Politics

The Friday Politics Goes from Zero to Bonkers

When I said last week I’d take on the Friday PT, I had an idea about how this first one would go. At that point, it was Day 3 and we were all still reeling, still raw from running through the Five Stages of Election Night Grief 1 and still processing our sadness, fear, and anger for ourselves and others, and just general fucking exhaustion with the whole goddamn American experiment, AND feeling sad about our fellow PT’ers who (quite understandably!) decided to process that away from the PT. I personally thought that, despite everything, I was getting along pretty okay, and then I realized I literally hadn’t left the house in four days. So my initial plan was for a super-soft header based around this tweet:

Resistance is NOT a one lane highway. Maybe your lane is protesting, maybe your lane is organizing, maybe your lane is counseling, maybe your lane is art activism, maybe your lane is surviving the day. Do NOT feel guilty for not occupying every lane. We need all of them.

And I still really love this sentiment! It’s very true and something we all should remember right now! I could probably just stop here!

But then…

Well. But then we started getting wind of Trump’s cabinet appointments and it is truly astounding the rate at which things went from zero to bonkers. As I’m writing this, it was only three days ago that it started with utter wiener Marco Rubio being rumored for Secretary of State and utter monster Tom Homan being installed as ‘border czar’, and that seemed about right, BUT THEN. In very quick succession we got:

  • Pete Hegseth, a former c-team Fox News host who by his own admission has not washed his hands since approximately 1993, as the Secretary of Defense. Hegseth doesn’t think women should serve in combat, and apparently loooooves war crimes. Like, fucking loves them. And racism and white supremacist Knights Templar cosplay. Also this, from Wikipedia: ‘On June 14, 2015, Hegseth accidentally hit a West Point drummer with an axe while filming a live TV segment in honor of Flag Day.’2
  • Tulsi Gabbard, former Democratic senator and propagandeuse extraordinaire as Director of National Intelligence. That cool white streak in her hair makes her look like a mastermind supervillain, but she’s really just a tool of the Russian government.
  • Oh shit! I forgot about dog-killer Kristi Noem as the Secretary of DHS! Banned from all the tribal land in her state because she sucks so much!
  • And finally,3 Matt Gaetz as Attorney General. Gaetz has a track record of breaking the government and he’s being investigated by the House Ethics Committee for child sex trafficking, so he really does seem like Trump’s perfect guy. He resigned from the House Wednesday, presumably to keep anyone from seeing the Ethics Committee report. Senators from both sides are already demanding to see it–apparently in the eight years he’s spent as a Congressman, Gaetz hasn’t learned that the Senate will take any opportunity to bully the House and also pretty much everyone fucking hates him. Personally, I think there’s a halfway decent chance that Gaetz doesn’t actually become AG, not because the Senate won’t confirm him, but because Gaetz will get locked into a war for tall-hair supremacy with Vivek Ramaswamy4 and it results in their mutual destruction by Christmas.

The craziest part about the whole thing for me (besides literally everything else about it5) was how easy it was to take a look at this combination of terror and bugfuck absurdity and integrate it right back on into my life. I’m not sure how it shakes out yet besides writing PT headers, but I guess that’s a lane too.

Also The Onion bought Infowars. Sometimes the bugfuck absurdity shakes out in your favor.

Be nice to each other. Take care of yourselves.

  1. 1) Oh, Fuck; 2) Frantically Flipping Through Election Night Coverage Too Fast to Hear Anything, But Slow Enough to Get the Gist; 3) Fetal Position; 4) Falling Asleep Because Maybe You Forgot You Took NyQuil and This Is a Hallucination?; 5) Oh. Fuck. ↩︎
  2. In fairness, I should say the drummer only sustained minor injuries, but I won’t because fuck Pete Hegseth. ↩︎
  3. This was where the Transportation Secretary Danica Patrick joke was going to go, but I realized she might be actually be nominated by the time this was posted. While I was writing this, we also got RFK, Jr. as HHS secretary. Big get for the brainworms-having, disease-loving, whale-chainsawing, baby-bear-crimescene-staging community. And Trump’s very own idiot defense lawyer Todd Blanche is apparently being tapped to be second-in-command at DOJ. Who knows what the hell else happened while I was sleeping! ↩︎
  4. Co-running the (ugh) Department of Governmental Efficiency with Elno; I’m not giving them the satisfaction of getting their own bullet points. ↩︎
  5. Literally everything about it is also the most terrifying part. ↩︎