The Carpentariat

Relief could be on the way

Reveals a National Research poll ("A/B"):

• 54% of Americans support Twitter's decision to add fact-checking labels to Trump's tweets.
• Of the remainder, 26% thought Twitter was wrong, while 20% neither support nor oppose Twitter's move.
• Only one-third of Americans support President Trump's decision to sign an executive order that aims to limit the power of social media companies to moderate content. Nearly half (48%) opposed it.

We could slash the unemployment rate overnight. Fact-checking every one of Trump's prodigiously mendacious tweets would require the labor of roughly half of America's jobless, currently around 40 million.

The downside? They'd all lose their job in about five months, and then Joe Biden would be blamed for having created Trump's unemployment crisis. 

Please don't think outside the box

About every day I read it or hear it somewhere in the news: "Think outside the box." Thus did some NYT editor apply it to Maureen Dowd's latest column: "Think Outside the Box, Jack," referring to Jack Dorsey, CEO and co-founder of Twitter.

The four-word abomination is kin to another awful cliché (which advocates thinking inside the box) — "Get with the program" — though this one seems to have faded. What's so nauseatingly ironic about Think outside the box, though, is that the tedious minds that encourage its use are also the minds least capable of thinking outside the box.

Live-tweeting a do-nothing White House

The president spent the day "cloistered inside [the White House], periodically sending out Twitter messages like 'LAW & ORDER!'"; saying he "will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization," even though no other domestic group — e.g., a far-right militia — is designated as such; and being told by aides, "repeatedly," that "the protests were not only about him."

They are, however, the sole responsibility of governors and mayors, as Trump once again rejects even the notion of presidential leadership in times of national crisis:

Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors. These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020

What out-of-office Joe Biden has to do with it I'm not sure — but if this is not what America wants, shouldn't the American president be in charge of resolving it?

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.