UD first encountered “tumescent” in a poem written by the sister of her high school boyfriend, and EKS used the word in its most common sense to mean an erect penis.

In this excerpt, Michael Tomasky, whose writing I admire, mixes things up a bit too much, offers too generous a helping of figurative language. He uses tumefied correctly, to mean narcissistically swelled up about one’s own greatness. But those of us familiar with this fancy adjective’s provenance are likely to venture toward swollen phallus territory.

Yet just after we start venturing, we’re hit with flaccid, a word, like tumescent, rarely employed non-phallically.

So is Donald Trump impressively tumescent/tumefied, or is he, like at least sixty percent of men his age, tumescent-challenged?

Ain’t none of my business; the point here is that Tomasky’s writing has me thinking about flaccid v. tumescent, and that’s not where he wants my thinking to go.

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken

There’s a pain goes on and on
Empty chairs in Pennsylvania
As DT drones on and on…

...............

From the podium before them
They can see our land reborn
Yet they rise to go home early
They would rather download porn

..............

... The very words that he is speaking
Become 'slur-filled delusions'
On this lonely barricade
At dawn

Sing it.

Strange dear, but true dear,
The shit you say about Jews, dear,
It makes me scared! cuz I…
Am a Jew about to die!

I must flee to Valencia

[Unless you have dementia]

Oh Don darling why
Do you say I’m gonna die?

Trump Warns That if Kamala Harris Wins,

‘Everybody Gets Health Care’

America’s a wasteland, says Vance guru Peter Thiel

I’m boxing up my billions and I’m moving to New Zeal.

Patriots like me believe

If you don’t like the US, leave.

Fuck that ‘Make America Great Again’ spiel.

Overcome by emotion, a mother at the Laney/Westside High School football game grabs her child and rolls around the bleachers with glee!

Details here!

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

Fans CAN’T WAIT to run home and tell their friends all about it!

Oh whoooops. Same school, coupla years ago!

New jobs went to migrants a hundred million percent.’

You can read many UD entries exploring Trump-as-Ubu.

But with Trump’s latest comment about the Medal of Honor (“Everyone [who] gets the congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers. They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead.”), it occurs to UD that Trump is perhaps better understood through the character of Sir Walter Elliot, in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion.

An appearances-obsessed snob, Elliot doesn’t like the idea of a naval officer renting his house (Elliot’s idiocy and greed have ruined him financially, so he must rent out his house and find someplace cheaper to live), because “it is the same with them all: they are all knocked about, and exposed to every climate, and every weather, till they are not fit to be seen. It is a pity they are not knocked on the head at once…”

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

Update: ‘Asinine’ is good.

The city returns to nature.

“A snake was captured by a seagull and dropped on to a terrace,” he said. “The city has become a proper jungle.”

When females become merely fossils

Too old for the bedroom or brothel

According to Vance

They still have a chance

To watch babies when postmenopausal

Admittedly, that has not happened. But we are getting headlines like this one in Newsweek:

Donald Trump Committing ‘Political Suicide,’ Republican Pollster Says

And this one in Daily Mail:

DON’S DEATH WISH

Vance might be a little creepy, and he certainly draws attention to Trump’s bad judgment, old age, and general extremism, but voters already know that Trump is old, extreme, and more than a little crazy… Donald Trump has slowed down considerably over the last four years. He is very old. He struggles to hold his thoughts together, even by his own standards. And he has considerably less energy than he did even a few years ago. He can’t campaign vigorously. Which means he will have to rely on his running mate—whom everyone seems to hate… He is a liability on several fronts: an inexperienced and off-putting politician with views that are far outside the mainstream… He’s uninspiring and goofy. His political program is wildly at odds even with that of many Republicans. As a stand-in, he emphasizes all of Trump’s most unappealing qualities. He can’t help but disparage people without children or make off-putting remarks…  There are plenty of hangers-on and people who will happily say insane shit as warm-up acts. But there aren’t actual stand-ins. Vance is going to become that as Trump stays off the trail. And it will likely be a disaster.

‘The faces of Afghan women are erased, obliterated by the burqa, or, if they are mannequins, by plastic bags or strips of adhesive tape…

The darkening of faces is a metaphor for the condition of women, victims of liberty-killing measures that in a patriarchal society like that of Afghanistan do not arouse much horror, such as the reintroduction of stoning for adultery. …Most government bans are aimed at mothers, wives, daughters, who are forbidden from any action: from walking alone in the street, to attending schools and universities, to participating in active life.’

How do you think he kept all that money coming in?