600 percent more bullshit

     Yeah, I watched the speech Wednesday night. Switched away from a very satisfying "American Masters" program about Dick Van Dyke on PBS to do so. I had no idea Van Dyke's road to success was so rocky — the number of blind alleys he went down, the failed shows, the misfires, and then "The Dick Van Dyke Show" was cancelled at the end of its first season, and only an extraordinary effort by its producer saved the program at the last moment. Life is struggle.
     But I was curious. Of course I hoped for some kind of Captain Queeg quality gibbering breakdown. Icing on the cake of a generally lousy few weeks for the Orange Enormity, not that his base is paying attention or cares at this point. Maybe a few are feeling a flash of unease that something might not be perfect. But that ain't no revolution. Once you get in the habit of ignoring reality, as I always say, the precise nature of the reality being ignored hardly matters.
     I distracted myself by sending out quips on Bluesky. He launched into his diatribe, and I thought of a train. "All aboard …. for Crazytown!"
     Though it wasn't even that terrible, not by our sub-gutter standards. Just the usual lies. His greatest hits. I'll grant him this — his skin tone looked almost normal. That's something new.
     My wife couldn't stand it, and fled the room. Me, I marveled that he was reading — had someone written down a rambling rant, and he was repeating it? There wasn't an artful sentence in the whole spiel. It was like watching a baby cry from a script.
     What struck me was how expected, unsurprising, and dull it all was, more of the same, in the standard spirit that everything he says is a confession.
     “One year ago our country was dead, absolutely dead,” said the animate corpse, his soul a suppurating slab of putrefaction.
     “We are respected again,” said the international laughingstock.
     Prescription prices were falling “400, 500, even 600 percent,” said the innumerate moron. Math doesn’t work like that.
     I think I'll end here. But we shouldn't hurry past that math gaffe. He's done it before. A 10-year-old can grasp the reality: If an apple costs a dollar, and I give you a 90 percent discount, then the apple costs you a dime. If I give you a 100 percent discount, then it's free. I'm not sure a 500 percent discount even makes sense, in this context, but it could mean that I'm paying you $4 to take it.
     The pharmaceutical companies aren't paying you to take their drugs. And I'm not going to bother flagging all the other lies in the speech, except to note the media still does not call the lies. "Untruths" or "fabrications" or whatever. Which itself is idiotic. We descend to his level, or toward it anyway. 
     The whole thing left me sad — this is the man who is destroying America? This? This? Who might yet upend democracy? This thing? We shouldn't skate by the $1,776 payment to each soldier. Of course it might never be delivered — he said the checks were on the way, which means nothing. And it seems that the payments might be real, but have nothing to do with him. He's just taking credit for them, which is par for the course.

     Maybe he's trying to spin the payments into a bribe of some kind, to buy the soldiers' loyalty. Cheap, to sell out our country. But then Trump sold the entire United State government to Elon Musk for $274 million. Trump probably thought it was a lot, but it was selling us out for very little. I've seen a lot of corrupt officials in my day at the paper, and it's always shocking how little they get for their betrayals. America sold its soul for nothing.