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.

Animal Farm

Remember back in 2008, when a worthless piece of shit tried to bamboozle anyone who was dumb enough to listen that a couple of giant knee-grows mugged her, held her down and carved a reverse "B" in her cheek to compel her to vote for Obama? Good times.

Cut to this magical plague year, and here come the credulous dupes at 'murka's flagship bumwipe, to breathlessly share with us the terrible tale of some asshole farm-subsidy welfare-cheat in Nebraska. Agriculture researcher Dr. Sarah Taber has a great explainer thread on this nonsense.

Seriously, boycott the fucking Times already. Every dollar you give them is better used to wad up and flush down your toilet, or line your cat box. Even on the off chance that Farmer Ted's story is remotely true (because yeah, Nebraska Antifa decided that the best strategic use of gaining traction in a +20 R state is to destroy a half-million dollar farm machine), that is clearly not the thrust of the headline. This is just the millionth Cletus safari, gussied up slightly for horse-race coverage.

The only people they're fooling with this shit are their subscribers. Do your duty, America -- flush twice.

Game Plan

People look to me and say, "Is the end near? Is this the final day? What's the future of mankind?"
How would I know? I got left behind.
Everyone goes through changes, looking to find the truth.
Don't look to me for answers. Don't ask me -- I don't know. -- Ozzy Osbourne, I Don't Know

As we start to wind down this wondrous Year Of Winning, waiting with bated breath to see if the national fever has a temporary break, it's a good time for all of us to take stock in what is, rather than what should be, and what we want for ourselves and our loved ones in the months and years to come, regardless of next week's (next month's perhaps) outcome.

Start with what you know, what you can control. We can't control -- or even affect -- the ongoing dumbassification of America, as Chuck D memorably put it long ago. All we control is what we do. Do we still support a shitty corporate media, while complaining about it? Then we're each doing our small part to perpetuate the problem, right?

Look, I enjoy the writing of Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie and such like, and they've done some remarkable in-depth pieces lately. But if my New York Times subscription dollar also goes for the upkeep and maintenance of useless hacks like Maggie Haberman and Elaina Plott, and hopeless, sloppy thinkers such as MoDo and Bobo and Bretbug, then it might be time to spend my news dollar more wisely. You'd be surprised what conclusions the Punch Sulzbergers of the world will reach when the invisible hand of the free market gets jammed up their asses for a surprise exam.

And if they reach the wrong conclusions and keep the hacks and cut the good ones loose, then you drew the right conclusion about the Times in the first place. The good ones will find a way, just as they did when Deadspin got ripped apart, root and branch, and David Roth and Drew Magary and the rest of them went and founded Defector. Now that, I can tell you first-hand, is money well spent.

I mean, you saw the Plott thing, right? The usual hackjob Cletus safari, this time about white college-educated Trump voters in Georgia. Turns out one of these plain folks on the street was the president of a Young Republicans chapter (cell, pod, whatever -- the guy's in his fuckin' 30s, which tells you he's really there to wow some coed chooch with how he rolls with Dear Leader's inner circle or some shit), and another was a paid Republicon consultant.

The 'splainin' and backpedaling was as hilarious as you might assume, but here's the thing --  this is something that a professional journamalist would have been fired for in the past, and the Times has done this shit multiple times before on previous Cletus safaris. They frequently talk with county GOP chairs in Indiana and Kansas without identifying them as such. These articles aren't just tedious and unseemly, the lack of sourcing on them frequently puts them in the "journalistic malpractice" category.

I should be clearer -- what Plott did was not any sort of error or mistake or oversight, though it's being retroactively characterized that way. She wrote for the Atlantic before going to the Times. She knows what she's doing, and if she doesn't then maybe she needs a couple years stringing for some podunk rag so she figures out one of the cardinal tenets of decent journalism. This should be unacceptable, yet it has become routine. Plott is a self-professed Ann Coulter fan-girl. She knows exactly what she did, and why she did it.

But the fix is in, and it's mostly because these trust-fund babies need their fucking horse-race, the hell with the consequences for actual human beings.

Broadly speaking, there are four possible outcomes for next week:

1. Trump wins, GOP retains Senate. Game over. Either get your papers in order and start looking abroad, or learn to deal with the reality of it. The people who have been warning of "creeping authoritarianism" are, it will turn out, underselling it by a country mile. It will be Trump Unchained; it will spell the end of what's left of this rotted, doddering empire. A.R. Moxon has a fantastic thread enumerating the likely results. For the rest of my lifetime and probably yours, it will be a continued decline in every aspect -- economic, cultural, diplomatic, and more.
   
2. Biden wins, GOP retains Senate. The slide into collapse will be slower, but no less sure. The remaining Goopers may half-heartedly pretend to reject Spray-Tan Satan and all his nefarious works, but only a complete moron could fail to see that Trump has been the culmination of the party, that everything that has taken place has not been in spite of him, but because he and they are perfectly aligned. They'll do everything they can to hamstring Biden and grease the skids for Josh Hawley, who is slightly more intelligent than Trump, but whose religious fanaticism is much more sincere.
3. Trump wins, Dems flip Senate. This scenario is highly unlikely, but then look what we thought was impossible just four years ago. This would actually be better than the second outcome, as a Democratic Senate could effectively tie Trump's tiny, tiny hands in many areas. Whether they actually would, though, is as always a matter of fanciful speculation. Most of these assholes couldn't find their balls in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight. But the possibility would at least be there.
4. Biden wins, Dems flip Senate. Obviously the best possible outcome, and one with a pretty fair chance of actually occurring. Since we've just come to passively accept that Trump will cheat or steal a close election, this scenario has to be assumed to be at least something of a blowout -- roughly a 2:1 EC spread, and probably about a 53-47 D-R spread (including Sanders and King on the D side). This gives the Dems a clear mandate to start unfucking everything Trump and his scumbag administration has done. Again, whether they will actually take yes for an answer and act quickly and decisively is another story. It's not an exaggeration to say that the next couple decades (at the very least) in this country will be directly determined by the choices they make in this scenario.

For what it's worth, despite my usual cranky pessimism, I am still cautiously optimistic that the last outcome will be the one that happens. Seventy million people have already voted, obviously an unprecedented number. We've all seen the videos of lines in state after state -- not just in corrupt shitholes like Georgia and Texas, but even in "safe" states like New York. This nation's voting system, state by state, is a fucking disgrace and an embarrassment, criminally so, and it should be one of the top three priorities for a Biden administration to address.

But it's probably safe to assume that most people do not wait for hours in line to vote for the politicians who made them wait for hours in line to vote. You know?

(California, I am pleased to report, seems to have a voting system that actually functions pretty well. I voted three weeks ago, and have already checked and verified that my vote was received and tallied. As I always point out, one in eight Americans live here, so as much as outliers like to complain -- and like any other state, California certainly has its problems -- this is something that is working at a very large scale. Maybe it's not the smartest idea in the world to have essentially fifty different voting systems. Maybe it's time to standardize as much of this as possible, and not leave substantial swaths of the country at the mercy of backdoored Serbian software with no paper trails.)

Prison for praise is not worth thinking
Sin is still in and our ballots are shrinking
So unleash the dogs - the only solution
Forgive and forget, fuck no
I'm talking about a revolution -- Corrosion of Conformity, Vote With a Bullet

Enough people seem to be ready to change the channel on this reality shitshow, and that's at least something. But we all have to do this with the realization that, even in a 538-0 EC massacre, an 80-20 popular vote split, even if that were to occur, the work still needs to be done, and it's just beginning.

And I wouldn't discount the very real probability -- fairly low but not insubstantial -- that the Supreme Court will steal it for him, right out in the open. Brett "Rapebro McGambledrunk" Kavanaugh's specious, nakedly partisan ruling essentially boils down to states can count ballots as long as they're Republicon ballots, and again, they're not even trying to hide this. Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett (Ofjesse) all cut their teeth helping Fredo Arbusto steal the 2000 election from one Albert Arnold Gore, Junior.

(Knowing what you now know, you think maybe Gore should have carried his home state, or picked a decent running mate, or maybe fought harder for Florida? It really isn't 100% Thanksralph's fault here, not by a long shot. There's a lot of blame to go around.)

Political common taters across the spectrum are fond of pointing the finger at this or that party or elected representative as some sort of strategic or logistical fulcrum by which legislative impunity or perfidy gets leveraged. But every elected representative, no matter how great or awful, is an accurate reflection of the people who voted for them -- and of the people who couldn't be bothered to show up to vote against them.

This is the foundational problem with democracy, it turns out -- in a nation teeming with Idiocracy rejects, the fact of the matter is that no matter how smart or engaged you might be, the system is always at the mercy of the dumbest, most inconsiderate dipshit in the class.

Just like real life -- the last time you drove somewhere, it wasn't the 95% of drivers who watched where they were going and paid attention who you noticed, it was that asshole that merged right on your front bumper and hit the brakes. It's that jerkoff that takes two or three parking spots because he's just that fuckin' special. It's the tool in Costco that leaves their flat-cart across the middle of the aisle while they waddle away for "just a second" to find that five-gallon bucket of mayonnaise.

So it is with the process of collectively determining who might be the best-suited to manage the nation's well-being, to maintain its increasingly tenuous standing in an interdependent world that has already begun shifting its focus to the burgeoning Indian Ocean nations. It's the "undecided" voters, these fickle doofuses trudging along in "swing" states, who can't muster much in the way of empirical facts, but do understand all too well the disproportionate power they wield just because they live in Ohio or Florida.

(I don't know if we'll ever be rid of the damned Electoral College, but it would be the biggest favor we ever did ourselves, regardless of political affiliation. The look on my few remaining Republicon friends' faces when I remind them that, since they're in California, their votes don't really count, is priceless.

But the fact of the matter is, the only people who still support keeping the EC are the same people who support all the various, nefarious forms of voter suppression across the country. It all boils down to the same thing:  they're afraid of a fair fight. That's all there is to any of this. The fact of the matter is that there are some people who believe that rather than one citizen equals one vote, that one dollar or one acre equals a vote. Wonder who they keep getting that notion from.)

From time to time throughout this wondrous year, I have mentioned that I will be shutting down the blog at the end of the year. This was a decision I had made in the Before Times, before the #TrumpPlague took over everyone's lives, whether or not it actually infected them. I would modify that ever so slightly and say that there is a slim chance -- like five to ten percent -- that in the instance of Outcome #4 listed above (Biden wins; Dems flip Senate) I might instead take a brief hiatus and then return in some limited format, a couple posts a month or something.

For a while I thought about starting a Substack and at least collecting beer money for my cranky perambulations, but the fact is that it's increasingly difficult to keep writing about the same things over and over again. Turns out the daily spew from a hideous rage-goblin gets old after a while. And win or lose, the fucker ain't going away until the bitter end.

Trump has indeed sucked most of the oxygen out of the room and made it all about him, as he does, but there's more to it than that. Frankly, it's beyond demoralizing to be reminded on a daily basis that at somewhere between a third and half of your fellow citizens are fine with all this winning, that they want more of it, now. It's almost as demoralizing to consider that the putative opposition party has to be cajoled and wheedled into doing the bare minimum -- and frequently not even that -- to protect basic constitutional norms, to at least try to uphold the remaining integrity of the document they swore to protect and defend.

Even in the best case scenario, the winning party will have to be reminded constantly that there is no "returning" to a pre-Trump "normal," that those days are gone for good, and they can't get there from here. And while I get that all of us have been exhausted by this ridiculous toddler and his scummy family and henchmen, I frankly don't trust anyone beyond the usual "political junkie" (a pejorative I've always despised, connoting as it does an unreasonable fixation on, you know, what the people who make decisions that affect everyone's lives are doing and saying) class to remain engaged.

This thing will not work -- will grind to a fucking halt, I promise you -- if enough people are not willing to stick with it, to show up and vote every time, to make sure they're registered, to pay attention to who's doing what. As long as we have a critical mass of people who can only (maybe) be motivated by well-meaning pods of strangers, canvassing neighborhoods like Jehovah's Witness to plead with their fellow citizens to do their bare basic minimum civic duty, we're going to keep coming back to this.

Except the next Trump won't be a slobby, ludicrous buffoon. We all know that, but it's as if we're all waiting for someone else to do something about it. And it's true that as individuals, we have been rendered powerless in most respects.

But one thing you do have control over is the realization that the American political media -- with a few notable exceptions, but by and large -- is nothing more than a giant PR machine for the psychotic billionaires who really run this joint. Frank Zappa once said that "politics is the entertainment arm of industry," and boy was he ever right about that. There is not a lot of daylight between the coverage of most of those shows, and that of the Kardashians.

(Again, you can only generalize so far, but it tells you a lot about a certain number and type of person that anyone at all is still paying attention to those useless dunces. They can't just go rent their fucking island for their birthday and leave the rest of us alone, they have to rub everyone's nose in it. For the love of all that is profane and unholy, change the goddamned channel on these people, none of whom have ever done a single thing to merit the slightest bit of attention.)

So boycott the political media, boycott their sponsors, tell them what you're doing and why. If enough people do that, they will have to listen. CNN would be a great place to start -- CEO Jeff Zucker is one of the two people most responsible for Trump (Mark Burnett being the other so, uh, you might want to boycott The Voice while you're at it). The current dingbat posing as press suckaterry for this human centipede of an administration got her start as the token yammering conservatard on their stupid panel shows.

I think most normal people would prefer to just cast their vote and then get back to their lives. That is not feasible for at least the next few election cycles, if ever. Unless you stock the entire Democratic party with AOC clones, people who are passionate and smart and actually give a shit, and who you don't have to watch 24-7, this is how it is for now. We will have to keep Biden and Harris to their word; we will have to make our senators step up their game and get shit done, to put country not only party, but over whatever remnants of "collegiality" they want to cling to.

There are no good Republicons. They must be crushed. That's all there is to it.

The choice here is flawed but obvious -- fascism or not-fascism. White supremacy and theocratic authoritarianism with a corporate veneer, or not. I can give you a dozen things that annoy me about Joe Biden, but as P.J. O'Rourke memorably said about Hillary Clinton, Biden is "wrong within normal parameters."

If there's a more perfect metaphor for everything Trump has done in his life -- not just as chief executive, but all along -- it was last night. He held another super-spreader rally in Omaha -- where exactly one electoral vote is at stake -- and thousands of attendees, many of them elderly and enfeebled, were stranded for hours in the 31-degree night. At least seven of these idiot codgers were taken to the hospital for hypothermia.

To which I say, Good. Serves them right. I wish them all the very worst things in life, for however much remains for them. If they still want to vote for the geezer freezer after that, they deserve every single bit of the predictable consequences.

It's important to see things and people as they really are, and to act accordingly. Not react -- you don't need to run out and tell all your relatives and co-workers to go fuck themselves. That accomplishes nothing. It means to understand them, perhaps better than they are willing to consider the situation and understand themselves on honest terms, and take it from there. Maybe they can be reasoned with, maybe not. If not, just walk away, don't engage. Not worth your time to try to reason with people who have chosen to live in their own reality.

And in that instance, it's also an important fact to keep in mind -- Trump is an authoritarian fascist in nature and character, and will always behave as such. He cannot do otherwise. His party has chosen to ride along as far as the road takes them. The people who show up to the rallies have chosen the same path. They are all complicit in what has happened, and what is yet to happen. This is important to keep in mind.

Consider the following sketch:  two young men, Jeff and Larry, pull up to a convenience store. Jeff is driving, Larry is going to enter the store and rob it.

EXT. SHOT -- STORE PARKING LOT:  Car pulls abruptly into parking space near entrance. LARRY hops out and heads through the door.

INT. -- CONVENIENCE STORE:  LARRY looks around the store, sees no other customers, approaches counter and pulls a gun on CLERK.

LARRY:  Give me everything in the register and the safe.

CLERK [opening register]:  I can't open the safe.

LARRY [takes register cash, clearly dismayed at the measly amount]:  This all you got?

CLERK [bemused]:  No one pays with cash anymore. You know what year it is, right?

LARRY [glares, pissed]:  Smart-ass motherfucker! [shoots CLERK twice, heads out door and back to car]

JEFF:  You have a gun? That wasn't part of the plan.

LARRY:  What'd you think I was gonna rob him with, a spoon? Get the fuck out of here!

Now, at that point, Jeff has a choice to make. He can get out and run, and when the authorities eventually catch up to him he can hopefully convince them that he really didn't know Larry had a gun, or that he would shoot the clerk. Or he can put the car into gear and start driving away, which would immediately make him an accomplice, just as surely as if he'd killed that clerk himself. As far as the law is concerned, Jeff is a mur-diddly-urderer, pure and simple.

So it is with anyone still willing to support Trump, and especially the people attending the rallies, paid or not. There's still time to get out and run, but they choose not to. This is entirely of their own volition, and pretending that some Russian micro-targeted ad campaign bamboozled them somehow is just about the dumbest thing to believe in. They know what they're doing, what they're supporting, and why they're there. He's spreading hate, lies, fear, violence, and disease, and they want all of that, as if it's the purest heroin, injected straight into the collapsed veins of their arms. They can't get enough of it. If someone created Trump suppositories, these rubes would kill each other with their bare hands just for the right to stick one up their gaping assholes.

[Note to self:  Possible marketing idea -- Trump suppositories. Soaked in oxy or fentanyl maybe? Cheap vodka? Red white and blue, or would color really matter once they've been used? The whole family, or just the big guy?]

How many times can you hear it? It goes on all day long.
Everyone knows everything, and no one's ever wrong -- until later.... -- Rush, Show Don't Tell

It's important to see them for who they are, and to act accordingly -- not to confront them directly, since we've already established that as a complete waste of time, but to find ways to counteract them, to offset the things they do and say.

But there's a difference between paying sufficient attention and showing up as needed, and immersing ourselves in the arcane strategies of the weasel-faced consultants who appear like young Jimmy the Greek types, to offer their pigskin prognostications. Those people are only talking to each other, and to potential clients. They are not talking to you. Ignore them.

I made a decision to see this through partly out of some perverse sense of "duty," to make it to the end of this dismal movie, to watch how the fifty-car pile-up turns out, etc. That is definitely a huge factor in this. I've watched every scene of this stinker so far, I might as well see the end.

But there's also the realization that there really is no end, not a clean, defined one anyway. Either Trump wins and we're done, as far as an America that suits the majority of its inhabitants, or the Democrats win and we get to watch their feckless dithering for a couple years. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The only end that really matters is how each of us can begin turning away from this ongoing wreck, this sham of a government, and get back to fulfilling what used to be important to us individually. Surely we must be motivated by something more than tuning in for this week's scaremongering. I think a lot of us have lost some of that along the way. There are times when I think I have lost that, and other times when I look back and find a random past post to review and think, okay, that was pretty damned good. I caught something there.

There will be a few posts to wrap up the end of the election cycle, the year, etc. Stay tuned, stay frosty. Keep your fingers crossed for the big day. I'm always glad to be wrong about this sort of thing -- maybe it'll all work out. See you next Tuesday.

Deep Thought #1

 Maggie Haberman is a paid Trump campaign operative. Prove me wrong.

Street Voices

As penance for their miserable collective performance over, oh, let's say this past decade just to be charitable about it, for every one of these tiresome missives, there needs to be at least a dozen from people who weren't careless.

Let me play devil's advocate for a second:  look, I get it. Even people who haven't come within a hundred miles or a dozen degrees of separation from a single COVID case have still lost a year off their lives, with no real end in sight. They're tired of being cooped up. You cannot live your entire life as a bubble person, or move around in a hamster ball. You are at greater mortal risk every time you get in your automobile. These are facts.

But. The layers of bougie self-regard in this article are head-shakingly perfect. Gay and conservative and lives in Texas. So let's break that down to its chief political components:  he has a nice comfortable suburban lifestyle, so in a state that is always one hurricane season away from needing a quarter-trillion in emergency funds, in a state that has an atrocious rate of murders of trans people, in a state where slobby, neckbearded goons routinely strap on automatic weapons and drive their coal-rollers to the local Starbucks or Wal-Mart just to show everyone who's boss, this asshole almost certainly voted for a second term for Ted Cruz, and will probably do the same for fellow Trump-cuck John Cornyn. Because they assure him a lower tax bill. Everyone wants good roads and schools and services, but strangely no one wants to pay for them.

Do we have that about right? I will bet you gin-yoo-wine boner-fied folding 'murkin currency that we're in the ballpark with this one. There is no other reason for a gay man to be "conservative" in a place famous for kicking the shit out of people like him, not to mention the fact that there are no more true conservatives as such, just supernumeraries in a reactionary cult.

We'll never know, because this guy never quite indicates that he's learned his lesson from all this, from watching his beloved father-in-law (who was younger than me, for chrissake) die from the #TrumpPlague, to nearly dying from it himself. He just gives us a rather gnomic, pensive closer: 

There’s no relief. This virus, I can’t escape it. It’s torn up our family. It’s all over my Facebook. It’s the election. It’s Trump. It’s what I keep thinking about. How many people would have gotten sick if I’d never hosted that weekend? One? Maybe two? The grief comes in waves, but that guilt just sits.

Is he responsible for his FIL's untimely death? I wouldn't say so, but I get why he feels guilty about it all the same. The question becomes, what do you intend to do to make up for whatever it is you feel guilty about? How do you intend to move forward from this year of personal tragedies? It is not accidental that I use the word intend; to absolve our consciences and expiate our sins, real or imagined, requires us to think and act with real intent.

It would be nice if you could separate the medical dimensions of the pandemic from the political dimensions. It would also be fantastic if a duffel bag packed with unmarked benjamins was delivered to my front porch by a nekkid Scarlett Johansson. Tomorrow morning would be perfect; I usually wake up and start getting ready for work at about 6:15 a.m.

So I don't know what is meant by the wishy-washy phrasing of It’s the election. It’s Trump. I suppose it shows at least an implicit realization of how Trump's sociopathic indifference contributed heavily to the rapid, dangerous spread of this virus that killed someone he cared for deeply. But it does not convey a seriousness of purpose, an understanding that all the politicians who run the state he lives in bear responsibility for this as well.

There has been an immense amount of suffering and loss this year, for people of all ages, races, economic groups, geographic regions, all walks of life. The pain has been spread far and wide, but definitely not equally. Some have had to bear unthinkable losses, while some (like me) have had minor inconveniences at worst. It's not fair.

But it is connected in some instances to how seriously each of us chooses to take the situation, and how our choices inform our intent to move forward and on with our lives, as this plague hopefully fades away.

Now, what if it doesn't fade away? What if it lingers into next spring, and then next summer mutates (it is a virus, after all) into COVID-21? What do you think your elected representatives at the federal, state, and local levels should do to prepare for such and instance, and react in the event it occurs? Do you want more of the same? How's this magickal year been going for you so far?

Only Tony Green can answer those questions for himself. But it's those answers that determine whether he's actually learned anything from all this, and whether he intends to move beyond his own personal guilt and grief.

In the meantime, hey, dear media, what if you actually published something from someone who paid attention, wore the masks, did the distancing, didn't get weird or emotional or flip out over basic acts of common courtesy, just did their part to pull their weight and not spread the fucking plague. I wonder what that might be like, to give just a small token affirmation to the millions of people out there who have been doing all those things, instead of making fools out of themselves at Trader Joe's.

Part of the reason we have all become convinced that everyone else is some toxic combination of idiot and asshole is because that's all that's modeled for us by our insect corporate overlords. It's always the wizened, bigoted shithead in the haunted Pennsyltucky Stuckey's that gets the coverage, never the church deacon who quietly runs the food bank for the town and hustles shekels from the local car dealers to try to advance his part of Christ's mission, just an inch or two at a time.

To listen to the American corporate media for any length of time is to slowly condition oneself to think that man-bites-dog stories are routine and average and normal. They have become accustomed to the notion that all over this vast nation of ours, right now people are biting dogs by the score. There is no proper sense of perspective or proportion.

When the majority of the voices amplified consistently are the voices of shitheads and scumbags, it's not unreasonable to start assuming that we're outnumbered by shitheads and scumbags. Who knows? Maybe we are. We're about to find out, one way or the other, but the fact is that either result is going to require action with intent. But I think it's safe to say that the picture they've been painting is not very accurate. Their overweening obsession with clickbait and access and selling boner pills and cheeseburgers has clouded their judgment and compromised their stated professional mission.

Turns out the news actually is fake, to some extent, though in neither the scope, scale, nor direction that Dear Leader supposes, in his endless parade of self-loathing and eternal butt-hurt. But it's up to us to let them know we've had enough.

If you think it sucks that the Vichy Times continues to employ a "journalist" who is such a shamelessly lazy hack that she literally amplified a Wile E. Coyote-grade "scandal" from Rudy Ghouliani's scotch-soaked brain, before checking a single detail to find out that it was complete bullshit, then stop giving them your money. Encourage them to fire her worthless ass. Honestly, when was the last time -- or any time -- that Maga Haberman told you anything you wanted to know or didn't already know? When was the last time she didn't use her access to function as a propaganda vessel for these monsters?

If you think it's bullshit that NBC "News" has decided to rush a me-too clown-hall event for Dear Leader, then you need to realize that they're doing this as a favor to Mark Burnett, who ran Trump's dipshit fake-tycoon show, and now has The Voice as one of his more lucrative properties. So? Boycott NBC, especially that show. Boycott anything with Burnett's name on it; all he does is reality garbage, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure those out.

If we want to get rid of the bastards and monsters who are ruining everything, the first step is to stop giving them money. Otherwise, expect more of the same, since they literally have no disincentive to change anything.

In the Tank

Just as a reminder that the "elite" corporate media is a major part of why we are all being forced to live in the worst timeline, here are two examples just from today:

1. Meet the Press handed free campaign airtime to professional liar, deadbeat dad, and all-around turd Jason Miller. Imagine being so committed to your journamalistic integrity that you'll hand your show over to an unrepentant propagandist, without even a guest from the "opposition" party to give a pro forma rebuttal to the pro forma lies.
   
2. NY Times "profile" of Biden's reluctance to disclose specific details on their health protocols. It took three people to slap this fucking garbage together. It's like it doesn't even occur to any of them that maybe there are legitimate security reasons why, in the current climate, campaigns wouldn't want to give up too many details about that sort of thing. If you don't think Trump's White House is full of people (such as Jason Miller) who would use that info for nefarious purposes, you really should start paying attention.

All of these fools should be made to find other work as quickly as possible. Perhaps licking every door handle and toilet seat in the White House until they catch the bug might be a good start for them.

Again, there is a small, deeply nihilistic part of me that almost hopes that these thugs retain power, bust to watch them force these useless hacks to really tow the authoritarian line, with a genuine threat of violence.

These people get paid an awful lot of money to commit grievous harm to the operational integrity of the country, in a time of severe crisis. The least we can do is bankrupt their companies and shun each and every individual involved. Fuck. These. People. Stop feeding them.

Fuck NPR

Look at this ridiculous bullshit posturing as news. Fuck these people, and everyone who still supports it. Boycott them all. Demand better.

One Weird Trick

I swore off the Vichy Times long ago, because: 1) life is too short; and 2) they suck rhino balls. However, I'll lift the shun for a second here for this nifty bit of trolling from Jamelle Bouie, who turns out also to be a fine cook, as my wife recently made one of his recipes for poundcake, and it was excellent.

It’s not too late. With a little more than two months until the election, the [piece of shit] can still reverse course. But he cannot do so as long as he and his campaign indulge the fantasy that he is blameless and untouched by the crisis in “Democrat cities.”

....

Face to face with law enforcement at the site of a terrible tragedy, [Fuckface] will have the chance to rebuke both bad policing and the self-styled militias who raised the heat on an already tense situation.

[Fuckface] needs to show swing voters that he cares about the rights of African-Americans and has a plan to handle police brutality and violence. He needs to show his independence from the most radical parts of his base. It’s an opportunity he shouldn’t let go to waste.

Obviously, nothing close to any of this will happen, nor would it help him anyway, and Bouie of course knows all that. Which makes it even better -- Bouie is really taking aim at the cheap performative rituals his own newspaper indulges in routinely, without thought and only against Democratic candidates.

When we reflexively dismiss the "both-siderism" of the elite gatekeeper corporate media, what we tend to forget is that it really isn't expecting the same things from both sides, that the bar is immeasurably, inexcusably lower for one side than the other. Democrats are expected to genuflect for every perceived gaffe and pre-emptively stake out rhetorical ground in order to attract the elusive unicorn voter.

Republicons, on the other hand, can do and say and openly support the most vile things. It was disclosed yesterday that the leader of one of Loozyanna's largest neo-nazi groups has donated at least a couple grand to Hair Fuhrer. That's just the latest among literally hundreds of other things that ordinarily would have given reputable news orgs cause to demand resignation due to manifest unfitness for office.

That may be one of their main nefarious superpowers -- the ability to manufacture consent in the face of common sense and decency, the need and desire to keep stupid, reprehensible people in the spotlight, getting paid ten or a hundred times as much as the audience of dupes they lie to so smoothly. They keep doing it because enough people haven't made it clear to them that they shouldn't.

The Little Engine That Wouldn't

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe someone should enforce the law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sign of the Times

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

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

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

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

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?

Desaparecidos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

Job Qualification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media-crity

Not sure who is more deserving of the "simp of the week" award:

• the guy who thought there'd be a good story in plumbing the deep thoughts of a bunch of frothing bozos, only to find that they were, well, a bunch of frothing bozos;
• the people who keep showing up to transcribe the plain lies of this peroxided cunt, and somehow manage to appear shocked when the bar goes ever lower.

Did you learn anything new from either of those narratives? Of course not. There was nothing to learn at all.

In the first example, we affirm the fact that in a nation of 325 million people, some of them are assholes, some of them are stupid, and some are both. It's up to you to figure for yourself just what "some" entails, but it's funny how often the camera pans up from these stupid "lockdown protests," only to show that, well, it's really just a few dozen idiots who just got tired of spanking their hapless monkeys to Judge Judy or whatever.

Who gives a fuck what they think? We already know what they think, because they never shut the fuck up. I mean, great job Journamalist Guy, for finally giving voice to belligerent slapdicks. Up to now, we really were in the dark as to what these cousin-fuckers were thankin' 'bout.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ. This fucking guy. Mommy, I stuck my head in the chimp cage, and they threw doo-doo at me and tried to rip my face off! The hell you say.

The second example is even more consistent and pervasive, since these accredited saps keep showing up for this fucking nonsense. It might be a good idea to return to basic principles and ask fundamental questions:  What is the purpose of a White House press conference? What is our purpose in attending these things, when we know they're lying, the public knows they're lying, and the liars know that everyone knows they're lying? What do we hope to achieve by daily transcribing this malignant guff, for people who have already made up their minds?

When there is no point to it, when it's all just a street-corner three-card monte game, you effectively are just a conduit for agitprop, the jet plane by which the lie gets around the world while the poor truth is still struggling to get its socks on. You can tell yourself whatever you need to in order to sleep at night, but you're really just helping Team Satan.

I didn't need you people to tell me that Kayleigh MagaNinny is an awful human being, utterly without principle, happy to sell her country out in order to cash checks from someone she knows full well is a monster. She defends his monstrosity with lies. That is her job. Used to be that a journalist with integrity would flat-out refuse to give oxygen to a subject that could not be vetted or fact-checked -- a subject that was, you know, a fucking liar.

Tune these fucking losers out, all of them -- the shitheads that do stunt coverage like this, and their subjects. The only reason any of them are doing it is because outrage sells, it gathers eyeballs and clicks. Fuck these people, let them ply an honest trade for once in their got-damned lives.

Our Liberal Media

I'm obviously not a fan of "celebrity journalism" -- gossip tabloids and such, but it does have its place, and at least shows the double-edged-sword side of fame and publicity. I don't read it, and it seems like the practitioners of that particular dark art should go out and find respectable work, such as giving handjobs for crack in a needle-strewn gutter. But it's easy to see how people can enjoy the temporary rush of reading tacky, scurrilous innuendo about the hapless souls who are at some indefinable -- even to themselves -- point on a predictable arc from discovery to love to loathing to (maybe) redemption.

But what really makes this Esquire profile of the Page Six tabloid is how eager these celebro-journos were to compromise themselves ethically, and then how many of them made the jump to other areas of manufacturing consent.

Toward the end of the article, it mentions how many of these turds would show up at Harvey Weinstein's big parties, with many popular stars in attendance, and omit details about Weinstein's frequent abusive outbursts, and accusations of physical and sexual assault, in order to ensure their invite to the next one. This appears to be the rule for these people, rather than the exception.

Earlier in the piece, it mentions how one of the tabloid writers, Tara Palmeri, eventually got on with ABC News, covering the White House. Now, this is not to single out Palmeri as a particularly noteworthy offender (especially since, frankly, she's fucking hot), but to suggest her as a rather mundane example of how "journalists" as a general class become accustomed to operating. They take the same shoddy ethical standards and style of coverage with them from entertainment to sports to news.

And that is the problem with the American corporate media ecosystem, right there in a nutshell. You cannot cover the people who run the damned country in the same way you do PR puff pieces on Matt Damon or LeBron James, and expect to maintain any sort of rigorous standard in the content you produce.

This is how the New York Times has been compromised so badly, and it seems that the Washington Post is sliding back under that low bar as well. Both papers (but especially the Times) tend to rely heavily on unnamed sources "speaking on background" regarding whatever bombshell-of-the-day they're peddling. As stupid and oafish as Trump may be, he at least understands, as Jimmy Breslin pointed out decades ago, that the media monkeys come cheap and easy -- all you have to do is return their phone calls.

So what do you think the likelihood is that Trump has people all through his inner circle who understand just how to use the credulous dupes at the Times to broadcast their messaging for free, in the guise of "reporting"? How much fact-checking do you think Maggie Haberman bothers with, to corroborate or refute whatever White House shithead "leaked" to her? The only thing this human centipede of an administration does competently is propaganda, and they know how to use the Times for their own means, just as Harvey Weinstein knew how to use Page Six for his.

But in the end, it's a free market, and companies don't sell what people won't buy. Jabbering assholes like Tweety Matthews are still on the air because someone's dumb enough to keep watching him, even though he has yet to have a fresh or interesting observation on any subject. Vulture capitalists are tearing through local and regional newspapers like a swarm of army ants because they can, and because no one will stop them.

This situation will never get better until enough people become more discerning consumers, and stop rewarding shoddy, cynical hacks like we have now.

Learn to Swim, See You Down in Arizona Bay

Character is fate. -- Heraclitus

Some say a comet will fall from the sky, followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by fault lines that cannot sit still.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
And some say the end is near, some say we'll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I could use a vacation from this stupid shit. -- Tool, Ænema

Here we go. After a brief feint at pretending to dither over their foregone conclusion, the cowardly scum that comprise the Senate Republicons did their sworn duty to their orange overlord and wrapped this farce up tighter than Yertle McConnell's favorite leather gimp.

No one is shocked or even surprised. We knew they would do this, because this is what they are. They hate this country, they hate most of its citizens, and they fully intend to cling to power by any means necessary. Now that they have openly authorized the chief executive -- as long as he's from their party, of course -- to do as he pleases, up to and including offering monetary inducements to foreign leaders to influence US elections, expect the phone calls and thick envelopes to fly fast and hard.

Like I keep saying:  Don't despair, prepare. Of course people feel like crying or throwing their hands up and saying fuck it, and checking out from all of it. What good does any of it do, if they're just gonna cheat to win?

Well, again, if they weren't worried about the outcome, they wouldn't need to cheat at every turn, now would they? Just a little over a year ago, people showed up for the midterms, and it paid off. Democrats retook the House. All the hearings and witnesses and evidence that came out during this process, the very fact that you were allowed to know about any of it is entirely due to the fact that people showed up in November of 2018. It's the difference between Adam Schiff running things, and a corrupt shit like Devin Nunes brushing it under the rug and running to lick his master's boots.

You don't have to wait until November to start voting either. Vote with your wallet, every day. Make your choices count. You know how much money things like the Kentucky Derby and NCAA basketball and Jim Beam bourbon dump into Kentucky's economy? Sit 'em out this year, until that festering turd McConnell finally gets flushed. Tons of teevee shows and movies are made in Georgia. What companies are still buying commercial time on Fox News?

You want things to change and improve, it's going to take a little work. Those things are bare minimum, but I guarantee you if enough people do them, it will make a difference. If you have more money, donate to some of the opposition candidates; if you have more time and the inclination to act like a Jehovah's Witness, I guess you could go door-to-door or hit the supermarkets, and get people to register to vote. If you have free time and some speaking skills and the patience to deal with idiots in the audience, maybe you run for your local planning commission or school board or city council.

(I've actually been asked by quite a few people in my area over the years, liberal and conservative, to run for some sort of local government seat. I'd be fucking terrible at it. I have the knowledge and passion, but not the patience. I've sat in on a few city council and county board meetings over the years. I know some of the members of these groups. It is nothing more than assembly-line tedium. Everything starts with pro-forma nuisances like reciting the pledge of allegiance, then before actually getting to business you have to give the audience a chance to speak. The only people who have time to attend these things are either elderly folks with nothing else to do, or idiots who are riled up over some $2.00/year mosquito abatement assessment being voted on. (That one is real, I can still recall it quite clearly.) Look at every time a new Krispy Kreme shop opens, or a new $1,000 phone is released with a slightly improved bezel. There is simply a certain percentage of people whose time is worth literally nothing to them. And they all show up at local gov't meetings. The first few episodes of the sitcom Parks & Recreation were pretty much a documentary of that phenomenon. So, thanks but no thanks.)

It's going to be difficult to keep the faith between now and then. The corporate media are engineered and incentivized to demoralize you, the better to keep you in your place. That's why they beat on Sanders and Warren, because either one of those two will actually do something. The media will go after Biden and Buttigieg and Klobuchar as well. It's always someone's turn in the barrel. They want to stir up infighting between the candidates' supporters, to depress turnout in the general election.

This is not incidental, this is the goal. An actual liberal media would not keep doing these tired-ass Cletus safari pieces, venturing out to talk to these spiteful hicks who won't fucking die already, who hate their grandkids and whine about communism but hey, where's my entitlements?

So boycott them too. Seriously, when was the last time CNN gave you anything of value? Why on earth would you read most of the Times columnists, or their lap-dog "reporting" and "anonymous" sourcing?

Of the five remaining "main" Dem candidates, I would honestly say each of them has some chance to win. There are people who have a vested interest in maintaining that Bernie or Warren are "too left" and therefore susceptible to a McGovern-type landslide. You may want to check if any of those folks offered predictions about 2016, and how that turned out.

Everyone got 2016 wrong. I got it way wrong (though, oddly enough, I do think that some of the breakdown and analysis in the linked post might still hold at least some water). Nobody, not even Trump himself, thought he would or even could win. A fake businessman with multiple bankruptcies, ridiculous appearance, a long track record of failure and incompetence, no experience in public office, had no chance against probably the most over-qualified person ever to apply for the job.

But he won because there really is a deep current of frustration and anger in this country, and he understood it well enough to monetize and weaponize it. Sanders clearly taps that discontent with just as much efficiency. Warren is getting better at it too. The panel monkeys and smart-set slop-ed columnists all beat the how're we gonna pay for it? drum like it's the only song they know.

It doesn't occur to them that some under-employed single mom with a sick kid or two and no insurance -- or hell, even with insurance, it's not like it's a vast improvement -- hears that argument and reflexively thinks about all the bullshit that gets paid for without so much as a blink. And now we're three years into paying that fat fuck to play golf on his own courses every goddamned weekend, so he can force the Secret Service to rent golf carts and jet skis and hotel rooms directly from him. Tell us again how we just can't find any money to cut working families some slack on the decades of interest payments they're forced to make to student-loan corporations.

That's the real reason the Cletus safari doofuses need to get their heads out of their asses and talk to some Democratic voters once in a while -- because we're fucking pissed too. There is a misconception that Trump's cult of cousin-fucking yahoos have some kind of monopoly on righteous anger, and that's entirely because they're the only ones the corporate media will talk to. They don't realize that Sanders and Warren have just as much of a shot as Biden -- maybe more -- because those two have learned very well how to empathize with the anger, and give it voice.

The bottom line on all this is to keep in mind one definite inevitability -- none of the remaining candidates will be ideal for everyone. Someone will have to compromise, someone will have to hold their nose for someone they really don't care for. To which I would respond, Are you sure you dislike Candidate X more than the doddering asshole that's been in there? Because that's the choice right now. It's a process -- you remove the person you're tired of, replace them with someone you can live with for the time-being, and then start looking for someone better for the next go-round.

Think of it as a slump-buster, if that helps. Sometimes you just need a warm body for a short period of time to get you out of a rut, until you find your rhythm again. I am fine with having Amy Klobuchar as a slump-buster, if it gets that clog out of the White House toilet. Hell, I'll vote for Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer if that's what it takes. We all need to focus on getting that fucker out, period. Worry about policy specs later.

Take a good, long look at the last two weeks, that despicable sham in the Senate. Get pissed. Make them pay, with your votes and your wallets. Be creative, be consistent. Make it hurt and don't stop the pain. Most of all, show up every time. Never forget that that's exactly what they don't want you to do.

Every election is always the most important one ever, which is another way to desensitize people over time to how things really are. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this year really is that important, and in fact may actually be a make-or-break scenario for the continuation of what we might still recognize and hope to be a relatively free country. The upcoming sham "verdict" will legitimize what these fuckers have already done, as well as what they are going to do, and they've probably already started doing it.

It's not an exaggeration that a we saw this week a major step toward formalizing the turn into a "soft authoritarian" state, a shell of a representative democracy but really just an open rubber stamp parliament at the behest of the despot and his cronies. This country has always been run by the wealthy and conniving, and we've been heading down this road even before Trump got into politics. But it was done with a wink and a nod and at least a sop to the proles here and there.

It's all wide out in the open now. It's Lamar Alexander -- who turns eighty in July, is independently wealthy, and is retiring later this year -- casting the die for this treachery, as one final favor. Not to Trump, but to Bill Barr, who now heads an organization that has been more or less explicitly empowered to engage in whatever tactics domestically that Barr sees fit.

Bearing in mind, of course, that Barr is an Opus Dei fanatic who is on record as another one of those "moral decay" assholes that really wants to force everyone to go to the same church. Notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that Barr's own father was a pervert who wrote sex-slave pulp sci-fi books and gave Jeffrey Epstein his first real job, a job that Epstein was literally unqualified for.

Remember when the Feds raided Epstein's Manhattan sex castle last summer and confiscated truckloads of evidence? Yeah, good times. Wonder how that all turned out. I don't mean Uncle Jeff's "suicide," I mean what happened to all the fucking evidence? Maybe someone could get a House subcommittee going to investigate that.

I get why people might get confused or frustrated with this endless barrage of connections and people and timelines and dirty deeds done for fun. They can only get so far in before they throw up their hands and decide that they all do it. Everyone is corrupt, doing the same awful things to the same lurid degree. I might as well just either check out, or at least cast my lot with the guy that pushes my buttons.

That's how you end up with a mendacious pro-wrestling clown. That how you end up with fifty-one grown-ass adults who are perfectly willing to sell their country all the way down the road to despotism, under an erratic, impulsive, vindictive, blindingly stupid criminal -- someone they all know full well is guilty and incompetent and corrupt to his bones, someone they all deeply detest on a personal basis, because he is weird and pathetic and needy and completely unlikable in the way a whiny, self-absorbed brat is unlikable. They sold their souls and their country for nothing, for a brief extension to their tenuous grasp on power, and the money they can't take with them when they die.

That's how you end up with such despicable, miserable people -- by abdicating your responsibilities, by not showing up, by hoping someone else will come along and do it, because someone always does. Welp, Superman's not comin' to save the day this time, podna, so you best take stock of the situation, figure out what you can and what you can't control, and prepare accordingly.

There are many ideas and emotions that compel me to persist in pissing my thoughts into the electronic void ad nauseam, but if there is a single key defining characteristic, it's this:  a sense of justice. I hate seeing scumbags go unpunished or rewarded, while decent people who work hard and play by the rules get trampled. It drives me nuts when people just accept it as "the way things are." No, the reason things get that way is because enough people are willing to accept it. As long as it's not them or theirs, it doesn't matter. It's someone else's problem, even if it's preventable.

All that we need to do is to look at these people and the things they do, assess them accurately and objectively, and act accordingly. Liars, hypocrites, thieves, killers, the people who enable them and do their dirty work for them -- bring them to account in all the possible ways. Maybe that means bringing them to account in a court of law if they've committed a crime, maybe it means heckling them out of restaurants if they're just really awful excuses for humanity.

The reason you hear the phrase "cancel culture" so much these days is because there is a subsection of wealthy or powerful or influential people who, thanks to the wondrous technology of social media, are being held publicly to account by people from "lower" classes, who in the past had no way to effect any sort of recourse at all for the Important Person's misdeeds. The Important People can't stand it that the great unwashed can now tell them to go fuck themselves, either in Twitter or Instagram, or in public if there's a sighting.

Sometimes this gets out of hand and hits people who just made a slightly off-color comment that they later wish they hadn't. Sometimes people over-react. Who knew? But the good outweighs the bad, and the proof of that was last summer, when within the space of a few weeks, you had Maureen Dowd and Bret Stephens, two wealthy and influential people who are rewarded handsomely even though they are terrible at their job, both whining (again, in their well-paid sinecures at the nation's (erp!) flagship newspaper) about how all the nasty emails and tweets they got presaged guillotines and Kristallnacht.

I mean, when you can get that level of high-pitched whining and pearl-clutching, you know you've hit the mark. But it's also a sad reminder that, since Dowd and Stephens still have their jobs, someone still enjoys reading them. People out there still plan to vote for Trump enthusiastically, no matter how much of a thin-skinned, incompetent criminal he is, no matter how many farmers hang themselves because his genius trade war bankrupted them.

Having a sense of justice is also the inevitable, hard understanding that it is truly rare. Plenty of horrible shit never gets resolved; countless horrible people throughout history were never held accountable. They slept fine right up until the end and died comfortably. No one did jack shit about them.

That's what you really have to prepare for -- more and worse things could and probably will come out as this year progresses, and there's still a good chance that he wins. The Democrats are already showing their talent for fucking things up in the nomination process, and their fallback position is to complain that the media tools are never fair to them. Obviously the reality goes further than that. There are a lot of people in this country whose actions are incoherent and spiteful, and there are plenty who are so untroubled by all of it, they can't even be bothered to show up. If he wins, it means they win; it means once again that maybe this country isn't what you thought it was.

I don't know much, but I know at least two things:  one, that my dad didn't fight the fucking nazis and imperial Japanese in WW2 for this bullshit, any of it; two, I'm getting old and really don't feel like spending the rest of my years concerning myself with an idea that doesn't exist anymore. In other words, if the majority wants to make Idiocracy a documentary, then maybe it's time to seek greener pastures. I can't imagine doing that to my daughter and eventually grandchildren, sentencing them to some pinched, cruel, oligarchic fascist state that thinks The Handmaid's Tale is an instructional text.

We've got about 277 days or so to figure this out, folks; there really may not be a next one at this rate. We might not even get this one. It only works if enough people have enough spine and sense to stand up for themselves.

And if they can't be bothered or roused or convinced -- well, that too is an answer.