Trump Knows Shit About Shit, Plus
I guess it's time to fall in line again, plus fighting about the war department, plus music.
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Quick ditty today; places to do, people to be.
Trump Knows Shit About Shit
Shit like how to manipulate, intimidate and charm people, although I don’t understand that last; how to get stuff built by contractors doing a decent job in the full knowledge that he may stiff them; how to bribe and bully officals in various potentially troubling capacities (building inspectors, f’rinstance); how to satisfy his aesthetic. His aesthetic is obviously shit but it’s consistent and when he goes on a rant about somebody damaging his precious limestone in the country club annex that used to be the Rose Garden, it’s clear he knows what he’s talking about. He obviously knows how to source all that gilt crap he slathers on everything. He knows shit.
He doesn’t know shit about a whole lot of other shit—it’s why the regime is littered with Project 2025 people who know how to wreck shit in strategic fashion, and with Christian nationalists who know how to wrap up the support of critical voters and legislators.
Speaking of Christian nationalists and other fundamentalist crazies, my brother suggested recently that they clearly have a witch problem with all these women troubling their blood and souls, and they need to bring back witch hunts. To which I say they already have. In a very real sense, all women are witches to them, and they all need corralled. (My brother has a very otherworldly sense of humor sometimes, don’t light him up.)
I guess it's time to fall in line again
I’ve been running across an increasing number of people in various social media and other precincts excoriating voters and former voters for abandoning Democrats in last year’s elections. In truth Democrats didn’t too poorly in congressional elections; they lost congress but they were going to. Anyway, it’s the presidential election drawing the ire, aimed mostly at people who protested the Gaza genocide and supported Palestinians.
In most of these instances the sentiment is that the voters in question should have just got over it instead of staying home or, in very small numbers, voting for Trump in the desperate (and yes, nutso) belief he might improve that particular situation.
Did those voters cost Democrats the White House? Well, no, obviously: the people who somehow couldn’t manage to avoid complicity in genocide and who vocally supported the sometimes violent suppression of protests against the genocide and in favor of Palestinian human rights—they cost Democrats the White House, along with the Biden reelection stupidity and an utter inability to internalize the fact that their gleaming economy wasn’t doing shit for some people.
Lots of countries don’t supply weapons and rhetorical/diplomatic cover for genocidaires, or violate their own country’s laws against doing so. It can’t be that hard.
And about those laws: Rule of law! Rule of law! Lots of people don’t seem to give much of a fuck about the rule of law when it’s their team doing the scorning of it. We’re often told that if we want change we have to demand better of our leaders, but actually do it—put your neck on the line or your academic career or your green card or student visa in protests, or even support a candidate the party leaders don’t—and you get inundated with bile.
The closest thing to a reasonable argument against challenging the party physically—drawing negative attention to it—or at the polls is that it won’t do any good anyway, so why not just vote for them. Well, okay, I guess. Demand change, but not in any way that might have a ghost of a chance of working. And besides, it was only Palestinians. Only genocide. Only the entire party leadership in service to big money and big horrors.
I mean, fuck.
Fighting about the war department
Oh, come on. It’s been the defense department for almost 80 years, and we’ve been blowing shit and people up the entire time, and helping other people do it too. We’ve been materially complicit in at least two genocides, in East Timor and now Gaza; we’ve sold hundreds of billions of weapons to some of the world’s most despotic regimes, sometimes selling or giving away so much that we run out of our own stuff; and we’ve armed and funded some of the very worst non-state militias and whatever in the world, as with the South and Central American dirty wars and the mujaheddin/future Taliban.
We’re constantly at war. I understand the impulse to reject anything Trump suggests but we’re the better part of a century into calling it the defense department so obviously nobody else is gonna change it. It’s the war department.
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Music
Yard Act with Elton John, “100% Endurance”
Yard Act (without Elton John) Where’s My Utopia, “100% Endurance”
Adrianne Lenker, bright future, “No Machine”
Wet Leg, Moisturizer, “CPR”
Jools Holland and Joe Strummer, Small World Big Band, “The Return of the Blues Cowboy”
All I got. Take care, be well.
You've nailed this, Weldon. "Knows shit...about shit."
That about sums up Trump. From his upholstered brothel down in Florida to the upholstered brothel plans he has in mind for the White House, he sure knows a thing or two about shit.
On the idiotic mistake made by voters switching to Trump or not voting at all, thus enabling Trump, it's hard to know where to begin. Just like sports teams and their fans who disdain playing defense because it isn't sexy, voters refusing to play defense because it isn't inspiring bring about the deepening of their misery. It's beyond stupid but seems firmly entrenched in the eligible voting public.