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New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

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

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Republicans in disarray!

T R E 4 5 O N

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

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

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you don’t.

The next time the wall street journal editorial board speaks the truth will be the first.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

If you still can’t see these things even now, maybe politics isn’t your forte and you should stop writing about it.

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

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

I really should read my own blog.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires.

Republicans don’t trust women.

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

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

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Late ‘Saturday Night’s for Fighting’ Open Thread: Salmagundi

Late ‘Saturday Night’s for Fighting’ Open Thread: Salmagundi

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For those who didn’t grow up consciously Irish-American, the line about ‘immigrants welcomed with open arms’ is a bitter communal joke, going back to at least the first Gilded Age. As expressed by Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley:

…Th’ stars an’ sthripes whispered a welcome in th’ breeze an’ a shovel was thrust into me hand an’ I was pushed into a sthreet excyvatin’ as though I’d been born here. Th’ pilgrim father who bossed th’ job was a fine ol’ puritan be th’ name iv Doherty, who come over in th’ Mayflower about th’ time iv the potato rot in Wexford, an’ he made me think they was a hole in th’ breakwather iv th’ haven iv refuge an’ some iv th’ wash iv th’ seas iv opprission had got through.

Annyhow, I was rayceived with open arms that sometimes ended in a clinch. I was afraid I wasn’t goin’ to assimilate with th’ airlyer pilgrim fathers an’ th’ instichoochions iv th’ counthry, but I soon found that a long swing iv th’ pick made me as good as another man an’ it didn’t require a gr-reat intellect, or sometimes anny at all, to vote th’ dimmycrat ticket, an’ befure I was here a month, I felt enough like a native born American to burn a witch.

Versions of that story — as I remember it, They had a shovel in one hand and a hod carrier in the other, and when they demanded ‘Say thanks, you drunken brutes’ the armed men behind them made it clear we had no choice — were still in common use in the mid-1960s, and apparently in the mid-1980s…

 

Some sporting news, with due apologies to Dave Anderson:

I’m not a drinker, so others will have to judge this recipe:

Irish-American traitor chaos agent, taking a hit…

Grifters gonna grift:


But there’s only so much money to be grifted, and an ever-growing band of grifters fighting over it.

When Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes suddenly vanished last Thursday while recording his internet show, moments he claimed that someone had barged into his studio while he was filming, his fans were immediately concerned…

Nearly a week later, though, many of McInnes’ fans have come to believe that he faked his disappearance in a bid for attention. The local and federal law enforcement agencies that could potentially have arrested McInnes have all denied involvement, and McInnes hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Now McInnes, still laying low, is facing backlash from his former allies and supporters over the hoax.

McInnes’s fake arrest has gone over especially poorly since other Proud Boys have actually been imprisoned, with one Proud Boy involved in the Capitol riot sentenced to 55 months in prison just days after McInnes vanished.

“Gavin McInnes has never spent a day in prison,” fumed Matthew Walker, a Tennessee Proud Boys leader, in a Telegram post. “7 of my friends are in there because of him!”

McInnes’s false arrest scheme came to light after Owen Benjamin, a far-right anti-Semitic figure and former comedian, posted text messages he claimed to have received from McInnes on Instagram. In Benjamin’s telling, he had texted McInnes out of genuine concern that McInnes was facing criminal charges.

“Prank,” McInnes wrote back, according to Benjamin. “Don’t tell.”

Benjamin ignored McInnes’s request, exposing the prank on a livestreamed broadcast to his own fans. Benjamin — who gained notoriety for his failed attempt to create a bear-themed compound in Idaho for his supporters — complained that McInnes’s ruse worried his fans, who feared a tyrannical Biden administration might launch mass arrests after seizing McInnes.

“People are actually scared, you know?” Benjamin said. “People are actually afraid when things like that happen.”…

Second-hand reports from tonight’s MAGAt rally:

You assign *me* to search a 16-year-old boy’s room, I’m demanding full protective gear and hazard pay…

DougJ, doing another hazardous job:

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62Comments

  1. 1.

    Quaker in a Basement

    “Yeeeahhhh, that’s it. I took those classified documents to…to DECORATE MY BAR! Yeah.”

  2. 2.

    ian

    What do you think the conversation is like between the barber/hairstylist and the white nationalist when it becomes clear he is asking for the Hitler look?

    Also, that is one shitty mustache.

  7. 7.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

     Trump suggests FBI agents tampered with evidence in Barron Trump’s room

    he’s ratting out his biological issue: “I didn’t do it, it was Barron”

  8. 8.

    MagdaInBlack

    I did watch a bit of the rally, through my usual filter of Hal Sparks youtube channel. I got bored pretty quickly, even with Hal’s ridicule. T sure did prove Biden’s point, didn’t he?

  9. 9.

    Feathers

    On the Irish side. Born in Virginia, moved to Dublin for a year and a bit during The Troubles, went to school there. Moved back to busing era Virginia.

    My mother told me “Remember all those terrible things you heard English people saying about the Irish on British TV? None of it was true. Right? You are going to hear people saying terrible things about Black people. And it will be a lot of the same things, being poor and dirty and not wanting to work. And it will be just as not true about them as it was not true about you.”

    Can’t say I haven’t made some missteps in living in this racist country, but I have always seen through the lies and tried to make sure others saw they were lies as well.

  12. 12.

    Steeplejack

    @Soprano2:

    Inorite. But, other than the new Mar-a-Lago stuff, he was mostly cycling through his greatest hits: electric cars bad, windmills as bird graveyards, etc. Just nuts.

    It reminded me again that a big problem with the media coverage of Trump has been that he’s just “doing a bit” for his fans, as opposed to he’s fucking mentally ill.

  13. 13.

    Steeplejack

    Motorbike neighbor across the street just fired up and putt-putted off down the street. I haven’t heard that in a while; I wonder if he was off work or something. Actually, I don’t think it’s job-related. Quite often he leaves around 3:30-4:00 a.m., but I don’t think it’s a regular five-times-a-week thing. But maybe I miss some with my erratic sleep schedule.

    Oh, well, back to reruns of Help! I Wrecked My House on HGTV and semi-random Twitter stuff.

  15. 15.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Steeplejack: The media did the same thing for…. (checks notes)… Hitler

     

    But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers and keep them aroused, enthusiastic, and in line for the time when his organization is perfected and sufficiently powerful to be employed effectively for political purposes.

    FTFNYT  Nov 21, 1922

    FTFNYT so wants the bad parts of their daddy not to be true

  16. 16.

    montanareddog

    A few days ago, I started watching a 2015 indie movie called Creative Control. I was about 5 minutes in when I said to myself “that guy at the office meeting looks like Gavin fucking MacInnes. Shit, it is Gavin fucking MacInnes!”

    I could not watch any longer – it was visceral. And, from the couple of minutes I did see, I can confidently assert that that choad cannot act.

  20. 20.

    Splitting Image

    @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:

    The thing is, even if Hitler hadn’t been a hardcore anti-Semite, him churning up hatred for Jews the way he did made it obvious how much support there was in the country for a party which was led by a hardcore anti-Semite, and the guy doing it for show would have been replaced by the real deal soon enough.

    This is exactly what’s happened to the GOP over the past fifty years. Nixon may or may not have cared whether the Southern Strategy had any effects beyond getting him elected in ’68 and ’72, but the movement purged all of the softies using the rhetoric for show and began electing true believers. 2016 was the result.

  21. 21.

    satby

    @Feathers: Where I grew up was known as an Irish-Catholic neighborhood, but it had been a WASP one previously. When the first group of Irish Dominican nuns moved into a house there to start a parochial school, they were welcomed by a burning cross on the lawn. 50 years later an old coot I was interviewing for a longitudinal study, who was blind and couldn’t see my red hair and “map of Ireland” face, told me that the area had started to deteriorate when the Irish moved in. One of the many times in my life I heard anti-Irish sentiments from the other white people around. Which mystified the younger black people I knew, because Irish are white. Hate is such a strong tradition in this country.

    The Drop Kick Murphy’s continue in the long tradition of Irish rebellion music. My kids and all their friends have followed them since they played in local pubs in Chicago on tour.

  22. 22.

    Expat

    Irish immigrants were considered “white niggers” and were cheaper and more disposable labor than expensive, black slaves.  Irish dug the ditches and canals in Louisiana for pennies per day and died by the thousands from malaria, yellow fever and malnutrition.  No matter. Another boatload would soon replace them.  So, it’s appalling to see anyone of Irish descent aligned with the Republican party, but it just goes to show you that most humans are  happy to find someone else to shit on.

  27. 27.

    Geminid

    @Splitting Image: After he signed the Civil Rights Act, “F”LBJ predicted that it would cost the Democratic it’s majority of the South for decades. This came to be as the parties realigned in the 1970s. It happened quickly in Virginia. Mills Godwin, backed by the conservative Byrd machine, was elected Governor as a Democrat in 1965. In 1971 Godwin was elected Governor as a Republican. The 7th Congressional District, based on the white suburbs of Richmond, elected Republicans from the 1970s right up until 2018 when Abigail Spanberger flipped it.

    This party realignment altered the balance of power within the Republican party. The “Rockefeller Republicans” of the Northeast were marginalized, and formerly Republican New England has become almost entirely Democratic in its Congressional representation.

    There was always a strong Nativist strain in the party. The American (Know Nothing) Party had become a fairly powerful bloc by the 1850s, but it dissolved itself  in 1860 and most of its members joined the new Republican Party. The Republicans became the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-union party and remained so.

    The “Taft Republicans” of the 1940s and 50s inherited this reactionary tradition. You might say the more pragmatic and forward looking “Eisenhower Republicans” had the upper hand for a while. But the influx of Southern racists tipped the balance. Now the party is in effect run by No Nothings and Neo-Confederates.

  28. 28.

    lowtechcyclist

    @opiejeanne: ​
     

    My question is why is there evidence in Barron’s room?

    I’m not sure he said there was. Just that the FBI searched Melania’s and Barron’s rooms, and he’s upset that (a) they went through his lady’s things (how dare they!), and in both Melania’s and Barron’s rooms, the FBI didn’t put everything back exactly the way they found it.

    Well, doofus, that’s what happens when you lie to the FBI and tell them that all the papers you took from the White House were in that one storage room, and they find out that wasn’t the case. You bet they’re going to make sure you didn’t hide classified documents under Barron’s mattress or at the bottom of Melania’s lingerie drawer, thinking, “oh, they’d never look there.”

  29. 29.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Geminid:

    It happened quickly in Virginia. Mills Godwin, backed by the conservative Byrd machine, was elected Governor as a Democrat in 1965. In 1971 Godwin was elected Governor as a Republican.

    Nitpick: 1973, not 1971. But on target with the rest of it.

    I thought we were finally moving in the right direction in Virginia in 1985 when we elected Baliles, Wilder, and Terry (you could almost see the RWNJs’ heads explode, with a black and a woman on the Dem ticket) as Gov, Lt Gov, and AG.  But that only lasted so long.

  30. 30.

    Geminid

    @Expat: Cargo ships took cotton from New Orleans to England and brought back Irish people. By 1860 many of these immigrants identified with their new home and joined the Louisiana regiments sent to fight the Civil War. Then the Union captured New Orleans- the South’s largest city- in the Spring of 1862. After that, few of the city’s Irish would join their compatriots fighting for the Confederacy.

  31. 31.

    sab

    @satby: My grandmother’s mother was from a Canadian banking family (Presbyterian/Anglican) who married the son of an Irish laborer and his lace curtain Irish wife in Wisconsin.

    We are culturally very confused. Which is apparently why my sister only marries Chinese guys who like art.

  32. 32.

    prostratedragon

    @lowtechcyclist: ​ The subpoenas that lead to the search warrant that we know of was not restricted to Mar-a-Lago. This came to light when DOJ asked for the subpoenas to be unsealed this past week, as noted at Emptywheel. So, one more thing for TFG to stop whining about — and maybe more search warrants already out there or soon to be, that we haven’t yet heard about.

    Although the SDFL Motion indicates that FPOTUS directed his staff to conduct a review of boxes moved “from the White House to Florida,” the subpoena was not so limited, instead seeking “[a]ny and all documents or writings in the custody or control of Donald J. Trump and/or the Office of Donald J. Trump bearing classification markings,” without limitation to where they were stored.

  34. 34.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: That’s right, moderate Republican Linwood Holton was elected Virginia Governor in 1969, and Godwin was not elected Governor until 1973. Holton was Tim Kaine’s father-in-law.

    The Democratic resurgence in the 1980s that you describe did not last. One reason might have been the mobilization of politicized evangelicals that added Republican voters. Now they and their more secular “tea party” allies have the upper hand in Virginia’s Republican party.

    But not in Virginia as a whole. In 2020, Joe Biden carried the state by ten points. This was the best Democratic performance in Virginia since “F” LBJ in 1964.

  35. 35.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @satby: ​
    A few years before Brexit I would read articles about Englanders who bitterly resented Poles and Czechs working as nurses and pharmacists. It blew my mind until I remembered their long time dislike of the Irish.

  36. 36.

    Matt McIrvin

    @lowtechcyclist: The general political trend in Virginia has been positive ever since the 1980s. There’s just a lot of swing on top of that.

    I was a teenager in Fairfax County in the age of Reagan. My neighborhood was bright red America in those days. It’s not any more.

  38. 38.

    Ken

    @Soprano2: TFG really said Zuckerberg came to see him at the WH “last week”.

    Working on that diminished competency defense, I guess?

    The only thing I’ve seen of it is a screencap with him talking on one side, and an ad for a gold-ish coin commemorating the speech on the other. Looked a bit like the Home Shopping Network, and made me wonder what else they’d been hawking during the speech. Memory foam pillows and ginsu knives, perhaps.

    * To steal a line from Terry Pratchett, who was referring to the somewhat debased state of Ankh-Morpork’s metallic currency.

  39. 39.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Baud: ​
      My mom met him once at a department store, she though he was Tim Conway. He took it in good spirits.

    He was jewish who married a christian, who became born again, and they split up and then got back together again and she insisted it was God answering her prayers for reconciliation and somehow God was also a born again, so he converted. The moral of the story is Mao was right, religion is poison.

  40. 40.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Matt McIrvin: ​
      Gawd, even during the Blitz the short handed fighter command refused to let free Poles fight until they had no choice. They viewed them as some kind of sub human and they turned out be elite pilots.

  41. 41.

    Ken

    @prostratedragon: I think I saw this in a movie once. They’re waiting for TFG to move documents to Mar-a-Lago from his other properties, thinking that they’ve already searched there so won’t look again. Then they have more evidence that he knew of documents that had not been returned as required, plus further intent to conceal.

  42. 42.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Ken:

    me wonder what else they’d been hawking during the speech.

    burial plots on a golf course

  43. 43.

    sab

    @David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: I was always puzzled by the Founding Fathers anti- Catholicism. Which half my family shared. The other half was Catholic.

    Now I see the current Supreme Court and I am forced to realize that my bigoted Protestant ancestors had a point. Church and state have to be separated. Otherwise you have religious wars.

  44. 44.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: The thing that still boggles me in hindsight was that the reactionary Reagan version of conservatism was actually relatively welcoming to immigrants from the Communist world, many of whom were not white, and they got a lot of support that way. Trump-style conservatism wouldn’t dream of it unless they were sufficiently white and nominally Christian.

  45. 45.

    Ken

    @Matt McIrvin: I was re-reading Murder on the Orient Express recently, and was struck by one of Poirot’s lines, to the effect that a mix of nationalities such as were on the train would only be found in one other place, America.  Not any more, Dame Agatha.

    Another Poirot line revealing such assumptions was when he referred to the elderly Russian woman as being an unlikely suspect because of “her social position, her frail physique, and the alibi given by her maid”. She definitely isn’t capable of making the wounds, and the alibi is good — but the most important reason she’s above suspicion is that she’s an aristocrat.

  46. 46.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: Demographic trends have strengthened the Democratic vote in Virginia. There are now a lot of first and second generation immigrants and they tend to vote for Democrats. The state has been economically dynamic over the last few decades, and the proportion of the college educated in the electorate has risen. This group was majority Republican 50 years ago, but now it is increasingly Democratic.  The “Blue Wave” that won us a House majority in 2018 was led by suburban districts across the country that had a larger proportion of college educated voters.

    I think a third factor in Virginia’s political shift has been the radicalization of the state’s Republican party.  The Chamber of Commerce/Country club Republicans who used to call the shots have been displaced by an alliance of tea party cranks and bible thumpers. Last year Glenn Youngkin was able to paper over this rift with money, but it’s still there.

    Moderates and even moderate conservatives have been alienated by the radicals. We’ll see how much they still are next year, when both General Assembly houses are up for election. There will be a new, more neutral map to replace the Republican drawn map in use since 2011. Democrats are very mobilized now, and I think they will thrash the Republicans.

  47. 47.

    geg6

    Cheetolini accused Fetterman of being a drug addict.  Says he wants to legalize heroin because he does it.  What a piece of shit.

  48. 48.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @sab:  I read a biography of 19th century English Prime Minister William Gladstone and his reason for anti catholicism had a non bigoted basis:

     

    Gladstone had a complex ambivalence about Catholicism. He was attracted by its international success in majestic traditions. More important, he was strongly opposed to the authoritarianism of its pope and bishops, its profound public opposition to liberalism, and its refusal to distinguish between secular allegiance on the one hand and spiritual obedience on the other.[110] The danger came when the pope or bishops attempted to exert temporal power, as in the Vatican decrees of 1870 as the climax of the papal attempt to control churches in different nations, despite their independent nationalism.[111]

    From that 18th and 19th century point of view, a foreign center intervening into domestic issues would be irritating.

    Today the issue is the fundamentalist, reactionary, exclusionary sect of U.S. catholicism forcing their views not only on the liberation theology wing of catholicism but on all domestic religions and secular society.
     

  50. 50.

    Geminid

    @Ken: @RonFilpkowski tweeted an interview with a rallier selling iron skillets with an image of trump molded into the cooking surface. The entrepeneur said it was for cooking “MAGA pancakes.”

    There was also at least one vendor selling nazi-themed flags, shirts and armbands with swastikas.

  51. 51.

    kalakal

    @Ken: There’s a fun spoof on that in Gosford Park. The detective (Stephen Fry) announces early on that he’s not going to bother with the aristos because the murderer has to be one of servants, instantly telling all viewers that the murderer must be one of the upper crust.

  52. 52.

    lowtechcyclist

    @geg6: ​
     

    Cheetolini accused Fetterman of being a drug addict. Says he wants to legalize heroin because he does it. What a piece of shit.

    Republicans make all sorts of outlandish smears of Democrats all the time, and nobody in the media notices. But Biden tells the truth for once about where the GOP is headed, and it rattles teacups all over the networks and the big newspapers.

    Bothsidesing requires an incredible double standard.

  53. 53.

    Whomever

    @Matt McIrvin: London has been a very international city for a long time.  EG Especially in the 19th c it was relatively tolerant of Jews and attracted a community of them, and of course empire meant people from around the world.

    The little Englanders think of London roughly the way rural Americans think of New York, and for the same reasons.

    Now since we are talking Irish, what’s more interesting is Dublin has also become this way.  30 years ago Ireland was a de-facto theocracy; I was back there a couple of years ago and these days (thanks a lot to the EU) it’s full of people from all over, with great food.  Their previous Prime Minister was gay and of Indian Descent, and previous lord mayor of Chinese descent.

    As someone who can’t learn languages, Dublin is definitely on the list of “places I’d potentially live some day”, more so than Brexit Britain.

  54. 54.

    kalakal

    @Betty: There’s been an academic controversy about that sign/s for years as to wether it actually existed. There seems to a lot of heat but little light in the arguments

    racist-xenophobic-sign

    There’s certainly been a long history of anti Irish racism in the UK.

    I mostly lived in a very multicultural area and had until recently a feeling that racism was on the back foot in the UK. To nearly everybody under 50 (it seemed to me) racism was about as acceptable as smoking in a creche. The popular youth movements in the 70s & 80s (Rock against Racism etc) seemed to have stomped the NF and their unlovely brethren flat.

    Then along came Brexit and unleashed a tidal wave of pus. I’m beginning to pick up signs that a backlash is building, I sure hope so.

    Probably the most overt racism I noted was against Pakistanis, Indians & Sikhs ( most of whom are as British as anyone else). The knuckledraggers show their historical & cultural ignorance with the catch all cry of P*ki.

    Sadly  there seems to be plenty of racist hate to go around as the boneheads also rail against Chinese, West Indians, Poles etc etc. I do believe these gits are a relatively small minority vastly amplified by the Tory Party, UKIP, and of the course the vileness that is the British Press but there sure seems to be a well of poison.

  55. 55.

    Another Scott

    @satby: When I was a very young WASP (mostly Baptist) kid in Cobb county GA, several of my friends would frequently tell Pol*ck jokes.  Really vile things.  I couldn’t understand it at the time.  They were big fans of fancy Nazi military hardware too.

    The indoctrination starts when they are very young.  :⁠-⁠(

    Grrr…,
    Scott.

  56. 56.

    Wapiti

    @sab: The Founders were closer to the 30 Years War than we are to the Civil War. They did not want the state choosing one religion and attacking all of other faiths.

  60. 60.

    Bill Arnold

    @geg6:

    Cheetolini accused Fetterman of being a drug addict. Says he wants to legalize heroin because he does it. What a piece of shit.

    This is D.J. Trump; every accusation is a confession.
    I thought DJT’s preferred uppers like Adderall; interesting that he might be confessing to also abusing opiate pain pills.

  61. 61.

    sab

    @Wapiti: The Founders had a kosher table at the convening of the first continental congresss

    ETA They weren’t just accepting all Christian faiths. They accepted all faiths.

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