Some of the People All of the Time

You might not believe this, and I certainly wouldn't blame you, but I'm getting tired and bored of talking about Trump. I really just wish he'd fucking go away already, and never darken the world's doorstep again. Consistently the point of reference for my interest (which is also fading fast) is in the people who are itching to vote for him, who stand in line to listen to his moronic "my dad can beat up your dad" type of tautological jabber, and eat it right up and come back for more.

So in reading the latest and greatest assessment of the Gooper landscape, as he interviews various individuals, I honestly can't help but wonder if Ryan Lizza intentionally tried to find the dumbest fucking people possible or what.

“We’re just tired of the actions of the government nowadays,” Karon Stewart, who is fifty-nine years old, told me after a rally in Mississippi. “The simple people pretty much have been forgotten.”

She said that she has followed Trump’s tabloid life on TV, and last year, when she heard him speak about politics, she registered to vote for the first time.

[emphasis mine]

There's more from this dunce and her one-legged husband who, by their telling works "seventeen hours every day, Monday through Friday," as well as on weekends. But it doesn't matter. Everything that comes after the revelation about her complete lack of a voting history renders her entire narrative utterly useless. It would be like taking eyewitness testimony from an admitted crack whore.

Look, I think that the more acutely aware one becomes about the nature of American politics, and the people who tend to participate in them on a professional level (this means not just politicians, but lobbyists, donors/owners, and the various other usual weasels), the more it makes sense that one might not want to bother with it. If you decide the game is permanently rigged and the walls can't be breached, why wouldn't you stay home?

But again, I encourage any and all sentient beings to dial up any Trump rally on the YouTube, sit through as much of it as you can, and see if any of it -- any of it at all -- makes any sense whatsoever as a coherent platform presented by someone who understands how things actually work. And it doesn't (or shouldn't; if any of it does make sense to you, by all means, feel free to elaborate in comments); it's just a rich, bitter old man telling a bunch of deluded nitwits how great he is, and how he's just going to wave his huge old-man cock at the Iranians and Chinese and such like, and they'll just all bow down to the greatness of the wrinkled sausage.

Ask a Trump fan what they like about him, and once you chip away at the "I like what he says and doesn't take any shit" bafflegab, they generally fall back on the "he's a successful bidnessman" gambit. At that point, you need to ask them exactly what Trump has been successful at, besides self-promotion. It takes but a few minutes to Google through his list of failed enterprises:  airlines, steaks, mortgages, a (heh) "university" that has a class-action suit against it for being a transparent grift. Failed casinos. Four bankruptcies and counting.

The fact is, there are only three things Trump has been truly successful at:

1. Marrying much younger women, preferably from Eastern Europe.
2. Selling his name to other people to put on their shit.
3. Pretending to fire people who don't really work for him on his stupid reality teevee show.

 So when this Karon Stewart fool follows up her admission that she's never bothered to register to vote by the age of fifty-nine, but was finally inspired to do so by Fuckface Von Clownstick, I can only assume she's in the final stages of mad cow disease. I give less than half a fuck about what such a person thinks about anything. And the rest of the maroons Lizza talks to are just as bad, just as deeply stupid. They are only important to the debate at large to the extent that they are holding the rest of society back. The real shame is that they don't continue to stay home and not vote.

Frequently this sort of rhetorical idiot-bashing gets portrayed in the media as condescending, which is a rather tendentious misuse of the word, and I believe one borne of reflexive urban liberalism one typically finds in media types. The framing of this is the smug urban Smart Set type looking down their nose and chuckling at the lack of sophistication of those rural rubes who jest don't know any better.

Condescending is when someone makes unfounded, baseless assumptions about other people based on what they look like, or where they're from, that sort of thing. It is not condescending to point out when a stupid person says a stupid thing. I don't care that someone is from the south; there are smart people and stupid people in the south, just like there are in California or New York or anywhere else.

But to say you got interested in the political process (and the Stewarts are far from the only ones; apparently there is a statistically significant percentage of "first-timers" in the Trump camp, and not all of them are young) because of the nonsense spewed by a billionaire carny is stupid. And stupid people should be pointed out as such at every opportunity.

To not do so is how end up with the gaggle of reprobates who represent the Republican Party these dark days -- both on the stage, and in front of it.