… sounds as though it has claimed its … thirty-fifth? … victim. And this one is said to be in the hospital in grave condition: Crede Bailey, head of the WH security office (!).

The hebephrenic-in-chief’s latest announcement reminds UD of one of her favorite essays, Gore Vidal’s 1978 “How to Find God and Make Money.” Gore already knew all about the long-popular fundamentalist Christian claim that getting a dread disease is the very best thing that can happen to you.

Thank God I Have Cancer! by Clifford Oden has best seller written all over it. Arlington House tells us that “When Rev. Oden learned he had cancer eight years ago he turned to God in prayer. He asked God to show him how to cope. Now he is living proof that cancer can be controlled by natural means – without surgery, without radiation or chemotherapy.”

Over 200,000 Americans have died. The economy has tanked, shedding tens of millions of jobs. The White House itself is the center of a massive Covid-19 outbreak that has infected the president, the first lady, several senators, and many other administration and Republican Party officials. Far from a beacon of resilience, the president has become a symbol of just how deeply the country has been affected by the pandemic. In public appearances since contracting the virus, he appears hoarse, shaky, and frightened; reports of his hospitalization include at least two concerning drops in oxygen level and a cocktail of drugs that indicate pneumonia...

Trailing in the polls with only 30 days left before the 2020 election, the president has embraced a reelection strategy that is, even for him, profoundly stupid...

Trump is now trailing with every age group of voters and is underwater with senior citizens — a voting block that helped him immensely in 2016. He is trailing by increasingly large margins in every swing state and [Biden] appears to be pulling away in Florida and Pennsylvania. A landslide defeat grows more likely by the hour…

The person many consider the nation’s top immunologist resigns in disgust from the government’s politicized anti-covid activity.

Public health and safety have been jeopardized by the administration’s hostility to the truth and by its politicization of the pandemic response, undoubtedly leading to tens of thousands of preventable deaths… More than half of the states in this country are reporting rising covid-19 cases. Nine months into the pandemic, the United States continues to grapple with failed White House leadership. Instead, we get the recent spectacle of the president exploiting his own illness for political purposes and advising the nation, “Don’t be afraid of Covid.”

Other researchers will leave in the same disgust, hoping that their gesture will somehow move the country away from rule by self-serving idiots.

The EU Court of course rules against Hungary’s having hounded out the Central European University.

Hungary long ago decided it wanted to be the Alabama of Europe. Countries are free to be cultural pits, if that’s what they want to be. Nobody writes about Hungary anymore, except for when the EU Court makes its meaninglessness official.

… sets NY on fire (while shouting “TRUMP! TRUMP!“), an Israeli journalist offers a fascinating account of the escalating violence among ultraorthodox Jews in both countries.

[T]here are elements in the Haredi community intentionally generating hatred of Haredim among the rest of the Israeli population.

The “barriers should be higher,” these people believe; you can never be too separatist a cult, and making people outside the cult loathe you guarantees they won’t get anywhere near you. So — refuse basic health measures in a pandemic. To be sure, a lot of cult members will die; but this is the will of God. What’s more important is that viciously, insistently, imperiling the life of anyone anywhere near you keeps appalled outsiders far, far away.

But is this really a good way to guarantee the flourishing of your cult?

Well, consider your hero, Mr Trump. He and his vile advisor, Giuliani, obsessively say and do things that make people sick. Does this work to repel and intimidate their enemies, so that they stay hands off?

No. Reason? There’s an escalation written into the strategy. Almost all human beings respond strongly to cruelty; cruelty attracts sadists, to be sure, but there aren’t that many sadists. Mainly there are normal people horrified by cruelty. When you intentionally generate hatred by your cruelty, you eventually mobilize some outsiders against you.

If you’re an ultraorthodox Jew, your cultic paranoia may overreact to these mobilized people and double down on that which sets you apart, which builds the walls higher: You look and act increasingly bizarre (your mohels refuse to stop sucking infants’ penises, for instance); your contempt for state authority becomes more and more violent; your disbelief in the germ theory of disease becomes more and more adamant.

Trump and the ultraorthodox take the path of escalating grotesquerie – and the grotesque certainly stops people in their tracks.

But then we recover from being stunned, and we realize that there are basic human values we need to defend against Trump and his battalion.

Unlike Trump and his battalion, we hate war. But we are willing to fight.

The head of the Georgia Forestry Commission was busted for stealing a saw at a hardware store while wearing his agency uniform, police said.

Charles “Chuck” Williams, 64, was arrested on Aug. 13 for misdemeanor shoplifting at an Ace Hardware store in Gray, where a surveillance camera caught him a day earlier switching the bar code from a $55.99 saw onto a Silky Sugoi saw worth $109.99 …

Williams, a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives who earned a $165,000 salary as the agency’s director, then paid for the cheaper saw using his credit card while wearing his forestry commission uniform, a cashier told police.

Williams, who was arrested when he returned to the store to speak to a manager, admitted to swapping the price tags, saying “he had done such things in the past and does it for the thrill.”

… to mark yet another name change since The Balcony Moment:

Evita.

… he urgently needs a Baghdad Bob, a spokesperson who will get out there and gloat that “THE MARKETS HAVE SPIKED!”

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

“Every single poll shows he’s MOPPING THE FLOOR with Biden!”

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

“This is the healthiest, most coronavirus-free, White House in the history of the country!”

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

He’d better do something fast, cuz the adults in this country can laugh off a lot, but when you seriously fuck with our stock market …

[Donald Trump watches Rudy Giuliani coughing throughout his Fox interview.]

Donald [to Don Jr]: Oh I do so hope Rudy has the coronavirus. It makes all of us so much stronger and wiser. [Shouts.] Biden isn’t even coughing yet! He’s a total zero with his [spits]… MASKS. I have personal experience fighting the coronavirus. That firsthand experience, Joe Biden doesn’t have that.

Don Jr: Dad, I want a word with you. [Nervously, with his father still watching the screen.] You know how much better you’ve been lately… I mean, more … in touch! More grounded! The family really feels you’ve come back to us after… drifting from us a bit… [DT does not respond. Still watching screen.] But Dad, your behavior the last few days… It’s like you’re back in the … bad old days…

Donald: [Hand goes automatically to his hair. Scowls.] The nurses messed up my do. Son, am I still young and beautiful? Have my looks faded? Howard Stern – how long ago it seems! – told me I was the handsomest man he’d ever met. How much simpler life was then!

Don Jr: [Gazes with deep sorrow at his father.] I feel so damned sunk. Because this time you had me fooled. I really believed you were mentally sound. I really believed you had it licked. I can’t forgive you yet. I’d begun to hope… I’ve never known you to drown yourself in it as deep as this…

Donald: The Secret Service delivers a dozen bumper cars to the Rose Garden tomorrow. Hope, Kayleigh, Thom, Mike, Ron, Chris, uh, who else, Melania, Ronna, and Kellyanne, have all said they’ll be there and we’ll play bumper cars and show Americans that the Rose Garden isn’t a place of quote infection or whatever but a place of FUN. We all feel better than we did twenty years ago!

There once was a man, LaPierre,

Who only would say, “I don’t care!”

“Because of your money affairs,

We’re shutting you down, LaPierre.”

LaPierre only said, “I don ‘t care.”

“The IRS has assembled a squad

To look into possible fraud.

So all we can say is Beware!“

LaPierre only said, “I don’t care.”

Grave. Get it?

Take heart. You’re not the only one. About three hundred million of us have been hammering that point home.

When meeting with journalists daily

She handles them firmly but gaily.

Her briefing’s now viral

She’s entered the spiral:

Corona has caught up to Kayleigh.