American Carnage

And crows will eat your eyes. -- Motörhead, Traitor

I promise that I don't intend to make a habit of breaking radio silence, especially just a couple weeks after making a show of pulling the plug, but the events at the Capitol building on January 6th bear some consideration and discussion that I am missing in most of the mediocracy pow-wows so far. Watching the events unfold live, I realized I hadn't had such visceral feelings of genuine revulsion and anger since watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Others have already brought up the 9/11 comparisons. But the thing is, if we are careless in pursuing true accountability and making it sting, the event may actually turn out to be closer to Fort Sumter. I know I've scoffed at the possibility of a true "civil war" dynamic in the past, and I still strongly believe that the lack of foresight, coordination, strategy, or even any aligned goal prevents these people from doing much in the way of setting up an actual competing governmental system.

But that doesn't mean they can't do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people giving it a try.

There appears to be genuine anger on the Democratic side, and a desire for real accountability and even retribution, and that's a great start. This is not something that can just be "let go" for the sake of comity. Many media observers were quick to frame the rioters as "domestic terrorists," and that too is good and necessary. Anyone shying away from those terms and that framing is in on the con, period.

There is nothing to be discussed or broached or reconciled with these rioters. At all. They are traitors and insurrectionists. Fuck them and their "Camp Auschwitz" and "6MWE (6 Million [Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust] Wasn't Enough)" tee-shirts. Fuck their treasonous flags, devoted to one individual rather than a show of loyalty to their country.

I am not joking in the slightest, nor trying to be polemic, when I say that as many of them as possible should be summarily tried in open hearings, and immediately after sentencing, lined up against a wall and shot. In an earlier time, they would have been gibbeted and immured, as a warning to others. Some of them are military. They should be court-martialed and sentenced to death. The death sentence can be commuted to life without parole at the Florence Supermax, or it can be carried out. I really don't give a shit which. They can dump these assholes into a filled swimming pool and toss a fucking toaster in for all I care.

At least some of those poor bastards back in the day, the folks who ended up in the gibbet, had legitimate grievances. These dopes have nothing but the nonsense they've been spoonfed by the lifelong liar Trump and his booze-soaked sidekick Ghouliani, who is probably lining up yet another thirsty pig to receive his slobbering, grotesque sexual overtures.

It has already been noted by multiple observers that it was just a damned lucky break that of the hundreds of legislators and staffers that were forced to quickly evacuate and hide and barricade themselves for hours, none of them were found and dragged and beaten or executed by the braying mob of traitorous slapdicks. Again, it wasn't for lack of trying.

There was a forty-foot gallows erected outside the building. How do you like them apples? Amazing what you can get away with when you're the right shade.

Another thing we need to understand fully is that all of this is exactly what he promised before the election -- and before the 2016 election. If I lose, it's because the election is rigged. Remember that, both times? Heads I win, tails you lose. There are always suckers -- people still purchase music and clothing from Kanye West. There will always be enough impressionable morons to make something happen, through deception and repetition. It's even easier when you have an entire teevee network at your disposal.

As the usual weasels start retconning excuses and strategems for "unity" (with what, precisely? Be specific, show your work, and your plan to get there from here.) and the like, we all need to consider the sort of craven individuals who make such proposals.

Imagine the sort of person who was in very real danger, whose colleagues and employees were in very real physical danger as well, and yet a couple days later, are bleating mealy noises about how we mustn't do anything at all to enrage these terrorists any further.

They were openly shouting for Mike Pence to be hung at their makeshift gallows. They were looking for Pelosi, for Schumer, for whoever they could tase and zip-tie into submission, for their fantasy show-trials. Oh no, we better not do anything to enrage them! Jesus H. Christ.

If you do not know your enemy by now, and truly understand them as such, you never will. I don't know what to tell such people, since they are clearly unyoked from any sort of moral compass, but are welded to a compelling motive of personal profit and ambition. Anyone insisting on a mitigation of accountability is a clear enemy of this country and all of its citizens, and needs to be treated accordingly. Let's not overthink this. They told us who they are, over and over again. At some point, it might be time to take them at their word.

The most important thing to consider about their weird collective psychosis is how they see themselves -- and each other, for that matter. Now, there is some money peppered through these crowds at certain nodes. All that faggy cult swag costs money, as does the tacticool gear, the trips all over the country to the rallies and the be-ins, like deadheads that took the brown acid and chased it with a bucket of Wild Turkey that had been left in the sun for a month.

But you can tell that the median morlock in these crowds is a goddamned loser -- not because their education abruptly halted somewhere around their seventeenth birthday, but because they felt at that point that they had learned and known enough, enough for the rest of their lives. And everything they've done in their lives since those critical decision points, every job and every relationship they've stumbled into and shouted themselves out of, reflects that outlook on life.

The word "loser" should be taken literally here, but like all such folks, they need to envision themselves as victims of circumstance, of the machinations of some malevolent force or baroque conspiracy. It can't just be that you're a willfully ignorant bum with anger management issues. It's always someone else's fault.

And now they're in their forties or fifties, these median dopes, their best years long behind them, and there warn't too many of those in the first place. They don't know much, but they know that much. The only thing they have to look forward to, the thing that informs what passes for their political sentiments, is the hope of pulling as many of their fella 'murkins down to the same level.

Remember the ancient joke about the campers awakened by the approaching bear, how you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other campers? Well, imagine the sort of person that just wants to be the bear.

But because these people still see themselves as good people, as decent people, they did what all delusional people do and crafted a story that casts themselves as heroes rather than villains. The crucible of social media, and the common bond of the Q mythos, enabled them to quickly forge a more solid and sweeping narrative for themselves, noble hobbitses headed for Mount Doom to thwart the satanic pedophile cabal headed by Hitlery Clinton.

Did I get all that right? Does it matter? The main thing is that it gives them the excuses and the rhetorical cover they need in order to strive for something they know is monstrous. It doesn't matter that the strike dates of the Q mythos keep shifting, like doomsday predictions from crackpot preachers. It doesn't matter that Trump can't show a single tangible accomplishment that would benefit any of them. It doesn't even matter that Trump turned on Pence -- and even on them -- by essentially conceding the day after the riot, by acknowledging that there would indeed be a transfer of power on January 20th.

Some of them will squawk about betrayal and such, but their hearts aren't in it. After all, they have nowhere else to go. I don't mean the garden-variety asshole coworker or uncle we all have in our lives; I mean specifically the individuals at the rallies, at the Capitol riot. I mean the sort of person who seriously thought that if they bum-rushed the Capitol cops, smeared shit on the walls and vandalized the place good and proper, maybe dragged a couple of heretics out to the makeshift gallows and strung 'em up, that the other 330 million of us would just roll over and go, Oh, okay guys, we see your point now. I guess we can go ahead and flip the script for Fat Orange Elvis' second term. No fucking problem.

No, the people who invaded the halls of American governance last Wednesday afternoon have nowhere else to go, politically, morally, spiritually. These are people who have alienated every sensible person who was in their lives, who have moved on without them. These are people who have been rolling around in an impermeable hamster ball of epistemic closure.

Ted Kaczynski holed himself up in a hundred-square-foot cabin in the remote wilderness, with nothing but his jotted musings and his increasingly fevered aspirations. Imagine if the Unabomber had been able to stew and commiserate for years with like-minded souls in members-only Fakebook groups, steadily bringing each others' sentiments and outlook to a rolling boil.

Cold, alone, and alive
You're afraid but that's not what I asked. Wanna go for a ride?
Sharpen your teeth, my darlings, sharpen your minds
Take a finger -- if the hand feeds you shit, take one scalp at a time. -- Them Crooked Vultures, Spinning In Daffodils

We have a crisis in our angry-yokel population, to be sure (best one I've seen so far is Coup Klux Klan), but it seems to me that the real -- and sorely under-reported -- crisis is in law enforcement, a term becoming an oxymoron on the level of jumbo shrimp or Holy Roman Empire.

We saw it all last summer, the beatdowns of unarmed college kids and elderly trespassers, in city after city after city. Violence occurred, and buildings were set ablaze, but in countless videos, it was rarely the Molotov cocktail chuckers who were getting the batons, but mostly the passive, unarmed resistors.

 

We've all just come to accept it, since the only people who can do anything about it refuse to. But the actions and behavior of the Capitol Police on January 6th indicate a non-zero percentage of officers and leadership who are coup sympathizers at best, and sabotaging moles at worst. They let these hooting yokels right in to do as they pleased, and escorted them out and down the steps when they were done. They risked the lives of their own fellow officers, and got one of their own killed.  Arrests were comically few and mostly late in the day, after media figures had already been openly questioning their, ah, dedication to their job.

One thing for sure is that they were fucking terrible at their job that day, the Capitol Police. How the hell is it that the terrorists plan openly online for weeks in advance, with the date, time, and location, and there's no preparation whatsoever, no barricades, no reinforcements, no orders to use force early and often? They had bike racks that the terrorists swiped and used as ladders to climb the walls.

Not to mention the fact that this entire time -- during the Capitol invasion and even last weekend in Frankfort, Kentucky -- there have been cells of armed white supremacists menacing state capitals across the country. Kansas, Oregon, Washington, Michigan. They're planning more leading up to the 20th. No one is doing a goddamned thing about any of it. Wonder why that is.

This is not just a constitutional crisis. This is a very real crisis in "law enforcement" and what that entails, quite literally. You have an entire class of people who are held completely unaccountable, who are legally immunized from everything they do, no matter how awful. In the cities, they are militarized, and far more powerful than the legally elected city councils and mayors and such. They decide which laws to enforce, and how rigorously, and upon whom.

 

Their choices in those regards should be clear to all right now. It's certainly clear to the terrorists. They knew they wouldn't be touched, and they were right. Hell, they were given directions to Schumer's office. They put their feet up on Pelosi's desk. They took selfies with these paragons of law and order.

There is no justice if laws are not enforced equally. This is so obvious that it shouldn't need to be said. Yet here we are. It's good that people are finally saying it out loud. But as much effort as it's going to take to send the treasonous cockroaches scuttling back to their swamp caves, it's going to take ten times that effort -- a hundred times -- to weed out all the sympathizers and the thugs and the fascists that infest every level of this nation's law enforcement services.

 

I honestly don't think it's doable, and it's a real problem. We'll see on January 20th, for starters; now that one of their own came up as a casualty of their malicious incompetence, the CP have to at least make a half-hearted show of force for whatever inaugural recognition is taking place that day. Maybe we should all send them reminders to put on their fucking calendars.

 

Some of the assholes are coming back for seconds, and some new assholes are planning on showing up as well. They've printed up tee-shirts and everything, with the date and location. Maybe you should prepare, you know, just in case. Like a security type of thing.

And then people will go back to what they were doing, assuming that the foot-dragging agencies and entities entrusted with making these fuckers pay dearly will actually do their jobs. I have a feeling we'll be disappointed in that regard, which will only embolden them for the next round, for the eventual Tim McVeigh type who isn't a booger-eating cartoon character, but a trained, focused, committed killer.

 

There's been a lot of close calls with this sort of thing lately. Think about how close the governor of Michigan came to being kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by a cell of these "militia" dinks a few months back. You only get so many rolls of the dice before they come up snake eyes.

 

I hope I'm wrong. As of now, it looks like impeachment will happen, as will an effort to expel the treasonous congress-critters who fomented and supported this bullshit. Let them all swing for it.

Now, the right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. But any people or part of a people who resort to this remedy, stake their lives, their property, and every claim for protection given by citizenship--on the issue. Victory, or the conditions imposed by the conqueror--must be the result. 

-- President Ulysses S. Grant

Let's be clear -- the people who showed up to storm the seat of American governance (such as it is) are not good people, nor are they patriots. They don't give a fuck about this country, only their nihilistic death cult. They must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, or they're just going to do it again and again until they succeed. The people defending them and attempting to find points of "reconciliation" are even worse -- they know better and actually have power to do the right thing, but choose not to.

 

They don't want unity or justice, they want appeasement. They want reassurances that once again, for the umpteenth time, angry crackers have the "right" to expect leniency and complaisance. I don't know who they think they're fooling with this bullshit, but it ain't happening anymore. They bought the ticket, they can take the ride.

It's not all grim -- for starters, Sheldon Adelson is dead, as are Josh Hawley's presidential ambitions. Ted Cruz is finding himself more and more on an island. The Powers That Really Be have at long last decided that Fuckface Von Clownstick's antics really are bad for business, and so they are pulling the plug on the whole black op. Assholes are getting deplatformed, and it is glorious to watch them vent and preen in futility.

(Anyone starting in with that "freeze peach" bullshit can go right on ahead and fuck themselves with a pineapple. Not only are you not "free" to organize terrorist attacks and incite violence, you're definitely not free to use someone else's private business to do that shit. I mean seriously, have any of these morons ever even skimmed a EULA? The same question keeps coming up with Trump and all of his dupes -- are these people really that fucking stupid, or is it that they think everyone else is dumb enough to believe their bullshit?)

 

And in fact, so many of these dopes seem determined to prove that they're even stupider than they seem, which is always entertaining. The best part was when some of them -- led, to be fair, by their elite mouthpieces in the media and rump House insurgency caucus -- tried to blame the dreaded antifa. This would be the part in every cult where the cultists prove their loyalty by faithfully regurgitating something that they know not to be true, while insisting that it must be true because the leader said so.

 

Both the cultists and the leader understand this dynamic between them -- the leader knows that the flock know this thing to be false, yet prove themselves to him with this test. If he wanted a night with each of their wives and daughters instead, they'd gladly grant him that. That's not an exaggeration -- it's a death cult. They have shown over and over again that they are willing to die for him, willing to commit acts of violence and kill for him. It's not hyperbole. As dumb as they are, they are dangerous people and need to be treated as such. This goes for the petit bourgeoisie assholes who showed up, every bit as much as for the cartoon characters we mostly saw.

But the idea that any antifa-BLM type of counter-protester was anywhere near there, much less staging a false-flag incident in the midst of the real mob, is of course ludicrous. Here's a few things that should be said in response every time someone tries to pull that line:

• Gee, it's too bad none of the Real 'murkin Patriots there was able to stop them.
• If they were antifa, the cops would have actually beaten and arrested them.
• Even if they were antifa, prosecute and imprison them just the same.
• I don't believe that you really believe that. We know you know better.
  

That settles that. The other darkly humorous aspect was in a couple of the terrorist deaths. One asshole tased himself in the balls and had a heart attack, while trying to steal a portrait of Tip O'Neill. One gal got trampled while carrying her "Don't Tread On Me" flag.

You can't say the writers aren't pulling out all the stops this season.

I also enjoy reading the perfunctory, anonymized accounts of how dismayed and disheartened the various minions and dogsbodies have become. Their professional and personal ambitions thwarted, because it turns out that white-shoe law firms not only are notoriously gun-shy about hiring nazis, they also aren't terribly interested in hiring the assistant to the regional nazi. Who would have thought?

I'd say their choices are clear:  they can assess their role in this ongoing catastrophe, and how much time and effort they put into it, and come up with an honest multiplier, and put that amount of time and effort into some charitable pursuit -- helping the unhoused; rescuing animals; distributing vaccines; penning public apologia for being fucking scumbags and promising to do better with their given time in this mortal plane.

 

So, for example, the kid who brings Dear Leader his Diet Coke every hour can just do a 1:1 or 1.5:1 amount of time in such a pursuit. Kayleigh MagaNinny, on the other hand, needs at least a decade or so at a truly charitable pursuit that doesn't line her pockets, a place where she can truly contemplate what an awful facsimile of a human she let herself become. (Recalling, of course, that like so many of these interchangeable minions, she was vocally anti-Clownstick before she started cashing his checks.)

 

Or they can all go back to their respective homes, eat one final cheeseburger and jerk off one last time, and blow their fucking brains out. I really don't care which they choose, so long as we are spared any additional public navel-gazing from these dismal parasites, who take and destroy and lie and perpetuate their seedy little hustles, and then expect us to feel sorry for them when it predictably blows up in their faces.

 

Even allowing for the incredibly unlikely conditions I propose above, even where there might happen to be some form of genuine contrition and regret, none of them should be allowed anywhere near the levers of real governmental power again. They've already shown what they're capable of. There are plenty of people who can do government service right. There's no reason to try to rehabilitate traitors and failsons and shitheads. Again, if any of them had any real sense of shame, they'd have already done the right thing. Their problem is that they've been seen for what they are. Head on back home to Goatfuck, Missourah, and prepare to spend the rest of your sad life running dad's Kia dealership.

To listen to the plaints of these turds is to listen to their boss, the impotent threats implied in a cascade of wheedling and cajoling. It's like it never occurred to any of these assholes that it's possible to make money and be happy without being a complete piece of shit, without surrendering your soul.

I try to conjure an image of the sort of person whose biggest ambition is to push ass for Rupert Murdoch's red-baiting agitprop network, or to defend resource extractors and poisoners, to cash those fat checks and spend it on slightly better bottles of single-malt, a slightly bigger McMansion in a slightly better neighborhood, a slightly newer XUV to drive to the Whole Foods. People who think that that's all there is to life, all that's worth having and doing. People who will align and attach themselves to the lowest types in order to fulfill those empty dreams.

They're as bad as the rest of them, really. They hide behind their uptown degrees and their family connections, but they're willing to con violent rubes into doing the wetwork, they're willing to affix their lips to the rump of the despot, regardless of the souls he chooses to squish in his ascent to fleeting greatness and vainglorious conquest. The people who do evil, who commit the acts to further the agenda, cannot do what they do without the ceaseless behind-the-scenes toiling of these little Eichmanns.

They'll never do the right thing on their own, and you hate to use the word "purge," but the house is in dire need of a cleaning, to say the least. And make no mistake, had a few states turned the other way, or just made it close enough to steal, they would have completed the purge they've been doing in plain sight the whole time. The Foreign Service is gutted. There has been zero transition planning or coordination since the election. Even without a coup, the Biden Administration starts off in a deep hole, and that is by design and intent. Everything you see going on right now is because someone wants it that way.

And that's not just Trump, that's the little worker ants who were all too willing and happy to do his bidding. And now they're caught and identified and blackballed. They're worried about their future job prospects Well, fuck them. They deserve to never hold decent employment again. Let them toil away in Jeff Bezos' warehouses for nickels on the dollar. Make sure to send all the corporations who bankrolled the putsch a nice "fuck you" card while you're at it.

This is about retribution, but more than that, it's a deeply practical matter. Everyone involved in this beer-belly putsch -- and it ain't over yet, you just watch -- needs to be made to pay dearly, or it'll just keep happening until they get it right.

The bullshit stops with just two words -- enforce laws. Enforce them equally -- rich, poor, black, white, cops, civilians, famous, anonymous, the powerful and the powerless, from hedge-funders to hedge-trimmers. Maybe the question everyone should be asking is why it seems to be so damned difficult to live up to those two simple words.

Let's end with a poem of sorts, shall we?

The Art of the Fall of Rome, by D.J. Trump (with profound apologies to W.H. Auden):

Knuckleheads ascend the stairs

Approach en masse the blessed doors;

With incoherent yowls and roars

Affix the mall cops with mighty glares.

Messaging in fecal scrawls

The atmosphere grows ever tense,

As chants of "Hang that fucker Pence"

Echo through historic halls.

Cerebrotonic Q-balls may

Wrack their wretched lizard brains,

To seek the secret money trains

Where jooz transport their pilfered pay.

Homoerotic banners billow

As they catch the wafting breeze.

The bozos hear the lilting wheeze

Of the asshole from My Pillow.

Debt-collectors begin to swarm

Around the supercilious jerks

Writing I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On their non-disclosure forms.

Unsurprised it turned out shitty,

Tremendous birds with the best legs --

Seriously, people, you've never seen such legs --

Flee from plague-ravaged cities.

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of morons move around;

Can't get back up, so they can't sit down

Awaiting their quadruple bypass.

And in the end, the bitter cry

Because they never found the nerve

To tell the chumps what they deserve

To please, at last, fuck off and die.

Disbarred

Opus Dei anal cyst Bill Barr, whose dad was a teen-diddler and who had Jeffrey Epstein murdered in prison and all the seized Trump-incriminating evidence destroyed, has been fired for refusing to help Agent Orange steal the election.

I have to admit to being somewhat surprised, but as corrupt as Barr has always been, he is intelligent enough to see that it just wasn't close enough to poach. It's not that he wouldn't do it because it was illegal, it's that he couldn't pull it off with enough credibility, once the SCOTUS kicked the bullshit Texas lawsuit back into the dumpster whence it originated.

Even completely amoral dirtbags have some core principles, it turns out. Barr's is that he knows better than to self-incriminate any more than he already has. He's just lucky that the Democrats didn't have the stones to string him up for what he's done.

The biggest failure of leadership and governance regarding Barr's most recent tenure as AG is that he wasn't impeached for lying to Congress, which, last I checked, is still nominally a crime. The second biggest failure is that Barr will now take his walking papers and ooze into a seven-figure "consultant" sinecure at some scummy big-bucks white-shoe law firm, the kind that defends child slavery for fun and profit.

Something this nation has never quite figured out, and until it does, things will never get better:  power needs to be held to account, at least once in a great while. When allowed to operate with total impunity, you keep getting people and acts like these, endlessly escalating. All these fuckers should be in prison, yet they will all be rewarded in various ways. Really, why shouldn't they keep doing what they do?

The White House Dog

 I swear before everything unholy and profane that, as sure as I am sitting here, this ad was going to end with a long, lingering shot of Lindsey Graham.

Twenty Points Down

The popular phrase in preventing the smug assumption that Biden will beat the evil clown in a landslide, even though he clearly should beat that failed attempt at a functioning human being by seventy points and five hundred electoral votes, is to act like you're way behind in the polls. Ignore the polls. Don't get lulled into complacency by months of leading in the polls. And so forth.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it's easy to forget that people have been repeating that mantra for months with regard to a Biden-Trump matchup specifically, and they've been beating themselves with it for several years in general.

And it's a great idea in general. Show up. Make sure you can show up. Don't ever get complacent again, at any level.

With that mantra in mind, combined with current circumstances and rhetoric, it is not unreasonable or unforeseeable that many people are getting concerned about the practicalities of the election itself -- counting the votes properly, abiding by the results, transferring power properly. When you've been dulling your senses for the past four years that at least a third of your fellow citizens are perfectly okay with an open slide into outright fascism, it makes sense that you might start expecting the worst.

So I get where this guy is coming from, as far as the political probabilities go, and I think we can probably be cautiously optimistic about the ultimate outcome here.

But you know, I'd drop the whole quit being so paranoid, you fucking ninnies tone there. This has been a consistent pattern throughout Trump's reign of error -- the insistence that norms and rules and process will ensure correct outcomes. And in each instance, he has proven that none of that shit matters if there's no one to enforce it, if the only side that even respects those things anymore is also the side that refuses to use every tool at their disposal to exert what little power they actually have.

It's not a paranoid pipe dream at all:  Trump has repeatedly said that any election outcome where he doesn't win is by definition illegitimate. He continues to maintain this stance. No one is challenging him on it in any meaningful way -- not his own party, not the corporate media, not the courts, nobody.

It doesn't require any sort of violent overthrow, or even a stubborn "refusal" to vacate the White House. All he has to do is what he's openly threatened to do, and what political observers across the spectrum have speculated -- declare victory early, before mail-in ballots are counted; if Biden is the winner after the mail-in count, declare those votes invalid (as he has been doing for months already); muddy the waters just enough to throw it to the courts and the individual states.

He has all those tools at his disposal. His own party has long given up challenging him on anything; he could nuke Omaha tomorrow and Ben Sasse would say, Thank you sir, may I have another?. The Democrats have made it clear that they are either completely unable or unwilling to undertake any meaningful action. They will wait and dither and agonize until it's too late.

Now, do I think all of these things will happen? Probably not, but there is definitely a non-zero chance of it. It's definitely possible.

And that's the real trick right there, the root explanation for why so many people right now have this desperate, anxious undercurrent. It's not just that Trump is a piece of shit, or that the people who work for him are scumbags, or that the corporate media are cowed by the whole circus and just want clicks. It's the realization that there are more angry idiots and toxic weirdos out there than they thought there were, and that they have real leverage now.

The rise of the QAnon cult -- an utterly ludicrous, incoherent smattering of conspiracy jabber -- is a perfect example. Imagine a group of people that spin these credulous yarns about cannibal pedo cults and sex trafficking, while they emphatically support a party featuring such well known pedophiles and enablers such as Jim Jordan, Dennis Hastert, and Roy Moore.

And Trump himself -- in countless videos hanging out partying with his good buddy (and one-time neighbor) Jeffrey Epstein, on audio and video describing how much fun he had peeping in on teenage pageant contestants getting dressed, on his own daughter being a hot piece of ass, on sexually assaulting women. Right now he's refusing to give DNA that would exonerate him on a rape charge.

And yet you have this seething, teeming, growing movement of cult loons -- maybe thousands, maybe more -- who would rather construct an insane, impossibly baroque conspiracy that has no basis in fact, than confront the very real network of people right in front of them who indulge in sexual perversion.

I know that as good libruls, we're not supposed to judge others on their sex kinks, and 99% of the time, that's a pretty good rule to follow. But in the context of their own words and beliefs, it's helpful to keep in mind:  Roger Stone is an orgiast who gets off on watching his wife get spit-roasted by strangers. Paul Manafort enjoyed setting up gangbangs for his own wife, who has some cognitive disabilities from a horse-riding accident years ago, and may not have been an entirely willing participant.

Again, we're not allowed to judge, but just consider for a moment the sort of sexual pathologies one must have for those activities. This kind of shit makes the Falwells look like rank amateurs. Now keep in mind that Stone and Manafort have been business partners for forty years. One of their earliest clients -- who they still work for to this very day -- was a young swashbuckling real-estate developer named Donald Trump.

Turds of a feather, you know? I wouldn't stay in the same room with people like Stone or Manafort for five minutes, and I led a pretty wild life for a long time. And I sure as fuck wouldn't turn to people like that for guidance or advice on running a country. These are people who have spent their adult lives weaponizing the worms in their brains in the devil's arena of political consultancy, where nothing is true and everything goes.

We have a good chance of muddling through all this ugliness, if enough people are willing to show up and stick with it. But let's not shit on the folks that are getting nervous about their prospects. They have no one they can trust anymore -- their fellow 'murkins have lost their fucking minds, the Democratic party is full of ineffectual blowhards, the Republicon party is full of flat-out traitors, the basic mechanisms of the country no longer function, and the figurehead tyrant has openly promised multiple times to fuck up the electoral process.

You don't have to be paranoid, but you might want to at least wonder what the contingency plan is for when shit starts coming down. Hoping that certain people will "do their job" when that has failed multiple times previously is barely more than nothing.

Suckers and Losers

Everybody has read the article by now, and absolutely nobody is surprised. Maybe it will move the needle a touch, but probably not, which is the real story.

Maybe he's right -- maybe people who are willing to serve and sacrifice for The State, a faceless leviathan that may or may not be there for them in their time of need, have been bamboozled. Maybe the people who continue to support this fucking monster, whose defining trait is open contempt of the very concepts of charity and grace, are also suckers and losers. Maybe the liberals and Democrats, waiting for their elected leaders to do something even performatively and making excuses for why they refuse to, are also suckers.

[Case in point:  Impeach Bill Barr now. He is openly discussing the ways in which he will sow distrust in the election results, and foment civil unrest. He has already lied to Congress multiple times, including at his job interview. It doesn't matter that the Republicon senators are traitors and will acquit him. The investigative process will generate enough evidence that can be use to prosecute Barr if Biden wins. And if Biden loses -- or "loses"? Hope your passport's in good shape.]

Maybe my dad, who fought the Nazis in the Atlantic and the Imperial Japanese in the Pacific, who was literally en route to Japan on a fucking minesweeper when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a sucker for believing that his efforts then were necessary to keep the country he loved from turning into a mass of sweaty, ignorant slobs. Maybe my uncle, who served two tours in Vietnam as a Marine platoon leader and got soaked in Agent Orange, and died hard just a few weeks after his fifty-first birthday twenty years ago, was a sucker for jumping into a fight he was told was right and just. He got there and saw the truth and came back changed, and spent the rest of his life trying to get back what he'd lost. I have a younger cousin who joined the Marines earlier this year, for a CINC who's made it clear that he couldn't care less that the Russians are paying Islamic militants bounties on American military corpses. Sucker!

And on and on. It's a giant, all-encompassing scam, and we've all bought into some aspect or other of it. Remember when a couple of feckless billionaires inserted themselves into the Democratic primary, just long enough to knock Elizabeth Warren outta there? Where's OK Bloomer now that we could use his precious money, not just for Biden but for at least six or eight Senate seats? Where's Tom Steyer and all his bro-gressive happy talk? Yeah, they really care about "their country," but it's a different country than the rest of us live in.

Maybe the folks out in the streets protesting, as well-meaning as they are, might be suckers as well. They think something will "change" from their efforts. Well, you've been doing it all summer, and the only thing that's changed is that the police forces of Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and NYC -- all cities run by liberal Democratic mayors in states run by liberal Democratic governors -- are much more comfortable openly displaying their true sympathies.

They stand aside while roving white supremacist gangs barrel through crowds in their $70k trucks and attack unarmed protesters. They let assault-rifle-toting kids who have just murdered people in the street with a weapon they were not legally allowed to possess just walk on by. They have not stopped killing, beating, kidnapping. They have made their position entirely clear, and no one is even pretending to try to stop them.

Black Lives Matter? Are you fucking kidding? Your life doesn't matter, liberal white protester. As far as the redneck death squads and their good buddies on the PD are concerned, you're not white. They probably won't shoot you seven times in the back, but you never know. They sure as hell won't stop the bearded goon with the riot helmet and the Kevlar Pepe the Frog vest from stomping the shit out of you.

Now that we're in the final sixty days of the electoral race, people are starting to look at the clock, because they're exhausted, demoralized, disheartened. They want it to "be over," but it will never be over. This is just beginning, sorry to say, but as we near the homestretch in this here blog, I am convinced that that will be the crushing minor chord I will end with in a few months.

Getting rid of Trump is -- and really, always was -- only the symbolic part of it. It's real, and it's vital to any semblance of continuity in what passes for elected representation in this flawed experiment. The real challenge, as the Atlantic article lays out so clearly, is in figuring out just how to deal with individuals who are fine with all of it. They have constructed an alternate reality for themselves, one that gives them permission -- hell, makes it their patriotic duty -- to support this thug who so openly disparages military service and sacrifice.

And putatively liberal media outlets make painstakingly multiple efforts over and over again to construct their own alternate reality, one where these people are Real 'murkins, who support monsters out of some well-meaning intent and love for their country. Such articles are not only worthy of every bit of scorn and derision we can muster, they also represent a profound dereliction of journalistic duty.

These people should be portrayed as they truly are -- as people who gladly support all of this, every bit of it. They are lying when they mutter something about "wish he would tweet less" or whatever. They love the tweets. After all, he's doing what they wish they had the platform to do -- tell all them fags and libruls and race-traitors to go fuck themselves. They wish he'd tweet more, that he'd crack down more on all the people they've been taught to hate, conditioned like hamsters in Fox News' Skinner box to pat the metal plate for the daily outrage pellet. I don't know if it's possible to deprogram most of them at this point. I do know that there is no point in trying to engage with them anymore.

It's easy for him, because he's never served anyone or sacrificed anything. He's never had to learn or understand or know anything, because he's rented minions to wipe his ass for him his entire miserable life. But the working-class schmuck that still rolls with all this? That's a harder nut to crack, and I don't know if you even want to waste your time on it. Remember that the largest number of voters is non-voters, and ask yourself why, and if there's a way to reach them.

Are they really lazy and stupid, or do they see the lack of leadership and conviction (to varying degrees, of course) on both sides, and simply say no? There's no excuse for doing that this time around, but again, if the opposition party started playing with a real sense of urgency, instead of always just playing not to lose, they might motivate some of those sideline spectators for once. What's the harm in trying?

West of Oxygen

I'm not worried that Kanye's stupid stunt "campaign" is going to siphon a significant number of votes from Biden -- if it does, we're done anyway, we just don't know it -- but this sounds a hell of a lot like election fraud:

West may face particular issues in Virginia, where seven of the thirteen electors that West submitted told Intelligencer they were either unaware that they signed up to cast electoral votes on his behalf, or that they had signed notarized paperwork connected to the rapper’s presidential bid at all.

 Maybe in some states it's legal to misrepresent the entity for which you are soliciting votes. I doubt it, and if there are, I doubt Virginia is one of them. But maybe. This country's voting system is clearly not much better than any random Central Asian despotate where the lifetime Supreme Leader renames the months of the year after the members of his family. And the voting strictures of many states are clearly just fallbacks to enable criminals to disenfranchise those people.

(See Kemp, Brian, as the foremost current example of a place where people know they can never win fair and square, so they cheat every fucking time. And why shouldn't they? It's not like anyone stops them. Compare with the case of Crystal Mason, the lady in Texas who's doing five years in prison for voting improperly. Different rules for different people. Same as it ever was.)

I would think most adults who have ever owned property or gotten a home loan or been the executor of a will have dealt with notaries before. The idea that an official document can be "pre-notarized," as implied by the blockquote above, runs counter to the whole point of notarizing in the first place. It is a verification process, by its very definition. It is slow, painstaking, meticulous. The entire point of the notary is that an officially vetted and licensed individual is establishing a contractual understanding between the parties, that each entity knows precisely what they are agreeing to.

So if this "paperwork" was indeed "notarized" and half the signees are still indicating that they were lied to about what they were signing, then at the very least the notary should have their license revoked. But this is also fraud. It can't possibly be legal to misrepresent a petition drive for political office. Doesn't matter if it's an infraction with a modest fine, make him show up to court and explain himself and pay the fucking fine.

This is a point I make periodically, and it seems like a nitpicky thing, but I assure you it is not:  too often we let annoying people get away with being annoying, simply because it's too much trouble and bother to slap them down the first time around, even when they do something illegal. Jacob Wohl accused Robert Mueller of sexual harassment, and implied he was a rapist. Nothing was done about it. A false accusation of a violent crime against a gov't official, and it's not prosecuted? Fortunately Wohl and his butt-buddy Jack Posobiec learned their lesson, and never caused any more mischief again, right?

Same with Kanye here. He's openly colluding with Kushner to fuck up the electoral process, while Trump is also openly trying to fuck up the electoral process. All the states where West has filed petitions to get on the ballot, some literally with "Mickey Mouse" signatures, the AGs of those states need to take this seriously and file fraud charges against him. This is not a joke, this is open subversion of an already compromised democratic process.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy lied before Congress yesterday. Last I checked, that's a crime. Will it be dealt with as such and prosecuted? Again, every state AG should be joining in that fight to make it clear to DeJoy that even if Trump pardons him from any federal crimes, the state crimes will stand, and he will answer for them. Otherwise, why wouldn't he continue to operate with impunity? It would be a dereliction of duty to not charge him by the first part of next week, period. No excuses, no "the senate won't convict." Either lying to Congress is a crime, or it isn't. It really is that simple.

Letting it go just emboldens them to come back with something worse, defying you to do something about it. Perhaps you've noticed who's currently lawn-darting the country, and the tortuous process by which he oozed into office. Thanks, librul media! Thanks, everyone who thought he'd grow into the office! Thanks, every elected representative who said he'd learned his lesson! Your grandchildren will piss on your graves when they learn how you all just stood by, waiting for someone else to take care of the problem.

And again, anyone who's still giving any money or attention to Kanye or his wife or her family, they're part of the fucking problem. Shame on them. It should be our civic duty to bankrupt this ludicrous piece of shit. The first thing Biden should do -- assuming we're allowed to vote and he's allowed to win -- is have the IRS spelunk his tax records. I promise you that fucker's a tax cheat. He handles his money just like everything else in his life -- half-assed and narcissistic.

Job Qualification

If you're not too broken up at or distracted by the invisible perfidies of, ah, cancel culture, here's an interesting thread from the New Yorker's Adam Davidson on the likelihood of King Leer's Scottish golf resort (probably all of them, really) being a useful node in the global bratva money-laundering network.

Martyn McLaughlin has also been doing plenty of work for years on this story on the Scottish side. Natasha Bertrand broke a story last fall about the Air Force having to stop at the base nearby for refueling flights, and staying and playing -- on the taxpayer's dime -- at the golf club instead of at a hotel or on the base.

It's interesting to note how little mention any of this ever gets in the American corporate mediocracy. WaPo's David Fahrenthold has done excellent work for years on how Trump ran his scam charities through his rat-infested resorts, and it eventually got Trump busted and fined $2 million for charity fraud -- which again got precious little mention in the vaunted MSM.

Davidson does note this problematic pattern down in the comments section of the thread. Being the natural-born cynic that I am, I can't help but wonder if, despite the fine efforts by many fine reporters, the editors and publishers who actually own and run the media entities see these "failures" as such. Maybe it's not a bug but a feature that they're always ready, willing, and able to catch the latest volley from the press suckaterry follies, to rub our noses in the daily lies, rather than digging for the truth and pushing that for a change.

As depressing as it must be to be a scrivening journamalist in the corporate 'murkin press corpse, it must be brutal to be a good one, to always know that your heroic efforts are going to be ignored and pushed off the masthead, because Sulzberger doesn't want to anger the powers that really be, or Jeff Zucker's two-decade scam of promoting the worst humanoid in the country makes him and his fucking friends so much precious money.

I know it's not an easy button-push, like the endless stream of sinecured crybabies whining on nationally-disseminated establishment platforms that Twitter invective is squelching their First Amendment rights and repressing them -- EXACTLY LIKE THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, YOU GUYS! -- but it's kinda important all the same. There's a steadily accruing amount of circumstantial evidence that the chief executive of this country has been a launderer for the Russian mob for decades, and he's openly and deliberately taken every possible step to avoid producing evidence that would clear it up instantly.

Maybe people should check into all that? I mean, I'm not a professional journamalist, in that I don't get paid lotsa money to read from a teleprompter into a camera, but it seems kinda important and useful to know. Maybe we could set up a ratio to make everyone feel better, say, one story about Dear Leader's almost-out-in-the-open money-laundering for organized crime, for every, I dunno, ten stories on today's COVID count, or today's lies from Kayleigh MagaNinny or today's yellicopter briefing, or all the other completely useless pro forma exercises the Fourth Estate indulge in every day, instead of just once informing us about shit we didn't already know.

The ability of otherwise well-meaning people to continuously deny what is right in front of them the whole time, to fritter away their opportunities with endless nonsense and fabricated claims of systematic free-speech repression -- like, uh, like when was the last time you saw Noam Chomsky on your teevee screen, or in the pages of the New York Times versus, say, Rudy Ghouliani or Newt Gingrich? -- never ceases to amaze me. Anything to avoid picking the fight that is right in front of them, that would actually affect them and their lives.

After a while, it's reasonable to assume that this ongoing lack of focus, this endless paucity of useful thought and analysis and insight, is not accidental, especially when people -- you know, readers -- keep asking them about it.

[Addendum:  Also, too. Read the whole thing. Yes, much of the info in the thread comes from Times articles, which is to their credit. But again, it's interesting how no one really bothered to pick it all back up during, say, the 2016 campaign, and just beat him over the head with it, and make it a non-stop topic of conversation. Seriously, it has everything, it's right out of a night-time soap opera:  sex, drugs, murder, money laundering, mob ties. If you accept the fact that news and entertainment have irretrievably commingled, that should have been all the more reason to investigate and push this narrative. It is reasonable to ask not only why they didn't do that at the time, but much more importantly, why they aren't doing that now?

Same with the Democrats -- if they're not going to open investigations or impeachment proceedings, the least they can do is keep it in the conversation. Bring it up every single time. If someone asks "why aren't you investigating or impeaching," you just respond with the very second the election is over, no matter what the outcome, we will.]

The Republican Party Hates America

You sell your oldest friends, you sold your countrymen
And yet we know your name....  Motörhead, Traitor

I long ago gave up on the New York Times, and I still think the daily harm they do outweighs the occasional good, but you have to hand it to them on their latest scoop (login required), which of course reveals much more than just the basic premise of the headline.

I don't know that I had "Russia offering bounties to Taliban insurgents for killing American soldiers, and Trump knew about it" on my 2020 bingo card, but I do know that I'm not surprised, not even a little. There are infinite ways for a faithless bucket of shit to prove themselves, and this is just one of the more egregious. It's appalling, but not surprising.

What is at least a little surprising is that none of the people around him who also knew simply stepped forward and took their chances, or at least leaked it to someone in Congress.

But hell, maybe they did try a congressweasel first. It's not like either party is willing to step up and confront this fucking monster.

The title of this post is a bit misleading. The thing about hate is that you actually have to give a shit about the things you take the effort to hate. And the Republicons have made it abundantly clear that they don't care enough even about their own base to expend the energy it would take to hate them.

Contempt is a more accurate word for this. It's the contempt that a successful con artist has for the saps who fall for his sorry act, the loathing a drug dealer has for his best customers, the resentment a pussy-hound has for the women he bangs in quick succession. It's the general sentiment that suckers and dupes deserve their lot, that they'll never earn a fair shake, that if you don't take advantage of their stupidity you're the real idiot in the equation.

Already that MagaNinny broad, that horrid fucking dingbat posing as a press suckaterry, has responded that Trump and Pence "were not briefed" on the bounty issue. Think about that:  the national security apparatus of the USA had identified a situation where a rival power was paying bounties on American troops in a war zone, and they chose for some reason not to brief the chief executive and his trusty li'l sidekick. It's difficult to determine whether it's worse that that's a pathetic lie, or that it might actually be true.

I have a relative who is currently finishing boot camp at Camp Pendleton. He wants to serve his country in the military. The great thing about being young is that you don't know any better yet. All politics aside, it's disturbing to think that he and the other kids he's in camp with, young men and women with their whole lives ahead of them, finding for whatever reason some value and virtue in military service for a dying empire, are being sold out by their commander-in-chief, a gutless, pathetic old man who has never sacrificed anything for anyone, who has always prided himself on getting the upper hand over the contemptible dupes who bought his nonsense.

I don't want to ever again hear about "supporting our troops" from these worthless cocksuckers, these scumbags who sold the troops out long ago, and would in fact push their own grandmothers into a wood chipper if it would get them re-elected to whatever gubmint sinecure they're currently milking.

One rhetorical question that gets asked with some regularity is what will it take for Republicons to stand up to Trump's corruption and malfeasance? What line would he have to cross in order to necessitate action on their part? A perfectly valid question that becomes more imperative with each passing offense.

But you might also ask that question of the supposed opposition party. How bad does it get before they decide that the situation is urgent enough to act with a  genuine sense of urgency? Political prognostications about the "failure" of an impeachment effort ignore the moral and practical necessity of investigating criminal activity, which now literally encompasses what was previously unthinkable -- an American president selling out the lives of American soldiers.

It's not enough to point out the sad, obvious fact that there is no bottom to the degeneracy of this human centipede of an administration. We may not have known the ultimate depth -- and they probably will sink even lower -- but we all understood the principle long ago. This is a situation that draws stark lines, and the political futures of all participating parties should be determined by where they find themselves in relation to those lines.

If the Democrats aren't calling for hearings and flooding the zone within the next couple of days, plague or no plague, we'll know where they stand as well. I have zero interest in perpetuating gutless incrementalism. They can take their "wait for November" bullshit and stick it up their asses. Either you use all the powers you have now, or you don't.

Summer of Stupid

Because the US has a constant surplus of genuinely stupid, credulous dupes who rilly rilly care about shit, but simply cannot be bothered enough to find out whether it's even true or not, there is always a running narrative or several at any given moment that serve only to reinforce that basic concept.

Here are three such current notions, and why they're fucking dumb, as are their adherents:

1. Voting by mail is inherently fraudulent.
   Given that its biggest proponent has been voting by mail long before he threw his head-ferret into the political ring, this one shouldn't even need to be debunked. And yet, because there is a gross ratio of simpletons who perceive a linear correlation between repetition and veracity -- in other words, the more you repeat the lie, the more they buy it -- it needs to be debunked.
   
   So here's the thing:  it's not even worth bothering with trucking out the usual statistical data showing that fraud by mail ballot is almost literally (and is statistically) nonexistent. Instead, let's think for a hot second about the mechanics of the mail-ballot process. Preznit Genius Q. Dealmaker would have his fan-club of shitheads and suckers believe that anyone could simply run down to Kinko's with their absentee ballot, and run off infinity copies, and pass them off as "real" (i.e., fraudulent) votes.
   
   Okay. Go ahead and try it. (Especially you Trumptards out there -- I fucking encourage you to try it, because it'll be a complete waste of your disability check.) Take your mail-in ballot and run off, say, a thousand copies. If you're feeling extra ambitious, make it a million copies. The folks at the copy shop will looove you.
   
   So. You've made your hundreds or thousands of copies of your ballot, right? Now you take them home, and spend x number of hours filling them all out, meticulously, methodically, consistently. You are gonna TURN THIS ELECTION ROUND, Y'ALL. Why doesn't everyone on the mail-in scam do this? you ask yourself. How the fuck did I get to be so much smarter than everyone else?
   
   Then, as you finish filling out ballot #9,999 or the ten thousand you made with your crafty little scheme, you notice a small but important detail -- the ballot registry number. You see, whether you vote in person or by mail, you have to register, and when you do that, the county verifies your residence -- to prevent duplication, you see -- and assigns you a number on the county roster. Since your "ballots" are all copies, it's all the same number, ten thousand times.
   
   Which means that once the county sees your ballot -- any one of the ten thousand or so you paid money to copy, and spent time to fill out, they check you off on the county roster. You voted, it's done. You can send the entire stack in if it floats your boat, but they will throw it all away -- but not before, if they're worth half a shit at their job, coming after you and slapping you with a fat fine for voter fraud.
   
   It's a concentric ring of increasingly stupid and obvious lies -- not only does Dear Leader and his entire claque vote by mail, and not only is fraud statistically nonexistent by mail-in ballots, it is mechanically and procedurally impossible to do so to any meaningful degree. You have to literally have no earthly clue how the process works -- like, at all -- to buy this one.


2. Statues and monuments are intended to be educational tools.
   This one is just too easy. No doubt you have seen by now some tedious version of the usual Facebook uncle YEW CAIN'T TAKE ARRR HISSTRY nonsense, as a response to the wave of statue-toppling going on right now.
   
   So go ahead and think for a second how much you know about American history -- or any history -- and how much of that knowledge was gleaned from looking at statues or monuments.
   
   Those cultural objects, whatever their values, are not intended to educate, but commemorate -- and in the case of the participation trophies cluttering the south, intimidate. That is not a "modern" "liberal" interpretation, four or five generations removed from the installation of such things, it was explicitly stated as such at the time. It was part of the benediction and investiture of those abominations.
   
   Consider:  what other country in the world insists on keeping monuments to people who took up arms against their own country and lost badly, names military bases after traitors and losers? Name one other country that honors enemy combatants. Go ahead, we'll wait.
   
   And yet, I'll wager that the average German knows a hell of a lot more about the Nazi regime than the average southerner knows about the confederate regime. No one "learns" anything of value from a statue or monument, even if it's of Abraham Lincoln or Albert Einstein. At best you get a plaque with fifty or a hundred words containing some decontextualized specifics about the honoree.
   
   But if you wanted to learn something about Einstein or Lincoln, if you wanted to get educated about the "history" of the confederacy and its participants and adherents, you'd read a fucking book. They still have those, you know. The library in your town is still free. I'll bet they have at least one book about Jeff Davis or Bobby Lee or Albert Pike, or whichever scumbag traitor shitbird they tore down today.
   
   The people who claim that participation trophies are the best -- or even a good, or marginally reliable -- source of information or "history" are participating in a mass self-delusion, a sort of line-dancing of evasion. They don't know the history, and don't want to know. They want to pretend that all interpretations are equally valid, even the empirically false ones, even the versions based on pure hatred and blatant racism, and they want you to join them in that pretense.
   
   They don't want to keep slave-owner statues and plantation "tours" because those things present a more complete picture of a complex time. They want to keep those things because they validate a vision and a goal of returning to a time where certain people ruled the roost, and everyone else knew their place.
   
   But let's call the lie for what it really is -- nobody ever came away from a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest or whatever traitor-slaver dirtbag you prefer, knowing more useful information about that person and the context and time they operated in, than they did before they stepped up to the plaque and moved their lips to the inscription.


3. Impeachment is a waste of time if you know you can't win.
   In the interest of fairness, and mostly because these people piss me off as much as confederate apologists piss me off, let's take a look at a rather stout beam of current liberal and Democratic orthodoxy.
   
   Now, if you are not too distracted by the homilies of inept confederate sculpture, you may have seen in the onrushing torrent of political coverage that since his sham impeachment trial a few months ago, the chief executive has continued to act in ways that not only countermand and subvert the national interest, but are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.
   
   It turns out also that the current attorney general, a self-proclaimed culture paladin whose own father was the very same pederast headmaster who hired one Jeffrey Epstein, has openly played an active role in purging the ranks of the "Justice" Department, squashing inconvenient investigations, and generally making no secret of his goal of completing the job of turning this country into a fully fledged banana republic.
   
   The logical and moral thing to do would be for the House of Representatives (pay particular attention to the last word of that name) to use every tool at their disposal to investigate these ongoing misdeeds, with the goal of prosecuting and trying them in public, for the benefit of same. Beyond simply prosecuting and punishing these crimes as such, the ancillary goals would be to make it as inconvenient as possible for the criminals to continue their activities, as well as make it clear to them that their actions will not go without a response.
   
   Since the impeachment farce, which showed beyond all doubt that the Republicon senators have been irretrievably corrupted and must be voted out of office as soon as possible, the Democratic response to further calls for investigation and prosecution have been met with limp responses of "wait till November," as if people will actually get the chance to cast a vote and get it counted without undue interference.
   
   (Turns out there is no need to concoct a baroque scheme to mass-copy mail-in ballots, or bus in illegals from Massachusetts across the New Hampshire border. All you need to do is have vested financial interest with the companies that produce electronic voting machines for contentious states, and then make sure that the secretaries of state in those places can be bought. See the great state of Georgia for the most egregious example, but Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and others are all following suit in various ways.)
   
   Of course a second impeachment of Trump, or a first impeachment of Barr, will end in acquittal by the Senate. So what? Do it anyway. Do it because it's your fucking job. See, there already was an election mandating the investigation of corruption. That was that "blue wave" of 2018, remember? You're representatives, and now it is time to represent. You really may not have another shot at this.
   
   Either the law means something, or it doesn't. Either corruption is something that should be called out and publicly shamed for what it is at every opportunity and every occurrence, or not. There is a disagreement on what "failure" means in this context. It does not mean trying and not succeeding in conviction, it means not trying at all, which is much more empowering and validating to the criminals than putting up a good fight and maybe not getting across the finish line.
   
   Look at how federal prosecutors have used creative tactics to secure convictions against mobsters over the years, from Al Capone to John Gotti. It frequently takes years, and multiple tries, and even questionable methods sometimes. But persistence is key, and while the odds may be slim, they're always better than pre-emptively giving up.
   
   Even the political aspect of trying makes more sense. The Democrats' problem typically is finding ways to inspire passion and action in its ranks. Who the fuck is inspired by yeah, we know they're guilty as hell, but let's wait six months and see if we're still allowed to vote?
   
   We voted, assholes, and it was clear at the time what we were voting for. So do it, not with narrowly-drawn articles that a chimp could scramble out of, but with a barrage of throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks charges. Hammer them for fucking jaywalking. Hammer them for being assholes. Hammer them because you don't like the color of their suits. Whatever.
   
   It's truly sad that a moral abomination of a political party has such a handle on marketing its horrific policies, but a lot of that boils down to passion. They may be nuts, they may be assholes, but they're all-in on those things. They don't second-guess, they don't worry about facts, or what works. They investigated the Benghazi nothingburger nine times, and when they still came up flat, they trotted it out at their convention to whip up the rubes. It was bullshit, but it worked where they needed it to work.
   
   What might it be like if the Democrats understood the gunfight for what it was, and finally dropped their Spork of Decorum™ and picked up a fucking MAC-10 and went to town?

Fight Liar with Liar

It's a very strange ongoing phenomenon to observe, on at least weekly and sometimes daily basis, not just the constant lies, personal attacks, innuendo, and outright slander and libel, but the degree to which it goes completely uncontested.

Let's look at just two (2) of the more recent notorious examples.

The first example is the recent resurfacing of the conspiracy theory arising from the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, who was an aide to outgoing congressman Joe Scarborough. It's easy to forget, after nearly twenty years, that in fact there did seem to be some shady shit around that event at the time, and it chased Scarborough around for a few years. It doesn't help that Scarborough's default setting is "smug, supercilious prick."

But whatever. For this example, it doesn't matter whether Morning Joe had anything to do with Klausutis' untimely demise. (For the record, I don't think he did.) From a cursory glance at his Twitter feed, it appears that Scarborough has chosen simply to take the vaunted "high road" and express sympathy for her family getting all this dredged up again, and retweeting supportive messages. All well and good.

But DID YOU KNOW [arches eyebrow ominously] that back in 1989, Donald Trump had three of his Taj Mahal executives killed in a helicopter crash, not long before the whole money-laundering operation went tits-up? It's true!

I dunno about you, but if some cheesedick piece of shit was publicly accusing me of murder, and said asshole had roughly a metric fuckton of serious dirt, rumors, allegations about him, and I had my own teevee show, I'd make a point of finding the nastiest thing I could, find a few bucks in the production budget for a couple decent private eyes, and flog that mule till the motherfucker dropped. Just keep hammering on it every day until someone squealed.

But hey, if Joe Blow wants to keep that "thoughts and prayers" high road, more power to him. We can see how well that has worked for so many other people, who just didn't want to sink to that level. [rolls eyes]

The second example involves Trump's ongoing lies about how the previous administration left the federal government completely unprepared for the current pandemic. He has repeatedly blamed Obama by name. This op-ed piece from the St. Louis Times-Dispatch lays out the lies pretty well.

Now, the general election campaign obviously has not really gotten into gear yet, but as someone who voted for Obama twice, I would like to see the man defend himself. I don't want to hear any bullshit about "presidential protocols" of not attacking other office-holders.

That taboo has clearly been shattered, and it's an odd thing to see one side uphold it while the other repeatedly, gleefully violates. Sorta like watching a duel where the participants agreed to use swords, but one side showed up with an assault rifle, and the dope with the sword just stands there, occasionally murmuring "but we agreed to use swords."

I want Obama to defend himself, and call out Trump's repeated, blatant lies for exactly what they are. But I also want him to say that on my behalf, and on behalf of the millions of Americans who supported him, and still do for that matter. He's not just saying you sucked, Barry, he's saying we were suckers for supporting you.

If I had the pulpit to say that's a fucking lie, I would. Then I'd remind everyone that he won't show his tax returns because he's been laundering bratva cash since before 9/11. But I don't. I'm just an anonymous schmuck, a drop in the vast internets ocean. It doesn't matter what I think or say.

But it does matter if a former President responds to the worthless piece of shit currently festering in the White House, and debunks those lies with specificity. Especially when the current guy is also lying about voting by mail, because he wants get those disqualified, so that he can cheat his way in for another term. Do ya think the situation is getting urgent? Okay then, it might be time to respond with a real sense of urgency. Waiting till November is not an option, when there's a significant non-zero chance that the election will be rigged or postponed.

I do think it's likely that Obama and/or Biden will respond to those lies at some point in the relatively near future. But the responses should be in real time, and should be forceful and declarative. No dancing around with carefully nuanced phrasing and word choices. These aren't "falsehoods" or "untrue statements," these are LIES -- as in they are completely false and Trump knows it.

I'm not a fan of Rick Wilson's history of political cockpunching, but I will say that he's talked better trash, baited Trump ably, and put together several powerful ads, than just about anything I've seen from the Democrats. It's kinda sad that a career rent-a-Republican wants these fuckers out more than the Democratic Party seems to most of the time.

Like I said at the top, this is a very strange phenomenon. We've become accustomed to it. People have decided that nothing can be done about it, so nothing gets done about it. No one even tries. Every Democratic politician should have been flooding the zone, every panel show, every Sunday shitshow, with a unified message -- that's a fucking lie, period, end of sentence. You are allowed to call liars what they are. Keep going down this path, and you might find that changed pretty soon. The bottom line is that no one has to take this shit from this fucking guy.

Did you ever know a kid who was bullied in school? Did the bully ever stop because the kid ignored them? Sometimes you have to fight back, and you might even end up with a black eye or a bloody nose. But the fucker knows you're gonna fight back next time, and that makes it more likely to move on.

When they know you're never gonna fight back, why should they move on?

Turtle Soup

Good profile of Addison McConnell in the New Yorker. The main thing to keep in mind about Moscow Mitch is not that he's the closest thing this country has to a flat-out traitor, nor that he's a soulless piece of shit lamely failing to masquerade as a human being.

No, the real takeaway with McConnell is that he's exactly what Republican voters want and deserve, and the sooner Democrats realize that nobody in that party can be "worked with" anymore, and that they must devote themselves to the goal of treating the Republicans as a hostile entity that must be completely eliminated from every facet of American governance, the better off we'll all be.

The fact that McConnell loathes Trump is not exculpatory, even though it hews closely to the "ends justify the means" expediency of the worst ideologues. In fact, it bonds McConnell to Trump inextricably, as the latter's term propels down the road to disaster and into the scrap-heap of history. Their relationship is not adversarial; it is deeply, grossly symbiotic.

McConnell is at least astute enough to know what sort of a turd Trump really is, a complete failure as a human being and utterly unfit for the office he defiles. McConnell loathes Trump and still does his bidding, obligingly, even cracking jokes at times. Hilarious.

No doubt McConnell tells himself routinely, in order to resist what must be a constant temptation to punch every mirror he passes by, that he is simply a reluctant, realistic observer of the dumpster fire that comprises the crude kleptarchy that now misrules the nation. The fact is that while Addison may not always be the guy holding the matches or the gasoline, he is the prime caretaker of the fire's ability to keep going constantly. He literally could stop all this at any time, and chooses not to.

The thing about these types is that they believe in "legacies" and such, and as he gets nearer to his eighties, no doubt Addison ponders from time to time how he'll be remembered. No doubt his donors and dogsbodies will sing his praises, but any decent person not previously rented by him will spit when they say his name, and envision themselves one day making it out to whatever marbled box Addison finds himself encased in for eternity, and taking a fat greasy dump at the head.

These are people who could have done anything with their privilege and power, but actively chose to dedicate themselves to making their communities and states and country worse places than they were. They will be remembered as such, except only by the rented losers of the industry. And every single person that still votes for scumbags like Addison McConnell, knowing what they really are and just not giving half a shit or thinking it's funny, deserves to burn in hell.

All that said, maybe it's time Democrats took a page from McConnell's playbook and turned it on him. He's ruthless, an evil master of procedure and mechanical process, and completely ready and willing to tear his opponents a new asshole just for the fun of it. The idea that Senate Democrats should continue to be "led" by an insufferable, pusillanimous twerp like Chuck Schumer is no longer acceptable. Time to go LBJ on those fuckers. No mercy.

It's time -- to use the technical jargon -- to fuck shit up. No more ice cream socials. Trump is openly looting and shaking down hospitals during a fucking plague, stealing PPE from medical personnel to auction off to the highest bidder. Maybe some of our elected representatives could look into that? If not now, when; if not them, whom? [extra points for pre-emptive grammar pedantry]

This is, in the strictest Clausewitzian sense, war. It's time to act like it. Get dirty, win back the White House and the Senate, and then set about reclaiming state legislatures, and crush that party of traitors. It's come to that -- either the Republican party ends, or the United States does. That's really all there is to it, and a lot of the reasons for that rest on the narrow, arthritic shoulders of Addison McConnell.

At the Movies, Dotard Edition

Ahahahahaha. TFW when you identify with Captain Bligh.

It's weird that someone doesn't quite seem to get how "one of [their] all time favorite movies" worked out for all the characters involved. But never is he more on-brand than he displays a spiritual bond with other exemplars of cruel stupidity. Can't wait to hear his thoughts on how misunderstood Jame Gumb was.

Seriously, when someone literally takes pride in being a straight-up irredeemable piece of shit, with this toxic level of consistency, you should pay attention. Nothing is beneath him. He is capable of anything. The level of indifference and dereliction is disgusting to see, and exhausting to keep up with.

We need a government that is responsive to this sort of thing festering in the halls of power. If the Democrats are not going to step up and at least read their protest into the official record, then we need new and better Democrats. This is unacceptable. His assertion of absolute power is itself an impeachable act, one that would had Obama or Hillary strung up within hours. People should start taking these warnings seriously, because there's not likely to be many more of them.

Shit Doctrine

Looks like four Republicon Senators so far (Richard Burr, Kelly Loeffler, Jim Inhofe, and Ron Johnson) are known to have sold off large quantities of personal stock holdings, after receiving briefings early on regarding the impending severity of the "hoax" virus. What do you think the mathematical probability might be that there are many more -- including, of course, Kim Don Un's family of grifting locusts -- that have been profiteering in real time from the delays and denials and supposed logistical difficulties in preparing for and responding to the situation?

I've expressed skepticism of the actual severity of the plague early on, and you could say I've cautiously revised those early assessments. Again, going from empirical data and common sense, it is now more clear that the numbers were artificially "low" here because no one's been tested yet. The numbers are likely to skyrocket in the coming weeks, and people will die.

(I'm still not entirely convinced that completely shutting down the world and trashing the economy is a practical solution, but clearly something needs to be done, since certain people were not as proactive as they could and should have been.)

Other people will be laid off or cut loose from their jobs, and in a country where a significant number of people are four hundred bucks away from the sidewalk, that can be as much or even more of a death sentence than the virus itself. Poverty is a health-care issue, duh.

And these fuckers are making a smooth buck of it, cashing in on the misery of their countrymen. Loeffler is the wealthiest member of Congress, worth half a billion dollars. Her husband is the FUCKING CHAIRMAN OF THE NEW YORK STOCK EXCHANGE. But she got the briefing several weeks ago, cashed in a few mil, and turned around and bought stock in Citrix, since people will be working from home for some time, doncha know. (Those that still have jobs, anyway.)

And the entire time, these dirtbags have been praising Dear Leader's competence and manly stamina, like the dutiful little bootlicking worms that they are. They knew what was coming down, could have taken any number of actions publicly or at least in their respective home states. But no, there was a precious dollar to be had. Money always comes first with people like that. Always. It is not figurative in the least.

Entire states are being shut down now; just a few hours ago, the governor of California instituted a "shelter in place" order for the entire state (the order had been going county-by-county over the past several days). One in eight Americans lives here. Forty million people, who now can't go to fucking work to get money to buy food and pay rent.

I feel grateful and fortunate that I have almost two months' worth of vacation and sick time banked, though given the extraordinary circumstances, I might not be able to use them. I won't know until tomorrow or Monday. I have enough in the bank to last us a couple months as well, though. The thing is, I know a lot of people who don't any such cushion. I'll try to help out a few friends if need be, and maybe find a way to donate to the local food bank.

But a lot of people are well and truly fucked, and are about to find their lives in a hole that may take them years to get back out of, if ever. Debt can be a prison of sorts, especially in an economy explicitly designed to keep the vast majority in a state of permanent precarity, of always being a missed paycheck or bad health-care break away from living in a van down by the river.

They should know that a small group of people deliberately profited from their misery. They deserve to have a political party that actually represents them and fights for them, instead of gutless incrementalists that couldn't lead a scout troop across a dirt road.

I've been thinking about this post I wrote last weekend, almost since the very minute I finished it. I was way, waaayyyyy too hard on Matt Colvin and the rest of the "garage arbitrageurs" in that article. I have read enough of the "side hustle" and "nichepreneur" blogs and articles and mini-books to know that there really is a very small but very committed group of folks out there that do this for their living. Usually through Amazon's affiliate program, they do things like find clearance pallets on Alibaba -- or, in Colvin's case, driving around to all the dollar stores in a hundred-mile radius, buy items that they know they can sell for a markup on their affiliate page, and move product or have it drop-shipped.

It's work, and while it occasionally ends up being some asshole in Tennessee sitting on a garage full of hand sanitizer, trying to gouge desperate panic-buyers, the fact is that we should be able to muster a proportionately larger volume of genuine outrage at wealthy people who have sworn a legally binding oath to never use their elected office for personal profit. The Tennessee Attorney General seized all the contents of Colvin's garage last weekend, and I sincerely hope Colvin was at least compensated for his expenses.

As long as the health-care gougers and corrupt politicians get away with their evil shit right out in the open, I feel embarrassed for even picking on a schmuck like Matt Colvin, who at the end of the day was trying to get what might have amounted to mid-five-figures at best. A life-changing amount for him and his family, unlike the couch-cushion change Kelly Loeffler sold out her country for. But I'm leaving that post up, unaltered, as a reminder to myself at least.

Another prime example from this week is that spring break kid from the Florida beach, who just wasn't all that concerned about the virus. If I get it, I get it. People expressed their outrage at his "selfishness," as if we weren't all that way when we were nineteen. As if that kid, and everyone in his generation, hasn't been explicitly told their entire lives, tough shit, your problem. Climate change? Your problem. Mass shootings in schools? Your problem. Decades of student-loan usury and gig-economy wage slavery? Your fucking problem. We got ours, sucks to be you.

But yeah, surfer dude's the selfish asshole. Right. I'd say he's internalized the lessons that have been taught to him his entire life.

A decent society that had a real understanding of what it's facing right about now would truss up that cohort of Senate profiteers like Thanksgiving turkeys, set up a guillotine in front of the White House gates, and commence with justice. It's bad enough that they'd happily watch you die in the gutter, but they decided to cash in on a situation that they knew would worsen drastically, and say nothing about it. They aided and abetted an ongoing crime that will kill people and ruin lives. They should be punished accordingly. The Republican Party is an organized crime syndicate that needs to be detained, investigated, and imprisoned, before they completely destroy what's left of the country. Really, it might already be too late now.

Since we are no longer a decent, serious society, and maybe never really were, we all already know what will happen to them -- nothing. They won't resign, they won't get censured or fined, there might be some insincere mea culpas and a few enraging homina-homina moments from the prime suspects, and then maybe some canned rebukes muttered on whichever MSNBC host needs a guest at the moment, and that will be that. It's all just a big game to them -- your life, my life, all of it.

Because let's face it, folks -- the real problem right now, the one truly undermining the stout fabric of a once-proud nation, is that the Chapo Trap House guys are dicks, and someone was mean to Bret Stephens on Twitter that one time. Priorities, people.

Oh, and fuck your feelings. Remember that one? Good times. They weren't joking.