Fuck The Republicans. Honestly.

https://t.co/SZoMwEnyja

— Brian J. Karem (@BrianKarem) November 17, 2022

Donald Trump is once again running for president. For some he's the second coming (or more accurately the third coming) of Jesus Christ, riding in on his mandarin chariot of vitriol, lies and deceit to save the world from God knows what. For the rest of us he's a human popcorn husk stuck between your teeth; a human case of long COVID you can't shake; a human cancer you can't excise, radiate or get rid of no matter how much chemotherapy you endure.

Trump never left. Because we never let go of him. Most of us, if we think of him at all, are just surprised he's not indicted and in the dock already.

Trump began his 2024 revenge tour in typical aplomb, before a crowd of cult followers cheering his every lie from a ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. Outside they were shouting "Trump or Death" and inside they worked themselves into a MAGA-hat frenzy like ferrets on Benzedrine, caffeine and meth.  

Tens of people outside, from what I saw (mostly Q-Anon cranks.  I discard them.  The crazy will always be with you.)  The ones inside were heading for the exits long before The Donald was through droning through his litany of self-pity.  Apparently they had to pee in cups, like prisoners do, I'm told.

Donald, as always, is a menace to society and he doesn't care. You can never quite count the idiot out: His survival instincts are preternatural and his ability to con is uncanny. But his new announcement comes just after the midterms, where his favorite candidates were trounced: Those who ran on the Big Lie lost and the Republican "red wave" never materialized. Many in the GOP are looking elsewhere, anywhere, for new leadership while Trump claims his movement is the greatest in the history of the world and there will probably "never be anything like it again."

His survival instincs are based on having money.  We generally don't bother people with money.  It's also hard to prosecute people with money.  Alan Weisselberg is busy telling a New York jury "I alone am responsible."  Which is horseshit, but it works because we can't place Trump at the scene of the murder with the smoking gun.  We're quite willing to convict poor people and non-white people on little or no evidence, without, in other words, evidence they were at the scene of the crime or that there ever was a smoking gun. But business crime is where the standards of criminal practice come up against our preference to punish poor people and non-white people, and honor rich people (it's the only reason anyone thinks Elon Musk is anything but a congenital idiot and a waste of space).  As for his 'ability to con,' there is no con without a mark.  It's the gullibility of so many, many marks that is uncanny.  Or it should be.  It isn't, really.  But it proves the GOP is no longer a political party; it's just a bunch of marks waiting to get taken, over and over and over again.  Newt Gingrich understood this 30 years ago.

We can only hope. 

Or we can stop pretending the GOP has any legitimacy except as a provider of legal access to ballots in all 50 states.

Trump is trying to resurrect his underdog status, which catapulted him into office in 2016, but he has the noose of several criminal and civil investigations, as well as his own track record as president, wrapped around his neck, weighing him down. It appears he has learned nothing from the midterm debacle suffered by the Republicans. His speech was pure fiction, including the claim that he kept us out of wars "for decades" while president. The lies, too numerous to itemize, read like a laundry list of reasons the voters rejected him so soundly in his last bid for the Oval Office.

And so we're all in trouble this time around because...?

His historically early announcement for the office belies his insecurity and was strategically made to try and suck all of the oxygen out of the room – as Trump often does – by planting himself firmly on center stage. His hope is to bench any and all Republican opposition to his nomination. For now, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — once a star fascist protégé of Trump's — looks to be the only viable alternative for the remnants of the Republican Party after Trump's ravages.

It will be best if we pull out the hook and yank Trump off stage. The world is finally looking more familiar and a little more hopeful with Joe Biden at the helm than it was at any point during Trump's years in office. 

Now we're getting somewhere...

Trump has long proclaimed, "Only I can fix it," but left the entire world teetering on the brink of disaster, a fact that was reinforced by this week's meeting between President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali. The two leaders spoke candidly about their priorities and intentions, including the need to work together to seek amicable solutions to serious problems. Rather than announcing "Only I can fix it," both leaders, despite their differences, acknowledged the need for all nations to work together to solve problems we all share. As Xi said, "We are at a crossroads." 

Working to build relationships is the cornerstone of Biden's foreign and domestic policy and is an anathema to Trump — who preaches unity through beating into submission those who disagree with him. 

Is this where we discuss how (according to Trump) Nixon never went to China because only Trump got "something" out of China?  Or should we just focus on the fact the world has moved on since Trump, and doesn't miss him a bit.  Yeah, better we do that, isn't it?

Biden acknowledges reality, and has been able to forge relationships with those who disagree with him to pass infrastructure bills and a coalition of support against Russian aggression in Ukraine. That has been at the heart of Biden's foreign policy. "He really believes that," a senior White House official recently explained to me. "He really thinks that we can work together with all nations, even our enemies on issues where we have similar interests."

That's far from the old Donald Trump mantra of chest-thumping, whining and screeching like a wounded animal caught in a trap.  It's also a far cry from Trump's claim, as he announced his third bid for the White House, that China was responsible for him losing the last election — which he has yet to admit he lost.

Isolationists are having a fit because of Biden's foreign policy while cheering Trump's insanity. They ignore reality at the cost of humanity's existence. We are all in this together, and isolating yourself from the rest of humanity is why the hunter-gatherers deep in the Amazon are no longer among us. 

So Trump's supporters are the "deplorables," right?  And we can just move on?  Good. Let's go....

Donald Trump is that man; a power-craving hunter-gatherer con artist out to stake his claim as a modern-day potentate while imbued with the pusillanimous power of a puff pastry. The world has moved on from Trump, even if his cult will still grovel and bray like wild jackasses at his flat feet. 

The rest of us are trying to take our lessons from the midterms and move on. Trump may not realize that taking away a woman's right to make her own medical choices is contrary to democratic principles; he may not acknowledge that denying the 2020 election results subverts democracy and he obviously does not care what the rest of us think. But Trump and his minions are in the minority, and after four years of Donald Trump the midterms made one thing exceedingly clear: He's done. He can ravage the country, he can cause suffering and pain, but he has no legacy to maintain and nothing positive to give to society. Rupert Murdoch has tossed him on the dung heap of history. Mike Pompeo swiped at his former boss and called on the GOP not to get caught "staring in the rearview mirror claiming victimhood." 

Well, not quite the dung heap.  Hannity didn't decline to broadcast any of Trump's speech, and Ingraham covered it by talking about it rather than showing any more of it. But this is the point where we realize FoxNews is a cable TV channel in a country cutting the cord, where only the oldest among us keep cable around, while the rest move to streaming and broadcast (which ain't what it used to be, either), and leave the world of cable-watchers to whither away.

It appears that what passes for Republicans in this day and age have had enough of getting their asses handed to them because of the meanderings of Trump and his mindless minions. But that is expected from those with any common sense at all. Veteran Republicans, delighting in their own rectitude, still labor under the false assumption that they are righteous — so they venerate themselves while dismissing the man they followed and lavished with praise until it was no longer profitable to do so. 

Joe Biden exhales as "red wave" runs dry: And he can't wait for Trump-DeSantis grudge match

That, of course, fails to describe Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Louie Gohmert and a handful of other crusty miscreants whose sum total of wisdom and maturity couldn't fill a thimble. They are the weakest of the weak, proud to be on display and far too ignorant to understand their sideshow status. They, like Trump, demand to be heard for no reason other than they've soiled their own laundry.

Well, sadly, no.  Graham and Johnson (at least) in the Senate still make obeisance to Trump, and the new majority in the House wants to start investigating Hunter Biden before Thanksgiving (they aren't even the majority until January).  Gohmert, by the way, lost his bid to be AG of Texas.  I don't think he stood for re-election, because I'm pretty sure he wasn't on the GOP primary ballot for his House seat.

Donald Trump has always attracted himself to such people and made the mistake of seeing weakness as a merit and inferiority as a superior asset. So have Pompeo, Bill Barr and others who once attached themselves to Trump like blood-sucking remoras to sharks.

Those characters and others like them are now looking for a new shark, and many are drawn to DeSantis,,,

Wait a minute, we're drifting off course here...

It's obvious that neither Cheney nor Kinzinger can win the Republican nomination in 2024 — but they'd be a major threat to Biden and the Democrats if they did.

But that may be missing the point as well. Trump will get a lot of attention from the press. DeSantis will too. But the Democrats don't need to fear either of them. They'd both be far easier to vanquish than the potential threat neither Democrats nor Republicans can see coming:   The re-emergence of a legitimate conservative party in America, whether it's called the Republican Party or something else. Democrats have been pushing for that since they got into office, most notably by giving Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger prominent positions on the Jan. 6 committee. The president often talks about "traditional" Republicans and has described the MAGA crowd as "a minority portion of the party" — which admittedly could mean as much as 49.9 percent of Republican voters. On this I agree. Many Republicans saw Trump as the easiest path to victory, and they love to win. Now that Trump no longer looks like a winner, where will those voters end up?  

Yeah, we're veering off into the...

Biden's actions could be inadvertently responsible for the greatest threat to Democratic victory in 2024: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger.

...horse race.

At this point it's obvious that neither of them could win the Republican nomination...

So let's just leave it there, shall we?

Pondering a possible Cheney campaign, a young GOP voter told me that the "woke liberals would eat their hearts out." This was a 26-year-old African-American who works in retail management. He is religious, a former high school football star and a conservative Republican. He belongs to the young Republican crowd that believes Democrats are all socialists, fascists and anti-American. He only votes for Democrats, he said, when the Republicans "are crazy." He didn't vote for Trump and he doesn't like DeSantis. But he says he is intrigued by Cheney and Kinzinger.

And there are people who are Bernie/AOC curious. Your point is?

To be sure, Donald Trump has a far better chance of becoming the Republican nominee in 2024 than Cheney does — and the Republicans are far closer to slipping deeper into authoritarianism than embracing the lessons they might learn from last week's midterm elections. For the moment, Cheney remains a young conservative's pipe dream.

Okay, now we're back where we should be.

Perhaps Democrats should stop slapping themselves on the back and reflect on the fact that they managed to lose the House to a party of election deniers, clowns, con artists and thieves.

It's a representative government, as Molly Ivins liked to remind people.  True in the Texas Lege; true in the hallowed halls of Congress.

The Democrats could learn something from the midterms as well. True, they stopped the "red wave," but not on the strength of their candidates. It was because of the issues. The voters, in many cases, chose what they saw as the lesser of two evils. And as we all know, the problem with doing that is that you are still choosing evil.

If you're gonna start arguing "purity of essence" I'm gonna find my way to the exit. When you find the perfectly honest, perfectly non-corrupted candidate, let me know.  We'll put him/her in a museum; because they'll never be seen in public holding elected office.

So what should the Democrats learn? Perhaps they might reflect on the fact that they still lost control of the House — by an agonizingly narrow margin — to a political party filled with election deniers, clowns, reprobates,  con artists, thieves and robber barons. The Republicans are gradually morphing into the Nazi Party and the Democrats still lost seats? Christ, how ineffective can you be? 

However low the Republicans set the bar, the flaccid Democrats barely crawled over it. The message from the Democrats after the midterms is that "people voted for democracy." Actually, that remains to be seen. Democrats are slapping themselves on the back because they didn't lose as badly as the pundits, pollsters and press thought they would. That's not cause for gloating. 

Given historical precedent (which led, along with bullshit GOP polls, to talk of a "red wave" among an all too credulous political press.  Can we bring them into this conversation, please?) and the power of incumbency (what else returns Ron Johnson to office?), Democrats did actually do fairly well.  Along with the fact the GOP had no answers to anything, just complaints about "the border" and "inflation" and "CRIME!"  None of which worked, by the way.  Can we have that conversation, too?

So what should the Democrats learn? Perhaps they might reflect on the fact that they still lost control of the House — by an agonizingly narrow margin — to a political party filled with election deniers, clowns, reprobates,  con artists, thieves and robber barons. The Republicans are gradually morphing into the Nazi Party and the Democrats still lost seats? Christ, how ineffective can you be? 

However low the Republicans set the bar, the flaccid Democrats barely crawled over it. The message from the Democrats after the midterms is that "people voted for democracy." Actually, that remains to be seen. Democrats are slapping themselves on the back because they didn't lose as badly as the pundits, pollsters and press thought they would. That's not cause for gloating. 

Whether or not it rains is pretty important, too.  Or maybe we could raise turnout by MAKING IT CONSIDERABLY EASIER TO VOTE, WHICH IS NOT THE SAME THING AS MAKING IT EASIER TO VOTE FRAUDULENTLY!  WHICH ISN'T REALLY A THING BECAUSE WHERE'S THE ADVANTAGE IN IT WITHOUT MACHINE POLITICS TO PROTECT YOU FROM THE CONSEQUENCES?

That is how they did it back in the day, and why we don't do it that way anymore.

I don't buy it. Donald Trump has failed to learn a lesson from reality, as so many times before in his life.

Yes. So?  And what is it you're not buying?  You lost me coming around that last turn.

The world has moved past him. 

Isn't that a good thing?

I still don't believe he'll be on the ballot in the 2024 general election.

There you go.  Optimism!

He is and remains a pariah. What's left of the Republican Party, held hostage by Trump for the last six years, is struggling to move on, despite its natural tendencies to play the role of the Gimp in "Pulp Fiction." 

Not struggling that hard.  Again.  The House GOP wants to start in on Hunter's laptop on Monday morning.  They act like they already have, and all the vote counts aren't official yet.

The Democrats, should Biden decide to run again, are potentially putting an octogenarian on the ballot against a  lunatic septuagenarian.

I, too, would prefer a Kennedyesque figure, or even someone as young as Obama.  But Trump's incompetence has proven we need competent hands at the wheel of the ship of state, and Biden is proving he was far more competent (if not as photogenic) than Obama was.  Kennedy had a lot to learn, too (and thank the lords and the low creatures he was able to learn most of it).

Ya gotta work with what ya got.

I pray there are other, better options. 

Piss in the other hand; see which fills up faster.

As Pete Townshend once told us, "I get on my knees and pray, we won't get fooled again."

I prefer "we won't fool ourselves again."

So "Who's Next?" (That's the album containing that song.) 

I hope it's someone who values democracy. 

Always a dicey proposition, considering what's been done before in the name of "democracy."  I'll settle for someone who learns from the example of Nancy Pelosi, and understands the importance of servant leadership.