Sorry, Lying is not a Superpower

 

For more than half a century, the major party candidates for president have sat down with 60 Minutes. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump accepted our invitation. Unfortunately, last week Trump canceled. https://t.co/7t5jr5nyFJ pic.twitter.com/VDJDDNYFab

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) October 8, 2024

Trump is the only candidate in half a century (my lifetime!) who cancelled like a little bitch. The good journalists of 60 Minutes are not Blog-Standard so they don't call him a little bitch. But you know what?

I feel like it was implied. 

Let's talk about Trump and lying--he does do that. He calls the press "liars" because they fact-check him and he can't handle the truth because he is, in fact, a little bitch.  He wants people to think he is being persecuted by the lying press so people don't trust the media and only hear what comes out of his lying mouth. It has worked on people situated in the Fox News Mushroom Farm because they are used to being kept in the dark and fed shit. They have been told to sneer at the elite liberal media apparatus and see fact-checking as a dirty trick. 

But I just want to direct your attention to something Trump said in a very friendly interview with Hugh Hewitt. Sure, he said a lot that suggested that he thought melanated people coming across our border were more genetically murdery--which is some really wild and racist stuff. But he also implied that Kamala Harris wasn't intelligent because she couldn't tell complicated lies. 

Trump to Hugh Hewitt on Kamala Harris: "She doesn't lie in a complicated way because her mind doesn't work that way. She's not a smart person. She's a low IQ individual ... She's a stupid person. We can't have a stupid person as our president." pic.twitter.com/7RPRErqk7O

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 7, 2024

Vice-President Harris not lying is somehow a bad thing? Like, lying is good? 

TWGB: The Doldrums

 

I don't know if this is anyone else's experience here in the longform blog community, but my engagement stats are in the doldrums, and I think it has a little bit a lot to do with the waiting. We're waiting on the indictments we feel like we were promised. But the chief purveyor of the arrest threat against Donald Trump came from Donald Trump for his own team's clicks, likes, and of course, remunerative values, and our hopes getting up was only a sideshow. 

But I do love getting my hopes up. I never set my sights on last Tuesday. That seemed a lot like forcing a response from the Trump brethren and cistern (is that not the right term?) and not really a signal to us lefties. But I want Trump to get a comeuppance. It is about the idea of justice being for all for me, and also for his fanclub understanding that his transgressions are not some hoax or joke but are real. I follow MSNBC lawyer folks and pretend Glenn Kirschner isn't blowing smoke up my skirt that we are gonna get a "Trump gets his time in the barrel", and yet there's a planned monthly break through most of April and I can't stand it. 

Why? Tell us we aren't getting an indictment now and fucking rip the Band-Aid off, Bragg you SOB, if that's how it is! Unless, unless, unless, unless...there's more to the story.  And I can't pretend I know, and I also can see a "strategery" behind postponing an indictment for a guy who tried to force the announcement of one. To get him when he expects it least. 

Where Does It Go From Here?

 

Ingraham: It starts with Marijuana but where does it go from there pic.twitter.com/uSMfpNvANM

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 7, 2022

I really love when conservatives try to wrap their heads around the concept of limited government like WTF? People will just be responsible...for THEMSELVES? Apparently. What stops the government from legalizing shooting heroin into your eyeballs? Putting rainbow fentanyl in your socks and calling it the Devil's pedicure? If we don't treat potheads like criminals, how will the drunks know they are better substance users? Where the hell does it go from here? Anarchy? Bloodsports? The PURGE! AAAARGHHHH!

Or, follow the math on this, people doing a drug not more harmful than liquor, which is already legal, get to have it and use it responsibly, and are only fucked up with the system when they violate the law high on their little friend. It seems equitable to me. 

But our conservative friends have a problem with the concept of equity. We just saw this with a court case regarding folks who wanted to cancel President Biden's college debt forgiveness because it would really benefit Black people. This is shades of a case that our newest Justice, Ketanji Brown-Jackson, entirely revealed the lie at, regarding whether reparative justice is still justice. (It is, for all the necessary reason to having an equitable society is, and equity is not a dirty word. We all have that nasty euphemism: skin in the game.) 

The Devil's Lettuce Made Them Do It!

 

Fox's Laura Ingraham blames mass shootings on “regular pot use”https://t.co/bDkOQVbxix

— Media Matters (@mmfa) July 6, 2022

I wonder a bit at Ingraham's rant that pot use is behind the mass shooting phenomenon in the US--is she trying to excuse mass murderers with moral trolling or will any opportunity to moral troll do? I'm skeptical that there's a path from Cheech and Chong to Klebold and Harris, myself. Also, I presume that Laura Ingraham does not herself partake of the jazz cigarettes, so what exactly accounts for her dead-eyed sociopathy?

Ha, I kid. (Do I?) Her fellow Fox News talker, Tucker Carlson. blames taking psychiatric meds and mean mommies, and the latter might be a bit of a personal issue. I have to question that, too--knowing how many mass shootings have begun with family abuse and violence against women, it seems to me Carlson is really just on-board with misogyny. Also, once again, just as with hosting COVID-19 disinfo, Carlson is making medical pronouncements he's highly unqualified to make. 

My own theory is that young men stew in a nihilistic environment in which they are baited into a vague sense of outrage and hopelessness by people who don't give a shit about right or wrong, whether in terms of truth and morality. They are told by soul-less media figures that they are put-upon, and that violence is a solution. They are even given plenty of hints at who to blame for their problems. 

It's just a theory.

Am I My Brother's Keeper?

 

Ingraham: Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of refugees from Afghanistan? pic.twitter.com/Sopvx4RJ0H

— Acyn (@Acyn) August 17, 2021

Well, Laura Ingraham's Fatherland figure, Donald Trump, certainly didn't think so, but there is a certain idea of reciprocity many civilized people would observe in regards to people who have risked their lives alongside of your people for a purpose--especially when the purpose (whatever kind of nation-building we were lying to ourselves and others about) never did come to fruition and these quite decent and extensively vetted people are in some deep shit.

I don't know what she thinks it would cost us. The dilution of our cultural purity, perhaps, for whatever value that's supposed to have. I have looked at the cultural value of Laura Ingraham, and found it disturbingly lacking. I would go so far as to say that Ingraham is lacking in the Judeo-Christian values she alleges to believe in, when the traditions that would have humanity's first murderer ask "Am I my brother's keeper?" are answered again and again with, "Love one another", "Treat the stranger among you like a citizen", "Love your enemies and bless them that curse you." 

All I know is, these people tangibly have done more to try and fix a deadly situation with their whole asses on the line, that Ingraham has done within her safe and well-paid sinecure--in fact, she's advocated for things that would worsen a slow-rolling pandemic negligent genocide. 

So what I'm saying is, for what it's worth, I would be less concerned about refugees from Afghanistan living in my neighborhood than a bigot who probably would consider my mixed urban neighborhood a slum in comparison to her experience. I know I place my faith in humankind as a humanist. I think her flavor of bigotry makes things worse, denies the common thread among people, hardens our hearts, makes it more difficult to connect and communicate. 

Of course you are your brother's keeper. And you are blessed to have him. Just as we're all cursed with one another on this heating rock, this triumph of the bacterial, this monument to entropy. You don't have to like doing someone else a fucking solid. But you'd want one yourself if things were on the other foot, right? So you do. You mask up, or greet a stranger with kindness, or just try for a whole minute not to be a hatemonger, which Ingraham has made her stock in trade. 

Is there a reason I should be this sister's keeper? All I have is my words, but she'd deny them. She could dine at my table, but never feel nourished. I could offer her water, but it would be salty to her. But it's only human to offer.  I can't be her keeper. I can only say she is wrong. And maybe some day she'd fix herself were she so inclined. 

But I doubt it.