Dictatorship Takes Shape

Dominance and Submission. Photo by Reuters/Jonathan Drake via Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

There's way too much going on. Two bogus emergencies formally declared, the one at the border and the "energy emergency" about Trump's weird belief that the US doesn't mine enough natural gas, and then I think what you might call a "woke emergency" signaled by his actions in the Justice Department: seen, for instance in the canceling of ongoing civil rights cases and police department consent decrees.

An ominous restructuring of the department's procedures was reported in today's Guardian in a piece on the DOJ's investigations of the Biden administration, of its "weaponization" of the federal government (read: its investigations of Trump's criminal participation in the January 6 insurrection and in the theft of government documents) and of its "censorship of speech" in the 2020 campaign--the Twitter Files stories attempting to suggest that when Twitter's trust and safety department blocked users from sharing the New York Post's October 14 Hunter Biden laptop story for a full 24 hours before allowing it was what James Comer called 

a coordinated campaign by social media companies, mainstream news and the intelligence communities to suppress and de-legitimize the existence of Hunter Biden's laptop and its contents...

in which the company was obeying the dictates of the FBI (it wasn't).

The new wrinkle in these two orders is in the reporting requirements: instead of directing investigators to direct the final reports to the department's office of personal responsibility or its inspector general, which would be the normal procedure, they will go to a political appointee at the White House—the deputy chief of staff for policy, who happens to be Mr. Stephen Miller, resuming the job he took with the first Trump administration in December 2016. 

Literary Corner: Made of Garbage

Via eBay (sold already).

Star-Maker

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

Nobody had ever heard
of some of these people
that worked for me in D.C.

All of a sudden, the Fake
News starts calling them.
Some of them—by no means all—
feel emboldened, brave, and
for the first time in their lives,
they feel like "something special,"
not the losers that they are—
and they talk, talk, talk!

Many say I am the greatest
star-maker of all time.
But some of the stars I produced
are actually made of garbage.

Literary Corner: The Emperor of I Scream

Old Harbor. By voitv/DeviantArt.

The poet-president did a private reading of some new pieces yesterday, at his meeting with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency gearing up for the start of the hurricane season, of which Washington Post got hold of an audio recording. There's a simple structure, drily comic tone, and unexpected granularity in the works, which greatly heightens the fantastical oddity of the things he says.

Alternative Facts

by Donald J. Trump

I. Hurricane Harvey

Sixteen thousand people,
many of them in Texas,
for whatever reason that is,
people went out in their boats
to watch the hurricane.
That didn’t work out too well.
That didn’t work out too well.

"I thought you were bringing the beer!" Hurricane viewing party, Houston, 28 August 2017, photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images. In fact it's a volunteer rescue party, saving people's lives, but television images of calm and colorful scenes like these have inspired Trump to imagine an entirely new narrative, like that of the Washington tourists who came out in carriages with blankets and picnic baskets to watch the First Battle of Bull Run.

Deep

Deep state: Vanuatu's underwater post office ("All you need is a deep breath and a waterproof postcard"), via Smithsonian.

The New York Times editorial page sighs with relief:

Finally, Trump Has Something Bad to Say About Russia

But that's not what it says in the fine print, I mean the editorial itself:

The West’s response to Russian aggression has usually been too little, too late, and devoid of the one voice that really matters — President Trump’s.

But at last, his administration is taking action, and Mr. Trump has spoken out, tentatively. On Thursday the Treasury Department announced it was imposing sanctions for the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 election. Officials have denounced the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain and Russia’s devastating bombing missions in Syria.

"Tentatively" is putting it mildly: in his St. Patrick's press availability yesterday with the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, later in the morning after the Treasury department issued its announcement, he answered one question:

Notes from the Undrained Swamp

Domenico Remp (1620-99) Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities, via Wikimedia Commons.

Happened to look at the Axios front page, at a report on this evening's meeting between Schumer and McConnell, which sounds like progress since they were reported to be not speaking to each other at all this afternoon, but didn't get anywhere, and checking out the White House gossip there for just the last few hours, which is really something else, as it adds up:

1. Trump is pissed off with Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, accused of "going rogue" when he was hanging out with Florida governor Rick Scott a couple of weeks ago and decided to make Florida exempt from Interior's program to force oil and gas drilling on all coastal states whether they like it or not, although Florida's Gulf Coast has the best reserves off any coast in the Lower 48, and although the way he did it is apparently illegal:

The department’s offshore leasing policies are guided by a strict process set by statute that can only take certain areas out of consideration gradually through a multi-year process that specifically weighs various factors, like environmental risks and oil and gas resource potential. By tweeting Florida would be removed just days after announcing the offshore leasing plan, and without considering any of those factors, Zinke didn’t follow the statute.

But he's not totally pissed off, because he really likes Zinke, who was a Navy Seal. I imagine it's somebody other than Trump who is truly pissed off with Zinke, and told Axios about his feelings as part of an effort to do something about this criminality. Good luck!

The Women of Trump

Maybe he could take on a phalanx of female bodyguards, like Colonel Qadhafi. Photo by Yahoo via Pakistan's The Express Tribune.

This piece of op-ed by Jen Kerns in The Hill, enthusiastically acclaimed by Uday or Qusay, has something very odd about it:

Trump's first year in office was the year of the woman https://t.co/ZBcZT2aP9K

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 17, 2018

WTF? This bizarre story doesn't give any numbers--just "astounding"--or criteria for what they mean by "senior position", so it's impossible to tell exactly how false it is, but it's clearly false. pic.twitter.com/Z0fid8I5yR

— Yask Not What Your Country Can Do For You (@Yastreblyansky) January 17, 2018

It literally refuses to tell the reader its own story: That there's something "astounding" about the number of women the Emperor has hired as opposed to his three most recent predecessors. Why haven't the media been acclaiming this? Kern blames it on liberal bias, but why isn't she saying what it is?

Annals of Derp: The Normalizing

Image via Steamspy.

So one of the twitterers I follow is a horrible hasbarist called Omri Ceren, who keeps you up to the minute on the propaganda messaging of the Netanyahu government. I don't usually address him directly, because he's very deep into the ugly, and there are usually about ten presuppositions you'd need to shoot down before getting to his point, but he's been wallowing into the Trumpery lately, naturally, and this particular slur, against former ambassador Michael McFaul, got my goat. It's also a case of The Normalizing, where the author indignantly rejects evidence of the Trump incompetence as if they were just making stuff up out of spite. Happily, Ceren turned out to be just as wrong as you might have hoped.

Trump's been in office 3 months & hasnt even NAMED (let alone confirmed) a Dep Sec for Defense or State. That is crazy. 886 tweets though

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) April 20, 2017

Tweet has 10K rts & 17K likes

It's false. Has been for wks

Just a Google search for "Trump names deputy state defense" brings up the names https://t.co/ZTzmrE62B7

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) April 22, 2017

@omriceren Hahahaha. That's @NYPost --Trump *intended* to nominate Patrick Shanahan as of March 16 but hasn't yet done so. https://t.co/un0eFPrl9E

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) April 22, 2017

Cheap shots: Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinet of curiosities from the collections of the Victor Wynd Museum, via ChurchOfHalloween.

I'll be back later...

@lauriedtmann @matthewstoller This is what people need to get--the model is Central Asian style fundamentalist family kleptotyrannies.

— El Çid (@EnBuenora) November 29, 2016

Petraeus is a felon! (That's what Andrew C McCarthy said https://t.co/o3u7D9Crfs)

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) November 29, 2016

Eleven reasons why climate denier #MyronEbell isn’t fit to lead the @EPA transition: https://t.co/YPCrdR40Vz?

— Climate Reality (@ClimateReality) November 30, 2016