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Decline and Fall

You are here: Home / Archives for Decline and Fall

Just Asking Questions – Open Thread

by Cheryl Rofer|  May 16, 20219:18 am| 263 Comments

This post is in: Trumpery, All Too Normal, Decline and Fall

To help WaterGirl keep the troubleshooting thread to just that, here’s something I’ve been thinking about.

We see statements not unlike TFG’s tweets occasionally emanate from a certain Florida resort. We see quotes in the news about grand political thinking from TFG – endorse this, fundraise that, remove Liz Cheney.

But we hardly ever see TFG. There was one video a couple of weeks ago that looked like one of those folks you see ranting on street corners about the unfairness of life, chemtrails, and the aliens that are hiding in the bank building. A small audience applauded. I wondered if that was a deepfake. It was perfectly believable.

And now the questions.

Is TFG having a hard time adjusting to his Twitterless existence? Is he ranting incoherently, so that his handlers don’t want the world to see him directly? Or is he just nursing his butthurt and thinks that he is damaging the media by denying them his essence? (Oh wait) Is he being manipulated by any number of manipulators?

You may have questions too. You may deposit them here or any other profound thinking you have to offer this Sunday morning.

Open thread!

Just Asking Questions – Open ThreadPost + Comments (263)

Acceptance Level: Unlocked

by Betty Cracker|  November 15, 20208:33 am| 396 Comments

This post is in: Domestic Politics, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Trumpery, Assholes, Clown Shoes, Decline and Fall, General Stupidity

Well, here it is:

Acceptance Level Unlocked

I edited out all the whiny lies. (You’re welcome.) But this is progress of a sort — the only concession this repulsive crybaby is ever likely to make. For the next 65 days, this egomaniacal wretch will do everything in his power to foment division and delegitimize the incoming administration.

There’s no way Trump sticks around the White House on January 20th to greet his successor and attend the inauguration as honor compels real presidents to do, no matter how hard fought the race. He’ll probably demand that all the toadies boycott the inauguration too.

In a way, good riddance — who wants those puling babies around stinking up the event with their loaded diapers? But Trump is playing a dangerous game with the country, and for no other reason than malice and spite. Fuck that guy.

Now, I’m off to continue binge-watching the latest season of The Crown.

Open thread!

Acceptance Level: UnlockedPost + Comments (396)

The Measure Of An Epidemic: New Coronavirus Units

by Tom Levenson|  April 6, 20209:18 pm| 83 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Bitter Despair is the New Black, Decline and Fall, Get Mad You Sons Of Bitches, The Republican Crime Syndicate, Their Motto: Apocalypse Now

Let’s review:

The first confirmed COVID-19 death on US soil occurred on March 1, 2020.   four p.m. EDT on April 2, 2020,  the United States’ cumulative coronavirus death toll hit 5,808.  Four days later, that number crossed the 10,000 line. There’s a long history behind the saying that while any one death is a tragedy many deaths —a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million— become statistics, but it certainly applies now:  the American pandemic has entered its statistical phase.

The Measure Of An Epidemic: New Coronavirus Units

This much is known about the tragic start to America’s  epidemic.  The first person to die  was a man in his fifties, who had been hosptialized in King County, Washington.  His name was not been released at the time, but it’s possible to reconstruct a part of his story: he was someone in the middle of a life who, only a week or two before its end, had no reason to think he faced his last days on earth. That’s a story we can tell ourselves; a loss we can recognize; a human being, however anonymous, we can mourn.

That one death is a marker in more than just timing.  Health officials noted one key fact about that particular case.  The dead man had no connection to the original coronavirus outbreak in China. He caught his disease here, from someone else in the United States who was already infected, in what is called “community transmission.” President Trump reacted to the news of his death within hours—by imposing travel restrictions on Iran.  That gesture was preceded by reckless inattention, to be followed by a disastrous series of performative decisions by the Trump administration that has produced the current best-case scenario of 100,000 to 240,000 Americans dead by summer.

It’s virtually impossible to grasp the losses implicit in such large numbers. When quantities break the bounds of ordinary experience they begin to disappear from view.  That’s the challenge: to see into what’s happening now, to extract from mere numbers both memory and meaning.

Here’s one way to do so: on September 11, 2001 2,996 people were killed in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington DC.  As I write this on April 3, the US has already suffered almost two 9/11s.

Another: between 1956, when the first American died in the conflict, and 2006, when the last American fatality attributed to the war was recorded—half a century–58,220 members of the US armed services died in the Vietnam War. COVID-19 has climbed to ten percent of that casualty count in a single month.

Looking forward, if the most optimistic current projections hold, coronavirus will bring between thirty and seventy 9/11s to the United States, or two to six Vietnams.  At those heights, the sheer scale of the misery again turns particular memories (where I was when the towers fell, what it felt like to run my fingers along the wall) into abstractions.

And beyond such numbers, should the best case scenarios fail to pan out, we’ll find ourselves in territory at the limits of national mourning. It took 405,000 American lives to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.  And should the US epidemic wholly overwhelms the still-patchwork effort to contain it, the only remaining national memory to measure our tragedy against will be America’s bloodiest conflict, the Civil War, in which an estimated 750,000 Americans lost their lives.

Back on the first of March, just one man lay dying of this awkwardly named new disease. Those who knew him could mourn him in his human singularity. Glimpsed now, through the lens of almost six thousand more dead, he is the unknown soldier in this viral campaign.

More than three 9/11s.

And counting.

Image: Pieter Breughel the Elder, The Triumph of Death, c. 1562

The Measure Of An Epidemic: New Coronavirus UnitsPost + Comments (83)

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: PopCult Celebrity

by Anne Laurie|  March 9, 202011:33 pm| 135 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Decline and Fall

Nero is being recognized more and more these days.

Except by him. pic.twitter.com/roKJyajibh

— Joanne Freeman (@jbf1755) March 8, 2020

The Senate had an opportunity to remove this President from office, and every Republican but one declined. pic.twitter.com/bK9cl6H1nr

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) March 8, 2020

ETA, per TPM (h/t multiple commentors):

… But for QAnon followers, the second half of the caption speaks to a central narrative in the conspiracy theory, which is based on years of cryptic online posts from an anonymous self-purported insider whose legion of fans pore over the posts like Talmudic scholars.

Trump, the theory posits, is engaged in a behind-the-scenes war against evil forces intent on his destruction. The unknown “Q” has used the phrase in several unsigned, largely inscrutable missives.
The phrase is meant to convey that mass arrests and a “great awakening” are inevitable no matter what the “deep state” or mainstream media do, said Travis View, co-host of the “QAnon Anonymous” podcast.

“It’s very fatalist,” View said…

So I guess the rest of us are left hoping for Heaven’s Gate, as opposed to Jonestown, climax for the cultists.
 

treat for you: open this tweet and see who the quote is about and die instantly https://t.co/Wq33ERuBTq

— steel reinforced hunter h (@HRETNUH) March 5, 2020

You have been warned…

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Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: PopCult CelebrityPost + Comments (135)

GOP Stupidity Open Thread: Mitt Romney Has Nothing to Worry About

by Anne Laurie|  February 10, 20209:57 pm| 36 Comments

This post is in: Impeachment Inquiry, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Trumpery, Assholes, Decline and Fall, Romney of the Uncanny Valley

And yet Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, a French fascist from a party founded by some of Hitler’s last bodyguards, was welcomed with thunderous applause. https://t.co/4Cvc7fWspn

— zeddy (@Zeddary) February 9, 2020

And CPAC was never exactly Mitt’s kinda people anyways. Remember when we could make fun of the grifters, resume-padders and grievance voters who hung around that event like flies circling carrion?

But he’ll go to a place he knows would result in violence against Romney

Of all the supposed “true conservatives” who’s become Trump bootlickers, Schlapp is one of the dumbest and one of the worst https://t.co/NIEFaiJac2

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) February 9, 2020

I wish I could remember which twitter wit referred to Matt Schlapp as ‘the sound made by two porkchops falling onto a wet kitchen floor.’

These Trump remoras can’t make me like Mitt Romney, but they’re making me more sympathetic to the general, near-extinct class of Honorable Republicans.

Worth the two minutes.

Colbert is a gem. pic.twitter.com/To69UTmYxU

— The Hoarse Whisperer (@HoarseWisperer) February 6, 2020

Mitt’s an upper-class Mormon. He grew up in a wealthy suburb in Michigan, moved to Massachusetts for college and to New York to make his fortune, moved back to Massachusetts to jump-start his political career because ‘nobody elects a president from Utah‘. He still has multi-million-dollar ‘family vacation homes’ in California and New Hampshire. But his primary loyalty has always been to his class and his faith, not necessarily in that order, and there’s no better place on earth for a well-to-do Mormon of impeccable LDS lineage than the state of Utah. They don’t care what that vulgar gentile in the White House thinks, although they’ll dutifully pull the (R) lever during the general election.

If you don’t trust my insight, McKay Coppins is also a Mormon:

Unsurprisingly, Romney’s vote to convict is not being met with the same apocalyptic rage in Utah as it is in much of MAGA country. https://t.co/hxhcAYJiFf

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) February 10, 2020

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GOP Stupidity Open Thread: Mitt Romney Has Nothing to Worry AboutPost + Comments (36)

And A Lagniappe…

by Tom Levenson|  January 3, 20207:33 pm| 69 Comments

This post is in: Crimes against humanity, Iran, All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Decline and Fall, Peak Wingnut Was a Lie!, Their Motto: Apocalypse Now

The AP is reporting another US drone strike in Iraq:

Another airstrike almost exactly 24 hours after the one that killed Soleimani hit two cars carrying Iran-backed militia north of Baghdad, killing five people, an Iraqi official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. The Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces confirmed the strike, saying it targeted one of its medical convoys near the stadium in Taji, north of Baghdad. The group denied any of its top leaders were killed.

I hope that every American in Iraq is taking really good care of their personal security; they are all targets now.

And I really hope against hope that the millions of Iraqis and Iranians in the crossfire don’t get further grief added to the tally of misery they’ve experienced for decades now.

And A Lagniappe...

And finally, I’ll note that war when pursued by sober and prudent leaders, who define their goals, identify strategy and tactics that can plausibly lead to those ends, and enact an ongoing process that can deal with what happens when any plan makes contact with the opposition is still a wasteful, tragic, destructive and always contingent and hugely risky proposition.

And then there is the GOP, and the whole feckless troupe of Trumpanzees.

Fuck.

Here’s a John Prine song that seems way too on point today:

 

Image: Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, between 1611 and 1612

And A Lagniappe…Post + Comments (69)

Bach Gets It: Boris Johnson Edition (With Bonus Tikka)

by Tom Levenson|  December 16, 20195:33 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Decline and Fall, I'm Too Big To Cry/Hurts Too Much To Laugh

Via my sister, the music theorist, and with a special place in our hearts for valued commenter and grand master of invective, Tony Jay, this:

 

Also, because who doesn’t need a little hostile cat action in the afternoon, please enjoy the picture below:

Bach Gets It: Boris Johnson Edition (With Bonus Tikka)

For the caption, I’m wavering between “You lookin’ at me?” and “Do you feel lucky today? Well, do you, punk?”

Last: y’all may have noticed a protracted lack of much stuff from yours truly. I’m rounding the last turn on my long-promised South Sea Bubble book — fixing footnotes.*

It is my hope though not my promise that I’ll be a little more useful around the joint once the MS goes back to Random House. In the meantime, I’ll keep on trying to satiate the jackaltariat with the occasional buffoonery.

With that, the thread is open.

*Mamas. Don’t let your babies grow up to put TKs in their citations!

Bach Gets It: Boris Johnson Edition (With Bonus Tikka)Post + Comments (63)

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