Thanks for coming, and don’t forget to tip your waitress.
Okay, I’ve got more to say, but Tom the Dancing Bug certainly did a lot of the heavy lifting, and I’d note his inclusion of a “temperature lowerer,” which suggests that this is a post-assassination-attempt effort or at least that Bolling added an edit before release.
Still, much of this was predictable and he does a nice job of rounding up what we’ve since seen take place in Milwaukee.
That’s not a case of damning with faint praise: There is a great deal of value in stating the obvious when the obvious seems to be getting past so many people. We keep hitting points where it’s reasonable to expect some mass revelation to take hold and yet it doesn’t.
Several people on social media have made the connection between Hulk Hogan’s flamboyant speech last night and the blustering, gun-toting President in Idiocracy, but, given that the entire audience in Milwaukee did not burst into laughter and begin throwing things, it’s clear that, hilarious as you may have found that movie, Mike Judge & Company hit the nail on the head.
The important part being that Hogan knows professional wrestling is fixed, but either a very large percentage of his fan base does not, or they believe that everything is fixed, which is worse, because it fits so well with the notion that, despite the massive proof that the 2020 election was fair and the absurdity of the accusations that it was fixed, they take it all in as part of a worldview in which fact and fiction are subjective distinctions.
Juxtaposition of the Day
In a world of subjective reality, or, in Kellyanne Conway’s actual words, “alternative facts,” the shifting opinions and fungible loyalties of political leaders are perfectly acceptable. Slyngstad portrays them as betraying the stated values of the party, but Whamond reduces them to comical flip-floppers.
Some of us remember when John Kerry’s presidential campaign was heavily damaged with charges of flip-flopping, but in Trumpworld, it’s no different than Donald Sutherland being a semi-retarded, funny GI in “The Dirty Dozen,” a brilliant crook in “the Great Train Robbery” and an outright villain in “the Hunger Games.”
After all, Hulk Hogan is really Terry Bollea. They’re all actors, playing roles to entertain us.
Are we not entertained?
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
It’s no secret that JD Vance referred to Trump as an American Hitler, but that was then and this is now and he’s no longer playing the Hillbilly Elegist, unless the team decides once more to promise coal mining jobs, in which case, he’ll put on his overalls and pick up a banjo.
Bear in mind that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton promised people in coal country she’d help them retrain for good jobs in growing fields, while Trump promised more coal-mining jobs. He won and the jobs didn’t appear.
Last night he blamed immigrants for — I kid you not — taking more jobs than exist:
By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs? The jobs that are created? 107% of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens. And you know who’s being hurt most by millions of people pouring into our country? The Black population and the Hispanic population, because they’re taking the jobs from our Black population, our Hispanic population.
But the fellow who isn’t at all an American Hitler has a plan to round up 20 million immigrants — including many with legal status and even citizenship — put them in concentration camps and then deport them. As Lalo Alcaraz (AMS) notes, the convention hall was filled with posters enthusiastically calling for Mass Deportation Now.
Trump also promised to bring down grocery prices, which will be quite a challenge once he’s sealed the border and made sure nobody is available to work in the fields and meat-packing plants.
I hope Latino voters were paying attention, because he’s also looking for ways to strip their American-born children of their citizenship despite the protection of the 14th Amendment. And he’s got just the Supreme Court to do it.
I should confess that I didn’t stay up to listen to Trump’s acceptance speech, though I read a number of reports about it this morning and I don’t think I missed a whole lot, or, at least, a whole lot that would have kept me from getting my sleep anyway.
Nate Silver offered this on-going commentary:
Darrin Bell (KFS) offered this translation of Trump’s version of what happened on Saturday and why. As noted before, an assassin who might have been dismissed as insane a generation ago is seen, at least in Milwaukee, as both a tool of the opposition and a chance for God to intervene for his favorite.
What I gather from more complete reporting is that he, unsurprisingly, departed from his prepared speech and launched off into his favorite digressions and even those attempting to cover things with journalistic formality were hard-pressed to keep up.
However, his acolytes have long since learned not to fret over his mangling of names and his recitation of alternative facts, alternative history and alternative logic. It’s only a role and actors often improvise.
It’s not as if he were a Democrat running for the office, which demands more verbal perfection.
Biden’s opponents — not the ones in Milwaukee, the other ones — are becoming more outspoken and determined to get him to quit the race, and, as Clay Bennett (CTFP) points out, his recent covid diagnosis seems an opportunity to pause and recalculate.
As noted here several times, I wanted Biden to be a one-and-done president, and think he’s done an excellent job of cleaning up the mess he inherited.
But Walt Handelsman didn’t have to reach for a unique metaphor to comment on a matter which may require a mid-stream change of horses.
He did well to put a donkey’s head on that trickster, because, for all that progressives may denounce the influence of money in politics, it’s hard to tell where megadonors leave off and party leadership begins, a challenge which assumes they’re distinct to begin with.
Are the new, louder public voices from more influential party figures based on time ticking away or money fading away?
And are those factors distinct, either?
I think it’s now completely obvious that whoever it who’s been charged with running Trump’s campaign has absolutely no influence on what he’s willing to say in public, as they certainly heard from the Black pundits who were unanimously offended by the idea that jobs are Black or Hispanic, as the implication is that migrant workers are taking jobs that those two racial groups are uniquely qualified to do. And yet, here he is repeating it just an hour after prime time, since the “very well-run” convention” didn’t manage to get him on stage before America had to go to bed. Why are Democrats still afraid they won’t beat this total dweeb?
Why are Democrats still afraid they won’t beat this total dweeb?
Because the system is actually rigged in the Republican’s favor? Besides, what would change if/when the Democrats won? It is obvious to me that Trump has been running a shadow government in parallel with the legitimately elected one. I woke up this morning thinking that Biden should relinquish the presidency to Harris immediately and she use presidential immunity to crush this wide spread lawless insurrection. I don’t think there will be a chance afterward unless the Dems win and do this as the winners as these right wingers are not going to just disappear. The Dems are in office now, so what not act now? I know this sounds paranoid, but it looks more and more to me like the right wingers are planning an armed insurrection if they still lose, even after all the rigging they have done in their favor. Of course, just my opinion.
RE: Tom the dancing bug. That cartoon was inspired by the Richard Scarry books which have been popular for decades! I have to wonder why nothing in this post, or on the cartoon gives him any credit. By depicting humans as animals, Scarry was quite a genius in depicting human behavior.
I agree that he is a brilliant cartoonist. And at least for now, it isn’t categorized as a political cartoon on GoComics, so people can still comment.
Bolling has used the Scarry format before: “More Richard Scarry’s 21st Century Busy Town Jobs” (12 October 2018), “Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy 21st Century Classroom” (3 June 2022), and possibly others. I don’t know why he omitted mentioning Scarry today; perhaps a cease-and-desist order or just an oversight.
… or maybe he just didn’t want to.* and that’s okay by me.
* see his “Donald and John” strips, e.g.
“There is a great deal of value in stating the obvious when the obvious seems to be getting past so many people.”
Seriously, the time for subtlety is over. With so much at stake we can’t afford for people to simply ‘not get it’.
I endured the entire 92-minute extravaganza that was Donny-By-Gaslight. Please indulge me this capsule wrap-up. The first 30 bathos-drenched minutes could quite easily have been mistaken for a midday Hallmark movie, as The Count Of Mostly Crisco thanked seemingly everyone present apart from fhe chair-stackers, then regaled us with a gelatinous rendition of every excruciating moment of his “Hand Of God” ear-clipping, replete with gratuitous ghastly props, before extending his warm, tiny-handed embrace to “All of America, not half of America”.
Then, warming to the task and incapable of resisting, Vincent Van Ugh swiftly ditched the tightly-scripted facade of Unity and Lerv and veered into his improv. One on-the-spot reporter described the teleprompter operator frantically scrolling back-and-forth through the prepared script seeking re-entry points for Doris from his lurching, random digressions. Swept up in self-love and pandering to the enraptured onsite cult choir, what Golden Boy utterly forgot was that he was being observed by America’s undecided and the rest of the world. He’s convinced he has this thing In The Bag. Not that it matters: it was made crystal-clear, to resounding applause, that he’s going to claim it whatever the outcome.
The ensuing off-piste diatribe included ALL his usual execrable Grossest Hits, starting with Crooked Nancy, Hannibal Lecter et al and confidently ramping up until his deluge of brags, lies, distortion and misrepresentation had roundly insulted, terrified and alienated all clear-thinking other-ethnicities, climate crusaders, LGBTQI+ communities and virtually every other demographic beside the 1% and the rapturous kool-aid krew present in the room. As for matters of foreign policy, there is zero need to dignify the Prince Of Peace’s far-ranging dissertation with any remark here.
The crowning, strangely under-reported highlight occurred after he’d Shut The Hell Up and was bathing in the crowd’s cascading post-orgasmic adoration: The hitherto-unseen M*lania-bot, rictus grin in place, stealthily approached and placed a hand on his back, a probable mandatory clause in their most recent negotiation. The priceless, shocked double-take by His Smugliness very nearly equalled his reaction in Butler last week. The rousing finale trotted out a cavalcade of grotesqueries featuring every entitled generation of the Dr*mpf dynasty – with the glaring exception of the young Barron. As the glittering tableau of tack concluded, I promptly left the house for a cleansing walk in the rain and fresh air.