Now I don’t know, or more accurately can’t remember if the title of this piece has been employed in this Venue or not, but it has a long and enduring history of use among Bloggers of a Liberal bent, because the wonder that we know now as Heather Digby Parton, has always been among the most articulate and cogent commentators on Politics during my time on the Internet.

I remember fondly of the day I found out that this Digby person was a girl, pardon me, a Woman! I remember that for me it was in the comments at the Eschaton, where the discovery was met with surprise, and if possible even more respect, for nobody weighing in on the subject had thought for a moment about the sex of the person whose writing we all respected, but if pressed admitted an assumption that she was a he! I believe my own response was some variation of “Digby is a Girl?!?!? Awesome!!!

The idea that someone had been capable of writing reams of political opinion with intelligence wit and flair, and being so damn good at it and with such grace and charm was for some of us, Ok I will speak only for myself, for me astonishing in a way that excited and bothered me…Why did I assume that Digby was a man? Because it was the picture of the person sitting in front of the keyboard that I had in mind at the time, I am sure there are a number of reasons, but I was bothered, just a little bit, and simultaneously overjoyed to find out otherwise…

Preamble over, let us examine the beatings: And in this case she titles the piece: “What he said”

The New York Times Charles Blow that is

And begins with a quote from his piece:

Trumpian language is a thing unto itself: some manner of sophistry peppered with superlatives. It is a way of speech that defies the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram. It is a jumble of incomplete thoughts stitched together with arrogance and ignorance. America is suffering under the tyranny of gibberish spouted by the lord of his faithful 46 percent.

For a Sophist who peppers his writing with superlative hyperbole™, I can’t but sit in awe of that sentence, nor wait to find out what the hell a Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram is, (though it suddenly occurs to me that he might be talking about something I last saw on the blackboard of a middle school English class) But to me that is like the rhetorical shiv that slips into the back of the target in a dark alley on an early morning which leaves its victim stumbling home, then lurching to a collapse on the porch in front of his door; ultimately choking to death on the blood pooling in his lungs. I mean I have just managed to use twice the words to say half as much. But then I am writing this not for the Times, but for a Liberal Snark Concern of questionable repute! He continues:

Trump’s employment of reduced rhetoric is not without precedent and is in fact a well-documented tool of history’s strongmen

And anyone who has spent any amount of time reading, writing, or otherwise attempting to process the unprecedented events of last fall may have come across a few references here and there to Mussolini or Twit-ler in various liberal haunts still extant and teeming with righteous indignation over the aforementioned circumvention of Democracy…And once again in some of those spaces and here as well, we are treated to prideful puffer-y and the Triumphal pounding of Chests as A strongman arrives to clean up the mess created by the Darkness, that Up-Jumped Uppity who presided over a peaceful eight years (mostly anyway) and managed to provide Millions with access to Health Care, they would not have managed to obtain under the previous implementation: A system not designed to secure the benefits of health, when life and liberty itself, might depend on them, but to extract rents under threat of suffering!

But Herr twitler™ is gonna remove that yoke, that burden of security from the shoulders of the man working overtime, in order to provide tax relief to parties that sneeze money when they encounter a bit too much pollen. In other words he is gonna do what all plutocrats do and take care of his own, who in his mind and their own, own it all and should suffer no burden, save occasionally having to put up with over eager assistance from the hired help. And for the vast numbers of those of us unwashed in the blood of grace those are burdons that not only would we fail to understand, but ones that we could in no fashion ever presume to undertake with the requisite grace or aplomb…

And she finishes:

It’s Orwellian, but I think we are having a hard time grappling with that because we assumed that an Orwellian world would spring from someone or a group of someones who planned it with ruthless efficiency. I don’t think it ever occurred to us that it would come about because our institutions would bend to a perceived necessity of propping up a celebrity imbecile and we’d all be sitting at home watching it happen on TV.

We should be happy with the scraps that our betters choose to pass on to us and we should strive to embrace, when our end comes, our dear leader: “And we loved Big Brother”

/shudders