#Dumbkirk was a glorious metaphor

It just gets better and better. All those supporters of 45 sailed out with flags and banners flying, and total chaos resulted.

The neat twist is that they did it to themselves — the problem was compounded by the request of the organizers.

Owners of boats of “all shapes and sizes” were encouraged to participate and to decorate them with “as many Trump flags as she can handle,” the event’s Facebook page said.

So the bigger boats of the richer Republicans charged out and put large wakes on top of already rough waters and swamped smaller boats. A perfect encapsulation of their policies.

Isn’t that nice of them to put on a demonstration of the class divisions they promote?

Musical accompaniment:

Nice.

Self-awareness isn’t their strong suit

Certain right wing grifters have found a new grift: hoisting themselves up on a comfortable, elevated perch, looking down on the peons, and crying about how they’re being crucified. Even better, they’ve found a way to turn the claim that they’ve been canceled into self-promotion. Behold, CancelCon!

Man, I only wish Rubin, Prager, Shapiro, and Corolla were being silenced, rather than merely using the claim that they were silenced as a way to amplify their noise.

You might wonder, how is a free event going to make them richer? It’s a promotional event for Prager/Corolla’s recent movie, No Safe Spaces, which was shown on 1 screen. They’ve got to do something to raise their revenue.

They also seem to be confused about that documentary. On the one hand, they’re oppressed, no one let’s them speak, they can’t get any respect…and on the other hand,

No Safe Spaces earned $1.3m at the box office and was the highest-rated film of 2019 as ranked by the Rotten Tomatoes audience score.

(They always have to have a qualifier in there, whether it’s “the greatest movie ever seen on a single screen” or “as ranked by an easily gamed popular site their fanatics crashed”)

So which is it? Are these incredibly popular speakers with great mobs of adoring fans hanging on their every word, or are they sad afflicted nobodies who have been totally canceled and have their mouths duct-taped shut? It doesn’t matter. They’re playing Oppression Olympics, and all that matters is how loudly they weep, and how many suckers fall for it. If there’s one thing we’ve had drilled into us over the last few years it’s that the world is full of gullible twits.

You aren’t one of them, are you?

They’ll still vote for him

Don’t expect the über-patriotic worshippers of Donald Trump to have any second thoughts about voting for him after this unsurprising revelation:

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

They won’t care. They’ll call it “fake news”, or worse, they’ll declare that they agree that gosh, they sure don’t want to see wounded veterans in their militaristic parades.

You know what wounds a democracy? Seeing demonstrably incompetent leaders, day after day, wrecking the country.

You know what undermines a democracy? A fawning press that makes excuses for bad leadership.

But what absolutely kills a democracy is when you lose all trust and confidence in your fellow citizens. My county is going to vote overwhelmingly for a dishonest, treacherous criminal in the next election, and that’s on them.

Oh boy. Here’s Trump’s response to military criticism.

Shut down everything!

This is just the tackiest pseudoscientific ménage à trois ever, someone turn off the soap opera

Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but the Discovery Institute, that spider hole of bad science and pseudo-scientific religious apologetics, is actually just another conservative think-tank that milks rich capitalists for funding. The DI was founded by George Gilder and Bruce Chapman — Phil Johnson was just the charismatic Christian babbler who was the front — and from the beginning, it was really all about promoting conservative values, supply-side economics, and Republican politics. The creationism was the attention-getting garnish on the story, but just one side. They also have a wing that focuses on policy issues in the Pacific Northwest, the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth and Poverty. Aren’t you cheered to know that they’re going to take the same insight and detailed appreciation of knowledge that they brought to biology, and have been focusing it on economics?

Recently their representative made an appearance on Tucker Carlson (oh god the idiocy is converging) to opine on the protests in Seattle and Portland. OK, the topic is definitely within their geographic remit, but no, a far-right arch-capitalist money-grubbing institution crusted with a patina of religiosity is not the authority we need right now, even if Fox News thinks so.

But the real amusement here is to see who else is jumping in bed with them: Quillette!

Yep, the Institute of Advanced Craniometry, Phrenology, and Evolutionary Psychology, AKA Quillette, is absolutely jubilant about joining forces with the Discovery Institute’s “Kill the Poor” department to find common cause with Fox News and the poor little rich boy, Tucker Carlson. Really, I’m not at all surprised. In this hell year, it’s exactly the right little touch of flavor to enhance the whole experience.

A marvel of bias in the guise of objectivity

I could learn to hate journalism, I really could. This is an abomination of the craft.

I mean, we’re all just objects in space, shifting meaninglessly in time. You can’t really demonstrate causality or even any kind of connection at all between multiple events. Two people died, bullets came out of a gun, an editor emitted words, the sun rises and sets, everything is meaningless.

You know Abby Johnson is a liar, right?

Johnson spoke at the Republican National Convention, which is no surprise, given that all the speakers had the prerequisite of being a liar and fraud in order to get a slot. I first dug into her history when her life “story” was told in the Christian propaganda film, Unplanned.

It’s good to get a reminder, though. Go read this update from Texas Monthly posted last year. She lied about Planned Parenthood, she lied about the abortion that she claimed motivated her to leave the organization. The truth is that she’s a venal fraud who saw an opportunity for a scandal that would profit her greatly, and has now put her on the national stage.

Is it too much to hope that hitching her star to the criminal grifter Trump will finally bring her down?

Is Ben Shapiro’s 15 minutes almost over?

I hope so.

All he has as a talent is the ability to talk really fast without thinking.