More to ignore, Book 91......
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Republican response to Biden's speech clarifies it: Yes, they are all MAGA fascists
Joan McCarterGOP's pearl-clutching over Biden's 'soul of the nation' speech tests the limits of hypocrisy (again)
Aldous J PennyfarthingRemember the time Donald Trump chided hurricane-weary Puerto Ricans about the devastating storm that had recently thrown “our budget a little out of whack”? Or the time he blamed Californians for losing their homes to wildfires, while at the same time threatening to withhold funds from the state that contributes more to our federal coffers than any other? Or the time he told four duly elected blue-state congresswomen of color that they should “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came”? How about that time he lied to the American people about the election he’d lost, thereby ensuring we’d face a long, weary slog through hectares of unhappy horseshit before we could even think about uniting the country again?
I sure do! Republicans, though? They fondly recall only those halcyon days—before Joe Biden ruined everything—when Americans of every race, creed, and color stood on verdant hillsides, hand-in-hand, singing eternal hosannas to their beloved benevolent suzerain, Donald Trump.
And now they’re up in arms because our current president pointed out that undermining democracy and the rule of law in order to prop up the purpling corpse of a cult of personality is maybe not such a great idea.
Whatever you think of President Biden’s Thursday night speech calling out MAGA over its threats to our republic, one thing that’s surely difficult to swallow is the criticism it received from MAGA Republicans, who’ve been telling us to **** our feelings for something like seven years now.
First up, Tickle Me Nosferatu:
Hmm, I didn’t hear any attack on “America.” I did hear an attack on people who are denying legitimate election results, fanboying racist proto-fascists like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and unconditionally supporting a former president who wants to pardon and apologize to literal insurrectionists and traitors. You know, people like Fiddle Drawers Rudy G.
Next in line, Fistpump McRunpants:
Nice screen grab there, Joshie. Though I’m sure I could round up about 10,000 far more menacing photos of Trump simply by Googling “feral orange weirdo” + “annual White House egg roll.” Seriously, I could scour the Getty photo archives for a fortnight and be hard-pressed to find a single photo of Trump where it doesn’t look like he’s fixing to unhinge his jaw and swallow Jim Acosta. And what exactly was “erratic” about Biden’s speech? Did he say windmills cause cancer, claim disinfectant is a panacea for COVID-19, or endlessly brag about passing a dementia test? Because that would truly be worrying.
And, of course, Leningrad Lindsey had to get his licks in:
While it’s easy to criticize Lindsey, he does make a good point about out-of-control crime. Imagine the message criminals are getting these days. It’s almost as if a former president stole highly classified documents and stored them in a desk drawer with his Eva Braun bobblehead and a tin of linty Altoids, knowing he could count on at least a third of the country to look the other way. Imagine the message that would send—if it weren’t all just a ploy to make Republicans look bad.
Next up, the amoral sack of moldering Fiddle Faddle, affectionately known as The Zodiac:
I see Ted picked out the same photo of Our Illustrious Overlord Dark Brandon as Hawley did. Though, to be frank, it kind of makes Biden look badass. Might be kind of hard to go back to painting him as a doddering Mr. Green Jeans who putters around his garden shed vainly searching for the stash of Werther’s Originals he hides from Jill, but I’m sure they’ll try.
Of course, none of these esteemed Republicans dared address the crux of Biden’s speech—namely, that their own actions are undermining democracy and the rule of law. That’s a case that Biden—and historians—have forcefully and credibly made for some time now.
But as an apparent sop to these willfully ignorant MAGA mites, Biden helped out his benighted former Senate colleagues with a short summary of his remarks after Fox News asked him about his view of Trump supporters.
Oh, my God! The hate! It burns!
Republicans are responding angrily to Biden's speech because they know he's telling the truth
Mark SumnerDonald Trump is a demagogue and a con man. He’s a bully who can never unite America. A race-baiting, xenophobic bigot. He’s a narcissist at a level the country has never seen before. A pathological liar who is utterly amoral. He’s a terrible human being whose statements are simply indefensible and disgusting. His behavior is atrocious and his actions are totally wrong.
None of those things came from President Joe Biden’s speech on Thursday evening. Those are the statements of Republicans in the House and Senate, who are now engaged in heavy-duty pearl clutching and pulling out the fainting couches to show how they take deep, deep umbrage at Biden pointing out a threat they recognized five years ago.
It’s not that Republicans don’t know that Trump is waging a war against both democracy and decency. It’s that they already surrendered. And now the Vichy GOP is going through the motions of pretending to be offended at Biden pointing out the threat of Trumpism. Because no one is more prickly, skittish, and hysterical, than people who know, right down to their bones, that they are on the wrong side........
Yes, Joe Biden is the Divisive One. Die On That Hill.
ShowerCap
Y’know, if this does all fall apart, at least future generations will be able to easily distinguish between the first American Civil War and the Dumb one. Silver linings......
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Okay, we better get the documents thing out of the way first, because it’s all so stupid, I’m afraid I’ll suffer an orbital fracture facepalming if I think about it any longer than I have to.
The secret ingredient here is the almost incomprehensible incompetence of Donald Trump’s lawyers. And yeah, we’ve been reading about that for years now; he can’t get anybody to represent him, because in addition to the ever larger, dumber crimes he insists upon committing at every available opportunity, he’s literally famous for not paying the people who work for him. He’s actually got worse attorneys now than he had during his failed coup.
So my expectations were pretty low going into this thing, but watching ‘em in action has been…zounds. It’s a ****in’ geek show. They truly are two years dumber than Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, if that makes sense, and I don’t think I comprehended the enormity of that until this week.
Admittedly, mounting a legal defense when you’re this unambiguously ****ed surely carries challenges. It hardly helps that the client can’t seem to stop confessing to felonies on his sad, sagging social media platform, but, crucially, these dopes don’t know enough to know what they don’t know, and they keep leaping, face first, from cow pie to cow pie…it has been a sight to behold, my friends.
They filed what they sincerely, adorably believed was a request for a special master, but was in actuality an invitation to the Justice Department to crotch-punt them all into the ****ing sun. And punt they did.
And while it’s certainly impressive that they made it all the way back from the sun, things aren’t going so well otherwise. Like, one of ‘em went on TV to volunteer the information that the room with the stolen classified intel had all kindsa visitors. Why, access to national security secrets was only an insincere bit of flattery to an easily manipulated manchild away! Good lawyerin’, kid!
And though we’re already miles past the wildest limits of dumbness e’er dreamt of by poets or philosophers, somehow, it gets dumber still.
Because just as the dastardly deep state was about to get away with their greatest assault on freedumb to date, in swept Donald Trump, waving a sword made of pure, incandescent truth, to reveal, in a voice clear, yet trembling with righteous indignation, that he, poor persecuted he, did not keep his purloined, o-so-clearly-marked classified documents recklessly ‘pon the floor like some common scofflaw; ‘twas the FBI who placed them there, in an act of treachery most monstrous.
…no really, that’s the play. The FBI “staged” the photo, on the FLOOR, y’see, and somehow it is the floorness of the staging that is so…I dunno, nefarious? Bad, somehow? ****, you tell me. It’s legal scholarship from the ideology of ivermectin, why would it make sense?
He’s demanding to be immediately reinstalled as President, based on the floor thing. He may be willing to settle for calling another election, which is uncharacteristically gracious.
In fairness, yapping about flooring is likely the only move left to you, once your own unforced error opens the door to the utter annihilation of your already flimsy cover story. The DoJ filing establishes a long, clear, documented pattern of deliberate (and, it must be said, oafish) obstruction, including moving and hiding requested documents, and you twerps can keep shrieking about Hillary’s emails if you think it’ll help, I guess.
The latest member of this legal Traveling Wilburys, Jim Trusty, (yes, that’s his real name; I guess Dipshit McFlunkedthebar was unavailable) equates one cheap gangster’s attempt to steal state secrets to a spat over an “overdue library book,” which reminds me of that time MBS gave me $2 billion for that copy of Encyclopedia Brown Lends a Hand I checked out in 1985, on the condition that I held the bonesaw while he changed into clean clothes.
THEY DIDN’T PUT HUNTER BIDEN’S LAPTOP ON THE FLOOR, THAT’S FER GODDAMN SURE!
Man, I wish I believed in anything as much as these dizzy clods believe in Hunter Biden’s laptop. There’s a MOVIE, y’all. An honest-to-goodness, Breitbart-distributed Hunter Biden movie. Satire is impossible when reality is this farcical; I showed the trailer to Oscar Wilde, and all he managed to say was “welp.”
Because the state of our political discourse is so healthy and intelligent, America requires an entire class of bullshit-debunking pundits nowadays, perpetually on standby in case CNN needs someone to clarify for the public that no, documents do not magically become declassified when a defeated former President smears his own feces all over them.
Anyway, as you can see, for a variety of reasons, a legal defense isn’t really an option for Off-Brand Orbán, which would probably be funnier if the back-up plan wasn’t mob violence. And while he’s had trouble retaining attorneys, when it comes to obediently bloodthirsty psychopaths, he’s got run of a well-stocked buffet.
Backed into the shittiest corner of the internet with the entire QAnon idiotwad is actually the worst possible place for Donald Trump, so let’s get him into prison ASAP, okay? Dedicating his ample free time to lobbing raw meat at the feral asshats who actually use Truth Social is going to get people killed, which is of course the point. Just, y’know, casually riling up maniacs on the off chance one of them happens to murder the one guy that’ll keep him out of prison. Good a plan as any, I guess.
All of this law enforcement hullabaloo ‘round the house has been quite the nuisance for poor Melania, who simply wants to plug her new NFT con in peace. I gotta say, that’s a better plan than waiting to knife fight Junior n’ Eric over whatever scraps’re left once the law’s finally done with Daddy’s estate, but to anybody out there contemplating an investment in NFTs from Melania Trump, just buy lottery tickets, you’ll have more fun.......
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Okay, I don’t like being a wet blanket, but you’re not allowed to read any further until you finish your lesbian dance theory homework. You don’t want to wind up like Lauren Boebert, do you?.......
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Speaking of grifters, I see Sarah Palin’s latest attempt to elbow her way back to the trough fell a bit short. Heh. ‘Course, she only lost cuz ranked choice voting is a Soros-funded frazzledrip Jade Helm plot to feminize the electorate, it couldn’t’ve possibly had the slightest thing to do with any of her widely-known shortcomings, like, say, the fact that the last time the people of Alaska elected her to do a job, she quit to pursue a now-stalled career as a celebrity nitwit........
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Determined to create the illusion of a voter fraud problem where none exists, agents of the Florida state bureaucracy worked out a naaaaaasty little conspiracy to entrap a handful of ex-cons, cuz that’s the sort of the thing Republicans think government is for. Truly, the states are the laboratories of kakistocracy, and DeSantistan is the Troma version.......
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Equally sinister were the anti-democratic hijinks of the Republicans on Michigan’s Board of State Canvassers, who had the ****ing gall to block an abortion rights ballot initiative because of a “spacing error.” They may not be very good at fixing problems or improving lives, but they’re really quite clever when it comes to cheating Americans of their right to self-governance.......
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Doug Mastriano doesn’t want this latest confederate uniform scandal to distract the public from his ties to white nationalist gathering hole Gab or his presence at the Capitol Riot or his penchant for axe-murdering Waffle House waitstaff or his abortion extremism and I only made one of those up, folks........
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From aboard a yacht christened “Medicare Fraud,” Rick Scott dictated a pouty little op-ed to some butler or indentured pool boy, insisting that America actually adores his preposterous party’s proffered slate of potential Senators, who are very good candidates indeed, and not, as they appear at first glance, a collection of characters cut from Todd Solondz films.
Well, let’s check under the hood of that clown car, see how Rick’s theory holds up.
Herschel Walker remains my one-man walking insurance policy against a slow news week. First, he falsely accused Raphael Warnock of lying about owning a dog, for lord knows what reason, then he spent a few hours strutting around in his Crackerjack box deputy badge, somehow believing that would go well for him, and he wound up babbling incoherently about bicycles. Pretty tame week, by Herschel’s standards.
Meanwhile, Blake Masters is now claiming to be the ghost of John McCain possessing Blake Masters’ body, part of the larger trend of Republican candidates backing away from the extreme abortion positions they trumpeted two weeks ago, desperately hoping moderate voters are as easy to bamboozle as the zombies who mainline Alex Jones in the parking lot behind the abandoned laundromat. I mean, all you need to do is make millions of women forget about the rights you stole from them, how hard could that be?.......
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Eager to help out, Ted Cruz provided his unusually punchable face to the Republican movement to claw back that ten grand in student loan forgiveness Biden just announced, despite the fact that the PPP loan Ted’s parents took out to pay kids to sit with him at lunch was completely forgiven.........
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Turns out Ginni Thomas, star of Peacock’s Insurrectionist Housewives of D.C., attempted to overturn the 2020 election in more states than we initially knew about, so update your scorecards........
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Whenever Tate Reeves pops up in your news feed, you know you’re about to lose some of the swagger that comes with citizenship in a superpower. See, now the fella who brought the second-highest Covid death rate IN THE WORLD to American soil can’t even deliver drinkable water in his own capitol city. Who’s the shithole now?....
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Well, it took a couple days, but Cult45 finally remembered they’re supposed to feign outrage when somebody points out they’re fascists. Or even when, out of an abundance of undeserved courtesy, President Biden generously attaches every conceivable qualifier in order to spare your fashy fee-fees.
Strictly as theatre, it’s been excruciating; give me the honest batshit meltdown of January 6th any day over the jowlsy bloviating of the Republican enabler class. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who has barely managed to harrumph derisively at the blazing hate orgy his party has become, was among the first to demand an apology.
…to demand an apology. Let me get something out of the way real quick.
**** your apology. **** Chris Sununu and every single pearl-clutching paperweight like him. Double **** Kevin McCarthy of course, with the rustiest garden tool in the Saw franchise. Or perhaps with the “electric cord of liberty.”
I cannot fathom how these invertebrates imagine they have the right to lecture anyone anywhere on anything. Demand an apology from the coward in the mirror, you like demanding so much. Better yet: shut the **** up. At long last, just shut the **** up.
Incidentally, you’re not allowed to wallow in this particular victimhood puddle with Lindsey Graham gawkily signaling to Oath Keepers and Proud Boys on the other channel. Who do y’all think you’re fooling? You can gaslight some mother****ers all damn day long, sure. You can drive them right off a cliff like lemmings, we’ve seen you do it. But to most of us, from the outside, you look like this blurred mass of furious clowns, ferociously rubbing shit into one another’s hair, for reasons that are difficult to determine. You truly do.
Like, do you little creeps understand how badly you’ve been behaving, to get the generic congressionals where they are right now? During inflation like this? People are sick of you and your shit and all the bizarre ways you insist upon inflicting harm on the rest of us.
After all we’ve suffered at the hands of these petty, vicious asshats; the disease spreading and the street violence and the endless, bleating griping; let me just say that I am supremely unwilling to be threatened by the likes of Lindsey Graham.
“My dad’s mob can beat up your justice system.” Bitch move, Senator. It’s like that time Ted Cruz challenged Ron Perlman to a fight…with Gym Jordan. You butt-suckling leeches. You mud-breathing weasels. Josh Hawley can call his book whatever he likes, if there is any group of Macy’s catalogue mediocrity models who are decidedly not man enough to deserve to plunge this nation into autocratic darkness, it’s the quivering vanilla pudding mound that is the Senate Republican Conference. Again I call upon them to SHUT THE **** UP, one and all.
Despite, or perhaps because of swift, decisive debunking, Tucker Carlson, “Libs of TikTok,” and their ilk redoubled their trans panic stochastic terror freakout targeting Boston Children’s Hospital, but I guess it’s unfair to disparage patriots who just want to get a few doctors murdered. My deepest, sincerest apologies for having offended you, Governor Sununu.
I don’t think they’re getting their apology from Biden, though. Seems he had something slightly different in mind.
Under the satanic light of the blood moon, Joe preached his dark gospel of democracy, berating the nation with divisive, partisan positions like “white supremacy is bad,” and “Republicans should incite less terrorism,” and he didn’t call for his hecklers to be physically assaulted even once.
And since then, it’s been a sonic wall of wingnut mewling, like every spoiled toddler in human history shitting themselves at once. MAGA culture has become an inescapable air horn of the petty grievances of the subpar, and it is unen****ingdurable.
…which is why I must excuse myself now, to rinse my cranium out with beer, and repeat my nightly prayer to get Rip Van Winkled out of this Age of Derp. Stay safe out there, folks, we need ya for the midterms.
The pathetic semantic squabble in coverage of Biden’s democracy speech
<p>Last night, after President Biden gave a prime-time address in Philadelphia warning that America’s democracy is under threat from extremist Republicans in thrall to Donald Trump, the lead story about the speech in the New York Times quoted a historian who succinctly put it in context. “We are...
www.cjr.org
....Of course Biden wants people to vote for his party. It’s also true that he used his speech last night to tout his agenda, including in the run-up to his call to vote; indeed, the Times characterized the address as effectively “two back-to-back speeches,” one focused darkly on threats to democracy, the other optimistically on his administration’s progress. But, at least conceptually, these focuses cannot be neatly separated, just as calls to vote and the touting of an agenda can’t be separated from the broader work of defending democracy—encouraging voting and making the case that the votes should be for you is the basic stuff of democracy. And it’s all the stuff of politics, which is one reason journalists’ efforts to police the political nature of Biden’s speech last night were so misguided. Merriam-Webster—and I hate to be this tedious, but apparently it’s necessary—has a whole bunch of entries for politics, the broadest (and, I think, best) of which defines it as “the total complex of relations between people living in society.” Saving democracy is thus political, inherently so. So is the military. So is just about anything the president says, no matter who is picking up the tab. Arguing about whether last night’s speech was political would have been silly and pedantic at the best of times. At this fraught moment, it’s akin to watching your house catch fire and shouting, “Wait a minute! Is this a house?”
What various top outlets seemed to actually mean by political—and some stated it outright—was partisan, referring to the idea that Biden was criticizing members of another party. To take a charitable view, this isn’t totally irrelevant as a concern, since there are rules governing campaigning using federal resources. (See: Trump hosting part of the 2020 Republican convention at the White House.) But it’s close to irrelevant in this case; there was much about the speech that was much more important than the setting. And partisan, like political, is a slippery term. That some members of the press used the two interchangeably last night is telling of a broader trope in political journalism: that politics is principally about the interrelation of political parties, not least in the electoral arena. The “total complex of relations” in a society, this is not.....
Don’t Reward Cowardice with Your Vote | National Review
Maybe Blake Masters was never really pro-life in the first place, or maybe he was and buckled under pressure. Either way, he doesn’t deserve your support.
www.nationalreview.com
....As a practical matter, I expect that this line of criticism will come to nothing, because Republicans at the moment give every indication that they enjoy being cynically used by self-seeking amoralists who exploit everything and everyone — including the most vulnerable among us — in the service of their own banal and tedious small-ball ambitions, yet another way in which today’s Republicans have come to resemble yesterday’s Democrats.
Obviously, one does not enter into a relationship with the Republican Party in 2022 because one is seeking opportunities for the exercise of honor. But if you are in public life and you aren’t willing to pay a price for what you believe, then, really: What use are you to anybody?
Scripture advises us not to put our trust in princes. That goes double for cowards.....
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www.washingtonpost.com
If it appears the volume of deception coming from MAGA Republicans is increasing, that’s because it is. Two academics from New York University set about documenting the proliferation of rubbish in a study they described this week for The Post’s Monkey Cage feature. They found that 36 percent of the news that Republican congressional candidates shared on social media came from unreliable sources on an average day from January to July, up from 8 percent for the same period in 2020. (The news shared by Democratic candidates from unreliable sources rose to 2 percent from 1 percent.)
The most ominous finding is where the crescendo of crazy is coming from. Incumbent Republican members of Congress were relatively truthful: Only 6 percent of the news they shared came from unreliable sources. Among Republican challengers, fully 45 percent came from unreliable outlets.......
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