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 ...

  Back in 2019, the first time Jeffrey Epstein was the name on everyone’s lips, the New York Times published the bizarre story of Leslie H. Wexner. The billionaire founder of Victoria’s Secret, this guy basically signed over his life — and much of his fortune — to Epstein. This went on for at least 16 years. Wexner gave Epstein power of attorney, and with it the ability to buy, sell, or sign for anything in Wexner’s name, thereby affording him extraordinary access to, and power over, the personal finances of an extremely wealthy man. Ostensibly Wexner had hired Epstein as a financial advisor, yet no one at L Brands — parent company of Victoria’s Secret— saw any official record of employment or compensation. Over a decade and a half, Epstein took over most, if not all, of Wexner’s personal investments, including substantial real estate holdings. Epstein transferred ownership of a lot of those properties to himself. This baffled and disturbed other executives...

  A s with most things having to do with soccer, the first-ever FIFA Club World Cup flew largely under the radar of American audiences, even though the month-long tournament was held entirely in the U.S. Among other things, it served as a reminder that the real World Cup, in all its over-the-top spectacle, is happening next summer, also in the U.S., together with Canada and Mexico. Three amigos, hosting the world. What could go wrong? But the final of this tournament, matching Chelsea, an English team, with Paris St. Germain, a French one, attracted real interest, even in this soccer-ambivalent country. A few million Americans were watching, me included. It was a really good game, but I wouldn’t be writing this if it weren’t for the TV camera that was fixed on the luxury box containing Donald and Melania Trump, seated next to Gianni Infantino and his wife, Leena Al Ashquar. Infantino, an Italian Swiss, is president — some say “emperor” — of FIFA, the domi...

  For various reasons, my writing output will be curtailed a bit this summer, so I’m trying to fill the void with pieces from the past that somehow resonate with our current situation. This is not as hard as it seems, as the Trump crowd has been remarkably consistent in their cruelty, ineptitude, and stupidity. So please return with me to April 13, 2020, to the earliest days of this blog, just as Covid was washing over us and shutting everything down. The first Trump administration was already breaking new ground for governmental incompetence, and an old Stephen King novel was finding a new and scary relevance that has not diminished since.   I have no intention of rereading  The Stand , Stephen King’s apocalyptic novel of a virus that obliterates most of the U.S. leaving a smattering of survivors to pick up the pieces. I read it twice — I was a bigger King fan then than now — but only because he released a second “original” version which was longe...