Quotes Of The Day -- The Contenders

 

The New Yorker's Susan Glasser writes about why the Malignant Loser is more scary and dangerous than ever, citing recent statements at CPAC:

... His call to arms was not merely the stuff of political symbolism. Echoing the inflammatory language with which he summoned his supporters to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump urged them to fight once again in explicitly end-time terms. “We have no choice,” he said. “If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever.” In case the comparison was lost on anybody, he explicitly extolled the “great, great patriots” unfairly sitting in jail, recasting the rioters who breached America’s own Capitol building as MAGA martyrs. “This is the final battle,” he insisted. “They know it. I know it. You know it. Everybody knows it. This is it. Either they win, or we win, and if they win we no longer have a country.”

This chilling peroration by Trump followed his December call, in a post on his Truth Social platform, for “termination” of the Constitution, if that is what it would take to return him to power. The two statements, taken together, sum up his campaign like no other. Termination and retribution are the reckless pillars on which Trump is running. Why not, finally, take him at his word?...

The Malignant Loser is a pathological liar, but on this, of course we take him at his word.  (He was also too crooked for serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein-- see post below.)

Meanwhile, his current main challenger, Floriduh Gov. Ron "Bootsie/ Meatball Ron" DeSantis delivered his State of the State address last week.  Gulf Today critiqued his Trumpism without Trump messages:

... He ignored the plight of hundreds of thousands of Florida residents whose access to affordable health insurance is almost completely blocked. He used the focus-group tested word “freedom” repeatedly, even as he referenced initiatives that would strip Floridians of fundamental liberties, including academic freedom, business decision-making and bodily autonomy.

For the Floridians who lack health insurance and the million-plus vulnerable low-income people facing the loss of Medicaid coverage in a few weeks, DeSantis did not offer one word of hope. In this administration, they don’t matter. Other Floridians only matter as human fuel for his grand plans.

He wants parents to have the “freedom” to choose vouchers for private schools. But where are the safeguards for those students, or assurances that his proposals won’t drain local school boards of the money they need? He wants Floridians to have the right to obtain and carry weapons pretty much anywhere. But where are the protections for families and communities torn apart by gun violence?...

DeSantis is a slick charlatan without any core principles except to support whatever gets him what he wants, which is unchallenged power.

Odds are one of these two democracy destroyers will be on the ballot in 2024. Sic transit gloria, America.

QOTD -- An Active Crime Scene

 

"The bottom line is that the story of the Trump Presidency still has important unanswered questions that the forthcoming pile of books cannot answer. And they have an urgency about them that unanswered questions about past Administrations usually don’t, given the ongoing threat to our democracy: Trump is not only preparing to run again but is determined to mold the G.O.P. into a single-issue Party, the ideology of which consists solely of disputing the legitimacy of the election that turned him out of office. The Trump Presidency is not yet, alas, simply a matter for booksellers and book writers; it’s an active crime scene." -- Susan Glasser in The New Yorker, on  the accumulating evidence of crimes against our democracy and the January 6 select committee's work that needs to proceed.

QOTD -- A Willingness To Let The Country Fail

 

"... Consider the news this week that now one in five hundred Americans has died in the pandemic; total deaths in the country approach seven hundred thousand. What’s worse, covid deaths—the vast majority of them preventable, avoidable deaths, now that science and the federal government have provided us with free vaccines—are continuing to rise across large swaths of vaccine-resistant Trump country. This is not a tragic mistake but a calculated choice by many Republicans who have made vaccine resistance synonymous with resistance to Biden and the Democrats. The current average of more than nineteen hundred dead a day means that a 9/11’s worth of Americans are perishing from covid roughly every thirty-eight hours. To my mind, this is the biggest news of the Biden Presidency so far, and it has nothing to do with Afghanistan, or the fate of the budget-reconciliation bill, or Bob Woodward’s new book.  [snip]

"The G.O.P.’s desire to see Biden fail has become a willingness to let the country fail. Nine months into Biden’s Presidency, the bottom line is that the Republican war on Biden’s legitimacy and the war on Biden’s covid policies are now inextricably linked. The consequences of this are so hard to contemplate that we often do not do so: a politics so broken that it is now killing Americans on an industrial scale." -- Susan Glasser in The New Yorker, writing about the nihilistic Trump Republican Party and many in its knuckle- dragging base who have always placed their race/ party above country.  That's why so many of those same people -- who will never admit the legitimacy of Democratic/ democratic governance-- are prepared to die very horribly on that sub- moronic hill.

QOTD

"In many ways, the whole Trump Presidency can be encapsulated in the past few days and weeks. It is self-dealing, denialism, dishonesty, and deflection. It is narcissism, recklessness, and disregard for the public good—and for democracy itself. There is nothing and no one he has not corrupted—or tried to. Even the remaining uncertainty about the election’s outcome is a product of Trump’s cynical, self-serving, and dangerous assault on the political system. Washington can read the polls, but after four years there’s still no poll that can fully account for this President. Folks, it ain’t over till it’s over." -- Susan Glasser in The New Yorker today.  Her subtext is to make sure that you vote and that your vote gets in on time to forestall the games COVID Donnie and his crooked judges will try to play on and after November 3.

Quotes Of The Day -- STFU, Trump

"Trump’s 10-minute Oval Office address Wednesday night reflected not only his handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads.

"Futures for the Dow Jones industrial average fell in real time with virtually each word Trump uttered, signaling a lack of confidence among investors that he had control of the crisis and previewing another bloodbath once the markets opened Thursday morning." -- Phil Rucker, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey, "Inside Trump's Failed Attempt to Calm Coronavirus Fears."

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"Trump spoke from the Oval Office exactly five weeks to the day since the end of his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate, which left him with essentially unchecked power after the Republican-led Senate voted against his removal. So much has happened since the trial, which already seems as if it happened in another era, but there is a through-line: Trump himself, constantly conflating the national interest with his personal interest. As the coronavirus spread and the President initially ignored, downplayed, and lied about it—even dismissing coverage of the risks as a media-inflamed “hoax”—the costs of the Senate’s impeachment decision have been cast in sharp relief. It will be a long time before we can reckon with the full damage done by an Administration whose incompetence, disinformation, and sheer bungling in the early stages of the crisis have been at once predictable and breathtaking."  Susan Glasser, on Very Stable Genius Donald "Dr. Trump, PhD'oh" Trump being less equal to the moment of any President in her memory, demonstrated most recently by his disastrous speech on Wednesday.

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"You’re so bad at conveying accurate virus information, you make the Fox News channel sound like the Scientific American. If you were a medical doctor, the board of examiners would yank your license. The county prosecutor would then jail you for thousands of counts of malpractice. After that, he’d charge you with manslaughter for serving as the virus’ accomplice." -- Jack Shafer, Politico, telling Trump to shut the fuck up about coronavirus, advice the malignant moron is not going to follow, btw.