America’s least popular senator is … Moscow Mitch McConnell!

Posted on January 15, 2023 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Ah, Mitch McConnell: the man whose face has launched a thousand quips. His refulgent charm touches our hearts, kidneys, lower intestine, and so on, before awkwardly lingering at our undercarriage and asking us to turn our heads and cough. His smile can light up a roomful of opium pipes. Amazing that we liberals decided to keep him in the Senate while we were stealing the election from Donald Trump. Maybe we need to lay off the a drenochrome for a bit. We’re clearly not thinking straight.

Of course, there was one thing we liberals couldn’t possibly keep Mitch from winning, and that’s the title of most loathed senator in the land.

The Hill:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is the least popular senator in the U.S., according to new polling, as the Kentucky Republican has faced backlash from both the right and the left over the last year.

McConnell holds a disapproval rating of 64 percent in his home state, according to the polling from Morning Consult. He had the approval of just 29 percent of Kentucky respondents.

McConnell, who has been the Senate’s top Republican since 2006, has been the target of much fury from former President Trump, who just this week took him to task for his handling of last year’s omnibus bill and called for him to face a primary challenger.

Moscow Mitch wasn’t alone in stoking the public’s distaste for politics, of course. In fact, the country’s least popular senators should be intimately familiar to anyone who’s kept up with the news over the past two years.

Rounding out the top five are Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Republican Susan Collins of Maine, and Democrat-turned-independent Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. (Collins is reportedly very concerned about her ranking.) Six through 10 are all Republicans: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Crapo of Idaho, and Mitt Romney of Utah.

Of course, it’s obvious what’s happening with some of these characters. Manchin and Sinema spent much of the past two years murdering dreams on behalf of their corporate overlords, while Donald Trump’s frequent criticism of McConnell, Murkowski, and Romney for not being abject lickspittles has no doubt dragged their favorables down. The rest—such as Johnson, Cruz, and Graham—no doubt earned their spots more honestly, by assiduously working on sucking.

Meanwhile, only four senators, McConnell, Manchin, Johnson, and Collins, had disapproval ratings above 50%—though McConnell’s disapproval rating, at 64%, far outstripped the others. The next highest was Manchin’s, at 53%.

But while these senators are generally unpopular, it’s not clear that they’ll ever be punished at the ballot box. McConnell, Collins, and Graham aren’t up for reelection until 2026, and Cruz is still somehow popular among Republicans, at least. In fact, if there’s anyone who might have cause to worry, it’s Romney—but only because of his relatively shaky standing among GOP voters.

Morning Consult:

Only Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee who voted twice to convict then-President Donald Trump during his impeachment trials, looks in trouble on the right.

Just 41% of Utah Republicans approve of Romney’s job performance, compared with 54% who disapprove. As he weighs a re-election campaign, that leaves Romney only slightly more popular than he was in the wake of Trump’s second impeachment trial in the first quarter of 2021.

The five most popular senators, according to Morning Consult, are Republican John Barrasso, Republican John Thune of South Dakota, Democrat Patrick Leahy (whose final term expired on Jan. 3), independent Bernie Sanders, and Republican Cynthia Lummis. Both Barrasso and Lummis represent Wyoming, while Sanders and Leahy both hail from Vermont.

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Conservative columnist explains why the GOP is so obsessed with Hunter Biden: Guilt over Trump

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

For seven long years, Republicans have serially debased themselves at the altar of Donald Trump—a ramshackle shrine that isn’t as ornate and gold leaf-gilded as you might think. Actually, it’s just like a traditional altar, except if God ever asked Trump to sacrifice his firstborn son on it, Trump would be elbows deep in failson viscera before Yahweh had a chance to tell him He was kidding.

But hey, some might say it’s out of bounds to go after an ex-president’s children—unless they work for his administration, campaign for him endlessly, or repeatedly show up on Fox News as his surrogate. So Barron is off-limits—at least until he’s caught on camera riding Rudy Giuliani around the West Palm Beach Spearmint Rhino like a horsey. Until that day, don’t you dare even mention his name.

But Republicans—they have no such forbearance. Their strategy for fighting inflation, creating jobs, and promoting democracy both here and abroad is single-pronged and simple: investigate Hunter Biden. After all, he has, well, nothing at all to do with his father's administration—but like millions of Americans, he’s battled a substance abuse problem, and so Republicans think they can embarrass our president to the point where he loses it and starts prescribing bleach shots for respiratory diseases and squirreling away top secret nuclear documents in his neck wattle.

Never mind that when it comes to Hunter Biden, all that Republicans are likely to find are some peccadilloes that are personally embarrassing—to Hunter Biden. Meanwhile, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner skipped town with a $2 billion loan from Prince Bone Saws, and No. 1 child Ivanka scored some sweet trademarks from China as her dad threatened and menaced its government with tariffs.

So why are Republicans doing this? Because they’re a waste of time, carbon, and oxygen? Yes, of course—but that’s only part of the answer. The real reason, according to conservative columnist Mona Charen, is pervasive guilt.

In a new column for The Bulwark, Charen argues that Trumpland is so up to its oleaginous teats in gaudy scandal, it has no choice but to paint its opponents with the same off-brand, lead-based paints its been marinating in for most of the past decade.

For seven years, the right has been explaining, excusing, avoiding, and eventually cheering the most morally depraved figure in American politics. That takes a toll on the psyche. You can tell yourself that the other side is worse. Or you can tell yourself that the critics are unhinged, suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome” whereas you are a man of the world who knows nobody’s perfect. But then Trump will do what he always does—he’ll make a fool of you. You denied that Trump purposely broke the law when he took highly classified documents to Mar-A-Lago and obstructed every effort to retrieve them. And then what does Trump do? He admits taking them! You scoff at the critics who’ve compared Trump with Nazis. And then what does he do? He has dinner with Nazis! (And fails to condemn them even after the fact.) You despised people who claimed Trump was a threat to the Constitution, and then Trump explicitly calls for “terminating” the Constitution in order to put himself back in the Oval Office.

Yup. Whatever fever dream you can conjure about Joe Biden and his family, Trump’s real life will eventually top it. Guaranteed. And it’s not even close. So Republicans’ only option now—other than embracing truth and belatedly attempting to salvage some modicum of dignity (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha … whoo! … *wipes away tear*)—is to try to make Biden look just as bad as the guy they gifted with a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free card. Unfortunately, Trump keeps fouling up their plans by continuing to breathe and speak.

President Biden is hardly the first president to have troubled family members. But Joe Biden didn’t hire Hunter at the White House, and if there is any evidence of the president using official influence on Hunter’s behalf, we haven’t seen it. The Department of Justice under President Trump opened an investigation into Hunter Biden. President Biden has left it alone. It’s ongoing.

So even though Hunter Biden’s alleged misdeeds have nothing at all to do with Joe Biden’s administration, the president has refused to intervene on his son’s behalf. Contrast that with Trump, who used the DOJ to spin the Mueller report, tried to use it to steal the 2020 election, and openly criticized his first attorney general for refusing to act as his mob consigliere.

The right has a deep psychological need for the Hunter Biden story. They desperately want Joe Biden to be corrupt and for the whole family to be, in [GOP Rep. Elise] Stefanik’s words, “a crime family” because they have provided succor and support to someone who has encouraged political violence since his early rallies in 2015, has stoked hatred of minorities through lies, has used his office for personal gain in the most flagrant fashion, has surrounded himself with criminals and con men, has committed human rights violations against would-be immigrants by separating children from their parents, has pardoned war criminals, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of COVID patients by discounting the virus and peddling quack cures, has revived racism in public discourse, and attempted a violent coup d’etat.

I wholeheartedly agree, and I couldn’t have said it better myself—because if I’d said it, I would have felt compelled to compare Trump unfavorably to a pumpkin-spiced whale placenta, and that may have lacked the necessary gravitas.

But whatever we on the American side of our country’s current political divide have to say, Republicans will likely go full Republican regardless. Their interminable Benghazi investigations surely contributed to Hillary Clinton’s eventual defenestration, and they can’t wait to perform the same black magic with Joe Biden’s troubled son.

The fact that there’s very little “there” there will hardly dissuade them. But maybe, just maybe, the American people will be wise to their tricks this time around. After all, Donald Trump’s trail of corruption is hard to miss—and Republicans will no doubt be slipping on that slug slime for many years to come, no matter how many distractions they try to throw in our path.

Pillow Man Mike Lindell is itching to challenge Ronna McDaniel for RNC chair

Posted on November 28, 2022 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

It’s crystal clear why Republicans had such a disappointing showing on Election Day. They didn’t harp on the 2020 election enough, didn’t embrace Donald Trump nearly closely enough (because when you do, hard candies and Happy Meal tchotchkes spill from his neck wattle like a piñata), and didn’t make it clear enough to Americans that a vote for GOP candidates was a vote for an elysian Christian dominionist future where abortion is universally acknowledged as an atrocity lying somewhere on the sin continuum between hanging Mike Pence and brutally profaning the name of Barron Trump.

Well, Pillow Man Mike Lindell, whose mustache pomade is almost certainly lead-based, is hoping to fix all that—by challenging Ronna McDaniel for chair of the Republican National Committee.

So McDaniel, who already gave up her name and what was left of her dignity to solidify her hold on the position, could now lose her job as well if Lindell has anything to say about it (which, to be clear, he really doesn’t. I mean, come on.).

Newsweek:

Prominent conspiracy theorist and pillow tycoon Mike Lindell is weighing up a challenge to Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel for leadership of the party following the GOP's underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterm elections.

In an appearance on his "Frank TV" livestream this week, the MyPillow CEO asked fans whether they would support him pursuing a bid against the sitting RNC chairwoman, whom he has previously criticized for her lack of effort to overturn the results of a 2020 election Lindell baselessly claims was rigged against former President Donald Trump.

They overwhelmingly did and Lindell—who has faced federal inquiries for his connections to a Colorado-based effort to prove fraud in that state's election—said he would seriously consider challenging McDaniel.

Mike Lindell announces that he has been drafted by his fans and supporters to run against Ronna McDaniel for RNC Chair, but he has to pray on it first. pic.twitter.com/JPNBCoX6uk
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) November 24, 2022

LINDELL: “Guys, if you support me running for, against Ronna McDaniel, please email me. I’m not gonna be able to email you back, but I want to hear, I want to read all this. I want the feedback. I want to know anything you see negative about it. One of the things I will tell you, you know, there will never, ever stop to get rid of these machines and make this the best elections in world history in our country. … We need something, everybody, and I would, I’ll step into that if, God willing.”

God willing? God’s been letting your prayers go straight to voicemail for years, dude. At this point you’re more likely to get a restraining order from God than any kind of coherent answer.

Now, Lindell mustering his motley army of deludenoids to do anything more complicated than aimlessly loiter in a random field in Wisconsin seems pretty far-fetched. But so did “President Donald J. Trump.” And we all know how that turned out.

So let’s pray for this to happen. Because Republicans clearly have not learned their lesson yet—namely, that there’s no point in voting because all our elections are fraudulent, abortion is a winning issue for conservatives, and what every suburban mom really wants to see is the beatific visage of Donald John Trump shining through their front bay windows like a jowly Chernobyl yeti.

Because what the GOP really needs is at least two more years of this:

Mike Lindell says he is about to “expose everything” with “cyber evidence” about how every election in AZ, PA, and MI was stolen. “They’re caught!” pic.twitter.com/8VosgLT0RK
— Ron Filipkowski 🇺🇦 (@RonFilipkowski) November 21, 2022

Godspeed, Pillow Man. Godspeed.

Sen. Raphael Warnock is still defending his Georgia seat, and the Dec. 6 runoff is coming fast. If you can—and if you aren’t too tired from saving America on Nov. 8—please rush a donation to Team Warnock now! You can also write letters to Georgia voters with Vote Forward! Let’s finish up strong!

Ex-MAGA mite Mo Brooks says Trump is ‘dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, crude’

Posted on November 15, 2022 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

The walls are closing in on Donald Trump, and for once it’s not just because he’s expanding. Republicans stuck with him through the Access Hollywood tape, Charlottesville, family separation, the Big Lie, the insurrection, two impeachments, interminable outrages, and tens of thousands of corrosive lies. But if there’s one thing Republicans won’t abide, it’s losing a chance at retaking the Senate and giving more tax breaks to billionaires.

And now one congressman—who found out too late that Trump is loyal only to himself, his appetites, and his gargoylish gonads—is saying what anyone with a functional brain stem has known for decades: Donald Trump is simply awful.

GOP Rep. Mo Brooks, who, acting on Trump’s behalf, was the first member of Congress to object to the 2020 presidential election results, has now gone full Michael Cohen on the ocher abomination. And it’s a beautiful sight.

Of course, Trump and Brooks’ relationship has been ice cold for some time. At an August 2021 rally, Brooks said voters should put the 2020 election behind them despite Trump’s continued obsession with somehow overturning it—which, of course, Trump asked Brooks to help him do, even after Biden had taken office. Eventually, Trump had had enough of Brooks’ insolence and un-endorsed him for Senate.

Well, now Brooks is warning his fellow Republicans about Trump in advance of Trump’s expected presidential announcement on Tuesday. Like they really need a warning after what happened last Tuesday. AL.com:

“It would be a bad mistake for the Republicans to have Donald Trump as their nominee in 2024,” Brooks said in an interview with AL.com. “Donald Trump has proven himself to be dishonest, disloyal, incompetent, crude and a lot of other things that alienate so many independents and Republicans. Even a candidate who campaigns from his basement can beat him.”

A reference, of course, to virtual campaign events Biden held from his home in Delaware during the pandemic.

“It’s just the way it is,” Brooks said.

Ope! It’s almost like this whole Trump-as-president experiment was a disaster for everyone—his friends as well as his enemies.

So if you’re thinking of getting in bed with Trump, you should think twice. And I mean that figuratively, of course. If you’re thinking of literally getting in bed with Trump, you should hire an EMT to follow you around with an Igloo cooler full of penicillin for the next two decades.

So that’s one more right-wing Republican off the Trump bandwagon. If you keep losing people from an already losing coalition, things probably don’t look great for your future. Unless you can recruit a lot more liberal Democrats to QAnon.

Sure. Good luck with that, Sparky.

And here you thought the midterms were over. Oh, no. Raphael Warnock is still defending his Senate seat. If you can—and if you aren’t too tired of saving America—rush a donation to Warnock now. Let’s finish up strong!

New book: During first impeachment, Ted Cruz admitted all 100 senators knew Trump was guilty

Posted on October 8, 2022 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Republicans love their phony bugaboos. Whether it’s graduate-level courses being taught in kindergarten, migrant caravans shoving old women out of the way at the A&P to score the last marble rye, or foreign drug cartels handing out fentanyl to trick-or-treaters for Squad-knows-what reason, the GOP is great at distracting you from the hell demons feasting on your viscera all day, every day, like so much Laffy Taffy.

But if there’s a suspected Russian agent in the White House doing things only a Russian agent would do—well, never mind. We’ll just see how it plays out. How about that, patriots?

In yet another tardy tell-all on the bag of moldering mystery dicks that was the Trump administration—this one titled Unchecked: The Untold Story Behind Congress’s Botched Impeachments of Donald Trump—POLITICO’s Rachael Bade and The Washington Post’s Karoun Demirjian detail the mental gymnastics congressional Republicans went through during Trump’s first impeachment, all in order to make him seem vaguely not-guilty. Yet according to no less an authority on evil than Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, every single Republican senator actually thought Trump was corrupt to the core. (Or to whatever passes as a Trump “core.” Truth is, all you’re likely to find in there is nougat. Or maybe an old, glitchy CPU from a Furby.)

If you think back to 2,137 hair-on-fire Donald Trump scandals ago, you’ll recall that Trump withheld vital military aid to Ukraine during a shooting war in order to blackmail its president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, into announcing an investigation into Joe Biden—who, if you’ll recall from 1,311 hair-on-fire Trump scandals ago, forced Trump to either go on a feral crusade against our democracy or retreat inside his own neck wattle in abject shame. (As you may recall, Trump opted for the former.)

The question at the time was whether Trump had engaged in a quid pro quo to force favors from his Ukrainian counterpart. It was obvious he had, of course, but Republicans weren’t going to give up on their fantasies that easily. After all, they had a country to ruin, and very little time in which to ruin it.

According to Bade and Demirjian, Republicans were so unimpressed with Trump’s lawyers—who included legendary law professor and Jeff Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz, who’d argued that Trump could do anything he wanted if he thought it would get him elected—they felt the need, as putative “jurors,” to help out Trump’s defense team.

HuffPost:

Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) told Trump’s team afterward to fire Dershowitz on the spot, while Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) warned them to switch tactics.

“Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one,” Cruz reportedly said at one point, contradicting what Republicans were saying publicly about the charges at the time.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) also fumed at Trump’s legal team after they fumbled responding to a senator’s question about calling new witnesses. Trump’s attorneys said that it was simply too late to do so, a line Graham worried would lose Republican votes.

In fact, after that fumble, Graham reportedly opined, “We are FUCKED. We are FUCKED!” as he walked into the GOP cloakroom.

According to the book, even as Republican senators balked at publicly discussing the hearings, telling the media that they needed to remain neutral as “jurors,” Trump’s incompetent legal team forced them to act in private. So then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell twisted arms, ultimately convincing Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Tennessee Sen. Lamar Alexander to vote against hearing further witnesses. Particularly at issue was likely testimony from former National Security Adviser John Bolton, who’d claimed in a book of his own that Trump had told him his scheme to withhold military aid from Ukraine was definitely part of a quid pro quo.

So why the reluctance to convict a guy whom they all knew was guilty? Because Republicans weren’t quite done handing out goodies to wealthy donors, stealing Supreme Court seats, or generally terrorizing anyone with a working womb.

“This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” McConnell reportedly told his charges. “It has always been about Nov. 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”

GOP Senate leaders weren’t just involved in fixing the vote, of course. They were also forced to coach the Trump team in the fine art of not looking like overt criminals.

The book recounts an episode in which McConnell’s top legal counsel, Andrew Ferguson, wrote out an answer to a question Republicans wanted to ask the Trump team during the trial. It was meant to establish a B.S. line of argument that Bolton’s testimony would be moot.

The group gathered around a laptop to weigh in as Ferguson typed. “Assuming for argument’s sake that John Bolton were to testify in the light most favorable to the allegations…isn’t it true that the allegations still would not rise to the level of an impeachable offense? They agreed to ask. “And that therefore…his testimony would add nothing to this case?”

But the senators were worried. Trump’s lawyers had already proven themselves unreliable, even when lobbed the easiest softball questions. “Is Trump’s team going to answer this the right way?” Graham asked.

“I will go down there and tell them to answer it the right way,” Ferguson vowed.

Way to go, “jury”! You saved this monster from himself! Good thing he didn’t go on to incite any insurrections or steal any top secret nuclear documents or anything. Crisis averted! The republic is saved!

When the history of this era is written, Cruz’s quote needs to be italicized, underlined and, ideally, tattooed on every congressional Republican’s forehead. Because it’s the only quote you need to understand the modern GOP.

In fact, their motto might as well be “Yes, we know better—but fuck you anyway, America!” It would be the first honest sentence we’ve heard out of them in years. We’re so close to Nov. 8, and our chance to expand our razor-thin Senate majority. Can you help us keep McConnell, Cruz, Graham, and their ilk in the minority with a donation of just $3 or more to our Senate slate?

‘Lying motherf***er’: In private, Lindsey Graham told the truth about Trump. In public, not so much

Posted on September 16, 2022 (Updated September 17, 2022) by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

With few notable exceptions—Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the drunk gremlin inside Louie Gohmert who controls his mind and wakes him up when he’s about to drown in shallow bowls of SpaghettiOs—congressional Republicans all know damned well that Donald Trump is a dangerous liar.

Yet for some reason, or combination of reasons—cowardice, blackmail, lust for power, free omelets—South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has been a Trump super-sycophant. But it’s unlikely that Graham’s 2016 assessments of Trump—including “I think he's a kook; I think he's crazy; I think he's unfit for office”—ever really changed. What changed was Lindsey’s semi-gelatinous backbone, which miraculously—and almost overnight—transformed into a thin slurry of dead spinal tissue.

As if we needed more evidence that Sen. Graham is slouching toward fascism with his eyes wide open, there’s new reporting about his true feelings toward Adderall Hitler.

The Independent:

In their upcoming book The Divider: Trump in the White House 2017-2021, authors Peter Baker and Susan Glasser recall how they met with Mr Graham outside a Washington DC steakhouse less than 48 hours after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced an impeachment inquiry into whether Mr Trump had extorted the president of Ukraine in a now-infamous July 2019 phone call. The Independent obtained a copy ahead of its 20 September publication date.

Standing on the sidewalk on 19th Street in Northwest Washington, Mr Graham bragged about his access to Mr Trump and told the husband-and-wife author duo about Mr Trump’s boasts regarding his closeness with evangelical pastors who’d met with him the day before. He said Mr Trump had told him: “Those f***ing Christians love me.”

“Those fucking Christians love me” is one of the Trumpiest quotes I’ve ever read, honestly. I’m sure he uttered that without the barest whiff of irony.

Of course, Graham, who voted against convicting Trump in our fugazi führer’s first impeachment trial, nevertheless admitted to the authors that he knew who Trump really was:

“He’s a lying motherf***er,” Mr Graham said, adding the caveat that Mr Trump was also “a lot of fun to hang out with.”

Well, if he’s fun to hang out with, I guess that makes everything he’s done—from blackmailing foreign heads of state to inciting an insurrection to stashing highly classified government documents in random TrapperKeepers in his basement—totally excusable. “Gang, meet Vladimir. He’s committing mass genocide as we speak, but check it out, he brought Pocky!” But Graham didn’t lean on delicious Japanese cookie sticks to justify his defense of Trump. What he actually used as justification for his loyalty is far worse: MAGA devotion to the GOP leader. “[Trump] could kill 50 people on our side and it wouldn’t matter,” he said.

I used to think that if this nation were ever faced with a credible fascistic threat, both major parties—and the mainstream media—would move heaven and Earth to excise the cancer. Instead, they’re leveraging this clear and present danger to Western democracy in order to marginally increase their political influence and sell more books.

Might have been nice of Baker and Glasser to expose this bit of Graham duplicity years ago, before he helped normalize Goofball Satan and his ongoing quest to turn America into a fascist Cracker Barrel. But hey, if this country is going to irrevocably transform itself into a dystopian hellscape anyway, might as well make a few bucks off it and save it for the book, right?

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‘Thanks for stopping by’: Biden fires back after Rick Scott flaunts toxic ‘Plan to Rescue America’

Posted on September 15, 2022 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Our Illustrious Overlord Dark Brandon of House Biden—Vanquisher of Jabronis, Doter of Grandchildren, and Dread Scourge of Dandelions—has been a right saucy rogue lately.

Whereas in the past he’s appeared content to seek common ground with uncommonly gross Republicans, something has lit a fire under Joe Biden lately, and he’s come out swinging. And sometimes—even when he’s not speaking—you can detect a rakish glint in his eye.

The latest? Florida Sen. Rick Scott, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and Medicare fraudster extraordinaire, is sarcastically urging President Biden to spread the word about his 12-point “Rescue America Plan”—and Uncle Joe is sarcastically (and wisely) doing just that.

Shot:

.@JoeBiden said he wished he had enough copies of my Rescue America plan, so I stopped by the White House today to make sure he did. Thanks for spreading the word, Joe! Check it out at: https://t.co/7ZLQG7dZy3 pic.twitter.com/XcoHKktDNm
— Rick Scott (@ScottforFlorida) September 13, 2022

Chaser:

Couldn’t agree more, Rick. And if anyone else wants to read your plan to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block, they should go to https://t.co/xDudwYX85v. Thanks for stopping by. https://t.co/9YXhMisGf5
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 14, 2022

Wait, why would both these guys—one who loves America and one who loves stealing Medicare funds from America—want you to read a Republican plan to “rescue” America? Well, because the plan is arboreal ape shit. And not the top-shelf variety.

And while the plan isn’t nearly as noxious as it used to be—when pretty much everyone from across the political spectrum panned it—it’s still pretty bad.

The major revision Sen. Scott made to his plan involved removing a policy plank insisting that everyone—including people who make little to no money—should be forced to pay income tax. (Guess that’s more important than requiring that all corporations pay a little something in taxes, huh?)

But the plan is still problematic, particularly if voters figure out that it’s an existential threat to Social Security and Medicare, which Sen. Scott probably sees as a corrupt boondoggle because it’s so comically easy to defraud.

Of course, Moscow Mitch McConnell, who understands better than most how to gaslight the plebes, did not like Scott’s plan one bit. Scott rolled it out in February, and fled a GOP press conference on March 1, moments before McConnell addressed what are arguably its two most worrying proposals:

“If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader. I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor,” McConnell said.

[...]

McConnell continued: “Let me tell you what will not be on our agenda. We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years. That will not be part of the Republican Senate majority agenda.”

Yet six months later, the part about sunsetting the vital programs millions of seniors and others depend on to keep eating and breathing? That’s still in there.

As Democratic political analyst and columnist Ed Kilgore noted in in New York magazine:

In any event, Scott was so worried about the stink of the tax-hike idea that his revised plan has 12 points rather than 11; the new one loudly advertises hatred of all taxes and includes the very dumb idea of making it even harder than it already is to avoid an economy-crushing debt default. But what interests me is the fact that he did not take the time to get rid of some of the other howlers in the original plan while he was at it. The five-year sunset on all federal laws that McConnell considered as bad as the minimum tax is still there. So is the truly stupid idea of a 12-year “term limit” on all federal nonmilitary employment, which would impose costs and inefficiencies nearly as severe as Scott’s other proposal to force the relocations of federal agencies outside Washington.

Also, while Lindsey Graham and friends are doing their best to keep the toxic (for Republicans) abortion issue front and center, vaporizing long-held reproductive rights remains an integral part of Scott’s plan:

Abortion kills human children. To deny that is to deny science.

Whether you believe in God or not, as a civilized people who accept science, we must protect babies, born and unborn, from all acts of violence.

All government policies will favor having more babies adopted, not aborted.

This reminds me of the good old days during Trump’s first impeachment, when Neck-Wattle Nero kept telling his followers to read the transcript, and we were all, “Yes, by all means, read the transcript! It shows Trump blackmailing a foreign head of state in order to manufacture dirt on a political opponent!”

Meanwhile, even Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is now getting in on the act, effusively thanking Republicans for punching themselves in their own arrogant faces.

Schumer: What are Democrats doing? Talking about new jobs.. What are the MAGA Republicans doing? A nationwide abortion ban. pic.twitter.com/Johu6hyHn1
— Acyn (@Acyn) September 13, 2022

(Partial) transcript!

SCHUMER: “… Americans from every walk of life are seeing the contrast: What are Democrats doing? Talking about new jobs, cheaper costs. What are the MAGA Republicans doing? A nationwide abortion ban.

“That’s the contrast between the two parties, plain and simple. … Republicans are twisting themselves in a pretzel trying to explain their position on abortion. Let me be clear: Again, what Sen. Graham is introducing is a MAGA Republican nationwide abortion ban. If it walks like a nationwide abortion ban and talks like a nationwide abortion ban, it is a nationwide abortion ban.

“So, that’s the contrast. The split screen is unmistakable for all Americans to see for themselves. We’re focused on job creating, inflation fighting. They’re focused on an extreme agenda that hurts women.”

Sen Schumer is right. There are clear and striking differences between the two parties right now, and Democrats seem keen to highlight them. For some reason, Republicans do, too. And that may finally be their downfall.

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Rudy says Trump didn’t actually steal top secret docs, he was simply ‘preserving’ them

Posted on August 21, 2022 (Updated August 21, 2022) by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

So if you or I had worked for the government and, upon leaving, squirreled away a few top secret nuclear documents in a Six Million Dollar Man lunchbox that we kept under a basement foosball table, we’d be sitting in brightly lit rooms asking if we could please get some unscented udder cream for our serially brutalized nipples. It’s unlikely we’d be able to trot out numerous contradictory excuses for our crimes and have roughly a third of the nation believe them. But Donald Trump is special.

And since his followers are 100% convinced he’s the bestest prezident since George Jefferson, anything he does must be holy, pure, and in the interest of all Americans. And when you have a stable of reliable sycophants like Tickle Me Nosferatu (the bullshit artist formerly known as Rudy Giuliani) at your beck and call, “creative” (read: terrible) rationalizations will flow like black-tar brain effluent down the withering cheeks of a weary nation.

So, yeah—this is the kind of excuse you come up with when you’re completely out of excuses:

Rudy Giuliani tells Newsmax that Trump was just trying to preserve documents by putting them in a safe place. pic.twitter.com/tDJag4loW4
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 19, 2022

GIULIANI: “And now they want to make him responsible for having taken classified documents and preserved them. Really, if you look at the Espionage Act, it’s not really about taking the documents, it’s about destroying them, or hiding them, or giving them to the enemy. It’s not about taking them and putting them in a place that’s roughly as safe as they were in in the first place.”

Yup, securing top secret nuclear documents in restricted, heavily guarded government facilities is exactly the same as leaving them in the hands of a guy well known for blurting out highly classified secrets in front of the Russian foreign minister, making calls on an unsecured cell phone, and tweeting sensitive satellite photos against the advice of every member of the intelligence community. Just like most of us prefer to store our life savings in a Folgers can instead of depositing it in a bank. Makes total sense.

Okay, so clearly, we’re not on the same page as Rudy. For one thing, we don’t hang out with pages. They’re minors, Rudy, and the musky melange of English Leather and Sanka breath is not the aphrodisiac you think it is. But—surprise!—what Rudy is blabbering here is simply not what the Espionage Act says.

As Vox explained in the wake of this kerfuffle, “The Espionage Act is actually a series of statutes under 18 U.S. Code Chapter 37 related to the collection, retention, or dissemination of national defense or classified information. The Mar-a-Lago search warrant referred to Section 793—‘Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information,’ which doesn’t just cover ‘spying’ in the sense that many think of when they hear the term. Section 793 specifically states that people legally granted access to national defense documents—people like the former president—are subject to punishment should they improperly retain that information.”

Trump “retained” this information and refused to give it back, and in June, his lawyers told the government that he no longer held any classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—even though he clearly did.

So how many excuses does this make now? At first, Trump wanted us to believe the FBI planted these documents. Then he claimed he’d declassified them—which only makes sense if he knew which documents the FBI had decided to plant. For a hot minute, Trump also tried to claim some of the documents fell under attorney-client privilege, and like the feckless fucknut he is, he demanded their return.

Then there was the “standing order” excuse, wherein Trump tried to claim that anything he took home with him automatically alchemized from a closely held government secret into a public domain document every American has a right to see—unlike, say, the former pr*sident’s tax returns.

CNN made short work of that one:

YouTube Video

And now—according to Rudy—it’s all good since Trump didn’t destroy the documents or, as far as we know, give them to Russia or Saudi Arabia. Though I assume if we find out he did give them to Saudi Arabia, they’ll move the goalposts again—most likely next to a Krispy Kreme for our ex-POTUS’ convenience.

Of course, if all of this weren’t so horrifying, it would be endlessly amusing. But this is the safety and security of our planet we’re talking about now.

We are not amused.

Alan Dershowitz whines that he’s now a pariah on Martha’s Vineyard just because he enabled Trump

Posted on July 24, 2022 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

You defend one wannabe fascist dictator by saying his boundless lust for power means he should be able to do anything he wants, and all of a sudden progressives don’t like you anymore. It’s brutally unfair, and we shouldn't stand for it. Every American has an inalienable right to be invited to exclusive dress-formal cotillions on Martha’s Vineyard, no matter how many absurd arguments they’ve trotted out on behalf of lawless autocrats.

What has the world come to?

Alan Dershowitz—who, according to Alan Dershowitz, definitely did not rape any underage girls with connections to Jeffrey Epstein—defended disgraced former Pr*sident Donald Trump during the latter’s first impeachment by saying Trump was allowed to use any corrupt methods he chose in order to stay in office, including pressuring a foreign leader to dig up dirt on a political opponent, because he thought he was a great president.

No, really, that was his argument. It’s sort of like saying it’s okay for me to steal a suit from Macy’s because I look so much cooler in it than the peasant who was going to buy it.

Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz: "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." https://t.co/jKErQcS1Iy pic.twitter.com/zo4rL6Zbla
— ABC News (@ABC) January 29, 2020

DERSHOWITZ: “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, and mostly you’re right. Your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

Okay, first of all, Donald Trump has never done anything in the public interest—unless that public interest happens to align with his own pubic—or similarly id-related—interest. Trump wanted to be president again because Attorney General Bill Barr kept telling him it made him untouchable. And maybe because he didn’t want future presidents to beat his high score on video golf. Serving the public interest is way, way down the list of Trump’s motivations, well behind “free four-year maintenance warranty on the Resolute Desk Diet Coke button.”

Also, really? This is really his argument? What if that president is so emboldened by nonsense like this that he launches a full-blown coup attempt and gets people killed—you know, because he cares so much about America and the public interest?

Well, apparently Dershowitz’s fellow liberals were a bit peeved at his efforts to lay the groundwork for Adderall Hitler's Thousand-Year Reich, so like the dedicated progressive he is, Dershowitz scurried over to the far-right bullshit confectionery Newsmax to whine about his “lost” party invitations.

The following clip is from Newsmax. I won’t link to it because I don't want to give them the page views. I also don’t want to give your computer any excuse to kill itself. I know you’ve been Googling “Chuck Grassley baby oil massage” + “rhinestone Speedo” all morning and your computer is already at the end of its rope, so I’m doing you a solid.

Dershowitz, via Newsmax:

“I have essentially been excluded from the Democratic Party. There was recently an event on Martha's Vineyard for Jewish Democrats – who would be the first person you would think of as a Jewish Democrat on Martha’s Vineyard – me, but I wasn't invited because I'm now cancelled essentially from the Democratic Party.

“The library won't allow me to speak on Martha's Vineyard, the Community Center, the major synagogue, all of them have canceled me because I had the chutzpah to defend the constitution on behalf of a president of the United States that they all voted against – the fact that I voted against him, too, and then I remain — in my mind a Liberal Democrat doesn't much matter. If I don't follow the party line down to the extreme, I am cancelled. People refuse to attend events if they know I'm gonna be there and that's why several friends of mine have who have invited me for years to events in their home or concerts that they've sponsored have apologetically said, ‘We're sorry we can't invite you because if you come everybody will leave,’” he added.

“If people don't think there's a cancel culture, I welcome them to Martha's Vineyard and I welcome them to see it with their own eyes.”

Yeah, that’s not cancel culture. It’s “we don’t invite assholes to our parties because they’re assholes and everyone hates them” culture.

You know what this is? It's the world's smallest violin. And it's playing the Benny Hill theme song as you're running around Jeffrey Epstein's island in your underwear. https://t.co/x7e6jLr6Fp
— Ken Tremendous (@KenTremendous) July 17, 2022

I guess helping democracy-hating autocrats desperately cling to power is lonely work on Martha’s Vineyard.

Who knew?

Retiring Sen. Toomey: Trump ‘disqualified himself’ and GOP will have ‘stronger candidate’ in 2024

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Aldous J Pennyfarthing

Why is it that, with a few notable exceptions, prominent Republicans almost always wait until they’re on their way out the door to slag off Donald Trump? They’re like B-movie ninjas who attack an enemy one at a time. Or, perhaps more accurately, they’re like doctors who watch the mole on your back gradually morph into a Rorschach blot over the course of six years before telling you, on the eve of their retirement, that you should probably think about getting that looked at.

Sen. Pat Toomey is one of these folks. While he voted to convict Donald Trump following his second impeachment (though not after the first)—and never really warmed up to the ocher arschloch during his reign of whatever-that-was—Toomey had already announced his retirement when he voted to dump Trump into the dustbin of history. So while his impeachment vote was more courageous than his compatriots’ votes to acquit, it wasn’t like he was risking his political future or anything.

That said, he's making his position perfectly clear before he rides off into the sunset to work at some noxious conservative think tank that will craft an elegant intellectual rationalization—based on time-honored Jeffersonian principles—for pushing Medicare recipients out to sea on ice floes.

But to his credit, he thinks Trump is garbage. Just listen to his very measured and dispassionate case, which he relayed toward the end of a recent Bloomberg TV interview:

Sen. Pat Toomey (R) Pennsylvania: “He disqualified himself from serving in public office by virtue of his post-election behavior.” He also thinks the Republican Party will have a stronger candidate than Donald Trump in the next presidential election https://t.co/qlvvI3zrft pic.twitter.com/qp32wpfbiz
— Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) June 30, 2022

TOOMEY: “I think he disqualified himself from serving in public office by virtue of his post-election behavior, especially leading right up to Jan. 6. I think the revelations from this committee make his path to even the Republican nomination much more tenuous. Never say never, and he decides whether to throw his hat in the ring, but I think we’ll have a stronger candidate.”

Okay, it’s nice of him to state the obvious and everything, but how about showing some urgency? How about dropping napalm like GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger are doing? Maybe he could out his fellow Republican senators who agree with him but are too craven to admit it lest Trump’s preternaturally wee Chucky Doll hands “Truth” out some scarcely comprehensible, ungrammatical, ALL-CAPS DIATRIBES to his flying monkeys in the heartland. It’s not like the future of our democracy is at stake or anything! Hello! McFly!

Donald Trump is not more powerful than every single member of the GOP combined. They didn’t need the revelations from the House Jan. 6 committee to sink him. They could have done that literally dozens of times over the past year and a half by closing ranks with whatever pro-democracy forces managed to crawl out of the smoldering wreckage of Jan. 6.

But, well, a mealy closing statement about the GOP having “better candidates” than Trump is something, isn’t it? It’s not much, but it’s something.

Of course the party has better candidates. No one on the face of God’s green globule could be a worse candidate. But what exactly are you going to do about it once you’re out of Congress, Toomey? Fire off a handful of press releases and call it a day?

We are at a crossroads. One fork of the road leads to Putin-style fascism, the other to a healthier and happier democracy that can continue to thrive on a planet that will at most be half Mad Max hellscape if we manage to reverse course in time.

The Republicans who know better—and I’d like to think there are a lot more than just Cheney, Toomey, and Kinzinger who do—need to do their sworn duty to our Constitution, or it will eventually be worth less than Donald Trump thinks it is.