… on deep state bonfire day.
Andrew Sullivan (no link) tells Biden to step aside, and he’s got a point.
Yes, Trump is almost as old as Biden. But he has the energy and stamina and obsessiveness of the truly mentally ill. I started to read his interview this week with Hugh Hewitt, and yes, it was a festival of delusion and lies and occasional decent points. But what struck me also was the zeal, untempered by time, the persistent, angry passion, the untiring drive to regain power. He is not what he was, and, appearances to the contrary, is mortal. But up against Biden, he seems like raw energy.
… Trump now has the aura of the American outlaw, a victim of the Biden DOJ, a man on the run. Look at that mug shot. He’s trolling the Constitution. I once wrote about Trump in the context of Shakespeare’s Richard III: it’s hard not to root for the monster in some mischievous way.
I get all that. I don’t quite get this:
[W]hen I think of the presidency right now, it feels like an empty space. The drift so many now feel as religion recedes from American life, as social media eats away at any sense of the common good, as all the worst elements of society are replayed on our phones over and over, is palpable.
I’m not palpating it. I see plenty of healthy civic activism – environment, reproductive rights, gun control – in large parts of this country. And since when does the recession of religion equal destructive drift? Looked at Norway lately? Looked at any list of the best countries in the world by any measure you’d like? Not a non-secular one among them. OTOH I won’t waste your time listing the God-fearing catastrophes. I mean, break it down by state. Among the worst elements of our society are the fundamentalists and the bigots breathed air into by Trump, and I agree with Sullivan that Biden’s a dangerously weak candidate to go up against them.
**********************
UD‘s very keen, if we’re talking Biden-subs, on Buttigieg, and not just because he’s read Ulysses (his father was a Joyce scholar). Unflappable, likes a good fight, smart as a whip, likeable, YOUNG, serious, military background, politically experienced, sense of humor. Americans are even willing to vote for intellectuals lately (Obama)! But I fear they’re not yet, in sufficient numbers, willing to vote – at the level of the presidency – for out gay people.
Per the John Eastman disbarment trial, new, yummy details about the traitors’ January 6 plot and the grand historic role reserved for Iowa’s own hayseed, Chuck Grassley.
The Constitution requires the vice president — who also serves as the president of the Senate — to preside over the counting of electoral votes to certify the presidential election. Historically, however, this job has at times fallen to the “Senate president pro tempore,” typically the most senior senator in the majority. In 2021, Grassley held that position…
Eastman … hinted [in an email] that he thought [Sen. Chuck] Grassley might play a role on Jan. 6. In the message, Eastman told Epshteyn that he hoped members of Congress would avoid taking any actions that might “constrain Pence (or Grassley)” from asserting the power to block Biden’s election…
Grassley started a furor on Jan. 5, 2021, when he told reporters of Pence “we don’t expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate.” His comments prompted an urgent rush by Pence’s staff to correct the record, eventually resulting in a statement from Grassley’s office indicating the senator had been “misinterpreted” and was merely saying he might fill in for Pence during some portions of the proceedings that day.
Yes, of course – misinterpreted.
Apparently plans were afoot to smother Pence in a hay silo in Pocahontas County, but his staff asked if it’d be okay if he were allowed to survive the proceedings and then take his chances with the crowd trying to hang him.
As someone who has covered the AMAZING cavalcade of convicted crooks who have learned their trade at Wharton, UD will say what she has lo these many years said about Wharton:
As an insider trader factory — as, more broadly, the nation’s most illustrious breeder of malfeasors this side of Ma Barker — Trump’s alma mater certainly should have taught wee Donald and his classmates what a mugshot is.
**********************
smith got mike pence
talky talky mike pence
smith got mike pence
to tell him all he knew
pence dropped a data dump
about his hangman trump
and what he tried last fall to do, do do
no cares has mike to grieve him
his godly honesty never leaves him
he’s singing like a lark believe him
as he goes rolling rolling home
The latest Trump indictment shows that the unprecedented has become routine. Before March, a former American president had never been indicted. Trump has now been indicted three times in about four months.
Fox … is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a “hostile” network…
One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about—or even heard—what they just said. [LOL] He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie... [LOOOL]
“I’m no great fan of Fox,” Trump complained at one point. “You’re sitting here,” Baier responded calmly. “Well, you gotta get your word out somehow, right?” Trump mumbled, with that sullen, childlike affect that is always so disconcerting to see in a man closer to 80 than 8. [This is the moment to visit all of UD’s UBU/TRUMP/TRUBU posts over many years. (Scroll down.)]
*********************
Roger Shattuck on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu:
[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…
Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character? It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability, the vestiges of original sin. Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him. He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images. He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.
***********
UD thanks Dmitry, a reader, for pointing out that Fox settled 787.5 million, not billion. She has corrected it.
“He will always put his own interests and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interests. There’s no question about it. This is a perfect example of that. He’s like a 9-year-old — a defiant 9-year-old kid who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table, defying his parents to stop him from doing it. It’s a means of self-assertion and exerting his dominance over other people. And he’s a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s, his personal gratification of his ego. But our country can’t be a therapy session for a troubled man like this.”
Speaking of all this, it’s time again to recognize and appreciate the much-maligned group of psychiatrists who back in 2017 tried leashing the beast. If they’d been able to move things along Twenty-fifth Amendment-wise, we might have been spared a very sick spectacle.
Andrew Sullivan on the Katzenjammer Kids. (No link.)
Your arraignment’s today
I don’t know if it’s sunny or gray
For I only have eyes for you
The judge sits on high
But I can’t see a thing but your tie
For I only have eyes for you
I don’t know if we’re in a garden
Or on a crowded avenue
You are here and so am I
Maybe millions of people go by
But they all disappear from view
And I only have eyes for you
Huh? UD‘s colleague Jonathan Turley (who, you recall, “wants one boy to have many girlies,”) says a funny thing.
Plenty of people, including Mike Pence, are now openly worrying that harm may indeed have occurred; and as to motive: Scads of responsible onlookers have no trouble wondering out loud whether an established anti-democrat with a striking fondness for dictators and a real bad sore spot over losing an election might be tempted to share valuable secrets.
And not to pile on, but: Trump’s mother was not only born in the Outer Hebrides but grew up speaking only Gaelic! A lot of people are saying that Trump himself is actually Scottish and holds no allegiance to the United States. Birth certificates can be faked, just the way the FBI planted hundreds of boxes of fake documents in Trump’s bathroom.
I’m not necessarily saying his not even holding American citizenship is true; it’s only that a lot of people are saying it is true but the deep state won’t look into it because of the power of the Scots lobby.
Even without influence peddling, there’s a lot of troubling evidence (“It’s great to be home”?) here.
How Are Things in Mar-a-Lago?
Thirty loos in Mar-a-Lago Or is the number thirty-three? It's a security farrago Where our guests are wont to pee. So we ask each crapping MAGA While you're crapping, look away For the boxes by your caca Vital secrets could betray.