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Wednesday, June 07, 2017

Going It Alone / Leaning Into It

Princess Snowflake's entirely predictable decision to pull out of the Paris Accords is annoying and disappointing, but again, not surprising in the least. Coupled with the much-less reported indications that the yuuugely successful Cuba embargo might be reinstated for some bizarre reason, it seems safe to say that this administration's guiding operational principle is simply to wipe the black-guy fingerprints off of everything. That is the one common factor so far, as Snowflake has done any number of unnecessary things for no useful or practical (even from an ideological standpoint) reason, but rather just to be a dick. Hoocoodanode, as the say in the 'hood.

(Oh, and now, based on what they think was Snowflake's money line in his fuck-youse speech, they're throwing a "Pittsburgh not Paris" rally in Lafayette Park, in DC. Not in Pittsburgh, mind you, since that city went 80% for Clinton, and hasn't been the blue-collar steel city for quite some time, but is doing quite well all the same. No, they're doing it in a DC park named after someone who is buried in -- wait for it -- Paris. These halfwits can't even get the imaginary optics straight, not that it will matter to the yahoos, who if they ever did happen to travel to Paris for some insane reason, would almost certainly head straight for the nearest Mickey D's.)

The empire has been in decline for some time, more steadily and drastically since Saint Reagan. Bill Clinton and Barry O introduced at least the veneer of "social conscience" into the equation, and even took a few positive steps to mitigate the economic stagnation here and there. But the slide into the wood chipper, fast or slow, ends in a pile of mulch all the same.

And so the Euros are realizing that the signals were clear after all, that we have been off our meds for some time, that the accidental selections of Fredo Arbusto were no accidents, but merely close statistical manipulations injected with muscle and gall. That the investiture of His Royal Hairness Emperor Princess Snowflake Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho Fuckface Von Clownstick is not the disease, but merely latest and nastiest outbreak of the tertiary political syphilis the US has acquired by fucking ourselves once too often.

So it makes sense that Angela Merkel, as nominal head of the European Union, understands that it may be high time to bond with France's new golden boy Emmanuel Macron, and move on without the bumptious country mice and their jabbering mutt of a figurehead. Clownstick may only be around for eight years max, but again it is clear that he is symptomatic of a much greater malaise, one that is generational so far, and shows no signs of abating.

China has slowly, steadily set itself up to take over as the big dog for this wondrous new century, and we seem determined to help them in every way possible. Clownstick is hell-bent to prove that the US can go it alone, that interdependence is an illusion or a hoax, perhaps a scam engineered by the Chinese or the Euros or whoever's on his shit-list that day.

It doesn't really matter, since facts no longer matter, and knowledge has no value, since a man who has gotten what he wants for seventy years by grifting, lying, stealing, or renting it is now in charge, and his moron cult followers wouldn't know an actual bidnessman if he sent their jobs to Bangalore.

But since Clownstick felt the need to give Merkel an extra dig, after dumping on her from day one, don't be too surprised if she calls the heads of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and every German automaker that has manufacturing facilities here in 'murka, and finds a way to coax at least some of them either back home or into Mexico or Canada. It would not take much in the way of tax breaks and/or leaning on nationalist pride. You can only treat people like shit for so long, especially when they're not getting anything out of it.

Look, most of us have had a friend or relative that, for whatever reason -- drugs, alcohol, maybe they're just an asshole to begin with -- goes off the deep end and just becomes insufferable, impossible to be around. You avoid them, you do things with other friends without them. You go out with these other friends, steeling yourselves for the likelihood that the asshole might come shambling along and get pissy about everyone hanging out without them, probably (almost definitely) talking shit about them. You keep it in the back of your mind, what you'll say when cornered:

"No one wants to tell you, so I'm just gonna tell you -- you're a fucking asshole, and no one wants to hang around you. You come over and raid our refrigerators and never offer to buy, and talk shit about everyone else's girlfriend, and you're just fucking miserable to be around. I'm telling you as a friend, either fuck off or get your head straight."

But you mostly hope to just avoid the fucker, until maybe they find a new set of friends willing to put up with their bullshit. Except in this case, the "new set of friends" Clownstick is reaching out to is entirely comprised of fellow assholes -- Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, the Saudis. We have to get our shit together as a nation, and decide if that's the collective path we want to go down.

Say what you want about the rubes and bozos who have fallen for the Clownschtick (see what I did there?) -- they have made themselves clear about what they think they want, and that they will show up at the fucking voting booth to git 'er duuuhnnn. Are the bien pensant pussy-hat protesters motivated enough to show up next year, and in 2020, to drive these motherless fucks out of office? You tell me.

And yet, as I finish reading Matt Taibbi's Insane Clown President, it is very difficult to not go into a completely nihilistic stance and dare these mutants to get exactly what they think they want. Taibbi presents an argument that is mostly very solid:  the Republicans have lost their goddamned minds; the Democrats sold their souls to the same renters and owners who "donate" to the two wings of the Party of Privilege; the voters are getting increasingly angry at getting screwed over by cynical "social" politics on the right and "incremental" horseshit on the (relative) left; the media consist mostly of hacks playing high-school pecking-order games, who can be bought off with (in Taibbi's words) a beer and a box of cookies.

ICP is mostly a collection of Taibbi's Rolling Stone essays and dispatches from the 2016 campaign trail, and as such, it resonates with the knowing futility of the outcome of the dismal affair, and with the recap of all the salient factors leading to that entirely avoidable outcome.

But as good as the book is, it is grievously, perhaps fatally flawed in one major respect -- in his effort to righteously excoriate his callow media colleagues and the cynical liars they follow around for what passes for a living, Taibbi ends up letting off the hook the angry flyover dopes whose self-regarding anger got us all in the mess we're currently in.

There's probably some measure of white liberal guilt baked into all this, as journos seem to have become almost instinctively reflexive about not seeming to be too condescending, or to try to "listen" more. I would take the opposite tack here -- if anything, the media have collectively given far too much time and print and analysis to these idiots.

Every goddamned week for going on two years now, we have been treated to any number of anthropological excursions to these places so that we can hear directly from belligerent rubes a line of invariably bizarre and logically groundless reasoning about why a grifting insult comic should even be in the discussion to run the world's largest economy and most powerful military. It's still going on, months after the election, these dopey, uncritical transcriptions of these people's fallacious excuses.

Meanwhile, have you seen even one (1) article where these intrepid scriveners talk to a few Clinton voters? Not before or since the election, I haven't seen a single one. I wonder why that might be. One clue would be to check in on your supposedly liberal media.

The conservative media outlets function essentially as you would expect them to do, as agitprop arms of the Republican party in general, and therefore in support of Clownstick in particular. The liberal media outlets, while critical of everything Clownstick does, are still functioning in a mode of constant reaction. Christ, what did this fucking idiot do today? Because it's clickbait -- but it isn't journalism. They chased their tails for a good twenty-four hours over the stupid "covfefe" thing, something that should have been a one-hour eyeroll at most. And now they're breathlessly retelling his latest twit-fest over the London attacks, essentially doing his promo work for him. They do this shit all the time; again, from watching the baton-passing nonsense with the prime-time lineup over at MSNBC, it's easy to see why people generally hold mediots in such contempt.

This is the natural consequence of having to fill twenty-four hours a day with constant, instantaneous content. They don't have time to pursue and air real stories of substance, and if they did, the ADHD rodents watching and retweeting wouldn't watch it anyway. But the bottom line is that they are spending almost all of their time chasing what he does, at the expense of any number of other stories. And when you're dealing with someone for whom "bad publicity" doesn't exist, because they don't give a shit what you think and their operational response to everything is Or what?, again the end result is just troll-feeding. The fact is that MSNBC and CNN can't quit their Clownstick coverage even if they want to. He's keeping them afloat at this point.

All that aside, again the tragic flaw in Taibbi's ICP thesis is that all those smug, condescending liberals and cynical politicians let these good people down. And that's just a bucket of steaming horseshit, from top to bottom, starting with the premise that they're all "good people" to begin with.

Taibbi himself contributes heavily to clarifying that misperception, in his constant recounting of rally attendees and Clownstick supporters he talks to, who repeat nasty, hateful lies and wear t-shirts with lovely sayings like She's a Cunt and Fuck Your Feelings. Taibbi recounts how on Election Day, outside Clownstick Tower, some doofus in a MAGA hat tapped Taibbi on his shoulder, asked him if he was part of the media, and when Taibbi answered in the affirmative, the guy sticks his middle finger in Taibbi's face, tells him to go fuck himself, and walks away ruffling his young son's hair.

Real family values these folks have, classy right up to the very end. It's a goddamned shame there aren't any more Hunter Thompson types around; for one, Thompson was six-foot-six and usually on some combination of mind-altering substances. These fake-tough punks would think twice pulling that shit on someone if they thought there might actually be consequences. But they have become accustomed to thinking of journalists as effete pussies who can be penned off and ridiculed, and they won't even try to fight back. I wonder how they got that idea.

But it's too bad Taibbi didn't drop that asshole. He probably felt sorry for him, because only someone who is a miserable fucking failure in life does that to a complete stranger. But that's no excuse for what seems to be becoming increasingly common behavior for these fools. Imagine what they'd have been like if she'd won, what with their candidate queering the water all through October by claiming the election was rigged.

Unless he won, of course. Then it's fair. Heads I win, tails you lose. How you like them apples?

To provide a little anecdata to the contrary, I know quite a few Clownstick supporters in real life, and I honestly can't imagine any of them wearing those t-shirts or flipping off strangers like that. Talking trash on Facebook is about their speed, which is nothing. But even there, it makes you wonder why the mediots keep giving any time or space at all to these stereotypical angry maroons. Feeding idiot trolls is what got us all into this in the first place.

But again, these salt-of-the-earth types are exactly the same people that voted for assholes like clockwork, because they could be counted on to keep blacks, gays, uppity wimmins, whoever, In Their Place. Their support of Clownstick is nothing new; they have supported assholes and liars for their entire lives, gladly. They come from generations of people who have learned to assuage their own failures in life by retelling some Dolchstosslegende iteration, not worrying about whether there's a nugget of truth to it or not. They have spent generations telling themselves and each other that they're the only "real Americans," even as they hoover up extra tax dollars from all those blue-state fags and hippies they despise.

Is the American political system a brutal, corrupt joke, bought and paid for, owned and operated by cynical, greedy scumbags? Reader, you know it is. It is at least as mindlessly cynical, as a response, to elevate the epitome of the corrupt, venal grifter to a position of power. And yet the "liberal" media, including Taibbi, apparently as some sort of self-inoculation against being too smug or condescending, continue to engage in this pointless effort of "understanding" these nasty, hateful people for overthrowing the shackles of their overlords. That's not why they voted for Clownstick.

They voted for him because they hate Hillary Clinton, and they wanted to stick their middle fingers in the faces of caricatured liberals. It's not complicated. Clownstick could come to their houses, fuck their wives and daughters in front of them, and take a huge shit on their dinner table, and they would vote for him again if they thought it would make George Clooney cry. This is how they function.

This is not the reality any rational person would have wanted or envisioned, but it is the reality we have right now, because it is the political system and media and electorate we have. All televised media across the political spectrum, with their endless rounds of BREAKING NEWS, have failed, and the world would be a better place if they were simply shut down for a year or two. Here's a news flash for all of you fart-knocking cable dipshits -- when everything is breaking news, nothing is. You cannot maintain this level of theatrical, pearl-clutching hysteria over every blasted thing, only to turn to the same fetid gene pool of "analysts" to kick around the goat's-head of faux-debate.

MSNBC have proven themselves to be nearly as awful and shallow as Fixed Noise; the last several times I checked in over the last week or so, no matter which program or host, they found increasingly forced and cheesy ways to shoehorn in a lengthy plug for Megyn Kelly's new stint at the network. We get it; you shelled out a lot of dough for her and now need to suck everyone's dick to try to recoup some of that money. Good luck with it, but life's too short. Maybe the weekend prison documentaries will help shore up the shortfall.

Make no mistake -- the media will do whatever is most expedient in this mess. Clownstick supporters are correct in their assumptions that corporate media are instinctively conditioned to protect whatever pose the establishment wants them to. This is by definition; corporations are, after all, the establishment. This includes Fixed Noise.

But as mentioned above, these are the same mediots that slavishly promote every inept rage-tweet and senior moment, these are the same morons that will literally show an empty podium while they wait around for him to lob the same jabber he did last week, while they lob their own inane, value-free repartee. The only thing they reveal with their endless hot-take patter is how little they know and understand.

A few days ago, in anticipation of James Comey's testimony tomorrow, I happened to catch a few minutes of a couple of media maroons (pretty sure it was Chris Cillizza on Wolf Blister's show, like it matters) talking about how, while the Clownstick administration could prevent Comey from testifying by invoking executive privilege, it was almost unthinkable they would do such a thing because -- get this -- it might make them look bad.

This is what I mean when I say that these people are deeply stupid. This is what I mean when I say that their "commentary" and "analysis" are literally value-free, in that they are worth nothing, add nothing of value to what you or anyone else might know about anything, and that any amount of money you offer in return for what they say is currency that might as well be set on fire, or used for bumwipe.

Seriously. What kind of asshole would look at the operational style of this administration, at the things it has said and done virtually every single day since (and including) its inauguration (not to mention every day of the campaign), and conclude that there is a single person involved in the daily workings of the executive branch of the United States government that gives even one-twentieth of a fuck about how anything looks? And why should they give such a fuck? Is someone going to hold them accountable?

Let's put it this way -- the only way Comey was going to get shut down by executive privilege was if he really had something solid and earth-shattering. If he testifies (and the prepared advance transcript is here), it is because it's nothing to write home about. To seriously postulate that the administration felt at all compelled to let him testify because they were afraid of "how it would look" if they shut it down, is to have been asleep for a very long time.

As lamentable of an exercise as that particular episode was, it served as a perfect example of the media's biggest problem -- people like Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cillizza act like the people in power are supposed to give a fuck what Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cillizza think and say about them. And we all know they do not give a fuck. It is plain to everyone that these media eunuchs have nothing of importance, and fulfill no truly useful role. They sit there and preen and pose like they're all Edward Fucking Murrow, but we all know that they're incapable of investigating or generating any facts or news on their own, and are content to sit there and regurgitate various strains of conventional wisdom as informed commentary. And they know that we know this. They are impotent, toothless. They are lapdogs who pretend to be watchdogs. They are there to chase down midnight tweets and be pushed around and lied to by a homunculus like Sean Spicer.

There is no purpose transcribing the blatant lies of a White House press conference, anymore than there was a purpose to sitting in a pen at the rallies, to transcribe Clownstick's campaign lies, and be verbally abused by the chuckle-headed mutants attending these idiotic escapades. All it does is give these ugly proceedings the dangerous veneer of legitimacy. Especially when most of them don't bother at all to see what the opposition party is up to -- except insofar as they respond to whatever daily idiocy the moron-in-chief is up to.

Yet they are exactly the media this electorate deserves -- fat, impotent, useless, lying or ignoring what's really important. Maybe we need to have health-care policy rewritten by Mitch McConnell before enough people get what's at stake here. Maybe we need to have Li'l Lord Rage-Tweet piss off enough of our allies and trading partners to realize that while we're the largest economy on paper for now, the demographics are not remotely in our favor, because we're only five percent of the earth's population, and we have decided that we're happy with having ten percent of our population own eighty-five percent of the assets. Maybe we needed to have this thieving, scummy grifter and his wretched crime family barge into our house, steal our silverware and defile our furniture right in front of us, to get the message.

1 comment:

Brian M said...

Wow. Just wow.

You should have the Rolling Stone gig, Heywood. Not (as much as I sometimes like him) Matty T the Trumpalo Whisperer.