NORMAL AND NOT: It's "not normal," the governor said!

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2025

That's only one part of the deal: There it sits, even as we sit here typing.

We refer to the headline which sits atop Ezra Klein's (lengthy) column for the New York Times. This is the headline as it exists online:

Stop Acting Like This Is Normal

Stop acting like this is normal! Within the body of his lengthy essay, Klein is offering that advice to Democratic members of Congress. 

More specifically, he's trying to decide what Democrats should do as the latest government shutdown approaches. He says he isn't sure what the Dem should do—but along the way, he says this:

Democrats cannot pretend this is a normal Republican administration. They cannot ignore masked agents in the streets, armed troops in the cities, billions of dollars of money going into the Trump family’s pockets, an administration that spins off several scandals in a week that would have consumed other presidencies for years. If Democrats cannot make an issue out of all that, then they are screwed and so are we.

And we might be...

Democrats shouldn't pretend that this is a normal administration. If Democrats can't establish that point, then we're all screwed, he says.

He also says that we might already be screwed. Continuing directly, he offers this

And we might be. Even if Democrats could agree on a message, do they have the messengers? Have Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer distinguished themselves as able to win an argument? Are they going to hold the line as national parks close down, as federal employees are furloughed, if checks stop going out the door, if flights are delayed because air traffic controllers aren’t getting paid? I don’t know that they will. I am quite certain that this moment deserves real opposition—that Democrats, morally speaking, should not fund a government that Trump is turning into a tool of personal enrichment and power. But I am not certain that Democrats can win a shutdown—I am not certain that they have the leaders that they need. It is absolutely the case that Democrats could lose a shutdown, but whatever they’re doing right now, it’s not called winning.

In Klein's view, Democrats could lose a showdown over the impending government shutdown—but whatever Dems are doing now, "it's not called winning." They may not have sufficiently talented leaders, he says.

We agree with all that! As we noted all last week, we suspect that the current undeclared American civil war has perhaps already been lost by the various ineffective forces of our own Blue America.

The Achaeans are coming over the walls again in this, the latest iteration of the never-ending human "night assault." To our eye, we Blues don't seem to have the slightest idea how to react to this onslaught.

We Blues don't seem to know what to do about this "night assault." And as we've long noted at this site, it's been this way for at least the past thirty-plus years, dating back to the invention of the Whitewater pseudo-scandal in bungled reporting on the front page of that same New York Times.

First that pseudo-scandal, then the subsequent years long war against Candidate Gore! We Blues just sat there and twiddled our thumbs as the current era got its start in those early (and deadly) assaults.

All in all, we Blues have never been able to discern a key fact—like the townsfolk of Camus' Oran, we just aren't especially sharp. At any rate, there was Ezra Klein's new column, and we agree with that headline:

We agree! A whole lot of entities in Blue America need to stop pretending that the devolving conduct of this administration is some version of normal.

In particular, the conduct of the sitting president has increasingly been "not normal!" We derive that quotation from a recent remark which has been widely reported.  

The statement was made by Governor Pritzker (D-Illinois). Here's the way the mild-mannered (and cash-strapped) PBS reported what the governor said, via the Associated Press:

Trump says ‘we’re not going to war’ with Chicago after threatening city on social media

President Donald Trump on Saturday amplified his promises to send National Guard troops and immigration agents to Chicago by posting a parody image from “Apocalypse Now” featuring a ball of flames as helicopters zoom over the nation’s third-largest city.

“’I love the smell of deportations in the morning,’” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

The president offered no details beyond the label “Chipocalypse Now,” a play on the title of Francis Ford Coppola’s dystopian 1979 film set in the Vietnam war, in which a character says: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

[...]

The president “is threatening to go to war with an American city,” Pritzker wrote on X over an image of Trump’s post. “This is not a joke. This is not normal.”

Let's focus on the governor's key remark, which we post below. It echoes the Ezra Klien headline:

This is not normal

"This is not normal," the governor said. It's hard to dispute that assessment.

The crackpot post by the sitting president had a clear crackpot feel. “’I love the smell of deportations in the morning?" So the bizarre sitting president said, as he said that his nation's third-largest city was about to encounter his nation's Department of WAR.

In truth, extremely strange posts by this rather strange man have become as Americana as apple pie, in the sense of being thoroughly normal. We recall, for example, the recent post in which he weirdly showed President Obama being frog-marched away in chains. 

"Truths" like that have become the norm. Over here in Blue America, our greatest news orgs have tended to avert their gaze from this ongoing strange behavior.  You can learn about it at Mediaite, but not in the New York Times.

Nothing to look at, those orgs have implicitly said. With that in mnd, there is one thing which can be said:

With increasingly frequency, the president's behavior does seem to be "not normal." In his most recent post, he said he loved the smell of deportations—of folks being led off in chains as the city of Chicago gets ready to learn about WAR.

Something seems to be possibly wrong with this very powerful man. We've advised you to pity the child, but with respect to his frequent behavior, it doesn't seem to be normal at all.

Nor is it only the president. The sitting vice president keeps pimping out social media posts in which he identifies the things he "doesn't give a shit" about. That too is decidedly "not normal." But sometimes in the course of human affairs, the "not normal" has wracked up big wins.

The Mongols, the Huns, the Goths—the Achaeans? All have staged famously successful "night assaults." Meanwhile, how about the warlike but little remembered Scythians? The leading authority on their conquests gives us this capsule on them:

Scythians

The Scythians or Scyths, also known as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranic equestrian nomadic people who migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, where they remained until the 3rd century BC.

Skilled in mounted warfare, the Scythians displaced the Agathyrsi and the Cimmerians as the dominant power on the western Eurasian Steppe in the 8th century BC. In the 7th century BC, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus Mountains and often raided West Asia along with the Cimmerians.

In the 6th century BC, they were expelled from West Asia by the Medes, and retreated back into the Pontic Steppe, and were later conquered by the Sarmatians in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BC. By the 3rd century AD, last remnants of the Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths, and by the early Middle Ages, the Scythians were assimilated and absorbed by the various successive populations who had moved into the Pontic Steppe...

The Scythians were overwhelmed by the Goths. At present, in roughly the same location, the Ukrainians are engaged in the long, slow process of being overwhelmed by the Russians as the sitting president delusionally whispers to poor Macron that his darling Vladimir wants to make a peace deal—indeed, wants to make a peace deal for him!

This administration's conduct is "not normal—or is its conduct perhaps as normal as the way we humans sleep and breathe? "Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world," sacred Camus writes in The Plague, "yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise."

As we start the week, we'll start by saying this:

We'd score Governor Pritzker's widely-reported statement as accurate. Sadly, we'd also say that many of his own assertions and behaviors will seem "not normal" to many voters—and we're  forced to say that such voters aren't exactly "wrong."

The "not normal" is general over the nation a this point in time. A "night assault" is part of the package—and we'd say that we Blues seem to be losing at present.

The president's conduct is "not normal"—but the same can be said of much of the conduct emerging from us Blues. In the eternally human manner, we Blues tend to have a very hard time seeing this fairly obvious fact about ourselves.

Our leading Blue American orgs won't report or discuss the way the president's troops are behaving on the Fox News Channel. Our orgs refuse to discuss the possibility that issues of "mental health" may be involved in this administration's various "not normal" behaviors.

By our assessment, the administration's behavior really is "not normal"—except in the way that such conduct has been a regular feature of human life here on Earth.  As for the conduct of us Blues, defeated  tribes have often behaved in the clueless ways we Blue Americans now exhibit—and then, the invaders have come over the walls and have wiped groups like the Trojans away.

Stop Acting Like This Is Normal, the Ezra Klein headline says.

In our view, that's extremely good advice with respect to major figures like President Trump and Vance and Bessent and Hegseth and Bondi and Bobby. (Tens of millions of fellow citizens disagree with that view.) 

In our view, that's good advice with respect to the current administration, Sadly, it's also good advice concerning the behavior of Us.

Tomorrow: What Governor Pritzker also said