Remember when the Vietnam veteran Walter Sobchak and the pacifist Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski took a break from bowling to discuss the upcoming Persian Gulf War?
WALTER: Sure you’ll see some tank battles. But fighting in desert is very different from fighting in canopy jungle.
DUDE: Uh-huh.
WALTER: I mean ‘Nam was a foot soldier’s war whereas, uh, this thing should be a fucking cakewalk. I mean I had an M16, Jacko, not an Abrams fucking tank. Just me and Charlie, man, eyeball to eyeball.
DUDE: Yeah.
WALTER: That’s fuckin’ combat. The man in the black pajamas, Dude. Worthy fuckin’ adversary.
DONNY: Who’s in pajamas, Walter?
WALTER: Shut the fuck up, Donny.
Sometimes I long for a worthy fuckin’ adversary. Lord knows, there’s no dignity in fighting these assholes. One moment, Donald Trump Jr. is in India sounding like just maybe he’s learned something from the trip.
“I don’t want to be glib but you can see the poorest of the poor and there is still a smile on a face… I know some of the most successful businessmen in the world, and some of them are the most miserable people in the world.”
And the next minute he’s like, “Time out, I gotta like these tweets about how this kid who survived the Parkland, Florida school shooting is running his mouth to cover for his dad who works in the FBI.”
The only way Donald Trump Jr. will ever learn anything is if he spends a sustained period of time behind bars. For his father, even that would provide no cause for hope.
No scriptwriters could concoct a story as bad as the one we’re living through.
But the Coen Brothers did get one thing right.
“Shut the fuck up, Donny.”
If the odious little prat does jail time I will believe that there is indeed a god.
The last year or so of this travesty in the White House has made me think of the Coen brothers more than a few times. The phrase “human paraquat” fits more than a few of the characters in this particular real life tragedy.
I’ve been stuck on the image of the weasels taking over Toad Hall for some time.
Uday is just out and about trying to salvage as much of his fiefdom as possible.
The complete abandonment of principles against nepotism in government service is yet another norm sacrificed by Trumpism and the cancerous “conservative” movement (complicit through its abject silence).
Remember the days when the misadventures and malapropisms of hapless first brother Billy Carter would sometimes become “news” for a day? Now Billy (transformed into the president’s son) runs his dad’s campaign for prez, schemes with Russians to influence elections, serves as some sort of (unconstitutional) emoluments “manager”, and travels on government assignment. While Billy’s clearance-lite sister and brother-in-law have extensive WH portfolios. That’s “conservatism”!
Ultimately the decay and corruption lie at the feet of the braindead American citizen, with The 46% especially cheering each new transgression. “Nepotism, that’s gettin’ things done! Stirrin’ the shit!”
You write:
That’s right!!! That fucking 46%!!! Let’s get rid of all of them!!!
But…wait a minute!!!
How are we going to do that!!!
I’ve got an idea!!!
Let’s hold a plebiscite!!! Kinda like the Brexit thing. Call it…ohhhh, call it USexit or whatever. Those 46% or so deplorables…a rather large estimate by the way, as far as I can see, but…those 46% or so deplorables that you so deplore can take their footballs, their weaponry, their pickup trucks and whatever else you think best brands them and start their own fucking country!!!
Problem solved.
Right?
WRONG!!!
So…whatchoo gonna do, euzoius?
Tell me.
Whatchoo gonna do?
There is only one workable solution to this problem, and that is…try to fucking understand why these people feel so desperate that they will support a mountebank like Trump against the mainstream government of the United States. They’re not all “stupid,” no matter how many times the media and centrist politicians try to characterize them as such. They are desperate, euzoius, and desperation often breeds a sort of recklessness that looks from the outside to be stupidity.
But it is not.
It is simply back-to-the-wall behavior. Fear behavior. A good and honorable 2016 Democratic presidential candidate would have reached out to these people instead of treating them like second-class citizens and calling them names, and the 46% (or whatever the figure) would have melted away considerably. Enough for the Dem to win, despite whatever machinations Russia did (or didn’t) manage to put in place. But HRC didn’t do that. She ran a campaign based on elitism, based on entitlement, exceptionalism and assumed superiority, and she got her ass kicked for her efforts. And now? Now we have the same forces running the DNC that effectively eliminated Bernie Sanders from contention during the primaries.
Good luck in 2020, no matter how badly Trump is branded.
What I keep hearing from the leftinesses is as follows:
Good work, euzoius.
Let’s see if we can foment our own “Syria” right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A.
Yes!!!
We can start with West Virginia, Alabama and Arkansas. That’ll each ’em!!!
WTFU.
AG
Well, cheering on the wholesale abandonment of every norm of democracy and government would imply some pretty severe “desperation” under your analysis, AG, and would require some metrics quite worse than the Great Depression, one would think. Of course there is nothing like this on the radar screen. The gap between Obama and Trump is simply too great for the economic gap of 2012-2016 to explain.
Look, even granting some level of economic “anxiety” and Clinton revulsion does not rationally explain the behavior we are watching. At the bare minimum you must grant that there is a modicum of spite and “fuck you!” nihilism motivating The 46%. That’s only reasonable on your part.
And of course, you are right, I do not grant those with the funds to purchase 8mpg monster pick-ups and AR-15s with true (economic) desperation. They may indeed be “desperate” (over what you do not specify), but I suspect it is not about economics…..
Well, euzoius…what percentage of your (largely fictional, as are the results of all polling) “46%” do you imagine are driving 8mpg monster pick-ups and owning AR-15s? I’m curious. I have a good friend who is a command-level police officer in rural (Trumpland. bet on it.) Maine. He worries much more about speed-crazed, devolved ex-con/biker types with handguns than he does about automatic weaponry, and he worries even more about the dumbasses who he commands. bet on that as well.
When I visit that part of the country I see damned few monster trucks and whole lot of rusted-out, U.S.-made pickup trucks with working men in them, trying to make a living any which way that they can. A ratio of 200 to 1 or thereabouts. Next time I’m there I’ll try to take a count.
You’ve been media-ed, euzoious.
Welcome to the club.
At least you won’t be lonely.
AG
By “The 46%” I merely mean the percent of the electorate who voted for the supremely unqualified and obviously deranged Trumper. It’s an objective figure. As for the various “breakouts” within it, that’s indefinable–so far as I know!
Monster pickups and SUVs have been the leading sellers for decades now–as the endless TV ads make crystal clear. One would hope (by now) that some of them have rusted out and been handed down to the next socio-economic class, haha. An old school pick-up is now a “classic”.
You write:
It is “objective” only if you ignore the roughly 46% % who refused to vote fort either so-called “candidate.”
Of course…you could quibble with those figures. After all, both Pew and the Census Bureau are mainstream centrist productions. Bu still…even if you discount say 1/3rd of those non-voters as simply too limited mentally to know the difference between a Dunkin’ Donut and a nuclear football, that leaves roughly 30% of the potential electorate not wanting to vote for either candidate.
That’s a potentially winning margin on either side of the equation.
Would bernie Sanders have eached these people without losing mllions of kneejerk cenrists?
I dunno.
But I do know this!!!
And I’ll tell you something else.
The chances of another old-line-DNC-hand-picked-and-backed candidate doing any better with these totally disgruntled voters…no matterhow ridiculous and/or guilty Trump appears between now and 2020…are slim and none.
Put that in your pipe and legalize it.
Later…
AG
We all saw the emails, Donnie. You odious little traitor.
A schmuck’s schmuck.