Satan's Day Off

 

Misogynistic Christian fascist incel Nick Fuentes says that once he turns 30, he'll probably find himself a 16-year-old child bride: "Right when the milk is good, I want to start drinking the milk." pic.twitter.com/uM99D1YC07

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) May 17, 2023

I'm not sure how I want to go about this, but the idea that the right is incensed, just pure livid, about child abuse feels like ashes in the mouth.  I mean Matt Walsh is someone who doesn't care that the Catholic Church has priests who screw underage people:

It's only weird when it's gay, you guys. Adult males fucking underage females is not something he has a problem with. He's got issues with the idea of consent. That's a cockblock. 

TWGB: No One is Above the Law

The decision to enter the public phase of the impeachment inquiry happened along partisan lines, but I think that has a lot more to do with what the Republican party is right now, than what Democrats intended to do. In the whistleblower report and what we very well understand to be a partial summary, not a word-for-word transcript, of the July 25th call between President Trump and Ukraine President Zelenskyy, there had been enough of a picture of the famous "quid pro quo", a clear suggestion that Trump's foreign policy was conditioned upon favors related to his re-election campaign, that it strongly merited looking into. 

Pelosi stated that no one came to congress in the hopes of impeaching a president--I don't know this is the case. The 2018 midterms saw a major victory for Democrats I believe because it was hoped that they would be a check on this president. We can't forget Rep. Rashida Tlaib and her cry to "Impeach the motherfucker already". Knowing full well that a deeply divided congress and this freaking president are what they are, impeachment was definitely in the cards in a way that meaningful legislation was not, and savvy voters had to know that. We are looking at evidence of extortion, solicitation of a bribe, and a request of foreign assistance with the 2020 election, evidenced not only by the "perfect phone call" summary (whose missing minutes we now know are likely a bit more damning) but the testimony of witnesses who know that the aid to Ukraine was stopped, and that the policy was to lean on Ukraine for an "investigation" of Hunter Biden--or at least the appearance of one. 

And the Republicans have chosen to see none of it. Just as you could go through any dozen of them earlier this year asking if they had taken the time to read the Mueller report, and find they had not. While we are not looking at a "coup" (Great galloping ghosts, did any of the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus smoothbrains ever think to read the copy of the Constitution they are all supposedly secreting in their pockets to realize that impeachment is in the Constitution?  It is not a coup--it is a fully sanctioned constitutional process.) I certainly think we have evidence of chickens. 

I am calling the Republican party" chickens". Like, actually, that's insulting to the noble gallus domesticus.  The very day this vote took place, the "quid pro quo"--the standard that Trump himself tried to set for whether his perfect phone call was indeed perfect, was again confirmed. While Republican lawmakers have stood in great indignation that the Democrats are supposedly trying to roll back the 2016 election, the President himself is trapped in conditioning his foreign policy on covering up the assistance he assuredly did get from Russia in 2016, and trying to affect the 2020 election as well. 

Trump is president and not one single Democrat voting for impeachment denies the legality of his swearing-in (even if they have serious reservations about how seriously he took that oath), and the founders never intended the president to be above the law. We don't have kings, here. And perhaps if we did, given the nature of this one, heads would need to, perchance, roll. If our loyalist demi-royalists aren't fucking scaredy-cats worried to death of what it means to be in Trump's cross hairs, or what it might mean to find that Trump isn't a fucking flotation device in case of a real emergency, let's note for the record he isn't above dining with his House buddies and promising who knows what--or appearing to bribe his friends in the Senate who will ultimately try him. 

Scared, corrupt, and indifferent to one's oath of office: Republicans seem to think they understand the politics of a "partisan" impeachment. I think they should look again. The facts are not their friends here. The facts will be known, and in some cases, Trump will even be the source of the most damning parts, because he simply doesn't understand what right and wrong are. Are GOP politicians so certain that their voters will stay forever fooled? Are they so in love with Trump--the damaged albatross around their necks, moldy and maggoty, that they don't know he's unhealthy for our body politic? 

I guess we will know in the unfolding of events. This vote did not show that Democrats were rabid for impeachment though, so much as it showed how much Republicans are loath to face a truly transparent investigation--and after all their protests for transparency, too. 

The NRA is About "Gun Safety" You Guys

Someone sent me this image of the latest copy of NRA's magazine, featuring a story with the words "Target Practice" next to a photo of Nancy Pelosi with Gabby Giffords. Maybe don't do this @NRA. pic.twitter.com/u9fQhxwEyk

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) February 22, 2019

When I saw this Tweet I was reminded of Thomas Ten Bears' comment on my last post about Sarah Palin's crosshairs and the damage done. The potential provocation of that ad campaign was not ever really directly connected to the gun rampage made by Jared Loughner, but to my mind, the idea that the language and imagery could be taken literally and not figuratively has always loomed large not because her particular symbolism was especially egregious or different from far-right discourse, but because of how much it was part of the same militant and culture war (heavy on the war, maybe not so heavy on the culture) and gun-specific references that feature in right wing media altogether. When Sarah Palin sued The New York Times (recently called "an enemy of the people" by Donald Trump) the court dismissed her continued "blood libel" whinge. Apparently, a failure to be treated as a free speech martyr is the worst consequence she will face, and that's fair enough. But an examination of inflammatory discourse seems pretty timely in light of the current environment--the rise in far right wing terrorism and hate crime.

I don't think it's wrong to say that the NRA has evolved from gun safety and education and being a general proponent of second amendment rights, to being a political monster that supports the Republican party (or is just very necessarily supported by Republican candidates because you can't be a real Republican if you aren't NRA cleared, so...) and that NRA rhetoric has gotten very...extra in the digital age. But the connection between the group that explicitly supports the second amendment seems to thrive on its connection to the folks that think they have reasons to stockpile weapons, and that's really concerning. Call it the "Chekhov's gun" of politics--you show people being really concerned about using weapons and buying loads of them in the first act, and you should be expecting them to use them, eventually.

The reason this is exceptionally egregious right now, though, is that the same weapons-stockpiling formerly anti-government violence-oriented types are gravitating to pro-government so long as it's their sort of folks--and the violence they want to bring isn't really good for democracy or peace. I mentioned in my post on Christopher Hasson that Fox News has been talking about civil war, but it's strange to really consider how long they've been at it--years, and how they try to underplay the activities of violent groups even now. (Sooooo not new, though, their acceptance of violence, as they for a bit--I don't think all that recently, though--had G. Gordon Liddy as a Fox News panelist, even though he advocated for the smart use of firearms against G-men, of which he once was one, although to be explicitly honest, not a very good one.)

But to bring this all back around to Trump and his associates, one of the not terribly funny things about the Roger Stone circus is that the guys he has in his circle? Are the alt-right fashy Proud Boys. Your basic Brownshirts reimagined in polos and chinos. I don't rightly know if that flatters PBs or insults them. Meh.

Anyway, the NRA probably laundered Russian money to who knows how many Republican candidates, but somehow are a proto-nationalist front and all they really seem to want is to arm bunches of folks to...fuck some shit up so badly that more guns are always needed. Which is a pretty amazing deviation from the bunch of hunting enthusiasts we used to think the NRA was about back in the day, right?

Also right-wing oriented media is a vector for brain worms and leads to just ridiculous Q-Anon and other assorted bullshit. Lara Logan and other people who say shit like "read Breitbart" should know that lefties do, but only enough to be sick, not enough to get literal brain damage.