling Chris Christie that he was auditioning for a job at MSNBC. He also said Nikki Haley was going to take a nice corporate job after this campaign, which raises the question of what company will hire him once he has to bow out after Iowa. “Biden’s Age” – oh yeah. “Assault on [insert] Liberties” – not an issue for anybody here. These guys don’t believe in liberty, even for themselves. Their approach to liberty is basically the Catholic Church’s position on freedom: They only do what the authorities tell them to do because that’s what they were going to do anyway. “Election Integrity” – not in so many words. “Anti-Ukraine Sentiment” – mainly from DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, which led to pushback from Nikki Haley in one of her better moments of the night, pointing out that on this very day Putin killed his own former henchman. “Hunter Biden!” “CRT” – that was DeSantis, mainly. “DeSantis Makes A Weird Face” – they’re ALL weird faces. “Referring to Insurrectionists as Patriots” – not really. “Soros Reference” – 49 minutes in! “Back the Blue” – not so much, but I did see a few people falling all over themselves to be the first one to invade Mexico to take out their drug networks. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind us violating their national sovereignty. After all, we do it all the time.

I kind of agree with the people who think that Tim Scott and Mike Pence, simply by not embarrassing themselves, did relatively well. And then you had Doug… lemme check… Doug Burgum. Every so often Bret Baier and Martha McCallum remembered he was on stage, and even more occasionally, so did he. And then you had the two mini-Trumps, DeSantis and Ramaswamy, and while Ramaswamy was kind of “cocaine energy” and sometimes just plain wrong, he was forthright and a good speaker. And then you had DeSantis. Baier told him crime was up in Miami. DeSantis responded that “crime is at a 50-year low in Florida.” Which didn’t exactly disprove the statement. (‘Sure I’ve got brain cancer, but my blood sugar is better than ever!’) The very first speech was DeSantis going “Our country is in decline.” Later Ramaswamy said “It is NOT morning in America.” So much for the Party of Reagan, eh?

Nikki Haley was formerly ambassador to the UN and conducted herself in such a manner, speaking very professionally. Haley said, correctly, that it was Republicans under the Trump Organization (where she served of course) that exploded the deficit. She admitted that is an issue everyone has to confront. She said that while she is pro-life, women should not be persecuted and prosecuted for being pregnant. She also said “what (the people) will tell you is, it is time for a new conservative leader… Trump is the most disliked politician in the country – and WE CAN’T WIN A GENERAL ELECTION THAT WAY.”

Asa Hutchinson, who was notably the only candidate who refused to raise a hand on the question of whether they would support Trump as the nominee, didn’t speak much, but he was very forthright on the point that Trump has disqualified himself, morally if not legally. Chris Christie said much the same thing, demurring on the point of whether he committed crimes but saying that character is an issue and the Party should not be supporting someone of such low character. He was basically saying the same thing Nikki Haley did, but took a lot more flak. At which point, he said the line of the night: “That’s the great thing about this country: Booing is allowed, but it doesn’t change the truth.”

And the response was generally, “SEZ YOU, COMMIE!”

Which is of course the issue in a nutshell. This was an audience that seriously believes that emotional partisanship can change the truth. The loudest cheers of the night, as with the question of who would support Trump as the nominee, were for “the elephant not in the room.” It was a decent debate in and of itself actually, mainly in the first hour, because you got these guys to talk about policy issues. And because you didn’t have Trump constantly talking over everybody, including the Fox hosts, to blather about himself. But the point is that policy doesn’t matter. About an hour in they had to bring up Trump and his legal issues, because Republican voters don’t care about policy issues, they want gladiatorial combat, and Fox knows that better than anybody. So since none of these guys have national reputations of their own, Fox got them to catfight over Trump. From their perspective it was the best of both worlds cause they got to bring him up without him being a liability to the event.

With the Republican Party, even the “adults in the room”, that is, the hosts, the network and most of the candidates, also believe that their emotions and wishes can change the truth of their situation, which is that this is not a party of conservatives but a Jonestown cult that would drink the Kool-Aid and belly up to the bar for seconds. They are of course still dominant in certain states mainly because they make the laws in those states, but everywhere else – including a lot of places where Democrats have no purchase – they’re losing the voters. Haley IS right – you can’t win nationally with the most despised person in the country. But try telling that to the cultists who think Trump is an invincible God-Emperor who’s gonna live forever and doesn’t have to worry about what happens when he’s gone. Not that he hasn’t lived an amazingly long time given his habits. But the adults in the room still think that what they do matters, on the impression that SOME day Trump’s not gonna be in the picture.

Ha Ha Ha. They’ve been wishing that for years and it hasn’t happened yet. I mean nobody’s gonna care so much about this on Thursday evening. Cause of course that’s when Liddle Donnie Clown Boy is obliged to surrender himself at the jailhouse in Atlanta, AND get a mugshot like all his lieutenants did Wednesday. Of course on one of his social media posts he taunted the judges for making him post bond, like he’s supposed to be slipping off to “Russia Russia Russia” and crash with Putin for the rest of his life. That would NOT be a good idea for obvious reasons, foremost among them that his overwhelming lead in party polls means he IS going to be the Republican nominee, meaning there’s always a chance he could win the general election. Plus, he’d have to somehow ditch his Secret Service detail, whose job is kind of keeping an eye on him at all times. But you never know. Sometime tomorrow he could be commandeering a white Bronco and trying to get a plane to Venezuela or somewhere. I mean, that would be UNBELIEVABLY STUPID. One of those things where you go “Even Trump can’t be THAT STUPID!” Which is what makes it all the more likely. Trump is like the Homer Simpson of fascism: Every time you think, “he can’t get THAT stupid!” he always finds a way to top himself.

The other surprise factor – which frankly I consider LESS likely than Trump trying to make a break for it – would be if the Georgia authorities, backed up by feds, surrounded Trump in the jail and said, “Hey you know all these conditions we set to release you from detention? You remember where we said you weren’t allowed to defame or threaten anyone involved in the case including law enforcement or witnesses or other people in the trial? And you remember when you posted the bond you specifically agreed you “shall make no threat of any direct or indirect nature” including but “not limited to, posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media”? And what did you do then, Donnie?”

“Here’s your cell, Donnie. That’s where you’re staying till the end of the trial.”

Of course that would cause the entire “conservative” media sphere to explode like Krakatoa, as would Trump trying to flee America, because then they’d have more egg on their faces than the co-star in a James Deen money shot. Either way, Trump is once again the only object of attention, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Monkey See, Monkey Do

This is another rant about Trump. But not entirely.

As we know, on August 1, Deranged Jack Smith (this is his first name now, apparently) released the federal charges against Donald Trump in regard to the January 6 case, and then the week after that Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis released state RICO charges against not only Trump but 18 co-conspirators including Rudy Guiliani and other insiders like John Eastman. Why does this matter compared to the other charges piling up on Trump? Because this is a state case, and a hypothetical President Trump or other Republican president cannot pardon state charges. Moreover pardons in Georgia are handled by panel, so the Republican Governor of Georgia cannot pardon Trump even if he were inclined to do so (which he is NOT). Moreover, the premise of a RICO case is that a criminal conspiracy existed. Unlike Smith’s federal cases, Willis does not need to entertain Trump’s bogus defense that he “really believed” he won and “didn’t think” he was doing anything wrong. All the State needs to do is establish that a conspiracy existed and that Trump was the focus of it.

Trump has been responding in his usual manner: with bullying and sleaze. He suggested that the former Lieutenant Governor in Georgia not testify against him, calling him a “nasty disaster” because he wouldn’t entertain Trump’s fantasy scenario that the election was stolen. He calls District Attorney Fani Willis a racist (remember, the world is run by Black people and they’re all trying to keep the Orange man down). On one of his weekend speeches, Trump decided to excrete this little story about how this certain DA had a case against a criminal in the past and ended up having an affair with him. Totally unproven, of course, but Trump’s fan club of not-so-closet racists ate it right up. Like caviar, or other Russian imports.

August 15, Trump posted on Truf Censhal saying “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete & will be presented by me at a major News Conference at 11:00 AM on Monday of next week in Bedminster, New Jersey. Based on the results of this CONCLUSIVE Report, all charges should be dropped against me & others – There will be a complete EXONERATION! They never went after those that Rigged the Election. They only went after those that fought to find the RIGGERS!”

Rigger, please.

‘Course, Mr. Alligator Mouth Hummingbird Ass ended up retracting all this last Thursday, saying “Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment”. Yes, Donnie. Because that’s where cases are tried. In court. I’m sure your lawyers would prefer it that way, as, unlike you, they have training and qualifications and know what the fuck they’re doing.


The irony being that Trump clearly wants to pull an OJ and try this case in the media, but it would actually be easier to try it in court, because if Trump had competent lawyers (hypothetically) they could find all manner of technicalities to remove or mitigate charges, whereas the more he wants to turn it into a media spectacle, the more guilty and defensive he looks and the more likely it is he will turn off the people who he needs to vote for him. And since his transparent strategy has been to muck with things until the election in the hopes he will actually win, so he can declare himself God-Emperor and make Smith’s charges (at least) go away, that’s counterproductive.

But speaking of Trump being chickenshit, the other news this week is that Donnie decided not to attend the little debate of presidential candidates scheduled for Wednesday on Fox. Instead he’s releasing an interview he pre-recorded with Fox News exile and fellow professional racist Tucker Carlson.

In a New York Times article, the decision is framed largely from Trump’s perspective as a desire to get back at Fox for not uncritically reporting his positions 100 percent of the time, and because he seems to think they have it out for him. “Also, they purposely show the absolutely worst pictures of me, especially the big ‘orange’ one with my chin pulled way back. They think they are getting away with something, they’re not.” Spoiler Alert, Donnie: They’re ALL bad pictures. They’re ALL big orange pictures with a receding chin. Because you are an accident of Nature that never should have been, and you take a roller of orange paint and layer it on your face attempting to look younger. The end result just makes you look like a lobeless Ferengi with a Tribble toupee.

In truth, there are good reasons for Trump to avoid a debate, because it reduces his legal liability or chance of embarrassing himself if he goes “unscripted” with somebody like Chris Christie who might actually take advantage. Also: Trump has refused to sign the Republican National Committee requirement that anybody who participates in the debates has to pledge loyalty to whoever ends up being the nominee. (As Donnie’s wives could tell you, one word he can’t understand is ‘loyalty’) But given how most polls show Trump far ahead of not only Ron DeSantis but DeSantis and any two other candidates combined, it’s easy to believe the stated position that Trump’s not participating because his lead is so big he doesn’t need to compete.

There are now eight “qualified” candidates for the debate, not including Trump, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to help the moderation if they don’t have to keep cutting Trump’s mic when it’s not his turn, going MommeeMommeeMommeeLookitmeLookitmeLookitmeLOOK AT ME YOU GODDAMN BITCH, but it’s going to be another one of those points to raise the question as to why any of these guys are even there.

But if any of this legal folderol actually undermines Trump’s performance in primaries, it means the debate matters because it raises the question of whether there even is any such thing as a Republican Party outside of Trump. And so far, all signs point to No.

Most institutions operate on a premise of “monkey see, monkey do”, especially the Republican Party, which is owned by the biggest howler monkey in the world. Which is why you see the more ambitious Republicans trying to out-Trump Trump because they perceive that’s where the Party is going.

Take entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s been getting a lot of press recently. Ramaswamy had an interview with conservative Hugh Hewitt and said that once we develop our own semiconductor supply, China can have Taiwan: “they have unfinished nationalistic business dating back to their civil war in 1949,” he added. “And if that’s the sole basis for Xi Jinping going after Taiwan after we have semiconductor independence, then you know what? I am not going to send our sons and daughters to die over that conflict. And that’s consistent with my position on Ukraine as well.” In that regard, Ramaswamy told CNN’s Jim Acosta “I would freeze the current lines of control and that would leave parts of the Donbas region with Russia, I would also further make a commitment that NATO would not admit Ukraine to NATO.” Acosta told the presidential hopeful “that sounds like a win for Putin,” which Ramaswamy countered, “Our goal should not be for Putin to lose, our goal should be for America to win.”

May I ask, in what world does America not lose if Putin is winning?

The logical answer is, only a world where America is a partner of Putin and not a balance against him. And given Putin’s absolutism, this necessarily means an unequal partnership where America is subservient to Putin.

And given that Putin has had to make himself largely subservient to Xi Jinping just to keep running his war, that would make China the greatest partner in the triumvirate. In any event, we could no longer say we were leading the “free world.”

And then of course, you have DeSantis, who has all along based his politics on following Trump’s lead and now wonders why nobody thinks he’d be a better leader. But apparently he’s gonna keep doing that. In a now well-publicized leak that is not likely to improve his polls, DeSantis’ debate advisers told him “Defend Trump when Chris Christie attacks him” and “Attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times.” I mean usually when somebody leaks your strategy you adapt and try something else that the enemy hasn’t prepared for, but DeSantis hasn’t been that flexible so far.

No surprise though that he and other candidates still want to defend Trump when the whole premise of the debate is that one of them is for some reason unexplained supposed to be a better choice. Especially when Mike Pence’s whole position is, “Look, Donald Trump tried to stop the proceeding of an election process and tried to have me lynched but I don’t think he did anything illegal.” And of course most of these guys are pledging to pardon Trump if he’s found guilty, if they get elected, which really begs the question, why do you think your chances of beating Trump to the nomination, let alone beating Biden, are greater than Trump’s chances of beating the rap?

Not to mention that the nominally better choices like Tim Scott, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, while certainly preferable to Trump and his mini-Trumps, are still part of the same Republican Party that has its own issues with credibility, especially Christie, who was a problematic Governor of New Jersey and a former Trump enabler. I mean, better that he turns back to the side of reason rather than riding the toilet rim all the way down like the other cultists, but objectively speaking there’s not much to vote for if you’re an independent, let alone a liberal.

As for where the Republican Party’s collective mindset is and what they have to offer the country at large, let’s prep with one of the several bingo cards being offered on social media:

In this, I keep going back to a quote I’ve used before that really explains how the Right went where it did. There was an article in Reason Magazine, March 2017, after Trump got in the White House, and they were having an interview with Congressman Thomas Massie (BR.-Kentucky) who at the time was described as “libertarian-leaning.” And they were talking about how Trump was attacking the Freedom Caucus and the various other small-l libertarian, “ideological” people, and the question was: “As a person like you, a congressman like you, when you are in the Freedom Caucus, when you’re lined up ideologically, and you have a president that is like this, what is it like for governing, and what is your hope like for the future?”
And Massie said: “Well, I’m still hopeful, okay? There are moments when populism lines up with libertarianism. But let me tell you about a realization that I came to when I was in Iowa campaigning for Senator Rand Paul to be president.

“You see in 2012, his dad did very well in Iowa, got like a quarter of the vote and a quarter of the vote in New Hampshire, and did very well in Nevada. I ran in 2012 on the same sort of libertarian ideas. Senator Rand Paul had blown a hole through the establishment Republican Party in Kentucky in 2010 on libertarian/republican ideas, and so I thought the libertarian ideology within the Republican party was really catching on, that it was popular. But then when I went to Iowa I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”

I should think, especially if the left-socialist political philosophy becomes dominant simply for lack of a serious alternative, that people will once again start examining the potential of a limited constitutional government that acts as a referee in private affairs and not as an interested party. But this is clearly not cool even in the actual Libertarian Party, let alone the larger Right political spectrum. In the short term, “conservatives” don’t want a serious political philosophy that can get the public behind it and change the government long-term. They want the craziest son of a bitch in the race. This is especially clear given how Massie, and the Freedom Caucus collectively, went from being a libertarian counter on Trumpnik populism to yet another extension of it.

If these guys had anything to offer other than being not “woke”, and if their actual policies on issues like abortion were not so deeply unpopular and counterproductive, they might be competitive without Trump. As it is, all they can offer is being the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And nobody can do that better than Trump. So in the unlikely event that Trump can’t make it to the finish line, this debate is significant only in that it confirms the real problem. The problem is not Trump per se. The problem is a voter base that seriously thinks Trump is the best choice.

Common People Can’t Be Trusted With The Vote, Which Is Why We’re Asking You To Vote To Take Your Votes Away

Well now, on the first day of August 2023 we finally had Mr. Smith’s federal indictment of ex-Viceroy Donald Trump on charges related his attempted coup on January 6, 2021. Trump is the sole defendant, although the text mentions six un-named co-conspirators who are currently unindicted, probably to speed up the process of trial proceedings. Defendant Trump is under four charges. Count One is 18 U.S.C. 371 – Conspiracy to Defraud the United States. Notably, even before the actual Election Day 2020, Trump spread rumors about the legitimacy of the ballot verification and the results. He keeps stating that his efforts are supposed to “Stop The Steal” and stop “election fraud.”

The indictment lays out: “From on our about November 14, 2020 through on or about January 6, 2021, in the District of Columbia and elsewhere, the Defendant (Trump) did knowingly combine, conspire, confederate and agree with co-conspirators… The Defendant and co-conspirators used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate results and change electoral votes from the Defendant’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., to electoral votes for the Defendant. … The Defendant and co-conspirators organized fraudulent slates of electors in seven targeted states (listed), attempting to mimic the procedures that the legitimate electors were supposed to follow under the Constitution and other federal and state laws. …The Defendant and co-conspirators attempted to enlist the Vice President to use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to fraudulently alter the election results … After it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the Vice President would not alter the election results, a large and angry crowd – including many individuals whom the Defendant had deceived into believing the Vice President could and might alter the election results – violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding. As violence ensued, the Defendant and co-conspirators exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to lay false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification base on those claims.”

In other words: ELECTION FRAUD.

One of these indictment counts, action against the citizen’s right to vote, (18 U.S.C. 241) is called ‘the Ku Klux Klan’ act, which given Trump’s family history, has gotta sting.

And yet the Fuehrer of Failure is still acting like HE’S the victim. Even before August 1, Trump responded to his metastasizing list of indictments by speaking to his fan club on June 26: “I’m being indicted for you,” Trump said, “and I believe the ‘you’ is more than 200 million people that love our country that are out there, and they love our country.”

Yes. Because the first three words we all think of when we think of Donald Trump are “self sacrificing altruist”.

Yet, the Church of Trump, who seem to think the actual Jesus is a woke pussy, still eat it up. While a majority of independents think Trump should drop out of the race, NPR says over 80 percent of Republicans want him to stay in the race and over 60 percent think he should be the nominee. In the previous indictment (for Mar-a-Lago) “Kevin McCarthy, the House speaker, lamented “a dark day for the United States of America” and said: “It is unconscionable for a president to indict the leading candidate opposing him.” Ron DeSantis, apparently forgetting he’s supposed to be running AGAINST Trump, said: “The weaponisation of federal law enforcement represents a mortal threat to a free society. We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.” One headline in The Hill said: “Trump indictment fuels GOP anger over DOJ ‘weaponization’“.

Oh, the Trumpniks are angry that their sweet little boy MIGHT actually get punished for being naughty? Have they ever considered the rage and hate that the REST of us feel that he used fraud and force to try and override our votes? Have they ever considered the rage and hate that the rest of the country feels at this stupid little brat who clearly doesn’t know what he’s doing, but insists on always being the center of attention and will never go away? Have they ever considered the rage and hate that the rest of the country feels about a political party that enables him every chance they get, and will not let us get rid of him, no matter how much damage he does to them??

This is what’s so infuriating about these people. They’re “gaslighting”, but they’re not even gaslighting. Gaslighting, to borrow from the original source, means a serious organized effort to alter perceptions and information to convince a target of untrue things. Contrary to what liberals say, what Trumpniks do isn’t gaslighting, it’s “don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.” Like when Trump’s latest lawyer, John Lauro, did the tour of Sunday chat shows and made the proposal that because Trump couldn’t get a fair trial in DC (where the events of the charges occurred), they should move the venue to West Virginia, where the jury would be more “racially diverse.” As opposed to, say, Maine or Idaho?

Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle stick, that is such screaming bullshit that not even a Democratic Senator would fall for it. (Well, maybe Dianne Feinstein.) But this is the Trumpniks’ entire approach to policy.

Serious question: WHY? Why do we put up with these people? They don’t take anything seriously, they don’t know how to run a government, they can’t even LIE right.

To go with what I’ve said on several other occasions: If you don’t have a better idea than your opponent, and you don’t have reason, and you don’t have negotiation, the only way you can get your agenda effected is with force. And force ultimately comes down to who has the biggest (or at least best armed) gang. By definition, you’re never going to be better armed than the government. Even in THIS country. And as for being the biggest gang, the existential terror of the Trumpniks is their subconscious realization that they are not the biggest gang, and at their current rate of popularity, never will be again.

So if a confrontation is ultimately not going to favor them, how do they keep getting over? Intimidation: the fear of what could happen if we don’t go along with them. Consider Trump’s role model, Daddy Vlad Putin. Every week or so, Putin and his state media stooges threaten to nuke everybody in the West if we don’t be nice to them and let them walk into Ukraine and kill everybody there. And the only reason NATO hasn’t already walked in and taken names like we did in the former Yugoslavia is because Putin does have nukes, and even with slipshod Russian engineering, some of them might go off as intended. Any strategic exchange would favor us, but Russia would do some damage- we just don’t know how much.

Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

As with Russia, this only really works if the government’s bullshit is a fait accompli that the people have to accept regardless of how stupid it is cause the government not only has the monopoly on force, they have the presumption of authority. But unlike Russia, one side has not clearly won control of the government. We don’t HAVE to put up with this bullshit “just because” Republicans are the authorities, even if THEY seem to think so.

Which is why I waited until after August 8 to comment on all this, because that’s when a state initiative was put up for vote, and the result of it is a good measure of how the public at large is reacting to the Party of Trump and its machinations.

In Ohio, the Republican-dominated state legislature foisted an “Issue 1” on the ballot for August 8, just months before an already planned Election Day vote to guarantee abortion rights and reproductive freedoms. Issue 1 nowhere mentions abortion in its text. What it does do is say any citizen ballot initiative would have to go from simple majority (51%) to 60 percent vote to succeed. It would have also required petitioners to get signatures from all counties to proceed (as opposed to the current 50 percent) and would have removed a ten day provision to correct erroneous signatures on the petition. “Issue 1 was proposed by State Representative Stewart and the state’s top election official, Secretary of State Frank LaRose. According to Stewart, Issue 1 is intended to stop “far-left ballot proposals” and “ballot campaigns [featuring] destructive policies that [liberal groups] could never get through a state legislature”, while according to LaRose, Issue 1 is “100% about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution”. LaRose later claimed that his statement was taken out of context and generally called the issue a “good government” move that blocks influence from out-of-state special interests.” The arbitrary and expedient nature of this scheduling was made clear in that House Bill 458, passed just months earlier, eliminated the August special election except in cases of fiscal emergency, “the stated rationale for this provision, given by Secretary of State Frank LaRose and others at the time, was the consistently low turnout seen in historical August elections.” Emphasis mine. In other words, break your own rules, so you can break the rules again. It’s almost like rules don’t matter, and laws don’t matter, and we’re “Fuck You and obey orders, cause we’re the government and you’re not.”

There was a good article in The Bulwark demonstrating exactly why this didn’t work in an otherwise ruby-red state: The author interviewed an art teacher in Cleveland, saying “(She) acknowledged she was concerned about the abortion factor in all this, but made it quite clear that abortion wasn’t the major reason she was voting no. Rather, she was mad about what she called Republicans “overstepping their bounds,” about their having “no respect for anything or anybody” and being willing to stomp on the rights of others “to get what they want.”

“It’s not that I expect them to act all nice and friendly while they are attempting to stab people in the back,” she told me. “But in this case, the feeling I am getting is that they thought most people were too dumb to figure out anything and that they could just walk all over all of us as if that is just how this world of politics works.”

Robert Alexander, a political scientist at Ohio Northern University came to this conclusion: “What the voters said to the Republican party in this election—and I’m talking about voters who voted both for Biden and Trump—is ‘Don’t try to treat us like fools.’”

This maneuver demonstrated both shamelessness and utter contempt for all voters, including (or especially) Republicans. Even if you are anti-abortion, even if you are in general on board with the Republican Party agenda, the premise of voting “Yes” on Issue 1 was: use the power of your vote so that in the future your vote will count for less. And on issues having nothing to do with abortion. But that is simply of a piece with what has been established. Donald Trump WILL BE the Republican presidential nominee. The Republican National Committee still has not enacted a party platform since 2016. The closest thing they had was an announcement at the 2020 RNC that “the Republican Party has and will continuously support the Presidents America-first agenda” – in other words, the only purpose of the Party is whatever Donald Trump says it is. Not only does he not acknowledge he lost the election, none of his attorneys will admit he lost the election, his entire legal defense in his case is that he “really believed” he won the election, and 2020 Republicans like Kari Lake in Arizona are still running around insisting “I WON.” For Trump, elections don’t count unless he wins. For an increasing number of Republicans, elections don’t count unless they win. That being the case it begs the question of why Trump and his Fan Club are even running for office when they won’t accept the results unless they win. If you’re voting for that Party in 2024, you’re voting to make sure that your vote will never matter again.

The irony being that this measure was put down by a substantial margin, but not by 60 percent or more – thus proving the need for the No vote. If you need 60 percent to get anything done, in this country you’ll never get anything done, and apparently that’s the way the 43 percent want it.

Which just goes to show that while the Party of Trump will never be a majority – especially at the rate things are going – they will always be in a position to undermine the country, at least as long as the system “works” the way it does.

It works the way it does because the federal system of our Constitution was specifically made to be counter-majoritarian with a whole bunch of choke points, and in many ways that’s justified but in retrospect just seems to be a case of the Founders out-thinking themselves. In particular, with the Electoral College, “A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. …Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” It was assumed that leaving the final choice for president to a general majority vote would elevate a candidate with “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” but a considered panel of electors from each state would be able to confirm a reasonable choice.

Well, as it turns out, while the American people collectively may be dumb enough to require a warning on cardboard sunscreens reading “DO NOT DRIVE WHILE SCREEN IS IN PLACE” the simple majority has never been dumb enough to say that a four-time bankrupt Jersey casino boss and “reality” TV star should get access to our national secrets and nuclear weapons codes. That takes a determined plurality in just enough states to force its will on a gross majority. And it was thus that the mechanism that the Founders intended to stop a creature of “foreign powers” from gaining ascendancy was the only mechanism by which that result could have occurred. And even then, that particular result only happened once.

Likewise the idea that a president or other official requires a majority vote to impeach in the House but a two-thirds vote in the Senate was considered an appropriate bar because any offense that could justify impeachment would have to be sufficiently grave that the need for conviction was obvious. But The Federalist Papers were written on the premise that the legislature, executive and judiciary were separate, even competing branches of government, and the Senate was an objective body to judge. That’s the Rules As Written. In the game as played, the three branches of government are the Democrats, the Republicans and the judiciary, and the last is selected by the dominant party of the other two. Accordingly, no impeachment vote is going to get the required threshold for conviction, because the Senate does not think of itself as a competing branch with the White House. One party thinks of the President as competition and the other party thinks he’s their boss. And you’re always going to have at least one-third of the Senate that will not vote against their boss. Which is why every time the Lamestream Media gives Trump the epithet “twice-impeached” they may think they’re attaching shame, but they’re merely making it clear what a joke the setup is. Impeachment should only be needed ONCE.

Even so, the Constitution’s Article II is not a universal standard in state and federal laws. But now that the problem with plurality supremacy is becoming clear to everyone, the Party of Trump wants to make it the standard and not an exception.

It’s the only way they can keep power.

I mean, they COULD try to do what Reagan and Buckley did and use positive philosophy to explain why the Right is superior to the liberal-left spectrum, but apparently that’s just being “woke” or something.

But now we are seeing exactly how the Trump Party’s anti-reality is going over with the rest of the country. Prior to Dobbs, Republicans could claim that it was Democrats who were trying to be extremists in removing all restrictions to abortion. Of course this was blanking out the point that Roe vs. Wade, which established the “quickening” or fetal viability standard, WAS the common-sense compromise on the abortion issue. And now that’s gone. And the same people who said the Supreme Court should not have made a unilateral ruling and the subject should have gone to the states are the same people trying to force abortion prohibition on states where it previously didn’t exist. And when you consider this radicalism in the wake of Trump, and then consider that Trump, the former New York socialite, has probably adapted more to his Party than the other way around, you see exactly how he achieved such identity fusion with the Evangelical cult that currently controls the Party: In retrospect, the Evangelicals are the only partner that Trump has never cheated or betrayed. He DID get the Israel embassy moved to Jerusalem, he DID get three Supreme Court Justices in one term and those three justices were the votes Alito and Thomas needed to kill Roe. Trump lost the Electoral College in 2020 before the Dobbs vs. Mississippi decision. And the rest of the country knows exactly who they have to thank for that decision.

So for all the polls I’m seeing showing Trump in parity with Joe Biden in the presidential race, I don’t think Trump’s chances in 2024 are any better than in 2020, when he had all the advantages of incumbency and was not saddled with all the scandals that came after that election. Not to say he can’t win – because God is real, and He hates us all – but as I’ve said, even the Supreme Being can only do so much to cover for his Meshuggah Messiah’s incompetence. It becomes that much more obvious when people in states where the Democratic Party has very little presence are still rejecting the Republican radical agenda.

So keep on treating voters like fools, Trumpniks. Next year, we’ll see who the real idiots are.

The Answer To Life, The Universe, and Everything.

Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.”

William Beveridge

On Thursday July 27, everyone in the mainstream media was waiting on the grand jury in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of the January 6 insurrection to make formal indictments on Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. That didn’t happen. What did happen is that in the Mar-a-Lago case, Smith suddenly released a “superseding indictment” meaning that it overrides the indictment previously released in June as it contains new information. The indictment previously detailed 37 counts against Trump and his aide Walt Nauta for withholding documents and obstructing justice in the government’s attempts to regain those documents. How many new counts are added in this week’s presentation? Five. And how many does that make added to 37?

42!

42! FORTY-TWO counts!
AH HA ha ha haha HA!!!

Specifically, the indictment now includes Mar-a-Lago employee Carlos de Olivera on charges including “Altering, Destroying, Mutilating or Concealing an Object”, by means including draining the pool in such a way that it just happened to flood the room that contained the servers holding the resort’s surveillance footage.

This is all just corroborating evidence on the point that the government’s case is intended to establish Trump’s ‘mens rea’ or consciousness of guilt. And kids, if you still think ‘white privilege’ is not a thing, consider that positions like “I had every right to take those documents”, “I didn’t do anything wrong” and “the election was rigged and stolen” are considered serious legal defenses that a prosecution must address before making a case. In this case, it’s more like ‘orange privilege’, because such defenses usually don’t get too far for people who aren’t Trump.

Hey Donnie… have you ever tried NOT doing crimes?

Guess not.

But again: Not like it matters. “A New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday sees Trump leading DeSantis by 37 points, 54% to 17%, among likely Republican primary voters. Those numbers come on the heels of a recent Fox News poll showing DeSantis trailing Trump by 40 points in the Iowa GOP presidential caucus.” No one besides Ron DeSantis even gets above 3 percent. Which raises the question of why these other people are even running. Especially why they’re even running when they don’t want to say anything bad about Trump. Not that it helps if you do. This weekend, Republican presidential candidate and former Texas Congressman Will Hurd (no, no one else has heard of him either) appeared at Iowa’s “Lincoln Day” dinner (where Trump was treated like the guest of honor) and was practically booed off the stage for saying what everybody knew: “Donald Trump is not running for president to represent people that voted for him in 2016 and 2020,” Hurd said. “Donald Trump is running to stay out of prison.”

(Seriously, that should be his campaign slogan: TRUMP 2024: P-P-P-PLEASE Re-Elect Me, I’m Too Pretty For Jail)

It’s been that way all year. At the Faith and Freedom conference on the weekend of June 24, Trump was the featured speaker on Sunday June 25, and the one presidential candidate who dared to criticize him, New Jersey’s Chris Christie, was openly booed and mocked.

During that event, there were conferences where Christians pointed out how Trump has delivered for them on social issues where other Republicans didn’t. “During one of the conference sessions, Republican communications consultant Alice Stewart drew loud applause when she said that “we may not like how he does things, but he has delivered on what we wanted.”

Stewart also said “I didn’t vote for him to be my pastor.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

Ahem.

So let’s review:

Fake hair, fake tan, fake suit – constantly surrounds himself with ostentatious displays of wealth – constantly brags about how much money he has but is constantly begging you for YOURS – always uses God as the ultimate appeal to authority – and when he gets caught doing crimes, you’re supposed to just forgive him, cause he’s against abortion? Or something?

Republicans… are you SURE you didn’t vote for a pastor?

Isn’t this exactly what we can expect when America’s designated not-liberal party is almost completely controlled by Evangelicals? Isn’t this the same celebrity televangelist worship that we’ve been seeing since at least Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart? The same dysfunctional, authoritarian leader who resembles Zeus more than Jesus? Isn’t this exactly the same kind of dysfunctional leadership culture that you think is proper for your spiritual communities?

You have the right to decide the organization of your own spiritual community, but you do NOT have the right to impose that model on the secular government when the rest of the country disagrees. That is the difference between faith and politics. Which you would know, if you KNEW the difference between faith and politics.

But then the whole point of “conservatism” these days is that nobody knows the difference between faith and politics and no one thinks there should be any.

If you want to know why the Founders made “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof” the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, maybe you should look at contemporary Irish history. Or French history. Or German history. There was this thing called The Thirty Years War, which is a great example of what happens when you have a large area composed of several states with different Christian denominations and you insist on imposing a central dogma on all of them.

But, if facts were good enough for you, you wouldn’t be voting Trump. Which is just another example of identity fusion, because Trump has the same attitude that you can just bull through inconvenient facts and if you do it for long enough it won’t matter. He, and you, assume this because it actually worked once, in a 2016 election that is looking like that much more like a fluke as time goes on. Because the establishment candidate was so unacceptable to so many of us, you thought you could excrete the most redolent bowel movement you could strain out and call that a President. And the fact that you continue to support him despite his mounting liabilities really says a lot more about you than about him.

Even if Democrats and their economy remain unpopular, the rest of the country is not so personalist as you are, they are not as obsessed with “reality” TV and “woke” and culture wars as you are, and they know that’s all you have to offer. You support Trump not despite his flaws but specifically BECAUSE OF THEM. You identify with Trump in the same way that you identify with other “strong” (read: unethical) leaders, and because YOU are the bigger problem, you and your laws, your “Moms Against Liberty” and your court cases to change the laws against both the majority will and common sense, the more you identify with Liddle Donnie Clown Boy, the more I am going to make fun of him, because I know that hurts you. And frankly, who ever heard of you?

So I know how scared to death you are of Trump getting indicted this week, cause we all know Trump is scared to death of it. Because even if the Mar-a-Lago case is under Judge Cannon, and the Florida jury pool is Trump country, we’re still waiting on that indictment in Washington DC, where the jury pool might include relatives of some of the people the Trump mob killed. And then of course there’s the Georgia case where a judge just tossed out a Trump “lawyer” attempt to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis from making a case against Trump (for trying to extort the state government to ‘find’ enough votes to ‘swing’ the state election), because “while being the subject (or even target) of a highly publicized criminal investigation is likely an unwelcome and unpleasant experience, no court ever has held that that status alone provides a basis for the courts to interfere with or halt the investigation”. In other words, that’s not how the law works, Donnie.

Plus which, this is a state case and not a federal election, so should Trump win in 2024, or in the even less likely event that some other Republican gets nominated and still chooses to serve as Trump’s gimp, said Republican could not use the presidential pardon to wipe out a conviction in the Georgia case.

It would be one thing if there were just one case and you could roll the dice on the jury or evidence going your way, but when you can’t stop doing crimes, the more likely it is the dice will land Trump on:

GO TO JAIL.

Go To Jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass GO. Do not collect a presidential pension.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL!

You have the knowledge that you’ve brought such shame and disgrace on your family name that Don Junior is thinking of changing HIS surname to Kushner! You don’t get a consolation prize! You don’t get a boxed supply of Rice-A-Roni, the San Francisco Treat! (TM) You don’t even get a copy of our home game! You’re a COMPLETE LOSER!!!

Relax, Charlie… I Got An ANGLE.

“We can’t have someone in the Oval Office who doesn’t understand the meaning of classified information.”

-Donald Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign

Since June 8 was not only the day that Pat Robertson died, but the day Special Counsel Jack Smith finally announced federal charges against once-and-future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump, it is that much more a day which will live in Schadenfreude.

That was Thursday. Friday was the day that Smith actually had the indictment unsealed for public release so we could get to see just how many spines are on the cactus that is going up Trump’s ass. When we first heard the news it was around seven charges. The current count is 37. I had heard it was 38. When you’ve got so many, it’s hard to keep track.

The whole series of revelations leading up to Friday systematically demolished all of Trump’s chimerical defenses, including the otherwise plausible defense that he was too stupid and ignorant to know what he was doing. It is perhaps for such reason that people gave his premise that he could declassify government documents “just by thinking about it” a lot more credibility than it deserved. At the very least, you couldn’t prove HE didn’t think that. Not anymore. The indictment says, among many, many other things, that Trump had shown a document referring to a military plan against “Country A”, and told his guests, “See, as president, I could have declassified it … Now, I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

Documents were piled up in various locations at the estate, including a bathroom that had its own ceiling and wall chandeliers. (For the man who has everything.) At one point he had had documents taken with him to a vacation home in New Jersey just to make sure he had physical access to them. On at least two occasions he showed these documents to people without security clearances. The evidence trail indicates that Trump and his staff played an elaborate shell game with not only the National Archives and other government representatives (including the Department of Justice in their subpoena) but with at least one of Trump’s own lawyers, identified here as “Attorney A.” At one point in the subpoena request, Trump asked an attorney, “what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them? Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?”

According to one of the charges, “The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”

Hey! Didn’t they kill the Rosenbergs for that?

If Trump were somehow convicted of multiple charges, the terms would be served concurrently, but the longest single term would be 20 years. Which is basically a life sentence if you’re over 70 and you eat more fast food than I do. Although as I say, my suspicion is that Trump will die of old age in the next few years anyway but linger on as a zombie for the rest of the century while he ties up his case in litigation with God.

This week was also noteworthy because of the death of Robert Hanssen, a seasoned FBI agent who turned out to have been a major source of intelligence for the Soviet Union. Hanssen served in the FBI from 1976 until 2001 when he was arrested after long-term investigation established he had been selling secrets to the Russians that among other things led to the exposure of undercover agents who were then executed by the KGB. Notably, Hanssen continued selling secrets to the Russian Federation after the fall of the Soviet Union. With the overwhelming evidence against him, to avoid the death penalty, Hanssen made a deal for life imprisonment in 2001, and died this June 5, apparently of natural causes.

If we re-elect Donald Trump, that would be like electing Robert Hanssen president.

If we re-elect Donald Trump, knowing what we know now, we will not deserve to lead the free world, and very quickly thereafter we will NOT be leading it, because all the other nations in that sphere know which side Donald Trump is on.

We would also not be leading the free world because we would no longer be in it. We have seen what his followers want to do if they ever get back in charge. We have seen what he was willing to do to stay in power: Whether you like it or not, he went silent for hours while his followers, acting in his name, riled up by his speech on January 6 2021, the day the Electoral College vote was to be certified in Congress, stormed the Capitol to stop the proceedings, under the impression that Trump was coming there to lead them, beating and breaking and threatening. Well, he wasn’t totally silent. At 2:24 pm, he twitted, “Mike Pence didn’t the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts” – in other words, blaming Pence as Vice President because he would not certify the “alternate” Trumpnik electors versus the ones that had already been officially certified, which he did not have the constitutional authority to do. In other words: Hang Mike Pence. And he would not have been the last.

If Donald Trump is not incarcerated, he is going to turn the rest of America into a prison.

The main reason Trump got elected the first time is because of a unique set of circumstances that will not happen again. Mainly, Hillary Clinton was his opponent, and even the rest of us who hated Trump still hated her guts. Even people like Bernie Sanders who are more leftist than the rest of us still hated Hillary (for that very reason). And even then she might have won in 2016 if FBI director James Comey hadn’t re-opened an investigation on her just before November. And even THEN she might have pulled through if she hadn’t taken so many “firewall” states for granted.

The people who didn’t vote Democrat because they couldn’t trust that Party now know they can’t keep their guard down as long as Trump can come back. Which leads to the other point, the difference between then and now is that people used to think of Trump as the cocky guy on “reality” TV and Comedy Central roasts who almost had a sense of humor and hung out with all kinds of people. He seemed like the reasonable alternative to the Democrat establishment. (Unless, like me, you’d been following his civilian career long enough to deduce that he was going to do to the country what he did to Atlantic City.) Now we know he’s a megalomaniac child with a skull full of oatmeal.

But precisely for that reason, he appealed to that crowd that had become more and more the majority in the Republican Party, the people who jeered at politically active celebrities and an education system that produced what Rush Limbaugh called “young skulls full of mush” without realizing that they themselves were being conditioned by talk radio and 24-hour “news” to see journalism as emotional entertainment. There was always a divide between the Republican “base” and the people they voted for because they would want to ban abortion or affirmative action or something else, whereas the people they voted for actually knew how Washington worked and saw people who disagreed with them as professional colleagues and not as wartime enemies who had to be destroyed by any means necessary. Just as Christ is the bridge between God and Man, Trump is the bridge between his Party and the base, because he’s the only Republican who can credibly pose as both an elitist and a populist. He’s the only guy who can tell both groups, “I’m one of YOU.”


And that’s his angle. Trump’s going to pull an OJ and try his case in the media and not a court of law.

He’s going to put on the poor, pitiful victim act, and it’s going to work on his marks, like it always does, because they see themselves as poor pitiful victims of… something. The deep state. The globalists. The Lizard People. The Elders of Zion. And he is their “voice”, their “retribution”, certainly their role model. The fun in dysfunctional. The Salieri of secessionists.

And keep in mind, these guys are cornered, and they know they are. Despite all their attempts at jiggering the election system, they lost elections in ruby-red states like Arizona and Georgia. They’re on borrowed time. Their whole “great replacement” sense of the world is that people like them are an endangered species, and socially, if not racially, they are. Not necessarily racially, because even cishet whiteys like me are sick of their shit. But they have that general sense of the world already and now they see their spiritual role model, this guy who has shown them they can indulge their worst selves, finally being called to account and they think, rightly, that if it could happen to him it could happen to ANYbody. Which is the joke. It happens to anybody BUT him. Normally when anybody else commits a crime they get at least investigated, if not punished.

And quit with the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” whining. The same Trumpniks who think their innocent little child is the most persecuted man in history scream like scalded cats when somebody brings up Hunter Biden or other Biden family “scandals”. At the Trump rallies, they still chant “LOCK HER UP!” They don’t object to punishment, they just judge on identity, not facts. I judge by facts, not identity.

If homeboy could have just stayed in retirement like Nixon and let the grownups try to clean up his mess, I don’t think anybody, including me, would care if he got to spend the rest of his life at Mar-a-Lago eating well-done steaks and double scoops of chocolate ice cream every night. But no. Trump’s problem is that he just can’t stop doing crimes. He is compulsive. As I said, Trump commits crimes like other people breathe, which is to say, he does so on reflex, without thinking, and if he ever stopped himself, he might die. And we all know the reason for this. Because this is a little boy who never grew up. And that’s because this is a little boy who clearly never got his ass spanked for bad behavior as a child, because he keeps pushing the envelope because he knows he can. After all, no one has ever stopped him before. When he told Billy Bush “when you’re a star, they let you do it” for once he was telling his truth. When you’re a star, you can grab the Constitution by the pussy. Because you gave the fetus fetishists enough votes to kill Roe v. Wade, and because the heads of the networks think you’re an entertaining buffoon who’s great for ratings.

Since Liddle Donnie Clown Boy went down the escalator in 2015, everyone has acted like he’s the God or High Lord of this Star Trek Mirror Universe we’re living in now, and can’t be stopped by anything, but the fact is, he’s been defeated more than once. And now even people who might otherwise agree with him (like Mitch McConnell) ought to know what the stakes are. If you let a megalomaniac child with a skull full of mush have access to our military secrets again, you might as well not even HAVE a country.

Even if his pet judge tries to stymie the Department of Justice case against him, she’s got an 11th Circuit Court of Appeals over her that has already demonstrated it has no time for her shit. And even if this case doesn’t work out, there’s still the 34 counts against Trump in New York. Not to mention the pending case in Atlanta where Trump is being investigated for ordering the Georgia Secretary of State to just “find” him enough votes to swing the state election.

Again, that’s what happens when you just can’t stop committing crimes.

As someone once said, the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.

This Memorial Day, Let’s Remember Having A Functional Government

This week, America approaches summer as it celebrates Memorial Day. It is a day that we honor those who died to serve this country. It seems approprate that this year we use the occasion to honor the memory of a government run by functional adults, cause it looks like we won’t see it again in our lifetime.

Late Saturday the breaking news was that President Biden and Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy had reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a federal debt default.

“The deal, if enacted, would boost the nation’s borrowing limit for two years and take the volatile issue of America’s credit worthiness off the table until after the next presidential election, according to multiple reports.”

Yeah, IF enacted. There’s the rub. Kevin McCarthy was unable to become Speaker of the new Republican House majority until he’d caved to other Republicans on every conceivable demand, one of which was that any one member could call for the Speaker’s removal at any time. Meaning that approval assumes that the whole thing won’t be torpedoed by some conceited needledick bugfucker just because he can. Please keep in mind that “conceited needledick bugfucker” is just my polite euphemism for “Matt Gaetz.”

The only reason this is even a crisis is because the United States government has imposed an artificial debt ceiling on its budget that frankly doesn’t make any sense because every time we reach or exceed it, the two parties end up raising the debt ceiling again precisely because failure to do so would default the government. And yet it’s retained, mainly by Republicans, because otherwise the budget would just keep going up and up and up and there would be no way to pressure the other party into fiscal restraint.

Again, I’m not a liberal. I DO think this government taxes and spends too much, and we could stand to cut some of that spending. I can even point out a couple of specifics. One Internet friend of mine said one place to trim the budget would be eliminating the US Marine Corps, given that we already have an Army and it did most of our major amphibious landings (like D-Day) and therefore the Marines are redundant. But then, this guy was in Army Intelligence, and Army tends to think the USMC is useless. (Typical Army joke: ‘what has an IQ of 199 and runs screaming through the desert?’ ‘200 Marines.’)

Seriously, there’s supposed to be $56 billion unallocated from COVID relief and you’d think they’d be able to liquidate that to create some room in the budget. Cause according to all the authorities, there’s no longer a COVID emergency, right? And if we’re trying to scale down government COVID response because there’s no longer a COVID emergency, well, it’s been over 22 years since somebody hijacked an airplane, so why do we still need Homeland Security in the airports taking X-Rays to see which of us are circumcised?

But no, up to this point and probably still now, the Democrats and media (same thing, really) continue to hope that they can get a discharge petition to pass a “clean” bill without needing the Speaker to advance it to the floor. All it would need is “five Republicans with courage.” Which is the joke that Democrats and media always subject themselves to. There ARE no five Republicans with courage. This is a party whose most literate members have seen their institution get devoured by a mob (in all senses of the term) and they have neither the courage to admit that they sympathize with the mob nor the courage to stand up to it. Anybody who could qualify as such is dead, retired, independent or already defected to the Democrats. You’re not going to find five reasonable Republicans in Washington for the same reason Jesus Christ wasn’t born there: They couldn’t find three wise men or one virgin.

At the same time, it would still be more likely to find five Republicans willing to work with the Democrats than it would be for Kevin to pass this thing without losing at least five of his caucus.

I would object to the Republican position less if it were actually principled, but we’ve known since fucking Reagan that these guys talk a good game about “fiscal conservatism” and then balloon the deficits by increasing the spending in the areas they like while slashing taxes on the upper percentile. Not to mention how during the Trump Organization, the Republican Congress raised the debt ceiling three times with no preconditions. It’s hostage taking, and Gaetz himself said as much. “I think my conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” Gaetz told Semafor.

I had already said that : “One solution to the high likelihood of a budget standoff shutting down the government would be to simply pass a law saying that where a new budget cannot be passed, the government continues on with the previous budget or continuing budget agreement by default. An automatic resolution would at least serve budget hawks in that they could not hold the government hostage to their budget but could also make sure that the government did not grow any more.” As it turned out there was already some preventative measure in the system previously. According to Wikipedia, Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt imposed the “Gephardt Rule” in 1979 stating that the debt ceiling was automatically raised when a budget was passed. This resolved the contradiction in voting for appropriations but not voting to fund them. This was in fact the standard until Gephardt lost his majority in 1995 and Republicans repealed the rule. The strange thing is that Democrats have had the majority at least once since then and not re-established the rule. Which further confirms the two main points of the issue: Crisis around the debt is entirely manufactured by Republicans for their own political purposes, and if Democrats can be blamed for anything, it’s their blithe assumption that they don’t need to establish sound procedures when they are in charge.

I’m thinking we should consider the terms of forming America 2.0. Cause this shitty government isn’t going to last the way it’s going.

Not that I am one of those pessimists who thinks America is necessarily going to break apart or decline in comparison to other nations. We still have more capital and resources than the European Union (our main liberal-capitalist rivals) and a more efficient military-industrial complex than China or Russia (our two main authoritarian rivals). But it could happen, and defaulting on our debt would be a big reason why. The problems facing our nation are completely preventable and almost completely the result of our political dysfunction.

Liberals hated Ronald Reagan for saying “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” But I’m sure they would have to agree with him now: Government is the problem, if only because the former Party of Reagan has MADE IT the problem. But then again, those Republicans, as reactionary as some of them may have been, were not completely off the deep end like they are now, nor was the Democratic Party exactly like what it is now. Republicans who think they’re clever point out that it was actually Democrat states that held slaves and the former Party of Lincoln who freed them. Which of course is blanking out how much things have changed since. “The problem” with government used to be the Democratic Party, but it just switched tents. The common element is the people who think all that stuff about “all men are created equal” only applies to them and their demographic. This was why they had endorsed slavery and as-good-as-slavery laws for blacks after the Civil War, not only to keep black people under control but to effectively outsource labor in their own country and undercut the value of white labor, so that they would also be under control, but would still support the system cause at least they weren’t black.

The reason Democrats of today aren’t blamed for all the slavery and Jim Crow laws is because they realized there are more votes to be had in the rest of the country. At least in theory. So they quit appealing to the people who liked segregation and theocracy and left them to the Republicans. The problem with the theory is that the Republicans found that their new coalition were Southern Christians, military people, people who’d been burned by liberal policies and the Carter Administration, people who were going to be highly motivated to vote if they had someone to vote for, and Reagan picked them up. But that actually was a “big tent.” Over the years Republicans ran out of ideas and could only survive on the “culture war” issues they’d been flogging since the ’70s. Such success as they’ve had after GW Bush is because they appeal to that Christianist core that will come out to vote no matter what, because while they may not agree with the conservative love of capitalism, they would never vote for a party that supported abortion rights. Or trans rights. Or gay rights. Or voting rights. Well, rights.

It’s not impossible for such a party to appeal to women and non-whites – look at Trump’s performance with women in 2016 and his performance with Hispanics in 2020 – but the more they lean into this strategy of alienating anybody who isn’t a fanatic, the more self-defeating it is in the long run, especially as previously unmotivated young people and middle class women realize that Republican policies are deliberately targeting them. Republicans know this on some level, which is why they have to keep the advantages they still have to block any sort of reform, or indeed anything the other party does at all, since they know they wouldn’t get any credit for the results if they let the Democrats win anything.

This partisan warfare is the reason no one can cooperate and why one party in particular deliberately selects its politicians for their most negative and belligerent traits.

I had said that slavery, which we treat as the Original Sin of the republic, was something that could be and technically was corrected in the Constitution. But the real Original Sin of our foundation was that the Founders, looking at the partisan politics of the mother country Britain, never accounted for the natural tendency of people to group into camps and therefore left the process to occur by default. And since it was not accounted for in the Constitution, the ad hoc rules and traditions that Washington (and the states) developed to adapt to it ended up becoming more important to the day-to-day process than the actual Constitution. One result of this is something I had already mentioned: Article I of the Constitution specifically mentions that a Speaker of the House is to be chosen by the entire chamber. The Senate has no such rule, partially because it’s a smaller body and partially because the original Constitution had Senators appointed to represent their State legislatures, not elected by popular vote. Which is another area where partisan politics crept in to the process. So Speaker is a constitutional position. Senate Majority Leader is a position created for the convenience of the duopoly, so there’s apparently nothing in the Constitution that says the Majority Leader can’t, say, exercise effective veto power over a President’s Supreme Court nominees by preventing a vote from even getting to the floor.

This is something that requires more in-depth thinking than I have time for right now. But it’s clear that from both the day-to-day operations of Washington (and many state legislatures that are not just stymied by Republicans but rigidly controlled by them) and the process of screening candidates in the primary round that the “two” party system is at the heart of what’s wrong with this country. Because while the polarization of the two factions means that the Republicans have purged themselves of their non-fanatics (meaning the Democrats are pretty much the coalition for the rest of the country) this also means that Republican power is concentrated so in those areas where they already have historical or cultural dominance, their policies are that much more authoritarian. In short, they’re a danger to the survival of the United States. And the real punch line is that no one wants to admit this, because then the Democrats would be completely in charge. And no one wants that. Including, I suspect, the Democrats.

But if the dysfunction in America’s politics is channeled and incentivized by the party nomination process, incentives can be used to course correct where we’re going. This is already happening in some places. California has changed its election system to have bipartisan monitoring of elections and changed from “winner take all” to a “top-two” system such that the primary round of voting advances the top two finishing candidates regardless of party so that the November general election is effectively a runoff. In Nevada, Question 3, which would change Nevada’s primary round to a ranked-choice voting system, passed by 52.9 to 47.1 percent. (However ballot questions have to survive a second vote in state elections, so this would not be confirmed until 2024, if it passes again.) The goal of such measures is not to ban political parties, given that even if we did, you can’t stop people from associating in groups. The goal is to disincentivize group think, such that only party loyalists come out to vote in the primary round and thus skew the vote in the general election for the rest of the public who might want another choice but wouldn’t get it because they can’t vote in closed-ticket primaries for the candidate they might want.

Of course the real problem with the Republican Party is not so much that they hate abortion and taxes, however much Democrats might object. The real problem is that they are catering to the biggest fucking hammerheads in the country, and again, if the rest of the population knows better but the Party caters to the crazies, moving away from closed primaries dilutes that.
The real problem there is that we need to federalize this approach rather than wait for it to happen state by state, especially since the states that are most likely to pass reforms are the ones like California that are already least likely to support Republican national politics. And for obvious reasons, Republicans are not going to support that either. But we might be able to use their existing set of priorities against them.

I mean, as long as we’re going to bring back institutional racism, we should also bring back literacy tests at the voting booth. Just as long as they apply to voters AND candidates.

The Search For A Demeaning Nickname

There is actually more than one Republican candidate for president who has already announced. It’s just that the media don’t pay any attention to them because they don’t have any chance against Once and Future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. However, this week a couple of Republicans announced a presidential campaign and they did get a certain level of coverage. In one case, for all the wrong reasons.

On Monday, May 22, Senator Tim Scott (R.-South Carolina) officially announced his presidential campaign after hinting at it for several months. He’s been Senator since 2014 (filling a term for a retiring senator) and has been re-elected twice since then, including 2022. He’s said to be well-liked by members of both parties in Washington, which is kind of rare these days. In his speech, he hit on the Republicans’ usual red-meat issues, including building a border wall, while also playing up a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps past as the son of a black single mother who went on to become the (only) Black Republican US Senator. For many reasons, he ought to appeal to a lot of people who remember the Republican Party as it used to be, and to people outside the Party. In his speech, Scott said: “We need a president who persuades not only our friends and our base.” He added, “We have to have a compassion for people who don’t agree with us.”

Well, that’s how I knew his primary campaign was doomed right there.

Tim Scott is well-spoken (and lest that seem patronizing, how many white politicians in either major party are well spoken these days?) and he seems to have honor. I say, seems to, given that as a Republican he is by definition obliged to go along with any sleazy thing the collective wants to push on the country. But he hearkens back to a time when Republicans were simply one wing of a political establishment that had a common conception of America as a constitutional republic, as opposed to being the right-wing version of a Leninist insurgency that aims to seize the state and remake society in its image.

A person who cares about morality, compassion (what person does that remind you of when you look at the Republican Party?) or persuasion rather than flipping off the libs is not somebody who has appeal to this Republican Party. Incidentally, they’re not a Grand Old Party any more so I refuse to call them “GOP.” Unless it stands for something like “Greedy Old Puritans” or “Guaranteeing Omnipresent Pedophilia.”

The people who run, or at least think they run, the Party are perfectly okay with using culture war agitation to get folks to vote for them while they turn the republic into a corporate feudalism, but the fact that they have to recruit from that group means that it’s harder to get things done in a legislature when some of their people actually believe things like the Flat Earth theory. What they want is somebody who’s going to rile up the proles while still being literate enough to negotiate bills on those increasingly rare occasions that Republicans still rely on legislation rather than courts. And so God made them

Ron DeSantis.

Ronald Dion DeSantis (yes, his middle name came from the singer) was born in Florida and grew up playing baseball in both Little League and in college at Yale. In 2001, he graduated Yale magna cum laude and by 2005 had received a Juris Doctor law degree from Harvard Law School. Prior to getting this degree, DeSantis joined the Navy as a commissioned officer in 2004, joining JAG (Judge Advocate General).

DeSantis was promoted to full Lieutenant in 2006, the same year he was assigned to the Joint Task Force at Guantanamo Bay. According to Wikipedia, “The records of his service in the Navy were often redacted upon release to the public, to protect personal privacy, according to the Navy. Mansur Ahmad Saad al-Dayfi, who was held at Guantanamo, alleged in 2022 that DeSantis oversaw force-feedings of detainees.”

Wow, even then Ron DeSantis was looking to build his resume as a Republican presidential candidate. That’s some work ethic.

Anyway, DeSantis moved back to Florida after leaving active duty, running for US Congress (Florida 6th Congressional District) in 2012 and getting re-elected twice. In 2018 DeSantis ran for Florida Governor to replace the term-limited Republican Rick Scott. “Asked whether he could name an issue on which he disagreed with Trump, DeSantis declined.” After a controversial recount, he beat Democratic candidate Andrew Gillum (which in retrospect might have been a case of Democrats dodging a bullet). In his 2022 re-election campaign, he went against former Governor (and former Republican) Charlie Crist, who in their one TV debate demanded that DeSantis commit to serving his full term rather than use the office as a stepping stone to the White House. DeSantis dodged the question and ended up beating Crist by 19 points.

Part of DeSantis’ popularity was playing to the anti-mask/anti-vax sentiment during the COVID eruption, even though he was not so doctrinaire as to avoid all containment measures. This appealed to people who didn’t like COVID restrictions on public activity and public school attendance. This and his fierce social conservatism allowed him to pose as a defender of “freedom” against “socialism”, and that also had a huge appeal to Florida Hispanics whose families fled countries like Cuba and Venezuela. But he also used that culture war posture as a wedge to define “freedom” as the freedom of government to restrict other people on behalf of his favored political demographic.

DeSantis is considered to do a pretty good job as Governor, if one defines the role of Governor as using one’s executive power in conjunction with a legislative majority to turn their state into a one-party regime. His appeal is expressly to those people who think that’s what America ought to be like. The difference between them and the typical Trumpniks is that DeSantis has the brains and legal background to get things done behind the scenes, and up to this point, that made him politically popular. But as his quest to be more Trump than Trump leads him to areas like abortion prohibition that have not been very popular even in red states, you get to the problem with DeSantis trying to be more Trump than Trump: He would have to have Trump’s “charisma” (which completely evades me) and his command of the media. And he’s completely lacking in both.

Even before he actually made his official announcement, DeSantis was doing everything he could to present the appearance of a presidential candidate, while leaving Donald Trump, the already announced candidate, to keep dunking on him in the media with little reprisal. DeSantis has become rather notorious in the media for refusing to do interviews. He also doesn’t talk very much with voters. So perhaps it’s understandable that when he wanted to make his big announcement, he gravitated to none other than Elon Musk, one of those bigwigs who seems increasingly comfortable with turning America into a corporate state but realizes that Donald Trump, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to that agenda. Of course the last year or so has demonstrated that Elon Musk, for all his gifts, is ultimately a liability to his own declared agenda. Over the last week, DeSantis’ campaign set up a big presentation announcing that Elon Musk was going to host DeSantis’ official campaign announcement Wednesday on… Twitter Spaces.

Did you know that Twitter Spaces was a thing? Yeah, neither did I. And apparently neither did anybody at Twitter, including Elon Musk. “The audio stream crashed repeatedly, making it virtually impossible for most users to hear the new presidential candidate in real time.” More than 20 minutes passed before the scheduled start time because of audio drop-offs and other technical issues. Musk insisted that the problems were because servers were crashing due to the attendance being so high.

If only Elon had a staff at Twitter that knew the system and could review performance issues in real time.

Even if everything had gone smoothly, the announcement was merely an audio feed with DeSantis giving a formal speech. The media reaction to the “event” exceeded the attendance of the event itself.

Donald Trump Jr. actually came up with a good one that ended up becoming the insult tag of the week: “#DeSaster”. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-New York) tweeted, “We had more people join when I played Among Us.”

Put it this way, Jason Johnson at MSDNC said “the Obamacare rollout looked better than this.”

Now with most of these competitors, Trump barely even bothers to acknowledge that a challenger exists. But he really seems hopped up about DeSantis. He takes him personally in a way that he wouldn’t with Scott or Nikki Haley. For various reasons. As a fellow Florida Man, DeSantis is technically Trump’s Governor and not only does Trump have to live under his authority, he’s also the main competition for the title of chief Florida Man. Plus, Trump can say, very accurately, that DeSantis needed his help and his endorsement to run for Governor the first time, to the extent that he was called a “mini-Trump.” On the other hand, in the 2022 off-year elections, DeSantis won re-election very handily without Trump’s help, even as Trump-endorsed candidates were tanking.

And course in order for Trump to really go after a target on Truf Censhal, he has to give them a demeaning little nickname. Like how he calls Chuck Schumer “Little Chuckie”, Nancy Pelosi “Crazy Nancy” and Vladmir Putin “Oh My Precious Lord And Master In Whose Name I Live And Serve.”

Trump still seems to be casting about for the right nickname to give DeSantis. I like “Meatball Ron.” It just has a ring to it. I also like “Ron DeSanctimonious.” Cause it’s so accurate. And it almost sounds clever. Which is why I think Trump didn’t actually come up with that one. I also get that impression because he doesn’t use it too often, probably because it has too many syllables for Donnie to spell or pronounce regularly. He’s more likely to just call him “Ron DeSanctus”, which is just another case of Trump not bothering to spell correctly. But I also think that Trump has a team that monitors his social media posts for typographical errors, and if there aren’t enough of them, they add some in to make the argle-bargle look more “authentic.”

Serious question, independent of my personal feelings on Trump: If you are another Republican candidate for president, and your campaign platform is basically the same as Trump’s except for a couple of slogans or a personal history, then why are you running when you have a candidate who is already running, has already been President, and has a built-in following that you don’t have?

If you can give me a serious and credible answer to that question, I will take you seriously as a candidate.

More than likely though, most of Trump’s alleged rivals are either angling to be his 2024 running mate (which is the assumption about Nikki Haley) or have realized both that Trumpnik attitudes are predominant in the Republican Party but in order to win a general election, a candidate has to do a halfway imitation of a Homo Sapiens, and Trump gave up on that a while ago. The other issue with Trump’s campaign is implied: Why is he running for office as though he planned to follow the lawful procedure of elections, when he’s shown he’s going to do everything he can to ignore the results he doesn’t like, in such a way that even Georgia’s Secretary of State had to push back?

Contrary to what Senator Scott seems to think, the only choice in the post 2015 Republican Party is either Trumpism with Trump or Trumpism without Trump. Which is to say, someone like Ron DeSantis who is attempting to back away from Trump’s influence while being just as radical and reactionary, if not more so.

But as Bill Maher put it on March 10, “Why would you listen to a tribute band when the original act is still out there?” If this Party cared about winning general elections, they wouldn’t have gone with Trump in the first place. Half of the reason he did win is because James Comey decided to re-open an investigation on Hillary Clinton at exactly the wrong time for her. Most down ballot Republican candidates either refuse to admit it if they lose or run in districts that are so safe that the only real contest is for the Republican primary, which is another reason the Party as a whole doesn’t care about general elections. Why is there a surprise that they supported Trump’s insurrection against the Electoral College results? The main difference between Trump and any other potential Republican nominee for president is that all the other politicians might accept the result if they lose. We know for a fact that Trump will not.

Back in the days of Goldwater and Reagan, Republicans knew that they were unpopular, and so they thought their job was to make themselves popular by making their philosophies and policies more competitive, to appeal to the uncommitted and people on the other side and bring them over. These “conservatives” don’t want to do that. It’s just too hard. It would require thinking instead of feeling, and that’s no FUN. More’s the pity, because given the general unpopularity of leftist taxing and spending and the potential appeal of libertarian policies (if the woke Right ever took them seriously), the Right might still be competitive.

Trump has kept going back to an old MAGA slogan: “They’re not after me… they’re after YOU. I’m just in the way.” Which like most Trump statements is the opposite of reality. The only reason the government hasn’t thrown Trump in a cell and thrown the cell away is because “YOU” (the Trump fan club) are in the way. No one is out to “get” Middle America. No one would care about the Trump base if they weren’t constantly enabling him to stay out of jail, so if they got out of the way of justice, nothing would happen to them. But I suspect that a lot of the cultists know this and that is exactly why they continue to worship such an unworthy master: Because otherwise no one would care about them.

Not the Democrats, who treat working-class America as “flyover country.” And certainly not the Republican establishment, who prior to 2015 would talk a good game about banning abortion, ending affirmative action or moving our Israel embassy to Jerusalem, but would always go with the centrist position for the general election because they still cared about liberal-bourgeois premises like “the candidate that gets the most votes wins the election.”

Of course the 2020 general election and 2022 midterms after Dobbs v. Mississippi made clear that it’s getting harder and harder to win a majority with Right-populist positions, with Republicans losing races they “shoulda” won because worship of Trump and his dogmas mattered more than what the general public wanted. In other words, it demonstrated why the establishment only paid lip service to the populist goals, because they knew better. But it doesn’t matter, because the Trumpniks run the show now. The Republican establishment lives in fear of their populist base, and not just figuratively. After all, before January 6, Republican politicians only assumed that any heresy against Our Lord and Savior would cause a bloodthirsty lynch mob to break into the Capitol to try and kill them. But now they KNOW.

The assumption of some political watchers is that Republicans are waiting for a deus ex machina to save them – if not the 78-year-old Trump getting a heart attack, then Jack Smith or one of these other guys putting him up on federal charges and winning. Here’s the joke, there’s no law saying a presidential candidate can’t run if they’re indicted, or arrested, or even convicted. That’s right, Trump could get convicted of felonies, and still win the election, at which point he could pardon himself, because at that point, who could tell him that he can’t? (In the abstract, this is actually a good thing, insofar as government in other countries has deliberately targeted opposition politicians with criminal charges specifically to keep them from running for office. It’s Putin’s standard procedure in Russia, and it’s what happened to Lula da Silva in Brazil before his case was overturned in the courts.) The only constitutional way to keep Trump out of office would have been to convict him in impeachment, and of course the Republican Party wouldn’t let that happen. Which gets to the point that if they really wanted to stop him, they would have, but they don’t because they would lose his fan club of AM radio and “reality” TV fans, which was what their voter base had turned into even before Trump became a politician.

Which gets to the real problem for these guys: Even if Trump somehow got taken out of contention during the presidential primary rounds, for the Republican Party that would be like if the German Army conspiracy had actually assassinated Hitler in 1944. (My apologies to Hitler for the comparison to Trump.) Seriously, if the conspirators had eliminated Hitler (and his support structure) they would have eliminated the fanatic stubbornness that was the main handicap to their planning, but they still would have been at war with an Allied coalition that by now was demanding unconditional surrender. And why did they? Because by that point Hitler had started a genocidal war with half the planet, and Germany had become too much of a threat to just be set back to “normal.” Remember, World War I ended after the Germans deposed the Kaiser and the Allies agreed to make peace and not invade the country. The Allies decided they couldn’t give the benefit of the doubt again. In 1918, Germany was merely reactionary and militarist (and they were hardly unique in that, frankly). In 1944, they were not only reactionary and militarist, they were enthralled to a radical collectivist philosophy that could not co-exist with the rest of the world. They had to be destroyed.

Even if Trump isn’t in the picture, the Republican Party is still the Party of Trump. It isn’t a party of low taxes and small government. It damn sure isn’t a party of “fiscal responsibility” to the extent it ever was. As much as the Right howls and screams about “socialism”, the reason Americans hate socialism is because socialism in practice is one party taking over the government, with that one party being controlled by one man, and that one man gets to decide for the rest of us what to think, what to say, where we’re allowed to go in public, what businesses are allowed to do, and how (or whether) we can pray. And THAT’s what the Republicans want for this country. And again, that’s not just Trump. That’s DeSantis.

Next year, they shouldn’t just be defeated. They should be outright destroyed. They should get their dick put in the dirt so deep that it fucks China.

What happens to Trump himself is at this point irrelevant. Again, giving him appropriate punishment for his scams is an independent issue from whether he becomes president again. He has to be defeated in court AND the ballot box. But the latter also involves defeating the movement that made him a threat, because it will continue without him. Whether he wants to admit it or not.

Call it Not News

Lie- lie to my face

Tell me it ain’t no thing, that’s what I wanna hear

Take your lie to the grave

That’s what an old friend told me, look what it did for him

The truth hurts so bad, wouldn’t you say?
So why tell it?
If ignorance is bliss, then I’m in

Heaven now

-Queens of the Stone Age, “3s and 7s”

I saw a post recently on Facebook saying that there was one consequence of the last Writer’s Guild strike that hasn’t been considered. NBC’s The Apprentice was losing ratings and they were going to drop Donald Trump’s contract, but the sudden need for “unscripted” TV meant they had to go back to him as the star of a new show, which was how we got Celebrity Apprentice, which was how Trump managed to get back into the public profile, also the same time he started pushing “birther” conspiracy theories about President Obama, which got a lot more credibility because TV producers who knew better pushed Donald Trump as though he were actually an expert source on finance, or on anything.

It is not newsworthy, or a surprise, that given a microphone and a stacked audience Trump will act like an orangoutan with Tourette’s Syndrome that fell fifty feet, landed on his head and is still able to talk, but what is surprising and newsworthy is that CNN, after everything we have learned about Trump in seven years, gave him a free platform AGAIN. Which raises the question of which entity is more stupid and desperate for attention.

Seriously: FUCK CNN. I blame these whores for the Trump presidency more than Russia, more than Hillary Clinton’s incompetence, more than James Comey and even more than Fox News. You would expect Russia and Fox to shill for a wannabe fascist. It took CNN to make him respectable. It took CNN to tell Middle America, “Hey, this is a REAL candidate. This is a centrist candidate. This is a serious alternative to Hillary Clinton, not like these minor party candidates that we’re NOT giving free air time.”

You could make the case that in 2015-2016, the people at CNN who knew Trump as a New York gadabout still liked him and didn’t know what he was really going to turn into, but they can’t say that now. Not after the Russky traitor bitch deliberately tried to destroy America’s (small r) republican system of government and showed he was willing to kill his own vice president to do it by crowdsurfing a mob of Confederate sympathizers. You can cover him, yes, because it’s the Republican Party that made the decision to keep him and that is a newsworthy (if repugnant) decision in itself, but that does not obligate you to enable him, as you (CNN and other media) did in the past. Keep in mind, this is a guy who used his presidential administration to help Saudi Arabia cover up and minimize the butcher death of Jamal Khashoggi (a Saudi-Turkish journalist working with the Washington Post) because he’d exposed critical truths about their government. This is a guy who routinely “jokes” about the violence he’d like to inflict on the press. And yet, CNN, like the Republican Party, comes crawling back to a man whom they know would have them killed just because it serves his purposes, or simply out of amusement.

What should we call them now?
Conservative News Network?
Call it Not News?
Cucking for Neo Nazis?

I mean really, it raises the question of why Trump needs to rape women when CNN will blow him and then bend over for free.

The thing is that whatever one might think of “conservatism”, it is clearly animating the Supreme Court, and several state governments, and requires some kind of philosophy. But that philosophy apparently doesn’t sell itself. You have Republicans in Congress like Nancy Mace and Dan Crenshaw who might be just as hardcore Christianist as the rest of them, but they still have enough brain cells to realize there’s a world outside their self-cultivated perceptions, and they need to negotiate with it, like everybody else does. But those aren’t the people running the Republican Party, let alone the Susan Collins-Mitt Romney types who clearly grew up in a different era. What’s running the Republican Party? The kind of goombas who wanted to watch what happened Wednesday on CNN, which is exactly why CNN presented it. You have an entire political party in this “two” party system that doesn’t believe in politics, it believes in “reality TV”, two words that do not belong in the same solar system, let alone the same phrase. They don’t want a government that works for anyone else, they don’t even want a government that works for them, they just want a circus. They just want Big Chief Ook-Ook Gorilla to dunk barrels on the mean old liberals and pound his chest and yell, so they can cheer along with all the other chimps in the audience. What they want, clearly what they’ve always wanted, is to turn the government of the most powerful country in the world into The Apprentice. And as long as they’re the ones who say how the Republican Party moves, anybody else who’s running for the Republican nomination is just another contestant on The Apprentice and Trump is still the host. And the grand prize for the winner is the chance to be Trump’s running mate in 2024, which as we know means being the designated patsy for Trump’s mob of mouth-breathers to kill when he needs someone to blame for his own incompetence.

But given the position that CNN has taken, it is clearly not trying to present “objective journalism” in giving Trumpism “equal time,” it’s deliberately appealing to that dysfunctional mindset, and that in itself is not an accident. Which raises the question as to what a concerned public is to do about all this.

Because clearly Chris Licht and the other suits at CNN think they can appeal to a Trump-friendly audience in the wake of Fox News settling its defamation lawsuit and then firing star anchor Tucker Carlson. But that debacle shows us how to combat this media misinformation campaign, given how the Fox case and the fall of Carlson was the main media story prior to CNN allowing Mr. Attention Hound to stink up the TV screen again.

The idea that one can shift the “Clinton News Network” rightward on the premise that that will make it more centrist is a bit disingenuous in this day and age. CNN was the only cable news network that still had pretenses to journalistic objectivity or objectivity on the part of its anchors. At both Fox and MSNBC hosts are expected to wear their politics on their sleeve. And that in itself has not killed journalism. Modern people find it more credible that a journalist would have an opinion than not. And one can have an opinion that Donald Trump did good things for this country, did good things for the economy, gave you the Supreme Court Justices you wanted, and all that. That’s no sin. Those are opinions. In some cases, they might even be backed up by fact. But you can’t say you’re violating journalism or committing fraud just for having an opinion. You ARE committing fraud if you present information that is opposite to what you know to be true, and you present that misinformation as real news.

CNN might not be deliberately presenting the opposite of truth as fact – yet – but it’s a small distinction when you allow Trump a whole hour to present his anti-truth with just Kaitlin Collins going “that’s not true” over and over again while she gets laughed down by his fan club of hooting redcaps. That was the technical concession that made the event “journalism” rather than a Trump campaign event. But as with the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit on Fox, there’s a pretty obvious effort to slant coverage, not on the basis of what is known to be fact, but to appeal to or retain a certain viewer demographic.

The difference with Fox is that we not only have a difference of opinion (as in, ‘should a man who plotted violent insurrection against an election certification even BE treated as a legitimate candidate, let alone given a friendly platform’) but direct evidence, obtained largely through the plaintiff’s discovery process, that Fox knew the votes weren’t there to save Trump’s re-election in 2020, but presented the false narrative that Dominion in particular had skewed their voting machines to take votes from him. In the process they also discovered certain embarrassing things about the company’s internal politics, such as, Tucker Carlson and other people at Fox actually hated and feared Trump but pushed the Dominion lie because they could see that telling the truth about Trump would alienate their “core audience“. Notably, as the Dominion case reached summary judgment, the presiding judge told Fox that if the case went to trial, Fox (the defendant) would not be allowed to make the argument that their coverage had news value, saying “I would have to tell the jury that newsworthiness is not a defense to defamation.”

Remember what Michelle Wolf said: “You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks, or vodka, or water, or college, or ties, or Eric… but he has helped YOU. He has helped you sell your papers, and your books, and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him.

Fox News, in particular, was so obsessed with catering to the Trump fan club that they crossed the line from simply advocating for a controversial position to presenting the opposite of fact as news. And when you do that, and do so at the expense of a party that is in position to sue you, you can get taken to court and you CAN lose. As Trump has also learned. Just because you have a right to say something doesn’t mean other people don’t have the right to call you on falsehood, and you can’t call it “news” when it’s really defamation.

Because if there was a bright side to CNN’s desperate appeal to the Trump audience, it’s that the most newsworthy aspect of the Wednesday town hall was Trump continuing to dig holes for himself. He told Collins that he had a right to threaten Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger: “I said ‘you owe me votes’ because the election was rigged,” said Trump, speaking to moderator Kaitlan Collins. “That election was rigged, and if this call was bad, why didn’t [Raffensperger] and his lawyers hang up?” An Atlanta newspaper quoted: “My initial thoughts were, this isn’t going to help,” said Caren Myers Morrison, a law professor at Georgia State University and a former prosecutor. “I think it’s some good corroborating evidence.” When Collins asked him if he’d shown the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago to anyone else after leaving the White House, he said “Not really.” When she asked him to clarify, he just said “Not that I can think of.” And just the day after he got found guilty of sexual assault and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case, Trump joshed about it to the CNN audience, using his go-to insult of “whack job” and insulting both her and her husband, to such an extent that Carroll’s lawyer told the New York Times they have cause to consider another lawsuit – one in which CNN might be held liable because they knew (or could easily guess) what Trump would say in advance.

See, this is why the Candyass Caligula spent most of that trial at his European golf properties even after the judge gave him the opportunity to testify in his own defense even after his defense rested. Because they couldn’t really offer a defense when Trump’s conduct is public record, and while he can tell any lie he wants outside a court, he knows he’s legally liable for what he says in deposition – and when he did make one it helped the case against him. If he lies in public OR tells the truth in court it makes things worse for him, because that’s what happens when you compulsively commit crimes. And it’s one thing to be liable in civil cases, but when your big mouth implicates you in plans to cancel an election that would remove you from power, that’s likely to lead to prison time.

Assuming, of course, that someone in Washington, New York or Atlanta cares to prosecute.

The Way Things Are Going, They’re Gonna Crucify Me

In Western Christianity, this is “Holy Week” – commemorating the short period between Christ arriving in Jerusalem, being arrested by the Romans and condemned to die before rising on Easter. It also happens to be the same week that Donald Trump, once and future Viceroy for Russian North America, was first arraigned on criminal offenses by the State of New York.

Lest I seem mocking in comparing Trump to Jesus, it is a comparison seriously made by his fan club, which was formerly called the Republican Party. As Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (BR.-Georgia) told a reporter in New York Tuesday, Trump is in the same situation as Nelson Mandela and Jesus, being prosecuted by the state.

No, Trump really is like Jesus. I mean, look at the comparisons: They can both turn water into wine and sugar into cocaine, they both hang out with sex workers, and they both have close friends and family who are Jewish even though most of their worshipers don’t like to admit it.

Just as Jesus was arrested by the Romans on a Tuesday, this Tuesday Trump actually had to enter a courtroom and while there were some photos, there wasn’t much of a transcript as to why the proceeding took almost 90 minutes. It was most notable for the photo shot of Trump sitting at a bench with his lawyers, with that same worn-out, defeated look he has when he leaves a closed-door meeting with Vladimir Putin. Outside meanwhile, you had professional Trumpniks like Greene trying to raise support for their Messiah while getting drowned out by native New Yorkers. It was like the Bane speech to Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, only substitute “the darkness” with “obnoxiousness.” One thing we did find out from the arraignment is that while the Judge, Juan Merchan did not give Trump a specific gag order, he did direct him to refrain from inflammatory statements as the case proceeded to trial. But as soon as he could, Trump got in his motorcade to the airport, almost as if he hated the city that made him as much as it now hates him, then flew back to his fortress in Mar-a-Lago to give a prime-time speech that hardly any major network covered, bad-mouthing the judge and his family -once he was no longer in New York jurisdiction.

Or as the poets said in Ancient Rome, “Alligator Mouth, Hummingbird Ass.”

What did we actually find out during the event?

According to the statement of facts released Tuesday, the Trump Organization’s machinations centered on various attempts to shut down the never-ending scandals that had the potential to sabotage Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Much of it was with the assistance of National Enquirer/American Media Incorporated head David Pecker. These were called “catch and kill” deals, where Trump’s people would get Pecker to offer a certain amount of money for rights to their sleazy story, but instead of publishing the piece, the National Enquirer would sit on it and keep it from getting out. One thing we didn’t know until Tuesday was that a former doorman at Trump Tower had a rumor that Trump had fathered a child with a woman who wasn’t Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougal. AMI paid this guy $30,000 for his story. “When AMI determined that the story was not true, the AMI CEO [Pecker] wanted to release the Doorman from the agreement. However Lawyer A [Michael Cohen] instructed the AMI CEO not to release the doorman until after the presidential election, and the AMI CEO complied with that instruction because of his agreement with the Defendant [Trump] and Lawyer A.” Shortly after the Access Hollywood (‘grab ’em by the pussy’) tape, AMI’s editor-in-chief contacted Pecker about another woman, Stormy Daniels (listed in the statement as ‘Woman 2’, as opposed to Karen McDougal, who is Woman 1 – keeping up so far?) who alleged that she had a sexual encounter with Defendant Trump while he was married. AMI arranged a deal to keep Daniels quiet, giving her $130,000. Twelve days before the 2016 election, Cohen drew $130,000 from a home loan, put it into a shell account, and used that to pay Daniels off. After the election, Trump repaid Cohen in installments, but had his Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg double the amount to $260,000 so that Cohen could classify the payment as income on tax returns (for ‘legal services’) rather than a reimbursement, allowing Cohen to make a profit once he’d paid income tax on the payment, assuming a total tax liability of 50 percent. So, not technically money-laundering, but pretty close. Close enough for the law, anyway. Not only did Michael Cohen go to prison over this, it was known during his trial that Trump was in fact aware of the payments Cohen made and agreed to pay him back. It was also revealed in the statement that Trump tried to delay the payment to Daniels as long as possible, preferably after the election, “because by that point it would not matter if the story became public.”

So so much for the idea that Trump was just trying to protect Melania from being hurt by the knowledge he’d had an affair. I mean, Melania was dating Trump when he was separated but not divorced from Marla Maples, so I don’t think it would surprise her that he was cheating. I mean, not like Melania is less likely to leave Trump than Lindsey Graham is. On that score, given that the transactions occurred just after the Access Hollywood tape, the Trump team, and most observers, really thought Trump was on the ropes, and one more scandal might have been enough. I don’t know. People hated Hillary Clinton THAT damn much, and the Trumpniks were that damn fanatic. I mean, early in the campaign, Trump said, in jest, “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” And the Republican Party has proven him right, rhetorically, ever since, every chance they get. All he needs to do now is actually kill somebody on Fifth Avenue, and we’ll know for sure. You might scoff, but I can see Lindsey Graham on Fox News now: “Look Sean, that three-year old was PACKING!!”

The statement of facts says that the participants mischaracterized the nature of the payments “for tax purposes.” The specific details of this constitute 34 felony counts against Defendant Trump. Now, under New York law, falsifying financial records is just a misdemeanor, but there is provision to change the charge to a felony if the State believes the act was to facilitate another crime or frustrate investigation of another crime. Also, misdemeanors have a statute of limitations. However, the statement of facts does not specify what second offense would justify elevating the charges to felonies.

But even though there are weaknesses in the case that a competent lawyer could exploit, that would assume Trump had a competent lawyer. That doesn’t seem to be the case. Trump runs through lawyers like Spinal Tap runs through drummers, and for similar reasons. While there were a couple people on Trump’s legal team Tuesday who looked like members of Homo sapiens sapiens, his main lawyer is currently a guy named Joe Tacopina, who was probably most famous for his grappling match against MSNBC’s Ari Melber as he tried to pull a document from Melber’s hand during an interview.

Even funnier, this guy donated to a Democrat (then-Congresswoman Kathleen Rice) who called for Trump to be prosecuted over his pressure call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” enough votes to swing the state. Republicans have issued fatwas for less. Not only that, in 2018, when all this stuff with Cohen came out, Tacopina was a legal analyst on CNN where he said that he believed Trump had had an affair with Daniels because “it means it’s true if he hasn’t threatened to sue” and on another show said “this could be looked as an in-kind contribution at the time of the election.”

But apparently this guy wasn’t hired for his smarts or consistency, but because he’d been one of the guys who defended a January 6 rioter in court (unsuccessfully). Like Cohen or Anthony Scaramucci, he’s not really there to provide legal acumen but to be Trump’s mouthpiece to the mainstream media and present that New York Tough Guy attitude Trump loves to fake so much, but with the imprimatur of a law degree.

It’s going to be that much harder for Trump to defend himself, given that when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity and Sean said “I can’t imagine you ever saying, ‘bring me back some of the boxes that we brought back from the White House, I’d like to take a look at them” Trump said, “I would have the right to do that, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Any lawyer who agrees to become Donald Trump’s defense attorney would have to be that much more stupid and gullible than he is, which would certainly explain Joe Tacopina.

Much of what Tacopina and Trump’s other legal minds have put together as a defense, prior to arraignment, was more ad hominem attacks against the various other parties, especially Michael Cohen. And certainly if Cohen wasn’t lying when he was first being investigated, he can be easily accused of not telling the truth now. Which is why I’m sure the prosecution is also relying on other sources, including Allen Weisselberg, who it seems has just switched attorneys.

But as Cohen himself said to Republicans in Congress when he was ordered to testify there, his job was to do what they’re doing now, support and defend Donald Trump. And if things keep going at this rate, they are all going to end up where he is now.

But all that being the case, it just comes back to the point that Michael Cohen is himself Exhibit A in the case. He was the instrument of the transactions, not the person who ordered them made. So if nothing Trump did rises to the level of a criminal offense, why was Cohen investigated on virtually identical charges, and why did HE go to prison for them and NOT Trump?

Which just leads to the other whine of the Church of Trump, that this is all “political” and none of these charges would be pursued if this wasn’t Trump. First, when the Republican Party’s entire agenda for the House of Representatives is “let’s get Hunter Biden’s laptop”, saying that the other side is trying to politicize the justice system is a bit rich. But frankly, none of this stuff would be happening if this wasn’t Trump, and if this wasn’t a particular moment in time. Because if it’s political to go after Trump now, it was no less “political” not to go after him when the transactions occurred. Because then he was a popular celebrity, the nominee of one of the major parties for president, eventually to be the president, and as far as his base was concerned, a sweet little boy who could never do anything wrong. To say that they’re going after Trump now because they can is to tacitly admit that they couldn’t go after Trump then, because the nature of the offenses has not changed, but the system was always acting on the basis of politics and optics and not the objective merits of the charges. So if the charges are the same as they were years ago, what has changed in regard to Trump since he became President?

Shall we review again?

Fired the FBI director who was in charge of investigating Trump’s activities prior to the election, telling Lester Holt that he did so specifically over the “Russia thing”, immediately thereafter gave intelligence to the Russian Foreign Minister while he was in Washington, had a press conference with Putin where he basically spread his cheeks and let Putin ream him in front of international cameras,

Played “both sides” to support white supremacists at the Charlottesville protest, including Richard Spencer and David Duke,

Gave his son-in-law a position of power in his Administration, basically as Minister Without Portfolio, since he was never approved by Congress, said son-in-law used that position to make money off the Saudis, and used that influence to pressure Qatar into refinancing his real estate deal, including a Saudi blockade of Qatar, said son-in-law was appointed to lead a coronavirus task force in 2020, and in that capacity shut down vaccine research, allegedly on the grounds that “the political folks believed that because [the virus] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors and that would be an effective political strategy.”

And when refusing to deal with coronavirus somehow led to more Democrats voting and more Republicans splitting the ticket, he ran through various schemes such as appointing “substitute electors” in red states that went for Biden, personally called Raffensberger to swing Georgia by himself, and when all that didn’t work, tried to pressure his own Vice President, Mike Pence, into decertifying the vote, getting his people like Steve Bannon to organize mobs around the January event, and when Pence refused to go along, that mob broke through the doors of the Capitol, hunted legislators, smeared feces on the walls, and ran Confederate battle flags through the halls of the Capitol, which Robert E. Lee was never able to do.

Let’s just say any ONE of these should have inspired an appropriate response from authorities.

Oh, I didn’t even get into the weeds of Trump holding all those government documents at Mar-a-Lago just cause he says he can.

The outrage is not that Our Lord And Savior is being obsessively persecuted by the “deep state” (which prior to Trump was just ‘the state’) but that it’s taken them SO GODDAMN LONG.

And if this is the weakest case against Trump, look at all the other cases building up, like the Mar-a-Lago documents case and the Georgia case where it’s going to be extremely hard to prove that Brad Raffensberger didn’t catch Trump attempting election tampering on tape. Everybody’s waiting for the next shoe to drop, and Trump’s got more “shoes” than Imelda Marcos.

Happy Easter. Remember, Good Christians (TM), Trump can’t really be Jesus until he’s crucified.

They Just INDICATED Me!!!

March 30, 2023.

A day which will live in Schadenfreude.

On that day, a New York grand jury, after hearing weeks of evidence, voted to indict former president Donald Trump, on charges to be specified at the hearing. And Trump’s response on Truf Censhal was with the usual flair:

“These Thugs and Radical Left Monsters have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican candidate, by far, for the 2024 nomination for President. THIS IS AN ATTACK ON OUR COUNTRY THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE. IT IS LIKEWISE A CONTINUING ATTACK ON OUR ONCE FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS. THE USA IS NOW A THIRD WORLD NATION, A NATION IN SERIOUS DECLINE. SO SAD!”

(Posted in ALL CAPS, because as we know, the three loudest things in the universe are the original Big Bang explosion, Disaster Area, and Donald Trump social media posts.)


Well, at least he spelled “INDICATED” correctly.

Again, the public has not been made aware of the specific charges, but based on the investigations that were known up to this point, charges seem to stem from money paid out to porn actress Stormy Daniels so that she would not confess to an affair with Trump in 2006. This payment was arranged in October 2016, just before the presidential election that Trump ended up winning. While some would describe this as a financial arrangement between consenting adults, we know this qualifies as a crime because Trump’s lawyer and “fixer”, Michael Cohen, who actually made the payments, was convicted for doing so. At the time, Cohen insisted that he did not make the payments in collusion with Trump, but later turned against his boss and admitted that the money was transferred to his accounts. On May 2, 2018, Trump’s new lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen. So… if it was a crime for Cohen, why is it NOT a crime for the “Individual One” who was listed as a “co-conspirator” in his case?

Trump’s logorrhea in this case is yet another example that every one of his accusations is either a projection or a confession. He is in no position to talk about free and fair elections when he whined about losing the popular vote in the 2016 election that he won with the Electoral College, and when we actually had a free and fair election in 2020 and he lost the popular vote AND the EC, he attacked that free and fair election by sending a lynch mob after the Congress that met to certify it. And if we are subjecting a former head of government to prosecution for criminal acts – as France has done at least once, and as Israel is doing with Benjamin Netanyahu – we are becoming less like a Third World nation, not more.

Which all leads to the question of how things will proceed. Supposedly Trump has agreed to fly to New York on Monday in order to appear in court Tuesday, when the charges will be unsealed. He will most likely have to be fingerprinted and recorded like any other suspect, although most sources agree he will not have to do a “perp walk” in handcuffs. After all, Trump is already under Secret Service escort at all times. What’s he going to do, flee to Russia as soon as it looks like he’s going to be arrested?

We are being told by the media that in order to preserve “the rule of law” that all proper legal procedures must be in place to protect the rights of a defendant, which is true, but elides the point that throughout his life, Donald Trump has had far more than the presumption of innocence, but has always acted on a presumption of immunity – as the formerly most criminal president in history, Richard Nixon, put it, “if the president does it, that means it’s NOT illegal.”

Of course Trump was not actually president at the time these transactions occurred, but that just gets to the larger point, that he has always acted as though he could do anything he wants because someone is always going to protect him. Because up until now, he has always had reason to believe that.

The liberal media keeps referring to Trump and this case by saying “no one is above the law.” But the fact that Trump has gotten away with as much as he has, as long as he has, proves that’s not the case, and it never really has been. But that’s okay. After all, we also keep saying “all men are created equal”, when in the legal system all men have never been equal to each other, let alone to women.

When we say “no man is above the law” or “all men are created equal”, these are not realities. These are aspirations. These are goals. And as long as we see that they are national aspirations and not the reality, we can make progress. This country has become more equitable insofar as we are capable of recognizing the contradiction between our ideal and our reality. Unlike some ideals, it is quite possible to make the legal system more fair, if not abstractly perfect. We can at least make it better than it was. People like Trump coast on the unfair reality of the world as it is, and that is what they seek to preserve. Far from a fair system, they want a sugar daddy government for themselves and a Road Warrior barbarism for the rest of us. When they whine that being equal under the law makes this country MORE of a Third World regime, they are not asking for a free country with fair elections. They want to indulge their desire to look up to a king.

Bad enough that that is the case, but Trump and the fan club that used to be a political party are willing to resort to intimidation. When Trump first heard he was going to be indicted, he first told his gang to protest at the court (when he should have known from local experience that NYPD aren’t nearly as restrained as Capitol Police) and then made a post on Truf Censhal showing a picture of him with a baseball bat next to a picture of New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, raising his hand. When the actual indictment came, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke up for the resident of his state, saying “The Soros-backed Manhattan District Attorney has consistently bent the law to downgrade felonies and to excuse criminal misconduct. Yet, now he is stretching the law to target a political opponent”. So the guy who is setting himself up to be the alternative to Trump in 2024 is going along with all the George Soros dog-whistling and antagonism to big cities, just like Daddy Trump does. Raising the question, is DeSantis really running for President, or Trump’s Vice President?

All of which sort of blows away the tut-tutting on MSDNC and other networks prior to the actual indictment about whether charges over an affair are worth a criminal case against Trump, when there’s so many more serious charges we should be pursuing. But as Cohen himself told the press, Al Capone was only convicted on tax evasion. And let’s review what we’re really dealing with: A populist who bragged about his support from the “poorly educated”, who said he would pay the legal costs for any fans who beat up protestors at his rallies, who openly begged Russia to release hacked intel on the Hillary Clinton campaign (which they DID), who as President fired people specifically because they investigated him, who hired an Attorney General (Bill Barr) largely to undermine investigations against him, who refused to admit the extent of coronavirus in 2020 because it would undermine his deals with Communist China, who told state governments to not allow special measures to vote by mail during the pandemic, because it helped his chances of re-election if people were less likely to vote, who still lost that second election anyway and refused to admit it, and who encouraged social media campaigns to organize violence against the certification, threatening the lives of Republican congressmen, not to mention his own Vice President.

This has gone far beyond having a difference of opinion. When you try to stop an election result from proceeding, you lose all right to talk about “FREE AND FAIR ELECTIONS” or rights when you certainly wouldn’t have given any rights to the people on the other side. Trump isn’t just some mean old conservative that woke liberals hate, he’s an active threat to national security. He has exhausted any benefit of the doubt, and any right to sympathy. And that goes double for anybody who looks at where he’s taken this country and thinks, “we need some MORE of that.” Bluntly, who gives a fuck which charge they get Trump on, as long as they GET him?

And if this doesn’t pan out – remember, it is a jury trial – there are all those other cases that the Feds and other states (namely Georgia) have waiting in the wings. If it was just one case of criminality, you could take your chances with the legal system. But Donald Trump is in a unique situation because of all our public personalities, only Trump lies, swindles and commits crimes like other people breathe. As in, he does so on reflex, and if he ever stops, he might die.

On the bright side, history also shows that while Al Capone got an 11-year prison sentence, he was released after only 7 1/2 years, after doctors diagnosed a case of syphilis that was slowly destroying his brain and his ability to function normally. But then we have no cause to believe that Donald Trump is suffering from an illness that is destroying his brain, much less an illness contracted from sexual incontinence.

What The State Of The Union Speech Should Have Been Like

Feburary 7, 2023

President Joseph Robinette Biden

Good Evening.

My fellow Americans… I had this big, over an hour long speech set up to go, and then I realized it wasn’t gonna make any difference. The State of the Union speech doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t convince anybody who’s not already in the President’s party, it’s just something you have to do, and nobody cares anymore. I mean look, they’ve got Sarah Huckabee Sanders doing the opposition response tonight, which should show you how much Republicans care about serious discussion.

So I threw it out, and, in consultation with Barack Obama’s anger management translator, I’m just going to lay out what I think right now.

I see we’ve got a lot of celebrities in the audience tonight. Like Bono from U2. He’s probably here to steal my rhymes cause he hasn’t come up with anything good since “Vertigo.” No, really. I mean, Bono, if you guys wanted to do a Ramones tribute, why didn’t you do what Motorhead did and write something that actually sounds like a Ramones song?

A lot of people are here cause they’re just expected to be. They don’t wanna be here. Like Samuel Alito. Congratulations on becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, by the way. At least you act like it.

And then there’s Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Yeah, I see you guys. Yeah, same to you. Hey, I gotta ask, why are you both wearing the “I’m With Stupid” T-Shirt?
Seriously, Margie, congratulations on becoming Speaker of the House. I know you worked hard for it.

(Looks over his shoulder) I said what I said.

But that kind of gets to why I’m here tonight. If the State of the Union speech serves anything, it’s for the President to lay out where he thinks our country is in the world right now, and the strength of our country, and what we can do to preserve or improve it. And to the point: The state of our Union is strong. But threatened.

And the point I want to make tonight is that none of that threat is really from outside. We are by far the most powerful economy, in the world. We have by far the most powerful military, in the world. We have, this week, set up a 2.2 billion dollar aid package for Ukraine in its defense against Russia. Now, do you remember, the first time Trump got impeached, it was when new President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was asking for military aid to deal with a Russian backed insurgency in his country, and Trump said, sure, you get that money, if you do us a favor. And that favor was doing opposition research against me, before I’d even really started a presidential campaign and before New Hampshire. Funny coincidence, there. And if you remember before that, when Barack was president, Ukraine had this pro-Russian president who got overthrown in a revolution, he fled to Russia, and then as soon as that happened, Russia just walked into Crimea? Another funny coincidence. It’s almost like, you have all these coincidences piling up to a certain result, and it quits looking like coincidence, doesn’t it?

But the fact that we’re in this position with foreign aid now is because of what we did then. We, and the world, are less affected by Russia or another outside actor than how we as a government, as a people, react. And the threat from outside was influenced by our internal response. Just like, the United States is the most powerful economy in the world. It’s often said that if the US gets a cold, other countries get pneumonia. And we’re reaching that point now. We have a decision to make on raising the debt ceiling, and if that’s not done, it affects our credit rating, and that may affect the entire world economy.

Now, I remember when the right wing was serious, that most Republicans didn’t think the federal government should be doing much more than paying to keep the lights on in the Capitol. Problem is, nowadays, what calls itself conservatism doesn’t even want to do that. They’d rather be in the dark. That’s the joke. Like, how many Republicans does it take to change a light bulb? None. They’ll just sit in the dark and praise Trump for doing such a great job changing the bulb.

We lost more men on both sides in the US Civil War than in World War I, and barely lost more men in World War II. Nobody is more of a threat to our country’s success and survival than we are. And I’m comparing this situation to the Civil War, and it seems like it’s got a lot of the same motivations.

You laugh, but why were all those guys rioting to stop my election running through the Capitol carrying Confederate battle flags? Some of them probably aren’t old enough to remember Lynyrd Skynyrd.

It’s almost like even now, they don’t want to admit they lost that war. A war where their idea of “freedom” meant the freedom for some men to keep others in bondage. A war where their concept of liberty only applied to people who looked, and thought, and prayed like them. So of course they’re not going to acknowledge the popular vote OR the Electoral College. That would mean acknowledging other people have the same rights they do. That’s the whole thing: They don’t want to live in reality.

It’s all of a piece. They don’t want to work on climate change, cause that would require admitting it’s real. Democrats, we may disagree on how to deal with climate change, but we can look at the water level of Lake Mead, and the Caspian Sea, and see that it’s real. In large part, they don’t want to help Ukraine against Russia, because they don’t want to admit Russia is not our friend. And officially, the Republican Party doesn’t want to admit I’m President. But guys: I’m here. I’M THE PRESIDENT. I’m here, now, giving the State of the Union speech. This is not some telepathic projection from the Reptoids trying to control your mind. You expect me to deal with you? You’re going to have to deal with me.

Yet, the posture of the Republican Party is just carry on, like reality isn’t a thing. You don’t just have Trump refusing to admit I won, you’ve got this Kari Lake in Arizona refusing to admit Katie Hobbs is the governor and not her. I mean, jeez, if that’s really how it works, we should send the Detroit Lions to the Super Bowl and not the Chiefs.

Look, that was just an example. I’m sorry Detroit. You’ve been through so much already.

We have two years left in my term. I have yet to announce officially that I’m running again. Like it makes a difference. Because we know Trump’s running again, and frankly, I’m the best chance of stopping him from getting the nuclear codes back. If I accomplish nothing else- and you all are sure trying to make sure that’s the case – it will be enough.

It would not be such an existential threat if a Republican won an election in the natural political cycle of things, but it is an existential threat when an individual can’t deal with reality. We can see from the example of Putin’s Russia what happens when an unhinged individual has no tether to outside reality and dissenting opinion. He pursues evil policies regardless of the consequences and no matter how many thousands or hundreds of thousands get killed. That has had its own effects on the world economy and standard of living. Imagine if that were us.

Imagine again if we just refused to pay our debts, a lot of which were built up just under the last Administration in four years. That’s going to cause terrible consequences to our standard of living, and worse in the rest of the world. And who do you think people are going to blame? Me, who warned you what would happen if you do it, or you, who want to do it just because I’m here and your guy isn’t?

Like I care. This is Dark Brandon you woke up here.

You really should have learned what happened the last time, and the last three to five times, you did a budget standoff. Everybody blamed you, not the Democrats. You try this again: I’m going to let you do it. And then I’m just gonna watch as you have to sit and stew and hear your constituents bitch about the budget problems YOU created for THEM. And I’m gonna see you come crying to me as if you didn’t know from all those times what would happen. And then I’m gonna tell you again: You want me to deal with you? You’re gonna have to deal with ME.

You are in no position to threaten anybody, with the budget, or with the military, because to paraphrase Ronald Reagan: Government is not the solution. Government, under Republicans, is the problem. Republicans are the reason we can’t get gun legislation. Republicans are the reason we can’t federalize abortion rights. Republicans are why the minimum wage is still less than 8 dollars an hour. You have spent as long as I remember – and that’s a long time – pulling this scam where you run for office saying “government is the problem” and then once you get elected, doing everything you can to prove it.

And if that was still working out for you, you wouldn’t be losing elections in Georgia and Arizona. You wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop Democrats from voting in Georgia and Texas and Florida. You wouldn’t have lost an abortion referendum in Kansas. You know how hard it is for Republicans to lose Kansas?

For as long as I still have, as long as I have to be here, every time you stand in the way of what needs to be done – with that FOUR SEAT majority you have – I’m not gonna cry. I’m not gonna whine. I’m not gonna pretend it isn’t happening. I’m just gonna let you do it, and I’m gonna let you live in your own mess. And then you’re gonna have to come to me. Because you’re standing in the way for the same reason you’re gonna let Trump take over your party again: Because you don’t have any better ideas.

So until you do, I say, in the immortal words of Dr. Dre,

“Fuck y’all. All y’all.”

Thank you, and God Bless America.