Verbum Dei

One of the more tedious ongoing narratives in the current mediasphere is the supposed rending of garments in the Catholic church over (surprise!) the roughly ten-millionth "revelation" of pederast priests raping and abusing children. That it's a subject yet again for "discussion" merely reiterates once again the utter paucity of ideas, of clear thought, of individuals in free societies deciding to once and for all during their brief existences on the mortal plane of flesh and futility to assert their own rights.

There are few good things about religion, any religion, and they're generally outweighed by all the bad things. But perhaps the best thing about religion, even in a frequently puritanical country like the United States, is that it's purely voluntary. No one makes any adult go to church, any church, and certainly no one forces anyone to stay in any church that preys on their children and their wallets.

No matter what this or any pope says about his internal anguish over these vile events, the prime directive of that position is to preserve the organizational structure, to do nothing that would threaten the authority of the hierarchy, and its sacred ability to prise cash from it eternal customers. That's not going to change, no matter how "progressive" the current pope's views are on gays and atheists and such. The job description remains what it's always been for two millennia.

The good news is that most of the major western churches have been losing younger customers, who simply aren't sufficiently interested or motivated to join a club with dues they can't pay and rules they won't obey. Especially in 'murka, where self-help books and lifestyle gurus function as the secular religion of the would-be upwardly mobile. The "solace" that religion can provide pales in comparison to the possibility of consumerist redemption in the temple of the holy kardashian.

So the dilemma for the spiritually conflicted is actually fairly simple:  either you support this, with your dollars and your commitment, or you don't. Rationalizing with "times have changed" bunkum won't help, not after the next eventual revelation, and the one after that, and so on. If they want to be Charlie Brown to the pope's Lucy, and keep on believin' that this time they'll get to kick the football, they are welcome to it. But the rest of us don't care and don't want to know.

Then again, like all "news" stories, the article and those like it aren't meant to reach or inform the ordinary reader, the peon with plenty of opinions but no power whatsoever. What we think of as news is really just the amalgamation of elites talking to each other, and filtered out to the masses as manufactured, pre-approved consent. Whether the priest wears a collar and speaks Latin, or wears a suit and spews state-sponsored bullshit, the result is the same.

News Cycle Filler

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interview with the Vampire

So we're all having good fun with the "Bowling Green Massacre" gaffe on the part of one Kellyanne Conway, soulless political hack and serial LIAR. (I think it's important to capitalize the words associated with LYING, in order to draw attention to the useless meatbags who do that for a living. Fuck them all, right in their tiny little coal-lump hearts. Conway is a fucking LIAR, every moment that she is conscious, and probably even when she is sleeping.)

For one, I would suggest that it wasn't a "mistake" at all, but merely another brick in the wall of disinformation this regime intends to utilize to secure its tentacles in the consciousness of its morlock voting base. These retards will believe literally anything, so long as it affirms their usual nonsense, and this is the sort of thing that feeds right into their booga-booga-moooslim paranoia.

Conway can try to dodge all she wants, and pretend this was all an "honest mistake," but her own words betray the truth, when she tries to insinuate that the media conspired to leave this tragic story uncovered. To which we can only say, If only that story had actually occurred.

But fuck all that. What needs to be asked of our intrepid media fools is why Conway needs to be "invited" on at all. What does she do? She LIES, over and over again. She's a fucking LIAR, pure and simple. Honestly, what is the point of having her on these stupid shows. I've got hands, I can jerk myself off. I don't need this LYING dingbat to fucking LIE to me one more LYING time.

The corporate media will probably never thrive again, not in this environment. People are simply too niched at this point, in acquiring the (dis)information they use to "inform" their decisions and opinions. And the media, in their insane quest for what they think of as objectivity, have actually managed to do nothing but piss off people on all sides of the political spectrum, because their version of objectivity has exposed them as untrustworthy for the most part. Even when their information turns out to be verifiable and empirically correct, too often it couched in the sonorous idiocies of High Broderism, the "both sides do it" system of false equivalence that gives flat-earth opinions a seat at the debate table.

So a question for said media solons:  what, if anything, would happen if, instead of having Conway on, and "challenging" her bald-faced LIES, only to let her counter them with MORE LIES, to your faces and then afterward on her Twitter account, what if you just stopped having her on at all? What value do her LIES add, seriously? Her role is to muddy the waters, and she is very good at that, but as much as the media dorks think that they're clarifying said waters, they really aren't.

So again, really, what harm would be done if they just didn't have her on at all anymore, since she's just wasting everyone's time and harming America?

[Update 2/4/17 10:00 PST:  Never thought I'd see the day where I'd be praising CNN for growing a pair, but we are indeed in strange times now. This is what it's going to take -- overpaid meat puppets being forced to make an existential decision about who and what they really are, and whether it means anything to them. It appears that CNN is making that decision, here and now. Good for them. Hopefully the Big Three follow suit, and quickly. The only reason to have Conway on should be to force her to defend Clownstick's nightly rage-tweets, one by one, and then make fun of her pathetic attempts to cover for him after her segment is over.]

All Or Nothing

Okay, this bullshit meme about taking Clownstick "literally but not seriously" versus the other way around has to stop. Right. Fucking. Now. For the media's sake, and for their consumers' sake.

I'm still kicking this notion around, and will expand on it in an upcoming post, but the bottom line is that if a journalist, or anyone who is supposed to be dealing in objective facts and informed opinions, starts letting their subjects dictate the tempo and tone of actual coverage, then there is literally, seriously no fucking point in said coverage.

Of course his entire scampaign was an extended troll, and it worked, so of course he's going to keep doing it, for as long as they keep falling for it. They are devaluing their own currency, and getting spun hard in the process, to the point where many of them do not seem to know how to cover him.

There are rules to the job of president, basic rules and norms which all holders of that position must follow, if this thing is to work. Probably the most basic of those rules is that while what the president says may fall within a greater context, the minimum expectation is that he speaks for all Americans. Literally. Seriously. This is not a new expectation, and we are not changing the rules and expectations because a reality-teevee pro-wrestling hack squeaked in by his hairpiece.

Job Qualification

It's interesting to see just how indignant some media folks are over Matt Lauer's passive, enabling "candidate forum" the other night. It's as if they expected some other -- any other -- outcome from having a morning-show hack from a key corporate media monopoly "interview" a reality-teevee actor from one of that same network's shows from the past decade. Did anyone expect anything other than inept softballs?

I mean, yes, Lauer is certainly welcome to fuck off and die; that shitshow the other night was just a ramped-up continuation of what Lauer has done his entire career, which is to hurt America. And now that hurt is on the verge of becoming quite literal. Not that it hurts Lauer, of course; he makes more money in a year than you and I will see in our entire lives. The only thing that would hurt him is if he lost his elite status.

People who fancy themselves as media-watchers, implying that they are savvy to what the corporate media minions are really all about, miss the point by a mile when they start trying to suss out the political preferences of this or that reporter. I have no idea whether Lauer considers himself liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat. Probably votes Democrat more often than not, maybe even fancies himself a good and generous citizen by contributing to the Clinton Foundation, if properly invited to the appropriate appletini soiree in the Hamptons. Whatever. Such considerations are irrelevant.

Rock and Roll Over

It's a small but somehow fitting irony that the inventor of the Pet Rock passed away just in time for April Fool's Day. For those folks too young to remember it, the Pet Rock -- and its numerous imitators, perhaps the most noteworthy at that time being the Invisible Dog Leash -- was one of those products that were quintessentially American, that could not have succeeded anywhere else.

Sure, there have been tulip crazes and such like, people paying vastly more for a product than it was objectively worth. But with the Pet Rock, you finally had the apex, the holy grail of marketing. Our usual snarky definition of marketing is "getting people to spend money they don't really have on something they don't really want." (And at Christmas, perhaps for someone they don't really like).

This presaged a new era of marketing, though, the sort of thing that would have made Don Draper break one in his no-press slacks. Here was something that people bought that had no objective worth whatsoever, that was purchased not just ironically but semiotically, a cultural signifier that you were in on the joke. This was something you could literally find in your backyard, thrown in a silly package, something that all observers could see had no intrinsic value, lying inert, much like the recorded catalog of Kanye West. [Ed: Hi-yoooooo!]

Since PR and marketing are the rackets that really run the industrialized world, far larger than the usual finance / health care / higher ed beasts combined (indeed, by definition, all rackets depend on PR and marketing in order to get people to accept the ripoff and ask for more), it makes sense that the scumbags who run the political circus would sit up on their hind legs and take notice.

As Mad Men finishes up its run, it has noted repeatedly that that era was where PR weasels finally crystallized their understanding that people buy the sizzle at least as much as the steak. An even more important realization was that many people are more than willing to buy just the sizzle (fo shizzle), and not even worry about the steak.

If you're old enough to recall the Pet Rock, then you probably also recall a time when Ronald Reagan was not taken seriously as a viable presidential candidate. Then in the mid-'90s, a dimwit fuck-up son of another preznit name o' Gee Dub Bush (aka Fredo Arbusto) first beat a popular governor in Texas, and then clawed and cheated his way into the White House. But the bar had been lowered.

Several years later, Sarah Palin, and now Ted Cruz. Not to mention the countless jabbering assholes and buffoons that litter the Senate and especially the House, brazen dickheads like Louie Gohmert and Scott DesJarlais, whom you wouldn't have allowed to clean your gutters twenty or thirty years ago.

In "inventing" a fun, silly way to make a few ducats for himself and his (I shit you not) investors, Gary Dahl inadvertently also demonstrated that the bar can always get lower in this country, even in more important areas of life, with the proper marketing.

News of the Whirled

It's odd, yet somehow fitting, that Brian Williams gets caught "conflating" his war stories at almost the exact same time as Jon Stewart announces that he's leaving The Daily Show. Who knows, maybe the impending demise of Williams' career played a part in Stewart's decision. Obviously the two are good friends, and Stewart walked a fine line in lampooning Williams' gaffe, and presenting a greater context for it.

Williams seems like a nice enough guy, and with his appearances on 30 Rock and Daily Show and such like, he's cemented that perception in the public mind. Given his position as corporate news reader, making such appearances is more crucial to career stability and advancement than, say, actual journalistic research. Stewart, on the other hand, may literally be the closest thing to an actual journalist this country has on television, though John Oliver has jumped in impressively and taken it up a notch, with deeper digging and no filters at all. And David Carr's recent untimely passing is a reminder of what real journalists do.

What we've become accustomed to thinking of as "journalism" most often involves video, rather than audio or (god forbid) print. Judicious editing and tight narrative replace nuance and context. The corporate logo, by definition, requires hewing to an establishment line. No doubt Brian Williams considers himself a serious journalist, and even though the helicopter he was riding in did not get hit, he still rode in a helicopter in a combat zone. Not that it matters; the most important subtext of a combat embed is that you're not showing a thing without the approval of the military and the government.

And it's not a minor detail that the conservatools bleating the loudest about Williams' typical lamestream perfidy are mum about the many prevarications of their latest and greatest totem, Chris Kyle. They do not care that Kyle almost certainly fabricated several image-building war anecdotes (one of which ended in a fat judgment against Kyle's estate in the favor of Jesse Ventura), and likely at least embellished some parts of his combat record.

To that point, actually I don't much care about Kyle's lies all that much either, insofar as they don't negate the things that Kyle did that are verifiable. And that's part of the point about Brian Williams. He's merely a product of the machine he works for, a machine that by design employs and promotes team players such as Williams, affable faces to provide a semblance of information between commercials for a tired, bored populace that wasn't going to rise up anyway. This is how consent is manufactured, and pharmaceuticals and automobiles are moved. It's not rocket science.

Nor is the cable commentary circus anything approaching rocket science either. So when a toxic dickhead like Rudy Giuliani starts running his filthy cakehole one more goddamned time, it's tough to get mad at Giuliani, any more than you can get mad at your dog when you leave him in the house and he shits on the floor and chews up your couch pillows. He's a fucking dog, you're the dumbass for not understanding that dogs do what they do when given the opportunity.

Giuliani is just one of countless professional buffoons whose stock in trade is ventriloquizing the moronic delusions of a demographic that deserves everything they're getting -- aggrieved maroons who, in between collecting their gubmint checks, begrudge everyone and everything else, and scribe fanciful tales about the Black Satan in the White House. The idea that Obama is a closet Muslim is ludicrous; the idea that he's a closet atheist, and understands exactly how shit would blow up on him were he to even hint at such a thing, makes much more sense. But we'll never know, because these coddled, cosseted dipshits literally would not be able to handle the truth.

It's unfortunate that the only barrier to entry in becoming a political meme or talking point these days is simply being something that can be described, digested, and shat out in under ten seconds, just long enough to get someone riled up about some nonsense. They would much rather send other people to fight and kill an enemy they know nothing about, make an awful situation even worse, so they can go back to what they were doing, which was absolving themselves from their ongoing fuck-ups.

Network and cable teevee news is all just marketing and public relations, properly diluted and vetted for mass consumption, something to keep people placid yet attentive enough to listen to the words from the sponsors, whether it's the Koch Brothers or Big Pharma.

Honor Among Thieves

The big problem with modern Democrats is that they learn all the wrong lessons, every time. As Matt Stoller points out, the current corporate-crony DLC model essentially aligned them very close to the Republicans on economic policy, and because they are political mercenaries, they have no incentive to change their operational principles.

So the lesson they'll learn from their electoral ass-kicking is not that they should have shown at least a little backbone, stood by the legitimate accomplishments of their president -- who, whatever else you want to say about the guy, did get elected twice, fair and square. No, what they'll take with them into the next round of the perpetual campaign system is that they weren't Republican enough.

It's estimated that over $110M was spent on the North Carolina Senate campaign between Kay Hagan and Thom Tillis alone. Especially since the "vulnerable" demographics who typically vote Democratic couldn't be bothered to show up, why and how exactly are Democratic candidates supposed to espouse policies that would benefit those groups? They'll never be part of the donor class, and half the time they don't even vote. It's a self-fulfilling dynamic.

But in an environment where the outgoing Attorney General might as well have been in cahoots with the thieving financial industry, it matters less and less. None of the losing Dem Senate candidates would have changed that; not one of them would have held the fort against predatory banks, or greedy oil companies wanting another pipeline, or kept another abortion clinic open, or anything any actual liberal cares about.

The ratchet-pawl system will continue apace, and the etiolated pseudo-libs will engage in the usual hippie-punching of any perceived dissenters who might be thinking about Elizabeth Warren. They will expend profound amounts of energy lecturing what's left of the left on the Importance Of Settling For Hillary, and nothing at all for their erstwhile compadres who, just as they abandoned Gore for Bush in 2000, will waste no time going for Jeb or Ted or Rand or whichever grinning psychopath runs against her.

And people like Al From will still get paid, because that's what they do.

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

I did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative. I believe that to be so obvious and undeniable a fact that I hardly think any honorable Gentleman will question it. -- John Stuart Mill

Hope this is what you wanted,
hope this is what you had in mind,
'cause this is what you're getting.
I hope you choke on it. -- Tool, Ticks and Leeches

For all you election junkies, this article is as exhaustive a breakdown of your proverbial "swing" states as one could hope to find. Ultimately, though, it is also as disheartening a read as one might suppose. Putatively Democratic candidates who can't run fast enough from -- or hell, directly against -- their duly elected president, because they're deathly afraid of pissing off their rube constituency.

Of course, it doesn't help to have the usual compliant and complaisant corporate media, who in the course of chasing their precious narrative would much rather talk about how Bruce Braley and his wife are kinda jerky about their neighbor's chickens, rather than how Joni Ernst is just another clown-car teahadi in a folksy drawl and a Tupperware saleswoman smile.

The real narrative to be understood here is how the teabaggers overstepped in 2010 and especially 2012, and that they're learned their lesson this time around. There are no clear loons like Todd Akin or Richard Mourdock, just pleasant jest-lahk-us types like Joni Ernst and Cory Gardner. The goofballs have cleaned up their act, while the supposed adult political party stands around holding their collective dicks and running from their erstwhile principles (which most of them would sell down the road in a heartbeat anyway).

It's long been a cliché that the massive sums of money dumped into the political process has been a corrosive influence on the process. But it's also altered the types of people who are willing to run for office, not only to subject themselves to cartoonish levels of scrutiny, but to sell themselves constantly to anyone and anything, because of the sheer amount of money it takes just to stay in office, even for an incumbent. An average of thousands of dollars per day need to be raised to retain a US Senate seat, and most House seats aren't cheap either.

An estimated $4 billion total was spent in the 2012 election. When we start thinking more closely about which industry specifically received most of that money, and proceed and engage accordingly, we might finally start getting better candidates, instead of the candidates we deserve.

Tea for Two

In a world full of phantom scandals, the attempt to make deposed IRS factotum Lois Lerner look like the Obersturmbannführer of the imaginary teabagger persecution wing ranks as one of the more desperate, right down there with your Benghazis and your border security rambunctions.

Look, I'm about the last person to stick up for the IRS, especially since it's expanding as part of Obamacare, but there's just nothing to this one. These shithead astroturf teabagger groups tried to apply for non-profit tax status, but keep their political advocacy. And you can't do that. Hundreds of liberal groups were denied that status as well, but you don't hear them crying.

Even more pathetic is the way this plaint is tinged with dark undertones of "animus" and targeting, as if these poor patriots were being followed around and harassed by gubmint goons. No, such cheap and cowardly tactics seem to be the province of gun nuts, who are all too happy to pick on veterans and women who happen to disagree with the notion that an anonymous asshole strapped with an assault rifle in a Chipotle is a good idea.

All Lerner said -- in a private email, poor judgment in using her gov't account aside -- was that the talk-radio hosts catering to these maroons were "assholes" and "crazies". It's hard to disagree with that assertion, and in fact, it does transmit to the listeners, by osmosis if nothing else.

But it seems clear that right-wing radio, more so than what passes for a left-wing counterpart, traffics specifically in affirmation, rather than information. That crazy uncle that keeps forwarding Glenn Beck rants to you isn't trying to stay informed, no matter what he says or thinks. He's affirming his imaginary grievances, mustering ad hominem arguments to bolster his lame assertions that the blah guy has fucked up everything and anything, most likely on purpose.

It's amazing to think that what passes for political debate in this country is, more often than not, merely an exchange of fnords, a distraction created by a select few to keep the many at each others' throats, lest they pay attention to the hand which is always and forever in their pockets.