The Gish Gallop Rodeo

Coming Live to a Constitution Near You!

We mentioned this last week in ‘Whatever Happened To the Fourth Estate?’- the strategy of flooding your statements with so many lies that the opposition can’t respond to any particular one. It was on full display when Trump debated Kamala Harris. It was, in fact, his only strategy.

In light of the developments of the last week, we decided to run with it. (No pun intended, ok, yes, dammit, it was.)

The ‘Gish Gallop’ is now more than a lying debate technique.

It’s now a form of government.

Trump’s first two weeks in office have been a Gish Gallop- an overwhelming flood- of stupid, illegal, immoral and downright cruel acts.

He froze all government spending. He demanded we ‘own’ Greenland and the Panama Canal, and that Canada become a state. He almost flooded a California valley and wasted the coming summer’s irrigation water. He withdrew the US from W.H.O., the International Human Rights Organization, The Paris Agreement, is dismantling the Board of Education, stripped reference to gender and DEI from all government websites, barred many LGBTQ issues, started trade wars, halted all health and safety warnings, and is allowing Musk to raid and destroy government departments at will, including shutting down all foreign aid, and now he says the US will ‘own’ Gaza’.

I know.

“We’re looking at a long term ownership position”.

He’s talking about it like it’s a real estate transaction.

And, to him, that’s all it is.

(Side note- resort hotels with his name on it are the common denominator in all of his deals with despots. All they have to do is say “yes, we’ll talk about it”, and he’s like “can I give you some CIA files?”)

He’s going to displace 1.7 million Palestinians to ‘he doesn’t say where’, and then ‘redevelop’ Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’?

This, after spending the entire summer accusing Biden of genocide for not effectively controlling Netanyahu against the Palestinians.

Now, he’s announced, with Bibi at his side, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of all Palestinians from Gaza.

Yes, he’s just going to boot them all out and build resorts.

That is some fucked up shit right there.

The point here is the chaos. A Gish Gallop of lies and actions. So many absurdities, the opposition can’t possibly address them all in time.

Nobody knows quite what to do. Each new disaster is from a completely different direction.

It’s intentional. It’s supposed to divide the opposition on too many fronts, weakening their overall response.

The more consequences, the better, because then the enemy has to deal with that, too.

This was the plan all along, and frankly, Russell Vought, Leonard Leo and Putin have got to be giggling with joy. Never, in their wildest dreams, could it have gone this swimmingly, this easily, and this completely.

To do this at all is a major diabolical political scheme. To assemble all of this behind one man is a huge undertaking, requiring massive collusion at least. To do it with a suave, articulate persuader as a frontman is one thing……

To do it with the most abhorrent, objectionable, lying, psychopathic, astoundingly stupid, shallow, vain, dishonest, thieving, go a head and add some of your own, piece of shit they could find as the ‘leader’ is beyond surreal.

They’ve got the press normalizing them and censoring Democrats, they’ve got all the richest people on the planet bankrolling them, they’ve got their patsy freak Musk deep inside, literally dismantling the government, they’ve got the Supreme Court in their pocket and they’ve got the entire Republican Party with the majority to stop any Democratic initiatives, callously ignoring or gruesomely encouraging every new illegal act.

It’s a Machiavellian dream come true.

You, know- “what pleases the prince has the force of law” and ‘the ends justify the means”. They have rarely been this literally borne out in real time, not even in Machiavelli’s day, and he was writing while the fucking Borgias were in power. (That’s not a profanity, it’s an adjective, because that’s what the Borgias were doing the whole time.)

Now, keep in mind, none of the oligarchs behind this have any real idea what the hell they’re doing. Especially Musk. Oligarchs haven’t had this kind of literal control in 100 years. Trump has no idea what he’s doing, ever, but also, Vought and Leo, et al, don’t know or understand how outcome based entities work, and are destroying all of those precious services that enable modern life.

Musk has no idea how government logistics work, and his kids can’t possibly know COBOL well enough to navigate the antiquated systems, nor, at 19-24 years old, could they possibly know what the hell they’re doing with the data.

Republicans have no idea how global cons work and are allowing these fucks to do whatever they want because Trump’s culture wars get them votes.

Truly, nobody on the damn planet ever thought that the US would burn it down.

While everybody expected the worst from Trump, nobody really expected this level of widespread instant chaos.

Except the historians who warned us that there would be chaos.

And, the Democrats, who warned us there would be chaos.

And the political scholars who warned us there would be, uh, chaos.

And the liberal pundits who warned us there would be, um, uh, chaos.

Oh, and, Trump, who basically told us every day that he would bring, uh, ok, chaos.

It’s not that we didn’t listen.

Many of us did.

We knew there would be chaos. We just didn’t realize it would be this wildly stupid the first two weeks.

And we didn’t realize that the Republicans would approve of it getting this stupid in just two weeks.

And we didn’t realize that even in this extreme circumstance, the press would silence the Democrats and normalize the crimes.

And nobody expected Elon ‘fuckhead’ Musk to jump in like Rambo with nuclear hand grenades and a knife in his teeth.

Seriously, we knew Trump would say and do a lot of stupid, dangerous shit and Republicans would stand by and let him, but we didn’t know Musk would send a bunch of college kids into government buildings to hijack the computer systems and take control of the country’s checkbook.

Criminality here starts at off-the-charts.

Where it goes from here is anybody’s guess.

And, what, then, precisely, can Democrats do about it?

Normally, they could issue subpoenas, pass laws or resolutions to stop him, or just plain call the cops to stop them committing obvious crimes in broad daylight. Musk and his kids normally would have been arrested immediately upon entering the Treasury building without proper clearance. They and affiliates are already filing suits against all of these actions.

Any other president would have faced immediate legislative as well as court actions against these illegal breaches of national security.

But, Republicans won’t pass anything that stops Trump in any way, and the cops are complicit now, being directed by an election denying bribe-taker as AG. US Marshalls defended Elon, not the Treasury workers. And the press refuses to say honestly what is happening or to let Democrats on to do it themselves.

This is a very large scale coup from within and without. The MSM, the Republicans, the Supreme Court- all complicit.

We can reasonably expect lower and circuit courts to try to hold Trump and Musk accountable, as their actions clearly violate many laws and shred the Constitution. Thus, it’s inevitable that any or all of these cases will reach the SCOTUS.

Where the FedSoc6 have already assured Trump and Republicans that every decision will go their way.

Democrats can delay nominations in the Senate, to an extent, and they are. They can post bills and resolutions in the House, and they are. But both are ultimately futile without 4 House Republicans and 20 GOP Senators jumping ship.

If the MSM was not corrupted by Trump, they would be amplifying the Democrats, which could force those needed 24 Republicans to do the right thing. They have before. They could again. But, this time, they’re on the other team.

All of these awful, patently un-American things are exactly what Project 2025 calls for- total destruction of the post-WWII government, and institution of Christo-nationalist autocracy.

And, a new twist- imperialism.

Not only is Trump stopping all foreign aid, he’s already named four sovereign nations/territories that he plans to take.

He ran on fictitious crimes by Democrats, and he is now committing all of them, out loud, in full view, again. And, he, and Leonard and Russel and Elon have rigged the entire system to let him do it.

This is the point where I usually try to suggest a solution.

I got nothin’.

All I can say is, we dodged this shit in the past because when push came to shove, law enforcement, the courts, especially the Supreme Court, the press and even Republicans drew the line at the law and the Constitution. Nixon was booted because his crimes were a bridge too far for his own party.

These aren’t your grandpa’s Republicans anymore.

So, we’ve got to be very careful. Trump and MAGA are chomping at the bit for us to protest- they want violence so they can have another Kent State, and Trump can declare martial law.

Lower courts have routinely ruled by the law, as they did in all but one of the courts seeing Trump’s cases, but there is no longer any boundary to what Republicans and the FedSoc6 will allow. US legal code and SCOTUS precedent are irrelevant. Today’s Republicans would have let Nixon stay, and today’s SCOTUS would have let him keep the tapes.

We’re Gish-Galloping into autocracy, with lunatics in charge and the guardrails gone.

We are in completely uncharted territory.

“Here be dragons”.

c.2025 Cousin B