Strategery

I know it's good sport among the smart-set types to have a laugh at the idea that a seasoned, savvy politician like Nancy Pelosi needn't jump at the beck and call of internet scriveners and opinion weasels, but here's the deal:  impeachment is a necessity now, period. She can figure out the timetable and the rollout and all, but it needs to be done.

After Mueller's public statement yesterday, failure to impeach would be more catastrophic for the Democrats than impeachment, trial, and failure to convict. They were voted back into the House to rein in Grampa Walnuts and his arrogant criminality, not to tsk-tsk and send letters. Any random fool on the street can do that shit. Backing down now would just be a show of total weakness, a clear signal that they can do whatever they please without repercussions. And why not? So far, they can.

It's hard to be patient, but I do believe that Pelosi is slowly working her way toward getting the process in motion. They will impeach, hopefully soon. But there are three things they can do to make this process much more effective:

1. Approach it as a marketing campaign. Seriously. Say what you want about Trump's nonsensical chants of "no collusion," but it's effective on his base. Simple, clear, consistent messaging. Quit stumbling from info tidbit to hastily gathered photo op. This is the product, this is the value proposition, here is the launch and the rollout. Identify your point people (four to six maximum) and flood the fucking zone with them. Have them say the same few catch-phrases over and over and fucking over again as the investigation progresses and more shit comes out, until the rube on the corner knows the tunes by heart. Stop praising your "diversity" and "tolerance," which just boils down to piss-poor attempts to herd cats, and get your shit together. Build your own cult, for fuck's sake.
2. Tell the political consultants to go fuck themselves. It's those rented weasel-faced "centrist" dirtbags that got you in this mess in the first place. Listen to your voters for once, the sentiment is clear. Trump's voters are already "energized." They're all in regardless. You need to start worrying about not demoralizing your own base. We all know this motherfucker's crooked like a three-dollar bill, and if the Democrats are not going to vigorously pursue these matters, per their constitutional and moral obligation, then people will not bother to show up next year. What would be the point? Quit trying to poach these imaginary slivers of assholes who despise you, and start giving the people who want to vote for you a reason to do so.
3. Start identifying vulnerable Republicans in the House and Senate, and work them over. Approach them as colleagues and make one last good-faith effort to (lulz) appeal to what's left of their better angels, and when that inevitably fails, be ready to do town halls in their districts, using that message discipline, and get it all up on YouTube and social media. Fuck the corporate media. They're only talking to each other. Get some polls together that start showing some effect on the incumbent's rating, and then go back to those traitors and give them one last chance to do the right thing before you go scorched-earth on their worthless asses. Justin Amash is an outlier, but you get just a couple more to budge, and you get momentum. The next one of these gutless turds to "express private misgivings," ask them straight-up what it's going to take to get them to grow a conscience. Once they name a price, now you have a negotiation point.

The challenge with Mueller's investigation is that the deeper he dug, the broader the vein of corruption gold became. It's clear that we still probably don't know half of what went on -- hell, Mueller himself probably still doesn't know the half of it. That corrupt piece of shit Barr shut him down, pure and simple. There's a reason for that. The impeachment investigative process will bring more of that corruption to light, and consistent marketing of that steady drip-drip-drip will make a huge dent, and will bring a few remaining "centrist" Republicons around.

Bill Clinton once famously said that people would rather be strong and wrong than weak and right. I think the truth is even simpler and more fundamental:  People want politicians who will fight, even when they're wrong, even when their cause appears lost. And in this case, the cause is clear and right and vital, and if the Democrats can't get it up for this, then again, there is no point in continuing to vote for them. Yes, there is a chance that it will backfire, but refusal to even try will most definitely lead to failure.

Last Chance for Democracy?

With about seventy-five days and counting until midterms, it's important that voters -- well, let's be honest, Democratic voters -- need to not only be sure that they show up to vote, they need to take a few minutes beforehand and make sure they're still allowed to vote. These motherless fucks are perfectly willing to cheat and steal what they cannot win fairly. That fact should not be surprising.

So it's a good time to repost Ed Burmila's article about that very thing. Check in with your local county elections office, make sure you're still registered, that some teenager in a Macedonian troll farm owned by a Russian oligarch hasn't hacked the rolls and purged you and your neighbors off.

They are scum. They have no principles, no scruples, no reservations at all about stealing this thing. Take a few minutes while you still have time and make sure that they can't. Because if you think the last couple years have been hell, just imagine what it's going to be like if these bastards hang on to power, and assert an electoral mandate to do their worst.

Don't Do Something, Just Stand There!

The good folks at LGM have been all over what would be a Big Story, if we had a remotely competent corporate media. But since they're too busy transcribing Judy Ghouliani's "truth isn't truth" lies and stroking their chins about the meaning of it all, it mostly goes unnoticed.

Two Republican Secretaries of State, Kris K. (for Kansas) Kobach of Kansas, and Brian C. (for Cheater) Kemp of Georgia, are running for governor of their respective states. Kobach is perhaps most notorious for chairing the rigger voter fraud commission that FAILED in its mission to manufacture evidence of widespread (or even narrowly spread) fraudulent voting. Kemp's profile is a bit lower, but he deserves credit for stealing the GA-06 seat for Karen Handel (who also has a history of voter suppression when she was Georgia's Secretary of State) last year.

It's not an unfair question to pose to these scumbags:  why bother holding elections at all? Seriously, if they're not even bothering to conceal their cheating and rigging of the electoral system, why even bother? Let's just go full fashy and y'all can tell the peons who they voted for.

But this takes agency away from said peons. Kansans need to step up and take responsibility for their decisions, and start atoning for voting for a clown like Sam Brownback over and over again. The state is absolutely gutted, and they're lining up to have a two-by-four snapped off in their asses by Kobach. At some point people have to start paying attention and showing up, and not getting gulled over and over again by the last flag-humping teevee commercial they see before they go to cast their lot.

Georgia's predicament is a bit more transparent -- a white power minority (only slightly different from a white-power minority) preserving power over a black majority with several methods -- closing most of the polling places, throwing voters off of registration rolls, etc. They know they can't win fair and square, so they cheat and cheat and cheat some more. And no one does a goddamned thing about it.

Maybe disenfranchised voters should organize via this "social media" thing we keep hearing about, and organize a collective strike for a day or several. Maybe they should identify all of Kemp's corporate campaign sponsors and organize a boycott.

And maybe some politicians from the so-called Democratic Party could step up and make some noise too. I don't just mean the Chuck and Nancy show. How about former Georgia governor and noted fan of electoral integrity Jimmy Carter? How about recent president Barack Obama, if he's not too busy parasailing at Richard Branson's private Bahamian island? Former attorney general Eric Holder, mighty crusader against guitar companies and potheads? All of those people could at least raise a ruckus about this situation. But they don't even try. They never do. They'll mumble some bullshit platitudes about not wanting to corrupt the process, never mind that Kemp and Kobach and their ilk couldn't give half a fuck about corrupting the process.

Think about it -- Kemp and Kobach are openly rigging their own elections for themselves, right out in the open, and no one with any power is doing or saying a goddamned thing about it. And they're gonna get away with it.

Citizens do need to step up and exercise their franchise, as it were. But regular folks only have so much time to do such things, after commuting and working and finding some precious time in what little is left of the day to live their lives, knowing every moment of their debt-slave existence is befouled by the banana republic bullshit being rubbed in their faces every fucking day.

The future is going to be a lot uglier; it is absolutely going to get worse before it gets better, if indeed it ever really does. And this is how it starts, with the "small" stuff, stealing an election here and there, working the refs, knowing that the media exists to stenograph lies and truth side-by-side, naively thinking an addled populace will magically be able to suss the truth.

But in a world where lies are truth and truth is irrelevant, all that matters is the art of the steal. It would be a lot less disgusting and demoralizing to watch if some of the folks who seem to have a bottomless pocket of empty bromides for every occasion helped out a bit and gave the good guys a fighting chance once in a while. Instead they'll show up a week after the election somewhere on the rubber chicken circuit for $50k, to offer some cheap observations about our better angels or some such nonsense.

Allow me to be the first to pre-emptively say to them fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

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.

And The Horse He Rode In On

Doug Jones outspent Roah Moah 10:1, and got serious help drawing just enough black voters to get him across the finish line, but goddamn if he didn't just pull of the upset of the year. Congrats, Alabama, you did the right thing, seriously.

More strangely, exit polls tracking Clownstick approval ratings came out dead even, 48-48, in a state he won by nearly 28 points just a year ago. This is not a small thing:  over the weekend, I happened across a Politico article (I know, I know). Along the right sidebar was an ad imploring me to vote for Roah Moah -- however, the photo was not of Moah but of one HRH Fuckface Von Clownstick.

The subtext to this election was that it would be a referendum on Clownstick in one of his strongest states. Maybe not so much; they'll never get tired of the antics and insult-comic distractions, but they might get tired of their hospitals getting closed, their access to health care being steadily diminished, and their hero's complete inability to do much of anything beyond renting out hockey rinks in safe states and peddling the same tired-ass schtick. Build that wall! Lock her up! Cool story, bro. You got both houses of Congress and still can't get shit done, so how's that been workin' out for y'all?

Turns out it's pretty tough to troll librul snowflakes and slurp their tears if you're, y'know, dead. Not to get overly optimistic (after all, the turnout for this thing was projected to be somewhere between 25-30%), but this could turn out to be a harbinger of things to come electorally for the party that tried to sell its soul, only to find out it wasn't worth anything to begin with.

Yet Another Cletus Safari, Alabama Dingbats Edition

These people just never fucking learn:  the day before a hugely contentious Senate election, perhaps simply to prove that it's not just old angry white wimmins who love them some Roah (I say, Roah) Moah, Cosmo decides to give us all some "insight" into what the future iterations (one of them, I shit you not, is a Moah campaign intern) are cogimatatin'. Well, there's five minutes we'll never get back.

I honestly have no idea what purpose these stupid pieces are intended to serve, but let's note for the record that there does not appear to be any Cosmo article presenting an opposing point of view -- say, even one (1) person of any gender explificatin' to those of us dumb enough to waste time on these things, why they cannot vote for Roah Moah, and are in fact voting for Doug Jones.

Seriously, is there anyone out there who actually cares what these dipshits are thinking, why they do what they do, their excuses for the way they vote? It doesn't matter what they say -- their Christianity is the angel topping a Christmas tree, and their self-professed morals and values are merely the tinsel and lights to get you to look. It's a costume, a pose. It is meaningless.

They will say whatever they think is necessary to rationalize what they know inside to be a wretched choice. And their state will pay for it, as aerospace and tech companies will be the first to start divesting. Good.

We need a better media, one that doesn't keep legitimizing these jabbering retards by taking their pulses every few weeks. Listen close, assholes:  the majority of this country voted against Fuckface Von Clownstick, and his works, and people like Roah Moah. Maybe you should consider talking to a few of them once in a great while, if only to provide the veneer of "balance."

Tweet Hole Alabama

The weather forecast for Tuesday's Senate election looks favorable for Roy Moore -- it's supposed to dip into the teens. -- joke on the internets

Despite the supposed plaints from random Alabamans whining about "outsiders" tellin' 'em how ta vote, the hard fact is that this is all up to them -- every last bit of it. Electing a piece of shit like Roy Moore will have consequences, and not just because he's the sort of creep that got banned from a mall because he was cruising high-schoolers.

Moore was an incompetent jurist who was removed from his bench twice, for being a Christian Sharia whackjob. He's a fanatical anti-Muslim bigot and homophobe, and recently told a black questioner at a rally that slavery warn't all bad, 'cause there was more fambly valyews then.

(Except for, you know, the slave families that were broken up all the time -- parents watching their children be sold away and vice versa, husbands and wives sold separately, etc.)

So let's be honest about exactly what you're supporting here, Alabama. You can couch it in terms of wanting to support the agenda of another incompetent serial sexual harasser, or getting another SCOTUS justice, or "preserving" "tradition" and "values" -- though, look at the means you're pursuing to justify those ends.

Look, it's pretty simple. If you're tired of blue-state elitists perceiving you as cousin-fucking hillbillies, which choice makes more sense:  defiantly voting for a caricature of a cracker bigot and affirming those perceptions, or sensibly voting for a moderate, pro-gun prosecutor who put child-murdering Klansmen in prison?

Grow the fuck up. Do the right thing. Stop voting by temper tantrum, and start reading and thinking for yourselves, instead of what your orange grifter king and his flying Fixed Noise monkeys bullshit you with.

Because frankly, it wouldn't take a whole lot to make it hurt. Enough letters to Mercedes-Benz and they move their plant to a state that wants to live in this century; enough threats of a boycott to CBS and they stop broadcasting Crimson Tide games. You want to return to the 1950s and tell the rest of the nation to go fuck ourselves, we can certainly return that favor. And as much as you may resent the supposed smug elitism of your detractors, electing a crank like Moore will only confirm those assertions.

I would like to be proven wrong. I would love nothing more than to wake up Wednesday morning, and see that Doug Jones has squeaked into the US Senate. It would be worth it to apologize for making unkind assumptions. But again, the choice is up to you, Alabama, not the rest of us. Vote for something besides he hates the same people I hate, for once in your miserable lives.

Or don't. Keep riding the Chump Train and see what that gets you -- higher taxes and no health care, so that your cult leader and his billionaire butt-buddies can keep living high on the hog at your expense. Because the fact is that, despite that stupid county map the dotard keeps waving about (probably sleeps with it, and has a small hole cut into it so he can fuck it once in a while), the most productive parts of this country by far voted for her.

So you can grow up and join the 21st century, or you can flip off us elitist book-readers and stick with the fentanyl 'n' jebus strategy that's been working out so well. Either way, good luck.

Advanced Calvinball

The rules of Calvinball are as simple as they are impossible to codify:  no two games of Calvinball are alike; the rules change from game to game; whoever has the ball makes the rules. It's an apt metaphor for many things in life, particularly our political process, which appears daily to be more and more beyond retrieval.

I'm not too concerned with the abrupt way in which Rep. John Conyers was shoved out the door, except that it comes in the heat of the current sex-harassment witch-hunt environment. There are many other reasons Conyers should go, in addition to him being a creep. For one, he's 88 years old, yet another reminder that our federal body of governance needs to set at least modest retirement benchmarks.

Conyers' civil-rights record is respectable, but at this point he's just another pervert gerontocrat who thinks he's permanently entitled to his congressional seat, and all the perks that come with it. His first instinct upon departure was to endorse his son, who has no political experience and was involved in a domestic violence complaint earlier this year, to succeed him.

Conyers has held his seat for fifty years. He must know or have met at some point at least one (1) person who isn't related to him or beholden to him, who is qualified to succeed him. But his natural impulse is to perpetuate the dynasty. That tells you everything you need to know.

More concerning is the quickness in which Al Franken's fellow Dems have turned on him. To be sure, Franken has done himself no favors with his behavior, just the parts he's admitted to and been dumb enough to be photographed doing. However, Franken also immediately called for an ethics investigation into his own conduct, not exactly the go-to move for a true predator.

And as a point of pure practical utility, this is more of the usual bringing-a-spork-to-a-gunfight mentality that underpins everything the Democrats do. The Republicans are about ready to send a child molester to the fucking Senate, not to mention their fearless "leader," a serial adulterer who bragged in one of his ghost-written turd-swipers about fucking other men's wives, and in more recent years, was caught boasting on tape about his prowess at grabbing pussy. And then there's Scott DesJarlais. A real media would hounded that scumbag into eating his Smith & Wesson five years ago.

The Republicans strung this out masterfully, first shaming Democrats into getting rid of whatever cash Harvey Weinstein sent their way, then in making false equivalences between Franken playing grab-ass with middle-aged women and Roy Moore chasing teenage poon in his thirties.

It's not hard to see the practical ramifications of pushing Franken out, right here and now. MN governor Mark Dayton can appoint another Democrat, and that person will have close to a year to prepare to run for a full term. But that's really the only benefit for them. They will not get karma points or moral high ground for taking that supposed high road.

See, while the Democrats are playing their usual-brand of charisma-free rudderless politics-as-usual, the Republicans are playing a more advanced, intense version of Calvinball. It has two basic rules:

1. The rules are whatever we say they are, when we say it, subject to change without notice.
2. Go fuck yourself.

Mewling criticisms from effete media weasels mean even less than the same from their Democratic colleagues. They do not care, and they want to certain that everyone understands that. They protect their perverts without fail, and they will never apologize for it. They understand intrinsically that voters respond most viscerally to someone -- right or wrong, that cannot be over-emphasized -- with balls, much more than on policy specifics, or being "honest," or any of that horseshit.

The most powerful voting criterion right now is "he/she hates the same people/things I hate," followed closely by "he/she doesn't take any shit." Obviously these are the abiding principles of the Republican party as it currently stands, but I would suggest that the Democrats could use at least a small dose of that, just a quick bump to get them moving forward again.

Because you can't vote for people who you neither respect nor fear, and right now, all most people -- Democratic voters included -- see is a circular firing squad that thinks their virtue-signaling actually means anything. We'll see how much it means once the Republicans and Russians perfect how to weaponize the Dems' instinct to always believe every accuser before any real information is known or verified.

Fuck You, Emperor Snowflake

Looks like in spite of their complete inability to cobble together a coherent proactive message, or unify around any sort of figure to move them collectively forward, Democratic candidates swept the field in a variety of races on all levels all over the country. The message is clear, and hopefully gains momentum as Mueller keeps flipping the Russian rats, and more people simply get tired of Preznit YouTube Comments Thread.

What makes it even more hilarious is that Snowflake, balls deep in monkey-fucking our Asian trade arrangements, couldn't help but take a moment and bury Special Ed Gillespie in his (at the time of this post) nine-point loss to Ralph Northam.

As the Post article spells out, this is the sort of thing that will end up being Snowflake's undoing. Unlike Luther Strange, Ed Gillespie openly embraced the scaremongering and fear-jabber that has endeared Von Clownstick to his rube base. It didn't work (no, make that it really didn't work), and Snowflake unnecessarily went out of his way to piss on Gillespie's electoral grave. (Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, sez I.)

So he doesn't help electorally, and is disloyal to a fault, even when he doesn't need to be. The Republicans still running their anti-freeze lemonade stand maintain the delusion that their dementia-addled fake tycoon can get them across the finish line on those fucking tax cuts (for people who hide their money in Bermuda in the first place). They are as monomaniacal in their obsession as the emperor is in his.

The contest will become one concerning which faction is more beholden to their respective obsession -- the McConnell-Ryan faction to their damned tax cuts for people who don't need them, or Fuckface Von Clownstick's unshakeable self-regard. Tonight's electoral debacle will rattle the so-called GOPe weasels, but not quite enough to stop pushing for their donors. They'll keep going until it gets snapped off in their asses in the midterms.

Edroso also has a nice take on it from the "cultural" angle. In the wake of the second major mass shooting in less than five weeks, the rightard scriveners' claque may have gone to the "thoughts and prayers" well once too often for too many people. Only a complete dipshit would seriously think that "leftists" are mocking prayer in and of itself by ironically spitting the trope back at them.

Listen close, assholes, just so there's no confusion, real or otherwise:  Faith without works, according to the New Testament, is dead. Empty prayers aren't changing full coffins -- this time, in the case of Sutherland Springs, including more than a dozen children, including a fourteen-month infant. That's not to insist on confiscating all guns or some such; rather, it is a challenge to the empty-prayer folks to either do something, anything, or just shut the fuck up.

Only a full-on certifiable halfwit would be anything but repulsed by the sight of two disgusting people opining on how church is the best place to be shot. As the saying goes, that's a special kind of stupid, but it's also pretty fucking revolting. It would be one thing for them to go through the usual routine of shoulder-shrugging "whaddaya want us to do?" plaints about how the shooter got his guns legally, yada yada. But it's intolerable to decent people to watch these scumbags use the lives of slaughtered children to created twisted rhetoric for the sole purpose of impugning the folks who are simply wondering how many more times?

I've always taken some measure of pride in being a cynical bastid, but seeing the crude gestures of conservatard lowlifes from David French to Ainsley Earhardt, clearly I have some catching up to do.

Days of Whine and Poses, Slight Return

I don't begrudge Hillary Clinton the right to tell her side of the story and make a juicy buck off it, but it becomes tiring that every move she makes ends up becoming some sort of tactic or gambit in this weird, ongoing low-level dummycrat civil war between the Clintonistas and the Bernie Brats. This seems to be a recurring theme with her supporters over the years, and it's become tiresome and counterproductive.

Sanders has his flaws, but near as I can tell, he's at least trying to move a progressive piece of health-care legislation forward. (Funny how he managed to get something together to introduce in just a few months, while doing stump speeches around the country, while the Goopers thumbed their dicks for seven years and came up with jack shit.) Perhaps it occurs to some of the Bernie bashers that he is useful as a stalking horse for whatever actual liberals exist among Democratic senators; if the bill gets slammed, they can disavow it, if people love it, they can support him.

Or we can keep re-litigating last year's ultimate dog-fuck of an electoral loss until we're all sick of life itself. Blame Comey, the media, the Russians, whatever. You think the media just started fucking up their coverage last year? Tell it to Howard Dean, tell it to John Kerry or Mike Dukakis. The real problem is that too much of the electorate is now either completely disengaged or borderline retarded, and it's hard to come up with a sales pitch beyond the confines of Ooga-booga big! Ooga-booga strong!

But them's the perils of democracy, or the trappings of it. Here's a thought -- maybe if the rich paid their fair share, both in wages and taxes, we might be able to have schools that do more than warehouse the future meatbags.

I'm tired of hearing how their diaper is always full. They can't seem to talk enough people into voting for their own rational self-interest, and it's always someone else's fault. They sound like a bunch of alcoholics and junkies half the time, never accepting any blame for anything, no matter how obvious. They had the election gift-wrapped to them, thanks to the most obnoxious, polarizing candidate in our lifetimes, and they still found a way to fuck it up. Own it, learn from it, and move the fuck on already. All three of those things are necessary, and they haven't even done one 'em yet.

The Democratic Party could have made any number of modest efforts to preserve even a margin in those stupid rust belt states well before 2016, and they fucking didn't. They didn't do a goddamned thing to help the rubes, but they went to the mattresses for bathroom rights, and that's why that fucking clown won, and it's why that other dipshit clown Kid Rock has a pretty solid chance of taking Debbie Stabenow's Senate seat next year.

These people couldn't fuck their way out of a wet paper bag after a fistful of Viagra. They spent good money on shit pollsters who scammed them as badly as a Clownstick University doctorate program. And they're going to do it all over again, because it's more important to them to keep reliving their epic fail, and to attack the one guy who's actually trying to do something their party used to actually stand for, when it stood for something.

Thirteenth Step

[Post title because I'm currently listening to the Perfect Circle album of that title, but it's also relevant to the topic at hand.]

Since Hillary Clinton's account of last year's fiasco is coming out imminently, so are the virtual pitchforks and torches (tiki and otherwise) in response. It is rapidly becoming another Smug-ageddon between rump factions of erstwhile Clintonistas and ever-hopeful Berniebros, with the latter group wond'ring aloud why she refuses to kindly fuck off already, and the former group offering to kindly help the Berniebros over the nearest cliff.

As someone who voted enthusiastically for Sanders in the primaries, and nearly as enthusiastically for Clinton in the general election, let me offer some perspective in good faith. I don't begrudge at all Clinton knocking out a book as a commercially viable catharsis, for her and perhaps for many of us. Some are annoyed about the "timing," as if that were under her control, or that there would ever be an ideal time under the current reign of error.

In fact, I would say the timing of the book's release is damn near ideal. Consider the following:

• Senatorial leather gimp Addison M. "Turtle Fucker" McConnell may be heading into a death embrace over Reichenbach Falls with Emperor Snowflake. McConnell and soulless henchman "Better Call" Paul Ryan thought they had this one in the bag, that they could steer this "outsider" doofus into doing their bidding. Now it is starting to dawn on them that a bull in a china shop just means a lot of broken plates and bullshit everywhere. Hoocoodanode? At any rate, McConnell is "privately" (in other words, leaking to the Fucking New York Times) musing that Combover Caligula's dumbfuckery is bad for the Goopers' main business at hand, which is always and forever separating working people from their money and handing over to rich assholes who use it to keep score against each other.
• Apparently Congress will only be in session for twelve days next month, because it's only the end of the fucking fiscal year, and major portions of the budget, including the debt ceiling, are still being figured out (in other words, deciding whose poopchute the thing gets rammed into without lube). Herr Kanzler wants some money set aside to start that wall that the Meskins were are going to pay for. It is safe to assume at this point that his master plan is to get them to pay for it by hiring a Mexican contractor to build it, and then not pay them.
• Hillary Clinton, whose political career is truly over and done with, and who now has no conceivable thing to lose, is going to flood the zone promoting her book. She has absolutely no incentive to hold back with her opinions, and has already leaked a piece describing Shithead as a "creep." Oooh, shots fired!

At the heart of the criticism of Clinton (I think) is really the sinking feeling that the Democratic Party has failed to provide a sense of direction -- and more importantly, a new central figure around which to rally and take cues from. Patience (certainly not one of my strong suits) is the key here; yes, it's frustrating that the Dems are content to play prevent defense for now, but all eyes are on the guy down the road setting fire to his ammo shed, and there's not much they could say to draw attention anyway.

We all have this sensation of time accelerating lately, because that seems to be the overall dynamic anymore, and because none of us are used to having to worry several times a day what the occupant of the White House is up to. The corollary to that psychological effect is that it seems like it's taking forever to get rid of this motherfucker. And it is.

But he hasn't gotten a single meaningful thing done, and doesn't look to in the near future. His sole accomplishment in seven months is filling a SCOTUS seat that was stolen for him by the aforementioned turtle fucker. No health-care bill; no wall; no tax reform, as we head into the holiday season. That means that by the time he gives his first State of the Onion speech [rolls eyes], he will have exactly jack-fucking-shit to hang his hairpiece on. And that's only if Bob Mueller's team hasn't nailed his fat fucking diapered ass to the wall by then.

The Dem dynamic since November has been a weird muddle of contrition and bewilderment -- they're very sorry about fucking the dog, but they're not sure why, or even what breed the dog was. It's very difficult to apologize for something when you're not sure what you did, or if you disagree with people who tell you what you did wrong.

No matter, what's done is done. They need to move on, and do so with deliberation. The first thing they need to do is abandon this limp-dick "when they go low, we go high" bullshit. FUCKING STOP ALREADY. Look, people are pissed off, and not entirely without some justification, and many of them cannot articulate exactly why. They need catharsis. This is true on both sides.

It doesn't mean you send out Gavin Newsom (or whoever) to recite a laundry list of made-up anecdotes, like Snowflake. That's the beauty of it -- the Democrats don't have to lie at all, they can just point out the ugly truth. But they have to pack a punch now. They need to step up when Snowflake lies and flat-out say, That's a goddamned lie. He keeps lying. Why do people let this asshole keep lying about every motherfucking thing?

They need to look at this like it's a straight-up marketing campaign. Who are our rock stars for next year? Let's get them on the Sunday morning jerk-off chat shows, as much as possible! Get Kirsten Gillibrand (or the aforementioned Newsom) in there to tune up Poor Ol' Straight Talk or Huckleberry Closetcase or whatever dipshit warhorse they haven't shipped off to the glue factory just yet. Get an experienced media presence like Al Franken in there to fuck some people up with his impeccable timing. Let loose the House dogs, like Seth Moulton and Adam Schiff.

That's a big part of the frustration of the anti-Hillary crowd. It's not that they literally need her to disappear from public life, it's that they need to see where the party is going, and who's going to lead it forward. Someone under retirement age, for fuck's sake. That is not ageism, it's the simple fact that technology is altering the workforce and careerism much faster than our system has kept up, and there are some serious tectonic changes coming that Grandma Feinstein has no clue about, unless her great-grandchildren have told her about it during Murder, She Wrote reruns.

Seriously, I do not for the life of me understand the inner workings of the Democratic Party. They could crush these fuckers with a modest amount of coordination -- one or two personalities and messages to rally around, and they could kick this outhouse over. The Republicans, despite their numerical dominance, are on the verge of electoral collapse. The health-care fiasco proved it; they had seven years to come up with anything, and they thumbed their dicks. They're a shoddy operation, they're on the ropes.

Finish them off, this time for good. Sweep the knee, you fucking pussies. Either that, or recognize that both parties are good and dead, nothing more than shambling husks that don't know it yet, and adjust your social network strategy accordingly.

Rock the Vote

Looks like Jester's got the answer:

It might get in the way of Supergeeeenyus Snowflake Von Clownstick's tireless efforts to write off the three million more people who legitimately voted for his opponent, but them's the breaks.

Consider:  since the founding of the republic, between stuffing and/or tossing ballot boxes, voter intimidation, literacy tests, poll taxes, crooked or "broken" machines, deliberately shorting busy districts in order to create three-hour lines to frustrate voters, and on and on, this nation has almost certainly never had a one-hundred-percent free and fair election in every part of the country. Some ward heeler or local factotum always has their thumb on the scale in some location(s).

That's a different matter than saying that the will of the people has always been thwarted, but obviously it would be very difficult to forensically go back and re-litigate all those past exercises in civic futility. All of which is to say that it would simply be interesting, to say the least, to get a truly untainted picture of What The People Really Want, to the extent that they actually know.

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.

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

There are at least two certainties when it comes to what we like to think of as "the democratic process" or (snicker) "free and fair elections":

1. Self-styled liberals and progressives have a good chance of showing up to vote, but don't be too surprised if something else comes up, at which point the usual bullshit "off-year election" excuse comes up, as if midterm, off-year, or special elections don't count as much as the quadrennial circus that's ramrodded into every orifice two years in advance.
2. Asshole conservatives will definitely show up. Every. Fucking. Time.
3. If an election is looking too close for comfort, the asshole conservatives will conspire to nudge it in their direction with the usual "oops" shenanigans, a list of "dog ate my homework" excuses that would embarrass a fourth-grader who just didn't feel like reading the book for the report.

Which brings us to the special election in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, to replace "Doctor" Tom Price, whose insider trading makes Martha Stewart look like a piker (which she was anyway), and nevertheless was confirmed to, you know, oversee the nation's health-care racket.

Democratic candidate Jon Ossoff faces a clown car of Republican opponents, but need fifty percent to avoid a runoff in June. A few days ago, four electronic voter logs were stolen from the pickup truck of the poll manager, who left it unlocked at a Kroger while he went fucking grocery shopping. Somehow this dipshit still has a job; he shouldn't even be allowed to volunteer. I am willing to bet money that most of us who have jobs of any significance, if we had left crucial proprietary materials in our personal vehicle while we took care of a personal errand, and they were stolen out of the vehicle, we would be held accountable, as in fired. This asshole should be fired, even if he wasn't involved in anything nefarious. At the very least, though, the FEC needs to crawl up his ass with a microscope, and make sure he doesn't have any unsavory associates, maybe a collection of maga swag.

And now, tonight, while the election is underway, and Ossoff has fallen just a hair below 50%, the last county (Fulton) of the three in the district to report precincts, is having "technical difficulties." Oh, and Georgia is one of those states that does not require paper receipts for its electronic voting machines, because as always, accountability is for other people. And Ossoff's main opponent is Karen Handel, who is from Fulton County, and who, as Georgia's Secretary of State, would have overseen the placement of these voting machines. Handel will pull every string and call every back-room favor in order to steal the runoff in June.

It's a red district, and even if it heads to a runoff, Ossoff has done well, and has a fighting chance in June (until, again, Handel steals it). This isn't over at all, but that's not the point here. The point is being able to have an election anywhere, without this sort of transparent interference. It's times like these where you seriously wonder why we should bother having elections at all, when they're neither free nor fair unless you watch these thieving, traitorous scumbags like a hawk. They are disgracing their country, and everything they think they stand for.

Over the Edge

Not sure what the hell's going on over at Robb's jernt these days, but the commentary's off-base, and half of the commenters seem to have truckled over from whatever shithead white-power joo-baiting  site serves their insane purposes these days. You have to read it to believe it; these are the sorts of rubes who spout racial slurs at the workplace, whether in anger or in "jokes," and then seriously wonder why no one will hire them after they're summarily fired.

Anyhoo, Robb's contention is that the nascent (and ill-fated, let's face it) Electoral College upset tomorrow would signify the transmogrification of our Jebus' Favrit Nayshun into a banana republic.

Decent Exposure

The Rude Pundit has this one right: it's all well and good that Obama held a press conference yesterday to take a few lame rhetorical jabs at the coup-disguised-as-democratic-transition currently underway. But it will do nothing, it will change nothing.

I don't expect Obama to go nuts and scream or declare martial law or anything. But this is about the fate of the nation, quite possibly the world at large, and at the very least a presidential legacy that Obama worked very hard for. Everything he struggled for, uphill for eight years, all gone, washed away like a sandcastle under the encroaching tide. About the only one of Obama's legislative benchmarks that doesn't seem to interest Clownstick is marriage equality, but with a religious nut like Pence at his side, even that's not safe. Hell, he'd undo it just to be a dick, just because it wasn't his, a hyena killing a pup he didn't sire.

We all like the old norm of Reagan sitting in the Oval Office with Tip O'Neill over a couple tumblers of Scotch, discussing like grown-ass adults where they might reach common ground over some things. The idea was that people could agree to disagree on issues, and still acknowledge the other's humanity and basic decency. That norm is long out the window, well before the Clownstick regime came along, and only a complete fool would still be operating under that old way of thinking.

These people are fucking indecent, proudly so. It is time to address them as such, and not wait and hope that they won't be quite that bad. I'm pretty sure every victim of every serial killer held out that same false hope, right up to the moment that the killer's weapon broke skin, and they watched their lifeblood spill to the floor.

But Obama seems strangely passive, almost complacent, as if he had no agency in affecting events. He probably thinks that if he behaves himself, he can leverage that into having some sort of emeritus counsel to Clownstick and his entourage. This is a problem, and his party shares the same problem. Republicans lose an election, and they immediately get to work and start fucking things up. Democrats lose one and they start acting like a punk on the cell block, trying to figure out what will get their man off most quickly, so as to avoid a beatdown.

Well, fuck that shit. The phrase "better to die on your feet than to live on your knees" may be a cliché, but those things are true by definition, and if they really want any chance at future viability, they had all best unfuck themselves and see the storm(front) approaching. They still think this is some sort of contest of ideas that can be won with logic and reason, but we are apparently in a "post-truth" era where facts no longer have value, and so having a simple, powerful narrative and posture is much more important.

Count on this more than anything: you will know that the Dems have figured this out when their donors start pulling. This is a money game after all, and when the money dries up, the pencil-pushers get the message and change their approach. In the meantime, get ready for Chuck Schumer to assume the position and sell it all down the river, instead of doing what McConnell did from day one and just turning into a fucking doorstop. It's as if the Republicans didn't just spend the last nine months stonewalling the incumbent president's selection for the Supreme Court, just waiting out his term.

Say it again -- these people are fucking indecent, and it is time to stop pretending they can be reasoned with. They cheat and lie and steal, openly and brazenly, and the Dems fire back with their empty bullshit handjob "when they go low we go high" platitudes. Enough with that shit.

There's no shame in saying no, folks; in fact, it's in your own best interest to make that your new favorite word. Fight anything and everything, by any means necessary.

N8r B8rs -- 2016 Edition

Lolwut. Jesus H. Christ, people, as ludicrous a person and politician as Jill Stein is, she didn't cost you your sainted fucking election, Neither did Gary "Cheech" Johnson.

Nor, for that matter, did Hillary Clinton. She was a solid candidate with a good message. But there was a brutal confluence of various and nefarious factors, most of them out of the candidate's control. But yeah, maybe visiting Wisconsin even once during the general election might have helped, who knows?

I don't mean to pick on Paul Campos; I like his writing a lot. But I think the linked piece is a forerunner of what's to come, as FVC takes office and makes GWB look like FDR. There will be many bitter recriminations like this along the way, and it will not be pretty.

And so I think it's important not to jerk oneself off and fall into that same trap as the Dems did in 2004. Fucking wake up already and realize that the corporate media represent corporate interests, not the peoples'. They are always going to chase the dollar, and never worry for a second about what's "right" or "useful." They were never on your side, or his. They're on their side, and everything else is incidental. Realize that the Democratic Party itself is little more than a vestigial appendage in many states, at the state and local level, and that there's not much of a bench even at the national level.

Or you can spend the next couple electoral cycles bemoaning the hubris of protest candidates daring to contest the Holy Duopoly, and see what that gets you. How'd all those long, cold years of Thanksralphery go for you?

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.

Bedwetters' Brigade

A natural result of having a far-too-long electoral campaign season is the spate of "oh shit" sentiments among the faithful, the so-called bedwetters. I'll count myself among the number of folks who find themselves enormously frustrated with the closeness of the polls, while still maintaining a fairly strong conviction that HFC, despite her flaws and over-familiarity, and despite having the media refs basically working against her with their false equivalences and mindless squirrel-chasing, will win. It'll be close, but the math dictates that she should win, in spite of everything.

It's important to recall that at this time in 2008, Obama and McCain were virtually deadlocked; Obama did not start pulling away until after the first debate, and really did not surpass the margin of error until the end of September. And 2012 was even worse -- the Rmoney/Ryan ticket led polling throughout October, frequently exceeding the MOE.

The real source of the bedwetting right now, aside from the unusually high stakes of the election and volatility of the polls, is that the campaign has revealed (or rather, confirmed) two extremely troubling factors:

1. The media, aside from a few notable exceptions, are too caught up in the "narrative" to check facts, call lies, and maintain a sense of proportion between the two candidates;
2. There is an even more substantial portion of the electorate that is comprised of racists and/or morons than previously assumed.

Rather than obsessing over the daily poll fluctuations, it's better to look at market averages such as Predictwise and the RCP average of polls, to get a much more realistic picture of what's going on. Right now, HFC is hovering at about 70% chance of getting elected, while the RCP average has her at just +1.5%, which could be cause for alarm, until you factor the above contemporaneous polling from '08 and '12, and remember that the first (and most important) debate is still over a week away. The pendulum will swing again.

One more thing to keep in mind, that I haven't seen mentioned in the media -- while you probably have heard that many potential Drumpf voters are reluctant or embarrassed to admit it, thus skewing the polls, given HFC's unfavorability numbers, there's a pretty good chance that the same phenomenon exists on her side of the fence as well. For example, a married couple where the husband wants him some Clownstick, but the wife really doesn't, she may just be holding her tongue and nodding "yes, dear" until the magic day where she can nullify his vote. I think those two groups, however prevalent they actually are, will end up being roughly equal in size, and thus will cancel each other out.

The "enthusiasm gap" between the two candidates exists, but only in the sense that on the HFC side, you don't have a bunch of borderline retards saying ricockulous things like gawwwd sint ahr candit ta sayve da cuhntree. I may not be enthused for Hillary herself, but I am more than enthused to send Drumpf and his shit-sack of deplorables -- and yes, they are fucking detestable, deplorable, contemptible excuses for oxygen-wasting fucktards, not half but all of them -- back home with their vestigial tails between their legs. I am as enthused about that as I was for voting for Obama in 2008. So take that into your conventional wisdom and shove it sideways, horse-race media.

There's plenty of time to go, it's difficult to conceive of an obnoxious asshole like Drumpf converting any remaining fence-sitters, and he gives HFC's team ad copy to work with pretty much every day. A strong performance by HFC in the debate, and some ad brutality throughout October should turn the tide. It would be nice if more voters were sane, and the media did their job, but barring some major weirdness (I know, I know) the Republic should survive, and send Clownstick and his shitbird family back to their comic-book-villain tower.

If only things went more smoothly, the Drumpfkins might get the massive blowout they truly deserve. But we can live with them just getting beaten.

Foundation and Empire

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