Enjoying the view from Limbo
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,...
As you know, Highly Disputed Heavyweight Champion Donald “Pantywaist” Trumpkov has responded to a direct question about the Hong Kong protesters by crawling all the way across the Pacific Ocean in a championship-caliber grovel to Xi Jinping, begging Xi on live television to forgive him for having no choice but to publicly express a marginal, insincere bit of backhanded damning-with-faint-praise sympathy with those...
I, Daren Jonescu, hereby concede defeat in the Trump Wars. I sincerely believe that not one human being who was ever inclined to support Trump has had his head turned, or his rational faculty activated in the least, by anything I have ever written about Trump, or by all that I have written on the subject taken collectively. And none ever will. Tribalism...
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