Sunday, October 18, 2026

Doom Report (Week 91: Yeah, But That Was Different)


Once upon a time—by which I mean a little over two years ago—I told this story about my record-collector father:

In our family, he’s somewhat infamous for shitting on my and my brother’s musical taste.  For everything from rap to heavy metal—and, in particular, for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which he has an inexplicable hatred of—he can be heard to proclaim decisively “they can’t sing, they just scream” and “it sounds like a bunch of stray cats fighting” and sometimes just “that just isn’t music, son.”  And, once, after he’d said that, I reminded him that he grew up in the motherfucking fifties: during the foundational years of rock-n-roll, when parents holding their ears and decrying their children’s choice of listening material is practically a stereotype.  “Dad,” I pointed out as gently as I could, “isn’t ‘that’s not music’ exactly what your parents said to you when you were young?”  And he furrowed his brow, and shook his head, and responded, with zero irony or self-awareness whatsoever, “yes, but that was different.”

And, as I ponder the weeks’ news, I have to wonder: is it just a coincidence that my father is a conservative Republican?  Not a rightwing nutjob—mostly—but a staunch conservative nonetheless.  So maybe it’s something about that type of personality that leads people to fall into this trap, over and over again.  Because, it occurs to me that I also wrote a short post a bit over two years ago where I talked about the college protests against Israeli genocide.  (Hard to believe that that started even before Trump, although not before Mike Johnson’s tenure.)  If you’ll allow me the supreme indulgence of quoting myself a second time in one post, here’s what I said about the lack of irony that university administrators were showing when they decided to bring in the police and the National Guard to “calm things down”:

... it might also behoove people in positions of collegial power to try to think of a time when there were widespread college protests that we currently look back on and think, man, those college kids were totally wrong.  Would it be the Free Speech Movement in 1964? the civil rights protests against racial inequality in 1968? the antiwar protests of 1970? the anti-apartheid protests of 1985? the protests against school shootings in 2018? the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 and again in 2020?  Which of these are people looking back on and saying “well, here’s an example of where the college kids really blew it, and I bet they’re embarrassed about it now!”  Is there a single counterexample that I’ve missed? a single case where the protests were misguided? a single case where these people—and to call them “young people” is just pointlessly reductive—really should have been told to “stop the nonsense; stop wasting your parents’ money”?  I haven’t thought of one yet.  But perhaps I lack the imagination of those wiser than I.  (Although, I gotta tell you: at this point, I’ve managed to live long enough that most of the idiots spewing this sort of garbage are no longer older than I, so maybe I should start referring to them as the “young people.”)

And this pattern keeps on being repeated, again and again.  Joe Biden’s kid got around $3 million from a Ukrainian company, and that was the ultimate expression of nepotism and grift, but when Tump’s son-in-law got $2 billion from Saudi Arabia, that was different.  When Trump was prosecuted for something he absolutely, unquestionably did, that was weaponization of the Justice Department, but when Trump’s DoJ brought charges against James Comey—and Letitia James, and Jerome Powell, and on and on—which were so badly constructed that they were essentially laughed out of court, that was different.  When Obama saluted with a coffee cup in his hand, it generated reams of rightwing outrage.  But when Trump refused to take his hat off while attending the dignified transfer of the first troops killed in his new forever war, Fox didn’t even show the footage ... because that was different.

And, sure: maybe some of this is deliberate hypocrisy and obfuscation, especially for the hacks over at Fox “News”.  But if we’re talking about the regular people that, say, Jordan Klepper is interviewing at Trump rallies, I believe they sincerely think this.  If your guy does it, it’s bad; if my guy does it, well, that’s different.  Many of our comedic commentators have opined that we now live in a post-irony society, and maybe that’s true.  Many have mourned the death of civility, and maybe that’s true too.  Or maybe it’s just that the inability to indulge in self-introspection, to recognize in yourself the same faults you easily call out in others, is endemic to a certain kind of political viewpoint, and that all those other things are not cause, but rather effect.

Or at least that’s what I’ve been pondering lately.  It’s just a thought.

Other things you need to know this week:

  • On Tuesday’s episode of Even More News, Katy, Cody, and Jonathan cover the federal raid on Ilhan Omar’s home, plus their take on the Talarico conspiracy theory, and a few other bits and bobs.
  • Three good “Kinzinger Report"s this week:
    • On Monday, Ukraine takes out a significant Russain Internet asset and all of a sudden there were a lot fewer bots on the Internet (go figure), Trump wants to give Putin money to try to drop the price of diesel (but it’s probably too late), and more.
    • On Thursday, Adam covers the latest MAGA infighting, this time between “lawyer” Alina Habba and “director” of the Kennedy Center Rich Grenell, Talarico showing up to a debate that Paxton was too chickenshit to attend, and more.
    • Finally, on Friday, Adam tells us about the January 6th Memory Project, which rescued all the DoJ documents on Jan 6 before the Trump regime started taking them down.  Best quote: “They can’t erase history.  That’s what his project proves.  The administration pardoned the rioters, fired the prosecutors, and scrubbed the record, but they couldn’t make the facts disappear.”  Plus, as always, more.

A bunch of longer videos this week!

  • W. Kamau Bell is back with Robert Reich (and, this week, Michael Lahanas-Calderón) on the Coffee Klatch.  This time they cover just how fast a press secretary can get canned, more about the raid on Ilhan Omar, and their take on the midterms.

I’m not going to say it was the brightest spot in my week, but it was a bright spot, and I thought it worth sharing.  Saturday Night Live was dark this week, but SNL UK was not.  And we were treated not only to another great Andy Burnham impression from SNL UK regular George Fouracres, but also James Austin Johnson shows up to do his classic Trump.  Johnson does a little fourth-wall breaking as well, marvelling at how you can say “shit” on British television (“very weird”) and having a bit of fun with the fact that Fouracres also did the impression of the previous Prime Minister, Keir Starmer (“please Keir Andy, please Andy Fouracres ...”).  But my favorite bit was this exchange, after one of Johnson’s spot-on stream-of-consciousness ramblings:

Burnham: Mr. Trump, do you have a point?
Trump: Not usually, no.

It’s a quick 6 minutes out of your day for a few chuckles.  Not a bad exchange.









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