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.

The Dude Is Happy

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Twilight of Hot Take Nation

I don't have any pithy thoughts on What Happened In Las Vegas. It's tragic, but not unexpected; as mentioned here countless times, we have become inured to the mayhem, accustomed to thinking of these events as the cost of doing business. So this is the cost, an annual blood sacrifice of several dozen innocent lives, so that the oppressive state doesn't impose too harshly on the rights of lawful gun users.

It would be no surprise at all to find that Stephen Paddock had no political agenda whatsoever, that he was neither a Clownstick hater nor supporter, just a lone nut with lots of legally obtained firearms. This is the inadvertently nasty trick the founding fathers played on later generations, the blank insistence that any citizen has an absolute right to any sort of weapon they desire, no test for qualification or competence.

There are, I believe some exculpatory perspectives on the absolutism of the Second Amendment. The main one is that, in societies with real gun control, there is an overt emphasis on the "monopoly of force" that is to be the prerogative of the state. Technically, if the state apparatus is popularly elected and supported, then said force should represent a willful and lawful majority of the citizens, versus the accumulated stockpiles of regional warlords and assorted cranks. Still, the view is at odds with the actual history and culture of the United States.

Second to that is the hoary but still true analogy that we don't take everyone's cars away when some dipshit careens through a farmers' market and takes out a dozen pedestrians. (Of course, we do test for driver competence, but go out on any given road for, say, fifteen minutes, and try to keep count of how many morons you encounter.)

People can and do go back and forth on all the facets of this issue, with the usual results. Whatever else you may hear over the coming week, however cynical or political or naively idealistic, the bottom line is this:  the cost of not changing is not yet greater than the cost of changing. This is the operative axiom for any major (or even moderate) societal change, period. It is as universal a law as gravity.

Tragically, in a geographically secure nation of 320 million people, you probably never reach that point of equilibrium where gun control laws would be implemented across the nation. There is too much invested in the rhetoric of "states' rights" and "tradition" and that sort of thing. Even standardizing basic background checks and waiting periods would be impossible.

If the Sandy Hook massacre -- a crazy asshole using his mommy's Bushmaster rifle to murder a classroom full of first-graders -- didn't change anything, you unfortunately have to start considering the moral calculus at work here. It's a ghoulish exercise in reverse engineering:  what would it take to get meaningful gun control laws across the country, 100, 200, 500 people? What is the benchmark, the casualty count at which enough people say, "Okay. Fuck this."? Seriously, try to conjure up a suitable number and setting for yourself.

The really strange thing about all this is that Americans are notoriously willing -- eager, in fact -- to embrace any manner of intrusions for the illusion of security. We'll stand in line for hours on end to be randomly searched and probed by TSA schmucks so's we can fly to Hawaii; we've passively accepted the mass surveillance of our emails and online communiques; we routinely let overzealous Barney Fife types push us around at traffic stops. Considering the statistical facts that fewer individuals own more guns, it's weird that the majority of 'murkins seem to be fine with this absolutism when it comes to gun rights.

So this is all old, well-trod ground. We've been hashing this bullshit out for as long as I care to remember, while the NRA continued -- and still does -- to build political influence on the bodies of the slain, fear-mongering to the fearful and paranoid.

What's more interesting (to me, anyway) is the meta aspect of it all -- the collective commentary on the event, then the secondary commentary on the initial commentary, etc. Something like this:  The Gateway Pundit retard posts a bullshit item about the shooting, it gets carried on Facebook because Zuckerberg gives less than a quarter of a fuck about anything besides raking in dough, and lowly bloggerses futilely attempt to clear up the facts as they are known. And nothing results from any of it, ever.

This dynamic has become at best a collective catharsis, a tacit acknowledgement that we are well and truly screwed, and can't do jack shit about it but complain and hope that the benevolent aliens hear us. And then we're all right back at square one for the next one, like it'll turn out any different. This is a classic death spiral; if you had a cousin like this, you'd get together with family and hold an intervention, if only to register your concerns before it was "too late."

I think it's too late, in many respects. When it comes to the daily concern of how to manage the mad emperor, I have a reasonable level of competence that Bob Mueller has unearthed at least enough evidence to shame and disempower him, if not remove him from power outright.

But that does fuck-all about the disease of which Snowflake is but a nasty symptom -- it brings no jobs back, it doesn't lessen the causes or effects of ongoing climate change, it doesn't get opposing cadres of 'murkins out of each others' collective asses, stoked by the ministrations of the orange insect overlord.

The commentariat --- and hell, I'll even throw myself in as a barnacle on the hull of internets discussion -- is as bad as the "conventional" mediots at this point. We can all poke fun at the media monkeys dancing to the corporate tune, penned in at a rally, having to contend with barely ambulatory morons screaming at them and flipping them off, and dutifully transcribing the proceedings like a bunch of assholes. But we bloggerses are much the same, meta-commenting and snarking and such like, but not really affecting anything meaningful. Yes, so-and-so is a certifiable, provable asshole, but the proof means nothing when said asshole just got elected, because enough of your fellow countrymen are toxic douchebags.

Maybe this is what a dying post-industrial empire looks like:  everyone endlessly commenting on everyone else and nobody listening, just shoveling shit into an entropic void.

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.