Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Mediocre white men think RFK Jr’s pathetic midlife crisis is inspirational. The bar is set so low for them, it’s subterranean.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

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

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

the 10% who apparently lack object permanence

Beware of advice from anyone for whom Democrats are “they” and not “we.”

Consistently wrong since 2002

… gradually, and then suddenly.

You are here: Home / Politics / Trumpery / Hail to the Hairpiece / Open Thread: Toddlers & Clowns Always Love A Parade

Open Thread: Toddlers & Clowns Always Love A Parade

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Excellent overview from the Washington Post‘s Ishaan Tharoor — “Military parades are about ego and power. Of course Trump wants one.”:

… In the same week we heard the president call his political opponents “treasonous” for not clapping at the State of the Union address, we now contemplate his excitement for the sort of martial display these days more associated with single-party states and irredentist autocrats.

Trump, who fondly refers to “my generals” and espouses a decidedly militarist agenda, now thinks it’s his turn. “We’re all aware in this country of the president’s affection and respect for the military,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Wednesday. “We have been putting together some options. We will send them up to the White House for decision.”…

In a piece highlighting the difference between France’s yearly spectacular and Trump’s own ambitions, my colleague Rick Noack argued that Trump’s imagined parade is ultimately about his own brand of showboating nationalism, but that the French ceremonies nowadays commemorate something a bit more inclusive.

“France’s Bastille Day parade, which has persisted through two world wars and a Nazi occupation, has also been used to emphasize a very different message, which could be summarized as: We are only strong together,” Noack wrote. “What Trump may have missed while watching the Paris parade last July was that its organizers have frequently invited foreign troops — from Morocco and India to the United States, Britain and Germany — to march alongside French soldiers or to even lead the procession. Instead of the French flag, French soldiers sometimes wave the European Union flag, even though the political bloc does not have its own army.”…

So what’s the point? “A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life,” wrote the great British author George Orwell.

Orwell was writing in 1941, at a time when Britons faced the prospect of defeat and conquest by the Nazis. He decried the fascist “goose-step” as “one of the most horrible sights in the world,” and saw in it “an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim.”

This led Orwell to conclude that, “beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.”

For Trump, the army certainly is no laughing matter — and he has picked a series of political battles with any domestic critics he claims are disrespecting the military. But while most Americans dare not laugh at their army, the reaction to Trump’s parade shows that quite a few are laughing at him.

Reader Interactions

109Comments

  1. 1.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Vulture Magazine: What’s stirred everything up? Is it all about Trumpism?

    Quincy Jones: It’s Trump and uneducated rednecks. Trump is just telling them what they want to hear. I used to hang out with him. He’s a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally — a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him. I used to date Ivanka, you know.

    Vulture Magazine: Wait, really?

    Quincy Jones: Yes, sir. Twelve years ago. Tommy Hilfiger, who was working with my daughter Kidada, said, “Ivanka wants to have dinner with you.” I said, “No problem. She’s a fine motherfucker.” She had the most beautiful legs I ever saw in my life. Wrong father, though.

    (link)

  2. 2.

    Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ

    There are vets who survived wars overseas who are dying on American soil now because the VA can’t see them fast enough and when they finally do they provide inadequate care. There are thousands of homeless vets wandering our streets and thousands of soldiers with PTSD who remain undiagnosed and unaided (not to mention no help for their families struggling to cope). And we continue to send our young men and women into the Middle East meat grinder so these problems will only get worse. Trump, who is most likely ignorant of these issues or even more likely indifferent to them, wants to spend millions of dollars on a g*ddamn parade so he can smile with that bunghole of a mouth and clap his tiny sweaty hands in delight at the display of “his” power and might–so he can be entertained. The man is an abomination.

  3. 3.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Vulture Magazine: What’s stirred everything up? Is it all about Trumpism?

    Quincy Jones: It’s Trump and uneducated rednecks. Trump is just telling them what they want to hear. I used to hang out with him. He’s a crazy motherfucker. Limited mentally — a megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him. I used to date Ivanka, you know.

    Vulture Magazine: Wait, really?

    Quincy Jones: Yes, sir. Twelve years ago. Tommy Hilfiger, who was working with my daughter, said, “Ivanka wants to have dinner with you.” I said, “No problem. She’s a fine motherfucker.” She had the most beautiful legs I ever saw in my life. Wrong father, though.

  8. 8.

    OzarkHillbilly

    “We’re all aware in this country of the president’s affection and respect for the military,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Wednesday. “We have been putting together some options. We will send them up to the White House for decision.”

    Yes, he has so much affection and respect for the military he spent a decade avoiding it. I suggest one of the options they send to the White House is that every single one of the useless fucks presently working there, especially the useless fuck in chief, get sent to Afghanistan with body armor and an M-4 where they can parade around the streets of Kandahar to their precious little hearts’ content.

  9. 9.

    ThresherK

    So the best thing is to run one company of soldiers and one tank and one of each thing around in a circle so he sees each multiple times?

    Normally I’d say “that’s too stupid to fool.anyone”.

    Normally.

  11. 11.

    Betty Cracker

    As we’ve often discussed here, we must have a reckoning in this country if it’s to be saved. The first step is to throw the corrupt and cynical Republicans out of power and use their time in the political wilderness to shore up our hollow institutions and codify standards previously (and falsely) thought to be universally shared.

    But the reckoning should also include rethinking who we are as a country, and that means reexamining the role of the military. Do we want to keep spending as much on our military as the next eight nations combined? Does it make sense to direct so many resources to hardware when we now know that the front line of an attack by a hostile foreign power will be Twitter or Facebook?

    Trump shouldn’t get his stupid parade, of course. But the mindset it represents has to go too.

  14. 14.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Betty Cracker:

    Trump is the avatar of white conservatism. The rot, petty vindictiveness, stupidity, racism, and worship of wealth for wealth’s sake was there – he simply pulled back the sheets the morning after for all to see.

  15. 15.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Betty Cracker:

    Does it make sense to direct so many resources to hardware when we now know that the front line of an attack by a hostile foreign power will be Twitter or Facebook?

    Social media doesn’t put billions of dollars into the pockets of defense contractors

  20. 20.

    SFAW

    @Betty Cracker:

    we must have a reckoning in this country if it’s to be saved.

    Whenever I see the word “reckoning” in this type of context, I auto-fill “blood” as the word just before it. During the worst periods of RWNJ insanity/evil, I sometimes think that’s what it will take. That thought depresses me to some extent, in that I’m even thinking about it.

  21. 21.

    Kay

    The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.
    In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn’t talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, “We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.”
    Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, “2016 was a wake-up call and now it’s incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again.”

    Well, we can’t. We’re too busy having parades.

    Incidentally- you can’t work as a police officer in this town with a protection order in place- good to know you can assist the President of the United States during your mandatory suspension from patrolling the school crosswalk.

    Christ almighty, could the standards get any lower? Have all the Trump employees lift their pants leg- let’s see if anyone’s on an ankle monitor. Start with the President.

  22. 22.

    SFAW

    @Kay:

    Christ almighty, could the standards get any lower?

    With this maladministration, of course they could.

    It’s akin to asking “have we reached Peak Wingnut”? You know we haven’t — we just can’t specifically predict what will come next that’s worse.

  23. 23.

    NotMax

    Long, long, long time ago was friendly with a couple named Parré, proud new parents of their first child, a girl. They hadn’t settled on a name for the kid and were soliciting suggestions from everyone they knew.

    My suggestion was Ailuva.

  28. 28.

    Amir Khalid

    @NotMax:
    Onc in a while, you come across magazine articles or suchlike listing particularly goofy names. I’ve often wondered what the parents of Nancy Anne Cianci were thinking. I’m aware that Canaan Banana could scarcely have avoided his surname, but at least it didn’t stop him becoming President of Zimbabwe.

  31. 31.

    David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch

    Vulture Magazine: Would your friend Oprah be a good president?

    Quincy Jones:     I don’t think she should run. She doesn’t have the chops for it. If you haven’t been governor of a state or the CEO of a company or a military general, you don’t know how to lead people.

    Vulture Magazine: She is the CEO of a company.

    Quincy Jones: A symphony conductor knows more about how to lead than most businesspeople — more than Trump does. He doesn’t know shit. Someone who knows about real leadership wouldn’t have as many people against him as he does. He’s a fucking idiot.

  33. 33.

    Kay

    Kelly issued the same statement again on Wednesday afternoon after Porter announced he would resign. By that time, the Daily Mail and the Intercept had published articles featuring interviews with Porter’s other ex-wife, Colbie Holderness, in which she alleges he physically abused her and punched her in the face. The articles included photographs of bruising around Holderness’ eye.

    I guess they were busy following the blockbuster story of Hillary Clinton’s ’08 campaign hire so missed the guy in the White House with the CPO. Which everyone knew about.

    We should Google some names of the other high-ranking Trump hires. See what comes up.

  35. 35.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    Ruth Marcus: For the record: Trump is terrible. He has done some terrible things where women are involved. I try to call him out all the time although, confession, some stuff slips through the cracks — e.g., the porn star thing I haven’t gotten around to writing about. But I write about Hillary and my frustrations with her — going back to the campaign — not because I hate her but because — like Alyssa before the Big Breakup — I like her so much and I am so disappointed by her seeming inability to change some drawbacks in the way she approaches things.

    [Hillary Clinton and I are done]

    Alyssa Rosenberg: I hate that you even have to issue that disclaimer about Trump, Ruth!

    Christine Emba: Yes. We can all agree on Trump’s manifold flaws, to the point that they become less worth discussing. Because there’s nothing to argue! Truly nothing new there.

    Get with the program, Kay.

  37. 37.

    Kay

    Are they ever going to release the information on the breach of voting systems? Voters know nothing about this.

    Wouldn’t we be the ones to tell? It’s been two years. How many elections are they planning on holding where they tell us after the election that election systems were breached? “It’s just a coupla states!” Which states? What happened?

  41. 41.

    Montanareddog

    @Kay:

    I guess they were busy following the blockbuster story of Hillary Clinton’s ’08 campaign hire so missed the guy in the White House with the CPO. Which everyone knew about.

    And I guess Cilizza’s countdown clock only works on Dem time. I would so love that egregious little fuck to call out some Republicans, for once. That disgrace Kelly for starters, or Orrin “Mormon values” Hatch.

  44. 44.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    I want to know if the abused ex wife shopped that story and how it is that only the Guardian and The Intercept picked it up.

    The NYTimes is probably still interviewing Hillary Clinton ’08 staffers. They put the crack email team on it. We know more about the theoretical Clinton Administration than we do about the sitting President. “It woulda been TERRIBLE- here’s why”

  46. 46.

    germy

    The U.S. official in charge of protecting American elections from hacking says the Russians successfully penetrated the voter registration rolls of several U.S. states prior to the 2016 presidential election.

    In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn’t talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, “We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.”

    Jeh Johnson, who was DHS secretary during the Russian intrusions, said, “2016 was a wake-up call and now it’s incumbent upon states and the Feds to do something about it before our democracy is attacked again.”

    link

    But I remember reading about this a few months ago. Why is this being treated like a “breaking news” story now?

  47. 47.

    Baud

    @Kay:

    I want to know if the abused ex wife shopped that story and how it is that only the Guardian and The Intercept picked it up.

    Excellent question, Kay.

  48. 48.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    They dogged Clinton for days on her statement on the staffer. Let’s see if anyone asks The General to explain his nonsensical statement on the wife beater he hired.

  49. 49.

    germy

    @Baud: Porter’s ex-wives said they informed the FBI in January 2017 of their allegations against him while they were being interviewed by agents as part of Porter’s security clearance review.

    I’m guessing the FBI released this now as payback.

  50. 50.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @Betty Cracker:

    It’s getting less likely by the minute. The supine conservative Supreme Court will fail again, ushering in a second American Civil War.

  51. 51.

    germy

    @Kay:

    I want to know if the abused ex wife shopped that story and how it is that only the Guardian and The Intercept picked it up.

    Wives. Plural.

    A pattern of spousal abuse. No wonder he fit right in to the admin.

  53. 53.

    Kay

    @germy:

    Great! Good to see everyone is focusing like a laser on public service.

    Maybe the FBI could see their way clear to investigating the infiltration of 21 state election systems? Sometime this decade?

  56. 56.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    Is is just me, or would anybody else like to see somebody go after Jason Chaffetz with a baseball bat?

  57. 57.

    Kay

    @germy:

    It’s hard for me because CPO’s are a huge issue for normal people. Normal people undergo FBI background checks and this would be a big deal. They do FBI background checks for adoptions and guardians and foster parents in Ohio. I’ve had 50 year olds turned down for a bar fight in CA when they were 21 and in the Navy.

    There are two sets of rules, apparently. The more powerful you are the lower the standards.

  59. 59.

    OzarkHillbilly

    “You don’t need a big parade to prove your strength, or as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once said, ‘being powerful is like being a lady, if you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.’ Well, President Trump is no lady,”

    -Ali Velshi

  60. 60.

    Kay

    @Baud:

    The Trump people planted a story this week where they want “killers” in the Administration to replace the regular assholes they hired- apparently they meant that literally.

    They brag about this- “get me the killer“. The NYTimes political team swoons. Finally! Manly-men of the Right are in charge!

  61. 61.

    Kay

    @germy:

    I saw a partial list a year ago. The only state I remember was Illinois.

    Since then we’ve been focused mostly on how bad the Clinton Administration would have been. That and parades.

  62. 62.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Mrs. D. Ranged in AZ:
    Trump has the typical Republican attitude towards the military, both elected and rank-and-file. They love knowing that someone, somewhere is being killed with bullets and bombs, and they have a piece of that power. The actual troops? Forget it. They love the violence and the bragging.

  65. 65.

    germy

    If one of the ex-wives hadn’t gone to the press, would this story have come out?

    Colbie Holderness, Porter’s first wife, provided her correspondence with the FBI to The Intercept. (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment, and the agent involved in the exchange declined to speak about the case.) In an interview, she said the pattern of violence in her marriage to Porter began on their honeymoon in the Canary Islands in 2003 and continued from there.

    (the intercept)

  67. 67.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Oh, I have a list.

    They could do a pay per view – conservative pundits and pols shrieking in fear about how they didn’t mean anything by their words and deeds, and crying out “why – it was just politics”, then settling down to sad gurgles….

  69. 69.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: I think we should set up a GoFundMe page for the parade. All the people who want the parade can pledge their tax cut money for the year to it. The parade would be about 2 clown cars long.

  71. 71.

    Gin & Tonic

    @germy: I know people’s personal lives are complicated and none of my business, but when you’re 40 and already have two ex-wives, I think that might signal something about you.

  72. 72.

    SFAW

    @Betty Cracker:

    I’m still hopeful that we can resolve this crisis without bloodshed.

    Me, too.

    But the part of me that says “we need to make an example of the worst attempted-destroyers of America” sometimes comes out.

  75. 75.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    And with modern technology, you can loop it – no longer would you have to sit through rewind to watch again!

  76. 76.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Gin & Tonic:

    but when you’re 40 and already have two ex-wives, I think that might signal something about you.

    In Hollywood that is way behind the curve.

  77. 77.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @MomSense:

    With Ryan, you make him watch as everybody else goes through it. Let him really anticipate what’s coming….

    I really need to collaborate with Tarantino on this movie idea, now that he’s tainted.

  79. 79.

    Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    A friend of mine was married (third marriage) to a woman who was on her fourth. She cheated with and married their marriage counselor. When she divorced that husband, she called my friend and said “I’m wondering if it’s me”.

  80. 80.

    MomSense

    @germy:

    The problem is that some of the systems are so archaic that I’m not even sure how anyone would know if they had been successfully infiltrated.

    It wouldn’t matter as much if they hit Maine because we have same day registration. We are better equipped to sort this out on Election Day.

  82. 82.

    Kay

    Someone could file in a state court under state sunshine laws in one of the 21 states and get information on the incursion into voting systems.

    You would need standing but I bet any candidate could assert that. The feds would try to stop any release but at least you’d get a hearing and a judge to decide what can and can’t be released, instead of leaving it up to Donald Trump and his low quality hires.

    I wish the ACLU would do it. No one is giving us jack shit on what happened here and I don’t think we;re ever going to find out without some outside actor forcing the issue. We really have a right to know if a foreign government infiltrated our state election system, and to what extent, and what’s being done about it. Election officials keep copious records. There”s a record somewhere – who flagged it, what it was, what was done about it.

  83. 83.

    Patricia Kayden

    It’s fascinating to see Joe Scarborough and Mika feign surprise that Kelly is an awful person who was never going to play the role of “only adult in the room” for Trump’s White House. They completely ignore Kelly’s racially tinged attack on Representative Fredricka Wilson and his ridiculous comments about the Civil War. They also ignore his short stint as Secretary of DHS where he escalated deportations under ICE and harassment of foreign visitors under CBP.

    It’s only now that Kelly supported a domestic abuser that some folks are finally questioning his character although he’s shown himself to be a Trump shill over and over again.

  84. 84.

    Cheryl Rofer

    @Betty Cracker:

    But the reckoning should also include rethinking who we are as a country, and that means reexamining the role of the military. Do we want to keep spending as much on our military as the next eight nations combined? Does it make sense to direct so many resources to hardware when we now know that the front line of an attack by a hostile foreign power will be Twitter or Facebook?

    So much this.

  85. 85.

    JR

    Maybe Trump can come up with a clever name for his parade? “Useful splendor” works. Goes hand in hand with the tax cuts AND bastille day!

  93. 93.

    Weaselone

    @Kay: Also racism. I’m not saying Joe and Mika are part of the sheet wearing set, just that they’ve been marinating in the same toxic brew as the rest of us and have neither the humility nor the self awareness to question why they didn’t factor an old white man’s repeated shitting on minorities into their assessment of his character.

  94. 94.

    Another Scott

    @Kay: I don’t think the “news” yesterday was anything new. We heard about that last year and in 2016, I’m reasonably sure. The Brennan Center keeps track of stuff like this:

    When the history of the 2016 election is written, one of the leading narratives is likely to be how foreign powers tried to influence its outcome.

    This foreign interference in the presidential election exposed cracks in the security of America’s electoral system, the most fundamental part of our democracy. News reports revealed that hackers working on behalf of the Russian government targeted state and local voter registration databases and managed to access elections systems in as many as 39 states. The attack shows that our current election systems are susceptible to foreign interference, and will only become more vulnerable as hacking methods are refined.

    One of the really big problems with “social media” is recycling of stuff that we already know. It’s cheap, and it can get clicks if enough of the right people repeat it. :-/

    I’m not saying this isn’t important. I am saying that the US needs to be working with the states to harden their election systems from outside hacking and improve transparency and accuracy and timeliness of the reporting – and that we need to be aware of what’s being done (and not done), and to not think that we’re learning new things when we’re actually not.

    My $0.02.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  96. 96.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Trump wants the parade in November? Sounds like the next step in Disneyfing 911.

  101. 101.

    Tenar Arha

    @germy: It’s a guess but probably two reasons
    1. the cable news & traditional outlets are kinda incompetent and good at memory holing last month, let alone about 6-10 months ago (they really are no context machines)
    2. But also the “media” got a face and a person to interview so they finally feel like they can tell the story

  104. 104.

    J R in WV

    @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:

    I’ll hold him if you’ve got a good swing. Or you can put your foot out behind his knees when I push, then we can both swing while he’s down. What a piece of work! Dirt-bag. Him and Kelly both. And this Porter guy.

    I know a guy, strong environmentalist, works against big mining companies in court. Seems mild mannered. But I also know he physically abused at least one wife who dropped him like a rock. He has back trouble, perhaps from losing sleep over being physically violent to someone it allegedly loved.

    I don’t expect many of these vulgar White House dirt-bags will have that problem, no morals at all to bother them late at night. Nothing is their fault.

  106. 106.

    Ksmiami

    @SFAW: I’m thinking we use technological prowess against them it proved a critical advantage in civil war part 1- then a complete eradication of fox and the conservative propaganda machine. This goes with a new deal 2 to bring rural America up to date or simply starve the non productive areas of resources. They have a lot of guns, but we have intelligence

  109. 109.

    Ms. D. Ranged in AZ

    @Frankensteinbeck: Oh how well I know it. I’ve lost count of the eedjits that recklessly and thoughtlessly drive around Arizona with ‘Murika stickers and tattered US and Gadsden flags streaming behind their gas guzzling over-sized trucks. Can’t throw a stick without hitting one of them. But let there be any actual demand for patriotism from them and they scurry back into dark crevasses.

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