Murder on the MCC Express

Everyone had a motive for wanting Jeffrey Epstein dead -- Trump, the Clintons, Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, Leslie Wexner, and many more. It reads like a list of Lizard People Who Really Run The World from one of David Icke's books.

I recently read James Patterson's Filthy Rich, a profile of Epstein's life and crimes that, while not exactly investigative or revelatory, at least effectively curates all things Epstein into one concise volume. To be sure, Epstein's crimes against teenaged girls are disgusting and unforgivable. But many facets of the story are interesting, in particular two recurring factors:

1. Epstein ingratiated himself with the movers and/or shakers of the 'murkin cultural elite by engaging in their favorite contact sport -- philanthropy. By donating (or promising to) large amounts of money to relatively liberal and progressive causes, and convening scientists and politicians and such, Epstein managed to create a nice little club of high-profile defenders for when his behavior was finally uncovered. Consequently, he got a sweetheart deal from Alex Acosta, who frankly comes across in Patterson's book as a career tool who got steamrolled by people much further up the ladder. In other words, Acosta didn't necessarily desire a cushy deal for Epstein so much as he was instructed to give him one. All of this stems from Epstein's ability to cultivate -- and perhaps compromise -- a roster of Very Important People.


2. Although Epstein was typically referred to as a "hedge-fund manager," the fact is that there appears to have been no real hedge fund per se. Epstein's first (and possibly only) wealth-management client was Wexner, who oddly disclosed just a couple days ago that Epstein had swindled him out of $46 million, yet Wexner for some reason had never previously decided to, you know, contact the authorities, or even the SEC. Regardless, Epstein's actual asset wealth seems to be a small fraction (like maybe ten percent) of his previously claimed net worth. Sound like anyone else we know?

Already Epstein's demise is the greatest conspiracy theory since the JFK assassination or 9/11, and it's likely many people will never "know" whether he was murdered or if he really committed suicide. That is to say, they'll never be satisfied with the official explanations. Nor should they be -- virtually no one in this mess has functioned as an honest broker, and they're not going to start now.

There are conflicting accounts of Epstein's previous suicide attempt on July 23rd; for one, Epstein himself apparently asserted that he did not try to kill himself, but was in fact attacked by another prisoner, a former cop doing life for murdering four drug dealers. That's why he wasn't on suicide watch.

More to the point, let's use a little common sense here. Most of us accept as fact by now that Epstein appears to have engineered a large, complex extortion scheme, in which he would entice wealthy partygoers into compromising positions with his teenage harem, and then use the videos and photos to blackmail them. Seems strange that he has that kind of leverage over such people, and opts out without even using his volume of material.

Maybe he knew his goose was cooked, and there was no way out this time. But you'd think that a creep like Epstein would have had no reservations about taking down with him whoever else he could, before checking out. Otherwise, what's the point of accumulating all that dirt on influential people?

In the end, it doesn't really matter if Epstein killed himself or was helped along. The main thing to remember is that no one will be held accountable for anything. Oh sure, the SDNY has the files and data and all the dirt from raiding Epstein's mansion. So what? Bill Barr -- whose father gave a grossly underqualified Epstein his first real job, teaching physics and calculus at The Dalton School, even though Epstein had never finished his college degree -- will clean up that mess, just like he's cleaned up all the others.

Maybe Barr will find a convenient liberal type -- Epstein was, after all a liberal and cultivated more high-profile friends from that side of the aisle -- to throw in as a scapegoat. But he'll squash the rest. Whatever Trump's involvement with this creep, he'll get away scot-free, just like he always has and will for all of his shit. Everyone who thought Saint Mueller would save the day should see things for what they are by now -- the whole point of being wealthy and powerful is to insulate yourself from all consequences and accountability.

Last Chance for Democracy?

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

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

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

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.

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.

The Dude Is Happy

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

Yet Another Cletus Safari, Alabama Dingbats Edition

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

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

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

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

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

Bum's Rush

When I speak intemperately of the toxic orange slug festering in the people's house -- and frankly, that is the only proper way to mention Emperor Snowflake -- there are myriad reasons for that tone, every single one of them provided by Himself.

This is fucking unacceptable, every bit of it, and it's been a pleasure and a joy this fine weekend to watch athletes of all races and multiple sports unite against it. There's a reason Colin Kaepernick's jersey was the biggest seller last year, after he began taking his weekly stand (so to speak). It's the same reason NFL players are linking arms today, why the Pittsburgh Steelers refused as a team (except for offensive lineman Alejandro Villanueva, who is an Army veteran) to even step foot on the field for the anthem.

Obviously, sports occupy a very peculiar place in the national psyche, and of course it's even more absurdly pronounced in many other nations, where soccer riots and such are not uncommon. The movement of a ball can do some hinky shit to the brains of otherwise fairly normal people. So of course there are those who are deeply butt-hurt over all this mishegoss. They are very wound up about the "disrespect shown to our military," but you can bet your next paycheck they have fuck-all to say about someone who taunted a tortured military veteran, who talked shit about a Gold Star family who lost their son in combat, who propagated a FUCKING BIRTHER LIE for FIVE FUCKING YEARS.

Respect, it seems, is only important to these folks when it involves people and things they care about. I know, I know, try to contain your shock at this amazing revelation.

The bigger picture is that the walls are closing in, and Old Man Clownstick is rage-tweeting while he's filling his old-man diapers, because Mueller's got his fucking number, because now it turns out that his own team has been using private email accounts (LOCK THEM UP! LOCK THEM UP!), because his approval rating scraped forty percent last week after he managed not to completely fuck up the hurricane responses in Texas and Florida. (Puerto Rico, on the other hand....), because the jig is about to be up, and he desperately needs a distraction.

Jesus H. Christ, this doddering dotard was so discombobulated the other night with his half-witted endorsement of oversized tool Luther Strange, he actually acknowledged that he might have made a mistake in endorsing Strange, and that maybe he should endorse ultra-whackjob Roy Moore. (By the way:  fuck you, Alabama, for foisting that piece of shit on the rest of the country.)

Most of all, even the cultiest of supporters have to acknowledge, if only to themselves, that if the world is a flaming hellscape -- if we are under mortal threat from North Korea and Iran, if ISIS is still imping along, if we are stuck in a failed war in Afghanistan and a despicable genocide in Yemen, then how does this fucking asshole have the time to worry about professional athletes exercising their First Amendment rights?

There needs to be a reckoning:  for the piece of shit defiling the nation's highest office on a daily basis; for the idiots and cranks who put him there; for the party that continues to enable this monster because they value billionaire tax cuts over everything; for the transnational merchant princes who bought enough politicians from both parties to create the conditions that made it possible for the P.O.S. to slither into office in the first place.

More and more people are recognizing these increasingly authoritarian conditions for what they are, and for what King Asshole wants them to be. Athletes using their positions to express resistance to this is a great thing, and hopefully the start of something greater. Let there be no confusion -- this is a warped, demented old man, a divisive, hateful, incompetent scumbag who needs to be stopped. Now.

Days of Whine and Poses, Slight Return

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Cover Queen

In the scheme of things, it's barely worth mentioning, except as further evidence of what a needy little cunt he truly is. There's something seriously fucking wrong with him. This weird, incessant LYING about everygoddamnthing, no matter how insignificant, is a pathology. And it's just exhausting and pathetic.

Betting Pool

So the betting markets fucked up royally in predicting the election outcome, obviously, but so did the "professional" pollsters. With that caveat in mind, and acknowledging that we are barely sixty days into this amateur clusterfuck of an administration, it bears mentioning that there are at least existing bets one can place that these motherless fucks will be down the road before the end of the first term, and even by the end of this year.

It's a hair too soon to be overly optimistic, but something is brewing and gathering momentum. Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, and now Devin Nunes all appear to be up to their asses in alligators over the pattern of collusion between the Clownstick campaign and Russian intel. The only one of these assholes that's even a bit hard is maybe Flynn, and that's only because whatever his faults, he's still a general.

The rest of them? Pfft. Manafort just wants to go back to his dismal existence of serving as a bagman and PR flack for murderers and tyrants. Stone is a perv who literally likes to watch other guys fuck his wife; even more damning, he's a lifelong professional ratfucker. Page appears to be a broker between the Clownstick regime and the Russian oligarchs, and Nunes simply backed the wrong horse because he has way more ambition than brains or ethics.

Delete Your Job; Or, Just the Hacks, Ma'am

Steve has already covered this thoroughly, but it pisses me off to no end, and so I feel compelled to hurl my voice into the internets void:  I fucking despise these people down to their very molecules.

What Amber Phillips has scrawled on the virtual wall deserves to be roundly fisked, FJMed, deconstructed to a atomic level, refuted right down to Phillips' choice of verbs. But life is too short, so let's just grab a few of the high notes. Take a look at Bernie Sanders' tweetstorm this morning, whence comes Phillips' worthless analysis:



Near as I can tell, the good senator bookended three objective, empirical verities of very recent vintage with two salient, if somewhat objective, assertions. He essentially said that a leader who lies -- and this is important -- so flagrantly, and about things that are easily refuted, not only is no leader, but he undermines the credibility of the nation in the eyes of the world, and Sanders provided three fresh examples to support his argument. This is very solid work, in fewer than seven hundred characters, far fewer than the number of helpless pixels Phillips expends in her shameless hackery.

A prominent U.S. senator just described the president of the United States as a frequent and “shameless” liar, a claim that for reasons I'll explain is difficult to prove.

Yeah, except she doesn't explain it at all, except to assume that maybe Fuckface Von Clownstick legitimately does not know the facts regarding the things he asserts. In other words, despite having the facts explained to him over and over and over again by the very media outlet (among many others) for which Amber Phillips haplessly plies her trade, Clownstick may sincerely believe that millions of people voted fraudulently, that his inauguration crowd was record-setting despite all photographic evidence to the contrary, that Barack Hussein Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii.

That's why this ultra-tense Democrat-Trump relationship is more than just he-said, she-said politics. Because Senate Democrats can require 60 votes to approve any piece of legislation, they have leverage over Trump and congressional Republicans, who have only 52 members in the Senate. Trump needs at least a handful of Democrats to help him repeal and replace Obamacare. And carry out his plan to restructure the tax code. Or pass a $1 trillion infrastructure package.

Right now, the exact opposite is happening: Democrats are blocking Trump in historic ways, like stalling committee hearings for key Cabinet posts or threatening to filibuster his Supreme Court nominee.

To read this tedious nonsense, you would never guess that we just spent the last eight years watching a Democratic president (who won by margins much larger than that of the current occupant) get kneecapped by the opposition party for no good reason at all, out of sheer obstructionism. But this asshole selects for his cabinet fellow skeevy billionaires and feckless morons who promise to destroy the agencies they have been appointed to lead. This is a strategy, albeit a demented one, employed by someone who has spent the better part of the last two years campaigning on the most toxic lies and corrosive rhetoric in modern memory. But it's the Democrats who are being meeeaan. Hey, fuck you.

Phillips lards the rest of her turd-burglary with weasel phrases such as "Democrats say," as if they were making unsubstantiated claims just to be dicks, as opposed to using facts to respond to someone who is making unsubstantiated claims just to be a dick. Repeated throughout, this serves as a cheap hack-media device to separate the writer from their intrinsic fear of "editorializing," as if this was all just a matter of partisan opinion-mongering.

The whole column is a pile of shit that should be flushed twice, but again what really takes it that extra turd-mile is this butt-nugget near the end:

It's possible Trump believes the allegations he's making, which seem to have surfaced on a conservative news site one of his top aides used to manage. Several top House Republicans haven't brushed off the wiretapping claims, with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, saying he'll look into it.

[emphasis in original]

Lots of things are possible. It's possible that I have a billion dollars in the bank and a twelve-inch cock, which I use on Salma Hayek several times a day. It's possible that the corporeal entity we know as "Donald Trump" is actually two hyperactive children piggy-backed under a trench coat, like trying to sneak into an R-rated movie in a cartoon. It's definitely possible that Amber Phillips should have reread the nonsense she was writing before she sent it in to her editor.

Because Phillips' own logic undermines her own argument. By her logic, this fucking jerkoff is either a pathological liar or the dumbest fucking guy on the planet. Because all of his lies -- and let's stop fucking around here, folks, he's lying and he knows it, he just doesn't give a shit -- have been refuted over and over again. Whether he chooses to read anything besides Breitbart, or watch anything besides Hannity or Fox and Friends, is irrelevant. You can cut a dropout oxy addict in Bumfuck, Ohio some slack for not having their facts straight; it is an existential danger and a complete abdication of responsibility to cut the guy in the Oval Office such slack. Also, Devin Nunes is a shameless douchebag who would probably chug Steve Bannon's pole on the White House lawn if told to do so. [Ed.-- But he'd wait for Jason Chaffetz to finish his turn.]

You might expect more out of a corporate media entity than a cheap reiteration of George Costanza rationales. You would be wrong to have that expectation.

Word of advice to the "legit" media -- the only thing required for you to do your job is that you call people and things what they objectively are. Stop using weasel words and pretzel logic and idiotic false equivalences, especially in what is essentially an opinion column.

Provocateur

It's been an interesting week for poor Milo, no? Having not been familiar with him except by name, until his appearance last week on Bill Maher's show, I didn't really know what to expect. By the end of the segment, I guess it was mildly surprising how utterly fact-free and hacky the guy really is. I thought there'd be at least some nugget of principle, some vague core conviction of contrarianism or something.

But he's nothing but a confection of queer-lib schtick and bratty hair-pulling third-grader. He's basically a gay British Bart Simpson, minus the charm. Even Rush Limbaugh is entertaining on rare occasions. The idea that someone like Milo has any impact on the political world should give one an idea of how far gone we are. This is just "think of the stupidest thing you can, make something out of it, and do it in character."

The Investiture of Fuckface Von Clownstick

Was there anyone who seriously thought that Tweety would change from blustery campaign asshole to someone more presimadentiamable? Probably, but that's why they're called suckers.

Clownstick's inaugural benediction was indeed a piece of dark, Lovecraftian doggerel for the depths of R'lyeh, a tone poem for the Elder Gods, painting a lurid story of a flaming hellscape in the middle of a Thunderdome, and only Batman can save us from ourselves. Seriously, what kind of thumb-sucking dipshit believes this nonsense?

Of course, we've all heard exactly what kind of dipshit, the same kind that lives in these wiped-out shithole counties that have been busted out by opioids and heroin. We'll see how long it takes before these rubes come out of their comas and realize that Batman doesn't really give a fuck about them. Nor does he really exist, because life is not a fucking played-out comic-book movie franchise.

And really, what is Batman's deal, anyway? Consider:  Bruce Wayne is a single billionaire who is expertly trained in martial arts and wants to fight the bad guys in his crime-riddled city. So does he join the police force? Does he buy them some new equipment? Does he maybe create a fund for them to finance more staff on the force? No, he dresses up like a bat and goes vigilante. Probably hasn't paid his fucking taxes for twenty years either.

It is interesting and heartening so far to see some form of resistance to this idiot nutcase, but we'll see if it holds. The Democrats and the corporate media each seem to be finally getting the message that these people are not fucking around, that the animosity is real, it's not schtick, and they either fight back like they mean it or find new jobs.

Or learn to speak Russian.

Liars' Poker

In terms of making a mint from the internets, I frequently think I was born about 15-20 years too early (1967), maybe more. I think people born about 1990 or so, growing up with the modern toys we all take for granted now, are instinctively attuned in a way we older folk had to learn. I can definitely say that even mundane things such as Excel have made me think and process information differently than I did in the previous century, but they've grown up with those things, where we older folks learned them, implanted them on the old paradigm we grew up with, which was so different.

Having a teenager in the house is a constant reminder of how difficult it is to convey how much different life was before these wondrous things. Of course I have tried, by mentioning such oddities as rotary-dial phones and black-and-white TVs, but understandably I just get a blank stare. It would be like my great-grandmother trying to explain how music recordings were once played by wax cylinders.

Like many kids her age, my daughter wants to be a video game designer, which is yet another area in which I can only lamely attempt to tell her how things used to be. Games are as sophisticated as movies now, of course, and as such require not only coders but scriptwriters. I don't have any ironic nostalgia for Pong or Adventure or Pitfall or Pac-Man, as much fun as those games were back in the day, anymore than I would trade Breaking Bad for Dukes of Hazzard. Trust me, your Facebook friends posting memes about that shit are missing the boat.

Cruel and Usual

Now that the summer silly season is winding down, and "serious" (at least in comparison) observers and observations are getting more involved in what passes for a political discussion in this country, Donald Trump's oldest children are flooding the zone to defend dear old dad's spewage and tone.

Let's play devil's advocate for a few:  I don't doubt their sincerity. I believe that if he likes you, needs something from you, or you at least pull your weight, Donald Trump is probably a reasonably generous person, nice even. There, I said it.

He's an obnoxious tool partly by temperament, partly because, like Jesus and Gandhi and L. Ron Hubbard, Trump intuitively understands that he has to fully commit to his own hype. It's kind of like being in an up-and-coming band -- if you don't believe you're awesome and destined for success, why on earth should anyone else?

Lie of the Crier

Not sure what the hell Mike Huckabee thinks he's going to get out of bandwagoning and orchestrating the small (300 people? really?) pep rally for oft-married, recently converted super-Christian Kim Davis' release from county jail. If he thinks his single-issue preaching to the converted is going to get him so much as a low-level cabinet appointment in a never-gonna-happen Ted Cruz administration, he's even dumber than he sounds trying to defend this sanctimonious dunce.

Are her fifteen minutes up yet already? Again, who gives two shits what a handful of inbred rubes and jokers think about anything? They've already got their minds made up; we know who they'll be voting for next year and for the next ten to twenty years. There's no mystery about places like this. These are people who literally cannot decide whether or not they should be allowed to purchase alcohol. Are they Moooslims, or just stoopid?

OK Stupid

So looks like good ol' Josh Duggar has stepped on his dick yet again, getting caught in the Ashley Madison hack not only as a denizen of that site, but apparently he has an OK Cupid account as well. Knock me over with a feather.

Unlike sanctimonious, holier-than-thou shitheads like, well, the entire Duggar family, most of us realize that humans are messy, complex, full of contradictions and complications. The difference is that most of us do not earn a cushy living trying to legislate morality for all.

Blood Libel

You knew the Clownstick implosion was inevitable, but this quickly? Maybe the most fun part of it will be watching his maroon "fans" piss and moan at the unfair treatment their wampeter got from what has basically been his home team.

This is as good an opportunity as ever to bring up again just how weird Trump is, in this observer's humble opinion anyway. I've said this before:  if I'm even a tenth as wealthy as Trump claims to be, if I have walking-away money for the next several generations, I'm fucking walking away. I am not spending my time on Twitter wars and virtual slapfights; I'm not even paying a flunky for that bullshit. I'm on my fucking 300-foot yacht wherever the weather is nicest, living on endless surf-and-turf and Ketel One and Russian supermodel poontang. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with this guy?

Beyond all the bluster and bullshit and dick-waving self-aggrandizement this asshole has been known for, beyond the cult of dipshits who think he can "fix" everything, this is the most unsettling thing about Trump. There's something to be said about someone who doesn't take any shit from anyone; many's the time we all wish Obama had had a little "fuck you" in his bones to throw back at McConnell and Boehner and the rest of them.

But that seems to be Clownstick's default setting. This is the guy that's going to be negotiating trade deals and arms treaties, this thin-skinned douchebag, this cartoon character blow-dried mook? He can't take a "tough question" at a dog-and-pony debate, but he's going to go balls-deep with Putin and the Chinese and the mullahs? Really?

So far, the guy has proven to be Palin with a penis and a worse hair weave. Everyone else is a loser, crude assertions are pulled directly out of the alimentary canal and waved around as empirical facts, disagreements and cheap shots are reacted to as if they were the gravest of insults. No true solutions are offered for anything, just magic-wand if-I-were-king bafflegab. He'll keep the Mexicans out by building a wall and making them pay for it. He would have resolved the Iran nuclear crisis by doubling or tripling sanctions. You bang your wife doggy style, he'd do her reverse cowgirl and make her forget all about you. And so forth.

I don't know what's scarier -- the fact that Trump's followers clearly swallow this horseshit unquestioningly, or that Trump might seriously believe it himself. He understands his audience, knows that his "message" appears to old, bewildered shitheads who don't have the goddamned decency to go find an ice floe to push themselves off onto already. The idea that he can't be bought because he's already wealthy doesn't quite stick either, because as Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina found out the hard way here in Cali, only a moron spends their own money running for office. So Clownstick has to raise money just like anyone else, once push comes to shove.

I think we need to start looking at the long game here, and what ramifications it has for the Republican Party, which may implode regardless of whether Trump goes third-party or stays in the GOP fray. The party is increasingly driven by its most vocal, loose-cannon extra-chromosome base, people who do not do nuance or big-picture thinking. The world and the nation keep moving on, have left these dopey, ancient crackers behind, and they just can't stand it.

So the question becomes which blustery goofball becomes their next rock star. They get worse and worse with each iteration, from Fredo Arbusto to Caribou Barbie to Ted Cruz to Fuckface Von Clownstick. Sooner or later they're going to strike oil on one of these kampfers, someone with the same message, but smoother, subtler, bluster-free and truly charismatic.

Watching future Cali governor Gavin Newsom last night on Bill Maher's show, sandwiched between Republican consultants Steve Schmidt and Mary Matalin, I was struck at how effortlessly charismatic the guy is. He's good-looking and well-spoken, but what sets Newsom apart is how carefully he chooses his words, and how deftly he co-opts moderate Republican talking points. He understands intrinsically that politics is niched too much to be won by doubling down on your base appeal. You have to get the fence-sitters to take a look at you, and you do that by not saying or doing stupid things that spook the horses. It will be a few more election cycles, probably 2024 or 2028 (or 2020 if Clinton somehow loses next year), but I would be very surprised if Newsom doesn't take a shot at the big ring at some point.

Sooner or later the Goopers will figure that out; indeed, they may have that very person waiting in the wings in Marco Rubio. Out of all the clown car occupants at the big kids' table Thursday night, only Rubio and maybe John Kasich came off as anything resembling reasonable. Neither of them would make a good president, but both understand the value of appearing inclusive and comparatively moderate, and not stomping every hot-button issue into the floor.

And while Hillary Clinton is no doubt dancing in her pantsuit watching this slow-motion clusterfuck, nothing is settled. She has as many negatives as positives; she turns off as many people as she appeals to. Probably ninety percent of the people who will vote for her will do so reluctantly, waiting and wishing for someone better, someone less oleaginous and transparently insincere. Why on earth would I want to vote for someone who willingly hangs out with the likes of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, did someone seriously tell her this would be a selling point to anyone? (Yes, I get it, they attended a fundraiser and snapped a selfie; the larger point remains valid.)

The Republicans will beat mercilessly on Clinton's negatives, real and fictitious, and no doubt create some new ones in the process. It is going to be ugly, and probably closer than people might assume, whether or not Clownstick blows up the narrative by going, um, rogue. If Rubio can polish his own narrative a bit, moderate his impulses, reach beyond the doddering base that can't seem to decide on which asshole of the week they want to roll with, he could make things even weirder than they already are. Getcha popcorn.

5 Kids and Counting

So, how 'bout them Duggars, amirite? The actual details of what Josh Duggar did to four of his sisters and another girl he was babysitting are pretty bad, though not by the standards of what your average social worker sees routinely.

What makes it worse is that, if you do the math, when Josh was 14, his next four sisters would have been 12, 11, 10, and 9 (depending on the dates of the incident(s), the younger two girls may have been 9 and 8). It's hard to tell from the heavily-redacted police report in the In Touch article what the age was of the non-related girl. But this is all pretty bad shit, worse when you make your living humping the country's leg about their moral decline.

Certainly the timing of this story is politically convenient, seeing as how all the events, including the belated investigation, are a decade old or more. It would not be surprising at all to find the fingerprints of whatever ratfucking scumbag Hillary Clinton has running the dirty ops arm of her campaign team. But that is entirely the fault of the asshole conservatard industry, who accumulate money and power lecturing the peons on their personal lives and choices, rather than doing a single goddamned thing to empower them and help them get their lives together.