Shorter Trump Presser

In case you missed Piggy's post-SCOTUS rebuke of his tariff regime...here's the short version.

The six justices who voted against the tariffs are fools, lapdogs, a disgrace and have betrayed ’Murrica. 

The Democrats on the Court did it because Dems want to destroy ’Murrica. The Republicans on the Court who overturned Trump’s tariff regime — including the two muppets he himself appointed — are actually RINO stooges under the influence of foreign powers.

But it doesn’t matter, because what the decision really said was that I have vastly more power to tariff, embargo, and destroy other countries than ever. I can destroy anyone. Any country. I tried to be nice before. I was a good boy. But now? Forget it.

Biden was incompetent. 

This country was dead a year and a half ago. Dead. Now we’re the hottest country in the world.  Barely legal but tits out to *here*!  And that ass!  

Every president but me was stupid for not using tariffs to make us all rich.

I’m very good at reading!

Brett Kavanaugh is a good lil’ stooge who’s gonna get two scoops. His dissent is genius, and you have to be a radical left lunatic to disagree.

I won. In a landslide. There was so much cheating, but I still won.

Yadda yadda yadda. All the usual demented rambling claptrap intermixed with the usual lies from a degenerate old criminal whose brain is turning to prune dip before our eyes. I’m sure I missed some of the finer points, since after a few minutes of this maniac slurring and stumbling us onto the ash heap of history, it all sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher — if that teacher were George Wallace, drunk and brain-damaged.

And if this makes your blood boil, don’t forget to thank your Republican neighbors, co-workers, and fellow churchgoers for putting this depraved, bigoted monster back in the Oval Office.

No Half Measures

Hot Lesbian Never Trumper Action Here!

File under: "History is Not Your Mommy".

A few days ago I noticed that all three of these Clinton-era three hobgoblins were top trending on Twitter and I had to double-check to make sure it wasn't 1995.

Nope. Still 2020.  Damn.

So put a pin in that and lets jump back in time a little more than 26 centuries to talk for a minute about history's most famous lesbian -- Sappho of Lesbos -- who was, during her time, one of the most popular and prolific lyric poets in ancient Greece.  Statues were erected in her honor.  Solon and Plato gave stirring speeches to her genius. She was considered Homer's equal, and frequently referred to simply as "The Poetess", just as Homer was "The Poet".

And yet today almost nothing is known of her life and of the 10,000 lines of her poetry -- which was widely read in antiquity -- only a few fragments survive.

Today, with a few clicks of the mouse from anywhere on the planet I could have a dozen different translations of Homer's  Iliad and Odyssey shipped to my home, so how exactly did Sappho's work suddenly all but vanish from history during 9th century?

One story holds that her collected works were put to the torch by leaders of the Catholic Church because they disapproved of her morals.  A more likely and less dramatic (but no less devastating) explanation is that copying manuscripts was hard work that used up a lot of papyrus, and the celibate, male, Catholic monks who were charged with preserving the written works on antiquity decided that the brilliant work of a long-dead lesbian poetess was not worth recording and passing along to future generations.

Because history is not a law of nature.

History is not physics. History is not plumbing.

And history is definitely not your Mommy.

History is not here to break up your stupid fights or clean up your messes.  It's not history's job to comfort you with promises of retroactively balancing the scales of justice decades from now.  History is not here to tell you that you're wonderful when the world knows you're not.  History is not here to comfort you with fairy tales about how, in the larger scheme of things, all the shit you did really wasn't so bad when the world knows it was.

Pick whichever quote you like --

"History is a set of lies agreed upon." -- Napoleon Bonaparte.

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it." -- Winston Churchill.

"They got a name for the winners in the world.  I want a name when I lose." -- Steely Dan.

-- but it all comes down to the same thing.  "History" is what gets passed along.  "History" is whatever those with the power to interpret events and stamp their interpretation as "Official" chose it to be.  "History" is a brutal, never-ending barroom brawl over who gets to decide what really happened and why it really happened.

And right now the American political media is doing what they have always done in the face of existential threats to our democracy which they helped to create: expending enormous institutional energies to make sure that history lets them and their friends and fellow travelers off the hook.

Consider this chummy tribunal of well-paid, media insiders warning that naughty people may be laughing now, but the Righteous Judgement of History will definitely come for them and boy howdy are they gonna be sorry!

Rush transcript, with emphasis added:

MIKE BARNACLE:  Everything we're talking about, Parnas, Pompeo, Pence, Trump, all of this is being recorded by an element among us called history. In terms of history, the snap of a finger. The behavior of the Republicans in the united states senator in 1974, it's literally a first.

So my question to you, and to you, too, Rick, is what has happened to the institution, not just the Republicans, but specifically now in the Senate Republicans, what has happened to our institutions is Trump slowly altering things, maybe forever in this country?

RICK WILSON:  I wouldn't say slowly.

[OFF CAMERA] Hope not.

RICK WILSON:  Barnacle, I would say he's altered them profoundly and swiftly. The idea of standing up for your state or your district for a Republican particularly is gone. You're judged only if you're loyal to Trump or not. That's the only scoring system in the Republican party. And he has reduced Washington to this corrupt and sort of corrupted environment. Sort of corrupted environment.

KURT BARDELLA:  I think about being not just history like 1974, but their own history. I remember when he was investigating Benghazi. He put out a report saying security is a priority and the administration failed, that's why we're doing the investigation, that's why we are investigating Hillary Clinton. Where is that Mike Pompeo now when someone's security, an ambassador's, has been compromised? Where is Jim Jordan who was on that committee? All these Republicans turned away from their own history, it wasn't that long ago. It was six years ago they were doing this.

SCARBOROUGH:  As a "Morning Joe" contributor, give our viewers a firsthand look back to what it was like when it was Republicans that were investigating Barack Obama. The hypocrisy is staggering.

BARDELLA:  It is so different. I was thinking about the interview last night with Parnas. If something like that was going on when we were in charge of Congress, we would have had a subpoena out that night, wouldn't have waited until the next day. During that interview you would have breaking news, House Republican Darrell Issa subpoenas for testimony. When anything happened that hinted of potential scandal or impropriety with Obama, Republicans were the first to issue subpoenas, have hearings, do closed-door depositions, things they rail about now, they were a big fan of closed-door depositions when they were the majority, it is complete hypocrisy, seeing a different standard. Frankly, we never had close to the volume of evidence that we have now when we were going after them.

When I look at this clutch of media insiders, I spy with my little eye ... one longtime aide to Darrel Issa and former member of the Breitbart goon squad ... one human husk and plagiarist who is now in charge of refilling the Morning Joe Both Sides Do It water cooler every day (or, it is rumored, he is whipped through the streets by Mika Brzezinski) ... one straight-up, life-long Republican ratfucker who found that credulous Liberals would give him more wealth and fame and influence than he ever dreamed possible if he called Donald Trump a shithead ... and two hosts who boost Donald Trump's campaign ointo orbit by giving him million of dollars in free publicity and soft-soap "interviews" on their teevee show.

And all of them have clearly escaped the the Righteous Judgement of History by a very wide margin.

Or consider the case of George Conway, who made his bones as a pro-cancer lawyer working for Big Tobacco and as one of the Republican goons who tried to blow up the Clinton presidency by any means necessary.  Husband to Kellyanne Conway.  Running buddies with Anne Coulter.  And here he is now, cozy in his media sinecure, issuing dire warnings about how Righteous Judgement of History will surely come for naughty people in, oh, five or ten years...

"Republican senators need to look themselves in the mirror," @gtconway3d says, "and think of what it's going to be like 5 years from now, 10 years, what their legacies are going to be. This evidence is going to keep coming out. Truth has a way of coming out..." pic.twitter.com/V5yiPZWNLb

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 22, 2020

Or consider the case of a sweaty, bipedal  rodent named Reince Priebus who, if the Righteous Judgement of History were actually a thing, would be spending the rest of his miserable life going door-to-door begging the forgiveness of the American people.  But instead:

CBS hires Reince Priebus, whose firms work for the GOP, the Trump Organization, and lobbying clients

Reince Priebus is a Republican operative who is best-known for his humiliating tenure as President Donald Trump’s first White House chief of staff. Priebus now holds senior roles at affiliated lobbying and legal firms; his law firm is connected to the Trump Organization and has collected over $280,000 in fees from GOP campaign groups such as the Republican National Committee.

Despite all that, CBS News announced on January 22 that the network has hired Priebus as a political analyst. He appeared on its coverage of the Senate impeachment trial, where he was the only political operative guest and his conflicts of interest went undisclosed...

Or consider that Ken Starr still walks the Earth and is solicited for his opinions.

Or consider all the time and money David Gregory and NBC spent making sure that Newt Gingrich's career was completely fenced off from the Righteous Judgement of History and his reputation was immediately rehabilitated every time he said or did something which should have gotten him run out of civilized society on a rail.

Or hell, just consider all the Bush Regime scutwork myrmidons -- creatures like David Frum, David Brooks, Michael Gerson, Bill Fucking Kristol, Peggy Noonan, Joe Scarborough, Marc Thiessen, Bretbug Stephens and Hugh Hewitt  (and yes, I know the complete list is much longer) -- who walked away from the bloody and monstrous catastrophes they helped to author with nary a paper cut from the Righteous Judgement of History.  Who, in fact, walked straight into promotions and tenured positions in the Beltway media where no one would dare to be rude enough to bring up their horrifically inconvenient past.

Appeals to the Judgement of History to balance the scales of justice at some point in the future are like appeals to an Almighty God to send bad people to hell.  At best, they provide comfort to the powerless and oppressed.  But at worst, they are the alibis of cowards who want to outsource the hard work of fixing shit here-and-now -- of holding monsters accountable here-and-now -- to imaginary people far in the future (who will apparently be very much better and wiser than we are), or to an all-powerful deity in the hereafter.

As for me, whenever I catch the antics of Bush Regime dead-enders yucking it up on cable teevee, or being paid to pass off their shopworn drivel as profundity in America's major newspapers, I wonder how anyone can continue to believe that eventually the Righteous Judgement of History will catch up with Conservative assholes.

Because as long as the Beltway media puts the full might of its "Strategic Forgettery" machinery behind helping these ghouls and grifters walk away from their crimes against journalism and democracy unscathed over and over again, the  Righteous Judgement of History might as well give up and go pick blueberries for a living.

History Is Bunk!

David Brooks: Disruption for Thee but Not for Me

The New York Times spends a tidy sum every year on the maintenance and upkeep of a great, gassy, incredibly fragile Republican dirigible called David Brooks.  Mr. Brooks' job at the Times is to glide ponderously above the messy fears and traumas of actual humans being roasted on the spit the Republican policies and dispersing blame for those policies onto "Both Sides".  They pay him to be "detached" --

But the detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans. She is progressive but not Democratic, conservative but not Republican. She fears the team mentality will blinker her views. She wants to remain mentally independent because she sees politics as a competition between partial truths, and she wants the liberty to find the proper balance between them, issue by issue.

-- as he hectors the hoi polloi on the importance of being humble and never taking any side of any issue.

So when Mr. Brooks abruptly brought his mighty Dirigible of Detachment in for an emergency landing during the middle of his year-end vacation in order to dash off an unscheduled Sunday New York Times column about !Monsters! and !Murder!...well something damn-near apocalyptic must have happened.  And not just "poor people" apocalyptic like Republicans throwing children into cages, or Republicans putting the hammer to health care for millions of Americans, or Republicans trying to deregulate the Earth into an uninhabitable hellscape, or even Republicans nominating and electing a treasonous, racist lunatic.

No this would have to be really apocalyptic.  "Acela Corridor" apocalyptic.  "Capitalism hanging its ass over David Brooks' privacy fence and taking a shit in his pool" apocalyptic.

And it was.

Who Killed The Weekly Standard?

Suddenly, one of capitalism's staunchest defenders and greatest beneficiaries of unearned privilege and undeserved wealth didn't like actual capitalists very much at all.

I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth.

I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and the lack of interest in ideas that go with the type.

Suddenly, Mr. Let's Not Judge had some very definite opinions about the sincerity of other people's Christianity:

And Anschutz, being a professing Christian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season, and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families.

Suddenly it wasn't the "creative destruction" wrought by rational actors making whatever decision they choose to with the company they own because capitalism is glorious but mess (which has been the generic sympathy card which tens of millions of Americans have been handed by men like David Brooks over the years as heroes of the free market hollowed out the American middle class.)

When the loot-and-scoot vultures finally came for David Brooks' wingnut welfare whelping box, suddenly it was straight-up murder, I tells ya!   Murder most foul!

This week, Anschutz and McKibben murdered The Weekly Standard, the conservative opinion magazine that Anschutz owned. They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money. They seemed to have murdered it out of greed and vengeance.

Linger on this sentence for a moment.  "They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money."

I have a strong suspicion that it is precisely because so many of The Weekly Standard's eulogists have apparently never held a real job in the real world, that the fact that TWS consistently lost money seems so weirdly irrelevant to their indignation.  A trivial matter, really.  Somebody else's problem (from Commentary magazine):

To be sure, it has never made money. Magazines like it never make money. But its circulation has always been extraordinarily healthy in opinion-journal terms. And within the giant corporations run by the wealthy men who started the Standard and then bought it—Rupert Murdoch and then Anschutz—its annual losses were a rounding error, akin to the budget for the catering on one of their blockbuster movie productions...

This is a direct glimpse into the wingnut welfare mindset that we poor peasants outside of Prince Prospero's castle very rarely get.   The arrogance of Conservative men (and they are mostly men) who came to believe that it was in the natural order of things that wealth and privilege and influence should flow to them -- a natural order for which someone else should pick up the tab in perpetuity.

The corporate culture Mr. Brooks describes at the magazine Rupert Murdoch's money propped up sounds delightful for those we were inside the tent pissing out.

It probably was.  I wouldn't know.  I never wrote for The Weekly Standard.

I was, however, frequently written about by The Weekly Standard.

Not me personally, of course.  Because while I have it on excellent authority that several professional Conservative havers-of-opinions (and more than a few professional Liberal havers-of-opinions) are quite aware of my work, as a Liberal blogger sans respectable byline, I officially do not exist.  But boy-howdy did Mr. David Brooks have some very firm opinions about Liberals just like me back in his TWS days, especially once the magazine had lashed itself to the administration of George W. Bush.

Back in those days, I was a "brainless, self-destructive" member of "The New Stupid Party" because I was concerned that massive Bush tax cuts would piss away the budget surplus which the Clinton Administration has finally accumulated after digging us out of the massive deficits which Mr. Brooks' party had created.

Because, according to Mr. Brooks, obviously the only problem with the Bush tax cuts is that the were too small!

I was just a stupid Pelosi Democrat who was wandering stupidly around stupid Paul Krugman-land.

The Pelosi Democrats  Are they going to become the stupid party?  

ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe? Are they about to go into Paul Krugman-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses? Are they about to go off on a jag that will ensure them permanent minority status in every state from North Carolina to Arizona?

Along with all Liberals and "the media" I was clearly "deranged":

What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They've portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical, some of his nominees as Confederacy-loving loons, and his voucher plan as a menace to the future of public education. To put it bluntly, this is all deranged. You get the impression that the left has actually started believing its own direct-mail fund-raising letters...

I was a dolt who refused to acknowledge that the GOP was not intolerant:

Pabulum with a Purpose
Beneath the much-mocked superficiality of the Philadelphia convention is a serious effort to transform the GOP
AUG 14, 2000 

The GOP is not intolerant...

I was a simpleton who refused to see that Bush and McCain had teamed up to invent an awesome new GOP! 

ONE NATION CONSERVATISM 

How George W. Bush and John McCain -- without quite realizing it -- are creating a new Republican philosophy
SEP 13, 1999 

...together, Bush's Compassionate Conservatism and McCain's New Patriotic Challenge are steps toward a fresh vision for the Republican party. Indeed, if you meld the core messages of the two campaigns, you get a coherent governing philosophy for the post-Clinton age.

That was gonna be, well, awesome!

Competent Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals
JAN 15, 2001 

We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair.

Yes, during  his tenure as Managing Editor at The Weekly Standard, Mr. Brooks penned many bold columns on the Greatness of George Bush.

Which were followed by columns on the Greatness of George Bush.

Which were interspersed with columns mocking stupid Liberals like me for not recognizing the Greatness of George Bush.

Over the years, when things were slow and TWS needed something to fill up the column inches, Mr. Brooks could always be relied on to toss red meat to the peanut gallery with some faux anthropological analysis of the ridiculous habits and folkways of those stupid Liberals.

Those intolerant Liberals.

And although he and his Beltway colleagues have been extremely successful getting almost everyone to pretend it never happened, there are still quite a few of us who remember that, on the subject of the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks really let his inner Breitbart all the way out.

Because like so many Conservatives, Mr. Brooks' most giddy obsession during those critical years was speculating on the exact size and velocity of the Hell the Dirty Hippies were going to catch -- and how warped and pathetic their vicious, mindless denial would be -- now that they had been proven wrong!-wrong!-wrong!  Because (in case you weren't there or don't remember), during this period Conservatives like Mr. Brooks genuinely believed that the  Conservative Millennium was at hand -- that in the Bush Presidency and the Iraq War they had at last found their Movement's Holy Grail:  a final, irrefutable, public, slam-dunk  vindication of their Grand Unifying Theory that Dirty Hippies really are awful people who really do hate America, and who really are responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened and deserving of every horrible thing that Conservatives like Mr. Brooks had ever said about them.

And as I have already written about extensively elsewhere, the nakedly opportunistic Mr. Brooks used his position at The Weekly Standard to grab that grail with both hands and gleefully beat the shit out of the Dirty Hippies with it.  In fact, he rode his Weekly Standard hippie punching and Bush hyping all the way to a job-for-life at The New York Times.

But hey, that's all ancient history now, right?   And certainly not a history which either the Conservative Brain Caste or the Beltway media have any interest in revising.  A history of a Conservative movement which created the very monster that consumed it.  A history recounted now only among the reprobates and no-accounts, late at night, 'round our Liberal hobo fires.

For everyone else, history will record that it was a fun place to work.  The greatest magazine that ever was, where witty badinage flowed like cheap beer in the CPAC hospitality suite, and the benefits package was nonpareil.  Hell, the Savior of Conservatism himself has declared Mr. Brooks' column to be a virtual Voight-Kampff test of goodthinkfulness.  Perhaps a little "thank you" for Mr. Brooks blurbing Mr. Goldberg's shitty book (“Epic and debate-shifting.”) so extravagantly..

The negative responses to this column will be like the results of an allergy test. The more intense the response, the greater the evidence of ignorance, idiocy, venality, political pettiness or intellectual corruption. https://t.co/uPhEu4VeoL

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) December 16, 2018

In fact a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after Bill Kristol, David Brooks and The Weekly Standard.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Never Trumpers Are Being Tormented By Their Younger, Crueler Selves

In aid of helping readers make sense of our mad and seemingly-incomprehensible world of mindless, smirking Conservative goons, sniveling Republican cowards and feckless Never Trumpers, I have turned to Ray Bradbury before, and I probably will again.  For example, to explain why Conservatives and Both Siderists both loathe us lefties with such intensity (and why we are all but banned from the mainstream media) you don't need to have mastered public policy because their contempt of us has nothing to do with public policy.  What you need to understand is that they dread us because we are the stewards of the past.  Because we are the ones who insist on remembering all manner of terrible things that their ideologies absolutely demand to be forgotten.

That is what makes us a genuinely existential threat to them.  And no one was ever better at explaining the kind of visceral hatred by the Many Who Want To Forget for the Few Who Dare To Remember than Bradbury:

Ray Bradbury's "The Chicago Abyss" is a tale of an old man who remembers too much. In the rubble of some bombed out urban center, the people physically abuse the old man when he shares his memories of such things as Baby Ruth candy bars, music, restaurants, and television. A small group protects and cares for the old guy, hiding him from the ever-searching police.

Of course, the reason for the loathing and fear of this gentleman was that he held a frame of reference that degraded the present...

And so today or tomorrow your assignment is to find 30 spare minutes to sit and enjoy "Night Call, Collect" while keeping the following in mind.  Like the old man in the story -- stranded alone on a desolate, abandoned Mars -- Never Trumpers are not at war with some external force, but instead are being tortured by an ideological engine which their younger, crueler selves gleefully set in motion decades ago. 

David A. Walsh at Washington Monthly puts this phenomenon into it a larger historical perspective here:

Conservative pundits repackaged Cold War–era attacks equating liberals with communists during the Bush years. In 2003, Ann Coulter, a frequent Fox News talking head, published Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism, which was a full-throated defense of Joseph McCarthy that accused liberals of being, well, traitors who hated America. The book sold 500,000 copies in its first three weeks. Even the racially charged birther myth—that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen, and was a covert Muslim, to boot—was a riff on the old John Birch Society charge that liberals, including moderate Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, were secret members of the international communist conspiracy. The cry that Obama was a Marxist, Maoist, Muslim Kenyan socialist was almost interchangeable with right-wing attacks directed against the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And the idea that a vast left-liberal conspiracy was both undermining the country and using dirty, underhanded tactics to do so rhetorically justified an anything-goes strategy on the part of the right. Shutting down government. Refusing confirmation votes. Supporting Donald Trump for president.

So-called Never Trump conservatives lament that the Republican Party and, indeed, the conservative movement have ceased to be about ideas beyond slavish devotion to Trump’s cult of personality. But this critique ignores the centrality of the idea of liberal nefariousness even in the self-consciously intellectual corners of the conservative movement. Jonah Goldberg, who has been affiliated with National Review for twenty years, has called for a revived conservative intellectual vigor to tackle the policy challenges of the twenty-first century. He was also the author, in 2008, of the book Liberal Fascism, which—until a last-minute change by Goldberg—bore the subtitle The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton...

And therein lies the real reason why both Conservatives and Both Siderists hate us so hard.

Because Never Trumpers would rather be staked to an anthill -- nekkid and covered in high fructose corn syrup -- than be forced to admit that the Left was right about them all along.  That the rough orange beast which is wrecking the country is nothing more than the toxic legacy of their own cruel and callow ideology -- a monster which they turned loose upon the world and for which they never in a million years thought they would have to foot the bill. 

And Both Siderists would rather be staked to the adjoining anthill rather than be forced to admit that they consciously ignored 30 years of Liberal warnings that this day was coming and enabled the rise of this run-amok Republican beast every step of the way. 

Behold, a Tip Jar!

My Name Is a Killing Word

I must say that I was very excited to learn just yesterday that I have Mystic Weirding Powers.

It's true.

I really thought that this "weirding" business was just a clever device Frank Herbert made up to move the plot along, and frankly, as a shitty Libtard blogger for the past 13 years, up until now there was absolutely no evidence whatsoever that I had ever had any influence on anyone's opinion of anything.

But now, quite suddenly, I learn that all it will take for Democrats to lose in the Fall is a few posts from me casting a critical eye on the good faith of our freshly minted (and apparently incredibly fragile) Never Trump besties. 

All it will take is a few posts from me posing a few very simple, blunt questions to our new True Conservative allies on a topic about which they have been only too happy lecture us endlessly for the past 30 years -- Personal Responsibility -- and somehow we're all fuuucked.

It is extremely important to win November's elections and the elections in 2020. When @JoeNBC is criticizing the people who we are trying to defeat now and in the future, it only helps Trump to attack Trump's critics based on what may be their past mistakes. #CircularFiringSquad https://t.co/v82qgY7ATo

— RonSupportsYou (@RonSupportsYou) July 9, 2018

My name is a killing word.

Fear me. 

Or hit my tip jar. 

Either way works for me.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

The People's Front of Republicanism

Another in my long-running series on Republican Detachment Disorder.

These days you can't throw yourself down a flight of stairs without landing in the front row of the ongoing comic opera that is The People's Front of Republicanism as they belligerently insist that the Republican People's Front aren't real Republicans.

From Michael Gerson's disquisition in The Washington Post on the rise of Roy Moore which acts as if Moore had just precipitated out of thin air instead of -- just like Trump -- being the perfectly logical and predictable destination of Mr. Gerson's Republican party based on where it has been plainly going for the past 40 years --

No, Moore is not really a theonomist. The boundaries of his worldview, it turns out, almost exactly coincide with those of the Breitbart agenda. Moore’s study of divine law has led him, in the end, to the shabby, third-rate gospel of Stephen K. Bannon.

-- to the going's on at my own state capitol --

McCann: Rauner Is ‘Not A Real Republican’: A local lawmaker isn’t just criticizing Governor Bruce… https://t.co/t7Hke6BUXV #DependOnUs

— 94.7 & 970 WMAY (@NewsTalkWMAY) September 29, 2017

-- it is clear that the "No True Scotsman" protocol is in effect party-wide.

I even listened to the latest episode of "With Friends Like These" to see if  the assertion made to me by Ana Marie Cox was actually true:

Listen to the episode, I think you’ll find I don’t let him off the hook.

— With Friends (@crooked_friends) September 29, 2017

I listened very carefully.  I made many notes.   And I reached several conclusions.

First, upspeaking the end of your sentences a couple of times to indicate a slightly increasing level of dubiety does not rise to the level of not letting Mr. Steele off the hook.  Not even close.

Second, if you think slightly upspeaking the end of a couple of sentences actually means you are holding a Republican accountable for the nonsense they're peddling,  maybe that explains why we Liberals lose so goddamn much.

Third, according to Mr. Steele, the reason he is a Republican is that, back in 1977, while living in a home with a dynamite mom (I have a dynamite mom too, so at least we have that in common) and pictures of JFK, MLK and Jesus on the wall, he researched the party and discovered that Harriet Tubman was pretty cool.  So he decided that he wanted to join the Republican party...as it existed in 1893.

Beyond that, the simple, irreducible truth is that Mr. Steele has made a very comfortable life for himself fronting for a party of racists, con men, theocrats, gun nuts, xenophobes, imbeciles, misogynists, demagogues and assorted other malfunctioning humans and he will go right on doing so as long as A) the checks clear and, B) he can continue to hold himself suspended in a dissociative state of denial, dissembling and dismissal.

So here we go...

Like virtually every other Republican I know, Mr. Steele hides the indefensible absurdity of his political position behind a welter of vainglorious bullshit (rush transcript from Ms. Cox's podcast) --

Steele:  I've run into the racism.  I've dealt with the bullshit.  All that.  But I also look at what I have been able to do in the party.  I also look at what I have been able to accomplish.  And the voice that I can try to represent on some critical issues at critical times.

-- and Both Siderist nonsense in which, again, like virtually ever fucking Republican in Christendom, he keeps attributing distinctly Republican malice and depravity to "Congress" and "politicians" and "the voters" and "the people" and "us" and "the country".

And, conversely, Mr. Steele inclusively absorbs distinctly non-Republican actions and attitudes into the category of things "we" are doing.

"We" had this march on Washington. "We" elected a black president.  And so "we" dumbed ourselves down about being post-racial, and "we" don't want to talk about "it".  

Not since "A Rose for Emily" has the second-person plural voice worked this hard:

Steele: This is what happened to Hillary and the Democrats. They were so concerned with the polls and the statistics and "the country" was, like, we're not feelin' her.  We're not feelin' that.  We're not over here where you think we are. 

See, according to Mr. Steele, polls don't count and numbers are meaningless because "real people" lie to pollsters all the time.  In fact, black people will vote in large numbers to cut their own economic throats "just to fuck with you."  Because Political Correctness!

But what about factors like the GOP's massive, coordinated, well-financed program of voter suppression?

Steele:  You say voter suppression on the Republican side.  I say voter control on the Democratic side.  It works on Both Sides. I'm beyond excuse-making.  I want to get to why things don't work the way we want it to work.

And of course, inevitably, this...

Steele: The president is much more of a Democrat than he is a Republican.  He's not a Republican. He's certainly not a Conservative.

It went on and on like that, most of so howlingly, predictably preposterous in all the ways that all Republican Detachment Disorderlies are howlingly, predictably preposterous these days that any of it could have been easily knocked to bits and vivisected, live, on-stage, if that had been Ms. Cox's goal.  

But Mr. Steele is a dear friend of hers.  The man she called for coffee and consolation the day after President Stupid was elected.  So she let one slow pitch after another glide over the plate untouched.

I promised Ms. Cox (whose podcast I listen to fairly regularly even though she doesn't listen to mine)  to hear her out before critiquing her efforts.

I have now kept my promise.

In summary, my opinion of Mr. Steele was not budged one iota from where it was back in the Olden Days when Lower Manhattanite would make mock of Mr. Steele's hi-larious hijinks.  

Not one iota from when I wrote this one year ago:

Republican Detachment Disorder: Michael Steele, Patient Zero

While some scientists believe that Republican Detachment Disorder is a Trump-era affliction, in fact, the RDD pre-dates the rise of Il Douche by many years.

For example, back in 2010, between excursions to bondage-themed strip clubs and lecturing George Stephanopoulos that government jobs aren't real jobs, Michael Steele -- the RNC's "Break Glass in Case the Democrats Elect a Black Guy" desperation-hire -- was faced with a vexing demographic problem:  98% of African-Americans hated the Republican party.

And like his predecessor (Ken Mehlman, a closeted, self-loathing gay American who fronted for the virulently anti-gay party) Mr. Steele (a self-loathing African-American who fronted for the racist party.  Are you noticing a pattern?) was forced by the existence of well-documented historical fact (man, those were the days) to acknowledge the existence of something called "The Southern Strategy".

From TPM in 2010:

Steele: African-Americans 'Really Don't Have A Reason' To Vote GOP

Appearing Tuesday at DePaul University in Chicago, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said that the Republican Party has not given African-Americans a reason to vote for them.

"You really don't have a reason to, to be honest -- we haven't done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True," said Steele, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

Steele said how the Republican party had been founded as a pro-civil rights party, with Frederick Douglass among its early members. However, Steele explained, the Republican Party has alienated those voters: "For the last 40-plus years we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South...

However, Mr. Steele quickly added that the GOP's racism had ended long before his time:

...Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, 'Bubba' went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton."

And yet based on the long, grim-faced sad I just saw Mr. Steele having on MSNBC this morning (no video available yet), like herpes, all of the seething racism that powers the GOP and somehow magically disappeared during Mr. Steele's time as a party leader...

...has magically reappeared now that he has left!

How amazing!

You see, RDD appears in many forms.

Sometimes it is of the relapsing/remitting Michael Steele variety in which party loyalty (and unhinged Liberals bashing) appears and disappears depending on who is footing the bill.

Sometimes it a mass pandemic event like the "Tea Party" in which millions of life-long Republican racists who were eager to get a jump on hating the Kenyan Usurper from Day One without having to answer a lot of embarrassing questions about all the shit they had been talking for the previous eight years, all burned their "Bush/Cheney 04" lawn signs, put on funny hats and swore on the lives of their children that they had never even heard of Dubya.  Just look at their fucking tee-shirts!  These good ol' boys are obviously Constitutional Conservative Christian Libertarian Independent Patriots, so why would you come 'round here callin' 'em Re-publicans.

What are ya, ignernt!

See like all Republican cowards tragically afflicted with RDD, the madness into which the GOP has been steadily descending for the last 40 years is never, ever about them.  Never about the things they said and did, the abominations they countenanced, the beasts they helped tinker together and turn loose.

The blame is always laid at the feet of some other group of irresponsible Republican elites waaaay over there.

Some other group of craven Republican bigots who let us all down.

Oh, and the Kenyan Usurper.

Who pals around with terrorists and works tirelessly to destroy Murrica.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is accusing President Obama of intentionally weakening America at home and abroad. 

“It’s now abundantly clear: Barack Obama has deliberately weakened America,” Rubio said early Monday during a speech on national security at the American Legion in Hooksett, N.H.

And Hillary Clinton, of course.

Who is kissing cousins with Lucifer.

And should be locked up.

Obviously.

There are no more party insiders or outsiders or victims or naifs on the Right any more.

There are only those who long ago walked away from Omelas or refused to live there in the first place, and those who stayed and profited because deep down they either do not care about the bigotry and sadism that powers their party, or they just plain revel in it.

On the Right there are only collaborators, co-conspirators and quislings now, and as Brother Charlie Pierce notes, Trump bought them all at fire-sale prices:

Last Night Chris Christie Had the Living Definition of a Shit-Eating Grin on His Face

Trump owns them all now.

CLEVELAND, OHIO—Once the deed was done, and folks were filtering out to celebrate the elevation of He, Trump to the toppermost of the poppermost of the Republican Party, it was time for the Volksgerichtshof portion of the festivities. One after another, the establishment pols came rolling out to pledge their undying fealty to the new boss. I'm surprised that He, Trump let them keep their belts on so their pants wouldn't fall down...

Behold, a Tip Jar!

In The Beginning...

"The junk [heroin] merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client."

-- William S. Burroughs, "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness" with a big h/t to Neo Tuxedo for this quote.

For the record, I am perfectly aware that the roots of our long and tortured political history go back to Beringa, Eric the Red and Strom Thurmond quitting the Democratic Party in 1948 to form the segregationist States' Rights Democratic Party also known as the "Dixiecrats" (note:  The Dixiecrats were later dissolved and then gradually reconstituted into a much larger, more powerful and better-funded segregationist party called "The Republicans".)

But because this post will not be one billion words long, it will not cover anything like a territory that vast.  (I just told you that to trick you into reading this far! Insert Evil Laugh here!) So pedants and "whatabouters" take it elsewhere, preferably to Blogger or Wordpress where you can start your own blog and publish your own sweeping and comprehensive history of American politics.  Which I will gladly read and carp about :-)

Instead what you'll get for the price of admission is a simplified overview of  "How We Got Here" spanning roughly one human generation:

In population biology and demography, the generation time is the average time between two consecutive generations in the lineages of a population. In human populations, the generation time typically ranges from 22 to 32 years.

Let us begin.

Fundraiser Day Five: Neutron Don Delivers His Payload Right On Schedule

So the racist orange fire demon who one outcast Liberal loser described back in May as a "political WMD designed to take out the Republican party, but leave their laptops and office space intact" has finally dropped the big one.

All over radio and print this AM and teevee last night, there was widespread pundit Shock! And Horror! And Even More Shock!

From the Chicago Tribune:

Trump refuses to say he will accept election results; Clinton calls it 'horrifying'

Threatening a fundamental pillar of American democracy, Donald Trump refused to say Wednesday night that he will accept the results of next month's election if he loses to Hillary Clinton. The Democratic nominee declared Trump's resistance "horrifying."...

Over here in my tiny Liberal outpost in the middle of Middle America, all I saw was the latest poisonous harvest from the toxic seeds the Republican Party has been carefully cultivating for decades.

Perhaps those very highly paid pundits would have been less Shock! And Horror! And Even More Shock! if they had been paying the slightest attention to what Liberals have been saying all along. 

Here, untouched and intact from 2005, is one of the first posts I ever wrote.  I would change a few details if I were putting it together today, but overall it still stands up as a solid B+ in a world where virtually every paid Beltway media professional has been pulling straight F's since Christ was a corporal:

Little Red State Fundy sez...


Whatever will we tell the children?

One day we will have to explain to the children what happened when Thurston Howell III lost his right mind and decided that for the sake of some tax cuts to make him incrementally more comfortable, his very bestest buddies in the whole, wide world were the Ultra Right Wing Gorgons down in Jesusland.

May I suggest the following?

The Story of Little Red State Fundy

Little Red State Fundy found a grain of hate.

"Who will help me plant the hate?" she asked.

"Not I," said the Moderate Republicans.

"Not I," said the Undecideds.

"Not I," said the Libertarians.

"Then I will," said Little Red State Fundy.

So she buried the hate in the bloody ground of the Old Confederacy. After a while it grew up paranoid and ignorant and violent.

"The hate is ripe now," said Little Red State Fundy. "Who will do the mass mailings and preach bigotry from the Pulpit?"

"Not I," said the Moderate Republicans.

"Not I," said the Undecideds.

"Not I," said the Libertarians.

"Then I will," said Little Red State Fundy.

So she licked envelopes until her bill was cracked and dry and stood up into the House of God and crowed to her flocks in their millions that God Loved Them for hating and killing creatures who were not like them.

Then she asked, "Who will help me focus this hatred politically?"

"Not I," said the Moderate Republicans.

"Not I," said the Undecideds.

"Not I," said the Libertarians.

"Then I will," said Little Red State Fundy.

So she made databases and phone banks, and walked door-to-door with petitions that talked of Gods Great Hatred of Gays, and Gods Great Hatred of Judges that did not worship the Hate God in exactly the way the Little Red State Fundy told them to.

Then she carried the hate to steps of the Congress and the White House.

"Who will make a mandate from this hate?" she asked.

"Not I," said the Moderate Republicans.

"Not I," said the Undecideds.

"Not I," said the Libertarians.

"Then I will," said Little Red State Fundy.

So she got on the phone with her very good friend Karl Rove and with his help organized carpools to the polls, and get-out-the-vote drives, anti-gay marriage amendments and smear campaigns. For Jesus.

And Little Red State Fundy delivered the margin of victory and was featured in many, many magazines: without Little Red State Fundy, the Republican Party could never, ever, ever win anything.

And now everybody knew it.

Then she said, "Now who shall help me Rule the Earth."

"We will!" said Moderate Republicans, Undecideds, and Libertarians.

"I am quite sure you would," said Little Red State Fundy, "but see, now you are all my bitches."

Then she called Randall Terry and Tom DeLay and Ann Coulter and Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh and James Dobson, and they and the rest of the Shining Path Republicans used what was left of the Constitution as ass-floss.

And judges were terrorized into silence.

And those deemed ungodly were beaten in the streets.

And they invaded whoever the fuck they felt like, for whatever fucking reason they chose.

And the very idea of a Free and Fair press died.

And to people who had been very clear all along that they genuinely believed in a Theocratic Nanny State and thought that precipitating Armageddon and triggering the Second Coming should be the highest calling of any worldly government, were handed over the police, courts, government, treasury and nuclear weapons stockpiles of the United States of America.

And in the end -- just as they had been warned for the past twenty years -- there was nothing whatsoever left at all for Moderate Republicans, Undecideds, and Libertarians.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

The Disownership Society

(h/t Alert Reader Patrick)
(h/t Commentor "JHB" for the title of this post)

If you look at the front page of the GOP's official website very carefully...or not very carefully...or just glance at it out of the window of a speeding car, you will see ads for "Reagan/Bush '84" coffee mugs, two, different pictures of Scary Hillary, a "Clinton Email Scandal" tab, a "Buy Some George H.W. Bush Socks!" tab, and so much more!

However as of this writing, what you will not see anywhere on the front page is Mr. Donald J. Trump.  No pictures.  No videos.  No Tweets.  No text.

Nothing. At. All.

Wow.

One can only imagine how very exciting the next meeting between Mr. Donald J. Trump and the online marketing team of "his" Republican party will be:

A Sound of Blunder

It seems someone told Senator Penny-Ante McCarthy that there was once an author named Ray Bradbury.

After which hilarity ensued.

...

Even Tuesday, Reid continued to his campaign against the Kochs. "They have all these phantom organizations," Reid said. "They must have 15 different phony organizations that they use to pump money into the system."

McConnell said he had little patience for the political stagecraft taking place.

"Everyone on this panel knows this proposal will never pass Congress," McConnell said. "This is a political exercise to stir up one party's political base so they'll show up in November by complaining loudly about certain Americans exercising their free speech and associational rights."

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, predicted the Democrats' amendment would allow critics to use the Constitution to ban books and films, and likened the move to repealing the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech.

"Ray Bradbury would be astonished because we are seeing 'Fahrenheit 451' Democrats today," Cruz said, invoking the novel about book burning.

...

Actually, Cruz is invoking the right author, but the wrong story.

See, over in An Adjacent Universe -- where they have created a commercially viable form of time travel -- for the right price, Time Safari, Inc. makes money taking rich, bloodthirsty assholes on a shooting parties to previous eras where they can kill a variety of apex predators to which modern humans no longer have access.

TIME SAFARI, INC.

SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.

YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.

WE TAKE YOU THERE.

YOU SHOOT IT.

Beyond proper identification and payment in advance, Time Safari, Inc. has one immutable rule: Once you arrive at your destination, stay on the path they've laid out for you. You walk along a slip of anti-gravity metal, touching nothing, and only killing the animal they have selected for you -- an animal which they know in advance was destined to die anyway, minutes later.

Sadly one day, one rich, bloodthirsty asshole freaks out, steps off the path and accidentally crushes a butterfly. 

And when the hunting party returns, they find a new reality where things are so fucked up that a buffoon like Ted Cruz is an actual Senator elected from an actual American state.

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Reader chautauqua notes that it's weird that no one has come up with a better phrase than "Both Siderism" yet.

OK.

How about ... The Gregorian Chant:

Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  (But Liberals Are Actually Worse.) Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.  Both Sides.

Congratulations.

You have now experienced the entire Sunday Morning public interest offering of every major teevee network in America in all its untrammeled glory.

For greater specificity, check out the Bobblespeak Translations and Dean Baker.  Also, by sometime tomorrow I'm sure Charlie Pierce will have posted something very much like what I would've written if I'd decide to write something other than this.

Haley Barbour

Another proud native son of Disneyssippi.

From the New York Times:

Discussing Civil Rights Era, a Governor Is Criticized
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — In an interview that set off a new round of debate on Monday about racial attitudes and politics, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a potential Republican presidential candidate, recalled the 1960s civil rights struggle in his hometown, Yazoo City, saying, “I just don’t remember it as being that bad.”

In a profile published Monday in The Weekly Standard, Mr. Barbour also talked about the White Citizens’ Councils of the late 1960s, which some historians have said were organized to oppose racial integration. Mr. Barbour, a teenager and young adult during the 1960’s, said that in his town, they were a positive force, praising them as “an organization of town leaders” who refused to tolerate the racist attitudes of the Ku Klux Klan.

“In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan” would be “run out of town,” Mr. Barbour said. “If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

The comments came as Mr. Barbour, 62, is actively considering a bid for the White House, and the governor’s political opponents and some civil rights groups quickly seized on the remarks.

Media Matters, a liberal organization, sent e-mail messages to reporters Monday urging coverage of the comments. Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi N.A.A.C.P., told The Huffington Post, “It’s beyond disturbing — it’s offensive that he would take that approach to the history of this state to many African-Americans who had to suffer as a result of the policies and practices of the Citizens Council.”

...

If you need it, Yglesias has more here.

Still, when your party Base is pretty much evenly split between bigots and imbeciles, none of this really matters does it?

Sack The Fops

End


The


Senate


From anonymous holds that let any Civil-War-grudge-holding flake randomly bring the government to its knees...to filibusters-by-proxy that let the minority rule by decree and ransom note...to mysterious, obscure double-magic-reverso rules which can undo all that has gone before (but only if invoked on the third Tuesday of a month when the official Senate chicken has laid an egg with a double yolk)...if the last two years has demonstrated anything, it is that America's House of Lords has failed.

Since the beginning, practically the Senate's only reason for being has been to act as a firewall against the excesses of the House, and the only weapons it really had were collegiality, compromise and an arsenal of arcane rules that punished outliers who wanted to push things along too quickly.

But Conservatism's engineered rage retrovirus -- spliced meticulously together out of racism, ignorance, fundamentalism and lies, and delivered everywhere at the speed of light via Fox News and Hate Radio -- has now done exactly what it was designed to do: kill any vestige of collegiality or compromise or reason on the Right. And now that this wingnut contagion has broken through the containment field and is running like wildfire through the halls of the Senate

the same, powerful, entangling tools which were originally designed to halt the progress of the disease have been turned into instruments for worsening its spread.

Thanks to the Republican Party, the Senate is no longer capable of performing its most basic bodily/political functions. Thanks to the Republican Party, the "World's Greatest Deliberative Body" has been reduced to a hopelessly dysfunctional sack of plague, bleeding out.

So if our fever ever breaks and we limp back to national sanity we can bring the Senate back from mothballs, but for now it is time to get rid of it.

Just to be sure.