Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Pete Kegsbreath...Hegseth...went on a feral rant during a press conference. Perhaps he's drinking again, but just as likely is that he was performing his job using the qualifications that got him the job in the first place. Hegseth, like so many others, was hired because Trump saw him being a tough-guy asshole on Fox. He wanted more tough guy assholes than he had last time, which is why he staffed his Cabinet with people he saw on Fox.
Meanwhile, Senate Republicans seem intent on making Ebeneezer Scrooge look like Santa Claus. Their budget bill is amazingly worse than the House version, which was incredibly terrible. It always seemed to me like the House was passing a terrible bill in order to please Trump and their worst members, hoping that the Senate would force some sanity on the process. The Senate, however, is making the bill even worse.
Luckily, Majority Leader Thune has said they won't overrule the Parliamentarian, so some of the awful non-budgetary stuff should get axed. Still, this sort of performative cruelty probably plays well in the corner offices at Fox, but it's a remarkably unpopular bill.
There are a lot of reasons why Madisonian democracy is teetering on the edge of collapse. Resurgent racism and sexism, the normalization of Trumpist lying and the psychological trauma of Covid. You have to say that one of the main pillar - perhaps THE main pillar - in this fascist edifice is Fox News and the ugliness that it has injected into our political life.
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