Day in the Life of an Idiot

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plaidadder:

ithPLAIDDER: Conn, welcome back to the studio. I’m sorry it’s a mess.

CONN: I can’t find anywhere in this universe to be that’s not a mess.

PLAIDDER: And we’re off! Well, Conn, there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since we last sat down together in…God, has it really been two months?

CONN: Only if you don’t count the flipped interview we did back a month ago…

PLAIDDER: Oh, right, back when I still had some bandwidth for J. K. Rowling and her traveling disaster. So, let’s talk current catastrophe. I don’t know how closely you’ve been following what’s going on in Portland.

CONN: I understand there’s an occupation in progress.

PLAIDDER: It’s funny, nobody’s actually using that term for it.

CONN: What else would you call it when you’re sending hostile forces into a city that didn’t ask for them and then terrorizing the local citizens in an attempt to get them to stop resisting the authority you represent?

PLAIDDER: Well you could call it an authoritarian crackdown, or a fascist power grab, or…I mean there are actually a lot of things you could call it but it’s curious to me that nobody’s reaching for that particular term. 

CONN: Do you think it’s because they’re all from the same country? I mean usually it’s one country invading and occupying another country.

PLAIDDER: I suppose. Except that I think that what’s actually happened since 2016 is that it has become clear that the United States of America is two countries. There’s the country that Buttercup considers himself president of, and there’s the country that Buttercup considers the Enemy. It’s confusing, because the borders are very complicated. Like, a lot of Oregon is part of Buttercuplandia, but Portland, which is IN Oregon, is actually enemy territory.

CONN: And so now your president is trying to occupy enemy territory.

PLAIDDER: Starting with Portland.

CONN: Do you think he’ll succeed?

PLAIDDER: That is the question, isn’t it.

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I don’t have the bandwidth to comment on what’s going on in LA right now; but it is worth remembering that Buttercoup has done this before: escalate a situation in order to justify his authoritarian crackdown. I see people making the connection to what happened in Lafayette Square, but the whole Portland thing seems to have been papered over. But it’s the same thing. A couple new observations:

1. The Trumplings want war powers. They have been very frustrated so far with the lack of war. Sending in the National Guard and the US military over Newsom’s objections is one of their many attempts to manufacture such a war. They were always going to respond with maximum force, regardless of what the protesters actually did. If you’re talking about protestor behavior right now you are playing the Trumplings’ game.

2. It’s worth remembering that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were catastrophes because the US military won the invasion and then lost the occupation. What the Trumplings want to do to Blue America–what they tried to do in Portland, what they appear to be trying to do in LA right now– is something that our military absolutely failed to do over a period of 20 years during which the Secretary of Defense was never Pete Hegseth. What they want to do is indeed horrifying. Whether they can do it is another question.

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