Went Over Like a Lead Turd

 

You know, taking your weird-ass conspiracy-theorist Pizzagate asshole friend along with you on serious European business all by itself is a whole kind of offensive fuckup.  Oh, wait, maybe that was a Hegseth team fuck up.  The down with America, up with Russia dipshit horror shows were so boldly evident at this flea circus display from the supposed America First crowd I guess I got confused. Hegseth was the one who told everyone we ain't got no navy to speak of so don't count on us and we can bug out our military presence in Europe so don't get too comfortable. 

I say wild ass shit when I'm hungover too, so I guess the Fox News veteran's words aren't all that surprising to me. 

But JD Vance being a condescending and unpleasant pro-Putin scold with no sense of irony is also not surprising to me. He chided Europe for lack of freedom of speech while at home, AP was being barred from the White House and Air Force One because their style guide stays with the more (for 400+ years) appropriate "Gulf of Mexico". And while Tom Homan hates on people who want to use the First Amendment to tell undocumented people about the other rights they have under the Constitution. 

A Reckless TrumpWorld Round-Up

 

I'm trying to take a moment of Christmas clarity to see the good in the world around me, and while I've never been a Suzy Silverlinings, I did notice the SEC seems to have decided to pay attention to some of Elon Musk's financial shenanigans regarding the purchase of Twitter. Basically, everyone who was wide awake in 2016 saw that social media was a powerful tool in shaping world events, and Elon bought in. Comms for his worldview is an expense in general, but he gets back what he's lost financially in DOGE and influence. 

It's a neat thing, using money to buy influence to get more influence to get more money. Here's a David Bowie song:

A Whiff of Musk

 

For some reason, Elon Musk has decided to ally himself with a white nationalist supposed billionaire US candidate for president, which just seems so out of place for a billionaire silver spoon immigrant from South Africa who thinks he wants to be DD Hariman and probably just wants a Space Force uniform. Is it the fascism? Is it the gimmicky anti-trans scapegoating that tries to amplify a """"problem"""" where no real problem exists? 

Is it the desire to keep really lucrative government contracts that might be in doubt because of various levels of fuckery? 

Shit I dunno. But instead of thinking about that really hard and popping a blood vessel about what he's done to Twitter, which is where I live, and which I will never call "X: because that is stupid, and undoes a really great cohesive social media theme, with the birdhouses and "Tweets" and other things that all kind of were bird-related, he just made everything dumb and generic and let Nazis post everywhere--I'm thinking about how Musk might be inviting himself to go to prison.

Because he's trying to buy votes and also has manufactured a fake Harris website and has also, too, has some kind of dumb lottery going and his GOTV thing is also not even effective and is really stupid.

No. Really. 

The GOP and Cheap Grace

 

Johnson: Clay Higgins is a dear friend of mine and a colleague from Louisiana, and a very frank and outspoken person. He's also a very principled man. I didn’t even see it but he tweeted something today about Haitians.

Reporter: He told them to get out of the country by Jan 20th… pic.twitter.com/Y0oFz727WO

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 25, 2024

There's a formula here that the GOP employs again and again: the Tweet/statement/activity was terrible, but this is a good person (because I said so), and while I didn't see the Tweet/know all the details, I will forgive/absolve this person, even though I was not the person hurt by the activity.  Because it's the Christian thing to do. 

It's a lie. They aren't forgiving a "real" transgression (to them), and they don't care if the person is a good person--that person is "good enough for the political moment" and requires a permission slip. The permission slip has been pre-written, and we are only really just viewing what the in-group's tolerances are.

This type of cheap grace applies to Higgins, to Mark Robinson, to JD Vance, and entirely explains Trump. 

Instead of this statement vouching for Rep. Higgins, who is not noticeably repentant, I would throw it back to Speaker Johnson--why do have such a nasty racist for a good friend? 

This Space Could Have Been an Email

 

Video of Trump hunched over and slurring his words while doing his Twitter Space. pic.twitter.com/V0hDakkJFA

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) August 13, 2024

The return of Trump to Twitter started with technical difficulties (and probably not a DDOS attack) and revealed a rambling, slurring candidate who could not be nudged to stay on topic. Is it possible the delay was due to a Trump malfunction, not a mechanical one? Because he sounded like either his teeth were left soaking in a jar--or he was. 

Anyhow, for me the funniest bit was Trump comparing Kamala Harris to Melania. On the Trump scale of weirdness, it's mostly only weird because he usually compares women to Ivanka. But of course, Harris isn't blonde. But it's not really that offensive for him to compare her to another attractive woman he isn't sleeping with either, is it? I mean, relatively speaking.

Also, he said that if he didn't win the election, he'd probably flee to Venezuela. I don't know how many people out on bail are that frank in public interviews.

Otherwise, the somewhat over 1.1 million listeners were treated to the kind of insights one might get from the average Trump rally, such as sea level rise meaning more waterfront property, and the need for an Iron Dome for the US, because you never know when Canada is gonna start lobbing short-range missiles at you, I guess. 

So, was it worth torching some Truth Social stock value over? Probably. People are talking about Trump, and he was always going to get paid, anyway. 

Did it help his campaign any? 

Honey, if this was pressing the Life Alert button, his ass is staying down. He seemed unstable and infirm and as has been noted more often of late, weird as heck. 

Musk is a Dangerous Prat

 

There was a moment when I almost liked Musk. The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, realizing climate change was a problem, wanting to spread our species across at least the solar system. It felt idealistic to me in a way--maybe I saw in him a touch of D. D. Harriman, I don't know. 

But then I realized he was a prat. 

It's the anti-woke stuff, you know. The idea that the "woke-mind virus" or diversity is going to prevent us from being a multiplanetary species is sheer twattery. We aren't actually going to be able to do it any other way.*

But anyway, Apartheid Clyde recently achieved a new low in a recent accelerating downward trajectory--no, not the thing where he's blaming ADL for his losing the multiple billions of dollars of value in Twitter that are actually his own stupid fault for letting the fascists and fucking child porn people back on his platform, but also destroying functionality (like analytics) and making people senselessly pay for things that were free and actually increased productive engagement. 

No, I mean the sabotage of a Ukrainian naval mission because he's a prat. 

Imagine being a contractor who decides to go so entirely outside of one's lane as to contact Russian authorities having been apprised of Ukrainian intent to do anything, and then believe the war criminals and just shut down the service they were contracted for. 

Do you think the heads of Lockheed Martin for a moment ever stop and go "You are using HIMARS for war stuff?! WTF!?" 

TWGB: Surrender, But Don't Give Yourself Away

 

I really felt underwhelmed by the speculation about what Trump's mugshot would look like and the "tale of the tape" regarding his height and weight. I mean, is it not enough that he's now standing at four indictments and 91 charges? No other president measures up to that, I can tell you!

But what anyone could also tell you is that he would use the mugshot to fundraise off of his situation. And of course he is, ironically using the slogan "Never surrender" when he Just. Surrendered. Himself. To. The Jailhouse. For. Processing.  His "Kubrick stare" into the Fulton County camera is supposed to show defiance. 

Eh. To me it looks like he's using "MySpace angles" to plausibly make his face look like he could theoretically stand 6'3" and 215 lbs. This is not me making a ding against his vanity (his bulletproof vanity!) but the credulity that we'd get an honest reckoning. This wasn't his physician's weigh in (Ronny Jackson only dared to tell us he was 239 lbs.) or the hype before a heavyweight bout. This is Trump's charitable best guess that he must have at least lost that much weight in sweat since his Manhattan indictment. 

The Jebbening! of Ron DeSantis

 

pic.twitter.com/H7G6q4TtKq

— Secular Talk🎙 (@KyleKulinski) May 25, 2023

You know, I love the sunny optimism of people who want to push the theory that Ron DeSantis will most surely fail because he's a weird fucking glitchy AI trained on Orwell as a handbook and White Christian supremacy as a goal who sort of can't stand like a man who has always had arms and regularly unhinges his mouth when he laughs like he's about to devour a sacrificial goat. I mean, sure, all that is really off-putting, but if one has the backing of enough big money donors and is somehow the largest tool in the shed after the other big tool gets majorly law-hammered (because the conviction of Trump for anything at all and legal removal from the primary pool springs eternal in the minds of those who have engaged in the contest--although they would never, never say something so obvious aloud) who you gonna settle with? 

Falling for Fakery on Ukraine

 

Zelensky has no right to presume that our sons and daughters will fight his war. Shame on him. We’ve somehow sent the message that we work for him. Shame on us! https://t.co/l84guBiIsk

— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) March 1, 2023

Here are both Senator Mike Lee and a former Trump Administration employee falling for a truncated video that appears to show Volodomyr Zelenskyy suggesting that US troops would defend Ukraine. The expanded version is Zelenskyy's opinion that if Russia is not stopped at Ukraine, then they will encroach NATO space and once NATO Article 5 is in effect, the conflict we've been dreading will come to pass. The lack of context is significant, and that these two individuals went with the outrage instead of exploring the context first, tells me a lot about what I dread from social media-oriented foreign policy.

It's bad enough that US foreign policy has become subject to the election cycle, partisanship, and the willingness of ambitious tools to subordinate the long-term interests of this country to their own short-term desire to be seen as standing up to the Administration of the opposite party. If people--responsible people with actual jobs making decisions about our foreign policy, can so easily fall for an outrage-farming post, I'm just sick inside. 

The Oversight Committee's Essential Business--Hunter Biden's Cock.

 

The job of the Oversight Committee is, per their web page: 

Our mission statement is to ensure the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of the federal government and all its agencies. We provide a check and balance on the role and power of Washington - and a voice to the people it serves. 

Genuinely good government requires a commitment to expose waste, fraud, and abuse. We ultimately report to hard working taxpayers to ensure their investment in government is spent effectively, efficiently, and transparently. 

We identify problems, shine light on the situation, and propose reforms to prevent abuses from being repeated.

And this is somehow why this body grilled former Twitter employees about why there was a 24-hour suppression of a story that people could still see outside of Twitter, and also why pictures of naked Hunter Biden were taken down at the request of the Biden campaign. Look back up at that mission statement. They are supposed to be looking at waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. And they are instead looking into how a corporation might have blocked a story favorable to Trump's political campaign? How does that protect the American taxpayer from government abuse?

Ha! It doesn't! This hearing was actually about using the House process (funded by taxpayer dollars) to further Republican conspiracy theories--an actual example of waste, fraud and abuse. Literally doing the thing the committee is supposed to expose. And yet, ironically, it was exposed! Or to quote Rep. Gery Connolly: “My, my, my. What happens when you hold a hearing, and you can’t prove your point?”

I Doubt His Influence

 

McCarthy: But I do want to thank especially President Trump. I don’t think anybody should doubt his influence. pic.twitter.com/UJdVKQ5VRA

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 7, 2023

I'd sooner give credit for the rumored "blackmail" threats than Trump for the eventual success of Kevin McCarthy's bid for Speaker, largely because Trump supported him from the beginning, and it went 15 rounds.  If anything, McCarthy is doing the obligatory thing by thanking Trump because at least he didn't get sandbagged for being a loser and then abandoned, which could have just as easily happened. 

Also, giving it a bit of a think, the show-y-ass "opposition" of the 20 or so holdouts that dragged this thing out probably didn't get them much more than they would have gotten anyway. Weird investigations into the politization of the FBI is right in line with the "Twitter files" crap and protecting his fellow Republicans by trying to interfere in potential investigations regarding them seems like something he'd be doing anyway--just from thinking back to his actions regarding the 1/6 Committee. I don't even think giving his bomb-throwers leave to discuss blowing up the economy via a debt default was ever off the table for him. Look back at 2011, 2018, etc. Like government shut-downs, it's another way Republicans can demonstrate that they aren't here to do good government and titillate their base that they are doing something rebellious by giving them nothing, and actually taking away--defunding things.

I think what we just witnessed was a bit of theater. It doesn't miss me that McCarthy got his successful vote two years to the day that the delayed vote certification of Biden's election occurred. 

They are a sorry lot, and for all his hollow, cravenness, McCarthy earned his right to be the leader of these people. And he will wring all the joy from it the "honor" deserves.

Greta and the Terrible Tate

 

I was vaguely aware of Andrew Tate before just a few days ago, mostly as a Terrible Influence for the Children--an openly misogynistic self-help toxic masculinist. I was very much aware of Greta Thunberg, who, although still a teen, has been the leader of a climate movement for years. So I very much understand what Andrew Tate was trying to do the other day by tagging her on his Tweet (from his recently-restored account under the new Regime) regarding his 30-something gas-guzzling cars--

He was seeking engagement with a higher profile account to get more engagement. It's what one does for more clicks, right? So, there he was, presumably tweaking a humorless scold liberal female on the social media when all of the sudden, she dunked on him. 

yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com https://t.co/V8geeVvEvg

— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 28, 2022

It's a thing of beauty in its spare economy of words. He called her out, and she said he was an overcompensating try-hard who needed to "get a life".  And his knee-jerk response has to be noted for all time:

How dare you!?

Weak. Afflicted. Shooketh. Taken out at the knees. Pressure applied to the nerve center of a very small area. That wasn't supposed to happen. 

Hours later, he composed himself, got into his smoking jacket, acquired a cheroot of some sort, sought out a wood-paneled back drop and a big old pizza box, and made a calm, obviously not-trying-too hard and does-so have a life video to the effect that he doesn't have a small one, she has the small one. 

(Right. She has a small one, it's his, and it's in her trophy room in a match box.)

And any way this social media exchange gave Romanian authorities enough information to find him and pick him up for rape and human trafficking, because sometimes people who espouse horrific points of view on the internet are, actually, horrible people. 

And there ends the lesson.

Main Character Assassination Coordinates, I Think?

 

So, I'm trying to understand the problem of Elon Musk and his disastrous turn as the head of Twitter, which I think he didn't really want and hardly knows what to do with, and I come back to the meme of the "Main Character" of Twitter. Elon Musk became the main character of Twitter by buying it, but the point of the parable of the main character is that every day there is one, and you should not be it. And yet, Musk offered himself up not to just manage Twitter as a free speech absolutist who hates the things people say, but to possibly fuck it up beyond all recognition. 

I have to think so from the way he's been doing things. If his fucking it all up isn't purposeful, I'd have to think he was actually quite dumb. And that's a very mean thing to think, isn't it? After all, his mum tells us he's very clever, and that has to account for something, yeah?

I just want to point out for posterity that almost every sensible bullied kid from the jump has understood that absolutely nothing would be made better by one's mom dipping her oar in to promote the idea that one's baby is *so* very clever and good. It is absolutely the genesis of another degree of roasting. 

But here's the fun part--Mr. Free Speech banned talking about the obvious diaspora going on by Twitterstans hauling off to Post and Mastodon and Tribel and all of them. Except Parler, TikTok and some other glaring omittances. Anyhow, he admitted there was a drift to bankruptcy going on with the social media site he sort of forced himself to take on. 

And it most definitely is affecting his other business concerns. And his falling Tesla stock is not just a happy accident regarding his poor stewardship of Twitter. It's about Tesla issues, as well. It just takes a push to realize that sometimes a genius isn't actually the savant one wants them to be. 

Anyway, he fronted that the problem with the journos he banned was doxxing him--revealing his "assassination coordinates". Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, really? Anyway, his personal story of dangerous doxxedology got realtime debunked.  

So, what is the main character to do now?

Post a poll to determine how to exeunt stage terminal main character, that's what. 

I actually will link this to Twitter because in my hope of hopes, Google snipes the off-cost social media shoulda been and we have a SM that is less evil. Of course, I'd settle for Mad Monk Dorsey again. I don't trust Musk and think he's screwing shit up on purpose as a possible provocateur. He wants the disinfo people, the Nazis, the illegitimate dialogue, the fuckery. He showed his pasty ass. But he can't be the main character on Twitter and still be Space X and Tesla fronting. He can't. What is more valuable? He has to get back to where, as the Beatles put it, he once belonged. What makes him money. 

I'm still not leaving. He's the one who sucks. 

Night of Elon Knives

 

So, I can co-exist with the best of them, and I won't Tweet this link out on Twitter because I think I understand the new rules, but apparently, if you are a journalist who mentions Elon Musk, Twitter isn't your home anymore. 

Now, it feels kind of thin-skinned, and it is. After all, Musk once talked about something like free speech maximalism, and this is definitely not that. 

He took not his worst critics, but his truest critics, and shat them out the airlock. Maybe he didn't want them to leave voluntarily--but he was fine with them getting bounced. 

Of course, the right wing folks he's been sucking up to love this, because they don't understand the terms of service, they just think that if conservatives anywhere get banzored, then liberals everywhere should be banzored. How else would life be fair? It doesn't sit right with me because I was following basically all of those guys and they were doing the work. 

Now, I have no social media skills (nor 44 billion to buy social media skillz, amirite?) so I don't think I'm big enough to get bounced for my lil Elon parody songs, or whatevs.  But there's the principle of the thing--do I stay when free speech is no longer the point, when the conversation palls, when the party isn't over, but the hosts are worn out and the food sucks?

Yeah, I stay. I don't quit Twitter, it quits me. Because I was here before Musk took over. Because I was a bullied queer kid and am used to hostile environments. Because Musk came to journalism central and tried to gatekeep truthtellers in a world where we all have been gatekept by the dastardliest. 

He had knives out for some of our best--and will need to expect people to want to do their worst. 

He will shut down the servers before he shuts down this roast. Because we operate this spit and the coals and Elon is very high profile and very roastable. He doesn't have a discourse, the discourse has him. 

That's the parasocial relationship Musk developed with actual hyperliterate assholes. It was a bad idea. We like Mars and electric cars, but we will find options. Will he? 

The Twitter Follies

 

I am more or less accusing Elon Musk of tooling his $44B vanity buy to the "audience of one" called Trump--and I have no idea why. The so-called "Twitter Files" revolve around the supposed suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the eventual removal of Trump's Twitter account post-1/6, and in both cases, the decision-making doesn't seem to have been particularly biased, but concerned for whether the social media company was behaving responsibly with respects to evolving situations--in one case, a potential disinformation threat by foreign actors with the intent of influencing a US election, and in the other, a homegrown domestic terrorism plot apparently headed by that country's very own lame duck leader. 

There's no great reason to produce Trump-centric content now, is there? The man is old and beat and twice-impeached and I don't think the smart money is on his line.  He's just a balance sheet of lawsuits and liabilities from here on out. He's what you might call a spent force. 

And after promoting the dimmest possible voter fraud stories, now the Chiclet-headed former supposed leader of the free world is on his probably-an-SEC-scam Truth Social, acting like the way he was treated by social media was the biggest scandal of all time, and maybe the suppression of the laptop story was what really cost him his second term. 

TWGB: How is Trump Doing Today?

 

If your answer to the titular question is "ready to set fire to the Constitution", then yay! You got it in one. Today's manic post on Truth Social reads:

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great "Founders" did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

So, I guess he's unhappy?

Now, far be it for me to put words into the mouths of the "Founders" (what is with Trump and the quotation marks?), but our elected officials swear an oath to the Constitution because without laws, we don't have a government, but anarchy. You might even say, if we throw out the Constitution, we "wouldn't even have a country," to use the refrain uttered by Trump and other "Flight 93 election" folks on the right.

It sounds like. once again, Trump is spouting a little too much "truth". Just as he acknowledged taking classified documents transparently, he is now telling us that he wants laws broken to restore him to office. He knows there's no Constitutional basis for any kind of a do-over. but it doesn't matter--he wants another chance and quickly.

It seems like this post coincides with the "revelation" of supposed Biden campaign-influenced suppression on social media of Hunter Biden stories in the "Twitter files" Elon Musk dropped last night. The funny old thing is--there isn't a there, there. To the extent there was any government influence, this happened during the Trump Administration, so whose government was it?  And many career IC officials felt, from experience, the Hunter Biden laptop story should be distrusted because it looked like disinfo.

Experience like the foreign disinfo campaign that went hard in 2016. In favor of Trump.  

It also coincides with another bad week for Trump in the courts,  As in:

Five members of the Oath Keepers were convicted for serious felonies relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that the former president instigated. The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows must testify in Georgia’s criminal investigation into his attempt to overturn the state’s results. And a federal judge denied Trump’s claim that he has absolute immunity from civil suits.

And people are still talking about how his friend Ye is having a very public racist meltdown. And also, Pat Cipolone and Patrick Philbin testified before a grand jury Friday and an appellate court dismissed "Loose" Cannon's Special Master ruling. And the Ways and Means Committee has six years of Trump's tax returns. And the Trump Organization fraud case goes to a jury on Monday...

I'm sure Trump is writing a new Constitution on the Mar-A-Lago walls in ketchup at this point. 

But as the old saw about "taking Trump literally or seriously" goes, we've seen by now--after 1/6? I take him very seriously and literally. He definitely is encouraging the breaking of laws to get him reinstalled in office. That's why he has shown so much solidarity lately with those arrested and tried for their participation in the 1/6 insurrection. 

He still means to do terrible harm to this country, and that people still support him is appalling.

Sometimes a Flute is Just a Musical Instrument

 

Sometimes I struggle with the diagnosis of being "terminally online". I prefer to think of myself as only "critically online". What I do know is, as a blogger, I don't love that my blog muses occasionally insist on my dealing with whatever messed-up thing is going on with the Online Discourse. 

I try: "Please," I bargain. "Let me do other stuff. The Discourse sucks. The people are terrible. I hate it here."

And the answer I get is hollow, mocking laughter. "This is the price you pay for your remit: the culture, white supremacy, radicalization, misogyny. Do your thing here, or we won't let you do the other stuff." 

And there I am. 

So, for some reason, the right wing online freaked out because Melissa Viviane Jefferson, an American musician and actress known for her ability to play the flute, was invited to play a 200-year-old crystal flute once owned by James Madison that was being stored at the Library of Congress. That's right, a modern popular musician who has done as much for the flute lately as, I dunno, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull or Chris Wood of Traffik (look, folks, I am not young anymore and rock music only ever does so much flute) played an instrument that it would be a damn shame to never get played again, and the racists got all up in arms. 

My "favorite" dumbass comment is probably this one from some guy I never heard of named Pedro who was just openly racist:

He said "The thing that is obvious but people don't want to say is that this is about humiliating white people, about desecrating American history and heritage. That's what you do when you're a conqueror. Humiliate the conquered."

It isn't obvious. This wouldn't humiliate white people who weren't unrelenting racists. She's literally a musician playing a musical instrument. She's an American, She's respecting the awesomeness of playing an antique historical artifact. There was no conquering or desecrating. She just played a flute. It was made to be used by musicians. The entire world this terribly online creature lives in is grievance-based and for no reason at all. 

What he's saying is: she used the wrong water fountain. She sat in the wrong bus seat. He wants to take her existence as an accomplished musician receiving the opportunity to handle a unique object as an affront, but by doing so, can only point to her race as the reason for his discomfiture. Because that's all the outrage is. 

TWGB: Trump Can't Admit He Lost

 

here's raw footage of Trump recording his January 7 video message, getting mad and lashing out, and not wanting to say "the election is over" pic.twitter.com/jIJ2hbO901

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 22, 2022

I mean, we knew contemporaneous with his inaction that he was literally happy that his street warriors were doing his thing. It never was unclear. Take his claim to Kevin McCarthy that he thought the marauders were antifa for one cool minute, before leaning into the phone to say that the people who were rioting care more about the election than McCarthy did. Antifa would not have cared. Trump knew full well who those folks were. 

And that was what was behind his phoning Senators that day, despite what the White House logs have to say about anything. When better to make one's case about what to do, than when one has a gun at someone's head? When Trump told his rioters that he loved them and they should go in peace, did he think they were antifa?  No. he knew they were his people. He knew. He called them there, he wanted to lead them to the Capitol. He approved of what they did. 

But the revealing thing is the out-takes of Trump just unable to say the election is over, because we know this minute he was still harassing state officials as of last week. That's a thing that should not be considered sane. I rankled a bit at the testimony of people who were describing Trump's absolutely deliberate Tweets regarding Mike Pence on 1/6 as "not helpful" and other lukewarm things. How about--murderous?  Trump was putting crosshairs on Mike Pence. 

He wanted his VP killed. I'm sorry, but there are only so many ways to interpret what he wanted there. And what he wanted was batshit crazy--to just have someone declare him the winner even though he lost. He was still pretending he won in a landslide when he...just absolutely did not. There is and has never been proof of voter fraud. Although I note with no small amount of glee that the 1/6 Committe has subpoenaed Phil Waldron to fork over documentation of some of his stupid, spaghetti at the wall claims. 

So hell yeah, election deniers--you are getting an investigation into your claims after all. What's good? 

Anyway, the takeaway should be that GOP leadership should have publicly stepped away from Trump at their nearest opportunity and their supporting him by supporting a coverup is absolute shit. Also, too, he isn't worthy of it because he was a shitty president because leading an insurrection is kind of the exact opposite of doing national security right. He showed his whole ass 1/6, and it was obvious. 

But he's not the only one who can't admit he lost, apparently.  Much of his party is still defending him as if he still had power to protect them. I'm not sure how long he can protect himself.

Straight as a Plumb Bob

 

pic.twitter.com/4BdOaktzqU

— Rep. Paul Gosar, DDS (@RepGosar) August 30, 2021

I genuinely don't know what this is, and because Rep. Paul Gosar, DDS, is likely to get Tweet-yeeted eventually for insurrection stuff, I will screen cap it:

 It's a picture of himself, hand in pocket, apparently using an arrow to demonstrate that he is standing very straight. It reminded me at once of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, when the protagonist, Mary, advises her cousin Colin that he hasn't a hump at all and she thinks he's ridiculous. His back is as "strong and straight as any boy in Yorkshire" it is! 

Gosar also Tweets some other pics, which leads me to wonder if this is a game--I think I've got this right:

Of course, this is ableist crap and I don't want to play anymore--I have a touch of scoliosis myself (which causes my traps to look peculiarly pronounced and tilts my head forward a smidge, not that you'd know if I never said since few have seen me IRL), and Gosar is so healthy (like a horse, he says!) he doesn't even need ivermectin. And everyone bends at some point, or leans or changes position, so long as one doesn't have rigor mortis!

Without much more context, I'm at a loss to determine if this is a commentary on his health, his manhood, his "virtue", or whether he's trying to convince us all that his fingers are not at all long enough to be poking the bulge the arrow is pointing to through his pocket.

I think regardless of the picture, there's something very twisted about Gosar, and his family seems to think so, too. And he might not like to be called a white supremacist, but why are all these white supremacists right the hell with him? 

Many people can stand up physically straight. But that doesn't mean they aren't standing for crookedness, deceit and lies over and over again. 

UPDATE: And is this weirdo actually being like: "also I am straighter than these cactus", because my stars and garters I am not a Freudian analyst but really?

UPDATE 2: Wow! Okay, following on what commenter Eddie Blake said about the incel thing, I looked about and huh! So, a grown-ass man and actual elected representative of the people is going in for the goofy-ass aesthetic rantings of a shitposter? And yet, no, that's exactly where I think we are on the whole Republican decline deal. Clown shoes, shitposting, snake oil sales and Christianist Daesh.

Local Man in Financial Straits Sues Big Companies

 

Trump held a press conference to announce that he has lawyers who will pretend to fight the big companies that are holding conservatives down by kicking them off their platforms when they really go out of their way to violate the terms of service that they agree to when they signed up for the platforms in the first place, and the fundraising commenced immediately thereupon. 

So far, the suits are apparently filed in the wrong venue, allege that the private companies are actually the government, and may be "sticking it to the man" by forcing a definition of free speech that will make platforms accept socially unacceptable speech--that can include open hate speech, harassment and porn. In other words, it's good the arguments don't appear defensible because the results would be intolerable. 

On the plus side for Trump though, he gets to be in the news for other reasons than his staggering electoral loss, his multiple tantrums since, his possible criminal wrongdoing via Trump Org and any other bad news that comes along. Oh and the fundraising. 

Yeah. The multi-billionaire who is always asking for folks' money, It would make you reallllllly think, if you were so inclined to do that.