But If You Try Sometimes, You Just Might Find You Get What You Need

Our old buddy Damian provides some healthy food for thought here. All of us get caught up to at least some degree in this friction of being in the world, of staying alert and aware of the depredations and injustices that occur every second, but also trying to not be too much of it, being a reed that follows every direction of the shifting winds.

I find myself doing exactly that, more and more, as I attempt to phase things out here in our little comedy treehouse, and move on to more fulfilling pastures (at the end of this year). Where I find myself getting snagged is that it is fulfilling to find perspectives on current events, and challenge myself to come up with observations that are interesting for me to write and for you to read.

As the world and its inhabitants become ever more baffling to me, this becomes more and more of a challenge, and it can at times feel like pissing in the wind. There are only so many variations one can muster for "[So-and-so] sucks."

But Damian's analogy works very well for me, as I am just a few years older and so am going through the same sorts of personal changes and realizations. It began physically, with eating better and exercising and sleeping more, and has spread to the more abstract life of the mind, this notion that we are what we eat, that physically and mentally we shit what we consume. Garbage in, garbage out.

Bread and circuses are fine as a sometimes food on your cheat day, but as the only meal it is obviously unhealthy. The problem is that it's cheap and easy and convenient, and everyone consumes it. It makes it that much harder to change your diet, and for some, going cold turkey actually works, while most people have to make gradual, committed, consistent changes over time, and stick with it.

I used to be a huge Frank Zappa fan, not only for the instrumental virtuosity and the doo-doo jokes, but I loved that he envisioned his crazily diverse catalog as one gigantic masterwork, which he referred to as Project/Object. Zappa's thesis was that despite all the different musical styles under his unique umbrella, there was "conceptual continuity," a unifying theme.

The nearest cultural comparison I can muster to it might be The Simpsons, where rather than focusing on individual episodes, taking the "helicopter view" of the entire body of work shows a well-realized miniature parallel universe, with fully fledged characters, and arcs and narratives that mirror real-world counterparts. Behind the barrage of pop-culture takes is a truly devastating insight to how human beings actually function -- dumb, short-sighted, messy, hypocritical, occasionally blundering into doing things that aren't completely selfish and venal.

The silly guessing games as to which state "Springfield" is "really" in miss the point -- Springfield is America.

When I do check in here these days to pound out a few missives to the virtual abyss, I am in the back of my mind teasing around for that common thread -- well, after fifteen years, it's more of a rope or a cable than a mere thread -- that describes whatever conceptual continuity exists here. I think it does exist, even though it's only occasionally on the tip of my brain just what that common rope might turn out to be.

Venting is important, and we all have our own ways of expelling those ill humors that collect over time, the mental chaff that results from the daily friction of being engaged with the machine. Maybe we have to reach a certain age or stage in life to come to our individual realization that there is an "equilibrium of engagement," for lack of a better term, that differs for each of us, and that that equilibrium moves as we move through our lives and things happen, people come and go, careers change, etc.

Ultimately, though, while the personal metrics are customized, the principles are more or less universal, and we can all stand to eat a little bit healthier. What we get out of it in the long run is a better perspective on ourselves, and what our expectations are out of our own thoughts and deeds, rather than frantically worrying and reacting to everyone else's. I have to remind myself of those things periodically, and I bet I'm not the only one.

It's already a weird, interesting year, and it's only going to get more so. Stay thirsty, my friends.

Royal Flush

I guess 'murkins need some sort of break from the constant barrage of shit that Captian Combover launches our way on an hourly basis, but e-fucking-nough of the wedding coverage already. I honestly have no idea why anyone would "care" about this, beyond the usual basic well-wishing you might have for any couple tying the proverbial knot.

Near as I can tell, there are only three (3) interesting things about this event:

1. They do seem to be nice enough people, and Harry has actually served two combat tours in Afghanistan, at his own insistence. Compare and contrast with the current scum in charge of this country, and keep this fact in mind at all times -- no Clownstick has ever served in the US military at any time. At all. Don't hold your breath, because despite their fecundity, the Clownsticks believe "public service" basically equates to hustling charities and selling distressed timeshares to morons.
2. This wedding is as much a political event as it is some fairytale romance bullshit that its target audience of gay men and day-drinking housewives think it is. The proof of that is in how Harry was forced to disinvite his good friend Barack Obama (you may have heard of him), because the British Foreign Office is concerned about upsetting the rather delicate relations between the US and UK right now.
   
   I have news for you limeys -- your meaningless acquiescence will not curry you any favor, for Emperor Snowflake is a capricious, volatile creature, who forgets favors instantly and remembers slights forever. Sometimes kissing ass just gets you a face-fart. Smell the love!
3. The BBC is trolling the emperor. That made it all worthwhile.

Good luck to the kids. Back to your regularly scheduled programming on 'murka Teevee, where health care is dead, ammunition is live, wealth is only for the already wealthy, and soma is for everyone else.

Frogs of War; Or, Alpha Frog

I don't pay a whole lot of attention to European politics in general or French politics in particular, but Emmanuel Macron's snuggling up to the likes of Emperor Snowflake reeks of desperation. Macron can't possibly think that the JCPOA can be renegotiated on the terms he and Snowflake propose, even though it's clear that Snowflake does think that's the case, making some blustery threats if Iran were to resume nuclear weapons development (which they obviously would if we welshed on the agreement).

Listening to this fat, incompetent old man rail like a barstool drunk at the teevee in the tavern, it's hard to imagine what sort of dupe listens to this idiot jabber and hears anything fearful or praiseworthy. Only a complete pussy would actually be scared of him, and only a cult member would actually think he sounds tough. If anything, he seems intent on showing both Iran and North Korea that the US cannot be trusted on these sorts of agreements.

(Nor is it helpful when Snowflake praises a murderous dictator like Kim Jong Un as "very honorable." It's slightly better than the schoolyard taunts of the past, but this is a guy who literally had his own half-brother murdered in public on foreign soil by poisoners, a Putin tactic if ever there was one.)

So Macron's star is falling, and with it his rather grandiose version of himself (which may explain at least some of his rush to embrace Snowflake, even letting Snowflake treat him like a chump at the photo-op). Macron is not wrong about the worrisome rise of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, but the solution is not to push Poland and Hungary back into Russia's sphere of influence. All of Europe is facing this crisis of authoritarianism, due to several factors, but so far Macron has yet to demonstrate that has either the best or only solutions. His "Jupiter" posturing should go over very well with his Ozymandias hero.

Girth of a Nation

I wanted to like the Roseanne reboot, I suppose; at the very least, I resolved not to let it be a political decision, which appears to be something of a feat for many folks these days. But let's not kid ourselves -- the show's namesake has gone out of her way the last few years to be (or at least make effort to appear to be) a repellent troll.

As her bumptious political opinions have pinballed around the dial throughout her tumultuous public life, one thing has remained consistent for Roseanne the person:  she seems to place an inordinate value in being tough to pigeonhole or defend. This would be worthy of note if only she'd ever had an opinion on any subject that was worth repeating or endorsing. But her main goal has always been simply to be a pain in the ass. Like her ricockulous orange golem idol, she can't stand to be ignored. Unlike Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, she doesn't care if you like her or not.

But again, I don't want to be one of those Zhdanovite douchebags, stress-testing every note of every song and every line of every show for absolute alignment with my own view of the world and its sorry inhabitants. Ultimately, either the show is funny, or it isn't.

And the show is funny....until it isn't. There are a lot of nice little moments, and some decent laughs. John Goodman fits right back into the Dan Conner (easily the best character on the show, then and now) role like a comfortable shoe. The original kids are all back, as is Laurie Metcalf. They all fall right back into familiar rhythms.

But the first two episodes, which aired back-to-back last week, submerge the viewer in tone and smarm and reverse PC winks. It's likely that the writers were going for an Archie vs. Meathead dynamic between Roseanne and Jackie, but Michael Stivic was actually allowed to make a point once in a while. Jackie is simply a hopped-up caricature of every conservatard twitbag's laundry list of imaginary grievances:  shrill, smug, self-righteous, pedantic. It gets old quickly.

Roseanne, on the other hand, is never ever wrong about anything, just ask her. She defends her choice of a moronic grifter with a vague grumble about "jobs" and brooks no further disagreement. We'll see how that all goes with the jobs and the health care booming along as they are in that part of the country. The bottom line is that it becomes difficult to separate a show from its politics when the show is so blatantly political at every turn.

One of the plots in the second episode encapsulates the dilemma of the show pretty well:  younger daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert, who is producing the reboot) has moved back home with her teen daughter and tween son, the latter of whom is, as the kids say in the 'hood, "gender fluid." Ultimately the grandparents' initial discomfort with a ten-year-old boy wearing unisex clothes and nail polish gives way to the predictable trope of fierce family protection.

All well and good, except this is precisely the same demographic that, in real life, could not stop braying about the looming danger of transgender bathrooms and such like. The lack of empathy in the real people the Conners are meant to represent is palpable, and the feeling that they (Roseanne and Dan) would have jeered at the same kid if he were in a news item at a school is inescapable. That's how they are -- they didn't give a fuck about heroin addicts, until it hit their trailer park. And they didn't give a fuck about jobs until theirs went to China and India and Mexico.

The preening arrogance of these people -- the real white working class and their teevee avatars -- is just exhausting. They seem to think that their diet of deep-fried twinkies and Bachelor offshoots confers some sort of "realness" upon them, that they are somehow more genuinely American than someone who (hurr!) reads hard-cover books and pays attention to actual news. That's really the worst out of all of it, you know, that they really seem to believe such bullshit.

Mostly though, the show is just old Thunderbird in a new-ish box. Underpinning the entire operation is this endless, constant, overweening grievance. It's the conservative reactionary version of that dreaded word, entitlement. To listen to these jabbering maroons, you'd never guess that their guy won, that they have a majority in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, that every thing their dotard has been criticized for has been well-earned. Seriously, these are the sorest fucking winners ever.

It is not the pussy-hat crowd's fault that the doddering grifter keeps shooting himself in the clown shoes every week, nor is it their fault that it turns out that -- surprise! -- all of his promises were predictably empty, that the widget-stamping jobs aren't coming back to BFE, and in fact his tiny-dick-waving stunts with the Chinese are threatening a trade war that will specifically target these salt-of-the-earth rubes.

For several years running, we've been entreatied to "listen" to a cohort of hostile, incoherent jokers who can't muster any facts, and blame everyone else for their manifest failures in life. There is never any countervailing voice, never anyone in the supposedly liberal media, and certainly nobody on the "conservative" side, who ever bothers to even suggest, Hey, more people voted for the other person, wonder if we might listen to them just once? I've gotta listen to them, over and over and fucking over again, but god forbid they'd ever come around to listen to me. Well, fuck that shit, as my great-grandmother used to tell her Sunday school class.

I don't know why that is, and I give up asking. All I know is that I've seen and heard enough plaints from these fools in real life, and I don't need a thinly fictionalized version of their nonsense to drive the point home. They'll never be happy, because they'll never get an even break, and they're never going to be honest with themselves about why that is. So why bother?

There was a time when Roseanne was ground-breaking in many respects, and downright hilarious much of the time. Now it just comes off as preachy and predictable, every bit as smug and spiteful and ill-informed as the loony lefties it lampoons.

But at least that should serve as an object lesson for any would-be liberals. Roseanne does deserve credit for telling her story her way -- loud, brash, aggressive, fuck you if you don't like it. If there are any real liberals (in entertainment or government or news) left, maybe they should consider doing the same thing for once, instead of meekly waiting around for Cadet Bonespurs to send us into a recession and nuke Tehran as a distraction. Waiting for Mueller and/or November is not a strategy.

In the meantime, instead of bothering with the nattering narcissism of the Oracle of the White Workin' Class (when she's not farming macadamia nuts in Hawaii), do yourself a favor and check out The President Show's special. Kathy Griffin's portrayal of soulless homunculus Kellyanne Con-way steals what was a pretty solid show all the way around.

It's a Start

It appears that Laura Ingraham's endless supply of snide comments has finally gotten her ass in a wringer. It couldn't happen to a more deserving person, and it's hilarious to watch how quickly she took to groveling soon as she realized her bullshit was finally going to cost her money.

Which is really all that's important to any of these useless idiots, Alex Jones and such like. Never forget that at the end of the day, it's all a fucking scam. The only thing these cock-smokers sincerely believe in is getting paid. Everything else is just filler between ads for catheters and pills and ambulance chasers "helping" you with your legal claims for mesothelioma or displaced vaginal mesh.

And what David Hogg initiated with his tweet is remarkable in its simplicity and effectiveness. Again, these young people are reminding us all that we don't have to take their shit -- really, we never did need to take their shit. He's reminding this smug smartass that it's not a joke, that his friends were murdered and for people like Ingraham and Loesch and the rest of the Jugend to crack wise about it is not going to fly anymore. Somebody had to do it.

The MSM are collectively cowed by "tradition" and "process" and "expectations" and "norms," while faithfully stenographing the comings and goings of an administration that is completely unencumbered by those things. They'll keep showing up to the "press briefings" for Baghdad Barb's daily sack o' lies, right up to the bitter end, whining in mock horror every time she, y'know, fucking lies about everything. Great. That and eight bucks will get me a nice artisanal mochachino.

It's vital to remember that, like her cult hero, Laura Ingraham is merely a symptom, not the disease. Considering she labors in the typhoid factory, she's little more than a voluntary carrier, spreading the pandemic around as much as possible, blowing her nose into the sandwiches and soups she sells to unwitting customers.

Like Facebook users, Fox viewers are not the customers -- they are the product. These tiresome fist-shaking codgers cling bitterly to the vestiges of life long after the thrill of living is gone, as their bodies and minds betray them full-tilt. Many of them have already collected more from Social Security than they paid in, and will tell you right away that they are entitled to all of it and more, even if they spend the next twenty years marinating in their own filth and decrepitude, watching lifelong losers like Geraldo Rivera spew lies at them non-stop.

So Ingraham sucks, but let's not forget Tucker Carlson, let's not forget that fatheaded turd Hannity, who actually has some sort of informal advisory role with one F. Von Clownstick, aka King Shit of Turd Hill.

Imagine that for a hard second -- it is well-known fact that a person unjustly thrust into perhaps the most important job on the planet spends his mornings poop-transcribing Fox and Friends on his Twitter account, then has dinner with Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro (who makes Ingraham look like Oprah Winfrey in comparison) on a regular basis. He solicits advice and counsel from these weasels.

Seriously, 'murka:  your domestic and foreign policy is literally being affected by Steve Doocy, who doesn't have three brain cells to rub together. We can all duly note, in the classic style of Yakov Smirnoff, that in Russia the leader controls state teevee -- but here in America, it's the other way around.

There's always the argument that "free speech" is being coercively squelched by reactive boycotts like this. But people like Jones and Hannity and Ingraham are impervious to the rigors of normal debate and argument. They are not interested in mustering facts or exchanging ideas. Upton Sinclair would recognize this nonsense for exactly what it is, people whose careers depend on them pissing and shitting into the well of public discourse.

Ordinarily you might say they are heedless or reckless in their disregard for what they're doing, and what effects their lies have on people and events, but you would be very wrong. They know exactly what they're doing. It's in their job description.

All of which means that maybe it's time to go after the big guns -- the Murdochs and their vile media empire. Maybe it's time to boycott the regular Fox network as well; I'm tired of football and Family Guy anyway. Truly, the old man is the worst sort of scum, and his sons are about as much of a "moderating influence" as Clownstick's awful brood. I wish them all long lives -- as poor, broke, miserable bastards. It would be nice at least once in this lifetime to see privileged scumbags held accountable for what they've done.

Rube Awakening

"One never knows how loyalty is born." -- Bert Cooper, Mad Men

Conor Lamb's recent victory in the PA-18 special election not only exposes very real fault lines in the crumbling Gooper claque, but also serves to bring some of the apostate rubes back home. Like all Cletus Safari articles, nothing more than anecdata can ever be churned by talking to a half-dozen people in a town whose name you've already forgotten by the end of the piece.

Still, the comments all point at the same thing:  they've grown tired of the shitshow, exhausted by the daily antics of ineptitude. The guy's a toxic asshole who can't get anything done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is reflected in my own anecdata, talking recently with a couple of Clownstick-supporting friends who, while still supporting him, separately offered the exact same qualifier:  I wish he wouldn't tweet so much.

It's difficult to top that complete lack of awareness, and I said so, made sure to remind each of these people of that fact:  This is who he is, what he is. This is how he's always been. Lying about everything on his Twitter account is literally what got him into this. He's never not been a bullshitter. He lies about everything, no matter how small or inconsequential. Politics has nothing to do with it. He's a diseased soul.

Two things yesterday hammered those very points home.

• Using the legal system to harass stripper/porn star Stormy Daniels. Apparently there is a clause in the non-disclosure agreement that Daniels signed and David Dennison Fuckface Von Clownstick didn't, stipulating that each breach incurs a fine of $1M. Most sentient humans with at least some knowledge of the legal system agree that the amount is laughably unenforceable in an agreement that paid only $130K total in the first place, and wasn't signed by one of the agreeing parties.
• Firing Andrew McCabe, less than forty-eight hours before McCabe would have retired anyway. Whether or not McCabe gets some or all of his pension and benefits, the fact is that Clownstick sent his paid perjurer Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuhd to do the dirty work yesterday specifically to fuck McCabe out of what he had earned in his civil-service career.

This is the cruel, petty, vindictive side of Clownstick that again, fucking everyone warned the morons about. I know I call everyone I don't like an asshole, but this guy is a fucking asshole. If he had been born poor he would have been the neighborhood creep that spent his teens torturing stray cats, before moving on to hunting humans.

McCabe will land on his feet regardless; as one might assume (unless you're a doddering narcissistic moron), he kept notes of all their interactions, will probably see his inevitable book advance double or triple what it would have been otherwise, and is most assuredly on his way to Mueller's office Monday morning. He's not an idiot, and now he's been motivated by the world's worst boss.

Beyond the anecdotal down-punching, the immersion in the impotent god-emperor's temper tantrums and incoherent volatility, the fan club has to be seeing the catastrophic decisions affecting the bigger picture. He shitcanned Tex Drillerson while Drillerson was literally on the shitcan; he's pushing H.R. Haldeman Pufnstuf out the door, possibly for John Bolton, or some other swamp thing that'll make us wish for Bolton. Think of that:  by the time this abortion of an administration is eighteen months along, it will be on at least its third National Security Director, its second Secretary of State, probably its third FBI Director. And at least three other high-level positions are looking to be shuffled around, and possibly filled by dipshits from Fixed Noise.

And let's not forget who the dotard appointed as his economic advisor:  a cokehead with a history degree and a long track record of not knowing what the fuck he's talking about when it comes to the economy. The economy is actually doing relatively well [fake numbers!] for now, and two-thirds of the country still despises this motherfucker. But we're already overdue for a recession, and even the diehards might take some issue when Captain Eight-Ball fucks the dog and that extra twenty bucks in their paychecks goes away, along with the rest of their paychecks.

Then again, the economy won't much matter once we're tangled in North Korea, Syria, and Iran simultaneously, because Group Sex McPornstache wants to flex nuts for Cadet Bonespurs.

What struck me about the Pennsyltucky voters from the Times article was this common thread of "let's try something new," without bothering to even minimally vet that new something. Well, now they know, and at least some of them are willing to change their minds, and maybe even remember next time that stoves are hot, and that when someone tells you who they are, maybe you should believe them.

I think (though I'm not always certain) that I've come to accept that I will always be mystified by how otherwise intelligent, sensible people got gulled by this transparent snake-oil dipshit. I mean, we've all become accustomed to the screaming goobers with their Fuck Your Feelings t-shirts, barking slogans like trained seals at the Two Minutes of Hate rallies.

But there are some supporters (really!) who have good jobs and careers and skills and college degrees. They run their own businesses. Some of these folks are book smart and street smart, the kind of people who can hit a used-car lot and come out with a solid deal, not get rooked on the undercoating by Jerry Lundegaard.

And yet they fell for....this fucking clown, a serial failure who has to call the New York Post pretending to be someone else, to brag about how great he is in the sack, to shame his first wife and impress his mistress. These are people who care about "character" in their politicians, and they went for someone who, if nothing else, is entirely forthright about his completely amoral character and utter lack of business ethics.

This will never fail to baffle me. I feel like I'm missing some enormous financial opportunity, in not finding a way to scam them further. I get why they can't admit they fucked up, but how did they fall for it in the first place? It's like one of those internet-romance-finance scams, where some lonely divorcee sends a ricockulous amount of money to some guy with a nice photo and a smooth rap.

You read about these things and say, who are these fucking people? There's a similar pathology at play with the Clownstick dupes. They know they fucked up but can't admit it, even to themselves. So they keep doubling down and making excuses, until they run out of both.

At any rate, it seems to be finally starting to sink in with some of them, that he really is a barstool drunk -- inept, mouthy, right about every fucking thing even after being proven wrong every time. And he's an obnoxious asshole and a tiresome crybaby on top of all that.

It should speak volumes that they flooded the zone with Clownstick and his vile children, poured over $10M dollars into a race for a congressional district that won't even exist nine months from now. It should raise the antenna of Republican operatives and strategists that in Clownstick's me-me-me rally, illegally talking himself up for 2020 when he was supposed to be stumping for Rick Saccone, that neither he nor the teevee ads bothered talking about the tax cuts.

There's something in the air, and they can smell it, and they know it's not the smell of victory. We're about to see if the Democrats can actually learn something from all this.

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.

The Government We Deserve

Because this is the country that made useless doorstops like the Kardashian sisters wealthy and famous, it is a virtual certainty that there's somebody out there -- hell, probably several million somebodies -- taking the idea of an Oprah Winfrey political candidacy seriously. It makes sense that the media dogs would chase their tails on this for a couple days, because as always, they have airspace to fill.

But the idea that a significant number of people would take such a thing seriously, or welcome it, is nothing more not less than a sign that those folks have given up -- on what a sane idea of a political system is and should encompass, on whether managing the world's largest economy and most powerful military force is a serious undertaking. Then again, letting Fuckface Von Clownstick run, much less win, is surely a sign of those things, but encouraging a billowy dilettante is just doubling down on all that.

That's not to say I wouldn't vote for her, if that was the choice. I would go out in my back field and dig up a river rock, and vote for that rock before I'd vote for Clownstick for any office. He'd fuck up dog-catcher. That should be abundantly clear by now.

I suppose there are many fine things about Oprah -- from all indications, she is generous and kind, and no doubt her charitable contributions and foundations hold up much better than Clownstick's little tax-evasion scams that barely make the effort of concealing their self-dealing and money-grubbing. And she is truly self-made. I find her incessant branding overweening and annoying, but there's no doubt that she came from poverty and bootstrapped herself into a position of real wealth and power, something Clownstick can claim but no one will ever believe (like every other claim he makes).

But Oprah is also responsible for inflicting on us Doctors Phil, Oz, and Jenny McCarthy. Someone who falls for this level of ongoing quackery has some issues. However, unlike Clownstick, she (and most normal human beings) at least understands what she is good at and not good at, and can delegate and let other people manage and have input over that latter category.

She's not going to run anyway, so no one out there should get too worried or get their hopes up too much. It's not going to happen. What almost certainly will happen is that Oprah will have a role in publicly vetting whatever roster of candidates eventually comes out of the Democrats' little shop of errors, and will pick on to put some money behind. Unlike these dopey vanity projects like Tom Steyer is running, Oprah understands that the money is better spent on candidates than petitions.

So if Kirsten Gillibrand is smart (and she is), she's already reaching out behind the scenes to Oprah, and getting on that train. Because the one thing Oprah has more of than money is cultural influence, one that transcends to some extent the weird class-race divide that's been stoked the last few years.

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.

Days of Whine and Poses

Edroso, as always, in on the right track here:

This goes back to something I've been saying forever about wingnut whining -- for example, when they complain that Yale and Harvard are prejudiced against them, I always say: Why not quitcher bitchin' and instead make Bob Jones and Liberty University the intellectual lighthouses to which the best students flock? Then you won't need to worry about Yale and Harvard! Bypass the gatekeepers! Be the star you are!

Similarly, why worry about the Times rankings at all? (Shoot, Regnery doesn't -- they say they'll stop using the Times rankings in their marketing which, given their bulk-sales-to-gomers approach, probably won't make any difference.) Conservatives having been saying for decades that the Times is untrustworthy and irrelevant -- why not instead lobby for the New York Post, Breitbart et alia to have their own lists, and then you can all enthuse that D'Souza's Liberal Fascism for the Even Dumber is #1 on the American Thinker Best Seller List?

The answer's pretty obvious: These guys don't really believe what they say they believe. They don't want the path cleared so they can be judged by the wide world on their own merits. What they want are the glittering prizes their enemies dispense, because somewhere deep in their blackened little souls they burn with desire for the approbation of the people they spend their days raging against, like spurned teenage suitors. And, if they can't have the prizes, they can at least retain the boogiemen -- Hollyweird! Eggheads! Shut Up and Sing! -- that they and their yokel supporters can invoke whenever they feel like having a good cry about how persecuted they are.

But I have to disagree, ever so slightly. "Conservatism" as we olds -- say, at least old enough to recall Saint Reagan's tenure clearly and in detail -- understood that word is long dead. It found itself temporarily supplanted by "neo" movementarian goons whose sole goal was to get us into Iraq (and this was before 9/11 gave us a convenient pretext). But one the neocons' war games became, well, inconvenient to their professed intemellectual strategery, the money guys got their Citizens United ruling, took a look around, and realized that what a nation full of reality-teevee-besotted retards really needed was some Real Housewives types to go to Washington, flip some tables, pull some weaves.

That engine is now being driven solely by full-blown, unapologetic reactionaries. And what reactionaries do more than anything else (as you might guess from the label) is complain. They react. And that's the problem with these assholes. They don't know how to govern, because they don't know how to take action. They only know how to rhetorically position themselves against what their sworn enemies do. They are not for anything, except destroying things. They don't have any true volition of their own.

I mean, Roy's base point is absolutely correct -- they are a bunch of fucking crybabies. And that's annoying. But the really scary thing is realizing that that really is the only song they know anymore. It was always a factor in how they defined themselves and differentiated themselves from, let's say, normal human beings. At this point, it appears to be about the only way they define themselves.

It cannot be pointed out too often how completely devoid of simple logic the conservatards' culture model really is. In their mythos, Evil Hollyweird, land of queers and jooos, forces their warped "values" on helpless reg'lar foke, who want nothin' more than good wholesome entertainment, like Hee Haw and such. (Never mind, of course, that the redder the state, the higher the divorce rate and the porn rate and the substance abuse rate, and on and on.)

Of course, none of this remotely squares with their endless jabbering about the Free Market and the Silent Majority -- or, in Dinesh D'Douchebag's case among so many others, Morality. In other words, per their pet theories, if the clear majority of the sainted 'murkin populace were really all that het up about the librul elites pushing them around at the box office, and the free market works its ineffable magic in response, then why aren't they putting these smut peddlers out of bidness, and putting their own stuff in?

I mean, did it ever occur to these culture monkeys why, of all the available networks, a show like (to cite just one notorious example) Family Guy airs on the network owned by the same asshole that peddles their propaganda on another of his networks? That maybe this is all just a long con, and they've always been the real marks?

The Evil of Banality, Part Two

The commemoration of Independence Day is always an opportunity to reflect on the good things about this country, even if for too many of our fella 'murkins it seems to be a chance to gorge on food and blow off our fingers.

After the last two years and counting, it seems now more to be a chance to reflect on whether we have the collective will to keep those good things and move forward. It's all well and good to write ourselves missives about how we can outlast the senile, doddering oaf currently at the helm. But we need to start working on how to overcome the factors that put him there in the first place, remembering once again that he is the symptom and not the disease.

The bigger problems are much more pernicious. All the wondrous technology we take for granted now, most of which was unimaginable just twenty years ago, was supposed to set us free, presumably on an ocean of infinite information and enlightenment. Instead, it has become the two-fisted tool of the would-be oppressor -- free porn (not just sexual, but things like "reality" teevee and celeb-sniffing and political bafflegab would count as well) for the masses, and tools of control for the owners.

Both are nothing more than sophisticated distractions, one more troubling than the other, but both working hand-in-glove. It's bad enough that people are besotted with kardashians (no longer capitalizing that word; they are merely nouns and objects), fake hook-up shows, and bottled lies from suspect content providers. What's even worse is that one party has systematically gerrymandered itself into a position of dominance, that their agenda is unabashedly regressive and ruinous. They seriously do not give a shit about anything but power, and are nakedly hypocritical in their pursuit of it.

And yet, gerrymandering or no, someone keeps putting them there -- or more accurately, many voters are putting many scumbags in there, over and over again. It's such a cheap cop-out to attribute it to voting habits, social influence, media bias. Individuals should take responsibility for their choices, and suffer the consequences for their poor choices, isn't that what we keep hearing? Failure to pay attention to reality is not an excuse, it's the con artist's invitation to do what he does best.

From the second New Yorker article linked above, let's take Texas Governor Greg Abbott as an example. Abbott was in his mid-twenties when he was paralyzed by a falling tree. He had no medical insurance, but sued the homeowner and the company that failed to identify and remove the tree, and won a settlement of about nine million dollars. Once he got into power, Abbott successfully got tort settlement amounts in Texas capped at $250,000.

It would be difficult to find a more stark example of how these fucking people think, how they don't even blink at their own rank hypocrisy. Abbott proudly belongs to a party that looks at uninsured people who fall into misfortune, and tells them to go fuck themselves. I think it's a goddamned shame that when Abbott had his accident, he wasn't stuck with the consequences of the very policies he has always supported. They should have dragged his broken ass into the street and told him he was on his own -- no payday, no free medical care. That is exactly what he thinks should be done to everyone else. Real christian of him.

So vile people have figured out how to use technology to do more efficiently what they have always done -- turn the lower classes against each other, against themselves, while the owners continue hoovering up all the wealth. They won't be happy until they have it all for themselves, and probably not even then. It is a pathology, a sickness of the soul they profess to believe in, but somehow never act accordingly. They always find some bullshit excuse to justify their rotten behavior. They have no shame, mainly because their constituencies keep letting them get away with it.

Voters are such cheap dates, it turns out. You don't have to take them to dinner, buy them flowers, any of that shit. You just tell them what they want to hear, empty platitudes and hoary bromides, scare talk about the other, whoever it is this week. And they buy it, every fucking time. Because it's easier to believe than to think rationally and skeptically. It lets them get back to their goddamned nothing that much more quickly. Who has time to read?

As a result of too many of our peers being stuck in their rut, content in having the intellectual lives of farm animals, we find ourselves in a bit of a pickle now. It has culminated -- again, for now, as this is systemic -- with the aforementioned doddering old man. He promised to fuck shit up, and that is one promise he is intent on making good on.

He is doing his grim best to non-strategically bluster the world into a nuclear conflagration. It may be us going at it with the Norks to defend Japan and South Korea, or it may be the "let's you and him fight" gambit he's trying with the Chinese -- who, like the Russians, see this fucking clown exactly for what he is, and are playing him as such.

It is actually something of a surprise that throughout, the stock market has held firm, even gained for the most part. Economic statistics tend to be lagging indicators, but one factor that was always presumed to be a given was stability, lack of volatility. Institutional investors do not typically like rolling dice and trying to guess what's coming day to day.

But here we are. We'll see how long it holds out, and then something will come next -- the same but worse, because it'll be smoother, more likable, less of a blustery prick. Pick any number of "moderate" Republicans who talk a good game when the cameras are on, but go along with the most vicious of policies every single time.

Hope is not a plan, but it is a way to keep one's bearings when times are darkest. So it's not the worst thing to try to maintain the dim hope that eventually enough people will see who their real enemies are and vote accordingly, not just at the ballot box, but with their wallets. Find out who's supporting these vile, lying bastards and put them out of business.

Journo Theater

Question for the Serious Professionamal Journamalists out there -- do you people (yes, I said you people) suffer from some sort of collective battered scrivener syndrome? Honestly, it's just about impossible to understand why they are bothering to show up for these things. White House press briefings have always been a complete waste of time, a cheesy public-relations standard for whoever's in charge.

But they've amazingly become even more useless, more idiotic. We all get that there's a collective fear among the individuals that sit through this ritualized abuse that if they decide to stop going, everyone else will still go and they'll scoop them. There's a certain logic to that, and in fact their fears are probably well-founded. CNN says "fuck it" and stops showing up for this nonsense, but NBC and Fox and the rest of them are all still there, chirping their meaningless questions, eliciting snotty, contemptuous lies. Can't let go of that clickbait heroin.

If anything, the Clownstick cult is doing the media monkeys a favor by laying out in stark terms just how dumb this whole thing is. You want some "breaking news," here you go -- nobody gives a shit about how mean Sean Spicer or Huckabee Junior was to you. It's your own fucking fault for sitting there and taking it, again and again and again. Jesus Christ, talk about Lucy and Charlie Brown with the fucking football. Only a complete fucking sap feels sorry for Charlie Brown after the first time.

Now, a smart reporter might take this as an ongoing opportunity to go do some, you know, reporting, rather than merely transcribing the daily LIES of paid LIARS. Bokay? They lie to you, and you write it down, and then read it back to your colleagues in the studio, and relay to all of us peons in the audience how shocking all this is.

Well, no, it isn't shocking at all. It's fucking Groundhog Day, you retards. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? I'm telling you, all it takes is one (1) of these maroons to just say fuck it, stop showing up, go do some actual work during that time they'd otherwise be sitting there getting abused. It might take a week or two, but the rest of the lemmings would sit up on their hind legs and take notice, especially if the departed lemming finds something interesting. Which would be damn near impossible not to do with the incompetent, arrogant, deeply stupid people currently in charge of the federal government. All it takes is for a few people to actually do their jobs.

Think about it. We've all seen the audience shots of the press room, how many people are in there on a given day, for nothing. Oh, a paid liar lied? Well, you could knock me over with a fucking feather, Cronkite. I despise them for lying to you and to us so easily and repeatedly, but I despise you nearly as much for sitting there and taking it, day after miserable day, instead of going out and finding some useful information that might actually make a dent in this shameless clusterfuck of an administration.

That might actually happen if all of those inert bodies in the audience simply gathered their self-respect and thought for a minute about what their job is really supposed to be. Hint:  it is not stenography. So go find something useful, or fuck off already.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All We Are Saying Is Give Beast A Chance

If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them. -- George Orwell, Freedom of the Park

Brief notes and errata from the blunderground:

This country clearly deserves a leader like Drumpf -- a petulant liar who thinks his prevarications and authoritarian impulses are holy writ. And hell, after a few years of AG Jefferson, I say Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuuhhhd, perhaps they will be. Maybe Jared Kushner and Uday and Qusay, armed with information obtained with illegal surveillance and nepotistic security clearances, will sic the corrupt FBI cells on the DFHs protesting in the streets, heckling Pence at Hamilton, refusing to dress the new queen or appear for the Kennedy Center Honors.

Recall that one of Drumpf's early stump lines was, "When I'm president, we'll all say 'Merry Christmas'." To which a reasonable free citizen can only reply, Or what, motherfucker?

Heartbreak and Resistance

It's been a long 72 hours or so for most of us. Hopefully the bruise is starting to go down a bit. It will get better. The media will not help; they have replaced their inane thumbsuckers about What Those Folks Out There In The Sticks Are Thinking with even more inane pieces about What Just Happened. Their efforts are in vain. They are merely trying to distract all of us -- and more importantly, themselves -- from the truth about their increasing irrelevance.

If there's one thing we might end up commending Drumpf for, it's that he may have exposed the entire rotten political campaign industry as the bunch of grifting, chicken-entrail-reading weasels we always thought they were. I have no idea how he knew their polling models were bullshit, since he doesn't seem to know much of anything at all, but his instincts were correct on that count.

Even the RNC's own internal polling on the morning of election day had him losing. Something's going on here, what it is ain't exactly clear. Maybe instead of more useless chucklers about the city mice venturing into the hinterlands to plumb the psyches of the country mice, someone might take a look at all that. Because it's fucking janky as all hell.

Freak Out

At this point, Clownstick is leading 244 electoral votes to 215, with a handful of states left to call. Friends 'n' neighbors, it's going to be a squeaker from hell at best, and he's likely to win. The betting markets were 80-20 for Hillary yesterday; they are 80-20 Clownstick right now. I don't know what the fuck happened in the last 24 hours, but there ya go. Feingold and Bayh already lost their Senate runs, so that's gone. It's looking pretty rough right now. She basically has to run the table on the Rust Belt states, and she's behind about 60-80k in each of them right now.

It would be a good time to repeat the last part of the penultimate paragraph of the previous post:

And if Drumpf does manage to win, then it's all over anyway, not only because of the destruction he will wreak on the very foundations of this country, but because it would mean there really are enough self-destructive morons to tear it all down, just to watch it burn.

I'm not sure what else to say. Regardless of the outcome, it might be a good time to pick up a new skill or three, do some more and different writing, figure out some monetization strategies to supplement income enough to save up some discretionary income, look for greener pastures.

No Cure For Cancer

A big part of the reason the media have dropped the ball so badly in this season's scampaign coverage is that they were wholly unprepared for the brazen, in-your-face, sky-is-purple-and-water-is-orange ability of Drumpf and his surrogates to LIE when questioned or interviewed. This is understandable, up to a certain point, a point which I think most of us can agree was passed long ago.

Journamalists seem to value access and availability more than anything. And of course these scumbags are available to flood the zone with their LIES anytime, anywhere. It's not like Chris Christie or Hunchback Giuliani were needed somewhere else; neither one has any other function anymore but to serve their dark orange master.

So it's up to the journos themselves to decide that if they're going to let these fuckers on their shows to try to legitimize their LIES, they have a responsibility to call them as such, and in fact to reach a point where, if the person they're interviewing is refusing to be truthful with them, then that person has no value to add to the exercise, even as pure kabuki theater (which of course most of this is anyway).

The way these people preen and lecture about the sanctity of their profession, you'd think they'd have more respect for it themselves. I can't respect someone who has LIARS on their teevee show to LIE to me and everyone else, and who then acts like they're upholding some sacred trust by letting these scumbags talk on at length, spreading their FUCKING LIES virtually uncontested.

I don't want Jake Tapper gently challenging Fatboy Christie on his LYING; I want Tapper to give him a chance or two to come clean, and then to say, You know, if we can't agree on basic, verifiable, empirical facts to discuss, then we're done here. We might as well just move on to the fucking farm report. I have better things to do than to serve as a scampaign megaphone for you soulless, LYING fucks. Okay? That's a public service. That's upholding the public trust.

The journos try to excuse their gutless, enabling behavior, saying they have a professional responsibility to air both sides of these issues. But there are not two sides to every issue. Hillary Clinton's 2008 campaign did not start the birther issue, that does not explain why Drumpf took it up in 2011 anyway. He did not end it in 2011, he started it then, and continued his rotten insinuations in his Twitter feed right up to last year, right before he descended that goddamned escalator. When he and his surrogates say anything other than those FACTS, they are LYING. See how easy that is?

Facts do not have "sides." Things are either true or false. These people are trafficking strictly in falsehoods. They do this because -- as we keep saying -- they understand how media weasels perceive themselves, and therefore they understand how to manipulate them. They know that these careerist dim-bulbs with their franchise shows want above all else to preserve the veneer of seriousness and decorum. They all think they're Mike Wallace, but none of them actually have the balls to call bullshit. The Drumpfsters know this, and have played it very effectively. They know that to their base, it makes them look defiant, and it makes their media interrogator look weak.

Maybe the media weasels need someone to tell them specifically that they have no ethical or professional obligation to sit there and let people flood the zone and LIE to them, that they can end the interviews, that they don't need to have them on in the first place.

Doubling Down

Beyond all the bluster and bullshit, the lies and the cheap spray-tan, enraged cheeto John Miller's main characteristic is his willingness -- no, his enjoyment -- of gambling. Not in the specific "bet the house on 33 black at the roulette wheel" sense, but in the more generic "fortune favors the bold" sense. Sometimes that works out for him, sometimes not.

The problem in never changing that tack is that now there are bigger things at stake if he gambles wrong, than simply stiffing his partners on another shitty casino-hotel. This sense of his trickles down to even his tweets; as the article shows, this is a calculated risk predicated on the dopey sensibilities of heedless cult following. If EgyptAir 840 turns out to be a mechanical failure, no problem; Miller's retard fanbase remains immune to his hysterical nonsense. On the other hand, if it was a terrorist incident, it becomes a prescient center-piece of Miller's jabber for the entire summer, even though Miller had no way of knowing either way when he wrote the tweet.

So as unlikely and risible as it may seem that the Screeching She-Beast of the Tundra might be on Miller's veep short-list, one has to look at the pattern and ask, why not? Seen from the perspective of two of the most sociopathic personality types -- gamblers and narcissists, of which Miller is both -- it makes a perverted sort of sense.

Conservatard critics of Obama, imbued with their own special smugness even as they continue to deride that supposed quality in their opponents, typically tag Obama with the "messiah" epithet, some sort of variation on that. The idea is to impute that Obama came into office riding atop a white horse, determined to save us from the gubmint, from each other, from ourselves, that he and only he would be capable of any of those things.

Sound like anyone we know?

Stupor Tuesday

Hopefully by now you have seen John Oliver's epic takedown of one Donald Drumpf; if not, I urge you to click on the video above and watch it now. I'll selfishly admit to some gratification at seeing many of the same themes I have been beating on since well before Scrooge McDick descended the golden escalator to speak to a rented crowd last June -- not just the boorish behavior, but the easily refuted lies, the thin-skinned overreactions, the stubborn fiction that Drumpf is some sort of genius businessman, and of course the much less cool ancestral last name.

But neither Oliver nor I nor anyone else engaging in these cheap shots have any particular insight. The one thing Donald Drumpf loves to do more than anything else is talk about himself. It's not like this information hasn't been publicly available and abundant for many years now. But the press chose not to do their jobs with any real vigor.

So now here we are, nine months into this bullshit, and this goofy motherfucker is the odds-on favorite to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. Two institutions -- the party and the media -- have failed utterly in their traditional roles. Part of this is because they are bloated and corrupt, but also it is because they were completely unprepared for the consequences of their bloat and corruption.

Punch Drunk

I managed to stomach just a precious few minutes of tonight's circle jerk, but apparently I caught most of the highlights. Obviously, it's down to fuck-or-walk for Cruz and especially Rubio, in that they needed to learn to start cockpunching back if they were going to make any headway against Herr Drumpf.

We don't even need to wait for hindsight on this clusterfuck to see how consistently this "deep bench" managed to hand it over to Trump, over and over and over again. It begins with there simply being too many of them to begin with, preventing a consolidation of opposition. Plus they're all just fucking horrible; it's a sad state of affairs that of the five remaining candidates, as awful as Trump is, he may be the least awful of them.