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Thursday, October 04, 2018

Five Queasy Pieces

The following lengthy articles have all come out in the past week, have gotten a great deal of attention, and if you haven't read them all, you really should.

Ryan Lizza's Esquire profile of the Iowa farm owned and operated by Devin Nunes' parents makes for a decent story, if not quite as potentially explosive, given these hopelessly cynical times, as Lizza might believe. While the weaselly shenanigans of the Nunes family makes for fine reading, what's even more interesting is how the residents in that county, mostly farmers whose workforces are mostly undocumented immigrants, square the circle in their own heads about voting for a paranoid bigot who wants to build a useless wall. Then again, these are the same people who will tell you what hardworking self-made bootstrappers they are, as they take the gubmint subsidy check, not to mention the bailout money Preznit Mario Kart had to dole out to cover for his tariff screw-up. They can fool themselves all they want with their creative compartmentalization, but they're not fooling anyone else.

Excerpt from Michael Lewis' upcoming book, The Fifth Risk, provides excruciating confirmation that the idiots running the country are even more inept and incompetent than anyone had assumed. Everything's a full-on goat rodeo with these dipshits. They could fuck up a two-car funeral. The one thing you can give them some credit for so far is that they have managed not to lawn-dart the solid (if unspectacular) economy Obummer left for them. So far.

I already linked to the NY Times' epic exposé on the ongoing fraud and tax evasion that serve as cornerstones of the Clownstick family fortune for generations, but it really deserves a fresh link and a careful read. Old Man Fred Clownstick was one shady motherfucker, and he greased every Democrat palm within reach to make sure no one got too close to ask about his shell corps and bullshit trust funds. There are really two (at least) major takeaways from this article, which is undoubtedly the best thing this gaping asshole of a newspaper has done in several years:  1) Since the Seventies, the New York media had been all too willing to serve as PR dupes for this monster. It's a goddamned shame they didn't shut him down with real reporting like this a long time ago, before the joke got out of hand.;  2) He really is a wretched businessman. It's not schtick. His dad gave him over $400 million, and he swindled the IRS out of another half-billion, and he still became so cash poor that he had to become a money-laundering butt-boy for the Russian mob. Sad!

Dan Alexander at Forbes magazine has already done several fine investigative pieces on the chicanery of the Clownstick grifting enterprise. This long read makes the feel-good argument that the enterprise has actually been losing money for years now, and the shitbag's ascent into office has actually accelerated that problem. Good. May every goddamned one of them be made utterly destitute, and the name be forever stained, so that future generations feel compelled to change it. Fuck every last one of them.

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic has also been doing fine work for some time during these crazy years, and his latest effectively limns the random, gleeful cruelty that ultimately serves as the defining characteristic not only of the Human Centipede Administration, but of its most vocal supporters. As we always point out, when we hate on politicians, we also recognize that more often than not, they are accurate reflections of the constituents who sent them there. So it goes with the hate-rally crowds. We can try to explain some of it away with pained jeremiads about "epistemic closure" and such like, but in the end it all comes down to the cold fact that they're fucking assholes, proudly so. A decent society would have marginalized these dumpster-diving mutants long ago, or at least done the humane thing and bribed them to sterilize themselves. Going forward, the least the rest of us can do is assure that they reap everything they've sown.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the Forbes link. I've been hoping to hear some news like that.