Image: Congress of Curious People (detail) by Marie Roberts. Acrylic on canvas, 2005
Well, apparently Rudy Giuliani melted down on CNN on Thursday night, unable to keep his story straight on whether he’d played any role in trying to get the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden to help President Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Rudy denying he asked Ukraine to investigate Biden followed by Rudy admitting he asked Ukraine to investigate Biden within 30 seconds of each other in this clip is just incredible to watch pic.twitter.com/Vx1fTrEz8Q
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 20, 2019
Who knows, at this point, what the heck Rudy’s doing? It could be bumbling incompetence, it could be deliberate distraction from something worse that Trump is up to, it could be both. To be honest, I’ve kind of lost the plot at this point.
Remember the other day when I wrote that brief apology about not blogging much lately? I’ve had a lot of stuff on my plate, and that’s definitely played a role in my current need for a quick recap, perhaps some offscreen narrator saying something like, “last week on American Downfall…”
But more of my failure to keep up is due to the daily tsunami of filth and corruption, from revoking California’s clean air standards, to Cory Lewandowski’s miserable House appearance (which I only heard tangentially, like I said I’ve been in a bubble), to the whole Iran/Saudi Arabia/Yemen drone thing that Trump is only too glad to stir up; to God knows what else.
So yeah: between sort of averting my eyes/not having the energy to write about it and the sheer volume of political sewage coming out of the Trump/Republican waste pipe, I have lost the plot. I used to joke that the 2016 campaign and everything that has happened since is like the most amazing movie of all time, so crazy that no sane producer would back it, and with more plot twists than… than a really twisty thing. The only problem, I’d laugh, was that the movie is too damned long.
I was making that joke three years ago. Now, for real, the movie has gone on too long. I feel like I did when I finished the first season of Babylon Berlin, just utterly swamped with plots, subplots, and sub-subplots, to the point of boredom. Babylon Berlin had much better-written characters than the ones in the Trump drama—here, everyone is a bad guy. Even the good guys, such as they are, are bad. There is not one likable character in the whole damn program.
Can we please end this shit show before it gets a second season?