CSotD: A Reasonable Facsimile of Truth
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If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. – Hannah Arendt
I woke up this morning to enough news stories about shootings that I’m still trying to sort them out in my mind. But what seems clear is that they will continue, that nobody in government will do anything to stop them and that they will be held up as proof of whatever somebody wants to prove.
Dear Leader immediately condemns each shooter as a left-wing operative before anything is known about him, and, in the case of Charlie Kirk’s murder, before the gunman had even been found, despite Kash Patel having announced that he was in custody.
Patel had to unannounce that, but don’t stand on one leg waiting for corrections out of the Oval Office. Our president is, to use an old expression, “often in error but never in doubt.”
And he certainly doesn’t apologize for anything.
There’s been a lot of talk on-line about the Reichstag Fire, which was used as an excuse for canceling civil rights under Hitler, and continues to spark speculation as to whether it was a real crime or something staged for propaganda purposes.
The GOP has attempted countering this impression by declaring that people should stop calling them “fascists,” which seems like kind of a fascisty thing to do, since it’s often accompanied by the explanation that free speech doesn’t include hate speech, which the Attorney General said and then had to withdraw after someone explained that free speech most certainly does include hate speech, that being the point of the First Amendment protection of it.
Noth republished this cartoon in light of Dear Leader’s condemnation of anybody who would dare to say what JD Vance said before he was named to the team.
What Vance said in 2016 was that he was going “back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a–hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
Meanwhile, it appears there’s a chance the guy who shot up, and burned down, a church in Michigan is a right-winger, while, after the boorish behavior of the Yanks at this past weekend’s Ryder Cup, there’s a growing sense that people on that end of the spectrum are beginning to flip out.
But another thing that surfaced was a video of Thomas Crooks practicing with a pistol in his bedroom, a reminder that we haven’t heard much about him since he tried to shoot Trump and was killed by security.
This matters because both the killer of Charlie Kirk and the guy who shot up the ICE detention center were neither right nor left but “shitposters,” nihilist gamers whose only goal in life is to create chaos.
Crooks had a random list of potential targets and seems to fall under that category, which suggests an emerging wild card in our descent into civil war.
Maybe our political commentators should re-read Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and brush up on the phenomenon.
Meanwhile, Dr. Trump and his assistant, Eye-gor Kennedy, are dispensing medical advice of such gobsmacking foolishness that the world seems stuck between horrified pity and astonished laughter.
We await the announcement that the cure for cancer involves swinging a dead cat around your head in a graveyard at midnight, and if that happens, you’d better lock up Kitty because the MAGA crowd will believe it.
And it wouldn’t be the dumbest medical advice to come out of the White House, because Dear Leader posted, then deleted, a video in which he promoted magical beds that cure all diseases, which brings us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
I don’t know that insulting MAGA people is any way to calm things down. If they see this sort of thing, it won’t make them ditch their red caps but will, rather, convince them that they are, indeed, victims of over-educated pencil-necked geeks and cause them to cling more tightly to their Fearless Leader.
But it is funny that Trump delivered what seems, at least to smart people, an insult. Pointing it out may raise spirits among his opponents and could persuade fence-sitters not to climb down onto the stupid side of the divide.
It’s not just the right-wing that promotes nonsense. As this fact-checking site notes, the illustration of Trump’s proposed ballroom that has been posted by anti-Trump people is nothing like the actual rendering, which looks like this:
That may not change it from a bad idea into a good idea, but circulating false information makes people doubt your word and wonder what else you’re lying about.
The honest take on this is to point out that, unless he overthrows the Constitution entirely, Trump will no longer live in the White House in a little over three years and will fly away in the free airplane that we’re paying a billion dollars to refit for him.
Until then, he is treating the White House as his personal property, rather than staying there while he serves the country as president.
Not every president has been from the upper crust: Washington snobs were horrified by the average folks who showed up for Andrew Jackson’s inaugural celebration, and it’s elitist to think that each First Lady should share the taste of a Jackie Kennedy.
Perhaps if more voters had seen how the Trump family lived in NYC, they’d have been wary of letting someone in the White House whose taste runs to Byzantine Bordello. At least his latest bizarre decorating touch, the Presidential Hall of Fame, didn’t involve commissioning Big Eyed portraits of his predecessors.
All his glitzy schmaltz can be taken down and the holes spackled. It’ll be harder to restore the Rose Garden, demolish the ballroom and return the Executive Mansion to its traditional quiet neutrality.
And even harder than that to repair a purposefully divided nation.
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