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Tuesday, August 04, 2015

Golem

I've never really been the "guilty pleasure" type, but I have to confess that I'm enjoying this Clownstick thing more and more by the day. Whether he intends it or not, Trump and his candidacy have revealed more about our sclerotic joke of a political system in general, and the Republican party in particular, than perhaps even Trump himself would want.

This is the natural, entirely foreseeable result of Citizens United, of the teatards' jabbering incoherence and raving toxicity being empowered and enabled. Since they are for nothing, only against things, and don't know or care how things actually work, the teatards act as an attacking swarm of fire ants, mindlessly converging on a target until they're bored with it, moving on to the next one. Johnny Walnuts had their reluctant fealty when he had the northern sorceress at his side, and hardly seven years later, he might as well be Jerry Brown or Jimmy Carter as far as they're concerned. Boehner and McConnell are next.

Clownstick understands how this game is played, understands his audience, knows that you never apologize and never admit wrongdoing. Even ol' Billy Jeff, likely to be your future first First Gentleman come November next year, once famously opined that 'murcans would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right. Trump has honed this knowledge to a science, perfected the technique, finessing his bluster and turning his greatest weakness -- an almost bizarrely thin skin, a complete inability to take even a mild joke at his expense -- into a "take no shit" demeanor that jibes perfectly with how his maroon followers see themselves, at least when their parole officers aren't around.

Pack all of your ongoing "cultural" signifiers into a hobo's bindle, and to an item they perfectly align with these miscreants' view of everything -- the world, the country, themselves. They seriously do not get that they are in the minority on these issues, that most people know that the traitor loser flag was a direct product of one of the most vile institutions known to humankind, and the only reason it was brought back in 1961 was to tell civil rights activists to fuck off. That most people understand that Benghazi!!1!one!! is a crock of shit kept alive by liars and intellectual perverts. That the Republican party has become a haven for crackpots and sociopaths, bankrolled by a handful of evil old men who literally do not understand money the way you or I or almost anyone else understands money.

The Iran nuclear "deal" is just the newest sack of steaming horseshit for them to sift through and smear on the walls. It is a perfect example of how their collective mindset is about fifty years out of date. The Cold War mindset is no longer operational, no matter how much Putin "rears his head" and annexes pieces of Ukraine. Iran is not going to blithely accept the conditions of a treaty signed by the hated shah 45 years ago, while its next-door neighbors build their arsenals.

Trump's reaction to the deal was just priceless, though. He said something to the effect that he would have "doubled" or "tripled" sanctions on the Iranians, presumably until they said  "uncle". That's all well and good, but it rings with the mindless bluster of someone who doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. For one, sanctions were internationally imposed, and were on the verge of expiring and collapsing, with no international support for renewal. European countries trade quite freely with Iran, and as the EU continues to unravel, the sanctions are hurting their bottom line. It's just business, and even a thrice-bankrupted casino huckster like Clownstick should understand that. Without international support for sanctions, you've got another Cuba on your hands, something the rest of the world looks for decades on as a monumental waste of time.

Secondly, despite how the deal is being portrayed as a handshake between John Kerry and the mullahs, this is a multilateral deal -- Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany are also signatories to this. It's an acknowledgement of reality, that the world is multipolar rather than unipolar or bipolar (heh) and we can't just piss on any and every hydrant we feel like anymore. Trump reinforces the notion, which should have been dispelled over the last decade in the sands of Sykes-Picot's hundredth anniversary, that we call all shots. It ain't like that anymore, hoss, and no amount of John Wayne posturing will change that.

That too is the fault of the elites:  globalization really means interdependence, which means that if we fuck around too much and China decides to stop buying our T-bills as a hedge for their own economic issues, we're fucked. They're fucked too, of course, but they dropped some 20 million souls during the Great Revolution, just from famine and hardship. They're not afraid to take a hit, where we talk a big game about sacrifice, but reserve the actual sacrifice for the 1% who actually participate in the warrior caste. There are no Clownsticks in the fucking army, nor will there ever be. This is all a money game, and there is no money to be had in serving, only in contracting.

While the Koch Brothers and Shelly Adelson and Foster Friess and Donald Trump use money to keep score and measure their shriveled, lifeless cocks, the rest of the world scrambles for crumbs just to stay afloat, to pay the mortgage, to buy food and medical care and birthday presents for the kids, to keep the student loan sharks at bay one more month, to purchase the fading glimmer of hope that maybe things will work out. It would be bad enough if these obscenely wealthy, do-nothing cocksuckers just hoarded their pelf and hid from the world; far worse that they instead choose to use said pelf to turn what's left of the working class on itself, against each other.

I don't feel a bit sorry for the working-class dogs who've been tricked mercilessly into voting against their own rational self-interest. I agree with them that the beauty of freedom and capitalism is that we are free to choose a great many things. And in a world where information is free and over-abundant, they choose to run after the bright shiny object, the fools' gold of reality teevee hucksters and comic-book movie franchises. They asked for all this; they still want it. Mencken was right that they deserve to get it good and hard. Try to insulate yourselves from the consequences as best you can. As I've been saying for some time now, I hear Costa Rica is nice.

1 comment:

Brian M said...

damn, Heywood.

You are on fire this week.

Sad to see Strix put things on hold, but writing like this...