The Books of Bokonon

I haven't put up a Jon Stewart video in a few weeks. Perhaps I was not much in the mood. But I am now. This Monday evening, he unpacked a new year with two terrorist attacks that fit nobody's preconceived narrative, and a January 6th that went much differently than the January 6th of 2021. Amazing what happens when the losing candidate handles it with panache, rather than throws a temper tantrum. Jon Stewart laughs, but as we all know, he does so with a certain amount of moral outrage. There was a line from V for Vendetta - I don't remember it exactly - where the character Gordon Dietrich is asked if everything is a joke to him. He answers "only the things that matter." I feel that. Let's watch the video:  

What a long title for what will probably be a short post. I think it is no secret that what we think of as MAGA in the US is a movement composed of demographic groups who ordinarily would never be allies. One of the huge challenges among the oligarchs who have their own fortunes to grow - while fleecing the rest of us of course - is how to package themselves as working class nationalist populists when what they really want is to keep the neoliberal gravy train flowing. It is quite the balancing act, and one likely doomed to failure. Elon Musk is our poster boy of an oligarch elite who truly believes he is better than the rabble he amplifies on his social media app. And now that he has his candidate about to occupy the White House, he's let the mask slip. Remember, the white nationalists in the US don't want immigrants at all. They're pretty clear about that. Musk's and Ramaswamy's argument that Americans are poorly educated and not capable of handling the jobs that ...

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: 

Why do all the MAGA weirdos hate America? There is an answer , and one in which we are reminded that the seeds of the current Trump cult of personality can be found in 19th and 20th century central Europe. I will give you an extended excerpt from the article: As everyone knows, Donald Trump admires Vladimir Putin, and so a large portion of the Republican Party admires Putin in an imitative and slavish manner. But even before Trump became a candidate, the most regressive elements of conservatism — the paleoconservatives who developed around former Nixon and Reagan staffer (and Hitler apologist ) Pat Buchanan , Christian nationalists and reconstructionists inspired by Francis Schaeffer , and the tech-obsessed neoreactionary movement fueled by Silicon Valley money, which has produced JD Vance — discovered how much there was to love about Putin’s Russia. This New Right also seems to have an easy familiarity with the theorists of totalitarianism. In an interview this June with New York ...

As some in the media might have said a couple decades ago, this scandal has legs. The couple who provided the money to fund Tenet Media have been charged for violation of sanctions and money laundering . It's believed they are back in Russia, so good luck with the extradition. As Kevin Drum says, the Russians have been targeting the far right in the US all along . The right-wing influencers who accepted considerable sums of the now-defunct Tenet Media were at best useful idiots . I guess if you pay people enough money, they'll look away and pretend like everything is legit? I have a hard time buying the excuses of ignorance . Then again, from what I do know of these influencers, if any of them were to come up with an original thought, it would die of loneliness.  As of now , the Tenet Media YouTube channel has been taken down and the couple who took Russian money to effectively bankroll the output of the comrades who spewed Kremlin talking points, while not yet facing charges, ...

This is my friendly reminder that rumors of Project 2025's demise are exaggerated. Project 2025 is alive and well, as a recently exposed cache of training videos makes perfectly clear. If you want to watch them, the link is here . As usual, ProPublica provides a helpful public service with its investigative journalism. As noted elsewhere, Project 2025 may not explicitly name Donald Trump as the beneficiary of Project 2025's proposals, it's very clear that this is a plan for the next GOP president, who would be Trump if he manages to win enough of the electoral vote count in November. It also is worth mentioning that the co-authors of the various chapters of that document are former and future Trump Cabinet members and potential leaders of various agencies in the eventuality of a Trump victory. This very partial list I found in Axios gives a bit of a teaser of what to expect if Project 2025 were implemented. Like your accurate weather forecasts? Too bad. NOAA is on the cho...

 Liz Dye: It's fine to laugh at JD Vance and his couch . At this juncture, the GOP is weird memes practically write themselves. You look at the policies that Vance, Trump, the right-wing think tanks (including the one that hatched Project 2025), and it becomes obvious that these folks are pushing policies and ideas that are really out of touch and just plain odd - definitely radically out of touch with what most of us as Americans want or value. That's worth mocking. Hell, we could all use a few good laughs after the events of these last few weeks, and definitely the last decade. As long as we remember to go to the polls and vote this November, let's continue to laugh. Note, image comes from link, which is credited to Getty. Also, most importantly, no couches were harmed in the composition of this post.

I'll give the wingnuts credit: they cannot help themselves when it comes to being unspeakably idiotic. If only their idiocy didn't have awful consequences for real people. Sometimes, all any of us can do is laugh, because the alternative would be to scream. Let's take a closer look: And yes, the wingnuts are talented at whinging about "cancel culture", but it's amazing how much cancelling these clowns do when they even get a bit of power.

You never know what special brand of insanity will come from the wingnuts who run the GOP. We have one wingnut Congress Critter who claims that somehow the "Deep State" and the "Left" are conspiring to cancel cowboys. Confused? Seth Meyers breaks it down in A Closer Look:

As you probably already know, extreme-right-wing supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro held their own January 6th style coup attempt by storming the Congressional building, the Presidential Palace, and the Supreme Court. Much like our own experience with a self-coup roughly two years ago, Bolsonaro's failed. As of now, well over a thousand individuals have been arrested and are being held for questioning, and investigators are collecting forensic evidence at what is now a crime scene in the capital city of Brasilia.  Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo has a fairly detailed run-down of what happened . One major concern is that the US, which once had a reputation of inspiring copycat attempts to create democracies is now gaining a reputation for copycat attempts to destroy democratic governments and institutions. We can thank Trump and the MAGA crowd for that. I am hoping that those responsible, including Bolsonaro, are brought swiftly to justice. If so, that would be an im...

We've ended the third full day of the new Congressional Session and the House has yet to elect a Speaker . Kevin McCarthy has lost 11 votes in a row. To put into context, that means that this is the first time since before the Civil War that it has taken more than nine votes for the House of Representatives to elect a Speaker. Then again, the majority party is the GOP, the guy wanting the Speaker's gavel is Kevin McCarthy, and so it's no great loss at least for now. My impression from catching coverage after my wife and I came home from our favorite diner was that McCarthy and his team will continue to hold votes for as long as it takes. Like Thanos, he claims to be "inevitable." And he may well be. He's made a ton of concessions to the 20 or so hold-outs, and so far that has not led to a breakthrough. So we go through another potential Groundhog Day scenario tomorrow, and perhaps the next day (and the next day, etc.). Any of us who have ever sought a leaders...

Like many of you, I've been checking the live blogs and C-SPAN to see how the GOP, with its very slim House Majority, would handle the vote for the Speaker's gavel. Our major parties are very broad coalitions, and so one expects negotiations ahead of a new session of Congress to be heated, but probably mostly settled by the time January 3rd hits.  Not this time. Kevin McCarthy has been jockeying for the Speaker's gavel for a good couple years, and is the GOP House Caucus Leader. However, he has never quite been able to close the deal. He's tried to become Speaker before in 2015. That effort failed when he did the equivalent of shooting himself in the foot. His sin that time? After the GOP leaders had taken great pains to present the Benghazi hearings as non-partisan, McCarthy let loose with how much the hearings had hurt Hillary Clinton's chances to become President. In other words, he could not be trusted to refrain from crossing the party line. His support evapora...