Self-Cancelling

I suppose the big "news" of the day is the back-to-back resignations of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan, from the NY Times and New York Magazine respectively. I assume they are either going to join forces with their tiresome ankle-biting and start some sort of "you can't cancel me" online portal, just as soon as the Koch check clears, or they'll become full-time sidekicks on Bill Maher's Weekly Cancel Culture Zoom Meeting, since they basically alternate weeks there anyway.

Just as political junkies across the spectrum often forget that most people don't engage with that dismal subject to any great depth or breadth, so too do they forget that 95% of the public couldn't identify Weiss or Sully or Bobo or Modo or Peggy Noonan or whoever. Not only have I never had anyone ever ask me if I had read something any of the op-ed dupes had written, I would be hard-pressed to recall the last time -- or any time -- I had read anything from most of them that was at all interesting or insightful.

Most op-ed columnists at these "elite" publications envision a smart-set salon consisting of themselves and their peers and colleagues, exchanging witty bon mots over appletinis and cucumber-and-watercress sandwiches about the weasels who run the country. They are not talking to you, Tonstant Weader, they are talking to each other, posing and preening like fucking show cats, never actually saying anything interesting or challenging.

Since they have no real-world experience, they are acutely unaware of just how out-of-touch they are. The rabble in the street, with their pedestrian protests and quotidian concerns, occasionally make enough noise to be heard way up on the 23rd floor of the ivory tower, but it's an annoyance to Our Betters, who again have never held an actual job but have countless recommendations on how you should do yours.

This "cancel culture" bullshit is one of the more annoying catch-phrases from the past year or so, made all the more annoying as it gains currency among a certain type of schmuck. I think I've made myself pretty clear on the subject multiple times, so I won't belabor the issue here. I will say that I think it's pretty fucking rich that these sinecured crybabies have the stones to take to their elite gatekeeper platforms and whine over and over again about how mean Twitter is to them, how it's just like the French Revolution or Kristallnacht.

I mean, you do get how, if you're complaining about being silenced, but you're voicing those complaints in Harper's or the Times or National Review or whatever, it's literally the opposite of what you're saying. You know? Go to Bari Weiss' own website and check out her CV. She's been on The View, for fuck's sake. I've seen her on Maher's show at least a half-dozen times in the last couple years. She's been writing for the New York Fucking Times. Yeah, damn, real tumbrels and guillotines there.

As with any viral movement, there are excesses. I don't think a young person should be run out of her own family's business because someone dredged up some shit from eight years ago that she apologized for. I don't see the benefit in firing someone for being dumb enough to wear blackface at a Halloween party. Some of this is pre-emptive corporate ass-covering though, the HR department trying to get out in front of something they could probably just brass out for a couple weeks if they really wanted to. It's not like we have a memory or an attention span anymore.

Elite opinion-mongers are a different breed of cat, though. James Bennet got his ass fired because not only did he not see anything wrong with giving a reactionary politician a free soapbox and megaphone to propose using American military troops on street demonstrators, he inadvertently admitted that, as editor-in-chief, he hadn't even read the piece first. Bennet had to go because the Times knew it had fucked up, that its hackcess White House Tiger Beat coverage has already lost subscribers, and that people are losing patience with the Times' routine bad-faith both-siderism.

The "cancel culture" phrase is already worn out; a more accurate term would be "crybaby culture" or "consequence culture" or accountability culture. That's what this is really all about -- spoiled elites doing sloppy work, put off that the peons are insufficiently grateful for the road apples of wisdom that are generously plopped onto the pages of the corporate media's factories of consent.

Endorse Meant

I mean this without the slightest trace of sarcasm or malice:  what sort of person attributes any import or meaning to the endorsement of a newspaper for a given political candidate, except perhaps as a negative characteristic?

In other words, I would never vote for a particular candidate just because the New York Times gave them their seal of approval, but it would certainly speak volumes about them as a legitimate journalistic operation if, say, they lost their fucking minds and endorsed Trump or David Duke or something like that.

But for the most part, the Times has continued to distinguish itself rather poorly overall. For every in-depth story or weekend magazine deep-dive they manage, there are a dozen or more elisions, omissions, qualifications, demurrals, anonymously sourced "hackcess journalism" pieces that add nothing of value. And then there's the stable of columnists, half of whom should have been set free in a dark forest with a crust of bread decades ago. (Feel free to guess which half.)

The main problem with old-school corporate institutions like the Times is that they practice "gatekeeper" journalism -- not only do they deem themselves as the font whence all conventional narrative springs forth like the purest blessed water, but they take it upon themselves to decide for everyone what "counts" and what doesn't, and how it should be presented.

In a normal political climate, it's still not a good thing; consent is still being manufactured, as it were. But in a climate where one side has figured out how to weaponize the studied hypocrisies of fake objectivity, it's become a dangerous dereliction of duty. They know what's really going on, and do still have something of a national soapbox to tell it like it is, but are simply too cowardly to do so.

That's how you get these half-assed dual "endorsements," where they profess to approve of the idealistic campaign of Elizabeth Warren, but have decided also for the more "realistic" and "electable" Amy Klobuchar. Who says you can't have it all?

Whenever reporters and op-ed writers start talking about "electability" as a positive attribute, you can pretty much dismiss whatever it is they're trying to push on you. As Osita Nwanevu notes, the word is nothing more than a "poisonous shibboleth," a totem wielded by gatekeepers and institutionalists to booga-booga the rabble into voting for the candidate who literally promises to do the very least.

It should not be a surprise to the folks in steerage that the swells in the luxury cabins have no interest in rocking the boat.

But as we always say here, it takes two to participate in any given con -- the con man and the mark, one to lie and one to believe it. No one makes you send your hard-earned money to televangelist grifters or Trump University hucksters, and no one makes you cast your vote for who someone else thinks is the best candidate.

I have, from time to time, advocated for particular candidates, but it is always with the understanding that this is my opinion. You are not required to fall into lockstep with me. Your priorities might be different than mine.

Presumably we agree that the one common goal among supporters of the various primary candidates is that Trump must go, the sooner the better. The Republicans who continue to support his open corruption and mendacity need to leave as well. These are basic operational premises. All the specific policy preferences -- health care, climate change, student loan debt, etc. -- don't matter without the removal of those obstructions first.

And that's what the primary campaign is for, to test the messaging and see which candidate resonates with the most voters, to sort out all the practical and stylistic differences. But the core premises are the same regardless. Klobuchar might be down my personal list a bit, maybe fourth or fifth, but if she ends up getting the nomination I'm fine with voting for her.

The other problem with the "electability" game is that the gatekeepers really mean which candidate is most palatable to older white conservatives, preferably in the Midwest, where only real 'murkins live. This is the real shibboleth, eternal, deathless, zombie-like in its singular direction. The gatekeepers then reinforce this myth by venturing out of their glass skyscrapers not to talk to the people in their own city (New York City alone has more inhabitants than all but twelve states, and has more than the bottom nine states combined), but to the fist-shaking codgers festering out in the desiccated, depopulated zones of the country.

I don't give a fuck what those people think about anything, even as ragebait. They will never vote for a Democrat. There is no point in trying to woo them. We need to stop playing this game, and if that means writing off the gatekeepers, that's probably for the best.

It's really just news-cycle churn, make-work for these smart-set types who really don't know, empirically, all that much about anything more than you or I do. How will people vote? I don't know, let's ask this statistically negligible sample set of random idiots from the same demographic sliver, in an ethnically homogenous state with maybe two percent of the total population. Sure, why not?

After that, it's just the usual Monday-morning quarterbacking nonsense for the next electoral cycle. Nwanevu captures that in this passage:

.... The victory or defeat of any given candidate does not foreclose the possibility that they might have performed differently under slightly different circumstances and cannot tell us conclusively whether another candidate might have done better or worse. The 2016 election race drew us close, but not close enough, to understanding this. Any politically engaged person today can rattle off a list of factors that might have tilted the race: Russian interference, irresponsible coverage of the Clinton email scandal, Trump’s omnipresence on cable television, James Comey’s eleventh-hour machinations, the Clinton campaign’s inattention to the Rust Belt. ....

Consider every one of those factors carefully. All of them rely on the credulity of the electorate. In other words, the majority of the vote went to Hillary Clinton, so clearly they were not swayed by those transparent gambits. You didn't fall for Russian Fakebook micro-targeting, you didn't fall for Jim Comey's stupid letter, you weren't affected by HFC's failure to genuflect to farm country.

That presumed credulity is at the heart of the gatekeepers' ministrations about "electability" and "realism." Convincing each individual reader separately that they should game their own vote based on the gatekeepers' cherry-picked analysis of bumptious flyover randos is the whole point of the game. It's an ongoing racket deliberately designed and deployed to discourage participation, and for those who do decide to participate after all, to second-guess themselves at all times.

Statistically, I should be a Trump voter -- white, middle-aged, above-median income, live in a conservative area. But I honestly cannot conceive of a single possible scenario, including a full-on invasion by outer-space aliens, where I can see myself voting for him, or anyone in that party. It would take a complete policy and attitude reversal on the part of them all, and frankly, an alien invasion is more likely.

So these empty assumptions are just that, and just because we see some poll numbers somewhere shouldn't change anything. If you stick to those core premises -- those fuckers have to go -- then the rest of it is clickbait and bullshit, and people need to recognize it for what it really is.

Crush 'em

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pot Calling the Kettle Fat

This dumb little skit from last week's empty-seat cult rally in New Hampshire is utterly meaningless, and yet perfectly encapsulates the operational aesthetic of this human centipede of an administration in general, as well as its top turd-sucker in particular:

President Trump on Thursday called the man he mocked for having a “weight problem” at a New Hampshire rally earlier that evening after discovering he was a supporter.

A senior administration official said Friday that after campaign staff got the rallygoer's contact information, Trump called him from Air Force One on the way back to Bedminster, N.J. [....to waste more taxpayer money playing fucking golf -- Ed.] The president left a voicemail message.

Fun! So let's break this down into its component parts, just to make sure we have it all covered:

• Morbidly obese septuagenarian who takes a golf cart to the shitter, and who literally believes exercise is bad for you, mocks a protester for being fat.


• Turns out the fat guy's a supporter, not a protester.


• Turns out that while he's not exactly Michael Phelps, he's not fat, either, certainly not compared to the spray-tanned, gravy-soaked tub of shit who mocked him from his very presidential stage.


• The fat guy who mocked the not-fat guy for being, well, fat decides to call and leave a very presidential voicemail in which he pointedly did not apologize -- because there is never anything to apologize for when you're oh-so-very-perfect in every conceivable way, and never wrong about anything, whatever and ever, amen.


• The chump at the receiving end of all this is such a cult-infused loser on wheels that he loves it, his support is unwavered in the least. Keep suckin' that dick, moron.

It's pretty sad to have to point out explicitly that pejorative terms such as "cult" and "loser" are not, and have never been (in this context, anyway) even mild exaggerations. This is textbook cult behavior, where the leader singles out an innocent member of the flock for punitive action or scorn, and the member loves Dear Leader for it.

You Can't Be Neutral On a Moving Train

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

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

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

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

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

Fucking Traitors

Remember these names. They hate their own country, and sold it down the river. We'll see how they split and spend their thirty pieces of silver.

But keep their names in mind, because some of them may try to slither away from what they've done. They might read the tea leaves and "retire" early, though many of them are in safe districts and/or are longtime incumbents. They might even get voted out in November, at which point some of them will try to come back in some form or other, most likely as lobbyists of some sort, since scum merely change form as needed.

That's when you write the companies that employ them, the teevee networks that give them guest spots, the newspapers and magazines that grant them op-ed space, and fucking boycott them as well. This cannot go on anymore; these motherless fucks must be held accountable for what they've done, and the only thing they really listen to is financial ruin.

It's shameful that these things -- they are no longer human, afaic -- have freely chosen to do what they've done. But it's downright baffling and pathetic that they've chosen to do so for someone so clearly unworthy of such devotion, because Fuckface Von Clownstick would throw each and every one of them into a wood chipper, if he thought it would make another half-empty airport hangar of losers and goons chant along with him.

This was clearly a desperation gambit on the part of these puling weasels, and from the looks of every one of their Twitter feeds, it's going to backfire bigly on them. Every single post on most of the pages is absolutely livid. This bullshit will not stand. These fuckers need to be put on the street, and their corrupt, treasonous party needs to be put down for good.

Flaw and Ordure

A frequent gag on The Simpsons consists of showing what's going on in Homer's brain in a given moment. Generally it's what you would expect - monkeys picking bugs off each others' asses, Homer eating a sandwich, that sort of thing.

It's not unreasonable to assume much the same thing going on between Emperor Snowflake's dried-apricot ears. In disgraced Arizona "sheriff" Joe Arpaio, Snowflake has made a point of pardoning what he clearly sees as a kindred spirit, a fellow birther-conspiracy dirtbag. No surprise there; Snowflake pretty much telegraphed his intentions at his half-attended stemwinder in Phoenix last Tuesday.

The moral cretinism underpinning this move, coming as it did while everyone was focused on Hurricane Harvey getting ready to slam into Galveston, cannot be overstated. Since Arpaio may be one of the few people in American public life who is even more of a vicious asshole than Snowflake, it makes a warped sort of sense.

But strategically, it makes no sense at all. Yes, like everything else he's done, it's a big middle finger to libtards, sure to whip up the proverbial base. But that base is starting to wear out a bit, and is only going to continue to do so as this moron continues stomping his way through everything. Even these drooling meatbags have to start seeing that he's a one-trick pony, and it's really not much of a trick, especially when some of us are making a point of laughing at him -- and them -- rather than recoiling in horror.

Additionally, it draws a wedge between Snowflake and his own party, who are rapidly getting tired of dealing with his erratic, impulsive incompetence. If Fatboy wants to throw his cameltoe behind Chemtrail Kelli Ward in the GOP primary against Jeff Flake, let him. It will be an excellent test of exactly where his level of support really is. But the bottom line is, there is almost no way that pardoning Arpaio just to be a dick turns out to be anything but counterproductive for his own agenda. It's like he did it just because people advised him not to. Fuck you, you can't tell me what to do!

Let's not put too fine a point on it -- Arpaio is not just a racist, he's a sadist. He delights in inflicting pain and torture on his inmates, many of whom, let's recall, are still awaiting trial, and are hence technically not guilty of anything yet. He frequently referred to his tent-city sweat box as a "concentration camp," took perverse pride in cheap punitive stunts such as banning newspapers, eliminating salt and pepper.

Hundreds of people have died in his concentration camp, from heat exhaustion, beatings from guards (surveillance cameras caught an inmate tied to a restraining chair and beaten to death by fourteen guards, because the prison screw's spirit animal is the cowardly but vicious hyena), hanging. Hundreds of sex assault cases, including dozens of children, went uninvestigated because Arpaio waned his deputies focused on harassing beaners. He's cruel just for the sheer joy of inflicting cruelty on those he deems deserving.

He's a bastard through and through; the reason Arpaio's mother died giving birth to him is that she wanted to get away from what she knew from the start would be a shameful legacy. When he does finally kick off, he should be dragged into the desert and left for the vultures.

The good news hidden in this is that the acceptance of a pardon is by definition an admission of guilt for purposes of civil suits. That means that this 85-year-old shitbird may very well spend the rest of his rotten life having damages incurred against his personal assets. Maricopa County has paid out somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million over the years from his abuses and excesses, which provides a number of precedents for future civil suits on Arpaio personally. I hope they nail his greasy ass to the wall. It's a goddamned shame he won't do any time in his own jail. Let him sit in a 135-degree tent in pink underwear. It won't happen, but watching him die broke and harassed would be some consolation.

The more troublesome aspect of this, of course, is that the pardon is not just a middle finger to libtards, it's a middle finger to the rule of law. It's a clear, deliberate expression of the emperor's contempt for any law or rule or norm that runs counter to what this doddering psychopath wants at a given moment. These are classic moves out of the dictator's playbook -- threatening the media, encouraging fascists by equating them with their opponents (really, people who hate nazis are as bad as nazis?), doing absolutely nothing to reach out to the majority of the population who did not vote for him, consolidating and rallying his base support.

The reason he got this far is because no one in any position of power or responsibility took his insurgency seriously enough to smack it down before it could gather momentum. That has changed; people from the Capitol to the street are slowly but surely starting to mobilize. There are people who want their country back. We'll see if there are enough of them. In the meantime, maybe we all need to mass-mail as many congress-critters as possible that they need to step up and resist this asshole as well.

Drumpferdämmerung; Or, Appetite for Distraction

After seven months that feels like an eternity, it is possible to hear a swirling sound, a rushing of water into a bottomless chasm. This toxic floater of an administration is on the verge of being flushed, and the world will be the better for it, if the clear majority of this country steps up and keeps its collective momentum. Who coulda seen it coming?

The media monkeys are welcome to chase their daily fixations for the time being, because it is important that our putative leader fails to clear even the lowest of ideological bars. The theater exile of porn/meth magnate Steve Bannon back to his propaganda post fools no one. The alcoholic slob is better able to do his real job back on the outside anyway, free from pesky oversight and pernicious leaks.

These people campaigned on being "outsiders" because that is how they function. Every breath they draw, everything they say and do, is designed to be an act of defiance. It makes sense that they would go back to focusing on how beleaguered they think they are (yes, with the Very White House, both houses of congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures, so very persecuted). When your team is always girding for an epic battle against an implacable foe, it's much easier to distract from the sheer ineptitude that characterizes the team's operations.

But the numbers don't lie, no matter how much one's accounting ledgers resemble cookbooks. All the corporations populating the great dealmaker's bidness councils have scrambled over one another to flee, forcing all of them to be disbanded. Corporate events at the Maga-Lardo are being cancelled as well. People -- most importantly, people with money -- are leaving in droves.

Even Fatboy's best partner-in-crime, corporate-raider asshole Carl Icahn, probably the true eminence grise behind the gold-painted shitter, has joined the rest of the rats overboard, even after pocketing a half-billion clams in just a few months. Pretty good work if you can get it -- which you can't, unless you suck up to this fucking loser.

This has all happened in the last few days, while Emperor Snowflake has been on vacation. There's no other way to put it -- this is enormously fun to watch, the downward spiral of these fuckers. If you know of a  publicly-traded popcorn company, you may want to consider buying stock in it.

It's a mistake, though to ascribe this impending failure to toxic ideology. Clearly the US has no shortage of toxic people who are fine with having a white supremacist (more accurately, a brainless old bigot) in charge. No, this comes down to incompetence, pure and simple, and these people are so goddamned incompetent, their own voters oughta sue 'em for malpractice. And it's important to keep pointing this out. Emperor Snowflake is the epitome of the idiot who shoots himself in the foot repeatedly and sues the gun company.

Incompetence is also, incidentally, an ideal area for the Democrats to focus on in the midterms. The Russian treason being unearthed plank-by-plank by Mueller's team is part of the picture, and a significant one at that. And per Napoleon Bonaparte's sage advice, it's understandable that the Dems don't want to interfere with an enemy intent on destroying himself.

But if there's one lesson they should have learned from last year's debacle, it's the old (but true!) football advice that prevent defenses prevent you from winning. So the Democrats need to market their product better, and get better pitchmen. Who will be the face of the Democratic Party in four, eight, twelve years? What will they stand for, and what will people think they stand for? Narrative, logline, protagonist, sales pitch -- goddammit, storyboard that shit and find a fresh face to push it.

This is not complicated, and it's nothing against Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or DiFi, but those three names add up to over two hundred years in age, most of it spent pushing stones uphill in DC. A grateful nation appreciates those years of honorable service, but maybe it's time to hand the reins over to someone below retirement age. For Christ's sake, Feinstein appears to be running for re-election next year, when she will turn 85 about five months before the election. It's probably the safest Senate seat in the country; maybe it's time to hand it off to someone who can lead the party forward in a time that, whether or not Snowflake does the right thing and abdicates, is going to get weirder and worse before it gets better.

People have chosen their own realities and their own facts, and some of these bozos will back Snowflake no matter what the Everest of evidence against him looks like. Against all logic, they will presume it's all a conspiracy to a coup, and some of them will act accordingly. Bet on it.

In the meantime, though, the money is leaving, and that's critical -- especially when you consider that despite winning more than five times as many counties as Hillary, there's still a 2:1 disparity in economic output. This will be a much bigger decider than ideology or racism, of the midterms and 2020. Follow the money.

Blut und Scheisse

We can't honestly say we weren't warned, nor can we honestly claim to be surprised. This is who he's always been -- not just bigoted, but stubborn and vain past the point of rational self-interest. People are welcome and correct to focus on Clownstick's insistence on both-siding with nazis, the most slam-dunk of all political oppositions to take.

He's sunk so low in approval ratings, and the bar has been lowered so much for him, he literally would have gained credence and political capital just by beating on the white power assholes. And of course he couldn't do it -- every single time he tries to speak spontaneously, he reveals and projects exactly who he's always been. He's incapable of doing otherwise. I will never not be utterly baffled that so many people couldn't see that characteristic. It's not like he ever tried to hide it.

At some point there will be some sort of political reckoning, if for no other reason than that he's making it easier for his congressional compadres to distance themselves from his poisonous agenda and toxic personality. In the meantime, keep on diggin', fucko. By the time this is all over, even Fixed Noise won't have his fat back, and the world will be boycotting his name, and everything it's plastered on.

Managing Oneself

Let's take a step back from our usual f-bomb-throwing hijinks in discussing the various mutant species currently pushing our fine country into permanent ruination, and step back and discuss the goings-on in more business-oriented perspective.

Unlike HRH Princess Snowflake von Clownstick, I actually completed my MBA, and have the massive student-loan debt to prove it. More importantly, I regularly read actual business books by actual business thinkers and innovators, as opposed to ghost-written celebrity memoirs that all end in Chapter 11.

One of those thinkers I like a lot is Peter Drucker, one of the true OG business innovators. Drucker, who passed away in 2005 a few days before his 96th birthday, was around so long that he literally was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He coined the business axiom "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it," which seems obvious enough, but go ahead and apply it to the current regime using the conventional metrics. The GDP and unemployment rates have held steady the first two quarters, but every econ novice knows that these are lagging indicators, and the market does not like instability or volatility.

Drucker also laid out basic principles of management competencies in his essay Managing Oneself, which later became a full-length treatise. Again, at the risk of stating the obvious, Drucker proposed that the competent manager's self-actualization consist primarily of awareness, knowledge, and discipline -- that is, awareness of one's strengths and skills, the ability to acquire knowledge as necessary, and the discipline to not only be consistent, but to assemble a team of complementary strengths, and to delegate appropriately.

So consider all that, and compare to what you see now, and what you saw in past administrations. Every president from Washington to Obama understood what they were good at -- and more importantly, what they weren't good at -- gathered people around them that could help fill the gaps and provide other perspectives for a more balanced approach, and let them do their jobs within the constraints of agreed-upon policy. Obviously, the better leaders did this more effectively, and the poorer ones (Andrew Johnson, for example) who ignored this concept usually paid the price.

But it all starts with having the self-awareness to know (at the risk of sounding like Don Rumsfeld) what you don't know, and to let others help you in those areas. So when you're a spoiled man-baby who's had everyone kiss your fat fucking ass your entire life, and you've never been wrong about anything, ever, and facts are no longer empirically verifiable points of data but merely riffs that you decide on the fly, how are you ever supposed to assemble such a team?

This is the true, practical danger not only of having an aristocracy that by nature becomes insulated from its collective shortcomings, but of having an individual from such an environment be put in charge of immensely complex systems that they are simply not equipped to comprehend, nor have they acquired the discipline necessary to learn about those systems and their components.

This is really the heart of the argument for Hillary Clinton, and against Princess Snowflake -- whatever her flaws, she put in the work over the years to learn these things, and applied herself within those systems, while he spent his entire adulthood failing upward and talking shit about people much, much smarter and more accomplished than he could ever have dreamed of being.

That's not even snark; that's just the way it is. An average West Wing intern from any of the past ten administrations knows light-years more about the mechanics of government than the current asshole-in-thief. The most important thing to know is that the day-to-day operations of running an efficient White House office is mechanical, and not ideological. It's not a panel show where everyone screams over everyone else about some inane talking point, nor is it a reality show where ten people and five sharp knives are dropped on an island. This is how you end up with bridge-and-tunnel dipshits like "The Mooch" running your office into the ground.

So when you have someone who sincerely believes that it is both of those things, a reality show and a poli-panel screamfest, you get what you have now -- a narcissistic moron who thinks the sun rises and sets out of his asshole. Nothing but drama. No awareness, no knowledge, no discipline, just buckets of bluster and bullshit that remind most sentient observers that if this guy was your employee, you'd fire his worthless ass, and if he was your boss, you'd quit and punch him in the throat on your way out the door.

That's what amazes me most about the people still steadfastly defending Princess Snowflake. Not just that they fell for the "great bidnessman" schtick, but that they buy the "alpha dog" schtick as well. He's not a true alpha, he's just louder and more obnoxious, and unafraid to pull nonsense straight out of his bunghole and pass it off as truth. I don't know what sort of idiot "feels safer" with this guy. It's more like having your senile grandparent live at your house because you can't afford the rest home, and you have to hide your car keys and deadbolt all the doors to keep him from wandering off.

As a counterfactual, it's actually pretty easy to consider a scenario where not only is Snowflake competent and qualified for the job, but finds a way to beat the Democrats at their own game and win some of their flock over. He could have come up with an actual infrastructure plan that wasn't a transparent beak-wetting cronyfest, but created tons of good-paying jobs for people who don't necessarily have college degrees. He could have just not been a lying dick every single day. Seriously, this could have gone a whole different direction, even with the tone of the campaign. Someday we'll look back at all this and think about how much effort went into just being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole. Completely unnecessary.

This will blow your mind, and sound like some self-help Tony Robbins shit (confession:  I like Tony Robbins a great deal) but good managers and leaders don't pit team members against each other, they don't engage in routine humiliation of subordinates, they do understand that loyalty is in fact a two-way street. And yet that's 90% of what's gone on the last six months.

One of Robbins' better aphorisms is that leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders. Think about it from that perspective -- if he's such a great fucking bidness leader and all-around Wile E. Coyote-level genius, name one person from Princess Snowflake's "organization" that "leads" in any sense of the word. His doofy sons try not to fuck up their intertwined grifts too badly, while biding their time before they get to drop more than honest working people make in a year to jet to Africa and murder an endangered animal. His daughter lamely pretends not to get involved in politics, while she runs the branding operation for her knock-off handbags from their White House office. It is utterly impossible to imagine any of these inbred dipshits working an honest job. You see any real companies trying to pull any of them onboard, like ever? No, and you know that will never happen. They know that will never happen.

I had an unexpected chat this morning with a close friend who voted for the "change" Clownstick promised, and is now feeling a bit sheepish about all that. I think that feeling is going to become more pervasive among sizable chunks of that bloc. What liberals and Democrats can do to accelerate and intensify that feeling heading into the midterms is to approach it from this "competent management" perspective described here, and color with plenty of mockery and ridicule, which will bait Snowflake into ever more entertaining tweet-rages.

The Idiot In His Flabyrinth; A Modest Prayer

Three brief Clownstick items for your perusal:

• This morning's first full cabinet meeting (five months in!), notable for its pathetic, mewling Soviet-style leader worship. Someone should tell Kim Jong Snack-Cakes that he's got some competition in the "need to be needed" sweepstakes.
• If you're still looking for a reason to despise the seemingly (only by comparison) "moderate" and "reasonable" Joanie Clownstick, this oughta do it. Has no one showed this privileged dunce her father's Twitter feed, did she not hear about the five years her father spent lying about Obama's birthplace, the mocking of cripples, war heroes, parents of dead soldiers, etc.? Is she for fucking real?
• This provided some much-needed comic relief. Read down the whole thread. These ugly-ass kids probably pre-spent their inheritances on plastic surgeries.

Again, this is not a matter of simple political disagreement -- these are fundamentally awful human beings. I wish them nothing but the worst that life and the universe has to offer. They are richly deserving of it, all of it. They're just fucking horrible, and they know it and don't care. And they refuse to go away.

Let a hard rain fall:  let them ruin what little of the health care system Obamacare managed to address; let the ban on scary Moooslins go through at long last; let them melt the mountains of Yosemite and Yellowstone for shale oil; let them pollute the waters and superheat the planet. Let them have their vile agenda, root and branch. Let it all push through.

Let the fan club morons in the flyover states reap the inevitable rewards. You voted for this, you assholes, it's only fair you should get the lion's share of the results. Let's see how all those jobs and opioid treatments go for you. Let everyone who aided and abetted this crime family get what's coming to them -- ruination and unemployability. Let the old joke about "you fuck one goat" come true for them and their careers.

And when it starts to sink in and the rest of us pull our shit together and undo these people fully, let us do it right. Let this shit family be completely broken, ruined financially, unable to grift or grasp or con or steal everything not nailed down anymore. Let them blow hobos in the alley and sell oranges at the freeway off-ramp to earn just enough for a cum-stained mattress at a fleabag hotel for the night. Let their children go to public schools. Let their future generations be compelled to change their names, a futile attempt to remove a wretched stain.

Fuck them. They make the world a worse place, every damned day. That takes some doing.

It's a Bot Time

Strange days have found us. Strange days have tracked us down. -- Jim Morrison

Starting here over at Jester's, some janky shit is going on in the Twitworld -- namely, that Princess Snowflake has a botnet reeling in actual users as followers, as well as muddying the waters with the usual agitprop.

This is where the "legit" corporate media are especially inept. They certainly don't have the resources to track it all, much less boil it down to a nine-second "if it bleeds, it leads" handjob. But this is where these assholes win, by making things up and propagating it through the miracle of automation. Stay frosty, folks.

The Secret Shame of Scrooge McCuck

Steve has a hilarious rundown of a few of the Snowflake cultists who are just appalled that Their Hero sold their vaunted principles down the wadi for a few dinars. It just never fails to make me wonder how these maroons suddenly figured out what was obvious to me back when I first encountered Princess Snowflake, about thirty years ago when I was barely out of high school -- he's a liar and a bully, nothing but a cheap, transparent bullshitter.

Those guys are always the biggest fucking pussies, and the first to fold their tent the second someone stands up to them. The guy has never been anything but talk. Ever. I just assumed it was so obvious and easy to check out, I almost feel sorry for someone who's too fucking dumb to realize it. Drinking the kool-aid is one thing, using it as amniotic fluid is quite another.

As always, Snowflake cultists, if you're that impressionable, feel free to drop a few bucks in the PayPal link on the right sidebar, and I'll be happy to give you further tips to deprogram yourselves from your zero's oh-so-compelling bluster. Just take the money you've been saving to attend Chump University, and send it my way. I'll send you a totally real and redeemable certificate of achievement if it'll help. Sheesh.

Seven Days in May, Part 2: Symptom of the Universe

"And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." -- some asshole

Picking up where we left off the other day, I want to explore the notion of what happens after enough of us decide that the king is a fink (or maybe a wild animal), that it's high time to send Princess Snowflake back to Butthurt Tower once and for all, for the good of the country. The momentum builds, drip by drop by plop, a tantric level of mendacity and dumbfuckery. This is a man who shoots himself in the foot practically by the hour, and reflexively blames the manufacturers of the gun and bullets.

Obviously, this sort of nonsense is unsustainable. Things cannot continue on like this. Perhaps the big overseas trip will serve as the "narrative reset" the bastards think it will. Certainly the corporate media are instinctively positioned to accept it as such; if not for the continued events unfolding and Snowflake's unerring knack for fucking up the simplest of things, the mediots would go back to default as quickly as possible. Keep that in mind as we go along here.

It's a parlor game -- and a fun one at that -- trying to predict how much longer it can go on. Here's exactly how long it will go on:  until enough of the treasonous cocksuckers in his own party decide he's bad for business. Even then it'll be an uphill struggle; even then it'll be close. There are Republicans and conservatives who are already bemoaning the GOP's imminent collapse for the next generation or so. They seem to have forgotten that Saint Reagan stormed the breaches just six years after Nixon resigned in disgrace, that Gerald Ford came shamefully close to winning in 1976. People are stupid and their memories are short. Shocking, I know.

So let's say that everything "works out" in the best possible liberal-progressive shorthand scenario:  Princess Snowflake is either impeached or resigns one step ahead, Mike Pence is an ineffective placeholder, Democrats come back bigly in 2018 and 2020. The terminal assholes who thought it'd be a grand idea to advance their careers in the service of a pro-wrestling cartoon have trouble finding gainful employment, and have to result to their natural skill, blowing crab-ridden hobos in a urine-soaked alley. Karma comes through for once. What then?

Recall that Princess Snowflake is not the disease but the symptom, the tangible result of the malaise that has plagued our political superstructure longer than any of us has been alive. Snowflake is the natural consequence of a cancerous system. So what actually changes once the tumor is excised, but the cancer remains? Which policies and large-scale trends get addressed and corrected by the "good" guys?

This is not the usual "evil of two lessers" complaint and false comparison, this is a challenge. To take perhaps the foremost current example:  the health care system cannot be improved until someone seriously addresses why things cost what they cost, why captive customers must be forced to subsidize the eight-figure salaries of insurance and pharma CEOs. As long as lobbyists from these entities continue to bankroll politicians from both parties, nothing will change there, it just becomes another can to be endlessly kicked.

Insurance in general is a net societal benefit; we could not afford to drive cars and own homes without comprehensive risk pooling. But health-care insurance specifically is essentially the one industry where the actual business model is literally predicated on not providing the customer with the service for which they have been paying for, and continue to do so.

This is just one of many issues that have not been addressed with any real impact by either party. I do believe that the ACA has been a net benefit, and would become very much like Social Security (i.e., politically popular and therefore untouchable) with enough time and tweaking. But it still does not address the usurious business practices of the health-care racket and its nefarious components (insurance, pharma, HMOs).

Another issue is energy independence. Fuck the fucking Saudis already, amirite? The bowing is merely a symbolic representation of what we actually do for these fuckers, who are nothing but trouble. They snap up our expensive real estate as investments, while they drive Yemen into misery and keep the Syrian civil war going. They bankroll at least as much terrorist activity as the Iranians. The American policy of propping up these disgusting pricks with our petrodollars needs to cease, like now. It starts with making it clear that unless you actually need to drive a truck, you're going to start paying for all the externalities borne by driving your Excursion to the post office. And make it a national Great Works project, similar to landing on the moon, to achieve true energy independence. Start with rehiring the coal miners to make solar panels and wind turbines.

There are actually a few things that Snowflake and his snowflake rally goons were right about, the main one being the disappearance of their jobs, and nothing to pick up the slack. While I do believe that these real 'murkins, rugged individualists to the very last, need to suck it up and retrain or relocate, the fact is that there is also a role for the gubmint to help them to do so. It was promised to them as far back as NAFTA, and never really took place to any meaningful extent. So after Snowflake goes, what is the presumed Democratic savior's plan to set this situation right? A bunch of mealy-mouthed jabber about deferring usurious student loans for a couple years is not going to cut it.

Look. While the case presented by Snowflake and his cult followers is hysterical and overwrought, it is not imaginary. The wur muh country gawn "cultural" whinge is stupid, but there is a great deal of truth to the economic component of their argument. It's just that Snowflake, between his borderline retardation and his complete inability to empathize with other sentient beings, was never going to be the one to handle it.

It will only get worse. Climate change will continue to affect most harshly the countries who are already in a whole, overpopulated and impoverished and desperate. They will continue to flee to the havens of the industrialized nations, who are undergoing their own societal convulsions, and are simply no longer prepared to take all comers. Put more abruptly, Germany is essentially paying Turkey protection money to warehouse refugees from Syria and other countries. The Turks have the EU countries over a major barrel, and both sides know it. And the Turks control all the levers that affect the Syrian conflict, especially water.

All of these issues -- overpopulation, resource depletion, extreme poverty, terrorism -- are not just going to continue, they are going to accelerate. That's not politics, it's math. The numbers don't lie. Hell, they can't even keep the lights on in a lot of these countries.

The people who really run the country and the world, the media and the political system, have invested heavily in keeping us pitted against each other, for sensible reasons and stupid reasons, for economic verities and tribal emotions. They are certainly getting their money's worth, and there is no reason to assume that pushing Princess Snowflake off the Iron Throne would change that larger dynamic.

Meanwhile, the prion disease that affects the 27-percenters that make up the permanent doofus base only gets worse. They are in their cocoon, and they aren't coming out. As Steve notes, they can bullshit all they want about how they love them some 'murka, but they don't. They hate this country, what they think it has become, the road they think it's headed down, and the people -- which are, you know, the numerical majority -- who drive those demographic changes, or who accept those changes for what they are. They care more about monuments to traitors and slavers than they do about their own role in the here and now. It's unclear whether even helping them achieve better economic security would cure their epistemic closure, considering that that is entirely voluntary on their part.

Some of the Snowflake suckers are in counties that voted for Obama twice, but that doesn't mean that those individuals voted for him. Some of them can be won over or won back, and some simply cannot be reached. It is important to determine that distinction, and proceed accordingly. The Democratic party suffers from its own prion disease, that of fucking over its own base to curry favor with people who will never vote for them.

So rather than fixate on the exact moment of Snowflake's impending exile to his Manhattan Elba, it would behoove the liberals and progressives and party-liners to look beyond the schadenfreude of a lifelong schmuck meeting his entirely foreseeable political fate, and develop a grand strategy for breaching the very real political impasse. Not just to return to power, but to at least make a competent effort at walking their talk, at being an organization that is actually responsive and attentive to their constituents, and not just their donors.

Because the alternative is this:  there will be another Republican candidate to come, who will embody all the loathsome Snowflake traits, but will be smoother, slicker, less abrasive, more intelligent and well-spoken. A clumsy fascist is relatively easy to parry, especially one so anxious to step on his own dick voluntarily. A fascist with even a modicum of self-control will find an electorate ready and willing to actualize their daddy issues at the ballot box again, and a media environment willing to sell its soul down the river one more time for buckets of clickbait.

Seven Days in May

Never a dull moment, eh? Let's recap just the major events of the past week:

• Clownstick fires the FBI director.
• Clownstick meets with the top two Russian diplomats in the Oval Office, deliberately excluding American media but including Russian state media. It's as if all sixteen American intelligence agencies hadn't, less than six months ago, agreed unanimously that Russia did something adverse to affect our electoral process. What could possibly go wrong with having a closed-door meeting with their top spies?
• Clownstick initially claims Comey was fired for not handling But Her Emails' case properly, perhaps inadvertently proving the point of every "guilt-based confession" story (Tell-Tale Heart, Crime and Punishment, etc.).
• Clownstick subsequently undermines his own rationales, as well as those of his staff. Comedy ensues as the gang tries in vain to get their stories straight.
• Clownstick openly threatens Comey on Twitter. Every time Grampa Walnuts makes a boom-boom, a White House staff member clutches the ragged ulcer where their stomach used to be.
• Remember that closed-door meeting with the Russians? Genius decides to show off to his new buddies and lets slip a piece of intel that is considered "code word classified"; that is, very tightly restricted and not to be shared with the fucking Russians. But (again) Her Emails, amirite?
• It gets even better -- White House staff had to leak the piece about the intel leak just to get out in front of the Russians, so that they couldn't blackmail the Retard-in-Thief, or drop a nuclear news item in the next edition of Pravda. This is the kind of damage control last seen in Dr. Strangelove.
• Turns out Comey takes notes of his more, shall we say, contentious meetings and conversations. More comic flailing.
• Turns out Russian asset "General" Mike Flynn was known to be under investigation when the Clownstick transition team were vetting him. Plus Flynn blatantly lied on his background questionnaire. Plus Flynn, as a paid (and unlicensed) agent of the Turkish government, tried to put his thumb on the scale for them as well. No wonder the Drumpfkins liked him so much; mercenaries are alike in their ultimate loyalty. The rumor was that Flynn, seeing the writing on the wall, offered last month to turn state's evidence in exchange for full immunity, and was declined. It might be because they have enough to nail his treasonous balls to the wall, and so any horse trading is simply going to be a reduction, rather than an elimination, of the years Flynn will spend at Club Fed.
• After unironically whining about armchair critics at a commencement address at Jerry Falwell Cracker College over the weekend, Princess Snowflake cranked up the waterworks for the US Coast Guard Academy, whinging as only he can about how the media are so meeeaaannn to him for reporting the things he says and does. Presumably 911 was called and they got him his binky until the waaahmbulance got there. Fucking pussy.

All this -- and more, I'm sure -- in just a week. This is more hare-brained bullshit than we saw in eight years of Obama. Can't say we're not getting value for our entertainment dollar here, folks.

One cool phenomenon has taken place for me, and I suspect at least a few other people. The anger and frustration I have felt for so many months about this situation has almost completely dissipated. I'm not kidding when I say that, as dumb and arrogant as I thought this asshole was after watching him hump 'murka's leg since the Eighties, it's no small surprise that he's found a way to turn out be dumber, meaner, more inept, more corrupt, than I could have imagined. Not just barely, but by a fucking country mile. This is a deeply stupid man who genuinely seems unaware just how coddled and insulated from reality his status in life has kept him.

Questions about whether he lies with intent, or whether he simply lives in some sort of (as Jacob Bacharach put it a while back) "collapsed distinction" between truth and falsehood, are moot. A person who continues to spin falsehoods for self-serving reasons, utterly indifferent to accuracy or probity, is just as bad as someone who is actively trying to put one over on you. The effect is certainly the same, anyway.

This goes for the Clownstick cultists as well. Shame on all the commentators and journamalists who insist on giving them a pass, or smugly lecture everyone else about how "this is why he won". He won because enough people didn't care what was true or not anymore, and wanted to throw a temper tantrum -- so what, are the rest of the country's citizens -- the majority, it must be pointed out -- supposed to give them a there, there, it'll be all right hug and validate their fucking feewings?

Why? Why is that the only answer; why are they never implored to grow the fuck up, read a book once in a while, maybe come around to the understanding that the rest of the world doesn't owe you a coal mining or auto manufacturing job? You are going to have to retrain, maybe get some more education, maybe even relocate. One candidate was prepared to help you do those things, the other one lied in your faces and dared you to not believe your own lyin' eyes.

Well, you fucked up -- you trusted the wrong guy, backed the wrong horse. So why are all the people who saw the dipshit con man for exactly what he was supposed to reach out and salve your butt-hurt? What the fuck ever happened to at least meeting each other halfway?

Whatever; we've gone over those questions ad nauseam since the election and before, and are no closer to an answer. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe it comes down to a couple of the core principles I've espoused consistently in here for well over a decade now:

1. It is impossible to use logic and reason effectively with irrational people.
2. People do not change until they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing.

These things are not elitist snark. They are facts. They are axiomatic, physical, mechanical laws of the universe, as sure and predictable as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. We would do well to keep these axioms in mind as things progress, as the snowball gains mass and speed, and the best laid plans gang aft agley.

So. Where do we go from here? Well, as I mentioned above, I have very little of the earlier anger and frustration I felt for so long, watching impotently as so many of my fellow countrymen willingly signed on to this inept asshole. And now it's starting to unravel, bigly. I will turn fifty years old ten days from now, and I would be lying if I said I didn't regard the imminent disintegration of this profoundly vile enterprise to be something of a rather timely present for a milestone birthday.

The cultists are already gnashing their teeth and rending their garments, aghast at the treacherous leakers and the infernal fake newsers who report their perfidy. They ignore what is right in front of them, that their hero is a fucking moron, that his only skill is reliving them of their wallets, of misusing and abusing their loyalty to him. They are still convinced that he is some sort of brilliant bidness mind, that his magnificence and unparalleled expertise will save us all.

Friends 'n' neighbors, let me add one more rule of thumb to the mix here:  Emperor Princess Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick is to running a successful business what Michael Jackson was to child care, what Jim Jones was to making a tasty beverage, what Jeffrey Dahmer was to veganism. Look, it should be a clue to even the dimmest of bulbs that, even in the ultra-elite billionaires' club, none of the other members (giggity) of that club would be caught dead in the same photo frame as Snowflake Clownstick. I wonder if the real tycoons all know something that the angry crackers in the meeting room of the Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas Waffle House don't.

(See? See? That's why he got elected! Oh, go fuck yourself.)

As for the now-simmering debate over whether to impeach or to invoke the competency clause of the 25th Amendment, I would counsel patience for the time being. This is counter-intuitive, but true all the same. Bear in mind the two main core principles listed above, both of which apply directly to Clownstick's remaining supporters -- which, it should be noted, seem to still comprise a rather large percentage of his voters.

Again, it hasn't even been 120 days, even if it seems much longer (giggity). We saw all the stories, read all the interviews, saw all the profiles of these dumbasses. It's going to take time and an undeniable preponderance of evidence to get them to budge. They have to realize that the cost of sticking with a cynical grifter who is just using them is much greater than admitting (if only to themselves) that they fucked up, and need to drop him like the case of political gonorrhea that he really is.

What will make them come to that realization is the slow, patient, non-dramatic process of building a case, plank by plank, making sure that allegations and evidence are solid and irrefutable. This is exactly what is about to take place, and we have to let it happen. It may take months, or a full year, or even longer. Everything from delay tactics to seasonal recesses will bog down the process, make it take forever and a day. Keep in mind what's happened so far, and the delta -- the rate of acceleration -- that has been building the entire time.

Some are worried about a civil war, of butt-hurt rubes getting butt-hurt and taking to the streets. There will probably be a few isolated instances here and there, but a close reading of the Clownsticker profiles should alleviate most concerns. The most unhinged acolytes are, it turns out, the worst purveyors of the usual empty jabber. They are welcome to grab their AR-15s and mount their trusty Rascals, take to the streets, and see what that gets them. The vast majority of them are precisely what you think they are -- bitter cranks clogging their Facebook feeds with nonsense and lies.

In the meantime, I think Robert Mueller is a solid choice for special counsel. I think these guys are up to their asses in alligators, and they are starting to realize it. I think Page and Manafort, for starters, are people who realize that their literal asses will be traded for smokes and candy bars in the joint, and they will become very invested in avoiding that fate. I think that from here forward, even if the investigation falters and these fuckers get away with it all, every day spent holding their dicks to the grill is another day they can't implement their vicious agenda.

And in the end, perhaps Mencken was right, and nature really does abhor a moron, and that, combined with the other immutable physical laws of the universe, makes all the difference here. I hope so. I want to see every person involved with this clusterfuck rendered destitute, unemployable. They have betrayed their country for long enough already.

Bunker Mentality

I get where Steve is coming from with the "recluse movie" bit, but he gives Clownstick way too much credit. If there's a movie that befits his reclusive, insular, impulsive approach to what used to be considered governance, but has now devolved to constant trolling, this is the movie:

I went to a friend's birthday party yesterday, and there were quite a few older conservative folks there, and they do indeed seem to be just fine with Princess Snowflake, for now. Nothing's going to change their minds, not yet anyway. As Ed rightly points out, we're barely a hundred days into this clusterfuck. He struck a chord with these knuckle-dragging apes, and they will need a bit more skull-fuckery and ineptitude to back away from him. Is there any doubt that he'll give it to them in spades?

But it's not going to get any better for him or for them. Snowflake has made it clear that he has no other gear; despite his claims during the campaign that he could be less of an asshole once in office, he is incapable of such a thing. He acts on impulse, thinks he knows everything and actually knows nothing. This is a combination of traits that has only one outcome -- failure.

This asshole is as stupid and corrupt as the day is long, and he may be getting away with some of it for now, but only because the Republicans in Congress will let him do literally anything, as long as they get their fucking tax cuts for their owners. But Snowflake is down to 36% approval (who are these fucking people, anyway?), and again he is incapable of reversing that trend, or of reaching out to his opponents. Once the Goopers understand that he's going to take them down with him, they'll turn on him so fast, it'll knock that fucking thing off his head.

Ordinarily you'd worry about a Reichstag fire, but these assholes wouldn't be able to pull that one off. The old saying about people who could fuck up a two-car funeral is true with these morons.

Among Bushes

You're cruising down the highway and you see what appears to be a massive, bloody, fiery wreck. Authorities have arrived at the scene, but have not had a chance to close the site and detour traffic. The crash site appears to be little more than a cluster of crumpled metal and bloody pavement.

You slow down to an appropriate speed, and make a silent resolution not to look, but you see a rolling head out of the corner of your eye, hear the keening wail of a trapped child, something to require your glance. You slow down even more than you need to, without realizing it.

There are two ways this administration can go now -- chastened impotence or flat-out tyranny. There is no longer a middle ground, nor any "debate" among honest brokers about whether these people respect not just hoary norms of decorum, but the basic rule of law and the importance of long-standing institutions. (Hint:  they don't.)

100 Days of Trollitude

Trying to keep to my semi-pledge of not giving this worthless piece of shit any more oxygen, so let's keep this short:  the only surprise this floater of an administration has contained so far is that the caudillo's defining characteristics are even more pronounced than one might have supposed. I mean, he's been a barnacle on this nation's pocked, bloated ass for over thirty years now, so we knew he was a preening dipshit. We know he's a pissy, ignorant blowhard who can't let the slightest of slights go, and who has never been wrong about anything in his pampered, spoiled waste of a life.

But holy shit, he's the biggest fucking crybaby snowflake imaginable, a nasty little shit throwing a temper tantrum in the supermarket over not getting his favorite cereal. And he's somehow even stupider than one could have supposed, even after decades of brainless nonsense. In just the last few weeks, he's confessed to not knowing that:

1. Resolving the health care crisis is complicated.
2. Lincoln was a Republican.
3. The office that he stinks up turns out to be difficult.

I don't know how you get that fucking dumb, unless you seriously have not cracked a book since high school. There's just no other way around it. And he's too fucking stupid to understand just how fucking stupid he really is. Even Fredo Arbusto knew his limitations, and let more intelligent people handle the heavy lifting, as lousy as it was.

Vichy media attempts to normalize this bullshit serve only to reveal their scriveners as fools themselves. Andrew Jackson was a monster and an asshole, but at least he was competent. the one thing we can retain hope in is that Clownstick is simply too incompetent to do too much damage before (hopefully) enough soi disant libruls manage to get off their asses next year and vote.

In the meantime, we'll get more stupid anthropological exegeses about how the Real 'murkin Clownstick voter still supports their man, even though he's either failed or flubbed every promise so far, or done all of the exact things he rage-tweeted against the Evil Overlord Chocolate Hussein Thunder for three or four years ago. None of those stories will have the guts to say the truth of what needs to be said -- those people are idiots, and it is more important to them to troll their country with an incompetent, incontinent old man than it is to fix the things that are wrong.

May they continue to get everything they voted for, good and hard.

The Special Club

Oh good -- Mister Man has signed another executive order. Buy American, Hire American! What a fucking tool. The American hotels that he slaps his name on are built with Chinese steel by illegal Polacks. He hires foreigners to do the scut work at his shitbox E. coli country club (pro tip: try the room-temp ham!). All of the shitty, low-quality products he slaps his name on are manufactured in twelve different countries; only his cologne (Sauerkraut, available in gallon jugs at your local True Value hardware store) is made in the USA.

Even his family and history exists largely from afar. His mother and his current wife came to this country under at least questionable circumstances, and may in fact have been technically illegal.

I don't really care about any of those things, except insofar as he thinks and acts as if he's in some exalted class of exception. The rules don't apply to him, you see. He lectures and warns and preens this "buy American" horseshit, as if American companies aren't supposed to do what he does routinely -- seek out the best available price for materials and labor, optimize the cost of goods sold.

This isn't going to work, of course; in fact, it will no doubt antagonize the tech and movie companies, which are heavily dependent on H-1B visa workers. It won't happen, it never does, but it would be sweet if just one (1) person with a large enough megaphone, whether a reporter or a business typhoon, looks at that stupid "order" and says, "Hey asshole -- you first."

Give Us This Week Our Weekly Fuck 'em

I have no idea why our insipid intrepid mediots continue to plumb the wisdom of the rubes, but three months in, and their tears of stupid are not even a leetle bit old, they are in fact quite tasty:

Usually, this pathway outside Parx Casino is reserved for self-flagellation, a private lament at the last hundred lost. But lately, as with most any gathering place around here since late January — the checkout line, the liquor store, the park nearby where losing lottery numbers are pressed into the mulch — patrons have found occasion to project their angst outward, second-guessing a November wager.

“Just like any other damn president,” sighed Theresa Remington, 44, a home-care worker and the mother of two active-duty Marines, scraping at an unlit cigarette. She had voted for Donald J. Trump because she expected him to improve conditions for veterans and overhaul the health care system. Now?

“Political bluster,” Ms. Remington said, before making another run at the quarter slots. She wondered aloud how Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont might have fared in the job.

Well, gee whiz, I dunno, you stupid cunt. You clearly have the decision-making process of an angry chimp slinging its feces at a dartboard. What could possibly go fucking wrong?

Seriously, let's break this down just a touch -- the only way you end up finding a genuine dilemma in choosing between Clownstick and Sanders, two of the most diametrically-opposed candidates on every issue imaginable, is if you literally never read or watch or discuss with friends any sort of news or current events, or if you're simply a foaming-at-the-mouth Never Hitlery dipshit. Either way, you get what you deserve. Good luck with your fucking health-care plan, dumbass. Considering the system is now being headed by a crooked congress-critter who should have been disqualified for profiteering, literally buying and selling stocks in the companies he was approving legislature for, but wasn't because we are now officially a banana republic, the outcome doesn't look too promising. Maybe your slot winnings will cover it. I mean, for fuck's sake.

Then there's this asshole:

“It’s not what he’s done, it’s what he’s trying to do,” said Bill Yokobosky IV, 33, a train engineer from Langhorne, Pa., who was waiting for a haircut at a strip mall. “He hasn’t succeeded, really.”

Nonsense, Bill the Fourth, he's succeeding bigly. He's doing precisely what he set out to do -- make as much fucking money as possible. That's why he's installed his daughter and son-in-law in the roles they have now, to monetize every damned thing, to steal everything that isn't nailed down -- and if it is nailed down, steal the nails while they're at it.

On April 6, Ivanka Trump's company won provisional approval from the Chinese government for three new trademarks, giving it monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world's second-largest economy. That night, the first daughter and her husband, Jared Kushner, sat next to the president of China and his wife for a steak and Dover sole dinner at Mar-a-Lago, her father’s Florida resort.

The scenario underscores how difficult it is for Trump, who has tried to distance herself from the brand that bears her name, to separate business from politics in her new position at the White House.

This is a fatally flawed assumption on the part of a media that at this point (in the aggregate, with precious few exceptions), can only be either inept or complicit. It's not "difficult" for Ivanka at all to "distance herself" or "separate business from politics," because there's been no attempt to do that, nor will there be. I can't believe a serious journamalist actually typed that sentence out without either laughing or crying, because it's not remotely fucking true. She's there to embrace the many monetization opportunities that will present themselves in dealing with the Chinese, who make us look like amateurs when it comes to checkbook diplomacy. They understand all too well that there's absolutely no need to get into an argument with a rival, when you can easily buy them off. That's her role, and her husband's role, to wet the family beak.

What's annoying is that yabbos from the NYT article like Bill the Fourth and Slots McHealthcare would be apoplectic if But Her Emails was doing one-tenth of the shit their hero does right out in the open (hell, I would have called her out for it); what's pathetic is that they seriously believed that a guy who has never not been an obvious, inept con-man had any intention whatsoever to "look out" for people like them, their families, their communities. The guy has managed to do at least one thing every single week that completely contradicts what he spent years whinging about on his Twitter account. Face it, you fucking assclowns, you endorsed someone who's biggest qualification is giving dating advice to Twilight actors. Enjoy that whirlwind.

The least we can do, once the majority of this idiot country finally gathers up their balls and brains and runs these shameless hucksters out on a rail, is make sure to start a fund to provide these simple, well-meaning foke with full-ride scholarships to Clownstick University. In the meantime, this is your fault. You made the choice to cut off your noses, I have no interest in helping you out with the plastic surgery. Own it.

[Update 4/18/17 6:48 PM PDT:  Holy fucking shit, the stupid never stops with these goddamned people (h/t to LGM commenter Outside Counsel):

"We love him," said Keith Muhlenbeck, 46. "We support him in everything he's doing. He's a businessman who knows how to get things done, and you can tell he has America's best interests at heart."

Washington pundits might be criticizing Trump for his recent reversals on a number of policy issues, including trade with China and the future of the Export-Import Bank. But Bobbi Muhlenbeck sees the president as a tough talker who stands his ground.

"I like that he doesn't back down," said Muhlenbeck's wife, 49.

Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad found that out the hard way, her husband noted, citing Trump's decision to bomb a Syrian air base to retaliate for Assad's use of chemical weapons on his own people.

"This country used to stand for something, and now we're a joke," he said, arguing that former President Barack Obama projected weakness – something Trump obviously doesn't do.

"There's iron in the glove now," he said.

As for Trump's proposed budget cuts, Muhlenbeck doesn't worry that the food bank his family depends on will be forced to shut down.
"I'm sure they'll find the money somewhere," he said.

....

The Muhlenbecks, who live on government disability payments due to assorted ailments and injuries, were among about 200 people who lined up in a parking lot outside the Cornerstone Outreach Center for free groceries last week.

[emphasis added]

These morons are impossible to parody, but I sincerely hope they get what's coming to them. I'm beginning to see the appeal to being a Republican, where you don't have to pretend to give two shits about what happens to these thankless slobs when you cut them off from their free food and disability payments. Fuck 'em, good and hard. See how they like that "iron in the glove" when they're scrounging for garbage in the dumpster behind the donut shop by the tent city.]