Shitposting and Pissposting

📌 Told y'all he is trash 🤮🐥

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— tweety (@bluskypolitics.bsky.social) October 19, 2025 at 7:45 AM

That's at https://bsky.app/profile/bluskypolitics.bsky.social/post/3m3ka37hh7s2z if you want to look at the video

Maybe what he's doing here is asserting that he isn't king, at least not yet, in the sense that if he was king that's what he'd be doing, jetting around in his shitbombing jet with his crown on, shitbombing all his  enemies in the urban streets, or maybe we should read it as a warning of what he's going to do once he's taken the final steps, or maybe we should read it as a metaphor for what he's already doing to his enemies, in which the jet stands for his weaponized Department of Justice and the shit for the bogus lawsuits and unfounded criminal investigations he's flinging at all the people who exposed his criminality, and he's claiming to be king already.

 Then again, there's this one:

Showtime

 

This may be more obvious than I think, but this week's votes on a continuing resolution to keep the government going past Friday's debt ceiling deadline until September are a kind of confession of failure on the part of House Republicans, and Speaker Mike Johnson in particular, retreating from the effort to use reconciliation rules to put through the huge package of tax cuts and spending cuts they passed on February 25 for fiscal year 2025. Never mind, said Johnson: Elon and Donald can do it, or something like it.

But Johnson said those cuts would be reserved for legislation to fund the government in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1.

"We will actually be able to change the way this is done and incorporate all the extraordinary savings that DOGE is uncovering through fraud, waste and abuse, the other revenues that President Trump is bringing about because of his policies," Johnson told the Fox News program "Sunday Morning Futures."

Although as you know DOGE hasn't uncovered any fraud, waste, or abuse at all that they're able to publicly identify, and their own estimate of how much money they've managed to save so far—$105 billion—would be pretty pathetic as an attack on a $2 trillion deficit, if it were accurate, which it clearly isn't anywhere near. While the revenue that President Trump is "bringing about because of his policies" means tariffs, and it's pretty hard to estimate, what with Trump changing his mind up to three or four times in a given day (just announced he's doubling the tariffs on steel and aluminum he's landing on Canada on Wednesday, from 25% to 50%), but the best guesses seem to make it around $120 billion a year, which also isn't much, though the rise in consumer prices it will bring on, focused on the areas of electronics and clothing, motor vehicles and food, will cost us around $1600-$2000 a year per household. Not only a tax on Americans, whatever Trump may imagine, but a very regressive tax, mostly felt by those with lower incomes (the lower your income, the higher the proportion of it that you end up spending on stuff like food and clothing, or really anything).

The Road to Dictatorship

 

That thing about "Speaker" Mike Johnson proposing to release more video from the January 6 insurrection, but only with some of the faces of the rioters blurred out "because we don't want them to be retaliated against and we don't want them to be charged by the DOJ," is that that completely obviates the purpose Republicans claimed to have for releasing them, which was supposed to be for "transparency".

Actually, let's just come out and say it, the official reason for demanding the public release of the videos was the purported evidence they would probably have of who the "real" villains of January 6 were—not the 688 simple folks who have been convicted of crimes committed in the affair, 587 of them pleading guilty, but the masterminds of "antifa" and/or the FBI who secretly organized the thing. Which, of course, never happened, so there wouldn't be any evidence on the videos that it did. The object of Gaetz and Biggs and Gohmert and Greene and all those Republicans demanding the release of the videos was not, in fact, to get them released (against the advice of Capitol security, which feared making them generally available would reveal too much about the arrangements in the building, such as the locations of security cameras), but to nourish the paranoid belief that the 688 criminal convicts (or however many there are now) had been entrapped by the Deep State/Communist/Fascist conspiracy, by making it look as if the Capitol authorities were holding stuff back.

Lie like a Trump: Update

February 2016—he's a brand-new freshman, which makes me wonder why NPR went to him as an authority (update: maybe the senior members are getting more and more reluctant to defend the Trump). Also wonder what lie he was telling when he made this weasel face?

The transcript of that interview with Mike Johnson (R-LA) is up:

INSKEEP: One other thing, Congressman, before I let you go, the president made a statement the other day. He was talking at Central Command - United States Central Command. And he said that the media were hiding terrorist attacks, not reporting terrorist attacks. It was a false claim. The White House was asked for evidence that there were hidden terrorist attacks. They came up with a list of many attacks, like the attack on Paris or Nice, France, that we've covered extensively, that other people have covered extensively. It's just a false claim.

But that leads to my question. If the president's policies are right, why does he have to make false statements to defend them? Why can't the truth suffice?

JOHNSON: Well, listen, I think the truth is out there. I think NPR does a fair job in objectively covering that. But, you know, I would point out Fordham Law School's Center on National Security. Their new report - they released a report on ISIS prosecutions in the U.S. They determined that nearly 20 percent of alleged facilitators in ISIS prosecutions, in our country, do involve refugees and asylees. I mean, those kinds of facts are not as widely publicized, but they should be. I think the American people have a right to know that.

"The American people" have a right to not be abused by this kind of bald prevarication. Note the particular gesture by which he sidesteps Inskeep's question by suggesting the president's mendacity doesn't do any harm: "the truth is out there." It's OK to him that the president lies, because NPR is there and you can always listen to them instead if you want. Everybody playing her or his own part.

And further evidence that this is a Republican phenomenon, not a uniquely Trumpian thing, when he proceeds to dump a falsehood (see previous post) on NPR, one that makes the president's falsehood sound more plausible. Inskeep is perfectly likely to come up with a correction on this sooner or later, but the damage will have been done. It really enrages me.

Lie like a Trump

Syrian refugees in Lebanon, July 2013, via CNN.

Listening to Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) on NPR, who argues how the #MuslimBan isn't a Muslim ban because there are 40 Muslim-majority countries that aren't on it, and wishing as usual that somebody would explain: just because it will fail to ban most Muslims doesn't mean it's not a Muslim ban; it's just an ineffective one—it's aimed more at gratifying Trump's fans and giving the false impression that Trump has kept a campaign promise than anything else. It is a fake Muslim ban; a con, like everything Trump does. Nevertheless it plainly discriminates against Muslims. Just not all Muslims (and not any Muslims with whom President Trump has business dealings, as has been pointed out).

Anyway, Inskeep woke me by asking Johnson, to my surprise, why it is that Trump feels he needs to use untrue statements—I'll get the exact wording when they put up a transcript—and Johnson replied not with an answer to the question or a denial of its premises (why bother?) but some whataboutism, proffered with Kellyanne swiftness and aplomb; well, there are a lot of facts out there, and they don't get publicized, for instance this Fordham University study where they found that most 20% of people in the US charged as ISIS supporters were in fact refugees.

A little Googling revealed what he was talking about: