A Parade of Embarrassments

A week of cascading humiliations

The hard part is keeping up with it all: Alito’s flag, the GOP Handmaids at Trump’s trial, congressional tantrums, threats over vaccines, and the MAGA penis balloons.

Surely, you didn’t miss that last one.

I have to admit that I was fascinated by the headline in the NY Post: “Pro-Trump artist releases penis-shaped balloons.…” Rather than read the story, I attempted a very brief thought experiment: I tried to imagine what the artist was going for with this bit of phallic performance art.

Was the release of 100 pink penis-shaped balloons somehow a tribute to the prowess of the Orange Sex God? An airborne declaration of Trumpian virility? Could it have been an absurdist parody? A satiric embrace of the pussy-grabbing, rapist, ex-president’s success with porn stars and Playboy models?

And were the balloons mushroom-shaped?

Alas, no. They were just dick balloons.

[The balloons featured] the faces of US Special Counsel Jack Smith and Manhattan Judges Juan Merchan and Arthur Engoron — titled “D–ks of Hazard” to show that “these guys are a bunch of useless d–ks.”

The wit. It burns.

Happy Saturday.

Obligatory dog pictures

Eli surveys his lake.

As does Auggie.

Two years ago. Pete got a visit from his friend Leo.

Trump threats against vaccine mandates risk kids' lives

For you fans of alliteration, my latest over at MSNBC:

Amid former President Donald Trump’s fire hose of fabulism, feculence and felonies, it can be hard to keep track of his many concerning 2025 pledges. One nugget that may have escaped wider notice is his declaration, made in speech after campaign speech, that he will “not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.” As Steve Benen notes, “Trump’s rhetoric was neither accidental nor new.” But we also can’t ignore it. 

We are occasionally assured that we should take Trump seriously, but not literally. Yet Trump seems committed to this vaccine mandate threat. As Benen notes, the former president has repeated his anti-vax vow “word for word, for at least a year.” And, lest there be any confusion, he occasionally emphasizes that his pledge would apply to every public school “from kindergarten through college.”

Nor does he specifically limit his pledge to Covid-era vaccines.

It’s hard to overstate what this could mean.

Every state, as well as the District of Columbia, has vaccination requirements for children attending school. It’s routine to require that children be immunized against measles, rubella, chickenpox, tetanus, pertussis, polio, hepatitis B and pneumococcal disease.

These mandates highlight one of the biggest triumphs of modern science. The proof is as dramatic as it is incontrovertible. Diseases that once killed hundreds of thousands of Americans have been eliminated or drastically reduced.

Smallpox and polio have been eradicated, while diseases like measles, chickenpox, mumps and pertussis have been dramatically cut. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, routine childhood vaccinations are believed to have helped prevent 472 million illnesses and 1,052,000 deaths just among American children born between 1994 and 2021…

Of course, even a Trump-inspired cutoff of federal aid would not mean the end of vaccine mandates writ large. States and local communities could still choose to continue protecting children from infectious diseases with the strategy that has proven effective for decades.

But the risk of Trump’s threat is very real, and the toll could be measured in the lives of America's children. In 2024, that needs to be taken both literally and seriously. 

You can read the whole thing here.

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The attack on vaccines is, of course, an attack on science. But it is also another sign of the breakdown of the social contract. Back in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I wrote about that:

This is not how healthy societies respond to a crisis.

Imagine for a moment London during the Blitz, and thousands of residents simply decided to turn on the lights and open the shades because they were tired of the blackout. Imagine a nation in the grips of a plague where the public decided that only cucks took precautions . . . oh, wait.

The essential element in all of this is voluntary compliance. There are simply not enough cops, not enough bureaucrats, and not enough monitors for it to be otherwise.

But the problem now is not the lack of cops, it's the erosion of a culture that calls us all to common purpose and sacrifice. In other words, a culture bound by a social contract that says we are in this together.

Conservatives used to understand this. Insisting on responsible self government is not the opposite of freedom, it is the essential predicate. Freedom-oriented conservatives used to argue that individuals and non-governmental institutions would act in their rational self interest and would do a better and more effective job than bureaucratic top-down fiats.

But this requires responsible and credible moral leadership to reinforce responsible conduct.

Those norms (like simple good manners or even rules of gun safety) are enforced both formally and informally; by public exhortations to responsible conduct, but also by the informal values of peer groups that quietly urge us not to give into our dickiest impulses. These norms may have been codified in formal rules, but they were enforced because they were accepted, honored, and reinforced on a daily basis informally. We can all remember some older individual or colleague who quietly cautioned us against taking a rash action telling us that it was a bad idea or that it was not the way to do things….

This is a useful thread. Stanford professor Keith Humphreys warns that countries that have successful testing programs not only have more deference to government, but also more of a sense of communal social responsibility…

Here is his kicker: In a mobile nation like ours, "you can’t build a 'no peeing' section in the swimming pool."

Giving Alito the benefit of the doubt?

Late last week, the NYT broke this remarkable story: “Supreme Court Justice Alito’s House Displayed a ‘Stop the Steal’ Flag After Jan. 6 .”

Considering the context — the attempted Insurrection and the role of the Court — this seems like it could be a problem, don’t you think?

Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.

The mere impression of political opinion can be a problem, the ethics experts said. “It might be his spouse or someone else living in his home, but he shouldn’t have it in his yard as his message to the world,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia.

This is “the equivalent of putting a ‘Stop the Steal’ sign in your yard, which is a problem if you’re deciding election-related cases,” she said.

Naturally, the usual turd-polishers have rushed forward to assure us that this is a nothing-burger and that it tells us nothing about Justice Alito’s jurisprudence, judgement, or fitness for office. And, anyway, it was his wife’s fault. The ever-chivalrous justice was quick to throw her directly under the bus. (Presumably he has no say in how the flag is displayed outside his home.)

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

The Supreme Court justice then followed up by sharing more details with Fox News host Shannon Bream.

Where to begin? Or as Justice Oliver Wendell Homes might have opined, “WTAF?”

A quick roundup of other reactions:

“I'm trying to understand Justice Alito's position here & the best I can come up with is that he thought it was okay to violate judicial ethics because a neighbor was exercising their First Amendment rights.” — Joyce Alene

"To disabuse my neighbor of the notion I supported the Jan. 6th attacks I hoisted a flag supporting the Jan. 6th attacks." No notes. — Christopher Ingraham

“I would die of shame before I put out a statement explaining “we flew the American flag upside down to piss off the neighbors” A complete and unreserved apology would be much less of a public humiliation than this weird defense / rationalization.” — Christian Vanderbrouk

“Best part of the Alito statement, the most perfect distillation of his entire worldview is him saying that it’s his *neighbors* who are “very political.” Not the Alitos of course! The ones who went through the trouble of flying the coup flag!” — Chris Hayes

“We've all played the "imagine if Biden or Obama did what Trump did" game, but imagine if, say, Sotomayor said "Well, my husband flew an anarchist flag because people were pissing him off" This isn't normal, and we shouldn't accept it as normal.” — Tom Nichols

“That a Supreme Court justice is so thin-skinned that neighbors saying vulgar things caused him to allow his home to fly a treasonous flag is not reassuring at all. This man has no business on the Supreme Court. Period.” — Ian Bassin

“The most charitable interpretation of Alito’s non-disavowal of the upside-down flag and its meaning is that, because the Court has several forthcoming cases related to Trump’s actions, he wanted to avoid expressing an opinion beforehand. Justices do typically try to avoid opining publicly on matters that come before them, and to avoid the appearance of partisanship, even if they do not always succeed. Perhaps this really was what Alito was thinking when he gave that statement to the Times. The flaw in this defense is that Alito is as shy about sharing his political opinions as a street preacher is in predicting the apocalypse.” — Adam Serwer

Nota Bene

Matt Labash: “Should the RNC start a MAGA organ selling program?”

As of earlier this year, the RNC was facing its worst cash crunch in over a decade, one that only promises to grow steeper if Lara starts expensing her Botox and filler treatments. So finding novel ways to raise money — besides spamming senior citizens with scary if-they-can-do-this-to-Trump-they-can-do-this-to-you emails (it’s a pretty safe bet that Grandma didn’t have sex with a porn star, pay her hush money, then lie about it on campaign finance reports)  — might be just what the doctor ordered. After all, who wouldn’t pay top dollar for Lil’ Marco Rubio’s spine (assuming he has one), or J.D. Vance’s huevos, which Trump currently keeps in an adorable MAGA coin purse in his back pocket.

**

Elaine Godfrey: “Ladies and Gentlemen, the State of Things”

Three high-profile women in Congress got into it last night during a meeting of the House Oversight Committee, in what some outlets have described as a “heated exchange.” But that label feels too dignified. Instead, the whole scene played out like a Saturday Night Live sketch: a cringeworthy five-minute commentary on the miserable state of American politics….

Really, no one comes off looking good here. This may sound sanctimonious, but: Members of Congress should be better than personal insults and body-shaming commentary. And both Ocasio-Cortez and Crockett have to know by now that, as the idiom goes, wrestling with pigs makes everyone look sloppy. What would Michelle Obama—the patron saint of Democrats, who famously instructed Democrats to go high when Republicans go low—think of Crockett’s response?

Zoomed out, this unseemly episode is just one more sad example of partisanship and performance politics, two forces that continue to rile Americans up and drive us apart.

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And finally…