Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

It's been two weeks since the Republican Drug-Fueled Freak Show on the White House lawn. Anybody seen Kimberly Guilfoyle since then? Don Jr.? Kellyanne grabbed her broom and flew away for parts unknown. Eric is safely put back in an attic closet. Rudy's probably in the Ukraine screaming, texting like mad, and sweating profusely as he tries to keep his teeth in. The FOX "News" goons are back in their KKK Klubhouse. Boats are sinking...

Anyway, Oakland, CA based artist Eddie Colla has assembled a nice commemorative video (above). Gee, for some reason, the Repug Party doesn't want anything to do with it. He sent it to them with a nice letter, too; a beautiful letter! I have no sympathy for them. Whatever abuse and derision is aimed at them is more than well-deserved. Well done, Mr. Colla! Well done!

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

All week long, I've been wondering what to do with all of the memes that depict this week's 2020 Cavalcade Of Republican Goonery. I mean, there's so much, where do I start? So I've decided that the best thing to do is just present a selection of the week's better Republican Con-Vention memes as a kind of rap-up, more or less let the pictures do the talking. and leave it at that. Besides, a week of prime time exposure to the Republican Party's selection of "best people" and "very fine people" has left me almost speechless like many of you.

First I'll start with the First "Lady." Some people may think that I should go easy on her, but, why? The woman is a disease. She's part of this Republican attack on America so she's fair game. She doesn't get away with her role in this just because she can flash her lashes and stick out the biggest boobs that money can buy. First, here she is in her Stalin era Red Army uniform knock off as she gave her little speech. Second, a comparison to her hubby's idol.

Queen Melanoma has liked to play totalitarian dress up before. Remember her trip to Africa where she dressed up as the Nazi archaeologist from one of the Indiana Jones movies? She's very into symbolism. I made that point in Thursday's Midnight meme and so did one of our readers. How long before she publishes her "Little Red Book Of Gardening Tips?"

Next up, Washington's two amperes of brain power couple Donald Trump Jr. and Kimberly Guilfoyle from Monday night's opening screamfest.

My god! What were these people snoring backstage before they appeared? Don Jr. was pathetically trying to look like a future president in an in house pageant at the local insane asylum. He was the poster boy for "Lost My Grip On Reality." And Kimberly? That was some Rudy Giuliani imitation! I don't think much of Kimberly's ex Gavin Newsome but he should be breathing a huge sigh of relief that that nutball is no longer in his life. The fact that she once was should, in a sane world, disqualify him from ever holding public office again. Count yer lucky stars, Gavin. You dodged a bullet. And, lets not forget how many people have pointed out that Kimberly reminds them of someone else.

And, of course, how could I forget the biggest, most dangerous lunatic of all.

Last Night's Festival Of Deception And Lies

On Thursday night Trump spoke for an hour, closing out his 2020 nominating convention. The media rushed to count the lies and put them all into context. Glenn Kessler's fact-checking team at the Washington Post dubbed his speech "a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history" and listed 32 lies-- 25 from Señor Trumpanzee himself and 7 from his handpicked Thursday speakers. You're welcome to read them all here.

The Big Liar Ends The RNC With Big Lies About Himself And Biden was how Ed Kilgore introduced the topic for New York Magazine reader. He wrote that the "entire convention, reflected perfectly in Trump’s own acceptance speech, accepted the challenge of building up the incumbent and tearing down his opponent with big, audacious lies, repeated so monotonously as to seem less remarkable. And the Big Liar himself, described incredibly as an inveterate truth-teller by his wife on the second night of the convention, put an exclamation report on every lie. How many times did we hear that prior to the China Virus Trump had compiled the most stunning record of accomplishment of any president, who kept absolutely every promise he made in 2016? This is the president who, with partisan control of both Houses of Congress, could boast just one significant legislative victory in his first two years, a reactionary tax cut package that helped buy Republican loyalty. After his party lost the House, the Trump legislative agenda basically died with the exception of occasional deals to end or avoid government shutdowns he had triggered or brought near. We are still waiting on his health-care plan and his infrastructure plan...How often were we assured of Trump’s deep and abiding compassion for the downtrodden, those suffering from injustice and poverty and poor health? This is the president with a lifelong habit of sneering at hurting and vulnerable people as 'losers,' who struggled almost visibly during his daily coronavirus briefings to treat the pandemic as anything other than an annoyance that threatened his reelection."

For people who view truth-telling as a matter of bedrock values, it was most remarkable how often we heard of Donald Trump as a man of deep religious convictions, surrounded by the most sectarian of conservative Christians. This is the president who once confessed he had never done anything that require divine forgiveness, and who needs a coterie of religious advisors to keep him from laughable indications of his scriptural ignorance and spiritual poverty.

So often had his record been lied about that by the time Trump rose to praise himself, such amazing statements as this didn’t even seem out of the ordinary:

I have done more for the African-American community than any president since Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president.

More than Ulysses Grant, who fought for Reconstruction against the men honored in neo-Confederate monuments that Trump has defended? More than FDR, whose New Deal began chipping away at Black poverty? More than Eisenhower, who forced the desegregation of schools with the deployment of federal troops? More than LBJ, who pushed through Congress the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, the legacy Trump’s Supreme Court appointees are working to undermine? Trump’s arrogance is unsurprising, but that his allies let him say this in public is simply terrifying.

The Big Lies about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party, however, match those about his own record as exercises in chutzpah. Perhaps Trump can be forgiven for attributing trade agreements, globalization policies, immigration legislation, and overseas adventures mostly championed by and entirely supported by members of his own party to Biden; Trump has attacked Republicans for them as well. But it probably took three days of speaker after speaker lying through their teeth in saying that Biden and all Democrats favor “defunding the police” for Trump to get away with this assertion:

Make no mistake, if you give power to Joe Biden, the radical left will Defund Police Departments all across America. They will pass federal legislation to reduce law enforcement nationwide. They will make every city look like Democrat-run Portland, Oregon. No one will be safe in Biden’s America.

And it got worse:

Biden is a Trojan horse for socialism. If Joe Biden doesn’t have the strength to stand up to wild-eyed Marxists like Bernie Sanders and his fellow radicals, then how is he ever going to stand up FOR you?

...If the left gains power, they will demolish the suburbs, confiscate your guns, and appoint justices who will wipe away your Second Amendment and other Constitutional freedoms.

That is what is known as a pack of lies, uttered in such close succession that it’s tough to process them all. Bernie Sanders is not a “Marxist.” The suburbs are rapidly becoming a Democratic base, not places they want to demolish. Nobody in the Democratic Party has talked about “confiscating” guns, or even regulating them unless they are assault weapons. And all the attacks on Biden and Democrats for allegedly defending late-term abortions (only in very limited cases where there is a medically established threat to the woman’s health) might be fairer if Trump and nearly all Republicans didn’t support outlawing all abortions from the moment of conception.

Perhaps the biggest lie of all was the twinned assertion that Biden is a prophet of darkness and division, compared to a president who embodies national unity and absolutely owns patriotism (as illustrated, presumably, by the cavalier way in which he appropriated the White House as a campaign staging area, complete with giant Trump-Pence signs). As Mike Pence boldly claimed in his gesture of maximum loyalty on night three of the RNC, Trump’s enemies are fundamentally un-American, while the 45th president loves real Americans. Yet at the same time, Trump is running against the “anarchy” in “Democrat-run” cities, for which her is somehow entirely blameless, and against which he darkly threatens to rain down fire.

The question remains: will it work? It seems unlikely. As noted above, very nearly a majority of voters have probably already decided to vote against Trump, and it’s unlikely many of them tuned into a convention so clearly tailored to MAGA tastes. Trump is unlikely to make it until November 3 living up to the image on Mount Rushmore this convention projected for him, and Biden isn’t going to live down to the bizarre caricature of him as a sort of communist fellow traveler who hates his country. Most of all, the biggest lodestone on Trump’s reelection campaign, his mismanagement of COVID-19, isn’t going to miraculously go away, even if his acceptance speech doesn’t turn out to be a super-spreader event.

Perhaps through his impressive willingness to lie and inspire others to lie, Trump can put himself into a sufficiently competitive position to lose the popular vote but either squeak out another improbable electoral college majority, or more likely, to muddy the waters on Election Night and hope through chicanery and perhaps a Supreme Court ruling he can turn defeat into victory before January. It’s the hand he has dealt himself, and if all else fails, he has enjoyed at least one more egregious White House display of the power he craves and the glory he believes he deserves.

CNN's review: "Taken in total, the speech felt like a mash-up of a State of the Union address and an opposition research dump. And one that you'd seen and heard before."

Politico: "It wasn’t a terribly effective address. The speech lacked structure and thematic discipline. The president swerved between topics, some of which felt beneath the occasion, and appeared so drained by the marathon effort that he failed to punch through what should have been the most impactful moments. ('Really needed to be edited down and reorganized. A lot of stuff that could've been left on the cutting room floor diluted the powerful parts,' tweeted Scott Jennings, the conservative CNN commentator and Trump supporter.)... This hodgepodge of oratory was wrapped around a warning to America-- that Joe Biden, 'a Trojan horse for socialism,' would destroy this country as we know it... [D]espite the statements and overstatements, Trump’s speech was most notable for what it lacked. Call it humility. Or self awareness. Or introspection. What the president failed to do Thursday is what he's refused to do throughout his presidency: acknowledge the thing that makes so many people dislike him."

GOP Death Cult Convention Celebrates Trump's Leadership-- As U.S. Hurtles Towards 200,000 COVID-Deaths

Tuesday, which was the second day of the #CocaineConvention, was just another normal pandemic day in the USA-- another 1,291 Americans killed by Trump and the Republican Party and another 40,098 new cases. These are the ten worst anti-hero Trumpist governors causing their states the most unnecessary contagion and how many new cases they caused as the GOP Convention kicked off:

• Greg Abbott +6,803-- 21,231 cases per million Texans
• Ron DeSantis +2,673-- 28,192 cases per million Floridians
• Brian Kemp +2,101-- 24,333 cases per million Georgians
• Mike Parson +1,060-- 12,692 cases per million Missourans
• Henry McMaster +937-- 22,042 cases per million South Carolinians
• Doug Ducey +859-- 27,377 cases per million Arizonans
• Bill Lee +813-- 21,293 cases per million Tennesseans
• Tate Reeves +801-- 26,614 cases per million Mississippans
• Kevin Stitt +650-- 13,690 cases per million Sooners
• Kim Reynolds +631-- 18,161 cases per million Iowans

For sake of comparison, the worst hit Europeans country, Spain, has 9,051 cases per million Spaniards. Yesterday, Texas and Florida led the nation in reported new COVID-deaths, respectively 206 and 186. All the western European countries combined didn't have as many deaths yesterday as either Texas or Florida:

• Spain +52
• UK +16
• France +16
• Germany +9
• Netherlands +5
• Italy +4
• Belgium +4
• Portugal +4
• Switzerland +1
• Greece +1

Sweden, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Norway, and Finland all reported no new deaths on Tuesday.

All these numbers point to a failure of American political leadership-- a failure by Trump, first and foremost-- and a failure by his puppet governors. Harsh? Not at all. Ron DeSantis-- who forced his state's schools to reopen this month in the middle of a deadly, out of control pandemic infected 8,585 school children-- bringing the Florida total to 48,730 cases among children in the worst-run of big states in America. DeSantis ordered that any school not holding in person classes at least 5 days a week would be cut off from state funding. Many Floridians are asking if DeSantis should be tried for murder. Anselm Weber is the Democratic Party nominee for the open Florida state House seat representing HD-76 (Fort Myers Beach, Bonita Springs, Sanibel) He told us that "It is downright diabolical what DeSantis is doing with school reopenings. It doesn't take a genius to realize sending kids and school staff back to work during a pandemic, while not mandating masks, will lead to significant rises in COVID deaths. Israel was handling the virus relatively well before they reopened schools, which then resulted in a massive uptick in cases. Florida has already been the global epicenter for COVID-19 roughly a month ago, and we are in absolutely no standing to reopen schools. Moreover, DeSantis is using this opportunity to cut school funding for schools that wish not to reopen. The GOP is intentionally allowing massive COVID deaths while using this as a pretext to support their ghoulish austerity driven ideology."

Kathy Lewis is looking like a winner in a Tampa Bay area open seat district. She has also noticed what DeSantis is up to. "This is a sad situation for all," she told me yesterday. "There is no correct way that I am aware of to handle the back-to-school dilemma during a pandemic. But Governor DeSantis has put our children's lives and their parents' and teachers' livelihoods at risk by forcing a return to in-person classes. Parents and teachers are looking for well-thought direction from their elected leaders, not just offhand orders to 'figure it out.' For instance, this plan does not consider children who need specialized curricula, such as those with disabilities, who are being left adrift by the state while their teachers and parents struggle to find ways to accommodate them and keep all their students safe. I fully expect we will see a preventable rise in the number of new COVID cases and related deaths in early September-- all a result of this unconscionable decision requiring school districts to trade the safety of their students and teachers for desperately needed funding."

After Night Two of the GOP Lie-Fest, Glenn Kessler and his Washington Post team of fact checkers called it "another tsunami of untruths" and singled out 19 particular big lies.

And right after the second night's festivities Post reporter Touluse Olorunnipa began his analysis by noting that "Faced with a pandemic that has killed more than 175,000 Americans, President Trump used glitzy video and misleading testimonials to spin a tale of heroism and resolve far removed from the grim reality of a country in the throes of an uncontrolled public health crisis. At the Republican National Convention on Monday, Trump was hailed as a bold and lifesaving leader who 'was right' on the novel coronavirus while Democrats, doctors and pundits were wrong from the beginning. One campaign-style video that aired during the convention hailed Trump as the 'one leader' who stood up to the virus while quoting Democratic figures who played down the severity of the virus in its early stages."

It’s a revisionist version of recent history belied by hours of videotape in which the president minimized the threat of the virus for months, falsely predicted that it would “disappear” with warmer weather, promoted several unproven miracle cures, pushed states to reopen before meeting federal government benchmarks, equivocated on mask-wearing, defied social distancing guidelines and repeatedly told Americans that everything was under control.

With the pandemic still ravaging the country just 10 weeks before Election Day, the president is mounting his most ambitious effort yet to change Americans’ minds about his handling of the crisis-- relying on his background in reality television and show business to create an alternative reality that edits out his mistakes and magnifies those of his opponents.

“The RNC is taking a ‘Mission Accomplished’ approach to coronavirus, but the fact [Trump] can’t even hold a regular convention says otherwise,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and a Trump critic who wrote a book titled Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies To Us.

“American life as we know it has been shut down since last March because of his magical and paranoid style of thinking, campaigning and governing,” she said.

While Trump has previously touted his coronavirus response with misleading videos, charts and quotes during news briefings and in campaign ads, the Republican National Convention gives him a platform unique in its scope and reach. Over the course of four nights, the GOP will have 10 hours of prime time coverage, with cable and broadcast networks airing large chunks of the program uninterrupted.

It is perhaps Trump’s last best chance to present an unfiltered affirmative case for a second term in a race where a majority of voters disapprove of his handling of a pandemic that has battered the economy and upended Americans’ lives.





It is likely to be a difficult task.

Government forecasts predict the country’s coronavirus death toll could surpass 200,000 by mid-September; schools continue to struggle with reopening plans as mini-outbreaks across the country shut down classes and frustrate parents; the economy continues to suffer from recession-level unemployment and desperation; a safe and effective vaccine is at least months away; and a flu season looms that public health experts say will only worsen an already precarious situation.

Trump’s positive portrayal this week of his pandemic response is also undermined by the fact that the convention is mostly virtual despite the president’s best efforts to have an in-person gathering. Still, Trump has found ways to flout public health guidance or at least to show a disregard for social distancing. He plans to have a large crowd at the White House to watch his speech Thursday on the South Lawn.

The broadly accepted view that Trump has mishandled the virus is a political liability for the president, as polls show his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, leading nationally and with key voting groups that will determine the outcome. A Washington Post-ABC News poll this month found that nearly two-thirds of registered voters say they are worried that they or their families might contract the coronavirus, and half of Republicans expressed that concern. Many of those respondents plan to vote for Biden.

Much of Monday’s convention program appeared designed to appeal to such concerned voters by convincing them they should not worry.

During one of his appearances in Monday’s program, Trump spoke with a group of front-line workers to thank them for their efforts in combating the virus.

“Well, I’m for the nurses, I’m for the doctors,” Trump said. “We just have to make this China virus go away, and it’s happening.”

The remarks echoed comments Trump has been making since January, in which he has repeatedly claimed the virus was receding or under control as it spread through the country.

“We have it totally under control,” Trump said in January when asked by a CNBC host whether he worried about a pandemic. “It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

A month later, he praised his administration for “a pretty good job we’ve done,” predicting that the number of confirmed cases in the country would soon decline to zero. The next day he declared “one day-- it’s like a miracle-- it will disappear.”

As cases surged by the thousands in the spring and throughout the summer-- leaving the United States with the most coronavirus deaths in the world-- Trump continued to tout his own handling of the virus and refer to it in the past tense. He regularly made announcements of breakthrough treatments that ultimately did not prove effective, including the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine and ultraviolet rays.

He held rallies and avoided wearing a mask at a time when public health experts said social distancing and face coverings were the country’s best tools to contain the virus.

More recently, Trump has pushed for schools to reopen, claiming falsely that children are essentially immune from catching and spreading the virus. Multiple schools have shut down in-person learning in recent weeks as hundreds of students contracted the virus. The president continues to promote the false idea that case numbers are rising mostly because of more testing. And on Sunday, Trump called an impromptu news conference to announce a “historic breakthrough,” touting a convalescent plasma treatment about which scientists have expressed doubt.

In the video that aired at the convention Monday, Trump was praised for instituting travel restrictions on China and leading an effort to quickly produce personal protective equipment and a vaccine. In the narrator’s telling, only Trump’s perceived opponents and critics were at fault for the country’s predicament.

“From the very beginning, Democrats, the media and the World Health Organization got coronavirus wrong,” the narrator says in the video, which features clips of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio commenting on the novel virus in February and early March.

The video, like others Trump has touted, does not include comments from the president in February, when he publicly dismissed concerns about the virus despite receiving briefings and warnings from top aides and the intelligence community. Trump also praised Chinese President Xi Jinping in January for “transparency” in comments that are now out of step with the president’s tough-on-China stance.

Democrats, who used much of their convention last week to slam Trump as mishandling the pandemic response, said Monday’s program was proof that the president continued to lack a coherent plan to solve the country’s topmost problem.

“The truth is that his failed leadership has needlessly cost over 177,000 Americans their lives, tens of millions of Americans their jobs, and left the United States the hardest hit country by the pandemic in the whole world,” Biden deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement.

Trump has been his chief spokesman in defending his coronavirus response-- with his own public health experts regularly contradicting him publicly-- but this week’s convention provided an opportunity for the president to showcase other voices that support his boasts of handling the crisis flawlessly.

“As a health-care professional, I can tell you without hesitation, Donald Trump’s quick action and leadership saved thousands of lives during covid-19,” said Amy Johnson Ford, a nurse in West Virginia, who spoke of the Trump administration’s move to expand access to telemedicine.

Though public health experts have criticized the president as failing to take the virus seriously at the beginning of the year, Ford said Trump “recognized the threat this virus presented for all Americans early on and made rapid policy changes.”

Other speakers praised Trump for his administration’s efforts to ramp up production of PPE and testing kits, countering criticism he has received for the country’s shortages at the height of the pandemic.

Trump tried to cast criticism of his response as partisan politicking, using a speech in Charlotte to accuse Democrats of locking down states to hurt his electoral prospects.

“These Democrat governors love shutdowns until the election is over because they want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the economy,” Trump said during a 50-minute speech that included several baseless charges.

Nancy Rosenblum, a professor of ethics in politics and government at Harvard University, said the president’s willingness to embrace conspiracy theories during a pandemic has hampered the country’s ability to mount an effective public health response. It’s a far cry from the traditional response to a crisis, in which Americans band together across political lines, she said.

“It’s a kind of polarized politics that has now reached down into every aspect of our lives, even to life itself,” said Rosenblum, co-author of A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy.

In a second video that aired during the convention, the narrator took on a more bipartisan tone while still praising Trump’s “swift action” to save lives during the pandemic.

“We are America. Despite unpredictable events, we as Americans work together to overcome challenges and write our own stories,” the narrator said.

But with the death toll continuing to mount and just weeks to go before voting begins in several states, Trump’s attempt to rewrite the script will have limited impact on voters, Carpenter said.

“Four nights of Trumptastic reality TV won’t change the dystopian reality we are living with Donald Trump as president,” she said. “People believe their own eyes and ears over Trump.”

The number of deaths is likely to surpass the benchmark Trump set for success earlier this year just ahead of the election.

“If we can hold that down to 100,000... it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job,” he said during a March 29 news conference.

The president, who is to meet with medical professionals Wednesday to discuss the pandemic, has said he will use his acceptance speech at the convention Thursday to set the record straight on his handling of the crisis.

“So we’ll be talking, because really the job that we’ve done is incredible,” Trump said Monday in Charlotte. “It’s incredible, and none of us get any credit for it, and that’s okay.”

As Ezra Klein wrote yesterday, the convention has been "bizarre, unnerving, and unprecedented. It was banal, predictable, and expected... What is there to say upon hearing Trump described as 'the bodyguard of Western civilization?' It’s not an argument so much as a loyalty oath, an offering cut from the speaker’s dignity and burnt for the pleasure of the Dear Leader himself. But the outrageousness is the point. Protest and you’re triggered-- just another oversensitive lib who can’t take a joke. Ignore it and you’re complicit. To care is to lose. The Republican Party on display Monday night didn’t represent an ideology or a governing agenda. It was a personality cult, and a tired one at that. Republicans, in a break with tradition, refused to write a party platform. They chose, instead, to recycle their 2016 platform. But the delegates agreed that if they had met to fashion an actual agenda, they 'would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration,' and as such, 'the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.'... The problem for Republicans is that the main thing Trump has told them to support is himself. There are no detailed policy proposals, much less a coherent ideology or set of governing principles. And so speech after speech followed the same template: How was America going to stop the coronavirus? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to revive its economy? By reelecting Donald Trump. How was it going to ensure domestic harmony? By reelecting Donald Trump. The contradiction at the heart of the convention, of course, is that Donald Trump is currently president. I’m dead serious. How would reelecting Trump resolve these crises that Trump has proven unable to resolve-- and has, in many cases, worsened-- in office? No one even took a shot at that Rubik’s cube. Instead, the speakers awkwardly talked around the fact of Trump’s incumbency. He was presented, strangely, as both incumbent and challenger; the man who had fixed America’s problems, but also the man needed to fix an America beset by more problems than ever... The core of Trump’s agenda has always been untethering American politics from factual reality, and among Republicans, at least, he’s been startlingly successful. The convention is a loyalty test for Republicans, and a reality check for the rest of us. What are they willing to say? What are we prepared to believe? Do we still have it in us to be surprised?"

Will The Señor Trumpanzee #CocaineConvention Manage To Generate A Reverse Bounce?

I'm still hoping lots and lots of people watch the Republican #CocaineConvention. That's because I think it will turn off independent voters and may even persuade some mainstream-- as in non-fascist-- Republicans to stay home on November 3rd. Unfortunately, according to Nielsen, just 15.9 million people watched, a 28% drop from 2016. The first night of the Democratic Convention last week, drew 18.7 million viewers, also a 28% drop from 2016.

The former chief of staff of Trump's Department of Homeland Security, Miles Taylor, joined Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on a Daily Beast podcast to continue his fun new job of denouncing and exposing Trump. "You thought what happened on screen on night one of the convention was crazy? It’s nothing compared to Trump behind the scenes, where national security officials couldn’t get through a meeting 'without him doing 20 tangents, becoming irascible, turning red in the face, demanding a diet Coke, spewing spit,' Taylor explained. 'Literally out of goddamn nowhere, he'd be like, You know, who’s just my favorite guy? The MyPillow guy. Do any of you have those pillows? When it came to the issue of the border wall, Trump would be dreaming up 'sickenin' medieval plots 'to pierce the flesh' of migrants, rip all the families apart, 'maim,' and gas them. 'This was a man with no humanity whatsoever,' Taylor says. 'He says, we got to do this, this, this, and this, all of which are probably impossible, illegal unethical,' Taylor recalls, but he was writing them down as the president spoke. 'And he looks over me and he goes, you fucking taken notes?'"



That leaves some people wondering if the Republican Party will survive Trumpism and some wondering if the party needs to be burned down to the ground an started all over again-- something many progressives also wonder about the Democratic Party. "Conservative intellectuals," wrote Jonathan Chait, "have spent most of the past four decades claiming-- especially during periods of Republican ascent-- to be winning the 'war of ideas.' Hardly any of them bother to make such a boast now. Now that the Republican convention has given itself over to four straight nights starring Donald Trump-- also featuring other unaccomplished members of his family along with some teens who were victimized by social media for wearing Trump gear-- and abandoned its platform altogether for the platform equivalent of a MAGA hat, all the fun has been drained out of the exercise.

In place of the usual gloating, the right has been engaged in a furious intramural debate over whether to burn down the Republican Party in the wake of Trump’s expected (but hardly assured) defeat. Advocates for burning it down include Max Boot, George Will, Stuart Stevens, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, and Jonathan V. Last. Critics include David French, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. Somewhat in the middle lie Ross Douthat, David Brooks,  Jonah Goldberg, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Kevin D. Williamson. In yesterday’s New York Times, former George W. Bush adviser Peter Wehner treats the burning as a (metaphorical) given and urges, “Any attempt to rescue conservatism from the ashes, then, has to begin with the defeat of Donald Trump in November.”

All parties to the dispute agree that Trump is deeply unfit for the presidency. They disagree about how broadly to define the moral and practical implications of that fact.

The anti-burners take a narrow view. The problem, as they see it, is Trump, and therefore his departure solves it. And it is certainly true that the current president has unique liabilities that no other Republican leader who succeeds him will share. However awful the next Republican leader may be, he or she will probably not use the office for personal profit, will tell lies numbering in fewer than five figures, will listen to their advisers, will spend the bulk of their waking hours working rather than obsessively watching television, and will be trained as a public servant rather than as a professional swindler and money launderer.

If Republicans’ goal is to replace Trump with a normal, noncriminal politician, they can achieve it without any systemic change. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, or possibly even one of the Trump children would be capable of showing up every day, doing eight hours or so of actual work a day, and staffing the administration with people who do not secretly believe their boss is deranged.





However, the pro-burners believe the Trump experience has exposed some deeper rot... If you take the broader view of the party’s problem, you quickly realize the problem is not just Trump himself but a party that would not merely cooperate with but actually idolize a grotesquely bigoted authoritarian. Once Trump disappears, Fox News will begin pummeling the next Democratic president with absurd lies and then building a new cult of personality around the next Republican who emerges as a leader, and that leader will pursue a more competent version of an essentially similar program: upper-class tax cuts, allowing business to self-regulate, ignoring large swaths of scientific expertise, and entrenching minority rule.

And if any Republicans wish to alter their fate from that trajectory, the solution is both simpler and more radical than anything they have acknowledged: They must sever the party from the ideological movement that has controlled it for a generation and driven it into its present dysfunctional state.

To the modern ear, the very idea of a Republican Party that operates independently of the conservative movement sounds preposterous, even oxymoronic. The movement’s association with the GOP is now so deep that almost everybody uses the terms Republican and conservative synonymously. But it was only about 60 years ago that the two had very different meanings.

A right-of-center leader in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan would not deny the need to do anything about climate change, oppose universal health insurance, or insist cutting taxes on the rich will pay for itself. For a period of time, the Republican Party seemed to be following the same course as right-of-center parties in other industrialized democracies today. Dwight Eisenhower accepted the contours and legitimacy of the New Deal while fighting many of the particulars. The conservative movement’s purpose was to oppose and reverse Eisenhower’s political vision for the Republican Party.

As detailed by books like Rule and Ruin, by Geoffrey Kabaservice, or Before the Storm, by Rick Perlstein, the conservative movement was once a minority faction within the GOP. It regarded the party’s leadership with about as much hostility as the Democratic Socialists of America today view the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden-- lesser evils at best, outright traitors at worst.

The movement loathed Republican leaders for having accepted as a settled fact Franklin Roosevelt’s extension of the welfare and regulatory states-- Barry Goldwater excoriated Eisenhower’s “dime-store New Deal”-- and Harry Truman’s Cold War containment. It demanded an apocalyptic confrontation that would roll back big government at home and communism abroad.

Modern conservatives have created a mythical story of how they took over the party, sustained through endless repetition. The myth holds that they gained control of the party because they were thoughtful and responsible. William F. Buckley, their intellectual leader, “expelled the Birchers”-- the far-right, conspiratorial John Birch Society-- and thus, having purged the movement of its kooks, prepared it for governance.

The truth is very nearly the opposite. A former Buckley colleague, Alvin Felzenberg, has detailed that Buckley tread very carefully with the Birchers. Grasping that the movement was far too important to the right to alienate, he tried to placate its leader, Joseph Welch, ultimately breaking with him while still endorsing the John Birch Society itself.

This small and seemingly esoteric point of historical interpretation is the root of the intellectual right’s systemic inability to face up to its problems. Conservatives have treated Buckley’s gentle and very partial break with the leader of the Birchers as his central legacy while dismissing many of his other positions as unimportant details. But those “details” are, in fact, the conservative movement’s DNA.

Buckley and the conservative movement defended Joe McCarthy, whose depiction of a vast secret Communist conspiracy and demands for aggressive rollback of existing communism closely tracked their own beliefs. They supported racial apartheid, first in the American South and then, after it was defeated there, in South Africa. They were supportive of right-wing authoritarianism both abroad and at home. Conservatives were skeptical of Richard Nixon because of his moderate policy agenda, but they closed ranks with him over Watergate. Nixon’s pragmatism repelled the right, but his authoritarianism attracted conservatives to him.

Center-right parties abroad are able to defeat left-wing appeals by co-opting popular elements. American conservatism is too rigid to do that. It regards democracy itself as a form of oppression-- a system that enables the majority to oppress the wealthy minority by redistributing income via the ballot box. One of the predictable features of any American debate over tax levels is that conservative politicians or business leaders will compare the latest Democratic plan to something out of Hitler’s Germany.

Conservatives famously created a vast network of think tanks, media, and activist institutions, which they used to slowly take over the GOP. The takeover took decades to complete. Even by the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, conservatives only had a large foothold but had to share power with Establishmentarians. And so, while Reagan would sometimes follow the conservative line, at other times his moderate advisers would steer him toward course corrections. Reagan repeatedly violated conservative orthodoxy by supporting a series of tax hikes, cap-and-trade environmental regulations, a tax reform that raised effective rates on the rich, liberalized immigration, and détente with the Soviets.

Conservatives were able to swallow their anger over these betrayals because, at the time, Reagan offered them the closest opening to real power they had enjoyed since the Hoover administration. But as they consolidated their party takeover, they would eventually demand far more complete fealty. Even the pragmatism permitted under Reagan would become unacceptable.

The key break point in the history of the party came under George H.W. Bush. In 1990, Bush cut a deal with congressional Democrats to reduce the deficit. In return for (rather deep) spending cuts, Democrats prevailed on Bush to accept a small increase in the top income-tax rate. Conservative Republicans led by Newt Gingrich revolted against Bush and later credited their opposition with causing his defeat. After the Gingrich revolt-- which later styled itself as a “Republican revolution” against Bill Clinton-- conservatives drove out Bush’s remaining moderate advisers and consolidated full right-wing control over the party.

It would be an overstatement to paint Trump as representing nothing but the triumph of the conservative movement. In his personal defects, Trump is indeed sui generis. But the broad outlines of his agenda and his style do closely follow the trajectory of the American right: racism, authoritarianism, and disdain for expertise. The movement attracts disordered personalities like McCarthy, Sarah Palin, and Trump and paranoid cults like the John Birch Society and QAnon.

Above all, Trump follows the American right’s Manichaean approach to political conflict. Every new extension of government, however limited or necessary, is a secret plot to extend government control over every aspect of American life. Conservatives met both Clinton and Obama’s agenda with absolute hysteria, whipping themselves into a terror that rendered them unable to negotiate.

The right has thought this way all along. Reagan, in his ’60s-era incarnation as conservative insurgent spokesman, warned that unless Medicare was stopped, “You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” Conservatives are usually unable to roll back existing government programs and instead treat every new proposed extension as the final stand for freedom against socialist tyranny.

...[T]he American conservative movement lacks the analytic tools to acknowledge what acceptable social programs look like. An inability to distinguish reasonable, well-designed government programs that address real market failures from Soviet-style oppression is a congenital defect in conservative thought.

The most libertarian-minded conservatives laugh bitterly at the idea that the modern party reflects their ideology. In a sense, they are right: The last two Republican presidents both attempted to roll back a major entitlement (Bush sought to privatize Social Security, Trump to repeal Obamacare) and were defeated and instead presided over an expanded government. But they have also clung as tightly as ever to the actual governing priorities of the movement’s power centers: low taxes for the rich, placing business lobbyists in charge of federal regulations, and appointing jurists who believe in rolling back the regulatory state. For all his supposed populism, Trump’s plan to revive the economy is just more tax cuts.

Trumpism is a natural by-product of the dissonance between the conservative movement’s ambitions and the limitations of democratic politics. Totalitarian plots lie around every corner: the New Deal, the civil-rights movement, peaceniks, the Clintons, Obamacare, and Black Lives Matter. Every policy matter, from Bill Clinton’s modest aim of reducing the deficit to Obama’s goal of a national version of Romneycare, becomes a culture war. Since the right is unable to engage with any of these issues in a practical manner, conservative politics is forced to operate entirely on a symbolic level.

Because the stakes of even the most mundane policy disagreement are existential, and because the right keeps losing, there is no release for the tension that keeps building. All the accumulated terror is simply off-loaded from the last Armageddon to the next. Trump is not even pretending to have a positive second-term program. His only goal is to stop the next Democratic administration because the next liberal program is always the one that will usher in the final triumph of socialism.

The most likely near-term outcome for a post-Trump GOP would look something like this: The party reconstitutes itself in opposition to everything the next Democratic president proposes, “rediscovers” its existential terror of deficit spending, throws itself into vote suppression and minority rule, and eventually returns to power for another round of upper-class tax cuts and a large-scale managerial debacle. I suspect many of the Republicans who privately or publicly loathe Trump would be satisfied with such an outcome.

This is so incredibly illegal; not even consiglieri William Barr could explain this away:





This morning, Bernie reminded his followers that, alas-- and despite the hysterical carryings on at the #CocaineConvention-- Biden is no socialist and he and Kamala will not be carrying out the his or AOC's or Ilhan Omar's agenda. "If only that were true," wrote Bernie wistfully. "But while they scream 'socialist' as an epithet in their videos and from the stage, what everyone needs to know is that Trump and the Republican Party just LOVE socialism-- a corporate socialism for the rich and the powerful. And let's be clear. Their brand of socialism has resulted in more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s, with three multi-billionaires now owning more wealth than the bottom half of our nation. Their socialism has allowed, during this pandemic, the very, very rich to become much richer while tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, their health care and face eviction. While Trump denounces socialism let us never forget the $885 million in government subsidies and tax breaks the Trump family received for a real estate empire built on racial discrimination. But Trump is not alone."

The high priest of unfettered capitalism, Trump’s National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, spoke in a video last night.

And who could ever forget when Larry was on television begging for the largest federal bailout in American history for his friends on Wall Street-- some $700 billion from the Treasury and trillions in support from the Federal Reserve-- after their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.

But it is not just Trump and Larry Kudlow.

If you are a fossil fuel company, whose carbon emissions are destroying the planet, you get billions in government subsidies including special tax breaks, royalty relief, funding for research and development and numerous tax loopholes.

If you are a pharmaceutical company, you make huge profits on patent rights for medicines that were developed with taxpayer-funded research.

If you are a monopoly like Amazon, owned by the wealthiest person in America, you get hundreds of millions of dollars in economic incentives from taxpayers to build warehouses and you end up paying not one penny in federal income taxes.

If you are the Walton family, the wealthiest family in America, you get massive government subsidies because your low-wage workers are forced to rely on food stamps, Medicaid and public housing in order to survive-- all paid for by taxpayers.

This is what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. meant when he said that “This country has socialism for the rich, and rugged individualism for the poor.”

And that is the difference between Donald Trump and us.

Trump believes in corporate socialism for the rich and powerful.

We believe in a democratic socialism that works for the working families of this country. We believe that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, economic rights are human rights.

So yes, progressives and even moderate Democrats will face attacks from people who attempt to use the word "socialism" as a slur.

There is nothing new of that.

Like President Harry Truman said, "Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years... Socialism is what they called Social Security … Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people."

Our job in this moment is to stay focused.

First priority: defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in modern American history-- and defeat him badly.

Then on Day 1 of the Biden administration, we will mobilize the working families of this country to demand a government that represents all of us and not just the few. We will fight to ensure that every American has a right to a decent job that pays a living wage, to health care, to a complete education, to affordable housing, to a clean environment, and to a secure retirement-- and no more tax breaks for billionaires and large corporations.

...The one percent in this country may have enormous wealth and power, and they will use it to try and stop our agenda. But they are just the one percent. And if the 99 percent in this country stand together, defeat Trump, and go on to fight for the values we share, we can transform this country.

Bannon's Wall-- The Final Installation by Nancy Ohanian

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

2 miscreants, a few years and 100 pounds ago.

But now it looks like Steve Bannon won't be speaking at the bigly tremendous Republican Goon Death & Swindle Fest this week, but, not to worry. He will be there in spirit. Who knows, maybe he'll just throw on a sheet and hood and blend in with the rest of the crowd. And fear not, there's a steady parade of other goons to behold and you still have time to tune in and watch some of them. The additional meme below shows just a few. Don't you wish your TV came with a controller that sent shocks directly to the speakers? I know I do. And it wouldn't just be shocks!

Hmmm, I wonder if Trump still hopes to wear his buddy's monogrammed speedo again someday. Does he keep it around? Ah, memories!

Special thanks to the DWT Dept. Of Things You Can't Unsee.

What Do Mainstream Republican Careerists Think Of The #CocaineConvention So Far?

Before the #CocaineConvention began yesterday, I passed a TV and noticed that Trump was doing a press gaggle of some kind. Briefly interested in the way you might be attracted to a pile-up on the inter-state shown on TV, I was soon wondering why the TV network didn't just label it "And now an uninterrupted hour of lies from your president." And that was just a precursor of what was coming-- Apocalypse Now, 2020.

CNN, which was thanked by Señor T, for covering his shit-show, noted this morning that it "started off with a parade of dishonesty, in stark contrast with last week's Democratic convention. While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn't have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans' convention." CNN listed over a dozen of the most blatant and pre-approved lies that, in sum, are the substitute for a party platform.

Speaking of which, at The Atlantic this morning, David Frum ran down the unspoken GOP platform, which the party has decided not to publish. "This omission," he noted, "has led some to conclude that the GOP lacks ideas, that it stands for nothing, that it has shriveled to little more than a Trump cult. This conclusion is wrong. The Republican Party of 2020 has lots of ideas. He listed 13 ideas that "command almost universal assent within the Trump administration, within the Republican caucuses of the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, among governors and state legislators, on Fox News, and among rank-and-file Republicans. Once you read the list, I think you’ll agree that these are authentic ideas with meaningful policy consequences, and that they are broadly shared. The question is not why Republicans lack a coherent platform; it’s why they’re so reluctant to publish the one on which they’re running." I'll summarize, using Frum's words:

• Adjusting the burden of taxation down on society’s richest citizens.
• Coronavirus is a much-overhyped problem. It’s not that dangerous and will soon burn itself out. States should reopen their economies as rapidly as possible, and accept the ensuing casualties as a cost worth paying-- and certainly a better trade-off than saving every last life by shutting down state economies. Masking is useless and theatrical, if not outright counterproductive.
• Climate change is a much-overhyped problem. It’s probably not happening. If it is happening, it’s not worth worrying about.
• China has become an economic and geopolitical adversary of the United States. Military spending should be invested with an eye to defeating China on the seas, in space, and in the cyber-realm.
• The trade and alliance structures built after World War II are outdated. America still needs partners of course, especially Israel and maybe Russia.
• Health care is a purchase like any other. Individuals should make their own best deals in the insurance market with minimal government supervision. Those who pay more should get more. Those who cannot pay must either rely on Medicaid, accept charity, or go without.
• Voting is a privilege. States should have wide latitude to regulate that privilege in such a way as to minimize voting fraud, which is rife among African Americans and new immigrant communities. The federal role in voting oversight should be limited to preventing Democrats from abusing the U.S. Postal Service to enable fraud by their voters.
• Anti-black racism has ceased to be an important problem in American life. At this point, the people most likely to be targets of adverse discrimination are whites, Christians, and Asian university applicants.
• The courts should move gradually and carefully toward eliminating the mistake made in 1965 when women’s sexual privacy was elevated into a constitutional right.
• The post-Watergate ethics reforms overreached. We should welcome the trend toward unrestricted and secret campaign donations. Overly strict conflict-of-interest rules will only bar wealthy and successful businesspeople from public service.
• Trump’s border wall is the right policy to slow illegal immigration; the task of enforcing immigration rules should not fall on business operators.
• The country is currently gripped by a surge of crime and lawlessness as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and its criticism of police.
• Civility and respect are cherished ideals. But in the face of the overwhelming and unfair onslaught against President Trump by the media and the Deep State, his occasional excesses on Twitter and at his rallies should be understood as pardonable reactions to much more severe misconduct by others.

"So, concluded Frum, "there’s the platform right there. Why not publish it? There are two answers to that question, one simple, one more complicated. The simple answer is that President Trump’s impulsive management style has cast his convention into chaos. The location, the speaking program, the arrangements-- all were decided at the last minute. Managing the rollout of a platform, as well, was just one task too many. The more complicated answer is that the platform I’ve just described, like so much of the Trump-Republican program, commands support only among a minority of the American people. The platform works (to the extent it does work) by exciting enthusiastic support among Trump supporters; but stated too explicitly, it invites a backlash among the American majority. This is a platform for a party that talks to itself, not to the rest of the country. And for those purposes, it will succeed most to the extent it is communicated only implicitly, to those receptive to its message. The challenge for Republicans in the week ahead is to hope that President Trump can remember, night after night, to speak only the things he’s supposed to speak-- not to blurt the things his party wants its supporters to absorb unspoken."

Frum just neglected to mention one big and rapidly growing part of the unwritten Republican Party Platform-- Q-Anon, the new Republican Party Religion, which is disrupting the GOP and the already crackpot religious right churches. "Once the fascination of far-right commentators and their followers, QAnon is no longer fringe," wrote Katelyn Beaty for ReligionNews. "With support from Trump and other elected officials, it has gained credibility both on the web and in the offline world: In Georgia, a candidate for Congress has praised Q as “a mythical hero,” and at least five other congressional hopefuls from Illinois to Oregon have voiced support. One scholar found a 71% increase in QAnon content on Twitter and a 651% increase on Facebook since March." 

Jon Thorngate is the pastor at LifeBridge, a nondenominational church of about 300 in a Milwaukee suburb. In recent months, he said, his members have shared “Plandemic,” a half-hour film that presents COVID-19 as a moneymaking scheme by government officials and others, on Facebook. Members have also passed around a now-banned Breitbart video that promotes hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the virus.

Thorngate, one of the few pastors who would go on the record among those who called QAnon a real problem in their churches, said that only five to 10 members are actually posting the videos online. But in conversations with other members, he’s realized many more are open to conspiracy theories than those who post.

  Thorngate attributes the phenomenon in part to the “death of expertise”-- a distrust of authority figures that leads some Americans to undervalue long-established measures of competency and wisdom. Among some church members, he said, the attitude is, “I’m going to use church for the things I like, ignore it for the things I don’t and find my own truth.

“That part for us is concerning, that nothing feels authoritative right now.”

For years in the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. evangelicals, above nearly any other group, warned what will happen when people abandon absolute truth (which they located in the Bible), saying the idea of relative truth would lead to people believing whatever confirms their own inward hunches. But suspicion of big government, questioning of scientific consensus (on evolution, for example) and a rejection of the morals of Hollywood and liberal elites took hold among millennial Christians, many of whom feel politically alienated and beat up by mainstream media. They are natural targets for QAnon.