He is Rizz

Seeing a lot of headshaking over the President's Easter message,  which gives up the traditional "Happy Easter, even to the haters and lunatics" in favor of what I suppose he considers the true Churchillian leader-at-war tone and doesn't mention the holiest day of the Christian year at all:

It does look like decompensation in the personality disorder, like a complete loss of self-control, or at least an acceleration. I don't think he's introduced "fuck" into his written public communications before (though he's certainly been uttering it in rallies as far back as 2022, not to mention performing a mime blow job at a rally days before the 2024 election, which did not wreck his chances of winning), and Laura Loomer is going to wonder what he means by offering praise to Allah, and the 25th Amendment talk is certainly getting louder out here where you and I hang out, but I'd note that Vice President Vance and Speaker Johnson, the central figures in an invocation of the 25th, aren't listening to us, or as far as I can tell to Trump either (you can be sure if Johnson is asked what he thinks of this particular Truth, he'll say he hasn't had time to look at it, presumably because he's so busy preventing government from functioning).

But there are a couple of signs that the performance is more calculated than crazy.

One is the TACO maneuver hidden inside it: that 48-hour deadline is a 24-hour step back from the 48-hour deadline he issued on Saturday, if I'm reading that Truth right

“Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

(And Hell shall reign forever and ever! Hallelujah! How Eastery was that?!) 

Though it's impossible to figure where exactly that 10 days would have started, and the tell-tale "two to three weeks" surely meant, as usual, that he had no idea himself:

Trump on March 21 originally gave Tehran a 48-hour deadline, but then extended it, saying he wanted to give talks a chance to succeed.

Iran has rejected a 15-point US plan presented to it through Pakistani mediators but on April 4 left open the possibility of further negotiations.

In an April 1 televised address, Trump also suggested peace talks -- either directly or indirectly -- were still possible, but he also threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" and "hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks."

Then, though he certainly sounds a bit linguistically wilder than yesterday, with the Hormuz Strait becoming the "Fuckin' Strait" and the crusader's Glory to GOD turning into I don't know whose praise to Allah (our own M. de Norpois, NYT's David Sanger, says the language is "unusually vivid"), he may be using a technique he's used since Roy Cohn days, reacting to a public setback by not retreating but doubling down; here, I think, confronting the anger his war has caused among the Known Nothing Buchananites of his base, like Marjorie Taylor Greene with an appeal to the more important part, the nihilist bros who love him because he's a comedian, the podcast audience, the Beavises and Butt-Heads who really pulled him across the finish line in the battleground states in 2016 and 2024, though not in the plague year 2020. Those dudes are going to love "Fuckin' Strait".

I don't know that it will make the difference, though—I kind of think it won't, all things considered, between the gas prices and the advent of what looks like a real war, on its way to becoming either a quagmire or an ignominious US defeat as the Fuckin' Strait remains closed or a toll road where everybody ponies up the toll, from Japan to the Gulf states (whose natural gas US needs right now desperately for fertilizing the spring planting, though our own natural gas is sufficient most of the year), plus the stink of corruption everyone is starting to become aware with associated with the abusive management in DHS and DOJ. Trump can fire all the clowns in the cabinet from Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to Kash Patel, but he can't stop the rot until he fires himself and the multibillion-dollar presidenting business in which his major clients, Saudi Arabia and UAE, call the shots alongside Putin and Netanyahu. We'll see what happens, as the man says, in two or three weeks, but I think he's lost the chance, as he did in 2020, to win his base back with rhetoric alone..

Literary Corner: For Our Sins

 

Image by Cowicide, December 2021.

Happy Easter Everyone!

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

Happy Easter to all, including crooked
and corrupt prosecutors and judges
that are doing everything possible
to interfere with the presidential
election of 2024, and put me in prison,
including those many people that I completely &
totally despise because they want to destroy
America, a now failing nation, like “deranged”
Jack Smith, who is evil and “sick,”
Mrs. Fani “Fauni” Wade, who said
she hardly knew the “special” prosecutor,
only to find that he spent years “loving” her,
long before the Georgia persecution
of President Trump began (and thereby making
the case against me null, void, and illegal!),
and lazy on violent crime Alvin Bragg who,
with crooked Joe’s DOJ thugs, unfairly working
in the D.A.’s office, illegally indicted me
on a case he never wanted to bring and
virtually all legal scholars say is a case
that should not be brought, is breaking the
law in doing so (Pomerantz!), was turned
down by all other law enforcement authorities,
and is not a crime. Happy Easter everyone!

As is traditional in his annual Easter messages, the former president (who has eloquently said of Easter that it is "just a very special— time for me. And it really represents family and get-together and—and something, you know, if you're a—a Christian"), takes time to reach out to folks he may have neglected for a while over the past year, especially those engaged in what he calls "election interference", by which he means trying to hold him to account for the various crimes he's committed over the past eight-odd years, which might, if he's convicted, make it harder for him to win another term, kind of like the 48 Russian athletes who had Olympic medals taken from them since 2008, just because they used performance-enhancing drugs. It really seems unfair, if you think about it, or even more if you don't think about it.

Blogging Beyond Theocracy

Gut yom tov, merry Easter, and Ramadan kareem to all who celebrate, and at least some merriment to those who don't (I got to attend the extended family seder last night, for the first time in three years, and that's something to be grateful for), because we could all use some merriment right now, regardless of faith or lack thereof.

St. Conilius of Bologna, British Library Medieval, Add. 49622., via.  Just kidding. But the manuscript shelfmark is real.

The tradition of the Easter egg commemorates a miracle in the vita of the martyred Saint Conilius, deacon in a congregation of 5th-century Bononia, who found his family at the end of one Lent too poor for meat with which to break the fast, except a little bacon. He saw a fat hare in his garden, nibbling at the new ramps, and lunged for it—but as he was readying himself to break its neck he saw its eyes filling with tears, and bethought himself of the Blessed Virgin's suffering through the death of her Son on the Cross, and let the animal go. It scampered away, but not without pausing here and there in the bushes, where it miraculously laid a sequence of eggs about the size of duck's eggs and equally rich, in a rainbow of different colors. Conilius gathered up a dozen or so and brought them home, where he invented spaghetti alla carbonara.

Wrote this back in 2013, and reprinted the original post that contained it in 2015, and always felt it has not been sufficiently praised, possibly because it came at the end of the o.p. and nobody ever read that far, so this is a re-up of the 2017 version.

Of course it is an alternative fact, not true, or #fakenews, depending on your political opinions. It did not happen, nor has anybody other than me ever said it did. It is an inauthentic myth, as is the story circulating on Twitter:

Literary Corner: Easter Message

Down the bunny trail https://t.co/UmwLqJEX7A

— Jumpin Jack Flash It's a Yas Yas Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 3, 2021

Why Is It?

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

Why is it that every time the 2020 ELECTION
FRAUD is discussed, the Fake News Media
consistently states that such charges are baseless,

unfounded, unwarranted, etc.? Sadly, there was
massive fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election,
and many very angry people understand that.

With each passing day, and unfortunately
for the Radical Left CRAZIES, more and more facts
are coming out. Other than that, Happy Easter!

Brooks is Risen

DAVID BROOKS

The Cruelest Month

Starnbergersee, Bavaria. CreditPhoto by Tourismusvarband Starnberger Fünf-Seen-Land.

Image

By David Brooks

April 1, 2018

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.

First, winter kept us warm. It covered earth in forgetful snow. It fed a little life with dried tubers. Second, summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain. We stopped in the colonnade and went on in sunlight into the Hofgarten. Third, we drank coffee and talked for an hour.

The other day, a woman I'll call Marie told me, “I'm not Russian at all. My family is from Lithuania, authentic German, and when we were children, staying at the archduke's place, he took me out on a sled. The archduke is my cousin. I was frightened. He said, ‘Marie, Marie, hold on tight.’ ”

In the mountains, there you feel free. I read much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch? What branches grow out of this stony rubbish? I can't speak for everybody, but I suspect it will be something higher and more lovely, reminding me of Abraham Lincoln, as things usually do.

Blogging Past Theocracy

St. Conilius of Bologna, Briish Library Medieval, Add. 49622., via.  Just kidding. But the manuscript shelfmark is real.

The tradition of the Easter egg commemorates a miracle in the vita of the martyred Saint Conilius, deacon in a congregation of 5th-century Bononia, who found his family at the end of one Lent too poor for meat with which to break the fast, except a little bacon. He saw a fat hare in his garden, nibbling at the new ramps, and lunged for it—but as he was readying himself to break its neck he saw its eyes filling with tears, and bethought himself of the Blessed Virgin's suffering through the death of her Son on the Cross, and let the animal go. It scampered away, but not without pausing here and there in the bushes, where it miraculously laid a sequence of eggs about the size of duck's eggs and equally rich, in a rainbow of different colors. Conilius gathered up a dozen or so and brought them home, where he invented spaghetti alla carbonara.

Wrote this back in 2013, and reprinted the original post that contained it in 2015, and always felt it has not been sufficiently praised, possibly because it came at the end of the o.p. and nobody ever read that far, so here I go again.

Of course it is an alternative fact, not true, or #fakenews, depending on your political opinions. It did not happen, nor has anybody other than me ever said it did. It is an inauthentic myth, as is the story circulating on Twitter:

My president went to Latin America, and all I got was this lousy figure of speech

Gaeta. From the Italian blog "La Solitudine Verticale—'Stay hungry, stay foolish'"

Dowd apparently got to travel with the entourage to Havana and Buenos Aires, and she must have had a fairly good time, because she's in a fairly benign mood toward Obama, and lays off the presidential candidates altogether, and doesn't have a truly harsh word for anybody but George W. Bush—even Raúl Castro comes off more as cute—and I don't feel like fisking through the whole thing, because what for, but I was very startled for literary reasons by her opening:

WASHINGTON — BARACK OBAMA is tangoing into history, and there’s something perfect about that.

The tango has been described as vertical solitude. And this president is all about vertical solitude.

Really? It doesn't take two? And where did you pick up this cliché-destroying observation?

Good News for Barabbas

Rerun from April 2012:

ANCHOR: Reporting here on the arrest of unorthodox rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, who was picked up by legionnaires after a brief struggle outside Jerusalem in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he and his followers were sleeping off the effects of yesterday's Passover seder, very early this morning. With me is our Caesarea bureau chief Rex Tremenda, and legal correspondent Gloria Tibi, and Rex? Can you fill us in on the latest developments?

Gethsemane. From Israel Travel & Tours.

REX: Well, Steve, we have a report on the one soldier who was injured—he lost part of
an ear—and he's going to be fine. None of the followers were taken into custody, the authorities are not regarding them as dangerous—one official who asked us not to use his name said they were quote a bunch of tax collectors and prostitutes unquote. If you'll pardon my Vulgar Latin.

ANCHOR: Heh-heh! And the rabbi himself?

REX: Rabbi Jesus is at the headquarters of the Hebrews' high priest, Caiaphas, as we speak.

ANCHOR: Now, Gloria, we understand he's being put on trial there, for blasphemy. What does he need to do this morning?

A Libertarian Easter

How conservatives really think about the Lord.

From the monumental OMFG Raptor Jesus by Benpadiah.

Via Chris Allen. Good post, too.

Drawing by A.F. Branco for The Liberty Alliance. This one apparently not meant ironically.

For a more serious approach, don't miss Tengrain and Vixen Blogging Against Theocracy.