Dunce Confederacy Does the White House

 

Tom Nichols assembles a platter of remarks from Trump's Merry Mopes of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in his recent article in "The Atlantic."

What You See Is What You Get

Mad Dog had not seen assembled such a collection of piffle before, but in the aggregate, they gel into a pretty clear picture:

1/ Karoline Leavitt (Press Secretary)

When asked by a reporter who planned a meeting between Trump and Putin, a rather mundane, but staple question asked routinely, Ms. Leavitt replied, "Your Mom did." The reporter might have replied, "Uh, please? And thank you," but we'll never know.

Ms. Leavitt is clearly no C.J. Craig. 

She did not know the answer, or she knew the answer and knew it would be embarrassing, so she simply dug deep into that repertoire from the elementary school playground, which is about where her intellectual development stalled.

I'm Ready To Speak for Trump

2/ Pete Hegseth

Follow Me!

Announcing the end of "DEI" practices Hegseth said, "We're done with that shit."

That, of course, would have sufficed at Joe's Bar, but we were all hoping for something more quotable, something along the lines of, "Diversity has been distorted into an excuse for incompetence, replacing real merit with group think, as if being a particular race is a qualification or virtue." Or something. Some actual argument, you know?

But no. We get, "We're done with that shit." Did he lock and load and fire off a round after saying that, or just throw an axe at some poor drummer?

3/ Vice President Vance, asked whether destroying boats in the Caribbean, killing all on board, without first stopping and searching them, to establish guilt or innocence might be considered a "war crime," replied, "I don't give a shit what you call it."

And he's right to not care whether it's a war crime or not, as recent events, and distant events have demonstrated--you can do all sorts of war crimes for years from Ukraine to Gazza and there will be no calling to account. 

4/ President Trump responded to the No Kings rallies with an AI cartoon showing him joyfully dumping feces on the protesters.

Your President; I Kid You Not

At least Nixon tried to respond to war protesters by calling them "bums." Didn't work. But, you know. He tried.

One might ask:

1/ Do these players think profanity, scatological cartoons are edgy? Do they think if they respond to questions, which is a part of their official duties, with hostility, taunts or by passing gas, they are South Park funny?

2/ Or, could it be, they each realize they have no capacity to formulate a reasonable response, so they just resort to jibes and what they think are ribald jokes, believing themselves to be witty and/or commanding?

There's a wonderful scene in Roxane, the Steve Martin movie which updates the Cyrano De Bergerac play where a knuckle dragger in a bar calls him "Big nose," and Martin challenges him to come up with a better insult, which, of course this Hegseth like buffoon cannot do, and then Martin launches into twenty really funny insults to his own nose, each funnier than the next, which unmasks the goon as a simpleton and thoroughly humiliates him, while at the same time generating considerable sympathy for Cyrano, who has clearly had to live with insults about his nose his whole life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urdf4g-LXk4

But neither Hegseth nor the bar dweeb are capable of any real wit.

Nichols calls this "post-ironic glib dismissal." 

They delight in the crass and the lewd, rude, crude and foul.

They think it makes them more accessible, less like the polished,  Hillary Clinton model, with her crafted sentences, designed to allow for plausible denial which came off as sounding to formulaic, dodgy and legalistic.

They delight the Hulk Hogan, Joe Rogan, FOXNEWS mob.

"Just tell it like it is!" the MAGA mob smirks. 

This is the segment of the population which consists of people who get drawn into an argument about tariffs or ICE kidnappings or January 6th, or shutting down the government and once they see, after a few sentences of exchange, that they are failing to persuade, pervade or punish, they expostulate, "Fuck you! You radical leftist effete snob!"

Noem skull

And then they turn their backs and strut away thinking they've just driven their opponent into a dot of humiliation. They have got attention and they think they've intimidated.

Trump is the patron saint  of the third stringer, Nichols suggests, and the only way to respond to them may be to say, "Feel better now? Well, good, Now answer the question. Who arranged the meeting? What is the difference between murder and blowing up a boat with human beings on board without warning--especially when there are other effective options?"

Many have observed you cannot argue with the MAGA mob, because they do not understand how to argue and they simply degenerate into name calling and insults, the way Trump does whenever a reporter asks him an embarrassing question: "You are a very bad person? Did you know that?"

But it's somehow a comfort to see it laid out: These are simple not people worth worrying about. They have been plucked out of obscurity and given their moment in the spotlight, but they cannot sing, dance or even be funny.

They can delight some folks with their insouciance and crudity and vulgarity, but that too grows old pretty quickly. We are only 9 months in this time. It's already stale.

All we can do now is persist and tune into Colbert, Kimmel, Adam Schiff, Paul Krugman, Paul Offit and Bernie Sanders.

And maybe now, Zohran Mamdani. 

Like most newcomers to the political scene, we really don't know much about him. He may be another Obama, or he may crash and burn. But, at least, his vocabulary includes words with more than four letters.