Mr. Blowhard vs. Mr. Boring

 By Hal Brown

I hope Trump doesn't pick up the nickname Ron DeSooozer. I think it is the best one yet. Fortunately I rather doubt he reads my blog.

How long will the Governor of The Sunshine State fight clean against the slinger of salacious suggestions?

Click above to enlarge

Yesterday my partner and I managed to make our way through The Banshees of Inisherin ( 97% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes):

Set on a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN follows lifelong friends Pádraic and Colm, who find themselves at an impasse when Colm unexpectedly puts an end to their friendship. A stunned Pádraic, aided by his sister Siobhán and troubled young islander Dominic, endeavours to repair the relationship, refusing to take no for an answer. But Pádraic's repeated efforts only strengthen his former friend’s resolve and when Colm delivers a desperate ultimatum, events swiftly escalate, with shocking consequences.

To say the the movie is a downer is an understatement. The reason I am referring to it is because the story revolves about the reason Colm abruptly ends his friendship with Pádraic is that he's dull. Colm has concluded that he has better things to do with his life than waste time with Pádraic  Pádraic believes that boring or not there is virtue in being a nice guy. Colm isn't a blowhard like Trump, but he is a performer as he composes music which then entertains the villagers with playing on his violin at the pub to an appreciative audience. (I previously got the names reversed.)

Of course neither Donald Trump nor Ron DeSantis are nice guys but the most commonly described political deficit DeSantis has to overcome is that he comes across as boring and dull.

DeSantis makes the news by being an anti-woke warrior by promulgating policy. He stands before podiums with a plethora of cardboard signs and in his dull as dirt style announces his latest executive action.

He has yet to go on an offensive offensive directly against Donald Trump. 

DeSantis is not only dull as dirt but his delivery is as dry as the desert. 

If Trump trounces DeSantis he will do it for two reasons. One is that enough members of his cult remain loyal to him, but the other is that his schtick still sticks. Trump, from what I can tell , comes up with his insults himself. He spitballs them, now on Truth Social, and sees what sticks. 

DeSantis so far has mostly ignored them. On the accusation from Trump that he was a groomer of teenaged girls when he spent a year teaching as a private school this is how he responded:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday hit back at former President Donald Trump, a day after Trump promoted a social media post accusing DeSantis of "grooming" teenage girls.

While speaking with reporters, DeSantis was asked about Trump's decision to amplify a Truth Social post that accused DeSantis of plying teen girls with alcohol while he was a high school teacher.

After filibustering for a bit, DeSantis directly addressed Trump's efforts to falsely smear him as a sexual predator.

"I spend my time delivering results for the people of Florida and fighting against Joe Biden," the Florida governor said. "That's how I spend my time. I don't spend my time trying to smear other Republicans." Raw Story

Click above to enlarge tweet reposted by Trump

This is an attack ripe for a riposte since if anyone can be credibly accused of being ephebophiliaesque (primarily sexually attracted to mid to late adolescents) it's Donald Trump. This is evidenced by how he behaved at the Moscow Miss. Universe Pageant and other pageants he owned where contestants complained he watched them undress and harassed them.

Click above for article

DeSantis has plenty of ammunition to fire back at Trump. He has yet to utilize it. If he does so he will need help both an acting coach and a script writer because unlike Trump he is not a natural.

A knock-down drag-out slimy slugfest between these two will prove to be entertaining. The winner will go up against someone who doesn't need any coaching or script writers to help craft comebacks. Joe Biden can do this with his wry sense of humor.

Consider how he put down Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene on Wednesday, sarcastically asking a room full of House Democrats during their annual retreat in Baltimore “isn’t she amazing?”

“She was very specific — I shouldn’t digress, probably — I read, she was very specific recently saying that a mom, a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl, that I killed her sons. Well, the interesting thing is, that fentanyl they took came during the last administration,” Biden said, letting out a chuckle.

He stopped himself from continuing on the topic.

“Look folks. Anyway, I don’t want to get started,” he said.

 (The Hill)

No matter who ultimately wins the GOP primary I hope that whoever runs is so battered and bruised that the swing voters who leaned Republican consider them so damaged that they'll look at all that President Biden and the Democrats accomplished for them and the country, and to promote democracy, and vote D down the line.

Addendum:

I doubt Trump has the five point plan suggested here. He is well aware that few if any of the members of his cult care, or even understand, anything on the list. He knows that they will respond viscerally (not that he can define this word) to his hurling insults at DeSantis. He knows that even if DeSantis wanted to fight back in kind he'd be inept in doing this. In effect it would be a battle between Mr. Blowhard and Mr. Boring. DeSantis might try to get Trump to drink poison but Trump won't take a swallow.

‘They will bend the knee’: Lincoln project cofounder cautions against dismissing Trump

He (Rick Wilson) adds: “Right now they’re all talking so much shit: ‘I’m not going to get with Trump. I’m going to be with the hot new number, DeSantis.’ When DeSantis gets his ass handed to him, when he gets his clock cleaned in a debate or forum or just by Trump grinding away at him, eating him alive mentally for weeks on end, and suddenly Donald Trump’s numbers start posting up again, all the conservative thinkers who are right now like, ‘We will never vote for Trump again, we have integrity!’ will find themselves some excuse. ‘Well, you know, we don’t like Trump’s tweets, but otherwise it’s pure communism!’

Recommended reading:

The media is underestimating Donald Trump — again

How many expeditions into Trumplandia will the media have to take?

By Chauncey DeVega

Comments:

 Anonymous said...

Your ongoing fixation on Trump is quite sad. I hope you get help.

March 3, 2023 at 7:09 AM

 

 Ben Kalom said...

I would offer in response to the first comment: 
We have an obligation to remain vigilant, to continue to offer up ridicule, to be hyperaware of both Mr. Trump and Mr. DeSantis. Predators need to be paid attention to. The pair of them have only one goal - hunting down their next victim.

This is a continuation of a traumatic stretch of years in our lives.

Interesting interview with Steven Spielberg on Colbert last night.

They got into the topic of antisemitism, and Spielberg offered up that he hadn't seen the rise in antisemitism in the last 50 years or so, not until now, when marginalization made possible the returned spread of general hatred, and its bedfellow, antisemitism.

Spielberg said he was given hope through the words of Anne Frank, who offered, in her diary, people are basically good.

When you watch the interview, you will see the imaginarium of Spielberg's genius, being stretched to find that hope.

If these creepos get their way, minorities will be marched off to some as-yet undisclosed location, to be eliminated, to re-enact the horror of 1938-1945 Germany.

The ONLY thing that stops the insanity of our current foment and discord is when good people get pissed off, stand resolute, agree to defend their herds and find community with those doing the same.

Please keep bashing the shit outta these two assclowns. They have earned our contempt.

March 3, 2023 at 7:27 AM

 

I was ready to open a Truth Social account and try to post an abridged version on this which was complementary to Trump on a new free blog in an attempt to get Trump to "re-Truth" it. I thought that I might get him to start using Ron DeSnoozer and then I could take credit for it and direct people to my actual blog. I opened a new dedicated email and that worked for step one of verification but then in order to complete registering I needed a phone number which they would verify as step two. I tried some fake phone numbers I found online but none of them worked. I wasn't about to give them one of my two real phone numbers. 

If I really want to bother going through with this I can buy a $20 burner phone and see if I can register with that number.

The Sandra Sanders speech wasn't psychiatric word salad, it was deliberate gaslighting

 The Sandra Sanders speech wasn't psychiatric word salad, it was deliberate gaslighting

By Hal Brown, MSW

Those of us who watch MSNBC keep hearing terms like unhinged and untethered from reality, and today in the Raw Story article shown above (with my added picture) "word salad" is a term used to describe the GOP response Sarah Sanders gave to the State of the Union speech.

These terms tend to be used colloquially but many of them have counterparts in psychiatry. "Word salad" is one of them. Used to describe the Sanders rebuttal it is meant to be a mishmash of ingredients which, alas, for a chef would make a hard to stomach salad.

In psychiatry those who speak in a word salad are manifesting a symptom of a serious disorder.

Wikipedia has as good a description as any:

A word salad, or schizophasia, is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases",^[1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The term schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia.^[2] The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but are semantically confused to the point that the listener cannot extract any meaning from them. The term is often used in psychiatry as well as in theoretical linguistics to describe a type of grammatical acceptability judgement by native speakers, and in computer programming to describe textual randomization.

In psychiatry

Word salad may describe a symptom of neurological or psychiatric conditions in which a person attempts to communicate an idea, but words and phrases that may appear to be random and unrelated come out in an incoherent sequence instead. Often, the person is unaware that he or she did not make sense. It appears in people with dementia and schizophrenia,^[3] as well as after anoxic brain injury. In schizophrenia it is also referred to as schizophasia.^[2] Clang associations are especially characteristic of mania, as seen in bipolar disorder, as a somewhat more severe variation of flight of ideas. In extreme mania, the patient's speech may become incoherent, with associations markedly loosened, thus presenting as a veritable word salad.

I am not saying that Sanders has a psychiatric disorder. This is more what she was doing, also from Wikipedia:

Deliberate use

Narcissistic word salad is a type of purposefully confusing speech, using circular reasoning, logical fallacies and other rhetorical devices to disorient and manipulate a person or group. Some antisocial and narcissistic people use it in gaslighting their targets.

She was all over the place with her emphasis on how horrible the Democrats are in promoting so-called "woke" policies and using the word freedom numerous times. Of course she's trying to gaslight everyone as if by describing the destruction of freedom as freedom it will make people question their own sanity. 

Just about every part of the anti-woke culture war is an attempt to take away freedom, from a woman's right to choose to the right to read what you want to read, to learning the truth about racism I'm America, to your gender identity choice. It's as if she thinks that the more she uses the word freedom she will distract from the fact that these anti-workers want to subjugate those they disagree with.

Here's a good article about her speech:

Republicans Respond to Biden: We’re Not Weird

• By: Matthew Sheffield 
• Feb 8, 2023

Will the public ever recognize instantly who the initials JRB stands for?

 Will the public ever recognize instantly who the initials JRB stands for?

By Hal Brown

Look up FDR and you will find...

 247,000,000 results on Google. The initials LBJ and JFK are readily associated with the two presidents.

Look up JRB on Google and while there are 8,820,000 results none, at least on the first page, refer to Joseph Robinette Biden.

Click above to enlarge

The text I used for the illustration on this blog is from this Salon article by historian Robert S. McElvaine's article ... 

Of course some presidents no matter where history ever ranks them end up being referred to by three initials even when their middle names were fairly well known. Harry S. Truman never became HST, for example.

The reference to President Biden as JRB, who is usually referred to as Joe Biden rather than Joseph Biden, jumped out at me. I think using the three initials was an attempt by the author to equate him with FDR and LBJ.

I agree with the author's assessment. 

I think that Biden's (JRB's if you prefer) accomplishments have been drowned out in the GOP noice machine. He's been like Pablo Casals or Jascha Heifetz playing a solo during  a shit-throwing battle between screeching monkeys.

After describing the accomplishments that he uses to justify why FDR and LBJ were great presidents the author explains why he thinks Biden's two-year record stacks up well against "the very high bars set" by FDR and LBJ. Here are bullet points:

• The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to stimulate the economy.
• The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to provide for repairs and extensions to the nation's roads, bridges, railroads, water systems and broadband. 
• The PACT Act, expanding health care and benefits for those who were exposed to toxic substances during their military service. 
• The CHIPS and Science Act, funding advanced scientific research and investing $53 billion to manufacture silicone microchips in the U.S. 
• The Inflation Reduction Act, which does more than any previous legislation to mitigate climate change, allows Medicare to negotiate with Big Pharma to cut prescription drug prices, begins to crack down on tax evasion by corporations and the very rich and much more. 
• The Respect for Marriage Act, protecting both same-sex and interracial marriage.
• A reform of the Electoral Count Act, making it more difficult to overturn an election, and reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.
• Biden has also excelled on the international stage far more than Roosevelt did in his first two years — and more than Johnson ever did. Biden rallied the forces of democracy to oppose Vladimir Putin's authoritarian aggression and aid Ukraine and revived NATO, which Trump had on the verge of collapse.

The future not only for JRB, for American democracy itself, depends on how well Democrats are able to, one, get enough voters to know about these accomplishments, and two and perhaps just as or more importantly, to care about how these benefit them personally.

Those who prefer to have a fascist authoritarian America where minority groups are marginalized (or worse) are a lost cause.  In their MAGA slogan "again" is a yearning for a pre-Civil War Confederacy. 

Those with even a rudimentary grasp of history wouldn't be bothered by the similarities between the rise of Hitler in the 1930's and what is happening in the United States today. To the contrary, they would applaud it.

--------- Addendum---------

Other articles by Robert S. McElvaine:

WHATTAYA THINK OF “SLEEPY JOE” & “DYSFUNCTIONAL” DEMOCRATS NOW, AMERICA? Aug. 2022

 

Seven days in July: America's moment of political climate change Aug. 2022

-------

Coincidentally, as I was finishing up this story the Cincinnati mayor was being interviewed on "Morning Joe" about how Biden's infrastructure bill was helping his city from improving transportation to increasing funding to the police in order to enable them to hire community resource officers to deal with mental health calls.

Postscripts:

Jennifer Rubin in a Washington Post Q&A answers this question: Will Republican lunacy ever cost them any significant number of voters?

There are multiple groups of voters who continue to support GOP candidates. The first is the hardcore cultists, who are beyond reason and persuasion. The second includes business interests, which go along for the tax cuts and anti-regulation policies. Those people are more reachable if they fear House Republcians are inviting economic chaos.

The final group includes habitual Republicans with an inordinate fear of Democrats. They can also be swayed. These are the voters who at some level understand that Biden is not a raving socialist; that our economy is recovering; that our international standing has improved; and that the side that is radical is the GOP. Biden's appeal to bipartisanship, good faith efforts to address the border and popular economic measures (e.g., infrastructure investments) are effective in persuading this group. Overall, the best thing going for Democrats is the unhinged, irresponsible conduct of the MAGA House.

-----

I posted links to this on Facebook, Tribel, Mastodon, and Twitter. On the latter I included the most popular hashtags with Biden including the one with the highest number, BidenWorstPresdientInHistory. I'll add replies to this tweet here if I get any.

Here's my tweet:

One person train wrecks and a huge traffic pileup

One person train wrecks and a huge traffic pileup

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

 

Is it any coincidence that all of the people who have become one person train wrecks and the large group that has become a huge highway traffic pileup are Republicans? I can't think of a Democrat but would be happy if readers can find one to add to my list.

In a quick glance at RawStory this morning I saw these articles:

The first one is about the coming battle in the House for who will be Speaker. I consider this just the beginning of what will be a huge traffic pileup for the House GOP as they begin their investigations into Hunter Biden, who everyone has heard of but few care about, to Alejandro Mayorkas who nobody has heard of but will once the hearings start.  Their eventual goal may be to try to impeach President Biden, an effort that might be successful in the Republican controlled House but will go nowhere in the Senate. 

What it all adds up to is a gridlocked (to use another traffic term) legislative agenda in the House which you better believe Democrats will publicize to their advantage when popular bills go down to defeat.

The individuals who have the most ginormous train wrecks Donald Trump and Elon Musk who are the most publicized. The lack of judgment and self-defeating grandiose narcissism of these two is 

If Herschel Walker loses he will be added to the list. Hell, if he wins, covering his putting his foot in his mouth as a Senator will prove irresistible to media.

Other train wrecks who make the news who come to mind are Kari Lake (read story) and Ye (who is apparently going to run for president with 

Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos helping in his campaign ). 

I predict that there will be many opportunities for the likes of Jim Jordan (read yesterday's blog story about the soon to be chair of the GOP Judiciary Committee) and other House Republicans, especially those in the Freedom Caucus who crave attention like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Goetz, to vie for the dubious distinction of becoming headline grabbing train wreck of the day or week.

The reason some of the individuals who will crash and burn will be due to calculated attempts to gain notoriety and to stand out in a crowded field. Keep my highway metaphor, compare it to someone driving 100 MPH in attempt to beat everyone else to a destination.

Most of them also just happen to meet the many of the clinical criteria for having a narcissistic personality disorder.  This is from The Mayo Clinic:

Symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and how severe they are can vary. People with the disorder can:

• Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
• Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
• Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
• Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.
• Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
• Believe they are superior to others and can only spend time with or be understood by equally special people.
• Be critical of and look down on people they feel are not important.
• Expect special favors and expect other people to do what they want without questioning them.
• Take advantage of others to get what they want.
• Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
• Be envious of others and believe others envy them.
• Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited.
• Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office.

At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they view as criticism. They can:

• Become impatient or angry when they don't receive special recognition or treatment.
• Have major problems interacting with others and easily feel slighted.
• React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior.
• Have difficulty managing their emotions and behavior.
• Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change.
• Withdraw from or avoid situations in which they might fail.
• Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection.
• Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure.