Hot but overcast a bit this late-afternoon Monday here in California’s Central Valley — and with the clouds, the air is more livable and somewhat easier to handle. Plus, temperatures are reportedly under three digits, so there’s that, too.
Meanwhile, the politics of America continue unabated into a full-blown whacked country. Our timeline despite recent history is completely in sequence with all kinds of other ugly worldwide shit, like climate change — what a moment to have the horrible T-Rump come on the scene allowing Republicans to finally — after at least five decades — come out of the closet and be asshole, pieces-of-shit right out in the open.
Our scenario is that T-Rump, MAGA Republicans are horribly, near-indescribably bad for this country. All this weird-ass bullshit from abortion, and trans/gay rights to book bans, along with a shitload of other items and is propelled by a most-definite mean-spiritedness. Although a minority of our population, there’s definitely a big chunk of Americans, and they’re nasty and armed.
Yet we have somewhat of an advantage — the T-Rump and his minions are really, really stupid.
In the classified-documents case, the plot line and characters would be funny, slapstick clownish, absurd, and downright dumb if there wasn’t an underlying horror to the idiocy, a view into the appalling ignorance and criminal intent of people who could be in control/running this country.
In a ridiculous instance — over the weekend, former Georgia lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan had this to say about the T-Rump situation: ‘“Nominating Donald Trump for the Republican Party is a lot like peeing in your pants, right? … It’s gonna feel good for a couple of seconds, but then you wake up and realise the realities of what you just did.”‘
Funny, right? Yet really, really shitty, with a really enormous personal. impact.
However, too late.
And the case in point is the new Mar-a-Lago charges — a plotline those striking Hollywood writers would love to have created. Except, no one could have thought it: Nothing explains naive, obviously dumb-ass criminals:
The new Mar-a-Lago indictment is achingly, mind-numbingly ridiculous.https://t.co/KbhUbW3YtJ
— Liz Dye (@5DollarFeminist) July 31, 2023
Journalist Liz Dye at Public Notice this morning with what could have been the making of a possible movie about some inept bunch of bungling morons led by a narcissistic idiot — some snips:
The tale of the two gormless henchmen creeping around the basement pointing flashlights at security cameras and the servers they’d been dispatched by Trump to wipe — all the while being captured by those very same cameras! — is almost too ludicrous to bear. Who knew there could be something more preposterous than that photo of the tacky bathroom with the boxes stacked in the shower?
[…]
It’s clear from the indictment that Trump’s club is equipped with an extensive network of security cameras. That’s how we know that Nauta met up with De Oliveira after landing in Florida on June 25, and at 5:46 p.m. the pair “went to the security guard booth where surveillance video is displayed on monitors, walked with a flashlight through the tunnel where the Storage Room was located, and observed and pointed out surveillance cameras.”
Were they dressed like Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern in the Home Alone movies? Did they take flashlights because they hoped somehow to defeat the motion-activated camera sensors referred to in the evidentiary pleadings? We may never know. But we do know that at 9:48 a.m. on June 27, De Oliveira approached the IT office and pulled Taveras aside for a private chat. A minute later, they were in an “audio closet” near the White and Gold Ballroom, where Trump’s stolen boxes had been stacked before Nauta shifted them to the storage locker.
[…]
And if you’re having trouble keeping the dramatis personae here straight, it’s because the whole thing is a Keystone Cops comedy where the protagonist is a cartoon villain who swipes oversized love notes from murderous despots and stashes military secrets in his pool locker.
Normal people don’t pratfall into violating the Espionage Act because they think that national defense documents are cool keepsakes to have around. But normal people also don’t spend 70 years cultivating a reputation as serial philanderers, only to hold themselves out as avatars of Christian values. So perhaps it was inevitable that we’d wind up here, with the former president facing a decade in jail for crimes so mind-numbingly stupid, and yet so extensively documented.
From the boxes in the bathroom, to the flashlights in the tunnel. From the lawyer fresh off a stint at OAN, to the lawyer dictating a long memo explaining that his client instructed him to defy a grand jury subpoena. From Trump recording himself disseminating national defense information, to his goons getting caught on camera trying to destroy the security footage.
It’s all so offensively dumb!
Shushing emojis? Seriously?
If the writers weren’t already on strike, they’d walk out in protest. Next we’ll find out that the security camera footage was destroyed in a conveniently timed flood.
Go read the whole piece — Aaron Rupur’s Public Notice is really, really good. Worth the read just about every day it’s published, which is about every day.
Anyway, let’s finish this slapstick post with a little flutter of stick:
Nothing more, nothing less https://t.co/vZsFXjQw7V
— Laurence Tribe ?? ?? (@tribelaw) July 31, 2023
Comedy of terrors, or not, yet here we are once again…
(Illustration out front: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les Deux Saltimbanques: l’Arlequin et Sa Compagne,’ found here.)