Bleach Blonde Bad Built Butch Body in Congress? Oh you mean Marjorie!

[Hookah Horns 3083]

1 hour ago, washparkhorn said:

Hoyer's Speech:

 

Damn good stuff. Better than anything I saw during the debate on impeachment. 

[Hookah Horns 3083]

2 hours ago, Lobo said:

a half-'tard named Marjorie Greene 

Don't sell her short, man. She's 200 proof tard. 

[Hookah Horns 3083]

37 minutes ago, Woland said:

Honestly, will it make a difference if any Democrats sit on the committees? They can spend their time doing things that will actually achieve results.

It's pretty much impossible to achieve anything in Congress if you're not on a committee. Which is why removing MTG is a fairly big deal. 

[Brandywine 1317]

Will she just be put on other committees or is she banned from all committees?

[TexasEd 8077]

1 hour ago, conVINCEd said:

Upton is a good Republican.  He’s also Kate Upton’s uncle.

Edited February 5, 2021 by TexasEd

[pyrohornIII 4823]

 

8 hours ago, TexArcher said:

Bingo.  

I said for years that no one should've hated Trump more than a true conservative, because you had all the reasons to hate him that the rest of us did, plus he hijacked your party and turned it into something else.

What happened to the party of family values, small federal government, and responsible government spending?  Sure, you only paid lip service to those things before, but at least you tried. 

Then Trump came along and made complete hypocrites of all of you.

Y'all accused Obama of wanting to be king with his executive orders then said nothing when Trump used exectutive orders even more frequently.  You bashed Obama for playing golf then said nothing when Trump played exponentially more golf.  Obama's wife was a whore for showing her shoulders that one time, but you don't care that I've seen Melania's naked fake tits on the internet and Donald fucked literal whores behind his pregnant wife's back.  You bashed Obama's spending then said nothing when Trump started a trade war with China and sank our soybean industry then gave the soybean farmers silos full of tax dollars to make it up to them, not to mention the exploding annual deficit even before Covid hit.

To be fair, I understand that most of you get your "news" from Fox, so you're not even aware of how hypocritical you're being because you missed most of the above.

But god damn, get a hold of yourselves.  Surely some of you understand that this OAN/MAGA/QAnon shit is going to splinter your party and make you irrelevant for literally decades.  And as much as you deserve that, we're better off with two strong parties to counter-balance each other.  So grow a pair and take your party back from the wingnuts.

Many of them feel the GOP, like the Titanic, is unsinkable.   They'll hold on and patch things up when clear of the iceberg.  The GOP is the only ship that can get them truly to the land of the 'Murican Dream.

1 hour ago, Bullneck said:

[elfenix 34334]

That happened 4 years ago when the Access Hollywood tapes came out.  How many here just assumed at that point, "Well, he's done now."  And yet he was elected.
 

Thanks in part to some carefully timed russian/wikileaks/Roger stone podesta email dumps that totally weren't coordinated with the Trump campaign, that story was up against 2 other massive stories that day.

[Bullneck 19212]

8 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

It's pretty much impossible to achieve anything in Congress if you're not on a committee. Which is why removing MTG is a fairly big deal. 

 

9 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

It's pretty much impossible to achieve anything in Congress if you're not on a committee. Which is why removing MTG is a fairly big deal. 

I think this is one reason the Q thing will eventually burn out.  The people who elected her may be old fashioned country gibberish spouting morons but they probably want someone who can get something done.  Voting for her is a wasted vote.

[Gatorubet 30320]

"Look, I'm not a Nazi.  The whole 'final solution' thing seems to me a bit too much.  I mean, not that you can believe the media.  "Auschwitz" sounds like fake news.  But anyway, I'm not a Nazi.  I just support them with my vote, without fail, because of their economic policies, and I hate commies, and if I support anyone but the Nazis, I'm supporting a commie.  And also because they bomb the Dutch, because fuck the Dutch.  Let's not forget that.  It's important."
The polling numbers are unambiguous.  The votes in Congress are unequivocal.  If you continue to support the GOP, maybe because of mah guns, or mah bortions, you necessarily support the current core point of the party: everyone opposed to us drinks baby blood and is pedophiles and is in league with the Chinese, the zionists, and the commies from commieland, and the election was stolen by the ghost of Chavez and Dominion and the Hamburglar, and any and all means of opposing these bad people is fine, including violent action like summarily executing them.  That whole last part.....it's kind of a big deal.
It's like arguing that you should stay in a relationship with a woman because she's got nice legs......but she also regularly lights all of your stuff on fire, you wake up to her trying to stab you on the regular, and she already murdered your dog and brags about it.  It, ummm, really doesn't matter how nice her legs are -- you're continuing to date a murderous animal abusing psychopath, and that's a bad choice.
 

Pics of legs not showing up.

[Woland 749]

13 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

It's pretty much impossible to achieve anything in Congress if you're not on a committee. Which is why removing MTG is a fairly big deal. 

Honest question. Was this really the case when the Republicans were last the majority party in the House? I seem to recall Republican leadership making the decisions and the committees rubber stamping their decisions.

[FondrenRoad 4378]

3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

 

It's like arguing that you should stay in a relationship with a woman because she's got nice legs......but she also regularly lights all of your stuff on fire, you wake up to her trying to stab you on the regular, and she already murdered your dog and brags about it.  It, ummm, really doesn't matter how nice her legs are -- you're continuing to date a murderous animal abusing psychopath, and that's a bad choice.

 

Damn, you were talking about my dream girl there up until the dog killing part.  If I'm waking up about to get stabbed, the night before must have been fun. 

[Biff Tannen 45745]

2 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

And NoHo Hank

 

[Chuckie Finster 22747]

I think this is one reason the Q thing will eventually burn out.  The people who elected her may be old fashioned country gibberish spouting morons but they probably want someone who can get something done.  Voting for her is a wasted vote.

Getting on Twitter every day and whining about how the Demonrats are out to get her is far more important to her constituents than passing some dumb bill in Congress. Playing the victim is the only core belief the current Republican party has.
She’ll win by more in 2022.

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

 

 

Almost 20 pages in 9 days. Crazy.

 

[South Austin 52620]

18 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

I think this is one reason the Q thing will eventually burn out.  The people who elected her may be old fashioned country gibberish spouting morons but they probably want someone who can get something done.  Voting for her is a wasted vote.

I doubt her constituents know or care of any specific accomplishments in Congress other than she says stupid inflammatory things that appeal to their IQ. They’ll gladly vote for her again.

[Hookah Horns 3083]

19 minutes ago, Woland said:

Honest question. Was this really the case when the Republicans were last the majority party in the House? I seem to recall Republican leadership making the decisions and the committees rubber stamping their decisions.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but for a long time now the committees and subcommittees are who conduct investigations and write all the bills. The majority party leadership, of course, sets the agenda. 

If you're not on a committee basically all you can do is vote on things brought before the whole chamber. 

[Hookah Horns 3083]

31 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

 

I think this is one reason the Q thing will eventually burn out.  The people who elected her may be old fashioned country gibberish spouting morons but they probably want someone who can get something done.  Voting for her is a wasted vote.

Indeed, that's why Steve King finally lost his seat after years and years of being an open white supremacist. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

5 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

Indeed, that's why Steve King finally lost his seat after years and years of being an open white supremacist. 

I see your point, but with 'owning the libs' now a past-time of a large percentage of social media purveyors, she may adopt Cawthorn's strategy and just fundraise and tweet all day. Worked for her idol. If she travels back and forth talking to people it 'looks' like she is doing something, and let's be honest: some of those who voted for her really don't understand how all this works.

[Hookah Horns 3083]

6 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

I see your point, but with 'owning the libs' now a past-time of a large percentage of social media purveyors, she may adopt Cawthorn's strategy and just fundraise and tweet all day. Worked for her idol. If she travels back and forth talking to people it 'looks' like she is doing something, and let's be honest: some of those who voted for her really don't understand how all this works.

Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all if she gets re-elected in a landslide. I really think she's going to be Trump's running mate in '24.

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

9 minutes ago, Hookah Horns said:

Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me at all if she gets re-elected in a landslide. I really think she's going to be Trump's running mate in '24.

Did you put her down in the 2024 thread for that? If not, make a post. We'll see in a few years if we make it that far.

[Chooky 13319]

 

[Jive Turkey 12644]

1 hour ago, Hookah Horns said:

It's pretty much impossible to achieve anything in Congress if you're not on a committee. Which is why removing MTG is a fairly big deal. 

How many of the newly elected Republicans want to achieve anything? Not MTG. Not Madison Cawthorn. This new wave of Rs is solely there to troll and make libs cry by simply being there. By winning elections. 

If she actually cared about legislating, this would be a big deal. But she takes after Dear Orange Leader. She’s there for the tweets. And the grift. 

Now, expelling her ass would be a fairly big deal. 

[elfenix 34334]

1 hour ago, Gatorubet said:

Pics of legs not showing up.

i think all the pics of mfcdg are gone

[Francisco 2.0 32430]

David Roth @ Defector wrote a great piece today.  Longish, but eventually gets to the point.  Maybe his best work in months.  

To paraphrase one of the commentors; his 2nd to last paragraph is probably the best summary of the MAGA belief system I've ever read:

 

Quote

The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage. The terrified and fuming derangement that conservative media sought to embed in its consumers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks, has blossomed into this: a rising army of impossibly unhappy people, their ambitions both vague and vast, who have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point.

 

Here's the article:

https://defector.com/the-march-of-the-american-kooks/

 

Spoiler

Steve Carlton won 27 games and the National League Cy Young Award in 1972, lost 20 games and gave up more earned runs than any pitcher in the league in 1973, and then stopped speaking to the media entirely over the next few seasons. Carlton continued not to talk—not as he won the Cy Young three more times in six years, not after he won his 200th career game or his 300th, and not as the lightning in his left arm first flickered and then finally failed, by which point Carlton was trying to make back the $10 million that an unscrupulous agent had taken from him. During that purgatorial final stretch, Carlton shuffled through five different teams in two years. He won a World Series with the Cardinals when he was first becoming what he would be, in 1967, and then another with the Twins in 1987, as a 42-year-old emergency starter with an ERA that started with a six. He pitched brilliantly for both the decades between those triumphs. 

There was one particularly unlikable Philadelphia columnist that Carlton particularly didn’t want to talk to, but mostly he didn’t want to play his designated part in the industrial process of baseball media, and so just did not. The people covering Carlton called it The Big Silence, and hated him for it. Carlton finally started talking, a little desperately, near the end, but when he insisted, after a dead-cat bounce of quasi-competence with the White Sox in 1986, that he could still pitch into his 40s, the Chicago Tribune‘s Bernie Lincicome wrote that he “should have kept his mouth shut.” Lincicome added a line break for emphasis before concluding, “at least when he wasn’t talking, he didn’t lie.” 

Carlton received 96 percent of the vote in his first year on the Hall of Fame ballot, in 1994; among starting pitchers, only Tom Seaver has ever received a higher percentage. Carlton was uncharacteristically or conveniently or maybe even authentically voluble after his election, and seemingly quite happy to talk. “I thought he did a super job answering questions,” Hall of Fame vice president Bill Guilfoyle told Murray Chass of the New York Times in April of 1994. “It was focused strictly on baseball. He made some pertinent observations about hitters, pitchers, catchers.” 

The reason Chass was asking, and the reason Guilfoyle was moved to mention that Carlton stuck to sports in those interviews, was a story that Pat Jordan had written about Carlton for that month’s issue of Philadelphia Magazine. Carlton was known as a fastidious, driven, multiply eccentric baseball genius during his career, but also only known by the observable public-facing edges of his personal unusualness—the “mood behavior” room in which he sat before starts staring at a painting of the ocean; the arm exercises he did in a bucket of brown rice; the Eastern philosophy he read and the various esoteric disciplines he was purported to practice. The story in Philadelphia Magazine filled that outline in, in Carlton’s own words, and what had appeared from the outside to be a typical ballplayer mishmash of useful affirmations and secret tenets was revealed as something both more and less coherent, and which now seems much more prosaic. This was how Tim McCarver, Carlton’s longtime personal catcher, came to tell Chass that he “could say, with all the assurance in the world, that Lefty is not a bigot and he is not an anti-Semite.” 

You have probably guessed that McCarver said this because Carlton was quoted saying some extremely fucking bigoted and anti-Semitic things in Jordan’s story.

But Carlton said a lot of things in that story, and the sheer volume of his various conflicting and often contradictory conspiratorial beliefs was such that their roaring and furious confluence obliterated any legible politics. Still, Bob Ryan was moved last week to make the comparison, despite Twitter’s inadvisable character count restrictions, between Carlton and huffy Hall of Fame snubee Curt Schilling.

Yes, Carlton was living in an earthship in southwestern Colorado, doing yoga and hoarding guns and preparing for The Revolution in whatever Red Dawn–ish guise it might arrive, but he was not doing any of this for just one reason. As Jordan wrote, “One minute he’ll say, ‘The Russian and U.S. governments fill the air with low-frequency sound waves meant to control us,'” Jordan wrote, “and the next he’ll say, ‘The Elders of Zion rule the world,’ and then, ‘The British MI-5 and-6 intelligence agencies have ruled the world since 1812,’ and, ‘Twelve Jewish bankers meeting in Switzerland rule the world,’ and, ‘The world is controlled by a committee of 300 which meets at a roundtable in Rome.'” 

Carlton also believed a bunch of hoary, bigoted bullshit about AIDS and the Clintons and the other things that people who like to believe hoary, bigoted bullshit liked to believe during that era. There is a name for people like this, with beliefs like these, and if it is a bit dismissive, this short word is also the only one capacious enough to cover that blunderbuss blast of anxiety and suspicion and willful, frightened, wholly cosmetic certitude. Steve Carlton, it turned out, was a purebred American Kook.

---

In his willingness to entertain any fantastical or conspiratorial explanation for why he felt so crushingly anxious and hunted and betrayed all the time, Carlton was also an early adopter. He had Facebook Brain a generation or two before Facebook existed, although it’s more accurate to say that Carlton worked assiduously to give himself a disorder that is now much easier to catch. “Lefty reads too many books,” McCarver told Chass. “If he’s guilty of anything, it’s believing some of the material he reads.” 

That’s true enough, to a point, but one of the signatures of Facebook Brain is how that load-bearing “some of” is only ever deployed in self-defense. The point and the principle is to believe all of it, even and especially where those explanations cancel out or contradict one another, and to hold those beliefs tightest where they are most tenuous. This is fundamental to the belief system; to do any less would be cowardly, not merely a concession but an actual betrayal. 

As politics, this doesn’t really work, for the same obvious reasons that, say, a grapefruit does not work as a helicopter; as a worldview it is among other things hopelessly recursive, a locked groove filled with static. As a lifestyle, though, it is pretty straightforward: a rejection not just of conventional wisdom but consensus reality, done in defiance and with relentlessly signifying intensity, wherever and whenever the opportunity presents itself, always. 

Steve Carlton, to his great credit, has stayed on his ranch, planting fruit trees and selling autographs when he needs money. He believes whatever he believes and isn’t really hurting anyone. This is how most people are, mostly. But the people who think or suspect or are otherwise inclined in the ways Carlton was now have both the capacity and the incentive to perform that belief. For some, it’s an opportunity to make money and win attention as an influencer and advocate for that lifestyle, but the lifestyle also offers every acolyte an opportunity to become an important character in the broader seething story. In a society that signals, in a million brutally overt ways, that your life does not really count for very much, it is easy in the abstract to see the appeal of being able to opt into something a little more significant—to be a leader, a rescuer, a hero or a star or just a soldier on the winning side. Which, sadly, brings us back to those particulars, and what they demand.

“This is a sharing information protest and march against everything COVID, Vaccine, PCR Tests, Lockdowns, Masks, Fauci, Gates, Newsom, China, digital tracking, etc,” organizers of a SCAMDEMIC PROTEST/MARCH that briefly shut down a vaccination site at Dodger Stadium over the weekend explained in a social media post advertising the event. “Please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire,” they requested, “as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple.” 

Put all that weirdly superior, gleefully expansive, relentlessly aggrieved incoherence into action and you have what we’ve got—not just people blasting their friends and family with weird corrosive bullshit nonstop, but people preventing strangers from getting a vaccine during a time of plague, because they wanted those people to have to see them, and to have to deal with them. As it happened, many of the people at the Dodger Stadium action wore their Trump shit anyway. The strange fidelities of this movement are tragic, but they are also very deeply held.

---

Here is the synchronicity that binds old-fashioned American kookery’s longstanding suspicions and signature fantasies to the person Donald Trump, and which sent them charging into the Capitol last month ready to commit murder in his service, and which has them still standing back and standing by to advance a fantastical and self-invented agenda of retribution and exterminative violence. Trump’s inexcusable celebrity and singularly rancid self are the irritant around which this weird pearl has formed, but the process was perfectly natural. 

Without social media, Trump himself is a spent force, just another podgy golf asshole griping in a country club. But also he is airborne, now. 

He is alive in all the Americans who are not just blinkered and baffled and vain enough to consider wearing a mask into a supermarket somehow the same thing as dying in the holocaust, but who also believe that their confrontations with the tyranny of The Door Guy At Trader Joe’s must be streamed someplace where people can throw it some hearts, or likes, or fuming devil faces, or money. Social media is bad for people like this in the ways that it’s bad for everyone, but there is no more intoxicating or deranging a gift for a person who is already like this than something that looks and feels so much like a megaphone.

The belief system that has emerged from these incentives and pressures is defined by simple stubbornness and a uniquely curdled hedonism; the game is to believe (or, anyway, to push) whatever feels hottest, which is what you yourself find most intriguing and that which centers you most. From there, the gig is to just keep on finding ever more elaborate and extravagant and fervid ways to profess that belief, all the time. It is Trump’s personal damage to believe that the world revolves around him and his every cheesy chiseling gripe; his vanity is limitless, but it limits him in turn. But his legacy is and will long be everywhere around us, in the people he has empowered to think and feel and act and be more and more like him, and who believe that they can become powerful and rich and safe in the ways that he is by acting in the ways that he acts.

To return to Bob Ryan’s binary, it is not quite right to say that this development is why Steve Carlton is in Cooperstown and Curt Schilling is still shy of induction. Carlton was one of the best pitchers of the last century, while Schilling is nowhere near that on merit, and if he’s probably a Hall of Famer he is also inarguably enough of an asshole to make the decision difficult. The difference is not just that Carlton didn’t say anything for a couple decades and, once he finally broke his silence, mostly talked about 1) how he was done wrong and 2) what the queers are doing to our soil, and it’s not even how much harder he needed to work to get up to speed on his goofy-vile beliefs. It’s that Carlton, unlike Schilling, had not come to believe that it was his sacred duty to make his goofy-vile beliefs everyone else’s business all the time. The compulsive shitposting and defiant ugliness that made Schilling toxic are not things he can turn off; they are quite plainly who and what he believes himself to be. 

For all the clammy and overdetermined machinations by the aspirants to Trump’s throne, it is plain to see which people in our politics are most authentically like him. The new congressional Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert take after Trump in their thirst and strident idiocy, but mostly in their understanding that their jobs are to sell, and complain, and post and post and post, and never to disclaim any of the lazy suspicions and secondhand gripes and idle vendettas out of which they’ve fashioned their public selves. As with Trump, the goal is in one sense more about presence than power; as also with Trump, and with Schilling, the obligation to that thirst runs far deeper than the ridiculous outward presentation would suggest. 

The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage. The terrified and fuming derangement that conservative media sought to embed in its consumers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks, has blossomed into this: a rising army of impossibly unhappy people, their ambitions both vague and vast, who have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point. 

Post by post and provocation by provocation, it is absolutely as stupid and ridiculous as it looks. But whether it’s out of some curdled honor or sincere belief, the more important point is that they would absolutely kill to keep it all going, because they cannot imagine any way of being outside of it. For all the wild talk of vengeance and violence and humiliation, the fantasy catharsis of firing squads and military tribunals and the rope, there’s nothing they truly want on the other side of those lurid resolutions. They need to feel like this all the time, because they can’t imagine another way to feel. This is the last and most meaningful tenet of this vain and annihilating and wildly metastatic politics: It just can’t stop.

 

[Biff Tannen 45745]

4 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

How many of the newly elected Republicans want to achieve anything? Not MTG. Not Madison Cawthorn. This new wave of Rs is solely there to troll and make libs cry by simply being there. By winning elections. 

If she actually cared about legislating, this would be a big deal. But she takes after Dear Orange Leader. She’s there for the tweets. And the grift. 

Now, expelling her ass would be a fairly big deal. 

This is correct. There is nothing about governing that interests these people. It’s all a grift. 

[Hookah Horns 3083]

7 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

How many of the newly elected Republicans want to achieve anything? Not MTG. Not Madison Cawthorn. This new wave of Rs is solely there to troll and make libs cry by simply being there. By winning elections. 

If she actually cared about legislating, this would be a big deal. But she takes after Dear Orange Leader. She’s there for the tweets. And the grift. 

Now, expelling her ass would be a fairly big deal. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

7 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

David Roth @ Defector wrote a great piece today.  Longish, but eventually gets to the point.  Maybe his best work in months.  

To paraphrase one of the commentors; his 2nd to last paragraph is probably the best summary of the MAGA belief system I've ever read:

 

 

Here's the article:

https://defector.com/the-march-of-the-american-kooks/

 

  Hide contents

Steve Carlton won 27 games and the National League Cy Young Award in 1972, lost 20 games and gave up more earned runs than any pitcher in the league in 1973, and then stopped speaking to the media entirely over the next few seasons. Carlton continued not to talk—not as he won the Cy Young three more times in six years, not after he won his 200th career game or his 300th, and not as the lightning in his left arm first flickered and then finally failed, by which point Carlton was trying to make back the $10 million that an unscrupulous agent had taken from him. During that purgatorial final stretch, Carlton shuffled through five different teams in two years. He won a World Series with the Cardinals when he was first becoming what he would be, in 1967, and then another with the Twins in 1987, as a 42-year-old emergency starter with an ERA that started with a six. He pitched brilliantly for both the decades between those triumphs. 

There was one particularly unlikable Philadelphia columnist that Carlton particularly didn’t want to talk to, but mostly he didn’t want to play his designated part in the industrial process of baseball media, and so just did not. The people covering Carlton called it The Big Silence, and hated him for it. Carlton finally started talking, a little desperately, near the end, but when he insisted, after a dead-cat bounce of quasi-competence with the White Sox in 1986, that he could still pitch into his 40s, the Chicago Tribune‘s Bernie Lincicome wrote that he “should have kept his mouth shut.” Lincicome added a line break for emphasis before concluding, “at least when he wasn’t talking, he didn’t lie.” 

Carlton received 96 percent of the vote in his first year on the Hall of Fame ballot, in 1994; among starting pitchers, only Tom Seaver has ever received a higher percentage. Carlton was uncharacteristically or conveniently or maybe even authentically voluble after his election, and seemingly quite happy to talk. “I thought he did a super job answering questions,” Hall of Fame vice president Bill Guilfoyle told Murray Chass of the New York Times in April of 1994. “It was focused strictly on baseball. He made some pertinent observations about hitters, pitchers, catchers.” 

The reason Chass was asking, and the reason Guilfoyle was moved to mention that Carlton stuck to sports in those interviews, was a story that Pat Jordan had written about Carlton for that month’s issue of Philadelphia Magazine. Carlton was known as a fastidious, driven, multiply eccentric baseball genius during his career, but also only known by the observable public-facing edges of his personal unusualness—the “mood behavior” room in which he sat before starts staring at a painting of the ocean; the arm exercises he did in a bucket of brown rice; the Eastern philosophy he read and the various esoteric disciplines he was purported to practice. The story in Philadelphia Magazine filled that outline in, in Carlton’s own words, and what had appeared from the outside to be a typical ballplayer mishmash of useful affirmations and secret tenets was revealed as something both more and less coherent, and which now seems much more prosaic. This was how Tim McCarver, Carlton’s longtime personal catcher, came to tell Chass that he “could say, with all the assurance in the world, that Lefty is not a bigot and he is not an anti-Semite.” 

You have probably guessed that McCarver said this because Carlton was quoted saying some extremely fucking bigoted and anti-Semitic things in Jordan’s story.

But Carlton said a lot of things in that story, and the sheer volume of his various conflicting and often contradictory conspiratorial beliefs was such that their roaring and furious confluence obliterated any legible politics. Still, Bob Ryan was moved last week to make the comparison, despite Twitter’s inadvisable character count restrictions, between Carlton and huffy Hall of Fame snubee Curt Schilling.

Yes, Carlton was living in an earthship in southwestern Colorado, doing yoga and hoarding guns and preparing for The Revolution in whatever Red Dawn–ish guise it might arrive, but he was not doing any of this for just one reason. As Jordan wrote, “One minute he’ll say, ‘The Russian and U.S. governments fill the air with low-frequency sound waves meant to control us,'” Jordan wrote, “and the next he’ll say, ‘The Elders of Zion rule the world,’ and then, ‘The British MI-5 and-6 intelligence agencies have ruled the world since 1812,’ and, ‘Twelve Jewish bankers meeting in Switzerland rule the world,’ and, ‘The world is controlled by a committee of 300 which meets at a roundtable in Rome.'” 

Carlton also believed a bunch of hoary, bigoted bullshit about AIDS and the Clintons and the other things that people who like to believe hoary, bigoted bullshit liked to believe during that era. There is a name for people like this, with beliefs like these, and if it is a bit dismissive, this short word is also the only one capacious enough to cover that blunderbuss blast of anxiety and suspicion and willful, frightened, wholly cosmetic certitude. Steve Carlton, it turned out, was a purebred American Kook.

---

In his willingness to entertain any fantastical or conspiratorial explanation for why he felt so crushingly anxious and hunted and betrayed all the time, Carlton was also an early adopter. He had Facebook Brain a generation or two before Facebook existed, although it’s more accurate to say that Carlton worked assiduously to give himself a disorder that is now much easier to catch. “Lefty reads too many books,” McCarver told Chass. “If he’s guilty of anything, it’s believing some of the material he reads.” 

That’s true enough, to a point, but one of the signatures of Facebook Brain is how that load-bearing “some of” is only ever deployed in self-defense. The point and the principle is to believe all of it, even and especially where those explanations cancel out or contradict one another, and to hold those beliefs tightest where they are most tenuous. This is fundamental to the belief system; to do any less would be cowardly, not merely a concession but an actual betrayal. 

As politics, this doesn’t really work, for the same obvious reasons that, say, a grapefruit does not work as a helicopter; as a worldview it is among other things hopelessly recursive, a locked groove filled with static. As a lifestyle, though, it is pretty straightforward: a rejection not just of conventional wisdom but consensus reality, done in defiance and with relentlessly signifying intensity, wherever and whenever the opportunity presents itself, always. 

Steve Carlton, to his great credit, has stayed on his ranch, planting fruit trees and selling autographs when he needs money. He believes whatever he believes and isn’t really hurting anyone. This is how most people are, mostly. But the people who think or suspect or are otherwise inclined in the ways Carlton was now have both the capacity and the incentive to perform that belief. For some, it’s an opportunity to make money and win attention as an influencer and advocate for that lifestyle, but the lifestyle also offers every acolyte an opportunity to become an important character in the broader seething story. In a society that signals, in a million brutally overt ways, that your life does not really count for very much, it is easy in the abstract to see the appeal of being able to opt into something a little more significant—to be a leader, a rescuer, a hero or a star or just a soldier on the winning side. Which, sadly, brings us back to those particulars, and what they demand.

“This is a sharing information protest and march against everything COVID, Vaccine, PCR Tests, Lockdowns, Masks, Fauci, Gates, Newsom, China, digital tracking, etc,” organizers of a SCAMDEMIC PROTEST/MARCH that briefly shut down a vaccination site at Dodger Stadium over the weekend explained in a social media post advertising the event. “Please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire,” they requested, “as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple.” 

Put all that weirdly superior, gleefully expansive, relentlessly aggrieved incoherence into action and you have what we’ve got—not just people blasting their friends and family with weird corrosive bullshit nonstop, but people preventing strangers from getting a vaccine during a time of plague, because they wanted those people to have to see them, and to have to deal with them. As it happened, many of the people at the Dodger Stadium action wore their Trump shit anyway. The strange fidelities of this movement are tragic, but they are also very deeply held.

---

Here is the synchronicity that binds old-fashioned American kookery’s longstanding suspicions and signature fantasies to the person Donald Trump, and which sent them charging into the Capitol last month ready to commit murder in his service, and which has them still standing back and standing by to advance a fantastical and self-invented agenda of retribution and exterminative violence. Trump’s inexcusable celebrity and singularly rancid self are the irritant around which this weird pearl has formed, but the process was perfectly natural. 

Without social media, Trump himself is a spent force, just another podgy golf asshole griping in a country club. But also he is airborne, now. 

He is alive in all the Americans who are not just blinkered and baffled and vain enough to consider wearing a mask into a supermarket somehow the same thing as dying in the holocaust, but who also believe that their confrontations with the tyranny of The Door Guy At Trader Joe’s must be streamed someplace where people can throw it some hearts, or likes, or fuming devil faces, or money. Social media is bad for people like this in the ways that it’s bad for everyone, but there is no more intoxicating or deranging a gift for a person who is already like this than something that looks and feels so much like a megaphone.

The belief system that has emerged from these incentives and pressures is defined by simple stubbornness and a uniquely curdled hedonism; the game is to believe (or, anyway, to push) whatever feels hottest, which is what you yourself find most intriguing and that which centers you most. From there, the gig is to just keep on finding ever more elaborate and extravagant and fervid ways to profess that belief, all the time. It is Trump’s personal damage to believe that the world revolves around him and his every cheesy chiseling gripe; his vanity is limitless, but it limits him in turn. But his legacy is and will long be everywhere around us, in the people he has empowered to think and feel and act and be more and more like him, and who believe that they can become powerful and rich and safe in the ways that he is by acting in the ways that he acts.

To return to Bob Ryan’s binary, it is not quite right to say that this development is why Steve Carlton is in Cooperstown and Curt Schilling is still shy of induction. Carlton was one of the best pitchers of the last century, while Schilling is nowhere near that on merit, and if he’s probably a Hall of Famer he is also inarguably enough of an asshole to make the decision difficult. The difference is not just that Carlton didn’t say anything for a couple decades and, once he finally broke his silence, mostly talked about 1) how he was done wrong and 2) what the queers are doing to our soil, and it’s not even how much harder he needed to work to get up to speed on his goofy-vile beliefs. It’s that Carlton, unlike Schilling, had not come to believe that it was his sacred duty to make his goofy-vile beliefs everyone else’s business all the time. The compulsive shitposting and defiant ugliness that made Schilling toxic are not things he can turn off; they are quite plainly who and what he believes himself to be. 

For all the clammy and overdetermined machinations by the aspirants to Trump’s throne, it is plain to see which people in our politics are most authentically like him. The new congressional Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert take after Trump in their thirst and strident idiocy, but mostly in their understanding that their jobs are to sell, and complain, and post and post and post, and never to disclaim any of the lazy suspicions and secondhand gripes and idle vendettas out of which they’ve fashioned their public selves. As with Trump, the goal is in one sense more about presence than power; as also with Trump, and with Schilling, the obligation to that thirst runs far deeper than the ridiculous outward presentation would suggest. 

The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage. The terrified and fuming derangement that conservative media sought to embed in its consumers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks, has blossomed into this: a rising army of impossibly unhappy people, their ambitions both vague and vast, who have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point. 

Post by post and provocation by provocation, it is absolutely as stupid and ridiculous as it looks. But whether it’s out of some curdled honor or sincere belief, the more important point is that they would absolutely kill to keep it all going, because they cannot imagine any way of being outside of it. For all the wild talk of vengeance and violence and humiliation, the fantasy catharsis of firing squads and military tribunals and the rope, there’s nothing they truly want on the other side of those lurid resolutions. They need to feel like this all the time, because they can’t imagine another way to feel. This is the last and most meaningful tenet of this vain and annihilating and wildly metastatic politics: It just can’t stop.

 

Rep for that. I'm going to read it a second time. If I am being honest with myself, I have definitely gotten in the frame of mind the author describes. Standing on the ledge, miserable during the impeachment hearings and the whole long suffering final year of the 45th presidency. Just vacillating back and forth with anger and hopelessness. The best thing since the inauguration has been the press briefings because I tune in while working, catch the main points and then Shut. It. Off.

But the last bit, about the "wild talk of vengeance and violence?" While there may not be anything on the other side, it doesn't mean they won't keep up a violent frenzy--the bloodlust is real and in their social media driven voyeuristic world, they want to be stars.

[Beau Vine 54443]

1 hour ago, Bullneck said:

 

I think this is one reason the Q thing will eventually burn out.  The people who elected her may be old fashioned country gibberish spouting morons but they probably want someone who can get something done.  Voting for her is a wasted vote.

 

1 hour ago, Hookah Horns said:

It's pretty much impossible to achieve anything in Congress if you're not on a committee. Which is why removing MTG is a fairly big deal. 

Serious question...What exactly do you think they elected her to do?  Her entire platform seemed to be "TRUMP IS TEH BESTEST!!!"

[Hookah Horns 3083]

6 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

 

Serious question...What exactly do you think they elected her to do?  Her entire platform seemed to be "TRUMP IS TEH BESTEST!!!"

Obstruct and own the libs. Even that mandate is better served by being on a committee. 

[Biff Tannen 45745]

9 minutes ago, Beau Vine said:

  Her entire platform seemed to be "TRUMP IS TEH BESTEST!!!"

Also the platform of the Republican Party, as proven, literally, on their 2020 website. And of course, the Dotard himself. That’s his life mantra. 

[Pato del Muerto 52608]

I assume McCarthy gets to name her successor?  Is boobert assigned anywhere?

[TexasEd 8077]

1 minute ago, Pato del Muerto said:

I assume McCarthy gets to name her successor?  Is boobert assigned anywhere?

yeah, 2020 GED recipient the on the Education committee

[Woland 749]

Now she has time to head up the Qanon Caucus.

[atomheartbevo 89810]

11 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

Seems like McCarthy and other GOP leaders are still uncertain how to handle Trump. Trump seems to be powerless at the moment with zero social media but they're worried about the future if that isn't the case.

Trump is amazingly powerless without social media.  Shit, I was expecting him to be on nonstop every evening on Hannity.

I think the secret vote to keep Cheney proves that.

And I don't see him being able to get back into social media the way he was in the past.

[atomheartbevo 89810]

10 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

I keep seeing people say this, but I have trouble believing it, absent a LOT more organization by Trump.  Most of the Trumpers I see on Facebook aren't even particularly political; they're just king-worshipers.  They're not going to turn out to vote for a bunch of plebes not named "Trump."

2018 and the 2021 Georgia runoff shows they have a serious problem without Trump on the ticket, and 2020's general election showed there was a serious problem with Trump on the ballot.

McCarthy appears to be too fucking stupid to understand all of this, but Turtle sure as hell does, otherwise he doesn't publicly defend Cheney and publicly attack MGT.

[atomheartbevo 89810]

12 hours ago, wildcat09 said:

Maybe Smax is saying that the average Republican enjoys killing dogs?

So APD is full of Republicans?

[Pato del Muerto 52608]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

2018 and the 2021 Georgia runoff shows they have a serious problem without Trump on the ticket, and 2020's general election showed there was a serious problem with Trump on the ballot.

McCarthy appears to be too fucking stupid to understand all of this, but Turtle sure as hell does, otherwise he doesn't publicly defend Cheney and publicly attack MGT.

You say this as if McCarthy and McConnell don’t speak to each other. 

[Biff Tannen 45745]

7 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

Trump is amazingly powerless without social media.  Shit, I was expecting him to be on nonstop every evening on Hannity.

I’m pretty shocked by this as well. You’d think he would at least try. Are his minions trying to create new accounts and just being thwarted?  Or has he actually given up? 
 

Even if so, why is he not blanketing fox, OAN, newsmax and the like?

[atomheartbevo 89810]

Just now, Pato del Muerto said:

You say this as if McCarthy and McConnell don’t speak to each other. 

Oh I'm sure Turtle speaks to McCarthy a lot, but you can also speak to a little kid and tell them that what they are doing is going to end up getting them hurt or in trouble, and they are still going to plow ahead and do it, and then beg you to bail them out.

Turtle is playing a long game.  McCarthy seems to only be focused on what's immediately in front of him, and he doesn't realize that if he ignores the Trumpy part of the party,  it'll be a pain in the ass in the short term, but the Trumpanzees who are shitting in their hands and  flinging it around will  lose even more power than they already have now that Trump is out of the White House and off of social media.

McCarthy and Cheney have a shitload of power, they just refuse to exercise it.  Which is ironic, since all of the sudden the Democrats have learned how to exercise the power they have.  

These people need to go watch Game of Thrones or something.

[mchookem 16397]

3 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

 

 

[atomheartbevo 89810]

2 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

I’m pretty shocked by this as well. You’d think he would at least try. Are his minions trying to create new accounts and just being thwarted?  Or has he actually given up? 

Even if so, why is he not blanketing fox, OAN, newsmax and the like?

That's a huge mystery to me.  There's no way he doesn't have a fancy little gold-plated studio with an official looking desk setup at Mar-a-Lago to give remote interviews.

Hell, I'd think he'd be doing it just to try to hawk Trump merchandise and/or fundraise.

I'd laugh if he went all Howard Hughes.

[Bama Chick 28596]

I doubt her constituents know or care of any specific accomplishments in Congress other than she says stupid inflammatory things that appeal to their IQ. They’ll gladly vote for her again.

Imagine thinking the Deliverance troglodytes that call North Georgia home give two red hot shits about legislation or policy.

[UpperWestside 6190]

1 hour ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

David Roth @ Defector wrote a great piece today.  Longish, but eventually gets to the point.  Maybe his best work in months.  

To paraphrase one of the commentors; his 2nd to last paragraph is probably the best summary of the MAGA belief system I've ever read:

 

 

Here's the article:

https://defector.com/the-march-of-the-american-kooks/

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Steve Carlton won 27 games and the National League Cy Young Award in 1972, lost 20 games and gave up more earned runs than any pitcher in the league in 1973, and then stopped speaking to the media entirely over the next few seasons. Carlton continued not to talk—not as he won the Cy Young three more times in six years, not after he won his 200th career game or his 300th, and not as the lightning in his left arm first flickered and then finally failed, by which point Carlton was trying to make back the $10 million that an unscrupulous agent had taken from him. During that purgatorial final stretch, Carlton shuffled through five different teams in two years. He won a World Series with the Cardinals when he was first becoming what he would be, in 1967, and then another with the Twins in 1987, as a 42-year-old emergency starter with an ERA that started with a six. He pitched brilliantly for both the decades between those triumphs. 

There was one particularly unlikable Philadelphia columnist that Carlton particularly didn’t want to talk to, but mostly he didn’t want to play his designated part in the industrial process of baseball media, and so just did not. The people covering Carlton called it The Big Silence, and hated him for it. Carlton finally started talking, a little desperately, near the end, but when he insisted, after a dead-cat bounce of quasi-competence with the White Sox in 1986, that he could still pitch into his 40s, the Chicago Tribune‘s Bernie Lincicome wrote that he “should have kept his mouth shut.” Lincicome added a line break for emphasis before concluding, “at least when he wasn’t talking, he didn’t lie.” 

Carlton received 96 percent of the vote in his first year on the Hall of Fame ballot, in 1994; among starting pitchers, only Tom Seaver has ever received a higher percentage. Carlton was uncharacteristically or conveniently or maybe even authentically voluble after his election, and seemingly quite happy to talk. “I thought he did a super job answering questions,” Hall of Fame vice president Bill Guilfoyle told Murray Chass of the New York Times in April of 1994. “It was focused strictly on baseball. He made some pertinent observations about hitters, pitchers, catchers.” 

The reason Chass was asking, and the reason Guilfoyle was moved to mention that Carlton stuck to sports in those interviews, was a story that Pat Jordan had written about Carlton for that month’s issue of Philadelphia Magazine. Carlton was known as a fastidious, driven, multiply eccentric baseball genius during his career, but also only known by the observable public-facing edges of his personal unusualness—the “mood behavior” room in which he sat before starts staring at a painting of the ocean; the arm exercises he did in a bucket of brown rice; the Eastern philosophy he read and the various esoteric disciplines he was purported to practice. The story in Philadelphia Magazine filled that outline in, in Carlton’s own words, and what had appeared from the outside to be a typical ballplayer mishmash of useful affirmations and secret tenets was revealed as something both more and less coherent, and which now seems much more prosaic. This was how Tim McCarver, Carlton’s longtime personal catcher, came to tell Chass that he “could say, with all the assurance in the world, that Lefty is not a bigot and he is not an anti-Semite.” 

You have probably guessed that McCarver said this because Carlton was quoted saying some extremely fucking bigoted and anti-Semitic things in Jordan’s story.

But Carlton said a lot of things in that story, and the sheer volume of his various conflicting and often contradictory conspiratorial beliefs was such that their roaring and furious confluence obliterated any legible politics. Still, Bob Ryan was moved last week to make the comparison, despite Twitter’s inadvisable character count restrictions, between Carlton and huffy Hall of Fame snubee Curt Schilling.

Yes, Carlton was living in an earthship in southwestern Colorado, doing yoga and hoarding guns and preparing for The Revolution in whatever Red Dawn–ish guise it might arrive, but he was not doing any of this for just one reason. As Jordan wrote, “One minute he’ll say, ‘The Russian and U.S. governments fill the air with low-frequency sound waves meant to control us,'” Jordan wrote, “and the next he’ll say, ‘The Elders of Zion rule the world,’ and then, ‘The British MI-5 and-6 intelligence agencies have ruled the world since 1812,’ and, ‘Twelve Jewish bankers meeting in Switzerland rule the world,’ and, ‘The world is controlled by a committee of 300 which meets at a roundtable in Rome.'” 

Carlton also believed a bunch of hoary, bigoted bullshit about AIDS and the Clintons and the other things that people who like to believe hoary, bigoted bullshit liked to believe during that era. There is a name for people like this, with beliefs like these, and if it is a bit dismissive, this short word is also the only one capacious enough to cover that blunderbuss blast of anxiety and suspicion and willful, frightened, wholly cosmetic certitude. Steve Carlton, it turned out, was a purebred American Kook.

---

In his willingness to entertain any fantastical or conspiratorial explanation for why he felt so crushingly anxious and hunted and betrayed all the time, Carlton was also an early adopter. He had Facebook Brain a generation or two before Facebook existed, although it’s more accurate to say that Carlton worked assiduously to give himself a disorder that is now much easier to catch. “Lefty reads too many books,” McCarver told Chass. “If he’s guilty of anything, it’s believing some of the material he reads.” 

That’s true enough, to a point, but one of the signatures of Facebook Brain is how that load-bearing “some of” is only ever deployed in self-defense. The point and the principle is to believe all of it, even and especially where those explanations cancel out or contradict one another, and to hold those beliefs tightest where they are most tenuous. This is fundamental to the belief system; to do any less would be cowardly, not merely a concession but an actual betrayal. 

As politics, this doesn’t really work, for the same obvious reasons that, say, a grapefruit does not work as a helicopter; as a worldview it is among other things hopelessly recursive, a locked groove filled with static. As a lifestyle, though, it is pretty straightforward: a rejection not just of conventional wisdom but consensus reality, done in defiance and with relentlessly signifying intensity, wherever and whenever the opportunity presents itself, always. 

Steve Carlton, to his great credit, has stayed on his ranch, planting fruit trees and selling autographs when he needs money. He believes whatever he believes and isn’t really hurting anyone. This is how most people are, mostly. But the people who think or suspect or are otherwise inclined in the ways Carlton was now have both the capacity and the incentive to perform that belief. For some, it’s an opportunity to make money and win attention as an influencer and advocate for that lifestyle, but the lifestyle also offers every acolyte an opportunity to become an important character in the broader seething story. In a society that signals, in a million brutally overt ways, that your life does not really count for very much, it is easy in the abstract to see the appeal of being able to opt into something a little more significant—to be a leader, a rescuer, a hero or a star or just a soldier on the winning side. Which, sadly, brings us back to those particulars, and what they demand.

“This is a sharing information protest and march against everything COVID, Vaccine, PCR Tests, Lockdowns, Masks, Fauci, Gates, Newsom, China, digital tracking, etc,” organizers of a SCAMDEMIC PROTEST/MARCH that briefly shut down a vaccination site at Dodger Stadium over the weekend explained in a social media post advertising the event. “Please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire,” they requested, “as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple.” 

Put all that weirdly superior, gleefully expansive, relentlessly aggrieved incoherence into action and you have what we’ve got—not just people blasting their friends and family with weird corrosive bullshit nonstop, but people preventing strangers from getting a vaccine during a time of plague, because they wanted those people to have to see them, and to have to deal with them. As it happened, many of the people at the Dodger Stadium action wore their Trump shit anyway. The strange fidelities of this movement are tragic, but they are also very deeply held.

---

Here is the synchronicity that binds old-fashioned American kookery’s longstanding suspicions and signature fantasies to the person Donald Trump, and which sent them charging into the Capitol last month ready to commit murder in his service, and which has them still standing back and standing by to advance a fantastical and self-invented agenda of retribution and exterminative violence. Trump’s inexcusable celebrity and singularly rancid self are the irritant around which this weird pearl has formed, but the process was perfectly natural. 

Without social media, Trump himself is a spent force, just another podgy golf asshole griping in a country club. But also he is airborne, now. 

He is alive in all the Americans who are not just blinkered and baffled and vain enough to consider wearing a mask into a supermarket somehow the same thing as dying in the holocaust, but who also believe that their confrontations with the tyranny of The Door Guy At Trader Joe’s must be streamed someplace where people can throw it some hearts, or likes, or fuming devil faces, or money. Social media is bad for people like this in the ways that it’s bad for everyone, but there is no more intoxicating or deranging a gift for a person who is already like this than something that looks and feels so much like a megaphone.

The belief system that has emerged from these incentives and pressures is defined by simple stubbornness and a uniquely curdled hedonism; the game is to believe (or, anyway, to push) whatever feels hottest, which is what you yourself find most intriguing and that which centers you most. From there, the gig is to just keep on finding ever more elaborate and extravagant and fervid ways to profess that belief, all the time. It is Trump’s personal damage to believe that the world revolves around him and his every cheesy chiseling gripe; his vanity is limitless, but it limits him in turn. But his legacy is and will long be everywhere around us, in the people he has empowered to think and feel and act and be more and more like him, and who believe that they can become powerful and rich and safe in the ways that he is by acting in the ways that he acts.

To return to Bob Ryan’s binary, it is not quite right to say that this development is why Steve Carlton is in Cooperstown and Curt Schilling is still shy of induction. Carlton was one of the best pitchers of the last century, while Schilling is nowhere near that on merit, and if he’s probably a Hall of Famer he is also inarguably enough of an asshole to make the decision difficult. The difference is not just that Carlton didn’t say anything for a couple decades and, once he finally broke his silence, mostly talked about 1) how he was done wrong and 2) what the queers are doing to our soil, and it’s not even how much harder he needed to work to get up to speed on his goofy-vile beliefs. It’s that Carlton, unlike Schilling, had not come to believe that it was his sacred duty to make his goofy-vile beliefs everyone else’s business all the time. The compulsive shitposting and defiant ugliness that made Schilling toxic are not things he can turn off; they are quite plainly who and what he believes himself to be. 

For all the clammy and overdetermined machinations by the aspirants to Trump’s throne, it is plain to see which people in our politics are most authentically like him. The new congressional Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert take after Trump in their thirst and strident idiocy, but mostly in their understanding that their jobs are to sell, and complain, and post and post and post, and never to disclaim any of the lazy suspicions and secondhand gripes and idle vendettas out of which they’ve fashioned their public selves. As with Trump, the goal is in one sense more about presence than power; as also with Trump, and with Schilling, the obligation to that thirst runs far deeper than the ridiculous outward presentation would suggest. 

The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage. The terrified and fuming derangement that conservative media sought to embed in its consumers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks, has blossomed into this: a rising army of impossibly unhappy people, their ambitions both vague and vast, who have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point. 

Post by post and provocation by provocation, it is absolutely as stupid and ridiculous as it looks. But whether it’s out of some curdled honor or sincere belief, the more important point is that they would absolutely kill to keep it all going, because they cannot imagine any way of being outside of it. For all the wild talk of vengeance and violence and humiliation, the fantasy catharsis of firing squads and military tribunals and the rope, there’s nothing they truly want on the other side of those lurid resolutions. They need to feel like this all the time, because they can’t imagine another way to feel. This is the last and most meaningful tenet of this vain and annihilating and wildly metastatic politics: It just can’t stop.

 

I subscribe to Defector and Roth and Magary are the biggest reasons why. Roth is an incredibly talented writer and that piece he wrote was one of his finest. The man has a God given gift for writing. He can tell a great story, but still bring  it all home by the end of the article. I would suggest that anyone who enjoys a good read should go through his articles starting with this one.

Edited February 5, 2021 by UpperWestside

[A-Tex Devil 2463]

18 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

Imagine thinking the Deliverance troglodytes that call North Georgia home give two red hot shits about legislation or policy.

Well, her district will get shit for congressional pork the next two years.  I am not holding my breath that her voters care.  But at least they are going to get punished, too, for being idiots.

[NorthLoop 14249]

3 minutes ago, A-Tex Devil said:

Well, her district will get shit for congressional pork the next two years.  I am not holding my breath that her voters care.  But at least they are going to get punished, too, for being idiots.

What does that even mean 

[TwiceHorn 31539]

2 hours ago, Hookah Horns said:

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but for a long time now the committees and subcommittees are who conduct investigations and write all the bills. The majority party leadership, of course, sets the agenda. 

If you're not on a committee basically all you can do is vote on things brought before the whole chamber. 

Someone writes a bill, it gets assigned to a committee, who may consider it, rewrite it, and vote it out of committee, which is the only way it becomes eligible for a floor vote, i.e. passage.

Your last sentence is spot on.  Unless you have some allies on your committee or the committee to which it is assigned, your bills are going nowhere.  All you can do is vote on others' bills that made it out of committee and to a floor vote.

Edited February 5, 2021 by TwiceHorn

[TwiceHorn 31539]

2 minutes ago, NorthLoop said:

What does that even mean 

Committees are where pork gets written into bills, mostly.  If you aren't on a committee, you have no chance of bringing home the bacon.

[MaybeACoordinator 8349]

4 hours ago, Bullneck said:

[UpperWestside 6190]

5 hours ago, hayden_horn said:

compelling. they should boot her out of congress.

Absolutely. This goes beyond the letter next to your name. No one should be in Congress who holds the beliefs this woman does or has said the things she has about fellow members of Congress. If Republicans had the ability to stand up to Trump's base this woman would be booted out. She may be representative of what is wrong with her district, but keep this there. Someone with her beliefs and tendencies toward racism, inciting violence and obvious violent fantasies about killing members of Congress should be barred from ever setting foot in DC ever again. Democrats have to draw a hard line in the sand and take whatever comes from that. Anyone with an R next to their name that has any ounce of human decency left in them should join them in having her taken out of Congress. I was sitting a row up from a congressional representative that is a republican on my way back to New York because I had a connecting flight to DC. Part of me wanted to greet him and say to please do the right thing with this woman, but I let it go because I believe in decency and not harassing public officials and demeaning them even if I disagree with them.

[Degenerate Gardner 4085]

49 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

That's a huge mystery to me.  There's no way he doesn't have a fancy little gold-plated studio with an official looking desk setup at Mar-a-Lago to give remote interviews.

Hell, I'd think he'd be doing it just to try to hawk Trump merchandise and/or fundraise.

I'd laugh if he went all Howard Hughes.

My guess is that he's been warned by R's to steer clear of public pronouncements until the impeachment proceedings conclude. Something along the lines of 'Don't force me to vote to impeach.' Trump knows the eternal campaign grift would dry up if he was no longer eligible to hold office.