Doom Report (Week 37: No Fatties, No Beardos)

This week I think everyone wants to talk about the government shutdown, but I find that remarkably boring: the Democrats finally found some balls, which they will promptly shoot themselves in, because the point of a shutdown is to make sure everyone knows it’s the other side’s fault, and, even with the Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office, the Dems are so bad at messaging that the Republicans will inevitably convince everyone that they had nothing to do with this shutdown at all.  So I find that a foregone conclusion, and thus: boring.

No, to me the interesting thing that happened this week was Hegseth and Trump addressing all the generals.  Now, I’ve yet to figure out if this is a totally unprecedented conference, or whether it’s something that happens every year, but usually in secret, for obvious security-related reasons (I’ve seen it reported both ways), but, either way, the amount of utter batshit crazy that was spewed onto these poor military commanders is not just stunning, but also just plain bone-chilling.  The Even More News crew sums it up very well, especially highlighting the depth of shit we’re in by butting this quote from Hegseth:

We fight to win.  We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy.  We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement.  We untie the hands of our war fighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.  No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement: just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for war fighters.

up against this quote from Trump:

Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia while America is under invasion from within.  We’re under invasion from within.  No different than a foreign enemy, ...

Yes, our President told our generals that they were to treat his enemies as the enemies of our country directly after our Secretary of Defense (playacting as the Secretary of War) that they should hunt down those enemies with overwhelming violence and maximum lethality while ignoring the rules of engagement.  Sure, the government is shut down, but I think that the fact that His Great Orange Bloviatedness wants to send American troops into your city to murder you might be slightly more problematic.

Other things you need to know this week:

• Seth Meyers also covers the “enemy within” speech to the generals in A Closer Look this week.

• Adam Kinzinger has another good weekly news round-up.

• Some More News this week did a really great assessment of the death of Charlie Kirk and its impact on our national conversation.

• On The Weekly Show this week, Jon Stewart interviews David Faris and Tim Miller.  Normally, I put Miller into the same bucket as Kinzinger: former Republicans who left that party because of the MAGA takeover but are still sane—in other words, the few remaining voices of reason on the conservative side.  But I take exception to his characterization of the Dems as being too focussed on the “one trans girl that is in on the lacrosse team.”  The Dems didn’t focus on that at all: the Republicans did.  Now, do the Dems suck for allowing Repubs to define them in this way?  Of course.  If the Democrats were half as smart as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny, they would just point out how immeasurably creepy it is for these old white men to be so obsessed with the bodies of trans children—hell, the SS women have said “leave trans kids alone you absolute freaks” so often at this point that they’ve literally made a shirt out of it.  But, point being: this is not something you can really blame the Dems for.

• At a very dense 90 minutes, I’ll still recommend one of Jamelle Bouie’s “favorite things” from the end segment of this week’s Strict Scrutiny: How Comedy Was Destroyed by an Anti-Reality Doomsday Cult from the Elephant Graveyard.  It’s surreal, and occasionally sounds like a PhD thesis, but it really is quite revealing of the Joe Rogan extended universe and how it got to the weird place it is today.

Our message of hope this week comes from an opinion from First Circuit Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, as read by Robert Reich on this week’s Coffee Klatch:

First of all, the judge gets, you know, one of these crazy, all handwritten, all in caps: “Trump has pardons and tanks ... what do you have?”  So, it’s a threatening note he gets.  Well, what does the judge do?  He puts this threatening note right on the top of his opinion.  And then the judge writes,

“Dear Mr. or Ms. Anonymous,

Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty.

Together, we the people of the United States—you and me—have our magnificent Constitution.

Here’s how that works out in a specific case—”

Just in case we were all thinking that everyone had given up.  Apparently, a few people are still fighting.  For which I’m thankful.