Beltway Syndrome

Story time, kids -- pretty sure I have not told this one before, if I have it was years ago. After sixteen years, the Blogheimers is kicking in with some regularity.

So back in the mid-'70s, when I moved from smoggy Los Angeles to the epic glories of the Great State of Jefferson, we lived for about two years out in a rural district, probably ten miles removed from what was then a town of about 3,500 to begin with. I was in second grade, rode the bus, which given the distance it had to cover took about thirty to forty minutes to get to the school. Fun times.

Even at that age, I was a voracious reader, and would walk to the library on the next block over from the school to grab three or four books for most weekends. I liked the Hardy Boys "mysteries" in particular; as cheesy and twee as they might be in retrospect, they probably provided an early synaptic pathway for my adult love of most crime fiction.

Mind you, I'm not saying that the Hardy Boys are a gateway drug to Dennis Lehane and James Lee Burke, but if you start reading that genre (even peripherally) at seven years of age, you might hard-wire yourself to later, more adult iterations.

Anyway. So one fine morning we're on the school bus headed into town. Most of the kids got along fairly well, but one kid, a former friend from up the road who was a year older, and had several meaner older brothers (one of whom later did nine years for rape, and was ultimately murdered by his own adult daughter in retribution -- take a wild guess for what) who enjoyed egging him on, decided to give me a hard time. You know, for being a reader. As Homer Simpson so poetically put it, Egghead likes his booky-wook!

So first a couple of taunts and head-slaps, then shoving my books onto the floor. Even at the ripe old age of seven, I could sense a couple of important things quite clearly:

• This was going to escalate, one way or another.
• I can get out in front of this, or I can curl up and wait it out.
• If I choose option #2, this is going to be a daily occurrence. Plus, since I go to the same school as this asshole, and he's only a year older than me, this might go on for a while.

As the bus, piloted by a crotchety tart lovingly nicknamed "Myrtle the Turtle," trundled its way past the rural district cemetery, I picked up the top book from the pile on the floor, and swung it directly into the other kid's face. Didn't break anything, fortunately, but there was blood suddenly. I dropped the book and started swinging wildly, the way a kid who's never thrown a punch yet will do, connecting maybe one in five but getting a message through -- don't fuck with me, I will fight back.

After what seemed like an hour but was only a few seconds -- we were, after all, still moseying past the maybe two-acre cemetery -- I had enough awareness to consider the possibility that fighting on the bus might Get Me In Big Trouble. I stopped for a moment and glanced up the seemingly endless center aisle of the school bus, toward that large rectangular mirror where you could see what or whom the bus driver was looking at. Myrtle looked directly at me, and beneath that grim squint I could see the barest trace of a tight-lipped smile. All bus drivers know who the troublemakers are on their routes.

So I did not Get In Trouble; as I departed the bus, Myrtle looked over at me and said, "Don't do that anymore," with that same tight-lipped smirk. "Okay," I peeped meekly, just relieved that whatever that Trouble was, it wouldn't find me that day anyway.

Better yet, those other kids left me alone after that. We didn't magically become all friends, but they at least understood that, for their purposes of cheap amusement, I was more trouble than I was worth. And for the entire next year, until we moved across town, there wasn't any guff from anyone.

By now, you see my broader point. It's a staple of every cheesy prison movie, from The Shawshank Redemption on down -- you don't have to be a brutal predator, but if you show yourself as a victim, there will always be a line of takers to treat you like one.

I'd like to think Joe Biden has seen, far more intimately than any of us can imagine, how the empty tropes of collegiality and courtesy and comity work out in reality, when the other side is actively invested in engineering your failure, and makes it clear that they couldn't care less about how it all affects non-elite citizens. I'd like to think he understands that he doesn't have to take suggestions from professional cynics, that if he wants to purge bad-faith weasels and little Eichmanns out of his offices, that is his prerogative, and it is entirely in his own rational self-interest.

If Biden hopes to get anything done, he needs to start with wiping the functionary scum, the bureaucratic enzymes that processed the previous maladminstration's endless fecal waste, out of the body. And he doesn't owe anyone any apologies for it; in fact, he -- and the rest of the octogenarians running his party -- need to step up and take credit for as much as they can, shout it from the rooftops.

The "performative" aspect of politics has been gone into at great length here and elsewhere, increasingly so over the past half-decade. It sucks that it matters, but it matters. Just like in that little-kid "fight" on the school bus nearly a half-century(!) ago, it was less important that I "won" the fight, than that I showed all those kids that I was willing to fight, that they weren't just going to roll me.

Biden doesn't need to ask anyone's fucking permission -- not Moscow Mitch, and certainly not some Beltway scriveners who are directly dependent on their access and their surface-of-the-sun hot-takes, suffused as they are with the hoariest of conventional wisdoms. Only Democrats need to seek the permission of the opposition party. Only Democrats need to seek "unity" with the hopelessly angry, hopelessly incoherent bloc that comprises the base of the opposition party. Only Democrats are expected to "moderate" with purposefully immoderate people. Every fucking time.

They need to operate as if their backs are against a great big immovable wall, because they are. They need to remember back to 2006, when they took a midterm win and literally managed to save Social Security from privatization. They fought like they understood that it was real life-or-death shit, that the usual gutless incrementalism wouldn't cut it anymore. That was engineered by none other than Nancy Pelosi, which proves she can do it.

But they have to stop fretting and prattling about how they're going to "explain" their moves to some hostile low-info dipshit out in East Overshoe, Arkansas. Those motherfuckers will never vote for you, even if you came to their doorsteps with duffel bags full of cash. Bokay? They just won't.

When the Democrats stop worrying about "explaining" and "framing" shit, and putting real energy and effort into motivating people, it's an ironclad guarantee that they'll be surprised at the results. Say what you will about the conspiracy-addled doofuses on the right, but they are motivated, passionate, and they show up. I mean, they're motivated and passionate about all the wrong things, but what would a motivated and passionate counterpart to them on the left look like, people motivated about things that would actually benefit them and their communities and regions, the country and planet as a whole?

What might that look like? Since we are not permitted to vote for any parties other than the two (or two wings of the same one) duly anointed by the holy dollars of Corporate America and its mediaopoly octopus, we'll never know.

But in the end, this will be the one true barometer you can use to determine whether the Biden administration has a chance at "success," however you want to define it, and whether the next decade in the US can start undoing the ravages of the first two decades of this wondrous new millennium, or if we have more 'n' better decline of empire in the years to come.

It all starts with whether Biden and his team understand that this is their one and only chance to fight, that when the zombie apocalypse comes, capitulation is really not an option -- you can only strive to find slightly safer ground, and take as many of them down as you can in the process. They are not going to negotiate with you on anything.

So whom and what do they intend to fight for? We're about to find out, and the answer will either raise or doom their party, whether they understand that or not. But they need to decide, or Moscow Mitch and his merry brand of treasonous bandidos will be happy to make that decision for them.

Rush to Judgment

Not going to waste much time or effort on this, because he really isn't worth it, but it is a fine larf to see some of the usual dopes entreating us to "be best" or whatever, with Rush Limbaugh's supposedly terminal diagnosis. (I thought he was stage four -- which, in my understanding, generally means "there's nothing more we can do" -- back at the beginning of the year.)

I could say something shitty, like hoping that every breath he continues to draw is more agonizing than the previous one, something like that. But the fact is that you have to care about something or someone in order to hate it (them) sufficiently. And I just don't care, at all.

I assume that most people, once they hit a certain age, begin having those little existential conversations with themselves. What kind of mark will I make? How will people remember me? What part of me will live on, and for how long?

Obviously, for 99.9999% of us (not an empirically proven number), the answers are, in order:  Little to none; fondly (at best) for a while, then less and less; very little, and not for very long. Even for people with large families and/or large groups of friends, they all move on at some point.

Limbaugh has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several decades by poisoning the well of what passes for American political discourse. People reflexively point to him calling then thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog" early in his career, but the fact is that that's one of his more harmless bits.

He's always been a cheerful prevaricator, a passer of rumors and innuendo, the orchestrator of an endless campaign of calumny and fear. Basically his show and his schtick have been an ongoing false-flag operation, distracting his rube audience with fake misdeeds from the Democratic villains of his passion play, while his Republicon saints robbed the country blind and stupid.

Here's what he had to say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg a couple years ago -- or has he memorably dubs her, Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg. [Ed:  Hi-yooooo!] You can see where Genius Q. Dealmaker swiped his splendiferous gift for nicknamification. Truly, this is inspired stuff. And he couldn't even wait for the body to get cold before he was clamoring for a (fascist) replacement to be installed in the seat.

It goes without saying that the people who will have anything positive to say about Limbaugh are the same sort of arm-dragging troglodytes who will miss Trump when that final Double Whopper finally takes him to hell. Limbaugh's impact is arguably larger than Trump's, and in fact, it's clear that the life's work of the former was to set the stage for the latter, to keep people dumb and angry and eager for the next day's outrage pill, like the Skinner-box rodents they really are.

Like I say, I don't really give two shits whether Limbaugh keels over tomorrow or ten years from now, because his legacy and operational principles will be the same either way:

1. The herrenvolk are entitled to their own set of rules and customs, which (as Frank Wilhoit so memorably put it) protect but don't bind them, while simultaneously binding but not protecting everyone else.
2. Hate and bullshit are easier to digest -- and more profitable! -- if you stuff those turds into a handful of cheesy "jokes" and nicknames, all of which are meant to be taken with utmost seriousness, while also being used as a shield to deflect the opposition's "humorless" rebuttals.
   
3. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

The one thing I actually do hope for Limbaugh is that, in his quiet, more reflective moments, when the microphone and lights are off, when he sits in his vast, empty mansion with his cat and his current wife, that he really thinks to himself about whether the life he chose to lead was the life he had dreamed of when he was younger, and if not, what might have gone differently.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and it sure doesn't hurt for everyone to take note that Limbaugh got a much fairer shake out of life than most decent people, and that whether we're "good" or "bad", we all end up the same.

So you might as well do something you can actually talk about in polite company, something that you don't have to be ashamed of. Carrying water for monstrous billionaires pays well, but the fact of the matter is that after a few weeks of grief kayfabe, they'll shove Charlie Kirk or some equally useless sack of shit in the chair to carry the water and poison the well, and Limbaugh will be completely forgotten within five or ten years, except for those who spit when they say his name, like Father Coughlin or Lord Haw Haw. Some legacy.

The main thing for liberals and Democrats is not to let themselves be gulled into this "let's be nice" high-road sucker's game. You have no obligation to forgive your abusers or their enablers, nor to mourn their demises. The fact is that they seek this absolution only as a way of minimizing the abuse and its effects. They don't actually care if you "forgive" them or are "civil" to them; it's just a cynical ploy to keep you on your back foot, to remind you that they will never give you the courtesies they demand from you at every turn.

Keep that in mind in the weeks and months (and even years) to come, because the bigger the landslide, the more you're gonna hear this "reconciliation" bullshit, this Rodney King can't-we-all-just-get-along rhetoric, as a hasty attempt to cover their real-world efforts to undermine the Democrats -- and more importantly, democracy itself.

Never forget what the true endgame is here -- making sure only the right people get to have a say in how their world runs. Limbaugh was an important voice in distilling that toxic brew down to a level where the average Keystone Light swiller could latch on to some talking points, and never have to worry about whether they were accurate in the least.

Deep Thought #2

I'd be happy to #BoycottNBC, but aside from Sunday night football, I never watch it. I couldn't name three shows on that network if you put a gun to my head.

That said, I mean, come on. Just what do you think is going to happen when this demented, drug-addled, still-contagious dotard is wheeled out to try his schtick on a crowd that is not comprised of his usual gaggle of booger-eating shitheads? The odds of this convincing a single person to vote for him, who wasn't already balls-deep in the cult, is about the same as the odds he'll read Infinite Jest over the holidays.

They All Knew

Of course Trump knew. Did anyone really need Bob Woodward to sit on that amazing revelation for seven months to come to that realization?

(I hope every meal Woodward eats for the rest of his life, food purchased with the royalty checks from these courtier journals, tastes like blood. Because it's fuckin' blood money, pure and simple. Shame on him, and shame on anyone paying a red cent for his goddamned book.)

People are going to focus on the raw moral perversion of Trump knowing back in January that the virus was real, and dangerous, and could kill a lot of people. And that's true, as far as that goes.

But here are some other things he knew, and that everyone close to him knew right from the start:

• There would be multiple opportunities to cash in along the way -- stocks for companies producing various necessities.
• The procurement system could be gamed heavily, not only for profit, but for leverage. So bootlickers like Ron DeSantis got more PPE than he needed in the first place, while Robert Kraft literally had to fly supplies in on his private jet -- in a state with a Republican governor -- so that the feds wouldn't hijack them like the cheap Goodfellas knock-offs they are.
• Every dime of aid that has gone out has been with the condition that employees forced back to illness and death have no recourse against the fiends who sent them in to die. How's that chicken taste now?
• Every key Republicon senator and house member was in on it, right from the start, cashing in every step of the way. Kelly Loeffler, Richard Burr, those are just the ones you may have heard about. Wait till someone audits Matt Gaetz's transactions, or Ted Cruz's. You just watch.
• The billionaires' club has collectively gained nearly a trillion dollars over the summer, while tens of millions of working schlubs are still out of work, facing eviction, watching the world burn around them, watching loved ones die on a remote Zoom feed.
• All of it was preventable, but it just wasn't profitable. So you cash in on the crash, then you cash in again on whatever recovery is to be had (or allowed).

Good thing the mediots are still showing up for Kayleigh's Hour of Lyin' fer Jebus. So helpful. You guys are really preserving democracy there. Try not to pull any muscles patting yourselves on the back. Remember, folks, MagaNinny came directly from CNN. Keep that in mind next time you're watching Tapper or Lemon or whoever. Zucker's shop is Satan's boiler room, period.

Good thing the Democrats are utilizing every single procedural power at their disposal  to respond to all this. Let's see -- Chuck Schumer lamented that Trump lied. Yeah, I think I saw that on the cover of No Shit, Sherlock magazine back in the fuckin' Nineties, bro-ham.

So Chuck, are you calling out your scumbag colleagues for not stopping this fucker before he killed two hundred thousand Americans? Rep. Pelosi, are we drawing up articles of impeachment for, shit, any of probably two dozen various things over the past six months? Are we impeaching Bill Barr for finally dropping any remaining pretense about being Trump's personal lawyer?

No, they're "not worth it," according to Madame Speaker. You got that? We'll be over a quarter-million dead by Thanksgiving, and they got him on tape confessing to knowing, but Trump's not worth it. Oh, and he's a rapist, and the attorney general of the country is openly bending the law to prevent his accountability, but Barr's not worth it either.

I wonder, but am reluctant to ask, just what awful deeds these would have to do in order to be worth upholding the law. I think that the day after this election, regardless of how it turns out, Democratic and liberal voters should start asking that very question of Democratic politicians. Because while they may have plausible deniability of knowing what Trump knew back when he first knew it, they've known it since then. They absolutely know now what the fuck he's capable of, and still they choose to wring their hands and chant about waiting for November.

Whether or not you know someone who's been directly affected by the #TrumpPlague (and by now, odds are that you do, at least secondarily), everyone's been affected by it. An entire year of everyone's life has been essentially wasted on this -- on top of all the needless deaths and waste and economic destruction. Trump's fuckery and incompetence are the wellspring whence all this comes, but he doesn't operate alone.

Primo Levi said that it wasn't the monsters you had to worry about -- they're easy to spot. It's the ordinary minions willing to do the dirty work, or just willing to look the other way. Think about all the individuals who could have done and said something, who still could say and do something, anything. The leading newspapers and politicians who should have been calling for his resignation months ago. The people who work in the White House -- from the custodial staff to the paper-pushers -- who could walk out in protest. The congress-weasels who could call out their faithless colleagues for their support of this vainglorious would-be despot. Hell, John Kelly, who literally let Trump talk shit about Kelly's son's service and sacrifice at Robert Kelly's grave in Arlington. Doesn't get more in-the-tank than that.

At the current rate, another thirty thousand Americans will die unnecessarily, waiting for November. That's on them as much as it's on him now. Too bad it's not "worth it" to do anything about it, or at least try.

The Next Kyle

There's at least one of these assholes in every town:

A Black girl was beaten and harassed by a boy in an apparently racially motivated attack in Kansas.

Brandi Stewart said her 11-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Thomas, was playing with friends outside an apartment complex Friday evening near her Shawnee school when an older boy began taunting her with racial slurs, reported WDAF-TV.

....

The girl responded by telling the 12-year-old boy that “my Black is beautiful” — and that’s when he allegedly knocked her unconscious with a pole.

His parents must be proud. The kid will get some slap on the wrist, just enough to piss him off more at the injustice of it all, and then....well, you just wait until he hits eighteen or twenty-one. The trajectory of losers like that is as predictable as a drop of rain. He'll last just long enough to inflict real damage to someone else someday. That's all people like that do, and these days, they are overtly encouraged to do so as they please.

This nation, like most, has deep, ugly pathologies that it has tried to alleviate and/or remove, with varying levels of effort and success. That kid was taught by someone to treat other people like that. It gets passed down from generation to generation like some evil family heirloom, sweating, pulsating, sentient.

I don't know what you do to end it. I used to think that simply leveling the playing field for these sorts would at least put their "economic anxieties" on the back burner, and I still think economic justice is a necessary precursor to real social justice. But it's also likely that many of them would still be hateful assholes, just with more money.

I do hope that this poor girl grows and gains the understanding that not everyone is like the thing that attacked her, that most people really are not like that (though a distressing number of them really are like that). It's just the vocal zombie contingent that gets the most attention, who distract us all from the basic fact that there's still a slight majority of us who just want to live a life unencumbered by doubt and debt and hate and fear.

That is not to say that "love conquers hate" or "non-violence overcomes violence" or any of that nonsense. History should clarify that for you with a quickness. It is to say that, whatever else, a life lived immersed in hate and lies tends to be nasty, short, and brutish. It cannot be pleasant or peaceful or contemplative, bereft of anything resembling an inner life or an appreciation for anything worth appreciating.

There is no joy in the life of a person who treats other people like garbage, only the temporary escape from an ugly existence. The lies of the ad hoc heroic myth fade away quickly, and the person quickly realizes that people who live in the real world -- employers, friends, even relatives -- want nothing to do with him, that the only people who will associate with him are all awful.

Imagine, for a second, being someone like Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, being just smart enough to know that what you do is disgusting and scummy, but being just dumb enough to believe that there is some amount of money that will fill the hole where your soul once was.

This is the life Kyle Rittenhouse has ahead of him, whether or not he goes to prison [Narrator: He won't.]. There will only be thirsty opportunists and hangers-on, and generational racists who will want to further indoctrinate him. It's a vicious, self-reinforcing dynamic, and we've seen it all before.

(All that said, I am not convinced that Rittenhouse is a racist per se. He seems more like an impressionable, not-terribly-bright kid who went looking for trouble and found some. Whether the white-power-adjacent influences in his information system take a more influential role as his life progresses along its new path obviously remains to be seen. It seems likely, though.)

All you can really do is shun them, but completely. That goes even more so for the enablers and handlers and media shitheads who use their platforms to push this evil nonsense just to put a few more bucks in their pockets. Many of them appear to be in their mid-twenties or early thirties. These people should never be able to feel comfortable around decent people again.

Opportunity Costs

Throughout the summer, I've been thinking a great deal about the various opportunities we have managed to collectively squander -- chances to rethink fundamental assumptions about "how" "things" "work" in "society," what all those terms mean for various stakeholders, and how quality-of-life metrics could and should have been improved upon or at least touched in this crisis, but instead, of course, were ignored, scorned, repudiated.

This essay is a nice distillation of that grand -- yet very small, personal, intimate -- idea. What kind of life do we want for ourselves, and for the people we care about? What was our dream, and how has it changed?

Few things sum up the dynamic of brutal end-stage capitalism than a handful of millionaires, hustling away at the behest of billionaires, telling the working-class rubes to get their lazy asses back to work, that an extra $600/month for a few months will turn them irretrievably into lazy slackers. You know, like the Wal-Mart heirs and all their kids.

Wait, you say, Wal-Mart is a corporation. They provide goods and services the free market wants. They earned whatever money they have, and can bequeath it how they see fit.

Fair enough. But Wal-Mart also has always used taxpayer-funded gubmint largesse to fund its lucrative operations. From the long-term tax abatements and incentives to open up in economically depressed areas, to deliberately shorting employee hours so they have to get public assistance for food and health care, the Waltons have always suckled at the teat of Uncle Sucker.

You paid for that two-hundred-foot yacht where the family celebrates New Year's in Sydney Harbor. You paid for the useless grandkid who went to USC and paid a classmate to write all their papers and take their tests for them. You paid for the infrastructure improvements that were necessary just to get the stores built in all those little towns.

Public subsidy, private profit. It's a phrase that crops up a great deal, once you start doing a little digging on where the money comes from, and where it ends up.

There are countless opportunities for a better society that we have always passed on, obviously. But during the #TrumpPlague, three huge ones stand out:

• Education. In a world where information is at everyone's fingertips, we no longer need a century-old indoctrination system we borrowed from the Prussians. Education now is about three valuable things:  knowing what knowledge is useful; knowing where to find it; and hands-on experience. It's more involved than that, but those are the basics. Socialization is fine and valuable, but the toys have already changed the coming generation in ways we oldsters could not have anticipated and cannot turn back. The problem is that from the management end, the education system is really a funnel designed to ensure pliant workers and consumers for our magical hyper-capitalist singularity future, while also keeping the kids properly warehoused so their parents can work. And the higher education system is just a financialized grift, pushing kids into schools to get a piece of paper that they'll be paying for until they're fifty. It's credentialism as much as education or experience. And it's all about to change drastically anyway. Wait and see how many small colleges go broke over the next six to twelve months. But going forward:  what sorts of things do "we" want "our" kids to learn, and how much should they be charged against their futures for the privilege?


• Work. Who are the "essential" people? What specifically do they do that makes them essential? Are they paid accordingly? What role do you as a consumer have in all that? Should you pay a little for meat from your local butcher, or produce from your local grower, before supporting the factory-farm supply chain that coerces people back to dangerous, low-paying jobs? Do we want to "restore" the vaunted American manufacturing base? Well, here's the deal with that:  it cannot happen to scale unless and until we decouple health care access from employment status. That's all there is to it. Next time you're watching your friendly corporate or cable "news" broadcast, no matter which channel, no matter what time of day, watch it for at least a half-hour or an hour, and count how many health care commercials you see. I bet you didn't even notice until you started taking count.


• Money -- more specifically, wealth inequality. I've used this analogy many times before -- think of the economy as a massive circulatory system, and money is the blood. If you get too much concentrated in a single area, what happens to the body? Why did our elected representatives shovel trillions of dollars at people who were already obscenely wealthy, and will just hoard the money? They literally could have given every household $31k (based on a low-ball estimate of $4 trillion in economic assistance so far), and that money would have poured directly into the real economy. Shit, you could have picked four million people at random and given each of them $1M, as opposed to the equally arbitrary tactic of handing money to people who already had millions or billions. We have been bamboozled to believe that the Dow and the GDP are accurate barometers of the economy. They are not -- they are betting predictors for a handful of whales at the NYSE casino, where the house always wins, and if the shit blows up, well, Joe Sixpack will be forced to help them keep their extra vacation homes. In return, Joe gets his shitty health plan whittled away, and his pension fund ripped off. Same as it ever was.

It's easy to say that the idiots have dragged us all down with their nonsense, and certainly they have, but this has been a long time coming, and from many angles. The bestiary of American idiots is large and varied, from the coal-rolling shock troops heading into the cities (outside agitators) in the hopes of escalating violence and mayhem, to the hapless good-governance liberal dupe who still believes in institutional integrity and the rightness of their principles.

If this country had anything resembling moral leaders or a collective conscience, they would have been calling for Trump's resignation months ago. Instead you have a seedy subculture of hackcess journos pretending to protect the sanctity of the republic with their court stenography, working at the behest of publishers and editors-in-chief who are there explicitly to protect their own role as elite gatekeeper media -- that is, elites talking to each other, and thus setting the tone for "general discourse," but really just trying to make a horserace out of a corrupted process, in order to -- wait for it -- sell you more boner pills and big ol' trucks. Meanwhile, the "serious journos" hang on to the good stuff for their fucking books.

It's all slipping away, right in front of us, thanks to a deliberately engineered plutocratic insurgency decades in the making. The good news is, it's still up to you to some small extent, though this is almost certainly our last best chance to salvage what's left and try to start putting things back together. Ignore the polls, and the vicious, corrupt machinery that churns them out. Ignore the media's cynical spins and gutless hot takes. Remember that if your vote didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying so hard to cheat you out of it.

But you have to show every goddamned time, not just on Super Bowl Sunday. Everything from dog-catcher on up matters. That's how the fuckers got in charge at every level, because they took it seriously. Being a citizen is a job, and if you fail to show up or pay attention or take the right action at the right time, someone else will be more than happy to make those decisions for you.

No more excuses. Put up or shut up; fuck or walk. Make sure you can vote, and then bloody well do it, every time. You wanna make good trouble, that's the best kind.

Useful Idiots

So this guy gets some level of street cred in the political media for being a "serious" "conservative" or whatever, and so these silly attempts at analysis get attention as substitutes for serious thought. Trump's incessant antics and nonsense provide a lot of rhetorical cover for these guys, so they can dance around the obvious truth -- he's the logical culmination of all their efforts for the last forty years at least.

The idea that now they suddenly don't "stand" for their supposed long-preserved "values" is just industrial-grade bullshit. The only problem they pretend to have with Trump is that he's an asshole. But even that's a lie -- they love that he's an asshole. They get everything they want and they get to blame Fuckface if he loses, and double-down on the process if he manages to cheat and steal a win.

It's the perfect racket for an organization that stopped being functional two generations ago. To be fair, I suppose you have to be of a certain minimum age, and never read any books about times you're too young to recall directly, in order to know just how ridiculous this all is.

Republicons made a deal with the devil back in the 1960s, preferring to use angry crackers and their bullshit grievances, and steep them in a potent brew of god-bothering jabber, in order to gull the working-class rubes into voting to make billionaires wealthier. It's a working formula, so it's hard to blame them for continuing with it.

What's changed in the past decade is how much eight years of a black president enraged them, and how social media showed them that there were enough like-minded assholes out there that they could say the quiet parts loud. So Trump spent five years rounding up the dipshits with his birther conspiracies, and #MoscowMitch and #LeningradLindsey took notes, pretended to be offended.

Again, their feigned horror at his boorish manners is tempered by their glee at how he gives them everything they want, provides them plenty of distractions so they can quietly push through unqualified judges to lifetime appointments, and the instant validation they get from the millions of douchebags who are completely down with all of it.

Democrats and liberals need to stop reading articles like this and believing it, because it peddles a seductive lie that establishment Dem pols want very much to believe -- if we can just get rid of Trump, we can get back to normal. Maybe they're just holding their fire until they see how the election shakes out for them, but anyone who genuinely believes that "getting back to normal" is even a remote possibility needs to do themselves and their constituents a favor and retire as soon as they can.

There is no going back, and not just because of the way Trump has burned through the "norms" and "rules" and useless performative fripperies they have all wasted time with all those years, but because the country is in truly dire straits, and getting worse by the month. It will take years of triage to undo not just Trump's destruction, but even the destruction wrought by the Cheney regime is still being undone. You think we're done paying for the fucking war?

Many Dems and libs want to tell themselves that the "fever" that has overtaken their opponents and their constituencies is the result of the permanent pernicious influences of Fox News and AM hate radio. Implicit in that is that these folks have been tricked or brainwashed, and that is a dangerous category error. Yes, they're being lied to, but that's not because they don't know the facts, it's because facts are irrelevant to them. Facts are not part of their decision-making process.

This is a very difficult thing for Democratic policy-makers and strategists to understand, because they are hard-wired to try to "reach out" to these people, somehow never learning their lesson, always managing to trick themselves into thinking that it's easier to poach a couple percent from an increasingly polarized bloc that despises them, than to convince ten percent of the much larger pool of non-voters that there's something worth showing up for.

As the Trump base continues its slide toward lunatic cultism, it is important to recall a truism:  it is impossible to deal with irrational people using rationality. By definition they do not function or react with it. It's a waste of time. You're not going to deprogram them with ten weeks of thirty-second ad blasts, and you sure as hell aren't going to move them with [rolls eyes] your fuckin' binders of facts.

All this tedious theorizing from behavioral psychologists about tribal heuristics and cognitive biases and all that shit? Have you considered the possibility that maybe a lot of them are just indecent people, that you can attribute it to conditioning or temperament or social pressure or some combination thereof, but in the end, they're not going to listen to your appeals to rationality and so it doesn't matter?

They believe they're in a war for survival, and their elected representatives speak and act accordingly. They wield power. They don't fuck around. If the best-case scenario occurs, and Biden wins and the Dems flip the Senate, they need to act with a real sense of urgency, and do everything they can to crush the opposing party into a state of utter irrelevance.

And frankly, I don't see that they have that understanding among the leaders of the party. Again, they think Trump is an aberration, when he is the culmination. It's a vital difference that, if they fail to note and act upon, will bite them in the ass in 2024.

Meanwhile the nation's largest state is on fire throughout, hurricane season is kicking off with two storms converging on the Gulf Coast, the #TrumpPlague is still running wild, tallying up a 9/11-sized body count (that we know of) twice every week, tens of millions out of work, millions about to get evicted, economic depression looming, and only the handful of people who own the stock market are doing well.

And Tim Alberta's Republicon Party is fine with all of it. Does he really think Trump had to tell McConnell to sit on the hundreds of bills the House has passed over the last eighteen months, that Mitch had to be arm-twisted into withholding COVID relief that had been passed back in May? Fuck no, it's the same shit he pulled all through Obama's tenure as imperial custodian. And all his fellow senators stand by while Trump commits an impeachable act every week, sells out the country, shrugs his shoulders while a thousand Americans die every day.

Trump is just what an old-time street-crime team would call the "stall," the seemingly random guy that walks up to the mark and asks for directions while the partner comes up behind and picks the mark's pocket, or thumps him on the head with a sap.

The problem here is not that Tim Alberta's party suddenly became something he no longer recognizes; the problem is that Alberta knows full well that his party is openly, actively, gleefully destroying this nation, because all they really ever stood for was power and money. They see an opportunity to have it all, and they're giving it their best shot. They're a bunch of fucking traitors, and Alberta knows it.

There's no "coming back" from the things they've done just this calendar year, the monstrous things they've stood by and silently supported. Two hundred thousand Americans dead in about one hundred fifty days, and they couldn't care less. The economy is a shambles and it's a de facto banana republic, and they could stop it but refuse to. They have no shame.

They betrayed their country, and simply count on the fact that there are just enough awful people out there to keep them in business. They might be right about that, as it turns out. Maybe in time, a party of actual conservatives can be formed from the ashes of the current group of Russian dupes and flat-out turncoats. But it's disingenuous to pretend that this just started when Orange Foolius blundered into the room, especially as long as shitbags like Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr still draw breath.

The Little Engine That Wouldn't

I like Ted Lieu, I really do. (And yes, I am aware that that sounds like a Dr. Seuss couplet.) But he does not seem to take seriously the ramifications of his own words. Trump has made it clear that he will do whatever it takes to cheat and steal -- if not to win outright, then to get it close enough to drag into court, and/or to fuck it all up enough to delegitimize the results. (Unless, of course, he "wins," in which case it was the best election ever, tremendously huge and very, very honest, the most honest election process in the history of the country.)

What if the open burning of the USPS is just the beginning of this delegitimization process? What if he finds a way to allow certain mail-in ballots, but not the "wrong" ones? What if he finds ways to burn walk-in voters as well? There are numerous ways to do that, and you can bet he and his team of scumbags will do all of them.

And they won't even try to hide the effort. Why should they? Rep. Lieu and the "leaders" of his party have made it clear that they don't want to dirty their hands in this fight. They want you and me -- because we have nothing better to do, and it's not like it's our fucking job -- to vote in a corrupt process, and then if that turns out to be a dead parrot, then to get out in the street and protest.

Yeah. People have been protesting shit all across the country, all summer long. Tell me one tangible thing that has resulted from all that, all those moms getting gassed, all those veterans getting truncheoned, all those journalists getting blinded. How's that been working out? A couple cops got arrested, big fucking deal. What changed as a result of all that? Anything? Bueller?

The General Accountability Office has found that Chad Wolf and Ken Cuccinelli, the "acting" head and deputy respectively of the Department of Homeland Security, are in their positions illegally. That is, it is a violation of the law for them to be in their positions -- and again, these are the individuals calling the literal shots at the protests -- any longer, without being officially vetted and confirmed. Pursuant to that law, Congress can resolve to oust these individuals, to halt payment on their salaries, to call them into chambers and formally question them.

Imagine that -- illegally placed government officials putting unmarked thugs on the streets to beat up nonviolent protesters. It's happening. It's been happening. Ho-hum.

Maybe someone should enforce the law.

The current postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is a Republicon contributor and lackey who has at least $60 million invested in direct private-entity competitors to the United States Postal Service. His conflicts of interest and operational bad faith are wide out in the open. As a civil officer, he can be impeached. He can be called into House chambers and questioned, under threat of subpoena and arrest if need be.

Maybe someone should use the powers afforded to them. If there is a crisis, if the situation is urgent, then perhaps it is time to act with a sense of urgency. I mean, are you just waiting around to see if Dear Leader decides mid-October that the elections need to be postponed outright? If so, what do you propose to do about that, Congressman, since it would be your own powers being openly usurped?

I am sick and tired of hearing from these people all the things they can't do, when they haven't even gotten around to trying all the things they can do, that they must do. What was the so-called Blue Wave for, if not for this, to stand and fight against open banana-republic activities?

Impeach Trump again and again. Impeach Barr. Impeach DeJoy. Stop giving in before even joining the fight. Stop telling all of the peons that it is they who must be prepared to fight. You can call hearings, you can subpoena testimony, you can file emergency injunctions in district and federal courts. You can impeach. You can arrest people who refuse to cooperate. You still have many tools at your disposal, but prefer to generate excuses as to why those tools are inconvenient or not timely enough. Stop punting on first down. Quit whining for a royal flush, and play the hand you're dealt.

When these sorts of operational issues are raised, many liberals will reflexively give you the evergreen "Democrats in disarray" response, a nod to the corporate media tropes that suffuse our bumbling twilight empire.

Let's be clear about this:  The Democrats are arrayed exactly as they intend to be.

This is a hell of a marketing pitch, you have to admit -- please vote for me, even though I am utterly powerless to do anything beyond my comfort zone. Have you tried every single tool at your disposal, every single shred of power that you do possess? No? Well, come back when you have. Otherwise, seriously, what the hell are you doing that I can't already do on my own?

Slope of Enlightenment

It would be difficult to put a number on just how many collective hours and column inches have been dedicated to assessing the various and sundry cognitive failings of one Jenius Q. Dealmaker, Fuckface in Charge, and Caudillo of Bedminster, First of His Name.

Clinical diagnoses abound:  the narcissistic personality disorder; oppositional defiance disorder; sociopathy; psychopathy; and on and on. And of course the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger effect, where stupid people are unaware of just how stupid they really are.

Certainly all of those ugly pathologies and more explain the smooth, diseased wad of oatmeal between his ears. But the armchair diagnoses give short shrift to the more immediate pathology at hand:

You, America. Fuck you.

Well, maybe not you personally, maybe not me personally. But take a week or several and make a partial list of all the fucked-up things El Caudillo has done and said over the past five years, and then remind yourself that once again, over forty percent of your fellow 'murkins are fine with it. They want more of it. They want you to have more of it.

Do they sound like the sort of people who can be reasoned with, who can be "met" in some proverbial "middle"? What is the middle on, say, Russia paying bounties to Islamic terrorists for American scalps? What would be the middle on defunding Social Security and Medicare? What is this middle people speak of, as applied to gassing suburban moms and kicking unarmed teenagers in the face, blinding journalists, extrajudicial domestic renditioning for civil disobedience?

That's just a few random items from the past six weeks or so. You know? A full reckoning would be damn near impossible.

The "middle" of a hog-shit lagoon still stinks of filth and disease. The "middle" of hell is still pretty fucking warm. Meeting Jeffrey Dahmer "in the middle" still results in someone ending up in the cooking pot.

Maybe I'm not being clear about this.

Every elected politician, no matter how "good" or "terrible," no matter how "smart" or "stupid," is a reasonably accurate reflection of their constituency. This is a truism that gets ignored all too often, especially by "moderate" or "conservative" Democratic politicians, who are forever trying to convince themselves, each other, and their donors, that "tacking right" on this or that petty social issue is better and more effective than, say, coming down unequivocally for something approaching economic justice for the rabble.

The reason Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey keep winning, even as they gleefully cut their constituents' throats and sell them down the river at every opportunity, is not because they're great guys doing a great job. It's because there are enough assholes who would rather undermine themselves and their families and communities, watching the exercise of raw power, than risk the chance of giving even one dollar to someone who they deemed undeserving. They would rather spend the rest of their lives wallowing in a pit of impotent bitterness and rage, than come to their senses and admit -- even just to themselves -- that they got rooked by a cheap, obvious con.

So El Caudillo's various cognitive pathologies and biases are also theirs, most acutely the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger effect. In an era where information is free and everywhere, if you are reasonably literate, then being an ignorant dupe is a choice.

You choose to watch the white-power rage-monkeys on Fox News, instead of reading an article -- or god forbid, a fucking book. You choose to forward the nonsense your idiot Facebook uncle sends you, without fact-checking a lick of it. You choose to chortle and snicker at His Travesty's increasingly desperate tweaks of an increasingly useless White House journamalists' pool, knowing that he's full of shit, knowing that you would never buy so much as a canned ham from this grotesque charlatan, much less a car or a house or health insurance coverage.

It's not just that "he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy," or "a poor person's idea of a rich person." His fans have that exact same vision of themselves. They decided long ago that they were much smarter than the average bear, so much so that they could decide for themselves what was "real" and what wasn't, who was telling the "truth" and who wasn't. They decided that the only person they could believe was a guy who's been telling provable lies his entire life, defying everyone to call him a fucking liar.

And now that we're chugging into a full-blown economic depression, a quarter-million dead by the end of the year, forty million already out of work, people waiting in line and online for basic goods, they're now distracting each other with some harebrained conspiracy theory about how everyone in Hollyweird is a SEX PREEVERT YOU GUYS WON'T YOU LISTEN?!

In their bizarro universe, celebrities such as Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain were "suicided" because they were on the verge of revealing this hidden truth. In that universe the Democrats, partly to protect their fellow child molesters but also just because they're assholes, have rigged this whole "plandemic," which will magically end on November 4th when Joseph "Satan" Biden is installed as the new antichrist. [cue Omen music]

It doesn't matter to them that there is far more photo and video evidence of Dear Leader palling around with Jeffrey Epstein (who was suicided) and Ghislaine Maxwell, or that Epstein literally lived next door to the rat-infested CoronaLago estate for years. They would rather believe that a pizza place that has no basement was running a child-trafficking ring out of its basement.

It takes a peculiar magnitude of cognitive bias to believe that on the one hand, the Dummycrats are too weak and impotent to electorally beat an obnoxious moron, while being simultaneously so omnipotent that they have forced the entire corporate media system and every other world leader to bend to their plandemic hoax. These idiots make 9/11 truthers look like the model of sanity and empirical probity.

They manage to get by in their little bubble, aided by an endless parade of self-loathing journos and politicians who cater to their "real 'murkin" pretensions. They're just as naked as their emperor has always been, long before he got into politics, and they're about to find out that there is an empirical reality, that this is not a simulation, that whether or not their monster manages to cheat and steal its way back in, a hard rain is gonna fall, and they better learn to swim.

Sign of the Times

Good morning sunshine, the earth says hello! Today's fresh outrage is that the nation's bumbling, stumbling excuse for a flagship newspaper "accidentally" tweeted yet another stupid, empirically false fact-shaped item, in a sad attempt to flog one of their sad slop-ed columns. It's a recursion of stupid mendacity and narrative confusion that makes Inception look as straightforward as Night of the Living Dead.

(Which, when you think about it, is perhaps as good an explanatory cinematic combination as you can find, for this country in this year of our dark satanic lord.)

The question we should be asking is not, "why does the Times suck," or "why does the Times persist in doing ham-fisted shit like this," or "why does the Times continue to employ demonstrably useless -- no, destructive -- writers in its stable of opinion-mongering horse meat?"

No, the question we should be asking is, why does anyone continue to throw good money after bad to such a worthless, objectively harmful rag?

The Courage of Your Convictions

Christ, he's such a fucking pussy:

“It was a disappointing meeting,” declared top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer, saying the White House had rejected an offer by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to curb Democratic demands by about $1 trillion. He urged the White House to “negotiate with Democrats and meet us in the middle. Don’t say it’s your way or no way.”

To be somewhat fair to Schumer, he did at one point in his full press meet assert the fact that the House had passed the HEROES Act back in May. But that should have been all Schumer had to say, other than maybe ending with "....if only Moscow Mitch gave half as much of a fuck about the working people of his state or the country, as he does about shoveling unqualified dipshits into lifetime sinecures in the federal judiciary, and handing pallets of money to fuckers who already have more than they could spend in twenty lifetimes." What the fuck is this "meet us in the middle" shit?

This is yet another of those "what would it take" rhetorical questions that we all ask ourselves now. What would it take for a Trump cultist to change their mind and see the light of basic empirical reality? What would it take for leading Republican politicians to put country before party and stand up to the pig? What would it take for leading Democratic politicians to stop with the stupid pretense that we're all on the same team and want the same things for the country and can work together?

The answer to all of those questions should be clear by now, and of course it is the same answer for all of them:  Nothing. There is no conceivable event or situation that will cause any of these groups of people to find the moral courage to do what they know is right. None of them stand for anything except raw power and/or money.

Schumer and Pelosi should be in front of every camera repeating over and over how these fuckers didn't have any second thoughts about shoveling trillions of dollars to the hotel and cruise line industries -- even though those are dead or crippled for the foreseeable future, so the money just went to the execs anyway, and the cruise lines are American in name only anyway, since they register the ships in Liberia or Panama, and are mostly staffed with non-Americans. They should be telling the truth and shaming the devils, not this mewling, puling gosh, why won't they play nice bullshit.

You know why working-class dumbasses keep voting Republicon, above all else, even though they know they're being ripped off? Because they fight. Even when the fight itself is futile and stupid.

Because when Obama was in charge, and the Democrats ran Congress, and Moscow Mitch didn't get his way on something, he went straight to the cameras and railed about the fuckery, and he disciplined his party minions to go forth and do likewise. They are never not on message, and their message is fuck you.

And while they're in power, the appended message is make me. It's a nihilist death cult from top to bottom, and it's long past time to recognize it as such. Again, Chuckles, us peons on the street can go out and get a big bag of nothing on our own. You should at least be able to convey in a convincing manner that the animals you are up against are not your fucking friends, nor are they the friends of any American who is not in the coveted "net worth" club. For fuck's sake, at this late point, 160k people dead and 40M out of work in about four months, it should not be that difficult to put across that simple, toxic dynamic.

That thumb-shaped dickweed openly killing the Post Office met with Schumer and Pelosi yesterday. Today he scrambled the top execs of the USPS just to fuck it up even more. So that must have been a super-effective meeting yesterday. Can't wait to hear their big plan to preserve electoral integrity, or just to get the exterminator in to fumigate the White House and make the cockroaches leave even if we are allowed to vote and there's a landslide.

We all hear and say a lot about how the Republicon party needs to be ended completely, how they have utterly abdicated their role and face a generational landslide blowout blah-blah-blah. And that is true enough -- IF THE ELECTION ACTUALLY HAPPENS. And day by day, that prospect is being whittled away, right out in the open. And nobody is doing a goddamned thing about it.

So an equally real existential dilemma is staring the Democratic Party square in the eye -- when they're not looking at the ground, slump-shouldered, hat-in-hand, hoping for another crumb from the table. If they don't win this in an indisputable blowout, they're doubly screwed, because their own base will abandon them, since they can't get anything done anyway, and the Republicons will absolutely go medieval on their asses.

Hoping for some Fitzmas, deus ex machina, miracle whatever bullshit ain't gonna cut it. They're gonna close all the physical precincts, and refuse to deliver the mail-in ballots. They are openly stealing the election, point blank.

What are they doing about it? And they want my vote, and my donation? For what? A fucking means-tested 401(k) carve-out or property tax deduction or some dickless bullshit like that? Two-year interest deferment on loans for minority-owned small businesses? [rolls eyes, makes jerkoff motion]

This is not some standard mediot "Dems in disarray" guff. The problem is that the Democrats appear to be arrayed exactly as they intend to be. Fortune favors the bold, and time is short, and their colleagues are actually their mortal enemies, and they really should have noticed that about [checks watch] ten or twelve years ago.

One way or another, the problem will be resolved in less than ninety days.

This Is Us

However this movie ends -- and while my prediction wavers week-to-week, I think Biden squeaks through, though it will definitely get much uglier regardless -- it seems we may owe ol' Fuckface Von Clownstick a verrrry begrudging measure of gratitude. [pauses while readers collect their dropped jaws and exploded heads] Why? Hear me out.

1. The political system. Obviously it's a swamp of corruption and always has been, ever since it was an actual swamp waiting to be architected by some frog. But by simultaneously chanting the mantra "drain the swamp" while merely restocking it with his own gators, Trump forced observers to confront their own cynical assumptions about our political system, which is really just a vehicle for institutionalized graft and rentier capitalists, and to collectively turn away from it all with each of our assumptions, however individually divergent, confirmed. That is to say, whether you think it's more corrupt than ever, or whether you (amazingly) think he's doing everything he can to clean things up, your suspicions have been proven true to you.


2. The media ecosystem. The corporate (aka mainstream, "lamestream," ad nauseam) media are on their collective heels, ravaged by private equity vultures and by years of ad revenues lost to internet competitors. They are mostly just horse-race coverage now, vainly clinging to a transparent veneer of pretenses to some hallowed "fourth estate" principle they have rarely ever tried to live up to. It's just a rotating claque of fifty-percent prognosticators taking their tired opinions and slapdash analyses from panel show to panel show, and a gaggle of impotent losers stenographing lies and talking points (which are also lies).
   
   Nothing new is ever mined from these dismal pockets of (b)ore, just fools' gold. They are consistent only in the sheer paucity of original thought, and in the complete disconnect these bozos have from anyone with a real job -- so much so that they are routinely gulled, in their stupid Cletus safari articles, into collating either the marketing points of the chair of the Bumfuck County Republicon Party, or the foaming rants of some fist-shaking codger at a roadkill eatery.
   
   Mostly, though, the ease with which Trump has been able to render them as collectively supine, obedient, and utterly impotent, should make each and every media consumer out there wonder exactly what they're handing over their money and time for. Turns out they get paid whether or not they actually do their job -- or maybe being useless and compliant is their job after all. There's a Lucy-with-the-football dynamic in a lot of areas, and when it comes to the media and the average 'murkin, take a wild guess who's Charlie Brown.


3. The Republican party. Oh, if he loses they'll insist he was an aberration, an anomaly, a sui generis force they heroically endeavored to contain. The people who will be fooled by that want -- no, need -- to be fooled by it. There is nothing new in pointing out that Trump is simply the boorish but entirely practical culmination of GOP policies and strategy for the last fifty years -- steer racist whites into voting to let billionaires become trillionaires by hoovering ever more money out of the peons' pockets. That's all they've ever stood for in my lifetime, even counting Nixon's few liberal feints toward the EPA and such like. Anyone who continues to deny that at this point is either lying to you or to themselves. (Probably just to you, in order to profit for themselves. Because as we know, the only thing that matters in this world is money.)


4. The Democratic party. There are a few bright lights, but it's mostly a bunch of terrified bureaucrats more worried about losing their Wall Street donors than they are driven to motivate the burgeoning base of frustrated non-voters. I have no empirical data to support this, but I am convinced that for every lazy slob who just can't be bothered to give enough of a shit about anything to cast their lot, there is at least one other non-voter who is waiting for something or someone to vote for, rather than the evil of two lessers. I know because I was one of those people when I was young and foolish.
   
   Now that I am old and foolish, I can say that voting is definitely an exercise in futility, but one that would paradoxically become less futile in proportion with increased participation. In other words, the bastards keep winning because they are successful at discouraging you. Soon as you understand that it's not a one-time event, not the Super Bowl or the Kentucky Derby, but an endless exercise in process improvement, you focus on the dynamic aspect of improving the process, and the people who participate in it.
   
   For now, that means getting rid of the Republican party in its entirety, and putting the Democrats on notice. The old, entrenched entities of the party need to be made to understand that unless they are willing to fight for every inch of ground, they will be replaced at the earliest opportunity. Regardless, Trump has shown the current lineup for who and what they really are -- completely willing to spend months drafting performative bills to rot on Moscow Mitch's desk, but shrugging that there's simply nothing they can possibly do to counter or impede the open corruption of Trump and his dog Bill Barr. Either you use every power you have at your disposal, or you don't.


5. This is America. The COVID death count is about 160k at this point -- almost the combined total of WW1 and Vietnam. It will probably be over a quarter-million by the end of the year. Trump has found ways to be increasingly feckless and erratic throughout, getting worse and more brazen by the week, and his approval ratings have risen in the past couple weeks. He's made it clear he doesn't give a shit how many people die from this entirely preventable situation, and it's okay.
   
   You can make all the usual excuses about the media being in the tank or whatever, but there's no getting around this fact. Ignorant, nasty, spiteful people are fine with being ignorant, nasty, and spiteful. They've made a choice just like you and I make our choices. This is what they are, this is who they are. And when there's enough of them, to the extent that we humanize a nationalist mythos, imbue it with its own personhood and agency, it becomes a critical mass that determines what the country is, what it intends to be and do, what its role in the world should be and become. They have made themselves clear.
   
   The billionaires who really run this country, who own and operate the political system and all the nodes of information, make no secret that they hate you and me and everyone who isn't in their elite net-worth status. You're nothing but ignorant rabble to them, something to be manipulated and sold and used up as needed. They don't try to hide any of this. They would literally rather spend thirty or fifty percent of their precious profits subsidizing Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or some shithead think tank, than pay even one percent tax. That's just the way it is. You already know this.
   
   And it makes sense that Limbaugh or whoever is willing to take their money -- hell, I'd be happy to to take thirty million a year to do what he does (for a year anyway, before pulling the pin on that grenade and telling the audience to go fuck themselves), because you can bet when he finally kicks off, someone will take that job, and millions of broke peons with nothing to gain and nothing to lose will be happy to listen to whoever is willing to stoke their racial and class fears. It's a drug as potent as whatever strain of opioid is running through their dried-up towns this week, and they don't have anything else. That's the thing -- at least you can say Limbaugh and Hannity are in it for the money; to what extent is up for debate. But their listeners and viewers are cutting their own throats for free. (It's a small consolation to know that the billionaires and the talking heads they rent hate them too.)
   
   We'll see how it goes in ninety days, but unless it really is an unstoppable blue tsunami that completely eliminates these monsters, it might be time to consider that nations, like humans, have a lifespan, they run their course and then they turn to dust, and that maybe our individual lifespans are simply too short to keep at the futility of trying to talk suckers out of their tree. But again, as with the the above groups, Trump has clarified this dynamic for everyone.
   
   Liberals can no longer fool themselves into believing some tired variant of if only they knew. It should be clear by now that they know, and they're good with it, all of it. They want more of it. So maybe it's time to consider real estate prices on the Adriatic coastline or something. If this is how it is, then there's not really much you can do or say to change their minds. You can march in the streets and get your skull cracked and your eye shot out, maybe get whisked away by unmarked men in an unmarked van, maybe pull twenty years in Club Fed for throwing a rock at a Robert E. Lee statue. See what changes as a result of all that. How's it been working out so far?

I wish I had something more positive to say, but it's become impossible to have any faith or trust in any of this country's political leaders, media monkeys, or even average citizens. All the institutional bulwarks have failed, and all it took was someone with the nerve to completely ignore them. Too many people are simply too lazy and cynical to pull it together and change course, and that weighs down whatever idealism there is. I wish I was wrong more often than not. (If that was the case, then I'd probably have a cushy cable-pundit sinecure, or a NY Times column.) But you can feel free to go back through fifteen years' worth of archives, and you tell me what my batting average is.

I do think there is one last chance here to snatch the fat from the fire, but it will take dedication and commitment and consistency, for years after the election. This fight is not going away; they have a lot more money, and they use it weaponize that laziness and cynicism, and pit people with common interests against each other. Again, most people know all this already, but knowing something and acting in accordance with that knowledge are obviously two very different things, otherwise we wouldn't be where we are.

It takes more than a willingness to engage in the banal distractions of trying to convince some asshole on your Facebook feed or whatever. It takes voting with wallets, every day, as well as ballots every couple years. It takes sending periodic emails to companies and congress-critters alike, and letting them know where you draw those lines for yourself. If enough people did just those things -- which are free, and so many people have so much time on their hands now -- they would have to listen.

Either it's worth fighting and expending effort for, or it isn't.

So what's it gonna be?

Idiots and Assholes

Hoarse Whisperer has been one of my favorite reads on Twitter for some time now, and this post is one reason why, because I've made the exact same point before, just from the opposite angle, so to speak. And it's an important fundamental point in why I believe the things I believe, and how I process information against those values and beliefs.

Ideally, we all get through life without being and idiot or an asshole, but that ideal is rarely met. (Fred Rogers, Albert Einstein, a handful of others. Feel free to add your own in comments.) The fact of the matter is that most people are one or the other to some degree -- again, hopefully not too much.

So, to use myself as an example, I'll happily cop to being a judgmental asshole, even impatient and arrogant at times with stupid people, but that's the extent of it. Some people are maybe not so bright or quick on the uptake, but they're decent people, and so you overlook that trait that might otherwise be somewhat frustrating to deal with.

But when you run into people who are idiots and assholes, you seriously have to watch yourself. For one, intelligence is a different thing than cunning, and many assholes are ruthlessly cunning, and idiots are dumb enough to think they'll get away with it.

Consider the soulless monster currently festering in the White House as the epitome of this theory. What are we up to now, three million infected, a hundred forty thousand dead, something like that? The guy is back to golfing every weekend. Why? Because he's bored with talking about his inept response to the plague he caused, but more importantly, because we literally have to put money in his pockets every time he plays golf at one of his rat-infested sumps.

And that goes for everyone who enables him, collects a paycheck from being around him, pays him membership dues, whatever. They're out to screw you out of something -- your money, your vote, your loyalty.

Desaparecidos

If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so. -- Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio, President of Guatemala, 1970-1974

If you had "Portland becomes the Gaza Strip" on your 2020 bingo card, congratulations. In fact, as this summer of mostly police-escalated riots in putatively "liberal" or "Democratic" cities has progressed, the patterns and rhythms are similar from city to city, and are playing a familiar tune.

Even so, Portland stands out in that group. A famously progressive city, the largest city in its state by far, with a liberal Democratic mayor and city council, in a state with majority Democratic state legislators and congressional representatives, a liberal governor (Jerry Brown's sister, no less), and two liberal US senators.

So how's all that working out for them? Aside from a sharply worded letter from Jeff Merkley to Bill Barr (which the latter no doubt promptly wiped his ass with) and a few acerbic phrases from Nancy Pelosi, what precisely is anyone in the Democratic Party doing about the in-your-face authoritarianism, anonymous goon squads in full military gear hustling suspected graffiti artists into rental vans with Florida plates without so much as a word? What the fuck is the Border Patrol doing hundreds of miles from the Canadian border, much less the Mexican one, and in what way is this sort of activity within their scope of work?

It is already being hinted that the counterinsurgency ops (let's call them what they are) in Portland are essentially a proving ground for expansion into other cities -- again, all governed by Democrats -- experiencing the thrill of, ah, "social unrest." Never mind that in hundreds of documented incidents across the country, it has consistently been the various strains of militarized "law enforcement" types who have escalated peaceful protests into violent conflagrations. (Strange how they're always able to find a way to disarm and subdue white nutjobs without any bloodshed, though.)

Which is, of course their goal:  the best way to undermine these movements is to crack skulls, and then discredit the protesters by painting them as rioters and anarchists. And why not? Who's going to stop them?

It's also a practice run for November, in case the election isn't enough of a blowout, and Dear Leader decides not to accept the results. Sounds like a paranoid conspiracy theory? Okey-dokey. I would say that it's unlikely, but by no means impossible. Take a moment and reflect on just how many things over the past four years have occurred, that prior to 2016 you had considered "unthinkable."

It's been three full weeks since it became known that the Russians have been paying Islamic militants to murder American soldiers in Afghanistan -- and not only has no one called for Trumps' resignation, or written up some sort of protest legislation or censure, as far as I can tell, no major media figure has even asked him about it. The same sinecured dipshits that whined for weeks about Obama wearing a tan suit simply cannot be bothered to ask about openly treasonous conduct. If that isn't a stone-cold indicator of where we're at right now, I really don't know what is. We need journalists who give a fuck, just as much as we need politicians who give a fuck.

John Lewis was a giant among men, channeling his righteous anger into a storied career in public service. Seeing him side-by-side with Martin Luther King, both looking so young, Lewis especially at just twenty-three, but focused and committed. The man took dozens of beatings for his commitment and his principles, things that are certainly lost on the thugs currently infesting the executive branch, and the mangy guard dogs who strain at the leash to do their bidding.

Here's yet another example, and you can find hundreds more from the past couple months if you do a little bit of searching. Look at these brave men, bravely beating down this violent anarchist. So fucking brave, really. I honestly don't know how someone does something like that, just this incredibly chickenshit deed, and then goes home and resists the urge to eat their sidearm. I mean, you have to be a real die-hard fucking turd of a human being to withstand the temptation. These thugs can go straight to hell, seriously. Their very worst fear is a fair fight.

They should rename the Edmund Pettus bridge after John Lewis, like, years ago, but certainly now. Pettus was a dirtbag piece of shit who died thirty-some years before the bridge was even built. It was never his bridge to begin with. Some shitheads named it after him just tell everyone else fuck you. Once John Lewis walked across it, it became his bridge, now and forever.

It would be nice to think that Lewis' epic courage and commitment might inspire a generation of Americans, decent people who are at long last exhausted by the wretched hive of scum and villainy that has at long last taken over this plague-ridden cesspool. I guess we'll see in November.

Despite Rep. Lewis' stellar example, I remain skeptical that street demonstrations actually accomplish anything. Yes, they raise consciousness and awareness and all that. I'm talking about tangible, identifiable changes as a direct result.

The main thing is, I'm not willing to do it myself, and I don't ask other people to do something I'm unwilling to do myself. There is nothing here that I'm willing to get my skull cracked for, or shuttled away in an unmarked van for this domestic extraordinary rendition program we apparently now have going, and that again, no one will do jack shit about.

There is no goddamned way I'm going to get my head caved in for fuckin' Nancy Pelosi or Joe Biden or any of those people. The day they risk anything to fight for me will the the first such day. They get my vote because they manage to be slightly less awful, but that's the extent of it. No one should have to sacrifice their bodies or lives in order to motivate people who, for whatever reason, cannot be motivated otherwise to simply show up and do the right thing.

All that said, if someone is determined to get out in the streets and confront the fascist thugs, I would recommend a couple of things that might seem dumb and insignificant, but could make a difference:

1. Flag swag. Carrying a full-size flag, like some Skokie-marching skinhead, would be unnecessarily cumbersome. Put some flag patches on your clothes. Wear a flag-design mask or t-shirt. No sayings or jokes or hortatory rhetoric. Just do it. It makes it a lot harder to paint someone as some commie pinko anarchist.
2. Bring a gun. I'm not remotely kidding about this one. Especially in Portland -- Oregon is an open-carry state, you just can't carry a loaded weapon in Portland city limits. You can make fun of the doughy neckbeards with their Meal Team Six getups and their DURRR MUH GUNZ dick fetish all you want, but you know what? The cops never fuck with those guys, do they?

Weirdly, I seem to be finding new levels of contempt for certain people. Trump is easy meat; the guy's been a shithead since his mother shat him on the piss-stained concrete of a Hell's Kitchen drug alley. Anyone with functioning synapses sees him for what he is and despises him for all of it.

Then you have the people who are willing to be in the same room with him and sell out their country on a daily basis, for a goddamned paycheck. These are awful people who should never hold a decent job again.

But it's the people who are willing and eager to commit violence on his behalf, the thugs and bullies who look forward to "tuning up" anyone who dares to cross them. I don't know what wrong turn such people made in their lives where they end up like that, but I do know that we're all less safe with such people being allowed to carry deadly weapons and use them with no accountability.

Stay safe. Know who the bastards are and deny them your money as well as your brain. Show up in November, and every single time afterward.

Job Qualification, Slight Return: Dereliction of Duty

Per the previous post, Adam Davidson has a brief explanatory follow-up as to why and how the money-laundering sausage doesn't get made so much. And while it all makes a certain perverse sense, it's just a lame excuse. "It's confusing"? "It takes too long and doesn't have enough impact"? "Everyone knows Trump is corrupt and has become numb to it"? Really?

If that's their rationale, then my response is, then what the fuck do we need you for? If we already know Trump is a corrupt liar, then what is the point of sending journo minions to sit in carefully spaced folding chairs to transcribe the obvious lies of soulless shills? Is it not the job of good journalists to take stories that are complex and possibly "confusing," and craft a narrative that clarifies and explains, without oversimplifying or omitting salient detail?

Watergate was complex. Iran/Contra was complex. Somehow ways were devised to explain these narratives to the thumb-sucking rube that apparently constitutes the average mainstream media consumer.

I don't blame Adam Davidson for this, mind you; I've read plenty of his pieces and he's one of the good guys. Anyone wanting to be a solid reporter could learn a thing or two from him. But these self-serving excuses from editors, providing cover for their imperialist running-dog corporate publisher overlords, are bullshit, pure and simple.

Take a look around and pick at random from the rancid piles of content garbage Corporate America has made you care about, or at least know about. I've never watched so much as a minute of American Idol or Bachelor or Survivor, but there are names and faces I know and recognize from these products, thanks to constant network cross-promotion and Google News aggregation.

Obviously, that's the first step of effective marketing -- creating awareness through promotion and repetition. You're telling me they can do this with the thirsty wretches of reality teevee purgatory, but not with the fact that the chief executive is a treasonous, money-laundering criminal who literally doesn't care that the Russians are paying Islamic militants for American military corpses? Really?

In the past, when presidents have had especially egregious scandals, journalists felt some editorial responsibility to weigh in, sometimes even suggesting that they resign "for the sake of the country" or whatever. More than one hundred newspapers -- including most of the leading national ones -- called on Bill Clinton to resign before he was even impeached. These days, not so much. They don't want the headache generated by pissing off cultists.

Well, guess what, folks? No matter what you do or what you say, if you're not fully in the tank for Orange Foolius, they will hate you regardless. So you might as well do the right thing. Do your job.

Same goes for Democrats, especially House Democrats. They pre-emptively squash the idea of impeaching again, which gives the angry toddler a pretext to continue his behavior, knowing that it will not be curbed or punished. And why shouldn't he? He has no disincentive not to.

When challenged on this, the reflexive cry is, the Senate will just acquit, so it's pointless, the people just have to show up and vote.

So let's look at those two points separately:

1. House Dems were fond, at least before the #TrumpPlague hit (and hey, there's a missed opportunity for opposition branding, no?) of pointing out how many hundreds of bills they had passed, but that big meanie #MoscowMitch was holding up because he's a dick. Well, by their own logic, this is a stellar example of pointless, symbolic posturing. Why bother going through all the motion it takes to propose, write, troubleshoot, and pass bills when you already know they'll be ignored or rejected? But in fact, it's even more useless than another impeachment would be (or, for that matter, a separate impeachment of Bill Barr). The impeachment process entails extra mechanical process of investigation, which not only adds scrutiny to the proceedings -- assuming a few diligent scriveners can be prised from Kayleigh MagaNinny's asshole, or the East Wing Tiger Beat column Maga Haberman runs for the Times -- but also legally mandates compliance from the targets of the inquiries. In other words, Barr wouldn't be able to just laugh and blow it off, knowing that the Dems don't have the stones to make it sting. He' have to comply, or face criminal charges. This would effectively halt (or at least impede) Barr's ability to continue his behind-the scenes evisceration of the federal prosecutorial system.
2. The people did show up and vote. It was called the midterms. It was in all the papers and everything. It was triumphantly known as the "blue wave." Maybe you heard about that. The idea that the "blue wave" parsed out to, ehhh, just drag your feet into eventually making one half-assed attempt at impeaching this fucking traitor, and when you fail you totally don't have to bother trying anything else until the next election, good job everybody! is a ludicrous lie that only a cosseted, self-serving politidunce could possibly believe. The voters voted. The message was clear. You want me to vote again, I will, but I'm going to make sure to vote for people who take the fight seriously. Gutless dweebs who whine about the battle being lost before it is ever fought need to go back to their fucking car dealerships or whatever. I want people who are going to exploit every media outlet available to them, in order to spread a clear, consistent, unified message, and if that's too much to ask, the unemployment line is over there.

This is the great question we should ask ourselves and each other, about these self-appointed guardians of democracy who always seem to get caught sleeping on the job -- what is the job of journalists, what is the job of opposition-party politicians? I would suggest that maybe the layperson's understanding of those jobs is fundamentally different from the understanding of the people who actually hold those jobs. In that gap lies the real problem at hand.

We can't just keep whining that journos are in the tank for Republicons. If that's the case, then fucking boycott them. If you're still bothering with CNN or the NY Times, you're part of the problem anyway, whether you know it or not. If you're not primarying establishment hacks like Pelosi and Schumer, ditto.

Think back to Obama's terms in office. However corrupt and mendacious and comically awful the opposition party was, they were effective. Their goal was to obstruct and impede, and they largely succeeded. They kept him from doing most of what he wanted to do, and effectively ankle-bit him even when he was successful with something. They don't give a fuck about looking "unpatriotic" or whatever. They go for the throat, lie about whatever needs lying about, and say fuck you to the rest. They don't punt on first down or go into a prevent defense for the fourth quarter. You keep fighting until the whistle blows, period.

Summer is the doldrums, and hopefully the Democrats are using the downtime wisely to run up the score in the homestretch after Labor Day. This is not just about getting rid of Trump and getting Biden in there. This is about retaking the Senate and increasing the House majority. This is about the necessity -- the actual, practical, operational necessity -- of driving a stake through the blackened heart of that party of traitors and criminals, for the sake of whatever's left. This is about putting down a rabid dog.

Whatever the Dems think the score is right now -- 42-17 in the third quarter or what-have-you -- they have to commit to going all out in that fourth quarter and running the score up as much as possible. Make it 84-17 if you can, or 200-0. Changing sports metaphors, go Harlem Globetrotters on them. People like to tell themselves and each other that the best offense is a good defense, but that's not true. The best offense is a good offense. Don't overthink it.

The comfortable fiction -- one that not only Republicons but their feckless Dem enablers need you to believe, for the preservation of the establishment money machine that greases them all -- is that Trump is an anomaly, a political aberration. That is a lie, a goddamned lie. Trump is the culmination of fifty years of tactics and propaganda, come to fruition. If he wasn't such an asshole about it, they wouldn't even be embarrassed to say it.

The Republican party needs to be ended as a viable political entity, full stop. It is a fascist mishmash of grubby plutocrats, sweaty authoritarians, and thieving evangelicals. They hate you and everything you've ever cared about in your life. They are more than willing to completely destroy the country if they can broker the ongoing looting of the country for a handful of billionaires. It is important not only to end all support for them, but for any entity who continues to operate as if they can be "worked with" in good faith.

If corporate media entities can't be bothered with that sort of work, then leave them to their reality-teevee coverage. If politicians can't be brought around to understand who the real enemy is, then it's time for them to go. There is no longer another option.