About Last Week...

Binge and Purge

The deep state binged and now they are being purged.

While potentially clever, the above lede line could be seen as playing into the hands of those upset and terrified that government workers are being shown the door.

That’s because the media has described what is happening now as a “purge.” It seems they have moved on from calling the Trump administration’s actions a coup – that really didn’t stick – and are now equivalizing people getting pensioned off with being shot.

For people with a sense of history – a demographic group getting smaller each day – “purge” evokes from very nasty things.

Dictators purge their opposition; they do not merely fire or place on leave or reconsider their contracts or ask them to resign without losing their benefits.

Purged people are taken to basement cells and have the bejesus beaten out of them until they confess to something. They are then shot and/or shipped off to a frozen gulag where they will almost certainly wish that they had been shot.

The word is meant to instill a feeling of automatic injustice, a sense of sympathy for the “victim,” in the reader. From Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives to Stalin’s never-ending effort to literally eliminate anyone who could possibly pose a threat to him (and millions of others just for ideological fun, one supposes,) a purge is by definition evil and unwarranted.

It’s not just firing people to create new efficiencies and implement new policies – being purged rather than being let go inherently implies that the action was wrong and bad and diabolically motivated.

It absolves the former and soon to be former government employees of having any responsibility for their own firing. Sure, they funneled billions of dollars to absurd and/or potentially treasonous and/or certainly damaging projects for which they should/could be fired for cause, but if they are being “purged” by bad billionaires then nothing is their fault, nothing they did was actually wrong.

Hence the current popularity of the word.

Now, if I put on my PR hat and was being paid millions to advise the purgees (I wish ‘purgatives’ worked here – far more cynically accurately descriptive of the individuals involved) I would make sure right now to snag the “trumpsgulag.com” domain name to have a place to post my pathetic narcissistic bitches and whines and complaints for the next few years.

Or I would suggest just writing for The Bulwark.

Speaking of deep state scribes, they will soon have to do without one of their heroes…or someone who by voting against Trump cabinet nominees became a hero very recently despite his 647 years in the Senate.

Mitch McConnell will not be running for re-election come next fall…and that could mean either November 2026 or the next time he falls down.

Does it matter? Well, maybe. Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Andy Beshear is rather popular and he could make a play for the seat, costing Republicans part of their slim majority, though that would most likely be balanced out if Georgia Governor Brian Kemp unseats Jon Ossoff as he is expected to do.

And then there is the sadly expected but really quite unexpected.

Last week, some Anchor-bot 3000 said something dumb on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Soooo dumb even progressive/left media types noticed.

Regarding Vice President JD Vance’s “wake up and smell the espresso” speech at a “security conference” in Munich, Margaret Brennan said the following to Secretary of State Marco Rubio:

“Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide, and he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the right.”

Rubio said he disagreed with that assessment, which was correct but did not go far enough.

Asserting that “free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide” is the same as stating categorically that the moon weighs exactly six pounds.

If it weren’t so terrifying that a person that incompredelusional with access to millions of people each week, it would have been wonderfully radiantly bizarre.

It was not even eight-bong hit dorm room philosophizing– it was such the opposite of true that it has never been said before by anyone.

“Secretary Rubio, you are aware that eleven monkeys ate a wall book, five green, correct?”

If she thought of the idea herself, she is an idiot and not only should not be afforded national airtime but should probably not be allowed to use scissors. If one of her illiterate 20-year-old production assistants suggested the line and she used it she may even be stupider than that.

This week’s epigram is a quote that is not at all meant to be dirty but for some reason is.

Try this line on a date:

“It’s my probe, my project.”

This is, of course as if I have to remind you, from “The Revenge of Dr. X,” a very very bad very very shouty movie.

Here’s a quick re-cap of the film, courtesy of the folks at RiffTrax – the above line is at the 6:08 mark but take a few minutes out of your life to have a giggle and watch the whole thing.

Best of Rifftrax 'Revenge of Dr. X'

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