[O]fficial organs of the Republican Party [see] their job as covering for Trump, even as evidence [has] emerged that he literally suggested that a Republican vice president should be lynched. The lessons of the interwar period, and indeed the long history of mainstream conservative parties’ dalliances with radicals, seem entirely lost on the Republican leadership.

And this, in the end, is why using fascism as a framework for understanding January 6 is worthwhile. This explicit alliance of political violence to an effort to seize power through force is shocking — so shocking that it deserves comparisons to what’s universally seen as the darkest moment in the history of Western democracy.

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

The more details emerge, the more ashamed I am as an American. At some point, faced with our nation having made DT president, evasion, irony, and humor all fail, and what one feels – what I feel – is shame.

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

The sheer scale of Donald Trump’s’ depravity is unmatched in the history of the American presidency, and the Republican party made it possible.

Pence’s attempt to salvage the Republican Party won’t succeed. It will fail not because of any intrinsic problem with the party itself—political parties are merely vessels for the will of the people—but because the problem with the Republican Party is Republican voters. They’re the ones who wanted Trump. They’re the ones who approve of January 6. They’re the ones who insist that Trump actually won in 2020. They’re the ones who are clamoring to nominate him again in 2024.

Republican voters view all of the terrible outcomes from the first Trump administration—the political violence, the white nationalism, the fiscal irresponsibility, the COVID death tolls—not as bugs but as features.This is what they want.

Yet have I left a daughter:
Tifferil, fruit of a brief affair.
Then get thee hence, vile Ivankan!
O Proud Boys, take me there.

Tifferil will love the father
That all his kingdom sings
And I will have my vengeance
Yes I shall do such things...

… is withdrawn from contention for a literary prize.

STAR FINDER

The evening birds quieten, and now it’s the owl,

And fireflies.  And stars.  And fireflies that somehow,

With their buglight, compete on an even playing

Field with the stars.  These stars are, somehow,

Constellated, and I hear my mother’s ghost saying

I left you my old field guide.  The quiet dark allows

All of her to come inside. She’s clearly conveying

The ease and importance of learning the constellations.

Sing it, sister.

UD is agog at the names of the real estate agents representing a new beach resort community. Tiffany, Misty, and Whitney? Did the development hire on a first-name only basis?

That’s one word for it. Others that come to mind: Contemptible. Sickening. Lowest of the low. And above all: Unbelievably stupid.

When you add to this the fact that one of history’s most disgusting and prolific plagiarists continues to lie out of his lying ass about not at all having intentionally plagiarized huge gobs of his novel, you have to conclude that the Nobel laureate the fucker plagiarized (that’s her reaction to the extensive theft in my headline) was far too mild in her use of the word outrageous.

Consider also the sacred nature of the subject matter in (of course) both books: The unspeakable suffering of women during the Second World War. I mean, why don’t I just lift actual agonized testimony and stick it in my work and call myself its author.

Let’s sweeten the pot even more: The plagiarist has been nominated for Australia’s highest literary prize.

And why do I say stupid?

How many times must I explain this to you. If you are going to plagiarize, you need to squirrel around until you find an entirely obscure book published in 1923 in another language… The book has been moldering on the shelves of the Lower East Winnipeg Public Library for generations, waiting for you to translate it and publish it as a work of fiction written by yourself. Get it? Let’s review: Author long dead so not able to read your plagiarism and label it outrageous. Author totally obscure so not a Nobel laureate everyone is going to pay attention to. Crossover from one language to another just to make absolutely certain no one will find the plagiarized source. Are you getting all of this down?

… shifting in Wyoming, are you? A Wyoming senator is

… “surprised” that her office was flooded with calls [after the Uvalde massacre] from constituents expressing a deep desire to do something to stop the spate of mass shootings across the country…

Yeah what a shocker! She certainly assumed they didn’t give a shit.

[Cynthia] Lummis said callers to her office generally have not declared themselves for or against specific policy proposals, but have expressed a “willingness to be open to suggestions.” She also said they may be motivated to act by Wyoming’s high suicide rate.

“The surprise to me has been the number of people that have weighed in, not with particular solutions that they support, but with a willingness to be open to suggestions,” she said. “They’re worried in large about, as I’ve said, the mental health issue, and Wyoming has the highest suicide rate in the nation.”

You could knock her over with a feather. Significant numbers of people in her state are upset about the SCADS of her constituents who use their guns to turn their own heads into tomato soup. How could Senator Loomis ever be expected to anticipate an upset reaction, much less, as Senator, do anything about all the gun suicides? Wyomingites love their guns!!!!! But jeez! Okay! If you insist…

Ivanka Trump had spent much of the day trying to keep her father from going too far. She had refused to address the rally on the Ellipse but at the last minute was so concerned by her father’s anger toward Mr. Pence that she decided to accompany him there in hopes of avoiding a worse clash. Over the following hours, as rioters rampaged through the Capitol, she ran up and down the stairs in the West Wing from her office to the Oval Office hoping to persuade her father to issue stronger statements calling off the attackers.

Let’s Hang on to Farkhad’s Yacht

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

There ain’t no good in our untyin’

The super sloop we made ours and my-en

But he’s cryin’…

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

Let’s hang on to Farkhad’s yacht!

Don’t let go now, we’ve got a lot

Got a lot of yacht between us
Hang on, hang on, hang on, to Farkhad’s yacht

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

He says that he and Vlad are gonna have a sit

Gonna end Ukraine and make the Russians quit

Make it up (Yes Putin really said it!)

Make it up (He says we won’t regret it!)

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

That little slip of army in Ukraine –

You give your personal word it won’t be back again

But you know it’s hard to believe

But you know we think you might deceive

Farkhad don’t you know

We don’t want the yacht to go

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

Let’s hang on to Farkhad’s yacht

Don’t let go now we’ve got a lot

Got a lot of yacht between us

Hang on hang on hang on to Farkhad’s yacht…

When the frats kill – or destroy – a particularly young one, I post this variant I wrote of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was 0.486 booze.

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

Don’t read how they destroyed him if you lack a strong stomach.

As with extreme gun enthusiasts, frat killers consider the death or almost-death of teenagers to be a perfectly okay price to pay for their pleasure.

Know Hope.

(Yes, SOS is aware that last part should be whose career the ex-president declared ‘over’.)

Forcibly evicted by the citizens of SF, the city’s appalling district attorney discovers (no he doesn’t, and he never will; but the rest of us discover it again today) that acting on assumptions and theories rather than acting on reality is murderously stupid.

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

Nellie Bowles:

[H]e didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city…

[W]ith the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results...

Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents...

[It’s] a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, …the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...

During his campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.

But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell...

We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.

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

Don’t read the section on the school board unless you’re absolutely vomit-proof.

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

The thing on nihilism and congratulating yourself on your radical personal freedom morality when someone dies on the street dovetails wonderfully with the same contemptible shit deep in the far-right libertarian weeds… The same necrophiliac splendor… Congratulating yourself, really, on your corpse-love… (“In February 2021, at a corner in the lovely Japantown neighborhood, just a few feet from a house that would soon sell for $4.8 million, a 37-year-old homeless man named Dustin Walker died by the side of the road. His body lay there for at least 11 hours.”) On the right, excitement at the big bloody holes in place of children a truly superior sporting rifle can make; on the left, the same excitement at the big bloody holes fentanyl can make all over dead bodies in city plazas. I wish I were Cormac McCarthy or William Burroughs or Irvine Welsh or Anthony Burgess or John Fowles or hey even Jonathan Swift so I could begin to be adequate to the blood-soaked hard right/hard left orgasms of this my beloved country. So many of our teenage massacrists spent all their time, before they picked themselves up out of their chairs, getting off on exactly this via unspeakable video games. No gun restrictions for this country. The pleasure is too deep, and lots of our senators either share the bloodlust or would never think of getting in its way.