Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

If you voted for Trump, you don’t get to speak about ethics, morals, or rule of law.

Petty moves from a petty man.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

The republican speaker is a slippery little devil.

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Books are my comfort food!

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

When I was faster i was always behind.

People identifying as christian while ignoring christ and his teachings is a strange thing indeed.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

The willow is too close to the house.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

We will not go back.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

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86Comments

  3. 3.

    West of the Rockies (been a while)

    Casual guess? Alcoholism, substance abuse, mental illness, earlier history of trauma (victim or perpetrator). My creep detector is red-lighting.

  4. 4.

    XTPD

    Pine box by September. The Secret Service clearly gives less of a shit than it did during Obama.

    Also that dude sounds like Spongebob Squarepants, “Mr.” Doug Lawrence.

  6. 6.

    efgoldman

    In an effort not to damage any of my flat screen teevees, I limit my Cheetoh Bandito consumption to what’s on the evening news, and even that is too much.

    As far as Donnie’s Weird Buddy, people that I know with life-size cardboard cutouts are either kids with sports figures, or guys that can’t get a real date.

  12. 12.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I was thinking “admirable poker face” on the anchor, but she flinched when he said he prays to the cardboard box President Trump

  13. 13.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Jerzy Russian:

    Is there a transcript I can point to and laugh at?

    Only very slightly paraphrased:

    Derp herp trump is a god, a fucking GOD, I have a shrine to him in my garage, herp derp, I fellate the life size cardboard cutout of him every day, HURR DURR TRUMP

  15. 15.

    MomSense

    45 was calling this guy up on stage and it sounded like the secret service agents off stage weren’t so sure they should let him approach 45.

    Another one who sets off my creepometer.

  18. 18.

    Timurid

    The press and their interaction with Trump is like somebody sitting on Jeffrey Dahmer’s skull sofa and being offered a bowl of Laotian rent boy stew while asking him about his plans for grad school.

  19. 19.

    Adam L Silverman

    @MomSense: They let the whacked out Yaweh ben Yahweh cultist “Blacks for Trump” set up right behind the podium. Those folks have been involved with some serious crimes. Their leader, who was right behind the President, has a history of violent criminal activities.

  20. 20.

    MomSense

    @Adam L Silverman:

    I wondered about that. At one point it looked like there were three or four people holding those “blacks for trump something something 2020” signs.

    So much for even basic vetting.

  21. 21.

    patrick II

    There are troubled people in the world. My problem is not so much with him, but with both Trump’s people and Trump himself who evidentlyt think this is in any way someone you want to share with an audience for both the poor man’s sake and the dignity of the office in which Trump now resides. People all over the world will see this and be revolted

  22. 22.

    Mnemosyne

    This may have already been covered (I was out most of the day) but Mother Jones has one of the more interesting why conservative white people are so fucked up articles since it manages to explain without making excuses.

    The middle-class woman at the center of the story is especially interesting because she’s a good example of how crappy parenting can turn people conservative. When you dad abandons you without another word when you’re 16 and your mom is pretty obviously a narcissist, of course you’re going to think that relying on other people is bad, because the adults around you are either totally unreliable or humiliate you if you ask for help.

  24. 24.

    Mnemosyne

    @MomSense:

    Hey, random thought after something you said about your mom in the previous thread: make sure they check her for diabetes. It’s one of those things that can cause odd behavior and yet is so common they sometimes forget to screen people for it. My sister in law has been having odd “episodes” for a while, but it turns out that they’ve never checked her for type 2 diabetes even though she’s an overweight woman in her 40s.

  25. 25.

    jl

    @amk:

    ” ok, his base is whacko deranged demented lunatic unhinged unbalanced racist nutz. what else you got? ”

    Quite a few knuckleheads. This guy might be one of those.

  32. 32.

    jl

    Tomorrow is Presidents’ Day, when we honor the presidents, particularly Washington and Lincoln (holiday used to be two days off their birthdays, I think).

    Anyway, somewhere, tomorrow, Warren G. Harding will be weeping.

    Edit: Hell, even Dub will probably get drunk tomorrow. What exists of his legacy is trashed.

  33. 33.

    efgoldman

    @jl:

    holiday used to be two days off their birthdays, I think

    Lincoln’s birthday was never a day off. In New England, they built a week of school vacation around Washington’s (Feb 22) until they decided he was born on a Monday. It’s still school vacation week, though.

  35. 35.

    jl

    Come to think of it, after Mr. 45 is finished, assuming there is an after (knock on wood), we need to go back to celebrating Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, so there is no confusion and implied endorsement.

    Or, we could have 44 presidential birthday holidays, and leave Frump out. We need more holidays anyway. We can adjust things. Maybe William Henry Harrison doesn’t deserve a whole day. We could have a federal lunch hour for him.

  36. 36.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @jl: Nah, W is looking good these days. Second worst is better than worst. Although James Buchanan claims his due.

  39. 39.

    efgoldman

    @delk:

    When do the pictures of him dressed in deeply discounted Ivanka brand clothing show up?

    Did she do branded bib overalls? Really?

  43. 43.

    Mnemosyne

    @EBT:

    The woman in the article has a story about her daughter calling her while staying with her grandmother (the subject’s mother) to complain that her grandmother was demanding that she make the grandmother’s bed. I’ve actually heard stuff like that before from people who have narcissistic parents, so alarm bells started going off for me.

    My parents were fairly screwed up, and they screwed me up pretty good, but at least they weren’t toxic, for which I am now grateful, because I could have had it so much worse.

  44. 44.

    Mnemosyne

    @patrick II:

    Yeah, it doesn’t sound like the guy is a plant, as in a fake. It sounds like the Trump people sought out a superfan to highlight, and this was the guy who was picked.

    It’s reminding me of when the Georgia legislature decided to have people testify about why RFID chips were bad, and one of the people the Republicans hand-picked testified that the CIA (or aliens) had implanted a chip in her and that was why she knew they were bad. Many Republicans are in so deep that they can no longer recognize crazy even when it’s right in front of them.

  45. 45.

    MomSense

    @Mnemosyne:

    Thanks. I don’t think they did check for diabetes. Most of the tests were neurological. She has a follow up with her doctor so I’ll ask about that. I wondered if it was a seizure but it’s hard to say.

  46. 46.

    jl

    I looked up Harding quotes, but I can figure most of them out. IIRC, the word ‘bloviating’ was invented during his term. No wonder.
    I saw this one:
    ” I am not fit for this office and should never have been here. ”

    I didn’t see this one, maybe it is apocryphal
    “One man comes in and says one thing, then another man comes in and says the opposite, and I don’t know what to do. Oh God I hate this job!”

    I didn’t see
    “We ran out of Cuban rum at the white house poker game last weekend. We can’t let that happen again. Senator Snort gets cranky.’
    or
    “Hey, your a pretty little thing. If you ever want a roll on the South Lawn, if you know what I mean, call this number.”

    ha ha… I made the last two up, but from what I’ve read, Harding must of said them many times.

  47. 47.

    jl

    This supposedly full service blog is not even safe for Warren G. Harding quotes. Sad!

    I looked up Harding quotes, but I can figure most of them out. IIRC, the word ‘bloviating’ was invented during his term. No wonder.
    I saw this one:
    ” I am not fit for this office and should never have been here. ”

    I didn’t see this one, maybe it is apocryphal
    “One man comes in and says one thing, then another man comes in and says the opposite, and I don’t know what to do. Oh God I hate this job!”

    I didn’t see
    “We ran out of Cuban rum at the white house p – k – – game last weekend. We can’t let that happen again. Senator Snort gets cranky.’
    or
    “Hey, you’re a pretty little thing. If you ever want a roll on the South Lawn, if you know what I mean, call this number.”

    ha ha… I made the last two up, but from what I’ve read, Harding must of said them many times.

  48. 48.

    Mnemosyne

    @MomSense:

    My SIL has been having these weird episodes for several years where she starts talking gibberish, and the neurologist has been stumped. With her last one, the paramedics gave her sugar and she was almost normal by the time they got her to the ER.

    Of course, I don’t think she bothered to follow up, but that’s a whole other story ….

  50. 50.

    Mnemosyne

    @jl:

    Isn’t Harding the one whose mistress claimed they had sex in a closet during a state dinner? He was probably our biggest horndog president, and that includes JFK and Bill Clinton.

  53. 53.

    jl

    @Mnemosyne: I don’t know. Could be. I read people suspected that his wife poisoned him because she got so furious about his almost continual hook-ups. I read that she tried to recruit members of the Secret Service to try to keep him from picking up hot young women on an almost daily basis.

    Harding died in San Francisco after a fishing trip in Alaska, at the Palace Hotel I think. One of that high toned dump’s claims to fame.

  55. 55.

    NotMax

    Guy’s gotta be a snowbird. Or has a twin who stands at a busy intersection near the Bowery in NYC, clutching a grimy, gritty rag and scuttling over to smear your windshield for a buck.

  56. 56.

    EBT

    @Mnemosyne: Once I spilled a soda on my mother, her response was to talk about how much she wished she could haul me out in the woods and shoot me. That was just the drive home, she beat me fairly senseless when we got home.

  58. 58.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Andrea MitchellVerified account
    Andrea Mitchell Retweeted Donald J. Trump
    This is Nixonian in a bad way
    Donald J. Trump @ realDonaldTrump
    The FAKE NEWS media (failing nytimes, NBCNews, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

    I don’t know if I have ever heard “Nixonian” used as a compliment

  59. 59.

    scav

    Hoo-la. That’ll be fun as such as he are the officially “vetted” poster children for Trump fandom. Wonder how many of the Trump-fans in my company will eagerly accept their kinship to those groupies their leader chooses to embrace both as starring representatives of the breed and as cuddly toys for when he’s feeling the need for a little validating hug and admiration.

  61. 61.

    cbear

    Nothing wrong with this guy that Trump had on stage with him. Nothing wrong at all…

    He seems nice.

    Sometimes I wonder if we were perhaps a little too hasty in abandoning that whole eugenics thingy.
    Just saying.

  62. 62.

    A

    The best part is that the ticker memorializes Lincoln City’s upset of Burnleyat Burnley in the FA Cup fifth round. That would be non-league Lincoln City beating EPL side Burnley. The magic of the FA Cup!

  63. 63.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @XTPD:

    (Because Raven is probably in bed, sleeping a dreamless, innocent, and untroubled sleep):

    FUCK Buck Strickland LBJ.

  64. 64.

    Yarrow

    It sounds like this guy is a plant. He’s still crazy. And what’s up with those “Blacks for Trump 2020” signs? I guess Trump fans aren’t even slightly bothered that it’s 2017 and he’s already campaigning for 2020.

    I guess under current norms, since Trump is campaigning for president it’s not proper to vote on his nominee for the Supreme Court. Wouldn’t be seemly during an election.

  65. 65.

    Mnemosyne

    @EBT:

    I realize this is a ridiculously mild way to put it, but I’m sorry your parents were toxic, abusive assholes. Have you ever been on the Raised By Narcissists board on Reddit? I suspect you will find many kindred spirits there.

  66. 66.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Mnemosyne: and @Mnemosyne:
    I got as far as the stories about her trailer park residents, and the ‘abuser/alcoholic/narcissist’ alarms started ringing off the hook. Yes, her renters were SO two-dimensionally lazy, and that water bill was just so high, obviously you can’t blame her for kicking them out of their homes with one month’s notice. All that ‘self-reliance’ talk sounded like the stories abusers make up to justify themselves as heroes. I did appreciate the psychological portrait the writer painted of how these people feel. It’s certainly correct, because that’s how mean-spirited, selfish, self-absorbed racist assholes feel. Everyone else is getting an unfair advantage. They’re whiny and resentful people. Note the woman who complained that nobody thought about anyone but themselves anymore, and why weren’t her own needs getting addressed?

  67. 67.

    seaboogie

    @Mnemosyne: I got a cardboard cut-out of “Nuns on the Run” from the local video store many years ago – was startling to encounter it in the middle of the night when I forgot we had it.

  70. 70.

    Mnemosyne

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    She may be a narcissist herself, but also it’s pretty common for people whose parents were narcissists and/or abusers to develop defenses that are quite similar, especially if they never realize that their parents are abusive and just think that what happened to them was normal.

    ETA: They’re also prone to getting drawn into relationships (romantic and otherwise) with narcissists because the narcissist’s behavior feels normal to them.

  71. 71.

    seaboogie

    @Frankensteinbeck: Well, if you want to get all judgy on folks living in the margins with limited involvement in the wider world, so be it. I found it very illuminating. I don’t want to piss on them, I want to find a way for them – and all of us – to keep from getting pissed on. Everyone deserves dignity and hope.

  72. 72.

    Mnemosyne

    @seaboogie:

    FWIW, the woman at the center of the story struck me as a bit of a codependent/enabler, which is another reason why she would have a sudden freakout and throw everyone out of the trailer park.

    ETA: And the whole thing where her father abandoned the family, and then she got pregnant and entered a “covenant marriage” at 17 — damn, she was desperate for stability, but she was too damaged herself to seek it out with people were stable.

  73. 73.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @seaboogie:
    I do want to judge them, because I knew them most of my life and fled to LA to get away from them. Despite that, I want to help them. I don’t separate those who get help by whether they’re ‘deserving’, which she and her kind do, as the article mentions. That article was full of the stories cruel people tell to make it sound like they’re the heroes. They specifically abuse the sympathy of others, so that their bigotry can be treated as reasonable. They made this bed by solving all their problems with ‘drag someone else lower.’ Despite that, I would help them out of it if I could. Government should lift us ALL up.

  75. 75.

    sigaba

    @Mnemosyne: I saw this article when it came out.

    I can summarize all of these articles really briefly: shame of unemployment is America’s Moloch. There is literally no amount of death and destruction that is considered worse than people being unemployed.

  76. 76.

    Mnemosyne

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    What’s interesting in the story is that, by the end, the author identifies what I think is an actual fissure in the Republican coalition between people who think the welfare state should be entirely dismantled for everyone and people who think it should generously benefit white people. This is why there are Trump voters freaking out about ending Obamacare — the Republicans aren’t supposed to end programs that THEY benefit from. People like Paul Ryan didn’t realize that this fissure existed, and now they’re trying to figure out what to do.

  77. 77.

    Ruckus

    @Frankensteinbeck:
    And yet some people, while accepting the help, argue and yell about how terrible it is. And yes I see this at the VA often enough that I know it happens regularly. There’s always the old joke about the guy who’d complain if they hung him with a new rope.

  78. 78.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Mnemosyne: fascinating to me that when discussing Trump’s appeal, you never (or at least I never) hear VSPs mention that he promised, over and over again, to protect Medicare and Social Security. everyone Chuck Todd knows knows we need “entitlement reform”

  79. 79.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    @Mnemosyne:

    And the whole thing where her father abandoned the family, and then she got pregnant and entered a “covenant marriage” at 17 [. . .].

    You are doing a lot of reading between the lines. What the article says is:

    Three years after her father wordlessly left home when she was 17, Sharon married, soon embracing a covenant marriage [. . .].

    And it doesn’t say whether or not she was pregnant when she got married.

  81. 81.

    Joey Maloney

    @efgoldman: The guys that can’t get a real date go for the anime body pillows nowadays. Hmm, I have an idea to get my hands on some Trumpanzee cash…

  82. 82.

    Michael Bersin

    @jl:

    “…Hell, even Dub will probably get drunk tomorrow….”

    Only because, not even in his wildest dreams, can he believe and process the reality that the stain of his eight years in the White House has largely been eclipsed by the last twenty-eight days.

  86. 86.

    -ly Ballou

    @Mnemosyne: As Philip Larkin (himself a racist wingnut, among other things) so piquantly put it:

    They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
    They may not mean to, but they do.
    They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

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