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Everybody saw this coming.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

The revolution will be supervised.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Republicans do not pay their debts.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

Not all heroes wear capes.

I really should read my own blog.

I’d hate to be the candidate who lost to this guy.

Infrastructure week. at last.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Tick tock motherfuckers!

Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.

I did not have telepathic declassification on my 2022 bingo card.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

In my day, never was longer.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

You are here: Home / He really looks quite religious, he’s been an outlaw all his life

He really looks quite religious, he’s been an outlaw all his life

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This is more Dennis G’s beat and the story broke a few weeks ago, but it’s been stuck in my head: there was a rumor a few weeks ago that Donald Trump might choose Ralph Reed as his campaign manager. Turns out Ralph is busy with other Jesusy stuff…anyway, I don’t think Trump is running at this point.

As Dennis as ably chronicled, Reed has always been a grifter. I’ll just leave you with his one of his quotes, because it’s such a good example of how these candy ass scumbags fantasize that they are really Navy SEALs:

“I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.”

If Reed had led Trump to an improbable Republican nomination, you can be sure that the David Broders of today would be eating quail at his table and admiring the splendid landscape from the porch of his historic cabin and inviting him to Salzburg seminars…all the while railing against vituperative, foul-mouthed bloggers and the ultimate evil of blowjobs from interns.

When I began working on this post yesterday, I thought to write this is worse than organized crime, where the biggest sociopath rises to the top and is praised by all, because at least in organized crime, there aren’t endless sermons about morality. Then I realized that in movies and tv shows about organized crime, there usually are endless sermons about morality.

Who knows if that’s realistic or not, but sometimes the similarities between the two worlds are striking.

Reader Interactions

64Comments

  6. 6.

    BerkeleyMom

    Rachel doing a take-down of Ralph Reed right now. Barney Frank in for the assist.

  7. 7.

    BGinCHI

    Finally watched “Inside Job” last night.

    If you don’t think the financial industry is organized crime, motherfucking literally, then you ain’t been paying attention. It even has the Economics professoriat sewed up like a mobster with his shrink.

  9. 9.

    hell's littlest angel

    Oh, if only Republicans occasionally gunned each other down in restaurants and barber shops.

  11. 11.

    Bob Loblaw

    I don’t think Trump is running at this point

    Oh dear, and after bloggers went to all that trouble of talking about him every day for two weeks straight because the media told them they should be doing so.

    But wait, does this mean that Donald Trump doesn’t explain everything there is to know about the future of the Republican Party and race relations in this country? Double oh dear!

    Next you’re gonna tell me that the GOP will simply go and be boring and nominate their granola equivalent of Dukakis instead, lose the election, and have to overhaul their party in the wake of a rhetorically overwhelming counterpart. Bummer. “Third Way Republicans” are so much less exciting for junkie bloggers than racists in tricorner hats…

  13. 13.

    ed

    anyway, I don’t think Trump is running at this point.

    Trump was never (really) running.

  14. 14.

    General Stuck

    Maybe Reed should dress up in a Corleone costume and travel around the country with the tea tard gay musketeers.

  15. 15.

    superfly

    Who knows if that’s realistic or not, but sometimes the similarities between the two worlds are striking.

    Um, yeah…

    Michael: My father is no different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or senator.
    Kay Adams: Do you know how naive you sound, Michael? Presidents and senators don’t have men killed.
    Michael: Oh. Who’s being naive, Kay?

    Organized crime is less hypocritical.

  16. 16.

    Spaghetti Lee

    @Bob Loblaw:

    I think people here and elsewhere talked about Trump because he’s fun to laugh at. I don’t recall anyone who seriously thought he would be the Republican nominee, although I’m kind of surprised at just how quickly his grift fell apart.

  18. 18.

    General Stuck

    @Spaghetti Lee:

    The way we are going, I wouldn’t rule out a Daffy Duck nomination from the wingnuts. Not Donald, but Daffy certainly fits the mold. The scurrilous quacker.

  20. 20.

    khead

    When I began working on this post yesterday…

    I hate to sound all SNL….. but really? You started on this post yesterday? Really?

    I need to start a blog.

  21. 21.

    Mike Kay (Ding-Dong-Broder's Dead)

    It’s been a big year.

    bin Laden is at the bottom of the ocean.

    And the Great Satan DBroder is in purgatory.

  26. 26.

    eemom

    He really looks quite religious, he’s been an outlaw all his life

    damn it. Had to google. : (

  28. 28.

    Gus

    @ed: No shit. I can’t believe anyone really thought he was. It was obvious that it was a ploy to get ratings for his shit show from the beginning.

  29. 29.

    Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)

    @Doug Harlan J: We only want the first thing that pops into your without revision or consideration. Or spell-check. Anything else is just cheating.

  30. 30.

    MikeJ

    @eemom: With DougJ, always start with the Stones. If I weren’t so lazy I’d analyse his post titles, but I am, so that ain’t happening.

  31. 31.

    khead

    @Doug Harlan J:

    LOL. Sorry man. No lawsuit needed. Just getting in a dig at the fact that I doubt you needed 24 seconds to dwell on that post – much less 24 hours.

    I know y’all have pages and threads to fill, but Trump was never running and most folks here already knew it.

  32. 32.

    Parallel 5ths (Jewish Steel)

    @Bob Loblaw: I know you’re really Omer Asik.

    In fact, you’re posting from the bench right now. Head in the game, dammit!

  33. 33.

    Mike Kay (Ding-Dong-Broder's Dead)

    You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. hogtied and wearing two wet suits.

    /fix’d

  34. 34.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    Christ, you jackals climb down off of DougJ’s nuts. If he wants to write about combing and brushing My Little Pony, it’s his fucking privilege.

  35. 35.

    Doug Harlan J

    @khead:

    I don’t think it’s so simple, if Trump’s poll numbers hadn’t dropped I think he might have actually run. I was always in it just to make fun of him, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have run if he got the urge.

  36. 36.

    Mike Kay (Ding-Dong-Broder's Dead)

    @MikeJ:

    If I weren’t so lazy I’d analyse his post titles, but I am, so that ain’t happening.

    Ah, another classic Stones lyric.

  39. 39.

    Mike Kay (Ding-Dong-Broder's Dead)

    Uh-Oh.

    Someone let Fuckface out of his cage.

    here comes 30 obsessive compulsive posts on how much he hates obots.

  41. 41.

    cat48

    @Doug Harlan J:

    Since you love writing about GOP candidates, this info was new to me; don’t know if the “values” voters will be happy about:

    The confirmation that the Daniels’ marriage is the last hurdle in front of a bid for the White House highlights the delicate situation in which the Governor finds himself.
    In 1993, Cheri Daniels left her husband with their four daughters and married another man in California. She returned a few years later, reconciled with Daniels, and the two were remarried in 1997. That is, in a nutshell, the story. The national press first picked up on it last year when it was buried at the bottom of an 8,600-word Weekly Standard profile.

    No big deal really, but I’m not a gooper “values” voter.
    What do you think?

  42. 42.

    Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther

    @Doug Harlan J: Exactly. My expert analysis is that he wouldn’t have run, because it wouldn’t have panned out, because he was bound to flame out, but if he had felt he had a genuine chance — sure he would have run. Arrogance that towering (no pun intended) isn’t swayed by anything but flat-out failure. Which is what POTUS handed him, by gum.

    (I realize my logic is circular and messy. To quote a blogger I’m familiar with, “sue me.”)

  43. 43.

    Doug Harlan J

    @cat48:

    No reason a work out fanatic who loves motorcycles would ever lose interest in women for a few years, right?

  44. 44.

    fhtagn

    @cat48:

    Well, isn’t that what Arabs like Mitch Bin Daniels normally do? Wife-swapping? Or do I mean porcupines like King Solomon?

  45. 45.

    JCT

    @eemom: I had to ask my music-obsessed teenage son. So I had to put up with him knowing something I didn’t. Sigh.

  47. 47.

    El Cid

    For pop versions of true mafia culture, I’d check out Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah about the Camorra syndicate of Naples. The reality of such crooks, says the journalist who went undercover into the Camorra and now faces constant threat upon his life, isn’t the “Godfather” evil knighthood, but a bunch of cheap shits who beat up elderly women and ape the styles of whatever cool movie has recently come out.

    The film of Gomorrah is savage, squalid, claustrophobic and relentless. The action is authentic, in gratifying contrast to the grotesque romance of films like The Godfather.
    __
    ‘All Camorristi love Scarface,’ says Saviano.
    __
    He cites newer role models – The Matrix and Pulp Fiction – as ‘how the Camorristi want to see themselves’. Among the newly powerful women, Saviano points to a gangster called Immolata Capone who dresses in the same yellow as Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.

    Or they sell filthy polluted baked bread to unsuspecting locals so that children can pile up toxins in their bodies.

    Open 24 hours a day, the street sellers are drawing shoppers with cheap, crusty bread fresh from wood-burning ovens, the way Neapolitans like it. But police say Naples’ new breed of bakers are slowly poisoning their customers by burning old varnished wood, nut shells covered in pesticides and even planks pulled from exhumed coffins. ‘Whoever buys this bread is eating dioxins and carcinogenic substances and putting their health at serious risk,’ said Francesco Borrelli, assessor for agriculture for the province of Naples.
    __
    Borrelli’s investigation into the underground bakeries prompted raids by Carabinieri police who found dough being mixed by illegal immigrant labour in filthy, humid and mould-streaked cellars, some perilously close to burning piles of toxic waste dumped in fields around Naples by the Camorra, which was linked earlier this year to suspected tainting of local mozzarella.

  48. 48.

    Uloborus

    @Just Some Fuckhead:
    …dude. My Little Pony is the BEST GOD DAMN CARTOON in years. Once Avatar ended we got hit with another round of ‘But South Park *must* mean people really like stupid cartoons!’ That we’re emerging from that Hellhole and the cartoons are better than ever delights me, so I for one welcome threads about combing and brushing ponies!

  49. 49.

    fhtagn

    @Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:

    Trump would never have run because he would have had to reveal just how far he is from being solvent, never mind a billionaire. Damn it all, the man can’t even afford Romney Hair, like a serious person.

  50. 50.

    Martin

    Yep, Donald Trump: Fuck you, I got mine.

    When tax receipts from the Grand Hyatt plummeted to $667,000 from $3.7 million the year before, the city budget director asked Auditor General Burstein to review the hotel’s financial records. Burstein said the Grand Hyatt, through “aberrant” accounting practices, had understated its profits by $5 million and shorted the city by $2,870,259 in taxes.
    __
    “The people who didn’t get the foregone taxes were the police, the schools and public hospitals of this city,” she said, adding that “Trump leveraged tax forgiveness and clout into a deal where he had essentially no risk at all; there was no downside. Then, having triumphed, he repaid his benefactors by excoriating them as inept, venal and useless.”

    I think the GOP may start loving this guy again.

  51. 51.

    fhtagn

    @El Cid:

    I hope Haley Barbour isn’t getting ideas from you for make great glorious Secessionism of Mississippistan.

  52. 52.

    Splitting Image

    @General Stuck:

    The way we are going, I wouldn’t rule out a Daffy Duck nomination from the wingnuts. Not Donald, but Daffy certainly fits the mold. The scurrilous quacker.

    Are you serious? Daffy is black. He’d never get past the South Carolina primary.

  53. 53.

    Mike in NC

    Trump might choose Ralph Reed as his campaign manager.

    Work for Trump? Never.

    But sign on with Santorum, Huckabubba, Gingrich or some other blowhard from the religious right? Quite possibly.

  55. 55.

    Dr. Loveless

    “I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.”

    Has anyone ever seen Ralph Reed and Charlie Sheen in the same place together?

  56. 56.

    Joel

    the collapse of Trump’s numbers indicates to me that a significant number of Birthers actually believed their crap. I always thought it was just a rhetorical weapon, but I guess if you repeat a lie long enough…

  57. 57.

    Asshole

    @El Cid:

    This. The American branch isn’t any better. Roy DeMeo used to sell child pornography to turn a profit, when he wasn’t running a $250,000-a-week car theft ring. Or selling kilos of cocaine. Or shooting 19-year-old girls in the face because their dead boyfriends were informants and they might’ve become informants too, and then ripping their halter tops off so the police would pursue a rape angle. (The boyfriend, of course, was chopped into little pieces and thrown out in trash bags, same as most of the other 70-200 people DeMeo killed or had killed.)

    Or we could talk about the sometimes-glorified John Gotti, who had one of his neighbors kidnapped and chainsawed in half because the man hit Gotti’s kid in a tragic car accident. He also had a mentally disturbed man tortured and then murdered because the man fired a pistol at the window of his social club.

    America loves mobsters. America loves thieving sociopath murderers who fuck over every American they possibly can in their quest to gain themselves an extra nickel or two, be it by price-gouging or fraud or extortion or murder.

    And you know what? These thieving butchers call themselves “soldiers” and “captains,” too, so the military pretensions were still there. Who they’re supposed to be at war with- besides the entirety of civilization, and with other gangs of thieving murderers- is unclear.

    But rest assured, most of them are also socially conservative family men, eager to moralize against homosexuals, Hippies, Commies, or wives demonstrating even the slightest tendency toward the types of marital infidelity they pursue habitually.

  58. 58.

    Jennifer

    Then I realized that in movies and tv shows about organized crime, there usually are endless sermons about morality.

    In the last or next-to-last episode of the Sopranos, where Tony’s crew was warring with the NY crew and Tony & his surviving crew members were about to go into hiding, he tells a worried Carmella, “don’t worry – you know the rules on how this works. Family members don’t get touched.”

    Compare and contrast with Karl Rove: “Wilson’s wife is fair game.”

    You insult mobsters by comparing them to the likes of Rove.

  59. 59.

    Redwood Rhiadra

    @cat48: Cat, “values” voters don’t give a flying fuck about divorce or adultery (if it’s a Republican, anyway). Look at McCain, Gingrich, or any of many, many other GOP candidates supported by so-called “values” voters despite being serial adulterers and divorcers.

    Hell, the fact that she came back and remarried him might even be a bonus, showing her to be a “true Christian wife”.

  63. 63.

    ornery curmudgeon

    @Jennifer: “Tony & his surviving crew members were about to go into hiding, he tells a worried Carmella, “don’t worry – you know the rules on how this works. Family members don’t get touched.”

    Compare and contrast with Karl Rove: “Wilson’s wife is fair game.”

    Except that Wilson wasn’t part of The Family.

  64. 64.

    Barry

    @cat48: “No big deal really, but I’m not a gooper “values” voter.
    What do you think?”

    The day that GOP ‘values’ voters reject hypocritical sanctimony will be a cold day in the Infernal Regions.

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