Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

If you are still in the gop, you are either an extremist yourself, or in bed with those who are.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

đŸŽ¶ Those boots were made for mockin’ đŸŽ”

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

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

“But what about the lurkers?”

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

All hail the time of the bunny!

We will not go back.

Roe is not about choice. It is about freedom.

T R E 4 5 O N

Give the craziest people you know everything they want and hope they don’t ask for more? Great plan.

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Latest Night Open Thread: CPAC to T-PAC

Latest Night Open Thread: CPAC to T-PAC

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Warm-up for the Big Yuuuuge Event:

Tonight:



Ex-Republican:

Elsewhere in the arena:

Real step down from Orban, if you ask me:

New grift drops!

… cuz last grift, not doing so well…

Speaking of grifts:

Kameraderie!

And yet, it can always get more pathetic…

Reader Interactions

76Comments

  1. 1.

    MattF

    It’s a reality show, produced and directed by TFG. They are all trying to avoid becoming the Designated Loser.

  3. 3.

    Shalimar

    My mom has dementia, but you wouldn’t know it from a normal conversation with her.  She fixates on weird things, can’t focus on a conversation or remember what she said a few minutes ago, and does strange, totally inexplicable things like buy a giant bag of refrigerated dog food that weighs more than her chihuahua.  You have to know her to realize these things aren’t how she has always been.

    Trump isn’t weird and obsessed because of the dementia.  He’s weird and obsessed because he’s a narcissistic sociopath.

  4. 4.

    Brachiator

     

    “I am your justice,” Trump tells them. “I am your retribution.”

    Jesus Freaking Christ.

    Trump attacking DeWitless and others is to be expected. But the GOP has given Trump a gift which lets him pretend to pivot towards the center right. Unlike DeMoron or Nikki Haley, Trump has promised to defend Social Security and Medicare. This is, of course, a lie, but Trump may be able to ride this home to a primary victory.

    DeSantis is All the Anger with Half the Crazy. But right now this is not enough to move the needle with the MAGA crowd.

  5. 5.

    eclare

    Senator Foghorn Leghorn never disappoints.  Glad he is playing the greatest hits including kale.  Yuck yuckity yuck.

  6. 6.

    Amir Khalid

    CPAC’s failure this year should be big political news, especially over there in the US. Is it in the normie news much.

  7. 7.

    eclare

    @Brachiator:   I was raised in a “normal” church.  This is scary, old testament, “vengeance is mine” writ large.  And I guarandamntee that is how everyone heard it.  And how TFG meant it.

    He is the golden calf.

  8. 8.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Shalimar:

    Trump isn’t weird and obsessed because of the dementia.

    No, but he does have dementia.  He has suffered visible, massive cognitive decline over the last 20 years.  He was always weird, racist, obsessed, mean as fuck, racist, stupid, corrupt, petty, racist, and narcissistic.  He used to be way, way more coherent about it.  Even over his presidency you can see his vocabulary drop, his rambling get less controlled and more bizarre, and his ability to adjust quickly drop.  He has continued to decline since.  He has days when he’s almost back to 2016 levels is the best you can say.

  9. 9.

    Shalimar

    How does Steve Bannon have an adult daughter who still speaks to him?  That makes no sense to me.  Does she have amnesia and forget what he’s like?

  11. 11.

    Amir Khalid

    @eclare:

    Given how much her Dad owes in financial judgements, that should surely be ¹¹¹. (ETA: If that.)

  13. 13.

    lgerard

    Hilarious that Matt Schlapp felt it necessary to define antisemitism in his statement just to make sure attendees knew it was wrong

  15. 15.

    Aussie Sheila

    Thank you Nick Farage for the shout out to Australia. ‘Most woke country in the world.’ Woo Hoo!

    I look forward to his next visit where he is even more ignored than when he last came here. What a tosser, or as we say here what a ‘cooker’.

  19. 19.

    Ruckus

    @Shalimar:

    Sorry about your mom.

    Everyone with dementia goes through it differently. Best of luck

    And while SFB may have dementia, he is exactly as you say. Dementia may be the least of his issues.

  20. 20.

    NotMax

    @>Ruckus

    Yuppers. Absence of attention is a potent toxin in that crabbed, fetid universe.

    We need to practice it more often.

  21. 21.

    Baud

    Interesting.  Reddit is focused on Trump’s call for a new baby boom, but didn’t even make the cut here.

  23. 23.

    Tony Jay

    @NotMax:

    I heard a story that ‘wanker’ was unknown in the US until Phil Collins, who was guest-starting in Miami Vice, introduced it during a scene re-write.

    Hopefully this is true and not another urban myth like Jennifer Garner’s contested parentage.

    ION – Guarantee Farage’s spot at ExterminationNation Fest doesn’t get a moments attention back in the UK. Can’t have people thinking the Right are a bunch of racist loons, not when that’s the hat being assigned to the Left in our national discourse.

  24. 24.

    Aussie Sheila

    @NotMax: ‘Wanker’ is so pre Covid ! ‘Cooker’ is the new wanker, if you know what I mean. ‘Cooker’ is better too because it doesn’t get you into trouble with sensitive platforms or on TV. It actually refers to  Meth manufacturers, which came into general popular parlance during Covid lockdowns when F wits staged demos against lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations.

    Since 95.9% of Australians have had vaccinations against Covid, meth addicts seems a good way to describe people who don’t want to live.

  25. 25.

    David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    You have to buy a ticket to attend CPAC. It’s not free, like a campaign rally. That’s why no one showed up. They only show up when the hate is free.​

  28. 28.

    Brachiator

    @Baud:

    Reddit is focused on Trump’s call for a new baby boom, but didn’t even make the cut here.

    I almost forgot about that. Problem is, even Trump will have a hard time explaining how he only wants white people to have more kids.

    I also forget which European goon he lifted this idea from.

    Trump is going further than any approved GOP platform. And he is two steps away from declaring himself Libertarian Jesus.

    Also, the sad fact is that MAGA idiots will vote for him even if he is imprisoned or goes completely mental.

  29. 29.

    NotMax

    @Aussie Sheila

    Aware that in England, anyway, cooker can refer to a stove. “We bought a new electric cooker.”

    Let confusion reign!   ;)

  31. 31.

    Tony Jay

    In February 2009, U2 member Bono called Chris Martin a wanker live on air during Jo Whiley’s Radio 1 show.

    This is like Hitler ragging Mussolini for being a shouty bully with a fetish for uniforms.

  33. 33.

    Tony Jay

    @Chetan Murthy:

    Looks like the word was around, maybe in a very different context, was briefly mentioned more in the context of Spinal Tap (maybe) then we hit the 80s and Mr Collins’ potty mouth.

    It’s a great word. So useful in any social situation.

  34. 34.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Brachiator:

    I also forget which European goon he lifted this idea from.

    ‘White people need to have more babies’ is a long-standing and common white supremacist (and especially evangelicals) cry.  Very common.  Trump has made more than a few nods towards a Nazi-esque belief in master race genetics, so this seems on-brand.  What I’m saying is, I don’t think he needed to lift it from Europe.

  35. 35.

    Tony Jay

    @Chetan Murthy:

    I’ll almost certainly be driven to post some kind of rant about UK politics soon, what with the calamitous turd-bucket Flobalob has chucked himself into, and the Nor-Kor style non-personality cult being imposed on The Corporate Franchise Opportunity Formerly Known As The Labour Party.

    I apologise in advance.

  37. 37.

    NotMax

    @Tony Jay

    Seem to very hazily recall a foofaraw over David Frost uttering the term on the 60s program That Was the Week That Was.

  41. 41.

    Brachiator

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    RE: I also forget which European goon he lifted this idea from.

    ‘White people need to have more babies’ is a long-standing and common white supremacist (and especially evangelicals) cry.  Very common.

    This is not that common among evangelicals. And even though he encourages racists, Trump clearly believes that the white masses are a bunch of dopes.

    Here’s what I was looking for. From The Guardian, February 2019

    Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has promised that women who have four or more children will never pay income tax again, in a move aimed at boosting the country’s population.

    Orbán, who has emerged as Europe’s loudest rightwing, anti-immigration voice in recent years, said getting Hungarian families to have more children was preferable to allowing immigrants from Muslim countries to enter.

    Trump is very strange. He’s a racist, but he wants non-white people to like him. He’s playing with fire here. I don’t know how hard he will push this noxious nonsense. Or how the cowardly media will deal with this.

  42. 42.

    Tony Jay

    @NotMax:

    “Whaaat ahhhh Fwahhhn-Kehhhh”

    Damn, Frostie is hard to do Funetikly.

    I think Jakobivs Reek-Mohotep has generally entered slang more along the lines of “Ye Gads! One appears to have set foot in a pile of Mogg!”

  44. 44.

    Cameron

    @Tony Jay: Oh, yeah!  I remember Ian Fleming using it, “The name is Wanker.  James Wanker.”  OK, maybe I remembered it wrong.

  45. 45.

    Leslie

    @Brachiator:

     

    This is not that common among evangelicals.

    Common enough that entire shows have been dedicated to Quiverfull families. It may not be one of the five pillars of fundamentalism, but it’s not exactly obscure.

  46. 46.

    Cameron

    Just looking over the collection of CPAC attendees and their quoted words of wisdom, I thought: “Isn’t this what Geoffrey Chaucer would write if he lived in the 21st century and had dropped a couple thousand mics of acid?”

  47. 47.

    Leslie

    The latest in Florida fuckery and anti-trans hatred:

     

    A proposed bill making its way through the Florida State Senate would allow the state “emergency jurisdiction” over children who receive or are “at risk of” receiving gender-affirming care — or if their parent receives it themselves.

    Senate Bill 254, introduced Friday by State Senator Clay Yarborough, would grant the court authority to take emergency custody of kids under the same statute that protects them from domestic violence and abuse.

    The state could take temporary custody of children if “it is necessary in an emergency to protect the child because the child, or a sibling or parent of the child” is “at risk of or is being subjected to the provision of sex reassignment prescriptions or procedures,” according to the proposed bill text. 


    The court would also be granted “jurisdiction to vacate, stay, or modify a child custody determination of a court of another state to protect the child from the risk of being subjected to the provision of sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures,” according to the proposed bill text. “The court must vacate, stay, or modify the child custody determination to the extent necessary to protect the child from the provision of such prescriptions or procedures.”

    Not remotely legal, that last bit, not that that ever seems to stop them.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/florida-anti-trans-bill-court-custody-kids-gender-affirming-care-2023-3

  48. 48.

    Tony Jay

    @Cameron:

    No, you remember right. That’s from the Uncensored Ian Fleming Omnibus, Bantam Press, 1955. Before the Woke busybodies got their hands on it.

    Pretty accurate description of the odious 007 too.

  49. 49.

    David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    @Cameron: So was Dr. Strangelove:

     

    Naturally, they would breed prodigiously. There would be much time, and little to do. But with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years.

  50. 50.

    Anne Laurie

    @Brachiator: I also forget which European goon he lifted this idea from.

    As others have said, it’s a common Euro-racist trope (which is why I didn’t bother looking for a specific tweet).

    But specifically, Orban got bigly applause for touting Hungary’s shiny new ‘Hero Mother of Patriots’ child-support laws at the last CPAC rantfest, and I’m pretty sure somebody on the CPAC board was careful to remind TFG about that.

  51. 51.

    Brachiator

    @Cameron:

    Weren’t the Nazis big on that baby boom thing, too?

    Which brings us back to the US and other Western nations and the early 20th century eugenics movement.

  53. 53.

    ColoradoGuy

    TFG is a straight-up cult, and his followers truly worship him. His bizarreness, combined with the oversized Las Vegas showbiz personality, is the attraction. Craziness on the big screen is what they crave.

  55. 55.

    different-church-lady

    @MattF:

    They are all trying to avoid becoming the Designated Loser.

    Don’t tell Trump, buuuuuuut
.

  56. 56.

    Ken

    I think “world famous art thief”‘s tweet thread makes more sense if you reverse the order:

    you seem happy. how do we ruin that.

    listening to these speeches at cpac

  57. 57.

    different-church-lady

    @Brachiator:

    Trump is very strange. He’s a racist, but he wants non-white people to like him.

    Once again: it’s futile to seek coherence in this cult of personality.

  60. 60.

    Jinchi

    Elon Musk said this week he wants to create an anti-woke AI chatbot.

    Every unconstrained AI chat bot has turned racist within 24 hours of being exposed to the internet, but sure, why not create one explicitly from the get-go.

  61. 61.

    BC in Illinois

    @NotMax:

    Aware that in England, anyway, cooker can refer to a stove. “We bought a new electric cooker.”

    I think we should all adopt the honest descriptor: refer to all stoves as “burners.”  “Put it on the burner.”

    @Brachiator:

    “White people need to have more babies.”

    This is not that common among evangelicals.

    I can say, from a perspective of a conservative Lutheran denomination, that this approach is extremely common among the leadership, if not the laity. If the denomination is losing members, then the members need to be having more children. Duh.

  63. 63.

    RedDirtGirl

    I like how in Matt Schlapp’s statement about Nick Fuentes he had to dumb down “anti-semitic rhetoric” to “jew hatred” for his audience.

  65. 65.

    J R in WV

    @BC in Illinois: ​
     

    I can say, from a perspective of a conservative Lutheran denomination, that this approach is extremely common among the leadership, if not the laity. If the denomination is losing members, then the members need to be having more children. Duh.

    Or perhaps the leadership of the denomination is deranged and scaring membership away on a weekly basis, and making it quite difficult to recruit new members from the community at large.

    I’m not sure what the actual difference is between the Southern Baptist Pro-Slavery Church and the Lutheran deranged Synod of Bigots, personally. Both seem to have lots of illegal sexual perversion among the youth leadership, for example.

    Christo-Fascism seems to never go out of style, does it?

  66. 66.

    Wapiti

    @Frankensteinbeck: Yup. About 40 years ago I met a guy from Idaho who had 10 kids and a visibly pregnant spouse. His explanation was that if whites don’t have kids they’ll slip into a minority.

    And I think the “quiverful” idea has expanded since then.

  68. 68.

    Cheez Whiz

    There’s a power struggle going on in the Republican Party, and CPAC is one of the few places where it comes out in public. All of Trump’s opponents (other than Nikki, who absolutely must be running for VP) were at a Club For Growth fundraiser instead, meaning Trump owns CPAC, whatever that’s worth. But it’s a pretty good example of what a 2nd Trump administration would look like. About the only thing Trump learned is that the adults in the room were full of shit and no use to him at all, so he won’t make that mistake again.

  69. 69.

    VOR

    The venue for CPAC is the Gaylord National Harbor. While often described as being in DC, in reality it is WELL outside DC. I haven’t attended a conference there in years, but there used to be no public transit to it. Back when I visited, it was part of a little cluster of shops, hotels, and restaurants off on their own and not really connected to any residential areas. So no wonder these clowns holding an afterparty at their house wouldn’t attract anyone – it’s simply too far to travel.

  72. 72.

    Tony Jay

    @RedDirtGirl:

    Nothing that interesting, I’m afraid. A few weeks ago it turned out that my decades long belief that Jennifer Garner was James Garner’s daughter (I’m sure I read it somewhere and just look at her, FFS, they have a real family resemblance) was totally 100% wrong.

    Boy, did I feel stoopid.

  73. 73.

    brantl

    At #CPAC,
    @DonaldJTrumpJr
    announces there are gold-wrapped chocolate bars under various audience seats that grant admission to a reception w/ TRUMP on Saturday.

    So, what do the WINNERS get?

  74. 74.

    Paul in KY

    @Tony Jay: My mother was/is British (born in Warrington), but a well brought up lady and I never heard ‘wanker’ until I was an adult. In a movie, I guess.

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