Doom Report (Week 11: Point and Counterpoint)

Look, I know I’m not the first person to notice this, but I think that the primary reason these people are so terrible is just plain lack of self-esteem.  Much has been made of how cold and indifferent the fathers of Trump and Musk were, and there’s something to that.  But you gotta expect terrible behavior from the old white men.  It’s when you see it in gay men, or Latines, or black men (Byron Donalds had a moment this week), that you have to wonder, what went wrong in these folks’ lives?  The women are often the most baffling to me: Trump hates women, other than the exact moment he’s sleeping with them (and, honestly, I’m not all that certain even then).  He certainly has no respect for them, and is happiest when surrounded by men who feel the same.  For instance, this week’s profile on Brian Glen by The Daily Show includes a clip of Glen denigrating liberal women for not wearing make-up or shaving their legs: “That is not embracing what it means to be a woman” (he actually utters these words, out loud, into a camera).  So I often have to scratch my head at the folks like Marjorie Taylor Greene (Glen’s girlfriend, as it happens) who fawn over Trump and his ilk.  But the good folks over at Have I Got News For You (US version) have cleared it all up for me.  I’ve watched their exposé on “Mar-a-Lago face” 3 or 4 times now, and every time I’m stunned all over again.  There are 3 “before and after” photos of prominent Republican women, and the contrast is ... well, I think “shocking” undersells it, but it’s the best word I can come up with.  Look at that third example (I won’t spoil it for you as to who it is) and tell me how much that woman had to hate herself to do what she did to her face.  Amber Ruffin’s reactions are also priceless, but just sit with it for a bit.  These people are all compensating for something, and in the meantime we’re all going to suffer for it.  Horribly.

If you only have time to watch one video this week, I highly recommend this week’s Armageddon Update.  Unusually, this one is not done by Christopher Titus, but rather by his wife Rachel Bradley, and it is quite possibly the best one I’ve ever watched.  Rachel attacks the bizarre Evangelical belief that an adulterous misogynist (you know, the “grab ’em by the pussy” guy) was somehow “sent by God.”  I encourage you to watch the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

Please, stop calling it Christianity, because we all know this ugly festering open sore was not sent by God.  Christianity was my grandma Jean, who was still delivering Meals on Wheels to people just months before her death at 89.  Meals on Wheels: another food program cancelled by Trump.  Right after he canceled kids’ cancer research.  You know, just like Jesus.

Preach, sister.

If you have time to watch two videos this week (and can handle something more like an hour-long show), I cannot recommend enough Jon Stewart’s Weekly Show this week.  He interviews Michael Lewis, who is the author of both Moneyball and The Big Short, two books which have I not read that were made into remarkably entertaining movies, given their supposedly dry subject matter.  He’s written a new book called Who Is Government? where he (and other writers such as Sarah Vowell and W. Kamau Bell) profile various civil servants.  His conversation with Jon starts with him telling an amazing, unlikely story about a government worker that you will barely be able to believe ... and then he tells another one.  And another one.  He started on this journey when the first Trump administration fired their transition team.  President Obama had assembled a team to brief the incoming administration, and that team had spent six months preparing for the briefings, and Trump just ... never did it.  He told Chris Christie that “you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”  (Side note: this is the basis of another Lewis book, The Fifth Risk, which you can read a rather long excerpt from on The Guardian’s website.  Even for a guy like me who thought he understood just how awful Trump is, it’s pretty shocking.  At one point, Trump referred to raising money for the transition team as “You’re stealing my fucking money!”) So, now, when we look at President Musk and Trumpy running roughshod over the civil service, it makes so much more sense: they have no idea what these folks do.  Not in a figurative or hyperbolic sense—they literally have no idea, because they never bothered to learn.  They were supposed to, and there were people set aside to help them do so, but they just ... didn’t.

I also like the tie back to Stewart’s interview with Ezra Klein, which I mentioned last week.  Since then, I’ve discovered that a lot of progressives (including Francesca Fiorentini from America Unhinged, who I normally agree with) really don’t like Klein.  I suppose because he’s pointing out places where the progressive movement goes wrong, and it can sound a lot like what the crazy right-wingers say.  Personally, I don’t have any problem looking at idiocies in our bureaucracy and talking about how to improve them.  And to imagine that Klein is somehow a far right plant or a secret MAGA-head is just willful ignorance of what he’s actually saying.  But Lewis spoke of him as a counterpoint:

So I’m just guessing here, but I bet if we—you and I—wandered through the government looking for bright spots, like, things that worked— Ezra’s looking for things that don’t work.  And there are plenty of things that don’t work.  But if you are looking for things that work, you’d find that over and over, that—and it’s where there’s some distance from the political process.

Exactly.  There are plenty of things that don’t work, and we should never shy away from trying to fix those.  But there are so many things that really do work, and tearing all that down in order to fix what’s broken—assuming we even believe that lie any more—it’s just not practical.  Or sane.

If you weren’t already scared to fly because of what the regime has done to the FAA, More Perfect Union’s video on the TSA may do the trick for you.  I was especially amused by the guy who voted for Trump and is now regretting it.  Look, I know we’re supposed to be showing empathy for these folks and celebrating them for waking up and realizing their mistake.  But, honestly: you vote for a billionaire—specifically one who was actually sued for anti-union comments—and then are surprised he came after your union?  Dude, you need to wake up before you vote.

Of course, the big news was that Trump’s placed tariffs on just about every country in the world, including those those inhabited exclusively by penguins.  Well, except for Russia.  No tariffs for our old pal Putin.  In more hopeful news, President Musk lost in Wisconsin.  To be clear, he wasn’t running in Wisconsin: billionaires don’t run in elections.  They just buy them.  So perhaps more accurate to say that he failed to buy the election in Wisconsin that he really wanted.  Of course, he wanted it because he’s suing the state of Wisconsin because it won’t let him make as much money as he wants to.  But there are other reasons why it was an important victory.

Another bright spot: Cory Booker broke Strom Thurmond’s filibuster record, which seems fitting.  He spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes, and none of it was reading the phone book, or Green Eggs and Ham, or any bullshit like that.  He talked about our nation’s problems, and his constituents, and his fears for our future.  It was a purely symbolic gesture that changes nothing ... and yet it’s the most backbone we’ve seen out of Democrats (who aren’t Bernie Sanders, or AOC, or Jasmine Crockett) in months.  So maybe it will change something after all.

We can hope.