Rob DuBois

Taking—at least—a break from Twitter. Still on IG, FB, and LI. Will return if this ceases to be a personality cult’s political weapon cloaked as “free speech.”

@BrittanyinTexas Apparently no amount of Maybelline can hide the soul death in those lovely eyes. …Hers are nice, too.

Amazing what months of selling your soul can do, the light’s been snuffed out of their eyes.

it is getting increasingly tiresome to read and hear calls to "finish the job" in Iran absent any serious discussion of what the job is and how it is to be accomplished with military force.

“Zelenskyy shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt that night.”

@Rail_splitter1 “Zelenskyy shouldn’t have been wearing that short skirt that night.”

“We just told Zelensky the guarantees won't kick in until he does what russia wants.” This is the Secretary of State of the United States telling the victim of aggression that it must do what the aggressor wants. Never forget. Vote them all out.

Robert Mueller died last night. He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving. He had integrity. And tonight the President of the United States said good! I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good. I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word. Good. This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather. That is what is happening. That is what has happened. The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming. America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner. And the church said nothing. Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary. Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him. Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart. JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn. These men are something more painful than monsters. They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again. Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing. Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less. That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him. And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it. When Trump is gone, they will still be here. Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous. That morning is coming. Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say. He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true. He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad. The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it. That is all it needed to be. A man died. His family is broken open with grief. That is all it needed to be. Instead the President said good. And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

"We can take them at their word." No, you can't, but this is what happens when you don't send experts - experienced diplomats - and instead send your son-in-law and a guy you know.

@atrupar Whenever a mouthpiece goes out of his way to say “people are not personally profiting from this,” you can be damn sure people are personally profiting from this.

Jared Kushner at the "Board of Peace" -- "People are not personally profiting from this"

@Matt_Pinner Why no zero, or negative options?

Simple poll. Please be honest! As of today, how much do you still trust this team? A. 100% B. 75% C. 50% D. 25% E. 0%

@atrupar Republicans are investigating Bad Bunny instead of the people in the #EpsteinFiles. You can’t make this stupid shxt up. 🤷🏻‍♀️

@atrupar He’s an excellent dancer, for his age.

Peter Navarro: "The jobs report comes out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like ... Wall Street has to adjust for the fact that we're deporting millions of illegals out of the job market."

Many in America today will poo poo this warning. “American exceptionalism!“ They will believe it means we can weather any storm. They’re wrong, but they won’t realize how badly wrong until their children are tortured by the consequences coming for us.

@Suzierizzo1 A 13-year-old with an iPad and GarageBand could have made her sound 50% better in 10 minutes. It’s like they think it’s good as is. 😐

If I didn’t know better I would have thought her voice was fake,but it’s not hell even TPUSA didn’t ask her to preform even after she kept dropping hints and offering to! 🤣

@michaeldweiss And there goes Donald: “Vlad gave me this, I want Vlad to be happy, and I demand that the Ukrainians accept this ‘American’ peace plan within days…or dire consequences.”

U.S. officials now confirmed what I wrote yesterday -- this whole thing was a Russian active measure, leaked to the press to sow panic and confusion and be conflated with U.S. policy in an administration where incompetence and dysfunction are evidently features, not bugs. macspaunday.substack.com/p/he-got-this-…

@MeidasTouch And yet…3 million likes on his own post. America is sickening and destroying itself.

Here’s the original clip of Ronald Reagan from April 25, 1987, where he delivered a complete and total rebuke against tariffs. Trump is calling Reagan’s words in this video “FAKE” and “fraudulent.” They’re 100% real. And the original clip is actually far worse for Trump, as much is left out of the ad. Watch this clip and read the full transcript: Throughout the world, there's a growing realization that the way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition. Now, there are sound historical reasons for this. For those of us who lived through the Great Depression, the memory of the suffering it caused is deep and searing. And today, many economic analysts and historians argue that high tariff legislation passed back in that period, called the Smoot-Hawley tariff, greatly deepened the depression and prevented economic recovery. You see, at first when someone says, let's impose tariffs on foreign imports, it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while, it works, but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is, first, homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industry shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs. The memory of all this occurring back in the 30s made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity. Now, it hasn't always been easy. There are those in the Congress, just as there were back in the 30s, who want to go for the quick political advantage, who risk America's prosperity for the sake of a short-term appeal to some special interest group, who forget that more than 5 million American jobs are directly tied to the foreign export business, and additional millions are tied to imports. Well, I've never forgotten those jobs. And on trade issues, by and large, we've done well.

@Sushiquitodame @atrupar Looks like one of Ed Gein’s better masks.

@atrupar This the face of a despicable human being full of hate

Kristi Noem dismisses a question about "shocking" images of ICE kidnapping and brutalizing people, including children: "Our law enforcement officers are doing everything appropriately and correct."

@beyoncegarden What a pitiful douchebag. But at least he feels like a brave boy. We’ll call that a “gender affirming procedure.”

the way no one gaf about what they were doing is taking me out😭

@atrupar I’ve been watching press Secretaries for over 50 years, and never have I seen one that poses exclusively for the camera, so obviously exclusively trying to feed info/disinfo to the base. Barely glanced at the journos she was speaking to. We’re in a different and not better world.

REPORTER: Egg prices have skyrocketed since President Trump took office. So what specifically is he doing to lower those costs? LEAVITT: When Joe Biden was in the Oval Office or upstairs sleeping -- I'm not so sure -- egg prices increased 65 percent

Here’s me receiving an outpouring amount of affection during the “day of love”—January 6, 2021.

“Nixon Blasts False Charges”—fifty years ago today:

So as this thing circles the drain, but before it goes bloop, I’ll reiterate: you can still find my #RobDuBois accounts at LI, IG, and FB … and now Mastodon as @RobDuBois. 😉 And somebody please remind the new owner: character still counts. Abusive self-serving is a dead end.