R vous fucking kidding?? We can do WAY better!!!

Thomas L. Friedman makes me think about the limits of words in contexts of unlimited atrocity. You feel him straining, in this rather flamboyant, Faulknerian sentence, to arrive at, to be adequate to, to express verbally, the actually inexpressible horror of a man of no conscience who continues to command the loyalty of tens of millions of Americans. Up against evil embraced by millions, Friedman’s words seem weak.

Some writers resolve the inexpressibility problem by jumping over it into psychopathology. Trump is a high-functioning insane person (a contradiction in terms, no?), an hysterical narcissist, an infantile disordered etc. etc. Their writing goes toward elaborating his dangerous lunacy rather than, as with Friedman, his moral obscenity.

But approaching Trump in himself, whether your approach is ethical or clinical, seems a bit beside the point at this late date in his democracy-ravaging career. The point is not so much Trump as the capacity of so many Americans to adore him, in the way millions of Italians still adore Mussolini, and Russians Stalin. The pertinent pathology is ye olde escape from freedom.

The New York Post relegated Donald Trump’s declaration of his candidacy for president on Tuesday night to page 26 of this morning’s edition of the paper, hinting at the announcement on the front page with the demeaning teaser “Florida Man Makes Announcement.”

“They just kept coming, more and more gunshots – just wouldn’t stop,” Lynch said, adding the gunman then “just sort of walked or skipped off the bus.”

(Probably stopped because he ran out of bullets.)

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So here are some details. Apparently he didn’t even know the people he killed. He acted strangely throughout the trip and reportedly muttered crazy shit about video games as he shot up the bus.

So… sorry, but here you have clear evidence of concealed ownership of guns (weep for the people on that bus – no one thought it worthwhile to tell them they were traveling with someone who had a criminal past with guns), plus serious madness (his father knew he was a gun-toting angry paranoid and did nothing).

But of course it all went down in America, and you know how that goes.

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UPDATE: Wednesday’s [court] hearing also revealed that Jones was charged and convicted of a reckless driving and hit and run in 2021 and had a concealed weapons charge the same year. He received suspended sentences for all of the offenses.

The list keeps getting longer.

It will not be easy to dislodge Mr. Trump. His bond with his supporters is personal — it is based on the promise of humiliating … enemies… The … current Republican Party … is depraved …

Insufficiently depraved MAGA lasses – Ivanka Trump, Kayleigh McEnany – are jumping ship post non-tsunami, leaving the head of the ladies’ auxiliary open to the woman who has long desired and deserved it — the yugely sadistic pasionaria Lara Trump, who UD believes has a clear path to leadership, not only because of her personal qualities, but because she is the likeliest answer to the question Bill Maher recently posed.

Politically ambitious, an absolutely savage lover of violence, Lara blows wannabe brutalists like Kari Lake and Sarah Palin out of the water. Unlike Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lara’s no buffoon; she’s always calm, smiling, and camera-ready. Unlike Kimberly Guilfoyle, who will never live this down, Lara would never let her fervency reduce her to a national joke. On the contrary, her frank, rational disclosure of the charismatic malignity of the Trump revolution seems likely to move her into a commanding position vis-a-vis Trump himself. Bitter and sedentary, he can hardly compete with a perky marathon runner who tirelessly carries the torch he lit but can no longer hold aloft.

Lake, Palin, Boebert, Greene, Guilfoyle – these will form the core of Lara’s Lasserators. Many more will follow.

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UPDATE: Details on Lara’s master plan are beginning to come in. Here’s what we’re hearing.

A lot of people are saying that her hush-hush relationship with her father-in-law (see above) has to do with blackmailing him to make her his VP: A Trump/Trump ticket.

A lot of other people are saying that she won’t even have to blackmail him. She is in her own right the perfect candidate: Absolutely fully committed to the MAGA agenda. Young, to pull in the youth vote. Smart, articulate, fearless, with the patented Trump cruelty. A woman and a family member whose enormous enthusiasm will counteract Ivanka’s refusal to be involved in the campaign. This blog will provide updates as this intriguing story develops.

Every country has mentally ill people. Only America arms them, as Adam Gopnik writes.

The father of the UVa killer knew his son was ‘really paranoid’; he almost certainly also knew he had guns. (How many guns does the father own?) How many other people knew the killer was going nuts? UVa knew he told people he had guns on campus; the school knew as well that he’d been arrested for gun violations. No one did shit as an armed paranoid stalked the campus, and now a significant portion of the school’s football team is dead, in critical condition, or in recovery.

Here’s a close parallel: The sister of Phillip Adams knew he was, in her words, “aggressively” mentally ill – paranoid. He also had shitloads of guns.

Pretty much everyone knew Adams was right round the bend, but no one did shit.

“Going berserk with guns has become an American way of life,” writes Nathan Heller.

Like the UVa killer, Adams had been a college football player — at South Carolina State, which even after his mass murder of an entire family, including toddlers, maintains his hero page. Good ol’ Phil! He did it his way.

Another country might look at CTE ravaged paranoids with guns and restrict their access to weapons. Another country might find a way to commit them to long-term hospital care. America looks at them and says BRING ON MORE GUNS.

Great cast of characters there, and I’m sure she would have won if she’d added John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell. Where were her campaign advisors?

[The shooter] had been investigated by campus officials in September after someone reported [he] made a comment about owning a gun…

[The shooter] was also involved in a hazing investigation on campus …

[A spokesman further noted the university] learned of a prior criminal incident involving a concealed weapon violation that occurred outside the city of Charlottesville in February of 2021…

[The shooter] was required to report that to the University, but he never did. The University’s judicial council took over the case and the results are still pending.

Blah blah this and that this and that and we’re kinda still kinda looking into it. Told people about his weaponry; involved in hazing; criminal incident involving concealment lalalalala….

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This is what happens when guns are absolutely everywhere. When there are practically four hundred million civilian-owned guns in your country, you’re unlikely to give the issue your, uh, full attention. For many Americans, guns seem to have about the status of a household appliance. I mean, who cares.

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Update:

UVa Knew of Gun Conviction Against Student

Before Triple Murder

But Never Started Discipline Process

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This will cost the school gobs of money.

[E]vangelicals and Catholics… have presented themselves as these very strict arbiters of what your morality should be….. [T]his morality is used as a shield to hide from everyone else the … power that they want to have…

[T]hey don’t care about morality for themselves. This is why Herschel Walker gets a pass for two abortions; he gets a pass for beating women. He gets a pass because he’s forgiven by God. But the rest of you have to follow the rules …

GenZ wants nothing to do with these hypocrites.

UVa remains sheltered in place; a football recruit killed three and injured two. UD will go ahead and guess that this was some sort of weekend party/drunken fight that got crazy, but it’s of course too soon to know much.

[Update: The shooting took place in an on-campus parking garage, so the motive might have been a dispute between drivers. Road rage…?]

The Idaho details suggest the shooter (if this was about shooting; it certainly sounds like it, though a different weapon might have been used) is dead at the scene. (The Virginia killer is at large and since he’s heavily armed, with his photo in every paper, and everyone in the world is looking for him, UD’s gonna guess he’ll kill himself.) This one sounds more personal – a nutty vindictive ex-lover? – but we’ll see. Someone reported seeing an unconscious person and called the police, which maybe means at least one of the bodies was outside the off-campus house. Trying to flee? Or the body of the killer?

Both events could be as simple as someone turned away from a party, pissed about it, and returning with one of his big ol’ guns.

My blog post title comes from NPR‘s coverage. It’s America, so we have to bundle these stories.

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UPDATE: He killed this UVa football player.

UPDATE: He also killed Lavel Davis, Jr., another player.

UPDATE: The third person killed, Devin Chandler, was also a football player.

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Virginia shooter is in custody. Could his motive have been resentment? He’s apparently never been an active player; he killed three active players.

Sounds as though some sort of fight broke out, or words were exchanged, on a bus returning to campus from a class field trip to DC to see a play.

… Michael Moore.

Of course Trump helped; normal Americans finally, in the aftermath of the January 6 committee hearings, really felt, and feared, his movement’s cruelty and stupidity.

For the next several weeks, Trump’s social media statements will confirm his madness; he will almost certainly try to whip his Proud Boys up to some serious violence. So while this particular moment is about celebration, we have to start doing some cold consideration of the fact that his remnant nihilists will obey his orders to burn everything down.

But it was the Clarence Thomas brigade, with their vile denial of an important established right, that fucked up the Republican party but good. The medieval cruelty of denying raped ten year old girls abortions drew the attention of all enlightened and humane souls. UD believes the graphic barbarism of this behavior, especially in the context of ongoing highly publicized barbarism against girls and women in benighted countries like Iran and Afghanistan, has so shocked people with normal moral instincts that the abortion issue will not go away, but will continue to bedevil the Republican party as much as Le Monstre Trump has. Behind no exceptions anti-abortion lies precisely the bizarre religious fanaticism and coercion against which this country was established. I can think of nothing more anti-American. When the Supreme Court went there, it activated basic American instincts in millions of us, and now it can do little other than sit back and enjoy the fruits of its idiocy.

The country I love, the country I recognize, has spoken. I am intensely proud.

[T]he right-populist surge is retreating somewhat everywhere. Boris is gone in Britain, just a few years after a landslide win, replaced by a mainstream non-white Tory. Bolsonaro was just dispatched in Brazil (and is not protesting the results). Putin and Xi increasingly look like tin-pot tyrants, incapable of adjusting to events, adopting insane policies — invading Ukraine and imposing zero-Covid madness — and grabbing more and more power to protect them from the consequences.