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.

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?

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.

Uncle Tim's Cabin

You know, it's sad and annoying that a black Democrat would shill for Trump, but you know, Vernon Jones has been a known shithead for quite some time, a true DINO. Clean your fucking barn out once in a while, people, or accept the fact that you're going to get "surprises" like this from time to time.

But really, if that's the best they can pull over to the dork side, some state lege asshole who appears to be feathering his nest for a post-house run on K Street, that's pretty small potatoes, until Jeff Van Camp gets up there Thursday. Now it's up to Vern's constituents to run his ass out of office, and then depending on who wins, up to the party leaders whether he ever holds a job in the arena again.

If the Dems win, Jones should spend the rest of his days asking if we want fries with that; if Kim Don Un steals one out, it's even odds whether Big Daddy will even remember Vern's name when he needs something. Favors and loyalty only run one way in this swamp, son.

As for real Republicons like Tim Scott and Ben Carson, who knows what the hell their deal is? They're not entirely wrong that the Democrats have frequently taken blacks for granted as a voting bloc, but, you know, if you can't see the contrast between enthusiastic skull-busters and half-hearted incrementalism, I don't know what to say. Neither is good, but one is far worse.

And guys like Scott and Carson can bullshit themselves all they want about how they're in a party that let them succeed on their own merits rather than the color of their skin, but if they don't realize that the GOP has its own "we gotta get one of those too" protocols, it's because they've chosen not to see it.

She Seems Fun

You think Gavin Newsom ever looks back on when he was hitched to this goofy broad and thinks, Jesus, I dodged a fuckin' bullet?

Back in those days, it was our Sunday morning ritual to pick up a nice thick copy of the SF Chronicle, and spend the entire morning reading through it, sipping coffee, trading sections. I recall one time when they ran a puff piece on Guilfoyle in their society pages (which are always off-putting in principle anyway), and it's been too long for me to put it into specific detail, but I do distinctly recall coming away from the article thinking I really don't like her.

There was something weird and overly calculated and "ambitious" -- not in the gritty Working Girl way, but in the ugly Sunset Boulevard or Showgirls way -- that really gave me a bad vibe about her. Newsom was mayor at the time, of course, and has had higher ambitions from the start, but manages to carry himself without being a leg-humping, social-climbing asshole.

So it's no surprise at all to see how Kim Guilfoyle has turned out -- smug, obnoxious, annoying, coked out of her skull like her douchebag boyfriend. Together they always look like they're about to shoot some weird stepmom-fetish porn, then go to a restaurant and abuse the waitstaff, nurse a couple of drinks while the shit wears off.

As far as the conventions themselves go, I watched a few bits from the Democratic convention, and while I don't plan to hate-watch the Republicon convention, I will read some hate-recaps here and there.

So after the opening night of the GOP festivities, I'll say that the one main difference I would have assumed beforehand is true in spades so far, and will no doubt worsen:  the Democratic convention was designed to enthuse the base, and encourage moderates and independents to come to sanity, while the Republicons will do nothing other than beat the one drum they have and simply badger the shitheads that comprise their base to show up.

These are awful, profoundly indecent people, appealing only to like-minded souls, telling them that it's worth all the death and destruction so far, and to come, if only to keep those people in their rightful places. That's all they've got anymore, and they're happy to use a big mouth and a fat set of jugs to make the pitch to the pot-bellied, fist-shaking codgers who still jerk off to this shit.

Useful Idiots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Such a Nasty Woman

So Biden's veep pick is Kamala Harris, and it's not just a selection I can "live with," but I actually like her a great deal. Since I knew it wouldn't be Liz Warren, I was hoping for either Harris or Tammy Duckworth, and largely for the same reasons -- most importantly, they don't suffer fools gladly and they don't take any shit.

Those are vital qualities to have if this country is going to extricate itself from its self-inflicted mess. We got stuck with this miserable clown because no one in his own party had the balls to call him out early on, and tell him to sit down and shut the fuck up. Then the corporate mediots "couldn't figure out how to cover him," because they still do not understand (or maybe it's me that doesn't understand) what their job entails.

Then of course the Democrats were consistently shocked and appalled as he shredded their sacred norms and decorum, reducing the whole thing to kayfabe spectacle, a cheesy pro-wrestling exhibition where the stunts and the blood are real, only the narrative is fake.

For someone who seems to fancy himself a raging heterosexual, Trump is really only heterosexual in the most technical sense -- he likes people to know that he bangs attractive women, because he understands that as a point of "esteem" among the types of people whose respect he covets. But he clearly doesn't like women, unless they work for him or fawn over him. He probably doesn't even like sex (shudder) all that much, since good sex involves satisfying someone else's needs as well as your own.

Every woman who's ever voluntarily had sex (ugh, sorry) with this sweaty gastropod has done so only because of his money. And he knows it. Without his money, he'd never get laid, even back in the day. He doesn't know how to talk to women, beyond basic "how you like my new building" self-aggrandizing. He doesn't listen to anyone, certainly not some hoor.

The master dealmaker really doesn't know how to deal with women at all, unless they're the sort that are willing to work for a fucking pig like him. This puts him at a disadvantage with someone like Harris, whose presidential run was not exactly a smooth ride, but she is a fast learner, a sharp debater, and an experienced prosecutor who knows how to seek and exploit opponents' weaknesses.

And since this dumpster fire of an administration is nothing but weaknesses, she'll actually have to show some restraint. Pick a few choice wounds and really make them sting and sing for the crowd until they can sing it back:

• Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
• How's that record stock market working out for the working class?
• Well, he did say he would run the country like one of his businesses.

Harris will be good in that role, and she'll genuinely enjoy it because even though she's ambitious, she also seems to have an actual sense of justice. It will be good training for what, even if they win in a landslide, will be a difficult, ugly slog against the worst fucking humans infesting the planet.

I'm not just talking about Trump and Pence and their minion Moscow Mitch. I'm talking Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Hannity, Rupert Murdoch -- people who sold out their country long ago, and now are just molesting the corpse and cashing the checks. They'll be out in full force against everything Biden tries to do to fix the damage these thieves and monsters have done.

And it has to be a real landslide, a straight-up Reagan-Mondale ass-kicking. "Close" will not cut it. They have to take the Senate back as well, and they have to be prepared to go big and bold right away, and tell the critics -- including the ankle-biting "moderate" shitheads on the Sunday follies shows -- to go to hell. They have to have a marketing team to designate key people to hit the necessary media nodes and sell the plan with consistency and urgency.

As much of a downer as I have been in here lately, I still think it's possible. There's a sense of fatigue in some areas of the fan club; the cult will always be there, but there are some who really wanted to try something different, or just had been poisoned against Hillary for too long to ever vote for her.

And after four years of American carnage, they're tired. They've been stuck at home for six months, and this prattling dunce hasn't done a goddamned thing to make any of it better, he just shoveled more money to the few who needed it the least. These folks were fine with him telling libruls to go fuck themselves, but now he's effectively told them to go fuck themselves. The show has gotten old.

So it won't be easy, but despite the cheating and stealing and various modes of voter suppression, it is doable. And it is still worth doing.

This Is Us

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

So what's it gonna be?

Subverting Norms

Lately I find myself thinking back frequently to a classic Norm Macdonald bit, about a homeless guy who has a dog with him. (Bear in mind that the bit is about thirty years old, and I don't want to hear any politically correct pedantry about othering the houseless or whatever.) The punchline, such as it is, is that Norm figures the dog is probably thinking, You know, I can do this shit on my own, buddy.

That's basically how I feel about the Democratic Party "leadership" much of the time these days. I'll still trudge to the polls and cast my lot with the rest of you schmucks (if we're still allowed, I guess), but I've been building about a hundred feet of fencing and gate around my house, and probably getting another couple guns in the near future to complement my Mossberg and my Sig P226 (maybe a Glock 19 this time). I'm also looking into emigration requirements for places like Scotland and Ireland.

I have no confidence in the Democratic leadership. I see stupid little blurbs like Nancy Pelosi smirking that she refers to Cheetolini as "Mister Make Matters Worse," and am underwhelmed by it. They should be impeaching Bill Barr like six months ago. They should have worked up new articles of impeachment against Trump the day after the last farce was over.

The idea that doing absolutely nothing in the face of open tyranny is somehow better than at least trying and not succeeding in the ultimate outcome, is repulsive for starters.

But doing nothing is also not that difficult. I can do that shit my own, good buddy. What the fuck do I need to pay you for?

Trump has always had a four-step process to everything he does in life, whether it's bankrupting a casino, calling Page Six and bragging about how good he porked that showgirl, or lawn-darting the country and setting its citizens to each others' throats:

1. Lie.
2. Cheat.
3. Steal.
4. Destroy.

That's it. That's the process. It's simple but effective, and why should he change it. It works. It's worked for him for years, because no one ever just lifted their shoe and scraped this fucking dog turd of a human being off the bottom of society's shoe. And now you've got dog shit everywhere, as far as the eye can see.

He could and should have been shut down years ago, but the New York Democrats were happy to hold their noses and cash his checks, and the New York mediots were happy to take his calls and do his PR for free. And so here we are, and nobody who can actually do anything or at least influence anything has the balls to do so.

So in the case of voting by mail, he's been lying about the whole thing for months, right down to how it actually works. Gee, maybe people should step in -- every time -- and correct the lie, and call it for what it is?

Like all marketing, lies work by repetition. That's why he's mostly just doddered around repeating the same bullshit over and over again for years, till the smooth-brained death cult can chant it in their dreamless collective sleep. The usual panel monkeys on the usual shows use the usual colorful phrasing to dance around the word "lie," when all they have to do is say, that's a goddamned lie, he knows it and so do we.

But now he has enough momentum with the lie about mail-in voting, and enough morons believing it, that now he toys with the next part -- muddying the waters just enough to discredit the results, defunding the USPS just enough to cripple their ability to handle the job effectively, and so on.

When that doesn't work, and people (as the current parlance goes) "crawl over broken glass" to do this thing they should have done in 2016 and 2014 and 2010 to prevent all this, he will then simply have his trusty mutt Barr draft up some emergency proclamation postponing or nullifying or whatever his vaunted gut decrees.

And what will anyone do about it? Will Nancy Smash have another smug nickname for His Travesty? Will Barry O have another carefully crafted oratory invoking our better angels?

Better angels? Forty fucking percent of this goddamned country is ecstatic with all of this. Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham could throw white-power hand signals at each other night after night and get two million bastards to tune in consistently. Everyone likes to invoke the old Michael Caine Batman mantra of some people just want to watch the world burn. Yes, they do and they are, and the resolute bulwark against the daily evil is merely to presume that of course we'll be permitted to vote in November.

To which the correct answer is, Yes, probably. But what is your contingency plan if this fucker goes full Mobutu Sese Seko on us? Humor us and just share it with the class, this plan of action in the face of crisis and urgency.

That is where they're failing. There is no backup. They scoff and sneer and harrumph that of course there is no way that this norm could possibly be traduced; why even Lincoln made sure the election was held on time in the middle of the Civil War.

Yeah, but -- and hear me out on this one -- Jesus Fucking Christ, I don't know if you've noticed, but he's not Lincoln. He's a criminal scumbag who's surrounded and insulated himself with like-minded scumbags who will do his bidding, no matter what.

I frequently use the exaggerated epithet "would push their own grandmother into a wood-chipper" to attempt to describe the sort of animal who would do literally anything to achieve their political goal. Well, Stephen Miller's grandmother recently died of the #TrumpPlague. You see him change his fucking rhythm by even a sixteenth of a beat? Me neither.

You think Bill Barr won't sign that fucking emergency memo postponing the election, to keep the "anarchists" from installing Diamond Joe Biden? Fine, then we can agree to disagree.

But just for safety's sake, you should still probably be able to describe what can be done if he does sign that memo, or decide that the election count is unacceptable, or whatever banana-republic bullshit these people have already made clear multiple times that they are completely comfortable with.

So far, I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever that any of the people who actually have the power to affect that -- even in futility -- have taken any measures to do so. Impeach Barr now -- the investigative process alone will at least stall ever-so-slightly his continued attempts to turn this popsicle stand into some Opus Dei freak show. Half of something is always better than nothing.

And for the people in power who choose to just complain and bemoan their lot -- well, I can do that shit on my own, asshole. Now tell me why I should bother voting for you after this debacle, win lose or draw.

The Questions You Didn't Ask

Not really questions, so much as a suggestion and an observation.

Suggestion:  Maybe one of these reportin' types, when asking Trump or one his bootlicking toadies about the prospect of starting the school year in the middle of an entirely predictable resurgence of the COVID pandemic, might point out that Trump still has a school-age child. Obviously a rich white kid in a private school is at a much lower risk, but there's still a risk, for the students and the school staff.

We all know the bit about how minor children should be off-limits, but it's not at all out of line to ask if Barron Trump is also going back to school, or if this is just another item in an endless line of Donald Trump trying to wheedle suckers into taking a risk he would never take himself?

Observation:  Obviously systemic racism is an enormous part of the police brutality problem, and is at the root of this wondrous summer of protests (which, again, the corporate mediots prefer to cover only when the proles strike back). But I would offer the notion that Trump whistling past a question about state violence with whoa, hey, wait a minute, cops kill more whites than blacks is not the brilliant defense he thinks it is.

It does qualify, like many of the things the stable genius blurts, as an inadvertent explanation. This is something that's been lost in the obsessive focus on the racism, at the expense of an equally large part of the problem -- this is what modern American police are trained to do, to act like an occupying army, to treat the civilians they serve the same way the Israeli Defense Force treats Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Just another example of how truly gullible and stupid mediots can be, to reflexively get into parsing rates versus totals, without at all touching on the fact that nearly 4,000 extrajudicial killings in the last five years is too fucking many, especially when we've all read and seen any number of examples where the level of violence was unjustified and overwhelming.

The idea of "defunding" the police is a polemic, and an unrealistic one if taken literally. The goal should be to re-examine the role of civilian law enforcement in this country, and to demilitarize that role, to take away the toys gleaned from military surplus, to stop the IDF-style trainings, to review the psych batteries and get the bullies and the assholes and the roid-rage turds the fuck outta there. Use the money saved to fund community engagement efforts and win back the trust of the public.

Again, it's easy to understand all the institutional reasons why these inconvenient questions don't get posed, but it doesn't change the basic dynamic that people have been realizing about the press for a while:  if you're not going to challenge these people, if instead you're just going to show up and sit there and transcribe the lies and nonsense, what fucking good are you?

Very Fine People

Since we're all "reopening" the wage-slave service economy now, plague be damned, you can probably start the countdown to the next elite mediot haunted diner safari to lecture us all for the kajillionth time on the "economic anxiety" these salt-of-the-earth types factor into their decision-making, such as it is.

Any doubts or concerns about why my default position on these dirtbags starts at seething contempt and generally worsens, should be answered thoroughly by that video. That town and its inhabitants are a dog turd stuck to the sole of the world's collective shoe. This isn't some "worst of the worst" scenario; the cops are standing there while the lone protester gets threatened and assaulted. This is how it is in these places.

The only consolation to be had is that pretty much everyone you see in that video has the coveted blood type of Gravy+, and as such won't live long enough collect their Social Security. (Though clearly most of them are collecting it prematurely in the form of various other social programs, as you wouldn't hire a single one of those losers to clean your gutters or move rocks across your driveway.)

This is what you're up against. The cops won't help you; they're on their side, the side of authoritarianism and fascism. So don't get angry, get ahead. The main thing is to stop pretending that if their soul-deadening widget-stamping jobs came back to East Overshoe, they'd be totally different people. They wouldn't. They'd just be racist scumbags with steadier income. The factory leaving town twenty years ago is just the excuse they've always hidden behind. Did someone put a fucking gun to their heads and keep them from going to the free library and learning a new job skill?

It occurs to me that while I suppose I self-identify as a "liberal" essentially by default, since all the alternatives are either rabidly stupid or wildly ineffective, the thing I notice about real liberals is that most of them have this weird teleological need to believe in the "innate goodness of humanity" or some shit like that. It's like religion without the money -- which, you know, what's the fuckin' point then?

And the cold fact is that, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp sagely wrote thirty-some years ago, some people ain't no damned good. Like Dr. Cox in Scrubs said, most people are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

Not you or me, of course -- we're the good guys, right? I mean, I won't claim to be simon-pure, but I do know I've never been part of a snarling circle of predators surrounding a terrified kid for the high crime of speaking his fucking mind in what we used to at least pretend was a free country. You know? I have no doubt that most of these shitheads are trudging back home to lives of futility -- and that thrills me to no end.

They deserve to be miserable with every waking breath. I hope their lives are the stuff of Hank Williams songs. They pretty much have to be, because successful, happy people don't have time for this angry-chimp bullshit.

When they tell you and show you, over and over and over again, who and what they really are, it might be best to give up notions about helping them find their "better angels," and just believe them. They're nothing more and nothing less than miserable fucks who lost the game of life before they dropped out of tenth grade, and have spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but trying to pull the rest of the world down to their level. They'll lamely try to tell you that they just want to be "left alone," but somehow that always seems to include their gawwwd-given right to push around anyone who disagrees with them.

Leave me alone, but I insist upon the privilege of never having to leave you alone.

Dung beetles don't morph into butterflies, folks. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is simply insulate yourself as much as possible from the decisions of the lowest common denominators of society. Not every problem has a solution.

There is no percentage in arguing with some toothless cousin-fucker living out his vicarious revenge-porn fantasy (probably on his probation officer, or on the judge who slapped him with a restraining order and child-support payments, or on his ex's divorce lawyer, or her new boyfriend, etc.) with his stupid Punisher tee-shirt. Okay? There's just not a discussion to be had, no compromise, no "reaching out" by whatever "conservative Democrat" asshole thinks will get him that 50.1% electoral victory.

Just tell them that a nice chug of Drano will cure their tertiary syphilis and prevent the COVID, and let karma find its way.

Of Mice and Maniacs

There is something deeply, ludicrously ironic in the spectacle of Big Pussy using his favorite superpower to try to strong-arm Twitter into letting his lies go unchecked. It's as if it doesn't occur to him that such an action frees up people even more to respond in kind about him.

Not just the stuff we know is absolutely true and well-documented, but the things that are probably true or highly likely, like those Taj Mahal execs he had lawn-darted in a chartered helicopter, or the well-known fact that "executive time" is when he jerks off to photos of his eldest daughter. That sort of thing.

We've been conditioned by decades of entertainment tropes to a default setting of seeing tech dweebs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk as basically extras from Silicon Valley -- charmless but essentially harmless dorks whose lack of social skills pushed them, like blind people who compensate with superhuman hearing, to greater heights with their natural skill sets. That narrative has blinded us to the notion that maybe these guys are just creeps and assholes and opportunistic weirdos, not really all that different from Stephen Miller or Stephen Bannon, or any of the other barnacles and remorae clinging to the side of this whale carcass.

Like Big Pussy and his crew of human colostomy bags, the tech weasels have not tried to hide any of this at all. Zuckerberg contradicts himself with each appearance before a congressional panel or media interlocutor, his waxy, uncanny-valley visage and spun-to-the-gills eyes conveying a, to put it mildly, conflicted inner dialogue. Best case scenario with Zuck is that he really just doesn't give a fuck, he'll be glad to sell out his country to these monsters for a piece of that sweet campaign action.

Twitter is a bit of a different nut to crack, and Dorsey is caught between having to play ball with Big Pussy's idiotic whining, and not getting dumped by his own board and replaced with an even more pliant CEO. Dorsey probably realized some time ago that he should have done something about Trump's poisonous bullshit way back when he was pushing birther conspiracies and other lies. Too late, hoss, you waited too long, and now here we are.

The big tell here is that Trump could just, you know, stop posting on Twitter altogether, start up a new personal account on Parler or Gab or whatever gutter these turds are rolling in this week, and instantly take over. The reason he doesn't just do that is because this is another test run for future mayhem. People keep saying that the EO can't supersede the written law, as if they haven't been watching this motherless fuck wipe his ass with the fucking Constitution every goddamned day for the past four years. Who's gonna stop him? Chuck Schumer? Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

He's laying groundwork, with Bill Barr's evil guidance, so that if he manages to steal the election, he can go full hog and start taking down critics for the next four years.

This presents a real moral dilemma for me, personally -- while there's obviously a lot of repulsive garbage on Twitter, there's also a lot of excellent writing to be found. It would be great if they all jumped en masse over to Counter Social, but I get why they might be loath to suddenly ditch the quarter-million followers they spent years building and curating.

But this can't go on this way for much longer. Something has to give. If the social media weasels aren't going to push back against these aggressive encroachments, their users will have to, or Big Baby and his big-igloo fail-children are just going to take it over for good.

Some of Those That Work Forces

Who you gonna believe -- the lying fascist thugs in their paramilitary gear, or your lyin' eyes?

This is a predictable outcome of a chief executive literally telling cops to bang heads and tune up "bad guys" -- well, not the white guys who loot pension funds, or the white guys who launder bratva cash, or the white guys who stalk the halls of gubmint with their AR-15s and their Meal Team Six getups, who spit and scream in the faces of cops for their inalienable right to a haircut.

Not those guys. You know, bad guys. Some of those who burn crosses are the same that hold office.

Again, these people are not shying away from telling exactly who they are, and exactly what they intend to do. They are not trying to hide it, there is no attempt to conceal it. All you have to do is observe, not even all that carefully.

People like to say it is what it is. But the fact is that it is what it has always been.

Some people need to support the lie, because the truth is too devastating for them. Identify them as such, and treat them accordingly, as people who are okay with racially targeted extrajudicial murder under color of authority.

There's an evil synthesis of race and class issues baked into all of it. The bottom line is this, for anyone not in the 1% of wealth and/or power:  if you haven't run afoul of (selective) law enforcement yet, you're still nothing more than livestock; if you have gotten on the bad side of the paramilitary forces, god help you.

But as of late, there sure do seem to be an awful lot of incidents involving LEO or ex-LEO murdering black people. It is supported from the top, and nothing will be done about any of it. Maybe an Amber Guyger slap on the wrist, where the murderer is eligible for parole after just five years served, and a key witness for the prosecution gets capped shortly after testifying.

You just watch. The incompetent turds who murdered Breonna Taylor on a no-knock warrant (at the wrong fucking address, when they had the perp in custody already); the father-son pillbillies who shot Ahmaud Arbery in the street like a fucking dog; and now this thug who asphyxiated a prone, handcuffed man with a knee in the throat -- one or a couple of these fuckers may do a little time, or maybe even see a bit of financial damage. But there is no goddamned way any of them will carry a murder wrap.

And as always, it's interesting to see who gets the tear gas, and who never needs to even worry about the possibility. That's what country this is.

Epistemic Closure

There's an interesting juxtaposition to be observed between these two articles:  one in the Wall Street Journal, the other in Counterpunch (not that I read Counterpunch, but this turned out to be a somewhat noteworthy one to stumble across).

It takes a tedious corporate appendage like the WSJ to grant op-ed time to an asshole who doesn't even have the good graces to be ashamed of himself for insisting that he "deserves" an exemption from the tariffs he supports. Fuck that guy, and fuck his employees. I don't what kinds of drugs you have to take to even start growing balls that fucking huge, but there are probably side effects. They got what they voted for. I don't see what the problem is.

As for the rural Ohioans caught up in the "shit-life syndrome," as it were, gee I wish I knew what to to tell you, folks. There are a lot of things wrong in this country, but two consistent verities are:  one, public education is not only free but mandatory, twelve years' worth, in fact; two, even dying shit-hole towns have free public libraries.

Get this -- you can walk in, pick out a book that contains information about something that interests you -- maybe even info that increases your skill set and enhances your employability -- and take it home for a couple weeks and read the motherfucker. You can do that over and over again, as many times as you like. Imagine that.

Those things are free, it should be reiterated. There is also, I'm told, a ton of free info on just about any subject you can think of, on this thing called The Internet. Turns out it's not just for jerking off and playing online slots, there are other uses for this not free but relatively inexpensive entity. Who knew?

Look, I do have some compassion for these people. They are definitely in a bad way. The problems in these small towns get compounded because almost all the smart kids who don't have family businesses to inherit get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible. They head off to college and they never look back. That leaves a serious imbalance of intelligence and talent. So the same handful of relatively successful people in the town just run things for themselves for generations, the losers keep losing, and the vicious cycle gets perpetuated.

This passage is something else, though:

I talked to Trump voters in 2016, and many of them felt that Trump was not a nice person, even a jerk, but their fantasy was that he was one of those rich guys with a big ego who needed to be a hero. Progressives who merely mock this way of thinking rather than create a strategy to deal with it are going to get four more years of Trump.

So let me see if we have this straight -- you make the time to stay informed and engaged on the issues and the candidates, you give a shit about something other than what's right in front of your nose and benefits you, and this is your reward? Being warned over and over again by these fucking op-ed writers that now you must pay attention to the special needs of the opioid-soaked denizens of Slapdick, Ohio? Cater to their goddamned fantasies?

My English is not so good, so let me be certain to phrase this correctly:  Fuck. You. Oh, and fuck them, too. Fuck them especially. You want another four years of winning, have at it, guys. I am not going to read the cultural tea leaves to search for which putatively Democratic candidate has just the right amount of "unconventional" voodoo to placate the fist-shaking codgers of the haunted diners of Pennsyltucky.

It is everyone's job as citizens of a free republic (hurrr) to pay attention and vote accordingly. It is expressly not our job to find a better brand of pro-wrestling kayfabe, in order to soothe the jangled nerves of hapless morons who couldn't be bothered to do the most basic elements of their jobs as citizens. They hate welfare until it's their dipshit kid getting it. They complain about immigrants, even as they need them to build their houses, kill their chickens, clean their hotel rooms, muck out the dairies. Who the fuck do they think is doing all that scut work for them, the fucking Keebler elves?

Again, we're all beyond tired of seeing and hearing this ridonkulous, braying jackass sucking out every molecule of oxygen left in the public life of this dying dinosaur of a nation. I'm pretty sure both of my middle fingers are permanently sprained from flipping off my teevee and computer screens scores of times daily.

The Counterpunch guy is right that one would think that a party supposedly in the pocket of the Hollyweird creative claque would do at least an adequate job of conveying a quick, effective message that maybe, just maybe, the Lyin' King doesn't follow through on his "promises," that they've been suckered yet again, and that maybe the least they could do for their country is either grow the fuck up or just stay home on election day.

But that day is still ten months away, and Dear Leader has provided plenty of fodder for mashups and compilations. Whether our wondrous corporate media will get their shit together as well remains to be seen. Maybe they could start figuring out what their job is, and do it already. I don't think any of us are holding our breath.

The two articles, coming from opposite ends of the economic spectrum, strike similar chords. And the correct response to each is the same:  This is what you wanted. He told you he was going to do all these things, and he's doing them. He's not sneaking anything in on you, he was quite open and upfront about all of this. If you're tired of all the winning, then take that into the voting booth with you. Otherwise, kindly go fuck yourselves. This is what you wanted. This is what you get.

These people seem to think that threatening the rest of us with four more years of Dear Leader is more of a threat to us than it is to them. And while four more years of this destructive, mendacious behavior will no doubt accelerate the fall of the empire, and expose many more millions here and around the world to grievous harm from war, climate change, environmental depredation, disease, and deaths from despair, the fact of the matter is that these people are cutting their own throats, not ours.

(Demographically speaking. I am well aware that there are plenty of folks on the edge who showed up and voted for Butter Emails, and are getting shafted. That sucks. But we are talking in the statistical aggregate here.)

They're the ones who are going to suffer the most, and the idea that we're supposed to stand there with sorrowful, empathetic looks and plead with them, No, please don't! is just too much. I don't want them to keep killing themselves, mind you, but I simply don't have the time or inclination to keep futilely trying to talk them out of their tree. For one, I don't negotiate at gunpoint, which is what these quasi-journalistic plaints and threats feels like after a while. I've never done it in real life, and I'm not about to start in the political abstract. That way lies failure and frustration.

But more importantly, the fact of the matter is that the gun is not really pointed at my head to begin with. They're pointing it at themselves, saying Stop or I'll shoot!. Well, okay then, don't let me stop you, hoss. Reminds me of that old Polack joke where the guy comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. Distraught, ol' Stan grabs a gun from the drawer and holds it to his own head. The wife starts laughing. Stan says, Don't laugh, bitch, you're next!

Look. When in doubt, always keep this in mind:  there are 325 million people in this country. Some of them are idiots. Some of them are assholes. Some are both. That is not a political observation, just the law of averages. Also, as George Carlin said, consider the average American, and remember that by the definition of that word, half of 'em aren't even that smart.

There are never any demands made of them to get their shit together and fly right. It's always, always put upon the people who actually pay attention and give a shit, to compromise and make the supposed move toward the middle, while they get to take yet another step back away, so you have to keep trying to meet them in the new middle.

It's a ridiculously transparent tactic, and I don't know why people keep falling for it. It's bullshit, pure and simple. Maybe they need the old "Lucy with the football" graphic to get the fucking picture already. Or maybe, per Upton Sinclair, they get paid to not understand how it really is.

These constant entreaties to dumb yourself down to their level, to do something stupid or self-destructive to make them feel better about their own stupidity and self-destructiveness -- I have no interest in any of it, any more than I care about people who were stupid enough to get rolled by something as preposterous as "Trump University."

You know? Maybe they need to stop being fucking morons. Maybe life has to snap one off in their asses before they get the message. Maybe they still don't get the message, even after the fact. I don't know what to tell them. I do know that I am going to do everything I can to insulate my own life from the consequences of bad decisions made by dumb, toxic people.

Maybe that's really all any of us can do in the end. I'm not going house-to-house, like some goddamned Jehovah's Witness, trying to convince my neighbors to register to vote and do their damned job as citizens. Life's too short to wipe everyone's ass for them. If they can't be bothered, then I have better things to do, and I'm going to spend that time reinforcing my own ability to withstand their repulsive indifference.

It's a cheap parlor trick designed to look like cogent political strategy, this idea that we have to placate "real 'murkins" in order to win. It is a terrible lie built on an obvious fallacy. It is the attempt to commodify magical thinking and pig-blind stubbornness, things that by their nature cannot be predicted or controlled. This is all because the plutocrats and oligarchs who are gleefully wrecking this country cannot be persuaded to part with even a couple percent off their ill-gotten pelf, for the betterment of the country whose systems and institutions have benefited them enormously.

That's your real problem, right there, not trying to figure out how to second-guess the Cletus vote. The sooner these dopey scriveners get wise to that and get on the same virtual page, the better chance we'll have of getting through this more or less intact. As always, don't count on it.

The Pope of Staten Island

You want to take down a cult leader, make him (and all churches) pay taxes. You want to take down Cult 45, it's even simpler -- point and laugh at him. Every time.

This is not complicated. It's as plain as the as the tang-coated, adderall-stuffed nose on his fat fucking face. You don't need another interminable psych composite to recognize a narcissistic sociopath when you hear and see one, especially when you can scarcely avoid them for years on end.

The defining characteristic of this honking, soulless turd is his vainglory, and its complete lack of being tethered to reality. It would be one thing if he had some or any skill or core competence. It should be clear to all but the cult that he does not, unless you count incessant lying and losing other people's money.

Where he gets traction is that he recognizes that we are in a time and a society that has little use for facts or empirical data. This allows people with no conscience or character to simply manufacture self-serving lies, or repeat a familiar litany of them that the fan club can sing along to. The sociopath also knows that his honorable opponent will waste time and energy trying to refute the lies, while the sociopath just shrugs and moves on to the next one.

What do I keep saying about knowing your audience? A corollary to that would be if you want to poach market share from a competitor, you should not only know your audience, but your competitor's audience as well.

Failure of Imagination

As I cobble together a more extended post for the weekend (or, if you prefer, for the weakened), here's the first of a few Twitter threads that caught my eye (and, per Steven Wright, dragged it for twenty yards).

For those of you who choose not to click on the link, it's basically chronicling the assertion of Commander Combover that daughter-wife Princess Snowflake has, perhaps through her incredible magickal prowess at something-something, "created" more than twice as many jobs as have actually been "created" over the past three years.

While most will simply gawp at the seeming audacity of this ridonkulous "14 million" number, I look at it as a stark shortfall from Genius Q. Dealmaker's usual honking bluster. A real master promoter, you see, would have uncorked some fantabulous billionty-kajillionty type of number. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say, and in no instance is this principle more true than when neither word ("penny" and "pound") really means a goddamned thing.

These sorts of numbers serve a bizarre purpose anyway. In the past, they would have served as a sort of totem for Inner Party wonks to populate their talking points with, even as they set their thumbs on the numbers judiciously and worked their voodoo to determine what the real numbers were, so that the NYSE/NASDAQ whales would know where to set the limit prices and call their brokers.

Now the numbers are strictly meant as base prole agitprop, as well as a daily distraction/finger to the professional scriveners who, as they sputter and fume once again at the millionth iteration of open, shameless mendacity, must at least be reconsidering their choice of occupation.

Chop Shop

Just what you needed -- another checkdown on the plight of the Stockholm Syndrome corporate mediots. The self-referential version of a Cletus safari, the corporate media's other wonderful contribution to the "discussion."

Look, you morons, it's pretty simple:  if you stop showing up to these useless "yellicopter" stunts, he'll stop doing them. What the reporters, as individuals, and their employers are really afraid of is that if they act on their "principles" and don't show up, everyone else will still show up.

These things add no value to the average American citizen's ability to discern the nuances of policy emanating from this human centipede of an administration, like a stream of wet Family Guy farts following a feast of chili made with roadkill and Old Milwaukee. Like much of what the ragebait media does now, it is worse than useless, it has been outright harmful.

When you look at the valuable examples of media work, for example David Fahrenthold or Natasha Bertrand, you instantly see the enormous qualitative difference between what those two (and a few others like them) are doing, and the useless (funny how much that word crops up, but it's the right word) sound-bite coverage. The latter of the two merely serves as a convenient channel of lies and propaganda, presented as "oh, look at what this doddering rage-monkey said today," as if it was any different than what he said last week or last year.

But functionally it falls under the rubric of the old saw that the lies runs halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. And frankly, he's doing this worthless custom a favor -- White House press conferences have never not been little more than routine agitprop events. Trump and the mutants who work for him cannot help but let you in on the joke.

They hold anyone who questions or doubts them in very deep and cynical -- but completely sincere -- contempt, and this holds exponentially greater for the tedious scriveners who wait on the lawn to have lies screamed at them incoherently. And they make no attempt to hide it. The next step will be to limit Trump's press availability to "executive time" -- that is, he will only allow them to ask questions of them while he's growling out a huge, smelly Filet-O-Fish dump.

I don't feel sorry for them or their viewers and readers. Platitudes and bromides are useful in this context:  People will treat you how you let them treat you. When you expect little out of life and out of yourself, that's generally what you'll get. The only things Trump loves in life are money and the empty adulation of dipshits. And so on. Go back and read some Mencken, and be refreshed by what today turns out to be his rather sunny optimism.

Grampa Walnuts is dumber than a bag of snot, but he knows that the housebroken media monkeys will show up and dance to his tune, every fucking time. It's all they know how to do. It might be time for them to think about what their job really entails. Maybe this isn't what they aspired to do. God, you hope for their sake that they didn't intend to do that for a living, to serve as a collective rage-tampon for a demented criminal's daily rantings.

Not that investigating and uncovering the various nefarious activities of these scumbags is likely to change anything; America is nothing if not a deeply cynical nation, betrayed and bored to death by the mutual ankle-biting of the "elites" that the rabble somehow keep getting tricked into voting for. But what they're doing now comes with an ironclad no-bullshit 1000% absolute guar-on-tee that it will accomplish absolutely nothing. Might push a few more magazines or cheeseburgers or pharmaceuticals, but that's it. There is no scoop to be had in these things. It's a bad cat's litter box.

Trump's right -- it is fake news, in the sense that it's a contrived, cynical event, broadcasting things he says that he, they, and we all know to be untrue. There's nothing real or useful about any of it, and if the reporters had any goddamned self-respect, they'd just walk away and do some real digging. They'd rather stand there for hours in bad weather like a bunch of assholes, waiting for nothing, knowing full well that this evil old bastard is a sadist at heart, that their discomfort gives him a tiny chub.

Tune them out, turn the channel, boycott their sponsors. Withhold your business from all of them, as much as possible. That is the only thing that's going to change this sorry paradigm. Shut them down.

Going Down with the Ship

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has been fired. Here is his resignation letter. It is pretty much what you would expect, boilerplate from an old hand whose first duties are to the false gods of protocol and decorum. He does ultimately mention that his orders from Trump to reinstate convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher go against the oath Spencer took to defend and uphold the Constitution. (The same oath that Trump and Gallagher took, by the way.)

One sentence about halfway down stands out for me:  The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. This is untrue. Every country we have ever fought against had codified laws. What happens with dictators and despots and tyrants is that they bring in lackeys and minions to administer the law. They use henchmen to cow the channels of communication to the public, in order to poison the well from which the populace collectively drinks. And on and on. We all know how the fascist model works.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. The difference is that the despot simply declares that the law means what we say it means, much like a pelf-grubbing evangelist declaring their interpretation of the bible to be the only true reading. He appoints ministers to oversee the law to his preference; he installs judges who have pre-declared their fealty to him. He stacks the deck, and defies anyone to do anything about it.

A good con man understands his marks, knows what they think they need, knows how to diagnose their problems and sell them the snake oil to cure it. He also knows how to spot key players and use them, making them complicit in his crimes. These are Trump's skills, his only ones aside from losing other people's money and never being held accountable.

He knows that his base hate libtards far more than they give a shit about the well-being of the country. He knows that Republican politicians are hopelessly greedy and in thrall to the tax-free evangelical nutjobs. He knows that the pols that aren't on someone's payroll are constrained by "norms" and "rules" and that sort of worthless honor-code bullshit. He knows that military chiefs are bound by codes of duty and honor as well, and are also political players once they reach the ranks of general or admiral (even before then, really).

He knows that Rupert Murdoch's propaganda organs will say and do whatever he wants them to and keep the ignorant rabble in line, because Murdoch is a greedy scumbag who doesn't care about anything but hoarding precious money. He knows that he has an advantage over his opponents, because they insist on playing by the rules, while he is unconstrained by such nonsense.

These things are all assets to the con man. By making them all complicit, they can't turn against him without taking some heat themselves. Perhaps they tell themselves that concepts such as "nation" and "country" are mere abstractions, and therefore betraying is not real, like cheating on your spouse or something. The old saying about how it takes one to lie and one to believe it also holds true.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. Laws and norms and rules only matter when everyone agrees to abide by them, and when there are consequences for violating them.

No one should be surprised by any of this. Trump has been open and consistent in this area, as with all of the other areas where people (mostly idiot reporters and panel-show dickheads) profess to be "shocked" or "concerned" or some such.

But right from the start, on the subject of war, the draft-dodger has been on point from the start:  fuck their heathen religion, plunder their oil as the spoils of war. War crime? You and what army is gonna enforce that?

So of course he pardons a shameless murderer like Eddie Gallagher, whose own platoon, every one of them, turned him in for his crimes. When Trump claims to know more about ISIS than the generals, or have some special insight on warfare that apparently escapes lifetime military professionals, he's shitting on their service and commitment.

He's talked shit about wounded and tortured combat veterans, as well as Gold Star families who have lost their loved ones in combat. Nobody in his family has ever or will ever serve in the military, because that would require real sacrifice and some level of selflessness, two concepts that are utterly alien to him and his scummy, chiseling family.

Not to mention the other two enormous implications of dumping Spencer: the first is obviously that this sends yet another message to the nations we occupy now and in the future that we can do whatever the fuck we want to them, without repercussion; potentially even worse is that the military justice system and the operational chain of command has been openly subverted, sending a message to any miscreants in the service that all they need to do to get out their jam is to get to Pete Hegseth or whichever Foxtard can get on the morning show and make his case for Grampa Walnuts.

Old jokes about "military justice" oxymorons aside, there is a system in place, and if its functions are subverted by a senile autocrat, with no pushback or accountability, what's to stop him from unilaterally thwarting a directive from a federal court or the Supreme Court? Pointing at law books and reciting statutes doesn't work if no one is going to enforce them.

For the thousandth time, you are dealing with someone who has done wrong all his life, and never really faced any consequences for any of it. Someone else always pays his bills. He sure as fuck doesn't pay them, and no one ever makes him. Why should this be any different? All his life, the people who are in positions to tell him no refuse to do that simple thing.

So when military personnel claim to support him, you have to think about what they're really supporting. Same as the women who support him, even though he's an enthusiastic sexual assaulter and serial pervert. They know who and what he really is. People need to get honest with themselves, and stop warbling about how these rubes have been bamboozled by Russian trolls and memes on Fakebook. They know what they're doing. They know what they're supporting. They're good with it. They want more of it.