The convicted felon who sent a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol in a vain attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election returned to the scene of the crime on Thursday, June 13th. There he was welcomed with open arms by House Republicans, some of whom had fled in panic three years ago last January.
The Associated Press, in a tweet, chose to put a benign spin on the bizarre event: “AP: Donald Trump made a triumphant return to Capitol Hill on Thursday, his first with lawmakers since the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks, embraced by energized House and Senate Republicans who find themselves reinvigorated by his bid to retake the White House.”
As his Party’s presidential candidate, the felon frequently adopts the demeanor of a standup comedian—albeit without the use of such traditional comics’ tool such as insight, wit, and clever wordplay. He did so on the 13th, trying out some new material. It seemed to work well.
This is not to say he drew big laughs, though his chorus of sycophants frequently obliged. Rather, he seemed to want to deflect the media, lest they dwell too long on the irony of the occasion. It worked. Like so many trained oxen being led by their nose rings, many of those covering the event wrote about the felon’s cockamamie story claiming Nancy Pelosi’s daughter had made a vague reference to some sort of romantic liaison between the felon and the former Speaker of the House—a lurid fiction, the apparent point of which is that Pelosi is a few years older than him.
Notus, a new, apparently serious non-profit news organization founded in January, quoted a source who said being present was “Like talking to your drunk uncle at the family reunion.”
“Lawmakers who attended the meeting—which was nearly the entire House GOP conference—kicked off the affair with their own show of devotion: They sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Trump. The former president, who turns 78 on Friday, was then presented with a game ball from Wednesday night’s Congressional Baseball Game, where Republicans whooped Democrats 31-11.”
The candidate often accompanies his rambling, stream-of-unconsciousness diatribes by playing an invisible accordion. His mime act would be more convincing if he changed his makeup from orange to white and donned a striped shirt, but no one dares tell him that.
In the Foosteps of the Grand Poobah
Republican Members of Congress debased enough to ride the coattails of a madman aren’t the only ones willing to advance their careers at the expense of everyone and everything else. An entire faux news ecosystem has been created to turbocharge our rickety handcart as it rockets us to hell.
Its Grand Poobah used to be Rush Limbaugh. The smug cigar smoker’s cancerous lungs gave their last fetid gasp about six weeks after Trump’s hooligans trashed the Capitol. A pair of posers, Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, inherited his airspace shortly thereafter. The two bantering nitwits can’t hold a candle, though, to history’s second most famous flaming Nazi gasbag.*
By default, that seems to have left Sean Hannity as the top tone-setter for those who are masochistic enough to listen to talk radio. This provides yet more evidence that entropy is having a far more profound effect than most are willing to acknowledge.
Though Limbaugh’s intentions were invariably pernicious, his blather was brisk and full of imaginative perversity. Listening to him, one could not help but imagine his significant bulk jostling and bouncing behind the microphone as he enthusiastically acted out that day’s weird fantasy. Of course his listeners loved him. How could they not? His exuberance made his bile entertaining and infectious—provided you were blind to the terrible effects of the insidious policies he espoused.
Hannity’s modus operandi, on the other hand, sadly suggests that he may have suffered brain damage due to blows to the head in parochial school. He delivers his material in a monotonous drone. Were it not for his snarling, scornful tone, one might think he was reading a phone book.
Hannity’s content, such as it is, seems to consist—we admit, it’s extremely difficult to follow what he actually says—of a long, long, long list of rote phrases derived from, or inspired by, Newt Gingrich’s 1990 memo to fellow Republican bomb-throwers, titled, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Over the years, Hannity has interviewed Gingrich innumerable times, and Gingrich has filled in for Hannity. These phrases are apparently emitted at random, though there may be an algorithm involved. The effect would probably be the same either way.
The tedium is relieved somewhat when Hannity interviews an actual living person. The trouble is, the tedium is quickly displaced by alarm.
They Know… They Just Don’t Care
We were subjecting ourselves to some Hannity earlier this fortnight, to find him speaking with former Physician to the President, Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson. Hannity and Jackson were in perfect agreement: President Biden is hardly able to stand unassisted, and barely coherent. This, they said, was likely the result of an incurable organic brain disease. Further rapid deterioration was inevitable. A second Biden term—in the unlikely event that Americans are so rash as to return him to office—would be a grave threat to U.S. national security.
If we apply the Standard Treatment for Republican Rhetoric, i.e., black is white, up is down, etc., we may surmise that the GOP is aware that their presidential candidate’s own dementia has progressed far enough to have become their most important strategic concern. If so, there was probably a run on heart pills when Trump, from behind a podium at Turning Point USA, twice referred to Jackson as “Ronny Johnson.”
Jackson is a helluva guy to get involved in a mud-slinging contest about pharmaceuticals, but Republicans are nothing if not reckless. As Physician to the President and, later, Chief Medical Advisor, Jackson’s nickname was “Candyman.” The Defense Department’s Inspector General’s report reads like a pusher’s rap sheet.
Technically, Jackson retired from the Navy as what’s called a Rear Admiral (lower half). That’s an odd, clumsy phrase. Why not Half-Admiral? Perhaps because, as in Jackson’s case, that would prompt the slur, half-assed. It’s a moot point. Jackson was bounced from the White House in 2019 and later was elected to Congress from Texas’ 13th district. He ran as a Rear Admiral, but the Pentagon slapped that down. It turned out he’d been retroactively demoted to Captain for boozing while on duty and maintaining a hostile workplace. Now that he’s a Republican Congressman, these things are seen as meritorious.
Apparently as shameless as his former patient, Jackson accompanied Hannity in a burlesque duet, speculating about what particular drugs would best assist the incumbent president as he struggles to stay awake and appear cogent as he goes up against the most brilliant, virile man who ever lived in Thursday evening’s debate.
This inverted view of the candidates is hardly peculiar to Hannity and his guests.
Judd Legum, who runs the popular yet well-respected Substack newsletter Popular Information, recently examined how Sinclair Broadcast Group, “the second-largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations,” according to Wikipedia, with 193 stations reaching 40 percent of American households, and the largest owner of stations affiliated with Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC, is “flooding a vast network of local news websites with misleading articles suggesting Biden is mentally unfit.”
Legum writes, “The articles attacking Biden’s mental fitness are based on specious social media posts by @RNCResearch, which are then repackaged to resemble news reports.”
Here’s how the Twitter handle @RNCResearch bills itself: “Exposing the lies, hypocrisy, and failed far-left policies of Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Managed by @TeamTrump and the Republican National Committee.”
Just to be perfectly clear—because the brazenness of this really deserves to be fully appreciated—let us note that the Republican National Committee has two co-chairs. One is Michael Whatley, who was in the room and actively assisting as Trump badgered Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in 2020 in an attempt to steal electoral votes. The other is Lara Trump, who, ten years ago, married Eric Trump. [Eric is the Trump son who looks like Butt-Head. It’s Don Jr. who looks like Beavis. – The Ed., just trying to be helpful.]
Sean Hannity would have the world believe that the word “Biden” is merely one component of a compound proper noun, “Biden Crime Family.” Applying the rule of simple inversion, this forces us to consider its opposite: a Trump Crime Family.
Whether by blackmail, bribery, or mesmerism, the Trump Crime Family has taken control of the House of Representatives, and, through the filibuster, shut down the Senate. Having named much of it, it owns the Supreme Court.
It’s trying now, desperately, to shove its Godfather back into the White House. Not an easy task, since he’s so much like Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, minus the bathrobe.
So it comes as no surprise that, as Legum has demonstrated, a vast propaganda operation is working around the clock to smear the incumbent president as a drooling, incontinent husk—the mirror image of the smelly defendant who recently sat in a New York City courtroom.
Businessmen OK With Fraudster
The Business Roundtable also hosted Felonious Trump on June 13th. NPR’s Steve Inskeep, noting that both wages and the Dow are up, asked John Catsimatidis, the CEO of a grocery chain, “What disappoints business leaders about that?”
Catsimatidis replied, “the banks are having a hard time… interest rates have to come down, otherwise… [the] real estate industry is going to be in trouble.”
One wonders to whom these businessmen will sell their goods, once their candidate has finished wreaking havoc.
* LZ 129 Hindenburg, history’s largest rigid airship, March 4, 1936 – May 6, 1937.