Sen. John Cornyn, R-Tx., who currently finds himself in an unusually competitive race against Democratic opponent MJ Hegar, previously falsely represented himself as a graduate of Oxford University in England in the run-up to his successful election to the Texas Supreme Court, press and public records show.
In Texas politics, the word “intellectual” [or (God forbid) “professor”] is the equivalent of saying “fucks goats.” So why would Cornyn want to claim such a thing – and a foreign thing – in the first place? Texans are looking to elect people like Rick Perry, a cheerleader at Texas A&M.
I thought that my outrage meter had maxed out over the last eight months but today I found out that was wrong. I’ve been trying to gather thoughts for you about this all day long and all I can come up with is this unrelenting stream of profanity.
I’m an air force veteran. I served in Iraq. I served in Afghanistan. I took care of a lot of broken bodies over there. When the president came out and said we were suckers and losers I was pissed off. I wasn’t surprised but I was pissed off. When he said nothing when Putin put a bounty on our heads, I was pissed off but I wasn’t surprised because [Trump’s] in his pocket.
“To my Mormon friends, my Latter-day Saint friends,” [Utah Senator Mike] Lee said. “Think of [Trump] as Captain Moroni. He seeks not power but to pull it down. He seeks not the praise of the world or the fake news, but he seeks the wellbeing and the peace of the American people.”
The party’s over It’s time to call it a day They’ve voted early and soon To send the buffoon away It’s time to wind up the masquerade — The IRS called. It wants your taxes paid.
The party’s over The Trumpers flicker and dim They rallied all through the night
It seemed to be right but covid got them Now you must wake up, all dreams must end Take off your makeup, the party’s over It’s all over, my friend
… good writers like Caitlin Flanagan know how to tackle hopelessly tacky pointless topics. Faced, for instance, with writing about Melania Trump’s former BFF‘s tell-all, a publishing event registering magnitude minus one on the Richter Scale, Flanagan executes perfectly that old standby, the hilarious juxtaposition of high and low.
C’est entendu after all that her empty subject matter degrades anyone who approaches it; the only way to emerge unfilthed is to stop moaning and go the other way: resplendent-ify it by situating the nothingness within the world’s greatest, most substantive, cultural expressions.
The all-time great model for this approach, inSOS‘s humble opinion, is Drew Jubera’s piece on East Mississippi Community College (read and learn). When they go low, we go high is the technique. The lower the setting, the higher the cultural references. Try it and see if you don’t piss yourself laughing.
Now of course you have to be an extremely good writer (not to mention culturally literate) to do this thing. If you clicked on the Jubera link, you see how he did it. This is how Flanagan does it.
[A]t last we have a glimpse into the feelings and nature of our first lady, who has stalked through these past four years in high heels and a perfect blowout, her gaze pitiless as the sun.
Okay, hands? Do I see hands? Yes? Question over there?
What is the most famous line from Yeats’s The Second Coming doing at the end of this sentence? And why didn’t Flanagan write “slouched” instead of “stalked”? Though stalked is good super-modelogically, Yeats writes “slouches,” and supermodels also slouch…
But this is a quibble: By tossing into her review without comment this phrase from the crisis-ridden twentieth century’s highest-cultural poetic expression, Flanagan signals the base futility of her endeavor as well as the fun that might be had with it. Readers appreciate this sort of thing: The reduction of Yeats’s terrifying apocalyptic heartless beast to the runway robot’s belle indifférence … See what our world has come to kinda thing…
“I was there at the beginning,” [the ex-BFF] tells us, as though she had witnessed the separation of the Earth from the firmament, not bumped into a model in the Vogue offices.
Again grand Biblical/planetary language of inception is invoked in the context of the start of a chick flick.
[The BFF] describes working the inauguration as the 13th labor of Hercules…
Grand mythic sweep…
When [the BFF] explains that [Melania] will have to wear the clothes of an American designer to the inauguration, Melania is horrified. Her soul wounded, she cries out to the gods: “But I want to wear Lagerfeld!”
[Trump’s] three-pronged strategy of political suicide and public health disaster came together seamlessly last night in Omaha, Nebraska. Before stranding thousands of his hapless followers in the cold, ink-black darkness outside of the airport, the president babbled on for two minutes about this inscrutable non-scandal (“Vice President Biden was directly involved and personally involved in establishing corrupt business dealing with China and getting money for it”) and then repeatedly made fun of the media for covering the coronavirus: “But you notice the fake news now, right? All they talk about is COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID, COVID. And we’ve made such progress it’s incredible.”
Is the president on meth? Nebraska is a virus hotspot.
A chilling alternative, however fanciful, could arise if Trump flees abroad after losing a close, viciously contested election. Hunkered down in a foreign country willing to provide sanctuary, he could conceivably style himself a “president in exile” and incite his die-hard American followers to resist the election results.
