Monday, October 28, 2019

Monday, October 28, 2019

 Now, really. What did he expect? What did they expect?



 As we've all probably heard by now, Donald Trump showed up his dumb ass at last night's fifth game of the World Series between the Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros. I didn't watch the game, but at one point they cut to him and his coterie of lapdogs whereupon he received an undeniable round of loud boos from the stadium of something like 40,000 people, followed by chants of "Lock him up! Lock him up!" We're told that not long after the incident, Trump and his lackeys made themselves scarce as the Astros beat the Nats handily 7-1.

 It was pretty funny. No, really, it was hilarious to see the reception Trump got when he got around a huge crowd that wasn't there specifically to hear him speak. People often say "Twitter isn't real life" or that the political world is an echo chamber, but one can't ignore that a stadium-full of fans of the most middle-class, bourgeoisie sport in America told a guy who keeps referring to himself as "your favorite president" to go skip rope.

 It was fun to be on Twitter last night. Watching the video of the event, you could see the exact moment where Trump and his crew of lickspittles realized they were getting booed that harshly. It wasn't a smattering of boos among an equally loud bunch of cheers. Trump was unambiguously booed by the Washington crowd. And the "lock him up" chants were the icing on the cake, since that's still a go-to for the cultists are his rallies, obsessed as they are over Hilary Clinton.

 We all expected a run of rage tweets of Biblical proportions from the Blind Idiot God this morning, especially considering yesterday morning's successful strike against ISIS leader Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi which resulted in the terrorist's death. I'm sure Trump thought he'd be welcomed as the conquering hero, despite the weirdly ham-hand and self-aggrandizing way he made the announcement I'm sure he thought the peasants would be throwing laurels, just as I'm equally sure he pitched a three-alarm shit fit when he got back to the White House.

 Instead, he was pretty quiet until a couple hours ago when he started in on his regular, vaguely anti-Semitic tweet whine about Adam Schiff and, for some reason, lauding the dog involved in the raid, which is even weirder given his known distaste for dogs. I for one would love to have been a fly on the Oval Office wall last night. Trump's becoming known for his hair temper and irrational rages at not being loved and worshiped by hoi palloi, and I really doubt he let this one just roll off his back.

 The reaction from the wingnut horde was fairly predictable. Every Nationals fan was, of course, an elitist member of the Deep State and D.C. is a town hopelessly lost in liberalism and in Real America Trump wouldn't have been treated that way. Granted, Trump lost Houston - fairly progressive even by Texan standards - by a not insignificant margin and, again, this wasn't one of his rally crowds full of the blind faithful and paid off.

 The chattering class was equally goofy. "Respect the office," they cried. Bullshit, respect is earned and the office hasn't been worthy of instant respect for years. I'm pretty sure Nixon shit that particular bed thoroughly nearly 50 years ago. Nate Silver of 538, for some reason, bemoaned the "libs" inability to give Trump "one good day" despite him really not deserving the benefit of the doubt. In the process, he joined up with the execrable RedSteeze and Twitter's version of Dane Cook, Comfortably Smug. If you don't know who those two goobs are, consider yourself fortunate.

 Quite possibly the dumbest take came from that walking refutation of meritocracy Megan McArdle, where she compared the booing of Trump with South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson (R-Pinhead) mouthing "you lie" during Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress in 2009. When challenged - because that's stupid - she, as usual moved the goalposts so fast in nearly defied the General Theory of Relativity.

 Now. What do we take from all this? Is Trumped loathed? In Washington, D.C., without question. Baseball, as I said earlier, is a fairly middle-class, mainstream sport and there is absolutely no question that crowd loathed him. That he's not acknowledging it is interesting and suggests, if nothing else, someone kept his phone away from him until a couple hours ago. Trump's favorable-unfavorable numbers among people other than Republicans has never been worth writing home about, and since he's the most protected from the public president we've seen in an age, the massively negative response he got yesterday isn't all that surprising.

 Neither is the response from the media and even Democrats in calling for "civility" all that big a shock. They have a vested interest in not rocking the boat, regardless of how badly it needs rocking, so they're going to push for the plebes to sit down, shut up, and know their place. The only thing that's worrying if not surprising is the faithful's continuing dehumanization of anyone who doesn't swear fealty to the Blind Idiot God.

 Will this cause another round of mail bombs or violence from the pro-Trump crowd? Probably not, but when they can so easily claim that people from a certain town with a certain slant on politics are "un-American" - which doesn't mean a damn thing - it reinforces the idea they already have that some of us deserve to be targets.

 It's dangerous times, kids, have a good laugh when it comes but watch your backs.

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