Chant, Women for Trump Rally:

Every woman adores a Fascist!   
The boot in the face, the brute   
Brute heart of a
brute like you!

Bizarre. I mean, in Texas, that self-representation counts as a real negative.

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.

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

Ride ’em, cowboy!

Voice of the People

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.

But NOW. Now he’s coming for my integrity and he’s coming for the integrity of my entire profession. Like I would sell my soul, fake a death certificate, to get two thousand bucks. This is a bald faced brazen lie from the biggest bald faced brazen liar that’s ever sat in [the oval] office.

Across the street from UD’s house…

… a witch, a table with candy, and the abominable snowman.

Out of focus. Sorry.
Henry Purcell, in Early Evening Sunlight…

… in autumn.

The “Fake News” Verse from the Book of Mormon.

“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.”

‘TRUMP CANCELS PLANS FOR ELECTION NIGHT PARTY’

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

Mao-Tse Trump

WE ARE DRAWING TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE. THE GREAT RED WAVE IS COMING!!!

Scathing Online Schoolmarm Says…

… 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, in SOS‘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!”

You get the idea.

Dispatches from the Road

[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.

That’s one small step, Furman…

…but I think we’re ultimately looking at a giant leap in other race/ethnicity professor/fakes. Get ready.

‘New Poll Shows Trump Trailing Biden in Georgia, a Republican Stronghold for Nearly Three Decades’

It’s amazing what unrelenting cruelty and mendacity can accomplish.

Deep State Ate My Homework

Tucker Carlson Says He Had ‘Authentic, Damning’ New Hunter Biden Documents—But They Got Lost in the Mail

Sendero Trumpinoso

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.

‘One widely mocked tweet from conservative television host John Cardillo last week featured a photo of Biden tenderly kissing Hunter. “Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?” Thousands replied that it did.’

LOLOLOL

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte