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

[atomheartbevo 90663]

5 hours ago, tantric superman said:

Not to take away from WETA and all of those digital artists who helped bring Gollum to life, but these days when I see old footage of Gollum, the uncanny valley thing, the lack of stretching pores, proper lighting, etc. really stand out and kind of take me out of the scene (more so than putting Gollum in a business set for some promotional shit).

[berlinerbaer 692]

This must have been a brutal vote for so many Republicans, especially the ones in swingy districts. It was all avoidable if McCarthy would have just handled MTG by himself. Between this saga and the internal vote over Cheney, I can't think of a less effective leader. Mitch, or even Pelosi would have never allowed this to happen.

[ChiTownDoc 21346]

3 hours ago, South Austin said:

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.

I saw some of the interviews of the yokels in her district.  Made OKC seem like NYC.  Holy shit those are some ‘interesting’ people.  
And lol at them not voting for her again.  Come on people.  

[ChiTownDoc 21346]

Just now, ChiTownDoc said:

I saw some of the interviews with the yokels in her district.  Made OKC seem like NYC.  Holy shit those are some ‘interesting’ people.  
And lol at them not voting for her again.  Come on people.  

 

[washparkhorn 9974]

1 hour ago, TwiceHorn said:

pork

another person's sweet score. 

Sausage making. 

[washparkhorn 9974]

Anyone with links to media on constituents she serves? 

[washparkhorn 9974]

3 hours 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.

 

That is an excellent read, as stated by others above. 

________________________

Is it in the Q-Anon thread?  It should be stickied to the top. It's kind and relatable for sports fans who also have unusual beliefs. It may help some to pull out of the labyrinths where they search in vain.  peace

[TheStoicPaisano 9953]

Giving us a heads-up, that’s the one thing I appreciates about you, MTG. Anyone laying odds?

 

[washparkhorn 9974]

2 minutes ago, TheStoicPaisano said:

Giving us a heads-up, that’s the one thing I appreciates about you, MTG. Anyone laying odds?

 

following the trump script. 

Every-damn-day

[Wanker Bob 379]

3 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

So APD is full of Republicans?

[Tom 2960]

25 minutes ago, TheStoicPaisano said:

Giving us a heads-up, that’s the one thing I appreciates about you, MTG. Anyone laying odds?

 

Thanks.  I'll make sure to not tune in.

[AnTiM 1695]

One less nut case in Congress, how many more need to have their asses kicked off the job?

[Bullneck 19543]

7 hours ago, Bama Chick said:

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

I'll put it another way: the Deliverance troglodytes may not care about policy, but the House just made an example out of her.  It's the first step toward neutralizing the "I can go farther right than you in the primaries" way of thinking.  

[Bookman 4764]

6 hours ago, berlinerbaer said:

This must have been a brutal vote for so many Republicans, especially the ones in swingy districts. It was all avoidable if McCarthy would have just handled MTG by himself. Between this saga and the internal vote over Cheney, I can't think of a less effective leader. Mitch, or even Pelosi would have never allowed this to happen.

I think this is an excellent point. It shows how weak McCarthy is.

[wildcat09 29595]

1 minute ago, Bookman said:

I think this is an excellent point. It shows how weak McCarthy is.

To be fair to McCarthy (which is more than that quisling deserves), nobody who served in the House could ever hope to keep this House GOP caucus in line. That whole job is about getting the party pulling the same direction on a legislative agenda and they have no legislative agenda to speak of. They don’t give two shits about governing. To most of them, the entire job is just about posting and angry tv appearances attacking their enemies.

[Bookman 4764]

But isn't this the worst possible outcome?

[berlinerbaer 692]

36 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

To be fair to McCarthy (which is more than that quisling deserves), nobody who served in the House could ever hope to keep this House GOP caucus in line. That whole job is about getting the party pulling the same direction on a legislative agenda and they have no legislative agenda to speak of. They don’t give two shits about governing. To most of them, the entire job is just about posting and angry tv appearances attacking their enemies.

My point was that this vote did not have to happen if McCarthy would have dealt with MTG on his own or among leadership. Instead, he made all his caucus go on record. There are several freshmen Rs in purple districts who have had a rough first month in office, voting wise. I'm talking about the two ladies in CA, the one still undecided in NY, and the one in IA who won by like 10 votes.

The whole reason Mitch built a pile of Dem House bills up on his desk was to prevent them from coming up for a vote and making his members stick their necks out. One explanation is that Trump told McCarthy to hold the vote in order to find out who the "traitors" are, after flying down to Mar a Lago and slob his knob.

[bad_teammate 13561]

she's not mad

She is actually laughing.

[Jiggy-Z 3509]

12 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

she's not mad

She is actually laughing.

Freetime wasn't given. It was earned. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

To be fair to McCarthy (which is more than that quisling deserves), nobody who served in the House could ever hope to keep this House GOP caucus in line. That whole job is about getting the party pulling the same direction on a legislative agenda and they have no legislative agenda to speak of. They don’t give two shits about governing. To most of them, the entire job is just about posting and angry tv appearances attacking their enemies.

Rep for use of the word, "quisling."

 

Judging by the tweet that @bad_teammate posted, I do believe she is taking lessons from someone... wait til the nicknames really get rolling.

I must say, I don't care for the complete loss of decorum in Congress with respect to language. Some people are saying that it's just for show, "decorum" is, and certainly in American history there have been epic battles in the chambers but I do prefer that they at least show some higher thought processes when insulting a colleague. If the GOP is going to do nothing, then at least make it worthy viewing while the Democratic Party gets shit done.

[WhatTheBuck 28934]

I never wanted to be on those committees anyway!

[hookemATL 12300]

3 minutes ago, WhatTheBuck said:

I never wanted to be on those committees anyway!

“You know how hard it is to spell komitee?  Double gotdamn letters and whatnot. THE JEWS INVENTED LETTERS AND NUMBERS. I AM THE LIZARD QUEEN!” -mtg

[miguelito 11507]

7 hours ago, TheStoicPaisano said:

Giving us a heads-up, that’s the one thing I appreciates about you, MTG. Anyone laying odds?

 

"I'M BEING SILENCED!"

[WhatTheBuck 28934]

Just now, miguelito said:

"I'M BEING SILENCED!"

Stop shouting, bitch!

[jimmyjazz 47238]

"Democrat tyrannical government".

Jesus.  It's like Tom Herman's binder.

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

"Democrat tyrannical government".

Jesus.  It's like Tom Herman's binder.

She's probably hearing voices again. The same ones that caused unknown random people in her office to start liking hateful Facebook posts and filming videos.

[atomheartbevo 90663]

1 hour ago, wildcat09 said:

To be fair to McCarthy (which is more than that quisling deserves), nobody who served in the House could ever hope to keep this House GOP caucus in line. That whole job is about getting the party pulling the same direction on a legislative agenda and they have no legislative agenda to speak of. They don’t give two shits about governing. To most of them, the entire job is just about posting and angry tv appearances attacking their enemies.

I only half-joke when I say McCarthy needs to watch Game of Thrones or West Wing or whatever - the guy does not understand that he should have struck while the iron was hot, and dealt with her privately.  The secret vote on Cheney gave McCarthy all the backing and power he needed to deal with MTG privately.   Shit, Cheney openly supported impeaching Trump, meanwhile MTG was out there spouting shit about Jews causing fires, about all kinds of crazy conspiracy shit.   McCarthy had the power.  He knows there will be 61 Republicans who oppose him on whatever, but he knows there's two times that many that will back him.

McCarthy no longer has to worry about Donnie sending a mean tweet his way.  Donnie isn't even out there all over Fox News/NewsMax/OAN for that matter.  And Donnie doesn't get to fly around on Air Force 1 to whatever rally he feels like flying to - now everything he does has to come out of campaign coffers (and in Donnie's eyes, that money is HIS money, so he will be stingy with it).  And some have speculated, and I think they are correct, that if Donnie is going to campaign for anyone, or against anyone, he's going to want a hefty check made out to him (or a proxy of sorts).  That's going to really limit things.

McCarthy letting it go to a public vote, while it absolved McCarthy of having to take a stand, put a lot of Republicans on the spot as well, and it will be used against them in 2022.

McCarthy could have consolidated his power by taking her off those committees privately.

 

[aggie08 21839]

47 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

she's not mad

She is actually laughing.

Bitch, you're on minute 14. You're not attractive or interesting enough for the right wing media to use you as the poster girl for "Radical Left Censorship" for much longer.  

[Js1 87214]

1 hour ago, berlinerbaer said:

My point was that this vote did not have to happen if McCarthy would have dealt with MTG on his own or among leadership. Instead, he made all his caucus go on record. There are several freshmen Rs in purple districts who have had a rough first month in office, voting wise. I'm talking about the two ladies in CA, the one still undecided in NY, and the one in IA who won by like 10 votes.

The whole reason Mitch built a pile of Dem House bills up on his desk was to prevent them from coming up for a vote and making his members stick their necks out. One explanation is that Trump told McCarthy to hold the vote in order to find out who the "traitors" are, after flying down to Mar a Lago and slob his knob.

The mouth breathing Q-anon denier from California is/was still holding out hope he will be Speaker on January 3, 2023, not realizing he's going to wake up that day to either Speaker Hakeem Jeffries or, worse, a knife in his back from Speaker Gym Jordan. 

He didn't dare piss off the Qaucus for fear he would get fucked - without realizing he embarrassed himself in the process and will indeed, find out. 

Edited February 5, 2021 by Js1

[wildcat09 29595]

8 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I only half-joke when I say McCarthy needs to watch Game of Thrones or West Wing or whatever - the guy does not understand that he should have struck while the iron was hot, and dealt with her privately.  The secret vote on Cheney gave McCarthy all the backing and power he needed to deal with MTG privately.   Shit, Cheney openly supported impeaching Trump, meanwhile MTG was out there spouting shit about Jews causing fires, about all kinds of crazy conspiracy shit.   McCarthy had the power.  He knows there will be 61 Republicans who oppose him on whatever, but he knows there's two times that many that will back him.

McCarthy no longer has to worry about Donnie sending a mean tweet his way.  Donnie isn't even out there all over Fox News/NewsMax/OAN for that matter.  And Donnie doesn't get to fly around on Air Force 1 to whatever rally he feels like flying to - now everything he does has to come out of campaign coffers (and in Donnie's eyes, that money is HIS money, so he will be stingy with it).  And some have speculated, and I think they are correct, that if Donnie is going to campaign for anyone, or against anyone, he's going to want a hefty check made out to him (or a proxy of sorts).  That's going to really limit things.

McCarthy letting it go to a public vote, while it absolved McCarthy of having to take a stand, put a lot of Republicans on the spot as well, and it will be used against them in 2022.

McCarthy could have consolidated his power by taking her off those committees privately.

 

He obviously didn't think it'd play out that way. He's a certified dumbass so maybe you're right, but I wouldn't be surprised if he thought (with good reason) that taking all the heat for it could result in some Trumper killing him.

[Dr. Teeth 5868]

1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

she's not mad

She is actually laughing.

She didn't break up with me, I broke up with her. Now I can spend more time with my ships in a bottle.

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

He doesn't want stuff in his past to get dredged up again if he pisses off the wrong people, including his supposed affair from five years ago and some sketchy pork dole outs to family. Strike One.

Some of the people in his party don't trust him because he flip flops (like on abortion rights), among other things. Strike Two.

Internally, he doesn't feel he deserves any of it and although he wants power, he shies away from it and often has, thus making him weak. Strike Three.

The saddest of those is the last one. He could have taken  power and used it for something larger and greater than himself, which is a more appropriate use.

 

Plus @wildcat09's point of just being scared in general, completely understandable.

[Aqua Buddha 14807]

1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

she's not mad

She is actually laughing.

Said this the other day.  This is a win for her.  She doesn't have to do any work and gets free air time.  (No committee meetings to go to.)  Very Trumpian.

[High Plains Drifter 11192]

On 2/3/2021 at 10:46 PM, Smax said:

Im your average republican and dont believe any of this

Just sayin

 

 

So you voted for a failed business man who's only claim to fame was a shitty reality tv show, bankrupt casinos, and outrageous claims about Obama not being born in the US, then voted for him again despite 4 years of a dumpster fire that exposed him to be, in addition, a racist, narcissist liar, whiny bitch, vain buffoon suffering from the onset dementia, and the largest threat to our democracy since the civil war? Got it. Noted for future reference anytime you post anything.

Also, 75 percent of Republicans believe the election was stolen. Which means either you aren't an average republican, or you are lying. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't lying, which means you aren't an average republican. You aren't even a republican anymore, your party has left you.

 

 

[RomaVicta 30606]

12 hours 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.

 

Hate engine meets kookery. Brilliant paragraph and article. Thanks.

[Beau Vine 55870]

 

[wildcat09 29595]

15 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

 

So you voted for a failed business man who's only claim to fame was a shitty reality tv show, bankrupt casinos, and outrageous claims about Obama not being born in the US, then voted for him again despite 4 years of a dumpster fire that exposed him to be, in addition, a racist, narcissist liar, whiny bitch, vain buffoon suffering from the onset dementia, and the largest threat to our democracy since the civil war? Got it. Noted for future reference anytime you post anything.

Also, 75 percent of Republicans believe the election was stolen. Which means either you aren't an average republican, or you are lying. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you aren't lying, which means you aren't an average republican. You aren't even a republican anymore, your party has left you.

 

 

Smax has bragged about murdering a dog. 

[Brisketexan 106952]

43 minutes ago, aggie08 said:

Bitch, you're on minute 14. You're not attractive or interesting enough for the right wing media to use you as the poster girl for "Radical Left Censorship" for much longer.  

Stop.  You are looking at her through the window of rational thought.  Stop that.  That window has zero impact on the actions or outcomes of anything to do with the GOP.

She is playing the current GOP tune, and playing it well.  She is absolutely going to run for POTUS in 24, and if Trump doesn't run, she has a pretty damned good chance of getting the GOP nomination.

The only currency of value in the GOP is "who can shout crazy shit the loudest, the longest, and repetitively?"  She is swimming in piles of that currency like Scrooge McDuck.  She is a party leader, and is GOP presidential material.

[DigglerontheHoof 21557]

32 minutes ago, Dr. Teeth said:

She didn't break up with me, I broke up with her. Now I can spend more time with my ships in a bottle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0AhybE0R_k

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

Just now, Brisketexan said:

Stop.  You are looking at her through the window of rational thought.  Stop that.  That window has zero impact on the actions or outcomes of anything to do with the GOP.

She is playing the current GOP tune, and playing it well.  She is absolutely going to run for POTUS in 24, and if Trump doesn't run, she has a pretty damned good chance of getting the GOP nomination.

The only currency of value in the GOP is "who can shout crazy shit the loudest, the longest, and repetitively?"  She is swimming in piles of that currency like Scrooge McDuck.  She is a party leader, and is GOP presidential material.

She just fundraised over $100K on gibberish outrage alone, so yeah she's going places. Not back to Georgia like I hope, however.

I don't think she's going to make the Oval Office as President though. She certainly will try and take on one of the Senators from her home state though.

[Brisketexan 106952]

Just now, Mrs Whiggins said:

She just fundraised over $100K on gibberish outrage alone, so yeah she's going places. Not back to Georgia like I hope, however.

I don't think she's going to make the Oval Office as President though. She certainly will try and take on one of the Senators from her home state though.

Why limit yourself based on silly things like "experience" and "qualifications?"  She hates the libs.  She calls them names multiple times a day.  She fights for MAGA.  She is the most presidential* person in the GOP other than Trump himself.  Aiming for Senator is a waste of her time.

 

* Note that I am using the GOP definition of "presidential," which is limited to "really good at saying outlandish shit, trolling libs, and demonizing minorities, and other batshit stuff."

[Dr. Teeth 5868]

6 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Stop.  You are looking at her through the window of rational thought.  Stop that.  That window has zero impact on the actions or outcomes of anything to do with the GOP.

She is playing the current GOP tune, and playing it well.  She is absolutely going to run for POTUS in 24, and if Trump doesn't run, she has a pretty damned good chance of getting the GOP nomination.

The only currency of value in the GOP is "who can shout crazy shit the loudest, the longest, and repetitively?"  She is swimming in piles of that currency like Scrooge McDuck.  She is a party leader, and is GOP presidential material.

While I agree with all of that, her giving press conferences and being more vocal now that she is out of committees, is not good for her or the party nationally. If she does it too long, she will hurt the Rs chances of taking back the House. But yes, it will put her out in front for 2024. 

[Mrs Whiggins 13050]

1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

Why limit yourself based on silly things like "experience" and "qualifications?"  She hates the libs.  She calls them names multiple times a day.  She fights for MAGA.  She is the most presidential* person in the GOP other than Trump himself.  Aiming for Senator is a waste of her time.

 

* Note that I am using the GOP definition of "presidential," which is limited to "really good at saying outlandish shit, trolling libs, and demonizing minorities, and other batshit stuff."

I would concede that she might get the idea to throw her hat in the ring, and a lot would depend upon if Trump were to run or not, but I cannot see even Ronna and the other Freedom/Patriot group apparatus allowing it to get that far. Greene will go after Warnock in 2022 is my best guess.

[kevwun 16444]

She would get smoked in a statewide race.  She's reached her ceiling.  She's not electable in anything outside a Trumpkin House district.

[dingleberryswitzer 2724]

1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

she's not mad

She is actually laughing.

More time for what?  To show everyone what an ass she is?  

[Brisketexan 106952]

7 minutes ago, Dr. Teeth said:

While I agree with all of that, her giving press conferences and being more vocal now that she is out of committees, is not good for her or the party nationally. If she does it too long, she will hurt the Rs chances of taking back the House. But yes, it will put her out in front for 2024. 

Not a bad take.  Yes, continued Trumpism will hurt the GOP in some competitive house districts.  But it will be the only way to win in any district that leans more than +5 R.  And because most GOP districts are safe districts, this is absolutely going to be the dominant voice and theme of the GOP.

2 minutes ago, Mrs Whiggins said:

I would concede that she might get the idea to throw her hat in the ring, and a lot would depend upon if Trump were to run or not, but I cannot see even Ronna and the other Freedom/Patriot group apparatus allowing it to get that far. Greene will go after Warnock in 2022 is my best guess.

What you don't realize is that it's already gone that far.  There is no functioning apparatus other than the batshit apparatus.  The GOP stands for nothing but anger, childishness, and destruction, built around idolatry of a God-king.  Again - I feel like a broken record here - they actually made that their NATIONAL PLATFORM.  The ship has sailed.  Anyone trying to turn it even 1 degree off its current course is an apostate, and will be made to suffer by the base.  Ronna and the rest will get in line, because they want to win.  And the base will only give the gift of their votes -- necessary to win, for now -- to the batshit craziest.

Don't worry, though.  The GOP is working on alternative paths that will make elections unnecessary.  If you think they haven't already functionally adopted a position that elections can and should be overturned by a violent revolt, you haven't been paying attention.

[Born to Run 6601]

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.

No way. He has zero time or respect for any woman that he doesn't want to fuck including his daughter.

[bad_teammate 13561]

Trump was one of the most famous people on earth before he ran. he was someone we knew for decades and had a persona he had cultivated for decades.

 

She ain't Donald

[Js1 87214]

4 minutes ago, kevwun said:

She would get smoked in a statewide race.  She's reached her ceiling.  She's not electable in anything outside a Trumpkin House district.

This.

People seem to think these House members who win R+27 districts are good statewide candidates.  They'll run and lose badly in states like Georgia.  People who represent these districts aren't good statewide candidates.   Her district is like 28 points TO THE RIGHT of Georgia as a whole.

She'll never have to run a competitive race in her life as long as she's in that district.  So she has no idea of how to actually campaign and win votes from different voting blocs.  There's a reason national committees recruit candidates in swingier districts to run statewide, outside of states like Wyoming, Nebraska, New York, etc. - they actually know what they are doing. 

[bad_teammate 13561]

Her hair SUCKKKKSSSSSSSSSSS