Let’s face it – a majority of Texans who bother to vote are stupid.  After all, we get politicians like Fled Cruz (from Canada), Screwy Louie Gohmert, Sid Jesus Shot Miller, Dan I’m a Navy Seal! I’m a Navy Seal! Crenshaw, Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry, Greg I Sue and You Can’t Abbott among many others.  There are perpetually zero days since some Texas politician makes us a national embarrassment to normal people.  Well, it’s gotten worse if that’s even possible; we have another carpetbagger.

Enter Dan Rodimer.  Ol’ Dan (who calls himself Big Dan) is from New Jersey, born and raised.  He attended Seton Hall prep school, played football for the University of South Florida, and graduated from Ava Maria Law School in 2013.  But that’s not all he’s done; between college and law school, Big Dan played semi-pro football and arena football, then changed his name to Dan Rodman and became a professional wrestler, associated with WWE (yeah, THAT WWE).  Oh, and was charged with assault and domestic assault (by his now wife) between 2010 and 2013.  He agreed to deferred adjudication in one case and attended anger management training to get those charges dropped.

And there’s more; a lot more.  In 2018, Rodimer moved to Nevada and ran for the Nevada State senate.  He lost.  THEN, Rodimer ran for the US House from the Third District of Nevada.  He lost to incumbent, Susan Lee, a Democrat.  He’s not done, though.  Earlier this year, he moved to Mansfield, Texas, bought a cowboy hat and boots, then gained a southern drawl, to position himself to run in a special election for the Sixth District, now vacant since Ron Wright died from COVID in February.  Oh, and there’s more.  He’s positioning himself as none other than a bull rider, wearing the now familiar flak vest riders now wear to provide some protection when they get stomped by some angry bovine.

Rodimer is as fake as Trump’s hair.  He’s a chameleon, desperately trying to be relevant by getting a high profile job somewhere – New Jersey prep boy, second rate Florida football player, professional fake wrestler, fake Nevadan, now fake Texan and fake bull rider.  His new video ad includes a bull ride where Big Dan a stand-in actually got on a bull. How bad is Rodiman’s charade? None other than Matt Gaetz, drooling Trumpist and career liar, condemned Rodimer as a fake Texan:

Fake Texan makes fake video of fake bull ride.

We already have enough phonies in congress.

Texans, please send this Nevada man back to his true home state (where he lost two prior elections).

Texas shouldn’t import its congressmen.

Big Dan is all hat, no cattle. https://t.co/CcGZsUG4kv

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) March 26, 2021

First time I’ve ever agreed (or ever will) with Gaetz.  Advice for “Big Dan”:  Go home, wherever that is.  Leave us alone.  We want you to leave because Texas voters are stupid and will probably fall for you.  The last thing Texas needs is another snake oil salesman representing us.  We’re full up on those.

Remember earlier this month we were talking about John Bolton banging on the war drum and Trump moving military forces into the Persian Gulf?  There were ominous warnings about Iran’s aggression and our bases being put on high alert in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Remember, too, how no other country saw the threat and dared to say so? Well, just as quickly as the threat appeared, it also disappeared, ending when Trump, standing in the West Wing door, said, “I hope not,” when a reporter shouted the question about going to war with Iran.

Now we know what all that was about – arms sales to Saudi Arabia.  Trump has made some backroom deal with MBS and the House of Saud to sell weapons to them, along with the UAE and Jordan.  The trick?  By declaring a another fake emergency, Trump can bypass Congress, which approves arms sales to other countries.  Since MBS had journalist Jamal Kashoggi brutally murdered (and Trump didn’t do anything about it) Congress has refused to support the Saudi attacks on Yemen or to approve arms sales to them.  So, Trump just ignored Congress, again.

This is how Trump operates.  When the invertebrates in Congress occasionally stand up, or when the courts step in, Trump just disregards the law and acts unilaterally to do what he wants.  The strength of our system of government is also its greatest weakness.  The Founders designed a system of checks and balances to keep power in check.  The problem with that system is that they never dreamed that each of the branches of government would be simultaneously corrupt; they anticipated a Trump-like president, so gave the Congress co-equal power to control or remove him/her if necessary.  If the Congress is also corrupt, the system collapses, and this is exactly what’s happening.  Trump does what he wants, lines his own pockets, destabilizes entire regions of the world, and is making the US an unstable oligarchy with widening social injustice and gaping income inequality.  When Congress does makes some lame effort to slow his corruption, His Orangeness just doubles down and does what he wants.  McConnell and company just shrug, since they’re busily packing the courts with radicals and weirdos while Trump infests the WH.

At least we now know why the fake concern over a fake threat from Iran so Trump can declare a fake emergency to funnel weapons to his fellow oligarchs who are differentiated from him only by their garb, language, and hair style.

Normal people have gone from laughter to shock to anger to abject fear of the Trump presidency as his reality television drama has torn at the very fabric of our society for almost 2 years since he was inflicted upon us by voters who are idiots.  I worked in New York during the eighties when Trump was a punch line, the target of derision and anger over his trashy gold plated branding and real estate failures.  Many New Yorkers called him Donald Chump.

How did he go from laughingstock to the most powerful job in the world?  In one word, television.  Were it not for The Apprentice, Trump would still be relegated to the pages of tabloids like the Enquirer and the Daily Post.  The Apprentice used trumped up drama (no pun intended), manufactured qualifications, fake controversies, and personal destruction of contestants as a formula to transform Trump from widely known failure to a successful businessman.

Who accomplished this seemingly impossible feat?  His name is Mark Burnett, who invented the first major reality television series, Survivor, in 2000 and then The Apprentice a couple of years later.  After meeting Trump Burnett identified him as the perfect character around which to build a fake “successful” businessman who ruled over contestants each week.  Burnett called it the “Urban Survivor”.  The formula worked, and the rest is our nightmare today.  The New Yorker has just profiled Burnett, and the article reads like a…wait for it…reality television show.

So, if you want to blame someone for the train wreck that is now our daily reality, here’s the guy.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s in-house Nazi who is orchestrating the gleeful cruelty and dickishness of this president’s immigration policy idiocy, was on Face the Nation yesterday.  I responded to his appearance by using my normal coping mechanism of turning off the sound when one of Trump’s toads is spewing BS on national television; but, in the silence I noticed  that this guy looks different than usual – he had hair on his normally Gollum-bald pate.  Sure enough, looking closer, it appeared that Miller had suddenly grown a hair line; the problem with that hair line is that it was…wait for it…sprayed on.  I went to my usual source for research (Twitter) and it had already lit up with the same observation that indeed Miller had sprayed on a new hairline.  Here’s a before and after pic:

Best line in many tweets following Miller’s appearance was “I did Nazi that coming!”  Which was entertaining and almost worth the price of witnessing this creature polluting the national airwaves with his hate.

One of the Fall’s biggest movies premiers is First Man, a biographical/action movie about Neil Armstrong.  It screened last week at the Venice film festival to rave reviews and Oscar talk.  A movie about one of our biggest 20th century heroes complete with jets, rockets, and spaceflight?  Cool, eh?  Not so fast, bucko, we have to go through the Patriot Test.  Uh, oh, the movie left out the actual planting of the US flag on the moon.  Trigger The Outrage Machine.  Now, for context, only a couple of hundred people have seen this movie so far; it doesn’t release until October 12, but right wing screamers from Breitbart to Twitter to even Marco Rubio have whipped up The Outrage Machine and turned the movie into a political hot potato over leaving out a flag planting scene.  Again, NONE of the people screaming on social media have actually seen the movie, and apparently not even the trailer, since our beloved totem was even featured in that.  Have a look:

Those who have actually seen the movie say the flag is all over it, and even shown in the moon scenes.  Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong in the film, said that the the story depicts “human achievement” more than simply American, which, in fact, is the way Armstrong himself saw it.  They chose to focus on Armstrong’s story, not only American culture.  And to some, that is the unforgivable sin.

So where is the outrage coming from?  It’s coming from radical partisans (who haven’t seen the movie) using bullshit to whip up anger of the base using the excuse that Armstrong’s biography wasn’t All-American-Flag-Wavingly-Jingoistic enough.  Oh, and that Gosling is a goddam Canadian daring to play an American hero.  That all adds up to blasphemy against Jingo, the All Seeing God of all things nationalistic.

The whole controversy is manufactured from whole cloth to only piss off the base.  What does the base do?  They get pissed off, of course, and light up social media with fake outrage over nothing.  And that’s how it works.

If you held your nose and watched on Saturday, you heard the crowds at Trump’s campaign rally chanting “Nobel! Nobel! Nobel!” to Trump as he took complete credit for the thawing of relations between the two Koreas.  Let’s be frank; the vast majority of his followers don’t even know the meaning of the word Nobel, making it a certainty that the chant was planted by Trump operatives.  Additionally, FOR THE SECOND YEAR IN A ROW, a nomination for Trump was forged using identity theft.  That’s right, folks, Trumpland is actively working, illegally, I might add, to get Trump a Nobel Peace Prize.  The notion of Trump winning a Nobel is as laughable as Bernie Madoff winning Financial Deal of the Year award, but don’t let your laughter cloud your awareness.  The Nobel chant on Saturday was not just some spontaneous response from an adoring crowd – it’s an operation by Trumpland because Obama has one and he doesn’t.

We already know that Trump has lied for decades about a number of issues, including his own wealth to get into the Forbes 400.  This lie is classic Trump, but more pernicious – this time, he’s not simply impersonating himself to fluff up his own net worth.  This time, someone trying to help Trump has used identity theft to nominate Trump for a Nobel.  Shortly after that forgery, a crowd of sycophants in Michigan “spontaneously” starts chanting for Trump to get that nomination so he could demure and act (emphasis on act) modestly. What a coingkidink.

Putting aside the fact that the two Koreas have gotten together to mutually protect each of their countries from the lunatic infesting the White House, an end to the Korean War is a major event.  And I guess you could credit Trump for that thawing if threatening to murder millions of people would be considered diplomacy and peacemaking.  However, the real story here is that Trump is trying to use this major event for his own gain, which, of course, is the entire reason that he inflicted himself on the US in the first place.