I’m not saying there won’t be moments of levity in the next few years.
Capitol rioter who broke flagpole over officer saw Trump as replacement father figure, attorneys say in bid for leniency
Here’s the list of all the goodies (many of them baubles) Rudy must turn over to the two women whose lives he ruined.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just one poll. But a girl can dream.
The release of a pseudo-memoir under the name of a presidential candidate’s wife can at best occasion jokey remarks (see above) by those tasked with pseudo-reading it. Some of the reviewers’ lines are pretty good.
Another reviewer pissed to have gotten the assignment quotes sentences from the book like this one:
“Living my life with a core set of principles provides me with a foundation that leads to consistent and rational decision-making.”
The reviewer’s anger intensifies as she’s forced to rifle through the book for quotations for her review (wasn’t flipping through the fucker once enough?), and her final paragraph makes explicit what other reviewers merely signal: Vacuous people shouldn’t write memoirs cuz ain’t nothin to write.
We want to believe that whatever shallowness or stupidity that appears is a survival mechanism a woman had to take up when dealing with a misogynistic world. Well, sorry: sometimes women really are like Marie Antoinette’s pastries, … filled with nothing more complex than artificial fillers and dead air.
Yet another pissed reviewer (“I let out an exasperated snort.”) excerpts/comments:
Melania Trump team[ed] up with a company run by “successful businesspeople” to introduce the American public (the “consumer base”) to a “line of high-end skincare products” because, after all, “people frequently asked me about my regimen, marveling at the health of my skin,” and so, you see, what she really wanted to do was find a way to “empower women,” and if that means charging you $150 an ounce to put fish eggs on your face, then so be it.
Background here.
And here’s the judge, sentencing her to nine years.
Here, the defense has, and Ms. Peters in particular, remained quite defiant, which is her right, but certainly not helpful for her lot today… Your lies are well documented and these convictions are serious. I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant a defendant as this court has ever seen.
… You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again. In your world, it’s all about you.
… You have no respect for the checks and balances of government. You have no respect for this court. You have no respect for law enforcement, and you do not have respect for your … colleagues when you were a clerk and recorder who weren’t in lockstep in your beliefs.
… Your explanation about what happened is preposterous. It’s on video. You have no problem lying to officers. It’s happened multiple times. They’re recorded conversations. It’s just more lies... Yes, you are a charlatan and you cannot help but lie as easy as it is for you to breathe. You betrayed your oath for no one other than you.
… And this is what makes Ms. Peters such a danger to our community. It’s the position she held that has provided her the pulpit from which she can preach these lies, the undermining of our democratic process, the undermining of the belief and confidence in our election systems... Every effort to undermine the integrity of our elections and public’s trust in our institutions has been made by you.
Deprave‘s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
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To alter Andrew Marvell.
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“Deprave” is such a fine word, intimating dark and private vileness — vileness twisted and extended beyond the capacity of most of us to comprehend it. A survey of its use turns up, again and again, two characters in particular — Josef Mengele, and Kim Jong Un. Which is to say, we tend to reserve the word not only for the perverted evil people among us, but for high-level, solo practitioners: Mengele, Kim, and our obviously more constrained but nonetheless, as in Liz Cheney’s remark yesterday, depraved Donald Trump.
None, I think, do them embrace; all are radical isolationists, slashing depravedly about all by themselves; and indeed, as in the now-notorious Jan 6 moment, telling all the decent frightened normal people around them who beg them not to be depraved to fuck off. “Depraved” carries a sense of morally lost, far outside the recognizable human ambit. Lone wolves.
Depraved indifference. There is a head-scratching oddness and excess about depravity, as in What’s the percentage in it? Why? Questions that only the non-depraved would ever ask; but the answer must involve some deep, positively mystical, gratification, a well of delight into which one dips again and again with each unimaginable (for us. for us unimaginable) cruelty. Part of the sensation is one’s cosmic singular power – you alone have the freedom to torture children, entomb a country, end democratic life. You come to recognize yourself as a charismatic godlet, a Caligula for our times. You feel this, excitingly, in your blood: The willingness of the world to let you enact and then exceed one viciousness after another; the voyeuristic thrill you inspire in millions who lack the depravity to do the things you do, but who would dearly love to do them. I am, Trump declares, your retribution.
Is there ever any content to depravity? Can it have a purpose beyond lurid sexual or power gratification?
The worst form of depraved behavior presents itself as purposive: Mengele’s experiments; Pol Pot’s revolutionary communism. To the extent that any intellectual/ideological something adheres to the worst of which humans are capable, we are merely that much more shaken, hollowed out, terrified, by its emergence. Only when we understand the facade that “ideas” offer pure sadism are we able to put monsters like Mengele and Pol Pot in their proper place.
More common is the simple vacuity of what Cheney isolates in Trump — most depraved people don’t bother trying to sketch even the primitive outlines of a meaningful world view, much less a politics. The enormously attractive – charismatic – role they play for us is draughtsmen of mental darkness, drawers-up and drawers-out of private primal places within us of sadistic rage, obscene curiosity, physical aggression, and bloody nihilism.
WE ALL GOTTA GO SOMETIME
[A] social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol [told] supporters that Mr. Pence had let them all down. [Jack] Smith [has now] laid out extensive arguments for why that post on Twitter should merit Mr. Trump’s prosecution.
After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety.
Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?”
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THE NIGHT WHEN THE VOTE WENT OUT IN GEORGIA
Mr. Smith’s brief also portrayed Mr. Trump and some of his allies — like his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — as making wild claims about election fraud in public while other aides close to him doubted the same allegations in private.
In early December 2020, for example, Mr. Giuliani appeared at a hearing of state legislators in Georgia and proclaimed that as many 10,000 “dead voters” had cast their ballots in the race.
At that same moment, however, the brief contends, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows and one of the former president’s lawyers were exchanging text messages doubting the assertion, sharing with each other that only 12 votes in Georgia had been attributed to dead people.
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BIRDS DO IT BEES DO IT EVEN EDUCATED FEMALES DO IT
When … lawmakers told Mr. Trump that he had lost the election in Michigan because he had underperformed with “educated females,” the brief said, Mr. Trump was not pleased.
The lawmaker could tell by Mr. Trump’s “body language,” the brief recounts, “that he was not happy to hear” the assessment.
… Kari Lake has announced plans to shoot a puppy on live tv.
The Republican Party today isn’t incidentally grotesque; like the man who leads it, Donald Trump, it is grotesque at its core. It is the Island of Misfit Toys, though in this case there’s a maliciousness to the misfits, starting with Trump, that makes them uniquely dangerous to the republic. Since 2016, they have been at war with reality, delighting in their dime-store nihilism, creating “alternative facts” and tortured explanations to justify the lawlessness and moral depravity and derangement of their leader.
None of this is hidden; it is on display in neon lights, almost every hour of every day. No one who supports the Republican Party, who casts a vote for Trump and for his MAGA acolytes, can say they don’t know.
They know.
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Half of America. Half – by this account – is morally diseased, crooked, grotesque, depraved, tortured, or in league with the same. One hundred sixty-six million five hundred thousand people in the country are malicious nihilists, or positively attracted to them.
Say it’s true. How in the world to account for it?
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Ol’ UD says it’s that tasty German plate, Cheesy Nietzsche. “It’s the absence of surprise to life that harrows the head of everybody American you know,” wrote Thomas Pynchon, and it’s arguable that their always-entertaining, always a radical new stupidity/insult/outrage/lie, candidate puts a welcome spring in the step of otherwise enervated folk.
These people are looking for a specifically MAGA transvaluation of values. Yes, you can call it dime-store nihilism (it’s très Trumpian to kill yourself); at a slightly higher level, you can call it dollar-store dionysianism, but the point is a puborectalis-tightening encounter with the illicit, with an outrageous and ongoing public display of norm-nihilating. All That is Solid Melts into Hair.
Coastal elites like UD might prefer their boredom-suspending transgressiveness to take place with innocuous irony on the fart patio of Portlandia’s vegan cafe, but it’s not for her to decide how heartland Americans want to play this thing. All she can do is vote against it and pray.
Another day, another heaping helping of disaster for Arizona’s reigning queen of the Make America Great Again movement.
When this election is over, Republicans really should begin asking themselves when and if they ever want to win again — because if it wasn’t clear after already losing two Senate seats and every key statewide office, it’s about to become undeniably clear to all but the fiercest MAGA diehards.
“About damn time,” tweeted former Senate staffer Jim Manley.
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[A]ttorney Philip T. Kingston wrote: “Do you know how hard it is to get disbarred?”
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“You lie and make false statements in court to try and overturn ONE lousy election, and suddenly people are all mad about it,” [wrote] civil attorney Daniel Aguilar.
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Trump’s man in NC continues to impress.
“If the cops wanted to shoot an elderly black man they should have shot Al Sharpton … Closing his mouth would do this Nation good.”
“Obama IS a blackface step-in fectch-it [sic] for liberal white America.”
… “It’s Oprah the wicked witch, leading the way to sexing up the children!”