Look, if this is the dude my fellow Americans want, okay.

I’ll cop to always having taken for granted the essential dignity and reliability of American democracy; I’ll admit it seems wrong to me that the president of the country is claiming he won an election that isn’t over yet — a claim that seems just fine with his millions of enthusiastic supporters. Okay.

After all, nowhere is it written that UD gets to spend her entire incredibly fortunate life in a fundamentally unimperiled democracy. Things have never really been bumpy for her in any way, and now they’re bumpy. Okay.

Russian Clue.

Sing it.

Shoot them
Shoot them
Shoot them
Shoot them
Here come old orange top
He come groovin’ up slowly
He got ju-ju eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker
He just do what he please

Shoot them
Shoot them
Shoot them
Shoot them
He wear red makeup
He grab pussy pussy
He got little fingers
He drink Coca-Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is
You better love me
Come together, right now
Over me

Shoot them
Shoot them
Shoot them

Me dream of violence
Me got covid 19
Me a big psychotic
Me one nasty stinker
Me got jail time awaiting me
Hold you in my arms yeah
You can feel my disease
Come together, right now
Over me

Christopher Hitchens writes about George Orwell and the common capacity for / effort toward ethical and intellectual integrity.

Democracy’s keenest enemies are willfully ignorant and fanatical cultists, most vividly on display in America’s covid-indifferent, Trump-besotted ultraorthodox Jewish communities. No demographic in this country will have higher Trump vote totals. As in Israel, if you want to chart the decline of democratic instincts and institutions, there’s no better place than in the heart of this withdrawn, uneducated, law-flouting, and violent group. Herd obedience to authoritarian religious leaders means it will deliver, today, a virtually solid Trump vote.

As the returns from all over America come in, let us see if reason, civic sentiment, and morality can triumph over passion, indifference to the public realm, and cruelty.

Although the President has recently made various authoritarian gestures—in June, he threatened to deploy the military against protesters, and in July he talked about delaying the election—[Yale’s Timothy] Snyder contends that Trump’s predicament “is that he hasn’t ruined our system enough.” Snyder explained, “Generally, autocrats will distort the system as far as necessary to stay in power. Usually, it means warping democracy before they get to where Trump is now.” For an entrenched autocrat, an election is mere theatre—but the conclusion of the Trump-Biden race remains unpredictable, despite concerns about voter suppression, disputed ballot counts, and civil unrest.

Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits.

[The] leadership that we have … seems characterized by callousness and a level of cruelty that I think is really dangerous and then it infects the population…

Donald Trump doesn’t merely want to criticize his opponents; he takes a depraved delight in inflicting pain on others, even if there’s collateral damage in the process… There’s something quite sick about it all.

A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump—casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend. Their philosophy seems to be that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it. Will Trump’s white evangelical supporters—Franklin Graham, Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed—defend his behavior as the perfect embodiment of the New Testament ethic, the credo of Jesus, the message from the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the brutal, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

…

There is a wickedness in our president that long ago corrupted him. It’s corrupted his party. And it’s in the process of corrupting our country, too.

He is a crimson stain on American decency. He needs to go.

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track… Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

… The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected…

We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era… It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump… [Their community] is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them; [they] have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life… Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty…

The president’s ability to execute … cruelty through word and deed makes [his followers] euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

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

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!

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.

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

… in autumn.