Lord Dampnut’s recent address to the nation is one of the weirder things I’ve seen from the ogre clown. (And that includes his weird six-minute “weave” about the Peruvian viper – during a White House holiday event no less – when he claimed 26,000 to 28,000 people per year die from snake bite. Try six.) So there he is, speaking to the camera, no audience, straight from a teleprompter. It is surely a sign of the growing desperation in the inner circle that it is all falling apart that he agreed to do such a thing. And he, as far as we know, didn’t do much straying and even stayed on time. There were of course the usual piles of misleading, exaggerated and just downright false claims about his greatness and all that has been accomplished in the last year. A sampling includes:
- inherited the greatest inflation in history – except for the three or four other times it has been worse
- prices are down from the same time last year – except that four of the six or so he specified (cars, gas, hotel, and airfare) are up an average of 18%
- he mentioned turkey and eggs, both of which did come down from earlier in the year, but only because they got insanely high and despite falling are still higher than last year
- The “biggest tax cut in history” – it isn’t – will save “many families between $11,000 and $20,000 a year”. The average savings is actually $800. Guess who gets those fat five figure cuts? The top 1%.
Then there are the just farcical claims. He says he brought peace to the middle east for the “first time in 3,000 years”. I don’t even know what that could begin to mean, and by the way, that peace/ceasefire is no such thing, with attacks and casualties happening daily. He also claims to have brought drug prices down up to 600%. Um. I’m no economist but would that mean that the drug companies were paying us? If something costs a dollar and you reduce it by 100% it is now free. I don’t know what happens beyond that. In the if-you-are-specific-enough-it-must-be-true category, he said Biden admitted 11,888 murderers and that 50% of them killed more than one person. Even if that number that someone pulled out of their ass was accurate, the vast majority of them have been here for many years, most of them are in jail and many have been deported. I can play this game: “89.6 percent of the shit that comes out his mouth is bullshit, and 67.4 percent his statistics are made up.” Easy.
We’ve also learned some interesting things since the address. That “warrior dividend” that he was giving the military that was coming from all of the trillions of tariff dollars flowing in sounds good right? Turns out that $1,776 (cute) bonuses were actually already approved by Congress as part of the reconciliation bill and is a housing supplement funded by the USDA. He just renamed it. Also of note is that the myriad justifications and rationale for the military build up, boat strikes, seizure of tankers, etc surrounding Venezuela have nothing to do with fentanyl or Maduro or terrorist states or anything else they’ve trotted out. It’s about the oil. Again. The announcement that Venezuela had “stolen our oil” is not only ludicrous on its face, but in conjunction with the executive order declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction produces a specific and sickening sense of deja vu. Just search “Cheney and WMD” and brace yourself. But, hey, there are very few more tried and true methods to save a struggling presidency than starting a war.
Which brings me back to why I thought the address was so odd. He was lying as fast as he could as he always does (but is it lying if he really believes all he is saying to be true? We might have stumbled on a new koan), but there was a tone and feel that I don’t recall before. He was basically yelling at us, the audience of “American people” he couldn’t see, about how great everything all is, and why wouldn’t we believe him. He got steadily more strident as it went along, and even his closing “have a merry christmas and a happy new year” had an “or else” feel to it. It reminds me a bit of a favorite t-shirt that I got at a Ren Faire years ago that said “the floggings will continue until morale improves”. How dare we not believe everything he says despite mountains of evidence to the contrary and our own eyes? I would take heart in the unravelling if I wasn’t so concerned about what this particular feral rat might do if he no longer has anything to lose.
I couldn’t figure out any place else to put this little tidbit, but when something so demonstrates the idea of something that could be hysterical if it wasn’t so twisted (or on display in the fucking White House) you have to marvel. The quote from toady extraordinaire Karolyn Leavitt is breathtaking: “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.” No shit. I am genuinely baffled by her ability to spew such dreck day in and day out without imploding. Did you know that something worthy of noting about Reagan is that he was “a fan” of young Trump? What a legacy. Thanks for reading.