Today saw the final surrender of the last power center in the Republican Party that had not bent its knee to and kissed the ring of Donald Trump, when America’s greatest Confederate, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell announced that he would step down from his position as leader of the Senate Confederates this coming November.
I’m devastated by the SCOTUS decision. And repulsed by McConnell’s decision to sacrifice everything for his egotistical political agenda. He should also be included in Liz Cheney’s admonition that “dishonor will remain.”
Kills me that we’re careening at M.90 towards the brink. Hope there’s enough power to pullout of the spin.
We may get to the cliff edge without flying speed, but if we dive into the canyon, we'll get the speed and be able to pull out (I once did this at the Rock Springs Wyoming airport, so I know it works). :-)
My best political source thinks that SCOTUS will not grant the immunity Trump seeks, because if they were to do so they would totally lose any shred of credibility they have left.
I am proud that I can call a former U.S. senator a friend, and this person is known for not being critical of others. There's one person for which they make an exception: #MassMurderingMoscowMitch. That says it all.
I am at the point at which I cannot talk about this stuff with the Bride, because she is terrified that Trump (and Stephen Miller) will come for us and put us in a camp somewhere..... I don't think so - he may want to do that, but he will have thousands of wrongful termination lawsuits in the courts to keep him busy for at least a year. And I do not think he will be elected..... First, current polling is not likely to be accurate. Second, the Republican P{arty and Trump's own PACs are running short of money, and without money they cannot run a campaign. That's gonna hurt. Third, Trump WILL be convicted in the NY business fraud trial which starts in four weeks. That conviction will cost Trump votes among independents, and there is the possibility that he could actually be in jail by the end of summer. And Trump ain't James Michael Curley..... Mind you, the Bride is eyeing the UK if the 'balloon' is reelected.
Reading Rick Wilson's Substack of this afternoon is in order. I sent it to that pinhead "experienced" (his words) political writer Aaron Blake of WAPo this afternoon, in response to his out of touch horse race analysis of the Michigan primary. Madenly vapid. We have to keep hitting those shitforbrains who manipulate the inteligencia.
When the history of this period is written (if we are allowed to do that in the future), the mainstream media will earn their place as the institution that most failed the American people in this critical time. Their refusal to do the job that earned them a place in the first amendment will be counted as one of the greatest sins against the Republic.....
Buh bye Mitch and don’t let the door slam you in the ass on the way out, though your presence will still stain the halls of Congress for three more years…too bad you won’t have all that much time to enjoy all that money you received for political favors while you were in the Senate, but life is a bitch and then you die. Was it worth it, huh? Like Frankenstein’s monster, trump will destroy the GOP and you enabled him all the way. And you just might have destroyed this country in the process…was it worth it? Was it?
He did one thing that I was ok with--supported the bipartisan border bill with its funding for Ukraine and others. That barely makes a blip in the damage he did to the country by his hypocritical flip flop on confirming justices--leaving us where we are today with the crippling "wait till April to begin thinking about it" acceptance of cert on immunity.
"Like his fellow Southern traitor John C. Calhoun, his treason against the Republic stemmed from his inability to see past his own provincialism and sectarianism, to act for the greater good of the country." Great insight! Now off to ponder the relationship between "provincialism and sectarianism" and states' rights . . .
Speaking of the Confederacy, every time I look at Matt Gaetz, I see George Wallace. Either one could play Satan without makeup.
Whenever you're filling out a payment form online for your credit xcard, it asks you to list "state/province" - "provincialism" is the inability to see the larger issues, to pay primary attention to where you're from. Like how Robert E. Lee had greater loyalty to Virginia as his home state than to the United States as his home country, when he turned down Lincoln's offer of command of the Union armies.
My Richmond-born grandmother lived in the Boston area for the second half of her very long life. Since I grew up in a town eight miles away, I knew her well and spent lots of time at her house. I can see to this day the WWI recruiting poster she had next to her writing desk: It depicted a venerable Robert E. Lee in his gray uniform and the words I FOUGHT FOR VIRGINIA . . . NOW IT'S YOUR TURN.
Which is to say I grew up knowing this. At the same time -- the issue of state/country is worth exploring. It's easy, natural even, to identify with family and town/city: they're tangible, *real* -- we have sights, sounds, smells, etc., attached to them. "State" and, even more so, "country" are far more abstract. They can be and are manipulated by those in power: McCarthyism did exactly that, to define what "American" meant and cast anyone on the wrong side of its line as un-American, disloyal, treasonous even.
Provincial is quite accurate. The Kentucky ethos and the magas are provincial. (McConnell and Rand Paul are the best KY can do?) The magas lack any grasp of the US place in the world geographically, economically, militarily, or historically. That's why they believe in the Deep State boogeyman and Trump's ability to slay the shapeless dark dragons from the larger world that haunt their petty existences.
If I were a betting woman, which I’m not, I would lay odds that the final cause of Trump not standing trial on federal charges will be advanced dementia. Why is there no public speculation on how bad he has to get before the Putin Party picks an alternate figurehead?
I also think McConnell saw in that meeting that his time has passed. I would bet that he might even retire rather than see someone else in his leadership position wielding the power he once did. But no matter what that hateful SOB has a special place in hell waiting for him. Traitors don't come to a good end.
Right. He's a sick old man who's having "spells" of some kind (TIAs). He's been physically frail his entire life and was excluded from the military because of it. He'll back away from the Senate rather than outright leave it because the final traces of lust he has are for power. They may even end up finding him dead and utterly unremorseful in his own urine in a distant Senate corrridor in 2025.
So, now, how long will it be before Moscow Mitch starts singing like other former Republican politicians about the evils of Trumpism? Or writes a book? That's the pattern, right? All in for Trump, until you're escaping the burning building, then you've finally got the balls to tell the truth.
Balls??? Huh??? If they had balls, or the courage of patriotic convictions, they never would have gone along with that traitorous son of a maggot in the first place. I will remind you also that courage does not require balls. Ask Tammy Duckworth and other women heros.
we need to remember that Rome's Republic allowed for the election of a "dictator" with pretty absolute power. while I don't remember if this came up during the Constitutional Convention, it is clearly a place those guys were smart enough to keep away from.
but the actual "bottom line" right now is that a lot of our fellow citizens want that dictatorship BACK.
this is not to say they're AWARE that this is what they want based on their knowledge of world history, because most of 'em don't know it.
I had a conversation last week with a college kid (a close friend's grandson) who's in his junior year of college. he told me that he didn't know we lost the Vietnam War because they never taught this in school and even JUSTIFIED it by saying "well, of course they're not gonna teach anything about wars we LOST because it's embarrassing." when I asked him what he actually LEARNED about 20th century history, he said he learned almost nothing about WWI, WWII and only vaguely remembered something about a stock market crash. then he complained that his college (one of the most expensive in the country, although he's on a scholarship) wasn't giving him any preparation for a JOB, and I told him that a Liberal Education wasn't especially about job training nad that maybe he should have just skipped it and gone to Business School (he's a Business major faute de mieux). I have a feeling these conversations are going to be a lot less frequent.
he'd sent me a paper last year on "Poverty." the first page showed that he wasn't afraid of writing (very rare in his generation), although in the case he used, the theoretical person in poverty was worried about being up-to-date on his car payments, which struck me as not-quite-that-terribly poor. but then he went on to list how many poor counties there were in each of a bunch of randomly chosen states, but without percentages. he promised to prove stuff, but then failed to do so. his mother (who's the insane problem...a rabid anti-vaxxer who is also so terrified of Covid she didn't want the kid to get his license because he'd have to unmask for his photo at the DMV) thought it was BRILLIANT (and a few phrases had a nice quality that wouldn't have been out of place in a political speech, but this was a college paper. I thought that if I'd been the teacher, I might have given him a C and, since he can sort of write, maybe a C+, but with a LOT of comments and suggestions. there were NO citations, save a couple of random ones. but the citation style was wrong and wasn't even consistent. in other words, a shaky first draft which could possibly have been tweaked up to a B-. but I held my tongue, which was a good idea because he got a B+.
a few months later, I was talking to his grandma who started to complain about the same things I was upset about. she's a few years older than you are and did quite well at Baruch, which was then a part of CCNY, which was no-bullshit school, especially in those days, when there were over two years of required courses, including a one-year Norton Anthology survey for EVERYONE not in the Engineering School. so we were very much on the same page about this appalling lack of anything resembling structure or standards in what passes for "higher education" nowadays. I told the kid to take an American History course. it turns out that he's been listening to an old friend of the family, a nihilistic NYC Jewish lawyer whose career tanked when a judge he'd pissed off didn't allow him to collect on a big case. he is now sleeping on friends' couches in Milwaukee. an example: he was quoted to me as saying that there are three possible ways for the "border crisis" to work itself out: 1) let them all in and they'll "settle in; 2) we can "exterminate them" (his phrase) or 3) they'll come in and "exterminate us." I told him that this made no logical sense and that anyone who used terms like "exterminate" was an asshole to be avoided.
it was obvious I was pissing in the wind.
the big mystery for me in all this why I actually care about it so much.
so yeah, "Idiocracy" is about right. but it's right on a good day, when one feels positive about things. MOST days, I'd have to say it's a lot worse.
...and btw, I highly recommend the long profile of Matt Gaetz in last week's "New Yorker" by Dexter Filkins. I bet there's a paywall, but it's worth a shot. if you can't get the whole thing, there's also a New Yorker podcast that sums it up.
I think that oval office meeting with Johnson yesterday was the final straw. He came out separately from Johnson. I think he realized after that, that he has lost all his power. Game over.
WTF isn’t Gaetz arrested for his sex-n-state lines with a minor, already?????????? I wish McCarthy would get off his whooped butt and extract some revenge, already.
in that "New Yorker" profile, Filkins says there's some buzz about reopening the case. obviously, Gaetz is guilty as sin, being already the kind of guy who think it's cool to show Fellow Lawmakers nekkid pics of his recent "conquests." and Filkins quotes someone (or maybe just says it himself) that Gaetz seems to have "the impulse control of a twelve-year-old." I'm pretty sure my own sub-par impulse control was like Little Mattie's when I was ten. of course, if my dad had been a political power broker with too much money...who knows. but I betcha Cawthorne's stories about orgies and "key bumps" (a phrase I'd never heard before, but I avoid cokeheads, who are even less fun on it than off it) involved MG who even actually lied about "dating" ( now a synonym for "fucking") Cassidy Hutchinson.
I'm gonna really like this new computer. it's a gift from a generous neighbor who wanted no payment, but couldn't say no to an ounce or so of my cherished mycological specimens.
nobody wants him to stay and there ARE those pesky senior moments. thing is, I still am less frightened by Mitch than by one of those younger, more vigorous guys in line to replace him. we need both houses.
and, of course, Herakles in his Augean Stables mode...
I’m devastated by the SCOTUS decision. And repulsed by McConnell’s decision to sacrifice everything for his egotistical political agenda. He should also be included in Liz Cheney’s admonition that “dishonor will remain.”
Kills me that we’re careening at M.90 towards the brink. Hope there’s enough power to pullout of the spin.
We may get to the cliff edge without flying speed, but if we dive into the canyon, we'll get the speed and be able to pull out (I once did this at the Rock Springs Wyoming airport, so I know it works). :-)
My best political source thinks that SCOTUS will not grant the immunity Trump seeks, because if they were to do so they would totally lose any shred of credibility they have left.
That may be true David. But it’s all about the delay.
hard to like your, sadly, true, comment..
I know. If you haven’t read it yet read TC’s second post tonight. It really is up to us to save democracy.
Us is all we have.
Fingers crossed.
😉
I am proud that I can call a former U.S. senator a friend, and this person is known for not being critical of others. There's one person for which they make an exception: #MassMurderingMoscowMitch. That says it all.
I am at the point at which I cannot talk about this stuff with the Bride, because she is terrified that Trump (and Stephen Miller) will come for us and put us in a camp somewhere..... I don't think so - he may want to do that, but he will have thousands of wrongful termination lawsuits in the courts to keep him busy for at least a year. And I do not think he will be elected..... First, current polling is not likely to be accurate. Second, the Republican P{arty and Trump's own PACs are running short of money, and without money they cannot run a campaign. That's gonna hurt. Third, Trump WILL be convicted in the NY business fraud trial which starts in four weeks. That conviction will cost Trump votes among independents, and there is the possibility that he could actually be in jail by the end of summer. And Trump ain't James Michael Curley..... Mind you, the Bride is eyeing the UK if the 'balloon' is reelected.
Reading Rick Wilson's Substack of this afternoon is in order. I sent it to that pinhead "experienced" (his words) political writer Aaron Blake of WAPo this afternoon, in response to his out of touch horse race analysis of the Michigan primary. Madenly vapid. We have to keep hitting those shitforbrains who manipulate the inteligencia.
When the history of this period is written (if we are allowed to do that in the future), the mainstream media will earn their place as the institution that most failed the American people in this critical time. Their refusal to do the job that earned them a place in the first amendment will be counted as one of the greatest sins against the Republic.....
Fox Media Motto:
No News, Just Noise.
Buh bye Mitch and don’t let the door slam you in the ass on the way out, though your presence will still stain the halls of Congress for three more years…too bad you won’t have all that much time to enjoy all that money you received for political favors while you were in the Senate, but life is a bitch and then you die. Was it worth it, huh? Like Frankenstein’s monster, trump will destroy the GOP and you enabled him all the way. And you just might have destroyed this country in the process…was it worth it? Was it?
He did one thing that I was ok with--supported the bipartisan border bill with its funding for Ukraine and others. That barely makes a blip in the damage he did to the country by his hypocritical flip flop on confirming justices--leaving us where we are today with the crippling "wait till April to begin thinking about it" acceptance of cert on immunity.
"Like his fellow Southern traitor John C. Calhoun, his treason against the Republic stemmed from his inability to see past his own provincialism and sectarianism, to act for the greater good of the country." Great insight! Now off to ponder the relationship between "provincialism and sectarianism" and states' rights . . .
Speaking of the Confederacy, every time I look at Matt Gaetz, I see George Wallace. Either one could play Satan without makeup.
Whenever you're filling out a payment form online for your credit xcard, it asks you to list "state/province" - "provincialism" is the inability to see the larger issues, to pay primary attention to where you're from. Like how Robert E. Lee had greater loyalty to Virginia as his home state than to the United States as his home country, when he turned down Lincoln's offer of command of the Union armies.
My Richmond-born grandmother lived in the Boston area for the second half of her very long life. Since I grew up in a town eight miles away, I knew her well and spent lots of time at her house. I can see to this day the WWI recruiting poster she had next to her writing desk: It depicted a venerable Robert E. Lee in his gray uniform and the words I FOUGHT FOR VIRGINIA . . . NOW IT'S YOUR TURN.
Which is to say I grew up knowing this. At the same time -- the issue of state/country is worth exploring. It's easy, natural even, to identify with family and town/city: they're tangible, *real* -- we have sights, sounds, smells, etc., attached to them. "State" and, even more so, "country" are far more abstract. They can be and are manipulated by those in power: McCarthyism did exactly that, to define what "American" meant and cast anyone on the wrong side of its line as un-American, disloyal, treasonous even.
Provincial is quite accurate. The Kentucky ethos and the magas are provincial. (McConnell and Rand Paul are the best KY can do?) The magas lack any grasp of the US place in the world geographically, economically, militarily, or historically. That's why they believe in the Deep State boogeyman and Trump's ability to slay the shapeless dark dragons from the larger world that haunt their petty existences.
If I were a betting woman, which I’m not, I would lay odds that the final cause of Trump not standing trial on federal charges will be advanced dementia. Why is there no public speculation on how bad he has to get before the Putin Party picks an alternate figurehead?
Read Rick Wilsons post of this afternoon.
I also think McConnell saw in that meeting that his time has passed. I would bet that he might even retire rather than see someone else in his leadership position wielding the power he once did. But no matter what that hateful SOB has a special place in hell waiting for him. Traitors don't come to a good end.
Right. He's a sick old man who's having "spells" of some kind (TIAs). He's been physically frail his entire life and was excluded from the military because of it. He'll back away from the Senate rather than outright leave it because the final traces of lust he has are for power. They may even end up finding him dead and utterly unremorseful in his own urine in a distant Senate corrridor in 2025.
So, the turtle is going to pull his head in and crawl home.
I get the turtle thing, and it's good, but I've always seen him as some kind of Dr. Seuss bird.
and not a nice one, either.
I don't see ol' Mitch living very long after his "retirement."
So, now, how long will it be before Moscow Mitch starts singing like other former Republican politicians about the evils of Trumpism? Or writes a book? That's the pattern, right? All in for Trump, until you're escaping the burning building, then you've finally got the balls to tell the truth.
Balls??? Huh??? If they had balls, or the courage of patriotic convictions, they never would have gone along with that traitorous son of a maggot in the first place. I will remind you also that courage does not require balls. Ask Tammy Duckworth and other women heros.
betcha the ink is still wet on the contract. I wonder who the ghostwriter's gonna be. it's a shit gig, but probably fairly lucrative.
we need to remember that Rome's Republic allowed for the election of a "dictator" with pretty absolute power. while I don't remember if this came up during the Constitutional Convention, it is clearly a place those guys were smart enough to keep away from.
but the actual "bottom line" right now is that a lot of our fellow citizens want that dictatorship BACK.
this is not to say they're AWARE that this is what they want based on their knowledge of world history, because most of 'em don't know it.
I had a conversation last week with a college kid (a close friend's grandson) who's in his junior year of college. he told me that he didn't know we lost the Vietnam War because they never taught this in school and even JUSTIFIED it by saying "well, of course they're not gonna teach anything about wars we LOST because it's embarrassing." when I asked him what he actually LEARNED about 20th century history, he said he learned almost nothing about WWI, WWII and only vaguely remembered something about a stock market crash. then he complained that his college (one of the most expensive in the country, although he's on a scholarship) wasn't giving him any preparation for a JOB, and I told him that a Liberal Education wasn't especially about job training nad that maybe he should have just skipped it and gone to Business School (he's a Business major faute de mieux). I have a feeling these conversations are going to be a lot less frequent.
Welcome to "Idiocracy."
you got it.
he'd sent me a paper last year on "Poverty." the first page showed that he wasn't afraid of writing (very rare in his generation), although in the case he used, the theoretical person in poverty was worried about being up-to-date on his car payments, which struck me as not-quite-that-terribly poor. but then he went on to list how many poor counties there were in each of a bunch of randomly chosen states, but without percentages. he promised to prove stuff, but then failed to do so. his mother (who's the insane problem...a rabid anti-vaxxer who is also so terrified of Covid she didn't want the kid to get his license because he'd have to unmask for his photo at the DMV) thought it was BRILLIANT (and a few phrases had a nice quality that wouldn't have been out of place in a political speech, but this was a college paper. I thought that if I'd been the teacher, I might have given him a C and, since he can sort of write, maybe a C+, but with a LOT of comments and suggestions. there were NO citations, save a couple of random ones. but the citation style was wrong and wasn't even consistent. in other words, a shaky first draft which could possibly have been tweaked up to a B-. but I held my tongue, which was a good idea because he got a B+.
a few months later, I was talking to his grandma who started to complain about the same things I was upset about. she's a few years older than you are and did quite well at Baruch, which was then a part of CCNY, which was no-bullshit school, especially in those days, when there were over two years of required courses, including a one-year Norton Anthology survey for EVERYONE not in the Engineering School. so we were very much on the same page about this appalling lack of anything resembling structure or standards in what passes for "higher education" nowadays. I told the kid to take an American History course. it turns out that he's been listening to an old friend of the family, a nihilistic NYC Jewish lawyer whose career tanked when a judge he'd pissed off didn't allow him to collect on a big case. he is now sleeping on friends' couches in Milwaukee. an example: he was quoted to me as saying that there are three possible ways for the "border crisis" to work itself out: 1) let them all in and they'll "settle in; 2) we can "exterminate them" (his phrase) or 3) they'll come in and "exterminate us." I told him that this made no logical sense and that anyone who used terms like "exterminate" was an asshole to be avoided.
it was obvious I was pissing in the wind.
the big mystery for me in all this why I actually care about it so much.
so yeah, "Idiocracy" is about right. but it's right on a good day, when one feels positive about things. MOST days, I'd have to say it's a lot worse.
...and btw, I highly recommend the long profile of Matt Gaetz in last week's "New Yorker" by Dexter Filkins. I bet there's a paywall, but it's worth a shot. if you can't get the whole thing, there's also a New Yorker podcast that sums it up.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/26/matt-gaetz-profile
Why now do you think? A fit of pique? Naw. Tired sick old man? Maaaaybee… Threats to his family? Hm.
I think that oval office meeting with Johnson yesterday was the final straw. He came out separately from Johnson. I think he realized after that, that he has lost all his power. Game over.
WTF isn’t Gaetz arrested for his sex-n-state lines with a minor, already?????????? I wish McCarthy would get off his whooped butt and extract some revenge, already.
in that "New Yorker" profile, Filkins says there's some buzz about reopening the case. obviously, Gaetz is guilty as sin, being already the kind of guy who think it's cool to show Fellow Lawmakers nekkid pics of his recent "conquests." and Filkins quotes someone (or maybe just says it himself) that Gaetz seems to have "the impulse control of a twelve-year-old." I'm pretty sure my own sub-par impulse control was like Little Mattie's when I was ten. of course, if my dad had been a political power broker with too much money...who knows. but I betcha Cawthorne's stories about orgies and "key bumps" (a phrase I'd never heard before, but I avoid cokeheads, who are even less fun on it than off it) involved MG who even actually lied about "dating" ( now a synonym for "fucking") Cassidy Hutchinson.
I'm gonna really like this new computer. it's a gift from a generous neighbor who wanted no payment, but couldn't say no to an ounce or so of my cherished mycological specimens.
The impulse control of a 12 year old and the self awareness of a rock. (actually that's an insult to rocks)
if you'd said "dogshit," it would still be insulting to dogshit.
Goodbye Moscow Mitch. Not
sorry to see you go.
nobody wants him to stay and there ARE those pesky senior moments. thing is, I still am less frightened by Mitch than by one of those younger, more vigorous guys in line to replace him. we need both houses.
and, of course, Herakles in his Augean Stables mode...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/29/supreme-court-trump-immunity-jan6/?