Energy Secretary Attacks Offshore Wind and Dismisses Climate Change
Chris Wright, who travels to Europe next week to promote American gas, called climate change “not incredibly important.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Friday defended the Trump administration’s decision to block a nearly completed $6.2 billion wind farm off the coast of Rhode Island by saying offshore wind increases electricity prices and by downplaying the jobs at stake.
Energy experts accused Mr. Wright of oversimplifying the economics of offshore wind energy, noting that while it requires a significant amount of upfront capital to build a project, it was expected to create more than 55,000 jobs by the end of the decade and enough electricity to inexpensively power 22 million homes before the Trump administration took steps to throttle the nascent industry.
A former fracking executive, Mr. Wright said the focus in the United States to transition away from fossil fuels had hurt the country...
He called the 2015 Paris agreement, in which the United States and nearly every other country pledged to reduce greenhouse gases, “silly.”
“Climate change, for impacting the quality of your life, is not incredibly important,” Mr. Wright said. “In fact, if it wasn’t in the news, in the media, you wouldn’t know.”...
Sometimes you just have to take a moment, sit back, and wonder at the towering stupidity, not just of Trump and his cabinet, and his department heads, and not just the Republican senators who confirmed most of them, but of the tens of millions of racist, inbred meatbags who voted for all of this in three consecutive elections.
Sure, it's all horrible, but sometimes one incident sticks its head above the Great Scrum of Idiocy and demands special attention.
Like rubbernecking a multi-car pileup the size of Montana where one group of idiots just keep driving more cars into the burning wreckage, while a much larger group of idiots cheer them on. And then one brave man steps forward and announces, "Damn it, it's not enough to just pile my car into the inferno! I'm shall build a mighty ramp of paper-mâché and Trump flags and jump straight to the top of it in a motorcycle made of farts and old dynamite."
"You go to Trump's Fascist Security Theater with the rakes and yard waste
bags you have, not the rakes and yard waste bags you might want or wish to
have at a later time."
National guard troops have spent their last days of the summer mulching cherry trees, collecting trash and clearing homeless camps across Washington DC, as Donald Trump’s federal takeover of the capital evolved the guard from makeshift cops to armed jacks of all trades.
More than 2,200 soldiers from states including Mississippi and Louisiana have been stationed across the city since Trump declared a “crime emergency” on 11 August. However, their responsibilities now encompass clearing out Union Station and what officials term “beautification” projects, including trash collection, mulching around cherry trees at the Tidal Basin, and potential graffiti removal.
In addition to throwing troops into situations for which they were ill-suited and unprepared, both Republican Donalds also demonstrate(d) a casual willingness to use
administrative bullshit to screw the troops over.
On December 6, 2004, eight U.S. soldiers – five stationed in Iraq, two in
Kuwait on their way to Iraq, and one home on leave from Iraq about to be
shipped back – filed a federal lawsuit challenging the Armed Services’
so-called “stop loss” policy which would require them to serve beyond
their enlistment contracts. CCR Vice President Jules Lobel and cooperating
attorney Staughton Lynd are representing Specialist E-4 David W. Qualls
and seven anonymous (“John Doe”) plaintiffs who are seeking a court order
requiring their immediate release from military service. The suit was
brought against Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Acting Secretary of
the Army Les Brownlee, and Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve
Affairs, Reginald Brown.
'It infuriates us': Veterans rage at 'abusive' Trump over reports of
him stiffing soldiers
Donald Trump has reportedly gone out of his way to avoid paying
national guard troops sent in to Washington, D.C., resulting in outrage
from veterans.
The reports started earlier in the summer that Trump was utilizing a
loophole when deploying the national guard, and avoiding paying those
individuals certain additional benefits. In June, Vote In Or Out
reported that "Trump deployed National Guard troops on multiple 29-day
orders—specifically choosing durations under 30 days to avoid paying
full Basic Allowance for Housing Type 1 (BAH‑1)."
"Under Title 32 regulations, if orders run fewer than 30 days, members
receive only the reduced 'BAH‑Type 2,' not full BAH‑1; full benefits
begin only on day 31 and only apply from that point forward—not
retroactively," the group wrote. "By repeatedly cycling short
orders—ending them on day 29 and restarting on day 31—the administration
saved roughly $2,500 per service member per month, based on differences
between BAH‑Type 2 and BAH‑1."...
Stiffing the military he is deploying for his Fascist Security Theater like
the lawyers and contractors he spent his entire life stiffing is
so on-brand for Il Douche.
The U.S. government is offering military funeral honors for Ashli
Babbitt, the rioter who was killed at 35 by an officer in the Jan. 6,
2021, attack on the Capitol.
Babbitt was a U.S. Air Force veteran from California who was shot dead
wearing a Trump campaign flag wrapped around her shoulders while
attempting to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading
to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.
Offering military honors to one of the Capitol rioters is part of
President Donald Trump’s attempts to rewrite that chapter after the 2020
election as a patriotic stand, given he still denies he lost that
election. Babbitt has gained martyr status among Republicans, and the
Trump administration agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a
wrongful-death lawsuit that her family filed over her shooting.
Pentagon Is Reinstalling Portrait of Confederate General at West Point
Library
The Pentagon is putting back up a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee at the
military academy, as the Trump administration seeks to restore honors for
American figures who fought to preserve slavery.
The Pentagon is restoring a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which
includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the
background, to the West Point library three years after a congressionally
mandated commission ordered it removed, officials said.
The 20-foot-tall painting, which hung at the United States Military
Academy for 70 years, was taken down in response to a 2020 law that
stripped the names of Confederate leaders from military bases.
That legislation also created a commission to come up with new base
names. In 2022, the commission ordered West Point to take down all
displays that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.” A few weeks
later, the portrait of General Lee with his slave in the background was
placed in storage.
It was not clear how West Point could return General Lee’s portrait to
the library without violating the law, which emerged from the protests
that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers in
2020.
Here is some footage documenting the "negotiations".
So the next time you see Vice President Couchfucker running his lying mouth --
BREAKING: JD Vance lies that there was a negotiated end to the Second World War. With who? Hitler killed himself in the bunker. Mussolini was overthrown. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Germany and Japan were occupied by allied forces. Read a book. pic.twitter.com/ZDdZfuw5Lc
— Trump Lie Tracker (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) August 24, 2025
-- perhaps gently advise him, in a fatherly sort of way, that if he is very,
very lucky, the worst that will happen to him once the Trump administration is
history is being paraded though the streets of
Washington D.C. alongside the rest to the traitors, head shaved, wearing a sandwich board
with "I Collaborated" written in big, red letters, front and back.
How darkly appropriate that one of the best descriptions of the Trump
Administration came from Hunter Thompson long before there was a Trump
Administration.
“The Circus-Circus Mar-a-Pedo is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich...”
One more thing for Democrats to fix: the Republican Party
At some point, Republicans will be in charge. That is why we must do
everything we can to ensure a more moderate, saner version of the GOP is in
place when that happens.
By Neal Urwitz
Remember kids, not a single Republican anywhere -- from the gas-sippin',
mouth-breathin', Confederate-flag flyin' double-wide denizens of Sisterfuck
Arkansas, to Republican congressmen and senators, to the decrepit orange
traitor and pedo-protector in the White House -- none of them
have any agency at all.
Not a one of them has the capacity to control their actions or behave like
civilized humans.
Therefor it will always fall to Democrats to be responsible for everything.
How Dems Fight Back: Treat Trump Like a Potty-Training Toddler
Children respond best to praise and rewards. The Resistance should adopt
the same strategy with the president-elect.
My wife and I have spent the last week potty training our son. Anyone who
has been through this knows what’s involved: reading and rereading “Elmo
Learns to Use the Potty,” effusive praise for successful trips to the
toilet and lots of M&Ms as a reward.
As every parent knows, the most effective strategy to train a toddler is
to cajole them to do the right thing and heap on the praise; it’s
prettied-up manipulation.
We need to praise him effusively every time he even approximates doing
the right thing. We need to laud him for every mainstream, reasonably
competent appointment he makes, for every bipartisan bill he supports, and
for any time he refrains from outrageous or unlawful actions and
negotiates with Congress instead...
The goal for Democrats should be to prevent worst-case scenarios by
coaxing Trump to behave like an adult. If we are not disciplined enough to
lead with praise for good behavior, we risk accelerating his democratic
backsliding, his most draconian policies and the irreparable damage he
could do to our economy and our society.
Have I mentioned that, apparently, not a single Republican anywhere -- from the gas-sippin', mouth-breathin', Confederate-flag flyin' double-wide denizens of Sisterfuck Arkansas, to Republican congressmen and senators, to the decrepit orange traitor and pedo-protector in the White House -- is capable of controlling their
moral or constitutional bowels?
That uncontrollably shitting out lies and treason and ludicrous conspiracy
theories and outright fascism is just who they are, and it is unreasonable to
expect them to behave like civilized humans?
That it therefor follows that Democrats are to not only to be held responsible
for everything every Democrat says and does (even garbage that Fox News just
makes up), but everything Republicans do as well?
Have I mentioned that? Because it feels like I might have mentioned that
once or twice over the past 20 years.
However, what remains a taboo subject everywhere except out here in
disreputable wilds of whatever is left of the Liberal blogosphere is
how exactly the Republican base came to be such a aggregation of
unsalvageable garbage people that they would nominate this degenerate monster
for president three times and elect him twice.
How is it that no one but us dirty hippies noticed or cared about the monstrous cancer that was growing in plain sight at the heart of the GOP until it was far too late to stop it?
What Major General Alfred Terry and Rear Admiral David Porter did with shot
and shell to take Fort Fisher in January 1865, we must do to the Trump
administration with words, pictures, music, video, formal speeches, letters to the editor, protests, signs, buttons and votes in the House, the Senate and statehouses across the country.
Bondi’s Obama Grand Jury: The Authoritarian Moment We’ve All Feared
It’s officially happening: the use of the machinery of justice to go on
fishing expeditions about political predecessors. Absolute madness.
It’s the moment we’ve feared—the moment the Supreme Court invoked in giving
Donald Trump immunity, and the moment that marks an authoritarian government
at its most vulgar and vicious.
On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi signed an order directing an
as-yet-unidentified federal prosecutor to convene a grand jury to investigate
whether prominent officials in Barack Obama’s administration, including Obama
himself, purposely manufactured an intelligence assessment in January 2017.
The supposed purpose of the Obama officials’ scheme: to promote a “false
narrative” that Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, engaged in an
operation to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election with the intent of helping
Trump win.
Problem #1: There’s nothing whatsoever false about this narrative.
The Intelligence Community Assessment, or ICA, prepared by career
professionals and our intelligence agencies, indeed concluded: “Russian
President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 to undermine
public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and
harm her electability and potential presidency.”
...that conclusion has been repeatedly reaffirmed in multiple
investigations—including those of special counsel Robert Mueller, the Senate
Intelligence Committee, and special prosecutor John Durham.
The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee unanimously found in 2020 that
the ICA was “coherent and well constructed” and reconfirmed that Russia
“engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence” the 2016
election in Trump’s favor.
Donald Trump's Name in Jeffrey Epstein Files Redacted by FBI: Report
Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.”
I'm sure Trump's ham-fisted, panic-sweat-soaked shenanigans will continue to fool most of MAGA idiots because the Republican base has always been the "some of the people" who can be fooled all of the time.
"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who
worked in the Trump administration. Like, I want to live in a world where,
25 years from now, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume
because they don't want to put they were part of the Trump administration on
their resume."
-- Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.
What a noble sentiment! Would that we lived in a world where people who
uncritically served and cheered on a corrupt and criminally incompetent
administration that left disaster after disaster in its wake would end up
feeling really, really bad about it. So deeply ashamed that it would
affect their employability.
Sigh.
Hey, how about, just for goofs, instead of looking forward25 years to
a utopian future where feeling shame about serving and cheering on a corrupt
and criminally incompetent administration had, y'know, consequences --
-- let's look back 25 years and see how this noble sentiment played out
in the real world during what our Never Trumper friends would have you believe
were the good old days of rectitude and personal responsibility.
So, the year 2025 - 25 gives us...hey! 2000!
You might remember that was the year a Republican mob disrupted vote counting
in Florida. The year that five Republican-appointed Supreme Court
justices anointed George W. Bush president of the United States.
After that came Bush's catastrophic failure on 9/11. Then lying us into
the wrong war. Then fucking that war up -- the worst foreign policy
debacle in modern history, but enriched the vice president's cronies and
former business partners. Pissing away the Clinton surplus and saddling
us with even bigger deficits than Reagan and Bush I combined. Then came
Hurricane Katrina. Teri Schiavo. The failed attempt to privative
Social Security. The attorney general scandal. Then the collapse
of the world economy. And so many more!
So, if we rejigger Ms. Longwell's words just a little bit...
"I want to live in a world where there is deep shame by all the people who
worked in the George W. Bush administration. Like, I want to live in a world
where, 25 years later, when people, uh, they've got a gap in their resume
because they don't want to put they were part of the Dubya administration on
their resume." -- driftglass.
But that didn't happen, did it?
You will remember that, having been in office barely a minute and in response
to a reporter's question about the arrest of his friend, Harvard professor
Henry Louis Gates Jr., in 2009 for disorderly conduct outside of his own home,
Barack Obama made this offhand but truthful remark:
"I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role
race played in that, but I think it's fair to say... that the Cambridge
police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof
that they were in their own home."
You’d have thought that he had publicly wiped his ass with the Bill of
Rights. A president of the United States had the temerity to say, out
loud, that some cops acted stupidly! Massive blowback. Massive
outcry.
Fun historical fact: eight years later, the same people who pretended to
faint in outraged droves over this would go on to elect elect a racist
internet troll and adjudicated rapist who calls anyone who disagrees with him
even slightly "stupid" and "terrible" and "weak" and "the enemy of the people"
and "terrorists" and worse, on and on and on and on and on, every fucking day.
Anyway, hence, the so-called beer summit.
But when it came the actual war crimes committed by the
Bush administration, the legacy media and Conservative media and Republican
politicians all locked arms and decided on a strategy of purposeful ignorance.
From Eric Alterman in The Nation, May 6, 2009:
Even after the disgraceful performance of so many armchair warriors
during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, who would have dared predict
the willingness, nay, eagerness, of respected journalists and pundits to
argue in favor of purposeful ignorance? Sadly, many of them have shown
less interest in potential war crimes committed by the Bush administration
than little Misha Lerner, the Jewish Primary Day School fourth grader who
quizzed Condoleezza Rice about her inability to explain the legality of
these policies to a group of Stanford students.
While many have made the case to varying degrees, Peggy Noonan made it
most explicitly: “Some things in life need to be mysterious,” she said of
America’s role in torturing terrorist suspects. “Sometimes you need to just
keep walking.”
This is the full Noonan quote:
"Some things in life need to be mysterious. Sometimes you need
to just keep walking. ... It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing
these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking, oh, much
good will come of that."
Go down the list of every war criminal in the Bush administration and you will
find none – zero – who ever paid any price for any of the atrocities they
committed.
In fact, this was the mastermind of the Iraq debacle back in 2014 at a
Politico event.
Go down the list of the most prominent
Bush administration cheerleaders and torture enthusiasts and what do you
find?
You find that none of them ever apologized. None were ever
chastised. None were shamed out of their media gigs. None of them
ever missed a meal.
Instead, you find some of them, like Nicolle Wallace
and Joe Scarborough, hosting shows on MSNBC, Wallace glossing over the entire
Bush Administration with the phrase, “My former boss whatever you think of
him”. You find them with op-ed columns in The New York Times,
the Washington Post and The Atlantic.
You find the scumbag who cooked up
the absurd legal predicate for the Bush administration's torture regime, John
Yoo, is now the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of
California, Berkeley.
You find Spit-Comb Paul Wolfowitz being
appointed the president of the World Bank, a job he had to quit two years
later only because of an unrelated sex scandal.
All the Fox
News degenerates who led the scorched earth slander campaign against the
anti-war movement all still have jobs, and before he died and went to hell,
Donald Trump awarded Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of
Freedom.
So, Sarah Longwell, this is exactly how we got to
where we are. Rules and consequences. Your party’s rules and your
party's consequences, going back decades.
Republicans spent an enormous
amount of time and effort teaching generations of Republican voters one, basic
rule: that, no matter how ignorant and bigoted and wrong they acted, it
was their God-given right to never be held responsible for anything. To
never feel shame for being dead-rat stupid. To revel in being vicious
and cruel.
And the consequences? You can see those all around you every day.
You taught
Conservative media and Republican politicians that the key to success was
flattering and appeasing the mob.
You taught them, the louder the demagogue and the
bloodier the lie, the more the morons would cheer.
In Jonestown, not everyone in the cult drank the poison.
Some had already defected and left when Jim Jones gave the death order.
Some were away from the compound.
When the order came down, some were forcibly injected with poison, or forced
to drink the cyanide-laced Flavor Aid.
Some tried to resist and were shot.
Some escaped into the jungle.
And hanging over it all was the fact that Jonestown was physically isolated
from the rest of the world.
But MAGA cultists are not physically isolated from the rest of the world, are
they?
Quite the opposite: they live in one of the most technologically advanced
societies on the planet, during an era of instant communication and instant
access to information unlike anything that has ever existed in history.
There are no barbwire fences or guards with machine guns forcing them to
swallow increasingly hateful and ludicrous propaganda every day.
They choose this life. Every day they choose to believe liars who laugh
at them as they take their money and their votes. Every day they make a
grotesque mockery of the Christianity they claim to believe in. And
every day they have to work just a little bit harder to make sure that nothing
of the outside world and the horrendous consequences of their electoral
decision leaks into their tiny, suffocating, self-imposed cave.
And now, after a decade of Trump ordering them to swallow all kinds of toxic
garbage in the name of Jebus and Freedumb, he is ordering them to drink
straight cyanide. No additives. Nothing to make it go down
easier. Just shut up and drink it.
Trump blasts 'stupid' and 'foolish' Republicans amid calls to reveal more
Epstein files The president made baseless claims that Democrats
created a "hoax."
Trump can't stop MAGA from obsessing about the Epstein files
MAGA-friendly media has been torn over how to respond to a base that
wants more on the Epstein files and a president who wants it to move
on.
And now they're praying to Republican Jebus like they've never prayed to him
before to please let this cup pass from them. But it won't.
Because it can't. Because faith in their insane conspiracy theories is,
at the moment, synonymous with their faith in the pope of their Church of
Insane Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump.
So, in then end, most will drink from the cup Trump offers. Rather than
admit they were wrong, they will swallow whatever stupid hellbrew of
transparent lies, deflections of supplementary conspiracy nonsense it
contains. They will shout whatever deranged bullshit he commands them to
shout. They will do this because they really are nothing more than
reprogrammable meatbags. And however humiliating it might be to go along
with Trump Pedophile coverup, the alternative -- admitting they had been wrong
about Trump all along -- is literally unthinkable. To extend the
"reprogrammable" metaphor, the Epstein Files are an "app" but their blind
faith in Trump is their operating system, so do not make the mistake of
expecting better from these dregs of humanity.
In the end, most of them will drink from the cup Trump offers...
... but not all of them. And that is where hope lies.
Those who stay in the cult are lost, damned souls. There is no saving
them so stop wasting your time trying.
But because they live in one of the most technologically advanced societies on
the planet, during an era of instant communication and instant access to
information unlike anything that has ever existed in history, no matter how
diligently they work to keep the blinding nova daylight of Trump's complicity
in his dead best friend's child sex trafficking ring from leaking into their
tiny, suffocating, self-imposed cave, some of it will break through and some
of them will be thrown into panicked confusion.
Some will resist and be cast out.
Some will flee.
And that may be enough.
Do not expect the few MAGA meatheads who make a break for it to show up at our
doorstep offering to knock doors for Zohran Mamdani, Kat Abughazaleh or Ro
Khanna. Decades of relentless Conservative media slander has done its
work: to MAGA meatbags, Democrats are nothing but a Soros-funded cabal of
commie baby-killers, and nothing but the erosion of mortal demography is
going to change that.
But for those few MAGA meatheads who flee the cult, the Both Sides Do It lie
they've used to keep Reality at bay through all previous Republican scandals
may finally pay some unexpected dividends.
Whether they opt to scream
"Uniparty" until they burst a blood vessel and throw their vote down Musk's
third party rathole, or they just quit politics altogether and spend the rest
of their miserable lives hunkered down in their doublewides, getting drunk
watching NCIS, and weeping themselves to sleep listening to a Lee Greenwood
cover of "Didn't We Almost Have it All"... I don't fucking care.
If enough of them take French leave from MAGA to give Democrats enough
leverage to start to drive a stake though the heart of the Trump presidency,
that will be enough of a first step to warrant a toast.
Not be enough to win the war, obviously. Because this is a war. But maybe enough to give democracy
some breathing room.
So far, Stupid Watergate is checking every box. Crimes, cash and
coverups.
In both scandals, a hugely incriminating gap in a critical tape has been found
that just happens to be right where the smoking gun would have been.
In both scandals, we find shoe leather hustle by honest journalists on a
story that none of the elite members of the legacy media wanted to touch.
Honest reporting that is not only moving the story forward, but also shaming
the "Let's move on to something else" legacy media into getting off their fat
asses and start asking questions. of their own.
The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out
Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes
and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut
starts right at the “missing minute.”
In both scandals, there are ominous and obviously panicked firings of key
players who threaten to bring the scandal inside the White House.
Pam Bondi Fired the Avenger of Sex Trafficking Victims on Donald Trump’s
Personal Authority
I’ve often said that, this time, Donald Trump has chosen poorly of which
people to make political martyrs.
Less than eight hours after proclaiming that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was
just some “new SCAM” perpetrated by Democrats, about four days after he
first attempted to float the wildly illogical claim that the Epstein “Files
[were] written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and
Criminals of the Biden Administration,” DOJ fired Jim Comey’s daughter,
Maurene.
According to the NYT, the letter terminating Ms. Comey cited Article II
authority.
Ms. Comey was informed of her firing in a letter that cited Article II of
the Constitution, which describes the powers of the president, according
to two of the people.
From 1973, the Saturday Night Massacre:
The obvious difference this time is that Nixon's Attorney General, Eliot Richardson, was fired because he took a principled stand against what Nixon was trying to do, whereas Trump's Attorney General is an unprincipled whore who would do any monstrous thing Trump told her to do.
On the other hand, Nixon's previous Attorney General, John Mitchell, was corrupt as fuck and was convicted of several Watergate-related crimes.
Like OG Watergate, Stupid Watergate implicates members of Trump's cabinet and his inner circle of creepy, fascist "advisors".
And, like OG Watergate, the central character in Stupid Watergate is a bitter, paranoid, lying crook who is obviously guilty as hell, who is unraveling by the day, who is shedding supporters like a pug sheds fur, who is lashing out in all directions, and who oscillates wildly between pleading and demanding that everyone shut the fuck up and move on.
This may be where Stupid Watergate veers off the OG Watergate track, but if not, then expect Trump to offer to reveal the TRUTH about the Epstein files, "warts and all", but only via an "investigation" he personally controls, which will produce a PERFECT "report" that he will personally edit. Should this be the case, expect "The Final Word On The Obama Biden Crooked Hillary Epstein Hoax SCAM" to be bound in cheap, fake leather and offered on Trump's merch site alongside the Trump Bible and Trump Shitcoins and all the rest of the landfill detritus of this Monster from the Republican Id.
If you can think of any other parallels between OG Watergate and Stupid Watergate, leave them in the comments.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Addenda: As Lindsay Beyerstein points out, what makes Stupid Watergate extra potent is the nature of the scandal at the heart of it:
We are living through a slow-burn satanic panic where a large percentage of evangelicals believe that child traffickers run the United States of America.
“This is a very specific complaint that is deeply felt and very dark that is in MAGA. If you spend much time in MAGA circles you will encounter a lot of people it’s not just that they think the elites are out to get them. They think the elites are running a global pedophile ring, that America is run by pedophiles. Now, the extreme version of that is the QAnon but the Epstein controversy is part and parcel of this," [David] French explains.
The whole reason these people supported Donald Trump in the first place was because he promised to liberate America from the Satanic pedophiles and if he won't do that, he's not the Chosen One after all.
In five years, having voted for Bush will have become the parachute pants
of this decade.
It will become the “Oh my GOD. What the fuck was I thinking?” shameful
secret people will occasionally and elliptically allude to by piping up
with, “well, he did good after 9/11” as schoolchildren are taught what a
disaster on every front and by every measure he was, and as adults who now
have to pay and pay dearly for the myriad lies and crimes and follies of
George W. Bush recount his Top 100 Fuckups and bitterly laugh and laugh
and laugh.
So that’s where we are now.
I was directionally correct, but after watching Republicans and the legacy
media haul the history of the Bush administration down the the River Lethe,
weigh it down with stones, sew it into a bag and toss it in, I realized that,
as cynical as I was, I underestimated both the sheer moral
hollowness of Republican voters and how complicit the legacy media was willing
to be in bulldozing the Bush administration down the memory hole.
I recalibrated my estimation of how much trouble we were in downward, and have
not been off the mark since.
Because there were no shameful admissions. No rueful laughter at their
toxic folly. Because they had already learned the most important aspect
of Conservatism: under no circumstances will Conservatives ever be
required to admit they were wrong or had made a mistake. Everything will
always be either someone else's fault, or everything they did was the result
of a painful Hobbesian choice they were forced to make because, as the legacy
media and Conservative media have both drilled into them for decades,
Democrats are always, always, alwaysas bad or worse than Republicans.
So, by 2008, Republican scum had already begun to tart themselves up as
"independents."
By 2009, David Fucking Brooks was already legitimizing these
Republicans-in-Independent-camo in the pages of the New York Times.
By 2010, they had tromped through the Bush-Off Machine and fully morphed into
the Fake Tea Party, bellowing about deficits, taxes, Death Panels, Birth
Certificates and the Scary Radical Negro president.
But... but... however hard they tried to scrub it off, these assholes who had
had been the braying, strutting cheerleaders of everything Dubya had done were
desperate to get back to the awesome "when none can call our power to account"
aspect of being a Conservative --
Out, damned spot! out, I say!--One: two: why, then, 'tis time to
do't.--Hell is murky!--Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need
we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?--Yet who
would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him.
-- but, like Lady MacBeth, they could never quite cleanse
themselves of that big, bloody Bush administration stain.
And why? Because the leaders of their own party refused to do the one
thing the base wanted above all else: make George W. Bush the villain.
Sacrifice him to exonerate them. Wicker Man his ass. Instead,
those eight years of ruin and failure were just, sorta left there. A
rotting carcass in the middle of the room, lightly covered with a sheet, but
everyone still had to step around it to get where they were goin, and the
smell still hung in the air.
And then along came Trump, who told the base exactly what they wanted to
hear. From Politico, February 14, 2016:
Trump Goes Code Pink on George W. Bush
It was weird that an angry Code Pink-style protester interrupted last
night’s Republican presidential debate with a barrage of familiar
Democratic talking points about George W. Bush—that he lied the country
into a disastrous war in Iraq, failed to prevent the September 11
attacks, and even whiffed on an opportunity to kill Osama bin Laden. It
was especially weird that the protestor was one Donald J. Trump, who
happens to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
Trump didn’t just call the Iraq war a mistake. He called it “a big fat
mistake.” And he didn't call it an inadvertent mistake because of faulty
intelligence. “They lied!” he thundered. “They said there were weapons
of mass destruction … and they knew there were none.” ...
Then Trump turned and pointed the finger directly at "Jeb!"
[Trump] spent much of the night mocking George’s brother Jeb as a weak,
incompetent, lying loser.
And it is a measure of how completely clueless about the state of the
Republican base the legacy media, Republican elites and Conservative pundits
all were that they rose almost as one, in surprise and bemusement and
pearl-clutching umbrage, to begin drafting Trump's political obituary for
doing such a thing.
But this was the sort of thing the base of the Republican base had been dying
for. Not shamefaced deflection and denial, but full-throated,
unequivocal absolution. It wasn't their fault! They had been
deceived! Tricked! Hoodwinked! Cheated!
Bamboozled!
This was what Trump offered. Reassurance. Validation.
Remember, the Republican party spent decades and billions of dollars carefully
cultivating a base of xenophobes, homophobes, misogynists, white nationalists,
gun nuts, Conservative Christian theocrats, bigots and imbeciles. Anyone
who listened to Hate Radio or watched Fox News for five minutes could see
it. And yet, to make itself acceptable a legacy media which the base
despised, Conservative pundits consistently pretended that base did not
exist. Instead, pundits pretended that the base was made up entirely of
thoughtful, yeoman farmers and shopkeepers who lived in a place called Real
America, and spent their days quoting Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman back
and forth to each other over the back yard fence.
To win elections, party leaders needed a base that was stupid enough and
paranoid enough and rage-drunk enough to consistently vote against their own
interests because Democrats were Murrica-hatin', terrorist-luvin',
baby-killin' commies. But at the same time they also
needed that base to shut the fuck up about how stupid and paranoid and
rage-drunk they were when the normies were paying attention.
Bill Buckley in the streets, George Wallace between the sheets.
And then along came Trump who told them, fuck all that. Fuck the elites
who tell you to be ashamed. Fuck the Fake News that tells you things you
don't want to hear. Be proud of your bigotry. Lean in to your
misogyny. Revel in your cruelty. Wipe your asses with the
Constitution and laugh when Liberal whine about it!
Trump's 2016 appeal began with telling the base to celebrate everything the
party elites told them to be ashamed of, and absolving the GOP base of all the
heinous shit they had said and done that had blown up in their faces during
the Dubya years.
So whether Trump is wheeled out of office in January, 2029, drooling and
gibbering, or he goes out toes-up on a gurney before then, the MAGA mob isn't
going anywhere. And because the rule is that the MAGA mob must never,
ever be required to admit they were wrong or had made a mistake, you can bet
your last $10 egg that the next Republican demagogue to win the MAGA mob will
do it by finding a way to absolve them of all the heinous shit they are saying
and doing now, that will have blown up in their faces by the then.
"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." -- Frank Herbert, Dune
In 2016, voters were offered a choice between a competent, capable, dedicated public servant with a track record of success, and a lying, racist sexual predator. And 62,984,825 of our fellow citizens stared into the lying, racist abyss that is Donald Trump and said, "Hell yes!"
In 2020, voters were once again offered a choice between a competent, capable, dedicated public servant with a track record of success, and that very same lying, racist, openly-fascist sexual predator who had just finished nearly wrecked the country with his corruption, incompetence and unprecedented, non-stop lying. This time 74,224,319 of our fellow citizens stared into the lying, corrupt, racist, predatory abyss that is Donald Trump and said, "Hell yes!"
In 2024, voters were yet again offered a choice between a competent, capable, dedicated public servant with a track record of success, and that very same lying, racist, openly-fascist sexual predator who had now led a violent coup against the government of the United States, who promised to pardon the traitors who had tried to overthrow the government, who had been impeached twice, was credibly accused of serious federal and state crimes in multiple jurisdictions and was now a multiply-convicted felon. This time 77,302,580 of our fellow citizens stared into the lying, corrupt, racist, predatory abyss that is Donald Trump and said, "Hell yes!"
And in handing him absolute control over this country, they gave him the power to destroy it. Which he and his henchmen are, right now, in the process of doing.
G.O.P. Bill Has $1.1 Trillion in Health Cuts and 11.8 Million Losing Care, C.B.O. Says
Analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that Republicans’ new version of the legislation would make far deeper cuts and lead to more people becoming uninsured than previous proposals.
According to a report published late Saturday night, the legislation would mean 11.8 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2034. Federal spending on Medicaid, Medicare and Obamacare would be reduced by more than $1.1 trillion over that period — with more than $1 trillion of those cuts coming from Medicaid alone.
The fresh estimates make official what many analysts had already predicted and some Republican lawmakers had feared. The size and scope of the health care cuts in the bill, particularly from Medicaid, have been hotly debated, with fiscal hawks pressing for bigger reductions and other Republicans resisting them as they consider the impact on their constituents and health providers in their districts and states.
They are also at odds with President Trump’s vow not to touch Medicaid except to do away with waste and fraud.
The scale of the proposed reductions in Medicaid is unprecedented in the history of the program, which has tended to expand coverage over time since its creation in 1965.
USAID cuts could lead to 14 million deaths over the next five years, researchers say
An analysis published Monday in the medical journal The Lancet projects that cuts to the agency will lead to more deaths from diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
Analysis: Senate GOP’s Updated Megabill is Still a Disaster for Affordability, Jobs, and Clean Energy
It’s official: Republican Senate Leadership has released an updated version of their tax megabill, which will likely be the version that goes to the floor for a final vote. And somehow, it’s even worse than before. Senate Republicans are proposing passing legislation that will lock in higher household energy bills, kill American jobs, sell out the health of working and frontline communities, harm Medicaid, jeopardize food assistance, and torch our future.
If this bill passes, Republicans would be responsible for the loss of over 800,000 jobs, raising the average American’s electricity bills by 10 percent, and in a time of intense heat and grid demand, they’ll be reducing new energy capacity installed on the grid by at least 50 percent. All this—simply to line the pockets of billionaires, fossil fuel executives, and their top corporate backers with massive tax cuts.
All of this and all that is to come aren't the actions of a single monster, or even that monster and his pet Republican cowards and quislings and fanatics in congress.
All of this and all that is to come are the result of a premeditated act of democracide by 77,302,580 of our fellow citizens, and of all their enablers who stayed home or otherwise threw their vote away because they just couldn't bring themselves to vote for the black lady, or because, y'know, Both Sides.
If 77,302,580 feels like too big and too abstract a number for you to get your head around, remember that among all of those tens of millions who affirmatively decided to bind our country hand and foot and turn it over to rapacious degenerate parasites are...
...people who are in the pews with you on Sunday, if you are a church-goer.
...people who are in line with you at the grocery store.
...people who are on the staff of your local school districts
...people who own local businesses.
...retirees living on pensions dining a couple of tables over from you at a local diner.
All of this and all that is to come is their fault.
It is our job to make sure they can never, ever live it down.
If you have eyes to see with and ears to hear, you have no doubt noticed the
media making a big deal of the 10 year anniversary of Donald Trump's June
16, 2015 journey down an escalator and into the hearts of the Republican
base.
Trump Has Us On His Golden Escalator to Hell—But There is a Way Off
Fox News:
Flashback: 10 years since Trump's golden escalator ride
‘The Five’ co-hosts recount President Donald Trump’s first election,
his game-changing rise in politics and already ‘fascinating’ second
term.
The Washington Examiner:
A decade of MAGA: How Trump’s golden escalator ride changed America
At the time, right down the line, all the Very Serious People and every
Republican who would go on to be a Never Trumpers regarded the whole idea of
Trump running for president as a goof. A joke. A jape. A
stunt. Burlesque. The notion of this jumped-up real estate
buffoon and reality teevee guy running for, well, anything was seen as a
clown on his way to the inevitable banana peel.
But there was a tiny contingent of us dirty hippies (who had long since been dispatched to media Coventry for the unforgivable sin of being right about the Right when everyone else had been wrong) who looked at Trump and saw the genuine threat he represented.
It's not that I had any special, inside dope about the way Trump had operated in the New York real estate market, or in the New York media market, or on reality teevee. I didn't. What I did have was a lifetime of up-close-and-personal exposure the Republican base, and could see with my own two eyes the terrible trajectory they had already been on for decades: a trajectory which both the legacy media and elite Conservative media categorically refused to believe existed at all.
And so, on June 18, 2015 -- two days after Trump announced -- I wrote this, which you are encouraged to send along to your favorite Never Trumper who still insists that no one could possibly have seen Trump coming, or what geniuses they are because they and only they caught wind of what a colossal ass-ache Trump might develop into. You are especially encouraged to send this along to your favorite Never Trump who is constantly moaning that we Liberals are potty-mouthed idiots who have no inkling what's really going on, or what is at stake.
From me, June 18, 2015:
The Premium Leads
In case you missed it, Squint and the Meat Puppet handed the MSNBC camera over to Donald Trump this morning for a relaxing, 30-minute handjob. While Trump rambled lazily from one pinnacle of bullshit and narcissism to the next, Morning Joe crack house regulars Mark Halperin (Glenn Beck's favorite mainstream media enabler) and the pickled remains of Mike Barnacle looked on, smirking and giggling. All that it lacked to complete the creepy, peep-show effect were trench-coats and bad lighting.
But of course, the story of the Trump candidacy has very little to do with Donald Trump.
As I wrote a few years ago, the brain-caste of the GOP spent a 40 years and billions of dollars carefully breeding an army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps. And they have been so successful at completely re-engineering the Right's ideological digestive system that they can no longer process any information which does not come to them in the form of Fox-approved Benghaaaazi goo.
In other words, in order to win elections and rake in vast fortunes, the Conservative brain caste has painstakingly created the perfect feeding-ground for con men and demagogues like Trump, the louder and more bombastic the better. And from David Brooks and the Wall Street Journal and "Meet the Press", to Ann Coulter and the Washington Free Beacon and the Breitbart Collective, in one way or another, virtually everyone in the media makes bank by flattering Conservative meatheads and pandering to their delusions.
They are the GOP's premium leads, but however abundant and renewable a resource the Conservative meatheads may be, come Presidential election time, there is never enough room at the trough for every rapacious Republican hog. This is why every few years we have these Little Red State Fundy moments; that delicate time when the knives come out and the various species of Conservative con men start cutting each other's balls over who gets to pluck the wingnut pigeons...
...while trying desperately not to call attention to the fact that their entire political system depends on pandering to the army of reliably angry, paranoid, racists chumps which the GOP has worked so long and hard to cultivate.
Fortunately for the Right, now that the "respectable" media has as much to lose by cracking out of turn as Hate Radio and Fox News, we can all look forward to another campaign season of the American mainstream media looking stoically the other way.
End of sobering sojourn into the twilight of the Before Time.
