This is the real face of the hot fascistic mess the Republican Party has become, complete with their hillbilly version of the Praetorian Guard. Roid raging, poorly trained bums like you'd expect to find guarding the red door at a beyond creepy club where patrons are routinely dragged into in the back alley and beaten. Total effin psychos.

Masked, of course. Ergo, anonymous. With assurances from on-high of "absolute immunity" covering their behavior.

And their frontmen and frontwomen in their crisp shirts ad expensive suits? They can't speak out when their paramilitary thugs brazenly murder people in our streets?

Don't forget.

This is the real face of the hot fascistic mess the Republican Party has become, complete with their hillbilly version of the Praetorian Guard. Roid raging, poorly trained bums like you'd expect to find guarding the red door at a beyond creepy club where patrons are routinely dragged into in the back alley and beaten. Total effin psychos.

Masked, of course. Ergo, anonymous. With assurances from on-high of "absolute immunity" covering their behavior.

And their frontmen and frontwomen in their crisp shirts ad expensive suits? They can't speak out when their paramilitary thugs brazenly murder people in our streets?

Don't forget.

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist."
Hannah Arendt

The main driver in Trump's sh*tty poll numbers is ... wait for it ... no, it's coming..almost here ... TRUMP.

Even some MAGAts, after helping install a thief, grifter, multi-bankrupt, pathological liar, convicted felon (34 times), adjudicated sexual abuser, and informational ignoramus in the Oval Office, seem a bit queasy.

They will calm down and reassume their customary position.

But the normals? Lost to this wretched creature. Forever.

Advice from congressional Republicans, aka the Traitors' Caucus?
About what?
Cowering in a corner, lower lip quivering, beady eyes darting?
Fuhgedaboudit,lewzwes, just stfu and slink away from the wreckage to which you've so greatly contributed.

"The randomness is the difference between a regime based on terror and a regime that is plainly repressive," Gessen explains. "Even in brutally repressive regimes, including those of the Soviet colonies in Eastern Europe, one knew where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lay."

Open protest would get one arrested; kitchen conversation would not. Writing subversive essays or novels or editing underground journals would get one arrested; reading these banned works and quietly passing them on to friends probably would not. A regime based on terror, on the other hand, deploys violence precisely to reinforce the message that anyone can be subjected to it.

When we think of the terror regimes of the past, it is tempting to superimpose a logical narrative on them, as though totalitarian leaders had an extermination to-do list and worked their way through it methodically. This, I think, is how most people understand Martin Niemller's classic poem "First They Came." In reality, though, the people living under those regimes never knew which group of people would be designated an enemy of the state next.

"Terror itself was not the end goal of those regimes," Gessen writes of Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR, "but nothing that followed would have been possible without it."

For this was the secret about the secret police that became clear when the K.G.B. archives were opened (briefly) in the 1990s: They were ruled by quotas. Local squadrons had to arrest a certain number of citizens so they could be designated enemies of the people. That the officers often swept up groups of colleagues, friends and family members was probably a matter of convenience more than anything else. Fundamentally, the terror was random. That is, in fact, how state terror works.

That's Old Yeller, working hard at his real job: attempting to prove the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

Old Yeller TACOed.
Again.
Yuuge coward.

"The need for authoritarian regimes to promote the least able is easy to understand in theory, but has seldom been studied scientifically since existing or aspirant autocracies do not disclose their recruitment and promotion policies," writes Cockburn. "But some years back Adam Scharpf and Christian Glassel wrote a fascinating article entitled Why Underachievers Dominate Secret Police Organisations: Evidence from Autocratic Argentina', published in the American Journal of Political Science."

They looked at the careers of 4,000 officers in the core institution of state repression in Argentina during the 1975-83 military dictatorship, asking: "Why would anyone do dirty work for the regime? Are these people sadistic psychopaths, sectarian fanatics, or forced by the regime to terrorise the population?"

They concluded that, while all these factors may play a role, the typical profile of secret police agents is shaped rather by the mundane need to keep a job and win promotion.

"In competition with better qualified peers, officials with weak early performances have little chances of climbing up to the most lucrative positions at the top," they wrote. "For such underachievers the arduous nature of secret police work offers the opportunity to signal their value to the regime and get ahead of competitors for higher positions."

It is shocking to realise that what was true of Argentinian security services half a century ago is likely to apply to ICE today.

The response from the regime? A lie.

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at DHS, told the Guardian that the coat was standard issue and responded to a query by saying it was a "manufactured outrage". Previously she said to the New York Times that the coat was part of a "standard-issue border patrol winter dress uniform", although the newspaper also cited a 2025 document detailing the Border Patrol's Uniform and Grooming Standards in which the coat in question was not listed as part of any official uniform.

Check out WW1 and WW2 casualties and timelines if you want them as a measure to identify a country that came very late to the conflict.

For perspective's sake, Google "Trump family military service."

"That boy is a P-I-G pig."

idiocy personified.
#11 | POSTED BY SHRIMPTACODAN

Your posts? Indeed. Frankly, I'm just three klicks away from sending you a gift basket of Trump kitsch in recognition of this unexpected display of a degree of self-awareness you've never shown before. Congrats, kiddo, congrats.

POSTED BY BELLRINGER
No one has to give a crap about stuff like this until after the full Epstein Files are released.
#9 | POSTED BY ZED

I formerly tended to the belief Trump wasn't actually involved in Epstein's pedo network.
Then came the ongoing, transparent Trump Epstein Coverup.
Now I think Trump may well be in those files in ways that will shock even many MAGAts.
Before those files are "cleansed" through consignment to the memory hole.
But, seriously MAGAts (e.g. Jeffy), why the clumsily obvious coverup?
Unless pedophilia should be added to the long list of Trump's felonies?

Yup, a regular 5-dimensional chess player is your Old Yeller.

Lil' Marco wants a parade along Havana's Malecon. More likely, he and his Miami buddies will be seen for what they are: carpetbaggers.

From the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" ...

"But the Emperor has nothing at all on!" said a little child.

"Listen to the voice of innocence!" exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.

"But he has nothing at all on!" at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now! And the lords of the bedchamber took greater pains than ever, to appear holding up a train, although, in reality, there was no train to hold.

The weakness Trump displays with his unending yips and yaps about how he is such a monumental figure (he and the nation are one: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), great but tragically and nefariously under-appreciated are reflective of a person so needy they can never attain anything approaching fulfillment. Behold POTUS, a truly miserable human being.

Boaz just goes through the motions now.
Trump's gotten about everything he can wring out of him and his other MAGAt marks.
About for Old Yeller to move on to bigger, more lucrative grifts.
Buh bye, Buh-buh-buh-bozo.

Meanwhile ...

TRUMP'S EPSTEIN COVERUP CONTINUES

Thanks, Republicans, masters of the bent knee.

Just a peek into the world these grifters and thieves inhabit: