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.

October Surprise

Paul Campos at LGM has a post about the prospects of an actual slide into authoritarianism post-election, and despite my vacillations over the past few months, I actually tend to share that cautious optimism.

Part of that cautious optimism is more recent, though, and due directly as a result of Orange Foolius' catastrophic debate performance the other night. Obviously, as we found out the hard way in 2016, debate "wins" or "losses" don't matter all that much; it is universally agreed that HFC "won" all three of her debates with #Brokeahontas, and lotta good it did her, right?

But that was then, as they say, and this is now. The people who decided to "take a chance" or "vote for change" now know what that entails. He is no longer an unknown quantity. There is zero chance he will "learn" or "grow into" the rigors of the job. He's done everything he can to cater not just to his base, but to the basest elements of that base, the worst fucking people.

Obviously this doesn't mean anything should be taken for granted, either -- just as he's never made a single honest dollar in his rotten excuse for a life, Trump has never been in a fair fight. The office he defiles daily also confers an array of powers he can deploy, and already he is trying every trick in the book, and some that aren't even in the library.

But the fact is that after months of trying to delegitimize the vote (unless he wins, of course), no one outside the cult is buying it -- in fact, no one outside the cult is buying anything he's selling at this point. People have had enough, they're exhausted, and it shows. They don't want another four years of this bullshit, accelerating into decline and incoherent fury.

And that's really what you saw in full bloom in that debate -- the heedless cruelty, the indifferent mendacity, the raging incompetence. It's been there the whole time, you know. I saw these things in him back in the 1980s, when I barely paid attention to the news. But I know a fucking asshole when I see and hear and smell one.

I honestly cannot believe anyone ever sat through five fucking minutes of his stupid show. There's a part of me -- the part that despises stupidity, that sincerely wishes for the worst things to happen to willfully dumb people -- that unfortunately believes that to some degree, this nation deserved Trump, if only to see that there is a difference, that these things do matter, and that you have to pay attention and stay engaged and take action once in a while.

I have for some months considered this election basically as a choice between Terminator 2 (where Schwarzenegger is the good Terminator) and Ike Turner. Trump goes off the rails, raging incoherently like the fundamentally abusive male that he really is at heart, saying, bitch, look what you made me do, while Biden looks out at a bemused, enervated citizenry and says, Come with me if you want to live.

That is what the choice really comes down to, and it's true all the way down-ticket. Either you support these monsters or you don't. It is that simple. Anything else is just empty, self-serving rationalization.

Two hundred thousand dead in six months is an atrocity, a grim milestone that speaks volumes about the players in question. In a nation of 330 million people, it is proportionally few, so the majority of 'murkins have had the luxury of not having had it personally affect them. I know of people second- and third-hand who have contracted the bug, maybe one person (who was nearly ninety years of age) who may have died from complications (details were not clear as they were relayed to me indirectly). I suspect many, many others are in a similar boat.

But everyone has been affected by this, regardless. At best, each and every one of us lost an entire year from our lives from this shit -- and it ain't over, not by a long shot. It is resurgent in many areas, it will gain more traction during flu season, and actual doctors are saying it could be another full year before they really have a handle on it.

So even a die-hard supporter of this raging clown has to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that their blind, stupid devotion has directly cost them a year and probably two of their actual, literal life. And it was completely preventable. All that was required was leaders who cared about their country. Instead we had a feckless dope and his scumbag enablers, people whose first and only thoughts were how to monetize the disaster.

That may not cost him the cultists -- if anything, they've shown conclusively that literally nothing will sway them, and they can go straight to hell with him -- but it doesn't gain him any converts. And the math says that the hardcore base simply isn't enough, even with the EC advantages in those states.

(I would also assume a fair-to-high probability that Brad Parscale's weekend meltdown is directly related to some serious criminality in Dear Leader's money-grab of a campaign, and that Parscale can easily be leveraged to flip on his bosses, who are already dumping him under the proverbial bus. The real question is how soon all that takes place. The guy is clearly unbalanced and stressed out. There's nothing stopping him from going straight to the media the second his 5150 hold is up.)

The other thing is that despite the constant dog-whistles and calls-to-arms for the various fascist gangs out there, there has been relatively little actual violence perpetrated by those elements, considering the scope and scale and sheer volume of the protests, and the ample opportunities for them to commit real mayhem, were they so inclined. The daily displays of vigilante theater have amounted to very little.

I don't think anyone would miss the Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers if they disappeared tomorrow, but the fact is that nearly all of their activity has been the usual social-media woofing. It's disturbing that so many active LEO are affiliated with these creeps, but I bet most of them aren't willing to throw away their ability to get pensioned at forty-five or fifty years of age and start up their security consultancy or whatever. They cannot just show up and "poll watch" wherever they feel like, and the precincts that do let them get away with it are likely to be blood-red (politically, of course) anyway.

I mean, do they think we don't all notice that they never seem to show up in any, ah, black areas? You see any of these Meal Team Six boogalosers in fuckin' Compton or Milwaukee or Atlanta? There's a reason you don't, just as there's a reason that aside from a disaffected teenager who went looking for trouble in Kenosha and found it, there has been very little major violence.

Think about that for a second -- they've been encouraged for the past month from law enforcement and the highest levels of government, that there are no consequences for murdering "leftist" protesters in the middle of the street. We all assumed that they would take the wink-and-a-nod as official assent, or at least a promise to look the other way.

And yet they haven't done much of anything except get all their pieces of flair together in their gaping-asshole suburban-commando gas-guzzlers, yee-haw and stroke each other in the nearest Wal-Mart parking lot for an afternoon, and maybe cruise a few blocks in Portland with paintball guns and pepper spray. This is not to say that none of them will ever do anything, but the threat of actual, systematic political violence has not occurred, despite official approval.

(The BLM street martyrs seem to have gotten wiser about their good trouble as well. If you're not going to arm yourselves and come ready to scrap, then it's best practice to do your thing in daylight, and get home before dark. It should be clear by now that your sacrifice will change nothing, and there's nothing in this hollowed-out husk of a nation worth getting maimed or murdered for. Everyone knows Kyle Rittenhouse's name; very few people still recall the names of the people he killed and wounded.)

It may turn out to be wishful thinking, but if we get an actual landslide, the surprise might be that he and his shitbird minions will have to stand down and go away. I wouldn't be too surprised if there is at least one really ugly incident between now and, say, Thanksgiving. There's a decent chance that the mutants are keeping their powder dry for a close aftermath.

So it's up to all of us to show up and make that happen, to make the margins wide and clear enough so that the shenanigans can't work.

Don't Retreat, Reload

What A.R. Moxon says. To beat on a recent neologism, this cannot be emphasized enough -- the Democratic House members need to be preparing for another round of investigations and new articles of impeachment. Preznit Sling Blade has provided more than enough material to do so, and all of us -- especially the traitorous Republicon senators who gleefully sold their country down the river for a cheap sack of tarnished silver -- know it.

We already know what the Goopers are made of, and what they've become. They are now openly in collusion with a chief executive that they know and admit to being thoroughly corrupt, and are defying anyone to do anything about it.

No, this is now about finding out what stuff the Democrats are made of, how far they are willing to go to do what's right. There is no percentage in them doing what's expedient, or collegial, or any of that. As Moxon points out, pushing an agenda that is aggressively barbaric and even illegal, and that a consistent majority of the public oppose, has never stopped the Republicons. Never.

The Republican Party needs to be completely dismantled, root and branch, piled up and immolated, the ashes scattered to the winds and the remainder pissed and shat on, covered with lime and salt to prevent anything from ever growing there again. Its members have aligned themselves individually and collectively with thugs, traitors, polluters, tax dodgers, evangelical hucksters -- and that's just Trump we're talking about there.

No, seriously, take a good look at what that party has stood for, for decades, and what it looks forward to, and decide if that is a world you want for your children and grandchildren and so on. Every person in a leading position is pure scum, someone you wouldn't trust with a ten-dollar bill, much less your pension or health-care.

And they're gonna come after your Social Security too, which I would heartily endorse if it just meant the fist-shaking codgers that voted for this shit. I am not remotely kidding when I say that I hope every one of them ends up living on cat food and wondering why their kids and grandkids stopped talking to them, oh, roughly around mid-2016. But there are plenty of seniors out there who voted against that fucking thing, and are every bit as vulnerable to these coming depredations.

Of course, the SS cuts won't hit the current generation; the boomers managed not only to fuck up the world, but really to never pay any generational consequences for it. No, they'll take it out of my generation, like they always have. I just love being part of a generational cohort that has been treated like absolute fucking dogshit by the generation that came before it, at every possible turn. It would be difficult to find a historical parallel of one group of people that had such a palpable, abiding hatred for the succeeding generation.

Ahem. In the meantime, let's hope that Adam Schiff is leading the charge to get the next round moving ASAFP. In fact, it would be a fine publicity stunt if the Democratic members of the HPSCI made a point of skipping the utterly useless State of the Union speech on Tuesday, and made sure every news org understood that it would be so they could have a closed-door strategic session on upcoming matters. A good place to start would be to subpoena Lev Parnas and John Bolton, and broadcast that testimony far and wide. Take away Dear Leader's crowing victory lap while they're at it.

Whether they like it or not, the Democratic leadership is now not only in the role of trying to salvage what remains of the country, but it's going to be a fight for their own survival as a viable political party. Nancy Pelosi turns eighty in March. Who is being prepared to take over when she retires? What will things be like for them when Sling Blade squeaks by in November -- or loses but refuses to acknowledge the results?

There are no easy choices for them anymore, there is only fight or die, roll or be rolled over. They have a few dozen weeks in which to figure out a strategy and begin executing it. Let's hope they see it clearly and act accordingly. Get a fresh set of hearings going, a few talking points to hammer home relentlessly on the Sunday follies shows, flood the zone, stick to the script, speak with passion and conviction, and people will get behind it.

Somewhere between 70-75% of the public wanted witnesses, so that has to have included a good number of Republican voters. This is a popular, bipartisan issue. This is no time to be timid and worry about what Chuck Todd thinks, or some imaginary "swing" voter in Pig's Knuckle thinks, or what their "colleagues" across the aisle think. It should be clear by now that Ben Sasse would slit their throats for a pat on the head from his master. Keep up the great work, Nebraska!

So let's get this party started, again and again, right up until the election. Make the traitor turtle have to explain himself over and over for the next nine months. There is literally nothing to lose by fighting back as hard as possible now.

Off the Fence

For many years, I've maintained what I felt was a rather stalwart neutrality on the issue of guns and the Second Amendment. I believe reasonable people have a Constitutional right to reasonable hardware; i.e., no AK-47s or RPG launchers or flamethrowers. Universal background checks. Domestic violence convictions and violent felonies cancel out those rights for at least ten years, if not permanently. Mandatory insurance on these fetish objects might be an option worth pursuing.

I have generally supported and voted for politicians who maintain an essentially "moderate" stance on the subject. I am put off by the little-boy dick-grabbing "gun culture" as such, but I personally know enough responsible gun owners who are just as mortified by mass shootings and random violence as Gabrielle Giffords is.

I have a shotgun and a handgun that I rarely take out to the range, but are handy to have in an area where it can take the sheriffs a half-hour to show up in an emergency. I don't consider myself a serious "gun owner," when most of the real gun owners I know have over a dozen. Gun owners don't feel like their rights should be abrogated because of some random whackjob shooting up a mall, any more than any of us think that everyone's cars should be taken away because of a handful of drunk drivers.

Crush 'em

Another day, another tough guy leaving a threatening voicemail for a congress-critter who has the gall to disagree with Dear Leader. These losers really are a dime a dozen.

When all is said and done, if we really want to save what's left of the republic -- and hey, maybe we don't want to save it; there's a perfectly reasonable argument to be made that it's run its course, and is now just an empty husk for the plutocrats to take turns using like a blow-up doll -- but if we do think there's still something worth preserving and restoring to goodness if not greatness, then fucking well commit to it.

Obviously that means voting, despite how futile and pointless it seems anymore. Even so, game theory teaches that however dismal the odds, they're still slightly better if everyone votes than if they don't vote. And the good thing is that the more people that show up, the better those odds will get.

Unfortunately, you only get to do that every couple years at best, not counting special elections. What do you do in the meantime? Plenty -- for starters, make sure you can vote. Double-check with your local elections office to be sure. See if you can register to vote by mail, which you can do early, and is immune from the usual election-day shenanigans you read about taking place all across the angry-cracker states. No compromised voting machines to change your vote or "lose" a power cable or any of that bullshit that people do.

THEY CHEAT BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEY CAN'T WIN FAIR AND SQUARE.

Keep that in mind at all times, and use it as a weapon. Think about the thought processes involved in them not only cheating on the day of, but planning and strategizing how to cheat in advance, starting with #MoscowMitch (Putin's Bitch) preventing all election security legislation that has been drafted by the House, to come to a Senate floor vote. Many states use electronic machines whose software was created in -- wait for it -- Serbia. Yeah, no way the Russians could possibly hack our elections at all.

But simple math, and the results of the 2016 election, tell you that as awful as the cultists are (and no, it's not snark when I say repeatedly that I sincerely wish on them all the very worst things life has to offer), there are more people who see Dear Leader for what he is, and despise him for it, than there are of these simpering morons who would gladly let him fuck their wives and take a dump on their dinner tables. That's why they have to cheat -- there are more of us than there are of them, and they know it, pure and simple.

So use that day-to-day. Maybe I'll have to repeat this on a daily basis until I pull the plug on this popsicle stand in a year or so, but if enough of us boycott the companies that support the shows that put the liars and the propagandists on, they'll have to notice. Their money people will panic. The companies will pull ad space. I check into random Fox News shows every month or so, and they're running out of advertisers. It's all catheter companies who have nowhere else to go, or pharma companies that can absorb the hit.

But most of it's just in-house promo at this point, which means Fox is having to subsidize itself. That's not a sustainable business model, not even for an evil Australian bastard whose sole goal in life was to ruin the world. And you accomplished it, Rupert. Now kindly go off to your celestial reward.

As for the rest of it, the pro-wrestling spectacle that dominates the airwaves? Tune it out, turn it off, leave it. Don't listen, don't engage, don't respond. It seems like most of us have already gotten to that point, where we don't even bother to respond to that idiot relative or friend that we all have, that insists on sending whatever crap appeared on their front porch that morning. We don't even give them the satisfaction of a "bullshit" in response.

The goal at this point should be simply not to just elect any Democrat, but whichever Democrat understands the most that we can no longer return to some imaginary era of bipartisan comity. People like Joe Biden want to pretend that if we can just get rid of Trump, then we can go back to "getting things done," whatever the fuck that means. To which I would just reply, for starters:  Merrick Garland. Bokay?

Trump is not the cause of what ails us these days, but the natural culmination of thirty or forty years of Republicon propaganda and gaslighting, bankrolled by a handful of psychotic billionaires who should be rendered destitute at the earliest possible opportunity. And the party is all in on him at this point, and why shouldn't they be? He's given them everything they wanted, and told everyone to go fuck themselves in the process. He's perfect for them, and them for him. When he's gone, they'll just return to being obstructionist doorstops and discount fabulists. It's as if Diamond Joe has forgotten what Obama's entire second term was like.

So we all need to get on the same page and stay there. These people must be crushed, completely removed from power, and ended as a viable political entity. Period. You end the party, and you end the cult. Don't bother arguing with them or protesting. Explain only with your wallets and ballots, at every possible opportunity, and they will have to listen to you, I promise. It's not politics, it's math.

Civil Bore

Not to pull the Bill Maher "new rule" schtick, but there should be a rule for anyone who starts talking about or (more hilariously for Trump cultists) "threatening" a "civil war" (or "cival" if you're in illiterate MLB chumpire).

As John Rogers correctly points out, if you think you're serious about such a thing, you need to figure out the logistics first. Your best case scenario is that your Oathkeeper militia overtakes, secures, and maintains an area with the help of local law enforcement (unlikely, but technically possible in some parts of the country), and then what? Hold off the armed forces of the United States? (Posse Comitatus does not apply to armed, violent insurrections seeking to overthrow legitimately elected government.)

I should (and probably will, may post them if they're worth a shit) cook up a few short fiction scenes to game this out, but beyond spasms of regionalized ethnic cleansing of some sort, mass casualty episodes of domestic terrorism, perhaps assassinating political figures, there is no strategy, no endgame, no game plan for this sort of thing.

The very second you kill someone, whether it's some antifa type or a law-enforcement officer sent to take yer gun-slash-erotic-totem (what, you didn't seriously think Beto O'Rourke was literally, personally going to go house-to-house by himself to grab your AR-15, did you?), you're a killer, a mur-diddly-urderer, and there's walking that back.

Second Amendment fetishists fascinate me anyway, because they seriously do prize that sole attribute above literally everything else they profess to love about this country. The preferred framing of the situation is that of a bulwark against the overweening intrusions of Big Gubmint. And yet every time they board a plane, they take off their shoes and surrender their toothpaste, like the compliant little sheeple they really are.

All the Trump cultist, like the cult leader himself, has to keep themselves going is the fight. Struggle. Kampf. Jihad. The resurrection of long-lost terms such as Dolchstosslegende, Blut und Boden, and herrenvolk does not necessarily mean they are literal nazis, just that they are a lot less uncomfortable with the actual rhetoric and narrative that the originals had adapted to inform and excuse their subsequent actions. Those terms have suddenly become very useful again to describe some things that have become more prevalent. For starters, they seem to be perfectly okay with the children of asylum-seeking refugees being given to strangers as adoptees. Last I heard, that's human trafficking.

Any society, no matter how "modernized" or "sophisticated" or even "progressive" it may fancy itself, has a certain portion that is the polar opposite of all that. Maybe it's John Rogers' famous 27% figure, or a little bit higher or lower. My guess is that for just about every European or Anglosphere nation, the window is going to be somewhere between one-quarter and one-third, mostly but certainly not solely rural and non-college-educated, white and for some bizarre reason feeling persecuted.

They don't know anything about history "rhyming" or "repeating" itself, because you have to read it in the first place to be aware of those concepts and when they occur. All they know is that they didn't get the deal out of life that they think they deserved, and they know that no one will give them that deal. So the next best thing for them is to actualize through the candidate that ventriloquizes that anger most effectively, spouting lies and racist jabber in defiance of what the smart set claims as "good" and "right".

Doesn't matter to them that his cognitive skills are clearly impaired and worsening, that he consistently meets and exceeds the clinical checklists for narcissistic personality disorder and sociopathy, that he's incompetent and completely unfit for any office, that he lies constantly and is dumber than a sack of manure. It doesn't even seem to matter to them that, contrary to their delusion that he (hurrr!) "makes libturds cry," what he really has done is enrage and motivate the liberal base against him, as well as turn away key Republican electoral blocs, such as suburban voters and college-educated women.

And he hasn't even tried to fix any of the issues that they claim to care about -- health care, infrastructure, opioid deaths, good jobs. They don't care. It's a fucking cult, and should be treated as such. They might as well go to the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood and ask the folks there how they feel about L. Ron Hubbard.

You'd think that might dissuade idiot journos from skulking out to these desiccated holes to transcribe the tedious rants of interchangeable fist-shaking codgers, but no. There's money to be made in stoking the anger and fanning the flames, and pretending that two-thirds of the people in this country don't flat out despise that motherfucker. It's their revenue model.

So of course the chatter eventually turns to "civil war," but it's clear that hardly anyone across the political spectrum has really thought that term through. I think that to the extent we can have one, it's been in motion for some time. Mass shootings committed by people who just happen to have 8chan "manifestos" and the like, folders of photos of themselves with confederate flags and throwback Rhodesia patches on their fake army-surplus khaki jackets. "Lone wolf" types who are strangely connected in the bowels of social media, feeding and goading each other to commit an act for the cause and take one for the team.

Because most people simply don't read books anymore, certainly not history books, they tend to have a very antiquated notion of what a civil war looks like. They cannot help but frame it in the outdated context of the war of confederate secession, but there is no organized movement on the part of any state governments to secede, nor any clear "cause" around which to organize such a movement. Not to mention that aside from Texas and Florida, none of the other "red states" can afford to leave, since they all take more from the eeevil federal gubmint than they pay in.

Oddly, the Purge movies probably provide the closest idea to what a modern civil war might look like -- bouts of mostly urbanized stochastic terrorism, where law enforcement at every level either can't or won't interfere or mediate, and there are no clear sides, just random people fighting and killing each other for unclear reasons. And in more gang-infested areas of large metropolitan areas, that's basically what happens. But that's not politically-motivated warfare, just violent people doing business and crazy people doing crazy.

There's conceivably a path or paths in which interconnected cadres of bad actors could coordinate and organize systematic attacks on their perceived enemies, and do real damage. They could even fund themselves with sophisticated forms of highway banditry and various forms of theft. But taking and holding territory and fending off legitimate government enforcement would be beyond the capabilities of even sober-minded, intelligent groups of well-trained individuals.

And I'll be goddamned if I've ever seen so much as a single cultist who remotely fits that bill. Most of the camera pans at the hate rallies show vast swaths of paunchy middle-aged (or older) assholes who talk a big tee-shirt, but probably couldn't run a quarter-mile in ten minutes if you put a gun to their head. And that's just the women. [Hi-yoooooo!]

I wouldn't get too worried about the prospect of a Rascal Revolution. Their idiotic Red Dawn fantasies would peter out right about the time they lose the Fox News signal at the cabin. They hate the gubmint until that fucking check comes. They're loud and obnoxious, but there are fewer of them than they think, and there are definitely fewer of them than there are of us. And a lot of us have guns as well, and know how to use them.

Again, when we look back at this weird period of time, ten or twenty years or more from now, what will (or at least should) stand out prominently is the utterly credulous nature of these wannabe warriors, not only the passion with which they spewed their impotent virtual rage, but that they did it all on behalf of a ridiculous fucking clown who never did a goddamned thing for them, and in reality wouldn't have crossed the street to piss on them if they were on fire.

The Onion Timeline

Parody is deader than Generalissimo Francisco Franco. No mere bloggerses such as yours truly, we lowly scriveners who occasionally cook up short burlesques for your and our amusement, would stoop to something this cheap and obvious. And yet there it is (as always, click to embiggen).

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times -- every day with this ridiculous, jabbering moron is like watching Wile E. Coyote paint a tunnel on the side of a mountain. The added bonus of his dipshit kids (and useless dingbat Meghan McCain) lecturing everyone on nepotism is just icing on the cake.

So he green-lights ethnic cleansing on a loyal ally that helped stop ISIS. So Turkey's dictator now has fifty of our nuclear bombs. So we might be sliding toward World War 3, and/or a recession, and/or more and worse climate change issues. As long as that greasy piece of shit still sits there and people still pretend he's remotely fit to hold any office, we get exactly what we deserve.

Oh well, maybe Sean Spicer is preparing his next Dancing with the Scars skit. Probably dressed up as Maria Schneider from Last Tango in Paris this time. Bring your own butter!

Video Games

These people, they just never stop, do they? These weird closet-case assholes who self-actualize by re-imagining an obese, drug-addled senior citizen who never exercises, probably can't walk more than thirty feet at a time and certainly can't run, as this righteous ninja taking down all his "enemies" like a bad-ass. Maybe they just ran out of fetish porn to liberate their knuckle-children to, who knows?

Apparently the video -- and we both know which video I'm referring to, right? -- has actually been out for some time, making the rounds of the incel sector of YouTube. Interesting that, in addition to showing "Trump" "killing" all the "fake news" networks, shown with logos for heads (wow, these guys just never cease to amaze with their profound creativity), and "celebrity" critics such as Kathy Griffin and Rosie O'Donnell, there are also political figures such as Rep. Maxine Waters, Sens. Bernie Sanders, Willard "Mitt" Rmoney, and Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama. Seems like someone should get a visit from the good folks of the Secret Service.

There are the usual howls of outrage from the usual howlers, but we'll see how long it lasts until the next one. Corporate media journalists are particularly sensitive about this one, understandably so. But this has been coming for a long time, and it's not like he's bothered to conceal his contempt for them. Some of them are doing good work with limited resources and bandwidth. Others might want to pause for a second and ask themselves if anyone is really clamoring for another profile of some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner.

Whatever the case, never doubt for a moment that these people have made themselves abundantly clear. Their "humor" is the humor of the Joker, the sadism of an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon or a bloody Deadpool (or in this particular case, Kingsman) movie. And that's not a slam against those movies; as mindless action movies go, they're well-made and passably entertaining.

But for these obsessive goons who worship a pathetic old huckster and make these little objects of devotion as a token of love, the line becomes blurred eventually, as their "works" become more notorious but strangely, women still won't fuck them. Obviously they're not successful at anything else in life, so it revolves around the one thing they're....well, good at is not the right word, maybe recognized for.

But even that has its limits -- this Carpe Donktum asshole is going to get doxed and outed, and probably shit-canned from whatever broom- or button-pushing job he has in meatspace. It's not like Commander Babyfingers is going to show his appreciation by appointing him Minister of Dopey Propaganda and throwing money at him. The real news is, that's not how Fat Donnie has ever operated. It's a one-way street, hoss. So good luck with all that.

The good news is that maybe now some folks can quit with the damned civility lectures. There's your fucking civility, champ. How do you like it? Maybe it's time to punch back by putting together a few two-minute compilations of Fatboy Says the Dumbest Things, give it Yakety Sax or sad-trombone bumper music, and make it viral.

The King In Yellow

I barely regard him -- it -- as human anymore, using words like "monster" and "thing" to describe the creature that continues to defile the White House and corrode what's left of this country, day by rotting day. And at first there may have been a vein of schtick, trash talk, the proverbial smackdown, but that part rang hollow, that there might be any semblance of even grim humor to those specifically chosen words.

Because humans, even assholes, have common threads that identify them as such. We've gone over this many times before, but it can't be repeated enough:  humans have things and people that they like and appreciate for their own merits. Music, books, art, friends, family, pets, games, teevee shows, whatever. Something. Unconditional love.

Normal human beings enjoy these pleasant little features of life because collectively those little features are what make life worth living. It's hard to know what to make of someone who has never -- and that may very well be literally true, like never -- had an appreciative or complimentary thing to say about anybody or anything, except in the context of how its quality was a reflection of themselves.

Like, as a hypothetical, someone asking such a person how they felt about, I dunno, the Beatles' music, and the response being something like, Oh, Paul McCartney stayed at one of my hotels once. Big spender, Great guy. What's your favorite movie? You know, Madonna dropped $500k at the craps table at the Taj Mahal once when she was in town doing some post on Shanghai Surprise. How does anyone listen to that pathetic, weird old man for any length of time and not hear the festering insanity? How did such a person get into a position to gut the country so critically in just a couple of years?

We can all take a deep collective breath that the midterm election results at least show that we don't have to pull the plug on the old bird just yet. It's still on life support, but it's still life, and maybe even having a chance to breathe on its own a bit and start to recuperate.

But it will take more work, and lots of it. Because the results also showed that there are more horrible people than you'd hoped. I said after the 2016 election that those results raised the question of whether the country we thought we'd become with a black president had changed somehow, or maybe that election just revealed and confirmed what we really still had been the whole time -- a seething, teeming, bitter, vituperative mess.

There are a lot of assholes out there, and the thing has unleashed their energy; pure spite and id and moiling fury. Bad people can have good qualities, but if they're supporting something that inspires pipe bombers and synagogue spree-killers and yahoo border militias because they think it pwns libtards for them, well, they're still bad people in the end. Hitler loved his dog, yada yada.

The most dangerous thing about them is, if you really listen to them (not a suggestion, by the way) you find pretty quickly that since they neither know nor care what they're yammering about, there is nothing that will make them happy. Nothing. You could give them ten million dollars and they'd just waste it; you could kick out all the Meskins and they'd bitch that strawberries are now too expensive. You could shout Merry Christmas at them year-round and they'd wonder what happened to Blessed Memorial Day.

Nothing will make them happy because they don't want to be happy. The fight is all they have, because the fight is all it has. It campaigned on the notion that Obummer had turned Jebus' Nayshun into a flaming hellscape, and that worked on the addled and the butt-hurt. Complaining is all it's capable of, and so that's all they know anymore. More and more it is observed that the behavior is cult-like, and that's not an exaggeration -- nor, to them, is it a flaw. It's a feature.

Troll Flag

The conventional wisdom holds that the midterm election is a referendum on that fucking thing currently defiling the White House. This is only partially true -- it is a referendum on us, and what kind of country we intend to be. Do enough of us want to move forward into what will most assuredly be a transitional decade on many fronts (political, economic, environmental, cultural), or are we going to continue slouching back to the 1930s?

This must be what life is like in a particle accelerator -- countless atoms propelled at impossible velocities into observed collisions. Each week moves faster than the last, with more and more and more crazy things. It tells you what kind of week it's been when the Saudis' admission -- after weeks of denial and almost defiant dog-ate-our-homework excuses -- that they planned the murder of a dissident journalist and carried it out in their Turkish consulate, that such a thing doesn't even register in the top three things of the past seven days.

The attempted pipe bombings and now yesterday's massacre at a synagogue serve to bring us all into sharp relief. We already know what sort of diseased soul he is; what will now be revealed is what sort of people we are collectively. Either we are fine with insane losers being egged on by the chief executive at hate rally after hate rally, or we've had enough. Either we're okay with one of our "allies" holding a journalist to a table and dismembering him alive, or we're not.

Either we see the connection or we choose not to, between said chief executive spending years going town to town, city to city, night after night, openly calling for the imprisonment without charges of his political opponents, and having audiences of angry losers chanting along. They can try to bullshit onlooker with the bullshit evasion of It's just a joke!, but it is clearly not a joke, and when unbalanced loners and losers take that shit both literally and seriously, either you address your role in that situation, or you're fine with it all.

Make no mistake -- they are fine with it. All of it.

Devil's Triangle

It's probably wishful thinking to assume that most -- or even many -- 'murkins have any real knowledge of the three branches of gubmint, and/or the principle of checks and balances. Maybe a plurality recall some of the broad strokes:  executive, legislative, judicial; these branches are designed to serve as checks on one another; now let us all pray and remember the sacred day that Jebus brought the Holy Constitution down from Mount Bullshit to bestow upon the Founding Fathers, who while infallible were in the end mere mortals.

With the tedious, rote theater of investing Rapebro McGambledrunk with a lifetime sinecure, in reward for his lifetime service as a company butt-boy, it should be clear by now that all three of those sacred branches have pretty much rotted off the proverbial tree. The executive branch is the playpen of a dipshit madman and anyone willing to suck up to him. The legislative branch is comprised of craven idiots who give the executive whatever it wants, provided the tax cuts and knuckle-dragger judges keep coming through. And now the judicial branch, long dying on the vine, is done.

Maine's good Senator, Angus King, sums up the objection to Kavanaugh thoroughly. Forget getting caught up in the endless he-said-she-said of Dr. Ford's accusation -- Kavanaugh's judicial record is problematic, as is his bullshit explanation of his massive credit card debt. And we all saw his temperament. This turd doesn't even deserve the job he already has. But they're going to promote him all the same. And there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it. Vote, sure, and protest and boycott and all that. Don't take any shit from these fucking mutants. But be realistic about the prospects, and manage expectations.

This has been going on for some time, since the Saint Reagan years at least. But Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010 served as the one-two punch to ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the rest of the political system. Kavanaugh's ascent, with all his spite and vengeance and his career of naked political opportunism, may very well be the end of SCOTUS as a legitimate institution.

So now there are no checks or balances on anything -- these branches now serve either to logroll each others' ideas in the service of the vile billionaires who put all of them in office, or to sit inert while the majority burns. This is untenable; by 2040 it is estimated that seventy percent of the US population will live in just fifteen states -- which of course means that the remaining thirty percent will have a 70-seat supermajority representing them.

On the one hand, we seem to have turned into a nation of drama queens, spurring each other on with ever more furious bouts of performative outrage over this or that hot-button issue of the day. On the other hand, it really doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that this election is essentially a make-or-break for the United States to continue on as a more or less functional entity, and that even if the Democrats take back the House and the Senate, which is highly unlikely, it will still take a rout in 2020 to start moving things back toward an even keel.

It should be clear by now that things will never get better until the Republicon Party is completely crushed, burned to the ground, the ashes scattered and the earth salted. All of them, including and perhaps especially the supposed "moderates" (Flake, Collins, Sasse, etc.), have cynically placed party over country and principle, every goddamned time. There should be no place for such people in a decent society, but we stopped being a decent society some time ago.

Balance is important in life, and so it should be in politics that you should have functioning, principled liberal and conservative parties in order to balance out certain tendencies in each. Obviously, we no longer have anything like that, there is no functional conservative party in this country anymore, just a virulently reactionary party and a technocratic centrist party trying vainly to keep in the game. But all the scumbag billionaires who own and operate the political system in this country bankroll just one party, the nutbag insane one.

The usual peanut gallery types are going to insist that the Democrats overplayed their hand on Dr. Ford's accusation and testimony. But that was the hand that was dealt -- all the other concerns about Kavanaugh, jurisprudential and financial, were brushed aside like pesky mosquitoes. This really was the only play to slow the process down at all. So what if it mobilized the basetards? Don't worry, there would have been some bullshit issue cranked out about this time to get them worked up regardless. If it wasn't this, it'd be football players again, some stupid shit. You never have to look far or try hard to find something to rile up morons.

And the thing is, Handmaid's Tale rhetoric aside, the Supreme Court is about to be catastrophic for a lot of things -- voting rights, worker's rights, privacy rights, the rights of individuals against corporations or the state. Hell, they'll push the Gamble decision on through, and then the emperor can pardon all his cronies. Won't that be fun? That's the most galling thing of all, out of all of this -- these whiny motherfuckers are never held fucking accountable for anything. Ever. Prove me wrong.

The Democrats need to start understanding the game as it is currently being played, and stop with the empty worship of "decorum" and "process" and "comity" and the like. These people are not your friends or colleagues anymore. They are your enemies. Trust me, you are certainly their enemies, and they are treating you accordingly. They will bury you with your dignity.

If the Democrats aren't doing every little thing to be obstructive, finding every obscure codicil and procedural maneuver available to slow this bullshit train down, then they fail, and the noble experiment in self-governance is done. You can tack on all the ponderous, empty, self-serving flatulence from the putrid likes of Jeff Fucking Flake, they add zero value except to Flake's future career as a scumbag lobbyist. It's fight or die, fuck or walk, shit or get the fuck off the pot and go home for good.

There are days when I hatch a speculative novel in my brain, about the current "cold civil war" going hot, or at least warming up. There is that aforementioned performative outrage, your dipshit Facebook friend who communicates largely in misspelled memes that really should all just read DURRRR FUCK OBUMMER DURRR N HITLERY 2 LOCK HER UP!!!. That shit is annoying but harmless; your FB friend is never going to actually prise his fat ass out of his couch and do anything. Hell, he may even forget to vote, so besotted with the innate greatness of Hair Fuhrer, he'll just assume a 100-0 landslide.

But the people getting arrested at the protests, the people harassing senators in the Capitol building, that shit is real, and those people are frustrated, and it wouldn't take much to see one or a few of them deciding that it's better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees, especially when they've just been flat-out lied to and shit on, their trauma mocked and ridiculed. That's not an endorsement, just an observation that it wouldn't be all that surprising sometimes.

And this is definitely one of those times. People are on edge, not just feeling but knowing, having their faces rubbed in it, that their government doesn't give two shits about them, that the national motto isn't In God We Trust, it's Fuck You, What Are You Gonna Do About It? That it's really just a bunch of elderly white men, and their female enablers, and the obscenely wealthy scumbags who rent them.

Unless you're in the donor/owner class, writing checks for these animals, you don't matter. Your sexual assault story doesn't matter, your family's hardship doesn't matter, your shitty job doesn't matter, the polluted water table that gave your kid terminal cancer doesn't fucking matter to them. At all.

Seriously. Flake's the perfect fucking example of that -- certainly his entire miserable career, but this past week has been an absolutely perfect snapshot of what he is, versus what he thinks he stands for. A week ago today, he nearly broke his arm patting himself on the back for his high-minded insistence that the FBI "investigate" the allegations Dr. Ford made in her testimony. Instantly, the scope and timeframe of the "investigation" was so tightly circumscribed that you wonder why they bothered with it at all, since it fooled absolutely no one, and therefore didn't even provide rhetorical "well, we checked it out" bullshit cover. It was nothing, worse than nothing.

And during that week, the Yale Law School, the American Bar Association, and several other organizations made their opposition to Kavanaugh known. Hell, the FBI didn't even interview Kavanaugh and Ford, the two main interlocutors, not to mention the many other people who came forward and wanted to talk to the FBI as well. The fix was in, and all could see. And Flake ended up exactly where we all knew he'd end up before he pulled his sanctimonious Lucy-with-the-football shit. Fuck him, and fuck Susan Collins and especially fuck Joe Manchin. These people are all vile, every bit as vile as the unrepentant knuckle-draggers like McConnell and Cornyn. I hope that when their respective times come, they all go out flat broke and universally despised.

So we have to vote, and we have to decide whether we want to take what's left of the country back, or let the rubes and the Jebus nazis have it all make the rest of us eat shit for the rest of our lives. It's going to take work, far beyond just the endless churn of the electoral-industrial complex. That's really what it comes down to. I can't even imagine what goes on in the head of someone who's "undecided" or who doesn't care enough to vote. If the shit comes down, I sincerely hope it gets snapped off in their asses worst of all.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Heading into the homestretch before the midterms, Orange Foolius has been barnstorming the rubes hard, three rallies in the past 96 hours:

WesBanco Arena, Wheeling WV -- capacity 5,600
Freedom Hall Civic Center, Johnson City TN -- capacity 8,500
Landers Center, Southaven MS -- capacity 10,045

Let's mention a couple things that might sound grudgingly complimentary, but really aren't.

• New schtick has been added, in his quest to shoehorn Rapebro McGambledrunk onto what's left of the Supreme Court for the next generation or so. Key to this is his mocking attempt to undermine Christine Blasey Ford's account of McGambledrunk's alleged sexual assault. So if you're a woman who's tired of being condescended to in that fashion, or just a sentient human being, rather than an angry hillbilly gastropod, he's giving you your motivation. Right?
• He's flat-out telling them that the election is a referendum on him, that however they vote, they're voting for him. Again, very true. Considering how rarely he manages to utter anything at all that is true or accurate, it's unclear whether this assertion is intentional on his part. But it's true all the same.

Just a month and some change, and we will see which direction we're going to head from here. Vote with ballots and wallets, and get ready to smack these mutants back down.

25th Amendment Remedies

This interview public relations hack job has to be read to be disbelieved. I have no idea who the two clowns are that participated in the dual fellation of Parsnut Mario Kart, but they need to shred and burn whatever journo creds they have, because those are fraudulent documents.

It's impossible to narrow it down to just one or two things. Here's a cursory list:

• He basically admits that he declassified the Carter Page docs because Dobbs, Hannity, and Pirro told him he should.
• He admits that he did not review the documents before declassifying them. He did it because "many people" asked him to.
• He keeps referring to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page as "lovers," which considering his own personal history is weird and creepy and hypocritical in its implicit moralizing. Maybe he thinks it'll keep his weird, creepy, hypocritically moralizing evangelical basetards in the game. He's probably right.
• He asserts that the FBI paid George Papadopoulos "from $500,000 to $2 million" for something or other, but never gets around to saying what.
• He thinks he should have fired Comey when he won the primaries. You know, five months before the fucking election.
• He continues to push the notion that Mueller is after his fat hide over some bullshit dispute of country club dues, something vague along that line. He's never quite clear about that, or about anything else. Oh, Mueller "wanted to be head of the FBI." Which he already had been, for over ten years. Fucking simpleton.
• He throws Jeff Sessions under the bus yet again. At this point, the KKKeebler Elf must be nothing but tire tracks and diesel exhaust, held together by spite and cracker crumbs. Sessions has even less self-respect than Ted Cruz and Chris Christie. Where does he find all these cucks anyway, do they rent their asses out at his club? I bet he has Roger Stone take them out for a test drive -- he's a power bottom if ever there was one.

Not only does he posit that the Democrats started the "Russia hoax" as an excuse for losing the election, seven months before the election, he lamely tries to cover that idiot logic by saying that was when people started thinking he had a chance to win. Right up to the very day of the election itself, I never saw a single reputable poll that gave him more than a fifteen percent chance. Even the normally reliable betting markets had Clinton at 85-90% chance of winning.

The idea that the Democrats -- who again were too inept to figure out how to beat a cartoon character with a well-documented history of bankruptcy, incompetence, and corruption -- were able to engineer months in advance this baroque hoax, with assistance from lifelong Republicans at every level, is so preposterous, only he and his ass-kissers on state teevee could possibly find a thread of logic in it.

Then an extended coda, riffing on the usual "I'm the greatest ever and no one has done more than me" jabber, but it reads and seems more jabbery than usual. It's hard to tell if it's because he knows the vise is closing on his droopy old-man balls, or because his narcissism prevents him from understanding why everyone doesn't think he's perfect all the time about everything. Probably a combination of both.

But these journos, inept as they are, deserve some credit, since their tedious knob job basically just let him keep going, and it's almost certain that a couple of the things he says, pertaining to Comey and perhaps Mueller and Sessions as well, could end up being self-incriminating. Just pick a random paragraph and read it aloud, and you ask yourself if that's someone who should be in any position of responsibility, much less in the White House.

It's almost tempting to leave him there to do more damage, since the people who vote for him don't even agree with him or the party on policy, but are merely voting out of spite to make the libtard snowflakes cry. They're about to get a further taste of tariff backlash magic, and their squeals of pain are surprisingly musical.
 

Lazy Bitch Ragin'

While the week culminated in Paulie the Wig flipping over on Fat Donny Dollhands, the latter spent the previous four days driving home every point every critic had ever made about him, oblivious as always.

Seriously, what kind of dipshit gives fist-pumps and thumbs-ups at a 9/11 memorial on 9/11? I'm surprised he didn't high-five one of the grieving family members. Maybe he didn't want to get his tiny, tiny hands outsized.

Then the multiple tweets contesting the Hurricane Maria body count in Puerto Rico. Even some of the cultists have to see by now the pathologies in play with him. It takes some doing to find two national tragedies that each took about three thousand American lives, and fuck them up on consecutive days. He made them both about himself, albeit in different ways. But that's his thing -- he doesn't know or understand the simple concept of other people and their needs and wants. For him, literally everything is about him.

And that's coming through more and more, evident to all. The requisite clips from the last few hate rallies show a rather....tempered enthusiasm, let's say. Oh sure, you read the local bumwipe and they'll profile the requisite "Ah niver voted bee-four he came along, and he's uh-may-zin!" losers in the crowd, waiting outside for hours because they have no lives. But that's a handful of hardcore suckers out in the middle of nowhere. Let him go anywhere an appreciable quantity of people live, see what happens.

He knows it, and they know it, and their peckerwood logic won't change any of that.

Manafort's flip seems to have quieted his tiny Twitter thumbs somewhat, though he bizarrely dug up this old gem last night, reminding everyone of something that happened ten years ago that no one gave a shit about, while simultaneously not getting just how much he's gotten away with the past few years -- hell, his entire life.

But you know he's run out of material when, in the wake of his campaign manager signing a cooperative plea agreement, he's reduced to whining about Obama's ancient "57 states" gaffe. Even Kellyanne's better half had to jump in on that one. Real tight ship these assholes run.

Bottom line:  as each week makes the previous one pale in comparison, and we know the coming week is going to be crazy, one fact remains consistent -- the guy is awful, just pure unadulterated scum. He genuinely doesn't see other people as separate entities apart from him, with their own interests. He doesn't understand or care about other people's pain. I've read about serial killers with more empathy for their victims.

The economy is doing relatively well -- for now, anyway, until the tariffs and trade wars kick in. The economy is a lagging indicator, and it takes time for these things to percolate. But the cold fact is that even with a strong economy and no major military conflicts dominating the news, two out of three Americans fucking hate him. It didn't necessarily have to be that way, but he can't have it any other way. He has to be the obstinate, bratty four-year-old losing his shit in the cereal aisle, every time.

The midterms will clarify the situation. Either we have a republic, or we have a banana republic. It's fuck-or-walk time, folks. Make sure you haven't been purged from the voter rolls, and then make sure to vote. I have little faith in the Dems even with a landslide victory, but even their gutless, squirrelly ineptitude is better than the lagoon of pig shit we have right now.

You Can't Be Neutral On a Moving Train

I think Steve is on to something here, that the one thing that could make Clownstick's base start to turn on him is if they felt like he wasn't owning libtards sufficiently. I would (and previously have, in various iterations) suggest that he really isn't doing that anymore, not that he ever really was. It just hasn't been adequately conveyed to them as such yet.

Don't bother reading or even skimming the soi-disant conservatard rags, your National Review and Weekly Standard and such like. We all know full well that your average basetard does not read such twaddle -- indeed, they clearly don't read any books or publications at all, preferring instead to get their talking points from whatever misspelled meme in their Facebook feed that rings their bell.

Strategically, it helps to step back and understand the base for precisely what they are, in as close to an ideological sense as possible. True, there is no orthodox ideology with these folks; it really does revolve around either whatever they think will annoy the librul caricatures that permanently squat in their fever dreams, or whatever jingoistic nonsense that strokes their outrage boner.

And so while they consider themselves "conservatives," what they really are is reactionaries. There is a difference, and it's an extremely important one. And among the cruder, more emotional and anti-intellectual of that breed, it's not even just about rolling the clock back, but about the fight itself. The struggle, the kampf, the jihad. The holy effort against the minions of the evil Other.

Ultimately they become identified -- and most critically, identify themselves -- by their opposition to things. What are they for, any of them? Beyond the ridonkulous spray-tan glow of their cult leader, they really aren't for anything. They just have an idea, carefully nurtured and watered by constant exposure to the UV rays of Fixed Noise, of what "liberals" are "like," and what "they" "want." All without ever actually asking or listening to or even just observing an actual liberal.

They Ask Questions

Not to single any particular person out, but this seems to sum up what a lot of people are supposing right about now:

Perfectly reasonable, right? Here's how the Human Centipede Administration answers that question:

The fuck you gonna DO about it, pal?

You have to admit, they're not wrong in that stance. What are you gonna do about it? Vote? Sure, if they allow you to, if Deripaska's Macedonian troll farm hasn't purged you off the rolls, if Brian Kemp hasn't prevented every black person in Georgia from voting against his enlightened despotism.

Recall that we've already had two (yes, two) presidential elections stolen just in this century, right in front of us, and no one did a goddamned thing about it. But just for sport, let's play along and say that you do get to vote and there is a blue tsunami and the Dummycrats reclaim the House and get to a 50-50 split in the Senate. Not enough to impeach and convict, but enough to control the House committees and jam up Traitor Bitch McConnell's daily efforts to skull-fuck what's left of the republic. Okay, now what?

We'll, I've been telling you since day one of this ongoing hemorrhoid what. The cornered rodent currently squatting in the White House will not only continue what he's been doing all along, he'll accelerate, increase, amplify. Because, again (you may have heard this one before):

The fuck you gonna DO about it, pal?

Everything is an act of defiance, a self-stroking of the imperial mini-cheeto, for no greater reason than to prove that he can, and to defy all comers to stop him. Imagine a four-year-old throwing a shit-fit in the cereal aisle for two years running, and a parent that lacks the will to step up and be a fucking parent. The supermarket workers are lamely standing at the edges of the scene asking the parent to take their asshole kid anywhere else, but the workers, the parent, and most importantly the asshole child all know they won't actually step up and shut it down.

And so the show goes on, because in this instant, the child has an entire propaganda network at his beck and call. Imagine -- dozens of supposedly professional careerists, basically just sitting around waiting for their marching orders from a demented old man who spends more time fixing his hilarious hair and skin than actually working.

When this is all over -- indeed, if it ever actually ends and this fucking turd is finally flushed for good -- there will be efforts from some corner to "reconcile," as if flat-out treason can ever be reconciled. At that point, lists need to be drawn up, and every single one of these Fixed Noise fuckers, right down to the kid that puts down the gaffer's tape, needs to be permanently blackballed from any sort of employment anywhere within a mile of government or news. They can all go ply their trade with fifty-cent blowjobs in the abandoned industrial park where the Beemer plant used to be before Cheetolini decided he knew more about tariffs than everyone else.

I'm not hardly kidding about this. If we ever get out of this jam, and if you really want to prevent it from happening again, they all have to pay dearly. Scorched earth. No quarter. What would General Sherman do?

Here Is Your Civility, My Main Man

It would be a Christmas/birthday/blowjob turducken (in other words, highly unlikely to happen, but amazingly sweet), but one fervently hopes that if (and it's a big if, frankly; there are simply too many retards wasting this nation's oxygen anymore) these thieving nazi cocksuckers can be pushed out of office, that the fucking lamestream media tone police and their selective hearing get pushed out along with them.

Never let those scumbags forget -- they're the reason we're stuck with these assholes in the first place. Fucking boycott them, all of them -- the NY Times, CNN, Kanye West, anything that's been touched by the greasy fingers of Mark Burnett, everything with the name Fox on it. Fascists can't do it without corporate enablers.

It's about to get weird, folks. Mueller seems ready to start dropping some shoes, the nazi fucks are "celebrating" the anniversary of last year's tiki-torch park putsch in DC, and all the cultists are going batshit over Baghdad Barb getting her worthless, lying ass tossed from a restaurant. At the very least, it's long past time for the dogsbodies of this elected tumor to be made aware that they are no longer welcome among decent folk. They need to all spend long lives selling oranges at the freeway off-ramp. This is no longer negotiable.

And their mediot appletini thumb-sucking asshole contingent should be right there alongside them. They can tell each other all their fucking Cletus safari stories, because the rest of us are sick of their Bungalow Bill horseshit. Go find honest work, assholes.

Failed State

In the seventy-two hours since 'murka sorta learned a bit about what a mentally-ill conspiracy troll Roseanne Barr really is (and her "Planet of the Apes" nonsense isn't even the third-worst thing she's said on her Twitter feed this week), several other things happened, all of them infinitely more important. I swear, it's true!

• A Harvard study conservatively estimates that the death toll from Hurricane Maria is more than fifty percent higher than that of 9/11. In response, the failing New York Times put that story on page A13, so as not to distract from the Roseanne hoof-clomping on the front page.
• A journalist critical of the emperor's daddy found himself in Putin's crosshairs. So the Ukrainian police, having gotten a heads-up on the assassination plot, helped him fake his death, and then helped him show up at a press conference the next day. Take a second and think about how amazing that is, as well as the obvious implications.
• Interpol, which is currently headed by a Russian internal-security specialist, attempted to arrest Bill Browder in Spain, for extradition to Russia, where he would certainly die. Fortunately, after bringing him in, the Spanish police released him. But shit is getting serious and weird on that whole story, as Browder is of course the Rosetta Stone to the whole Russia collusion narrative, if you dig back far enough.
• Princess Snowflake got thirteen trademarks awarded to her by the Chinese government, who just happen to have sunk half a billion dollars into Daddy's next building in Indonesia, and for whose security-violating tech company ZTE is going the extra mile to help. It's simply an amazing series of coincidences!
• The emperor has decided to start some weird trade war, with pretty much all of our allies, starting with steel and aluminum from Canada and Mexico and China, to proposing a ban on German luxury cars -- many of which, of course, are actually made in 'murka. It's as if he doesn't realize that Mercedes-Benz is the sponsor for the brand-new Atlanta Falcons football stadium.

And yet, chances are that you've seen at least ten or twenty times as many mentions to the other thing, either to the cultists' reaction to their slob goddess getting pushed off because her toxicity finally got bad for business, or to their renewed passion for librul scalps.

I like Sam Bee, but she obviously could not have picked a worse time to call Princess Snowflake the dreaded c-word. (A better c-word for Princess would have been "criminal". Just like dear ol' dud.) She only compounded the problem by apologizing. If there's one thing libruls should have learned from these toxic motherfuckers by now, it's never apologize. Double down, tell them to go fuck themselves, or just ignore them, but never ever apologize to them for anything. It's an admission of weakness, and they don't deserve the consideration in the first place. It's not as if such a thing would ever be reciprocated.

To put this as crudely as possible, Bee is going to get fired anyway, but now she first got on her knees for them, and let them blow a porn-size load in her face and hair. (I may be understating the case a bit.) Assuming TBS lets her have at least an episode or two before they pull the trigger on her (perhaps making it look like summer started, and they just opted not to renew), she should just do an entire episode on Princess' grifting, and her entire scumbag family using the office and residence of the chief executive as profit centers.

In the waning months of the Fredo Arbusto reign of error, this country had been taking on the classic signs and symptoms of a failing state. As the Dow plummeted and the banks went under, financial metrics (particularly debt-to-GDP ratio and insane financial leverage ratios) kept pointing toward doom. Obama tried his best to alleviate the situation, and was successful in some regard, but it would have taken at least a decade even with a cooperative congress. But things were at least sputtering in a generally forward direction.

Obviously, even that bit of incremental progress has been halted and reversed, and it's going to particularly affect all those rube farmers that voted for him because they wouldn't know a competent, honest bidnessman if they saw one. And it's going to be worse this time around, because in response to Preznit Chocolate Thunder, an entire industry of cultural grievance-stoking started and thrived and evolved, compounding the coming economic fuckery with a plurality of the public addled by fake news and ritualized performative outrage. That is a potent combination that will make even returning to the halcyon days of 2015 nearly impossible for the foreseeable future. And you know that the next iteration of these animals will be smoother, slicker, less obnoxious and boorish, but more adept with the dog-whistles and code words.

These people have weaponized the cultural grievance, put it into practice at the executive level. Picture any drunk at any barstool at any dive bar across the country, the dumber and drunker and dive-ier the better. How does such a person in such a place typically sound? At best, they're always right about everything, even though they're spouting nonsense, and they cannot be reasoned with. The bartender is just praying that the asshole will pass out or leave before he starts a fight or spills a full tumbler of well whiskey.

That's not only who we have in the White House, that's his staff, his supporters, his rabid retard fan-base that chants his empty slogans back to him, like the semi-trained pinnipeds they are. The sheer ugliness these mutants communicate with is bad enough, but the willful stupidity is what cinches it. They would have to work at getting up to a "deplorable" ranking; the vast majority are simply irredeemable.

And I hate to say it, and I am counting on the midterms to at least begin to pull us back from the brink, but these incomprehensibly stupid, worthless "cultural" arguments convince me more and more that the damage is done and the race is run. It doesn't matter if they die off, enough of them have adult children who have been raised and steeped in the nonsense, and are just as aggressively stupid as their parents. Eventually Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers will die, and not a moment too soon, but they all have adult kids who have been groomed to take over and keep the propaganda pumping.

It's turned a lot of people, who might otherwise be at least somewhat idealistic in nature, into nihilists. Part of me wants to watch those farmers lose their family farms when China breaks off a retaliatory tariff in their fat asses. Part of me wants to watch us stumble into another disastrous Middle East war, so gasoline goes to seven bucks a gallon. Part of me wants to watch Clownstick and his scum family continue to grift right out in the open, defying someone, anyone to do anything about it, just to expose the craven, gutless observers for what they are. Part of me wants to watch the bastards win again, overwhelmingly, so there's no mistaking where this country is at.

Again, did the election change this country into something vile and ugly, or was it there all along, just waiting to be unleashed? I think we're in the long, torturous process of finding that out right now.

Eventually these nihilism fugues run their course, and the numbers and logic kick back in, and the cycle renews. Most of it is because all the action is on one side of the table -- shit-for-brains struts and preens and rubs his insult-comic bullshit in everyone's faces, and his dipshit cultists repeat it verbatim, and the propaganda machine rolls on. And I want them to lose, badly, and to know that they caused their own misfortune. To know why they failed is vital to them ever having any hope of getting their heads out of their asses at any point.

Being a toxic, spiteful asshole should come with a karmic penalty sufficient to deter future such behavior. Unfortunately, life and the universe have never worked that way. Each of us, singly and collectively, has to decide if it's all worth it, if we even want "it" back, if Lady Liberty just turns out to be a rabid internet conspiracy troll with a dumb show that never should have been rebooted in the first place.

We are getting closer to finding out. Every election is billed as The Most Important Evar, but it's tough to deny that this time, it really might be that crucial. Not just because of the political aspects, but if we've decided to let the Bachelorette-huffing culture morons

Even When They're Right, They're Wrong

Three recent events -- two of them closely related to one another -- have surfaced as further evidence (as if anyone needed further evidence) that the god-emperor's compass of logic and reasoning is fatally flawed, because even in those rare instances where he says something that is accurate, he still manages to botch the execution. Let's take them in reverse order, starting with the most recent:

Syria:  It's difficult to imagine even his staunchest supporters being fooled by this nonsense. This is simply a repeat of last year's embarrassing dick-waving, slamming a few dozen million dollars' worth of ordnance into empty airfields and abandoned buildings. And for what? To "warn" Bashar al-Assad that dropping barrel bombs on apartment buildings is acceptable, but chlorine gas is not? Dead is dead. He's been killing children and civilians all along; whether it's with gas or with explosives packed with shrapnel shouldn't really matter. And warning the Russians ahead of time is exactly what he badgered Obama about in 2013. It's true what they say -- every tweet this asshole puts out has a rhetorical doppelganger from five years ago, hypocritically undermining his own pathetic attempts at logic.

He's right of course that in principle, Assad's conduct is unacceptable and should not be tolerated. But there are no good solutions to Syria, and Clownstick is certainly not the person to cut this particular Gordian knot. Russia is too heavily invested in the outcome now, as are (in no particular order) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel. The possibility of a spreading conflagration that ensnares key powers and escalates drastically (in other words, a "world war") is very real.

Forget individual personalities for a second -- the United States right now does not have the diplomatic resources needed to negotiate a settled outcome to the escalating conflict in Syria and its surrounding region. Everyone who could have provided expertise and insight into forging a peaceful path forward has resigned in frustration or been purged. They simply don't have anyone left, and now John "Stop calling me Michael" Bolton has been handed the keys to the 'murkin war machine, for which you can probably attribute the timing of last night's action.

Give Bolton this much credit -- he has wasted no time in purging NSC staff and seizing control of the foreign policy security apparatus. The problem is that Bolton, while slightly more intelligent than his insect overlord, has roughly the same temperament, and is remarkably ill-suited for the job. He is the Doug Neidermeyer of gubmint careerists -- smug, supercilious. Bolton is a conniving, ankle-biting little shit who is going to further damage American foreign policy credibility for the next 10-20 years, and endanger countless military and civilian lives around the world. Count on it. He has no business being anywhere near the levers of power, because he only knows how to break things. Which makes him a perfect fit for this clusterfuck.

The fact that Hair Furor chose to end this morning's self-congratulatory tweet with "Mission Accomplished" should indicate how tone-deaf and unserious he is about all this. (Not to mention just plain bizarre, given his oft-repeated prescience about what a debacle the Iraq War was and would become.) He has no understanding of the larger forces in motion in the region, nor any interest in gaining any such understanding. What is the "mission"? What is the plan for when Assad confers with Putin, decides he's protected, and launches another chemical attack? How do we know there was even a chemical attack by the Syrian government in the first place? Because Bolton said so? Fuck that, we're gonna need actual evidence, if not indisputable proof. But just the fact that Shit-for-Brains thinks anything's been "accomplished" by one night of "precision strikes" on carefully-groomed targets should be a clear indication of how poorly suited he is for this sort of action.

So how do you solve a problem like Assad? Obviously, there is no "good" clear-cut solution. But a start would be to work up a joint regional security pact with Russia, predicated on repatriating internal Syrian refuges back to their homes, giving the country at-cost deals on grain to replenish their depleted reserves, and then pressure the Turks to open up the Grand Anatolia dam network to get the Syrian farmland some water. Can all that be done? Certainly not with the US diplomatic corps as it stands. But Emperor Snowflake enjoys jabbering about how much he loves him some Putin and Erdogan, sweaty he-mens who give the emperor a little cheeto chubby. There's no reason he couldn't use those world-class deal-making skills to get them to go along with something like that.

Remember that the Syrian civil war started because of climate change (among other things; Assad sold off the country's grain reserves to generate cash, not foreseeing a five-year drought). Recall also that much of the water problems in Syria and Iraq are exacerbated by Turkey's control of the headwaters of all the major rivers of the Mesopotamian region. Turkey craves the legitimacy that being a member of international organizations such as NATO and the EU would give them. That can be used as a bargaining chip to get the water moving again, and it would be the right thing to do for all parties concerned in the first place.

But of course, all of this is well beyond El Jefe Maximo's comprehension, and that of his henchmen. They don't do delicate or nuanced, and whatever Obama's very real foreign policy flaws were, the guy at least understood that being reckless meant dead people, American soldiers and foreign civilians alike. Snowflake doesn't know or care about any of that, he just knows what makes him feel like a big man. That's going to get us in trouble in Syria. But there's always the chance that, like the same actions there last year, nothing else will occur, and he'll step on his dick again next week, and we'll move on to that.

Trans-Pacific Partnership:  Turns out that, despite his colorful metaphors of wily Asians butt-fucking real 'murkin widget-stampers out in gawwwd's country, Snowflake is having a change of heart about the TPP. I think both candidates in the 2016 election were correct in their stances against the treaty, while recognizing that those stances were more rhetorical than principled. I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would have at least attempted to renegotiate the treaty to make it viable for the US to enter into, and she would have been crucified in the media -- all media -- for doing such a thing.

With this fucking clown, there's been barely a peep so far, partly because there's been so much other clusterfuckery to cover, partly because he changes "ideas" like a sugar-addled kindergartner, so there's literally no expectations whatsoever regarding policy consistency, or even policy knowledge.

Remember how much we thought the bar had been lowered for special-ed Preznit Fredo Arbusto? Consider the notion that there is no longer any bar at all, at least not for Mister Man. Soon as a Dummycrat who can think and speak extemporaneously comes along, the bar will not only be put back in place, but it will be raised. I pity the fool who has to debate this asshole in 2020. There will be two completely different sets of expectations for the same event. The amount of slack this fucking retard and his dipshit cult are granted by the librul media is absolutely unconscionable.

Don't believe me? Ponder this counterfactual for a second:  you know all those stupid Cletus Safari articles that clutter up the major newspapers fortnightly? If Hillary Clinton had won, those same media monkeys would have done the exact same thing, gone out to the dilapidated diner in Fentanyl Flats and talked to the same incoherent, fist-shaking codgers ranting about how that bitch was fucking up real 'murka. You can fuckin-A count on that one. Our media are populated by clickbait slaves who have no guts or imagination, just a lemming-like drive to fill every news cycle with whatever's within a shovel's reach.

Anyway, the TPP. As originally drafted, there were simply too many intellectual property concessions in it (for starters) to make it viable for anyone but the elites who already own everything and spend their lives rubbing everyone's noses in it. So fuck them. But at the same time, the US withdrawing from the TPP also leaves us exposed to the Pacific Rim countries simply trucking on without us. This is something we're going to have to get used to in the decades to come, the rest of the world moving on without us. It cannot be overstated -- even if we somehow manage to avoid catastrophic conflict or natural disaster, the repercussions of this shithole administration will be with us for a very long time, certainly for the rest of my life (I'll be 51 next month) and probably for most of my daughter's life. And that's if we get our shit together and start turning this thing around, of which I am doubtful.

But again, Snowflake grumbles something about changing what passes for his mind and joining the TPP after all, yet provides no clue as to what the conditions would be, or how this would be done, or who would benefit, besides his goddamned children. Looking for possibilities to renegotiate and join the TPP is the right thing to do, but there has never been any indication that this particular gang has the knowledge or good faith to do something like that on anyone's behalf but their own as individuals.

Tariffs:  Even if (as with all things) his rhetoric on the subject was unnecessarily lurid and confrontational, there was a core of truth to Snowflake's assertions that free trade had damaged job prospects in the vaunted heartland, where (it cannot be said enough times) all the real 'murkins live, and only real 'murkins live. All of us heathens on the foul coasts are allowed to live only by their divine forbearance and grace. It's, like, in the Constitution or some shit.

But those folks do need jobs and careers that they can actually live on, and trade policy -- particularly with China and Mexico -- makes a difference for them. As with literally everything else this asshole touches, the problem is that he only does deals for himself. The big lie that the rubes bought was that he'd work his deal-making magic for them, never mind that he fucks up everything he gets his tiny doll-hands on, never mind that he's never negotiated anything that he didn't directly profit from. Even his charitable foundation was simply a transparently obvious tax dodge and money-laundering org.

So even if he cared enough to renegotiate trade policy with China to benefit something other than Princess' slave-made knock-off clothes, he doesn't know how. He "negotiates" deals like old people fuck. He said so himself in his own books that he just bullshits his way through everything; even his euphemism of "truthful hyperbole" serves only to underscore his inept approach to negotiation. He literally only has a couple of moves:  "anchoring" with a proposal he knows to be unacceptable, then "compromising" toward a more mutually acceptable outcome; and bullshitting his way through the deal and simply hoping that other guy is dumber than he is.

That is the deal-making philosophy of a degenerate gambler that puts the deed to his house on 33 Black at the roulette table, or goes all in at Texas Hold 'em on a ten hole card because another ten comes up on the turn. There is no strategy at all, he is all ego and volatile impulse.

And that's the common thread, not only with the three above examples, but with everything. This is where the rubes really got bamboozled. They cynically assumed -- against the weird "logic" of voting for a "non-politician" -- that like all politicians, Snowflake's campaign rambunctions were simply cut-to-the-chase examples of macho assertiveness, that he'd dial that down and get on to business in the job. They undercut themselves with that cynicism, somehow not realizing that, despite nearly forty years of televised evidence of this asshole humping the American media's leg like a terrier on a couch pillow, that that is who he is, that is all that he is. He is incapable of not being that guy.

There's a notion that a successful business-person cannot be a successful government executive, that despite the surface similarities, the mechanics of each job are too disparate. A CEO is too used to getting their own way to build coalitions and partnerships and work with others. There's some truth to that notion, but I wouldn't completely dismiss the possibility that a good business-person could be a good president.

But he's not a good businessman, and never has been. His only success is managing a portfolio of properties that he inherited from his dad. He's not a businessman, he's a fucking landlord, a rentier. Someone who is good at business creates and innovates. At the very least they develop better and more efficient ways to manage resources and optimize profits for stakeholders.

Snowflake has never done any of those things; at best he finds idiots who think his brand name is useful and he rents out his name to such people. It's pathetic to watch, really; normally even a moderately gifted bullshit artist has something to offer, they just exaggerate the benefits.

But he has nothing to offer, and never did. He's just a weird, pathetic old man who lives in an obscenely-decorated tower, where he can't even be straight about the number of fucking floors in the building, and goes around finding people dumb enough to believe his nonsense about having a twenty-four-inch cock. And that's just the stuff he does legally.

That is exactly the type of person who has a few random blind-pig-finds-an-acorn moments, and still never knows what to do with them. I wouldn't worry too much about Syria for now; hours after the "attack" they're partying in the streets as a show of defiance to the attacks, and attempts to distract a teevee-addled audience are doomed to fail when they're perpetrated by a careless bumbler with his own ADHD issues. But nothing good can ever come from this sad excuse for a man.