Joke on the Water

Worth a thousand words.

Family Affairs

Isn't it wonderful to live in a country where an endless line of otherwise unemployable fail-children can lecture everyone on the evils of nepotism? I mean, Hunter Biden seems like a garden-variety cheesedick failson who rode his last name as far as it would take him. Which makes him different from Ronna Romney, Liz Cheney, Meghan McCain, the adult Trump offspring, and all these other tedious assholes, exactly how?

Yes, it's bullshit that Hunter Biden should be able to get this makework bullshit job and scoop up an easy $50k/month for nothing. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to what the conniving, chiseling, pelf-grubbing spawn of Donald Trump's polluted seed raked in last year, and the year before, and next year. You know? The fucking balls on these goddamned people.

What the fuck does Meghan McCain do, sits her fat ass on a morning talk-show for bored housewives and inflicts her worthless opinions on everyone else, since she's completely unqualified for anything resembling actual labor where there's a tangible product at the end of the day. Her skill set includes calling the manager and pushing around the help. She doesn't do a single thing that you would trade a hard-earned dime for. If she was on a cruise that shipwrecked on a deserted island, she'd be roasted on a spit within a week -- one, because then you'd finally get her to shut the fuck up, and two, because she's completely useless otherwise.

I've always despised the Kennedys and Bushes for this same nonsense, this false sense of noblesse oblige intertwined with the expectation that since you know their name, you love their game. Oh, how nice of you to take a break from your Hamptons parties to pretend you give two shits about the peons. But at least most of the scions of those families made some minimal effort to be marginally competent at something. Not anymore. You wouldn't hire Eric Trump to fix your fucking toilet.

Once again, you have to give Paris Hilton some credit -- she may be a clueless idiot, but at least she had the common decency to take her hard-earned money and go the fuck away.

The Girl With All the Gifts

Nothing like a couple of scathing profiles of Princess Snowflake to make the weekend just a little more enjoyable. Whatever the outcome of Daddy Dearest's malignant reign of error, Princess will emerge with a chip on her shoulder, feeling wronged on all sides, that she has earned every privilege she's ever had, that we thankless peons should have just shut the fuck up and appreciated our brioche.

No matter. She can say what she wants, but she knows what she is. Your father is a fucking ghoul, lady, with his thumbs-up and his shit-eating grin, supposedly consoling survivors of a massacre, holding an infant like a trophy. This is your birthright, it is literally your job to enable this, and then pretend to be the voice of moderation. This is your empire of dirt.

Let her live with that knowledge, and so much more. She can fool the cult members with her phone-sex voice and her anime-sculpted features, because they want to be fooled -- hell, they need it. But in the dead of night, when the dreams come to visit, they remind her of who she really is, who her brothers and parents really are.

These are indecent people; even when they're not actively harming others, every thought and word and action is nothing more than a transaction for them. They are brand-bots, Kardashians with political power that they have no business having.

She and her vile family will never be held accountable for what they've done or what they are, so we might as well enjoy the print smackdowns when they're good.

Keep America Hate; Or, Character Is Density

By now, we've all seen the photos and videos of this disgusting bullshit, and there's not a whole lot to add. Res ipsa loquitur, as the kids are wont to say in the 'hood.

On the one hand, maybe it's harsh to pick on children; on the other hand, these "children" are awful. No one put a gun to their heads to force those fucking lids on them. Would you care to meet their parents? There's no guessing as to how this happens. It would be a failure of imagination -- and, therefore, given the perilous state of what passes for our free and independent media ecosystem, entirely predictable -- to pass this off as yet another example of racism.

Certainly racism is a driving element, but it's really a matter of asserting upper-middle-class white privilege, on a second-class group. The only way it could be any better if is these losers try to excuse their behavior by saying that they thought Nathan Phillips was Mexican, and hence wanted to build a wall to keep him out, per Dear Leader's impassioned plaints. Build that wall! Lock her up! Derp derp derp! Dee- fence! Unh-unh! Dee-fence!

Christ. What a bunch of morons -- but worse than that, what a bunch of truly useless humans. The world would not miss them, had they never come along, really. Gunny from Full Metal Jacket had it right -- the best part of these doughy losers ran down the back of their mommas' legs, ending up as brown stains on mattresses all over the greater Cincinnati area.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Rimrock Auto Arena in Billings, Montana, capacity 12,000. Depending on whom you prefer to believe, either there were about 10,000 of the usual cult losers wound up to rock-concert excitement, or an indeterminate number of bozos who received his requisite Putin praise with lukewarm enthusiasm.

And so it goes. It seems like the Deadline link provides a truer picture of the scene, a jabbering dunce decompensating before our eyes, but the Great Falls Tribune blowjob provides a truer portrait of the cultists and how they think, how they access and process the "information" and "facts" that they use to make their fantastic decisions to support this....this goddamned thing.

Debbie Robbins, too, ignored any negative news and said people opposing the president are making fools of themselves.

Robbins, 67, voted for the first time to vote for Trump. Her registration didn’t go through so she drove 60 miles to same-day register and vote in Dillon, the county seat.

She and Mike only wish he could be in office for 20 years.

She said the limited coverage of Medicare is a major concern.

Mike Robbins said Trump has an ambitious agenda and needs support to get it accomplished.

“We know how important it is to be united,” he said.

I almost wish that turd could stick around for a while, just so these dipshits could get the full brunt of the awesome health care reform their lord and master is, um, well, I guess there's something in the works, right?

But really, this is like the ultimate Cletus safari, these morons. It's not just the complete epistemic closure, the empty recitation of alternate facts. It's the knowledge of what they're waiting around all day in line for like a bunch of saps, because their time is worth nothing, their lives have nothing going on. I can't think of any politician I would have waited six hours in the sun to see. Especially a politician that just says the same three or four things over and over and over again: wow, I'm so great, no one is greater than me; everyone who disagrees with me is a traitor and a liar; everyone is so unfair, very unfair; did I mention how fucking perfect and awesome I am?

Seriously, these are people with absolutely nothing going on. They have utterly failed at the business of life. If they weren't so despicable they'd be pitiable. They don't seem to get that they are just as ridiculous as their empty hero. As it is, the fervent hope that they get everything they voted for -- good and hard, of course -- burns as bright as ever.

I'd Rather Be an American Than a Republican

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Boycott Spotify

It's not exactly a news flash that Alex Jones is a piece of shit. Currently he's seeking $100k in court costs from the parents of Noah Pozner, one of the young children murdered in the Sandy Hook hoax massacre.

So, you see, it might be understating things a bit to refer to Jones merely as a piece of shit. He's far worse than that, but it's difficult to quickly come up with a word that encompasses just how huge a fucking turd Jones really is.

Jones lost a bunch of advertisers from his YouTube channel earlier this year, but apparently Spotify still carries his lie-peddling podcast. This is still 'murka, and we all still have a right to free speech.

But we all may want to consider where we want to draw a line. A person certainly has a "right" to write and post (for example, certainly not an endorsement) slash-fic type crap that involves children or extreme violence or torture or pick-your-own-most-awful-thing, without being imprisoned for that speech, so long as they don't act on it or overtly incite other to act on it.

That right does not extend to compelling advertisers to support the medium by which such shit gets carried. And the same holds for Jones; he certainly has every right to record his lies and subhuman filth, verbal diarrhea that inflicts ongoing pain to parents of slaughtered first-graders. But he has not right to expect companies to disseminate that shit for him, much less for him to get paid for it.

So my daughter and I both have premium Spotify accounts, and they are now cancelled, and I've told them why. Maybe if enough people do the same, they'll step up.

Jones is fucking scum. I hope his ex-wife takes every penny, and he never sees his kids again, and that they know why, and Jones ends up selling oranges and handjobs (not necessarily in that order) at the nearest freeway off-ramp.

It's time to stop fucking around with these people, all of them. Spotify is a relatively neutral actor in a huge ecosystem that has far worse critters slithering through. Boycott them all the same. Boycott anything and everything with the name Fox on it, not just the propaganda channel. The fucking Simpsons cast and the football announcing crew are getting paid in agitprop scrip. So fuck them. I don't know about you, but I've had it with all of them. I want my country back.

Anything with Mark Burnett's name on it too. Reality teevee has ruined this fucking country, made it stupid beyond belief, and susceptible to this traitorous clown. That's bad enough; it should be intolerable that Burnett is also a friend to this bastard. Burnett and his wife can talk about Jebus and family all they want, but their deeds support the most ungodly (in every sense of the word) person to hold high office. They should be ashamed of themselves, but their money insulates them from consequences.

These people need to be made destitute. It's the only thing they understand.

At the Movies: Worthless Asshole Edition

In case you were wondering:  the only way I'll ever watch a Dinesh D'Souza movie is if it involves him putting a Mossberg in his diseased piehole and splattering his brain-pan across the nearest wall. In a world of useless, vile cocksuckers, D'Souza stands out -- or slouches out, anyway. Not only is he the true essence of scum, in the usual moral and conventional sense, but he's completely useless as a human being.

Even Roger Stone has held a job at some point, and had to add value to whatever sleazy concern he grifted from at the moment. But D'Souza is one of those true dirtbags who moralizes and preens to no end, while he cheats on his wife and fucks married women, outs gay college students, compares liberals to nazis, participates in election fraud, but never actually does anything useful.

This is another thing that has always annoyed me about Barack Obama:  the man was simply incapable of hating effectively, in the true strategic sense. Forget the paranoia about Nixon's "enemies list" or what-have-you -- if Obama had really made a point of dropping the fucking hammer on people who were asking for it (Joe Lieberman; Addison Graves "Joe" Wilson; D'Souza) he might have engendered some real fear and respect from Mitch the Bitch and his gang of traitors, and gotten more accomplished, instead of having his name and legacy erased in a year by a jism-crusted baboon smearing shit on the walls.

By letting those losers off the hook rather than making well-deserved examples of them, Obama showed himself as a light touch. And that's how you end up with an industry-written health-care reform bill that's mostly a legislative zombie these days, a stolen SCOTUS seat, and on and on. D'Souza should have had to push ass out of some New England hellhole like Walpole, where he would have been traded weekly around the cell block for commissary items. I'm not kidding or exaggerating at all, D'Souza's track record is something that any decent person would be deeply ashamed of. He's a fucking piece of shit.

Instead, he gets a high-profile pardon from Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, which has the triple effect of making a political point to the scum getting ready to roll on Orange Julius, trolling the libtards, and ushering the gutter worm back onto the conservatard radar, where he can once again collect wingnut welfare checks for his hacky little snuff films. I do hope Obama is enjoying his paragliding weekends with Richard Branson. When we needed someone to really fight, and drop ankle-biting turds like D'Isgrace D'Souza down a fucking hole once and for all, we got a patient, calm explanation in cool, professorial tones about why the fight was just and worthwhile.

Never again am I falling for this shit; I want a goddamned eye-gouging street fighter, someone who head-butts the opponent right in the nose, then leans in and goes Mike Tyson on the motherfucker's ear. All you Marquess of Queensberry fools lamenting the absence of decorum can sit right the fuck down, and go back to your accounting jobs or whatever.

Decorum is dead, they wheedled it into their windowless ice cream truck and raped and killed it, and we're not interested in resurrecting it until all the Pogo the Clown types on the other side have been dealt with appropriately and with real finality. I'm dead serious; I want their kids and grandkids to be completely unemployable.

Regardless of whether Fuckface Von Clownstick is impeached or resigns or gets another term, I have zero interest in returning to the gutless incrementalism and performative normalcy of the ambitiously cowed technocrats. The contradictions have been well and truly heightened, ferchrissake. The warning should be sent out to Democrats as well as Republicans -- fight or fuck off. Start bringing a gun to the gunfight for once in your worthless lives, because the other guys certainly are, every time.

To reiterate:  fuck that asshole. Like the rest of them, D'Souza needs to be crushed, made broke and powerless and away from any platform of influence. I hope we have a new generation of Democratic politicians coming in who quit persisting in delusions about "collegiality" with these traitors and thieves, and simply set about to the hard but rewarding work of ending them, of burning their careers and livelihoods to the ground and poisoning the earth beneath.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It

Some light reading:

Rebecca Solnit, The Coup Has Already Happened

Associated Press, The Princes, the President, and the Fortune Seekers

Daniel Larison, [Clownstick] Doesn't Have North Korea 'Cornered'

I suspect that most of us non-cultists veer between good days and bad days, or perhaps between bad days and worse ones. For the most part, I manage to persist in two assumptions that keep the balance mostly on the positive side:

1. That the inept crime syndicate currently running ruining this country are a special combination of arrogant and stupid. They are too arrogant to realize how stupid they really are, and they are too stupid to realize how their arrogance will undo them. This mitigates a lot of the damage they could be doing if they were even marginally competent.
2. That Mueller knows far more actionable information than we do, and is building his case with care and prudence, in order to keep it unassailable when the time comes.

It doesn't take much scrutiny to render these assertions as teleological more than anything; I am counting on these things to be essentially true, more than actually knowing or being able to prove them. They are at best semi-educated guesses, gleaned from years now of spelunking in the self-reinforcing mines of endless data, most of it contextualized as best as possible.

Job Qualification

Not sure why people are up in arms over this rotten cunt; after all, it's no worse than what her boss said a few years ago, and never even considered apologizing for. It's who he is and who they are, chickenhawks using military personnel as cynical props, and the suckers buy it every fucking time.

Question for the class:  is there anything that would turn the cultists against their wampeter, anything at all? I really don't think there is. Any of them could say and do pretty much anything, up to and including shooting a wounded veteran in Times Square, and the morlocks would rush to trot out their usual talking points.

They don't care about anything but grifting and wrecking what's left of this country. To their credit, they don't try to hide it. The sooner the Democrats and the putatively librul media realize that and start behaving accordingly, the sooner we have an outside chance of climbing out of this pit, away from these fucking scummy people.

What, and Give Up Show Business?

It has to be hard fucking work to be as obtuse as Chris Cillizza manages to be, day in and day out. At the very least, he deserves some grudging respect for a rather alarming track record of consistency.

I mean, get this -- Cillizza's premise here is that Baghdad Barb should quit, because her boss keeps sending her out to defend him with lies and half-truths and incomplete bits of disinformation. Apparently Cillizza thinks that this makes Baghdad Barb's boss a bad boss, and undermines poor Barb's ability to do her job. Sad!

Nowhere in this nonsense is the notion that maybe the same principle applies to Jim Acosta, to the other stenographers in the press room, to Cillizza himself. Acosta spends his time trying to bait Baghdad Barb into admitting that she's a flunky, a sap, a shill for a mendacious orange cocksucker in a hilarious combover. He knows she's never going to do that, and even if she did, who gives a shit? Nothing matters anymore. And yet, Jim Acosta presumably earns something resembling a respectable living faithfully executing this sham on a daily basis, just as Chris Cillizza gets his ducats wearily meta-commenting on the dismal proceedings.

At no point are useful facts or inculpatory evidence limned, just endless iterations of this shopworn above-the-fray schtick that informs no one and improves nothing. This is not news; this is filler. It is the pixelated equivalent of single-ply finger-blaster bumwipe, the kind you find in a portajohn.

Cillizza's plaintive querying as to why Baghdad Barb doesn't quit her job doesn't even top the low bar of "rhetorical." It's almost too sad to contemplate that he might actually be asking from a place of seriousness and sincerity, rather than the expected studied cynicism, but there ya go.

And there's an answer for such a question being asked sincerely:  Because she enjoys it. Because like her scumbag boss, she hates the gutless media monkeys, and she hates anyone who questions the emperor, and she loves rubbing their fucking noses in it. She gets moist, as close as she'll ever get to a true sexual frisson, when she vomits a clear and obvious lie into the faces in the crowd, and they sit and wallow in it, lamely trying to volley back with some limpdick question that she can snort and sneer at.

Everyone in the room knows it's all lies, and everyone knows there's not a goddamned thing anyone can or will do about any of it -- including refusing to continue this nonsense. That's power, knowing that she can rub their collective faces in the obvious lies, and they'll still be back the next day, waiting for the next shit sandwich. You wanna know why people despise the media, there's a huge reason.

Fuck you, Jim Acosta. Fuck you, April Ryan. Everything Baghdad Barb says at every one of these stupid, useless exercises in muscle and gall has that as a subtext. She could say to them, Have a great weekend!, and the subtext would still be, Sure hope you don't get plowed by a garbage truck, motherfuckers!

So I would pose Cillizza's question back to him, and to Jim Acosta, and April Ryan, and all the battered wives that keep showing up, day after day:  Is this what you went to j-school for, really? To dutifully appear like an ankle-biting mutt, and valiantly pretend that anyone cares that you know you're being lied to? If a job or career is supposed to have purpose and meaning, what kind of purpose and/or meaning do these exercises serve for you and your career aspirations? You think if you suck enough shit, you'll have a shot at the brass ring, the anchor chair, the panel slot, some fucking bullshit like that. Is that what you tell your kids when they ask what you do, is that what you tell your spouses when they give you that look?

Is that what you noble scriveners will tell yourselves in those quiet moments, when it's just you and a cold drink by the fireplace, no teevee white noise to drown out the contempt you feel for yourself, for what you thought you could and should have been, before you became just another showpiece for these evil fuckers? You ask why doesn't Sarah Sanders quit her job. Why don't you quit yours? Seriously. What purpose is served by these choreographed lies?

I'll tell ya some good journalists right now:  Natasha Bertrand. David Fahrenthold. Alexandra Petri's commentary has been scathing. Catherine Rampell has stepped up her game over the past year considerably. There are others, and what distinguishes them is that they're not squatting in a squalid pit with the Possum Queen, transcribing lies and bullshit, scribbling out remnants of their souls in pained missives that they all know are useless before they're even published. Nobody gives a fuck if Jim Acosta gently pushed back on Baghdad Barb that one time. She says, fuck you, that's why, and he meekly sits back down, and the world keeps on turning. Bokay?

Credibility? She's arguably the most powerful woman in the country right now. That doddering fucktard listens to her, confides in her, trusts her implicitly. Only a simp like Chris Cillizza would seriously think that Baghdad Barb gives a fuck about losing "credibility" in his eyes. She's got fifty million knuckle-dragging morons out there that hang on her every word -- and the more she sticks it to chumps like Jim Acosta, the more they love her.

Part of the kabuki is that these idiots periodically have to grumble about shoveling elephant shit, but let's not kid ourselves -- there's no place they'd rather be. And that's fine, if that's their [rolls eyes] minimum standard of competence. But they can at least spare us the endless posturing that they're somehow above the muck. They are the fucking muck, and the sad part is that they really don't have to be. It's their choice. Everyone in this administration is so vile and corrupt, there's bound to be stories under every rock you flip over. So why sit there and take it, when everyone knows it's bullshit?

It's their decision whether they'd rather die on their feet or live on their knees, but again, stop crying about the uncomfortable kneepads.

Access Washington

Just finished reading David Cay Johnston's The Making of [Fuckface Von Clownstick], and it's a very good (not great, but very good and quick) compilation of the countless small crimes of character His Orangeness rode into his current unearned position of power. As a career investigative reporter, Johnston for the most part wisely avoids editorializing and "analysis" and lets the ugly facts do all the talking.

There were a few specific items in the book I hadn't been aware of, but no real surprises. But there are three (actually more, but let's focus on three) major factors in Clownstick's rise to infamy that Johnston's book ably captures. Here they are in (imho) ascending order of importance:

1. During the Atlantic City casino years, the level of corruption and incompetence in New Jersey's gaming regulation boards was nothing short of criminal. Clownstick should never have been let anywhere near a casino, much less allowed to own one. Every job and investor stake lost in his failures is on the head of every corrupt gaming regulator who chose to look the other way instead of doing their fucking job.
2. In chapter after chapter, Johnston lists one failed scam after another, where Clownstick misrepresented himself and his family and his companies and his interests and stakes in any given project, from Chump "University" to Punta Bandera. In all of these, once the fish get wise and sue his ass, Clownstick ends up settling, contrary to his frequent boasts and LIES. And in all of these cases, the courts sealed the details of the settlements. Gee, it might have been nice for the public to know about these repeated incidents of fraud before the motherfucker ran for fucking political office.
3. The media sucks. Let it be shouted from the rooftops till all our eardrums bleed:  OUR MEDIA FUCKING SUCKS. More than any other entity, more than the in-the-pocket Jersey gaming commissions or the institutionally impotent court system, feckless media careerism is what propelled Clownstick into his current seat. Since the early 1980s, he has lied, bullied, cajoled, stroked, and bamboozled them collectively into giving him a platform to spout his LIES and nonsense, and then left them to lamely scramble after him and maybe (usually not) try to clean up the mess, too little too late.

To cite just one string of examples, how many times during the 2016 campaign was that asshole allowed to phone in from his gold-plated shitter to the Sunday morning follies, on all the networks, one after the other? How the fuck do you interview a presidential candidate over the phone, again and again, especially one with such a tenuous relationship with empirical reality? Yet they let him get away with it, over and over.

 

At no point did any of them say, Fuck it. We're not interviewing him unless he shows up, and then we're hammering him on at least some of the lies. Nope, they just let him call in, say what he wanted to, half-heartedly challenge him on his more egregious lies, but at no point did they stand up to him, or god forbid just refuse to have him on because of the incessant lying.

 

Have I mentioned that that cocksucker does nothing but LIE, about every goddamned thing?

And if today's collective marathon of pearl-clutching in defense of Baghdad Barb doesn't make all this clear, I don't know what will. These people are fucking terrible at their jobs. Or maybe I've just been misinformed all these years as to what their jobs actually are. Maybe they're supposed to suck up to powerful people who despise them. That certainly would explain things much better.

Look, we all get the rapidly changing institutional factors impacting their long-standing revenue model. Even the phrase "twenty-four-hour news cycle" means something completely different than it did from, say 1983 to 2015. Seriously. It used to mean that the cable news channels had so much airtime to fill, practically anything became a news story, or more likely, real news stories got beaten into the ground with incessant coverage and overly obsessive detail.

But the meaning of the phrase has changed since He Who Shall Not Be Named threw his hairpiece into the ring. Now with things happening constantly, there's not enough time to keep up with a given story and cover it with due diligence.

Here's another example:  Sean Hannity, Fox's flagship common-tater, was outed less than two weeks ago as one of three clients of Michael "Smithers" Cohen, the obsequious bratva-linked Clownstick toady, who clearly wants to spend the rest of his life polishing his idol's little cheeto. Now, it's bad enough that Cohen isn't really even a lawyer, he's a "businessman" (big finger quotes there, folks) who happens to have a law degree. He's a wannabe Ray Donovan-type "fixer" who uses said law degree to help his main client take care of things, like paying off his inconvenient hoors.

Now, Hannity has been extremely vocal in his defense of Smithers Cohen and Fuckface Von Clownstick, never once disclosing that he, Hannity, was another client of Cohen. When it finally did come out -- thanks to actual investigative reporting by The Guardian, a British media outlet -- Hannity lamely averred that he was an opinion and entertainment guy, not a serious journalist. NBC fired Brian Williams for far less (although Williams is back in a late-might slot at MSNBC these days, but still), but Fox took it all in stride and said they were fine with Hannity's excuse. Within twenty-four hours of the disclosure, Hannity was joking about it on-air with Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.

Since then -- again, bearing in mind that the initial revelation about Hannity was less than two weeks ago -- we have also found out that Hannity is a slumlord, using his ill-gotten pelf to buy up distressed properties with HUD-backed loans, and promptly jacking up the rent, because he's a fucking scumbag. Oh, and no one is surprised that Hannity has free-spending HUD director Ben Carson on with some regularity. It's all just a big coincidence. This sort of thing, this blatant collusion between a key anchorperson and the people he reports on and talks with, would have been unacceptable, even at Fox, just a few years ago.

Not to mention Clownstick's bizarre call-in rant to Fox & Fiends last Thursday, which now (please please) might be a monthly standing appointment. Fox is now officially a propaganda organ for these fuckers, and they aren't bothering to conceal it one bit.

Do gutless media twats like Chris Cillizza pontificate on those sorts of inconvenient truths? Why no, they prefer to grumble about the incivility of comedians calling out lazy media tools for their feckless, dickless careerism. Fucking lazy hypocrites, all of them. They are in the wrong line of work. They really are hurting America.

There are no consequences or accountability for bad behavior anymore. And that's what Johnston's book is really about, in the end -- this steaming orange turd is in charge because at every step of the way, when the courts, the media, the fucking gaming commissions had a chance to hold this fucking piece of shit accountable for the things he'd done, they pushed it off. They let it go; they let him go.

Fuckface Von Clownstick's entire existence -- indeed, his sole actual skill -- has been an extended exercise in getting other people to pay for his high-on-the-hog lifestyle. And he's been enabled the entire time by access journalism, from Page Six to the Today show, these careerist hacks who are more concerned with getting eyeballs and filling airtime than in calling an asshole what he is.

In a rational world, we'd drop him and his vile minions off on a remote island with all the Beltway hacks, let them deal with each other, and never hear from any of them again. They made him, they should be the ones to have to live with him.

There's a Fox Among the Chickens, and a Killer in the Hounds

Of course, no one can possibly surprised that that fucking melon-headed mick Hannity is so far up his master's ass he might as well be a tapeworm. Just imagine for a second if (just spitballing a random example) Rachel Maddow had been shilling aggressively for Preznit Hillary, that it was public knowledge that they regularly had dinners together, that Clinton called Maddow regularly after her show and sought her advice, and that, oh by the way, they have the same fucking lawyer, the same lawyer that Maddow went batshit over when said lawyer's office was raided by the SDNY and FBI.

Hannity is literally functioning as a surrogate for Fuckface Von Clownstick, while pretending to provide something remotely resembling fact-based analysis of current events. He is perhaps the most compromised, in-the-tank hack ever to squat his fat ass in front of a camera, and considering the piece-of-shit network he's a part of, that's saying something.

Neither their audience nor their detractors are under any illusions about whether Fox News is anything more than a cheap, transparent agitprop shop. That's all they've ever been, it's their sole purpose, and all the Shep Smith or Juan Williams useful-idiot types don't change that a bit. A vile Australian who simply refuses to do the right thing and die already, who is literally the model for The Simpsons' C. Montgomery Burns, uses his entertainment network to bankroll his propaganda network, a place with an institutionalized culture of coercing its female employees into sex. Fuck every single person who sets foot into that cursed building.

Fox has to go. Every bit of it. Fox News, Fox Entertainment, Fox Fucking Football. It's all part of the same evil, lying, self-dealing org. Boycott all of it, whether it's Tucker Carlson or Family Guy. Sign every petition you can find, send a note to as many of their advertisers as you have stomach for. Put them all out of work, make them earn an honest living at long last. Burn it all to the ground, salt the earth, piss on the ashes. This can't go on. We have to stop normalizing and accepting this behavior with a shrug. There needs to be accountability for poisoning the well.

[Update 4/17/18 8:30 PM PDT:  Chuck Toad is another useless sack of shit who needs to go find honest work as well. Fire all of them and start over.]

Motor Shitty Asshole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested Line of Questioning

John Bolton, he of the hilarious facial hair and questionable sex history, really is the worst of the worst -- vainglorious, full of shit about every-goddamned-thing, the stereotypical fake-tough armchair warrior. So he's perfect for this steaming choad of an administration.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the ultimate outcome of Bolton's selection, if only because Bolton has always been such a toxic presence, such an abysmal boss whose subordinates fucking loathe his very existence, that it will take him most of the spring and summer to "clean house" of people who might dare to disagree with his rush to sacrifice other people for his own bullshit principles. And all during that time Bolton's even more toxic boss will be doing and saying any number of stupid things, further alienating and demoralizing the margins of his own base, while further motivating the determination of opponents to push these motherless fucks into the outhouse of history, where they belong.

It seems like a roughly 99% certainty that Bolton was selected entirely because it would piss off the usual caricatured libtard snowflakes, as well as anyone with a triple-digit IQ. But as they are finding out the hard way, that's not really how you govern a country, because you can't get much of anything done. Good for everyone else, but good luck making a case that the only thing you've been successful at so far is monetizing all your Cabinet posts.

One thing that Fuckface Von Clownstick can lay claim to is a dogged repetition in his stump rhetoric. He says the same things over and over and over again, braying like a sunburnt mule about the same handful of imaginary grievances and positions. One issue he has been consistent about is his (false) claim about opposing the Iraq War, how it was a disaster, how his unique genius made him so prescient he just knew better than all those generals and smart-guy planners.

Well, as most of us know, one of those smart-guy planners was John Bolton, who still makes no bones about his feelings on the rightness and necessity of that war, the rest of the world be damned, the rest of that war's own architects be damned. Journalists can and should ask Bolton at the next opportunity about that, and ask him to elaborate. Bolton's a gaping asshole and a strategic moron, but he can think and speak extemporaneously.

Obviously there are any number of legitimate reasons to ask a new National Security Advisor to elaborate on his continued support for the unmitigated disaster of that war. So they need to do just that, and then they need to turn right around and ask Clownstick (if he's available), or one of his simpering dogsbodies about this vital inconsistency.

For once, take these jabbering idiots at their word -- if the emperor so fervently believes that the Iraq War was one of the biggest mistakes the US has ever made, then why for fuck's sake has he made one of that war's most ardent cheerleaders his national security adviser? It's a serious question that needs to be asked. This asshole wants war with Iran and North Korea, and is not above doing so pre-emptively. It's easy to learn nothing from the previous mistake, when you have no skin in the game.

Because our media entities are mostly crap, they will not bother with such important questions, besotted as they are with the more salacious details of the Stormy Daniels case (ignoring, of course, the most interesting detail by far -- that Clownstick's NDAs read like poorly transcribed Nolo templates, and he has his staff [illegally; they work for us, not him] sign NDAs as well, thus potentially opening the floodgates for tell-all books that will make Fire and Fury look like My Pet Goat). But someone needs to ask, and soon. Stop transcribing shameless lies, and start forcing these assholes to answer some real questions.

Both Sides Now

I don't really have much to offer on the subject of MSM concern trolling of "liberals" and "leftists" as those definitions even still exist as we might have understood them ten or twenty years ago, because whether it's coming out of James Bennet's troll farm or from the soi-disant conservative end, the results are the same, and you shall know their sloppy thinking by their works. Their crapulence should be self-evident enough that you don't need some random numbskull such as yours truly to connect the dots.

But the opening example from the above-linked AmCon essay deserves attention:

Earlier this March, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivors David Hogg and Cameron Kasky appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher.” Kasky used the opportunity to respond to those like NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch who he feels have used the activists’ young age as an excuse to say they don’t know what they are talking about. Kasky boldly declared: “We’ve been locked in a classroom. We have seen our friends text their parents goodbye. We are the experts. We know exactly what we’re talking about. How dare you tell us we don’t know?” Having endured a horrific and traumatizing experience, it’s understandable that Kasky would answer critics with emotion.

The bigger problem is that such emotional arguments have become the norm in our society. As Charles C.W. Cooke recently argued in National Review, it is wrong and belittling to dismiss Hogg and the other activists from Parkland simply because they are young, just as it is wrong to say that they should be immune from criticism on account of their age. If these students want to chime in on a national debate, it is their right to speak their minds and enter the scrum. Accordingly, their ideas should be criticized and praised under the same criteria as anyone else’s. In that spirit, it is rather difficult to accept Kasky’s claim to expertise solely by his being present at the scene of a horrific crime.

This is disingenuous enough to give a bad name to concern trolling, which is saying something. Let's break down the operational phrase "NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch," shall we? The NRA lobbies on behalf of gun manufacturers, not gun owners. It's a crucial difference between customer and product -- gun owners are the product that the NRA brings to their customers, by pushing booga-booga nonsense about so-and-so coming to take your arsenal, which you totally need in case you have to fight off the eeevil gubmint you claim to revere. Something like that; it becomes increasingly difficult to parse their self-contradictory jabber.

Anyhoo, Dana Loesch is the (urp!) spokesmodel peddling said paranoid jabber to old white men who buy into such guff, and regard her as eye candy. Loesch regards herself as eye candy as well, as she has also tried to pitch a sitcom idea for herself to star in as a "hot young mom." Um, okay. Can't believe they passed on that one.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is that not only is Dana Loesch delusional, she is a carny peddling gun paranoia to Dale Gribble burger-militia types between "jobs" out in BFE. Loesch's thinly veiled threats of armed insurrection may give the Cletii a chub, but the main thing is that she is making nakedly emotional appeals to the rubes she's selling to the gun manufacturers.

You see, it turns out that orange is not the new black after all -- since Fuckface Von Clownstick slithered into orifice, gun sales have tumbled, and Remington has filed for bankruptcy. The reasons have a cultural component, but it's mostly just math -- most people purchasing a gun these days already have one, or ten, or fifty, and so are not incentivized to buy more without something tickling their prostateparanoia gland. Enter Dana Loesch. [giggity]

So this glib chuckler walking past Loesch's role in all this really is not only inexcusable, it's the crux of the biscuit in this here argument. True, Cameron Kasky's role as victim/bystander in a tragic mass murder does not automatically confer upon him the role of "expert" in determining Second Amendment policy. His arguments can and should be scrutinized and contested where they might be flawed, just like anyone else.

But Dana Loesch is no expert either. She's a paid shill for a group that by its own inflated estimation accounts for maybe 5 million people, which is not peanuts, but is also a drop in a bucket of 320 million citizens. The NRA wraps themselves in the fucking flag and claims to represent all Americans, when in fact they represent weapons manufacturers, and count (probably falsely at that) a thin sliver of Americans as paid members. It's actually a pretty impressive racket when you think about it.

I'm not sure what the ultimate intent or endgame of the Parkland survivors will be; it's possible they don't even know for sure yet. They're probably still in "mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore" mode, and they should be. So far what they've done is impressive, and I hope they are able to accomplish more. Even if I end up disagreeing with the specifics of this or that policy proposal, I respect the fact that they've organized and mobilized and made it clear that they're not taking shit from any of these scumbags. Because that is exactly what Loesch and Wayne LaPierre and all the politicians they rent really are. Their gun fetish and the money it brings in are much more important to them than the safety of schoolchildren, every time.

We should be disgusted that not only is this the only nation on the planet that has these events occur, much less with regularity, but also that when they happen, there is always a claque of paid actors (such as Loesch, whom you can be sure does not work pro bono) who will scuttle out of the woodwork and claim that the survivors are paid actors.

Forget the false equivalences and the harrumphed pronunciamentos about arguing from emotion instead of reason: the real problem here is that when these tragedies occur, equal time and footing is given to horrible people, who are not yoked to any moral compass, who have no sense of shame or common decency, who are comfortable arguing from bad faith, peddling lies and hypocrisy.

And then you have the professional commentariat trotting out with their same tired-ass chin-stroking both-sider template. We'll see how creative they get when Loesch's calls for armed rebellion turn into bouts of domestic terrorism, because that's really the demographic she's been stoking all along, trying to gin up gun sales in a down market.

Let's cut the shit here, folks: what we've been watching here is a bunch of high-schoolers taking on one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country, as well as all of those rented political weasels. There's no fucking equal footing here; no one is paying any of these kids to stick their necks out on this, but every single one of the talking heads pitted against them is paid quite well, count on it.

Fuck those people, every last one of them. At this point, I don't care if gun-control advocates do start wanting full confiscation, as improbable as that might be, as impossible as it would be to carry out. Because no matter which party is power anymore, I want to see these motherfuckers lose, every time, from here on out. If they order a hot pastrami sandwich from a deli, I want them to get shit on a shingle.

Enough is enough. This nation has been held hostage by a handful of fetishists for far too long, and they need either to accept some very reasonable and modest checks on their "inalienable right," or we need to start revisiting the whole concept. The other 315 million people who are not NRA members do not owe that 1.56% sliver a goddamned thing.

Fucking Traitors

Remember these names. They hate their own country, and sold it down the river. We'll see how they split and spend their thirty pieces of silver.

But keep their names in mind, because some of them may try to slither away from what they've done. They might read the tea leaves and "retire" early, though many of them are in safe districts and/or are longtime incumbents. They might even get voted out in November, at which point some of them will try to come back in some form or other, most likely as lobbyists of some sort, since scum merely change form as needed.

That's when you write the companies that employ them, the teevee networks that give them guest spots, the newspapers and magazines that grant them op-ed space, and fucking boycott them as well. This cannot go on anymore; these motherless fucks must be held accountable for what they've done, and the only thing they really listen to is financial ruin.

It's shameful that these things -- they are no longer human, afaic -- have freely chosen to do what they've done. But it's downright baffling and pathetic that they've chosen to do so for someone so clearly unworthy of such devotion, because Fuckface Von Clownstick would throw each and every one of them into a wood chipper, if he thought it would make another half-empty airport hangar of losers and goons chant along with him.

This was clearly a desperation gambit on the part of these puling weasels, and from the looks of every one of their Twitter feeds, it's going to backfire bigly on them. Every single post on most of the pages is absolutely livid. This bullshit will not stand. These fuckers need to be put on the street, and their corrupt, treasonous party needs to be put down for good.

Social Justice Worriers

A thorough post-mortem analysis of the 2016 election will include the inevitable effects of reactionary sentiments, especially against putatively "progressive" causes that made the rounds in that year and the couple years preceding it. Some of this reactionarism certainly had its roots in racism, as the folks in the Black Lives Matter movement (insofar as it even qualifies as such) can attest.

Some of the working-class frustrations, whether real or cynically exploited by the Koch-Mercer-Murdoch axis of evil, had at least a strata of truth. Imagine someone out in the 'murka's vaunted heartland, town decimated by outsourcing, smart kids left and dumb ones stayed and impregnated each other, no prospects, no future, just the steady drip of generational dilapidation, punctuated by the occasional limp parade through town on the veterans' holidays, to remind of lost greatness and vigor. They've put up with this shit for some years, and are now watching those people riot, disrespect cops, and such like.

Now throw on immigrants collecting social services and squeezing out anchor babies, campus smart-asses jabbering about intersectional micro-grievances, and transvestites demanding restroom privileges, and Democratic politicians paying far more attention to such things than even mentioning (much less actually visiting and witnessing firsthand) the decaying Mayberries across the country. You can see where those folks might conclude that Something Had To Be Done, even if you completely disagree (as you should) that their chosen electoral action had any basis in operational reality.

In other words, people across the political spectrum can and should be able to see where people in many areas in the US might feel like their lives and communities are well and truly fucked, and their fat-cat pols are non-responsive. And yet they still should be able to see that electing a fake billionaire who apparently got a heart transplant from George Wallace might not be the solution to that set of problems.

It is perhaps the mark of a society that is collectively doing better than it thinks it is, when a sufficient number of people have the luxury to complain about micro-aggressions and triggering and the other inane jargon terms of the intersectional grievance claque. However, the corollary to that might be that you could say the same thing about a society that has the luxury of complaining about those complainers, especially when there are far worse challenges staring us all in the face.

There are the obvious big-picture transgressions:

• the piss-colored rosacea golem squatting in the people's house, profiteering illegally with impunity, sending his dipshit progeny to conduct sensitive high-level negotiations that hold countless lives in the balance;
• the steadily mounting evidence that a hostile foreign nation affected a US presidential election with the complicity of the victor and his campaign staff;
• a stolen SCOTUS seat;
• the Republican Party's rapid devolution into a proto-fascist enabling regime;
• the Democratic Party's typically dickless response -- these fuckers stole a Supreme Court seat and the election, and the only thing you assholes grandstand about is the so-called Dreamers?;
• the various cabinet ministers whose respective missions amount to killing off the agencies they have been appointed to oversee;
• the sizable minority that still supports such nonsense, directly counter to their own rational self-interest and that of the country they self-righteously claim to revere.

It is no exaggeration to say that it may take another full generation to come back from these things. Any and all of them are so much worse than whatever esoteric jabber some humanities major is concocting in their Wednesday empowerment group.

I've been rereading some of what I wrote in the immediate aftermath of the election, and one thing from then that certainly holds up is that the defiling of the Oval Office with the likes of Fuckface Von Clownstick really is the political equivalent of 9/11, in that it has literally changed how everyone, regardless of political persuasion, thinks and perceives pretty much everything in that arena.

The mainstream media have mostly relegated themselves to covering the daily follies and outrages, sputtering in impotent perplexity that he keeps getting away with it. But they still show up dutifully to be lied to by Baghdad Barb, who makes no effort to conceal her contempt for them. And rightly so -- they have forgotten what their real mission is, and so the majority show up like pathetic dogs, waiting to get their heads kicked in by their abusive owner. It's painful to watch. Everything changed, but they have not.

What does all this have to do with the SJW types? Not much, really, except to point out that most reasonable people can agree that the bumptious PC nonsense spewing forth from the campus crusaders is frustrating at best, but mostly eye-rolling and obnoxious. The paucity of critical thinking, the herd mentality of political correctness, the reflexive squelching of opposing views, all contribute to a stifled orthodoxy that, as most people outside academia can tell you, will be beaten out of them by the real world almost the instant they hit the street. Anybody working an honest job does not have time to parse the nuances of intersectionality.

No, the real world has much worse issues, many of which have been thrown in sharp relief by recent events. The Parkland school shooting in Florida is a prime example. It is a mundane, now routine observation that the US is the only nation on the planet where this sort of thing happens, much less happens on a frequent basis that we have all become accustomed to.

What compounds this gruesome calculus is that we are now also the only nation where the survivors of such events are routinely attacked, mocked, lied about, threatened. It was awful enough when that fat fuck Alex Jones disseminated the idea that the parents of the second-graders murdered in their classroom at Sandy Hook were "crisis actors," people brought forth to perpetuate a tragedy that never happened, in order to engage in the fruitless, endless quest for even modest gun control.

Now we are picking on teenagers who have had the temerity to stand up for themselves and speak their minds. About the mildest reproach I have seen toward these kids is the notion that since a handful of kids roughly the same age have gained some YouTube notoriety doing the "Tide Pod Challenge," that entire generation is therefore disqualified from even opining on the complexities of law-abidin' gun fetishists.

I would suggest that for the past several years, this whole goddamned nation has been participating in an ongoing Tide Pod Challenge, ever since the day that ridiculous asshole came down the escalator and tossed his piss-colored wig into the ring.

The Parkland survivors, most of them still (barely) too young to vote (but you can be assured that they will), provide some measure of hope beyond the gun control debate itself. They are proving first and foremost that we don't have to take shit from the right-wing nutjobs and their hired scum. They are demonstrating the hypocrisy of the bloodthirsty NRA and its shills, especially the loathsome Dana Loesch.

The NRA does not represent gun owners, it represents gun manufacturers, and Dana Loesch is a paid spokes-tool. This is something I have pointed out in one-on-one conversations with my gun-owning NRA friends -- they think they are customers, but they are the product. The NRA is basically a gigantic mailing list, a market for the NRA's true customers -- that is, the manufacturers -- since most guns are now purchased by people who already own guns. This is a very powerful statistic that underpins the entire problem, despite all the distracting rhetoric about "culture" and whatnot.

It should not be a terrible thing for a group of crime victims -- kids who watched their friends and classmates and teachers get murdered by a psychotic ex-classmate with an AR-15 -- to collectively observe that it should be at least somewhat challenging for such a person to have access to a military-grade weapon. In a country where schools are notoriously underfunded and teachers underpaid, it is retarded to insist that the best solution is to invest money into turning schools into fortified citadels, and teachers into trained killers.

But most of all, the hypocrisy of paid assholes such as Loesch excoriating victims as somehow insincere or financially goaded into the stance they've taken, well, that should be completely unacceptable. But in three short years, this orange animal and his dirtbag failsons and the paid cockroaches who enable and support him, they have turned this country on its collective head, practically eliminated our ability to process disgust and outrage at things that used to require very little time to arrive at that destination.

When and if the US climbs out of the abyss we have collectively thrust ourselves into, there will be a great many things that will need to be repaired. Almost certainly, the first thing that will need to be done is to formulate a highly specific set of protocols prohibiting the chief executive, and their family and staff, from personally enriching themselves through their elected office. A blind trust will be truly blind, not a wink and a nod to the aforementioned failsons minding daddy's grift machine while he pretends to be in charge. You can't just send your knockoff-handbag-peddling daughter to a geopolitical flashpoint to conduct highly sensitive strategic negotiations regarding a country with which we are still technically at war, because you're too fucking lazy to appoint a proper ambassador to the region.

But more intangibly, and hence more difficult to reclaim, will be our capacity for cynicism, and the ability to translate that into action. The sheer mendacity of every one of these fucking people is exhausting. This is beyond mere policy disagreements -- they are vile humans, every last one of them, and they have taken up actively against the interest of their own country. They are nothing short of traitors, and one hopes futilely that some sort of justice will eventually find some or most of them.

In the meantime, maybe we focus on that which is in front of us and actually threatens us all. Again, the campus crybabies will find out soon enough just how little use the real world has for their grievances of privilege. There are too many academic types on the opposing ideological side who have a vested interest in stoking those differences, otherwise they'd have nothing to write about, and then might be forced to ply an honest trade.

But we have kids dying, adults bullying the survivors, a claque of scummy oligarchs undermining the fundaments of the republic, and media monkeys who can't find their own assholes in a dark room with both hands an a flashlight. It is now more important than ever for us all to keep our eyes on the ball.

The Wart On Christmas

When Fuckface Von Clownstick proclaims that no president has done as much as he has in such a short time, he has a point:  in less than a year, Von Clownstick has managed to ruin football, the internet, and Christmas. As always, the liberal media gets credit for an assist:

“It offends me,” [some random dipshit] continued, “to see at the stores, where they just do ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Seasons Greetings.’ It should be ‘Merry Christmas.’ Put Christ back into Christmas. That’s what it’s supposed to be. . . . I just wish we would all get on the same page.”

Trump tapped into this sentiment on the campaign trail when he promised that if he was elected president, everyone would say “Merry Christmas” again — never mind that most Americans never stopped.

....

“We can’t say ‘Christmas,’ because there’s too many Muslims and Buddhists and Hindus, and it offends them,” said Naomi DePriest, a property manager in her mid-50s whose husband farms, over a lunch of fried catfish and ribs at Hens and Hogs. “I think they should keep Christ in Christmas, which is what they said originally, and to heck with anybody that don’t like it. Anybody that’s Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, let them do what they want to do, but don’t criticize those that want to keep Christ in Christmas.”

I've gone fifty circuits now on this overburdened blue-green pear, orbiting our yellow ball of fire, and I read way more (and specifically way more political jabber) than any sane person ought to, and I have never -- like not even once -- heard or read of a non-christian or even an atheist complaining about any distinction or preference between "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings" or whatthefuckever people choose to say.

Yes, you occasionally have your ACLU types striving valiantly (and usually in futility) to remove nativity scenes from publicly owned sites, but that's about the extent of it. You want to talk about insufferable fucking snowflakes, these jagoffs are the worst. They are demented in their delusions of persecution. The only time anyone has ever been told what to say during the holiday season has been as a matter of a perhaps more inclusive, if ultimately misguided, corporate policy. Don't like it? Then boycott the company, quit your job, whatever it takes, snowflake. Anything less would make Fentanyl Baby Jebus cry.

It's at least somewhat heartening to know that in the age of modern medical miracles, we have finally achieved the ability to perform brain transplants. Unfortunately, these rubes have chosen to exchange their brains for root vegetables. Ruta-bay-ee-a-ga, ruta-bay-ee-a-ga!

But again, the real problem here is not the angry rubes per se, it's that a national newspaper feels the urge to trudge out to some abandoned shithole where no one lives in the first place, and dutifully stenograph the deep thoughts of these dopey losers. I don't give a fuck what they think about anything, especially not Christmas, and their imagined persecution complex. They can spend the rest of their lives festering bitterly in their broke-ass hick town, wondering why they're being forced at gunpoint to bake cakes for faggots and memorize Family Guy scripts.

I don't care what morons are worried about, and no matter how many times the media-industrial complex humps my naked leg, I will never care. They pollute the world with their idiot nonsense, and the last thing the world needs is more insufferable retards. Unless, of course, their so-called revolution can be monetized.

What a truly liberal media would do is remind them -- remind us all -- that Christmas is really a holiday celebrating an anchor baby whose homeless mama had a bullshit story about her sex life. And they might talk to an actual liberal once in a great while, instead of repeatedly going out of their way to statistically insignificant places, to pretend that the demented ravings of fist-shaking codgers have any truth or utility to them.

Ridiculous People

Because he's a ricockulous, spray-tanned slab of shit, Emperor Snowflake deigned to spend Thanksgiving "visiting" some Coast Guard members with -- reader, I shit you not -- fucking turkey sandwiches and mini-bags of tater chips. Nice, right? Way to support Our Sacred Troops, asshole -- have Subway cater your bullshit Thanksgiving handjob. What a useless fucking chump he is.

During which, of course, because he operates in the washed-up never-was schlock-rocker "enough about me, what do you think about my album?" demi-monde, he regaled the hapless attendees with his illustrious accomplishments.

Fuckface Von Clownstick is the "political" equivalent of Meat Loaf trying to pick up chicks in 2017 by singing parts of Paradise by the Dashboard Light. He seriously has no idea just how goddamned ridiculous he is, every fucking time, every step of the way. First name's Jerk, last name's Off.

Hopefully, many of us have things to be thankful for, away from the feculent sewer of this man and his entire oeuvre of louche incompetence. At or near the top of such a list should be the fact that none of us had to spend one precious moment around this wretched excuse for a human being and his enabler. These people are fucking awful, and they're going down, and for that we can all be thankful.