Joe Biden Makes Shocking Announcement: None of His Children or Grandchildren Will Be Named Senior Advisers to the President

The Capitol-Trasher cult; the ultraorthodox cult; the integralist Catholic cult. Their leaders: Marjorie Taylor Greene; primitive authoritarian rabbis; Pater Edmund Waldstein. These groups are violent; they don’t recognize laws and institutions; they are irrational; they are primitive.

Everyone is so surprised that it turns out a significant minority of the Cap-Trash cult didn’t even vote in a presidential election whose result caused them to try to overthrow the government of the United States. They didn’t vote for Trump.

Why are you surprised? Cultists don’t vote. Or if they vote, it’s in robotic blocks, obeying commands from the cult leader.

Get with the program and perceive their world long enough to defend yourself.

They are trying to kill you and kill your world, and you totally need to defend yourself against them.

They’re not cute. Okay? Waldstein thinks burning non-cultists at the stake is a good idea. Greene wants to put a bullet through the head of Nancy Pelosi. Israeli haredim teach fifteen year old boys to burn down city buses and attack police. Why do you cling to the idea that because these people present themselves as god-fearing they deserve your respect?

Read Don DeLillo’s Mao II, his novel about cults, if you’d like to pause and understand the deep reasons people join cults. Or don’t bother learning the deep reasons. The imperative is to fight them with all you’ve got. With all we’ve got.

Only a small handful of states report voter registration data on a weekly basis. Others report monthly activity, and many states do not report granular details about those who leave one party or the other. Once more states report party registration data, the true number of Republicans who have [switched to Democrats] in recent weeks may prove to be much higher.

“I resent my own humanity and don’t feel anything real anymore,” one “starter pack” meme reads above a collage of White Claw, Xanax, vapes, succulents and streaming-platform logos.

DGMW: It’s a wonderful article (I’m not finished yet, but it’s a really good take on Oblomovism-in-America) which thinks hard, from a lot of angles, about the tendency (the author claims it’s a tendency – I’m not so sure), under the unrelenting stimulation of consumer capitalism, to pull away into no sensation, few possessions, the thinnest sort of personhood, nothingness… But when I got to this sentence, which rolled up into a little ball all the latest ennui products PLUS a Dostoevskian Girl Scout pledge (I promise to do my best to resent my humanity and feel nothing, so help me God.), I sorta lost it.

But let’s see… Let’s see what else this essay, which appears in the fat glossy New York Times Sunday Magazine, awash in splashy double-page ads for gigantic apartments in gated waterfront communities, has to say.

It says that a pandemicky insurrectiony landscape has driven us inward, escapeward, and we are using the free time to meditate on the meaninglessness of all things.

****************

Me, I see it as a much simpler panic-response to L’Age du Trump — Trump, who embodies the apotheosis of grasping, grandiose consumer capitalism.

Grotesquely fat, grotesquely tall, and obsessed with tallness, hebephrenically acquisitive, a vapid psychotic braggart with a tall vapid clotheshorse cantering alongside him, the Late Builder (let’s call him) assortatively mated with a skyscraper in order to produce a super-skyscraper. In the ironic way of well-laid plans, he made an almost seven foot tall teenager. Similarly, Trump wanted world-historical power and got slow hours on golf courses in the blinding sun, followed by regal waves to gatherings of the insane and stupid at Florida intersections. Anyone would be horrified by this fate, and much of America, as the NYT essay rightly notes, is sprinting, horrified, in the opposite direction.

Even the Mar-a-Lago membership is skedaddling from Ma and Pa Ubu’s palace.

Trump neatly, fully, in a chilling, cautionary way, conveys that wanting shit is stupid (our mad loathed Trumps du jour, Cruz and Hawley, want shit), so people don’t want shit. Even Trump’s exemplar and bromantic partner, Putin, might be beginning to understand this, as photos of his palace complex on the Black Sea appear in the Russian press and rouse the populace (see 1917).

One reason I doubt the whole NYT thesis has to do with something the author doesn’t mention – all them dogs everyone’s getting. In the last year, rates of dog ownership have gone through the woof. And unlike no-maintenance succulents, dogs are way-high maintenance, and I mean emotional as well as logistical. It’s only one trend, to be sure, but you can probably think of others equally at odds with existential/affective minimalism.

Anyway. My faith in my country’s earnest godly greed – the very foundation of the America dream – remains strong. You don’t want to get Americans too close to philosophy, because with all the drugs available here, plus our brittle naive Gatsby idealism, we take one glance at philosophy and collapse into a heap of accidental overdose. You don’t resent your own humanity; you resent the clownish/tyrannical non-humanity of the Late Builder. Do not panic; you are nothing like him. He has been shat out (with great groaning effort) from the body politic, and we’re going to be okay.

They’re always shocked – shocked – when strong majorities favor burqa/niqab bans; and they always say the same thing when warning their populace not to vote for them: So few fully veiled women walk the streets of our cities that it’s silly to legislate against them; only rabid reactionaries favor the bans; most fully veiled women are tourists…

So Switzerland, which has a national referendum on fully veiling coming up in early March, is yet another boringly repetitive example: Almost 65% of Swiss favor the ban; the government is madly lecturing them on how backward they are to support it; the population clearly intends to ignore the lecture. Only hard-right politicians favor it! … Well, okay, some left-wing parties favor it…

And why? For the obvious reason that it oppresses and erases women and by the way can certainly demoralize young girls who go out and see this embodiment of womanhood in their neighborhoods…

And who cares if they’re tourists? The fully veiled woman – a visitor from Saudi Arabia — who took a front row seat at the Opéra Bastille a few years back inspired an instant strike on the part of the performers: They would not sing until she unveiled or left. She left. (France has had a burqa ban for years.)

As to there being only a few full-veilers: Are you kidding me? Rates of full veiling appear to be going up in England, as you might expect when countries normalize the practice.

The main problem the Swiss government will face once the ban happens is the loss of a certain number of incredibly rich tourists. Boohoo. Otherwise, note that burqa bans all over Europe (and other parts of the world) have been imposed with virtually no difficulty.

When did the English language decide that the OO sound meant stoopid and/or crazy? Why is it so easy to think of words designating dumb/nuts that feature OO? Rube, yahoo, boob, booboisie, stooge, goon, loon, moonbeam, buffoon, doo-doo, woo-woo, zoo (as in “the zoo at the Capitol building”).

UD wondered about this as she read a wonderful opinion piece from Alabama, where the author, seeking an organizing principle, a leit motif, around which to discuss “our political class in Alabama, … folks too dumb to understand how dumb they are, made that way through self-inflicted repetitive brain injuries,” lights on The Three Stooges (plus Shemp).

Kyle Whitmire works his way down the list of Alabama’s highest-profile idiots, comparing each of them to his Stooge-equivalent:

Mo Brooks “believes sea-level rise is due to rocks falling in the water; he’s called mitigation measures put in place by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey ‘nanny state’ politics and last year, he bragged on the effectiveness of the American healthcare system against the coronavirus… [S]poke to insurrectionists before they stormed the capitol, [and] now faces censure by Congress.”

Rep. Barry Moore: “[T]old Alabamians that, if Trump could get the coronavirus, everybody would wind up getting it, so there was little point to protective measures… [S]upported overturning a lawful election and declared that he was leaving Twitter after the platform had already suspended his account… [S]hared a meme on Facebook defending Kenosha, Wisc., shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, saying he’s ‘fought back.'”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville is “too dangerous to trust around kitchen appliances, much less the power of a United States senator. And he’s prone to slap people he’s mad at and no one assumes he knows what he’s doing.”

[Attorney General] Steve Marshall’s organization “helped organize the pro-Trump march in Washington, but after that march turned into an assault on the capitol, Marshall said he didn’t know anything about the organization’s role in it. Marshall promised to investigate, but when asked whether Trump bore any responsibility, Marshall played dumb. ‘I didn’t see anything about the rally,’ he told the Montgomery Advertiser. ‘I don’t know anything about his remarks.'”

As the massive Trump tide recedes (or, as one observer memorably put it, as “witless ape rides helicopter” out of DC), it leaves in its wake schools of minnows that we hadn’t been able to see before, drowning as we were in the tide.

But now is the time to zoom in – on the fools, the nincompoops, the kooks, the googly-eyed, the stooges – before they try for another insurrection against the republic.

This blog will chronicle their movements.

“Making our institutions a joke is exactly what helps authoritarians like Mr Putin survive. If there’s no example of things going better, it makes their life much much easier. A big sad thing which is happening is that there is no longer an American example … that dissidents in China or [the] opposition in Hong Kong or journalists in Russia or Poland or Hungary or whatever can point to — thanks to Mr Trump.”

They’re really really sorry! It was a grave error… completely false…no evidence… no basis in fact and as a special offer just for you if you don’t sue us for a billion dollars the way you’re suing Sidney our managing editor will come to Toronto and go down on at least one and no more than three designated Dominion employees.

Please do not punish us for extensively publishing sick lies that led directly to a fatal insurrection which has damaged the United States of America beyond description! We meant well.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has cancelled a trip to Europe trip at the last minute.

Mr Pompeo had been due to fly out on Tuesday but Reuters reports that Luxembourg’s foreign minister and several top European Union officials have declined to meet with him.

No actually democratic country will have anything to do with you, ya big doodoo! Stick to your own kind – plenty of authoritarian regimes just like yours would love to hang out with you.

Football coach Bill Belichick doesn’t want anything from the bloody hands of Mr Fuckface, so Ff can take his Medal of Freedom and … find someone base enough to accept it.

UD suggests finding the guy who smashed that fire extinguisher over the head of the policeman in the Capitol the other day and killed him with it. That guy would probably be willing to accept a medal from Ff.

For four years, Trump’s critics have been accused of hysteria and hyperbole for describing his movement as fascist, authoritarian, or lawless. Today, as Congress attempts to certify the election of a new president, the president has vindicated those critics. In attempting this coup, Trump has also vindicated the Americans who voted decisively in November to remove him from office.

There is an obvious irony in someone like [Senator Josh] Hawley, who has built his career on decrying the cultural corruption and moral emptiness of his Democratic opponents, embracing nihilism. Hawley has previously argued that the country needs to return to the virtuous roots of the early republic. His evident disdain for the basic principles of democracy means that nobody should have to take his arguments on that score seriously.

Quinta Jurecic, The Atlantic

***************

UPDATE: But hey look at this! Hawley turns out to be the true Trump heir; as they say in the song, Tomorrow Belongs to Me! A spectacular liar and coward and hypocrite, just like his political daddy, Hawley goes after “scumbags” who massed in front of his house and “threatened” his “infant daughter” and in this way whips up the forces of righteousness… Only it was all bullshit:

Police Slap Down Josh Hawley’s Claim Antifa Terrorized His Family

There was video. It shows a tiny group in front of his house making noise about Hawley’s now-notorious attack on democracy. A few of them went up to the house and tried to deliver a copy of the Constitution, but it was (not surprisingly) refused. Then they dispersed.

So here’s the deal. You don’t get to lead a revolution against American democracy without running the risk of experiencing a bit of static. We feel quite strongly about our democratic traditions here, see, and you’ve seriously upset us. So anyway okay be a revolutionary! Tear down the whole fuckin republic, lad! No one’s stopping you! But assume the burden of your radical subversion. As Esther Wang writes: “Man, if you’re going to try to pull some authoritarian, anti-democratic bullshit, at least don’t be a weenie about it.” IOW: You hate democracy! We get it! But you have to own your hatred. There will be sacrifices – for you and for your fellow plotters against America. Surely you understand that. And it starts now.

You gotta figure Kelly’s gonna do the Trump thing and insist she won by a landslide or something. It will be fun to watch. Meanwhile, Ossoff’s race remains a nail-biter.

Everyone’s got what to say about the country’s shift toward authoritarianism, but Jonathan Chait’s brief piece in New York, where he locates Republican rejection of democracy in the emergence of Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr, is a must-read.

To support Trump’s reelection was always to endorse an attack on democracy. The chief divide [within] the party was between those Republicans who denied Trump’s clearly signaled intent to attack the democratic system, and those who reveled in it.

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw
Confirm thy soul in self-control
Thy liberty in law!

Words for our time, from a simple, beautiful song.