They don't respect you. With their fingers in their ears, they can't hear you. For many values of "They."
- That recorded deposition revealed a great deal about The Orange One (that we really already knew, if only we'd listened). Perhaps the most damning undercurrent, though, was Drumpf's mistaken confusion of the plaintiff with his ex-wife — which certainly explains both the "ex-" and The Orange One's inability to recognize that maybe (just maybe) he wasn't entitled (as a property right) to what it appears he took this time. One must wonder if the Access: H'wood "locker-room talk" was about a single incident… and exactly what kind of towel-snapping, stuff-the-nerds-in-the-locker locker room he thinks is appropriate when the military moved on from that crap half a century ago.
Which leads to some cringing and anticipated sympathy for any person who is the… object of romantic overtures… from Baron Trump, who is at this writing inherently the worst possible candidate for respectful interpersonal relations: A rich white teenaged boy. (One with a name that sounds like the villain — an irredeemable rake — in parody of a Regency romance, doesn't it?) He's had such faaaaaabulous examples of how to treat other people with respect throughout his family, and the bonus of a Secret Service detail during adolescence that may well have fumbled a "no" from someone other than their protectee — especially if accompanied by a knee to the groin, or a slap, or any physical response at all. So there's a nontrivial probability of at least one future victim of a Drumpf male to cringe at in advance, although hopefully at least in a less tawdry location than a department-store bathroom. Nurture? Nature? Who cares — same result. Maybe he'll overcome it, but that's a steep mountain to climb above and beyond, ya know, the craggy foothills of raging teenage hormones.
- Then there's the current Lost Cause — which is far more closely related to the more-famous one than one might expect, or than can be explained in a single link sausage. A significant portion of the Heffalump establishment now wants to assert what is in essence a later-session legislative veto/override by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, thereby potentially causing the United States to default on debt. (And yes, Manchin is part of the Heffalump establishment, notwithstanding his stated party affiliation.) However, rather than engage in persuasion; rather than muster the votes to actually overturn prior statutes that mandate spending — that is, passed by majorities in both houses of Congress and then either signed by the President or enacted through a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress; rather than raise taxes on those who can afford it to pay for "the general welfare" (for some value thereof that used to be "paid for" by draftees and now just generally is neglected)… they're trotting forth Calvin Coolidge as the savior of baseball, apple pie, and America.
Really.
Leave aside that most apple pie is oversweetened with imported sugar produced under rather dubious labor (and too often human rights) circumstances; that baseball is a communist plot to destroy the aerobic fitness and team ethic of America's youth; and that they keep using that word "America," but I (descendant of immigrants) do not think it means what they think it does. Calvin Coolidge? Renowned philosopher of circular reasoning like "The business of America is business," which just sort of neglects the whole "When in the course of human events" and "honor, lives, and sacred fortunes" and "equal protection of the laws" parts of actually governing in a democracy? What this really demonstrates is the theocratic turn in Heffalump ideology — inability to conceive of legitimate dissent — combined with some really bad translations from dead languages (which, one might add, will be impossible without publicly funded education): Taxreductionsforusbutnotfortheearethenewshibboleth. Of course, absent that publicly funded education neither Senator Turtle nor Representative Nocommondecency would be able to pronounce that word (and it's a perfectly valid construction in German, which they'd know if they weren't busy trying to overturn a century-old opinion by effect).
Debt-ceiling shenanigans make a heckler's veto look respectful. And good. Get over it, guys: At the time that it mattered, you lost. Just like the 2020 election, and yes I am trying to incite a riot — or at least a tempest in a teapot — by claiming that "election denialism" and "debt-ceiling brinksmanship" come from the same intellectual and ethical void. Now that Drumpf has no government position, Turtle and Nocommondecency are vying to fill an obvious abuse-of-power vacuum (and those of us who actually studied any science could explain to them the math demonstrating exactly how and why nature abhors a vacuum… if they'd hear it).
- Listen, we've had experience over here with brothers who are an embarassment to the head of state. I think in Blightly they were just trying to show the upstart colonials how it's supposed to be done. And very much the same with civil servants, who are neither to be seen nor heard. And definitely not respected as human beings… which is a common thread used to tie off all three of these link sausages. In a very negative-space fashion.