FUBAR
It’s six months to Election Day. Do you know where your sanity is?
The governor of South Dakota is boasting about a fictitious meeting with a North Korean dictator when she’s not tripling down about canicide — her own and the president’s.
The party that has made antisemitism the focus of its nonexistent legislative agenda is about to see the Jewish Space Laser lady move to oust the fundamentalist Christian House speaker.
And that party’s presumptive nominee has shattered Godwin’s Law, claiming his opponent is leading a “Gestapo” administration while he lays out an agenda that includes building detention camps to hold people he considers undesirable.
Meanwhile, the poll-watching editor of the “Paper of Record” declares immigration, not democracy, is at the top of the voters’ agenda, as it pummels the incumbent president over his age, apparently because the publisher is miffed they can’t get a sit-down interview.
The military invented a good term for this: FUBAR.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, looking to pump her vice presidential credentials, published a book in which she recalls that she put down a 14-month-old dog, a goat and three horses. Then blamed the ghost writer and the “fake news” — even though she narrated an audio book version — when the heat started to rise.
“Don’t believe the #fakenews media’s twisted spin. I had a choice between the safety of my children and an animal who had a history of attacking people & killing livestock. I chose my kids.”
Oh, and she suggested Joe Biden do the same for his German shepherd with a biting problem.
Meanwhile, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, upset that Congress voted military aid for Ukrainians fighting the Russian war on its civilians, is promising to pull the trigger, so to speak, on a motion to push out a second speaker in less than two years, because the House actually did something other than in fight.
An idea that apparently found rare common ground among Republicans and Democrats.
"Even trolls online have said they don't want it," one member told Axios.
Not to be outdone, an increasingly unhinged Donald Trump did what he does best, project his own actions onto others. Sleepy Donald, who recently laid out a full-fledged authoritarian agenda in an interview with Time Magazine, told supporters at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser that all of his criminal trials — including those brought by district attorneys in New York and Atlanta — are being orchestrated by Biden, a man he regularly claims is senile. Neat trick.
“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Mr. Trump told donors who attended the event at Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., according to an audio recording obtained by The New York Times. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”
Score at least one for the Times. It’s a better look than the chief White House correspondent regaling us with tales of cocktail party chatter about the best place to escape should the election turn south.
Executive editor Joe Kahn told Semafor’s Ben Smith (a Times alum) that the paper “went too far” in covering the campaign in the summer of 2020 and now wants to promote a free and fair election.
“It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? … We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?”
Perhaps they could reflect on the reality about job growth, shrinkflation and corporate profiteering instead of headlines designed to avoid the charge of bias that will come — one way or another.
I wonder what far-off retreats Times executives have lined up when Trump comes for them?