The Books of Bokonon

I already considered Trump's attempted shakedown of Ukrainian mineral rights to be thuggish and unhinged. What happened on Friday during what was around the start of my lunch break was at a completely different level of insanity. Don't believe me? See for yourself:   Chris Hayes' commentary strikes me as spot on. But even if you want to skip his commentary, watching the 7-minute meltdown that occurred at that particular event is a sight to behold, and I do not mean that in a good way. It was beyond embarrassing, and it was something many of us would have predicted as likely to happen - maybe I would not have predicted this clusterfuck from yesterday, but some other unhinged rant followed by a betrayal of our allies was to be expected. Many of us warned you. Many of you did not listen. After this debacle, old Trump let slip that the US government was turning its back on Ukraine. Again, this was predictable. If we interpret what old Trump and Vance did as an ambush on a leade...

I'll let Dr. Timothy Snyder explain:

There is a channel I follow on Telegram called Military & Strategic, and is typically signed by a blogger who refers to himself or herself as The Analyst. The primary topic is the on-going Russo-Ukraine war, but US politics gets mentioned from time to time, which is very pertinent to the Ukrainian cause. Here is one of The Analyst's most recent posts , which deals with the prospects for the Harris/Walz campaign's success in November: GROWING CONFIDENCE IN A DEMOCRATIC VICTORY We all know how important the coming election is in the US. We are quite literally faced with a fork in the road - one side takes us down a dark and dangerous path towards a semi-fascist autocracy and the other is the real America that despite its many flaws is a decent and honest democrat at its core. It’s a truly shocking difference in possible futures. However I am ever more certain that Kamala Harris will win the presidency. I am growing more certain that the Democrats will regain the House, and ju...

This scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail encapsulates the absurdity of a significant facet of our political dialog right now. Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog fame has more to say about an upcoming JD Vance campaign stop , involving a pastor who is claiming that Kamala Harris is a witch, and seems to be hell-bent on claiming that those of us not in the Trump camp are demon-possessed. Read through it all, and take a look at the embedded Twitter posts (I refuse to use whatever name a certain mad billionaire calls it now). It is truly theatre of the absurd.  The premise of Steve M.'s post is spot on. The usual scolds on legacy media, including the nominally liberal scolds, keep on telling us that we have to meet Trump's true believers where they are in order to persuade them to at least hear you out. I'll get back to the merits of that in a moment. But first, we need to look at this specific political environment in which we find ourselves. If your goal is to chang...

Thank goodness for late night talk show hosts. They've turned mocking Trump and Vance's weirdness into art form. Here's the latest from Seth Meyers: Here's The Daily Show's coverage of North Carolina's Gubernatorial candidate, Mark Robinson, who didn't do any weird creepy stuff (/sarcasm) as well as more on the mess Trump and Vance have made of Springfield, and otherwise act like they belong in a halfway house:   And here from last night is Stephen Colbert interviewing Rachel Maddow: 

  Maybe. Leeja Miller certainly makes her case.

  We're only halfway through the week, and it's been, shall we say, a bit weird. Okay. Really weird. The authoritarians are doing their worst, as usual. This is just a very partial list: A Kremlin-run troll farm has been pushing a fake Harris video . Thankfully they've been caught. An Ohio county sheriff has found his inner Stasi Chekist and is demanding the addresses of any county resident who posts a Harris/Walz yard sign .  He also uses a lot of eliminationist rhetoric. There's something oddly un-American about that. Supreme Court Justice Alito is apparently besties with a right-wing German aristocrat who is also obsessed with ending reproductive freedom. Nothing weird about that...oh who am I kidding.  William Kristol (a columnist I would have almost never endorsed a couple decades ago) has reminded us once more that it really is okay to tell the truth and call Trump a threat to democracy . He and his co-author rightly refer to the threats against the Haitian immig...

Trump may only cop to having a "concept of a plan" for healthcare law in the US, but JD Vance spills the tea: Democrats are always hoping for a break that’ll thrust kitchen-table issues like health care into the headlines. Suddenly they have two to work with. Donald Trump provided them the first one at last week’s presidential debate, when he admitted, nine years after he began trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, that he only has “concepts of a plan” to replace a law that tens of millions of Americans depend upon for their health insurance. Now comes another. Asked Sunday on Meet the Press to elaborate on Trump’s health care “concepts,” his running mate JD Vance explained that the Trump health-care agenda is to wreck protections for pre-existing conditions (while lying about it). That comes from Brian Beutler's substack (paywalled, except for the teaser paragraphs). I think The New Yorker has an extensive article as well, but it is so paywalled that we don...