At least, I wish it were satire. Alexandra Petri describes the role of senators.

A senator, as you know, is someone empowered by the Constitution to go on cable news and state opinions. A senator can do nothing to restrain the executive branch. In the system of checks and balances designed by the Founding Fathers, the Senate is neither.

The Senate is an appendix, a vestigial organ whose function no one can determine, so it just sits there and sometimes rumbles ominously after meals. Aside from its traditional role of acting as a rubber-stamp for judicial appointees, it is a kind of cheery bobblehead designed by the Constitution to stare at what the Executive is doing and offer tacit approval. It is decorative, not functional — like a pocket square, or a succulent in a dentist’s waiting room, or the “Share On Facebook” button at the bottom of an article.

It might be a little too accurate, since it perfectly describes the behavior of all those Republican senators who go on TV to deplore the president and mewl a little bit and then do nothing to stop him. Jeff Flake? John McCain? Susan Collins? All those pseudo-mavericks of the right?

What does one wear to a decapitation party? Rick Wiles says we’re going to have one by this weekend.

“America, you’ve been homosexualized. You’ve been Jewdy-ized. I’m just telling it how it is,” Wiles told viewers. “She was spewing out, last night, calls for revolution. She was telling the left, ‘Take a deep breath, we’re at the moment, it’s coming, we’re almost there, we’re going to remove him from the White House.’ We’re about 72 hours — possibly 72 hours — from a coup.

“Be prepared that you’re going to turn on the television and see helicopters hovering over the roof of the White House with men clad in black rappelling down ropes, entering into the White House. Be prepared for a shoot out in the White House as Secret Service agents shoot commandos coming in to arrest President Trump.”

But Wiles wasn’t finished with his hysterical anti-semitism and homophobia.

“That is how close we are to a revolution. Be prepared for a mob — a leftist mob — to tear down the gates, the fence at the White House and to go into the White House and to drag him out with his family and decapitate them on the lawn of the White House,” he said.

In case you’re wondering who “she” is, the leader of the revolution, the one who is going to chop off the president’s head, it’s Rachel Maddow. I knew I liked her.

However, once again, the Left has shown its inability to get their act together. I didn’t get any notice of this glorious uprising. Was it in the same envelope with my check from George Soros? ’cause that’s also late.

Trump is a bad man, corrupt and immoral. But putting the focus solely on his action in Finland is misleading. Russian meddling might have given him a slight boost in the last election, but really…lots of Americans voted for him. The Republican party is supporting him. All the howling aimed at one man is a distraction from the long term problem.

Why were Americans susceptible to Russian propaganda? Why do they vote for a criminal political party? Because for decades we’ve been demolishing our infrastructure, undermining unions, allowing big money to corrupt the political process, setting our standards for news media low, fostering greater income inequality, allowing racism and misogyny to run amuck, wrecking the educational system, and investing in the military rather than our people. It should be no surprise that people distrust and are resentful of The System, and are willing to endorse radicals who offer nothing but the promise to tear it all down and agree with the worst of our impulses.

Imagine a fantasy resolution: the Trump regime is thrown down, all of his appointees are thrown out and imprisoned, and the man himself is shipped off to the Hague and locked away for the rest of his life (that’s fantasy, it’s not going to happen). What next? What will change to prevent the next demagogue from taking over? What about the thousands of Republican party apparatchiks and the tens of millions of citizens who voted for them? We don’t need one guy stopped, we need the system changed.

I detest David Bentley Hart, everything he writes makes my lip curl in disgust, and his recent op-ed in the NY Times is no exception (although, given the downward trajectory in the quality of their opinion pages, that’s no surprise). It’s a hate piece, and the hyperbole is practically Lovecraftian in its florid descriptions of the target of his hatred. That target is…the New York Yankees. Jeez. I know that opinions of the Yankees tend to be passionate, but would you believe this is a description of a baseball game?

Not that the horror is easy to recall clearly. The trauma is too violent. Memory cringes, whines, tries to slink away. One recollects only a kaleidoscopic flux of gruesomely fragmentary impressions, too outlandish to be perfectly accurate, too vivid to be entirely false: nightmarish revenants from the dim haunts of the collective unconscious … monstrous, abortive shapes emerging from the abysmal murk of evolutionary history … things pre-hominid, even pre-mammalian … forms never quite resolving into discrete organisms, spilling over and into one another, making it uncertain where one ends and another begins. … It really is awful: ghastly glistening flesh … tentacles coiling and uncoiling, stretching and contracting … lidless orbicular eyes eerily waving on slender stalks … squamous hides, barbed quills, the unguinous sheen of cutaneous toxins … serrated tails, craggy horns, sallow fangs, gleaming talons … fragrances fungal and poisonous … sickly iridescences undulating across pallid, gelatinous underbellies or shimmering along slick, filmy scales. …

And what raucous yawps of elation they emit, like sea lions crying out in erotic transport. How languidly and grossly they intertwine with one another — how clumsily, lewdly, indiscriminately — like lascivious cephalopods merged in seething tangles of prehensile carnality. And somehow, without having to see, one knows things about them: that the categories “parent,” “sibling” and “mate” are only hazily delineated in their minds; that they suck nourishment from cellulose, heavy metals and cactus spines; that, should they grow hungry on the journey home from the game, they may pull over to the side of the road to devour their young. One simply knows. …

I take back the “almost” in “almost Lovecraftian”. Ol’ HP would be telling Hart to dial it back a notch if he were editing that bit. Also, if baseball was anything like that, I’d be at the stadium every weekend.

But there is one good paragraph — only one! — in the whole overwrought piece. This one.

America — with its decaying infrastructure, its third-world public transit, its shrinking labor market, its evaporating middle class, its expanding gulf between rich and poor, its heartless health insurance system, its mindless indifference to a dying ecology, its predatory credit agencies, its looming Social Security collapse, its interminable war, its metastasizing national debt and all the social pathologies that gave it a degenerate imbecile and child-abducting sadist as its president — remains the only developed economy in the world that believes it wrong to use civic wealth for civic goods. Its absurdly engorged military budget diverts hundreds of billions of dollars a year from the public weal to those who profit from the military-industrial complex. Its plutocratic policies and libertarian ethos are immune to all appeals of human solidarity. It towers over the world, but promises secure shelter only to the fortunate few.

Hart’s point, of course, is that America has become almost as evil as the New York Yankees. Almost.

It seems to be one English-speaking^* place that still has some sense.

^*More or less, but that’s OK, because Scottish accents are a marvel.

I thought the rough clip I mentioned earlier was horrifying, but take a look at the official Showtime promo for Sacha Baron Cohen’s show.

Some excerpts from Sacha Baron Cohen’s next show are leaking out. watch this bit if you want to see the gun lobby willingly exposing their delusional ideas about putting guns into the hands of kids.

The intensive 3 week Kinder Guardian course introduces specially selected children from 12 to 4 years old to pistols, rifles, semi-automatics, and rudimentary knowledge of mortars. In less than a month — less than a month! — a first grader can become a first grenadier.

Ha ha, Joe Walsh, very clever. Of course he has an excuse.

Like accused sexual predator Roy Moore, who threatened to sue Baron Cohen this week, Walsh was invited to receive an award in Washington, D.C., for being a friend to Israel and while he was there sat for an interview in which a documentary crew asked him to endorse various Israeli innovations—including the idea of arming four-year-olds to defend themselves against terrorists.

His excuse is that if Israel thought it was a good idea, then arming pre-school kids must be a good idea. He now says that he was duped, and that he said some really stupid things, but it hasn’t yet sunk in that maybe he should question his own beliefs that make it easy for him to be duped and say stupid things.

I watched scattered bits of the Strzok grilling yesterday (if you weren’t paying attention, Wonkette has the most interesting interpretation/”transcript” of the day). The one thing that struck me was how all the Republicans were hammering on one point: Strzok had his own opinions of Trump, and that his presence in any investigation means they were biased and unfair. It reminded of how the media goes flocking to “undecided voters” in every election, as if ignorance and vacillation and equivocation are some kind of ideal state of mind. As Strzok pointed out over and over, what matters is how he acts; does he act objectively, does he work with others who have different biases to reach a consensus? You are not going to find any intelligent person whose mind is devoid of opinions.

But there the Republicans sat, insisting that everyone who participates in any difficult analysis is not allowed to have any kind of independent perspective. There seems to be a total lack of understanding that everyone has biases, including goddamned Republicans, and that we have mechanisms to try and overcome them. But no, they want mindless lackeys doing all the work for them (which does, I admit, tend to give Republicans an edge in working for the government).

What we really have to worry about, though, is more mind-reading dentists running for congress.

Wow, they saved the stupidest part of the hearing for last. "I'm a dentist, Okay. So I read body language very, very well." https://t.co/puFFJFVdzn pic.twitter.com/ZmbzSzju8U

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 12, 2018

I had no idea dental schools were a predecessor to the Psi Corps.