I'm Not Deranged. You Are.

“TDS.” In its Jon Stewart/Trevor Noah heydays, the acronym meant “The Daily Show,” and I liked it. Now, though, consistent with the way Fulton County (Ga.) Inmate No. P01135809 has melted the minds of millions, it’s come to stand for “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term liberally (!) applied to these columns and to all Americans who find the former “president” abhorrent. Because he’s a threat to democracy; a liar; an instigator of violence. A promiser of vengeance and retribution against those who’ve rejected his claims of electoral fraud; a man of lifelong immorality, scams, business failures, and cozying to mobsters foreign and domestic. Who just claimed the endorsement of a former Gambino crime family Mafia hitman as a badge of honor.

TDS. As I responded recently to a less-than liker of my writing, it’s like saying people who found Jeffrey Dahmer bothersome were suffering from DDS. (No offense to dentists.) Nevertheless, Trump Derangement Syndrome is real, a condition of pandemic proportions. And, like an endemic virus, despite our best efforts, it defies attempts to eradicate it.

Criticizing Trump, rejecting his venality and mendaciousness, trying to awaken people to his unfitness, is no more of a “syndrome” than calling for help when your house is on fire. It’s observational. It’s recognizing imminent danger and sounding warnings. Supporting Trump, on the other hand, defending or denying his inadequacies and incompetence, or, worse, sharing his hate for the Constitution and most of the people protected by it, constitutes a confounding depth of definitional derangement. Believing his laughably conspicuous lies about elections, Joe Biden, birth certificates, the economy, the Presidential Records Act, etc., ought to have its own diagnostic code. It’s neither normal nor healthy for the body politic. And it’s evidently incurable. In this case, an effective vaccine would require Billgatesian, brain-altering microchips.

Example: my online conversation with a lady who insisted Trump had lowered the US budget deficit when, in fact, his unnecessary tax cuts for the wealthy exploded it. Inflation was lower under Trump, she said, correctly, but was unable to process that it was due to the economic impacts of the pandemic, made even worse by his mishandling of it. She blamed Biden for the subsequent rise in inflation even though it coincided with economic recovery and was and remains higher everywhere else in the Western world. Our lower rates of inflation may be attributed, at least in part, to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, of which she’d not heard.

Many Republican politicians who once forcefully criticized Trump, describing what a disaster his “presidency” was or would be, have shed their evanescent flicker of integrity and kissed the ring. Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Doug Burgum, among others, all endorsing him, derangedly. True, many people who worked directly with him in or near the White House are warning of the danger Trump represents; they’re enduring his and his supporters’ wrath and death threats because of it. But those temporary, timid truth-tellers tumbled when tested by Trump. Fear of those afflicted by the real TDS sent their honesty to the exits like the latest of Trump’s lawyers.

When asked why they support Trump, MAGAcal thinkers point to “the direction” this country is headed. Asked for specifics, it’s always the border. Wide open, so the undocumented will vote Democratic, they say, deluded and deranged. Some mention the economy, but are unable to elucidate, which is unsurprising, given its red-hotness and unprecedented job creation. Having no accomplishments on which to run, it’s understandable that “the border” is the MAGA rallying cry.

To the surprise of no one, Trump won Iowa. To the disappointment of no one, Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out. So did decent-guy but unnoticed Asa Hutchinson. 81% of Iowa voters agree with Trump that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America. 68% believe the 2020 election was “stolen.” This is who they and virtually all Trump voters are: TDS sufferers, worshippers at the feet of a xenophobic, demagogic liar, welcomers of dictatorship coming to America. People very much at home on derange.

It’s worth noting, with bridled optimism, that nearly half of Iowa Republicans who voted (only about eight percent of the registered did) chose not-Trump. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that, unlike previous winners of Iowa caucuses who weren’t -- Cruz, Huckabee, Santorum, Dole, and others -- Trump will be the nominee of the party that once produced people of honor. And elected them. Though it’s been sounding since Trump first dragged it down that Trump Tower escalator, the death knell of that long-ago party was completed in Iowa. Only non-MAGA Republicans can resurrect it. They could do it, just this once, by voting for Biden.

Jon Says It Better

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Postcards From the Pledge
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After readying the post below this one, I hied me to bed to watch The Daily Show. Seems JS sees The Pledge pretty much the way I do.

And here's another way of saying it, which won't get as many laughs:

And this won't get any laughs at all.

Either/Or

For some reason, I can no longer embed clips of The Daily Show. They work in my preview mode, but when I try to publish, I get an HTML error message. It's a shame, because Jon Stewart has been excellent of late. So, here's a link to last night's opening, in which he addresses the fundamental question of our time: is Fox "news" evil, or is it just stupid?

It's definitely worth a watch; most especially for [you know who] those that consider Fox credible in any way.

How It's Done

By now everyone has seen the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer interview (if not, it's here, in unedited form.) It's amazing to me that, as far as I know, the only place in the media where such a revelation has occurred is on a comedy show. (I give Cramer credit for showing up!)

The central point -- and one of which I'd say I was vaguely aware but had never formulated so clearly -- is that there are two investment worlds. The one that such networks as CNBC hype is the one in which most of us think we are participating: find good companies, or funds, invest in them for the long term. Solid, careful, thought-out. And then there's the other, about which those same networks clearly know, in which the monies thus invested are taken into the back room and morphed into shady deals, highly leveraged, risky business, making the players fabulously wealthy, using our hard-earned and hopeful money as their means for quick and massive enrichment. At our expense, making off with millions. With us taking all the risk. Unknowingly, for the most part.

Sure, it's more complicated than that, and "we" are not exempt: we've become convinced/duped that money can be made out of thin air, twenty, thirty percent a year, getting rich doing not a damn thing. Ignorant of, or ignoring, the house of cards -- imaginary cards -- on which it's all been built.

Maybe the most perfectly encapsulating comment in the entire show was when Jon Stewart, having shown clips of Cramer the hedge-fund manager baldly (!) talking about how he manipulated markets to make quick money, said "I want the Jim Cramer on CNBC to protect me from the Jim Cramer in those clips." (Or words very close to that.)

Stewart asked, but was not really given an answer: who is the audience of those financial shows and their talking heads, from their point of view? What do they see as their mission? Ginning up the substrate for their friends in high places to play with, winking all the way; or letting consumers know what's going on? And there's the problem: to lift the curtain would be not only to drain the brown bathwater in which they bathe; it could be an end to the quick-buck thinking that got us where we are today. Make people reconsider their whole raison d' etre.

Which is way too French.

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Bailing From The Bailout

I guess I'm batting .500. But as usual The Daily Show got it 100% right.

Whereas I've thought from before the beginning that the Iraq invasion was a horrible mistake, I bought into the bailout. When I saw the above bit as it aired, I must admit I was a little shaken; but economists that I've come to respect (admitting my own knowledge rounds off to zero) had generally said -- all with reservations -- that something needed to be done. Now, given the panbushopresidentially precedented mismanagement, it's looking like another bamboozlement (to put the best possible spin on it.)

Given the Paulsonian reversal, the lack of transparency, and the absent oversight, one can only wonder if this was the penultimate pillaging for personal profit as this pathetic president passes the portal. Lowest ever approval ratings in the history of mankind? Oh yeah? Well, take THIS, motherf%&kers!

(Is that too harsh a view? Maybe. But they do seem to be taking that attitude as they scramble to undo as many environmental laws as possible in their final days. It really does seem like George Bush, to the extent that he's engaged at all, is leaving with his middle finger raised.)

Other countries have taken action similar to ours, regarding bailing out their economies. The underlying notion of need may indeed be valid. Maybe it's just that over here, it's being done so erratically, with such a lack of central cohesion, so arrogantly (give us the damn bill and then shut the f@#k up, was the original proposal), that it's neither effective nor trustworthy. One can only wonder how many sub-rosa multimillionaires it's creating.

It's positively invasionokatrinoid. It seems this administration -- "the MBA presidency," we were told; "the adults have arrived" -- is constitutionally (to use a word unknown to them) unable to do anything right: to think a thing through carefully, to consider the big picture, to execute (to use a word that, in their case, negates my point) effectively.

So we, the people, are left holding a fatally full bag, while made to wonder if it was in any way necessary, and, if it was, whether it was either willfully distorted for personal gain, or simply handled so badly that it accomplished nothing but screwing us all, once again.

My impression of Barack Obama and the people around him is that they are very serious and thorough thinkers, committed to solutions and not to politics for its own sake. I hope to hell I'm right; it'll be necessary -- but hardly sufficient -- it they mean to repair the damage left behind.

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