A creeping sense of dread

 A lot of people felt apprehension on January 6, 2021, as the mob began to march on the Capitol.  According to her new book, however, Cassidy Hutchinson had more to fear than most:  "I find Rudy in the back of the tent...the corners of his mouth split into a Cheshire cat smile.  Waving a stack of documents, he moves towards me, like a wolf closing in on its prey..."  A bit of a mixed metaphor there, but she doesn't claim to be a professional writer.  "Rudy wraps one arm around my body, closing the space that was separating us.  I feel his stack of documents press into the small of my back.  I lower my eyes and watch his free hand reach for the hem of my blazer.  'By the way,' he says, 'I'm loving this leather jacket on you.'  His hand slips under my blazer, then my skirt.  I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh.  He tilts his chin up.  The whites of his eyes look jaundiced.  My eyes dart to John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin."  My god, a threesome?  

As present-tense first-person coup erotica goes, this is pretty good.  It's from Enough, Hutchinson's account of her disillusionment with the Trump court, in fine bookshops everywhere on September 26.    Besides the sex scenes she also explains that Trump's dislike of face masks during the height of covid stemmed from his reliance on orange makeup:  "The press would criticize him for not wearing a mask, not knowing that the depth of his vanity had caused him to reject masks -- and then millions of his fans followed suit."  What did Rudy do to her with his stack of documents? 

Literary sex of another kind is in the news from Texas, where a teacher was fired for exposing her eighth-graders to a graphic novelization of The Diary of Anne Frank.  That was roughly the age when I read the book and I don't remember any pornographic passages, but these days in places like Texas it's porn if it acknowledges that men and women are different.  Now jobless, the teacher is ordered by the Hamshire-Fannett school district to "communicate her apologies" to parents, bigots and anyone else whose corsets are a-twist; if I were she, I'd tell them to take a flying jump in the direction of Yucatan.  The problem seems to be that Anne was a normal adolescent living in a horrific time.  She did not obsess about Nazis every minute but thought about her body and its changes and whether she would ever fall in love and have a life.  If you can get past her shocking descriptions of her own breasts, it makes the Diary even more poignant.  Thousands of other girls met the same fate.

Fallout from the change in the Senate dress code continues, with the Republicans writing Chuck Schumer a heartrending letter begging him to think of "the sanctity" of the chamber.  You know, the one where Joe McCarthy ran amok and a dirt-dumb football coach currently sabotages the US military.  The man at the center of the hurricane, John Fetterman, is ready to compromise:  "If those jagoffs in the House stop trying to shut our government down and fully support Ukraine, then I will save democracy by wearing a suit on the Senate floor next week."

No response yet from the jagoffs but they've been busy.  Gym Jordan's committee spent six hours demanding to know why Merrick Garland has not announced an execution date for Hunter Biden and why his prosecution is in the hands of Trump-appointed US Attorney David Weiss instead of Attila the Hun.  Also, Matt Gaetz had advice for the President -- quit treating Hunter as a son he loves and inviting him to state dinners and such.  Why can't he be more like Trump, who barely remembers the names of his sons?  Next week Jamie Comer and the Comettes will kick off their impeachment inquiry under the legal theory of Lewis Carroll (impeachment first, evidence second).  Would it not be excellent if they had to fund the government just to keep their bullshit alive? 

Is Alabama the most lawless place in the nation (and now I'm not talking about Coach Numbnuts)?  The Supreme Court -- yes, the one in Washington -- ordered them to create a second majority-Black Congressional district and they defied it.  They're using a condemned prisoner as a guinea pig to test an untried form of killing, nitrogen hypoxia.  Now they're going after musicians.  A high school band director in Birmingham was conducting the players after a football game and ignored orders from police to stop, whereupon he was tased and arrested before hundreds of traumatized students.  "They came for the musicians and I did not protest, for I was not a musician..."