Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Are you … from the future?

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Naturally gregarious and alpha

I don’t care how fun he is after a few whiskies. fuck that guy.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

This blog will pay for itself.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

False Scribes! False Scribes!

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

This is how realignments happen…

Wetsuit optional.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

What fresh hell is this?

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

These guys can go mcfuck themselves.

I can’t take this shit today. I just can’t.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

No one could have predicted…

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Book Reviews: Dissecting the Monster, To Make Sure He’s Dead

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Trigger warning: News of the latest books on TFG’s maladministration, below the fold…

… House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been working toward this night for four years. For her, election night in 2016 had been a nightmare, and she was determined not to allow a repeat in 2020. “That night was like getting kicked in the back by a mule over and over again,” she said in an interview. The California Democrat recalled thinking that night about Trump’s surprise victory: “It can’t be true. It can’t be happening to our country.”

Pelosi added: “You understand that this is not a person of sound mind. You understand that. You know that. He’s not of sound mind …

One Trump confidant who mostly stayed out of the Map Room was Rudolph W. Giuliani. That’s because the president’s personal attorney had set up his own command center upstairs on the party floor. Giuliani sat at a table in the Red Room with his son, Andrew, who worked at the White House in the Office of Public Liaison, staring intensely at a laptop watching vote tallies. The Giulianis made for an odd scene, as partygoers swirled around them. After a while, Rudy Giuliani started to cause a commotion. He was telling other guests that he had come up with a strategy for Trump and was trying to get into the president’s private quarters to tell him about it. Some people thought Giuliani may have been drinking too much and suggested to Stepien that he go talk to the former New York mayor. Stepien, Meadows and Jason Miller took Giuliani down to a room just off the Map Room to hear him out…

Giuliani’s grand plan was to just say Trump won, state after state, based on nothing. Stepien, Miller and Meadows thought his argument was both incoherent and irresponsible.

“We can’t do that,” Meadows said, raising his voice. “We can’t.”…

William P. Barr had the same feeling. The attorney general had shown up for Trump’s election night party, even though he had thought for months that Trump was destined to become a one-term president. Trump didn’t seem able to get out of his own way and deliver a disciplined message. Barr hung around the party for a bit, but a little after 10 p.m. decided to call it a night. He went home to get some sleep…

[NB: Meadows and Barr hope for a future that doesn’t involve personal and professional shunning.]

Shortly after 2 a.m. on Nov. 4, “Hail to the Chief” played at the East Room party. Out walked Trump, followed by Melania Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Karen Pence. Stephen Miller and the speechwriting team had prepared remarks for Trump to deliver, but the president veered from his teleprompter script to instead deliver stream-of-consciousness thoughts.

“We were winning everything and all of a sudden it was just called off,” Trump said. He added, “Literally, we were just all set to get outside and just celebrate something that was so beautiful, so good.”…

“This is a fraud on the American public,” the president said. “This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me, this is a very sad moment, and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.”

This was an extraordinary accusation for any political candidate to make about any election, much less for a sitting president to make about the country’s most consequential election. Trump was telling the 74 million people who voted for him not to trust the results…

Pelosi watched Trump’s speech in horror. “It was just a complete, total manifestation [of] insanity,” she recalled in the interview.

“It was clear over that four-year period that this was not a person who was on the level — on the level intellectually, on the level mentally, on the level emotionally and certainly not on the level patriotically,” she said. “So for him to say what he said, I wouldn’t say was [as] surprising as it might have been if we hadn’t seen the instability all along.”…

Michael Bender’s Frankly, We Did Win This Election: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost:


Michael Wolff’s Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House:

… Books like this usually burst out of the gate with a few newsmaking anecdotes, and Wolff does provide some of these. Trump believed that the Democratic Party’s elders would pull Biden, sure to lose, at the last minute, and replace him with a ticket of Andrew Cuomo and Michelle Obama. He toyed with the idea of using the pandemic as a pretext for indefinitely postponing the election. The most notorious line in his speech to the incipient mob on Jan. 6 — “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” — was an ad-lib, not in the text his staff had prepared. But the strength of “Landslide” comes less from these stories and more from a coherent argument that Wolff, in partnership with his sources, makes about how we should understand the period between Nov. 3 and Jan. 20. Most quickly produced books about political events don’t do that…

More than all this, though, the quality of Trump’s that best explains what happened is that he commands a vast, enthusiastically loyal following that may represent as much as a quarter of the voting public, or even more, and a majority of the people who vote in Republican primaries. Nobody holding an appointed position has this, and very few elected officials do either. Wolff says the people around Trump believed he had “magical properties,” based on “a genius sense of how to satisfy the audience.” Everyone knew from firsthand observation how incompetent a chief executive he was: “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.” Therefore they assumed that his postelection lunacy would have no consequences, and that it was safe to avoid any public argument with the president that might arouse the Republican base. Essentially the only nefarious misdeed he was capable of pulling off was the one he did pull off, not entirely wittingly: the power to incite a violent, democracy-subverting mob of his devotees.

Trump’s election, his term in office and the manner of his departure have reawakened a dormant debate about the essential health of the American political system. Are there too many barriers in the way of voting? Is the public misinformed? Do billionaires and other elites control the system? Do the Electoral College and the way congressional representation is apportioned overempower underpopulated rural areas? Wolff raises a more fundamental and frightening possibility: that the lesson of Trump is that in a democratic society, a malign and dangerous “crazy person,” especially one with a deep instinctive understanding of public opinion and the media, can become genuinely popular. Millions of Americans love Trump. As Wolff points out, after Jan. 6, his standing in the polls went up..

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For Discussion: Where Are the Plumbers of Tomorrow?

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My old man always told us: Any job you can do indoors, sitting down, is not a ‘bad job’. But then…

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. – John W. Gardner

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Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Schadenfreude, Earned

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The Washington Post, industry paper for the company town whose monopoly is national politics, pulls no punches:

Ousted Social Security commissioner Andrew Saul, the Trump appointee who declared Friday he would defy his firing by President Biden, on Monday found his access to agency computers cut off, even as his acting replacement moved to undo his policies.

“I’m here to do the job,” Saul said from his home in Katonah, N.Y., where he had led the agency since the coronavirus pandemic forced most operations to shift in March 2020 to remote work, “but I can’t do anything with the communications shut down.”…

“There will be more,” said Saul, a wealthy former women’s apparel executive and prominent Republican donor who had served on the board of a conservative think tank that has called for cuts to Social Security benefits. “Stay tuned.”

His acting successor, Biden appointee Kilolo Kijakazi, took the reins Monday and was briefed by her staff on the agency’s top priorities, advocates in touch with her office said, including much anticipated planning for the safe reopening of Social Security’s national network of 1,200 field offices. The agency has been under pressure for months from lawmakers in both parties to return to serving the public in person after complaints from constituents who do not have access to the Internet.

“Acting Commissioner Kijakazi is engaging with her leadership team across the agency as she transitions into her new job,” spokesman Mark Hinkle wrote in an email. Saul’s name and that of deputy commissioner David Black, who resigned Friday following a request from the White House, were stripped from the agency’s organization chart.

Experts in federal personnel law, meanwhile, said it was doubtful that Saul could successfully sue the administration to get his job back, following two rulings by the Supreme Court that affirmed the authority of the president to fire the head of an independent agency with a single leader…

As head of an independent agency whose leadership has historically straddled incoming and outgoing presidential administrations, Saul had served for six months under Biden. But he had alienated key Democratic constituencies with a get-tough approach to federal employee unions and policies designed to clamp down on Americans’ eligibility for benefits. Labor leaders, advocates for the disabled and lawmakers on Capitol Hill called for months on Biden to dismiss him, asserting that he was a right-wing Trump advocate whose agenda was at odds with the administration’s.

A White House spokesman said Monday that any questions about Saul’s service to the federal government were resolved last week.

“As you know, the President asked for Andrew Saul’s resignation on Friday, and after he refused to submit it, his employment was terminated,” said Chris Meagher, a deputy White House press secretary. “As with any employment termination, the government has taken steps to offboard Andrew Saul as we would any other former employee.”…

And, speaking of offboarding…


Apparently, it changes nothing — “Allen Weisselberg’s at the company. He’s got a job. He’s going to remain at the company.” –yet. Except that it’s always a bad sign when the fleeing miscreants start tossing underlings out of the getaway car.

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The Forever War — Plus TV Reviews! (Open Thread)

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I got some insight yesterday into why I’m finding the endless internecine war within the Democratic Party so goddamned irritating lately. (Aside from the possibility that Republicans will successfully exploit the fissure to permanently effect a fascist takeover, I mean.) It was a Twitter exchange with a fellow liberal who lives in Alabama that led to the realization.

Ever since I moved back to my swampy home planet in a Trump +20 district, I have a better sense of who the REAL enemy is. The town just south of Tampa where we lived for 14 years before I came back home was majority Republican. We’d see Trump signs scattered around the neighborhood. But the people were mostly Jeb Bush Republicans, not Trump nutters, even if they voted for Trump.

I’m not making excuses for them; fuck those fascist enablers with their Big Bertha drivers! But here among the true believers who still maintain Trump shrines — not signs, actual fucking shrines — and participated in and/or supported the insurrection, the stakes are rather clearer to me.

So, I’ve got less patience with ongoing crap about the 2020 and 2016 primaries. I find the continued seething about Bernie Sanders less relevant and the present-day hostility toward Elizabeth Warren and the Squad inexplicable. There’s zero evidence any of these people are going to tank Biden’s agenda and pave the way for a Republican takeover in 2022. In fact, it looks like the only Democrats who might do that are the Squad’s opposite numbers in the party, who may still be brought around, I sincerely hope.

Anyhoo, anyone who enjoys shitting on progressives who are fellow Democrats or cranky old independents who caucus with Democrats should feel free to continue to do so! Crapping on centrist Dems is also fair game in my book. I’m not trying to change the tenor of the discussion of either topic around here or on Twitter, any more than I’d attempt to change the course of the Mississippi River, which I suspect would be as futile. Just sharing an epiphany I had about my own attitude toward the topic and why it evolved.

TV Reviews

Have y’all seen “Unbelievable” on Netflix? Seems like I remember some talk about it around here a while ago and meant to watch it but then forgot it existed (I should really write things down). Well, I finally did watch it, and wow, was it good! Tough subject matter (sexual assault), but the acting was amazing.

Toni Collette is in it. I’ve loved her since “Muriel’s Wedding,” and she was great in this too. Merritt Wever is also outstanding, and it kept bugging me that I couldn’t remember where I’d seen her before, but it turns out she was the rookie nurse in “Nurse Jackie” (I had to look it up). I’d never seen Kaitlyn Dever (who played one of the victims) in anything before, but she was awesome too. Also Dale Dickey — RoseMarie in “Unbelievable” — who played the scariest meth kingpin mamaw ever in “Winter’s Bone.”

Well worth a watch! Another highly recommended show: “Hacks” on HBO, which features the incomparable Jean Smart. Seen anything else that’s worth watching?

Open thread!

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: We Can’t Afford to Think Too Small

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Fighting the Pandemic Grifters: Some Longer Reads

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… The White House has decided to hit back harder on misinformation and scare tactics after Republican lawmakers and conservative activists pledged to fight the administration’s stated plans to go “door-to-door” to increase vaccination rates. The pushback will include directly calling out social media platforms and conservative news shows that promote such tactics.

“The big misinterpretation that Fox News or whomever else is saying is that they are essentially envisioning a bunch of federal workers knocking on your door, telling you you’ve got to do something that you don’t want to do,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, said in an interview on Sunday. “That’s absolutely not the case, it’s trusted messengers who are part of the community doing that — not government officials. So that’s where I think the disconnect is.”…

Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are also planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages. The goal is to ensure that people who may have difficulty getting a vaccination because of issues like transportation see those barriers lessened or removed entirely.

“We are steadfastly committed to keeping politics out of the effort to get every American vaccinated so that we can save lives and help our economy further recover,” White House spokesperson Kevin Munoz said. “When we see deliberate efforts to spread misinformation, we view that as an impediment to the country’s public health and will not shy away from calling that out.” …

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