To follow up on the political part of my last post...
The Lawyers, Guns, & Money gang are having a good laugh over the latest Trump weirdness story:
"My take here, not that it matters, is that Trump is now in some sort of twilight mental world in which his lifetime habit of bullshitting — saying stuff that he doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether it’s true or not — is blending with his age-related cognitive deterioration, to generate stories like this, that Trump more or less believes are true at the moment he’s confabulating them, to the extent he believes literally anything, which to be fair is not much."
In the post they dredge up an old something I remembered about Tubby because it ran head-on into my military history fetish.
This:
This weird fake "monument" supposedly dates back to the Oughts when Tubby bought the Northern Virginia golf club within which he set up this goofball thing.
IIRC when the story broke during his 2016 campaign Tubby's apologists tried to spin this as commemorating the 1861 "Battle of Ball's Bluff", one of the many early-war Union debacles. See, the narrative ran, that's what he means! Take him seriously but not literally!
One teensy little problem with that.
The two places - the battle site and the golf course - are nowhere even close. The red rectangle in the upper left is Ball's Bluff, the smaller square in the right center is this goofy plaque:
Ball's Bluff is over ten miles upriver from the golf course.
The essence of a good lie is that it has just enough proximity to some hard truth(s) as to be at least remotely plausible. You have to squint hard to see the lie.
The essence of good bullshit is similar; it can't be completely ridiculous. It has to have at least some elements of what sound like possibilities. If it's just flying donkeys? No, that's not effective bullshitting.
That's what I don't get about the MAGAt cult.
I have a certain wry appreciation for a clever liar, or an accomplished bullshitter, or a cunning grifter.
It takes a certain amount of wit, inventiveness, and brass to be one or all of them.
This stuff? The lies and bullshit that Tubby spews?
It's not even trying.
It's lazy. It's idiotic. It's childish.
History (and literature) is full of people who led others through a mixture of wit, nerve, inspiration, and brass...mixed in with genuine ideals and goals as well as some inspirational bullshit and even some outright lies.
It's the old "Saint Elizabeth of Hungary" thing - you start with a lie and then make it true.
History is also full of ignorant liars and bad bullshitters.
The outcomes of following the leads of people like that are usually...very, very bad. Children's Crusade bad.
I get that there's a bunch of angry people who want an angry person to lead them against the people they're angry at.
But this joker?
Seriously?
THIS guy?
He can't even fucking lie right.
And if they give him to us again in November, we're gonna find out just precisely how wrong that will be.
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