Split screen: Impeachment is all about counter-programming against Georgia trial

By Hal Brown

With House Republicans it's all about egos and eyes.

The clamor to hold impeachment hearings against President Joe Biden is a deafening cacaphony of caca. 

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It's quite a task for people like James Comer and Matt Gaetz to outdo Marjorie Taylor Greene who called for red state succession on the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 for mooning for the media. You may accuse the likes of these Republicans for lots of things but you can't say they are camera shy. You get between them and a camera at your own peril.

Now that Kevin McCarthy has bypassed a House vote (which would go down in defeat) and initiated a House impeachment inquiry (story) it is amusing to watch Greene erupt spewing molten lava like Mt. Kilauea claiming she was pressing for a Biden impeachment inquiry immediately upon taking office: see

Feud erupts between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz over Biden impeachment.

Still, try as they might media hogs like GOP members of the House Gaetz, Comer, Jim Jordan, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert et al, and Tommy Tuberville in the Senate, don't stand a chance of being immortalized in stone. It is Marjorie Taylor Greene who is vying to be sculpted on the Mt. Rushmore of GOP gigantism.

In the coming weeks thanks to Georgia courts allowing live video coverage we can expect compelling, perhaps dramatic, reality TV. The show will be starring well known "celebrities" whose faces are well known like Mark Meadows and Sidney Powell and Kenneth Cheesbro, whose name not his face are familiar. If Trump doesn't get his case removed to federal court, the mega MAGA star Donald Trump, the only defendant who actually has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, will be must-see TV if he's in court, especially if he decides against his lawyers' advice to testify.

He has the star, once defaced and replaced, there, and it is the most prominent attraction:

Read article about the star

Ironically, in order to pry eyes away from the trial if Trump is a featured celebrity House Republicans will have to put on a Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus extravganza.

This will be a challenge if their center ring attraction is only Hunter Biden. If President Biden testifies (the last president to appear before Congress was Gerald Ford) depending on what's happening in Georgia I can see the GOP winning the ratings rounds for a period of time. MAGAs want to see their GOP heroes make Joe Biden squirm under their barrage of goofball gotcha questions. Lots-a-luck with that. The president doesn't do squirm.

One crazy place to be will be in the control rooms of the major television  networks where directors will have to decide what to feature on the biggest portion of their split screen when interesting things are happening simultaneously. TV hosts and panelists will have to go back and forth as they talk about the House impeachment and the Georgia trial. Complicating all of this will be any other trial involving Trump which may be occurring at the same time but doesn't have live TV coverage.

The only thing that might wipe the political news off the media is a catergory nine earthquake along the San Andreas fault (aka The Big One) which literally wipes out large portions of coastal California, Oregon, and Washington.

Election 2024: Silly Season or Stinky Season?

By Hal Brown

Read today's blog story on single page here.

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Link to article "Like ‘wearing a Speedo’: Fox News freaks out over Biden wearing sneakers in public ‘instead of dress shoes’"

#sneakergate is now a hashtag on Twitter:

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They don't link to Twitter

Then there's this...

 See "Trump shares image of his minor son being used in political attack"

The two articles above caught my eye this morning. I thought how downright absurb, or silly if you will, they were. 

I suppose one way look at this is that there are some creative Trump supporters. After all, how does one turn the fact that instead of wearing sneakers meaning that President Biden is athletic they say this is proof postive he's senile? 

I'm 79 and mentally and physically fit. The four pairs of shoes I own languish in a box at the back of my closet since I rarely wear them.  In fact, I don't even own a necktie. Then again, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm not president of anything. As you can see I am one of the many who have discovered HOKA shoes which I wear in warm weather whenever I don't wear sandals.

Perhaps this Rosanna_RosannaDanna, who may or may not have made the image but did post it on Truth Social, thinks they are a brilliant satirist. Whoever it is took their handle, with the name spelled not quite correctly, from the Gilda Radner SNL character. They've been on Reddit (here) for four years but never posted anything.

The youngest Trump progeny (that we know of) has been kept out of poltics (though he still makes the news on some websites like this article about how he supposedly won't tell his father he loves him). From what I've read Melania wants to insulate him from daddy's poltical world. She might not be happy that Big Daddy reposted this image on Truth Social and that this is a story being shared. Horrors upon horror, not only did it make Raw Story, but it's on my blog.

It breaks my heart that Melania might be perturbed at Donald.

As for Rosanna: what a way to get national attention! It tempts me to join Truth Social and see if I can get Trump to re-post something I put on his personal online sandbox. One might ask "Who let the cat do his business in that particular sandbox?"

These attempts to smear President Biden are all rather silly, but then we have the likes of the class-act Marjorie Taylor Greene who thought it appropriate to hold up those photos of Hunter Biden with a scantily clad woman, supposedly a prostitute, at a House committee hearing.

We already have Jim Jordan's jingoistic juggernaut, James Comer's crime confabulations, and of course the master of miserable himself, Donald J. Trump... one may ask:

For those not familiar with the reverse question mark, it means the statement is rhetorical.

Venomous GOP House committee chair was just amazingly honest

 By Hal Brown

Update, new article in Salon blasts NY Times writers: N.Y. Times offers grotesque whitewash of Rep. James Comer, GOP's new attack dog

Lengthy profile of Oversight Committee chair James Comer is loaded with folksy details — but misses the real story

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There is a short Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. In it she refers to James Comer, the Kentucky member of the House, as the "newly crowned chair of the House Oversight Committee" hence my illustration above.

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The first half of the article before Marcotte went into what is in the title struck me as amazing because it describes the candor and forthrightness of a Republican who is only recently in the public eye, or at least in the eyes of people who follow politics closely.

"You know, the customer's always right."

Rep. James Comer gave this juicy quote to Jonathan Swan and Luke Broadwater for their New York Times profile of the Kentucky Republican. He was explaining his affection for right-wing conspiracy theories. The "customer[s]" in this case, as Swan and Broadwater write, are the "vengeful, hard-right voters" who "propelled Comer to stardom" in the GOP.

It's quite an admission from the newly crowned chair of the House Oversight Committee. When asked why he is so intent on using his powers, as Swan and Broadwater write, "to investigate unhinged claims about President Biden and Democrats," Comer could have played political word games, pretending either to take these conspiracy theories more seriously than he actually does. He could have feigned outrage at the suggestion that his motives are anything less than honorable. Instead, Comer seems unconcerned to be seen, to the readers of the New York Times anyway, as a huckster for disinformation scraped out of the darkest corners of the internet.

"They don't know that it's QAnon," he even told Swan and Broadwater, "but it's QAnon stuff."

Former senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweeted that “Jim Comer has a Trumpian blend of incompetence and malice”. Comer is described as the an "aggressive promoter of sinister-sounding claims about the president and his family" in The New York Times. The Times also says he "has gone from being a favorite Republican among Democrats in Kentucky’s Legislature to a commander of the G.O.P. war machine in Congress."

Credit...This is from the Times article:

Appearing on Fox News in January, Mr. Comer implied, without evidence, that there was a connection between Mr. Biden improperly holding on to classified documents when he was a private citizen and his son, Hunter, receiving a diamond from a Chinese tycoon. In another segment Mr. Comer lamented that Beau Biden, the president’s other son, who died of cancer in 2015, was never investigated.

His embrace of such statements reflects how Mr. Comer, who voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory and was a favorite among Democrats in Kentucky’s Legislature, has transformed himself to command the Republican war machine in Congress — becoming a high-profile example of what it takes to rise and thrive in the Fox News-fed MAGA universe.

It also underscores the cutthroat instincts of Mr. Comer, who presents himself as an affable country boy of limited abilities, but who has proved to be a methodical and transactional political operator, willing to go to great lengths to crush his adversaries.

During his campaign for governor in 2015, facing allegations of abuse from an ex-girlfriend who also said he had taken her to get an abortion, Mr. Comer worked to discredit a blogger reporting on the claims and a campaign rival he believed was behind them, leaking private emails between the two. Mr. Comer denied the woman’s charges but lost the race anyway.

The honesty shown in the interview with Swan and Broadwater is surprising, but it also may be an example of his incompetence. Why would he want to put it out there that he is deliberately manipulating people who voted him into office with lies? Whoever runs against him in the future would be stupid if they didn't use this against him.

What are we to make about how honest he was with Jonathan Karl and Luke Broadwater interviewing him for a newspaper he'd probably refer to as a purveyor of fake news? Does he assume that none of the Kentuckians who elected him four times to represent them will ever read it? After all he basically just called them ignoramuses.