Fear and loafing on the chem trails
We were somewhere around Butterpot on the edge of reality...
A writer is only as good as his subject but for political writers in Newfoundland and Labrador in this century it would be a poor workman who would blame the tools.
Donald Trump. Tuesday. Two and a half hours on the phone with Vladimir Putin, who makes it plain to the Confused Carrot he is not interested in peace. Played Trump for a fool including keeping him waiting for the call and laughing about it publicly. Offered a ceasefire on energy infrastructure, and then attacked energy infrastructure, among other demands that the Ukrainians and Europeans are never going to accept and Trump cannot deliver to Vlad. Classic rope-a-dope. Trump, so old school a dope that he is so not dope, bullscittes himself about a great victory on his own social media echo chamber. No one outside the chamber believes him.
Canadian media ask Trump’s White House a question about tariffs. The White House under Trump 47 where his parrot the other day said that if it weren’t for the Americans, the French would be speaking German now. If her boss gets his way the Ukrainians will be dead or speaking Russian again. So marches history except that the occupants of Trump’s White House are so lacking in self-awareness of their own ignorance they are their own self-parody.
The Canadians wanted to know when the tariffs would come as they are due April second. The official White House reply made it clear the White House operates on a shagged up calendar with Groundhog Day and April Fool’s in one, and every day is Groundhog Day. Not ready yet for all those new tariffs, just like not ready in February and not ready in March. But they’re coming, fer shur. Bigger than ever. Eventually. Oh and the administration is united. So united.
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The thing about the supposedly united administration is real. They actually said it. It is a tell. A flinch. A pre-emptive denial. Volunteering an answer to a question not asked, thereby inadvertently telling us the truth. The Rule of Opposites is in play. X = Not X. “The administration is united” means the administration is all over the place. An octopus in perpetual spasms. The Trumpsters cannot find their own arses, naked, in the broad daylight let alone the dark with a flashlight. So they are united, if only in their collective cluelessness. Understand that, you understand everything else in an American administration where the only people who think there is a grand design at play in the White House - aside from the Trump Fan Klub - are people less serious than the incredibly unserious monkeys currently running the United States circus.
Those unserious would include Canadian media, like the Toronto Broadcasting Corporation and See Tee Vee and the Globe who daily wonder what “the President” - as they call him, like all good Americans - had to say about Canada. Does he like us now? Will he stop beating us up? Does he know we have a shiny new preemeer? The questions and commentary are weak. Childish. Sickeningly infantile. Who gives a flying frig what Donald Trump thinks or cares about or what he has fed the Canuck news people by saying yet again he thinks Canada should be the 51st state?
There’s a movie where the people in the White House figure out their President is a nutter when he seriously talks about invading Canada. Truth and fiction collide and even as people remember this crappy old story, they ignore the obvious truth of fiction come to life. Vladimir Putin does not take Donald Trump seriously. Canadian media do. Judge for yourself who is smart and who is a fool.
Serious people don’t have a problem telling the difference, like the seriously angry ordinary Canadians who’d be all up for burning the tight-arsed White House to the ground, again, if given half a chance. Timothy Snyder wrote a perceptive piece about Canadians the other day. Not a new thing to notice, but worth remembering. Canadians are not nice, he said. Just polite. And when pissed off they know how to make their reply hurt.
Unserious people would be Doug Ford who, having said he needs to shut up now, keeps not shutting up. If tariffs are coming - and Doug still thinks they are - we need to be first in line for an exemption, says Ford, displaying once again exactly the weakness that Trump thrives on, and the gobsmacking stupidity of people who look at the bungling, fumbling, clusterfeck of an American White House and think we must do whatever they say. Seriously. Trump 45 had a White House with some credible people in it from earlier Republican administrations. This one has a string of Gordon Gecko clones running treasury and commerce or goofs like Elon Musk who joins Trump in running their mouths.
“Please don’t hurt us!” is the same line Ford and all the Premiers have been pushing since the start of all this last November. They’ve been slobbering fools waiting for an American boot to kiss or an arse to lick. They are not fussy about the boot or the arse, either. To wit, their outrageously embarrassing selfie-expedition to DC to hook up, ultimately, with the White House personnel guy in a meeting arranged by a bunch of state-level, no name, know-nothing lobbyists with no weight in Washington. If there were a Tinder or Grindr for politics, the Premiers would use it but the only swiping going on would be the money from their pockets.
The Premiers are weak, vacillating, inept, which is no surprise because that is what they have been for decades in Canada on Canadian issues. Faced with American tariffs they claim - *they* claim - THEY. CLAIM. - are a threat to human life in Canada and not one of them can be arsed to actually do something in their own power within Canada to fight it off. Like knock down the ridiculous trade and labour barriers among Canadian provinces. Easy billions, literally billions, of dollars’ worth of new economic activity at stake and tens if not hundreds of thousands of new jobs across Canada and the Premiers are, like Andrew Furey, happier to keep the walls up between provinces in order to protect, in Furey’s case, a few hundred jobs at two American-owned beer companies.
“Dale just truck beer in from da mainland” the union and some prof from Generic Canadian University said the other day to the Toronto Broadcasting Corporation’s townie sweatshop. Maybe “they” will. Maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll discover it is easier to ship niche brands and recipes they own from Newfoundland to the mainland and make money off Dominion, the old smoothie. What a better time to bring back a brand with that name. And even if da b’ys and girls on the pull on George Street any given day of the week had to buy their Coors or Blue skivvy remover made in Tranna or Kweebeck instead of Sin Jawns, they wouldn’t care or know the difference. Nor should the rest of us care when there could be lots of other jobs if only people like Furey got out of the way.
In Canada, we are now too far up our own collective arses to do what real people, serious people do, when faced with this comedy gold, which is to shit laughing at it. Take Andrew Furey. Please. [ba-dum-tiss] Dragged a bunch people out one day to say he was not running for re-election but running for the door. Gotta spend more time with the family. The cliche machine spouting cliche after cliche then took to the road to spend more time away from the family. Flopped back to Sin Jawns for clean underwear and a 500 buck a plate dinner where he provided the onanistic entertainment, posed for a selfie or 16 and then frigged off to Japan. Our time. Our dime. And Furey will go on wasting both until he cannot any more. This is the real Andrew Furey. See him now for what and who he is, all pretense of sincerity gone, the sneering contempt for the job he has and the people of the province naked as a newborn.
“Premier Furey in Japan to Explore New Trade Markets for Newfoundland and Labrador” one of his crew slapped on the news release announcing Furey’s latest junket, in between strong-arming people to back the least qualified candidate to replace the less qualified current boss who is on a one man trade mission to the bitter end of his expense account. Furey off to find the Japans. Furey, The Greatest of Great Explorers. Doctor Doolittle. Doctor Livingstone. Vasco de Gama. John Cabot. Thor Hyderdal. The Vikings. Mr. and Mrs. Brian Norris in their Ford Popular. The people who write this crap for Furey are so unaware of anything, including themselves, that they do not realise how much of a brutal self-parody they are, how foolish they all look.
Lots of things going on in the States these days. Lots of fear about cost of living, immigration, crime, and the like. If you want to understand, numbers help. Poll numbers in this case, from last year,but could equally be today.
Vox Magazine spoke with a key Democratic Party data miner, one of the people who look at poll numbers, answers to survey questions, and explain what they mean. Asked about the most important issues facing them and the United States, American voters clicked “cost of living” as the biggest issue. Ninety-one percent picked that issue out of a random list of things. “It’s really hard to get 91 percent of people to click on anything in a survey,” David Shor of Blue Rose Research told Vox. Hard to ignore the meaning.
Their next big issue was the size and scope of the federal government in the States, followed by the deficit, immigration, crime, and also health care. Setting Elon Musk loose with DOGE is about tackling that second one. Shipping a bunch of suspected drug dealers off to El Salvador is about immigration and crime. Deporting a Palestinian transplant surgeon who attended a Hamas leader’s funeral is immigration.
But for Canada look at that big one. The cost of living.
Now look at Trump’s tariffs and what we know just the threat of them is doing to the American economy and the cost of living there.
Now look at the huge pushback in the States across all income groups about what Donald Trump’s tariffs are doing to American’s single biggest concern.
Look again at Doug Ford and the Canadian response. Retaliatory tariffs hurt Canadians but they also drive up the cost of living in the United States and *we* did that. The last thing Canadians need to do on April third is be the cause of anything that makes American cost of living rise or of lessening the impact of Trump 47’s idiotic schemes on his own voters by begging for exemptions. If Donald Trump wants to add more tariffs and actually do it on April the second or whenever, then the best strategy is to let him. Just make sure everyone in the United States, especially people in states that voted Republican know Canadians are not to blame. Their MAGA boy is. Hilarity will ensue.
Canadians don’t need to be the first in line to grovel before Trump the way Trump grovels in front of Putin. No. Just tell The Donald to go the hell ahead. And make sure everyone in the United States knows who did it to them. Hit Putin’s Persimmon where he lives. In the ego. In the political gonads. Or more accurately, let him blow his own political brains out, then just sit back and watch as Americans blame him for making their biggest concern worse, not better.
That line some of Trump’s goof squad are spreading about how prices will go up and that’s good? Utter craziness anyway but politically deadly. One of the people pushing ever crazier and ever changing lines is Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent. Cheap goods are not the American dream, according to Bessent, which is a way of preparing people for higher prices on everything. Trump 47 and his crowd are so goofy even Fox News turned on Bessent last week. “First [people] thought [tariffs were] just about trade. Then they thought it was just about fentanyl. Then after that we talked about, well, maybe it's currency manipulation. Now you're talking about food testing.”
That was host Maria Bartiromo pushing back at Bessent as he explained that the tariffs were about all the hindrances on trade like testing American products, including food, to make sure they are safe. Basic government responsibilities. Unacceptable to Trumpians. The Americans do the same thing, although Trump, Bessent and their buddy Musk are busy getting rid of any government program design to protect American consumers. Bessent’s latest demented line is that quality testing and safety testing is bad.
Well, let’s try some Elon Musk logic on that claim, Scott. “With DOGE, I am completely aligned with what Elon Musk is doing” Bessent said recently. Meanwhile Musk said all the criticisms of DOGE are from people who want to keep the corruption DOGE is exposing. Forget he hasn’t exposed any. Just notice Musk is saying all the noise about slashing American government’s basic services is from people who are benefitting from the way things are now. That’s X = Not (x). The Rule of Opposites.
Logically, if Scott Bessent and his friends are complaining about public safety inspections, those inspections must be exposing poor quality and unsafe products, and the people complaining about them would profit from *no* seeing consumers protected. That’s the only reason Bessent’d complain since they don’t actually count as a trade barrier or actually add to costs for consumers. You can follow the simply logic as Bessent and Musk cross over each other’s wakes and drown themselves in their own lunacy. Yes, b’y. These are geniuses with a plan.
The past couple of days, Bessent is peddling yet another version of Trump’s tariffs. In this one, every country will be given a number, which, according to Bessent, represents what Americans think is the impact of that country’s trade restrictions on the United States. Then they’ll start negotiating to get that number low.
Reuters reported Bessent’s comments:
"We are going to go to them and say, 'Look, here's where we think the tariff levels are, non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, unfair funding, labor suppression, and if you will stop this, we will not put up the tariff wall,'" Bessent said of trading partners.
Countries that fail to reduce their trade barriers will face steeper tariffs aimed at protecting the U.S. economy, its workers and industries, Bessent said.
That assumes that countries will care enough to negotiate based on such foolishness, especially Europe and Canada, Japan, Australia, India, and so on. That is not a safe assumption. Everyone is united inside the Trump administration, according to the answer to a question not asked. Apparently not, since this latest version from yet another Trump mouthpiece - commerce secretary Howard Lutnick is reportedly not speaking on tariffs any more - is the umpteeneth version of the on-again, off-again tariffs, as Bartiromo pointed out. Now think again about what Doug Ford said. We have to be first in line to get exemptions. Well, that means Ford has already accepted whatever the Americans are saying even as they have said constantly different things over the past few days let alone the past few months. Every time the Yanks say jump, Doug jumped and asked if they wanted higher. Maybe Doug needs to shut up and mean it this time.
If Hunter Thompson hadn’t blown his brains out we might have been able to get him to cover Newfie politics in the first 25 years of the 21st century. Might. There’d have been two problems, one being the fact he wouldn’t need drugs to imagine himself attacked by hordes of giant bats and the other being that no one would print any of what Thompson wrote anywhere because no one would believe it.
“We were somewhere around Butterpot on the edge of reality when the drugs started to take hold. Ativan and Cardizem and Prilosec. bought cheap at a Costco just outside Cornwall Ontario.” The funniest thing I wrote in a long while was a parody of local politics, stealing shamelessly from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Two guys in a pick-up. Diving from Alberta back home and as they got around Butterpot, they get a text from the Premier’s Office. Stop by the Health Sciences and pick up Andrew and Fred - still Furey’s bodyman at the time - and then come up for a visit and a few selfies. Premier’s been following your trip on Facebook and he wants to meet you. You’ll just have to stop in the lobby for another announcement.
That kinda thing. Got a couple of pages done. Worked in a reference to Fred carrying around the cameras and all Furey’s gear in an old beat up hockey bag covered in peeling VOCM and NTV and OZ stickers. Now there was the word “Furey” on the side of it in squared off letters made out of hockey tape but you could still see the outline of “Hutton” underneath where dust and dirt had stuck to the glue from the tape when Fred peeled it off.
That was after Trump 45 was gone and when no one thought Trump 47 was possible. The thing never went any further not because there weren't lots of ways to take the story just working on local politics but because it was a waste of time making up stuff where the reality was way crazier. A writer is only as good as his subject but for political writers in Newfoundland and Labrador in this century it would be a poor workman who would blame the tools that offer such comedy gold every day. No point in blaming ‘em, anyway. Just write what they do. It is way funnier than anything you could come up with sober or stoned.
But it all proves Thompson was right.
The truth is weirder than any fiction.
