PMC Commentary

Utterly infuriating: It's those other guys who want to "litigate the former president into the future"?

If there has been a unified, full-phalanx counterthrust by Democrats against this McConnellesque horseshit, I've missed it.

"Though McConnell didn’t speak publicly Friday," writes NBC News, "he argued that Democrats would use the [1/6] commission as a vehicle to 'litigate the former president into the future.'"

Even for slithering Mitch — and the inhabitants of his entire snake pit, who blather the same — this proffered defense against the indefensible is downright breathtaking in its pyrotechnic disingenuity. The former president is the criminal culprit who daily, exhaustingly litigates past, present and future.

His rapid-fire missives from Mar-a-Lagos's Argentinian hideout; radio call-ins; cable-news interviews; soon, more rallies — all to rehash, relitigate and repeatedly thrash his audited, re-audited and again audited seven-million-vote and Electoral College loss of last year, all while dismissing the nation's only post-Civil War insurrection.

And right behind him, every day, congressional members of his criminal syndicate are all too happy to feed the base this selfsame, most rancid of raw meat.

But rather than aggressively counterattack in colorful language such screaming horseshit, Democrats fall back, muttering and grumbling about "the limits of bipartisanship." Get a fucking clue, guys and gals. Crippled bipartisanship isn't the issue; the issue is that Trump, McConnell, McCarthy and all the little tricksters and tyrants want to keep the 2020 election "Steal" alive — so that they can steal the next one.

Outrageous timidity and unholy political malpractice — the twofold foundation of way, way too many congressional Democrats. Both Roosevelts would have gagged at the sorryass spectacle.

A reminder

Nothing could be truer than this: The motherlode of what keeps this site running is you. Major publications from which I extract news and information, and then cast my commentary on, are paywalled at a costly monthly aggregate; then there are technology costs (good laptops aren't cheap) and, not least of all, my time and effort. This site needs your financial support. Simple as that. So please contribute. See the "Make a Donation" button in the sidebar. Thank you — PM

Senate Democrats: "Could be worse; could be raining"

Voting rights, climate, guns, education, infrastructure, child care, family leave, healthcare, Medicare expansion, immigration, tax reform, jobs — take your pick; save for reconciliation shelter, legislative inertia drenching everything, because of the filibuster.

It's "not in the U.S. Constitution, nor is it in a law, nor set in stone through some Supreme Court precedent," remarks the Washington Post. And yet it rules the land.

With Democratic disunity on the seemingly imponderable question of whether they should be allowed to do what they were elected to do, the Dems could wind up doing virtually nothing, for which voters would blame them, thus they could easily lose their majority and, worse, be forced to forego getting shit done. 

If the minority Gang of 50 can decide to kill a commission to investigate the origins of a movement designed to kill them, it certainly will have no problem with brushing away needy children, insecure elders and everyone else but Trump.

That is all too comprehensible. But what is absolutely stupefying is that Marty Feldman Democrats are stupefied about what should be done. Next month, as just one example, with the filibuster intact the Senate minority will annihilate a federal voting rights bill and thereby enhance the freedom of states to barricade Dems' very own voters from the polls. And Democratic senators will stand around, scratching their butts and wiping their foreheads and bellowing — My Gawd! how can this be? Unfuckingbelievable.

"Some Democratic senators … insist that bipartisanship is not dead," relates the Post, somehow with no audible laughter. "Indeed, skepticism about flatly eliminating the filibuster goes deeper in the Democratic ranks than the much-noted opposition of [Sens. Joe Manchin and Jeanne Shaheen]." There are at least eight others, says a Senate Dem aide. But why go vocal with their mossback notions when Manchin is "taking all the arrows for them"?

Says a former Harry Reid aide and author of Kill Switch — a self-explanatory title — "I 100 percent believe that the fate of the Democrat[ic] Party in the foreseeable future is in the balance." And I 100 percent believe that Mr. Jentleson is 100 percent correct, especially since the minority Gang of 50's warlord has said that "100 percent of my focus is on stopping this administration."

By hitting rock bottom, Fox News is back on top

I've no idea how Fox News once forgot its axiomatic guidance, but it did. For a few days in November, the network flew with the wings of a snow white dove by reporting — the news. Of Joe Biden's Arizona and general election victories. Regular viewers promptly shotgunned the dove and abandoned the network in throngs, cratering its ratings.

What were you thinking? asked the ghost of Joey Goebbels, horrified by Fox News' flippant neglect. You must always pander to ignorance and petty prejudices, intoned the hovering apparition, and eschew reality by all means possible — which, praise Satan, just happen to abound. Such is the creed, the doctrine, the whole goddamn premise of perfervid, fascist fundamentalism, rattled the Beelzebub of Big Lies in Jacob Marleylike cries. By reporting November's actual events, he shrilled, you have sinned. Now repent!

And by Joey, they did.

Fox News' executives have since scurried to cleanse the network of all grotesque realities and the personalities who have voiced them. Juan Williams, described as the "lone liberal voice" on some Foxy chat show, is now gone. Donna Brazile has also split: "last week, she quietly started a new job at ABC," reports the Times. (What, did she sneak into work in soft-soled shoes?) White House correspondent Kristin Fisher, who "aggressively debunked lies about election fraud," is Fox toast, CNN bound. The network's politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, who had the gall to report accurately on Arizona's returns, was sacked in January, and same month, Washington bureau chief Bill Sammon "resigned … after internal criticism over his handling of election coverage." (The Washington bureau has hired a former Bill Barr spokeswoman, sans any journalistic background.)

The Murdochs' purge of rational voices and gutter intensification of the crackpot corral have paid off. Fox News has regained its cable-news ratings supremacy, it's projected to trounce CNN's primetime audience this month, and its ad revenues have never been better. All that in profitable service to Trump and, more so, the millions of lobotomized lowlifes who adore him. Trump is, of course, repaying the network with his traditional gratitude. Yesterday he grabbed his Crayon kit and scrawled: "It was the day that [Paul] Ryan went on the board of Fox … that Fox totally lost its way and became a much different place."

But the Murdochs don't care, as long as they rake in the dough.

Were I not an agnostic, I'd assert with churchly confidence that the family has made a Faustian bargain. Regrettably, and much more likely, they have simply made another fortune. And unlike their aforementioned, hellish Virgil, who along with his wife and children met a ghastly end, the Murdochs will perish peacefully — and quite happily.

5/28 - a dark day nearly as sickening as 1/6

And there we have it: A "Republican"-negotiated bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrectionist monstrosity of 6 Jan., killed by that moniker's filibuster.

As always, "several undecided Republicans," reports Politico's breaking news, "came down against advancing" this bill — and many other bills to come.

But to label these gangsters as "undecided" and as members of any sort of respectable political party is an unspeakable insult to those murdered on 6 Jan., their loved ones, the Capitol police, the once-honorable American political system, and the nation at large. 

This commission never had a prayer, and everyone knew it. Because, you know, the gangsters.

There ought to be a bounty out on them, every last one of these unAmerican motherfuckers. Apprehend 'em and throw 'em in a snake pit; hell, they won't even notice a change in environment. 

And now a Democratic senator is back on the floor, calmly discussing that other bill, the one previously delayed because of systematic gangsterism. 

I feel like throwing up. 

First, see post below, last sentence

Just a few, off-the-top:

Contract Killers, Inc.

Jerk-offs R Us

Hannity SuckUps

Abe Lincoln Haters

Really Old White Guys — and a few 'Bitches'

Future Fox News, OAN & Newsmax Hosts

Former Americans

Taxpayer Drains

Weirder Than QAnoners

GOP Graveyarders

Feel free to jump in with alternatives. They're endless, as is the pain they inflict on us. 

We are not what we are, said Shakespeare's Republican Iago

​​​​​A Senate vote on the 1/6 commission was delayed last night by Republicans because of Republican delays in passing the bipartisan Innovation and Competition Act. This morning Republicans are still gumming up the ICA's passage by proposing yet more Republican amendments. That bill needs to pass before Republicans can gum up a vote on the Jan. 6th commission.

Which, at any rate, is doomed. Out of 50 Republican senators whose lives were endangered by the truest believers among their own Republican base, only three — Republicans Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins (we think) — publicly support the establishment of a commission as successfully negotiated by Republican House Minority Leader McCarthy, who also opposes it. (Republican Kevin, no doubt, also returns purchased items to Target, complaining they work too well.)

And among those three Republicans, Murkowski, at least, is still a bit slow on the uptake. "Is that really what this is about" she asked Republican Minority Leader McConnell, who's admitted that blocking an investigation is, or so he believes, good for Republicans politically. "Is everything just one election cycle after another?" persisted Murkowski. My dear Senator, where the hell have you been?

Says, via CNN, Republican senator and Republican whip John Thune, "Republicans would likely use five to six hours of their allotted time to speak on the floor. That could be followed by additional debate as well as a series of procedural votes ahead of final passage of the legislative package, pushing the vote on the 1/6 commission farther into the day Friday or possibly to the weekend."

In this post and its title I have used "Republican" or "Republicans" 17 times — now 19 — and yet this strangest of all things is incontrovertible: There is no such thing, any longer, as the Republican (20) Party. There is an erratic, criminally eccentric, anti-intellectual, anti-democratic, anti-American, very loosely organized syndicate of buffoons, wrench-throwers and government-paid idlers — among whom I include the Romneys, Cheneys and Kinzingers, who haven't even the sensible grace to quit the pernicious organization, so to speak.  

If Democrats, independents, journalists and opinionists insist on calling these buffoons etc. a group, then we — or rather they — need another name. 

Paul Ryan and the politics of ooze

When it comes to grade-A crude oil, you can't do better than Paul Ryan — the quintessence of ooze. In his quarter-century of public life, his habit of taking serious topics unseriously is legion, ducking and dodging Momentous Issues of the Day, from straightforward federal budgets to what constitutes valid macroeconomic policy. His preference has been abstractions, recondite evasions and fancy muddlements — excepting, of course, his unambiguous, outspoken opposition to extraordinarily successful programs that lift human beings, such as Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and Pell grants.

Barring those titanic Christian stances of Ayn Randian malice and callousness, Ryan talks in circles, cryptograms and small half-measures. Those he again displayed last night while speaking at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. "Here’s one reality we have to face," he said. "If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we’re not going anywhere."

Principally, that is, he who will not be named, when the non-namer refuses to extricate his tail from between his legs. His Where's Waldo game continued: "It was horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end." Hoover's? Nixon's?

Even more repugnant than Ryan's obfuscation was his singular clarity in praising — this time by name — "the populism of President Trump in action, [that is, an economy] tethered to conservative principles"; meaning, in truth, President Obama's vibrant economy, before Trump blew it up.

Ryan reverted to form as he then advanced while retreating on the hot topic of "every little cultural battle" we're forced to endure. "Sometimes these skirmishes are just creations of outrage peddlers," he said, "detached from reality and not worth anybody’s time."

Except his. As a board member of the unnamed Fox Corp. — the gold standard of outrage peddling — Paul demonstrated that he's willing to grab whatever he can from Rupert, and as for everyone else, fuck 'em. Thus he also demonstrated his one and only true ideal, Ayn Randism. 

"A Ryan spokesman did not respond when asked if the former speaker has concerns about Fox’s coverage," reported Wapo, which, by the way, incorrectly reported Ryan as being a "policy wonk." Perhaps the second word was just a typo; the reporter meant "policy wank."

QAnon & Republicans: Their proximity is narrowing

A survey from the Public Religion Research Institute, with an impressive, mere 1.5% margin of error (because of a sampling universe of more than 5,000 respondents), finds that about one-quarter of Republicans believe in QAnon's theory of "pedophile rings" embedded in government, media and business — and nearly 30% believe that some sort of political rapture will take place, through righteous violence.

I often qualify such shocking findings by conceding that, almost certainly, some unknown yet significant percentage of respondents answer insanely only to stick it to the libs, or simply to go along with the most outrageous conspiracy theories imaginable as prideful evidence of their Trumpian virtue.

But this poll, I believe, is genuine to the core. So many Republicans have parroted crazy for so long, they have, at last, transfigured into crazy itself. I am reminded of an underrated 1964 film — Shock Treatment — in which an asylum's obsessive, increasingly delusional psychiatrist (Lauren Bacall) morphs into actual madness, herself becoming a patient. 

It's akin to Trump's pathology. In the beginning he was perhaps lying about his ruthless denial of office. By now, though, after raging maniacally 10 times a day for months about "The Steal," he has taken to seriously believing it. Or so it seems.

International imbecility

Another variation on a Trumpian theme.

Below is one of Jair Bolsonaro’s former "health" ministers, shown testifying before his nation's Senate as it investigates the godawful human wreckage caused by the Brazilian president's pandemic mismanagement, to use the polite word.

Observes Brazilian writer Vanessa Barbara: "President Jair Bolsonaro apparently intended to lead the country to herd immunity by natural infection, whatever the consequences. That means — assuming a fatality rate of around 1 percent and taking 70 percent infection as a tentative threshold for herd immunity — that Mr. Bolsonaro effectively planned for at least 1.4 million deaths in Brazil."

Or, Bolsonaro could have just ordered that all Brazilians must wear their masks as the former health minister does. 

Reminder

Nothing could be truer than this: The motherlode of what keeps this site running is you. Major publications from which I extract news and information, and then cast my commentary on, are paywalled at a costly monthly aggregate; then there are technology costs (good laptops aren't cheap) and, not least of all, my time and effort. This site needs your financial support. Simple as that. So please contribute. See the "Make a Donation" button in the sidebar. Thank you — PM

Here they go again

As President Biden's infrastructure week hobbles along into infrastructure spring due to congressional dysfunction, due to the GOP's wholesale dysfunction, due to that criminal syndicate's leaders, due to their fealty to the syndicate's Indictable Don-ald, some of the lesser bosses are offering the country's victims their AWOL alibis.

For example former Yacht Club for Growth president and current senator Pat Toomey says, among his threefold excuses for opposing Biden's long, long overdue infrastructure package, that "we’re not going to pay for this by undoing the tax reform that gave us the best economy of my lifetime." (Note: his lifetime, not ours.)

As Toomey was speaking, economist Alan Blinder — he of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and former vice Fed chair — was publishing in the Wall Street Street an op-ed which included this line: "Early returns on the Trump tax cuts show they have done little to stimulate growth." Same with verifiable, easily accessible, empirical returns on Reagan and Bush's tax cuts.

Such evidence of Toomey's supply-side asininity has rained down on the Trump syndicate for decades. Nevertheless, being impenetrable to facts and reason, "the best economy" through massive tax cuts for the enormously affluent is their story, and they're stickin' to it. Nothing can shake these goons from their most enduring big lie — even Chicago phonebooks slammed down on their heads would effect no change to forthrightness.

Of some interest are their prelapsarian days, when they largely opposed President Kennedy's tax cuts, out of fear of exploding deficits. The cuts passed Congress under his successor and, once coupled with higher domestic spending, proved economically beneficial.

Politically scamming charlatans are always on the wrong side of history.

A Sad Tale of Two Nations

From Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump, from Winston Churchill to Boris Johnson. Such have been the parallel courses of Western civilization's closest allies, distinguished defenders of freedom and leading lights of democracy. The Fall. If misery loved company, then so too did similarly aligned electorates outsource their native intelligence to demagogues, dunces, quacks and dissemblers.

A growing number of the House of Trump's subalterns have been dismantling their former asylum plank by plank — some, willingly; others, under subpoena or reduced-sentence plea deals. Now comes the selfsame demolition amongst the enablers of Prime Minister Johnson; which is to say, the most egregious enabler there was, and generally the most egregious is followed by lesser ones.

Enter Dominic Cummings, a kind of Bannon to Boris' rise, and later the prime minister's top adviser.

Yesterday, speaking before a parliamentary committee, he deconstructed Johnson's national stewardship — a massive rubble, he said, of "chaos, confusion and incompetence" (NYT). As in America's White House, Downing Street's indifferent demagogue wholly mismanaged the pandemic and left behind countless unnecessary deaths. In fact Cummings swore "he had heard Mr. Johnson say he would rather see 'bodies pile high' than take the country into a third lockdown." The prime minister was "unfit for the job," said Cummings, who unsuccessfully attempted to encase Johnson in a circle of more enlightened policymaking. We know that story quite well.

As reported by the Times, the only gap between Trump and Johnson's malmanagement that I could see was that the Englander might have "skipped Covid meetings to work on a long-delayed book about Shakespeare." Shake-who? the Donald would ask, just as he had to ask his one-time presidential chief of staff, on the their way to the island memorial, what Pearl Harbor was all about. I kid you not. 

Swinging back to this post's introductory paragraph, what I found most absorbing about Cummings' testimony were these paraphrased words: "[He] said there was something wrong with a political system that produced Mr. Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, as the two contenders for prime minister in the 2019 election."

The U.S. and U.K.'s political systems differ, of course, and here we lack Britain's level of leftist lunacy (though not for a lack of trying). Yet both, essentially, are representative democracies. And a mere four score ago both were led by statesmen of vision, intelligence and courage. Shadows and more than shadows of these historic characteristics mostly followed — until 2016 and 2019. Both electorates transmogrified into laziness, stupidity and recklessness, installing in power the worst possible premiers.

Not, I must add, because of economic hardships, as sundry studies have confirmed. No, the precipitous slides into absurdity came about because of humankind's primitive prejudices about skin color, tribal accents and cultural variations. That, while both nations considered themselves the most advanced in the world.

Which leads us to ask: At the most fundamental level, have we even begun to crawl out of the primordial slime?

An intergalactic mystery

Touching again on UFO news of late, I often ponder why in the name of higher intelligence any extraterrestrial would want to visit this speck of gravel in the vastness of the universe, where so many of the speck's residents run around fretting about something as inane as the color of other residents' skin. The interstellar aliens would be just as edified had they dropped by when Australopithecines roamed just one continent, usually on all fours.

Related: Here in our little corner of this developmentally stunted Earth, add to our galactic embarrassment the U.S. Senate — the world's "greatest deliberative body" — in which Trumpicus ignoramuses similarly amble and forage for rotted sustenance, which they have no trouble finding.

Yesterday, the Senate "confirmed Kristen Clarke as the first Black woman to run the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department." She has a rap sheet of good, honorable works in civil rights as extensive an anyone could wish for. And yet she was confirmed by the slimmest of majorities — 51-48. Those whom human evolution has left behind, namely Sens. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Charles Grassley, said Clarke is too "partisan" and might oppose Americans' religious rights. (She once worked on behalf of "New York’s initiative to defend religious rights of workers.")

Just prior to that vulgarity, "Republican senators," notes Dana Milbank, "rose in near lockstep to oppose the confirmation of Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the first Black woman tapped to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Only five of the 50 Republican senators supported this health-policy veteran."

Add to that the Senate's ineffable slog of the George Floyd Act, along with Trumpicus ignoramus opposition to investigate the quad-pedal insurrection of 1/6. Whereupon one simply must ask oneself: Why in God's name would any super-cerebral extraterrestrial want to pop by, other than, perhaps, for primitive anthropology research purposes.

Here, though, is the most shameful angle to all this: As long as we Americans tolerate the cultist party, we're as responsible for its backward imbecilities as the cultists, charlatans and voodoo artists are.

Imagining Kevin McCarthy

What a leader you are, Kevin. It took a mere five days for you to condemn caucus-member Marjorie Taylor Greene's multiple abominations.

"Marjorie is wrong," you tweeted — without noting that she's been wrong for ages — "and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling."

But not so appalling that it required an immediate smackdown, let alone your and your "party's" decision to not kick her contemptible ass out of Congress.

Ever at the hyperpartisan helm, Capt. Kevin "then went on to allege that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi 'completely ignored' the rise of antisemitism in her Democratic Party." (Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, for one, said Greene should "stop this vile language immediately." You stop that, Sen. Schumer. That only encourages her. Just boot her butt out on the pavement.)  

Imagining Kevin as speaker of the House is as preposterous as, oh I don't know, imagining that Donald Trump was once president of the United States.