Except when it’s not.

“[The million dollar ad the Lincoln Project is about to release in Ohio] should be the closing chapter in Vivek Ramaswamy’s pathetic shitty mean small vile little political career.”

I mean not Wow at all, since in Indiana it’s perfectly fine for a 13 year old at a shooting range to carry loaded firearms. And to shoot them. Like this babe.

‘Ohio venues are pulling out of hosting Republican campaign events featuring gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, as backlash grows over his advert featuring his Democratic opponent Amy Acton’s estranged mother.

The Old Dog Ale House & Brewery in Delaware, Ohio, canceled a GOP event featuring Ramaswamy last Friday, according to USA Today reporter Jessie Balmert. The Ohio GOP said they had selected a new location for the event.

Meanwhile, Elliot’s Wood Fired Kitchen in Newark said in the comments section of a recent Facebook post that it would not host the Ohio GOP’s planned event on Tuesday. The Ohio Republican Party’s bus tour website now lists the location of the event as “to be announced.”

Several Ohio venues that hosted GOP events over the weekend have received a wave of one-star Google reviews following the events, including Kick-N-Ax in Zanesville, Izzy’s in Monroe, and The Local Bar Strongsville. Some reviewers included photos of Ramaswamy at the venues.’

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UPDATE: Statement from Ramaswamy campaign: “We take these cancellations as badges of honor, and look forward to an upcoming massive rally at Aultman Hospital’s leprosy ward in Canton.”

“[Ramaswamy’s fate is like that of] the pigs at the end of Animal Farm: they despised the two-legged farmers, [but] by the last chapter they’re living in the house, up on their hind legs, little vests on, pocket watches. They became exactly what they abhorred. That’s what happened here. In order to win, politicians break their first principles. They abandon their righteous philosophies and sink into a scum position.” Scum position is nice, and this is a thoughtful take on La Bomba.

Yet since Ramaswamy never had any first principles (besides personal advancement) to abandon, UD proposes Dangerous Liaisons as a closer analogy. Here, resentful and depraved aristocrats excite themselves by destroying the lives of innocent people. They find the destruction every bit as sadistically satisfying a spectacle as the modern elites watching Squid Game.

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At the end of Dangerous Liaisons, the worst of the sadistic aristocrats is totally shunned by decent society. Which is now happening to Ramaswamy, as one Ohio venue after another cancels their planned hosting of campaign events.

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 [a] 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.”