I take Mitch McConnell’s threats to derail any attempt to have a impeachment trial in the Senate very, very, very seriously. He has proven himself to be an astonishingly destructive Constitutional force and all things being equal, he’s got about a 99% chance of coming out on top.
But for one thing….Donald Trump.
Now, it is imperative that we impeach and convict Trump as quickly as possible. As I’ve said for three years now, he’s an existential threat to the Republic. And, in a sense, both he and Moscow Mitch are more avatars for how fucked up things are in the States than they are any sort of evil on a personal level.
What I mean is, if it wasn’t them fucking up everything else, it would be someone else. The Republican Party on an institutional level no longer believes in liberal democracy and so fuck you. So, in a sense, if Trump survives, then the last vestiges of the Republic fall aside. We are simply a Russian-style managed democracy and that’s that. Republicans flip a switch on the existing ICE camp infrastructure and people like me conveniently “vanish.”
That’s got about a 99% chance of happening at this point, matter how much liberals may think we “finally got” Trump.
That sole percent is a powerful one, however. Trump is so bad at his job, so erratic and such a monumental self-own artist that there’s a 1% chance that by the time the issue of impeachment finally get to the Republicans, the possibility of bringing down Trump won’t be a liberal fever dream. It will be a force of history.
We’re likely to know one way another how things are going to sort out when Trump actually is formally impeached. If he finally cracks under the pressure then, well, oooooooh boy.
But don’t get your hopes up just yet. Sometimes, the bad guys win and you just have to figure out how you’re going to survive.
The thing about Phoebe Waller-Bridge is how down to earth and honest she is. One thing I’ve noticed about her, however, is she doesn’t have the UCB chops that a lot of American TV stars have. She’s more of a writer and traditional actor.
Hey babe.
You notice it the most when she’s on a show like Late Night and Seth Meyers obviously really wants to do a form of improv with her and she can seem a bit slow on the take. She’s naturally funny, of course, but it comes out more naturally for her in the context of sitting in front of a laptop and thinking about it.
Having said all that, I have a hunch that she’s going to get sucked into the Hollywood community in a pretty big way. She’s recently divorced and there are plenty of single — and powerful — Hollywood leading men who love to have her by their side as they walked down the red carpet. The one guy who might find her a catch would be Bill Murray. He’s a bit old for her, but they would be an instant Hollywood power couple. (I’m too lazy to look at Wikipedia to see if he’s single.) I mean, the one guy I could see falling hard for Ms. Waller-Bridge is Jon Hamm. Hamm is a very funny guy and it seems like he would enjoy having Ms. Waller-Bridge a comic foil in both public and private endeavors.
I could see Hollywood producers have a bit of a struggle figuring out what to do with her because she’s not a traditional Hollywood beauty, but I can think of plenty of roles she would be perfect for. She’s got a unique comic voice that will serve her — and the audience — well for potentially decades to come.
One other thing is now that she’s hosted SNL, she’s a part of the SNL hivemind and there’s a good chance she might linger in its orbit as events warrant. She’s probably met a lot of the big wigs of SNL during the course of preparing for the show and those contacts will be beneficial to everyone involved going forward.
Saturday Night Live is not what the audience may think it is. It’s not a comedy show, it actually serves an important role in civil society. A lot of other elements of society use it as a shorthand for the mood of the nation about the zeitgeist. So, in real terms, it doesn’t even matter how funny it is. What matters is the general vibe of the show on any particular moment.
Reading Twitter comments about the show with that in mind can be rather grating. People get so worked up over how funny — or not funny — the show is. In fact, the case could be made that if the show was actually as funny as people want it to be, it wouldn’t have lasted as long as it has. SNL is the Bob Hope of institutional TV comedy. Its lack of comic Molotov cocktails ensures that it’s kind of background noise to the average person.
But, as I said, you can definitely get a bead on the mood of the country from the show, especially the cold open. I suspect a lot of the writers for the week night talk shows watch SNL and then use it to get a sense of what might play for the next week.
In passing, I would note that Great Britain, as best I can tell, doesn’t have an SNL equivalent. There’s plenty of great modern British comedy, but for some reason there’s no one late night show that critiques the days events in the country as best I can tell.
Anyway, SNL is at least one civil society institution in America that Trump hasn’t managed to destroy yet.
I don’t know what’s going on with the two major Anglophonic democracies right now, but someone needs to to the LHC on and off again or something. But let’s step away from the ginormous clusterfuck that is whatever it is that’s going on in the United States right now.
I dunno.
The limeys across the pond also have a crisis coming to a head. As I understand it the other blond fascist doofus in charge of an Anglophonic democracy is now challenging the Queen to fire him. He’s not so much challenging the Queen to fire him, he’s really threatening the very existence of the Monarchy itself. The moment she does it — and I think she will — she becomes exactly what she’s work so hard not to be: a political figure.
Once she’s a political figure, then Brexiters will want to get rid of her and Remainers will want to keep her. And, really, there’s one simply solution to all of this — abolish the Monarchy. I simply don’t know enough to give you any opinion that isn’t simply for entertainment value, but it seems the moment she does fire Boris, her fate is sealed.
It’s eerie that things seem to be careening to a solution on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s likely to happen by Halloween, too. If I hadn’t gone through three years of Trump, I would be naive enough to believe firing Johnson might be just the catharsis needed to balm the problems in Great Britain. More likely, the bolts are going to pop off. I don’t know, I just don’t know. It definitely seems as though the Brits are careening towards a solution, I just struggle to figure out what it is and exactly what it will look like.
At least in the States, we’re beginning to have some sense of the crisis going down a well-trod path. That Trump will panic enough to attempt to pin the blame on Rick Perry of all people is all anyone needs to know the state of things right now. I don’t know what’s going on, but there definitely does seem to be some sort of direction towards an endgame in both the States and the UK.
Trump was greeted today by a woman blowing a whistle. If enough of us follow her lead, we can save the United States from a Russian-style “managed democracy.”
Put your lips together and blow.
Whistles are an effective direction action form of protect because they’re non-violent, but annoying as hell. And, really, all you have to do is be anywhere near Moscow Mitch or Steven Miller or Dracula for it to be effective. And you could also just use your fingers in your mouth — or just your mouth — to whistle. That’s really hard to control. You don’t have to be in their face and risk arrest. Just blow anywhere near them and the idea of a whistleblower will be stuck in their mind.
If they can’t go anywhere, be in DC or a Congressional Town Hall meeting in their home district, without someone, somewhere blowing a whistle, that might at least, if nothing else, remind them of their failure to live up to their oath of office. And, you will have the satisfaction of making their live miserable.
Will this work? I don’t know. It does risk an escalation because MAGA may, in turn, just start murdering people with AR-15s. By as my Dad always says, no one ever got anywhere in this world without taking a risk.
It’s up to you if you feel having some agency in the fate of your nation is worth the risk or not.
No is going to save us. I guess the case could be made that the military might step in, but even that is a questionable line of reasoning. These days I swing wildly between assuming everything is going to work out and knowing that in the end I’m going to be just another of the “disappeared.” That House Trump would be acting so blase about what’s going on indicates to me that Trump, himself, is a coup.
What this means is Trump is the worse case scenario. The Republican Party doesn’t believe in liberal democracy or the rule of law — or the Constitution for that matter — and so, really, the entire fate of the nation hangs not on our political process but Trump’s likely continued mental decline.
Or, put another way, darkness has fallen. We pinned all our hope on Mueller saving the day, which only gave Trump time to learn how to use the levers of power. With the House under Republican rule for two years, he was given absolute power. It wasn’t until he was finally give a political pardon by the “bad optics” of the Mueller’s congressional testimony that he finally self-owned to the extent necessary for the House to get some backbone. But by that point it was too late. That Trump was so arrogant as to think that releasing what he did about the phone call to Ukraine would exonerate him gives us all the insight we need into the worldview of House Trump.
I find myself thinking how, exactly, America will finally descend into tyranny. It seems that what will happen is Trump will not be convicted by the Senate and then he will turn around and make absolutely sure that there is no free and fair election in 2020. It doesn’t matter how it happens, it will happen. If all else fails, he’ll get Putin to directly hack into the election. Trump’s failsafe will be doxing or bribing individual Electors. He pardons everyone as needed and then that’s that.
The next logical step will be to weaponize the existing ICE camp infrastructure. In his second term, he will grow so brazen as to be darkly comical. He will simply round up anyone he doesn’t like and either murder them or put them in a camp. All Trump really needs is a war or a major domestic terrorist attack to make this a reality. All things being equal, as of October 2019, Trump has an open road to finally getting what he wants — the right to be a fascist autocrat.
Again, like I said, there’s only one likely to make this difficult — Trump himself. If Trump finally snaps or does something so completely indefensible that he finally loses Republican support, I honestly don’t know what will happen. Republicans already are effectively using the, “Ok, so convict him and fuck you” defense. They don’t say it — yet — but that’s the effective consequences of their behavior.
Moscow Mitch has already suggested that he will actively squash any real attempt to try Trump in the Senate. So Trump even make it absolutely impossible for Republicans to defend him and still get away with it all. I always thought Trump would snap and there would be some sort of Regency. Now, I realize I was being surreally naive. Trump’s going to lose his shit and do it all in public. No one is going to say anything. Nothing will be done — at least within Republican circles.
So, it’s completely possible that Trump will escape justice AND be completely bonkers. He will be nothing more than King George III. A mad king. Very serious people will have spent so much time bickering about the subtle re-election strategy genius Trump has been playing that they will barely realize it when the are stood in front of a ditch and shot in the back of the head by an ICE agent.
The crux of this is we were so busy studying the exact nature of MAGA’s support for Trump that we completely overlooked that the entire Republican Party was being held hostage by Mad King Trump. When all of this first came out, I could not believe it. It seemed a little too on the nose. While it’s still possible Bill Barr is Q and he’s going to pop out and say “baba booey” that it hasn’t happened yet is a very dark sign. If this is all true and Barr and Pompeo are STILL looking for the supposed sinister origins of the Mueller investigation that will clear Manafort so Trump can pardon him then we are in very, very dark times.
And our only possible rescue is not anything we might do, it’s Trump finally going batshit insane to such an extent that Republicans finally, finally buckle just enough to convict Trump in the Senate. Then any number of potential would-be Trumps can jump into the arena and do it all over again. Only this time they will be younger, more focused and more passionate.
I hate horror movies. But we’re living in a political one right now. The end of Drag Me To Hell — a movie I’ve never actually seen — seems to fit what’s going on. Or maybe Deliverance. Any movie where one “subverts” the expectations of the audience.
I mean, we got Trump red handed and…nothing. Nothing’s happening. Barr, Pompeo, Mulvany, et al are still in power, still setting policy as if nothing has happened. The enormous abuse of power associated with trying to undermine the basis of the Mueller Report continues unabated. It’s all happening in broad daylight and there’s no sense of shame, no sense of the nation being in an existential crisis.
Things are weird.
This is a seriously fucked up situation.
What’s worse, even if we somehow magically extricate ourselves from the political cancer that is House Trump, there are a half a dozen would-be Trump’s in the pipeline who are younger, more focused and even more passionate in their hatred both of liberal democracy and brown people. In fact, I would go so far as to say what would have to happen to “save” us is so horrific that I don’t even want to think about it.
Let’s just say — it’s really bad. It’s so bad that, well, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.
Things are growing dark in the United States. So dark, that my options sometimes seem to be either staying drunk all the time or staring out into space thinking about how, exactly, I will escape the coming Trumplandia dystopia.
But, luckily for me, I have the novel I’m working on. It gives me hope. That’s all the hope I have right now, in fact. Hope that when I finishing writing the novel we will have reached some sort of endgame with Trumplandia and people will want a novel that helps them understand what the fuck just happened.
After months and months of development, pretty much all I have to do is write. I’ve finally given myself the right to write crap without judgement. I also am pushing any problems that I can’t figure out right now to the second draft. So some things I just don’t know about — like exactly how to structure subplots — I’m going to work on in between the first and second drafts.
Given that this novel is me raging against the Trump Era in a very accessible, breezy read I definitely have a lot of motivation to buckle down and keep going to the end. Writing a novel seriously is a massive undertaking, especially if you don’t, really, know what you’re doing. At this point, I’m simply using my gut and whatever native storytelling ability I might have.
At best, this novel will be “finished” at some point in, say, mid-2020. Should I sell it, I suspect there will be six or months of post-production. If I don’t ultimately sell it, I’ll just self-publish and turn my attention to a screenplay. I have a shit ton of movie concepts that I can work on now that I have a better understanding of how to pace out a plot. I believe you have to know structure before you can fuck with it. Plot structure is so built into the average person’s enjoyment of a movie or a novel, that you diverge from it at your own peril.
Anyway, I love writing and the process of writing and I generally write a lot without thinking about it. It’s like shedding skin for me. the difference now is that for once I have some sort of strategic goal to it all.
Having said all that, there’s a chance I might dabble in song lyrics again. I like the idea of art for art’s sake and all things being equal writing song lyrics when I don’t know anything about music — I can’t even play an instrument — is kind of a fool’s errand. The only reason why I might do a little of it is there are simply so many song concepts and titles being spun off the Trump clusterfuck it’s hard to keep up.
I hope to focus on writing the novel this weekend, however. It’s a lot of fun and I feel — at least at the moment — rather inspired.
The only hope I have at this point is the cold, hard fact that the American Military is simply not going to do what Trump is going to want them to do very soon — purge Congress of Democrats and dissolve Blue State governments.
But even then, things are not looking good for our democracy. Moscow Mitch is already fundraising off his ability to obstruct Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate. So, that definitely seems to indicate Moscow Mitch is prepared to do everything in his power to save Trump and destroy traditional American liberal democracy.
The aspect of this that should give you pause for thought is Trump is, in himself, an existential threat to American democracy. I’ve been ranting about this for three years to anyone who would listen and, well, lulz? In other words, if Trump isn’t removed then the United States is little more than a Russian-style “managed democracy.”
Now, remember, the moment Trump sees this for what it is — an existential threat to his presidency — he’s likely to snap mentally. As I have written repeatedly, it’s possible that we won’t save ourselves in the end, Trump’s mental instability will. But given the amazing extent of the cancer Trump has caused in the executive, we have to get rid of Pence too.
While a President Nancy Pelosi might make liberals spooge their pants — in real terms it would only be fun for about 24 hours. Then we enter a dystopian political hellscape as everyone turns on her for different reasons — many of them Democrats!
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