THINK TRUMP IS TIRED OF WINNING YET?
Don't get me wrong! Watching Trump suckle at the teat of failure is always nothing less than divine. But let’s pause for a moment and consider the implications of Trump failing to pass his first piece of signature legislative business: the repeal and replacement of that dreaded bugaboo, Obamacare. And no, it was not all just a part of some brilliant scheme by Steve Bannon to smoke out disloyal Republicans in order to identify them so that they might be targeted for future removal, as some right wingers have begun to speculate.
No, two things are immediately plain to see. First, up until early Friday afternoon, Trump actually thought he had the political capital to bull this thing trough Congress. Second, it's obvious that Trump's first order of business since Friday afternoon's unprecedented humiliation has been to find someone, ANYONE, to soak up the blame for his total, abject failure.
So... who has Trump tried to blame so far?
The Democrats were his first target, of course, as anyone could have told you they were going to be. But even a blind man could see that it isn’t the Democrats who pooped in Trump’s metaphorical punch bowl this time. No, this was clearly a friendly fire incident. It was a couple dozen Republicans who refused to back Trump's dead-on-arrival legislative loser of a healthcare package.
One interesting aspect of this phenomenon is trying to suss out exactly why so many Republican House members refused to back both their President and their Speaker. I mean, it's hard to quantify just exactly how big of a deal this is... how bad it makes the GOP look.
Rhetorically, the Republican nay-sayers are all publicly criticizing AHCA from the right; saying that it does, and costs, too much. This is to be expected, as the modern GOP is a rigid and doctrinaire conservative movementarian party.
However, the way yer old pal Jerky sees it, I think the real reason these "Freedom Caucus" cuckoos buckled and joined the Dems is because deep down, they knew it was a terrible piece of legislation. And even if, as philosophically rigid conservative movementarians, they couldn't give less of a shit about millions of Americans losing their healthcare coverage... they do give a shit about keeping their jobs, and all the perks and power that come with their political careers.
Which brings us to Saturday afternoon, when Trump took time out from his no doubt hectic schedule to take to Twitter and make a television viewing suggestion to all his many followers and fans:
Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M.— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 25, 2017
Gee, after such a bruising couple of days, I wonder why Trump could possibly think it was important for his followers to tune into that walking, talking, plastic surgery disaster's show? Let's tune in and find out!
Oooh... NOW I get it! Trump has settled on his scapegoat! He's decided Wisconsin's own Paul Ryan (R-Munster) is going to be the one to absorb all the blame for Trumpcare’s failure! And he's chosen Jeanine Pirro, the Wicked Witch of Westchester, to serve as his Creeping Death!
Personally, yer old pal Jerky's favorite moment from the above video is when this reptilian scorpion-woman disingenuously hisses through her pursed buccal sphincter: "Now, I certainly have not spoken with the President about ANY of this!" CLASSIC!
Personally, yer old pal Jerky's favorite moment from the above video is when this reptilian scorpion-woman disingenuously hisses through her pursed buccal sphincter: "Now, I certainly have not spoken with the President about ANY of this!" CLASSIC!
You know, there's just something so nakedly transparent about all this, so pathetically desperate and pathologically deceitful… it's just so fucking AWESOME!!!
- Did y'all catch former CIA Director James Woolsey tattling on disgraced National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, giving details about how he was there for the highly troubling White House meetings during which Flynn and his gaggle of Turkish paymasters tried to convince Trump to approve their plan to kidnap exiled cleric Fetulah Gulen from his compound in the Poconos and whisk him back to Turkey for... (ahem) "questioning" by the Erdogan regime? Wasn't it cute the way Woolsey backed away with his hands held up in front of him while shakily explaining how he, himself, had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO with those profoundly illegal plans?
- And did you hear that Flynn might... MIGHT!!! ...have turned state witness against Trump, striking a deal with the FBI in their whole ongoing probe into the connections between the Trump administration and Trump private interests with the Kremlin, Russian oligarchs, and Russian organized crime? If true... Yowza.
- One of the many delightful political ironies that took place last week was when the United States Supreme Court unanimously concluded that Trump's Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, who was at that very moment being interviewed for the job by the Senate Judiciary Committee, really shit the metaphotical bed in his 2008 decision involving the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. As if that wasn't enough, Gorsuch was later taken to the woodshed by Minesotta's Al Franken, the man who will soon become America's first Jewish President, according to yer old pal Jerky's crystal ball.
- Remember back in our March 19 edition, when I suggested you read the Washington Post's really pretty funny satirical defense of what was being described as Trump's "hard power" budget? It was titled "Trump's Budget Makes Perfect Sense and Will Fix American and I'll Tell You Why", and it described how cutting Meals on Wheels was just the thing to whip our fat, crippled seniors back into fighting trim... you know, stuff like that. It was pretty obvious that the budget was being mocked. Obvious to everyone... except the White House, apparently, who decided to chalk it up as a win in their daily release of pro-Trump knob-polishing drivel from the fart-catching likes of FOX "News" and Breitbart. Oopsie!
- Did you know that, in Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko (who's been in power since 1994 for fuck's sake) recently implemented a $230 "social parasite tax" that you have to pay if you go six months without working a job of some sort? The citizens of Belarus don't like it, but Lukashenko, like Trump, takes his ruling style cues from fellow strongman Vladimir Putin. Which is also why Americans should probably take note. With Trump's key, signature legislative effort now reduced to a mouthful of smoldering ash, he's probably going to be looking overseas for innovative new ways to pay for all those military increases he wants so badly. Because, let's face it, firing Big Bird might prove popular with his base, but it's small beans in terms of savings. Considering Lukashenko already has the Putin seal of approval, can a tax on, oh... say, speaking Spanish in public, or having "overly melenated skin" be far behind?
- And finally for today, on the very same day that Conspiritard-in-Chief Alex Jones attempted to weasel his way out of a lawsuit by publicly apologizing for the role he played in spreading all that PizzaGate nonsense over the past few months, dozens of the self-same people he'd helped to inspire gathered in Washington to "demand PizzaGate justice" or some other such bullshit. How did we get to the point where perfect idiots who literally know nothing about anything all of a sudden think that they know everything there is to know about everything, without even having to crack a book?! Fucking Internet has doomed us all, folks.
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SUGGESTED READINGS
1. Gotta admit, of all the stories I've run across in the last couple of days' websurfing, the one that caught me most off-guard was "Trafficked and Enslaved: The Teenagers Tending UK Cannabis Farms" in The Guardian, by Amelia Gentleman. She presents the harrowing tales of Vietnamese teens who are hoodwinked into "tending Britain's makeshift drug factories in empty buildings from suburban homes to a nuclear bunker." Gentleman writes:
The story of how much of the UK’s cannabis is grown sounds too far-fetched to be true: an international network of traffickers brings teenage boys from Vietnam to become enslaved gardeners in British suburbs. Yet every few weeks, another farm is discovered and new arrests are made.
Local newspapers offer fleeting insights into the industry, with scant facts: that police raided a red-brick terrace house on a suburban road in Liverpool after neighbours complained of the smell, and found the house stripped of furniture and converted into a cannabis farm, with two teenage boys hiding, terrified, beneath the floorboards. That a cannabis gardener in County Armagh was found living on tins of dog food. Or that police visited a two-storey house in Plymouth and found cannabis plants in every room, cellar to attic, tended by a Vietnamese boy with injuries to his face, who said he was 13; he was put in the care of social services while investigations were launched, but within days he had disappeared.This is some incredibly dark shit that Gentleman is exposing, here, and she's doing great work by bringing the stories of individual victims to the public's attention. Please give her story a read.
2. If you've been reading my work for any amount of time, you're likely very much aware that yer old pal Jerky worships unabashedly at the Temple of Floyd. You're also likely very much aware that I am a huge fan of progressive rock in general, and that, as a proud French Canadian, I take great delight in my people's wholehearted embracing of a musical genre that is considered by Anglo music snobs to be the worst of the worst of the worst. And so you might think I'd be totally on board for composer Julien Bilodeau's re-imagining of Roger Waters' rock opera The Wall, as performed by the world renowned Opera de Montreal, under the title Another Brick in the Wall. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons including but not limited to the fact that there's already a nearly fatal dose of pomposity in the original, rock opera version... I'm not. Not that it's going to matter to the promoters. It's been such a success in Montreal, they're taking the show on the road. In any case, you can check out the link provided above for a sense of how Bilodeau "improved" upon the source material for his project.
3. Check out this absolutely bonkers trailer for a new "extreme horror" film called The Evil Within, which you can watch via Video on Demand at Amazon (sorry, but I'm having trouble finding a Canadian VOD source at the moment)...
Pretty cuckoo, right? Well guess what? The back story on how this film got made is even more bonkers than this trailer makes the movie out to be. The Evil Within was the fifteen years in the making passion project of millionaire meth addict (and cinematic neophyte) Andrew Rork Getty (of the GETTY Gettys), who died before he could see his project be released. Which is kind of sad, because by the looks of things, The Evil Within has the makings to be a lasting and legit cult classic. Once I've found a way to pay for and download it up here in the Great White North, I'll publish my review over at The Mediavore!
Pretty cuckoo, right? Well guess what? The back story on how this film got made is even more bonkers than this trailer makes the movie out to be. The Evil Within was the fifteen years in the making passion project of millionaire meth addict (and cinematic neophyte) Andrew Rork Getty (of the GETTY Gettys), who died before he could see his project be released. Which is kind of sad, because by the looks of things, The Evil Within has the makings to be a lasting and legit cult classic. Once I've found a way to pay for and download it up here in the Great White North, I'll publish my review over at The Mediavore!
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“This, to us, is something that we're not going to give up on. We're not going to give up on destroying the healthcare system for the American people.”
- Paul Ryan (R-Munster) lets loose with the mother of all Freudian slips after the humiliating friendly fire downfall of his and Trump's signature piece of conservative movementarian pseudo-legislation. By the way, if you're interested in finding out what could possibly be the quintessential Trump administration quote uttered so far, the Washington Post has a real groovy tournament going on to figure out that very thing!
DDD EXTRAS
THE TAKEAWAY
All in all it's just another day filled with what feels like an unprecedented wave of insults and injuries, great and small. I mean, am I crazy, or does it seem as though the foundations of Western civilization are crumbling beneath our collective feet as we marvel (and, occasionally, blog) about it all?
- If you want to learn about some cool and/or weird things that happened on whatever day of history that it happens to be when you're reading this, why not check out our sister-site, Useless Eater Blog? You're sure to find something of interest, guaranteed!
- Did you see the video I linked to yesterday, featuring Samantha Bee's hilarious extended take-down of Nazi-sympathizing Hungarian wannabe alpha male Sebastian Gorka? If you didn't, you should go back and check it out!
- Over at The Mediavore, I serve up a steaming slice of Satanic 70's Made-for-TV goodness! Yer gonna love it!
All in all it's just another day filled with what feels like an unprecedented wave of insults and injuries, great and small. I mean, am I crazy, or does it seem as though the foundations of Western civilization are crumbling beneath our collective feet as we marvel (and, occasionally, blog) about it all?
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