The Carpentariat

Stalin's artistry, in reverse

[A hurried, single post today. I have an MRI scheduled in a bit, and I'm terrified; I have the granddaddy of all claustrophobia cases. They have promised to use a horse's dosage of Versid via IV, but I tend to be sedative/narcotics-resistant. They added that if the Versid fails — i.e., if I start screaming "Get me out of here" — then next, someday, they'll use anesthesia. But why not first potentially waste $$8,000 or whatever an MRI costs these days before trying the sure thing? See you tomorrow.]

Joseph Stalin's photographic artistry involved airbrushing unwanted, executed or Siberian-chilling nonpersons out of history. Trump's White House, having several extra decades of photographic technology in its favor, has picked up on Stalin's creativity, but in reverse: It adds much-wanted nonpersons (literally) to the wannabe dictator's pictorial history.

A few dozen people turned out yesterday afternoon in FL to hear Tя☭mp upon his arrival. Pic 1: Wide shot of actual crowd. Pic 2: White House released image of the event. Pics 3 & 4: Notations of the same people cut and pasted into the image to make the crowd bigger. #TrumpLies pic.twitter.com/KraWl5OUhs

— Jim (@CommentOnTWLB) August 1, 2020

***

I always corroborate viral photos, but I admit, today was a bad day, from morning till night. But as to belated corroboration (which, as noted, is inexcusable), a couple commenters rightly questioned the validity of the photos above. All I can say is here is Vox.com's Aaron Rupar's original photo-tweet of Trump's Tampa turnout. Did the White House release an altered photo? I just can't say. I could find no corroboration of that. So I should not have disseminated what could be a fraud. My apologies.

not exactly an overflow crowd at Trump's speech in Florida pic.twitter.com/uS2o0fptNE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 31, 2020

Another well-engineered calamity, courtesy the Trump GOP

Here it is, virtually disappearing and going from 15 to one in no time at all.

"The United States recorded more than 1.9 million new infections in July, nearly 42 percent of the more than 4.5 million cases reported nationwide since the pandemic began and more than double the number documented in any other month.... The previous monthly high came in April, when more than 880,000 new cases were recorded [my emphasis]….

"In many states, distressed government officials are retightening restrictions on residents and businesses, and sounding warnings about a rise in virus-related hospitalizations."

This fresh but also continuing calamity was predicted by all the health experts who didn't have some presidential thug pointing a gun at their head. Reopen too soon and too widely, they said, and we'll have an even worse disaster. They were right, and, shockingly, science-denying politicians and Republican partisans were wrong.

Meanwhile, as thousands more are being thrown out of work, the Republican Senate is trying its best to make this worse disaster seem like a mild preview. It has dug in to cut by two-thirds a two-months-old, $3 trillion relief package proposed and passed by House Democrats. The legislation "includes an extension of the jobless aid, nearly $200 billion for rental assistance and mortgage relief, $3.6 billion to bolster election security and additional aid for food assistance," writes the Times.

Food assistance? Election security? Mortgage and rental relief and yet more aid to those millions who so lazily got themselves laid off by a pandemic? How absurd.

The welcome reincarnation of Al Franken's inimitable humor

My guess is that since one solitary colleague — whose infamous name should never again be uttered — railroaded him out of the U.S. Senate for her own (mistaken) political gain, Sen. Franken has decided to return to less ponderous, though more truthful, political observations. 

I'd cut the TOP TEN to just FIVE: #s 10, 8, 6, 4 & 1.

The others still remain valid, of course.

And every Trumpeteer should commit him- or herself to at least three or four of these excuses now. To pre-escape the cliché of … avoid the rush.

Word of the week

As always, no cheating in cahoots with Merriam-Webster.

This week's pro-intellectual word of the week in reaction to modern conservatism's anti-intellectualism. (There is no prize except the self-satisfaction of knowledge.) 

Satyriasis.

Hint: A specifically, though in some instances pleasurable, male affliction. And that, gentle reader, along with the word's prefix, is a giveaway hint. I'm feeling generous this morning.  

Extra credit: A more useful but still more commonly theology-related word:

Exegetical. 

Attacking Dr. Fauci is Jim 'the gym' Jordan, another "originalist" who ignores the Constitution

Jim Jordan, a United States congressman sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution, totally ignores its First Amendment, which specifically ensures "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

This guaranteed right Mr. Jordan never mentions — nor, unfortunately, does Dr. Fauci — although that is the fundamental, critically important, constitutional difference between a BLM protest and an open "Gym."

The Bill of Rights says nothing about the right to go to work or to work out or to attend church (it only protects the "establishment of religion"). It still dazzles my brain to think that Republicans, who have made a national religion out of the establishment of their politics, persist in being the worst offenders of straightforward constitutional language.

Trump, his Christians, and his lions

To the pseudo-godly lady who says Trump "fights for righteousness," she's correct in one sense: With his own spoken righteousness in my corner, "I'd like to punch him in the face."

This, also from the Lincoln Project, satirizes(?) how any sane Republican would react after coming out of a three-and-a-half-year coma:

Someone needs to take Trump out for ice cream

Trump is setting psychological records for phenomenal self-pity, which makes me increasingly suspicious that he is deliberately attempting to lose the election. He can then finish what little business career he has left — next up: further swindling his vestigial base via his own media outlets, hawking pillows and vitamin supplements — while dodging criminal and civil suits in state and federal courts.

"Aides have described him as pained by the widespread rejection he is seeing in public opinion polls," reports the Times, "even as he continues with self-sabotaging behavior rather than taking steps that might help him, like getting involved in negotiations for a deal on Capitol Hill to lift the economy."

While doing nothing to lift the economy, he's also encouraging his own voters to risk contracting the coronavirus on Election Day out of distrust of mail-in ballots, which, in a word, is insane. (And that, of course, "could negatively affect not just Mr. Trump, but a host of down-ballot candidates," which is really beginning to piss off Messrs. McConnell et al. Even the House minority leader, the hilariously misspeaking Kevin McCarthy, said "we’ll find a way" to vote on 3 November — one supposes without simultaneously killing a sizable portion of their base; that is, just get your ballots in by Election Day, you dolts.)

In a separate piece, the Times notes that "the Trump campaign has completely gone off the air, temporarily suspending all television advertising nationwide as the campaign undertakes a 'review' of its advertising strategy under the new campaign manager, Bill Stepien." Has no one at Campaign HQ taken a look at the calendar? Did Trump not demand at least running some sort of anodyne campaign ad in the downtime interim? (President Obama thrashed Mitt Romney in 2012 largely by raising Mitt's negatives throughout the summer, not belatedly in the fall.)

On the other hand — and this has only amplified the president's self-pity — there's just not much harm the Trump campaign can inflict on Joe Biden. "The pause [in advertising] comes after several weeks of attacks against [Biden] on policing issues," continues the Times, which "sought to sow fear and division about the racial justice protests around the country and falsely depict them as violent." Instead, Trump's ads did nothing but increase Biden's lead. Plus, attacks on the former vice president as a socialist have proved absurd, as have ads depicting Biden as mentally feeble, "approved" by a manifest madman.

What must really anger a moneymonger like Trump is that his campaign has spent more than twice as much as Biden on "television and digital advertising, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm." And every Trump dollar spent has only aided his opponent.

All of these marvelous negatives have reduced Trump's daily schedule to tweeting and pulling the sheets over his head while muting cable news (assuming he's not golfing). From being a jackass, "The Thrill Is Gone," goes the song — as is his presidency.

Uncrazy Quote of the Day

It seems crazy but not TOTALLY out of the realm of the possible that a boycott-the-election movement starts among a certain faction of conspiratorial-minded Trump voters.

— Sam Stein (@samstein) July 31, 2020

Sam Stein is the Daily Beast's political editor and a frequent MSNBC commentator.

But, Sam, the crazier it seems the more likely it is totally within the realm of the possible.

In the irony department, Mr. Stein is correct. The more often Donnie Despot tells his Trumpeteers that the election is "rigged," the less likely they are to vote. (Which would be kind of a shame, since they'd otherwise show up at the polls without a mask.)

Obama's eulogy of John Lewis

I had a difficult time of it — watching President Obama's magnificent eulogy of Rep. John Lewis this afternoon. And my difficulty arose from the oddest of reasons.

Obama spoke of another man's decency; he praised another man's aspirations; he admired another man's splendid accomplishments; he thanked that other man for having inspired his own dedication to public service; he touchingly stressed how he would have never achieved what he achieved had it not been for that other man's example; he placed compassion over hatred; he encouraged the nation to unite and overcome mindless prejudice; he again told us that only we can make America what it is meant to be — and to never believe that one man alone can fix it.

Obama's ringing eulogy was — after years of Trump and Trumpism's indecency, inhumanity, conceit, indifference to public service, promotion of self-interestedness, chest-pounding, sundry hatreds, divisions, and an overinflated, ugly ego that has decimated this nation rather than fixed one damn thing — well, it was almost a foreign language to me. I choked up several times, as I am wont to do when touched by such beautiful souls: those of President Obama and Rep. John Lewis.

The president concluded by saying God bless us all. If he's out there, may he especially bless these two wonderful men.

They always find a way to dig themselves a little deeper

On Twitter, ABC News correspondent Will Steakin recalls the reporting of a network colleague on 23 April of this year: "Mark my words, I think he is gonna try to kick back the election somehow, come up with some rationale why it can't be held" — Joe Biden on Trump, to Johnny Verhovek in an ABC News virtual interview.

Responded a Trump campaign spokesman, same day: "Those are the incoherent, conspiracy theory ramblings of a lost candidate who is out of touch with reality." According to RealClearPolitics aggregate polling average, on 23 Apr. Biden led Trump by only 5.9 points.

Then, among other Trump blunders, came this today.

And that's just one reason that now, by July's end, Biden is leading Trump by, like, 93 points.

Just another distraction

It's always difficult to say with reasonable certainty which Trump-induced crisis he is distracting from by creating another crisis, such as his comment to Fox News' Chris Wallace last Sunday that he might reject the election's results: "I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election."

That unpresidential bit of lunacy seemed a species of what we might call generic distraction. Polls showed Joe Biden thumping Trump throughout most of the nation and, most ominously for the incumbent, in battleground states. That, along with Trump's increasingly wretched economy and his steady-handed, stay-the-course negligent homicide of tens of thousands of Americans had all conspired in his mind to spark the perfect moment for an utterly unsubstantiated "rigged-election" accusation. No particular catastrophe among the three seemed to stand out.

But this morning?

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 30, 2020

That lunatic distraction came just minutes after the Commerce Department reported that the G.D.P. had fallen at a staggering annualized rate of 32.9 percent during the second quarter — the "second worst" in recorded history, observes the NY Times. (And the Labor Department announced this morning that another 1.43 million new unemployment claims were filed last week.)

"Kids can go to school, but we can't vote?" responded the Lincoln Project to Trump on Twitter. Then there are the little matters of a federal statute requiring a presidential vote on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November and the U.S. Constitution's amended provision that a president's four-year tenure begin on 20 January — leaving even an illegal postponement in an insurmountable time-crunch (short of a coup, which won't happen).

What is just as expected as another of Trump's outrageous distractions? "So far, no major Republican figures [are] criticizing the president [for his tweet]," reports the Times. "Republican state chairmen said they have not seen it" and "Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ignored questions about it."

And so it goes. For another three months. 

Louie Gohmert … enough said?

​​​​​I'm indescribably relieved that the dumbest man in the United States House of Representatives, Louie Gohmert, can now be treated early for his most unfortunate covid affliction. I want Louie to hang around and be reelected by Texas' 1st congressional district another 20 times before he finally succumbs to chronic stupidity. I mean, who else could so naturally have come up with this?

"I can't help but think that if I hadn't been wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so, I really wonder if I wouldn't have gotten it. But, you know, moving the mask around, getting it just right, are bound to have put some virus on the mask. That's most likely what happened."

GOP @RepLouieGohmert, who just tested positive for COVID-19 tells a reporter he blames wearing a mask for his result: "I can't help but think that if I hadn't been wearing a mask so much in the last 10 days or so, I really wonder if I would have gotten it." pic.twitter.com/S6l2xU2oiL

— The American Independent (@AmerIndependent) July 29, 2020

My only regret? His infection was detected on the morning of the day he was to have flown to Texas with Trump on Air Force One — up close and personal, as they say. So Louie got bumped. Damn!

The upside? Here's a shot from Tuesday: That's Attorney General Bill Barr (unmasked) on the right, and Gohmert (unmasked), on the left — not far behind at all. So there's still hope.

Coming Soon: Carpentariat's Studio

(I'm leaving this post up for the day [Wed.]. Appointments to meet. See you Thursday.)

Within, probably, the next month, I will have completed redeveloping my art studio and, perhaps, completed an oil painting or two as well. It's been some time since I featured any of my earlier work, so I want to reacquaint you with my dominant style — some of which is reproduced directly from old-school impressionist masters. (The first two paintings, for instance, are taken from Monet; both have been sold.) The third I have no memory of its source, and I lost track of the piece years ago. The same is true of the fourth work — and please don't ask what possessed me to paint Vivian Leigh, since I have no recollection whatsoever. I'll also be introducing a new style, which I may need to play with a bit before working up a full piece on canvas. I shall be posting new works in oil, with price attached, framed or unframed. Then I can live a double life: that of a starving writer and a starving artist.  

Thanks for touring.

She's better than Alex Jones

Daily Beast:

A Houston doctor who praises hydroxychloroquine and says that face masks aren’t necessary to stop transmission of the highly contagious coronavirus has become a star on the right-wing internet, garnering tens of millions of views on Facebook on Monday alone. Donald Trump Jr. [who has been temporarily banned by Twitter] declared the video of Stella Immanuel a "must watch," while Donald Trump himself retweeted the video…..

Immanuel, a pediatrician and a religious minister, has a history of making bizarre claims about medical topics and other issues. She has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches.

She alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments [now who can argue with that?], and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious [having lost the vaccine war to fight, specifically, the Christian evangelical strain]. And … she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by "reptilians" and other aliens [OK, she may have something there].

This otherwise frightfully cretinous video and presidential endorsement of it actually comforted me. I'm assuming that men are also subject to having but soon forgetting inordinately dreamy sex with demons and witches, and since my STD test of four or five months ago came back clean as a hell's houndstooth, my underworld affairs have so far proceeded innocuously.

A desperate novelty morphs into unprecedented political stupidity

What should a president do when 114, no-insignia federal agents have figuratively parachuted into Portland, Ore. — "already the site of aggressive policing tactics that activists and city officials across the country say are inspiring more-violent clashes and re-energizing protests"?

Why the answer is simple, if you're der Führer in a bunker: You send an additional force of 150 secret police — who have been "followed by larger, better- equipped and more-aggressive crowds … [which] exhausted federal resources before it exhausted the protesters."

And he should do so when the city's population, which was originally protesting racial injustice, is now protesting the Führer's swelling police state.

It's a brilliant political strategy for a president far down in the polls but who is trying "to sell himself as a law-and-order candidate, the antidote" to lawlessness (largely his own) and disorder "that developed on his own watch." Portland suburbanites should enjoy seeing their once-comely downtown area converted into a kind of Warsaw ghetto.

In fact, why should the president not worsen his lawlessness, disorder and violence by expanding the fascist forces of black-vanned spooks to other major cities? Reports the Washington Post:

"In Seattle, protesters who saw camouflage-clad officers standing in their streets at a distance on Sunday wondered if they were the federal agents who were seen snatching protesters off the streets of Portland. 'We don’t even know who we’re dealing with,' said one protester, Madeline, who declined to give their [sic] last name because they feared police retribution."

Isn't that precious? Millions of Americans now fear America's growing equivalent of the Gestapo — which, for Trump, is so politically helpful, don't you think?