Poll Smokers

Ignore all polls -- yesterday, today, last week, next week, next month, a week before the election. I don't mean you need to remain ignorant of the polls, but seriously, what sort of person lets a poll result affect their vote or any part of their decision-making process? A dipshit, that's who. You already know that, though, you don't need some internet wiseass to point that simple fact out to you.

Much like reality teevee, the constant churn of meaningless data is a very real and metastasizing cancer on this country. It has poisoned the impressionable brains of simpletons, people who shouldn't be allowed out of the house with money or without a helmet.

Unlike every other modern representative government on this groaning, beaten planet of ours, the US is blessed with a perpetual campaign machine. It's another in a long list of uniquely American rackets that turn out to be lucrative, because we are largely a country of willing dupes.

So, for example, the health care system is a collusive racket between the insurance companies, HMOs, and big pharma. The university system is a collusive racket between the schools and Wall Street. Both are designed to do exactly the same thing -- hoover ungodly amounts of usury out of the pockets of a captive market.

Now, the perpetual campaign racket is similar in that it is basically underwritten by most of the above entities, since they all buy ad time on the corporate media propaganda outlets. But instead of sucking money directly out of your pocket, they grab your eyes and brains with piles of the worst sorts of tea-leaf-reading bullshit and pseudo-analytical nonsense.

Why are white men without college degrees twenty-five percent likelier to vote for Trump than any other demographic? they ask. I dunno, because they're idiots? Who knows? Who cares? I don't give two shits who my next-door neighbor or my relatives or some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner is going to vote for -- at all. I mean, I care in the sense that I hope they don't make the stupid choice, but whatever their choice turns out to be, it doesn't affect my choice in the slightest.

But when you have billions of dollars thrown at weaselly consultants whose sole mission is to convince you that some doofus "swing voters" should be courted like a busload of horny supermodels, you have your racket. And it's every bit as pernicious a racket as the health care or college rackets, maybe more so in some ways.

The real job of this dipshit consultant with their focus-group polling, appearing on a panel with other useless assholes on Jake Tapper's show or whatever, their real job is to convince you that any bold ideas that might upset the billionaires who own everything is Bad, and makes Candidate X "unelectable." This is explicitly designed to force Candidate X to "moderate" their tone, coin some "conciliatory" phrases in order to reassure our benevolent plutocrats that All Is Well, why, we would never so much as dare to dream of anything beyond a life of pointless make-work, eternal usury, and endless advertisements.

So the real "problem" with Elizabeth Warren proposing a plan to move to a "Medicare for All" type of system, is certainly not that it might displace some number of paper pushers and bill collectors whose jobs would be made redundant, nor even really that a "wealth tax" would be instituted to pay for it. The problem the billionaires have with it is that they are unclear on where their revenue stream  is in the proposed new system. How can we monetize it? How can we financialize it? Where is the magic pond in this plan, the one where I get to wet my beak for eternity?

As I keep preaching, their equity is an amalgam of other peoples' debt, just as your personal debt could be pieced out as other peoples' equity. They have a clear vested interest in keeping as many people as possible broke, stupid, and on the debt hook for the rest of their goddamned lives. An important part of gulling people into voting against themselves over and over again is to make them feel like they have at least a small stake in life, something worth not losing or risking, and then destabilizing them with barrages of data -- some true, some false, none of it matters -- in order to induce a state of fear.

Fear of losing your job or your house because the company you work for pulls up stakes overnight and moves operations to China. Fear of losing your crappy health insurance, because if you or your wife or one of your kids gets cancer or hit by a bus or whatever, you're fucked. Hell, even if you do still have your insurance, you're probably fucked. But at least there might be some lube involved.

(Of course, the hospital will charge the insurance company a thousand bucks for the one-ounce tube of lube, which the insurance company will then deny and send you the full bill on the EOB, against your five-thousand-dollar deductible. But I digress.)

And so the pelf-grubbers and the usurers and the spreadsheet-diddlers who produce and create nothing, but own everything, are welcomed on to the corporate media which is institutionally aligned with them, to lecture the peons about the "moral hazards" of not gouging every possible cent out of working people, for a product which typically does not recoup its cost in the first place, never mind the next decade or so of vig added on.

And then they'll turn around and have that nazi Spencer on, or the liar Kellyanne. The mission is not to inform, but to deform -- to irretrievably mutate the terms of discussion, so that a truly honest debate can never be had. It takes some serious balls for these fucking hacks to grind on Liz Warren's proposal -- which is all it is, we're not even into the primaries yet -- and not provide a side-by-side comparison with that flag-humping Caddyshack reject, who has done nothing, has proposed nothing, to resolve or even address what most people across the political spectrum agree is a serious problem.

It's a game, and we need to stop playing it. People like Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd really ought to be ashamed of themselves. What they do is not journalism, it's (as Frank Zappa once memorably put it) the entertainment branch of industry. It's PR for the Koch brothers and for Exxon, and whoever else is paying the bills.

The perpetually changing polls in the perpetual campaign are critical pieces in keeping the average rube unsettled and destabilized. They're designed to give the just-over-half-bright viewer a few simple talking points they can memorize the next time they have a run-in with their smarty-pants co-worker at the water cooler.

They can prattle about the two million clerical and admin jobs that might be lost in the M4A transition, which would take years to implement in the first place, without considering that part of the problem is that at least some of the money that comes out of your paycheck to pay for your shitty insurance pays for those jobs, and that maybe creating a real marketing efficiency would not only save you money on your insurance premiums, but give those workers an opportunity for something better than churning out EOB forms.

They can recite Leon Cooperman's bullshit about the moral hazards of student-loan forgiveness, without thinking about the fact that Cooperman owns a stake in Navient, so yeah, students' debt is his equity, where have you heard that one before? I think we're at the point where you could start a super PAC called "Chickens for Colonel Sanders," and no one would see the irony in it. We're post-Onion now. And it's because mediots with no sense anymore of what is actually newsworthy decided to give infinite air-time to people with no scruples or principles whatsoever.

So I don't care what the polls say, even when I agree with them. And I don't care what any media monkey says, even if I nod along with them. I have already made my resolution, and it's best phrased in A.R. Moxon's tweet at right:

I used that exact argument with a Trump-supporting friend a few months ago. I reminded him that I was very much a ticket-splitter for a long time, but as the Republicans have increasingly soiled their brand with hucksters and scumbags like Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, et al, I've written them off forever.

I figure I've got another seven or eight presidential election cycles left, and I don't care how bad the Democratic candidate is, I will never vote for a Republican again, not even for so much as fucking dog-catcher. My wife will never vote for a Republican. My daughter just turned eighteen, and is very much looking forward to casting her "fuck you" drop in the ocean against Trump and his scummy ilk next year, and for the next sixty or seventy years. And we already stopped buying from companies that support Trump or Fox, watching shows made in Georgia, all of it. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle, but I am fucking done with all of these people, and refuse to give them anything -- time, money, attention.

Just as I know more than my share of Trump supporters, I also know a good number of people who, like myself, did vote Republican sometimes, but now regard them with a snarl usually reserved for child molesters and red-light runners. Trump is not the cause of all this, but the natural outcome of their efforts for my entire lifetime. It's not just him, it's always been them. They're fucking scum, top to bottom, whether they vocally support Trump or not. Silence is complicity.

And I will make sure that if a pollster calls me, they know that, that it's not just "no" to Trump, but "never again" to the Republicons. They're a party of Fredo Corleones, completely dead to me. I think maybe Matt Bevin just found that out the hard way as well, and Trump may finally start figuring out that despite what the paid prognosticators and his bullshit in-house surveys tell him, people don't like that motherfucker, because he's an awful excuse for a human being, and a goddamned embarrassment to a majority of Americans.

Fuck the pollsters, and the mediots who put them on the air. Let's get this party started!

Bedbug

Bret Stephens, like many of his ilk on the NY Times' sorry excuse for an op-ed page, continues to find new and more efficient ways to demonstrate why, even on the occasions when that paper manages to not fuck something up, it's just not worth bothering with anymore. At all.

As long as they continue to provide sinecures to lazy thinkers and shitty writers such as Stephens (and Brooks, Dowd, Douthat, Friedman, and several of their primary political stenographers), life continues to be simply too short to wade into the muck. You know what they're gonna say, how they're gonna say it, etc.

There is literally no point in reading such a publication anymore. I couldn't care less about their 1619 project. There are countless academic texts out there covering the same ground, better and more thoroughly. Go to a fucking library once in a while.

By now, if you're in the mix, you already know the broad strokes:

• little-known associate professor at GW University refers to Stephens as a "bedbug" in a barely-read tweet;
• Stephens (who is so diligently hard-working, he apparently has time to Google himself for untoward references) happens across the post and summarily challenges Karpf to come to his (Stephens') house and call him that to his face, in front of his wife and children;
• tweet naturally blows up and goes viral because of Stephens' whining;
• Stephens contacts Karpf's boss and tries (unsuccessfully) to get Karpf fired;
• Stephens tops of a week of win with a column so infantile and self-regarding, in a rational universe it would be cause to inform Stephens of his new tax status, and send him on about his way finding honest work.

Bear in mind that just a couple months ago, Stephens had a column chastising people for using the term "concentration camps" to refer to the, you know, concentration camps where we are forcibly confining, under inhumane conditions, refugees seeking legal asylum. And back in 2013, when the Obama Administration was trying to craft the JCPOA to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions peacefully, Stephens wrote a column comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain. Civility, y'all! Stephens, who is after all Jewish and spent much of his childhood in Mexico City, should actually know better than most about the implications of the things he writes. But his schtick is that of paid contrarian, and as such, once bought he stays bought.

Believe it or not, this is not to lambaste Stephens in particular. Frankly, anyone still reading him or the aforementioned page-monkeys alongside him deserve precisely what they get -- a paucity of any fresh thought or analysis, just the same litany of rearranged buzzwords one would expect from someone whose prime motive in life is to get invited to the elite Hamptons soirees.

Imagine the sort of inherited-wealth douchebag who spends six figures on their wedding and their kids' preschools and all that, and still has the balls to act like they earned every penny, and you have an idea of who Stephens writes for and aspires to hang with and to be.

The people who really run the country and own the assets and the political process; the people who talk enormous amounts of shit about everything and everyone that even mildly affects their eternal goal of permanent excess; the people who routinely refer to the poor and working class as other species, insect and otherwise; the people who immediately get their panties in a wad and pitch a yuuuuge fucking fit the second anyone criticizes them for anything, no matter how accurately.

There are niches within each, of course, but whenever you subject yourself to the unnecessary pain of reading yet another screed from Stephens or Bobo or Modo or Douthat, that is the subtext of the essay, whatever the particular subject on a given day:  what does a wealthy, do-nothing swell with an unearned sense of entitlement want to hear? How can I affirm that person's sense of self-regard?

One of the most pernicious ways each of them operates -- and this is simply part of the process of being a Times columnist in the first place -- is to reiterate the tautology that simply being on the op-ed page confers automatic legitimacy, therefore not being on the op-ed page renders critics as automatically illegitimate, worthy of discussion only as a point of refutation, or -- in Karpf's case -- an unwashed, unpedigreed Other, whose impolitic words instantly conjure up visions of 1930s Germany or 1790s France.

Just in the past two weeks, not to mention the last several years, the chief executive of the United States of America has:

• offered to purchase the sovereign territory of an ally, and cancelled a diplomatic visit when the offer was rightly rebuffed;
• referred to himself with divinely-inspired nomenclature ("the chosen one") in reference to his role in an ongoing fiasco with our largest trading partner; if there were an instructional handbook for aspiring dictators, referring to oneself with religious titles would be on page one, right before "renaming the months of the year after one's family";
• "temporarily" shut down the FEC, by making it unable to fill a quorum, and thus carry out its duty of safeguarding elections and ensuring that campaigns abide by the law (that no one enforces anymore anyway);
• committed a securities violation, by falsely stating at last weekend's G7 meeting that China "had called" him, which on the following morning raised the market out of the 800-point funk he had sent it into the previous Friday;
• committed a national-security violation, by tweeting a classified photo from a spy satellite of a failed Iranian missile test, essentially showing the location of the satellite;
• threatened his departing personal assistant, who was fired for bragging that she has a closer relationship to Trump than his own daughters.

No doubt I'm forgetting a few; feel free to remind me in comments. But this is just from the last couple weeks, and August is supposed to be the slow season when everyone is on vacation.

And yet to grossly overpaid idiot gatekeepers such as Bret Stephens, the real problem is all these intolerant liberals, you see, all these would-be Goebbels and Robespierre types who are dehumanizing their political opponents with their rhetoric, and sharpening the guillotine blades. Never mind that the US government is literally dehumanizing people every goddamned day, literally sentencing sick people to die from treatable ailments. Never mind that real honest-to-jeebus white-power types routinely make rape and death threats to (usually female) bloggers and tweeters routinely.

Fuck that "bedbug" shit, there are serious people out there making real threats that have other real people looking over their shoulders every time they leave their houses. Stephens is just a spoiled crybaby who got pissy with an academic, because he was insufficiently deferential to Stephens' gatekeeping greatness.

While you're reading this, while Stephens is writing his next unreadable, bullshit-laden jeremiad, these things are happening. Right now. Oh, look, there goes another one, another scared child raped in a foster home or dropping dead in a hot desert camp. Careful with that guillotine, Robespierre!

As we've been saying in here for a very long time, well before the bewigged gastropod oozed its way into the spotlight, we have to decide what kind of country we're going to be. Either we're the kind of country that shits on immigrants from the "wrong" countries purely as a punitive measure, or we're not. Either we're the kind of country that keeps monstrous demagogues from derailing the nation's collective trajectory, or we just passively sit there and watch it happen. Gee, this sucks.

An integral part of all this can be summed up in the classic kids' nutrition phrase you are what you eat. The New York Times, from its political coverage to its op-ed columnists to its society pages, is a verbatim transcript of smooth-brained establishment elite bullshit. Just because there's occasionally a few kernels of corn here and there doesn't make it any more nutritious if you pick those out and eat them. They think their once-a-year deep-dive coverage on Trump's crooked past (that they could  and should have done ten or twenty years earlier) or some such makes up for the other 364 days of shameless hackcess journamalism and their day-care center of tiresome slop-ed failchildren.

The fact that a significant percentage of the Times' op-ed columnists spend a non-zero amount of time worrying about the tone and civility of a literally powerless opposition should tell you everything you need to know about them -- as thinkers, as writers, as human beings. The problem is not that AOC has effectively coined the term "concentration camps" for those places, the problem is that Bret Stephens, who has a prime spot for commentary and could literally write about any subject he chooses and get it into the national conversation, chooses to write about how unseemly that term is, rather than the operational reality of those places.

Maybe Stephens should go talk to his wife and kids face-to-face about that; if he doesn't have the guts, I'll be happy to drop by and do so, since he's tweeting out invites. I'll even bring a six-pack of whatever beverage he chooses. I won't even drop an f-bomb, I promise. It'll be civil.

So people either support this nonsense with their dollars and their eyeballs, or they don't, period. Even then, even if Stephens were to get even more butthurt and decide to pretend to go out and ply an honest trade, he'd just go and write an unreadable book about his imaginary travails shoveling coal for the nation's flagship newspaper for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, going on teevee and complaining about his lot in life whenever he chooses to, and having to deal with all those pesky internet Robespierres. Three hundred padded pages of boo-fucking-hoo, and yet another boo-hoo media tour to push that turd good and hard. He's gonna get paid either way, and the Times would just replace him with another interchangeable bedbug. The cycle continues.

But the bottom line really is that the worst possible thing you can do to someone like Bret Stephens is to completely ignore him, and the people who bankroll his crybaby nonsense. So maybe let's all do that. It's not like anyone's going to miss out on anything worthwhile.

The Best People

Take a minute and go through the list of mutts in this article, many of them instantly knowable by a single name:  Omarosa. Scaramucci. Michael Cohen, Lindsey Graham (aka #LeningradLindsey because fuck that piece of shit). Graham hasn't turned on Trump yet, unlike the others, but at the first sign of possibly losing his Senate seat, you can bet he will.

Rack your brain for a second and try to come up with a single well-known person who supports this spray-painted, raccoon-eyed walrus, that you would describe as reputable or reliable or hell, a decent human being. They have all sold their souls for something cheap and fleeting, counting on the notoriously short memories of idiot 'murkins, their minds permanently mushed by decades of reality teevee pablum blurring the lines between fact and fabrication, history and narrative.

Some of them will turn when the time is right and the opportunism is useful, because that is what such people do, and that is the only kind of people he wants around him anyway. The few serious people in this administration, like Mattis and McMaster, didn't last long, and they get to play out the string of what had been reasonably respectable careers as toadies for a demented moron.

John Kelly was a serious person with some accomplishments, and decided to trash all that to play the game, until he too got pushed off the island. Now he's a board member for the privatized concentration-camp company that incarcerates children who get molested and old women forced to drink out of toilets, because they bought into the idea that this nation actually stood for something. Sorry, no asylum for you, you're the wrong color. But as long as there's an opportunity to turn a filthy buck out of the misery of others, why it would be -- wait for it -- un-American not to take full advantage of that.

There used to be the sitcom/movie trope of poking fun at the tradition of small, insular religious communities -- the Amish, maybe the Mennonites or Mormons -- to shun individuals who were seen as out-of-step with the rest of the flock. In the movies and teevee shows, it's usually a hardy-har-har at the old chinstrap-bearded farts looking sternly at the wanton yout', with their sex and their electrical-geetar music. Oh, won't these old fuddy-duddies ever learn that you can't stop progress, nor can you keep Kevin Bacon from getting footloose?

As Donald Sutherland observed in Animal House, the most interesting character in Paradise Lost is Lucifer, because being bad is more fun than being good. Obviously. Turns out this is also true in real life, as some of us have found out by spending time on either side of the fence. Though as those of us who spent a wayward youth know, if you're still doing the sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll thing after, say thirty-five or forty and you're not in an actual touring band that people have heard and which has remunerated you in some tangible way, you probably spend a lot of time in your local police log.

Reality teevee, if you think about it, has reinforced the fun-villain thing rather consistently, from the amount of marketing I end up skin-popping in my news feed. You don't need to be a fan of that crap to realize that they keep the rubes glued by making assholes the center of the narrative. Not even villains, mind you -- traditionally, a villain is portrayed as having a viewpoint, and even some level of competence. Think Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes story --  a bad guy, but not a buffoon or a clown, or even someone who was a dick just for the sake of being a dick. He had reasons for his efforts.

But now? All our villains are merely assholes. They exist primarily to teabag whoever's in the out-group, and not much more than that. It's not even a Dr. Evil level of cartoon villainy, more of a pro-wrestling level. "Real" housewives talking shit and flipping tables, useless, botox-and-silicon cunts acting like they contribute in some way to civilization.

At least pro wrestlers know they're acting, as do the fans. Now, once you bring that hideous dynamic into the political arena and weld it to more deeply-rooted notions of nationalism and patriotism and religious belief, they become inextricably linked. It eventually insulates them from and precludes any attempts at rational thought. This is why those bozos at the cult rallies and haunted diners sound, when they are actually quoted verbatim, drunk off their asses. They are literally beyond the point of any clarity of thought.

Not only can they not defend their own positions, they frequently can't even explain them coherently. They talk in heroic terms about a preposterous grifter who is openly using the office to line his pockets with their tax dollars, in a variety of ways, and they're completely fine with it. It's impossible to compete with or penetrate that level of buy-in. That's a cult. Any deprogrammers out there looking for work?

And so you get, to use the most recent example in Portland just yesterday, throngs of unemployable losers in variously ludicrous forms of larper cosplay, insisting very seriously that the only demographic in this country that has any right to feel truly aggrieved and oppressed is the (presumably, though you wonder about some of these dopes) hetero white christian male.

Ordinarily you'd say, jeez, these guys really need to get laid, but what poor woman deserves that, some weird asshole with a Toys-R-Us Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle chest plate, that he hand-decorated with Kek logos and Pepe the Frog stickers, pretending he's saving the world from the J-O-O funded conspiracy to replace pasty lumps like himself with undeserving wetbacks? Even if he did manage to find a woman, she'd at least have to be open to conversion -- in other words, already on board with the whole nutjob philosophy.

Circling back to the top of the post there, these comic-book assholes -- you wouldn't hire any of them for any sort of work, ever. You would not hire Michael Cohen as your lawyer. You wouldn't let Mooch handle your pension fund. You wouldn't pay Omarosa to do whatever the fuck she does. And they are a reflection of the disloyal turd who hired them in the first place, who cut them loose and who they have now publicly turned against. You wouldn't hire him to manage anything or do anything either.

Competence matters, it turns out. A lot of salt-of-the-earth types out there in flyover country are finding that out the hard way, that between an unnecessary trade war and months of spring flooding that affected planting and will affect their harvests shortly (not that they can sell their products anyway), that pwnage they thought they were pulling on the libturds is really on themselves. Turns out we can grow corn and soybeans and shit out here in California too.

The Midwest could disappear from the map tomorrow and it would affect anything on the Pacific coast. That may not be a nice or politically correct thing to say, but that's the way it is. I'm not wishing any ill will on them, other than what they've inflicted on themselves. I'm saying that they have labored under the delusion that we need them more than they need us.

And the truth is that we don't need them at all, while they need our hedonistic sodomite tax dollars just to keep their subsidized corn-holes afloat. But they've cooked their noodles for the past couple decades, watching this corporate nonsense that's irreparably altered their perception of everything, where incompetent assholes get to have all the fun and none of the consequences. So they went ahead and put one in charge, and it turns out....there are consequences. For everyone, but for them most of all. So perhaps karma is a thing after all. We'll find out with a bit more certainty in about fourteen months.

Maybe it's time to think more seriously about the notion of shunning, that identifying idiots who are destructive just for the sake of being destructive and turning our backs on them is not just an act of collective punishment, but of self-preservation. None of these people -- Omarosa, Moochie, and especially Trump -- should ever have been allowed into our collective lives and psyches. They are nothing but snakes and weasels, indecent people pursuing naked ambition, without any of the qualifications for doing so except a streak of ruthlessness and an utter lack of conscience.

If we want better people to lead the nation, then we have to be better citizens and consumers, and step up and make choices that reflect our needs and values. You can't just keep blaming a shitty corporate media, if you keep watching it and giving their sponsors your business. You can't blame the sneaky Russians and their micro-targeted Facebook ads, if you were dumb enough to believe them. You can't blame the corrupt voting precinct for deregistering you for not voting for ten years and misspelling your name, if you don't vote and can't spell your fucking name.

The biggest thing these fuckers fear is not anger and pushback -- hell, that's where they make their nut, stoking conflict and performative outrage. What they really fear is a pissed-off populace that is informed, focused, prepared, and paying attention, and is ready to calmly go forth and do business.

So make sure you're registered, right now, get a receipt from the elections office to verify it for later reference, and then vote with your wallet every damned day going forward. Maybe write your congress-critters once in a while, just to let them know you're watching. If enough people just did those things, and did them consistently, within just a few years all the bullshit going on right now would seem like a bad dream.

Dinner for Schmucks

As it does every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner serves as a reminder that while individual journalists might be fine people, collectively they pretty much all fucking suck, are terrible at their jobs, and should be replaced at the earliest possible moment. Michelle Wolf did the two things a comedian is supposed to do, which is be funny and tell the truth, and if the truth is ugly, whose fucking fault is that?

Consider:  at the same exact moment Wolf smacked up the crowd with a few "[Clownstick] is so broke" yo momma jokes, and threw the lightest of shade at Baghdad Barb's overdone mascara, the so-called leader of the free world was at an indoor soccer field in Bumfuck, Michigan reciting his usual list of lies and calumniations, calling everyone who disagrees with him -- including journamalists -- traitors and enemies of the state. (That the pearl-clutching took some attention away from the magat rally is one small bright point.) So of course Wolf is the problem.

We have a real situation here, folks. If anyone can be characterized categorically as "enemies of the state," it is indeed the corporate media, from CNN to MSNBC to Fox to the NY Times and WaPo. Certainly the degrees of severity vary, and outlets such as the Post have made the effort to include some diamonds among the dross.

But consider Maga Haberman's whinging tweet about how poor Baghdad Barb was forced at gunpoint to sit there and "absorb intense criticism" about things that are objectively true. The only thing Wolf said about Barb's physical appearance was a throwaway line about "smoky eye," and as far as the critique on Barb's job performance, Wolf barely grazed her.

Haberman, of course, thinks she's being "objective" when she sticks up for Baghdad Barb. I honestly don't know why she doesn't just jump over to Fox News and have done with it.

Wolf could have gone much meaner and deeper. Obviously any WH press secretary for any administration is going to be something of a hack and a shill, dutifully sweeping various shenanigans under the nearest thing resembling a rug. But let's stop fucking around here -- Sarah Sanders has taken the job to a new low, aggressively lying and obfuscating for an administration that has richly earned (in barely a year) its multiple investigations and reputation for incompetence and corruption.

Sanders is an active, willing accomplice to their daily efforts to undermine this nation and pit its citizens against each other, while the clown-in-thief and his cronies nose each other along the public trough. She's the closest thing this country has to an out-and-out traitor; she's done far more damage than the likes of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning could ever conceive. Calling Sanders "Baghdad Barb" in this here blog is about as polite as I can get when talking about her, a chuckling wink that only barely alludes to the depth of my contempt for her.

Sean Spicer was and is an asshole, but his main problem during his stint as Depress Suckaterry was that he too frequently, through his body language and facial tics, gave away what he really thought of the whole shitshow. Sanders, on the other hand, is all in on this thing, as they say. She's not acting in order to meet basic job requirements. She'd do this for free; the fact that she's well-compensated for it is just gravy. She enjoys rubbing the noses of the librul mediots and their librul snowflake readers in as much shit as possible. She's about as much of a good christian as Saddam Hussein. Any god that would be okay with her constant lying, and her shameless defenses of the indefensible, is not a deity worth taking seriously.

There's no need to make cheap remarks about her physical appearance -- her soul is as deformed and fugly as they come. Twitter Nixon had her number right from the start, when he said something to the effect that she looks like she's spent plenty of time over the years defending her brother.

Things have gotten progressively worse since that doddering monster waddled down the fucking escalator three interminable years ago, yet the mediots insist on doing things the way they've always done them. Their revenue model is dying, and they don't know what to do, so they don't do anything differently. We all know what that's a recipe for, and it's coming true, as expected.

They like to pride themselves on being neutral objective observers, but they're not, and the WHCD is annual proof of that. Their currency is access, the uncool kids doing whatever it takes to get invited to the kewl kids' party, even though once they get in, everybody hates them all the same. And I don't blame the people in power one bit for hating the media monkeys. I despise them as well.

It's a free country and all, but no one respects someone who eats shit and sucks hobo dicks, like some desperate Fear Factor moron, just to get in the room with a bunch of unqualified thieves and grifters, just so they can swill appletinis with them and transcribe the lies. As nasty as Wolf might been to Sanders and that fucking scumbag she carries water for, she saved her sharpest arrows for the mediot sellouts picking at their monkfish at their corporate-sponsored "see and be seen" tables.

And she still went easy on them. There's no two ways about this -- the media, with their horse-race bullshit and their stupid Cletus safaris and their fucked-up senses of objectivity and priorities, are collectively responsible for the mess we're all in now. This has been building for a long time, and all it took was a career con-man with a long and formidable track record of gulling credulous journamalists every fucking time into taking his calls and stenographing his lies and conspiracy theories and moronic barstool-drunk jabber. He's been playing them like a cheap accordion for decades, and they don't even seem to mind. Whatever gets them clicks and eyeballs, that's really all they care about.

Certainly their customer base bears plenty of responsibility as well. We're not off the hook by any means. The mediots do what they do because there's enough of us who seek it out, or are at least placated by it.

But it's a symbiotic relationship at best; if the media became more responsible and improved their coverage and reportage, the idiots would head for the usual fast-food options of epistemic affirmation, but the people who want quality and have given up on that hope would be back to support such an effort.

And it all starts with these assholes stopping the pretense that they can hang out and party with the people they need to cover rigorously and objectively. We talk about politicians needing to put country over party. The media need to put country over parties. They don't have to be assholes to the people that they cover, but they can't be their friends, either. There has to be separation. This shouldn't even have to be said, but sadly it does. The idea of "collegiality" has to stop -- they are not colleagues. They're not your fucking friends. Stop pretending that they are.

We're past the point of having some good-natured ribbing between friendly rivals, you dumb motherfuckers. They stole a fucking SCOTUS seat, and their golem spends half his time calling us traitors, and the other half forcing us to pay him to play golf. And that doesn't even scratch the surface. If the mediots had any real integrity, they'd stop attending this dismal, debased ritual.

Motor Shitty Asshole

Imagine the whining from the conservatard claque if anyone -- anyone -- proposed shooting them during an interview. Well, no one listens to me, but uh, yeah, at what point do decent people hold worthless shitbags like Ted Nugent and Alex Jones accountable for this sort of thing?

Here's how it'll shake out:  there might be some sort of squawk of outrage, and Fuckface Nugent might mumble some sort of mealy-mouthed "I was only joking" sort of averral. Somebody else will do or say something stupid, and people will forget about it in a couple of weeks.

But here's the thing -- I don't know about you, but I've had my fill of these fucking people. All of them. The cliché they tell victims of domestic violence -- that people will treat you how you let them treat you -- is a hard truth. That other old wives' chestnut -- when someone tells you who they are, believe them -- is just as true.

Ted Nugent turns seventy in December, and it would be a fine thing if he keeled over into a wood chipper before then. Failing that, he has some concerts coming up, including one at the end of June less than a mile from where I was born. I will be contacting the club to ask them what they think about having someone who literally says "half of the government should be shot" performing at their establishment.

I would very much prefer to have Ted Nugent alive but with nowhere to play, nowhere to spew the vile nonsense he routinely does at his shows. It's probably too much to hope that he goes broke from lack of touring opportunities, but I sincerely hope that happens as well. He's a vile piece of shit, and the world will be a better place when he's dead and gone. In the meantime, our options in dealing with such people are ballots and wallets.

People -- including Bill Maher, who really oughta know better -- are complaining about the supposed "chilling effect" that David Hogg's boycott on Laura Ingraham's show has on free speech. In that particular example, they're not entirely wrong; Ingraham is at most a third-tier light on a network full of deserving douchebags. Frankly, the entire network should be boycotted, not just a particular performer (which is really all any of them are, trained monkeys).

But free speech does have a responsibility baked into it. The First Amendment merely says that the gubmint can't imprison you for speaking your mind, no matter how demented you are. But it certainly does not guarantee you or me or Rush Limbaugh or Ted Nugent a comfortable living doing so, especially when the person in question is saying things that are provably untrue, and/or incitements to violence. Arguing with such people is an exercise in futility. They are not there to debate the merits of this or that position. This is so obvious, it needn't be said. [And yet you did. -- Ed.]

I don't want Nugent or Jones arrested for the things they say; I want the people who sponsor and support them to pay a price for doing so. It should be unacceptable to decent people for someone to say that Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) should be shot. It should be unacceptable to claim repeatedly that a classroom massacre of first-graders was a hoax, as Jones has infamously done.

Kevin Williamson's another one. You cannot expect immunity from doubling down on the unspeakably stupid notion that women who have abortions should be hanged. (Extra points for Williamson's particularly stupid mode of doubling down -- by insisting he meant future women who have abortions, not the ones who have already had them. Oh, well, of course. Carry on then. Sheesh.)

This sort of rhetorical bomb-throwing keeps these losers employed, and that's the part that has to be shut down. They can spout their vile fictions all they want, but they should not have the expectation of securing a grand paycheck for their nonsense. (Incidentally, this also applies to more polite idiots such as Bobo and MoDo. Seriously, I can't believe there is anyone out there that still reads either of those two dipshits.) Williamson's defenders act like Williamson is someone trying to start some sort of good-faith dialogue, as if he's an honest broker in all this. All you have to do is read Williamson's responses to the abortion question [Q.: Are you serious?  A:. Hell yes, I'm serious.] to know that.

This is not to say that Williamson should have been fired from The Atlantic before he even had a chance to start. In fact, it would have been better for the abortion debate at large for Williamson to elaborate on his (let's say) peculiar sensibilities on the issue. But that is a different matter than noting that neither Williamson nor his new employers should have been in the least surprised when a number of people (including, you may be surprised to find, quite a few vagina-owning humans) were instantly revolted at the thought of reading a publication that employed such a person.

That is the accountability of the free marketplace, unless of course you're the one being held financially accountable for writing stupid things, in which case it's just a witch hunt.

Usually when free speech is squelched, it's from the top down. None of us will ever know how many momentous stories have been buried over the years by news editors, who are usually company creatures above all else. When it starts coming up from the bottom, from the powerless, people who don't have money or assets or media companies to push everyone around with, you can tell it's effective when the pigs start squealing.

So let's make Nugent squeal. The guy's already a fucking turd of a human being -- got a blowjob from Courtney Love when she was twelve and he was nearly thirty, right about the time he "adopted" a seventeen-year-old girl in order to beat the Mann Act. Plus, he literally shit his pants to get out of Vietnam, which is not a crime in and of itself (on the off chance he had a moral objection to the war), but tends to undercut his usual phony-tough guy stance.

Fuck him. He doesn't have to be shot, or even go broke, but if we're truly tired of hearing from people like that motherless fuck, the least we can do is make sure he can't show his face among decent people anymore. Let him have the Traitor-Slaver-Loser flag bozos, collectively drunkening to the thousandth iteration of Wang Dang Sweet Poontang. Fools and their money are lucky enough to get together in the first place. But it's time to start pressuring the companies that sponsor this shit.

Show Business

"Pastor" Mark Burns is a thief, a liar, a sellout, a snake-oil spiritualist. So why have him on your "news" program for anything in the first place, except to stoke some bullshit political kayfabe? You don't need a genius or a psychic to know that, since it takes a liar to defend a liar, that whoever they get on to "defend" Clownstick's "side" in any given issue is going to -- wait for it -- LIE.

So what (and I'm asking this rhetorically of the journo class) is the point of it? Why have Mark Burns or Kellyanne Conway or any of those idiots on for anything in the first place? Seriously, why bother? Most of the viewers of these shows know what such people will say before they even say it. Obviously, it's all just an exercise for the "interviewer" to indulge in some variation of choreographed sanctimony. It would have been marginally more entertaining if Reid had smacked Burns in the back of his fool head with a folding chair.

This "shithole" thing in particular is dumb and uninteresting anyway, precisely because these mediots refuse to focus on the one part about it that is interesting:  it is clear by his words and phrasing that Emperor Snowflake literally has no idea why people emigrate to other countries. None. Which is especially strange since his own mother was an immigrant. It is a function of his fundamental personality flaw -- he cannot conceive of a human being who is not driven by the twin demons of endless accumulation and self-aggrandizement. To him, those traits are the very point of existence, the essence of life. How could anyone not want to be a well-known grifter who uses other people's money to prop up an illusion of genuine wealth?

The mediots have spent countless collective hours and column inches constructing elaborate arguments detailing the emperor's ongoing cognitive decline, as tracked by his increasing bouts of naughty words and intemperate behavior. And it's partly true -- he does appear to be in the process of (to be polite about it) a severe attenuation of mental acuity.

But the pieces were in place long ago. He was an idiot and a bigot to begin with. He has never not been an emotional retard, devoid of basic human empathy. He does not care about anyone but himself, and will say anything to get what he wants. He sees and processes and responds to every issue through that lens.

It is a pathology, and for three decades now, every media outlet from Oprah to Howard Stern has given this dipshit windbag a soapbox to bloviate from. And now that he's bamboozled the rubes into putting him in charge, the same (or same type of) mediots get his surrogates on their interchangeable shows to spin their wheels and shuck the same jive.

The one thing Joy Reid, Mark Burns, and Fuckface Von Clownstick all have in common is that they each have a vested interest in keeping the "conversation" about Clownstick going ad infinitum. And for all that, they never seem to get around to what's been staring everyone in the face the entire time -- senile or not, he was a corroded soul to begin with, long before he entered the political arena.

News Cycle Filler

Flipping through the wasteland for something to watch on a Sunday morning before the football starts, I did catch a split-second of dead-eyed homunculus Stephen "Stop calling me Maurice!" Miller on CNN, and jumped away as fast as the remote would allow. The mistake Jake Tapper made was having Miller on in the first place, because creating base-stoking fodder was not just an opportunistic tactic for Miller, it was the whole reason for him to go on CNN in the first place.

I like Tapper, and he seems to be genuinely trying to do a good job and be an effective journamalist, but like all of them, he's operating in a hole. The endless, insatiable need to create and churn content 24-7-365 puts newsrooms in the position of being content providers, rather than reporters. From the perspective of Tapper and CNN, the best possible outcome of having a toad like Miller come on to lie and propagandize is to elicit an inappropriate response of some sort. It's not like Miller is going to say, Oh yeah, Michael Wolff was right on the money -- everyone in the White House is enabling a fucking retard!

There is some truth to the meme of "gotcha" journalism; clearly many of them who give air time to lying shitheads like Miller, or sit there in the "briefing" room to be hectored and lied to by Baghdad Barb, are trying to capture some incendiary quote or statement that they can then point to and say See? See?!

Does it really need to be pointed out that that sort of thing has no effect any more? There's been something like that every fucking day for the past couple years, and it hasn't brought these people down. Our last best hope (and it seems to be a valid one) is that Mueller has all these bastards by the short hairs.

But considering where we're at, it's just as possible that Mueller does have a ton of key evidence and indictments, and it still might not make a difference. These people have no trouble telling two-thirds of the nation to go fuck themselves, and they'll do whatever it takes to suppress the vote.

Frankly, considering CNN honcho Jeff Zucker is the dipshit who gave Fuckface Von Clownstick a public platform for his fake-tycoon bubble in the first place (when Zucker ran NBC), they're lucky we all haven't boycotted them already. Voting is still necessary, but the fact is that your most potent power is in your wallet, because all any of these people really care about is money.

Captive Audience

Back in the Eighties [Hail Reagan!], when I was in high school, a bizarre and shocking local story gained national attention. A married couple a half-hour away had kept a woman as a sex slave for seven years. The husband had kidnapped the woman (named Colleen Stan) in 1977 when she was hitchhiking, and had brainwashed her early on during her captivity into believing that he worked for some secret "Company" that would murder the woman and her family. The husband had already been treating his wife as a sex slave, and she, battered and broken, acquiesced to his perversions (probably a bit relieved to not be focus of his perversions for a while).

Imagine -- this woman was kept in a locked wooden box under their water bed, twenty-three hours a day most days, brought out only to be raped and fed. That went on for several years.

Perhaps most inexplicably, Colleen Stan was "allowed" to go visit her family in 1981, after four years of captivity. Stan was so brainwashed by her captor's empty threats that she returned to him after the family visit.

The old cliché is that we humans only use ten to fifteen percent of our brains' capacity. Obviously they are very powerful, our brains. But that power is a double-edged weapon, in that it can be turned against its owner by someone craftier, wilier, crueler. Other elements such as passivity, inertia, fear, careerism, or just lack of will, can also factor into an individual being persuaded not to use their wonderful brains, to not see what is right there in front of them.

Things keep happening in and around the White House, the administration, its minions and dogsbodies and agents of misfortune, and I find them baffling.

If you are a World War 2 veteran being "honored" at the White House with some meaningless jabber and a borderline slur right in front of a portrait of a literal force for Native American genocide, you can leave. You do not have to stay; no one can force or intimidate you. You have agency.

Similarly, and more ongoing, is the ugly dynamic of the utterly useless and completely demeaning pro forma ritual of the White House press conference. It is rare that anything genuinely informative has ever transpired at one of these things, no matter who's in charge, but under the current crew of sadists and morons, it is merely a tedious routine in cheap propaganda. Its perpetrators no longer even bother to pretend to try or care. Eat shit and go fuck yourselves is the prevailing tone, day after soul-crushing day.

So why do the career journamalists persist in this meaningless exercise? They know before they head into the room that nothing useful or informational will be uttered, that every word will be a lie, including and and the, that Huckabee Junior comports herself as a crude blend of Annie Wilkes and Nurse Ratched, a joyless sort who gets an endorphin rush every time she washes her kid's mouth out with soap for saying darn or gosh. What a job that must be, to stenograph lies and hope futilely that someone out there will give enough of a shit to do anything about it.

It's only a mater of time before Huckabee Junior makes it a standing rule that they have to wear dog collars and zippered gimp masks, and preface each question with Thank you sir, may I have another?

In the meantime, these Serious Journos really need to ask themselves:  Is this what I mean when I tell my parents that my job is interesting and important, that my role is vital to a free and open society?

One thing about these soulless fuckers running this shitshow is that they have given writers countless more things to write about than any previous administration. And the real fun isn't even starting yet. So why on earth would anyone want to sit there and be lied to and treated like shit by a truly nasty piece of work, to stenograph the lies she spews without batting a fake eyelash? That's not work, that's merely a routine.

You do not have to sit there and take shit from these horrible people. There is no value in being in the same room as they are; the atrocities can be recorded and analyzed from many other angles, any of them by definition more true and accurate than the one being spoon-fed to the crowd in the press room. They're afraid of losing access, but what value is access to these fucking reprobates? You would not want to be caught in the same room with Fuckface Von Clownstick or Huckabee Junior in a social engagement, and they are never going to share any useful -- or even true -- info with you. So what, again, is the point in playing their reindeer games?

Noted fake news org CNN has the right idea with declining the invite to the WH Christmas party. So far, the rest of the major news outlets are too cowed by their need to maintain "decorum" to grow a pair, but they should understand something by now -- the line has already been drawn. It is up to them which side of that line they prefer to be on.

They are not being forced to do their job under their self-imposed constraints. They are not being kept in locked boxes under waterbeds; their families are not being threatened. There is no outside coercion, physical or mental. Their limitations in this ugly instance are entirely of their own choosing. They have opted for the false hope of maintaining a sense of normalcy.

But none of this is normal, not at all, and journalists more than other occupations do a disservice to themselves and to their customers by continuing the pretense that any of it is normal. No one is making them sit there for their useless ritual of lies and abuse. No one is making them go on their stupid Cletus safaris -- again, an already useless pro forma exercise in reiterating ad nauseam the magical thinking and ignorant self-defeatism of your average slot jockey or meth addict. No one needs or wants a useless write-up of how "normal" and "average" the neo-nazi dipshit down the street turns out to be. Guess what guys:  he eats his cereal with a spoon, just like everyone else! Yeah, thanks for the heads-up there, Ed Murrow, I feel more informed by the nanosecond.

Meanwhile, there are millions of Hillary voters who would be more than happy to remind these wretched scriveners that every day is a reminder that we were right, that we are constantly vindicated in our blanket assumptions about this serial grifter, this borderline-retarded reality-teevee clown. Where's my article, where's my focus group, you bozo motherfuckers?

How many identical profiles of the stupid and the stubborn do we need to see in one lifetime? We get it -- there's no talking these assholes out of their trees. I lost count of these moronic articles months ago, but have yet to see even a single one profiling a few folks who voted against stupidity, against the evil clown.

This is when it's helpful to remember that despite their pious plaints, journos work for media conglomerates, and those companies are in the business of selling us giant pick-'em-up trucks and cheeseburgers and tampons and pills we don't really need. And the pitch they use to get us into the tent and keep us there is conflict. It's a surefire gimmick -- a ridiculous spray-painted man with ridiculous hair who says ridiculous things, defying people to correct or oppose him. Panel shows and common-taters have infinite job security in clucking daily at the malfeasance, while the ridiculous man knows that none of them have the balls to take him on.

The secret weapon of the bully is not the threat of force, or even the use of force. Bullies know instinctively that most people are passive, and wish to avoid confrontation. Normal people want things to go back to how they were, or at least to go easy. Things will eventually blow over, that sort of thing.

And that's what the bully counts on, that the victim would rather curl up and wish for someone to make it stop, than to stand up and fight back, or at least walk away. Now, most of us are never going to be in the same room as this pustulent pile of bile, and for that we should be grateful.

But the ones who are in proximity, they need to be reminded -- you don't have to accept it, you don't have to put up with it. Stop convincing yourself with nonsense about "respecting the office" -- he has no respect for the office or the country or for you, and unless enough people make it clear that they are not taking his shit anymore, it is his aim to change and twist the nature of the office to his liking.

When they talk about norms and rules and precedents and customs of the office and how the executive is supposed to do things, they are talking merely about expectations. None of the norms are legally binding, you see, so agreeing to abide by them is purely voluntary. This is bad enough when you have a ricockulous buffoon like Emperor Snowflake contorting those norms, but when you allow those precedents to be trampled without consequence, you allow the way to be paved for someone, smoother, slicker, smarter.

The healthiest thing for this country right now would be for its major media organizations, while they still can, to seize the remaining vestiges of their collective self-respect, and stop participating in these rituals and exercises that ad no value and only perpetuate the abuse and this overweening sense of unearned privilege this clown and his insane posse have cultivated for themselves. Nothing is stopping you from standing up and walking out, and investigating and reporting instead of merely transcribing.

Do it, for yourselves, for your readers and viewers, for the country you claim you love. Stand up. Walk out. Find the truth and write it and shout it, and do it again and again. Reclaim the self-respect you probably had before you set foot in that vile room with those vile fucking people. A "career" that consists of ritualized daily self-abasement is not much of a career, and is certainly not honest work.

Our Liberal Media

While it is a problem that NBC free-agent pickup Megyn Kelly is giving completely unnecessary face time to conspiracy-peddling jagoff Alex Jones, a bigger problem is that she's probably not going away -- in fact, this clusterfuck of an "interview" will probably end up being a stepping stone to Kelly getting that sweet Baba Wawa gig she wanted in the first place. NBC paid a lot of money for her, and they won't want to admit they fucked up.

I mean, Jones is who he is, but at least WYSWIG, right? If you want a fucking crackpot who believes that Sandy Hook was a staged hoax -- why is anyone's guess, since not a goddamned thing was done about guns as a result -- and takes his shirt off to eat barbecued spare ribs, then he's your guy. Jones mines that same ugly spectrum between entertaining and appalling -- let's coin the word appallitainment -- that other talk-radio shitheads like Rush Limbaugh have held court in for decades.

In fact, Jones and Limbaugh and the rest of these dirtbags simply underscore the point I and so many others have been making for quite some time, that Emperor Snowflake is not the disease, but a symptom. The hate-talk assholes are also symptoms, albeit  much more pronounced ones, since they were there when Snowflake came on the scene, and they'll be around after he's gone.

Nope, America is the disease, and we're metastasizing like stage-four brain cancer. Now, you and I might like to look at ourselves and the people we care about as individuals of good nature and good will, and that may very well be true, as far as it goes. But in a nation of 320 million people and counting, the law of averages says that some indeterminate number of that aggregate total must be assholes. That's just science.

So it behooves us to get some sort of idea as to roughly how many assholes there are, how many are actively spreading the monkey-brain-eating prion disease that has taken over the American political body and the media that cover it. Alex Jones peddles hateful lies and conspiracy theories to addled retards, who then turn around and threaten and harass the parents of murdered first-graders because of some "hoax" that no rational mind can possibly explain.

There are conspiracies in this big, beautiful, awful world of ours, and every single one of them starts with one question:  Cui bono? Who benefits from this plot, to what end is it constructed and executed? And can it be carried out as described?

And as much time and effort as Jones and his dipshit listeners have spent mooning over this loco jabber, none of them have yet presented a plausible theory of execution or rationale. This is where the 9/11 truthers fell short as well -- it's not that the gubmint is above doing something awful, but the logistics of it being carried off without a loose thread talking are roughly zero.

And in the case of Sandy Hook, even the "gubmint doing something awful" part doesn't make any sense. There are tens of thousands of violent gun deaths in this country every fucking year. Most of them could easily be leaned on in graphic, heart-tugging detail to push gun-control proposals. The idea that anyone would sit around and go, "You know what would really work with getting some gun control passed? Let's fake the slaughter of a classroom of first-graders? Can't fail!" Right.

Seriously, how fucking dumb does someone have to be to buy into something like that?

I like a good conspiracy theory or alternative history as the next person, but it has to make sense, and there has to be some sort of corroborating evidence. Here's a more harmless example:  Cleveland Cavaliers player Kyrie Irving supposedly believes with some level of sincerity that the earth is flat. I have a feeling that Irving is probably just screwing with people, but let's say he's serious. One would reasonably assume in that event that Irving has thought out some sort of scenario or (from the fiction-writing arena) "world rules" that comprise a somewhat coherent thesis?

For example, does "flat earth" mean that the planet is a disc? Okay then, what is at the center of the disc? What is on the bottom face of the disc? Is the Northern Hemisphere on the top face, and the Southern Hemisphere on the bottom? (But wait, it's no longer a "sphere," is it?) And so on. Tectonic geology, climatology, orbital physics -- there are countless empirically proven facts such a "theory" would butt up against.

Anyway. It's not a problem that Alex Jones and his toxic crap is getting exposure -- in fact, it might be a good thing that folks who somehow have still not been aware of this weirdo get a load of what he's been selling. The problem is that because Megyn Kelly is not actually a journalist but a media personality, her instinct is to sell Jones and "humanize" him, in the name of "both sides" or something. She could have simply researched the things Jones is on record as having said, and perhaps asked him directly about some of the more contentious pieces, of which there are many.

It sucks that "we" are all in this together in some respect. The idea that someone who listens to Infowars and harasses Sandy Hook parents also votes, breeds, drives a car, and maybe owns a gun is disgusting and horrifying. That is the sort of person who is ruining this country and the world, and it's a goddamned shame they don't have the guts to do the right thing and end themselves, to prevent further polluting the gene pool.

In the meantime, the very least we can do is boycott Megyn Kelly, and maybe make NBC think twice about giving any sort of platform to a hateful liar. (And no, this time I don't mean Newt Gingrich.)

The Con Way

When Kellyanne Conway says, "I'm not in the job of having evidence," she is, we all should admit, one hundred percent accurate. However artless her phrasing tends to be when she gets wound up, the fact is that facts are not her job. She is not in the business of disseminating information, or providing knowledge or insight.

She is nothing more nor less than a spreader of manure, a mechanism dedicated to the unholy task of fertilizing the media landscape with gin-you-whine, honest-to-Bannon, industrial-grade bullshit. And when the media play this tedious can you believe this shit? game with their readers and viewers, they are playing the game she wants them to play. Her goal, obvious as it is unstated, is to distract, to deflect, to muddy the waters and confuse the lines of questioning.

The easy slam would be to say she's "evil" like her boss, but the reality is that there are different shades and flavors of such a thing. The error in trying to categorize Clownstick's clear authoritarian tendencies is in trying to lump him in with other infamous political animals -- Hitler, Stalin, Mobutu, etc. And to be sure, Clownstick has the ethics of a termite and the soul of a banana republic caudillo.

Downward Spiral

Not even a week in, and Clownstick is already off the fucking chain. As always, don't just read the whole thing, but read it aloud, the better to savor every bit of stumbling bafflegab. This is the sort of thing they should have famous actors pair off and do parodic script-reads of.

Notice how Clownstick manages to get through the whole thing without really answering any of Muir's questions, while simultaneously chastising Muir, as a representative of the "media" -- that is, the media entities which actually make something of an honest effort to report verbatim what the man says, and how that lines up with objective, empirically verifiable reality.

It's good to see that the scriveners have finally seen what we all saw well over a year ago, and have adjusted their game plan. Too bad it won't really matter; as inept as these fuckers are, they are unencumbered by having to give a shit about that, or really much of anything else. A West Wing full of shit-throwing monkeys can eventually create, if not Shakespeare, any number of executive orders and ricockulous appointments.

But, you know, Hitlery used an off-grid email account and an unsecured Blackberry, as opposed to Mike Flynn's unsecured server at the Pentagon, and Clownstick's own Galaxy S3 (for fuck's sake, even my family all have S5's), which is wide-open for all sorts of hackery during Mister Man's masturbatory 3:00 AM rage-tweet sessions.

You know the old joke about elderly men ejaculating powdered milk or dust? What do you bet that Fuckface sprays either Cheeto dust or Tang?

Crybaby

Yes, how dare the media report exactly what I said verbatim -- it's not fair! Waaahhhhh!

Fuck this incompetent motherfucker, and his moron cult followers. It would be poetic justice if the media simply took him at his word, and just stopped covering him altogether, but obviously that's too much to ask. They need him for clickbait as badly as he needs them for a punching bag at his rallies.

You'd think at the very least the reporters would get tired of being penned at the rallies like animals, to endure Drumpf's Two Minutes of Hate and the inevitable spectacle afterward of halfwits waddling by to scream "traitor!" at them and flip them off.

There's still time for these fools to rediscover their personal dignity, and just say fuck it and not go anymore. What might that be like, if the media pen was completely empty? He's going to make shit up and say what he wants to say anyway, but Il Douche is a parasite at heart, with unearned attention and adulation the lifeblood.

Billion Dollar Baby

I'm not familiar with PoliticusUSA, so cannot vouch for the veracity, but for one, it seems far more professionally written and laid out than rightie sites, such as your Bartbrite or Right Wing News or Western Journalism, and for another, it's about Donald Drumpf Fuckface Von Clownstick John Miller, so frankly, I don't give two fucks if it's even accurate or true or not anymore.

But it sure as hell sounds one hundred percent accurate:

When Donald Trump told Republicans that his campaign had money, it was a lie. In meeting with Senate Republicans, Trump’s campaign privately admitted that they have no money and will not be able to run television ads until after the GOP convention in July.

So, let's recap, shall we:  One of Miller's biggest positives, according to the double-digit IQ mouth-breather cultists who support him, is that he's "self-funded" and therefore beholden to no one. But just in the last couple weeks, Sheldon Adelson (you know, the other casino-owning scumbag), has already pledged $100m to the cause, since his last 100m pledge -- to Newt Gingrich in 2012 -- flamed out hilariously. And now it turns out that Miller doesn't want to pull a Meg Whitman and dump his own money into this after all.

Lazy Train

Oh, for fuck's sake. Look, Drumpf-Miller-Barron (DMB) did not "destroy the interview" -- just from the first two examples described in the article, the journalists are the ones ruining it. Megyn Kelly didn't press Miller on his lying lies because she's a fucking hack who aspires to be the next Barbara Walters. And, you know, maybe the WaPo morons ought to think twice about letting Clownstick phone in next time.

DMB is thwarting the media because the media let him do it. Jesus, it seems like he phones into Face the Nation every other week or so, when he lives within spitting distance of the fucking studio. Do ya think there might be some strategery on his part in doing that, Doctor? Stop with the phone interviews; let the retards at Fox and Friends be his butt-boys, that's what they're there for.

The clown is winning the media battle because he understands the game better than they do. They will gladly abdicate their journalistic principles (if they have any to begin with) for ratings. That is their prime directive. Miller knows this, that's why he would never, and I mean never, agree to do a real one-on-one interview with a real bulldog journalist who would tune him up on his endless lies.

He knows better. They don't seem to. And time is running out. Start doing your fucking jobs already, and stop letting him call in to waste everyone's time with his goddamned lying. If he won't agree to a face-to-face interview, then do some oppo research. It's not like he hasn't spent the last four decades stinking up the joint. Just grab a shovel and choose a direction.

Enablers

Megyn Kelly -- who does actually seem intelligent enough to know better -- needs to cut the shit and be honest with herself at least. The reason people are "biased" against John Miller is because he's a liar, a pimp, a con-man, a mentally ill narcissistic man-child, a fucking moron who is completely unqualified for any sort of public office, much less the presidency. The reason people are biased against Fixed Noise is because the "network" itself is biased, a shameless shitshow comprised of failed Republican office-holders and -seekers, and their ass-sniffing dogsbodies. At least CNN and MSNBC make passable attempts at balance, though they mostly fail because they're just shitty journalists, not because of any political bias.

Kelly, whether she knows it or not, had at least some potential goodwill from people normally inclined to ignore her. I can't be the only one to the left of Attila the Hun to wonder, given the awful treatment Kelly received at the hands of Miller and his cult followers and surrogates, if Kelly might be motivated to make her interview with Miller a showcase in insightful, responsive reportage. There's no need to come into it with an agenda; Miller's own words are more than enough to inform such an exercise in (again) JOURNALISM.

Suck My Caucus

Jesus H. Christ, it's like Nevada looked at the shitshows in the previous three states and said, "Not clusterfucky enough. We can do better." And by god they did. Wonder how many of the Trumpalos voted two or six or twelve times. It's not like anyone bothered to keep track.

Pro tip:  it's pretty simple to blow the competition out of the water when the ballot workers are in the can for you.

We like to tell ourselves that we have the freest, fairest election process anywhere, that it is the envy of all other nations. Come on. Has there been a single primary yet, from either party, that wasn't janky, that didn't have shenanigans? Coin flips in Iowa for the Democrats, compromised counting processes in Nevada for the Republicans. Jimmy Carter couldn't keep these fucking lowlifes honest.

And now Trump is signaling for people who protest at his rallies to be beaten for having the nerve to exercise their First Amendment rights. The slackjawed goobers who populate the rallies love it, because they, like he, are proud of their jingoism and authoritarianism. It's only a matter of time before one of these putsches turn into an Altamont, and shit will have gotten real. Even that may not derail Trump; the fact is that he has given voice to the most disturbing segment of American politics right now, not just because they come as nativists and racists, but because they're so paranoid, and so over the top about it. And no amount of factual information can sway them from their wittle feewings. It's like arguing with a bunch of pissy four-year-olds.

Have It Your Way, Part 2: The Trumpening

(A real thing, by the way. Ain't 'murka grate?)

The nineteenth season of South Park just ended, and the final trilogy of episodes contained an intriguing premise -- the idea that advertisements (especially internet ads), through quickly accelerating iterations of evolution, are gaining sentience. Between the ubiquitous pop-ups, embeds, "sponsored content" posing as news, and the cookie-reading that enables the sites you visit to know what you looking at on Amazon, the show raises two essential points:

• Already it is difficult for many, if not most, people to differentiate between an advertisement and an actual news item.
• It's only a matter of time before we won't know the difference between a sentient, three-dimensional ad and a living, breathing human being.

The second point is for now the stuff of Dickian sci-fi, but given that author's track record so far, that future is probably much nearer than it seems. Maybe it'll come from the military engineering and tweaking robot warriors, or it could be open-sourced from the bottom. Whether it's Big Brother or Little Brother or both, the tech is improving, probably more rapidly than we know. We are used to hearing about the more sinister Terminator-style possibilities of weaponized mayhem, or aggregated domestic spying. But it's equally likely that it would be used by advertising weasels to continue their never-ending quest to monetize literally everything you see, hear, read, talk to, fuck, or otherwise experience or interact with.

Fortunate Scum

The summer of the shark just gets sharkier, as noted Vietnam veteran Fuckface von Clownstick calls out our good friend Poor Ol' Straight Talk on his service:

"He is not a war hero. He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, OK? I hate to tell you," Trump said. "I believe perhaps he is a war hero."

Von Clownstick is already trying to walk his bluster back as only he can -- by throwing the Veterans' Administration scandals and illegal immigration into the mix:

As Trump keeps surfacing at or near the top of polls, it's interesting to consider the ramifications of that. Sure, you can chalk it up to the usual bullshit -- small sample sizes, idiot respondents, the fact the election is still well over a year away (though primary season starts earlier and earlier, doesn't it?), but that doesn't completely capture the situation.

As the GOP clown car keeps filling up, turning into a short bus (17 Dipshits and Counting -- there's your reality show!), it becomes more and more apparent that as the Republican party loses its collective mind and continues empowering the baffled and bewildered of this country, it (the party and its vocal contingent) will only get worse. They have no intent of moderating their style, substance, message, or intent. And the Citizens United decision makes that possible, makes it easier.

While completely different in substance, Trump's appeal (such as it is) is much the same as that of Bernie Sanders:  in a business where insincerity is not only routine, but presumed, the idea that someone is saying something that they actually mean is unexpected, to say the least. Hillary Clinton literally cannot get a meal at Chipotle without testing it first with a focus group. Sanders clearly means what he says, while Trump at least appears to do the same, which still puts him ahead of the focus-grouped chumps.

Look, don't get me wrong. Donald Trump is a pimp and a prevaricator, five pounds of shit in a ten-pound bag, a useless blowhard fortunate enough to be in nation that can't seem to get enough of such types. He's a fucking teevee personality who has never run for or held public office, and upholds his inability to work well with others as a selling point. He has no goddamned business running for anything. You might as well vote for the meteorologist on your local station.

Sanders is sincere in addressing the US' frightening -- and increasing -- levels of systematic inequality, which are on the verge of becoming destabilizing in the sense of maintaining a civilized society. He has no chance of becoming president, because the people who own and run the system do not want any actual change. And the moment he becomes remotely viable, the Clintonistas will kneecap him. This is not just in their playbook, it's in the table of contents. The Republicans do not have to worry about Sanders, because the Democrats will happily do the dirty work for them. After all, they have mostly the same donors and owners.

Back to Trump. As long as he continues barking nonsense, he paradoxically reduces his overall viability, while enhancing his appeal to (ugh) his base (read:  paste-eating morons and people who view their own relatives as fair game for sexual opportunity). In a rational world, even he knows that he has no real chance.

But we are no longer in a rational world, if we ever were. It's comical enough that there are nearly twenty candidates vying for the office from one party, though some (Jindal, Christie, Perry, and several others) are almost certainly running for veep or a random cabinet slot. They're just maintaining visibility. But it's truly scary to think that there are any people at all who sincerely think that Donald Trump is remotely qualified for the job of President of the United States of America.

I think there's at least an even chance that at some point, maybe right before the primaries, or after the first or second successful one, Trump gets disavowed by the GOP establishment, takes his ego and his money and his fanbase, and pulls a Ross Perot. I would encourage him in that endeavor, as it would pretty much turn out as it did in 1992 for Perot, horking just enough votes away from the already divided Goopers to keep them out of the White House for another decade. (Not that that will keep them out of their gerrymandered congressional seats, no sirree. The knuckle-draggers will be making their mischief for years to come.)

But maybe Trump gets a few lucky breaks along the way, moderates his approach, brings more people onboard his campaign Titanic. At that point it becomes a litmus test for all of the above -- conservatives, liberals, Democrats, Republicans, teabaggers, hippies, the young and the old. If you're the sort of fist-shaking codger who campaigned for George McGovern in your feckless youth, but are now content to pull up the Social Security/Medicare ladder and skull-fuck your grandchildren, then Trump's your guy, and we thank your candor in admitting it.

On the other foot, if you're a young person who claims to Really Care, and then voting day comes and you don't show up, then kindly shut the fuck up. If you live in a state that requires a photo ID to vote -- as wrong-headed as that rule may be -- and you really want to vote, then you have a good fifteen (15) months or so to find the massive cash necessary to do so, and/or to procure the "primary" and "secondary" forms of identification. Plenty of time there, folks, and if you do it, you might actually get someone in there who can undo the unfairness of all that.

But the bottom line is, the elderly and the foolish show up to vote, because by definition they have nothing else to do. Hell, I think that voting beyond the local or state level is a useless joke, and even I vote. That's probably the sole advantage of the endless campaign season -- unless you're a complete moron, you have no excuse for not knowing when it's time to vote, and a plan for making sure you do it. And if you are a complete moron, you should be staying home and watching courtroom shows anyway.

So maybe we're about to find out where we're really at as a nation. Maybe the divisions are too deep and wide after all; maybe after nearly 400 years, the concept of the post-Westphalian centralized nation-state has run its course. If there is really a majority of simpletons clamoring to vote against their own rational self-interest, then perhaps it's time to find ways to disentangle your interests from theirs, to make sure your fortunes are not mutually tied. Maybe the coastal states that actually produce things and revenue break away from the welfare red states, and everyone figures out what their mutual interests actually are.

Perhaps the contradictions, as they say, need to be heightened. It's not just Trump, but the rest of the maroons jockeying for position that will be illuminating things in the months to come. Every election is like that, in some respect, but as economic and environmental conditions get more and more perilous, the situation becomes magnified.

[Update:  This is an interesting theory about Trump. Nothing would surprise me anymore.]

Cotton Pickin'

Tom Cotton fits in perfectly with the current iteration of the Republican party, in that the more you get to know him, his stances on various issues, and the idjits he rolls with, the less you like about him. Like good ol' Fredo Arbusto, Cotton seems to be determined to undermine whatever credibility remains in a Hahvahd pedigree.

I mean, when you consider the standard media propaganda model, it makes a twisted sort of sense that Bill Kristol gets so much air time. Like the political class he clucks about, Kristol is a pedigreed, sinecured schmuck with the track record of a county fair chicken crapping on a bingo sheet. He's perfect for helping his insect corporate overlords sell pharmaceuticals, outsized trucks, and hemorrhoid crèmes. (And perpetual war for perpetual peace. With other people's kids, of course.)

But the idea of someone who actually affects policy and decisions taking Kristol's advice, not just with a block of salt but at all, such a person has instantly disqualified themselves from serious consideration. I have a ton of misgivings about Obama's foreign policy acumen; he seems to think it's chess when it's really poker. But Kristol isn't even playing Stratego, more like fifty-two pickup.

King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime

If there is a creature more lacking in self-awareness than jerkoff emeritus Jorge Fredo Arbusto, I'll be damned if I know who it could be, though there's certainly no shortage of his fellow party members to give him a run for his money.

"....I think you have to earn your way into politics. I don’t think that anything is ever given to you."

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with this guy? His name is exactly what got him into politics; no one in their right mind would stake money behind a joker like him otherwise. Bush seems genuinely incapable of seeing what is so obvious to any honest observer -- that if he hadn't been the son of a president and the grandson of a senator (and the descendant of yet another president, Franklin Pierce), and born into considerable means that literally 99% of his fella 'murkins cannot even conceive of, he'd have been some dipshit floor manager at some random retailer, at best.

Shame on our complicit corporate media for giving this asshole a platform. But got into politics because of his last name, got into high office thanks to James Baker and the Supreme Court the first time, and Diebold the second time. He lawn-darted this country, setting off an expensive war that will take another generation to pay for, and is still going on in the region.

And he's got the fucking balls to sit there and whine to Bob Schieffer that poor ol' Jeb won't get a fair shake should he decide to run, because these days, people can say whatever they want without any consequences. What the hell would he know about being held accountable for things said and done? His entire life has been one of escaping the accountability that the rest of the world considers routine.

George Walker Bush should not be listened to on any subject whatsoever; in fact, the sooner he's ignored and forgotten, the better off we'll all be.