Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has cancelled a trip to Europe trip at the last minute.

Mr Pompeo had been due to fly out on Tuesday but Reuters reports that Luxembourg’s foreign minister and several top European Union officials have declined to meet with him.

No actually democratic country will have anything to do with you, ya big doodoo! Stick to your own kind – plenty of authoritarian regimes just like yours would love to hang out with you.

… in the Capitol building with a bunch of sick losers? Even at his lowest, when he was living in his car, Klete Keller was never a loser, never sick. He was, by his own account (listen up – it’s a half hour long but worth the investment of time), an entitled jerk, a man who thought being an Olympian meant he could keep swimming swiftly and easily through post-Olympic life.

Life had other ideas, and, when Keller realized basically nobody besides a few swim team kids gave a shit that he was a champion swimmer, he got depressed and angry and stopped working (or was fired) and started drinking and lazing about. His wife threw him out and he spent extended time homeless and altogether down and out.

One of Keller’s former Olympic teammates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly discuss Keller’s apparent descent, drew a line from the “goofy, oafish” swimmer he knew in the 2000s to the aimless, rudderless, 30-something man who, he speculated, became a perfect candidate to fall into a radical, conservative rabbit hole of conspiracy theorists and rioters involved in insurrection.

His sister eventually let him move in with her, and that’s when things started looking up for him.

Until a few days ago, he had a steady job in a real estate firm in Colorado; he might well have lost that job now. His name has been erased from the firm’s website. He faces possible arrest.

We needn’t waste time accounting for Keller’s big enthusiasm for Fuckface – that is apparently well documented in his (now-erased) social media. Anyone who wants to can be enthusiastic about Ff. But it’s certainly worth considering the fanaticism that brought him from Colorado to DC to the violence at the Capitol.

Having listened to him tell his story, I’ll offer this idea, sketchy and ill-informed as it has to be.

As I listened to Keller tell his tale, the phrase drama junkie kept coming to me. Also adrenalin junkie. After years and years of intense unrelenting swimming – in competitions, in practices – Keller had clearly built up a strong need for everything in life to be an unrelenting competitive test of his endurance in dramatic contests. He makes it clear that once his swimming career was over he entirely totally thoroughly collapsed. Ordinary vague daily life failed to be commensurate with the extraordinary small sharp warrior focus of the swimming pool. But Keller’s need for battle, self-testing, winning, superiority persisted.

Now this is a guy who dropped out of college – to focus on swimming, natch. One option as he left swimming would have been to finish his University of Southern California degree and get, like, a marketable skill. But he was, by his own admission, too arrogant for that. So down, down, down, he went. [Correction: According to this, he did eventually finish his degree.]

So my old friend Courtney, a really impressive all-around athlete, once sent me an article about the connection between athleticism and self-destructive behaviors. Here’s an excerpt from it:

If you’re an outdoor athlete and you’re good at it, you’re probably like I once was: a selfish, self-involved son of a bitch. It’s always more, more, more and me, me, me, and I was no different. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to do the hardest sport routes, to be the boldest on high, killer walls.

Why? Why not? I was addicted to climbing, and then to starvation, and when that wasn’t enough, I became addicted to drugs.

Maybe you see some of my method in your own madness. And perhaps your obsessions are “healthy”: wheatgrass, long runs, body sculpting, rock climbing. That’s great. But I tell you now, absent your passions you will feel the sharp scrape of withdrawal — just like any fixless junkie bug-eyed in a January alley. Reality can be reduced, at its sparest, to chemical reactions, our body craving the release of GABA, oxytocins, endorphins, serotonin, dopamine. It doesn’t care about their provenance. It just doesn’t. Cut off the source—any source—and you will pay.

The drama, injury, contests, even in some perverted sense the teamwork at the Capitol must have felt very familiar to poor Klete Keller, once a champion, then a loser, then a winner, and now at this late date once again a terrible loser. Turns out – maybe; I’m speculating – he never quite lost his addiction to bloody battle. And now he has drowned in it.

.. the obvious one, which is that if we don’t let them fly they won’t be able to leave. Give each man one free one-way ticket to anywhere outside the US willing to take him. THEN impose the flying ban.

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

As to where they should go: Hawley’s a no-brainer: Heiligenkreuz Abbey, a twelfth-century monastery near Vienna, and home to

Pater Edmund Waldstein, a 35-year-old Cistercian monk… By any conventional standard, his views are extreme: in addition to rejecting the separation of church and state, he is a monarchist who argues that the Church has the right to punish baptized heretics (Protestants), including by burning them at the stake.

Burning individual heretics at the stake can’t hold a candle, as it were, to violently bringing down the most powerful democracy in the world; but it’ll be a way for Josh to cool his heels while hatching the next assault on the Capitol.

Cruz? The Northern Lights look spectacular from Murmansk.

Yes. Murmansk.

Daniel Lubetzky points out that cowards and lazy fellow-travelers almost always help create the conditions for catastrophic social madness. If we don’t all stand up to nuts – writing and speaking against them, financially and otherwise supporting the enemies of unreason, demonstrating together against the debauched among us – we can’t pretend to be surprised when, emboldened, they strike.

The main thing, though, as the above excerpt from Lubetzky underlines, is that, once we’ve let it happen and the shit hits the fan – well, no kidding: You’ve got to hit them hard to make them fall back.

The abundant nut cases – most lately Elise VOTE FRAUD YES!!! Stefanik – are rapidly being removed from positions of responsibility, leaving a gaping hole where rational conservatives are supposed to be. I worry about Mitt being spread thin.

Ask yourself why a rich successful guy, facing very minor charges (unlawful entry; curfew violation) stemming from his effort to overthrow the government, came home to Georgia and apparently blew his brains out. “There’s blood everywhere,” his wife told 911, and there certainly would be if he used one of his SKS-45s to do the deed.

Judging by his house, the dude could have afforded excellent lawyers who would almost certainly arrange things so that he’d have to pay some eminently affordable penalty or something… So what the hell?

Let us speculate.

One possibility is that he was so devastated by his failure to destroy America that he saw no further reason to live. The event itself was heady stuff; he felt part of a righteous revolution. But within hours Nancy Pelosi – who should by rights have been dead by the end of the day – was not only alive but still presiding over the house. The anguish that settled upon him on his return to intolerable normalcy overcame him.

Another possibility is simply that this man, like his idol, is mentally ill. His violent extremism held off the inevitable violent suicide for awhile (there are several effective ways to off yourself; ask yourself why this man chose the absolute bloodiest, visiting piercing trauma upon his family as they discovered what he did to his head) by establishing a cult within which he could “normalize”and play out his fantasies. The failure of the cult’s attack on democracy shattered this man’s tenuous hold.

Another possibility goes the other way: shame. When the party’s over, and you see precisely the damage you’ve done to yourself and the people you love — hey, maybe even the country you love — you feel overpowering shame.

A security expert goes to the precise analogy: ISIS. Think ISIS and you can begin to think clearly about how to end our national nightmare. Make our native ISIS undergo decline.

Trump’s insistence that, despite all evidence, he won the election helped Democrats win both Georgia seats. Not even his followers can depend on him: Under pressure, he essentially conceded the election on Thursday, which meant either that he is unreliable or that he was lying to them the whole time. He has limited access to effective communication forums, most notably Twitter and Facebook. The platforms’ decision to suspend his accounts was controversial, but deplatforming is a successful counterterrorism technique that, although it may galvanize diehards, impedes a movement leader’s ability to reach new members. The MAGA-world leadership team is in disarray; Pence plans to attend Biden’s inauguration. In welcoming Pence to the event—“I’d be honored to have him there,” the president-elect said—Biden is replicating a common divide-and-conquer counterterrorism strategy that amplifies distrust and leads to paranoia among those who remain inside an extremist group. Companies such as American Express are pulling support for members of Congress who went along with Trump’s effort to block the certification of the electoral vote.

… The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way to unite this country is to isolate acts of violence—and a leader who incites it—from legitimate expression. Trump was a north star for a certain kind of radical. Americans will be safer the more that star loses its shine.

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

The particular analogy for the terrorists’ House and Senate enthusiasts is the mentally challenged young women from European cities who flew off to Syria and fucked one ISIS terrorist after another in order to push out squads of ISIS babies. As these moronic post-ISIS degenerates try to crawl back to England without the citizenship papers that they – whoops! – gleefully burned in YouTubes declaring their new citizenship in a caliphate dedicated to the torture and death of all Britons, they find that they are encountering… oddly… a little trouble being welcomed back.

No self-respecting democratic governing body should ever welcome back the Hawleys and Cruzes and all the others in both houses who revealed their depravity by fucking with domestic terrorism.

Most will, I believe, be voted out in the next cycle; meanwhile, enjoy the manifold forms of shunning — withdrawal of various forms of corporate support; demands for return of donations; rejection of awards, removal of honorary degrees; disbarment; expulsion from a wide variety of civic and private groups, etc., etc. — which all of the elected insurrectionists are currently experiencing. It is a small but important part of what this security expert is talking about – the degradation of the Trump brand.

[A]nother demonstration, which three members said was by far the most concerning plot, would involve insurrectionists forming a perimeter around the Capitol, the White House and the Supreme Court, and then blocking Democrats from entering the Capitol ― perhaps even killing them ― so that Republicans could take control of the government.

The members of Congress whom HuffPost spoke to Monday night were extremely concerned by the call…

The plan to surround the Capitol includes assassinating Democrats as well as Republicans who didn’t support Trump’s effort to overturn the election ― and allowing other Republicans to enter the building and control government…

A member on the call told HuffPost that there was an “eyes-wide-open realization” that Capitol Police needed to take precautions against “all these members who were in league with the insurrectionists …“

“You can’t just let them bypass security and walk right up to [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris at inauguration,” this lawmaker told HuffPost.

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

Josh Hawley is a violent religious fanatic who believes Jesus, incarnated on earth in the body of, for instance, Josh Hawley, must rule the United States and the world.

Josh Hawley – notorious for standing in front of the insurrectionists and pumping his fist – is also a gun freak about whom the NRA positively giggles with excitement.

This man must be removed from the Senate; more immediately, three armed guards should escort him non-stop throughout the inaugural events.

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

In a better world, the state of emergency just declared in DC would include barring demented rabble-rousers like Josh Hawley not merely from the inaugural grounds, but from the city. In lieu of that, we must hope that he will be placed under the severest restraints.

TRUMP [BLAMES] ‘ANTIFA PEOPLE’

FOR STORMING U.S. CAPITOL

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

SING IT:

Donald Trump is ordure you can count on

Donald Trump: Shit to the last drop

Donald Trump is

Vile stench

Donald Trump is

Steaming pile

Shit to the last drop, Donald Trump

Donald Trump – ordure you can count on

Always lies: Vile

Always lies: Vile

Always shit to the last drop

Donald Trump has

Eight days left and he’s

Shit to the very last drop

Football coach Bill Belichick doesn’t want anything from the bloody hands of Mr Fuckface, so Ff can take his Medal of Freedom and … find someone base enough to accept it.

UD suggests finding the guy who smashed that fire extinguisher over the head of the policeman in the Capitol the other day and killed him with it. That guy would probably be willing to accept a medal from Ff.

The choice is quite clear for Ivanka

Attend or clear out for Sri Lanka

If she’s nice to Joe

She might not have to go

Though her choice puts her dad in a funka

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

UPDATE: Melania Trump also plans to attend: with a date! “Yes, eetz Johnny Depp. I like bad boys.”

This petition asks that he be given the Medal of Honor.

*********

Update: UD thanks a reader who points out that the Medal of Honor is reserved for the military. Apparently a Congressional Gold Medal would be more appropriate.

… changed Fuckface’s State Dept page to say that his terms ends today. I love my fellow Americans.

[Sen. Josh] Hawley’s idea of freedom is the freedom to conform to what he and his preferred religious authorities know to be right. Mr. Hawley is not shy about making the point explicit. In a 2017 speech to the American Renewal Project, he declared — paraphrasing the Dutch Reformed theologian and onetime prime minister Abraham Kuyper — “There is not one square inch of all creation over which Jesus Christ is not Lord.” Mr. Kuyper is perhaps best known for his claim that Christianity has sole legitimate authority over all aspects of human life.

“We are called to take that message into every sphere of life that we touch, including the political realm,” Mr. Hawley said. “That is our charge. To take the Lordship of Christ, that message, into the public realm, and to seek the obedience of the nations. Of our nation!”

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

Sing it.

Every night I hoped and prayed

My dream lover would come my way

A man to rule in Jesus’ name

To blacken freedom with his holy flame

Cuz I want

The state

That Christ

Will bring

And I found Josh Hawley

To crown our Savior’s earthly king

Someday, I don’t know how

I hope he’ll hear my plea

Someway, I don’t know how

He’ll rule both you and me

Dream lover, until then

I’ll pray to God and dream again

That’s the only thing to do

Til my Rule-by-Jesus dreams come true

Cuz I want (repeat chorus)