P.M. Carpenter

Even D.C. hoodlums have more journalistic values than Trump's god-fearing followers

They may be hooligans, but they're discriminating hooligans, who know a purveyor of genuine "fake news" when they see it. 

I don't condone the intimidation and physical harassment of reporters — these days, largely because Donald Trump does (see: rallies) — but Fox News lost its right to the designation of "professional journalism" roughly two minutes after Matt Drudge discovered, to his delicate horror, the presence of presidential jizz on Monica's blue dress.

This led to countless hours of broadcast yellow journalism, which amplified the scourge of Gingrichian politics and culminated in the asinine impeachment of an otherwise responsible POTUS. Then came the network's shilling for a Boy King who became responsible — for the needless deaths of thousands of uniformed Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi innocents.

Then came endless, counterfeit controversies stirred by Fox for fatheads about a president who now ranks in the top 10 of all presidents — and then its baseless, inexcusable defenses of the incontrovertibly worst president in American history.

Now this, thanks in large part to the network's unforgivable, propagandistic defenses of this godawful chief executive: cities burning, more than one-hundred-thousand citizens dying, and a historic nation collapsing.

So do I feel sorry for this embattled schmuck who knowingly lowered himself to "report" for Fox News? Fuck no. Perhaps his mother does, assuming Trump hasn't yet killed her off with America's presidentially unchecked plague.

      

Unjustifiable justice

Fighting for harmony is like fucking for virginity.

These people should read Thoreau. 

PROOF that Donald Trump knows me by name

This just in via email, from Brad Parscale, Trump's reelection campaign manager:

***

PM, I recently stepped out of a meeting with President Trump to update him on our May fundraising numbers. We went over the most recent list of May Deadline Donors, and when he asked me why YOUR NAME was MISSING, I didn’t have an answer for him.

The President requested that I reach out to you because you’ve always been one of his most loyal supporters and he was surprised to see you hadn’t contributed yet.

***

This email is also proof that Trump knows his target market is populated by absolute morons. 

For Trump, the two different worlds of Lansing and Minneapolis

When Trump wanted laundry mats, massage parlors, churches and liquor stores reopened in the Wolverine State, and assault-rifle-armed protestors ominously gathered in Lansing to emphasize his opinion, the president gently tweeted that "the Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again."

But when "THUGS" gathered in Minneapolis, Minnesota to protest the wanton police murder of George Floyd, Trump harshly tweeted that "either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right." He famously added that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" — later explaining, in his usual disingenuous way, that he only meant that looting often turns even more violent.

Plainly, the two protests cannot be compared in attitude or purpose. But Trump's early reactions can. White Michiganders lethally armed against "that woman" were "good people"; black, mostly unarmed Minnesotans protesting tear-gassing police and one homicidal cop were "thugs" to be shot. In addition, what happened in Lansing was vividly "lawless anarchy and chaos," yet Trump applied the phrase only to the situation in Minneapolis.

Trump wanted to "LIBERATE" Michigan from the tyranny of closed floristries; in Minnesota, the tyranny of racial killings demanded a city's suppression. Adding to the surreal polarizations of Trumpworld was reelection campaign manager Brad Parscale, who blamed Twitter's fact-checking of the president for "fueling the misinformation" causing such anarchy.

Of course, neither Parscale nor Trump is really angry about the underclass chaos and Twitter-induced anarchy, since both are working out as intended. No one would have believed any Trumpian attempt at empathy for the actually oppressed, and everyone's attention is now off the 100,000 dead.

Come again?

I submit this Twitter advisory is more than a trifle baffling.

[Not all of us] have lost our sense of proportion

It seems I spoke a day too late. From HuffPost:

Activists laid body bags outside the White House Wednesday evening to protest … Trump and Republican officials' catastrophic response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The demonstration started with a mock 200-car funeral procession beginning at the residence of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, passing by the Capitol building, and ending at the White House, where demonstrators dumped body bags onto the sidewalk…. Religious leaders delivered eulogies, while other demonstrators gave speeches about loved ones they’ve lost to the virus.

The protest was part of a nationwide “Day of Mourning” … [and] similar demonstrations took place in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Texas and other states. More demonstrations will take place throughout the week and will include mock funeral motorcades outside the office of Sen. Lindsey Graham in Columbia, South Carolina, and outside a property owned by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner in Bedminster, New Jersey.

Presidential pouting

Reading Trump's executive order titled "PREVENTING ONLINE CENSORSHIP" is a journey into the surreal. In classic Trumpian fashion, the document is mostly a misdirection; In ominous language, it addresses a subject that lies outside the president's nitwitted dispute with Twitter:

"In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick [sic] the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power."

Most impressive and powerfully patriotic — except Twitter did not "hand pick [Trump's] speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet." What it did was to clarify and correct official authoritarian disinformation of the sort that one would expect to vomit from the diseased organs of Pyongyang.

It's all quite ironic and characteristically hypocritical of Trump, in that just two months ago his reelection "campaign sent cease and desist letters to TV stations to try to get them to stop airing [a Biden super PAC] ad criticizing his coronavirus response." Now that's censorship.

But let us not totally despair over Trump's tantrum of a retaliatory executive order, for it also contains quality entertainment:

"As recently as last week, Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets [with a warning label]."

No further comment is necessary.

I'm with her

This struck me as a precise representation of the religious right.

We have lost our sense of proportion

An honest, objective question.

First, I need to be clear. I am in no way unconcerned about the manner of George Floyd's death; it was brutal, cruel, unlawful, and almost certainly racist. I am also sympathetic to Minneapolis' African-American community's reaction to his needless death; it was understandable, likely inevitable, and probably overdue.

What does concern me is that a sitting president of the United States has, to date, according to some scientific studies, essentially murdered about 90,000 Americans of all ethnicities and ages. And yet, no protests, no marches, no demonstrations, and no violence.

At the very least, a funeral procession should pass by the White House every day, men in black, women in dark veils, children following, all socially distant and in masks, many holding elegiac signs in memory of the tens of thousands lost and naming the man who is responsible for their needless deaths.

This nation is living the authoritarian rot of Stalin's infamous, sociopathic aphorism — only mildly modified here: "If only one man dies of unjustified police violence, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that's only statistics."

Why are we applauding the understandable fierce reaction to one man's death, and yet quietly dismissing the wholly condemnable deaths of 90,000?

Borowitticism

How strategic is Mitt Romney's conscience?

I don't mean to be cynical about his probably heartfelt tweet below, however I still can't help but think that Mitt has his now-mainstream assault sights set on that higher office in what he hopes is a historically, socioeconomically ruinous, 2021-2024 post-Trump world.

Once Agent Orange has been gone from the White House for a while, leaving nothing but the metaphorical deforestation of once-prosperous America, perhaps at least a plurality of the pseudoconservative rabble will return to the conservative fold — with Mitt defining it for them.

No Americans should fear enmity and harm from those sworn to protect us. The death of George Floyd must not be in vain: Our shock and outrage must grow into collective determination to extinguish forever such racist abuse.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 28, 2020

3 1/2 things Don Jr. wants you to know

In a fundraising email from Prince Donnie, the old soft sell:

The Democrats have become the party that:

* Disrespects the American Flag and praises China
* Chooses BIG GOVERNMENT socialism over American prosperity
* Prioritizes illegal immigrants at the expense of American People
* And, would rather see America fail than my father succeed

Their liberal agenda would be a DISASTER for America if they were ever given the power to implement it…. We can’t sit by and let our Country be overrun by Big Government Socialists like Sleepy Joe, Cryin’ Chuck, and Crazy Nancy.

Let's assume that in Junior's list of four Democrazy convictions that Sleepy Joe, Cryin’ Chuck and Crazy Nancy really do detest the American flag and adore China, love big government only for big government's sake and would shower benefits on illegal immigrants while stealing the candy of noble, middle-class white folk. Let's assume those three items are all true, and Junior's prehensile readers need to know it.

His fourth itemized Democratic conviction, though, is absurdly, superfluously ironic. By now, even Junior's Everyman fundraising marks know that the more Pop succeeds, the more America fails, falls and flops. But Pop hates just the right people, so it's all worth another $25 pitched into the Trumpism pot.

When failure — through incompetence, corruption, cronyism and cretinism — is defined as success, one really can't lose.

Far left(?) meets center left

Socialist Bhaskar Sunkara has chosen to back Joe Biden, although grudgingly and with a dram of paranoia and a dollop of a persecution-complex: "'After the Nevada Blowout, It’s Bernie’s Party Now,' read a headline I wrote for Jacobin, the magazine I edit, after he won that state’s caucus in February. We all know what happened next. Centrist leaders within the Democratic Party, along with millions of ordinary voters, rallied behind Joe Biden."

No, what happened next had been predictable since Iowa and New Hampshire. The primaries moved to the Palmetto state, where the African-American vote put Biden back on top; where Sanders' deadly weakness among the party's chief minority base was strongly revealed; and whereafter Sanders' electoral weaknesses and Biden's strengths could no longer be denied by a majority of the Democratic rank and file. No "centrist leadership" coup was either present or implied.

Continues Mr. Sunkara, straining for an accommodation acceptable to his socialist readers:

"Like center-left liberals and progressives, during the coming presidential election and beyond we aim to defeat right-wing populism. The difference is that we refuse to do so on the centrist terms that we believe helped create it in the first place….

"[So] we are campaigning for core demands like Medicare for All, saving the U.S. Postal Service from bipartisan destruction, organizing essential workers to fight for better pay and conditions throughout the coronavirus crisis and backing downballot candidates, mostly running on the Democratic ballot line."

How far socialism has fallen. Or should I say, how high the Democracy has risen? Biden and Democrats are virtually all in favor of some form of Medicare for All — a public option, Biden's option, is essentially the same thing; the U.S. Postal Service would be secure under a Democratic administration; and just who from the center to center-left to progressivism — from even the center-right, for heaven's sake — opposes better pay and conditions for workers? All that worries are the potentially wacko downballot extremists supported by Mr. Sunkara et al.

But again, look at the policy priorities of America's socialists. They are largely mainstream. And yet organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America pride themselves on ideological virtues either unknown or unacceptable to rank-and-file Democrats. Something tells me most of the virtuous have never met one the pragmatic.

He golfs, tweets, and ...

More crap — this pile, rather humorous — from Trump's authoritarian impulses:

"Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices," he tweeted today. "We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen" (my emphasis).

Writes CNN: "Trump did not elaborate on what actions he could take. But the threat is Trump's clearest expression of intent to use the power of government to target his perceived political enemies in the private sector … [and safeguard his] misleading claims about mail-in voting and his baseless insinuations that a cable TV news host had a hand in an aide's death decades ago."

I'm not aware of any constitutional censorship actions he could take (not that that would necessarily stop him). But the tweet above is a Trumpian action in itself — that of authoritarian masturbation.

He had a cost-free sandbox all to himself at Twitter, and now the platform has gone and muscled its way in with an occasional fact check of the president's torrent of extraordinary lies. In response Trump fumed, screamed, pounded his desk is now pounding himself in furious self-abuse.

Trump unintentionally promotes Scarborough, and Romney guts Trump

If there was any chance of Sen. Romney and mob-boss Trump exchanging Christmas cards this year, it's now completely, totally, entirely, altogether gone with the wind.

I know Joe Scarborough. Joe is a friend of mine. I don't know T.J. Klausutis. Joe can weather vile, baseless accusations but T.J.? His heart is breaking. Enough already.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 27, 2020

As you may know, T.J. Klausutis is the widower of Lori Klausutis, the young Scarborough staffer who died in his Florida office in 2001 (while the congressman was in Washington, D.C.). There were no signs of foul play when her body was discovered early the next morning. "A medical examiner determined that [she] fainted as a result of an undiagnosed heart condition, fell, and hit her head on a desk."

Nevertheless, former congressman and MSNBC host Scarborough has been subjected to relentless calumny and accusations of murder ever since — first from Trumplike conspiracy mongers on the left, and now from the real, rancid thing himself. Last weekend he tweeted, "So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that," and earlier, "Did he get away with murder? Some people think so."

Then yesterday, in the Rose Garden, Trump falsely asserted that Mr. Klausutis wants to "get to the bottom of it." In fact, he has "express[ed] no desire for the matter to be further relitigated or publicly investigated," reports Business Insider. T.J. and family simply want to be left alone, for fear of "retaliation by online trolls of the type who went after parents of the Sandy Hook massacre victims," writes the Washington Post.

Scarborough is a public figure of considerable notoriety who, as a Trump critic, surely expected the president to take his customary, lowest road of counterattack. The television host can take care of himself. But the "heartbroken" Mr. Klausutis is another story. And only a true, "vile" sociopath would violate the widower's privacy merely to sling mud at a TV critic.

***

Update — Writes Mr. Klausutis to Twitter's chief executive:

"The frequency, intensity, ugliness, and promulgation of these horrifying lies ever increases on the internet. These conspiracy theorists, including most recently the President of the United States, continue to spread their bile and misinformation on your platform disparaging the memory of my wife and our marriage….

"My request is simple: Please delete [Trump's] tweets….

"I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him — the memory of my dead wife — and perverted it for perceived political gain."