Enjoying the view from Limbo
I have often said, of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, that the extent to which the Washington establishment now owns the souls of the American people may be measured by the fact that the supposed “two-party system” presented a choice between arguably the two worst human beings in the entire country, and almost every voter — a hundred and twenty-eight million adults —...
America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published February 22, 2020 · Last modified February 23, 2020
I have nothing to say today about Roger Stone’s sentencing, or Donald Trump’s almost certain eventual presidential pardon of Stone, which he will issue for no reason other than because Stone is a Trump “strategist” (aka sycophant). Nor do I have any conjectures to make about Trump’s rehiring of a very young “loyalist” (aka bootlicking groupie) as head of the presidential personnel office,...
Donald Trump issued a slew of pardons and commuted sentences yesterday, some of them directly related to political donors to Trump himself or his Republican defenders. The case that got the most attention, and which I discussed here yesterday, was his commutation of Rod Blagojevich’s sentence for selling Barack Obama’s vacated senate seat in Illinois. It makes perfect sense for Trump to find...
In the wake of his party’s official proclamation of his untouchability, Demagogue Extraordinaire Donald Trump decided it would make great optics to take the presidential armored car on a pre-race lap at the Daytona 500, after a “dramatic” flyover in Air Force One. In other words, he co-opted an annual sporting event, one popular with Republican voters, as an election campaign rally, which...
From Michael D. Langone, “Clinical Update on Cults,” in Psychiatric Times, July 2, 1996: The manipulativeness of cults is similar to the debility-dependency-dread (DDD) syndrome explanation of how the Chinese communists were able to gain a high degree of control over American POWs during the Korean conflict (Farber and colleagues). Contemporary cults, which operate in an open society and do not have the...
When all is equally agitated, nothing appears to be agitated, as in a ship. When all tend to debauchery, none appears to do so. He who stops draws attention to the excess of others, like a fixed point. — Pascal, Pensées, §382 A small event this past weekend crystallized the full ugliness of what America has become in the age of Donald Trump...
The democratic world has reached the “screaming in your sleep” point in the nightmare scenario George Washington warned of in his “Farewell Address,” namely the devolution of political debate into unthinking partisanship. For a perfectly clear object lesson on the danger Washington feared, we need look no further than the case of John Bolton’s relationship with Donald Trump’s Republican Party establishment. When Bolton...
The ever-shrinking band of Americans who perceive themselves as both sincere Christians and principled conservatives have spent much of the past four years staring at the silent heavens, praying for an answer to their urgent inquiry: How can all these supposed evangelical Christians, including even the alleged leaders of the movement, sell their souls so easily to the cult of Donald Trump? There...
I know the title of this post, referring to MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews gushing about his emotional response while listening to Barack Obama speak, evokes a gross image, and an even grosser level of puppy love politics, the likes of which so-called American conservatives and their media heroes used to mock relentlessly, when they were not issuing sincere dire warnings about the level...
I wonder how many of the tens of millions of Americans supporting Trump today, and condemning the Democrats for their “phony impeachment” and their “attack on American democracy,” were nodding their heads in agreement when Trump said, eleven years ago, that Nancy Pelosi — “a very impressive person, I like her a lot” — should have pursued the impeachment of George W. Bush,...
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