After 9 years of incendiary rhetoric, inciting actual violence, and personally threatening dozens of perceived enemies, TFG has certainly demonstrated that he can dish it out, but sure can’t take it.  He has spent years vilifiying everyone from Haitian immigrants to Dems to Taylor Swift, but when someone starts shooting at him, he’s shocked and appalled when the tables are turned.

Let’s be clear – violence is NEVER appropriate in any instance, political or otherwise.  But this monster of escalating violence has been wholy created by TFG and his sycophants repeating his vicious lies about everything from “the deep state”, to immigrants, and to anyone who happens to disagree with him.  He’s even inciting violence against schoolkids in Springfield, Ohio, FFS.  His social media accounts drip with hate, authoritarian declarations, threats, and lies against millions of people and entire classes of society, fabricated from whole cloth.  He even incited thousands of knuckleheads to attack the US Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the US government.

I find it pretty rich that TFG and Vance are now denouncing the very violence they’ve been inciting, but only because that violence has been turned on him.  If they want a reduction in violence they need to start that at home and turn down the heat, but I’m not expecting any of that.  A little self-awareness would be useful right now.

Because this sketch by Steve Cousineau couldn’t wait until next Friday.

“Passage from the tRUMP bible…Sermon on the Con.”

Yesterday Fox Noise announced that Tucker Carlson had “mutually agreed” to part ways with the news propaganda network which is interesting, since he said that he would be back on Monday when he signed off on Friday.  Reporting is that he was blindsided by the sudden firing, and that the decision had come straight from the top, meaning Rupert Murdoch.

There’s a lot of speculation about what happened, but my guess is that Carlson had become too powerful at the network with Republicans kowtowing to him and even pushing legislative and policy agendas he introduced to his audience.  And not inconsequential, Murdoch was undoubtedly miffed by the revelations of his uncharitable opinions of both senior Fox management and TFG that came to light during the Dominion case.  Add to these issues the Mt. Everest of lies, misogynist rants, and racist diatribes, and the result is not surprising.

Lastly, it’s been speculated that Carlson was served up by Murdoch in lieu of an apology in the Dominion settlement.  That makes a lot of sense, since he was the Grand Dragon of The Big Lie at Fox, repeating it five nights a week since the 2020 election.

Once again, Fox is in search of a new chief liar to take the prime seat at the network; in the meantime, Carlson will be searching for a new gig, joining Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck in the purgatory of online bullshit peddling to a shrinking audience.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

We all know that George Santos (or whatever his real name is) is a lying shitbag who has no business being anywhere near the seat of government, much less occupying a seat in the US House of Representatives.  To be fair, there are a lot of lying shitbags in Congress, but this particular shitbag is singularly accomplished in his volume of lying about everything from his ethnicity to his education to…well, just about everything.

But he’s worse than that – he’s a dog napper and abuser, and that’s where I draw the line.  We already know how he raised money to save a veteran’s dog that had cancer and then absconded with the money while bragging about “saving 3,000 dogs”.  It doesn’t stop there – in the Washington Post this morning there is a story about how Santos stole 5 Labrador Retrievers from an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania.  He promised to “wire $5,000” to him, but vanished.  He finally wrote checks to the farmer that bounced.  According to the farmer, he filed charges against Santos, but the charges were later dismissed after some kind of settlement.  Santo apparently did this to several breeders, writing over $15,000 in hot checks and then putting the dogs up for “adoption” and pocketing the money.

So, Santos screwed over a lot of people before lying his way into Congress; that makes him a shitbag and shame on those people for believing him.  But doing it to dogs?  That’s unforgivable and the last straw.  This guy has to go.

NOW.

Abbott and DeSantis are cynically doing election year stunts to keep their base whipped up to drive them to the polls in November.  Abbott bussing families to DC and New York, and DeSantis flying them to Martha’s Vineyard violate more than a few state and federal laws against human trafficking, crossing state lines with undocumented immigrants, misappropriation of taxpayer funds, and  others.  Clearly, both governor’s believe they are above the law (like TFG) and are thumbing their noses at immigration and law enforcement agencies.

I say, fine.  Don’t go after the governors’ lawbreaking (yet), but cut off access to the services they’re using to illegally dump immigrants around the country.  Let’s use the same tactics that anti-choice politicians use…get some our own pawns to use.  Go after those who are enabling this unprecedented cruelty, the drivers and owners of the buses and the pilots and owners of the aircraft being used.  They KNOW they’re transporting undocumented immigrants (or should know), so federal authorities should go after them and indict them for trafficking.  Pilots convicted of crimes lose their licenses.  Drivers may not lose their license but will certainly lose their jobs.  Both will certainly face jail time.  If we do that, no bus company or air charter company will touch this business.  Problem solved, at least until the governors get prosecuted.

The only way to fight fire is with fire.  The hallmark of TFGist Republicans is cruelty and dickishness.  The only way to stop them is to cut off their resources and make them pay personally.

Since Monday, I’ve been cogitating on the FBI’s search of Mar a Lago and why TFG would’ve so stupidly taken potentially top secret documents from the WH to hide in his basement in Florida.  What was he doing?  What was he thinking?  As all of us have experienced, TFG does lots of things without thinking, and being a malignant narcissist, everything is always about him and his effort to gain some kind of advantage over his perceived enemies.  What was this about?

My first thought was that TFG was going to release documents throughout his next campaign trying to impugn his enemies and using them to back his false claims that there is an effort by the “deep state” to take him down.  But as more information comes out about this sorry episode, it now looks to me like he was intentionally trying to provoke the FBI into doing exactly what they did.  Since it was discovered that he stole secret documents when he finally vacated the WH, he and his lawyers have been playing games with the FBI which lead to a search back in June after he virtually ignored a subpoena to disgorge the documents they sought.  Since then, he and his lawyers have been slow-playing the agency, and they acted on Monday after apparently a TFG insider “ratted” him out by confirming the location of the documents.

“During the search on Monday, TFG took to Truth Social and public statements to rage about the “raid” and the FBI “breaking into” his safe.  The facts so far haven’t supported his claims, especially since the Secret Service let the agents in and one of Trump’s lawyers was present during the search.  Almost immediately, TFGland went to DEFCON 1 and started firing up the rage machine. One of the main accusations, lead by his allies in congress, was that the FBI was “planting evidence” to take him down.

Well, there it is.  It appears, and I believe that this is true, that TFG’s plan all along was to provoke the FBI to act against him personally so he could claim the “deep state” was out to get him.  I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised that the “rat” was someone TFG picked to be the informant.  We’ve all heard about Schedule F, TFG’s plan to unravel the federal government by firing thousands of career public servants and replacing them with his loyalists at all levels of the federal government.  Part of this plan is to empty out DC, moving agencies out into the heartland like he did the USDA, which he moved to Kansas City.  The agency has struggled to recover, having lost thousands of career employees who quit rather than move.

Call me cynical, call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe that all of this is TFG and his enablers creating a new reality for his supporters as part of his relentless campaign to take over the US government for himself.  It’s already working; thousands of his supporters are raging on social media and in their be-flagged jacked-up TFG Train trucks, and one nut has already been killed after trying to break in to the FBI field office in Cincinnati.  I can only hope that Merrick Garland is one step ahead of him; my fear is that he’s not.