... and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him…
On the lack of social distancing or face masks at Trump’s #RNC2020 acceptance speech in the middle of the deadly coronavirus pandemic, a senior White House official tells @Acosta: “Everybody is going to catch this thing eventually.” ?? pic.twitter.com/0T5e6r3BSx
— Josh Campbell (@joshscampbell) August 28, 2020
There’s Mnuchin, Scalise?, some guy, Wilbur Ross…
Taking the coronavirus pandemic seriously. pic.twitter.com/AFrC6GU3UF
— Tim O'Brien (@TimOBrien) August 28, 2020
Herman Cain caught coronavirus at a Trump rally and died. There are 50% more active coronavirus cases in the country right now than there were the day of that rally. pic.twitter.com/fjrFFbh29U
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) August 28, 2020
If a Trump rally plausibly killed a former presidential candidate without any significant repercussions, I doubt losing a few apparatchiks from his acceptance speech will cause much of a stir.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 29, 2020
So the election may be determined by the outcome of a race between disenfranchisement and death. https://t.co/MgxBKZozaE
— Bear Braumoeller (@Prof_BearB) August 29, 2020
DT/45 supporters are sharing this on FB. I don't have the desire to tell them than the man cloaked in white is Charles Manson. pic.twitter.com/jOEUlXpIju
— @297_Aruba_Lover_Jo_Anne (@297_ArubaLover) August 24, 2020
Sunday Recipe Exchange: Cantanzaro Herbed Chicken
BruceFromOhio
My sole regret is that as each of these two-bit ratfuck soulless criminals wheeze their way to COVID deaths, they are sucking up medical care that could be used to save others.
patrick II
This is a horrible question and one that perhaps shouldn’t even be asked but 6 months ago it looked like, with a good economy, Trump might well have been re-elected. Today, after six months of coronavirus, I have seen his chances of winning given at 12%. So, the question is, would we be better off with Trump being such a disaster in his second term he would in all likelyhood go total fascist and destroy a democratic America, or are we better off with the virus?
Probably best for no one to answer out loud, but it is a question I have asked myself.
Chetan Murthy
@patrick II: Uh, either way we get the virus,right? I mean, what’s Trump going to do in his second term to resolve it? He’s just waiting for a vaccine, and that’s not in his (tiny) hands.
Martin
@patrick II: So, in the rowboat, motorboat, helicopter sense, you’re suggesting that Covid was sent by God to save America.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Indeed, if he -isn’t- re-elected, our chances of being able to suppress the virus go up significantly. *significantly*.
thruppence
Sheesh, another Jon McNaughton? His paintings give you a deep and creepy insight into what many Trump supporters want to believe about themselves. Makes my skin crawl.
patrick II
@Martin:
No. God has nothing to do with it. And as Chetan points out the reality is we are stuck with the virus either way. I guess I shouldn’t even have speculated.
But if we want to get better, we had better get rid of Trump.
The Moar You Know
I thought that…thing of Trump and Manson/Jesus HAD to be the latest vomit-worthy “artwork” from Jon McNaughton, but it’s not. And it really does seem to be Manson, which is just so damn appropriate.
Roger Moore
@patrick II:
I don’t want to count chickens before they’ve hatched, but it’s not obvious to me that Trump was going to cruise to reelection. The “fundamentals” people all said he should be a shoo-in because of the economy, but that’s not the way the opinion polls looked. His job approval numbers were poor, and he was behind in head-to-head matchups with all the likely Democratic candidates. And remember the Republicans got smoked badly in the 2018 midterms.
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: oof.
Gary K
Snopes says the claim that Trump supporters are sharing that image on Facebook is “mostly false.”
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-manson-image-real/
divF
Assuming we win, There is one thing I want more than anything else. I want Joe Biden to empty the bag about Trump and the GOP – all of the corruption, all of the sellouts to Putin and other foreign agents. No bullshit about “it will tear the country apart”, or “we have to protect sources and methods”. The country is already being torn apart, and we need to give people a chance to make a final informed choice about which side they are on.
Morzer
Out of curiosity, what does the Honorable (M)Assembly of Jackals think is going to be the outcome in the Kennedy versus Markey Senate primary? I am guessing that Markey holds on, but I’d welcome any better-informed perspectives.
Chetan Murthy
@Morzer: What I’m curious about is whether that fuckwit Richie Neal hangs on. Fuck I hope he’s gone. But he seems to have gotten fuckin’ lucky, the bastard.
Splitting Image
@patrick II:
Better off with the virus, obviously.
It’s true that historically, Spanish Flu killed more people than World War I, but its also true that the conditions caused by WWI helped to spread the virus when it hit. If Trump wins a second term and goes fascist, the U.S. will almost certainly be harder hit by the continuing pandemic and any further diseases that might be ready to crop up.
patrick II
@Roger Moore:
At the time he was sitting at about the same 42% he is now. But since then the undecideds have mostly gone the other way. I don’t know if that would have been true.
It’s more a theoretical question than a real one — like do you throw the switch to send the trolley down where it will for sure kill one person and perhaps save six.
Cacti
@Gary K: Snopes also said that Trump calling Covid a hoax is false.
They don’t always get it right.
Chetan Murthy
@Cacti: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-remark/
In the middle, splittin’ those hairs.
otmar
Those events/rallies are at least outside.
I don’t expect massive spreading from those, see e.g. the black lifes matter demonstrations, they also weren’t superspreader events.
Soprano2
Well, I had a friend post that image on FB.
Saw a woman wearing a Trump T-shirt today that depicted him wearing aviators that looked like the flag, with his shirt open and a ripped chest. He looked like a tough motorcycle dude. It’s amazing to me how they think about him compared to how he really is. I guess it’s wishful thinking.
Cacti
Speaking of the death cult, with the Portland shooting, we’ve now reached the point where Trump is encouraging brownshirt violence in the streets by his supporters.
But none in the media dare call it fascism.
SFAW
@Morzer:
Polling seems to give Markey a comfortable lead, but with the environment being what it is, I am not as trusting of poll accuracy as I used to be.
Ruckus
@Chetan Murthy:
Does anyone really think that shitforbrains is smart enough to make that distinction? That he can chose his words that well? Hasn’t his own supporters taken that to mean that the virus is a hoax?
Chetan Murthy
@Ruckus: inDEED.
James E Powell
I think it’s interesting that I’m seeing the right wing militia types being referred to as “Trump supporters” in social media.
Mallard Filmore
@Ruckus:
I could see that Trump meant his response, not the virus, since everything is about himself. The hoax would be centered around thinking he gave a poor response.
I can also see that his dim supporters think the virus is a hoax.
The legend takes a life of its own, like Sarah Palin being able to see Russia from her porch.
JoyceH
Yes, both types of events are outside, and that is a significant mitigating factor, but the difference is that in the protests, people were moving around.
As I understand it, to really be assured of picking up enough of a ‘viral load’ to catch COVID, you need to be in close proximity to an infected person for about fifteen minutes. So the Trump speech, despite being outdoors, was more likely to spread the virus than a protest demonstration, because people were seated close together in a particular seat and remained there for hours. Same for these hangar rallies he holds – people are usually standing, but remaining in one place.
The outdoor air circulation ought to keep down the number of people an infected person could infect, but the people on either side are at risk.
So maybe the Trump events will merely be spreaders versus superspreaders.
Oh, and the protesters were more likely to wear masks as well. For that march in Washington the other day, people weren’t even allowed to line up and march if they weren’t wearing a mask.
SectionH
What in the AF has happened today that ppl are freaking the fuck out here now about so much?
AL – Please don’t post pictures like that last one again. If I were a Christian, I’d called that Blaspheme. (Maybe that’s not the technical term, I’m not one but damn I’m a fucking WASP in background, and I know shit when I see it.)
@Morzer: I don’t live there, They’re both Dems, I don’t care. FFS, they’ll elect a Democrat. Let us please leave the fucking unimportant issues aside for now. The Main Stream Stenographers will keep trying, but damn.
TS (the original)
@SectionH:
You need to check who is doing the blasphemy and it sure isn’t AL. Your post seems to be a good example as to how stressed out everyone is at the moment & you are up there near the top.
Sometimes discussing an aspect of politics other than that involving the president* helps to relieve that stress.
SectionH
@TS (the original): Of course it’s not AL – it’s that appalling picture. I’m sorry, that causes my stomach to just, well anyway.
eta, ok: somewhat more elegantly, I had a visceral reaction to that abomination. (See, I throw even more religious words around!) Sorry about the ‘e’ rather than ‘y’ at the end of that word. I try to spell well enough for most the English speaking world, given variations, but I haven’t worried about the verb ‘blaspheme’ or whatecevs the noun ‘blasphemy’ to get that right the first time. Sorry about that.
montanareddog
Please enlighten me – why are some people saying it is Manson and not Jesus?
opiejeanne
@montanareddog: Because it looks exactly like Charles Manson.
montanareddog
@opiejeanne: Thanks. At least in my browser, the picture posted by AL is truncated below the face. Your reply indicated that that is not the full picture so I followed the link and, Lordy, they are right.
joel hanes
@montanareddog:
Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. He was outdoors a great deal.
The person depicted in that painting is a northern European who has stayed out of the sun. And the image bears considerable resemblance to Manson — but probably much less resemblance to the historical Jesus.
patrick II
@Chetan Murthy:
I don’t think that is in the middle, I think their estimation is a repeat of a republican lie.
Whether Trump says the virus is itself a hoax and not a serious matter, or if he says the Democrats are pulling a hoax because they are mistakingly proclaiming the virus a serious matter, there is no functional difference in his assertion’s outcome: a serious response to the virus is uncalled for, which is what happened to the detriment of us all.
Robert Sneddon
@joel hanes: Google Image Search will find a random picture on the internet. The face of the figure standing behind Trump in that illustration is taken/photoshopped from a newspaper photo of Charles Manson, complete to the overlong cowlick across his face.
Amir Khalid
@joel hanes:
I clicked to see the full image. The guy in the robe is indeed Charles Manson.
Tony Jay
Quite apart from the eerie resemblance he bears to that other race-war yearning cult leader, the first thing that jumps out to me about that awful picture is that it clearly depicts Doomed Donny in the first moments of a massive heart attack.
Jeebus Manson isn’t there to provide divine support, he’s come to personally escort his successor to his eternal…. uh… reward.
Which is nice.
joel hanes
I am baffled by the ability of soi-disant Christians to convince themselves that they see a reverent man of faith in Donald Trump.
Sloane Ranger
According to Snopes, the image was originally of Jesus but was photo-shopped, presumably by an anti-Trumper, to show Manson’s face. They have a picture of the original and a later revision by the artist.
Although Church of England, I attended a Baptist Sunday School (long story) and there was a picture of a similar Ayrian looking Jesus hanging on the schoolroom wall. It’s a common depiction within European culture, just as the Ethiopian Church depicts him as ethnically African. Every culture remakes his face as an idealized version of themselves.
And yes, using the image of Christ in this context is both sacrilegious and blasphemous.
FlyingToaster
@Morzer: It doesn’t matter. You couldn’t shove a piece of paper between their positions. See Pressley v Capuano, 2018.
The one who needs to go, this cycle, is Neal. He’s hardly representative of MA-01, and the attempt to ratfuck his opponent via the Amherst College Dems ought to have serious consequences. I have criticisms of much of the delegation (Lynch, Moulton, Keating), but even the assholes are better Democrats that the so-called Blue Dogs in the rest of the country.
WhatsMyNym
Manson was one creepy dude.
Jesse
@Sloane Ranger: If that’s right, it shows us that we ourselves are likely to be taken in by fakes and need to watch out for being taken in by nonsense. There’s a standard “spectrum” of depictions of Jesus, and that’s obviously not one of them. Even a dummy would see that (which is not to say that a fair number of dummies wouldn’t even notice the substitution of Jesus for Manson anyway).
Martin
@montanareddog: Because it’s actually, deliberately Manson edited in place of Jesus.
Martin
@WhatsMyNym: He’d have loved this period. Big race war proponent.
Keith P.
@montanareddog: I thought it was Jerry Falwell Jr. rubbing Trump’s shoulders while he tells him to lean back and enjoy the trappings of office.
rachel
The way 2020 is going, we can be pretty sure this year’s “October Surprise” won’t be Boss Tweet and Pence the Dense dying of coronavirus.
Vote!
AxelFoley
@Roger Moore:
Exactly. Thank you, 007. I don’t know where this thing about Trump being likely to win re-election came from, but like you said, his approvals and the economy were in the dumps before COVID, and he was losing to Biden head to head before everything went sideways, too.
J R in WV
@SectionH:
I understand that for many believers that picture is disturbing, but I would prefer to see that they’re trying to influence people with their bullshit, faux-religious blasphemy than to have it sneaking around in the dark shadows!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Gary K: Manson or not, the whole idea that Trump is one of with Jesus beyond absurd by itself. I mean were is Jesus thanking Trump with tears in his eyes?
Matt McIrvin
@SectionH: Violence in Portland and Kenosha, Republicans and Trump increasingly prone to actively encourage white-supremacist violence, coupled with what seems to be a huge Republican propaganda push designed to convince us that Trump got a massive polling boost, even though there’s little or no evidence that he did (yet).
Also, Michael Moore just announced that Trump is on track to win this, on the basis of he talked to a few guys in Michigan. I’ve seen liberals passing it around as a warning against complacency, and warning against complacency is fine, but of course Moore is phrasing it all in “Democrats suck” terms which is not helpful; I think he’s trying to set himself up for Bernie woulda won round 2. And even after everything he’s said and done, the US left seems incapable of internalizing the idea that Michael Moore is actually kind of a fool and has no special insight.
Aziz, light!
In that photo of Mnuchin, Ross, etc., “some guy” is Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@patrick II: You’re missing the big point of the pandemic, the one point Trump’s approvals went up was the first couple week of the Pandemic before he started with the virus denialism.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Matt McIrvin: Is this the same Michael Moore who said South Carolina Blacks don’t represent the Democratic Party?
or is it the Michael Moore who said McCain and Romney would would win?
Matt McIrvin
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Yeah, if you’d proposed the events of summer 2020 as a hypothetical and asked me what they’d do to Trump’s approval rating, I’d have said that the coronavirus pandemic would make it go down and the unrest after George Floyd’s murder would make it go up again. But instead it was the opposite.
Matt McIrvin
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: During the Flint water crisis I was surprised to realize that it’s a majority-black town, and it occurs to me that this is largely because Michael Moore didn’t particularly depict that in his films. And it makes me wonder why that is. It seems to be a big blind spot with him.
SectionH
@J R in WV:Yes, I get that. It fucking bothered me too though. It was appallingly ugly and evil. They pervert, or try to, every single thing that I have any respect about my ancestors’ religions for, AND every single thing the country’s founders, some of whom were at worst (I’d say best, but wvs) Theists wrote as a start. I so hope the Lincoln Project will show that picture to some targets.
If I were religious, I’d be inclined to think Trump is in fact the Anti-Christ. But it’s OK. At worst, he’s just An Anti-christ. Couple of $Mil a dozen, aren’t they? Come on, Barack was “THE”Anti-Christ” – wasn’t he? Their words. Subsequent models are…
Ken
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: It’s a third Michael Moore who’s wrong in a new way.
Morzer
@Ken: Michael Moore’s Law states that the rate of egregious errors in political analysis by Michael Moore doubles every two years.
Chris Johnson
@AxelFoley:
Same place the thing about ‘Trump will cheat and just declare victory and everyone will just roll over and let him continue to rule’ comes from: Russia.
It’s not particularly mysterious that they are flooding America with information to aid their guy in myriad ways. When I say ‘information’ I mean ‘made up’: I’m currently reading Steven Levy’s excellent book on Facebook and have just got to the part where he goes into detail on how many ads flooded Facebook, paid for in rubles by the Russian governmental arm in St. Petersburg dedicated to messing with US affairs. All pretty openly done, got lost in the shuffle and Facebook repeatedly chose not to resist any of it, and here we are.
I’m not claiming it’s exclusive: 27% crazy people may well amplify this because they believe it. But to claim in the face of all reality that Trump is doing great and will win, is clearly a narrative Russia wants to flood our media with. And, likewise, they want to flood our media with the Very Real Concern that the election is meaningless because Trump will decline to step down, and then (they claim) absolutely nobody will do a thing about it, so he will continue to rule which just shows the system has already failed and the lefties were right that it was a big sham (they claim).
Because all of these are narratives that directly serve the purposes of the Russlans, and so are narratives that we’re collapsing into a hellscape of civil war and violence. I posted a couple days ago about how hard they all tried to manufacture a war in the streets of Portland, and all they got was one murderous child. Honestly the police are way more effective at killing Democrats, the ability of Russia to manufacture homegrown terrorists and train them effectively is REALLY limited.
All the ‘Russiagate’ talk (that’s the Russian-approved term for mocking the very idea) is hardly abstract. It’s pretty direct, and the angles of attack are quite obvious. If stuff doesn’t pass the bullshit test, maybe someone is making it up because it serves their purposes.
dnfree
@Mallard Filmore: or like Al Gore inventing the internet. The press is lazy (as a group) and they don’t parse language as well as you would think they should.
Uncle Cosmo
Like so many on our side of the aisle, you are simply misreading them. As far as they are concerned, Trumpolini has been chosen by the Lord to do the Lord’s work – i.e., restoring the whitefolk:POC::master:slave “natural order of things” – & his manifest moral, ethical, legal and character flaws are irrelevant. It is not their place to question the “mysterious ways” in which their Lord frequently taps the most imperfect of humans to promote His by-definition-supremely-perfect agenda. This is why all the cataloguing of Agolf Twitler’s shortcomings from our side of the aisle will never chip more from the monobloc of his support than the few percent at the surface who were already starting to work their way loose.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
But MM has made movies! He has to be smart and know what’s going on! He can’t possibly have his head up his ass! I mean, he’s a movie producer, the smartest people on the planet!
OK I’m done. And I may have to go throw up a little…..
tokyokie
@Matt McIrvin:
I don’t disagree about Moore’s blind spot, but Roger and Me came out 31 years ago, and I imagine Flint’s demographics have changed since then, with white laid-off autoworkers moving out and poorer Blacks moving in as real-estate values fell.