I want to marry this article that Suzanne mentioned in an earlier thread.
THE MOST PATHETIC MEN IN AMERICA
Why Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and so many other cowards in Congress are still doing Trump’s bidding
by Mark Leibovich
This article is filled with Betty Cracker writing, sentence after sentence after sentence.
The hotel gave every impression of being a tight and well-managed operation, in contrast to the proprietor’s side hustle down the street. Lots of Washington reporters would hang around the establishment, too. We could always pick up dirt that Trump and his groveling legions tracked in. The place was crawling with them, these hollowed-out men and women who knew better.
.
But the guests who stood out for me most were Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy and the busybody senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham. I would sometimes see them around the lobby or steakhouse or function rooms, skipping from table to table and getting thanked for all the wonderful things they were doing to help our president. They had long been among the most supplicant super-careerists ever to play in a city known for the breed, and proved themselves to be essential lapdogs in Trump’s kennel.
.
Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I’m genuinely asking.
Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
I’ll just say this… these Trump sycophants are an embarrassment to all the bottom-feeders in the world.
Okay, one last thing. Is there any politically aware person who could read this phrase – “his fly was unzipped at the time and he was drunk on Bloody Marys” – and not know who that was in reference to?
Open thread.
Medicine Man
That would be Rudy.
WaterGirl
@Medicine Man: That would be the correct answer!
debbie
Yep, just read it and would at least like to have a drink with it.
Omnes Omnibus
Not Baud because pants are involved.
RSA
There will be no redemption for David Brooks, but this made me laugh:
debbie
@debbie:
Can’t remember what I was listening to yesterday, but my first thought was T.S. Eliot’s “We Are The Hollow Men.” To think that he thought the lowest men could reach was post-WWI!!!
RSA
@debbie: T. S. Eliot?
Mike in NC
Read where Loathsome Lindsey somehow got his hands on half a million bucks and donated all of it to the Fat Orange Clown’s reelection campaign.
Scout211
These are the best words.
debbie
@RSA:
Dammit, dammit, dammit. Thanks, fixed.
zhena gogolia
@RSA: same dif
debbie
@Scout211:
Which still hasn’t ended!
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
I sundown five minutes after waking up!
Spanky
Sounds like the author is channeling Hunter S. Thompson.
BruceFromOhio
That these simpering cowardly two-bit ratfucking soulless criminals stand ready and willing to plunge us into darkness to satisfy some sort of craving for ‘relevance’ is bad enough. That they may well succeed makes me wonder if America and her ideals of a democracy are really that fragile as to be laid low in such a way.
Scout211
I just read the article. It’s very good and saw this at the end:
Scout211
Toward the end of the article:
RSA
@debbie: Cool. On substance, I think your observation is on target.
dmsilev
Hah:
NotMax
Worst. Huckleberries. Ever.
The whole stinking lot of ’em.
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
A Bloody Mary drunk that isn’t at 10:30 or 11:00 am is simply gross. They are not to be consumed after noon unless you just woke up.
Omnes Omnibus
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg: It really depends how long brunch lasts.
Spanky
@Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg:
It’s Rudy. What’s your point?
ETA: Also, does it matter what you just woke up from?
zhena gogolia
Okay I read the article. Didn’t like the swipe at Biden or the oh so savvy assumption that the repugs will win the House
zhena gogolia
@debbie: me too
HinTN
@Scout211: Yes, they are although these are close:
The Moar You Know
@Mike in NC: he had to convert it from rubles before making the contribution.
Alison Rose
@RSA: Brooks may be an insufferable dimwit, but occasionally he can turn a good phrase. That made me cackle.
WaterGirl
@BruceFromOhio:
If only that could be a rotating tag.
Steeplejack
@Mike in NC:
That current tweet is someone rage-farming an article from November 2020. Goddamn, the Internet is dumber than usual sometimes.
ETA: Tweet here (with link to article). And the donation was to Trump’s defense fund, not his reëlection.
Suzanne
This was the paragraph that I enjoyed the most:
I love when they catch those little details that just eviscerate.
tom
I think I giggled for like 5 minutes when I read that.
WaterGirl
@dmsilev: It was really hard to pick the excerpts… so many perfect sentences and paragraphs.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Yes, those are exactly the two things that annoyed me, too.
Biden – 109! and I am so suck of “likely to lose the House” – I want to know where everyone is keeping their time travel machines. Because without them, no one fucking knows the result of the election in Nov.
WaterGirl
@HinTN: So much to love!
japa21
WG, yes it is an excellent article. Yes, the descriptive language is good. But Betty Cracker level good? Not even close.
Brachiator
Boris Johnson? Or more likely Dominic Raab.
NotMax
Exit, stage right.
Smacks of a certain someone having a mole inside the SEC?
James E Powell
@RSA:
So Brooks could see that Trump was a disaster, but he considered it his mission in life to write Op-Eds about how the Democrats were worse.
zhena gogolia
@japa21: I agree. The best lines come from other writers. But it’s good for Leibovich.
James E Powell
@RSA:
“It takes brains not to make money,” Colonel Cargill wrote in one of the homiletic memoranda he regularly prepared for circulation over General Peckem’s signature. “Any fool can make money these days and most of them do. But what about people with talent and brains? Name, for example, one poet who makes money.”
“T.S. Eliot,” ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen said in his mail-sorting cubicle at Twenty-seventh Air Force Headquarters, and slammed down the telephone without identifying himself.
Mai Naem mobile
I would like to know who bought the hotel. I had assumed it was a company Waldorf Astoria but its an investment company with a Waldorf Astoria branded hotel. I would be willing to bet its a corrupt deal. Its either Russian money, Saudi money or one of TFG’s wealthy pals that he did whatever favor for, paying him off by overpaying for the hotel.
Jeffro
@RSA:
@Scout211:
from GQP elected officials to their voters to their hirelings, I will never forgive a single one of them for their support, overt, tacit, or just head-in-the-sand-because-Dems, of this corrupt and idiotic monster.
There are worse things than losing an election, GQP. Try standing on principle sometime, once you find one.
debbie
@Suzanne:
Better than Mitt and the frogs’ legs dinners?
WaterGirl
@NotMax: It most certainly does.
WaterGirl
@Mai Naem mobile: I had the same thought. Who would buy that mess for a hundred million more than Trump paid for it???
Almost Retired
@zhena gogolia: Yeah the 109 year old Biden “joke” fell flat. But I agree with WaterGirl that I want to marry this article. But that Biden joke and the reference to the inevitability of losing the House makes me want to at least insist on a prenup.
Ksmiami
@BruceFromOhio: eh US democracy is pretty much a fiction for 70 percent of the actual people who reside here.
Omnes Omnibus
@WaterGirl: It’s okay. I have been informed that optimism ins condescending, so we should probably knock it off.
sixthdoctor
livewyre
@Ksmiami: Even then, you somehow don’t sound terribly committed to improving on that. I wonder why.
raven
Cameron
@sixthdoctor: I find that kind of odd phrasing – now he’s got me really interested in what he has to say.
JaySinWA
@Alison Rose : In typical Brooksian fashion he made the analogy far too anodyne. It needs more malevelance. Fireflies? Angry deranged hornets maybe.
Tony G
Great point about how Trump is tiresome. People like Trump and his sycophants are evil, but ultimately they are boring people. Everything that they do and say is predicable. (Even the January 6th attempted coup was predictable — Trump had been threatening that type of thing for months.). Years ago I used to sometimes force myself to listen to right-wing talk radio (Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc.) so that I could “understand my enemy”. After a short time, however, I realized that I was hearing the same childish rants over and over again. Those people are boring — as predictable as a “classic rock” station playing Led Zeppelin.
Brachiator
@Ksmiami:
Is it a democracy for you? If yes, what are you doing to make it better?
If no, same question.
raven
@Tony G: My brother sued them and they settled!
lowtechcyclist
I tired of the article fairly quickly. After awhile, it couldn’t make McCarthy, Graham, etc. seem any more lapdoggy than they’d been shown to be in the early paragraphs. If the book is more of the same, I’ll pass. I’ve already got the idea.
catclub
@tom: I thought Pompeo was most suited to taking over the GOP next after Trump. I thought he was the meanest of them.
Brachiator
@Tony G:
Sometimes that’s all you need. Trump succeeded by creating a base and telling them what they wanted to hear.
Democrats sometimes tell people what they need to hear. That is often a tougher sell.
danielx
The number of supposedly grown men and women willing to humiliate and debase not others but themselves in the service of a man whose only loyalty is to himself…remains one of the abiding mysteries of the Trump era. No wonder at the dregs with which he surrounded himself on January 6, anybody with a shred of self-respect had left a long time previously.
mrmoshpotato
@Medicine Man:
Looks like I guess right too. Hahaha
raven
@danielx: They like his policies.
Alison Rose
@JaySinWA: Hornets have too much energy for Trump. The electrical activity in his brain is probably on par with the wattage in my bathroom nightlight.
tom
@catclub: Looks like DeSantis has the inside track on taking over the GOP.
debbie
@raven:
What they like is his cruelty.
HumboldtBlue
I want to marry Jonathan Pie after seeing this brilliant takedown of Boris Johnson.
RSA
That is an amazing and hilarious coincidence! Thanks very much for remembering and posting.
Geminid
@Steeplejack: Maybe from Graham’s left-over campaign funds, and not out of his pocket.
danielx
@raven:
He didn’t have policies other than personal gain and punishing his perceived enemies. Everything else was impulses based upon whatever he felt benefited him on any given day. Which could change on an hourly basis, depending on what he saw on Fox News and the last person with whom he spoke.
Read a quote once from some Republican congressional staffer after Trump had blown up some carefully crafted legislation designed to further Republican ends, to the effect of: “we had it done, but he couldn’t keep his fucking mouth shut for eight fucking hours. Fuck him.”
Geminid
@catclub: Pompeo agrees. He’s the Koch’s blue eyed boy and will not lack for money if he runs in 2024. And now, like Cassius, Pompeo has that “lean and hungry look.”
Mike in NC
@catclub: No, DeSatan would eat Pompeo for breakfast and have plenty of leftovers.
HumboldtBlue
@raven:
Oh, and in reference to the Freedom Bird you mentioned in the thread below, I misconstrued as the Freedom Tower. I don’t know what the freedom bird is, and no, I don’t think it was there when I was there 87-92.
bbleh
@RSA: @debbie: @zhena gogolia: T.S.Eliot is, of course, “toilets” backwards. Yes it IS! Shuddup!
Sebastian
@NotMax:
The guy left holding the bag is …
Devin Nunes.
I am not joking. He’s getting shot in the face with both barrels.
piratedan
still having issues with the assumption that its a foregone conclusion that the GOP is going to win the midterms….
I sit back and look at the effect that the J6 Commission has to be making, I see gas prices coming down, I watch the assault on LGBT community and policies related to one’s own sexuality, I see ROE being overturned and 67% of the US saying the SCOTUS is off the rails and struggle to see how this means that a 15% increase in the price of ground beef is something that overrules everything else, like Dems saving Democracy, keeping people employed and helping make COVID survivable despite everyone on the OTHER side transparently fucking over both science and common sense and making it worse and somehow that means they’ll be rewarded with votes because of guns and their stellar treatment of women.
I just don’t see it and I don’t fucking understand why people continue to write that shit.
bbleh
@zhena gogolia: There is an AWFUL lot of Savvy in the article. All these cute swipes at Republican politicians but with an implication that nothing further will come of it than cute swipes, a little trash-talking, all just joshing among Village bros.
Something that really takes Graham down, something that exposes his nasty side, something that outs him viciously (because tell me who doesn’t deserve it more, except maybe Moscow Mitch), something that does him damage, now that I will stand and applaud.
But I felt at the end of the article like, hahaha, wadda game huh? Whatchagonnado?
Ruckus
@Spanky:
Is rudy ever actually awake?
Seems unlikely, more like a nightmare.
Or a mare’s ass…..
bbleh
@Mai Naem mobile: No! You mean somebody gave the Trump organization a $100M profit on a moribund property lease for something other than purely financial reasons? Just didn’t do their homework, right? Cuz hey, $350M isn’t really worth worrying over…
Geminid
@piratedan: It’s “conventional wisdom,” and pundits like to play it safe. Personally, I think control of the House is a 50-50 proposition, maybe slightly better for Democrats because they come into the election up five(?) seats. Control will come down to results in 20 or fewer districts, and we may not know the outcome in some of these until two or three days after the election.
But Republicans sure are counting their chickens! I know that there are more substantial interests at stake, but I really want to see them lose just so I can see the looks on their faces the day after.
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: I had to basically walk away from Balloon Juice for a week just so I wouldn’t slit my wrists.
There’s realism and then there’s negativity.
debbie
@bbleh:
Oy. Sadly, this is something I will probably remember.
WaterGirl
@Sebastian:
Can you say more?
Matt McIrvin
They “get the joke”. A million people died but it’s OK, they get the joke. While they’re shoveling bodies into the ovens we’ll know that they all got the joke.
sdhays
@Geminid: The Senate has never looked great for Republicans this year either. They have a weak slate and the Democratic base is incandescent.
Not predicting anything. Just that if ever there was a year to buck trends, this would be the year.
Steeplejack
@Geminid:
Well, hungry, anyway. Not so much lean.
James E Powell
@RSA:
Scenes from the novel Catch-22 pop into my head about every two weeks or so, except during the school year when it’s more like twice a week.
Steeplejack
@WaterGirl:
Nunes was installed as the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group, so apparently he’ll be dealing with the shitstorm.
debbie
@Steeplejack:
And yet he’ll still bend the knee and say, “Thank you, Sir.”
JoyceH
@Steeplejack: seen him lately? He’s lost a lot of weight! But – why can’t these guys ever just admit they had lapband surgery? Expecting us to believe he just reduced portion size and did a forty minute workout in the basement, and lost— ninety pounds in six months? Seriously?
James E Powell
@sdhays:
Tim Ryan is certainly ready for it.
He’s got one ridiculing his opponent.
See also, Fetterman mocking Oz for filming his tv ad in his house in New Jersey.
We need Johnson to go down for the trifecta. Rebuild the Blue Wall! And make. Republicans pay for it!
Steeplejack
@JoyceH:
I know he lost some weight, but the last I saw he still didn’t qualify as “lean.”
dww44
@zhena gogolia: I missed the Biden swipe.What was it ?
Re the GOP winning in November, I don’t like it either but that’s the realistic political take at this point. My 15 year old grandson, a whiz of a political data junkie, also predicted today a GOP takeover in the House and an increase in GOP control of statehouses. But there are 4 months to go and we can work to prove the prognosticators wrong.
dww44
@Geminid: I think that man, if elected, is a dangerous threat to the country.
debbie
@James E Powell:
He’s definitely swinging for the fences. Even to the point of saying he stood with Trump against his own party (on China tariffs, I believe). I’m not sure how I feel about this.
James E Powell
@debbie:
I mentioned that in a thread a few days ago. I didn’t like it. I rolled my eyes and said, Just Win Timmy!
My beloved home state has turned a toxic shade of red. I’m sure Ryan has a better idea of what he needs to do to win there than I do. I’ve been gone a long time.
debbie
@James E Powell:
Lucky you!
I think Ryan’s doing a great job overall, getting out all kinds of ads with very targeted messages about the issues conservatives care about. I’m surprised Vance hasn’t responded. Maybe he’s just sticking to OAN and NewsMax. I watch Fox news at night hoping to catch something, but no success yet.
Jerzy Russian
@HumboldtBlue: Goddamn, that was good. “A Shakespearean tragedy written by monkeys on typewriters”. Is there is place I could go in order to have multiple spouses? So far, it would be my current spouse, the Atlantic article highlighted above, and this clip.
brantl
@catclub: Coincidentally, one of the most crooked, too.
raven
@HumboldtBlue: It was a mockup of the kind of plane we flew back and forth on.
brantl
@WaterGirl: Is it paranoia, when they really are out to get you?
WaterGirl
@Steeplejack: I had totally missed that! hahahahaha
zhena gogolia
@bbleh: Yeah. And a lot of self-congratulation for being so close to the levers of power. The reporter suffers from the same syndrome as the people he’s ridiculing.