Month: August 2020

This piece from the Daily Beast’s “Right Richter” newsletter sheds some light on this weird phenomenon. Donald Trump’s obsession is simply that he thought he had a miracle cure and he can’t ever admit he waswrong. But this thing is being pushed by other people as well for reasons that seemed obscure. Sure, there’s money involved, of course. But there’s more to it:

 Initially, a group of doctors organized by the Tea Party Patriots scored a viral hit Monday with a press conference outside the Supreme Court lambasting conventional wisdom on the coronavirus and praising the unproven drug. Video of Texas Dr. Stella Immanuel praising hydroxychloroquine and bashing mask-wearing earned presidential retweets and more than 13 million views on Facebook before it was taken off the platform.

But Immanuel’s usefulness as the face of hydroxychloroquine faded after Right Richter pointed out that she also believes, among other things, that real-life medical problems are caused by sex with demons and that alien DNA can be used in medical treatments. 

Other doctors at the press conference had plenty of issues themselves. One, for example, produced a comically flawed study on the coronavirus’ prevalence in California. Nevertheless, Trump wouldn’t back down in his crusade to give them a platform, calling Immanuel an “important voice” on the virus response.

Why the fixation on hydroxychloroquine at all costs?

For the vast majority of Trump supporters, of course, the drug represents the possibility that COVID-19 can be successfully treated and the deaths stopped. But there’s also a political benefit: portraying hydroxychloroquine as a forbidden cure allows pro-Trump media to blame anyone but Trump for the coronavirus disaster. In this telling, COVID-19 could have been cured months ago with hydroxychloroquine, if only the Democrats, the media, and Dr. Anthony Fauci would have listened to Trump! 

Mega-popular right-wing talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, for example, has portrayed the opposition to hydroxychloroquine as an anti-Trump plot. 

“We’ve got people in this country doing their level best to destroy it, to scare people into not using it,” Limbaugh said on Monday.

This angle became a little clearer Thursday, when Herman Cain died of COVID-19 a month after he attended Trump’s maskless Tulsa rally. Cain’s death, in theory, should have brought home the coronavirus’ seriousness to the hardcore Trump faithful who have refused to wear masks. 

Instead, The Gateway Pundit knew who was to blame: Anthony Fauci, for opposing hydroxychloroquine!

“Is Dr. Fauci to Blame for Herman Cain’s Death?” the far-right website asked. 

“Herman Cain’s death is tragic,” Gateway Pundit boss Jim Hoft wrote. “It is too early to know what happened with his treatment. But it is clear that Dr. Fauci, the tech giants, and the liberal media are to blame for THOUSANDS of coronavirus deaths.”

As the death toll continues to mount, hydroxychloroquine’s value as a distraction from the administration’s own failures will likely only increase.

That sounds right to me. Because people are holding Trump accountable for this monstrous debacle, this is what they’ve come up with as their “I know you are but what am I” response.

And the fact that people are taking a drug that won’t help them and in some cases could hurt them is of no particular concern.

This op-ed from a school superintendent is just heartbreaking:

This is my choice, but I’m starting to wish that it wasn’t. I don’t feel qualified. I’ve been a superintendent for 20 years, so I guess I should be used to making decisions, but I keep getting lost in my head. I’ll be in my office looking at a blank computer screen, and then all of the sudden I realize a whole hour’s gone by. I’m worried. I’m worried about everything. Each possibility I come up with is a bad one.About this seriesVoices from the Pandemic is an oral history of covid-19 and those affected.

The governor has told us we have to open our schools to students on August 17th, or else we miss out on five percent of our funding. I run a high-needs district in middle-of-nowhere Arizona. We’re 90 percent Hispanic and more than 90 percent free-and-reduced lunch. These kids need every dollar we can get. But covid is spreading all over this area and hitting my staff, and now it feels like there’s a gun to my head. I already lost one teacher to this virus. Do I risk opening back up even if it’s going to cost us more lives? Or do we run school remotely and end up depriving these kids?

This is your classic one-horse town. Picture John Wayne riding through cactuses and all that. I’m superintendent, high school principal and sometimes the basketball referee during recess. This is a skeleton staff, and we pay an average salary of about 40,000 a year. I’ve got nothing to cut. We’re buying new programs for virtual learning and trying to get hotspots and iPads for all our kids. Five percent of our budget is hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where’s that going to come from? I might lose teaching positions or basic curriculum unless we somehow get up and running.

I’ve been in the building every day, sanitizing doors and measuring out space in classrooms. We still haven’t received our order of Plexiglas barriers, so we’re cutting up shower curtains and trying to make do with that. It’s one obstacle after the next. Just last week I found out we had another staff member who tested positive, so I went through the guidance from OSHA and the CDC and tried to figure out the protocols. I’m not an expert at any of this, but I did my best with the contact tracing. I called 10 people on staff and told them they’d had a possible exposure. I arranged separate cars and got us all to the testing site. Some of my staff members were crying. They’ve seen what can happen, and they’re coming to me with questions I can’t always answer. “Does my whole family need to get tested?” “How long do I have to quarantine?” “What if this virus hits me like it did Mrs. Byrd?”

We got back two of those tests already — both positive. We’re still waiting on eight more. That makes 11 percent of my staff that’s gotten covid, and we haven’t had a single student in our buildings since March. Part of our facility is closed down for decontamination, but we don’t have anyone left to decontaminate it unless I want to put on my hazmat suit and go in there. We’ve seen the impacts of this virus on our maintenance department, on transportation, on food service, on faculty. It’s like this district is shutting down case by case. I don’t understand how anyone could expect us to reopen the building this month in a way that feels safe. It’s like they’re telling us: “Okay. Summer’s over. It’s been long enough. Time to get back to normal.” But since when has this virus operated on our schedule?

Trump cultists like Governor Ducey of Arizona think the president knows what he’s talking about. They follow him. When he says schools should lose funding if they fail to open up in the middle of a raging pandemic that’s what they do. Florida, Arizona, South Carolina and a bunch of others have all followed him over the cliff in one way or another.

This administrator goes on to talk about how awful it for kids in his district to be denied the vital services that schools provide and how fundamental these institutions are to the well-being of kids in a variety of different ways. He reluctantly concludes with this:

But every time I start to play out what that looks like on August 17th, I get sick to my stomach. More than a quarter of our students live with grandparents. These kids could very easily catch this virus, spread it and bring it back home. It’s not safe. There’s no way it can be safe.

If you think anything else, I’m sorry, but it’s a fantasy. Kids will get sick, or worse. Family members will die. Teachers will die.

A chill went down my spine when I heard Fauci say this to teachers last week:

“As you try to get back to school, we’re going to be learning about that. In many respects, unfortunately, though this may sound a little scary and harsh—I don’t mean it to be that way—is that you’re going to actually be part of the experiment of the learning curve of what we need to know. Remember, early on when we shut down the country as it were, the schools were shut down, so we don’t know the full impact, we don’t have the total database of knowing what there is to expect.”

In other words, teachers are going to be lab animals used to see how much kids spread the virus and how deadly it is for the adults who are near them, in closed spaces, for hours every day. It should be interesting. Gosh, I wonder how many will get sick and die? Stay tuned …

I suppose this makes some sense. We’ve already put teachers and kids in the line of fire to test the limits of our tolerance for mass gun violence. That experiment has offered up some very valuable data (along with a shocking body count.) So now we have come to count on them to willingly put their lives on the line in the face of all lethal threats.

I guess that’s why they get the big bucks. Well, actually they don’t get big bucks but that’s one of the reasons this is so efficient.

.

Ok, this is even more nuts than I realized. The infiltration of Q into the mainstream is getting scary. How many people can be dumb enough to buy into this lunacy? (Don’t answer that — we know about 40% of the population thinks Donald Trump is a good president, so …)

Outside the Las Vegas Convention Center, Kayleigh McEnany raised a microphone to a mega-fan and asked what it felt like to be acknowledged by President Trump at his February rally in Sin City.

At the time a spokeswoman for Trump’s reelection campaign, McEnany nodded as the supporter said the shout-out was most meaningful because of the words on the shirt he was wearing, which he read aloud: “Where we go one, we go all,” the motto of QAnon conspiracy theorists who believe Trump is battling a cabal of deep-state saboteurs who worship Satan and traffic children for sex.

McEnany, who has since become the White House press secretary, continued, asking the supporter, “If you could say one thing to the president, what would you say?”

“Who is Q?” he replied, inquiring about the mysterious online figure behind the baseless theory. McEnany smiled and said, “Okay, well, I will pass all of this along.”AD

The little-noticed exchange — captured in a video posted to YouTube — illustrates how Trump and his campaign have courted and legitimized QAnon adherents.

The viral online movement, which took root on Internet message boards in the fall of 2017 with posts from a self-proclaimed government insider identified as “Q,” has triggered violent acts and occasional criminal cases. Its effects were catalogued last yearin an FBI intelligence bulletin listing QAnon among the “anti-government, identity based, and fringe political conspiracy theories” that “very likely motivate some domestic extremists to commit criminal, sometimes violent activity.”

As the worldview took shape online,its followersflocked to Trump rallies with QAnon apparel and placards. Recently,as the election hasdrawn closer,actions by the president and his associates have brought them more directly into the fold.

The Trump campaign’s director of press communications, for example, went on a QAnon program and urged listeners to “sign up and attend a Trump Victory Leadership Initiative training.” QAnon iconography has appeared in official campaign advertisementstargeting battleground states. And the White House’s director of social media and deputy chief of staff for communications, Dan Scavino, has gone from endorsing praise from QAnon accounts to posting their memes himself.

The president has repeatedly elevated its digital foot soldiers, sharing their tweets more than a dozen times on Fourth of July alone. His middle son, Eric, who is 36 and a campaign surrogate, recently posted, and then deleted, an image drumming up support for his father’s Tulsa rally that included a giant “Q” and the text, “Where we go one, we go all.”AD

The apparent convergence of Trump’s inner circle with an ever-widening cohort of QAnon believers is alarming to scholars of extremism and digital communications, some of whom characterize the theory’s adherents as a cult. What most troubles analysts, however, is not that McEnany and others responsible for carrying out Trump’s agenda are amplifying QAnon, which has permeated right-wing politics and inspired a cadre of congressional candidates who could soon bring the philosophy to Capitol Hill. Even more worrisome, these observers say, is that the president’s messaging is increasingly indistinguishable from some key elements of the conspiracy theory.

The erroneous ideas defining QAnon — that Trump is a messianic figure fighting the so-called deep state, that he alone can be trusted, that his opponents include both Democrats and Republicans complicit in years of wrongdoing and that his rivals are not just misguided but criminal and illegitimate — represent core tenets of the president’s reelection campaign, especially as his poll numbers slump.

Meanwhile, the salvation envisioned by QAnon believers, including military takeover and mass arrests of Democrats, rhymes with the president’s vow to use the armed forces to “dominate.” They back his endorsement of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that has not been proved to prevent coronavirus infection, and cast skeptics, including Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, as a deep-state plant.AD

“We’re seeing the Trump campaign tack closely to an almost explicitly QAnon narrative,” said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I don’t expect to hear the president talking about pedophilia or Satanism, but I expect to hear almost everything else.”

Fun stuff.

It’s hardly worth mentioning lies like this at this point, but perhaps it’s good to have them on the record:

This interview aired two weeks ago. Turns out Trump was lying about that health care plan. He’s golfing again today. https://t.co/iCvHw9BNoE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 2, 2020

He was just making stuff up, of course.

I doubt there will be very many politicians who will so confidently and brazenly lie like this, over and over again. But we really need to grapple with how so many tens of millions of people in this country came to see this as perfectly acceptable. There’s something truly sick about us, and it has something to do with celebrity culture, capitalism and the idea that “promotion” (meaning lying) is perfectly fine.

Montgomery’s death seems to have embarrassed some of the Trumpen Youth, at least enough to start deleting their most casually dismissive, insane rants about the pandemic. Daily Kos staffer Walter Einenkel posted this:

Turning Point USA is the collegiate alt-right racist organization that has brought you Charlie Kirk. Kirk is something of a Trump youth leader, best known for dressing the part of someone serious while saying the same bogus racist anti-immigration b.s. older white supremacists like Trump and Steve Bannon say. Not unlike their elected officials, Turning Point USA—which was started by Bill Montgomery—is wrong about 98% of the time, and when they’re wrong, Turning Point USA is spectacularly wrong 100% of the time.

Sadly, Montgomery died on Tuesday from complications due to the coronavirus. Kirk posted a tribute to Montgomery on Twitter and told Politico that “I can’t put into words how saddened I am by the death of my dear friend Bill Montgomery.” After that, as people began clipping and sending Kirk and his Turning Point USA social media team all of the anti-mask memes and conspiracy theory-laden statements they made about the global pandemic, Turning Point USA began deleting old posts.

It’s important to note that while Montgomery was dying from COVID-19, Turning Point USA was posting the above meme. People posted some of Turning Point USA’s other greatest COVID-19 hits.

They seem nice.

I suppose it’s good news that they had enough decency to start deleting those tweets. I wish I thought they’d learned something but it’s almost certain that they haven’t.

Washington Post:

Signs that President Trump’s reelection bid is in crisis grew steadily this past week, one of the most tumultuous moments of a presidency increasingly operating with an air of desperation as it tries to avoid political disaster in November.

Campaign officials pulled television ads off the air amid a late-stage review of strategy and messaging. At the same time, Trump publicly mused about delaying the November election, airing widely debunked allegations about fraud.

And as the campaign aims to mount a more aggressive defense of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the president has reverted to touting unproven miracle cures, attacking public health officials and undercutting his own government’s push to encourage good health practices.

New York Times:

For Heather Vaughn, a substitute teacher and graduate student, the decision last month to place the black sign with colorful lettering in her front yard — the one that said, “Black Lives Matter” and “Science is Real” — felt like an act of courage.

In previous years, such a placard might have drawn unwanted attention in her suburban, tree-lined neighborhood, where expansive homes with manicured gardens had been decked out with blue ribbons and signs of support for the police. But now it is one of three on her block that reflect support for nationwide protests against police brutality and a growing sense of unease with President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus.

This one speaks for itself:

That last tells the story of the Trump years. If he loses, things are going to be hell for quite a while. The nation will be in turmoil. But it’s hard to imagine that we will have three straight years of total, unrelenting, chaos.

The phrase “personal responsibility” has long been a dog whistle. Those invoking it assume the mantle of righteousness to imply that those to whom they direct the phrase are — let’s be blunt — lower caste, untouchables. Irresponsibles. Not real Americans. Other. To be really blunt: black.

It is a hypocritical lie, of course. As in personal responsibility for thee but not for me. Along the lines of socialism for the rich and bootstraps, rugged individualism for the rest. Permissiveness for the ruling class and its friends and harsh rules for lessers.

In examining our failure to control the coronavirus Paul Krugman examines the vehemence with which Republicans defend the right to ignore science and restrictions on personal behavior in service to the greater good. Particularly, the fury with which the right resists wearing masks:

You see, the modern U.S. right is committed to the proposition that greed is good, that we’re all better off when individuals engage in the untrammeled pursuit of self-interest. In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.

Support for this proposition is, if anything, more emotional than intellectual. I’ve long been struck by the intensity of right-wing anger against relatively trivial regulations, like bans on phosphates in detergent and efficiency standards for light bulbs. It’s the principle of the thing: Many on the right are enraged at any suggestion that their actions should take other people’s welfare into account.

This rage is sometimes portrayed as love of freedom. But people who insist on the right to pollute are notably unbothered by, say, federal agents tear-gassing peaceful protesters. What they call “freedom” is actually absence of responsibility.

Republicans angrily insist they will not extend temporary unemployment assistance again even to keep consumer spending (and the economy) from collapsing further. “Aiding the unemployed, even if their joblessness isn’t their own fault, is a tacit admission that lucky Americans should help their less-fortunate fellow citizens,” Krugman writes. “And that’s an admission the right doesn’t want to make.”

You can spot people who are serious about wanting the economy to recover faster. They are wearing masks. The others are the ones behaving irresponsibly, throwing tantrums, and claiming bogus exemptions, even selling them online.

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Stuart Stevens, author of  “It Was All a Lie,” saw the warnings of where his Republican party was heading and ignored them, choosing to believe what he preferred to believe. It is now the party of Trump, the man of 20,000 lies and 150,000 dead Americans:

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. What others and I thought were bedrock values turned out to be mere marketing slogans easily replaced. 

Stevens writes, “A party rooted in decency and values does not embrace the anger that Mr. Trump peddles as patriotism.” Yet, Republicans long ago became the party of a Southern Strategy built upon white grievance. And the South embraced and nurtured the big lie half a century before “Mein Kampf.” That American big lie is The Lost Cause.

Bennett Minton reviews in the Washington Post how Virginians used textbooks to inculcate in its schoolchildren the view that the War of Northern Aggression had been unjust. That slaves loved their masters and were well-treated. Historian Francis Simkins explained that slavery was “an educational process which transformed the black man from a primitive to a civilized person endowed with conceits, customs, industrial skills, Christian beliefs, and ideals, of the Anglo-Saxon of North America.”

Even now, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) argues against teaching a less propagandistic version of history. He has introduced a bill to prevent federal funds for teaching a history that views slavery as anything other than “the necessary evil upon which the union was built.”

Norman Eisen, impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, writes of the moment he realized just how corrupt the Republican defense of Donald Trump would be. His attorneys told the U.S. Senate, “In the Judiciary Committee . . . there were no rights for the president.” They claimed the president had been denied due process. It was a lie. In fact, Trump had stonewalled.

Eisen continues:

That was the moment I realized how dangerously deep the Trump rot went: The president’s lawyers could have defended him capably without stooping to this. Lawyers are not in place to repeat the excesses of their clients. And yet Trump had managed to finagle his team into an alarming display of mimicry. Falsehood was his stock in trade, and they were enthusiastic franchisees. Worse, the GOP-controlled Senate was all too ready to accept it.

People who live a lie, teach lies, and defend lies, find it very easy to lie.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

 — Charles Bukowski, from his novel Women

You have likely heard the cliché that the Eskimos have 50 words for “snow”? This is, of course, not 100% true. What we have here, is failure to communicate. What we do have here is a case of “polysynthesis” …which means that you have a base word (in this case, “snow”), which is then attached to many different suffixes which change the meaning. In this context, the Inuit and Aleut folks have hundreds of ways of describing snow (I know. This sounds like something the drunk at the end of the bar would say…just stay with me).

I would wager that anyone who has ever spent a few hours down at the local pub would concur with me that there are just as many different descriptive terms for drunks. Happy drunks, melancholy drunks, friendly drunks, hostile drunks, sentimental drunks, amorous drunks, philosophical drunks, crazy drunks…you get the picture. You get all of the above (and a large Irish coffee) in the extraordinary Sundance hit Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets.

Co-directed by brothers Turner and Bill Ross, the film vibes the “direct cinema” school popularized in the 60s and 70s by another pair of sibling filmmakers-the Maysles brothers. It centers on the staff and patrons of a Las Vegas dive bar on its final day of business. At least that is the premise I bought into hook, line, sinker, and latest issue of Angling Times. It was only after I saw it that I discovered this little tidbit via IndieWire:

Except that in reality, that bar is still open, it’s in New Orleans, and the patrons gathering for one last hurrah were cast by the filmmakers Turner and Bill Ross.

As Johnny Rotten once said, “Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” Sheepishly, I read on:

The night before the film premiered to rave reviews at Sundance, the Ross Brothers sat down, at a bar over beers, for a 70-minute interview with to discuss how they made “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” and the inevitable questions they knew it would unleash. From the Ross Brothers’ perspective, this, their fifth feature film that has everyone at Sundance talking, is simply the natural evolution of their process as filmmakers.

“With our first film we cast a broad net, we spent 100 hours and a year of life with people until we realized you could fish, how you could wait for these moments, find these moments, and then as we got further and further along, how can you can feed a situation where you create a dynamic situation that might be conducive to what you are looking for,” said Turner. “And we’ve gotten further along into this fifth feature. Well actually can we create a dynamic scenario where we could provoke or create situations where we might elicit these authentic found moments we’re looking for.”

That their work has been embraced and supported by the part of the documentary community that sees nonfiction filmmakers more as artists using form than documentarians practicing journalism, has given the brothers a supportive community and place in the filmmaking world. The flip side is that it’s an association that puts them on one side of the increasingly useless binary of nonfiction vs. fiction that defines most film festivals, and that their latest film confounds.

I hadn’t felt this much like a dunce since the night I happened onto Zak Penn’s Incident at Loch Ness while channel-flipping and got sucked into what I assumed was an obscure Werner Herzog documentary about the Loch Ness monster that I had somehow missed. I had no idea it was a mockumentary until the credits. Hook, line, sinker, and fake Nessie.

My bruised ego aside, I rather enjoyed Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (whatever the hell it “is”). Populated by characters straight out of a Charles Bukowski novel, the film works as a paean to the neighborhood tavern and a “day in the life” character study. It is also a microcosm of human behavior, infused with all the alcohol-induced bathos you’d expect.

“Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets” is now playing via SIFF’s Virtual Cinema platform.

Related reviews: Fat City, Tommaso, Catfish, 56 Up, Salesman

Here are 2 fun facts I learned watching Allison Ellwood’s rock doc The Go-Gos. I never realized they were the first all-female band who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to have a #1 album (I suppose that says something about the music biz that it took until 1982 for that precedent to be set?). I had also assumed they are inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. They are not (WTF?) That shows how much I know.

The band has also been overdue for a feature-length career retrospective; Ellwood’s film offers an absorbing portrait of the groundbreaking quintet’s rise, fall and resurrection(s).

The film begins with their D.I.Y. roots in the burgeoning L.A. punk scene of the late 70s, and goes on to recount the shuffling of various personnel that eventually settled into the now-classic lineup of lead vocalist Belinda Carlisle, rhythm guitarist and vocalist Jane Weidlin (both original co-founders) guitarist-keyboardist and  backing vocalist Charlotte Caffey, bassist Kathy Valentine, and drummer Gina Schock.

The doc does play like a glorified episode of “VH-1’s Behind the Music” at times, with the inevitable tales of bruised egos, backstage squabbles, drug addiction (and don’t forget rehab!)…but hey, that’s rock and roll. It’s nice to see the band recognized for their talent, influence and perseverance (hard to believe they have been around for 40 years). It’s also inspiring to see them together and producing new songs. They’ve still got the beat, baby!

“The Go-Gos” is now playing on Showtime cable and VOD.

Related reviews: The Runaways, The Decline of Western Civilization

More reviews at Den of Cinema

—Dennis Hartley

They always do.

Republicans have long attacked Democrats for how they behave at the funerals of Democratic politicians. Recall the phony handwringing years ago over the funeral of Paul Wellstone. Also:

Coretta Scott King

Ted Kennedy

Even John McCain

All of this falls under the general category of Right Wing Hissy Fit

Here is the predictable meltdown over John Lewis’s funeral oratory by Barack Obama, courtesy Media Matters.

Tucker Carlson: "Barack Obama one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures in the history of American politics use of George Floyd's death at a funeral to attack the police." pic.twitter.com/UXNI84GSKP

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) July 31, 2020

Racial calumny, courtesy of Barack Obama. https://t.co/qzq3mLCD7g

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) July 30, 2020

I don’t have the time left in my life to list all their Dear Leader’s grotesque disrespect for people living and dead in which he turns every last moment into a partisan death match.

And anyway, it’s a waste of breath. These people are beyond shame.

Even after three years of this monstrous barbarian in the White House they have no compunction about turning on the oozing sanctimony about proper public behavior. It’s maddening but we’re going to have to steel ourselves to it.

They have learned nothing. They will never change.