The dumbfuck thing was how many Trump stans fell for it. And he expects they will again when he reinvokes the same busted shit from a Bedminster stage in order to pretend he was exactly right to lean on the Georgia state campaign apparatus. Does anyone seriously believe he has some new shit he didn't wave from the rafters before he got indicted in Georgia? Like since he lost in 2020?
It sounds stupid to me, like something he's doing to once again threaten some court somewhere to gag him so he can play FREEZEPEACHMARTYR! I think he would adore the opportunity to have posters strewn about with his mouth sealed with duct tape or the like. Poor Trumpy, celebrity, owner of Truth Social, silenced. A victim of trying to do too much, to care too much, to be too much. Why do they hate him for being so awesome?
One thing better he could do? Gather up and pay his 2020 lawyers like Guiliani (who is apparently flat busted broke) that he forgot to pay anything to. In order to prevent them explaining in detail why their holding forth totally is fraud/crime exception in their plea deal. Since he apparently didn't pay them and they got indicted anyway. And he went and fundraised on his trials and tribulations.
But he won't think of that in a hurry. And that's great, too. I don't care. I am rooting for maximum Trump enbuggeration. Self embuggerment. Ye olde own petard-hoistification. I dunno. The thing of when he goes off and finally fully fucks himself.
As I fleetingly touched on earlier, Sidney Powell is still touting the possibility that Trump really won 2020 and will somehow be reinstated, and it seems like Trump himself believes this very weird thing, too. You could point out for a number of reasons why this makes no sense at all and isn't how anything works, and it would not mean a whole lot to the sort of person who would come to this belief in the first place, because that person is no longer concerned about what makes sense or how things worked in the real world, if they ever did.
Where the Trump mythos takes place is in a different world, though. Even Powell, when financially pressed, will point out that it's a fictional one. But in the Trump mythos, Our Everyman can come back from multiple trips to the underworld. He can be bankrupt, investigated, be waylaid by "temptresses", be stabbed in the back (I have shaded him before but--Bret Stephens wrote a very good one, there, no lie) by the press and even insufficiently faithful political allies. But he isn't supposed to lose. And that faith (wherever tokens of faith are sold) will be rewarded with either satisfaction, or knowledge. Or not. (They're just getting ripped off. )
So on a day when the New York Times lets us know that Mark Meadows, Trump's COS, spent the last days of Trumpelot wielding a lance on a dubious quest to find the Golden Chalice of Shit that Would Make Trump not Have Lost the Whole Fucking Enchilada, we see baggy-pants clown Trump, Trumpliaccio, take to the North Carolina GOP convention, to be wrong about things like whether the Spanish Flu pandemic started in 1917 (Jesus, this again?) or, you know, whether he didn't spend the early part of the pandemic kissing Xi's ass because he fucked up the China trade issue.
Meadows even questioned whether it was an Italian Job. I blogged this one in disbelief the night before the insurrection that some people had come to swallow extraordinary stupidities--and found myself acknowledging what was said so often just after January 6--those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.
And all for this guy.
This. This tottering elderly unvital slurring fuck, who looks like his ass is on backwards, and has his hair piled into a box and sprayed square before being dumped onto his numb receptive skull, is probably the GOP 2024 front-runner.
Not Ted Cruz. Not Tom Cotton, Not Nikki Haley. Not Marco Rubio. Not Mike Pence. Not Josh godforsaken Hawley. This guy. This guy right here.
So basically, he's both the worst threat to democracy that ever existed, or the best friend the Democratic party ever knew. He had the White House, and seems to think he will have it again.
If Ronna McDaniel finagles the primaries to benefit him, and eliminates debates so he doesn't get his ass kicked in, because of course, he needs that advantage just like he needs stimulants and capacious legwear, I don't really worry about how well Democrats will do. But I guess some people's mileage may vary. Even if Trump is clearly going nowhere.
He's the once and future president that our country will have to work to live down. A national nightmare. A conspiracy-theory president. A myth. But look and despair. There's also a real human being called Trump, and shit. Horror and pity. Horror and pity. Family tragedy and all that. But I also think his kids encourage dear papa in his madness. and alas--the GOP as well. This clown Lear, former king and fool at once.
This is late, but I have this 9-5 job and then there's my commute and my husband wants to spend time with me and all, so I just get to the poliblogging when I can. But I have a gaggle of grouses right now, so I'm hitting'em in a scattershot way, kind of like how Dick Cheney "hunts" quail.
So--let's start with Rudy!
Everyblogger and hir commenters have had at this by now, but, okay, here goes:
Rudy Guiliani has presented himself since 9/11 as something of a terrorism expert, because he was mayor of the major metro area that got attacked that day--but you knew that. What you may not know, and I sure as hell don't, is why he's seen that way. We were attacked domestically under Bush. There were the events of 9/11, but there was also the anthrax attacks, and the DC sniper, the shoe bomber, an incident at LAX at an El Al ticket counter, (for stuff that all happened in the first two years of the Bush administration)--and also some lesser known, but still pretty terror-isty things:
CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — A University of North Carolina graduate from Iran, accused of running down nine people on campus to avenge the treatment of Muslims, said at a hearing Monday that he was "thankful for the opportunity to spread the will of Allah."
Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar was accused of driving a sport utility vehicle through The Pit, a popular campus gathering spot, injuring nine people Friday. None of the victims was seriously hurt.
Police Chief Derek Poarch said Taheri-azar told investigators he intentionally hit people to "avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world."
Taheri-azar, 22, appeared in Orange County District Court in nearby Hillsborough on nine counts of attempted murder and nine counts of assault.
Or there was this event August 29, 2006 which involved, (from Wiki--it's like this event was wiped off the internets except for some right-wing anti-jihad sites):
Omeed Aziz Popal is alleged to have intentionally struck 18 pedestrians with his black Honda Pilot SUV on August 30, 2006, and faces a murder charge and 19 counts of attempted murder.[1][2] Popal was 29 at the time of the attack. Several major news organizations have described his attack in the San Francisco Bay Area as a "rampage".[3]....
Popal's attorney, Majeed Samara, has described his client as "mentally ill".[11] However, he provided no details. In contrast to his lawyer's claims, one psychologist has said that "the mental disorder explanation is actually very weak," and that it fails to account for this specific crime, which is exceptionally rare in the U.S.[12]
The media has noted the similarities between Popal's case and that of Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar, an American citizen who intentionally struck nine pedestrians with his SUV on March 3, 2006, and was charged with nine counts of attempted murder. Taheri-azar was 22 at the time of the attack.
(I count these two if Mr. Guiliani wants to count the Ft. Hood shooter.)
It starts to look as if terrorism has been an ever-present threat the past 9 years that Guiliani has been getting attention by speaking about it. That is so funny. Because it would seem as if he doesn't really know what he's talking about. Imagine that.
Okay, now that Guiliani is out of the way--John McCain is ready to face his opponent in the 2010 Senate race. He's prepared to run against....
Barack Obama?
I know, right? That's the cornerstone of his recent radio ad (yeah, that's his site, click where it talks about his radio ad). It says something like this:
"President Obama is leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America. I stand in his way every day. If I get a bruise or two knocking some sense into heads in Washington, so be it. I'll keep fighting for jobs and economic growth for Arizona as long as I'm in the Senate," McCain says in one of them.
"My lot in life has been to wage war against wrong, like today's massive spending at the worst possible time," he says in the other. A narrator calls McCain "Arizona's last line of defense" against Obama's agenda and says McCain leads the charge against "ridiculously unaffordable ideas like government-run health care." Conveniently for the McCain campaign, it appears that the only place to listen to the ads, other than Arizona radio stations, is here, on the campaign's contribution-form web page.
Last line of defense against Obama. Who whupped his ass in the presidential race. McCain's tropes will be:
Earmarks--bad!
Stimulus--bad!
Spending money--bad!
And any actual aleviation of the recession because of the aforementioned is going to have to be shown as illusory by McCampaign 2: The Senator Strikes Back. And he's going to have to out-conservative the Teaparty candidate that will surely primary his former-maverick self. It will be tough, but he's already established what he will do for the great people of Arizona:
He will willfully obstruct any legislation Obama seems to support, probably with little heed to merit, he'll eschew any earmarks or stimulus that might come their way--because that's just too much spending, my friends, and he'll possibly go back on anything he might have just said depending on what people seem to want at the moment. Except for the parts where you get what you want, Arizona.
Office-holders like McCain are why we have elections.
And now--I'm sorry--Sarah Palin!
I am so looking forward to 60 Minutes this Sunday, when Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the authors of Game Change, a book regarding the 2008 presidential election, will be interviewed. The above "O'Biden" clip is just a spot-verification of the claim by McCain campaigner Steve Schmidt that, well:
In the McCain-Palin camp, Schmidt says that when he was told by a campaign staffer prepping Palin for her debate with Biden that the vice presidential candidate was doing very poorly in her preparation, it was a crisis moment. "He told us the debate was going to be a debacle of historic and epic proportions…she was not focused…not engaged," he tells Cooper. "She was not really participating in the prep."
Schmidt confronted Palin with this and, he says, "She said, 'You know, I think that's right.'"
If that wasn't enough for deep concern, Palin had a reflexive tendency to refer to Biden as "O'Biden," says Schmidt, something that had to be fixed before the debate. He says others in the campaign came up with a solution. "It was multiple people - and I wasn't one of them - who all said at the same time, 'Just say, Can I call you Joe,' which she did."
Schmidt says he took over the prepping, simplified it, and says she "more than held her own" in the debate. But not without one "O'Biden" slip on national television.
O'Biden--yes, she did.
Ahhh--poliblogged. Got that out of my system for a minute....feels better.
