As you probably already know, Donald Trump has turned the USS Abraham Lincoln
into a floating gulag for any sailor unlucky
enough to be stationed there:
Trump says record USS Lincoln deployment 'not nearly long enough'
President Donald Trump reacted to reports of poor conditions on the USS
Abraham Lincoln on Friday, claiming that families of service members are
"not" concerned and saying that the vessel hasn't been deployed for
"nearly long enough."
The president also confirmed that a new aircraft carrier is headed to the
Middle East to replace it during a very brief gaggle with reporters on the
tarmac at Joint Base Andrews Friday afternoon.
The aircraft carrier's movements come amid reports of mental health and
supply issues aboard the USS Lincoln, whose long deployment to the Middle
East in support of the Iran war includes a record-setting time at sea of
more than 200 days. Navy leaders, including the Navy's acting Secretary
Hung Cao, last week held a heated town hall for families of the USS
Lincoln who had raised concerns about the conditions on the ship.
Tapper: What is your husband saying about conditions on the ship? Wife of
Service Member Aboard USS Lincoln: My husband is appalled at the
conditions on this ship. This is not his first deployment. And he is
saying that it is the worst deployment that he's ever been on. His
shipmates say the same.
This should come as no surprise, as Donald Trump has never given a shit about
the United States military except as a toy for him to play with. Trump
also thinks anyone willing to risk their life for their country is
a "sucker" and a "loser".
John Kelly confirms Trump privately disparaged U.S. service members and
veterans
Trump called fallen soldiers "suckers” and "losers" during his presidency,
according to a 2020 report in The Atlantic.
But do you remember the fate of the USS Abraham Lincoln during the last
Republican administration that lied us into a disastrous war in the Middle
East and then catastrophically botched it?
It was in all the papers.
That would be Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, delivered on
May 1, 2003.
And that, just two days before that speech, the cover story of the now-defunct
Weekly Standard featured David Brooks declaring that The War Was Over!
Yay!
The Good Guys had triumphed! Neoconservatism had been vindicated. And it
was time for the resistance to crawl under a nearby porch and quietly die, or
dry up and blow away or dissolve into laughably delusional
absurdism.
Pieces of Mr. Brooks' radioactively reckless and vindictive claptrap can be
found
here.
As you literati know, maritime myth and literature are full of stories about
ships "sailing under a doom." The story of Jonah from the Bible.
The tale of the Mary Celeste. The legend of the Flying Dutchman.
Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Poe's
MS. Found in a Bottle. Melville's Moby Dick. And so
on.
Now I'm not saying that the USS Abraham Lincoln is cursed. I am saying
that, if it is cursed, we definitely know why. And that, out of
an abundance of caution, it wouldn't hurt to burn some sage, flick a little
holy water around, ring some church bells, and never, ever put another
Republican in the White House.
You can take the boy out of [checks notes] The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon
Weekly Standard, The New York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR...
...but you can't take The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon Weekly Standard, The New
York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR out of the boy.
David Brooks: Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my
lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for
that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden
seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is
handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there
and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so
that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health
insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.
That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which
the party is moving further and further away from the center, and
therefore...
Jonathan Capehart:I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far
away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or
people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I
just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket
argument that the Democratic Party is running far left.
Let's hold on that a moment, because yesterday on the BlueSky Ana Marie Cox
asked:
What are David Brooks' worst columns? Everyone can cite the sandwich one,
and the Epstein one but of the top of dome--what else? He did say that
wearing a Mets hat could save democracy once? (I'm making a video.)
My Bat Signal lit up and I replied as follows:
I'd ask "alphabetically or chronologically", but it's a trick question,
since David Brooks has only ever written one column -- the same column --
over and over again. But if I had to choose...it's "Collapse of the
Dream Palaces" April, 2003,
excerpted here.
A close second is the full-blown freakout when his very good friend
& fellow Iraq war pimp, Joe Lieberman. lost to Ned Lamont in the
Democratic primary in 2006.
And then lied about it later.
Now back to his PBS performance.
It is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable
definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at
this moment".
It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.
All of which says a whole lot more about the people who keep paying him to confidently spout his poisonous claptrap decade after decade than it does about David Fucking Brooks himself.
As most of you know, on this blog, on our podcast, and on stage and screen, I
have long maintained a particular theory about how the Republican Party got itself
into this mess.
They kept two sets of books.
The first set of books was for the rubes, the bigots and the chucklefucks, who
make up the Republican base. And those books were full of absolute nonsense.
Liberals are baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demons. Trans people are coming
for your children. Immigrants are rapists. Tax cuts pay for themselves. The
government is always the problem. Whatever scary story or conspiracy theory
would keep people angry, frightened, and voting Republican -- that was what
went into the first set of books.
And there is no bottom to it. No limit. The Republican base will believe
whatever they were told, because the Republican Party spent decades training
them to believe it. But the point of those lies was never really
governing. The point was power.
The racism, the conspiracy theories, the fear, the culture-war panic -- those
were the keys that unlocked the public treasury. The Republican Party could
use Fox News, talk radio, and an entire conservative media ecosystem to push
those buttons whenever they needed votes. Then, once they were in power, they
could do what they actually wanted to do: deregulate everything, cut taxes for
wealthy people, and serve their donors.
That was the first set of books.
Ah, but to keep the country from complete collapse, Republican leadership had
to keep a second set of books. This one contained reality.
That was the book with the spreadsheets and the data and the boring stuff: how
economies work, how wars work, how logistics work, how science works, how
diseases work. It was the book you actually need if you are trying to run a
country.
And for decades, the Republican Party had a strange arrangement. They would
loudly scream about all the imaginary horrors from the first set of books to
get the base furious enough to elect them, then quietly operate from the
second set of books once they were in office.
They would tell their voters that they were going to deport everyone they
hated, crush their enemies, restore some imaginary golden age, and punish all
the people they had been taught to fear.
Then they would get into office and discover that reality existed. They never
delivered the fantasy. They never actually purged the country of all the
people they demonized. They never delivered the revenge fantasy they sold
their voters. OMG, they even -- gasp! -- cut deals with those baby
killing, gun-grabbing Commie demon Dems!
And as long as the Republican elites and donors controlled the party, the
arrangement sorta worked.
Then along came Trump, and the important thing Trump changed was not the
Republican Party's nature. It was that he simply burned the second set of
books. Trump decided he didn't need the reality-based ledger anymore. He
operated entirely from the first set of books.
He told the base: Yes. I really am going to give you everything you dreamed
of. I will punish the people you hate. I will hurt the people you fear. I will
break the rules for you. And in exchange, you will let me loot the place.
That was the deal. And it still is.
The Republican Party had always used fantasy as a political weapon. Trump
simply stopped pretending that reality existed at all. He looked at the
spreadsheets, the facts, the experts, the institutions, and basically said:
screw it. We don't need any of that.
It was the same kind of thinking that led people throughout history into
disasters: don't worry about the details, don't worry about logistics, don't
worry about reality. We can definitely invade the Soviet Union and
conquer it in two, three months tops because we're awesome! We always
win because we are awesome!
A triumph of the will, if you will. And when the Dear Leader lives in
that mindspace, facts are no longer an issue.
This was from me in September of 2016 -- years before anything called "Never Trump", and decades before Never Trumpers sloooooly and grudgingly began to accept that the real problem with the Republican party is that it's full of Republicans.
Once you start to notice that a depressingly large number of our fellow
citizens have become reprogrammable Orwellian meat-puppets, the rise of
Trump is not hard to understand at all.
And this was the citation from Orwell I was using:
"Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There
is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I
could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish
to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those 19th
century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of
Nature." -- O'Brien, 1984
And this is how Republicans operate all the time now. Everywhere.
Except there are still places where reality has a way of forcing itself back
into the room.
The courtroom is one of those places.
Outside the courtroom, operating from the first set of books, Republicans can
and do say anything. They can invent stories about reflecting pools, election
fraud, conspiracies, whatever. They can feed the base whatever toxic slop they
want because nobody is forcing them to prove it.
But eventually somebody crosses the border between fantasy and reality.
That's what happened to Jeanine Pirro.
When she is on television, playing to the audience, she can live in the first
set of books. She can repeat whatever bullshit the audience wants to hear.
But when she walks into a courtroom, she has crossed into domain of the second
set of books.
Here, there are rules. Here, tangible evidence matters. In fact, it's pretty much all
that matters. In here there are questions that can't be dodged, wriggled out of, or
dismissed with a demeaning insult. And most importantly, in here there
are now consequences for lying.
And once you've crossed the membrane between the domain where Boxwine Pirro spends most of her time, where Doug Burgam and
Donald Trump can lie all they want to because, as long as they keep feeding
the bigots and imbeciles the lies they want to hear, they are rewarded for
lying...
...and the domain of the courtroom, suddenly all the things that worked
outside the courtroom don't work anymore.
In here lawyers and judges get to demand that you show actual evidence.
Where are the photographs? Where are the witnesses? Where is the chain
of proof ? In here, Trump regime's lies and bluster evaporate like fairy gold once the enchantment has been broken.
This stupid Reflecting Pool fuck-up is the Decline and Fall of the Republican Party in microcosm, because reality is the wall Republicans keep slamming into. They have spent decades
building a political machine fueled entirely by bullshit from a fantasy
universe where nothing has to be proven. Because the base doesn't want
facts. They hate facts. They demand the story they were promised
-- the toxic slop they now crave like crack, which is why the people who feed
them that slop keep getting elected.
But science doesn't work that way. The law doesn't work that way.
Reality doesn't work that way.
We saw it with COVID. The refusal to respect facts and science had real
consequences. People died because this administration and its allies chose
political fantasy over reality. And now we see the same pattern in something as small and ridiculous as the
reflecting pool fiasco.
Trump made a bet that he could hire one of his mobbed up stooges to slap some paint, declare victory,
and everyone would accept the story. Which is pretty much his same "strategy" in Iran. When reality pushed back, the response was exactly what it has always been. Find a scapegoat. Find a boogeyman. Blame somebody else.
On questions about depleted munitions, Team Trump struggles to keep its story straight
To recap, the depleted stockpiles aren’t depleted, though they could be better, and everyone should blame Joe Biden.
But eventually you run into the problem that every authoritarian movement runs
into. There are still places where facts matter. There are still institutions where you cannot simply scream louder than
everyone else and reality goes away.
Which is why they keep losing. The more you force them into arenas where they have to answer questions,
produce evidence, and defend their claims, the more exposed they become.
Because their alternative to reality is always the same thing: Scream louder. Blame immigrants. Blame Muslims. Blame liberals. Blame trans kids. Blame anyone except themselves and their catastrophic decisions and failure. And the louder they scream, the clearer it becomes that they have nothing
else.
Look at the Republican campaign ads flooding the country right now. They have
money. They have the machinery. But what do they have to run on? Trump has wrecked the economy. He has driven up prices. His tariffs have hurt
consumers. His foreign policy disasters are piling up.
So what is left?
The first set of books. Fear. Rage. Racism. Resentment.
Because that is all they have.
It cracks me up with I see headlines from anonymous sources about Republicans getting nervous about Trump
hurting their chances in the midterms. Hey dum-dums, what it is about ""Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" that you do not understand? Because that, sure as shit, is what you signed up for.
Trump is the Republican Party. Trump is the movement. You no longer have an independent identity separate from him. You are not partners, or pals, or peers. You are a tool he can use and discard. You are mere cells in the body of Trumpism.
This is the bargain you accepted when you handed your party over to someone who never cared about the second set
of books. Someone who never cared about reality. Someone who only cared about the first set of books — the one where every lie
is true as long as enough people want to believe it.
But eventually, reality always comes looking for payback.
MAGA men lured by influencer's yoga pants and 'unusual' pose: 'She isn't subtle'
A MAGA influencer has blended politics with OnlyFans, using the adult platform to court right-wing male followers in a striking new way, according to a report Thursday.
