Extremely Plowed and Incredibly Gross

Now this is the good stuff I'm gonna miss. Just inject it right into my veins!

After going through what some called a scripted monologue that also featured interjections from Guilfoyle, Trump Jr. eventually paid some attention to what his girlfriend means to him. “And I’m reasonably thankful for Kimberly,” Trump Jr. began the awkward message. “Maybe not… not so much. I don’t wanna, you know, I’ve managed to maintain a very low bar with Kimberly, so I don’t want her to get too big of an ego, accustomed to kindness.”

I wouldn't spare too much sympathy for Li'l Kim there. Truly a nasty cunt, and that's not a word I use lightly. She deserves a companion like El Chupo, coked-up and vainglorious, forever stuck between desperately seeking his daddy's approval and wishing he was a Guccione.

One thing I'm absolutely certain of, and it brings me joy to no end, is the knowledge that Junior is one of the most miserable fuckers you could ever hope to avoid. All you have to do is listen to him and look at his facial expressions. He's an easy read, because like his old man, he's so painfully needy. He knows he's a pile of shit, that he could disappear tomorrow and no one would miss him, besides maybe his children. He has five, you know, and if even three of them are still on speaking terms with him by the time they reach adulthood, he should consider it a lucky break.

Don't feel sorry for any of these people. Unlike most people in that state of mind, Junior and Li'l Kim actually have the money and means to get off the pain train and work on themselves for as long as it takes to get right. They could take a year or two and just get away from the scumbags and pimps and chiselers that surround them, and figure out what their lives should really be like.

They choose not to, again and again, They want this. This is all they have. It takes courage to arrive at the understanding that you really are better off "broke" (relatively speaking) and happy than "wealthy" and miserable. It takes guts to realize that you need to work on yourself, and that the work never really ends -- that in fact there is joy and catharsis in the work itself.

Every single person in this grotesque "family" is a coward -- morally, ethically, spiritually. They have nothing else in their little lives but the unquenchable thirst -- for approval, for popularity, for the official cover to push around the haters and losers who see them for what they really are.

None of them has ever made an honest cent or been in a fair fight. That is all you need to understand about any of them. Guilfoyle's a perfect fit for them, because she's impossibly ambitious -- that is, her ambitions clearly exceed any actual talents by a country mile, and she knows it, so she has to make up for those deficits. She'd suck a roomful of random dicks to win a sack race. And she's fine with shacking up with a cokehead who talks about her like she's a stray dog. Her performance at the Republicon Convention a few months ago was not an act, it was her id unleashed, her true self boosted with what she knew her boyfriend and his creepy, ogling father would want to hear from her.

I would literally bet my next paycheck that Senior has grabbed her tits and/or ass at least once, or made some sort of obvious comment, and that Junior knows it, and will never confront his old man about it. Look at them, listen to them, you know it's true. Probably worse than that even.

I'm not saying that money can't buy you happiness -- despite what they tell you, it can. At the very least, having money is better than not having money, if you're a halfway well-adjusted human being. But if you're a miserable asshole to begin with, someone who's been able to coast through life never having to earn or justify anything you do or say, more money will just magnify those problems. It papers over them for a while, but sooner or later, it becomes clear that the demons are driving the bus, it's just a somewhat nicer-looking bus. Eventually the gold leaf and cheap filigree peel away and reveal things for what they always were.

Disbarred

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Rush to Judgment

Not going to waste much time or effort on this, because he really isn't worth it, but it is a fine larf to see some of the usual dopes entreating us to "be best" or whatever, with Rush Limbaugh's supposedly terminal diagnosis. (I thought he was stage four -- which, in my understanding, generally means "there's nothing more we can do" -- back at the beginning of the year.)

I could say something shitty, like hoping that every breath he continues to draw is more agonizing than the previous one, something like that. But the fact is that you have to care about something or someone in order to hate it (them) sufficiently. And I just don't care, at all.

I assume that most people, once they hit a certain age, begin having those little existential conversations with themselves. What kind of mark will I make? How will people remember me? What part of me will live on, and for how long?

Obviously, for 99.9999% of us (not an empirically proven number), the answers are, in order:  Little to none; fondly (at best) for a while, then less and less; very little, and not for very long. Even for people with large families and/or large groups of friends, they all move on at some point.

Limbaugh has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several decades by poisoning the well of what passes for American political discourse. People reflexively point to him calling then thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog" early in his career, but the fact is that that's one of his more harmless bits.

He's always been a cheerful prevaricator, a passer of rumors and innuendo, the orchestrator of an endless campaign of calumny and fear. Basically his show and his schtick have been an ongoing false-flag operation, distracting his rube audience with fake misdeeds from the Democratic villains of his passion play, while his Republicon saints robbed the country blind and stupid.

Here's what he had to say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg a couple years ago -- or has he memorably dubs her, Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg. [Ed:  Hi-yooooo!] You can see where Genius Q. Dealmaker swiped his splendiferous gift for nicknamification. Truly, this is inspired stuff. And he couldn't even wait for the body to get cold before he was clamoring for a (fascist) replacement to be installed in the seat.

It goes without saying that the people who will have anything positive to say about Limbaugh are the same sort of arm-dragging troglodytes who will miss Trump when that final Double Whopper finally takes him to hell. Limbaugh's impact is arguably larger than Trump's, and in fact, it's clear that the life's work of the former was to set the stage for the latter, to keep people dumb and angry and eager for the next day's outrage pill, like the Skinner-box rodents they really are.

Like I say, I don't really give two shits whether Limbaugh keels over tomorrow or ten years from now, because his legacy and operational principles will be the same either way:

1. The herrenvolk are entitled to their own set of rules and customs, which (as Frank Wilhoit so memorably put it) protect but don't bind them, while simultaneously binding but not protecting everyone else.
2. Hate and bullshit are easier to digest -- and more profitable! -- if you stuff those turds into a handful of cheesy "jokes" and nicknames, all of which are meant to be taken with utmost seriousness, while also being used as a shield to deflect the opposition's "humorless" rebuttals.
   
3. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

The one thing I actually do hope for Limbaugh is that, in his quiet, more reflective moments, when the microphone and lights are off, when he sits in his vast, empty mansion with his cat and his current wife, that he really thinks to himself about whether the life he chose to lead was the life he had dreamed of when he was younger, and if not, what might have gone differently.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and it sure doesn't hurt for everyone to take note that Limbaugh got a much fairer shake out of life than most decent people, and that whether we're "good" or "bad", we all end up the same.

So you might as well do something you can actually talk about in polite company, something that you don't have to be ashamed of. Carrying water for monstrous billionaires pays well, but the fact of the matter is that after a few weeks of grief kayfabe, they'll shove Charlie Kirk or some equally useless sack of shit in the chair to carry the water and poison the well, and Limbaugh will be completely forgotten within five or ten years, except for those who spit when they say his name, like Father Coughlin or Lord Haw Haw. Some legacy.

The main thing for liberals and Democrats is not to let themselves be gulled into this "let's be nice" high-road sucker's game. You have no obligation to forgive your abusers or their enablers, nor to mourn their demises. The fact is that they seek this absolution only as a way of minimizing the abuse and its effects. They don't actually care if you "forgive" them or are "civil" to them; it's just a cynical ploy to keep you on your back foot, to remind you that they will never give you the courtesies they demand from you at every turn.

Keep that in mind in the weeks and months (and even years) to come, because the bigger the landslide, the more you're gonna hear this "reconciliation" bullshit, this Rodney King can't-we-all-just-get-along rhetoric, as a hasty attempt to cover their real-world efforts to undermine the Democrats -- and more importantly, democracy itself.

Never forget what the true endgame is here -- making sure only the right people get to have a say in how their world runs. Limbaugh was an important voice in distilling that toxic brew down to a level where the average Keystone Light swiller could latch on to some talking points, and never have to worry about whether they were accurate in the least.

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.

It Is What It Is; Or, Weekend At Donnie's

Since we love to live in nostalgia -- that is, the fond misrecollections of an exaggerated past -- this whole year has been a fine reminder of the protracted collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. The heightened inequalities; the government-controlled (and -caused) shortages of PPE during a crisis; running out of toilet paper for weeks. Hell, try to find free weights or dumbbell plates for your home gym, seven months later. Mundane shit like that, things that never used to be an issue.

Oh yeah, and a quarter-million dead in less than a year; the tens of millions of jobs lost, many still not regained; the blatant lying and gaslighting from the government; the violent crackdowns in the streets; the looting of the national treasury by all the sycophants and hangers-on to the inner party elites.

And now, the uncertainty of Dear Leader's precious health, so reminiscent of the old days when American intel agents would micro-analyze appearances by Brezhnev or Andropov or Chernenko, how many days between public sightings, which individuals were accompanying them, their mood and coloration.

The Soviet leaders, it was commonly understood even by many 'murkin schoolchildren, were ancient, doddering alcoholics being propped up by a coterie of faithful lackeys, whose duties were not to Матушка Россия, but to whichever figurehead the military and the few people with real money and power chose to install for the time being.

Whatever the case, their true loyalties were clear -- not to the country or its people, but to its figurehead. And the disposition of that figurehead was always worse than portrayed to the willing dupes at Pravda or Izvestiya.

It's also a condition passed along from the old Союз Советских that whatever impotent opposition exists must always be kept in a permanent state of suspended veracity -- that is, for each instance or event presented to them, they are forced to go through the hapless ritual of trying to parse what is "true" and what is the game being played. Is this really a masterful jujitsu move, an eleventh-dimensional chess play designed to make the strongman appear invulnerable when he single-handedly defeats the implacable foe that has ravaged the countryside?

It's not the usual clichéd well, yes -- and no, so much as it is well, sort of -- and, seriously? I mean Jesus Christ, have you really observed how these clowns operate? Come on, they couldn't play regular chess if you made the pieces out of gold and diamonds. There is no subtlety, no strategy. There is only id and impulse and appetite.

You can be sure that if he is able to be made to seem more or less ambulatory by, say, October 13th, they will frame it as proof of the strongman's innate personal might, his good genes once again thwarting the pernicious, sneaky kung flu. But for now, one thing you can be dead certain about is that he has it, and the symptoms are probably bad enough to have them worried.

One subset of common taters and panel-show chat-monkeys that are welcome to fuck off all the way into the burning core of the sun, are the ones piously insisting that we must all set aside our grievances and wish him and his infected minions well. This captures my feelings about that adequately.

Let's gets something straight, and this is just in the past week -- it appears highly likely that the "ground zero" event for all these "leading" Republicons getting infected was their smarmy little end-zone dance last weekend for their fucking SCOTUS pick -- who herself reportedly had the bug "over the summer." But pretty much everyone who has come down with it all of a sudden was at that super-spreader event.

I've seen quite a few photos and videos from that event; some sites are going over it like the fuckin' Zapruder film. You know who I haven't seen in any of the photos or videos so far? Mitch McConnell. If he was there, he kept a low profile.

Regardless, I think you can count on it that Trump gave it to Hope Hicks, and not the other way around; that he almost certainly knew he had it before Tuesday night's debate debacle (for which Chris Christie reportedly coached Trump to be a blustery asshole in order to deliberately goad Biden into stuttering); that he definitely knew he had the bug by Wednesday when he went to Duluth, and Thursday when he held a fundraiser at his rat-infested club in New Jersey.

He knew, and he didn't give a shit. Now we're supposed to give a shit. Fuck -- and I cannot emphasize this nearly enough -- all the way off. Anyone badgering or lecturing you to be a good Christian and think of these animals as fellow human beings in need, they are cordially invited to take that proverbial bag of salted dicks, and shove them sideways into their sigmoid colons.

That's one shred of actual freedom you are still allowed to retain, това́рищ, that they haven't taken from you just yet -- the freedom to not pretend that your abusers are your fucking friends, or that you owe them any sort of grace or fealty.

Ask yourself how they would be acting, how he would be acting, if it had been Biden and Pelosi and Schumer and all them, who had tested positive. Try to conceive of the vile shit they would come up with in their gloating, and then realize that your worst assumptions are not even in the ballpark. These people are fucking scum, period. All of them.

They hate you -- I mean really, truly fucking hate you. They stole a year, probably two, from your lives. Your kids and grandkids will be paying for all the looting they've done just in the last six months, trillions of dollars spewed to the worst fucking people in the world, not to save shitty jobs but so millionaires could give each other fat bonuses and then lay off the peons.

And they lie about all of it to you every second of every day -- and then insist that you thank them for it? That you express sympathy for them when the natural consequences of their sociopathic indifference comes back to bite them?

Seems the best response to all these inner party shitheads coming down with the karmavirus is the same response they've given the entire country:  I really don't care, do you?

Truth In Advertising

I get the complaint, but honestly, I don't see the problem here:

The Agriculture Department last week began mandating that millions of boxes of surplus food for needy families include a letter from President Donald Trump claiming credit for the program.

Look, if these assholes want to remind people of why they're in such a fix that they have to go to the fuckin' food bank, I say let them dig that hole.

Hey folks, hope you enjoy the Trump Box of charity food you need because the Trump Plague killed your gig economy McJob! Don't worry, we'll send you another letter taking credit when we kill off what's left of your health care!

More seriously, yes, the preening arrogance of this fucktard and his soulless minions, entreating the peons to lavish their gratitude upon Dear Leader for his beneficence, is as off-putting as the endless stack of other things that are at least as insufferable and intellectually dishonest. After all, fellow taxpayers, you and I paid for the food in that goddamn box, not Brokeahontas there. Like everything else in his waste of a life, he lets other people pay the money and do the work, and then he steps in and slaps his name [spit] on it and takes all the credit.

Are you pissed? Good. Take that with you into the voting booth. Keep it and nurture it, wield it against every piece of shit that ever carried his water or served as a flack for him. Nurse it like a Serbian grudge, and never let it go. Value your hate and disgust, and use it to keep warm on the long, cold, dark nights to come. Trust me, they deserve so much worse.

You want to be rid of these motherless fucks, like really and forever? That's what it's gonna take, and then some. Sorry, but that's what it takes when too many of yer fella 'murkins got fat, lazy, stupid, and complacent.

Twenty Points Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

If the Pelosi salon thing lasts longer than twenty-four hours in the endless spin cycle, then this hollowed-out husk of a state deserves to go under, full stop. In the meantime, "I got set up" is maybe not the killer defense Pelosi seems to think it is.

Jesus. [puts palm to forehead, pinches nose, exhales slowly through nose for what seems like an eternity] Jesus H. Christ, people. How the hell, at this point in this infernal game, do the words "perfomative" and "kayfabe" not register with some of these people? There is no need to apologize, or explain, or demur or aver or any of the other cheap lawyer word-games these people play.

Since Trump wasted no time in latching on to this nonsense, all Pelosi needed to do was dump the whole thing in his lap:

Considering just last week Trump had hundreds of people on the White House lawn, clustered and maskless, and spent most of that week racking up dozens of Hatch Act violations, and just yesterday committed a felony and yet another in a long line of impeachable offenses by encouraging voter fraud in North Carolina, maybe he's not the right person to be lecturing anyone else on adhering to regulations. If I committed an infraction or violated an ordinance in getting my hair done, I'll pay the fine and just hire an individual to come to my house next time. In the meantime, you people need to get your fucking priorities straight.

But no, she took this stupid thing both seriously and literally, and so felt compelled to respond in kind. It's difficult to imagine that there are many people left at this point waiting for another reason to vote Democratic, and even fewer whose motivation hinges on the behavior of Nancy Pelosi. But there are a lot of people who would be more motivated to vote Democratic if they just once showed some spine and told their bullies in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves.

This is not that fucking hard, people. Quit falling for the kayfabe. Stop legitimizing their bullshit as if it's real. Remind them that he won't show his tax returns because he's a fucking criminal. Remind them that they had to drape a fifty-yard tarp over a battleship ramp when he visited yesterday, because he's an infirm codger who can't walk a ramp or hold a glass of water.

I mean, we're not just talking about the Speaker of the House here, we're talking about someone who's held her seat for over thirty years, and usually wins at 3:1 or 4:1 ratios or higher. It's not like she's in a competitive race. And she's eighty years old, so hopefully nearing retirement hint hint.

It's irritating when people -- especially politicians -- who have absolutely nothing to lose play their hand as if there's something to lose. Lady, nobody outside the booger-eating cultists give two shits about your salon visit, so don't even waste the dignity of a fart on it.

At this point, what motivates voters is not "norms" or "decorum" or even ideas and policy positions, it's the understanding that you'll fight, and not put up with ridiculous bullshit. So hey, let's try that.

Uncle Tim's Cabin

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

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

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

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

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

Useful Idiots

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Harder They Come, The Bigger They Falwell

I don't think anyone is surprised or even gives a shit that the Falwells are swingers. It ain't my thing, but I get that among some consenting adults, it is a thing. More power to them. Judging them on the mores and merits of "conventional" sexual expression is a waste of time.

As Hank Kingsley memorably put it many years ago, sex is not dirty, it's a caring act between two or more consenting adults. (Although it should be noted that Giancarlo Granda was only twenty years old when the affair started, the Falwells twenty-five to thirty years older and in an economically advantageous role, so make of that what you will. Probably nothing sinister to it, but for people who observe various power dynamics, there's one.)

However, judging Jerry Falwell Junior on the inherent hypocrisies of his lifelong monetized grift is encouraged. I do hope all the saps who attended "Liberty" "University" and their parents can appreciate what cannot have been a small investment for them. The entire point of keeping these homeschooled naifs sequestered from the evils of modern society as long as possible is precisely to avoid the sort of worldly shenanigans the Falwells enjoyed with their pool boy.

But these Nelson Muntz "haw haw" moments are frequent and fleeting, and all too human. The only thing that makes this at all interesting is this sneaking suspicion that there's a lot more to the story, and it involves money and/or sex. Junior's recent forced resignation from his legacy cash cow is somebody trying to get out in front of something bigger.

The kid is likely blackmailing them over something, and it's more than just Junior spanking his hapless monkey while the kid went to town on Mrs. Junior. It either rhymes with "money laundering" and/or "tax fraud," and/or Junior was more than just a passive observer.

Pro-tip:  If you're a high-profile couple in a very exclusive cultural niche that might take issue with your private life, it might not be a great idea to get involved in business deals with your bull. Similar to the principles of separation of church and state, or religion and science, but in this case, ah, two somewhat more volatile elements that should not have been mixed.

Regardless, there is a momentary chuckle in seeing one of these smugly judgmental assholes get hoist on their own petard. Not as hilarious as Franklin Graham's fetish for leather-clad garden gnomes, but close. These are not your neighbors minding their own business -- these are professional pecksniffs, minding everyone's business and getting paid well (tax-free) for it, and exerting political influence over other people's lives. So they deserve to get dragged through the damned mud for this.

Conversion Funnel

When you get out of high school and start experiencing the real world -- jobs, vehicles, girlfriends, responsibilities, ambitions, ideas about who you are and who you want to be -- you start formulating concepts that help you orient to the world as it is. In my second semester as a college freshman back in 1986, I took a Marketing 101 class. Within a week, I had cynically boiled down the principles of marketing to this:  getting people to spend money they don't really have on things they don't really want.

Feel free to take that as the angry pretension of a Holden Caulfield type, decrying the inauthenticity of the corrupt world he has been thrust into, but it's not wrong. As we grow up, we consciously or subconsciously modify these little maxims, adding and refining with the experiential knowledge we pick up along the way. Or we develop corollaries to them.

So another way to look at marketing is this:  convincing people either to try a product they do not use, or to keep using a product they have been using. That takes the sneering moralism out of the original, and enables us to focus on the practical nature of marketing. What are the features and benefits of the product? Why is it better than the product I am currently using, or have always used? I don't use this product at all, why should I start, and why should I use your brand?

Now, let's apply that two-pronged corollary [giggity] to the current political marketing schema of the Republicon party. Name a single thing any of them -- not just Trump himself, but any leading member of the party -- has said or done that would convince someone who voted Democratic in 2016 to jump over. You can't because they haven't. They've doubled -- tripled -- down on the lies and cheap shots and shitty rhetoric. They refuse to stop fucking that chicken.

That is a practical calculation on their part. Even if they were inclined to "reach out," they would lose the cult that keeps them there. And there is literally nothing they could do or say to change my mind at this point, and I suspect that is the median point for most people who did not vote for these scumbags in the first place.

So now the second part of the corollary:  keep using the product they have been using. White suburban women were the hidden demographic that helped Trump draw the proverbial inside straight last go-round. The midterms showed that they hemorrhaged that demographic, and the bleeding hasn't stopped.

What are they doing to win those women back? Not a goddamned thing. In fact, with Biden's selection of Kamala Harris as a running mate, the party's great idea is simply to point out that Mitt Romney's dipshit niece is the party chair. Big fucking deal. The only thing people like Ronna Romney McDaniel and Nikki Haley prove is that women can be just as awful and cynical as men.

And the cult base, not to be outdone in the all-important "humor" and pwning libturds departments, have already responded with "Joe and the Ho" tee-shirts, and a bumper sticker that shows the "A" in Harris" inverted, like a pair of spread legs, with the pulled-off panties as the crossbar in the letter.

Say what you will, they've got the market cornered on klass, y'all.

I can imagine what a woman, especially a professional woman but really any working woman, thinks when she sees that shit. Many of them already have to deal routinely with the snickering assumptions that they traded their way up the food chain with sex, and to have it dumped in their laps in such terms cannot be, let's say, a very convincing pitch to bring them back.

If anything, it's just a reminder to them of what they really did trade back in 2016, when they voted for a pig who literally bragged about his habit of sexual assault. Yeah, they told themselves it was just "locker room talk," but they know better. They know it wasn't bullshit, because they've dealt with assholes like that their entire lives, in school, at work, at home.

It is presumed that women generally vote on "safety and security" issues more than men. Since Trump has always talked a fake-tough-guy lawn-order game, that was part of the trade-off they bought into in 2016. Now all they have to do is look around -- they are neither safe nor secure. They get the kids ready for school, they go out and do all the shopping, they deal with the baroque clusterfuck that passes for a health-care insurance system, they frequently pay the bills. They know exactly what time it is now, and who ran the clock on them last time around.

It's very odd, not just from the usual political standpoint, but from the marketing standpoint, showing pictures from American cities aflame with violence all summer, declaring it to be "Joe Biden's America." Well, no, asshole, it's Trump's America, happening right now, and the women know it as well as anyone else.

For every cult Qaren or whatever female shithead gets dredged up for the latest viral video, you can bet that there are ten or twenty other women who are looking around them, and wondering how the hell they're going to get their families through the end of the year. Some of them fell for Trump's bullshit, and they know they got stung.

Back in 2016, the knock on Hillary getting the votes of men was that she reminded them of their ex-wives, or their divorce lawyers. The converse is true of women and Trump -- he reminds them of their first husbands, the bullshit artist who ended up banging their best friend and cleaning out their joint bank account. People make mistakes; the point is to learn from them. They gave him a shot, and now they know.

The Democrats have made the Terminator pitch:  Come with me if you want to live. The Republicons, because this really is all just a big fucking game to them, are content to stick with their tried-and-true Ike Turner pitch:  Bitch, why you make me do that?

We're about to see what kind of nation we really are, once and for all.

Vanish Armada

The ongoing national shitcom took a turn for the hilarious yesterday with the arrest and indictment of Meth Uncle Stevie B, along with several other shitheads, in a transparent money laundering scheme. I know, we're all shocked. The indictment is a pretty quick read, and I suggest you take a few minutes and peruse it.

Back in the Trump "University" lawsuit days, I opined (correctly) that the sort of schmuck who was willing to hand over their life savings to a cheesy huckster like Donald Trump deserved to lose their money anyway. They would have otherwise given it to a televangelist, or blown it on a sack of magic beans, or valuable moon acreage, some dopey shit like that.

That's not to say that Trump didn't also deserve to get sued, but I continue to live by the sacred adage that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. That may not sit well with some folks, but that's really the way it is; whether we "like" it or not is orthogonal to that universal truth.

Anyway, take that principle and multiply it by several orders of magnitude with this "We Build the Wall" bullshit. Fuck every one of these people, right in their goddamned neck wattles. They deserve to get fleeced out of every dime they have. If they had actually worked hard to earn their money, they'd have more fucking respect for it.

So there's that. Every single person involved in this obvious scam deserves the worst. I reserve a smidgen of sympathy for figurehead Brian Kolfage, because he really did sacrifice his body for this nation. But by the context of his emails quoted in the indictment, he was at best a willing accomplice.

And he's going to pay, whether or not he does any time. The indictment specifically lists the boat Kolfage used in the stupid Dear Leader river "parade" in Tampa earlier this year, which (along with Kris Fucking Kobach being the scam's legal advisor) is so perfectly on-brand for this crowd it makes your teeth hurt. The only way it could have been better is if Kolfage had named the boat Stugots.

Speaking of The Sopranos, fellow indictee Andrew Badolato appears to be straight out of the Matty Bevilacqua mold -- pump-and-dump scammer who ratted out his associates to keep out of Club Fed, and eventually gravitated to Bannon, who barely bothers to conceal the late-night-infomercial aesthetic that underpins every one of his Wile E. Coyote scams. Overthrow the Pope? Check. Buy a medieval Italian castle, in order to establish some goofball Opus Dei warrior-monk training academy? Check. Say what you will, Steve-O's ambitions have come a long way since his bathtub crank days.

And now this money-laundering thing, which is guaranteed to unravel on at least a couple of high-level people. The thing is, a couple miles of wall did get built, and some of the money did move to the construction company -- you know, the North Dakota construction company that somehow won a billion-dollar contract to build a fucking wall across Texas. Did not realize that Texas had run out of construction companies.

Oddly, only about half of the $50M can be tracked so far. I'd probably check Fat Donnie's super PACs first, but that's me. I promise you that every single one of these schemes that gets uncovered, he and his shitbag family are wetting their beaks. And even if any of the money has been declared in those legendary tax returns, it's all in shell corps that will then have to be unraveled. They'll probably never get to the bottom of it all. Remember when Mossack Fonseca was a thing? Oh yeah, we had all those thieving high rollers dead to rights. Good times.

A fitting solution for all of this would be to throw the perpetrators in jail, recoup costs and heavy fines, and then use the money to tear down the wall and get the refugee families out of the for-profit rape camps these evil motherfuckers threw them into so long ago. But I'll be surprised if anyone actually goes to jail. Every day is Fitzmas in this country -- big crimes, big promises, very little outcome.

Yes Please

Get a load of this fuckin' maroon:

So, I don't know who gets to break the bad news to the Commander o' Books, but even in a severe economic contraction, the People's Republic still accounts for almost fifteen percent of US GDP (last page of PDF in the link).

One in eight Americans live here in Cali, and we all get to sit back and watch, year after blessed year, as our tax dollars get siphoned away to keep the lights on in the parasite taker states, out there in Real 'murka.

Meanwhile, every year in the Golden State becomes more and more precarious, as more people keep coming in and our crumbling infrastructure gives way, in the face of climate change. Heat waves, wildfires, and rolling power outages all summer, followed by torrential rains and flash floods in the winter, and clean-up in the spring.

I wonder if some of that money we never get back from those fat cats in DC, our tax dollars that they use to keep the countless versions of Opioid Flats barely afloat, could be used here to shore up our own issues? I sure wouldn't mind finding out, and then Doctor Prepper there could take up the slack by showing the yokels how to build a smokehouse for curing roadkill, and filtering urine for drinking water. You know? Maybe if we weren't forced to prop up most of the south and midwest, we godless hedonistic sybarites might be able to keep our lights on and our heads above the rising water.

I've always had a bit of a grudging fascination with prepper culture, seriously. Perhaps it's the romanticized notion of living that rugged, contemplative, Grizzly-Adams-meets-Thoreau lifestyle of self-reliance that appeals to the Stoic gene. To be in the world but not of it, to watch the corrupt "civilized" world burn itself down while remaining safely out of the radius of effects is something that obviously appeals to people across a wide political and philosophical spectrum.

It's interesting, though, to note just how quickly all that went right out the window when the plague hit. These guys spend their whole lives supposedly training and preparing for that dystopian SHTF moment that fuels their lifestyle, and within weeks, boy, they were out in full force wailing about haircuts.

Where the hell do these people think all the toys they take for granted came from? The internet where they trade their dopey conspiracy theories and stupid ideas, the Twitter app where they heckle and jeer, the computers that they use to write and market their prepper books? That shit wasn't invented and developed out in Cooter's Huntin' Lodge, friendo, between rounds of moonshinin' and cousin-fuckin'. That was all college-edumacated elite types out here in the wild west.

I mean, is this guy kidding or what? I couldn't put a number on it with any precision, but I personally know more than a few native Californians who would be fine with breaking away. I sure as hell wouldn't mind. I resent being forced to support people who do nothing but talk shit about my state and the people in it. I would prefer if they just took their fucking welfare check, said "thank you," and went on about their goddamned way. But they won't. They never shut the hell up.

We grow every kind of crop here. We make every kind of product here. We're the fifth- or sixth-largest economy on the fuckin' planet, hoss. You need us, not the other way around. Don't kid yourself.

You want to pay off the national debt, start by demanding reparations from the Republicon Party and their billionaire tax cuts. Check the pockets on Grampa Walnuts' suit, and his family of grifters and ghouls. The fucking balls on these chumps, I swear to Christ.

They couldn't care less about the debt or deficit or any of it, until the Democrats control the gubmint, then they're all about the fiscal prudence. The sooner we just write these idiots off, omit them entirely from all serious policy discussions, and leave them to their masturbatory Red Dawn fantasies, the better off we'll all be -- even them.

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?