CSotD: Maintaining Outrage Among Chaos
Skip to comments
Sorensen is right. We get righteously upset about cruelty and stupidity and dishonesty … and then the fire dies down and it all becomes normal.
The challenge we face as we slip into fascism is maintaining some level of outrage. If nothing else, our grandchildren will wonder how we could sit back and just watch it happen.
The solution is to keep asking ourselves that question now.
Part of the issue is intentional distraction, and Dear Leader came out the other day with a nonsensical tweet in which he said he’d talked to the Coca-Cola people about using cane sugar in American Coke like they do in other countries and they agreed.
And then the Coca-Cola people said they hadn’t agreed and that there’s nothing wrong with corn syrup.
I suspect that the president really did call someone in Atlanta and said he thought cane sugar would be a really good idea and they said “Thank you, very much. We’ll sure look into it.”
But then Bobby Brainworm announced that some chain restaurant was going to start serving cane sugar Coke in glass bottles and I assume this is a restaurant that feels it would be swell to start importing bottled soft drinks from Mexico instead of mixing syrup and water on site because multiplying your costs is good business.
Also, by the way …
The answer to everything is “tariffs,” and I’m sure that restaurant will be proud to add 30% to the cost of importing bottled drinks from Mexico.
Ramirez’s cartoon reminds me of one David Horsey did back at the dawn of time:
One thing the media might consider is to stop calling those expenses “tariffs” and call them “import taxes,” which they are, despite the administration trying to sell the codswallop that foreign countries pay them when the money is coming from importers and, ultimately, consumers, which means you and me.
But now look at all the space I’ve wasted on imaginary changes to Coca-Cola, instead of focusing on things that really are happening, like kidnapping citizens and legal immigrants and shipping them off to be repeatedly tortured in foreign prisons.
Or cutting off funding for leftwing commie projects like teaching kids how to count and how to read and to make friends with people who have different colored skin and who speak different languages than you do.
Both progressives and fascisti have been using Sesame Street to represent public broadcasting, substituting the real issues with cute fuzzy distractions.
IMHO, the real issue is NPR, not PBS, given the percentage of programming on each devoted to news and issues rather than entertainment.
Even Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, a comedy show, makes decidedly liberal jokes, while I think you have to be pretty paranoid to discover leftwing propaganda embedded in Antiques Roadshow.
Meanwhile, you can’t blame Trump for cashing in on divisions that have been ginned up for the past couple of decades. He’s not the one who replaced Thurgood Marshall with Clarence Thomas.
You can hardly blame him for taking advantage of a long-range effort to pack the court with die-hard conservative partisans, such that, as noted here before, they ruled that Joe Biden couldn’t forgive student loans because Congress hadn’t said to, but that Trump can dissolve the Congressionally-created Department of Education without seeking legislative approval.
They also decreed that, as president, he’s not required to follow the law in his official actions, or to be held responsible for his personal behavior as long as he remains in office.
Just like it says in the Constitution, or would say, if the Founders had written down what they really and truly probably should have meant.
It’s called “Originalism” because they come up with original rulings instead of relying on established principles.
Though not even the Supremes can protect Dear Leader from all his excesses, and, as Blitt puts it, this Jeffrey Epstein business is plaguing him despite squeaky tank parades and his insistence that cane sugar makes Coca-Cola way better.
Nor, as Cousineau points out, is he getting very far by insisting that people shouldn’t keep harping on things that happened years ago.
As Moudakis suggests, he continues to insist that any criticism or contradiction of the reality he prefers is a “hoax,” and probably one dreamed up by Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, who have devoted their lives to plotting against him.
You can add Jeremy Powell to that enemies list, Trump having expressed astonishment that some idiot appointed Powell to the Fed.
Juxtaposition of the Day
The Epstein issue has put Dear Leader in the uncomfortable position of having people on both sides of the aisle distrusting his honesty and his competence.
In the case of progressives, as German says, it’s one more example of his ability to stall and tap dance and produce nothing.
But Heller cites the impatience of the MAGA crowd, and it’s hardly surprising, given that rightwing radio, QAnon activists, and Youtube radicals have all been demonizing pedophilia for several years, and specifically singling out Epstein as an example of gutter-level villainy.
At least some of the truth will come out, Murphy predicts, given that, even if there isn’t a list of men who joined in Epstein’s underage assaults, the victims’ identities may be redacted, but their reality will emerge.
As for Dear Leader’s latest dodge, Murphy and other legal experts point out that releasing the grand jury testimony seems unlikely, as it is in a category of tightly-held secrecy, but that, even if it were, it wouldn’t likely include much about Trump, not because he’s innocent but because he wasn’t the focus of that specific case.
And Julie Brown, the most prominent journalist looking into the Epstein case, told Jim Acosta on his podcast that, if Pam Bondi really had the Epstein files, they couldn’t be on her desk because they are so extensive that they would more than fill her office.
However it turns out legally, Katauskas points to what promises to be a long and lasting rupture in the MAGA world, where solidarity was once the whole point.
But that’s their problem, innit?
Comments 5
Comments are closed.