The Silence of the Remote

In a perfect world, I would tell you that I’m gonna wait until tomorrow night …after the debate…to do this. But this is not a perfect world.

Feckless Felon's speechifying centers mostly on batshit positions and policies. On Saturday, he posted the following on Truth Social:

“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Loosely translated.....he's gonna go after his political opponents. With the new powers of immunity granted by SCOTUS, this is not an idle threat if he wins. Even Dick Cheney is worried, and that's nothing to sneeze at. This is from his ad for his daughter Liz Cheney's campaign; he calls Feckless Felon a coward, and goes on the endorse not only his daughter, but Harris as well:

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

He's also threatened bloodshed at the border. From this month's The Atlantic:

At a campaign rally in Wisconsin yesterday, [Saturday, September 7, 2024]  Trump talked about his plans for “mass deportation” of border-crossers. “In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state,” he claimed, presumably alluding to reports of gang activity in an apartment building in a Denver suburb. “And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. They should never have been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.”

What did Trump mean by bloody story? He often fantasizes about unleashing state violence against groups and people he dislikes. Speaking to New York City cops in 2017, then-President Trump crowed about how “rough” immigration officers are and urged the police, “Please don’t be too nice” when making arrests. During the protests and riots of summer 2020, Trump similarly demanded that police “crack skulls” and “beat the fuck out of” demonstrators. “Just shoot them,” he repeated again and again at meetings attended by top officials, according to a book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender. And in 2023, Trump suggested on Truth Social that  Mark Milley, Trump’s own former top general, deserved the death penalty. (Trump was angry because of a report in this magazine that Milley had assured Chinese military leaders in October 2020 that Trump was not going to order a sneak attack to justify keeping power after his impending election defeat.)

It's hard enough to listen to him talk about women, including Vice President Harris, in such abusive and disgusting ways, but that's who he is. Like his choice for veep, J.D. Bedbug, they believe women have no place, much less deserving of any respect, in this country. If you want to delve deeper into that batshit, just look at how he plans to pay for his much touted parental leave plan cooked up by Ivanka and Marco Rubio a few years ago that he intends to put into place if elected. It's a dilly. From a speech he gave at the Economic Club of New York last Thursday:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down, and I was, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that, because, look, child care is child care is. Couldn’t, you know, there’s something, you have to have it — in this country you have to have it.”

Never mind that his remarks are notable for their incoherence, I mean, it does sound like gibberish, but how he plans to pay for that parental leave is stunning in its absurdity'; it punishes people for having kids. The LA Times explains it well:

The idea was to allow new parents, including adoptive parents, to receive up to 12 weeks of paid family leave. That sounds pretty good so far: The idea of paid family leave was (and is) enormously popular with voters, and providing it to American families would finally bring the U.S. into line with every other high-income nation in the world.

But in the proposal by Rubio and Ivanka Trump, families would have to raid their Social Security to pay for it by reducing or delaying their retirement benefits. As the Urban Institute calculated, for every 12-week leave, new parents would have to delay their Social Security benefits by more than twice that period, or as much as six months.

Parents who took four 12-week leaves, according to this analysis, would lose 10% of their retirement benefits, for life.

Based on the average benefit retirees receive this year, that would mean a hit of nearly $200 a month, taken at a time when many have few other financial resources if any: About 40% of retirees depend on Social Security for half their income or more, and for as many as 15%, Social Security represents 90% of their income.

Deferring retirement benefits, the Urban Institute observed, could “create financial hardship for people who develop health problems or lose their jobs as they approach retirement.”

I cannot wait for this debate. I really want the mics to be open if there's cross talk. Let's all  hope that Harris put her prosecutor hat on so she can be the indisputable adult in the room. 

The WP's Tip o'the Week 

There's a really handy secret button on your remote control.

It's the one with the X next to a speaker.

If you press it while batshit is being spewed, 

silence occurs.