Category Archives: current events

Notes for the State of the Union

Joe Biden, president of the United States of Marketing, Polling, Branding and the Roulette Wheel of the Stock Market, will be delivering the State of the Union in a day or two.   We hear, in the horse race handicapping mass media, that, in spite of doing an objectively decent job, in the face of united and often vicious obstruction, Biden’s popularity numbers are in the toilet, his favorables almost as unfavorable as Trump’s were at his peak of popularity.   The solid 39% who love Trump will not be dissuaded in that love by any so-called facts presented by so-called smart people.  The real reason they love him is the permission he gives them to rage about their grievances, no modern president ever let them embrace and cherish their anger, fear and hatreds as Trumpie has.   

Biden’s unfavorable numbers situation is largely a creation of the mass media, as was Trump’s rise to “normalcy” and a brilliantly engineered Electoral College victory in an election he otherwise lost by three million votes.  Biden can deliver the greatest State of the Union in history, the pundits and pollsters will have the final say about how it went, Americans will log-in to give a thumbs up or thumbs down, like the millions who decide the fate of contestants on American Idol or Dancing with the Stars, and the verdict will be in.

Here is the opening of Trumpie’s third State of the Union, delivered around the time he told Bob Woodward, on the record, that the coronavirus was a deadly, highly infectious disease, much stronger and more contagious than the worst strains of the flu.   As he appointed various inexperienced, non-medically trained loyalist pinheads to lead the “fight” against the pandemic, he kept telling Americans that covid-19 was a commie hoax, part of a vast plot to defeat him in the upcoming rigged election and that it would be gone, magically, in a few months, if everyone would just ignore it.   Look at these strong action words from the 2020 State of the Union (STRONG!):

the incredible results:

jobs are booming

incomes are soaring

poverty is plummeting

crime is falling

confidence is surging

and our country is now the international laughing stock I always said it was, chumps! We are thriving and highly respected again, and my member is over nine miles long, bitches.

Thankfully, and in spite of the agonizingly slow grinding of the creaky gears of justice for the rich and powerful, the Eternal Litigant’s days as leader of anything but the White Power movement are, and I say this with confidence even as I cringe with a small bit of nausea, most likely over. I say “most likely” to hedge my bets, in the event that a few years from now I am writing these squawkings from a gold-plated Trump De-education center. It is likely, when the NYS Attorney General is done, that the Trump Organization will go the way of Trump University, Trump Steaks, the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Airlines, Trump vodka, Trump condoms, the Trump Charitable Foundation and all the rest of the artist of the deal’s scams.

The dish will be served very cold, and many thousands had to die unnecessary deaths to fully prepare the dish, but… you know what vengeful people say about the best way to serve that bitter dish. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving psychopath.

Meantime, hopefully Biden will deliver a State of the Union as strong as the action-word filled turd state of the union delivered by his compulsively lying predecessor. Used to be lying was a bad thing, I seem to recall. Anyway, I’ll be looking for the media spin on Biden’s speech, it is sure to annoy the fuck out of me.

Nice ending to Washington Post article on new January 6th evidence

It sometimes seems that we will never see an end to this long fought Koch-network financed hellscape we live in today (though we will). A desperate, destructive imbecile con man still has tens of millions who believe in him, and the pernicious, often ridiculous, myths that enable his unprincipled ilk. The January 6th committee is now looking at evidence of the angry squabbles behind the scenes among organizers of the Ellipse rally the morning of Trump’s riot. I love the ending of this article, though it is also quite horrible.

In the middle of the afternoon on Jan. 6, Pierson sent another set of texts to Meadows, according to records gathered by the committee.


“Note: I was able to keep the crazies off the stage,” she texted at 2:40 p.m. “Glad it fought it,” she added.


By that time, the mob of Trump supporters had violently descended on the Capitol.

https://wapo.st/3BYfkog

Putin shows us how it’s done

Sarah Lazarus with some of today’s news

Putin on Friday urged the Ukrainian military to overthrow its own government and agree to a peace deal, calling Ukrainian political leaders a “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis.” (Your daily reminder that Zelensky is Jewish. Also, here’s the head of Odessa’s main synagogue tearfully fleeing Putin’s “de-Nazification” operation.) But that proposal seems like a wild misread of the situation: Russian troops have lost momentum in their push toward Kyiv, according to a senior Pentagon official, because Ukrainian forces put up a much fiercer fight than Russia had anticipated.

https://mailchi.mp/crooked/2-25-22

Manafort ties Putin-Ukraine-Trump expertly

Uncanny, really, the guy who worked seven years getting Putin’s guy elected president of Ukraine, then, working for free, got Trump past the RNC, while making introductions between Trump’s people and Putin’s people, then leaving the campaign when it looked like he was colluding with Russia, which he was, as Little Marco’s committe documented. Paul Manafort never gets the credit he deserves for all this, he has had a huge hand in shaping world events. Thank you, Paul!

Hannah Arendt on Evil

Arendt’s observation that Adolf Eichmann, rather than being an inhuman monster, was actually an ordinary man of at best average intelligence who believed the aberrant culture of Nazi Germany was completely normal and behaved accordingly, was regarded as radical, even heretical, in 1964. Events have proved her thesis sickeningly correct, (see, for example, Jared Kushner.) From the introduction of her masterpiece Eichmann in Jerusalem.:

Evil need not be committed only by demonic monsters but, with diastrous effect, by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.

And here it is in the beautiful reading of Wanda McCaddon:

Putin’s favorite 2016 candidate illegally took top secret documents from the White House?

I don’t see why he would, which is to say, of course, I don’t see why he wouldn’t. In fact he did, as the National Archives has confirmed. What could go wrong with a transactional, money hungry, deeply in debt, beleagured, compulsive liar having a trove of top-secret national security information for over a year in his private villa? What could go wrong?

Colbert I. King lays out the answers in a piece he calls What worries me most about the classified information discovered at Mar-a-Lago (link below).

https://wapo.st/3HiMqAg

Putin, predatory putz

Vladimir Putin launches a full scale military assault, on three fronts, a blitzkrieg, if you will, to “liberate” the people of Ukraine from an illegal “junta” that “seized control” after ousting Putin’s guy Yanukovych, the Russian oligarch-backed brute Paul Manafort spent years grooming to be Putin’s man in Ukraine.

Putin has announced plans to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, since the little Ukrainian Jew who was elected president in 2019 only got 73% of the votes cast in an election as corrupt, according to Putin, as the one that elected Joe Biden in 2020. Talk about yer Kremlin firehose of falsehood.

It’s tempting to to tell Putin “de-Nazify yourself first, motherfucker.“

The battle for control of Reality

The war over what is real is constantly being fought by partisan advertisers and influencers of all stripes. On one level it is what all of us do whenever we try to persuade someone to see things from our point of view. On the political level, it gets kind of crude sometimes.

For example, there are always a few clearly marked “Blacks for Trump” posers seated directly behind the great orange man as he orates, proving, of course, that the angry demagogue is no racist. To hammer this home it is good to have messaging like this out there, I suppose, inserted into the unsuspecting viewer’s YouTube suggestions.

It strikes me as highly unlikely that Biden ever foolishly claimed that Trump, though openly racist, was our first racist president. Most of the early presidents were slaveholders, more than one more recent president was in open sympathy with the Ku Klux Klan. Biden surely knows this, but why let the fact that he never said it stand in the way of making a hateful meme about him? It’s all about owning him, like Thomas Jefferson owned Sally Hemings.

So, since it is a war, fire must be strategically returned. I thought this was a pretty good one, with a big plus that it is hard to actually dispute based on the facts.