Left Jabs

  It isn’t easy to turn John Bolton into a sympathetic character. But when Kash Patel and his FBI thugs gleefully raided Bolton’s house last Friday, he became an instant symbol of the Trump junta’s ravenous taste for retribution. Before Trump came along, Bolton was easily one of the more loathsome figures to emerge from the Bush-era neocons. An unapologetic warmonger, he wasn’t an obvious choice for National Security Advisor in Trump’s first term, because for all his faults, he actually believed in objective reality and rational thought. This made him an awkward fit among the hacks, charlatans, and morons surrounding Trump — not to mention Trump himself. As an unrepentant cold warrior, Bolton has never had any use for Russia or Putin, which was yet another thing the Dear Leader would not find endearing. And since Trump’s re-emergence, Bolton has made a point of poking the bear, taunting Trump at every opportunity. He has called Trump things like “incompetent a...

  T he Epstein scandal is not just about those elusive files, though seeing them released would surely be a hallelujah moment. Don’t hold your breath. The scandal is really about a massive set of laughably contradictory lies, all of which add up to one big whopper of a question: Did Donald Trump have sex with underage girls, courtesy of his long-time sidekick, Jeffrey Epstein? It seems almost certain that he did, and on multiple occasions. Which is why he needs to lie about it like he’s never lied before. Talk about a high bar. Driftglass , of The Professional Left Podcast , has called this “the load-bearing lie” — the lie that has to carry far more weight than all the thousands of other lies that define the Trump era. A load-bearing lie is a lie that must not fail, under any circumstances, lest the entire house of lesser lies implode. Watching the fact-free, logically bereft tap dancing being performed almost daily by the likes of JD Vance, Pam Bondi, a...

A lot of what we’re now going through has echoes of what we went through during Covid. The timelines are eerily similar. In January 2020, the rumble was in the distance, but we knew the storm was headed our way. It wasn’t something we wanted to think about. We knew what the disease was capable of, but we only knew it from afar. Denial was easy. Read that last paragraph again, but substitute 2025 for 2020. The word ‘disease’ still applies — only its definition is expanded. By February, we could see the virus spreading, a few cases here, a few there, but the CDC was warning that this was not something you want to mess with. It was only a matter of time before it would arrive in full force, and our experts seemed flummoxed as to how to respond. A few tried to warn us, but the alarm went unheeded. Even so, a sense of dread was descending on the land. Same deal in February of this year. As DOGE vandalized the government, right out in the open, fear of the unknown ...

  Once again, I am recycling an old piece, this one from June 2020, just when the pandemic was hitting its stride. There's nothing here about Covid, but there were other diseases — more metaphorical, but no less virulent — plaguing the land, and I felt that a little perspective was required. Interestingly, my takeoff point was Stephen Colbert, whose imminent removal from late night TV is a natural result of the myths expressed here, and whose indelible declaration — see below — will live on forever.     “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” -         Stephen Colbert, 2006   One of the longest running fictions regularly trotted out by conservative propagandists is that of liberal bias in the media and the classroom. Through incessant repetition, mostly by bad faith actors, this has somehow become received wisdom, despite being utter nonsense. To be sure, both journalism and academia are rife with liberals. But is it a coincidence that ...