General
History rhyming
In the 1991 Louisiana governor’s race, voters were faced with two revolting choices: David Duke, a neo-Nazi and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and Edwin Edwards, a former three-term Democratic governor who had been indicted and acquitted on corruption charges.
Edwards’ supporters printed bumper stickers with what became an unofficial slogan of his campaign: “Vote for the Crook: It’s Important.”
Well, today, New Yorkers face an equally unpalatable choice between the Marxist Zohran Mamdani and Andrew M. Cuomo, the sleazy former three-term Democratic governor who was forced to resign in a sexual harassment scandal and whom many New Yorkers blame for the deaths of their grandparents during the covid pandemic.
Well, to those New Yorkers I say: “Vote for the Sleazeball: It’s important.”
I’m inclined to think the national press is paying too much attention to the NYC mayoral race, but maybe Mamdani really is the Democrats’ future, not just a lefty press reverie. But I always chuckle at the old “Vote for the Crook” story from Huey Longistan.
Not even subtle
“They say” that some guy named Jack Posobiec is the heir apparent of Charlie Kirk as top MAGA influencer. Among other things, he’s author of a book titled Unhuman, which is a polemic against progressives.
The working title for the German translation surely is “Untermensch.”
National
Incorrigibly ignorant
[V]arious right-wingers feigned confusion earlier this month about the “No Kings” rallies across the country. What exactly were the protesters protesting, they wondered? Where did they get the idea that Donald Trump presumes himself a king?
Well, in the nine days since those protests were held, the president slapped a new 10 percent tax on Americans for no better reason than that he’s mad about a TV commercial; he’s preparing to go to war with Venezuela without authorization or even meaningful input from Congress; he’s told people privately that he’s effectively the speaker of the House now, insofar as the House still exists after being out for about a month; he’s pardoned a corrupt Chinese crypto mogul who helped enrich him and the Trump family; he’s thinking of looting nearly a quarter billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury to reward himself for beating the rap on various crimes he almost certainly committed; and he demolished part of the White House so that he could build himself a ballroom worthy of a proper palace.
As others have noted, some of Trump’s sins against democracy are so quintessentially monarchical that they appear in the bill of particulars against George III in the Declaration of Independence. If you can digest all of that and still end up scratching your head at what the “No Kings” demonstrators were on about, it’s not because you don’t understand. It’s because you won’t understand. You’ve resolved psychologically not to take Trump’s autocratic desires seriously because doing so would force you to choose between loyalty to your tribe and loyalty to the Founders’ vision.
Small favors
Kudos to Republicans for passive-aggressively monkey-wrenching, at least as to the Federal District courts, Trump’s effort to pack the federal courts with political cronies rather than qualified judges.
Senate Republicans are holding firm against President Donald Trump’s pressure to scrap a longtime tradition in Congress’ upper chamber, issuing a substantive rebuke to his desires and openly disagreeing with him on the issue.
Trump has repeatedly called on the Senate GOP to eliminate its blue slip practice, which allows senators from the minority party to block judicial appointments such as lower court nominees and U.S. attorneys who hail from their states. The president has argued that Democratic senators are obstructing his nominees, but Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa is staunch in his resolve not to take away the century-old tradition.
“After a hundred years, why would you do away with it?” he told The Dispatch. “It’s supported by a hundred members of the United States Senate.”
Senate Republicans’ defiance of Trump here is perhaps the most substantive stand they have taken since they stonewalled the nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz to be his attorney general after last year’s election. To this point, members of the congressional GOP have often raised concerns or pushed for more information about Trump’s actions, but rarely have they obstructed his agenda. This time, however, they are refusing to sacrifice one of the Senate’s time-honored traditions, one that guards Congress’ power in an age where the legislative branch is often happy to cede authority to the executive.
Charles Hilu, Senate Republicans Are Actually Defying Donald Trump.
Passive-aggression is probably all we can hope for from Republican Senators who often appear emasculated by Trump.
But continuing the blue slip tradition is only part of it. Unusually high numbers of nominees to various offices have been withdrawn after back-channel communication:
[T]he Trump administration has faced some very significant resistance more privately to a large number of nominees, and that this has led a surprising number of them to be withdrawn. So far this year, the White House has withdrawn 49 nominations for Senate-confirmed positions. As Gabe Fleisher pointed out earlier this week, that is a (much) larger number of nominees than any modern president has had to withdraw from consideration in any year of his presidency.
And it is a particularly large number of withdrawn nominees in the first year of a new presidency. Ronald Reagan withdrew five nominations in his first year; for George H.W. Bush it was three; for Bill Clinton six; for George W. Bush seven; for Barack Obama twelve; for both Donald Trump in his first term and for Joe Biden the number was 13. The year is not even over and Trump has had to withdraw 49 nominations.
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This is surely in part because it is in no one’s interest to draw attention to it. The administration wants to always look triumphant, regardless of reality. Republican senators want to appear to be firmly backing the president, which they mostly are ….
Your tax dollars at work
Who says government can’t do anything right? ICE is advertising for thuggish goons and it’s getting them.
In today’s hiring binge, ICE recruiting ads ask: “Which way, American man?” Testosterone is the not-very-sub subtext. Recruits will “defend the homeland,” “recapture our national identity,” stymie an “invasion,” halt “cultural decline” and even save “civilization.”
Something uncivilized is indeed happening. What jobs, if any, are recruits leaving for the glory of donning battle gear and masks (hiding what from whom?) and roaming U.S. communities, throwing their weight around and throwing unarmed people to the ground?
Says who? Says mild-mannered true conservative octagenarian George Will (When ICE came for a U.S. citizen and Army veteran).
And just like that, bribes are a normal business expense in Trumpistan
To bribe or not to bribe: When voters turn their country into a banana republic by making a gangster president, kickbacks become part of the cost of doing business. If I were a CFO in 2025 in need of government approval for some new project, I’d feel obliged to allot a certain amount of the budget for a “donation” to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library and Casino.
Nick Catoggio, To Bribe or Not to Bribe
The kid with the Golden Shield
This kid (who supposedly has a law degree already) can magically provide a “Golden Shield” of immunity from prosecution for assassination, murder, torture and other governmental passtimes by writing a secret opinion that they’re legally A-Okay. Jack Goldsmith tells us all about it.
Not that the President needs it, mind you.
I wonder where the snowflakes are?
Any writer these days, who hasn’t been radicalized or redpilled, can tell you who the snowflakes are now. The people who were not long ago the loudest in preaching free speech are today the quickest to silence anyone who uses it to disagree with them. The people who railed against cancel culture are now trying to use the machinery of the state to try to destroy anyone who dares to posthumously criticize Charlie Kirk and the stances he took—which, it should be continually pointed out, included proudly sending buses to the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
It’s the people who love to dish out jokes and criticisms, but are not only outraged at Jimmy Kimmel’s distasteful jokes about Kirk, but fine with overt government pressure to take him off the air.
50 days after assassination, I think de mortuis nil nisi bonum passes its freshness date.
A real downer
Charles de Gaulle began his war memoirs with this sentence: “All my life I have had a certain idea about France.” Well, all my life I have had a certain idea about America. I have thought of America as a deeply flawed nation that is nonetheless a force for tremendous good in the world. From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.
Until January 20, 2025, I didn’t realize how much of my very identity was built on this faith in my country’s goodness—on the idea that we Americans are partners in a grand and heroic enterprise, that our daily lives are ennobled by service to that cause. Since January 20, as I have watched America behave vilely—toward our friends in Canada and Mexico, toward our friends in Europe, toward the heroes in Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office—I’ve had trouble describing the anguish I’ve experienced. Grief? Shock? Like I’m living through some sort of hallucination? Maybe the best description for what I’m feeling is moral shame: To watch the loss of your nation’s honor is embarrassing and painful.
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[I]f Trumpism has a central tenet, it is untrammeled lust for worldly power. In Trumpian circles, many people ostentatiously identify as Christians but don’t talk about Jesus very much; they have crosses on their chest but Nietzsche in their heart—or, to be more precise, a high-school sophomore’s version of Nietzsche.
To Nietzsche, all of those Christian pieties about justice, peace, love, and civility are constraints that the weak erect to emasculate the strong. In this view, Nietzscheanism is a morality for winners. It worships the pagan virtues: power, courage, glory, will, self-assertion. The Nietzschean Übermenschen—which Trump and Musk clearly believe themselves to be—offer the promise of domination over those sick sentimentalists who practice compassion.
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As the conference went on, I noticed a contest of metaphors. The true conservatives used metaphors of growth or spiritual recovery. Society is an organism that needs healing, or it is a social fabric that needs to be rewoven. A poet named Joshua Luke Smith said we needed to be the seeds of regrowth, to plant the trees for future generations. His incantation was beatitudinal: “Remember the poor. Remember the poor.”
But others relied on military metaphors. We are in the midst of civilizational war. “They”—the wokesters, the radical Muslims, the left—are destroying our culture. There were allusions to the final epochal battles in The Lord of the Rings. The implication was that Sauron is leading his Orc hordes to destroy us. We are the heroic remnant. We must crush or be crushed.
David Brooks, I Should Have Seen This Coming.
I got over naïve American exceptionalism a very long time ago — or so I like to imagine. The speed of our descent astonished (astonishes? do we have further to go?) me; that America was capable of deep descent does not.
And I don’t know how to climb out of the hole in an America where thinking outside the tribe will draw death threats for both the politician and his or her family.
We are all gatekeepers now.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 