LOL

He wanders, pale, sleepless, delusional, into a room, and performs a surrealistic piece that more and more people are calling, simply, “46 minutes.”

Soon the title of Trump’s unprecedented performance last Wednesday will shorten to 46, a nod to its obvious precursor, John Cage’s silent, genre-busting, 4’33. Recall the shock, amusement, anger, discomfort, and fascination when, in a New York concert hall in 1952, a pianist walked onstage with a flourish, sat grandly at a grand piano, and for four minutes and thirty-three seconds proceeded to do absolutely nothing. In a grand room of the White House, Trump’s appearance – vacuous, arrogant, hallucinatory – generated similar emotions.

Yet because of its basically unendurable sickness, the president’s performance was above all ignored by almost every American media outlet. It appeared only on Facebook.

Susan Glasser argues that we avert our eyes at our peril.

… This might have been a holy-shit speech, but it came in the “yeah, whatever” phase of Trump’s lame-duck Presidency. The courts have thrown out his legal team’s cases. The battleground states have all certified their election results affirming Biden’s win. The Electoral College will meet on December 14th, and the outcome does not appear to be in doubt.

And yet there are nearly fifty days until Biden’s Inauguration. This is far, far beyond the craziness of the past four years. Is this the kind of speech from their leader that Americans should just ignore?

… [Not] a single Republican senator had a word to say about Trump’s insane remarks from the White House on Wednesday …

… [W]hen the President launches a direct attack on the most important traditions of American democracy, I’m not ready to say “Yeah, whatever” just yet.

The presidency of Donald Trump is not mere performance art. In its degenerate stage it looks like Cage; it looks like Jarry. It looks like Mary Tyrone wandering in, pale, sleepless, and delusional at the end of Long Day’s Journey. But it is real. It is actually happening. A fourth Christ of Ypsilanti has entered Milton Rokeach’s hospital, this one with presidential powers.

‘Newt is coming from a very dark place. First, his wife is the “ambassador” to the “Vatican” and is according to unimpeachable sources in bed with (yes literally) an illegitimate pope who has openly questioned Donald Trump’s Christian faith. Behind Gingrich stand the massed powers and riches of the idolatrous Roman Catholic church, which, in league with George Soros, seeks the death of Donald Trump in order to protect their global “brand” from the internationally proliferating MAGA movement. If you break the letters NEWTGINGRICH into their component parts, you get GRINCH TWINGE. Newt Gingrich is The GRINCH who Stole the Election Without a TWINGE of Guilt. His wife’s name – Callista – is the title of an 1855 novel by none other than John Henry Newman, the most famous British Catholic priest ever. Aligned with Newt’s popery and Sorosian World Order is his capture by Bolivarian “Chavismo” and more broadly Hugo Chavez’s “Socialism of the Twenty-First Century.” For someone with this portfolio to call me destructive is really something.’

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(UD thanks a reader for correcting her extensive misspellings of Sidney Powell.)

“Deep state” isn’t the right term — its overtone is too clandestine, its undertone too nefarious — but let’s go with it, co-opt it, turn a put-down into a point of honor, the way gay rights activists did with “queer” and anti-Trump feminists did with “nasty woman.”

Let’s define it ourselves, not as a swampy society of self-preserving bureaucrats in Washington but as a steadfast, tradition-minded legion of public officials and civil servants all over the country, in every branch of government.

These officials and servants are distinguished by a professionalism that survives and edges out their partisan bearings, by an understanding that the codes of conduct and rules of engagement become more important, not less, when passions run hot. They’re incorrigible that way. Invaluable, too.

… Anthony Fauci is the steely superhero of my deep state, and he’s flanked and fortified by all the government health officials who also pushed back against the quackery of Scott Atlas, the Trump-flattering pandemic adviser who resigned on Monday.

They belong to a quiet and then not-so-quiet resistance that blunted, thwarted or tried to blunt and thwart Trump’s worst impulses when it came not just to public health but also to foreign policy, immigration, the environment. In The Times late last week, Lisa Friedman described such efforts within the Environmental Protection Agency.

“With two months left of the Trump administration,” she wrote, “career E.P.A. employees find themselves where they began, in a bureaucratic battle with the agency’s political leaders. But now, with the Biden administration on the horizon, they are emboldened to stymie Mr. Trump’s goals and to do so more openly.”

That’s the deep state rearing up. That’s the deep state roaring.

Because Communists help Communists. Because Venezuela has long had a special relationship with North Korea. Because Democrats know that our coastal defenses are weakest in the state of Maine, where the deep state replaced patriot Paul LePage with Democrat and Woman Janet Mills.

I predict a series of more and more paranoid presentations after this one. This is Number One.

I predict that this guttering man will do something psychotic on camera. No one can stop him. Sane people have tried.

Time to read the 25th Amendment with care. We can’t have the most powerful person on earth be isolated and insane. We need the Vice President, the Cabinet, and Congress to work together to remove this unhinged threat to democracy, and to the world.

Hungarian Lawmaker Resigns after Caught Fleeing a ‘Sex Party’ by Climbing Down a Drainpipe

No. Duh.

But it still will, of course.

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And then there’s the federal government:

“McKinsey’s abhorrent conduct also demands that Congress consider broader action. McKinsey earns billions of dollars from contracts with the federal government. No firm that proposes paying kickbacks for overdose deaths should receive a single cent from U.S. taxpayers.”

Donald Trump does not intend to go to Joe Biden’s inauguration as president in January, according to a report.

And the outgoing president will not even invite Mr Biden and Dr Jill Biden to the White House ahead of the 20 January event, according to NBCNews.

A determined autocrat in the White House poses a grave threat to our democratic institutions and can severely undermine faith in our elections, particularly when backed by partisans in Congress.

The guy probably earns around $200,000, but he’s too lazy/semi-literate to write a brief thank you note to the school community without plagiarizing it. Almost the entire letter is lifted from other sources.

Like a lot of people who do this (and for some reason school superintendents are particularly keen), he adds to his admirable traits a certainty that the fools he works with will never detect the theft.

His apology demonstrates why he stole. The man can’t write.

I know this behavior is not acceptable and minimizes my intent to tell you that I understand that last Spring and this school year have been very challenging for all of you and let you know that I truly do appreciate everything that all of you are doing to meet the needs of all our students and families and supporting each other.

The man can’t write, and he runs an entire school system. Why don’t the people of Rochester Minnesota think they deserve better than this?

This is must-see tv. When you watch Georgia’s Gabriel Sterling, you’re watching the village finally getting back at the village bully. Finally. Not that much of the village; it’s still only a few brave souls. But it’s really happening.

The twisted bully who commands crowds to shriek LOCK HER UP is finally getting what he has so richly deserved. His twisted, violent associates – most recently, bloodthirsty Joe diGenova – are also being called out.

To be sure, millions of people love violence – taking part in it, or watching it – and the last full measure of madmen and madwomen still standing around Trump at the very end will continue to give those millions what they want. But the overwhelming majority of Americans detests viciousness, cruelty, bullying, tormenting, and, like Gabriel Sterling, they are finding their voice.

Today, even William Barr is willing to say no fraud. He will probably welcome the vile attack Trump will level against him; he will probably be grateful to be fired. Maybe he can fashion some sort of respectable future for himself…

Meanwhile, watch out for more Gabriel Sterlings, people willing to call perversion perversion, people willing to be openly decent in an indecent time. Bravo.

It’s not – as Samuel Johnson claimed – patriotism. Months ago we got past whatever muck-sweat heavery the president thought might convey love of country to his rallies. We’re now into the final scenes (which, faithful UD readers know, I believe have a small but real chance of featuring executive self-slaughter), and these begin with institutional nihilism: All of our elections are rigged, including the one I won last time. Every operating part of America is bullshit: The law, the constitution, the FBI, the CIA: It’s all NOTHING. NOTHING! Nothing but global communist interstellar Soros machinations against me and you and there’s NOTHING we can do. None of it means anything. It’s pure murderous malignancy.

Here, Arkansas is the cutting edge. Got there a long time before everyone else.

So now the Republican party is worried that Republican voters will sit out the Georgia run-offs because why not? Why the hell not? Nothing matters. Nothing means anything. It’s all rigged. I don’t want to be a sucker.

Listen to Mitch McConnell lead his fellow Republican senators in singing the national anthem here.

So that’s the institutional final scene. We’re gonna get Trump’s personal nihilistic endgame pretty soon. Hold onto your hat.

One of the president’s lawyers issues the following statement about a fired Trump official who said that the election was clean:

He should be drawn and quartered. Taken out at dawn and shot.

Now that he’s exposed millions of Americans to a fatal pathogen, embarrassed his home institution (Stanford), and called on the people of Michigan to rise up against their governor because she’s trying to arrest the spread of covid, Scott Atlas’s work for Mr Trump is done. He has resigned, trailing clouds of gory.