THEY'RE ALL BULLSHITTERS NOW
Representative Claudia Tenney, generally considered till now to be a “reasonable” Republican, who is up for re-election in a competitive district in New York, sent out a tweet Friday night after a day of news about the attack on Paul Pelosi.
It was a photograph of a group of young, white men holding oversized hammers beside a gay Pride flag.
Her comment was “LOL.”
That a “reasonable Republican” like Tenney felt the need to be in on the “joke” demonstrates that Republicans have concluded that, as Trump has demonstrated, there is no political price to be paid for attacks on their opponents, however meanspirited, inflammatory or false.
If anything, they have come to believe they will be rewarded by the defective deplorables of the right-wing base for demonstrating such coarseness; they might even suffer negative political consequences if they do not join in and show they are in on “the joke.”
On Tuesday morning - after the prosecutors had publicly revealed the charges and laid out the case, attaching to it the confession of attempted-assassin David Pape - Trump went on the Chris Stigall radio show that airs mornings in Philadelphia and said:
“Wow, it’s — weird things going on in that household in the last couple of weeks. Probably, you and I are better off not talking about it. The glass it seems was broken from the inside to the out so it wasn’t a break in, it was a break out. I don’t know, you hear the same things I do.”
This is utter and complete bullshit. But Trump said it so you know that already. He has never said anything in his life ever that wasn’t utter and complete bullshit.
As the New York Times reported on the case that morning as Trump was saying that: “After breaking into the home by slamming his body through a glass door on the back porch, the intruder found Mr. Pelosi, 82, asleep in his bedroom just after 2 a.m., according to the filing.”
The entire Republican Party is now the Party of Bullshit. Professor Henry Frankfurt, in his masterful “On Bullshit,” defines the term thus:
“Bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but cares only whether the listener is persuaded.”
The main difference between lying and bullshit is intent and deception. People who are lying and people who are telling the truth are focused on the truth. Liars actively consider the truth when they conceal it; the liar wants to steer people away from discovering the truth. The person telling the truth wants to present the truth. The bullshitter differs from both liars and people presenting the truth in that he doesn’t care whether what he says is true or false.
Frankfurt concludes, "Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
Writing in 1710, Jonathan Swift said, “Considering that natural disposition in many men to lie, and in multitudes to believe, I have been perplexed what to do with that maxim so frequent in every body's mouth; that truth will at last prevail. By the time a lie is refuted, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect: like a man, who has thought of a good repartee, when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who has found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.'
What Donald Trump has demonstrated since he rode his golden escalator seven years ago is that, the bigger a jerk you can be, the more the defective deplorables of the GOP base will love you. The rest of the GOP has now internalized that.
Their reaction to the attempted assassination of the husband of the leading Democrat in Congress by a modern day Leon Czolgosz proves they are all bullshitters now, and their bullshit is bottomless.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat put it well the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017:
“Driven by opportunism, pragmatism, or fear, many begin to forget that they used to think certain things were unacceptable.”
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A friend of mine works in DC and says Democrats should be burning up the phone lines of each of these congressional offices. He cited as an example of someone who responds ... a certain Texan by way of Cancun. I love my friend, but he still thinks there are reasonable republicans, or that you can reason with them. But as a blogger named Craig Calcaterra put it so well the other day, every republican accusation is a confession.
trump is a carny barker selling rubes tickets to the Freak Show by bullshitting about the displays within the tent on the fairgrounds. Actually, it’s a hall of mirrors and the rubes are the real freaks.