In Praise Of Onychophagia As Election Day (November 6, 2018) Approaches

The bloviating media will make November 6^th, 2018 the political equivalent of D-Day with the fate of civilization (as we know it) at stake. The Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office has already proclaimed the 2018 midterm election to be a referendum on... (wait for it)... him, even though his miserable name doesn't appear on a single ballot. So, that is your choice as a voter — civilization or him. If this is a (fair & balanced) wish for a Blue Wave to cleanse this nation of the filth of corruption, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap 'Zine]
Letter Of Recommendation: Nail-Biting
By Suzannah Showler


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

activity anxiety assiduously Assos beds believe best biting body boxer central Cleanthes clippers consider edge eventually example fingernails fingers gnawing gross habit hand human knowledge life lived lot matter medical method mind nail nail-biting philosopher quite raw recommend scraps shift something soul spectrum stop suggests talking teeth tidy told urge

created at TagCrowd.com

History’s first nail-biter of note was a Stoic philosopher, Cleanthes of Assos (ca. 330-230 BC). If you’re picturing him as a frail neurotic, idling in a life of the mind, try again: Cleanthes, who lived to be 99 and had nicknames like “Second Heracles” and “the Ass,” was a former boxer who funded his philosophy habit with a graveyard shift hauling buckets of water. The human body clearly mattered to him — in fact, he believed it could manifest the highest faculties of the rational soul. It makes a tidy, self-contained kind of sense that he was a biter, gnawing scraps of his own body in pursuit of knowledge.

I consider Cleanthes the patron saint of nail-biters. His example backs up my suspicion that nail-biting pairs best not with tension and anxiety but with the moody, concentric revolutions of meditative thought. The urge itself may be faintly animalistic, but answering it can give rise to the kind of mental wandering that makes us more human. It’s freeing and creative, more about process than results. If the point were only to shorten your fingernails, clippers would do — but clippers are regimented and mechanical, while nail-biting is, literally, a manual art. It’s personal, bespoke, precise: You have to bite just the right nail, just the right amount. The method is traditional, and the materials couldn’t be more locally sourced. It’s the ultimate handicraft.

My own career as a nail-biter stretches back more than 25 years, since the day I arrived in a first-grade classroom and discovered that my best friend had given up her religious thumb-sucking for something more mature. “Watch,” she said, bringing her fingers to her mouth and delicately working the edge of a nail with her teeth. It was both methodical and reckless, and I could see that it was powerful stuff. “You should try it,” she told me. I did. I still do. Sometimes I stop for a while and polish my fingernails fancy, drumming them with percussive importance everywhere I go. But this makes me feel bionic and overdeveloped, like some glossy future iteration of a human; it’s not quite right, and it never lasts. The armor chips and a nail cracks, begging for quick intervention. I always find my way back to biting.

I’ve come to believe that biting your nails has its virtues. I’m not talking about gnawing your fingers raw, leaving ragged scraps of keratin abandoned in exposed beds; I’m not talking about drawing blood. Like a lot of human activities, nail-biting exists on a spectrum, and as with a lot of spectrums, there is a tidy pot of pathology waiting at the far end. Problematic nail-biting is considered a body-focused repetitive behavior by the DSM-5; the medical term is onychophagia (roughly “claw-eating,” from the Ancient Greek). I don’t recommend you go there, and I don’t mean to make light. Even before we reach these medical extremes, nail-biting is often taken as indicating a level of anxiety we generally seek to avoid. Cartoon figures under pressure are always speed-gobbling their fingers, teeth chattering like wood-choppers. “Nail-biter” is shorthand for an election too close to call or the overtime clock running down on a tie game.

But just as the specter of hoarding shouldn’t rule out collecting as a hobby, not every nibbled nail should be judged by the end-stage diagnosis. Nail-biting is something most of us do idly, instinctively, in the most banal and stress-free of moments. A nail’s raw edge snags; you casually snip it with your teeth. It’s easy, natural and, you’ll have to admit, pretty satisfying. It’s an efficient way to prune yourself, claiming your shaggy, mortal body as your own. In its ideal form, biting your nails happens in a state of balance: between knowledge and intuition, human and animal, life and death. The trick is to stop short of neurosis and settle into something more like mindfulness.

Throughout my life as a nail-biter, I’ve often been told how gross and unhygienic it is. I consider this objection misplaced. Even assuming you’re not assiduously washing your hands, microdosing matter from your environment is actually quite good for you: Research suggests that childhood nail-biters may develop better immune systems and fewer allergies. It’s gross that there are pesticides in our food. It’s gross (not to mention psychosexually revealing) that adults drink milk intended for the infants of other species. At least your hand hygiene is within your control.

The central feature of being alive is that you eventually stop doing it. Parts of you are stopping all the time. Fingernails are one uncanny example: The living tissue chugs along under the skin, growing at about the rate of the earth’s tectonic shifting, pushing to the surface a plate of cellular runoff that’s always already DOA. Maintaining your fingernails is, like most grooming, a sloughing and shaping and tending of your body’s already-dead bits. You could approach the task with fussy metal instruments that look as if they belong in a scale model of a medieval torture chamber. Or you could do the simpler, wilder thing and use your highly serviceable chompers.

I’m not going to exhort you to start biting your nails if you’ve truly never felt the urge. My only suggestion is that you remain open to the joys of a more free-form, primal sort of self-care — an activity performed deliberately but at the whim of a lizard-brained curiosity. I’m saying that if you do it right, biting your nails isn’t a “habit”: It’s a ritual. # # #

[Suzannah Showler is a Canadian author who has written three books — a volume of cultural criticism and two books of poetry. She also writes long and short essays about un/real things, culture, and capitalism, Showler's work has appeared in Slate, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, LA Review of Books, The Toast, and Hazlitt.. She received a BA (English and contemporary studies) from King's College (NS), an MA (English and creative writing) from the University of Toronto (ON), and an MFA (creative writing) from The Ohio State University.]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

If You Have Ever Thought That The Horse's A$$ In The Oval Office Is A Real Ying-Yang (Or Worse) — Read This Essay By The BoBo Boy (David Brooks)

Like so much of the idiocy that spews from the disgusting maw of the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office, he recently proclaimed to the cheers of his clueless quislings that he was a Nationalist. Of course, the addled Horse's A$$ was thinking National Socialist of his beloved Germany (1933-1945) when he uttered "Nationalist." The BoBo Boy (David Brooks) , whose breakout book in 2000 was entitled Bobos In Paradise that is derived from"bourgeois bohemians that described the urban upper class at the dawn of the 21^st-century. BoBo Boy parses nationalism.into a yin (negative and dark) and yang (positive and bright). BoBo Boy refuses to surrender nationalism to the negative and dark Horse's A$$ when the examples of positive and bright nationalism abound in the United States of America. If this is a (fair & blaanced) rejection of negative and dark qualities of life, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Yes, I’m An American Nationalist
By BoBo Boy (David Brooks)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

America American attachment beauty class common connected despise diversity family father feel half humanity identity individual life live lot love loyalty miles nation nationalist needs neighborhood opposite particular people question race remain Renan sacrifice school society soul spiritual state street strongest things think threatened town traditions tribe urge walk whole

created at TagCrowd.com

Here’s a question: To which layer of society do you feel most attached: your neighborhood, town, county, state, nation or humanity as a whole?

I’ve put that question to a lot of people. About 5 percent say they feel most connected to humanity as a whole. A vast majority of the rest say their strongest attachment is to the local — their neighborhood or town.

I get that. Though we’ve moved around a lot, my family has a clear home base. If you start at East 15^th Street in Lower Manhattan and walk two miles south, you will have walked by where my great-grandfather had his butcher shop, where my maternal grandfather practiced law, where my father lived during high school, where I went to elementary school and where my youngest son now attends college.

That’s five generations within two miles. I feel a magical attachment to that neighborhood. The blocks and street names enchant in my mind.

And yet I have to say my strongest attachment is to the nation, to the United States. You could take New York out of my identity and I’d be sort of the same. If you took America out of my identity I’d be unrecognizable to myself.

What does this national attachment feel like? It feels a bit like any other kind of love — a romantic love, or a love between friends. It is not one thing that you love but the confluence of a hundred things. Yes, it is the beauty of the Rockies, but it is not just the land. It is the Declaration of Independence, but not just the creed. It’s winning World War II and Silicon Valley, but it is not just the accomplishments. It is the craziness, the diversity, our particular brand of madness.

The 19^th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan argued that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle”: “These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices that one has committed and the troubles that one has suffered.”

When I think of the great American nationalists, I think of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph and Walt Whitman, of course, but also the wild mixed-up urge that seizes millions to sacrifice, in sometimes opposite ways, for the common good: Gloria Steinem as much as Phyllis Schlafly, those who stand for the anthem and those who kneel.

Love for nation is an expanding love because it is love for the whole people. It’s an ennobling love because it comes with the urge to hospitality — to share what you love and to want to make more love by extending it to others.

In the soul of a nationalist, Yoram Hazony writes in his book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018), there is a gratifying tension between a person’s intense loyalty to her inherited traditions and an awareness that there are many other traditions, similarly beautiful, but that don’t happen to be her own.

In a family you can feel when love is stretched and broken. And you can feel the same thing in the nation. Today, when bombs are sent and vitriol follows, our common American nationalism, our mutual loyalty, is under strain.

It’s threatened by extreme individualism — people who put the needs of the individual above the needs of the community. It’s threatened by globalists — people whose hearts have been bleached of the particular love of place. The greatest threats come from those who claim to be nationalists but who are the opposite.

Donald Trump says he is a nationalist, but you can’t be a nationalist if you despise half the nation — any more than you can be a good father if you despise half your children. You can’t be a nationalist if you think that groups in the nation are in a zero-sum conflict with one another — class against class, race against race, tribe against tribe.

You can’t be a nationalist if you despise diversity. America is diversity; if you don’t love diversity, you are not an American nationalist.

“We have chased metaphysical and theological abstractions from politics. What now remains?” Renan asked. People remain. People with their same old need for belonging. People with their same old need to dedicate their lives to something, but with the great unifying object of love — the nation — taken away.

If you stop the love songs to America, take the celebration of America out of public life, you leave people spiritually bereft, robbed of a great devotion. The results are what you see — loss of connection, a tendency to catastrophize, feelings of anger, isolation and powerlessness. People begin to feel that the injustices in American society are the whole and there is no hope of redemption. They get the urge to burn everything down.

American nationalism has been one of the great joys, comforts and motivators of my life. I don’t know how anybody can live without it. ###

[David Brooks became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in September 2003. His column appears every Tuesday and Friday. He is currently a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004), and The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011). Most recently he has written The Road to Character (2015). Brooks received a BA (history) from the University of Chicago (IL) and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

This Past Week Of Attempted Pipe-Bombings & Gun Violence Shall LIve In Infamy For The Rest Of Our Days

With today's 'toon, Tom/Dan added this note:

Hey, all.

Okay, I say this every week, but man it is impossible to keep up lately. I rewrote this one late in the week to include the reference to the pipe bomber, and then rewrote what I had already rewritten to include the synagogue shooting. And there was a third incident this week, when a racist gun nut shot two African Americans at random in a grocery store, that I didn’t even have room to include.

This was a genuinely terrible week in America. It seems like everything I’ve been watching, thinking about, writing about for a quarter century is all coming together in some perfect storm of awfulness, and I don’t know how we claw our way out of this. We better hope Democrats at least take back the House in a couple of weeks, because I don’t know what this country is going to look like in two years if they don’t. No, that’s not quite right — I have a good sense of it, and it’s not pretty.

There’s a famous line, often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis: “when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” What I didn’t quite see coming is that it would literally embrace the symbols and antisemitism of Nazi Germany. The President of the United States now openly calls himself a “nationalist” and denounces “globalists.” I don’t know if he’s even smart enough to understand what he’s saying, or if that weasel Stephen Miller is just whispering sweet nothings in his ear that he then waddles up to the podium to repeat because he likes the sound of them, but the effect is the same either way. The worst people in the country now feel revved up and empowered. Deranged, hate-filled lunatics go on YouTube and find out how to construct pipe bombs. Gun nuts with their precious AK-47s decide to strike a blow against an imaginary Jewish conspiracy (to overrun the country with scary dark-skinned foreign invaders), and gun down a bunch of senior citizens gathered to celebrate a young child’s rite of passage. Trump didn’t create the conditions and the hatreds which made the events of this last week possible, but he sure as hell stokes the fire and basks in its warmth.

Wish I had a more positive note to end on, but I’m just worn out by all of it.

Until next time,
Dan (aka Tom)

During the past week, this blogger has exchanged e-mail with old college friends and the sentiments expressed nearly echoed those of Tom/Dan. Unfortunately, the media provides 24/7 "news" from the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office. The miserable SOB is a traitor and every last fool who agrees with the Horse's A$$ is a traitor as well. If this is a (fiar & balanced) indictment, so be it.

[x TMW]
Just Another Week In Hell
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow." His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Daily Kos. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly. Perkins received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002. When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political blog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001. More recently, Dan Perkins, pen name Tom Tomorrow, was named the winner of the 2013 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning. Even more recently, Dan Perkins was a runner-up for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning.]

Copyright © 2018 This Modern World/Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) Locates Our Heart Of Darkness — In The Oval Office

If you want to see a riled-up Crazy, you should see this blogger when he hears the oleaginous sound of the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office spouting faux compassion for the victims of violence fomented by the Horse's A$$ himself. The sight of that bloated, disgusting excuse for a human being on TV is even worse. The sight brings a stream of obscenities (and worse) from this blogger, who luckily lives alone and out of hearing. The Cobra (Maureen Dowd's nickname bestowed by POTUS 43) cuts right through the "heart of darkness" to find the source of all of the senseless violence (or attempted violence-by-mail) and locates Gound Zero — the Oval Office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. If this is a (fair & balanced) wish for the Horse's A$$ to reap what he sows, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
"Riling Up the Crazies"
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

Ailes America around attack Atwater behind Bill black bomb campaign caravan Cheney coming covered crazies Democrats documentary effort elect Father fear Fox Horton John Kavanaugh later News people pipe politics president produced protect racist Republican riling Roger Sayoc scare Sometimes spreading stir suspect told Trump turned voters watch white Willie

created at TagCrowd.com

As long as I’ve covered politics, Republicans have been trying to scare me.

Sometimes, it has been about gays and transgender people and uppity women looming, but usually it has been about people with darker skin looming.

They’re coming, always coming, to take things and change things and hurt people.

A Democratic president coined the expression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But it was Republicans who flipped the sentiment and turned it into a powerful and remorseless campaign ethos: Make voters fear fear itself.

President Trump was relieved when the FBI arrested a bomb suspect — a racist, homophobic, roid-raging, strip-club-loving, MAGA-worshiping Florida man who was living in a van that looked like a decoupage of Fox News propaganda.

The real fear that Cesar Sayoc Jr. is accused of spreading was distracting from the fake fear Trump was spreading to spur Republicans to the polls. And the president didn’t like it. Before Sayoc was caught, Trump implied that the terrorism was a Democratic setup to deflect from his midterms roadshow. Pipe bombs getting in the way of pipe dreams.

Trump tweet-whined that “now this ‘Bomb’ stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows,” using dismissive quote marks around “Bomb.”

The president has, after all, put a tremendous effort into the sulfurous stew of lies, racially charged rhetoric and scaremongering that he has been serving up as an election closer. He has been inspired to new depths of delusion, tweeting that “Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican.”

He has been twinning the words “caravan” and “Kavanaugh” in a mellifluous poem to white male hegemony. Whites should be afraid of the migrant caravan traveling from Central America, especially since “unknown Middle Easterners” were hidden in its midst, an alternative fact that he cheerfully acknowledged was based on nothing.

The word “Kavanaugh” is meant to evoke the fear that aggrieved women will hurtle out of the past to tear down men from their rightful perches of privilege.

Democrats seem blown back by the ferocious — and often fictional — effort.

Naomi Wolf told Bill Clinton, and later Al Gore, they should present themselves as the Good Father, strong enough to protect the home (America) from invaders.

You’d think by now that Democrats would have learned to do that in a compassionate way, and that they would be ready to counteract Republican horror movies. It is always the same shameless playbook, replicated since Richard Nixon launched his racist Southern Strategy, stirring up fears on desegregation and busing. They merely reboot it to suit the times.

The only difference — and it is a shocking one — is that Donald Trump cuts out the middleman. He handles the dirty work himself — and revels in it. In the old days, presidents let their hatchet men stir up the racist skulduggery behind the scenes. So when Republican lawmakers complain about Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric, what they are really saying is that they prefer a more subtle racism.

When I covered the ’88 race, I watched Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes concoct the scheme to bring down Michael Dukakis by making “Willie Horton his running mate,” as Atwater put it. The ads made by the Bush campaign and outside groups centered on Horton, a black criminal who broke into a Maryland house, raped a white woman and stabbed her husband while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison.

“The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it,” Ailes told Time magazine.

During the 2000 South Carolina primary, W’s backers tried to appeal to racist voters with a whispered lie that John McCain fathered an illegitimate black child.

In 2004, Dick Cheney bluntly warned Americans that if they elected John Kerry, terrorists would hit us with a “devastating” attack (even though the devastating September 11 attack came on Cheney’s watch).

This season of ghouls is animated by the ghost of Roger Ailes, who — bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch — was the mastermind behind the hate-breeding technique he perfected on Fox News. It bore poison fruit with the Florida bomb suspect, whose Facebook page was littered with Fox News agitprop.

One Fox producer under Ailes said they called it “riling up the crazies.” For Ailes and now for his Frankenstein Trump — who has Ailes’s old lieutenant Bill Shine as his media czar — it’s all about picking and inventing the right battles, finding the lowest common denominator to boost ratings.

“Divide and Conquer,” an excellent new documentary produced by Alex Gibney and directed by Alexis Bloom, shows the divisive strategy Ailes used to help elect a succession of Republican presidents, even as he turned Fox News into a sexually transgressive cult where he and Bill O’Reilly and others could get away with any predation.

For Ailes, and later Trump, politics was a war to preserve a gauzy John Wayne throwback world, patriotic and traditional, to save it from a sneering, contemptuous elite and from the “Other.” Ailes was a student of Hitler propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. Sometimes, as with Trump’s birther campaign, the Other needed to be made to seem even more Other. Michelle Obama segments were designed to scare.

In the documentary, those around Ailes marveled at his relentless talent for pouring gas on a fire, for stoking the paranoia and fear that would keep viewers on the hook.

Trump’s main training for politics was being a sparring star in the House That Roger Built. And Ailes taught Trump well. ###

[Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

How Do You Spell Chaos, Boys & Girls? — U-S-A

Andy Borowitz provides a note of funny snark at the end of one of the most terrible weeks in memory. Unfortunately for this blogger, It hurts too much to laugh, but the blogger's too old to cry, in a paraphrase of Abraham Lincoln (with apologies to Adlai Stevenson II). If this is a (fair & balanced) summation of an awful week in the neighborhood, so be it.

[x New Yorker]
Trump Dispatches Sarah Huckabee Sanders To Saudi Arabia To Provide Lying Advice
By Andrew (Andy) Borowitz


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

absence According advice aides Arabia best better Borowitz coming comment confirmed Conway crown curve dispatched Donald essential family fix gotten horrified House Huckabee Kellyanne lying means meeting Mohammed President press prince provide quality reportedly Riyadh rudimentary Salman Sanders Sarah Saudi secretary skills Sources state steep told Trump virtually White zero

created at TagCrowd.com

Donald J. Trump has dispatched the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to Saudi Arabia to provide what the White House on Thursday called “essential lying advice and assistance.”

According to the counsellor to the President Kellyanne Conway, “The President was not happy with the quality of lies coming out of the Saudi royal family, and who better to fix that than Sarah Sanders?”

Sources close to Sanders said that the press secretary was “horrified” during her first meeting in Riyadh to discover that the crown prince’s lying skills were “rudimentary at best.”

“The absence of a free press in Saudi Arabia means that M.B.S.”—Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—“has had virtually zero experience lying to reporters,” Sanders reportedly told one of her aides. “The learning curve is going to be steep.”

In perhaps her most withering comment on the state of the Saudis’ lying, Sanders said, “These clowns could never have gotten Kavanaugh confirmed.” ###

[Andrew (Andy) Borowitz is the creator the Borowitz Report, a Web site that is a lot funnier than the stuff posted by Matt Drudge and his ilk. Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker. He is the first winner of the National Press Club's humor award and has won seven Dot-Comedy Awards for his web site. His most recent book (and Amazon's Best Kindle Single of the Year) is An Unexpected Twist (2012). Borowitz received a BA, magna cum laude (English) from Harvard University (MA).]

Copyright © 2018 The New Yorker/Condé Nast Digital




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Today, The Krait (Gail Collins) Deconstructs The Performance Of A Wannabe WWE Villain's Braggadoccio

The Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office is coming unhinged. The looming arrival of a bedraggled group of migrants out of Central America (mostly Honduras) has the Horse's A$$ in a panic. He is ordering a meaningless contingent of 500 US troops to stop the hordes on the Mexican side of the border. Of course, all the US troops can do is stand there and watch the comic-opera spectacle; US troops are forbidden by law to engage in law enforcement activities. Laredo ain't Fallujah, but the Horse's A$$ doesn't know the difference — along with everything else he babbles to his drooling (and equally stupid) supporters. BTW, Gail Collins is known as The Krait in this blog because she is every bit as venomous as The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) when it comes to whacking fools with snark. If this is the (fair & balanced) last batter on the NY Fishwrap's "Murderers Row" (along with Eags (Timothy Egan), so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Trump Gets Terrible — Things Can Get Worse, And With Him....
By The Krait (Gail Collins)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

administration anything appointed audience bad bombs border break Bush calls caravan claimed Clinton country Court cut details Donald everybody family George going Herman Jared John leaves lot middle-income night Nobody number officers Patrol people president rally reporters scarier secure sort Supreme tax Terrible things think Trump Washington week wildly working

created at TagCrowd.com

Terrible week. Donald Trump was on the road trying to rev up the country against a pitiful caravan of poor people struggling through Mexico. Meanwhile, there was a spate of bombing attempts directed at some of the president’s regular tirade targets, from Hillary Clinton to George Soros to CNN.

The FBI is working on the bombs. Trump has urged the country to unify, to which the country presumably replied, “Now you tell us?”

At his rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday night, Trump did have some early words for peace and harmony. Then he demanded that the media “set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and often time false attacks.” You would think that for at least one evening he’d just mention the importance of a free press. Or even suggest that, say, body-slamming reporters is a bad thing.

This is getting scarier and scarier. The president has been on a rally marathon in which he alternates between saying things that are meant to whip his audience into rage and things that are just wildly egocentric and imaginary. He’ll never improve. All we can do is hope he sticks to his less dangerous form of awfulness.

We want the Donald Trump who yowls about wildly overestimated crowd sizes and nonexistent achievements. For instance, on Monday in Houston he bragged about Brett Kavanaugh and gave the audience a primer on Supreme Court appointments that went like this:

“Who — who appointed the highest percentage of judges? No, no, no, it wasn’t Hillary Clinton. No, she didn’t make it, remember? She didn’t make it. No, you know who it is? You’ll never guess. It’s called George Washington. And we’re after George Washington. So, a very big thing, no, George Washington, why? Because he just started. He did 100 percent. Nobody’s ever going to break that record. Nobody’s ever going to break the record of George Washington.”

Always do enjoy bringing you some Trumpian oratory.

And — wait! In actual reality, Trump is not after George Washington. Franklin Delano Roosevelt placed eight justices on the Supreme Court and Ronald Reagan got four. Trump has gotten two, the same number as George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

I am telling you all this to cheer you up.

During the rally tour, the preferable making-stuff-up Trump also announced “a very major tax cut” just for middle-income people, which would be passed before November 1, or after the election, or “next week,” depending on when you were listening.

“We’ve been working on it for a few months,” he said in Houston.

This appeared to be total news to everybody in his administration. But maybe the “we” Trump referred to was Ivanka and Jared. Jared is great with numbers. Just because his company is teetering on bankruptcy due to one of the most disastrous deals in real estate history doesn’t mean there isn’t some talent. That sort of thing runs in the family.

Asked about details of his plan — like who would count as a middle-income person — Trump said they’d be coming “sometime just prior, I would say, to November.”

That would mean … next week. Well, some details. Maybe its name.

Pop Quiz: What do you think would be a good name for Trump’s tax cut?

A) Herman

B) Biggest Middle-Class Tax Cut Since George Washington

C) Thing That Never Was

I don’t know about you, but I’m kinda going for Herman. Or Rocco.

The cruel-is-cool Trump has been ranting about immigration, claiming the caravan of desperate families making their way out of Central America included bad people “from the Middle East.” None of the reporters who have been walking through the caravan have come across anything like this. The president claimed he learned it from Border Patrol officers. He quotes unnamed Border Patrol officers a lot. You get the impression that in the still of the night when everybody else is asleep and he can’t think of anything to twitter, he calls up the border police and chats about their day.

“Wait until you see what happens over the next couple of weeks,” he told the Wisconsin crowd, in one of the more ominous moments of the night. “You are going to see a very secure border. Very secure. You just watch. The military is ready. They’re all set.”

John Bolton, the freaky national security adviser, and John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, had what is known in polite circles as a “profanity-laced argument” about border policy. We’ve been hearing a lot lately about Kelly’s temper. This is sort of disturbing, since he’s supposed to be one of the not-insane people in the administration who will keep a lid on things if the president goes totally batty. Another is Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who Trump recently described as “sort of a Democrat” who “may leave. I mean, at some point everybody leaves.”

When you’re down and out, keep that last little bit in mind. At some point everybody leaves. ###

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she took a leave in order to complete America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. Collins returned to the Times as a columnist in July 2007. She received a BA (journalism) from Marquette University and an MA (government) from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Gail Collins’s newest book is As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda (2012).]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Roll Over, Edward Everett Hale — Make Way For The Dumbest People Without A Country

The new chant for the Resistance (and all who detest the Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office) should be "Lock Them Up!" Them includes every last one of the traitors who voted for the Horse's A$$ in 2018. This is no laughing matter. The United States of America is in jeopardy and since none of the traitors likes the USA, give them a one-way ticket to the Russian city of their choice. At the front of the lines at airports... all of the idiots wearing shirts with the slogan, "I'd Rather Be A Russian Than A Democrat." If this is a (fair & balanced) endgame, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
The Best Way To Keep Democrats From Blowing This Election
By Eags (Timothy Egan)


TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

asked assault behalf better campaign care change Congress cut Democrats election electorate fighting Gianforte guy health help House Kathleen lied life lost man message millions Montana national news party people percent political praises president recent representative running state tax throw Trump used voters week Williams willing woman won working year

created at TagCrowd.com

We know that outrage has a minimal shelf life in the Trump era. Our president can give despots a license to kill, claim that climate change is going to magically reverse itself, make up nonexistent riots — and it all passes in a blur.

So it was last week, when the Mendacity Machine rolled into Montana for a rally on behalf of two of the least likable politicians in the Rocky Mountains. Trump praised one of those pols, Representative Greg Gianforte, a man with nouveau Gilded Age wealth and attitude to go with it, for committing criminal assault.

“Any guy who can do a body slam, he’s my kinda guy,” said Trump. Gianforte, who stands to be the richest representative in the House with the retirement of Representative Darrell Issa, pleaded guilty last year to misdemeanor assault of a reporter who had asked him about health care. He threw the man to the ground and broke his glasses, then lied about it.

But while the presidential thug plug dominated the news, a quieter, more telling campaign has been unfolding under the Big Sky — one that returns Democrats to a role as defender of average working people. Kathleen Williams, who has been crisscrossing Montana in her camper with her dog, is poised to knock off Gianforte with an old-fashioned campaign that should be a model for Dems mired in media-driven sideshows.

Democrats used to be known for love of the Little Guy. Franklin Roosevelt won Texas, Oklahoma and Montana — for that matter, most of what is now Red State America — through four elections, while campaigning on behalf of “the forgotten man.” This dandy from a Hudson River Valley estate connected words to a political revolution that changed millions of lives for the better.

That message has been lost to history’s vapors. When 4,035 working-class voters in battleground states were recently asked to name an elected official who was fighting for them, the top answer was “no one.”

After attending the Democratic National Convention two years ago, Kellyanne Conway offered this summary of what she heard: “Their message is Donald Trump is bad, and we’re not Donald Trump. The rest of the message was race, gender, LGBT.”

As this filters out to the heartland, it doesn’t help good people trying to put a check on Trump. “The national party hasn’t been engaged with a good message,” as Billie Sutton, a Democratic former rodeo rider running for governor in South Dakota, told my colleague Jack Healy. “It used to be fighting for the little guy.”

As Trump praises violence, insults women and stokes a mob chant of “Lock her up,” it does no good for Democrats to say “that’s not who we are.” In fact, that is who we are, or have become — perhaps 40 percent of the electorate willing to throw decency, respect for truth and the law into the gutter with this president. An appeal to our better angels is a nonstarter in 2018.

A winning strategy is to go directly to the self-interest of a majority that is being hurt by Republican policies. The two biggest political thrusts of the Party of Trump — a tax cut for the rich that opened a tsunami of debt, and trying to take away health care from millions — are widely unpopular. This election should be no more complicated than that.

That’s exactly what Williams, who says she will not support Nancy Pelosi as House party leader, has figured out. While still a teenager, she lost her mother. And she later lost her husband, a Vietnam veteran, to early death as well. That gave her a sense of how life can throw a random punch to the gut.

“The millionaires have lots of people helping them,” she says. “I’m running for Congress because we need someone who will fight for us.” In a state that Trump won by 20 points, she’s polling about even with Gianforte.

“Not to be too dramatic about it, but Kathleen Williams is the congressional candidate Montana has been waiting for,” wrote the Missoulian newspaper in a recent editorial endorsement.

Gianforte, a tech magnate said to be worth about $600 million, favors tax cuts for people like himself and is against expanding health care for those at the other end. A Montana ballot measure that would raise tobacco taxes to provide health care for the working poor is well ahead in the polls. The key here is independent voters — around 44 percent of the electorate — who are willing to cut through the daily cable news fat in search of the real meat of politics.

It’s frustrating, during a week in which Trump has probably set a record for most lies to come out of a White House in so short a time, to stay focused on boring policy. Trump is counting on people being stupid, and easily distracted. Montana, a state that in 1916 sent the first woman to Congress, can show him otherwise, with the election of another woman in 2018. ###

[Timothy Egan writes now writes a semi-monthly column at the NY Fishwrap online. Egan — winner of both a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 as a member of a team of reporters who wrote the series "How Race Is Lived in America" and a National Book Award (The Worst Hard Time in 2006) — graduated from the University of Washington with a BA ( journalism), and was awarded a doctorate of humane letters (honoris causa) by Whitman College (WA) in 2000 for his environmental writings. Egan's most recent book is The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero (2016). See all other books by Eags here.]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) Bites... Hard & True In Today's Essay

The Cobra (Maureen Dowd's nickname bestowed by POTUS 43) is hissing and biting venomous snark at the denizens of the Evil Empire on the Persian Gulf and their traitorous friends in the USA. Of course, The Cobra is stirred by the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi exile, who lived in Washington, DC and wrote a column for The Washington Post that focused on the Persian Gulf, as well as the hypocritical babbling of the media-hating Horse's A$$ in the Oval Office about solving the murder. Was it Colonel Mustard in the library? The Cobra does not suffer fools gladly and the Horse's A$$ is a world-class fool. If this is (fair & balanced) patriotic denunciation of treason, so be it.

[NY Fishwrap]
Step Away From The Orb
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)



TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing

allowed America American Arabia away Bandar bin bombs box checks children clerics connected contact continue dear deserving family fight group head hijackers hit House Jared jets Khashoggi lost money oblong offered oil pass press prince protect psychotic Qaeda rights royals Saudis soldiers squad table terrorism traveled Trump war women years

created at TagCrowd.com

I was having dinner here once with a Saudi muck-a-muck. Midway through the interview, he passed an oblong velvet box across the table. Inside I found an expensive piece of jewelry.

I began laughing and explained that I was a reporter and could not take such baubles. The Saudi said he understood.

About 10 minutes later, I felt a knocking against my knee under the table. It was the oblong box, offered more covertly.

The Saudis are experts on emoluments. If you don’t take their favors one way, they find another way to try to co-opt you.

Hollywood, Silicon Valley, presidential libraries and foundations, politically connected private equity groups, PR firms, think tanks, universities and Trump family enterprises are awash in Arab money. The Saudis satisfy American greed, deftly playing their role as dollar signs in robes.

Donald Trump, who may be the only person more fond of lavish displays of arriviste gilt than the Saudis, is bedazzled by a Saudi pledge to buy billions worth of American weapons, just as he was flattered by the Saudi sword dance and weird luminescent orb séance on his visit to the kingdom.

Even before the bloodcurdling execution of Jamal Khashoggi for his just criticism of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, it was clear that the chump Trump and jejune Jared had bet their entire Middle East strategy on a chillingly autocratic and reckless person.

The prince was easing up on the draconian restrictions on women to get a gloss as a liberal visionary. But he was simultaneously jailing women activists, imprisoning and torturing royals and top businessmen and making America an accomplice in a grotesque war in Yemen, dropping bombs supplied by the US with little care about whether civilians died, including in an attack on a school bus, killing dozens of children. This, as the self-styled children’s advocate Ivanka was out on the town, talking about the fabulous “deliverables” she and Jared were bringing to their BFFs in Riyadh.

The Saudis blithely assume abhorrence at their inhumane behavior — from beheadings to forcing teenage girls without head scarves back into a burning school to die, as the religious police did in Mecca in 2002, to the brazen murder of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist — can be lubricated away with oil and money.

And why shouldn’t they?

Our alliance with the Saudis has always been poisoned by cynical bargains.

After the oil boom of the late ’70s, Islamic clerics were enraged at the hedonistic behavior of the royals. In order to continue with their hypocritical lifestyle, the royals offered cultural freedom and women’s rights as a sop to the fundamentalists, allowing anti-Western clerics and madrasas to flourish and giving a free pass to those who bankrolled terrorism.

Even as we hailed the Saudis as our partners in fighting terrorism, they were nurturing the monsters who would come for us. Seventeen years before the psychotic Saudi hit squad traveled to Istanbul to dismember Khashoggi while he was still alive, another psychotic Saudi hit squad traveled to America to turn planes packed with passengers into bombs [missiles?].

Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis -emphasis supplied]. The Saudi royals repeatedly stymied American efforts to crack down on Al Qaeda in the years before 9/11.

But they remained our dear friends. W.’s White House allowed Prince Bandar — the dean of the Washington diplomatic corps was so close to the Bush family that his nickname was “Bandar Bush” — to spirit Bin Laden’s family members and other wealthy Saudis out of America on jets after the twin towers fell. Bandar entertained and influenced pols and journalists with cigars and cognac in the reassembled British pub he had transported to his $135 million Aspen mansion, and with hunting jaunts at his estate in England’s Wychwood.

Even Barack Obama, who had no love lost for the Saudis, refused for eight years to release a classified document from 2002 detailing contacts between Saudi officials and some of the 9/11 hijackers, including checks from Saudi royals to operatives in contact with the hijackers and a connection between a Bandar employee and a Qaeda militant. (Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa, wrote charitable checks that ended up in the hands of two hijackers.)

Our Faustian deal was this: As long as the Saudis kept our oil prices low, bought our fighter jets, housed our fleets and drones and gave us cover in the region, they could keep their country proudly medieval.

It was accepted wisdom that it was futile to press the Saudis on the feudal, the degradation of women and human rights atrocities, because it would just make them dig in their heels. Even Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, never made an impassioned Beijing-style speech about women in Saudi Arabia being obliterated under a black tarp.

During the first gulf war, fought in part to protect the Saudis from an encroaching Saddam, a group of Saudi women — artists and academics — got excited by the presence of American female soldiers and went for a joy ride. The clerics branded the drivers “whores” and “harlots.” They received death threats and lost their jobs. Driving by women, banned by custom, was made illegal.

America was mute. Our government did not even fight for the right of its women soldiers protecting Saudi Arabia to refuse the Saudi directive to wear an abaya and head scarf when off the base.

The Saudis need us more than we need them. We now produce more oil than they do. And yet we continue to coddle them and shield them from responsibility for their barbaric ways.

Because, after all, the press is the Enemy of the People, deserving a body slam. And the Saudis are our dear friends, deserving bows, hugs and kisses. ###

Maureen Dowd received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1999, with the Pulitzer committee particularly citing her columns on the impeachment of Bill Clinton after his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Dowd joined The New York Times as a reporter in 1983, after writing for Time magazine and the now-defunct Washington Star. At The Times, Dowd was nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, then became a columnist for the paper's editorial page in 1995. Dowd's first book was a collection of columns entitled Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004). Most recently Dowd has written The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2017). See all of Dowd's books here. She received a BA (English) from Catholic University (DC).]

Copyright © 2018 The New York Times Company




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..

Copyright © 2018 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves