Monthly Archive: January 2018

Is Donald Trump Bill Clinton?

As Trump’s admirers inundated us with their year-end “Wishlist fulfilled!” declarations last week, detailing (without differentiation) the accomplishments, pending accomplishments, or dubious rhetorical “accomplishments” of his first year, I have begun to notice a distinctly familiar aura about this presidency — a fairly predictable aura to anyone who has been observing Trump from outside his cult’s myopic circus tent: the aura of the...

Trumpanzees Try to Deflect from Bannon Story

Streiff at RedState, one of Donald Trump’s most ardent damage controllers — it’s amusing how many feel the need to defend the honor of a man they claim to believe is Alpha++ — has posted an article in which he tries to deflect attention from Trump’s embarrassing chest-beating gorilla act over Steve Bannon, by nitpicking over inconsequential misstatements in Michael Wolff’s new “scandal”...

Imaginary Wall Just Got Ten Feet “Taller” (aka less real)

Republican lawmakers, continuing the time-honored Donald Jr.-Roger Stone-Reince Priebus-Jeff Sessions tradition of following Donald Trump around with a big beautiful pooper scooper, are now out at the microphones promising that of course when Trump built his cult of nationalist (i.e., anti-American populist) morons by endlessly repeating the mantra, “The Wall,” he didn’t actually mean a wall. He meant an amnesty deal. Someday, when...

Dwarf Wars II: Gee, Guess Who Wins

Matt Drudge — for years the GOP establishment’s most influential and valuable mouthpiece (aka fraud) within the so-called “new media” — inserts himself into the Trump-Bannon messy divorce case as Trump’s public defender and deflector shield. No surprise there. But what most people will fail to see is whom Drudge’s seek and destroy mission is really destined and designed to help: Mitch McConnell....

Dwarf Wars: Trump vs. Bannon

Steve Bannon, a woman scorned, now says Donald Trump’s family members are traitors, the Russia scandal is real, and Trump knew what was happening. (“Me too!”) Trump has responded by saying he never really loved Bannon, that Bannon was little more than a hanger-on, and that every mistake of the GOP during the past year was due to Bannon’s mindless incompetence. Ah, the...

World Progress Report, or Why Is There Still Socialism?

Well, my calendar says it’s 2018, but anyone taking a quick glance at today’s world scene and its sorry cast of characters could be forgiven for imagining it was 1918. After all, we humans pride ourselves on learning from our mistakes, and surely no era would be more inclined to indulge in this pride than one that calls itself “progressive.” And yet… One...

Warmed Over, or When Donald Trump is Too Clever for You…

Joseph Conrad said that “women, children, and revolutionaries hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all actions.” To challenge Conrad’s broad judgment of women and children (“Wasn’t the juvenile Jane Austen a most clever ironist?”) is perhaps to prove his point: One mark of a “true believer” is his inability to take a joke...