The child abuse candidate. He simply can’t stop talking about it.

It took him a full minute, originally, to get off on Donna Arthur’s porn short.

He’s now “released a new 30-second version of the original 60-second spot.”

The more he looks at Donna talking dirty, the quicker he succumbs. He hopes the voters of Ohio feel the same way.

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Next week he reportedly intends to edit the spot yet further — down to fifteen seconds of Donna simply purring over and over the word “liar.”

With Michelle Goldberg’s opinion piece in mind, that’s what I’d say we’ve become.

I was going to say that’s what the current Republican Party has reduced us to – a society founded on fending off cruelty from the top – but (recalling Judith Shklar and Richard Rorty), if we agree that cruelty is the worst thing we do, personally and politically, then maybe we should be grateful for a regime that clarifies this primitive human impulse. Easier for us to recognize it and respond morally.

A regime that puts cruelty into relief daily! Think of it. Vaudevillians Vivek & Vance are currently on show, shocking and agitating tens of millions of decent people, but more sadists at the highest levels of government are getting ready to spring.

In an essay that just appeared in the NYT, David French quotes Adam Serwer noting that Trump’s “only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear.”

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We all instinctively understand cruelty, because we’re all aware of times when we’ve been cruel, and we feel ashamed about it.

I mean, not all — sociopaths enjoy inflicting pain. There are criminal sociopaths, and there are milder quotidian humiliation-inflicters, ambitious or just plain nasty men and women who have watched Trump drain the national decency reserves, making the rest of us a society for the prevention of cruelty. They have made us think about cruelty (see Nietzsche, Freud, and Nabokov); they have activated our horror and disgust in relation to it. They have made us rush en masse to the defense of victims of Republican cruelty like Amy Acton and Khizr and Ghazala Khan; but they have also made us feel helpless, because cruelty is so incredibly strong and charismatic a force. Atavistic. Lord of the Fliesesque.

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

Or the just-released documentary about Lindsay Graham in which one of his reputed escorts says Graham told him he wanted to be degraded. Be cruel to me.

And that’s private life, folks — Graham had every right, consenting adultwise, to let it rip. But we are talking about an entire political class – and its followers – for whom lack of consent is titillation. The future box office of Vivek & Vance depends precisely on the degree to which Americans enjoy this electoral exteriorization of humanity’s darkest drive.

Ah, Florida A&M. A real bloodbath of a school, with violent scandal after violent scandal culminating, a few years ago, in the marching band beating one of its members to death.

After yesterday’s mass shooting during homecoming, the school’s president declared the campus safe.

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My title is from me. An earlier post.

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[There was] anger that a violent few ruined what was supposed to be a special homecoming weekend. “The bull—- never stops,” one man wrote on Facebook.

“We can’t have no good time,” he said. “We can’t even come out, we can’t celebrate homecoming. We can’t enjoy our people.”

Might could take a look at your state’s gun laws.

Surely not.

Gang-raping fraternities at Ivy League schools!

A depraved man films a depraved woman croaking obscene lies about the man’s opponent!

Oh my. Who can say why? Inexplicable!

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Cruelty makes people feel good. Real good. It sexually excites them. Vivek Ramaswamy watches the obscene lying crone and beats the meat to her every single night.

Hilarious column by Michelle Goldberg, hoping – for Vance and Ramaswamy’s sake – that the Republican party remains safely depraved.

‘Denouncing the Ramaswamy ad gives conservatives a chance to try to drag their movement out of the Trumpist gutter,’ she points out; but the party’s beautiful hopes for the future – V. and R. – are in deep shit if conservatives actually do suddenly decide that “moral depravity is disqualifying.”

As Zack Mayo said in An Officer and a Gentleman, they got nowhere else to go.

… Glocker!

Former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who clashed with Ramaswamy during the 2024 presidential campaign, reacted in an X post in which she wrote: “Just seeing what we tried to tell everyone back then. He’s a bad guy. It’s a shame he continues to get away with it.”

This statement from MK Pritzker came with a $500,000 donation to Amy Acton attached.

… shows Amy Acton being publicly executed.

MAGAworld is orgasming.

I’m grateful to V. Ramaswamy:

He tells me which Dem is a Commie

But the real why-oh-why-oh

He’s great for Ohio

Is his airing of Amy’s sweet mommy

Wonder why.

The leaders of the integralist thought group in the United States are Professors Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame and Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School. Their modus operandi is to assemble a small cadre of postliberalists, educated by them, unleash them into the government and schools, and then eventually control the United States government so that it can be governed by their version of Catholic natural law. I admit that this sounds outlandish and foolish, but they have been hard at work, and they have achieved extraordinary momentum by putting Vice President JD Vance in office…

[S]ince the rest of America [is] messed … up, they need to take over. It’s for the people’s own good, whether they agree or not. They have seen no need for a constitutional convention or popular consent, because they have abandoned representative democracy itself…  [T]hey have turned on liberal—aka republican (representative)—democracy, and seek authoritarian rule to bring the people to their own faith, voluntarily or not… [Their] … goal is to re-create a long-ago past by placing Catholic theology at the top of the governing system to coerce citizens into “moral” behavior. They seek to re-integrate Catholic supremacy, as it was before the modern, sovereign state developed.

Yeah, they’ve got Vance, who shows his Catholic compassion all the time, but while UD thinks it’s only responsible to keep you up to date on America’s Christian Crusade, she’s not – er – actively worried.