The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) has written a perceptive analysis of our national ennui. This blogger, and many people he knows, are all worn out with endless spewing of the despicable and disgusting words and actions in the daily media bombardment. We are sick of the HA (Horse's A$$) in the Oval Office whether we know it consciously or unconsciously. This is another tactic pursued by traitors: "destroy their will to resist." If this is the (fair & balanced) exposure of the existential threat to our well-being, so be it.
PS; The source of this blog's noms de stylo serpent reference to the three women on the NY Fishwrap's Op-Ed staff began with this 2001 essay by The Cobra (Maureen Dowd) who's been joined by her distaff colleagues: The Krait (Gail Collins), and — most recently — The Viper (Michelle Goldberg)
[x NY Fishwrap]
Crazy Is As Crazy Does
By The Cobra (Maureen Dowd)
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the following piece of writing
Sometimes, as the light comes in my bedroom window and I start to wake up, my mind drifts to other things.
I think about how talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge is, with her two mordant shows, “Killing Eve” and “Fleabag.” I think about how cool it will be to see Idris Elba resume his role as a world-weary London homicide detective in “Luther.” I think about what a harrowing tale Patrick Radden Keefe has woven in Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2019).
But once I’m completely awake, a gravitational pull takes hold and I am once more bedeviled by our preposterous president.
I flip on the TV and gird for the endless stream of vitriol coming from the White House, bracing for another day of overflowing, overlapping, overwrought news stories about Trump. I’m sapped before I rise.
As Mayor Pete said on his Fox town hall about the national Trump preoccupation, “It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.”
My head hurts, puzzling over whether Trump is just a big blowhard who’s flailing around, or a sinister genius laying traps to get himself impeached to animate the base ahead of the election.
A minute ago, we were fixated on the half of the Mueller report that vividly details how Trump tried to shut down and hinder the Mueller investigation. But now the president has triggered the media’s shock collar, so everyone is fixated on how he gave William Barr vast new powers to use the intelligence agencies to investigate the investigators.
Just as Trump once wore out contractors, bankers, lawyers and businesspeople in New York with his combative, insulting and wayward ways, now he’s wearing out the political crowd, as he tries to beat everybody here into submission with his daily, even hourly, onslaught of outrage piled upon outrage.
Journalists must not become inured to Trump’s outlandish, transgressive behavior. Mitch McConnell, Barr and almost everyone else in the GOP have made themselves numb to his abhorrent actions because of self-interest.
But for those who are concerned about the scarring of the American psyche, it’s exhausting to find the vocabulary to keep explaining, over and over, how beyond the pale and out of the norm the 45th president is.
How do you ratchet up from “remarkable,” “extraordinary,” “unprecedented”?
What words can you use about someone who considers pardoning war criminals on Memorial Day? Who wants to make it simpler for adoption agencies to bar same-sex couples? Who circumvents Congress to complete arms deals to benefit the same Saudis who are clearly culpable in the case of the dismembered Washington Post columnist?
Pete Buttigieg and Nancy Pelosi have both mastered the art of puncturing Trump — far better than his Republican primary debate rivals did.
“I don’t have a problem standing up to somebody who was working on Season 7 of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ when I was packing my bags for Afghanistan,” Buttigieg told The [DC] Post’s Robert Costa, saying he took a dim view of Trump’s bone-spurs excuse to get out of serving in Vietnam.
Pelosi winds Trump up when she drips condescension worthy of a Jane Austen grande dame, saying she will pray for the president or pleading for someone to stage an intervention with the poor soul.
After Pelosi remarked that the president was engaged in a cover-up, Trump dynamited his own meeting with “Crazy Nancy,” as he called her. His I’m not crazy, you’re crazy rebuttal to Pelosi echoed his I’m not a puppet, you’re a puppet line to Hillary Clinton during the debate.
Trump tweeted a video of Pelosi that was manipulated to make her look as if she were slurring her words.
“Well, I don’t know about the videos,” the president told reporters as he left on his trip to Japan.
“He does outrageous, nasty, destructive things, knowing full well he’s crossing a line, and then he pretends he didn’t,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “He has spent five decades going to gossip columnists, radio shows, TV interviews and newspapers to stick a knife into almost anybody who crosses his path that he doesn’t like and he revels in it. There is something amazing in the Energizer Bunny aspect of his nastiness and his ignorance. He doesn’t care what people think about how mean or dumb he is. He just keeps going.”
O’Brien said Pelosi “hit on something that is core to his con. His whole life is about the cover-up. He has covered up his academic record, his health reports, his dalliances with women, his finances, his family history. Even while he was saying he was the most transparent president in history, his Treasury secretary was across town telling Congress, ‘I’m not giving you the president’s tax returns.’
“One of the biggest motivating factors in Trump’s life — other than food, greed, sex and revenge — is mythmaking. Deep down, he knows he’s a pathological liar and he’s not the person he says he is. But any time anyone pierces that veil, it sends him into a rage.”
It’s wearing, not letting this petulant man wear us all out. ###
[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).]
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