FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: ANTI-CHOICE WITH A (REALLY BAD) EXPLANATION EDITION.

Friend of mine alerted me. This is the kind of goofy shit I love.

Yeah, I missed last week’s edition. I offer no apologies. It’s been a long time between vacations – last time I got four nights of rest was my pancreatectomy a year ago – and between the straight job and the five days of week dishing out premium copy at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down I’m to' up and worn out. 

And speaking of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, I know some of you missed the free issues I usually hand out on Fridays like NutraSweet gumballs. Well, a got a couple for you today.

First is one of my little playlets – longtimers will know I have a whole little REBIDverse with settings like the Mar-a-Lago Throne Room, the Decision Desk at Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, etc. This week it’s X Headquarters in San Francisco where America’s favorite supervillain/buffoon reacts to some bad publicity. It’s been a hard couple of weeks for Elmo the Unready – a $6 billion haircut on Tesla, the collapse of his ridiculous court action against the Center for Countering Digital Hate, and, perhaps most ignominiously, the exposure of his embarrassing testimony in a separate case. One can only imagine how this must chafe his famously sensitive self-image – or rather, one needn’t, because I have! Enjoy.

The other freebie is a brief bit of counsel on Tubby’s attempt to back away from his own anti-abortion record – namely, don’t get caught up in his bullshit, just say “he’s lying like always” and walk away. I wrote it before the Arizona Supreme Court shit the bed with its pre-civil-war forced-birth cosplay, but the basic message not only still applies to Trump, it self-evidently also applies to all the panic-stricken wingnuts who mired themselves in that policy. Kari Lake’s mealy-mouthed pro-choice turnaround is hilarious – like Franz Liebkind trying to distract from his Nazism by singing “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” in The Producers – but even better are the hardcore anti-abortionists trying to make their panicked troops hold the line, like the editors of National Review:

Republicans can put [Democrats] back on the defensive for their extremism on abortion and make a case that the law should protect life at some stage of pregnancy — but only if they put old grievances aside and offer voters a practical alternative.

“Look, we’ll let you subhumans murder your preborn angel-babies for a couple of weeks, tops, but after that we lock you in the birthin’ sheds. C’mon, bitches, we’re meeting you halfway!” One is tempted not to tell them how badly they’re fucking up, but I actually think they know and can’t help themselves, which just makes it funnier. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PEOPLE EDITION.

Sure, fuck it, let's go back there.

Happy Easter weekend! Here is my favorite Easter joke, which I will render in all caps because it is meant to be told out loud -- proper capitalization rather spoils it. 

Q: WHAT HAPPENED WHEN JESUS WENT TO MOUNT OLIVE?

A: POPEYE BEAT HIM UP.

Years later I’m still laughing. This past week was sort of a march up Calvary itself, but fortunately for you folks and the health of the nation I have a couple of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issues to release free to non-subscribers. (I must remind you that I sling this hash FIVE TIMES A WEEK and that a subscription is absurdly cheap, about 35 cents an issue, so you really ought to pony up and not wait around for leavin’s every Friday.)

In the first one, an episode of our political talk show, Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, treats the Ronna McDaniel née Romney catastrophe obliquely – via an interview between Bolt and yet another high-born Republican who changed his name to show conformity with the new order, Trumpy Killthelibs. Much discussion of liberal unfairness commences, as it did when NBC paid off the former RNC chair to go away after even bothsider simps like Chuck Todd publicly blanched at having an insurrectionist at the news analysis desk. 

Like I could give a shit about any of these people. But even when one of them does something resembling the right thing, the prestige press has to make it into a controversy rather than belated due diligence. The palace gossip angles taken by papers like Politico (“The staff revolt at NBC News underscores how the balance of power has shifted away from management”) is bad enough – some of the big rags were pushing the elderly Liberal Bias line.  “NBC fires former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel after internal uproar and blatant anti-GOP bias,” squirts Ingrid Jacques at USA Today, as if there were no difference between a major GOP executive who actively tried to overturn the 2020 Presidential election on behalf of her crooked boss and straight-laced Republican Joes like, say, the Romney relatives McDaniel disowned.  

Neither Jacques nor any other pundit taking this line even acknowledges what was considered so objectionable about McDaniel (“McDaniel's detractors insisted that she was a threat to democracy,” Jacques says, without revealing why), devolving instead into cancelculture crybaby tantrums. I understand why claiming persecution on behalf on rich Republicans who don’t get to be on the network of their choice appeals to the base, who are so addled by their own resentments and grudges they'll sing along with any bitch-and-moaner, but I can’t imagine normal people going for it – which I take as further proof that these people are counting on voter disenfranchisement, ballot tampering, and, when all else fails, January 6 Part II, rather than on the Will of the People, to get back into power.

The second freebie is my essay about the conservative reaction to Baltimore’s Key Bridge disaster – rehearsing some of the batshit conspiracy mongering and racist rants they offered instead of, I noticed, anything like compassion for the victims. Once upon a time they would have at least ginned up some thoughts-and-prayers – but no longer. American conservatives have always been advance men for wealthy interests, and as such they’ve always tried to claw back the gains that less-rich Americans made over the years and redistribute them to their rich donors; but in recent years this meanness has gotten less businesslike and become more like a deep soul sickness – like they’re more excited to see and revel in the suffering of their fellow Americans than they are to grab the cash. I think more than Tubby’s ravings it’s that sickness that makes people worried about them seizing back power.

FRIDAY 'ROUND -THE-HORN: WEAKLY WORLD NEWS EDITION.

If you were to. knock me down. I'd just get up again.

Been a wacky week around America. I know a lot of people are getting a kick out of Tubby’s hunt for the $474 million bond he’ll need to post if he doesn’t want his assets seized. But to me it just looks like more evidence that there are never any consequences for our biggest criminals. For one thing, Trump’s getting a $3 billion payday for the IPO on TruthSocial/TrumpMedia – a value proposition I absolutely do not understand, and apparently neither does anyone else, as CNN tells us “experts say the market is drastically overvaluing Trump Media based on the company’s fundamentals,” so he may not be able to cash out easily. But he’s got a great backup plan: The Republican Party, which has agreed to let him take a nice cut for himself on any Presidential campaign fundraising he does. The guy will never pay a dime nor serve a day. I wonder if Peter “Fall Guy” Navarro sees the irony. George Carlin tried to tell him it's a big club and he ain’t in it, but these guys always believe that doesn’t apply to them, even when they get bounced.

Speaking of current events, this week’s Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies are pretty timely. #1 is Governor Abbott’s meeting with his border-jumper bounty hunters. Right after this one came out a Fifth Circuit panel slapped a stay on the nutty law that gives Texas its own immigration department (with the blessings of the Trumpified SCOTUS), but Abbott is fighting back and if he gets his way several other states in the Shitheel Belt have signaled they want to throw immigrants out, too. It all makes me think back to the 1984 centenary of the Statue of Liberty, when every conservative from Reagan on down kvelled over Lady Liberty and her golden lamp and what immigration had done for America. Bad as they always were, conservatives can always find a way to get worse.   

Freebie #2 is our latest entry in the category of Hardcore, our term of our term of art for ragebait emails that lure your senile relatives to rightwing garbage sites. This time, though, instead of trawling the Mariana Trench of less-well-known wingnut equities, we focus on the work of two conservative icons whose recent gibberings have won them Hardcore status. First is Candace Owens, who just today got de-partnered by the Daily Wire, though probably for allegedly antisemitic content rather than the loony “French President’s wife is a man” thing she’s been pushing; second is one of our longtime fave figures-of-fun, Rod Dreher, who has risen to the latest ultraracist rightwing talking point that Haitians are cannibals bent on invading America and eating up the white people, and attributes this to voodoo and the fruit of its poisoned tree, the liberation of Haitian slaves in 1804. It’s a doozy, and I see Br’er Rod’s on a streak:

He was always weird but divorce really put the zap on his head. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: COME ON AND SUBSCRIBE ALREADY EDITION.

I admit it, I love music that you'd hear under a
"sinister dance club" scene in a movie.

A little late off the mark today -- Substack was down for a while so I couldn't set up the freebies for non-subscribers. (You know, an actual subscription is absurdly inexpensive - $7 a week month (whoops, I mistyped -- it's cheaper than I said!) even less when you do the annual plan, and that gets you five [5] issues every week. It's almost insane not to subscribe.)

Anyway: Freebie #1 is one of my Mar-a-Lago Throne Room sketches, this one speculating on what the next step might be after Tubby's total nepo-takeover of the GOP. Trump's yammerings, in real life as well as in my artistic renderings, just get weirder and more sinister every day, but democracy' loss is satire's gain. 

Speaking of which, Freebie #2 is a brief review of prestige press thumbsuckers that show how big a leg-up they're giving Trump, in part by concealing how openly racist and authoritarian he is, so voters just view the election as a couple of celebrities competing for a prize. This has become a popular topics in liberal circles, sometimes advanced by people who seem only to have acknowledged the problem very recently. Regard Lord Saletan:

Sounds miffed, doesn't he -- as if he'd thought: surely by now Republicans should be rising up and showing us all what good citizens they are! Tsk tsk, so disappointing; still, you have to admit Joe Biden is old.

FRIDAY ‘ROUND-THE-HORN: BIDEN GETS THE FORMULA EDITION

Absence of Malice!

 I was too busy with work to watch the State of the Union, but from the clips I’ve seen Biden was far from the doddering dotard Republicans and the prestige press (but I repeat myself) have spent years painting him as. Apparently their “pivot” is that Biden was on drugs! 

Given that the Trump White House pharmacy under the leadership of Dr. Ronny “Feelgood” Jackson was throwing around uppers and downers like beads at Mardi Gras, and that Tubby himself is an obvious user, you might say it’s projection, but I begin to think it’s the only explanation they can fathom. For why, in their view, would anyone get so excited about traditional Democratic policies that help less fortunate Americans get ahead? It’s got to be drugs! 

UPDATE. All the rightwing talking heads are getting into the act. Erick Erickson claims Biden's speech was "supplement fuelled." And get this, from the Washington Times:

A psychiatrist who has worked with elderly dementia patients said President Biden exhibited signs of stimulant use to mask cognitive decline in his amped-up, aggressive State of the Union speech on Thursday.

Mr. Biden, 81, often raced through his remarks with the speed of an auctioneer, loudly shouting his words despite having a microphone in front of him.

Speed and volume of speech can be a sign of using Adderall or another amphetamine, said Dr. Carole Lieberman, a forensic psychiatrist based in Beverly Hills, California.

You can find Lieberman elsewhere on the internet calling herself "America's Psychiatrist" and posting gibberish like this:

As Lorenzo Semple DuBois said in The Producers: They try... ok, how they try! 

Readers of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down know that for years I’ve been doing sketches in which “The Formula” – a mix of cocaine, Adderall, ketamine, and Lord knows what – is used by Trump’s handlers to keep him upright. (I’ve even got a few with Biden in them; here’s one I think you might enjoy under the circumstances.)

The cherry on the SOTU Sunday was Senator Tradwife’s rebuttal. As has been pointed out, her delivery is only bizarre if you’re unacquainted with the “fundie baby” voice with which evangelicals project winsomeness to cloak their theocratic intentions. But maybe now that ordinary Americans have gotten a load of it on national TV they’re starting to realize how fucking weird that whole crew is. 

I mentioned Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, which is a subscriber service – but as usual on Fridays I have a few free issues for you joy-poppers.  Feast your eyes! 

First, another of my recurring features – political talk show Received Opinion with your host Bolt Upright – in which Bolt asks whether Kyrsten Sinema’s departure from public life (the less-remunerative non-lobbyist part of it, anyway!) is yet another example of the sad death of comity and compromise in Washington, which in Bolt’s view and the view of all network chuckleheads are values to be treasured above democracy, equity, and everything else. 

Also: My annual Oscar predictions! Yes, once again I’m indulging my sick interest in this festival of glamour and hubris!  I’m already getting cold feet about my Adapted Screenplay pick, but by and large I think I’ve got something worth risking $5 in a pool. (That statement implies no responsibility if you lose the house! Wager responsibly!) 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: ICE CREAM HEADACHE EDITION.

It's still funny to me that this kind of music can qualify
as "a tune that's been running through my head"
as if it were some pretty Tin Pan Alley number.

Happy March! The deeper we get into political campaign season (what, you didn’t know? It started after the consultants got back from their post-election vacations in 2023) the more fucked up things look. 

For example, you would think, nine months out from the general, that Republicans would try harder to tamp down the crazy. Didn’t at least the more politically exposed Republicans try to look normal about IVF after their lunacy was revealed by the Alabama Supreme Court decision – which, after all, merely followed their stated belief that life begins with the fertilized egg, even if it’s in a freezer? Sure, they also blocked a Senate vote to protect IVF, but one could read that as a tribute to the Grand Old Party’s grand old tradition of being obviously full of shit. 

But their shock troops are still going before the public with snakes flying out of their mouths:

Sorry, kid, our base demands child broodslaves! Either the smart Republicans can’t control these nuts or smart Republicans don’t exist. Or they think binding the small core of nutcakes who can be counted on to vote/insurrect on their behalf is so important that they have to back up whatever lunacies they demand, and count on voter suppression to carry the day for their candidates in elections. 

Anyway I understand some of you are here for Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebies! OK, here’s the most recent edition of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, on the scandal of Joe Biden eating ice cream. I would have thought this a two-day story at best but the clown corps is still ON IT (“Joe Biden's awkward ice cream moment has only put the US president under more pressure,” etc). I guess it will never end and the Republican National Convention will include a ritual detonation of a big tub of Häagen-Dazs.  

I will also remind you aesthetic types that I’m doing my annual Oscar movie reviews – with my latest that’s all ten Best Picture nominees sorted, with all of those essays free to non-subscribers, so if you want to prep for the big show March 10 now’s your chance. I also intend to watch and report back on some of the other nominated films. Watch that space! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: FREEZE THEM KIDS EDITION.

Around all these years but I can't recall hearing them before. This'n's a banger!

Happy nearly almost spring, folks! Sunset’s more than an hour later than it was in the depths of winter, so have hope! 

Not that politics makes it easier, especially with all the bullshit being generated over the Alabama Supreme Court’s lunatic IVF ruling, which I covered in a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down item available to non-subscribers for free. Like I said, the outrage isn’t only about the fate of in-vitro for the people who need it to have children – it’s about the “fetal personhood” concept on which the ruling is based, which is exactly the concept on which Republicans base their drive to ban abortion nationwide – which is also why Republican “moderates” like Nikki Haley and Larry Hogan are doing such a tortured pee-dance over it: They know their bullshit ain’t getting over like it used to.

Now you see the Republican National Senatorial Committee rushing out talking points to convince voters that when they said life begins at fertilization they didn’t actually mean it – there’s a political-poison takeback clause! Funny, I don’t remember them taking this position in December 2022, when Republicans blocked a Senate bill to protect IVF:

Of course, back then their factota on the U.S. Supreme Court had just pushed Dobbs out and Republicans were feeling feisty – everything’s coming up Roeless! But after several state ballot ass-beatings showed that nobody is fooled, they’re shitting themselves and running for cover. We have to make sure they don’t get it. 

The other Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie is the one I talked about in the last post, about the Sad Truckers’ latest PR push: Claiming they’ll starve New York of groceries on behalf of Tubby. Though rightwing YouTubers and legacy drags like Jeffrey Lord try to keep it going, like all their previous chest-beating displays this one hasn’t panned out and even their more prominent spokesbuffoons are backing off. Guess it’s time to put Joe the Plumber on the case!   

MAGA TRUCKER-TYCOON COALITION NOT GOING SO WELL.

Hey, here’s a Humpday treat – a rare mid-week release of a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue FREE to gen pop. It’s the latest episode of our Washington Insider news talk show Received Opinion with Bolt Upright, this time focused on the Truckers Attack/Richies Forsake New York bullshit being spread by Republican operatives via credulous prestige-press journos. 

The casus bellow is Tubby’s $355 million fraud judgment, which allegedly has truckers threatening not to deliver goods to NYC stores. You might say this is a direct rip from the 2022 People’s Convoy grift, in which a sad gaggle of MAGA dopes rumbled their big rigs around DC claiming they were going to shut down the government, but left with dysentery and a few weeks of lost earnings. 

But it really goes back farther to what I call GOP Butch Cosplay – like the Hard Hat Riot of 1970 and the whole “Joe the Plumber” scam of 2008, it involves rightwingers acting all rough and tough and threatening to shut everything down if they don’t get their way. 

At least the hardhats actually beat up some hippies, though – these guys just yell and pose like WWE wrestlers and take selfies and expect the world to fall at their feet, but have to make do with dumb reporters and whatever half-wits believe them.

We also have rich guys claiming to withdraw their funds from New York City in protest of Tubby’s impending bankruptcy – e.g. today’s Fox News headline: “Real estate investor will ‘immediately discontinue’ working in NYC over Trump verdict, eying Florida, Texas.” It;s enough to make you miss the days when they got over on rubes by offering to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge. 

But, as I’ve also said before, MAGA types have been trained to despise New York as a symbol of everything they hate – different kinds of people living together, public services, culture, soap and toothpaste -- and will believe any crap they’re fed about how it’s all going to collapse any day now. I’d feel sorry for them if they weren’t dangerous lunatics. 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: TOO MUCH AIN'T ENOUGH EDITION.

Always liked these guys, glad they got back in the game.

Listen, I’ve never kept a dollar past sunset so I can be pretty tight-fisted, especially when it comes to giving out freebies to my bread-and-butter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down site. [Subscribe! Cheap!] But this week your cup runneth over – partly because I want you non-subscribers to get acquainted with some of that publication’s adorable features.

First, I’ve unlocked today’s installment of Fun Friday, which has become a regular week-ending post that prompts subscribers to talk about a specific type of pleasure in comments – for example, a moviegoing experience that the hecklers in the audience made memorable. Today’s edition is about things you love mainly or even simply because they’re old – or, rather, because their antiquity spurs nostalgia, either for your past or a past you never experienced. The real joy of these things – and this week is no exception – is our commenters, REBID’s secret weapon. Throw in your own comments if you like! 

Also, every year around this time I watch all the Oscar Best Picture nominees before the big show and write about them; this year I’m making all those essays available to non-subscribers. This week it’s on The Zone of Interest – and the post has links to the all my other open-access reviews as well. Nine down, one to go! 

This week’s final freebie is yet another in our series of Received Opinion with Bolt Upright episodes, in which political talk show clucks peck at the issues of the day. This week: How Joe Biden is oh so very old and disqualified while Trump is a dynamic imbecile. I know, it sounds just like the real thing, but you haven’t seen it chewed over by Bolt’s panel of pundits Peoni Doyenne, Chafe Dramaturgy, and Buff Toehold. Tune in! 

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN: A GOOD SWIFT KICK EDITION.

Got their Mojo workin'.

RIP to a real one. I met Mojo back in the day, and he wasn't putting it on, that was really him. I told him that when I came down South for the Memphis Jazz Fest I ate so much barbecue I didn't take a shit for a day and a half. He referred to me thereafter exclusively as Hambone.  

I missed a ‘Round-the-Horn last week, sorry! But here, let me offer you a Roy Edroso Breaks It Down freebie from that timeframe which is still good, or will be till after the Super Bowl: My as-usual behind-the-scenes look at how Tubby and his team plan to fight back against the Taylor Swift menace. I know, there’s been so much written already about the rightwing meltdown over the pretty white girl with a football hero boyfriend who for some reason doesn’t love enraged Nazi incels, but mine’s funny.  If you ain't read it yet, it's news to you! 

And look, it’s gotta be better than Ross Douthat’s plea for conservatives to embrace Taylor Swift because “the cultural valence of the Swift-Kelce romance... [is] normal and wholesome and mainstream in an explicitly conservative-coded way” – Ha! One images the wispy-bearded doofus trying to pitch that to a mob of howling conservabros and getting his ass hitched to a Ford F-30,000 and hauled out of Burlyman Camp in response. You can't reason with them, Father Ross!

Of more recent vintage is my other freebie, inspired by the latest in a series of prestige press Trump-wanks: A “guest essay” in the Good Grey Lady by Kellyanne Conway, the Trump bullshit firehose temporarily disguised as a disinterested observer of the American Scene, who asks, “Who Should Be Trump’s #2?” I expect the next such essay will be Stephen Miller asking, “Aren’t All You Regular Volk a Little Tired of Untermenschen Questioning Der Fuhrer?” We’ve gone way past the well-observed “working the refs” phenomenon, whereby rightwingers scream about “bias” until milquetoast liberal journalists are exhausted/intimidated into waving through all their bullshit; now it seems well-trained bigtime editors look at every single political event or issue and ask themselves, How is this good news for the John McCain Donald Trump?

Thus we have a former president who is very upfront about becoming a fascist dictator if he’s reelected, yet is portrayed in the prestige press as a victim because state officials interpret the Constitution as disqualifying insurrectionists from holding that office; also when a Republican investigator can't find evidence to charge the current president but takes the trouble to insert slurs about his mental state into his report, the pressies all run headlines like “Democrats’ Anxiety Over Biden’s Age Grows After Special Counsel Report.” I can only hope, as I wrote, that Americans have not yet lost the ability to smell bullshit.