ara ara ara?

Posted by Gary Legum

https://www.wonkette.com/p/trump-to-build-yugest-tackiest-ballroom

Fifteen years ago, David Axelrod, who was then a senior adviser to President Obama, got a call from Donald Trump. The cotton-candy-haired real estate developer was offering to build a big, fancy ballroom for the White House, where the largest event space only holds about 200 people for dinner. Bigger events such as state dinners with hundreds of guests require the White House staff to erect tents with flooring on the South Lawn.

Trump supposedly tried to sell Axelrod on the idea that he was the man for the job by pointing to the ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, which from every picture we have ever seen looks like an events room at an airport Hilton. But Axelrod was busy at the time, because he worked for a president who took his job seriously and an administration that had much more important things to do than indulge a billionaire with aesthetic taste that would make a Central Asian dictator blanche.

Axelrod passed off the project to someone else and never revisited it. The ballroom never happened, and Trump has been stewing about the slight for a decade and a half. Which seems about right, as the man is made up of nothing but bad cholesterol and old resentments.

Now that Trump is — sigh — living in the White House, he is in a position to build that big, fancy ballroom and, if the renderings of it released on Thursday are to be believed, decorate it to look like a Gilded Age bordello:

Seriously, look at that crap. It looks like a Chechen warlord threw up.

The White House rolled out the announcement of the building of the ballroom on Thursday with a press release and the usual sycophancy from Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt during the daily press briefing:

“The White House State Ballroom will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House.”

Ninety thousand square feet is waaaaay bigger than one needs to seat 650 people, unless each one is getting his or her own table. Maybe Trump plans on letting every team in the NFC East train in the ballroom at the same time.

We've been to the White House, and the grounds are not huge. Where will the president and convicted felon find the space for this monstrosity? The National Mall? The Capitol? Toronto?

“The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits. The East Wing was constructed in 1902 and has been renovated and changed many times, with a second story added in 1942.”

This is the White House’s way of telling us they are going to demolish the East Wing, which is where the First Lady has her offices. But since Melania is acting as First Lady for all of about three hours a week, we guess she doesn’t need the space.

Ninety. Thousand. Square. Feet. A football field is only 57,600 square feet. The square footage of the ground, state, and residence floors of the White House combined are only 55,000 square feet. (This does not include the West Wing or the apparently-soon-to-be-demolished East Wing, but those are not huge.) The Taj Mahal is less than half the size of this ballroom (approximately 35,100 square feet), and way less garish.

What’s the price tag on this monument to the Palace of Versailles, if the Palace of Versailles had been built by a coked-out Middle East potentate?

“President Trump, and other patriot donors, have generously committed to donating the funds necessary to build this approximately $200 million dollar structure.”

Here is the White House trying to get out ahead of the deserved criticism that apparently America cannot afford stuff like Medicaid, SNAP, disease research, environmental research, scientific research, peanut butter paste for famine-ravaged countries in Africa and other foreign aid, housing, space exploration, clean energy, Americorps, teachers, new schools, robustly funded world-class universities, emergency aid for any part of the country that gets wrecked by a natural disaster, weather data, hurricane monitoring satellites, enforcement of laws against ripping off consumers and poisoning the environment, and NATO.

But America can afford to blow $200 million on a giant room that might get used a few times a year, and for which the visual design is what you might get if you wrote a prompt for an AI along the lines of draw a gold ballroom that looks like Elton John exploded.

Claiming the ballroom will be funded by private donors also gets out ahead of the tiny detail that Congress has not appropriated $200 million to be put towards a ballroom as it would be legally required to do. Which someone will probably use as grounds for a lawsuit to stop the thing from being built. And it’s unnecessary, because this Congress would probably fork over $200 million to Daddy Trump for a ballroom without blinking. But Trump always has to make things harder.

Boy, between the ballroom and the $1 billion the taxpayers are spending to upgrade the giant donated Air Force One that Trump gets to take with him when he leaves office, there is a strong “let them eat cake” vibe emanating from this administration like decaying atoms radiating from Chernobyl.

The White House is over 200 years old, and there is nothing wrong with finding ways to update it. Truman oversaw significant renovations designed to keep the old place from falling down. Nixon put in that bowling alley. Gerald Ford put in a pool. Obama put in a basketball court. Jimmy Carter put in the solar panels that Ronald Reagan later ripped out because he was an asshole. Shoot, the soon-to-be-demolished East Wing wasn’t built until 1902, during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency.

Trump has already made some changes. He paved over the Rose Garden so it will look more like the patio at Mar-a-Lago. He cut down a tree planted by Andrew Jackson, supposedly for safety reasons, and put in two giant 88-foot flagpoles — oh, no reason — on the North and South Lawns.

But a president has never put his stamp on the White House by building an addition such as this: a big, tacky, unnecessary add-on that will dwarf the rest of the building and contain enough gold to blind Marine One pilots when they are trying to land on the lawn.

The decision to build the ballroom should not be up to Trump. We know he does not care, but technically the White House belongs to the American people. He and his descendants will not be living in it forever.

The White House is not a palace. If anything, it should be the opposite of a palace, in keeping with America’s historic belief in itself as a place that is governed by the people and not a king. Or at least we used to think of ourselves that way, before Flushing’s own Louis XVI scammed his way into office.

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[White House website / NPR]

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Posted by Robyn Pennacchia

https://www.wonkette.com/p/elon-agrees-women-are-built-to-be

This week, American Eagle, the clothing brand best known for being the step below Abercrombie & Fitch for 2000s-era high school students, made a big splash with an advertisement featuring Sydney Sweeney, of Euphoria and Once Upon a Time in America, talking about her good genes/jeans.

“Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue,” she said in one of the ads. In response, a few people on social media pointed out that it felt a tad eugenics-y. I’m not certain we even know who those people were, but we know that it must have happened, because it caused a variety of other people to go off about a supposed “leftist meltdown” over the ads.

“Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women,” Ted Cruz said on X. “I'm sure that will poll well.”

On Bluesky, current centrist and former Tea Party freak Joe Walsh wrote, “A message I just got from a buddy of mine, who’s a long time Democratic Party campaign consultant: ‘This Sydney Sweeney thing is the kind of thing that turns men away from our party. It’s why men think our party is weak & insane.’ My response to him? ‘Fuck yea it is. You are exactly right.’”

“I love how the leftist meltdown over the Sydney Sweeney ad has only resulted in a beautiful white blonde girl with blue eyes getting 1000x the exposure for her ‘good genes,’” former Fox News host Megyn Kelly wrote Tuesday, because someone has to stick up for the “beautiful white blonde girls” out there.

Now, it’s more than clear that what we have here is another case of the Right trying to turn criticism of the ad from a few people into “THE LEFT IS LOSING THEIR VERY MINDS! THEY HATE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN!”

Also this week, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, a man who was briefly in charge of dismantling our entire government, got involved in an explicitly racist and misogynistic conversation, which culminated in his sharing a post about how women were “built” to be traded and “captured” by men.

This all started when Morgonn McMichael, a baby Phyllis Schlafly from Turning Point USA, asked, “Why do liberal white women hate white people so much?” Musk responded, “They’ve been programmed to do so by their teachers and the media.”

Sorry to repeat myself, but …

It really is quite bold of these folks to assume that what anyone “hates” is “white people” in general and not them in particular. I, for one, have many white friends.

Thousands of people responded to McMichael’s post and to Musk’s comment — practically all of them in vehement support of this truly batshit idea. Dissenting voices were few and far between. Imagine being that repugnant, as a person, and actually believing that people have be brainwashed to not like you.

And yet, it gets worse. Somehow. Because someone decided to get real sciencey about it, in a post that Musk decided to actually share.

Insightful. Women are built to be traded to another tribe (or captured) and slide seamlessly into their new culture. That keeps them safe, even though they are physically weak.

20 years after they are captured, they are the matriarchs who enforce that culture. That is why women conform to the dominant culture, and thereby amplify that culture. IMO, that is why Western women, raised in anti-white culture, are now amplifying anti-white culture, even though they are white. They think that keeps them safe, and they are correct, but only in the sort [sic] term. In the long term, they will be forced to remember they are white. Better they are reminded of that by white men, because the alternative is not so gentle.

This also got thousands of likes and hundreds of mostly positive responses from people who were very excited to agree with the idea that women are born to be property and are best off being controlled by white men.

This was the top reply.

“For a heck of a long time kidnapping was seen as a legitimate relationship strategy. From the historical accounts that I read some of those turned out to be very successful partnerships (and others led to husbands meeting early and violent ends).”

I think we can be relatively certain that this person has not read a single “historical account” of this, or of anything else.

But just so we’re clear, liberals are “crazy” for suggesting that anything might be a reference to the kind of creepy, outdated “race science” regularly espoused by the majority of X users, while the richest man in the world and his legions of followers are chatting about how “it’s just science” that liberal women hate white people because women are biologically programmed to be treated like property and we’re just going along with the dominant forces that brainwashed us into not liking racists.

Not only that, but that fairly moderate criticism from people who are not elected officials of any kind is what will keep people from voting for Democrats, but conservatives actually claiming that white people are genetically superior or that women are “built” to be kidnapped is not something that will reflect poorly on Republicans. Hell, you can have actual Republicans running for office on the GD Auschwitz slogan and not one person will step up to chastise them for making people not want to vote for Republicans.

Charlie Kirk can promote Steve Sailer, a white supremacist who dabbles in the fine art of scientific racism and who just published a book about “noticing” that Jewish people control the world. (In case you were not aware, “noticing” is an anti-Semitic dog whistle — one which Kirk freely uses in the post below.)

Oh! And you can also have conservatives responding to the Sydney Sweeney ad by expressing relief and gratitude that they have been liberated from years of brutal oppression in the form of ads that do not feature pretty, thin white blonde girls with large breasts (although I’m really going to need to point out that, despite making up only 59 percent of the country, white people account for 72 percent of those featured in advertisements). They can openly rejoice about the fact that the ads feature Sweeney and not Lizzo.

Though, to be fair, there are still those who are complaining that Sweeney is an ancient and haggard 27 years old instead of 15 like Brooke Shields was when she was in a Calvin Klein ad that bordered on child pornography.

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The fact that the narrative this week is “Crazy liberals totally melt down over perfectly inoffensive ad! This is why people won’t vote for Democrats!” while all of this is going on is absurd.

The reason you see so many people saying “Oh! I have to vote Republican because the Left is just too woke and crazy!” isn’t because the Left is just too woke and crazy. It’s because they know exactly who they are aligning themselves with. They want to be on team “White people are genetically superior/Women are biologically predispositioned to be submissive to men/We are oppressed by Lizzo appearing in advertisements!” without it being a reflection on them and who they are as people. They want to be able to say “Well, you basically forced us to do this!” and far, far too many people who try to present themselves as trying to help the Left or help Democrats are more than happy to go along with it.

Anyone who would use this as an excuse to vote for Republicans at a time when mainstream Republicans are all over the internet saying, explicitly, what people suggested the American Eagle ad might be saying implicitly was never going to vote for Democrats anyway. It’s time to accept that, and to stop policing the Left for supposed overwokeness — because we’re just never going to be perfect enough for the kind of people who have a higher tolerance for out and out Nazi shit than they do for people maybe reading too much into an advertisement for jeans.

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https://www.wonkette.com/p/elon-agrees-women-are-built-to-be

Posted by Evan Hurst

https://www.wonkette.com/p/what-do-they-call-their-smithsonian

We feel like this is one of those moments, one that we’ll look back and go, “Yeah, that was definitely a sign things weren’t OK anymore.” The Smithsonian has removed Donald Trump from its exhibit on impeachment.

No, read that sentence again, and let its implications wash over you: The Smithsonian has removed Donald Trump from its exhibit on impeachment.

Par for the course for a country where they’re paving over the Rose Garden so President Cankles doesn’t have to step on the grass, and where they’re going to build a gigantic Epstein Ballroom on the White House grounds (we don’t know if that’s the name they’ve settled on), so Dear Leader can have more fucking ugly gold-plated shit that’s as tacky and crass as he is, and where people are filing bills to rename the entire Kennedy Center after Donald Trump.

But if the Smithsonian is doing that, then sorry, it’s not a museum anymore, it’s just a cocksucking homage to President Microdick, and all you teachers out there can go ahead and cancel your class trips.

The Washington Post reports that, per the Smithsonian, it has reverted the exhibit in question in the National Museum of American History back to an earlier form, which says that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” Would that be because Republicans are craven shitheels who don’t love America enough to remove presidents for pressuring our allies to help him steal elections, or for inciting mobs of violent Nazi pigs to attack the United States in his name, to overturn the results of elections he lost?

Or is today’s Smithsonian allowed to even discuss history at all? Because that’s a pretty important part of the history of the Grand Old Party, if you ask us, the part where it replaced all its remaining vestiges of pretending to be a legitimate political party and just decided to eat Donald Trump’s ass instead.

The Washington Post’s source, a person “familiar with the exhibit plans,” yadda yadda, says this was done at the request of Dear Leader’s administration, part of the “content review” Trump was stomping his big cankles and demanding, the one that’s supposed to removed “bias” from the museums.

Oh, but they swear this is just temporary, and the permanent exhibit will definitely reflect reality, assuming they ever build it, so we’ve got some people speaking out of both sides of their mouths within the same article. Is the Smithsonian caving to Stupid Hitler, or is this all in preparation for a much greater impeachment exhibition of the future?

A temporary label including content about Trump’s impeachments had been on display since September 2021 at the Washington museum, a Smithsonian spokesperson told The Washington Post, adding that it was intended to be a short-term addition to address current events. Now, the exhibit notes that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.”

In addition to describing Trump’s two impeachments, the temporary label — which read “Case under redesign (history happens)” — also offered information about the impeachments of presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, as well as Richard M. Nixon, who would have faced impeachment had he not resigned.

Also:

“In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section in The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibition needed to be addressed,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The section of this exhibition covers Congress, The Supreme Court, Impeachment, and Public Opinion. Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance.”

Yeah, OK, we are sure it is all one big coincidence, and the new exhibit will reflect that Donald Trump is the only president ever to have been impeached twice, and if Democrats retake the House next year, puny little bitch gonna get his ass impeached a third time.

We’re sure it’ll be just great.

The Smithsonian has of course been on King Trump’s destruction list pretty much ever since the most recent time he lied his way through his oath of office. Back in March, he executive ordered the Smithsonian to “work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo.” He also hereby demanded future funding not be used to contribute to exhibits that “degrade shared American values, divide Americans by race, or promote ideologies inconsistent with Federal law.” And of course he tried to fire the director of the National Portrait Gallery, accusing her of something something DEI. (She ended up stepping down of her own accord.)

Maybe it is considered grievously woke to discuss his various impeachments and failures too.

Or maybe not! We suppose the museum could always impress us!

But yeah sorry, we are not holding our breath. Sorry.

This also happened this month at the Smithsonian:

[T]he artist Amy Sherald withdrew an upcoming show at the National Portrait Gallery, saying she believed that the museum was considering removing her painting depicting a transgender Statue of Liberty — an effort, she added, meant to avoid provoking Mr. Trump. Ms. Sherald had risen to fame with her 2018 portrait of Michelle Obama.

Nope, can’t provoke that senile old bigot bitch, it’s just too risky.

It was cool having things like the Smithsonian, while all that lasted. Get excited for lots of videos of Emperor Trump doing his “jerking two dicks at once” dance in the new royal ballroom, though!

That’ll make the world stop laughing at us, you’ll see!

[Washington Post]

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