Real Sentences?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed…but I use a lot of ellipses. It’s almost as though I don’t really understand punctuation, really. Which may or may not be true. Indeed it may or may not be true that at times those just indicate the sort of trailing-off-then-getting-louder cadence of the tin-foil-hat brigade. It might also be true that they represent mercy in the form of not filling in the gaps in the fractured syntax with enough spine-crushingly detailed over-analysis of things I’m no more likely to be better informed about than anyone else to make the widest of eyes glaze over.

The point being that both things could be true. Or neither. Or sometimes one & sometimes the other. None of which would make any difference to the fact that I’d know why I typed them & anyone reading them would draw some conclusions of their own that would be impervious to my knowledge of my intent.

Roland Barthes was barking up a similar sort of a tree when he talked about the death of the author.

So I hope you’ll forgive me for once more banging this particular drum because I know I’m not the only one who sees this shit or finds it viscerally frustrating.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/13/everyone-is-focusing-wrong-part-william-barrs-interview/

This shit just keeps doubling-down & doubling-down until you’d swear it couldn’t sink any lower only to double on down again. Dante only had seven circles in his inferno but this dumpster fire of insanities just can’t seem to find rock bottom.

The thing that maybe might stick in my craw the worst though is that Barr’s telling the truth twice over. Teeny-tiny-toddler-thumbed Twittler may think it’s real neat that he can mash those chubby digits against his pocket dopamine-dispenser like the sloppy junkie he is & watch the impact of his incoherent invective make the world shudder but the myriad ways that approach breaks shit even he wouldn’t want to break if he only fucking understood them are no fucking joke.

So that shit does make it impossible for an AG to do the job of being Attorney General & by extension allow the Department to itself be occupied with the business of Justice. That’s not untrue. So, like any competent lawyer, he has a superficially plausible “most likely” reading of his words that is arguably defensible.

The trouble is that’s not the job he appears to be talking about, nor is it the job he’s doing. The job he begged for quite brazenly & publicly was, essentially, to be to Dolt45 what Roy Cohn was to pre-apprentice-era donnie-brand dispshittery.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship

It’s a job he is disturbingly good at. It’s also one that is specifically hampered by the dotarded one’s inability not to constantly hang a lampshade on it at every turn.

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/13/william-barr-roger-stone-trump/

You’d think I’d take comfort in the man’s signature inability not to compound his errors (& with them his crimes) in service of shoring up his support with those willfully ill-informed enough to be able to match his levels of cognitive dissonance. Or failing that, at least in the idea that the more observant folks seem to be decrying it all over town.

Trump Unleashed: The Trump Presidency Enters Its Most Dangerous Phase

[maybe it’s just me]

[but without these]

[the embed obscures the next bit]

Except that for oh, so many people the sheer volume of this kind of malfeasance has allowed it to achieve the dubious virtue of joining the ranks of the banal & the mundane & thus result in a sort of anesthetic effect

So, you might well be asking, what’s the fucking point of all this?

Why make the effort to spare us all the fucking dots just to moan about some shit we all already know?

The point is – or at least begins with – properly structured sentences.

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/13/william-barr-roger-stone-trump/

It’s important that a sentence be complete, or it isn’t a sentence. Not really. Even if it looks like one. Or we treat it like one. Like that one just now. Not really isn’t a sentence, really – the subject’s implied, the object’s unclear & there’s no verb for a start.

I’d argue though that the chances are you didn’t have any trouble reading right past it. In fact there’s a decent chance that those of you who find the excessive ellipsis thing more enervating than anything probably blew past still coasting on the novelty of my Using Upper Case Letters & limiting myself to the solitary Full Stop.

[Which, by the way is the one true name for the thing erroneously referred to as a period by the sadly unenlightened among you. Full Stop.]

That sort of oversight doesn’t matter all that much when it’s some random bit of semantic pedantry, obviously. When the sentences involved are custodial on the other hand it can matter a whole lot. Particularly so in a legal system that places a huge emphasis on precedent in case law.

The Real News in Bill Barr’s Announcement: He’s Vetoing Campaign Finance Investigations, Too

https://www.thedailybeast.com/king-donald-to-gop-and-now-and-forever-you-shall-be-my-servants

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/07/anatomy-trump-rally-percent-claims-are-false-or-lacking-evidence/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/27/2019-the-year-us-foreign-policy-fell-apart-donald-trump

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/10/the-mystery-of-the-trump-chaos-trades

So, I ask myself – how many of these are going to result in real sentences?

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/trump-investigations/

Hell, how many of them wouldn’t even be listed if the thing had been updated since December?

These may have left a mark he’s still smarting from but that orange ass is still installed in his ill-fitting suits behind an inappropriately Resolute Desk, after all.

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2019/12/politics/impeachment-articles-annotated/

So, if anybody needs me I’ll be looking for my beer goggles. They help me track down the next whisky bar.