Open Thread Jan. 31: Republicans Lick Trump’s Ass, Report It Tastes Like Fascism

The biggest takeaway from the State of the Union address is that nobody believes a word Trump says, even the people who want to. Lots of people worried that sticking to a teleprompted script would have pundits praising Trump, but there’s very little of that this morning. Josh Marshall’s sigh of resignation is more honest than most, because he isn’t trying to force a point.

For a more panicky take, you could dwell on the fact that Donnie Dollhands (thanks, Mike Dinsmore) just called for an end to the rule of law, but that would be nitpicking, wouldn’t it?

Republicans continue to give themselves the vapors over a concocted “scandal” at the FBI, the volatility of which depends very strongly on nobody finding out what’s actually in it. All we really know is that it smells strongly of bovine fecal matter, but those who’ve seen it say only a stone-cold moron would fall for the logic underlying it — that huge numbers of FBI agents all lied because, wait for it, they had to scuttle a Trump presidency. A presidency, mind you, that even the guy who became president ever thought would come about. This is what Republicans have come to — making Politburo ass-lickers look like paragons of independence and integrity.

According to America’s punditocracy, we’re always one Trump decision from a “constitutional crisis.” Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill yesterday said “fuck that” — well, not literally, but she asserted that Trump’s refusal to impose sanctions on Russia despite a Congressional override of his veto. What will Republicans who run Congress do about it? Tell Trump his farts smell like roses, that’s what.

The News Journal, which lacks the institutional memory to do much serious Delaware-based journalism, this morning tries instead to stir the pot —
no pun intended — by finding someone to editorialize against legalized marijuana. I won’t link to the piece, because I don’t feel like beating up a grieving father whose position is linked to his son’s opioid death. I will instead link to this story about a town of 2,900 people in West Virginia to which drug firms shipped more than 20 million doses of opiods in a 10-year period. That explains the opioid crisis far more pointedly than the fact that kids experiment with marijuana, a mild sedative treated as a deadly poison by authorities, before they try harder drugs. They almost all start off smoking tobacco, too, yet nobody calls for banning it on those grounds.

Finally — no pun intended — we should all be so lucky as to have someone who loves us enough to write an obituary as funny and heartfelt as this one when our time comes.