China Syndrome

Steve Hilton, Fixed Noise "analyst" and former advisor to British PM David Cameron, lands some pretty solid jabs in his analysis book excerpt regarding China's ascendance as an economic and military superpower. In particular, Hilton's points about the strictures imposed upon American companies doing business in China are problematic. Gee, if only Apple could afford to produce their thousand-dollar phones in America.

But it's here where Hilton, to put it mildly, loses the thread:

[Fuckface Von Clownstick] should now reject in its entirety the failed China strategy of his globalist predecessors. This means not just continuing, through tariffs, to pressurize[sic] the Chinese regime on issues like the theft of vital technology from American companies.

He needs to go bigger, and bolder. At the UN and beyond, he should rally the whole world behind a simple but audacious goal: to topple Xi Jinping's regime by turning China into a pariah state.

Only in the Fixed Noise alternate universe does that sound like a sensible idea. These assholes have just spent the better part of two years telling everyone apart from the world's most detestable dictators to go fuck themselves. What incentive do any of our allies and trading partners have to work with him on this "audacious goal"? Clownstick approaches every negotiation -- hell, every conversation -- with this "what's in it for meeee?" attitude. Well, what the hell makes anyone think Germany and France and the rest of them won't take the same posture for such a silly, stupid proposition?

Again, Hilton's not wrong in his list of grievances about the empowered authoritarian Chinese state. But we collectively decided that cheap toys were more important than anything else -- American jobs, human rights, economic parity and stability, collective sanity, and much more. We made our decision, and now it's too late to turn back. The locus of economic power is already shifting toward the Indian Ocean. China is poised to take over as the top economy in a year or two. It's already happening, and trying to conscript the European economies, who had their fill of our nonsense when we dumped the criminally inept Fredo Arbusto regime on them, and are in no mood to give us more chances now that we topped that fuck-up royally, is a fool's mission.

Maybe the phrase "too big to fail" has some resonance for Hilton. This is absolutely the case with China, and some hare-brained, no-plan stunt at the UN won't change that. Now, a person who had some intelligence, surrounded themselves with other smart people, and planned out such a massive undertaking carefully might have a shot at turning back China's impending dominance.

But we don't have that, do we? We have a dyspeptic, tantrum-throwing reality-teevee clown whose closest economic advisors are a movie producer and a cokehead teevee econ jerkoff with a decades-long track record of failed predictions. Yeah, I'm sure the winning team of Mnuchin and Kudlow have carefully crafted an exquisite master plan to make China a "pariah state" while keeping what's left of the American economy intact.

The fact is that, despite strong employment and GDP numbers, the precariat of the Obama years is still very much in effect. Real wages are still stagnant, despite near-constant reports of unfilled jobs and desperate employers. Somehow, they're not quite desperate enough to, you know, offer more money. Hmmm.

And while the emperor might be brushing aside his cheeseburger wrappers every other night to tweetkake the proles about the "record" economic boom, there's a problem baked into that -- if we accept the premise that economic booms are cyclical, and the current boom cycle has gone on longer than any (or at least most) that preceded it, then by definition that means that statistically, we're overdue for a recession. And he's started and escalated completely unnecessary trade wars with our largest trading partners. So how does the econ wizard Steve Hilton suppose that's going to shake out?

Besides which, I don't know if Princess Snowflake still has her knock-off wares being manufactured in the Shanghai sweatshops, but if she does, there's no goddamned way Daddy Dearest is going to ruin that for her.

Lazy Bitch Ragin'

While the week culminated in Paulie the Wig flipping over on Fat Donny Dollhands, the latter spent the previous four days driving home every point every critic had ever made about him, oblivious as always.

Seriously, what kind of dipshit gives fist-pumps and thumbs-ups at a 9/11 memorial on 9/11? I'm surprised he didn't high-five one of the grieving family members. Maybe he didn't want to get his tiny, tiny hands outsized.

Then the multiple tweets contesting the Hurricane Maria body count in Puerto Rico. Even some of the cultists have to see by now the pathologies in play with him. It takes some doing to find two national tragedies that each took about three thousand American lives, and fuck them up on consecutive days. He made them both about himself, albeit in different ways. But that's his thing -- he doesn't know or understand the simple concept of other people and their needs and wants. For him, literally everything is about him.

And that's coming through more and more, evident to all. The requisite clips from the last few hate rallies show a rather....tempered enthusiasm, let's say. Oh sure, you read the local bumwipe and they'll profile the requisite "Ah niver voted bee-four he came along, and he's uh-may-zin!" losers in the crowd, waiting outside for hours because they have no lives. But that's a handful of hardcore suckers out in the middle of nowhere. Let him go anywhere an appreciable quantity of people live, see what happens.

He knows it, and they know it, and their peckerwood logic won't change any of that.

Manafort's flip seems to have quieted his tiny Twitter thumbs somewhat, though he bizarrely dug up this old gem last night, reminding everyone of something that happened ten years ago that no one gave a shit about, while simultaneously not getting just how much he's gotten away with the past few years -- hell, his entire life.

But you know he's run out of material when, in the wake of his campaign manager signing a cooperative plea agreement, he's reduced to whining about Obama's ancient "57 states" gaffe. Even Kellyanne's better half had to jump in on that one. Real tight ship these assholes run.

Bottom line:  as each week makes the previous one pale in comparison, and we know the coming week is going to be crazy, one fact remains consistent -- the guy is awful, just pure unadulterated scum. He genuinely doesn't see other people as separate entities apart from him, with their own interests. He doesn't understand or care about other people's pain. I've read about serial killers with more empathy for their victims.

The economy is doing relatively well -- for now, anyway, until the tariffs and trade wars kick in. The economy is a lagging indicator, and it takes time for these things to percolate. But the cold fact is that even with a strong economy and no major military conflicts dominating the news, two out of three Americans fucking hate him. It didn't necessarily have to be that way, but he can't have it any other way. He has to be the obstinate, bratty four-year-old losing his shit in the cereal aisle, every time.

The midterms will clarify the situation. Either we have a republic, or we have a banana republic. It's fuck-or-walk time, folks. Make sure you haven't been purged from the voter rolls, and then make sure to vote. I have little faith in the Dems even with a landslide victory, but even their gutless, squirrelly ineptitude is better than the lagoon of pig shit we have right now.

Manafort Paul Seizin's; Or, The Lyin' In Winter

Good news is scarce enough to practically be in witness protection, so the news that Paulie the Wig is finally turning state's is surely a welcome development. With or without that fucking turd Kavanaugh skating through his not-even-pro-forma bullshit confirmation, Fuckface Von Clownstick's goose appears to be cooking nicely.

It's getting buried in the disaster-porn hurricane coverage that our shithead corporate media live and breathe for, but the biggest clue that Manafort has something huge to trade is that the cooperative plea deal required him to surrender $46 million in personal assets. In principle, I've never been a huge fan of civil asset forfeiture, as its application in various states and municipalities has generally ended in people getting shaken down by an authoritarian extortion racket, instead of being left the fuck alone.

But in the case of Manafort, we'll make a small exception -- this asshole has spent his adult life as a PR tool for some of the most evil dictators of the late 20th century. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. He's a procurer, a pimp, a professional prevaricator. He's a money launderer, a tax dodger, a peddler of influence and a distributor of thick envelopes. People like Manafort are the grease in the world's brutal wheels, and it would serve him right to spend the rest of his life rotting in prison, thinking about how many people had to die for his fucking ostrich jackets.

Beyond all that though, it again helps to focus on the massive amount of the forfeiture, which apparently didn't take long to push Paulie on. Seems like just a week or two ago Manafort was counting on his good buddy Fat Donny Tangelo to pardon him and absolve his many sins. One assumes that Mueller showed Paulie just enough of his cards to let him know that Paulie's ace in the hole was no match for Bobby's (at least) three kings.

Maybe it's a full house, maybe it's a four of a kind. Whatever it is, it was enough to convince Paulie to roll on his only hope for a walk, and at the cost of pretty much everything he had. So it's big. And we're about to find out what it is. And we've earned it. I hate these fucking people so much, Trump and all his enablers.

I've talked a lot of trash in here over the years, and smacked some richly deserving muthafuckaz. But Trump (and again, a very rare lapse into the actual name of the thing, because mockery and ridicule are central to sapping its illusory power) is one of the few people for whom my hate is genuine and deep and eternal. I hate everything about him, and always have. I sincerely wish and hope and pray that he is pursued and inundated by every misfortune life has to offer.

We'll get into it in a bit more detail in the next post, but to be more specific, it goes beyond his tedious stupidity and willful ignorance. He's complete scum as a human being, and he's shown it over and over again; even under the most tragic of circumstances, disasters that should evoke empathy from the hardest of hearts, he is only worried about himself. Watching that over and over again for the last thirty years or so has been appalling and tiresome. And still he refuses to go the fuck away.

In the end, though, it's the completely unearned sense of entitlement he's always had. I don't just mean the smarmy expectation that whatever fortune and privilege he has is his divine right, I mean the in-your-face-and-up-your-ass conviction that he should be allowed to play by an entirely different set of rules than everyone else, simply because he's so fucking awesome and incredible and special. It's been his defining characteristic the entire time, since he started humping 'murka's leg in the 1980s with his ridiculous thoughts and tacky personal life.

I don't have to play by your mortal rules. Turns out you do, fucker. You're not nearly as special as you think you are. You're about to get hosed, bigly, and your close minions Paulie the Wig and Mikey the Weasel are providing the ammo. I've waited for this for so long, I don't know if I can afford enough popcorn. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

Even When They're Right, They're Wrong

Three recent events -- two of them closely related to one another -- have surfaced as further evidence (as if anyone needed further evidence) that the god-emperor's compass of logic and reasoning is fatally flawed, because even in those rare instances where he says something that is accurate, he still manages to botch the execution. Let's take them in reverse order, starting with the most recent:

Syria:  It's difficult to imagine even his staunchest supporters being fooled by this nonsense. This is simply a repeat of last year's embarrassing dick-waving, slamming a few dozen million dollars' worth of ordnance into empty airfields and abandoned buildings. And for what? To "warn" Bashar al-Assad that dropping barrel bombs on apartment buildings is acceptable, but chlorine gas is not? Dead is dead. He's been killing children and civilians all along; whether it's with gas or with explosives packed with shrapnel shouldn't really matter. And warning the Russians ahead of time is exactly what he badgered Obama about in 2013. It's true what they say -- every tweet this asshole puts out has a rhetorical doppelganger from five years ago, hypocritically undermining his own pathetic attempts at logic.

He's right of course that in principle, Assad's conduct is unacceptable and should not be tolerated. But there are no good solutions to Syria, and Clownstick is certainly not the person to cut this particular Gordian knot. Russia is too heavily invested in the outcome now, as are (in no particular order) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel. The possibility of a spreading conflagration that ensnares key powers and escalates drastically (in other words, a "world war") is very real.

Forget individual personalities for a second -- the United States right now does not have the diplomatic resources needed to negotiate a settled outcome to the escalating conflict in Syria and its surrounding region. Everyone who could have provided expertise and insight into forging a peaceful path forward has resigned in frustration or been purged. They simply don't have anyone left, and now John "Stop calling me Michael" Bolton has been handed the keys to the 'murkin war machine, for which you can probably attribute the timing of last night's action.

Give Bolton this much credit -- he has wasted no time in purging NSC staff and seizing control of the foreign policy security apparatus. The problem is that Bolton, while slightly more intelligent than his insect overlord, has roughly the same temperament, and is remarkably ill-suited for the job. He is the Doug Neidermeyer of gubmint careerists -- smug, supercilious. Bolton is a conniving, ankle-biting little shit who is going to further damage American foreign policy credibility for the next 10-20 years, and endanger countless military and civilian lives around the world. Count on it. He has no business being anywhere near the levers of power, because he only knows how to break things. Which makes him a perfect fit for this clusterfuck.

The fact that Hair Furor chose to end this morning's self-congratulatory tweet with "Mission Accomplished" should indicate how tone-deaf and unserious he is about all this. (Not to mention just plain bizarre, given his oft-repeated prescience about what a debacle the Iraq War was and would become.) He has no understanding of the larger forces in motion in the region, nor any interest in gaining any such understanding. What is the "mission"? What is the plan for when Assad confers with Putin, decides he's protected, and launches another chemical attack? How do we know there was even a chemical attack by the Syrian government in the first place? Because Bolton said so? Fuck that, we're gonna need actual evidence, if not indisputable proof. But just the fact that Shit-for-Brains thinks anything's been "accomplished" by one night of "precision strikes" on carefully-groomed targets should be a clear indication of how poorly suited he is for this sort of action.

So how do you solve a problem like Assad? Obviously, there is no "good" clear-cut solution. But a start would be to work up a joint regional security pact with Russia, predicated on repatriating internal Syrian refuges back to their homes, giving the country at-cost deals on grain to replenish their depleted reserves, and then pressure the Turks to open up the Grand Anatolia dam network to get the Syrian farmland some water. Can all that be done? Certainly not with the US diplomatic corps as it stands. But Emperor Snowflake enjoys jabbering about how much he loves him some Putin and Erdogan, sweaty he-mens who give the emperor a little cheeto chubby. There's no reason he couldn't use those world-class deal-making skills to get them to go along with something like that.

Remember that the Syrian civil war started because of climate change (among other things; Assad sold off the country's grain reserves to generate cash, not foreseeing a five-year drought). Recall also that much of the water problems in Syria and Iraq are exacerbated by Turkey's control of the headwaters of all the major rivers of the Mesopotamian region. Turkey craves the legitimacy that being a member of international organizations such as NATO and the EU would give them. That can be used as a bargaining chip to get the water moving again, and it would be the right thing to do for all parties concerned in the first place.

But of course, all of this is well beyond El Jefe Maximo's comprehension, and that of his henchmen. They don't do delicate or nuanced, and whatever Obama's very real foreign policy flaws were, the guy at least understood that being reckless meant dead people, American soldiers and foreign civilians alike. Snowflake doesn't know or care about any of that, he just knows what makes him feel like a big man. That's going to get us in trouble in Syria. But there's always the chance that, like the same actions there last year, nothing else will occur, and he'll step on his dick again next week, and we'll move on to that.

Trans-Pacific Partnership:  Turns out that, despite his colorful metaphors of wily Asians butt-fucking real 'murkin widget-stampers out in gawwwd's country, Snowflake is having a change of heart about the TPP. I think both candidates in the 2016 election were correct in their stances against the treaty, while recognizing that those stances were more rhetorical than principled. I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would have at least attempted to renegotiate the treaty to make it viable for the US to enter into, and she would have been crucified in the media -- all media -- for doing such a thing.

With this fucking clown, there's been barely a peep so far, partly because there's been so much other clusterfuckery to cover, partly because he changes "ideas" like a sugar-addled kindergartner, so there's literally no expectations whatsoever regarding policy consistency, or even policy knowledge.

Remember how much we thought the bar had been lowered for special-ed Preznit Fredo Arbusto? Consider the notion that there is no longer any bar at all, at least not for Mister Man. Soon as a Dummycrat who can think and speak extemporaneously comes along, the bar will not only be put back in place, but it will be raised. I pity the fool who has to debate this asshole in 2020. There will be two completely different sets of expectations for the same event. The amount of slack this fucking retard and his dipshit cult are granted by the librul media is absolutely unconscionable.

Don't believe me? Ponder this counterfactual for a second:  you know all those stupid Cletus Safari articles that clutter up the major newspapers fortnightly? If Hillary Clinton had won, those same media monkeys would have done the exact same thing, gone out to the dilapidated diner in Fentanyl Flats and talked to the same incoherent, fist-shaking codgers ranting about how that bitch was fucking up real 'murka. You can fuckin-A count on that one. Our media are populated by clickbait slaves who have no guts or imagination, just a lemming-like drive to fill every news cycle with whatever's within a shovel's reach.

Anyway, the TPP. As originally drafted, there were simply too many intellectual property concessions in it (for starters) to make it viable for anyone but the elites who already own everything and spend their lives rubbing everyone's noses in it. So fuck them. But at the same time, the US withdrawing from the TPP also leaves us exposed to the Pacific Rim countries simply trucking on without us. This is something we're going to have to get used to in the decades to come, the rest of the world moving on without us. It cannot be overstated -- even if we somehow manage to avoid catastrophic conflict or natural disaster, the repercussions of this shithole administration will be with us for a very long time, certainly for the rest of my life (I'll be 51 next month) and probably for most of my daughter's life. And that's if we get our shit together and start turning this thing around, of which I am doubtful.

But again, Snowflake grumbles something about changing what passes for his mind and joining the TPP after all, yet provides no clue as to what the conditions would be, or how this would be done, or who would benefit, besides his goddamned children. Looking for possibilities to renegotiate and join the TPP is the right thing to do, but there has never been any indication that this particular gang has the knowledge or good faith to do something like that on anyone's behalf but their own as individuals.

Tariffs:  Even if (as with all things) his rhetoric on the subject was unnecessarily lurid and confrontational, there was a core of truth to Snowflake's assertions that free trade had damaged job prospects in the vaunted heartland, where (it cannot be said enough times) all the real 'murkins live, and only real 'murkins live. All of us heathens on the foul coasts are allowed to live only by their divine forbearance and grace. It's, like, in the Constitution or some shit.

But those folks do need jobs and careers that they can actually live on, and trade policy -- particularly with China and Mexico -- makes a difference for them. As with literally everything else this asshole touches, the problem is that he only does deals for himself. The big lie that the rubes bought was that he'd work his deal-making magic for them, never mind that he fucks up everything he gets his tiny doll-hands on, never mind that he's never negotiated anything that he didn't directly profit from. Even his charitable foundation was simply a transparently obvious tax dodge and money-laundering org.

So even if he cared enough to renegotiate trade policy with China to benefit something other than Princess' slave-made knock-off clothes, he doesn't know how. He "negotiates" deals like old people fuck. He said so himself in his own books that he just bullshits his way through everything; even his euphemism of "truthful hyperbole" serves only to underscore his inept approach to negotiation. He literally only has a couple of moves:  "anchoring" with a proposal he knows to be unacceptable, then "compromising" toward a more mutually acceptable outcome; and bullshitting his way through the deal and simply hoping that other guy is dumber than he is.

That is the deal-making philosophy of a degenerate gambler that puts the deed to his house on 33 Black at the roulette table, or goes all in at Texas Hold 'em on a ten hole card because another ten comes up on the turn. There is no strategy at all, he is all ego and volatile impulse.

And that's the common thread, not only with the three above examples, but with everything. This is where the rubes really got bamboozled. They cynically assumed -- against the weird "logic" of voting for a "non-politician" -- that like all politicians, Snowflake's campaign rambunctions were simply cut-to-the-chase examples of macho assertiveness, that he'd dial that down and get on to business in the job. They undercut themselves with that cynicism, somehow not realizing that, despite nearly forty years of televised evidence of this asshole humping the American media's leg like a terrier on a couch pillow, that that is who he is, that is all that he is. He is incapable of not being that guy.

There's a notion that a successful business-person cannot be a successful government executive, that despite the surface similarities, the mechanics of each job are too disparate. A CEO is too used to getting their own way to build coalitions and partnerships and work with others. There's some truth to that notion, but I wouldn't completely dismiss the possibility that a good business-person could be a good president.

But he's not a good businessman, and never has been. His only success is managing a portfolio of properties that he inherited from his dad. He's not a businessman, he's a fucking landlord, a rentier. Someone who is good at business creates and innovates. At the very least they develop better and more efficient ways to manage resources and optimize profits for stakeholders.

Snowflake has never done any of those things; at best he finds idiots who think his brand name is useful and he rents out his name to such people. It's pathetic to watch, really; normally even a moderately gifted bullshit artist has something to offer, they just exaggerate the benefits.

But he has nothing to offer, and never did. He's just a weird, pathetic old man who lives in an obscenely-decorated tower, where he can't even be straight about the number of fucking floors in the building, and goes around finding people dumb enough to believe his nonsense about having a twenty-four-inch cock. And that's just the stuff he does legally.

That is exactly the type of person who has a few random blind-pig-finds-an-acorn moments, and still never knows what to do with them. I wouldn't worry too much about Syria for now; hours after the "attack" they're partying in the streets as a show of defiance to the attacks, and attempts to distract a teevee-addled audience are doomed to fail when they're perpetrated by a careless bumbler with his own ADHD issues. But nothing good can ever come from this sad excuse for a man.

Yes Man

The NY Times' op-ed page is a big bowl of boiled ass these days, but once in a while they cook up an article that breaks out some useful info and details. If half of what's here is true -- and there's no reason not to believe it's 100% accurate -- we are in deep shit.

There's no way to overstate how much the US strategic position in Asia has been abruptly diminished by these fucking morons running the show now. This is much bigger than two fat guys with fucked-up haircuts battling over who has the coolest comb. The world is already headed toward a period of dominance centered around the Indian Ocean. The morons are simply accelerating that trend with alarming quickness.

This is what happens when you start your tenure as [fart] chief executive by gutting your entire foreign service apparatus, through a potent combination of spite, ignorance, mendacity, and negligence. When I've referred to Clownstick as a "barstool drunk," the sort of nasty idiot who thinks he knows everything and provides no evidence at all to back it up, this is Exhibit A. Clownstick has jabbered on and on and fucking on about how much they are shorting us on the security invoice, as if the US military was just a bunch of mall cops hired out to contain the shenanigans in the galleria food court.

It literally does not occur to the dotard that we have logical reasons for carrying more of the burden in NATO and the UN, that the greater outlay buys us far more credibility in calling the shots and providing direction. There are reasons we stay in Germany at greater expense to us, as well as Japan and South Korea. All of those countries would just as soon we packed up and went home, even as they grudgingly recognize that in the end, we do serve as a bulwark against Russian and Chinese hegemony. And the fact is, humanity is just at that point where there is going to be a hegemon regardless, so it might as well be the Americans.

But none of these things have any meaning to someone whose every thought and move and impulse is purely transactional, on a level that a crack-whore kneeling in an alley for her fifteenth blowjob of the day doesn't operate at. All the dotard sees when he looks at a map is how many more venues he can slap that worthless name of his on. He couldn't care less if he steps on the toes of allies he may need for something else in the future, or if he fucks up generations of established international diplomacy norms that have kept billions of people safe, however imperfectly.

These things were already in motion regardless, as we are now nearly four generations removed from the post-WW2 arrangements. Japan in particular has seen a resurgence of right-wing militarism and nationalism; the current generation clearly no longer has any use for the terms of surrender acceded to by their great-grandparents. Germany, like the rest of Western Europe, have already had enough of Mister Man's bullshit, and are trying to figure out a way to deal with the bear without our guns parked in their backyard. They seem to figure that they can trade and finance their way into some sort of arrangement, and given that Russia faces a serious succession crisis whenever the 65-year-old Putin retires or dies, they may be right.

All of it points to the same thing:  the other powers under our longstanding security umbrella have been growing restive, and were in the process of testing the waters anyway. Obama was reflexively conservative (in the old-school sense) about flexing US military power, and his over-reliance on soft power set the stage for the current volatility in the MENA region, and no doubt emboldened China and Japan at the very least to start charting their own courses.

The dotard's approach to North Korea, as detailed in the Times article, will eventually serve as a template of this group's disastrous approach to international diplomacy. It's one thing for him to bluster about ignoring Democrats and liberals on the foreign policy front, but this guy is undermining his own team, and it's a shortchanged team to begin with.

Think about it:  their big diplomatic feint with the Norks was to send his knockoff-handbag-peddling brandbot daughter to the fucking Olympics to stare them down. There is no official presence in the diplomatic corps for this part of the world, no ambassador to South Korea, no Undersecretary of State for the region, a shortage of qualified interpreters and translators in the foreign service.

Considering the various consequences and ramifications, and the singularly inept track record of the moron and his gang of dopes and fools, there's too many ways for them to fuck this up royally -- even if Kim and Clownstick never actually meet -- and only a couple ways to get it right.

Show Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hole Hearted

It would be somewhat hypocritical for yours truly to get too bent about the emperor referring to certain countries as shitholes. I've certainly pulled no punches about such an assessment, and have in fact used that word to refer to third world countries, or violent Islamic despotisms where basic human rights are scoffed at. That's not an evaluation of the individuals living in those countries, nor their suitability to emigrate to these here Yew-nighted States, merely an impolite observation of the condition of the government, the society, the economy, the levels of basic services, etc.

So yes, Haiti is a shithole, as is North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, and the Congo, and on and on. So are many parts of the US:  the opioid belt; large chunks of the NASCAR states; the swaths of washed-up towns festering out in the hinterland with delusions of revanchism and the lost glory of Granpappy's hallowed widget-stamping job that went to Malaysia during the Reagan years.

It is not necessarily a value judgment of the inhabitants, nor an assertion of moral superiority over them. Unlike the emperor, I don't hate the humans, I feel bad for their situation (except when they bring it on themselves). It is simply a blanket observation of an area that is arguably not only much worse off than other areas, but substantially worse off than it should be, if said area had its collective shit together. It is also a correlative observation that many or most of such areas have the common thread of overpopulation compounding the overall poverty rate. In other words, they could simply cut their birth rate in half and improve their lot within a generation, doing absolutely nothing else to move in the right direction.

Americans of white European heritage take things for granted (duh). They tend to forget that the countries their own ancestors left were not good places to be -- they were shitholes as well. That's why they left, y'know? Scotland was not a paradise when the emperor's mommy got out of there a hundred years ago. Many parts of Germany were ravaged by famine and wars of national confederation around the time the emperor's paternal grandfather left. The Pilgrims didn't come here because they were doing well back in England. I know my ancestors left Ireland and Wales and Poland because they needed to get the hell out of those places at the time. There are books about this sort of stuff. This is not rocket science.

So while the squirrel mediots fixate on the "vulgarity" of the word, they seem to be ignoring the much more important issue, the proverbial elephant in the room -- the man seems literally to not understand why people emigrate, why they would leave their homes, families, communities, the only places they've ever known in their harsh lives, to come to a country where they don't know anyone, don't understand the language. It doesn't even occur to him, the concept that someone from a poor, violent country would be more likely to want to leave home than someone from a prosperous, stable country.

People take those risks because the opportunities are worth it to them, because all they have is hope that things can get better. People who were doctors and lawyers in their homelands come here to drive taxis and taco trucks and run convenience stores, because they think of the USA as a place where someone can work hard and get ahead. Life is a series of offsets and tradeoffs, unless you're a spoiled dipshit who has always gotten everything you want.

Seriously. What kind of a moron does not get the basic concept that Norwegians no longer move to America because the average Norwegian has a better quality of life than the average American? Well, it turns out it's the kind of moron that's been given the keys to the country, and has chosen to drive it to the nearest cliff, gas pedal stomped to the floor. It's the kind of moron that talks derisively of other nations as shitholes, while doing his level best to turn this country into a shithole as well.

I felt that tonight's Netflix premiere of David Letterman's new interview show would be a nice break from the daily nonsense, as the featured guest of course was PRESIDENT BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA (PBUH). I miss both Letterman and Obama tremendously, all the more so for the current collective maelstrom we find ourselves in, and it was rewarding to see these two chat in an intimate setting, their mutual affection obvious to all.

It was somewhat disappointing but not at all surprising that Obama and Letterman studiously avoided any direct mentions of the emperor or his abortion of an administration. The interview was punctuated with a couple of segments of Letterman walking the Edmund Pettus Bridge with John Lewis, and much discussion of the importance of the civil rights movement to Obama's development as a person and a politician.

It turned out to be better for not mentioning that bastard and his works, because what you focused on with Obama and Letterman is how both men function as normal human beings who speak with enormous affection for their families and children, who go out into the world and experience it, who actually do things for other humans without expecting money and adulation in return. Both men are funny and sharp and kind and self-deprecating. This accumulated steadily into a wondrous contrast with what we've been immersed in, a claque of scummy cultists utterly obsessed with lying and cruelty and greed.

By the end, my wife was in tears, just thinking about what we've lost in the longest year of most of our lives, and what more will come before we pull out of it (if we ever really do). This toxic man and his toxic cult followers have poisoned the water table of our collective consciousness, and we're all waiting on Robert Mueller because no one else has the stones or ability to do or say anything meaningful about it. And the longer we all wait, the more of an effect the fumes have on all of our brains.

Perhaps most potently and subtly, the Obama interview was a reminder of a time, in the dim and distant past, when the President of the United States did not act like a jabbering drunk on a fucking barstool every goddamned day of the week.

Head Count

I've mentioned this several times before, but of course no one listens to me:  every time the pustulent fucktard steps out to do one of his dipshit rallies, the very first thing our intrepid librul media need to do is publish the capacity of the venue and the actual attendance. I don't know why this is so fucking difficult. Every major venue has a fire marshal overseeing the events taking place there, and they get a head count.

It's not rocket science, but apparently it is. None of the national write-ups caught it; at best they do their lame "thousands" estimates, because they have no idea. "Thousands" tells us nothing; that could mean two thousand or twenty thousand or fifty thousand.

In this case, only the Pensacola local media sort of had a reasonable (though still insufficient) estimate:

Thousands of people filled the 12,000-seat Pensacola Bay Center on Friday night for [Fuckhead]'s "Make America Great Again" rally as hundreds were left waiting in line to get in as the doors were closed.

There's that word again, but at least you know the full capacity of the venue. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the Pensacola Bay Center's capacity:

The Bay Center has a capacity of 8,150 for hockey games, and as much as 10,000 for non-hockey events.

Why is this stuff important? Because it drives him nuts, and he can't stand feeling, um, short-changed. It's especially important when a journo steps on his dick retweeting a photo from before the rally, showing empty seats.

Also -- and pay attention here, journos and wannabes, because this is the crux of the biscuit -- that number is a salient fact. When you are talking about someone who bullshits and exaggerates everything, literally everything, it is a solid fact that you can muster in this eternal, pointless quest to point out when lying liars are lying. At the very least, it shows that you're trying.

You would think that it would be of particular importance that a Snopes article clarifying that particular instance would (again) mention the name of the venue and the capacity, and the relative ratio of capacity to actual attendance, rather than an idiotic parsing of what "packed to the rafters" means.

And Dave Weigel? Don't apologize to that turd. Ever. Especially over the veracity of a tweet. Throw it back in his face with full pot-calling-kettle-black force. For fuck's sake, grow a pair already.

[Update 12/9/17 11:27PM PDT:  Dave Weigel is certainly sharp enough to know that no good deed goes unpunished, but sure as shit, even though Weigel deleted his erroneous tweet within twenty minutes, the emperor is still calling for Weigel to be fired. If Weigel has any spine, he'll retweet the scores of the emperor's own tweets that are pure, unadulterated bullshit (or, in the polite parlance of the journo, "factually erroneous") and throw it right back in his face.

Not to mention how routinely his favorite "news" organs, Breitbart and Fox, don't even bother with "facts" and just shit out whatever makes their trained-seal audience bark the loudest. For fuck's sake, the asshole got in the ring with several years' worth of birther nonsense.

I'm telling you right now, either these media monkeys start standing up for themselves, like the day before yesterday, and punch back, or they're going to be out of jobs anyway. Simple choice, folks -- die on your feet or live on your knees, or get forced out by bullshit and you'll have a new career asking folks if they'd like fries with that.]

Season's Beatings

I'm gonna go ahead and get out in front of the inevitable moron war on Christmas bullshit right now, considering Snowflake decreed that we would all be saying "Merry Christmas" from now on, since the Kenyan Moooslin had forbade us under penalty of death to do so during the long cold winter of his two terms.

During the holiday season, I typically do say "Merry Christmas," but not this year, and maybe not again for quite some time. You don't tell me what to fucking say or not say, old man. Period.

Like the cynical use of the troops to push against basic First Amendment rights to openly dissent, to be a rebel or even an asshole, those lying closet-case valyews voters can kiss my entire ass, and then go eat shit and die in a fire. They are not christian in any real, honest sense of that word -- they hate poor people, want more guns, and have aligned themselves with a lifelong thief and liar, someone who bears false witness routinely, who violates at least three or four of their so-called commandments before his second brunch.

So they can take their Merry Christmas and fuck themselves in the goddamned neck with it -- I'll say it when I fucking well feel like it, and there's not a thing they or he or anyone can do about it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the "Leader" of the Free World

Some places refer to HRH Emperor Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick by his given name and official title. "Respect for the office" or some such bullshit, as if he has ever shown any respect for the fucking office.

Here's reason #1,359,277 why I will never refer to him as such, ever. He retweeted that the other day, but he cries like the LITTLE BITCH that he is every time someone does something similar about him. Fuck him, and fuck his dipshit supporters that, no matter their meaningless demurrals, support this kind of nonsense as well.

There are no two ways about this -- Snowflake/Clownstick is an embarrassment to this country. He's a miserable whiny cunt, and a horrible excuse for a human being. It's going to take a generation just to get rid of the shame of having this piece of shit in charge of anything more complicated than an ice cream truck.

So. What's it gonna be, 'murka? Tired of having a disgrace run the place? Are we motivated enough to get off our lazy asses and actually show up to the voting booth next time, and every time?

I don't just blame the dipshit deplorables for putting this fucking fool in a position of power -- I blame every putative "liberal" and "progressive" who just couldn't stomach voting for her, who both-sided the choice until they lost all rational perspective, or just took it all for granted because the retard pollsters insisted she had this in the bag.

You know why they insisted that she had it in the bag? Because no rational person could conceive of a situation in which enough people were stupid enough to vote for a lifelong three-card monte huckster. It's that simple. The majority assumed that the moron minority was smaller than it actually was. No one wanted to believe there are so many dumbasses in one place, that they can't see the craven misogyny, projection, and outright incompetence that fills every pore of Snowflake's fat diaper-clad body.

I said this shortly after the election, and it still stands:  liberals who were paying attention were forced to decide whether the nation was in the process of becoming something we no longer recognized, or whether it simply reinforced what it has always been in so many respects.

Either you side with college-turd tiki-torch suburbo-nazis, or you don't. Either you side with fat militia cosplay wannabes toting assault weapons, or you don't. Either you side with a fat, dementia-addled old man who rage-tweets his dumps and routinely retweets sentiments from "white genocide" types and wishes physical harm on those who oppose him, or you don't. I don't like the window-breaking antifa types, nor do I care for the trigger-warning campus speech police. But I'll take a hundred of them every day of the week over a single one of these endlessly projecting crybaby hypocrites.

And I sincerely hope that every one of them gets what's coming to them, which is a continuation -- an acceleration, in fact -- of all the circumstances that drove them into the arms of a con man.

Drumpferdämmerung; Or, Appetite for Distraction

After seven months that feels like an eternity, it is possible to hear a swirling sound, a rushing of water into a bottomless chasm. This toxic floater of an administration is on the verge of being flushed, and the world will be the better for it, if the clear majority of this country steps up and keeps its collective momentum. Who coulda seen it coming?

The media monkeys are welcome to chase their daily fixations for the time being, because it is important that our putative leader fails to clear even the lowest of ideological bars. The theater exile of porn/meth magnate Steve Bannon back to his propaganda post fools no one. The alcoholic slob is better able to do his real job back on the outside anyway, free from pesky oversight and pernicious leaks.

These people campaigned on being "outsiders" because that is how they function. Every breath they draw, everything they say and do, is designed to be an act of defiance. It makes sense that they would go back to focusing on how beleaguered they think they are (yes, with the Very White House, both houses of congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures, so very persecuted). When your team is always girding for an epic battle against an implacable foe, it's much easier to distract from the sheer ineptitude that characterizes the team's operations.

But the numbers don't lie, no matter how much one's accounting ledgers resemble cookbooks. All the corporations populating the great dealmaker's bidness councils have scrambled over one another to flee, forcing all of them to be disbanded. Corporate events at the Maga-Lardo are being cancelled as well. People -- most importantly, people with money -- are leaving in droves.

Even Fatboy's best partner-in-crime, corporate-raider asshole Carl Icahn, probably the true eminence grise behind the gold-painted shitter, has joined the rest of the rats overboard, even after pocketing a half-billion clams in just a few months. Pretty good work if you can get it -- which you can't, unless you suck up to this fucking loser.

This has all happened in the last few days, while Emperor Snowflake has been on vacation. There's no other way to put it -- this is enormously fun to watch, the downward spiral of these fuckers. If you know of a  publicly-traded popcorn company, you may want to consider buying stock in it.

It's a mistake, though to ascribe this impending failure to toxic ideology. Clearly the US has no shortage of toxic people who are fine with having a white supremacist (more accurately, a brainless old bigot) in charge. No, this comes down to incompetence, pure and simple, and these people are so goddamned incompetent, their own voters oughta sue 'em for malpractice. And it's important to keep pointing this out. Emperor Snowflake is the epitome of the idiot who shoots himself in the foot repeatedly and sues the gun company.

Incompetence is also, incidentally, an ideal area for the Democrats to focus on in the midterms. The Russian treason being unearthed plank-by-plank by Mueller's team is part of the picture, and a significant one at that. And per Napoleon Bonaparte's sage advice, it's understandable that the Dems don't want to interfere with an enemy intent on destroying himself.

But if there's one lesson they should have learned from last year's debacle, it's the old (but true!) football advice that prevent defenses prevent you from winning. So the Democrats need to market their product better, and get better pitchmen. Who will be the face of the Democratic Party in four, eight, twelve years? What will they stand for, and what will people think they stand for? Narrative, logline, protagonist, sales pitch -- goddammit, storyboard that shit and find a fresh face to push it.

This is not complicated, and it's nothing against Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or DiFi, but those three names add up to over two hundred years in age, most of it spent pushing stones uphill in DC. A grateful nation appreciates those years of honorable service, but maybe it's time to hand the reins over to someone below retirement age. For Christ's sake, Feinstein appears to be running for re-election next year, when she will turn 85 about five months before the election. It's probably the safest Senate seat in the country; maybe it's time to hand it off to someone who can lead the party forward in a time that, whether or not Snowflake does the right thing and abdicates, is going to get weirder and worse before it gets better.

People have chosen their own realities and their own facts, and some of these bozos will back Snowflake no matter what the Everest of evidence against him looks like. Against all logic, they will presume it's all a conspiracy to a coup, and some of them will act accordingly. Bet on it.

In the meantime, though, the money is leaving, and that's critical -- especially when you consider that despite winning more than five times as many counties as Hillary, there's still a 2:1 disparity in economic output. This will be a much bigger decider than ideology or racism, of the midterms and 2020. Follow the money.

Blut und Scheisse

We can't honestly say we weren't warned, nor can we honestly claim to be surprised. This is who he's always been -- not just bigoted, but stubborn and vain past the point of rational self-interest. People are welcome and correct to focus on Clownstick's insistence on both-siding with nazis, the most slam-dunk of all political oppositions to take.

He's sunk so low in approval ratings, and the bar has been lowered so much for him, he literally would have gained credence and political capital just by beating on the white power assholes. And of course he couldn't do it -- every single time he tries to speak spontaneously, he reveals and projects exactly who he's always been. He's incapable of doing otherwise. I will never not be utterly baffled that so many people couldn't see that characteristic. It's not like he ever tried to hide it.

At some point there will be some sort of political reckoning, if for no other reason than that he's making it easier for his congressional compadres to distance themselves from his poisonous agenda and toxic personality. In the meantime, keep on diggin', fucko. By the time this is all over, even Fixed Noise won't have his fat back, and the world will be boycotting his name, and everything it's plastered on.

Plz Moar Tardz

Well, it's about that time again, time for the lamestream media's periodic ass-spelunking tour into dipshit country, to reinforce Emperor Snowflake's rapidly dwindling coterie of ball-lickers that somewhere out there, there's a derpelganger jes' lahk thaym:

Out on Colorado’s eastern plains, an agricultural region where voters went overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, the response to the president’s remarks was one of support, with little fear of repercussions.

“He needs to step all over that little twerp,” said John Stout, 71, who sat with three retired friends over coffee at the Sinclair gas station in Wiggins, Colo., on Thursday. The other men nodded in agreement. “If it had been me up there,” Mr. Stout continued, “I’d have done it a lot quicker.”

Sure you would've, old man. Everyone's a fucking tough guy when they have no skin in the game. Why, I recall the last time I played a Civilization 4 campaign, I finally got bored and decided to finish off the last AI opponent -- Korea -- by nuking....wait for it....Pyongyang. Then I smoked a cigarette. [cough cough hack] So satisfying.

Mr. Stout said he did not fear for his safety, and hoped that [Fuckface Von Clownstick] would take action to “take out” the North Korean leader’s nuclear abilities.

“Hell yes,” he said. “And they can pinpoint it to where they are not killing a lot of innocent people. That will be the big goal there.”

The worst thing this country ever did -- and continues to do, through its estimable coven of city-mouse scriveners -- is ascribe some sort of earthy wisdom to random jabber, simply because it comes from the piehole of a fist-shaking codger in a dumpy shithole town.

ROI

The endless discursions on Uday Clownstick's moronic need to publicly confess his malfeasance are a distraction. Per usual, Charles Pierce has the correct angle on this. It is about nothing more nor less than a fake tycoon whose value is mostly trapped in the distressed properties his daddy snapped up in the '70s, when NYC was a crime-ridden shit-hole, but is mostly cash-poor.

And none of the banks down the street from him would lend to him anymore, because he'd fucked them over every goddamned time. So he had to turn to Ze Germans for his project capital, and the bratva for operating cash. You have to give the Russians some credit here -- they played the long game, the 1000:1 one-trick pony that should have been turned into glue and dog food before the turn of the millennium, and it paid off, bigly.

Uday's meeting just scratches the dismal surface; the iceberg that awaits below the waterline is so much greater. Mueller's investigation is about to go full-tilt up this sleazy crime family's collective asshole, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people. I love reading that minions such as Michael Caputo are literally having to pawn off their children's futures in order to cover their legal bills. Sleep with dogs, wake with fleas, and all that. Serves him right; Caputo sold his soul only to find out that his dark lord left him to twist in the legal gibbet.

The reckoning is coming, slowly but inexorably, and a hard rain is about to fall. These are all fucking vile people who have betrayed their country, top to bottom, and they should pay the price. I don't need to see them up against a wall; it would be perfectly satisfying to see them selling oranges at the freeway off-ramp for the rest of their scuttling cockroach lives. Let them live out their lives with the eternal blemish of their sins.

The Evil of Banality, Part Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disenfranchise

While we're all distracted by the terrible awful no-good abuse of the enablers at Morning Joke:

• Clownstick's pet shitbird Kris Kobach saw his bullshit attempt to gather voter data get repudiated -- for now. I'll be more than happy to tell these cock-smokers to their faces why I've never voted for them, and never will -- just as soon as Emperor Snowflake shows those tax returns.
• We don't know who all the players are on that "very distinguished" panel, perhaps because they're just too distinguished to refer to by name. (IOW, Kushner, Bannon, Stone, Manafort, the usual gang of grifters and psychopaths.)
• Because the issue of "voter fraud" is sooo important in its prevalence, the GOP budget just happened to kill off the only federal agency that ensures the integrity of voting machines.
• That $50m congressional election in GA a couple weeks ago? Karen Handel was GA's Secretary of State -- you know, the person in charge of ensuring the integrity of the voting process -- from 2007 to 2010. Handel and her successor, Brian Kemp, have done everything they can to ensure the fine standards of voter suppression one would expect from a southern state -- or a banana republic.
• Georgia's voting machines are out-of date, easily hacked, and do not give paper receipts. As shown in the WaPo link above, this was pointed out to Handel in great detail, and for some weird reason, she chose to ignore it, as has Kemp. I wonder why that might be.
• Jon Ossoff led in most GA-6 polls right up to the very end. Funny how all these slam-dunks seem to be going tits-up lately. Pollsters are inept and voters are flaky, but there is also something janky going on here. Oh well, too bad the great state of Georgia doesn't believe in having a forensic account of what actually took place. Maybe someone could assemble a panel or commission to look into all that.

Make no mistake -- if these fuckers had their way, only good upstanding white christian men would be allowed to vote, the way the founding fathers intended it. They're going to try to find a way to make that happen, and you can bet that there are just enough of your friends and neighbors and gamily who just fine with all that.

But yeah, let's fixate on some spoiled journo getting dissed in some asshole's internet slam-book. 

Anhedonia

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

Heavy Petting

One of the better one-liners from the 2016 campaign came from P.J. O'Rourke, who explained that he would be voting for Hillary Clinton because even though Clinton was "wrong about absolutely everything, she's wrong within normal parameters." It was useful not because it was particularly side-splitting, but because it concisely explained the dynamic at work, between a careerist pol who, while competent was widely despised, and a shameless, inept grifter.

It was also useful because it served as an illustration, however rare, of a conservative taking an opportunity to demonstrate the concept of intellectual honesty. Unlike many of his peers in the wake of the election, O'Rourke has been consistent in his opposition to the incompetent clown.

The characterization is also useful because it applies quite well to some conservative politicians. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse would be a good example, as would Mike Pence. Pence is a hack among hacks, a talk-radio weasel who latched on to the political grift, and was on his way to getting unceremoniously booted out of Indiana before the angry clown rescued him.

So Pence's cat Oreo died today, at the age of thirteen, and the linked article provides several photos of Pence and his wife holding their pets (they have another cat named Pickle, and a rabbit named Marlon Bundo). It seems pretty clear that Pence genuinely loves his animals. And while we may find it weird that Pence calls his wife Karen "Mother," and refuses as a matter of principle to dine alone with any other woman, they clearly love and care for each other.

The Secret Shame of Scrooge McCuck

Steve has a hilarious rundown of a few of the Snowflake cultists who are just appalled that Their Hero sold their vaunted principles down the wadi for a few dinars. It just never fails to make me wonder how these maroons suddenly figured out what was obvious to me back when I first encountered Princess Snowflake, about thirty years ago when I was barely out of high school -- he's a liar and a bully, nothing but a cheap, transparent bullshitter.

Those guys are always the biggest fucking pussies, and the first to fold their tent the second someone stands up to them. The guy has never been anything but talk. Ever. I just assumed it was so obvious and easy to check out, I almost feel sorry for someone who's too fucking dumb to realize it. Drinking the kool-aid is one thing, using it as amniotic fluid is quite another.

As always, Snowflake cultists, if you're that impressionable, feel free to drop a few bucks in the PayPal link on the right sidebar, and I'll be happy to give you further tips to deprogram yourselves from your zero's oh-so-compelling bluster. Just take the money you've been saving to attend Chump University, and send it my way. I'll send you a totally real and redeemable certificate of achievement if it'll help. Sheesh.

Better Dead Than Read

I don't know if you've heard, but dead-eyed-daughter-of-famous-retard Joanie Clownstick has a "book" out. Proving that she has learned at the feet (or, well, the lap) of Dear Old Dud, Joanie has cobbled together a pastiche of poached, decontextualized sentiments from other people, poured a corn syrup of tone-deaf self-help bromides all over it, baked for a lifetime of privileged cluelessness, and served as her own dish.

I'm not sure what's worse, the soulless branding machine that churns out this sort of page poop, or the brainless asshole who actually shells out money for it, who see Joanie as something other than what she really is, like they somehow see her old man as something other than what he really is. It's not like this family of boutique grifters has ever been shy about humping 'murka's collective leg like a horny shar-pei violating a hapless couch pillow. Whatever. You can see from the Amazon page that while the "book" has a majority of poor reviews, it is still moving quite well. There will always be someone stupid enough to spend good money on the borrowed musings of a spoiled dunce, if only out of sheer spite.

Just for the fun of it, enjoy the hate reviews from Slate and Atlantic, and remember -- this overrated organism has more money and power than you will ever see in your lifetime, and accumulates more of it every second. She's one of those people who never has to acknowledge how fucking awful they really are, and has the goddamned nerve on top of it all to cloak it in this insufferable pose of "helping" other women. You have to credit these people -- the grift just never slows down.