Tag: Fuck Josh Hawley

All Fascists Are Just Cowardly Crybaby Bullies At Heart

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Ok, here’s the thing. For all of our good natured fun at the expensive of malignant goober Sen. Josh Hawley, he is one decision away from being extremely close to being POTUS.

If Trump decides to pass over completely insane people like Mike Flynn, or people who would make him feel better like Ivanka, he could very well pick Hawley to be his veep.

If that happens, Hawley is all but assured to be America’s Putin. He’s young enough that 30 years from now — Speaker Hawley will continue to rule America with an iron fist, serving as the autocrat behind any number of puppet presidents. That’s the type of shenanigans that autocratic states tend to do. They fuck with their Constitutions so they can be in power forever, even though the Constitution says they can’t.

I will note, however, that I once read a biography of Sen. Huey Long that said right before he was murdered, he was a big old coward. I don’t remember exactly what he did, but in the process of being assassinated, he did not exactly acquit himself in a manly fashion.

The point is — lulz, nothing matters. We’re either going to become an autocracy, or we’re going to have a civil war. There is no middle ground. That’s it, those are are two choices. I suppose you might also say that there’s a third choice — military junta — but that’s extremely debatable.

We’re fucked. We’re totally, completely fucked. Get out while you still can. At this point, it’s really up to Trump who America’s Putin will turn out to be. I still think it’s at least possible weirdo Mike Flynn might be it. But I also know that Trump has expressed a lot of support for Hawley in the past as well.

It will be interesting to see who Trump picks to finish the job he started.

President Chauncy Gardner #ETTD


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I called it. I said Trump would likely go bonkers around the time Congress counted Electors and I was right. And, in a more vague way, I predicted that we were careening towards something of a “political 9/11.”

And so here we are.

The conundrum of where we are now is we have only a fortnight left in the Trump Era. That’s it. Two weeks. If we can just make it through the next two weeks, then we lurch — maybe are pushed — into something quite unexpected: a true autocracy without an autocrat.

Our democracy is obviously so fragile that if Trump really was “the guy from The Apprentice” then, well, we wouldn’t be talking about Biden coming into office. Trump would have done the hard work of stealing his second term, he’d have a thin veneer of legality and that would be that.

And, yet, for all my endless speculation that Trump would do this or that autocratic thing, it turns out he really is just a deranged version of Chauncy Gardner from Being There.

TRUMP LITERALLY IS CHAUNCY GARDNER FROM BEING THERE.

Our president.

What this means is, we were all so busy assuming he was an autocrat that we missed that while he may have autocratic impulses, Trump is such a ding-dong that he can’t — or won’t — do the hard work necessary to actually become an autocrat.

As such, all the conditions and tools for autocracy are just laying around in our politics and society, waiting to be picked up by Josh Hawley (or whomever.) So, we’re probably going to just drift into the Biden Era and be in neutral until Biden gets inevitably impeached.

But.

Trump is so fucking bonkers right now that he could self-own in such a spectatular fashion in the next two weeks that the political 9/11 that we had to day could actually be a series of pollical 9/11s that absolutely FORCE us to act to push Trump out of office for no other reason than we’ve come to think he’s a threat to himself — or us.

I have no idea what is going to happen.

But it’s going to be weird.

Josh Hawley — America’s Would-Be ‘Young Putin’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I thought it was going to be Tom Cotton who murdered American democracy, but, surprise, it’s Josh Hawley who probably is going to get the honor. Traditional American liberal democracy is on life support and it’s probably going to be Hawley who ultimately pulls the plug.

The scenario I could see happening is Ivanka Trump becomes a senator from Florida, she dukes it out with Hawley in the 2024 primary and he ultimately becomes her Veep. They get elected — one way or another — and together they play the part of a fascist velvet fist.

Ivanka would just be the figure head, while Hawley would be the real power behind the throne. This would be similar to the situation in Russia where Putin kept bouncing back and forth between president and premier, never really leaving office. Under this scenario, Hawley would have the potential of being in office 16 years and maybe even more once he really gets into consolidating power and rams through his own Constitutional Convention.

The thing we have to come to grips with is autocracy is actually fairly popular in the United States. Trump was elected because people thought he was going to be an autocrat. In fact, the famous quip about Trump is his governing style is “malevolence only tempered by incompetence.” So, Hawley would just be regular old malevolence, which is what a sizable passionate and organized portion of the electorate wants because they’re afraid of the browning of America and women with sexual agency.

In my mind, this is all but a done deal, but for one thing — Trump.

Trump is such a wild card because of his mental instability and growing freak out about leaving office, that as I keep saying, it’s possible that he might self-own in such a spectacular fashion in the last few days of his time in office that it’s something of a “political 9/11” that so scars people that we actually punt our decline into autocracy for a generation.

But it’s not going to be a liberal fever dream. We’ll all going to get the shit scared out of us when it happens — we may not make it out alive.