Frogs of War; Or, Alpha Frog

I don't pay a whole lot of attention to European politics in general or French politics in particular, but Emmanuel Macron's snuggling up to the likes of Emperor Snowflake reeks of desperation. Macron can't possibly think that the JCPOA can be renegotiated on the terms he and Snowflake propose, even though it's clear that Snowflake does think that's the case, making some blustery threats if Iran were to resume nuclear weapons development (which they obviously would if we welshed on the agreement).

Listening to this fat, incompetent old man rail like a barstool drunk at the teevee in the tavern, it's hard to imagine what sort of dupe listens to this idiot jabber and hears anything fearful or praiseworthy. Only a complete pussy would actually be scared of him, and only a cult member would actually think he sounds tough. If anything, he seems intent on showing both Iran and North Korea that the US cannot be trusted on these sorts of agreements.

(Nor is it helpful when Snowflake praises a murderous dictator like Kim Jong Un as "very honorable." It's slightly better than the schoolyard taunts of the past, but this is a guy who literally had his own half-brother murdered in public on foreign soil by poisoners, a Putin tactic if ever there was one.)

So Macron's star is falling, and with it his rather grandiose version of himself (which may explain at least some of his rush to embrace Snowflake, even letting Snowflake treat him like a chump at the photo-op). Macron is not wrong about the worrisome rise of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, but the solution is not to push Poland and Hungary back into Russia's sphere of influence. All of Europe is facing this crisis of authoritarianism, due to several factors, but so far Macron has yet to demonstrate that has either the best or only solutions. His "Jupiter" posturing should go over very well with his Ozymandias hero.

Crowd Control

You can't help but feel sorry for the poor bastards in this article, but with the understanding that these are entirely foreseeable consequences of policies (or lack of) in their respective countries. Whether you let people breed like rabbits or restrict them into gender selectivity, the consequences are strangely similar -- an overabundance of men in those countries.

But that's also a symptom of there simply being an ever-increasing overabundance of humans in those countries, and pretty much everywhere else for that matter. You can't swing a poached leopard without finding some do-gooder bullshit about how the planet has infinite carrying capacity if we all consume less.

This might be a decent idea if, you know, the handful of individuals who own most of the stuff did anything with their lives other than hoard and accumulate. But that's not going to happen, and for every person who is conscious of the problem and tries to live modestly, have just one or two kids, recycles, there's another (or five or ten or twenty others) who are solidly conditioned to self-actualize through jonesmanship and shopping for things they don't really want with money they don't really have.

Sure, Earth can probably hold twenty billion ravenous humans, if most of them are willing to tolerate a Slumdog Millionaire existence while a handful of inheritance swells live the good life. Maybe some of the peons can get on with them -- they will, after all, need someone to cook their food, watch their kids, scrub their toilets, service them sexually.

And as we are seeing with the rising middle classes in China and India, they are having fewer children anyway -- but, as one might expect, are consuming more, just like their western counterparts. So even reduced birth rates come at a larger per capita ecological price. But it's still the right direction to head toward. An ongoing, concerted international effort to reduce birth rates and improve health and education in the worst parts of the world is obviously (except for the religious idiots who look at shanty towns and think their celestial friend will magically provide, in which case I encourage them to spend a year in the slums of Sao Paulo or Abidjan) a necessity. We should be dumping money into such efforts, rather than letting anti-condom and anti-abortion fanatics muck it up.

Nobody Does It Better

Nobody has ever been more of an obvious con man.
Nobody has ever been more incompetent at starting and/or running an actual business.
Nobody has ever been more transparent in their attempts to deceive, bamboozle, LIE at every opportunity, even creating opportunities to lie about things that are not even worth lying about.
Nobody has ever been more abusive to the English language, in terms of consistently using words that don't mean what he thinks they mean.
Nobody has ever been more destructive to this nation's norms and institutions, things we used to take for granted.
Nobody has ever been a worse husband, or a worse father. I hope that every time his gold-digger wife looks at him, she sees the blow-up dolls he stuck his little cheeto in, while she sat in her fucking tower, sometimes pregnant, sometimes with an infant for the nannies to take care of.
Nobody has ever been more of an obnoxious, cheap shill, in his tiresome attempts to hump everyone's leg until there's a tiny hole in it, insisting contrary to what all can see that he has a thirty-inch cock.
Nobody has ever been more like a stupid, tantrum-throwing toddler, every fucking day, without fail.
Nobody has ever been more gullible, taking all his marching orders from a bunch of traitors and sycophants at a propaganda network owned by an Australian.
Nobody has ever been more wasteful with self-tanning lotion, or spray, or UV beds, or whatever the fuck it is he uses to turn himself into a raccoon-eyed orange handbag.
Nobody has ever been more of a worthless cocksucker, useless and pathetic and utterly without any value whatsoever just as a human being.
Many people are saying that this asshole is a fucking embarrassment to what's left of this country, now that the pampered plutocrat class have killed it, and are merely figuring out how to divvy up the carcass.
People don't realize that because the Richie Rich scumbags have already killed it, the nation will probably never recover from what's taken place over the past three years.

Either we get rid of this piece of shit, and everyone who enabled him, or we deserve them. There is no middle ground to be had on this.
 

In Carny Nation

In case you haven't seen enough "Why Satan Won" thinkpieces over the last year or so, this one actually takes a fresher, more academic approach. I am aware of, but not familiar with, Bakhtin's "carnival" theory, but as explained in the link, it sounds similar to Barthes' deconstructed musings on pro wrestling as the true artistic expression of the proletariat.

The idea that the "jester" can provide a healthy outlet for the frustrations of the masses, without (usually) causing harm to the jester or the masses, is obviously an ancient and venerable one. Done well, it can provide the attentive ruler (or ruling class) an outlet as well, a path toward corrective behavior that could conceivably save their elite hides from a revolution.

But we're not on a path to revolution, or civil war, or anything else. It's just not going to happen. Nothing fazes us anymore. Billionaires have been screwing everyone else since the word "billionaire" was invented; to paraphrase Balzac, it's how they got there in the first place.

The elevation (to candidate for political office) of a comically boorish fake billionaire who pretends to be a populist certainly fits the carnival narrative of upending polite norms, embracing vulgarity and eschewing "correctness" and slapping the snobs in the face. But once the point's been made, elevating the cretin further -- or actually putting him in the seat of power -- makes the entire exercise utterly dependent on the person in question, their character or lack of it.

Pro wrestling was never particularly interesting to me, but the individuals from the ring that I've seen in interviews and movies tend to be very interesting people. There's a terrific documentary about Andre the Giant on HBO right now. Dwayne Johnson has crafted a successful movie career, mostly predicated on his likability, and John Cena is starting to do the same thing. Mick Foley was always funny and cool in his Daily Show guest appearances. Chris Jericho has his metal band Fozzy, as well as a goofy cameo in Devin Townsend's space-rock opera Z2. And of course there's They Live. Even Hulk Hogan was fun before he turned into a weird, cuckolded asshole with douchebag kids.

What made all the above individuals (and more that I'm forgetting, surely) funny and interesting is that they all made it very clear -- not explicitly, but clear all the same through their words and mannerisms -- that they were playing characters, that it was acting in the guise of sport. (Not to say that the physical damage and abuse isn't real; even if the punches and moves are exaggerated, most of us wouldn't last a minute in that ring.) They are there to entertain, have fun, hopefully make a few bucks.

It's much more difficult to tell where the crowds are at, though. They get into it with full-throated vigor, without seeming to have the knowing cynicism that comes with watching something that everyone knows is schtick, that we're all in on. And this will sound sexist, and I don't care, but if you've ever worked in an office with a lot of women, they can jabber on and on and fucking on about [pick virtually any "reality" teevee show, but used to be Survivor or Dancing with the Stars, now more likely one of the Bachelor franchises] as if the participants in these shows are "real" in the conventional sense, as if there's anything remotely non-contrived about a bunch of conventionally attractive people pretending to look for love in a hot tub while being filmed and selectively edited.

Unless I'm misreading the carnival theory premise (which is always possible), one of its central attributes is that it's temporary. Catharsis is important, but permanent catharsis would be paralyzing in many ways -- mentally, emotionally, productively. Set in an environment of epistemic closure, where facts and misbehavior don't matter, where the "legitimate" media are in a never-ending struggle to get clicks and keep moving, we've ended up with enough bitter, ignorant people who are too dumb and lazy to inform themselves, and instead act out of pure spite.

But that's exactly what the Republican Party has been cultivating for decades now, this ridiculous list of imaginary grievances, a narrative of complaints instead of policy and facts. It shouldn't be any surprise to have this massive audience of baying morons who take the schtick seriously, as literal truth. They were willing enough to vote for the wrestler who played to them, without worrying about the inherent cynicism.

Now they finally have a wrestler who is not playing a character. I think most people figured that the current waste of orange leather was playing the "heel" character, winking knowingly at "his" fans. We are all used to the schtick, regardless of our particular political persuasions. We expect the cynicism. Most people did not expect a wrestler who is his character, who has no separation at all from the jerkoff he has played on teevee for many years. (It is not for nothing that he really is a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, and that he frequently refers to his supporters as "fans".)

Emperor Snowflake is an old, lazy man who doesn't (perhaps can't) read, has the attention span and impulse control of a four-year-old, and wants to grow up to be a banana republic caudillo. The main thing to keep in mind here (beyond his innate, lifelong ineptitude) is that he's old. He'll be gone, maybe sooner rather than later, but statistically some point in the next decade or so.

(I sincerely look forward to taking a huge shit on his grave, whenever that time comes. I'll eat half an all-meat pizza and chug a pitcher of beer first, maybe a few shots of whiskey. Should be a good ten-pound growler for His Majesty.)

But the audience will still be there, rabid, ravenous, incoherent, impossible to please. It's one thing to sublimate your own identity for an entertainment product, to live vicariously through imaginary heroes because your own life is going nowhere. It's quite another to actively subvert the future of your country because the most important thing to you is sticking your finger in the eye of an imagined caricature of your political opponents. If this doesn't change or at least get disempowered, sent back to its rightful place of impotent rage, then we are screwed, and maybe we deserve it.

Requiem for a Bush

No doubt we've given Gramma Bush a hard time or two in here at some point, most likely after her Katrina gaffe, but compared to the current group of scumbags within the White House and supporting them in the media, she's a saint. It's not hard to appreciate a tough old bird who knew when to say when, went home on her own terms, and had bourbon at the end.

Having said all that, this classic internets conspiracy theory never fails to make me chuckle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Chilling Effect

Well, there they go again -- an honest, hard-workin' talk-show raver has been run out of his job by LIBTARD CORRECKNESS YOU GUYS. First they came for poor Laura Ingraham for taunting, then Kevin Williamson loses his livelihood just because he insisted that getting an abortion be punishable by death. And now this.

Why oh why can't a free and open exchange of thoughtful ideas include threats of violence? I mean, where's the fun in that? Can't everyone else simply read the minds of people like Jamie Allman and Kevin Williamson, and intuit that they and their ilk are, to a person, just a bunch of fat lazy armchair tough guys who couldn't harm anything more powerful than a bag of Doritos, that this is all just idle jabber, that the losers who listen to these phony-tough assholes are just like them, a bunch of dickless crybabies chewing holes in their cheeks with their impotent rage?

The main thing to remember, at all times, is that there's really just two effective methods of getting your point across to the cocksuckers of the world:  ballots and wallets. But you have to go deep and wide. For example, why boycott Laura Ingraham when the network she works for is a cesspool of lies and filth? Fox is a scummy organization that operated in a culture of rape and sexual harassment, and now peddles lies in dump-truck volume. The network itself actively destroys the fabric of this country on a daily basis, for no better reason than to make money and piss off doddering morons.

Same goes for Jamie Allman -- the resignation is a nice start, but Sinclair aspires to be the network version of Fox's cable operation. They have literally said that they want to help Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, and they want to do it the same way Fox has been doing it, with lies and propaganda.

This is so much bigger than whichever of these scumbags is picking on this or that Parkland survivor, whther it's physically threatening David Hogg, or photo-shopping pics of Emma Gonzalez ripping up the Constitution. They are liars, calumniators, bearers of false witness. They support a piece of shit like Scott Pruitt screwing the taxpayers and wrecking the environment; they support a clown like Ryan Zinke strutting around like a fake cowboy and selling national monuments to oil companies, when he's not logrolling massive disaster relief jobs to unqualified companies in his district. They support a religious fanatic like Betsy DeVos destroying what's left of the public education system in this country, and turning it into profit centers.

This is all or nothing, folks. This is not a good-faith dialogue of intellectual probity and thoughtful ideas. This is nothing short of a rhetorical war with people who will never support their arguments in good faith. That is a waste of time. Either you ignore their poison and hope it goes away (futilely), or you let the companies who sponsor them know that it will cost them your business.

Maybe they'll do the same thing to Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert or Bill Maher. That's the risk and the promise of this strategy. The 2016 election cast into sharp relief what kind of country the US had turned into, or perhaps was all along. But we know more, so much more, now than we did even eighteen months ago, and there is no more excuse for the dipshits who voted for him thinking he'd "grow into the office" or "bring change" or whatever stupid thing they told themselves as self-absolution for their dumb decision.

There are no more excuses. What happens in six months will either reinforce the seismic shift of 2016, or possibly point to a direction back from the brink. The absolutely most effective -- and entirely peaceful and non-violent -- way to accomplish this is with economic coercion. But it's not just about the electoral cycle. It is an ongoing fight, every day, every week. You can bet that they are working at it diligently.

Remember, you don't have to take their shit. Their entire argument about the "free marketplace of ideas" is a pernicious lie. They have no interest in honest debate on any subject. Theirs is the ethos of full-throated, epistemically closed nihilism. There's no responding to it; you might as well yell into a toilet bowl. When enough people quit bringing sporks to the gunfight, and realize that these fuckers have no rules or mores, you can shut them down.

Motor Shitty Asshole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Girth of a Nation

I wanted to like the Roseanne reboot, I suppose; at the very least, I resolved not to let it be a political decision, which appears to be something of a feat for many folks these days. But let's not kid ourselves -- the show's namesake has gone out of her way the last few years to be (or at least make effort to appear to be) a repellent troll.

As her bumptious political opinions have pinballed around the dial throughout her tumultuous public life, one thing has remained consistent for Roseanne the person:  she seems to place an inordinate value in being tough to pigeonhole or defend. This would be worthy of note if only she'd ever had an opinion on any subject that was worth repeating or endorsing. But her main goal has always been simply to be a pain in the ass. Like her ricockulous orange golem idol, she can't stand to be ignored. Unlike Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, she doesn't care if you like her or not.

But again, I don't want to be one of those Zhdanovite douchebags, stress-testing every note of every song and every line of every show for absolute alignment with my own view of the world and its sorry inhabitants. Ultimately, either the show is funny, or it isn't.

And the show is funny....until it isn't. There are a lot of nice little moments, and some decent laughs. John Goodman fits right back into the Dan Conner (easily the best character on the show, then and now) role like a comfortable shoe. The original kids are all back, as is Laurie Metcalf. They all fall right back into familiar rhythms.

But the first two episodes, which aired back-to-back last week, submerge the viewer in tone and smarm and reverse PC winks. It's likely that the writers were going for an Archie vs. Meathead dynamic between Roseanne and Jackie, but Michael Stivic was actually allowed to make a point once in a while. Jackie is simply a hopped-up caricature of every conservatard twitbag's laundry list of imaginary grievances:  shrill, smug, self-righteous, pedantic. It gets old quickly.

Roseanne, on the other hand, is never ever wrong about anything, just ask her. She defends her choice of a moronic grifter with a vague grumble about "jobs" and brooks no further disagreement. We'll see how that all goes with the jobs and the health care booming along as they are in that part of the country. The bottom line is that it becomes difficult to separate a show from its politics when the show is so blatantly political at every turn.

One of the plots in the second episode encapsulates the dilemma of the show pretty well:  younger daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert, who is producing the reboot) has moved back home with her teen daughter and tween son, the latter of whom is, as the kids say in the 'hood, "gender fluid." Ultimately the grandparents' initial discomfort with a ten-year-old boy wearing unisex clothes and nail polish gives way to the predictable trope of fierce family protection.

All well and good, except this is precisely the same demographic that, in real life, could not stop braying about the looming danger of transgender bathrooms and such like. The lack of empathy in the real people the Conners are meant to represent is palpable, and the feeling that they (Roseanne and Dan) would have jeered at the same kid if he were in a news item at a school is inescapable. That's how they are -- they didn't give a fuck about heroin addicts, until it hit their trailer park. And they didn't give a fuck about jobs until theirs went to China and India and Mexico.

The preening arrogance of these people -- the real white working class and their teevee avatars -- is just exhausting. They seem to think that their diet of deep-fried twinkies and Bachelor offshoots confers some sort of "realness" upon them, that they are somehow more genuinely American than someone who (hurr!) reads hard-cover books and pays attention to actual news. That's really the worst out of all of it, you know, that they really seem to believe such bullshit.

Mostly though, the show is just old Thunderbird in a new-ish box. Underpinning the entire operation is this endless, constant, overweening grievance. It's the conservative reactionary version of that dreaded word, entitlement. To listen to these jabbering maroons, you'd never guess that their guy won, that they have a majority in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, that every thing their dotard has been criticized for has been well-earned. Seriously, these are the sorest fucking winners ever.

It is not the pussy-hat crowd's fault that the doddering grifter keeps shooting himself in the clown shoes every week, nor is it their fault that it turns out that -- surprise! -- all of his promises were predictably empty, that the widget-stamping jobs aren't coming back to BFE, and in fact his tiny-dick-waving stunts with the Chinese are threatening a trade war that will specifically target these salt-of-the-earth rubes.

For several years running, we've been entreatied to "listen" to a cohort of hostile, incoherent jokers who can't muster any facts, and blame everyone else for their manifest failures in life. There is never any countervailing voice, never anyone in the supposedly liberal media, and certainly nobody on the "conservative" side, who ever bothers to even suggest, Hey, more people voted for the other person, wonder if we might listen to them just once? I've gotta listen to them, over and over and fucking over again, but god forbid they'd ever come around to listen to me. Well, fuck that shit, as my great-grandmother used to tell her Sunday school class.

I don't know why that is, and I give up asking. All I know is that I've seen and heard enough plaints from these fools in real life, and I don't need a thinly fictionalized version of their nonsense to drive the point home. They'll never be happy, because they'll never get an even break, and they're never going to be honest with themselves about why that is. So why bother?

There was a time when Roseanne was ground-breaking in many respects, and downright hilarious much of the time. Now it just comes off as preachy and predictable, every bit as smug and spiteful and ill-informed as the loony lefties it lampoons.

But at least that should serve as an object lesson for any would-be liberals. Roseanne does deserve credit for telling her story her way -- loud, brash, aggressive, fuck you if you don't like it. If there are any real liberals (in entertainment or government or news) left, maybe they should consider doing the same thing for once, instead of meekly waiting around for Cadet Bonespurs to send us into a recession and nuke Tehran as a distraction. Waiting for Mueller and/or November is not a strategy.

In the meantime, instead of bothering with the nattering narcissism of the Oracle of the White Workin' Class (when she's not farming macadamia nuts in Hawaii), do yourself a favor and check out The President Show's special. Kathy Griffin's portrayal of soulless homunculus Kellyanne Con-way steals what was a pretty solid show all the way around.

Suggested Line of Questioning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a Start

It appears that Laura Ingraham's endless supply of snide comments has finally gotten her ass in a wringer. It couldn't happen to a more deserving person, and it's hilarious to watch how quickly she took to groveling soon as she realized her bullshit was finally going to cost her money.

Which is really all that's important to any of these useless idiots, Alex Jones and such like. Never forget that at the end of the day, it's all a fucking scam. The only thing these cock-smokers sincerely believe in is getting paid. Everything else is just filler between ads for catheters and pills and ambulance chasers "helping" you with your legal claims for mesothelioma or displaced vaginal mesh.

And what David Hogg initiated with his tweet is remarkable in its simplicity and effectiveness. Again, these young people are reminding us all that we don't have to take their shit -- really, we never did need to take their shit. He's reminding this smug smartass that it's not a joke, that his friends were murdered and for people like Ingraham and Loesch and the rest of the Jugend to crack wise about it is not going to fly anymore. Somebody had to do it.

The MSM are collectively cowed by "tradition" and "process" and "expectations" and "norms," while faithfully stenographing the comings and goings of an administration that is completely unencumbered by those things. They'll keep showing up to the "press briefings" for Baghdad Barb's daily sack o' lies, right up to the bitter end, whining in mock horror every time she, y'know, fucking lies about everything. Great. That and eight bucks will get me a nice artisanal mochachino.

It's vital to remember that, like her cult hero, Laura Ingraham is merely a symptom, not the disease. Considering she labors in the typhoid factory, she's little more than a voluntary carrier, spreading the pandemic around as much as possible, blowing her nose into the sandwiches and soups she sells to unwitting customers.

Like Facebook users, Fox viewers are not the customers -- they are the product. These tiresome fist-shaking codgers cling bitterly to the vestiges of life long after the thrill of living is gone, as their bodies and minds betray them full-tilt. Many of them have already collected more from Social Security than they paid in, and will tell you right away that they are entitled to all of it and more, even if they spend the next twenty years marinating in their own filth and decrepitude, watching lifelong losers like Geraldo Rivera spew lies at them non-stop.

So Ingraham sucks, but let's not forget Tucker Carlson, let's not forget that fatheaded turd Hannity, who actually has some sort of informal advisory role with one F. Von Clownstick, aka King Shit of Turd Hill.

Imagine that for a hard second -- it is well-known fact that a person unjustly thrust into perhaps the most important job on the planet spends his mornings poop-transcribing Fox and Friends on his Twitter account, then has dinner with Sean Hannity and Jeanine Pirro (who makes Ingraham look like Oprah Winfrey in comparison) on a regular basis. He solicits advice and counsel from these weasels.

Seriously, 'murka:  your domestic and foreign policy is literally being affected by Steve Doocy, who doesn't have three brain cells to rub together. We can all duly note, in the classic style of Yakov Smirnoff, that in Russia the leader controls state teevee -- but here in America, it's the other way around.

There's always the argument that "free speech" is being coercively squelched by reactive boycotts like this. But people like Jones and Hannity and Ingraham are impervious to the rigors of normal debate and argument. They are not interested in mustering facts or exchanging ideas. Upton Sinclair would recognize this nonsense for exactly what it is, people whose careers depend on them pissing and shitting into the well of public discourse.

Ordinarily you might say they are heedless or reckless in their disregard for what they're doing, and what effects their lies have on people and events, but you would be very wrong. They know exactly what they're doing. It's in their job description.

All of which means that maybe it's time to go after the big guns -- the Murdochs and their vile media empire. Maybe it's time to boycott the regular Fox network as well; I'm tired of football and Family Guy anyway. Truly, the old man is the worst sort of scum, and his sons are about as much of a "moderating influence" as Clownstick's awful brood. I wish them all long lives -- as poor, broke, miserable bastards. It would be nice at least once in this lifetime to see privileged scumbags held accountable for what they've done.

The Kids Are Alright

Maybe instead of getting annoyed with Sanctimonium Santorum trolling high school students with his sage "take CPR in case aderanged shooter drops in with an AR-15" advice, maybe we should ask CNN why they keep having in on to spout nonsense. The fact that he was once a You Ass Senator only means that Pennsyltuckians have a knuckle-dragger contingent like every other state in the union.

Look, this is an industry, and CNN has no problem selling the nutritional equivalent of deep-fried twinkies, under the usual guise of "let's hear both sides." Again, when the issue is how can we stop or at least reduce the frequency of school shootings?, recommending CPR classes and posting five-gallon buckets at strategic locations is not a fucking "side," it's inexcusably stupid and borderline deranged.

So you might say to yourself, "Self, I wonder why the supposedly librul lamestream media keep having liars and morons peddle nonsense and cheap invective? I wonder why the nation's leading newspapers keep making bi-weekly pilgrimages out to talk to handfuls of fist-shaking codgers in dilapidated diners in decrepit towns?"

The mediots are dedicated first and foremost to peddling clickbait, things that will infuriate all the usual people and get them squawking. They are marketing a product, just as surely as Frito-Lay or Smirnoff or Applebee's or Tampax is marketing a product.

It is our collective decision whether we wish to consume the media product -- and more importantly, the products of their sponsors -- or not. It's also our decision whether or not we wish to take note that the person who runs CNN is the same person who ran NBC when Fuckface Von Clownstick had his stupid fake-tycoon celebritard fuckfest, and if that's all just a big coincidence.

The Parkland students have managed a formidable accomplishment, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of cities around the world, with just a month to organize things, with the right-wing propaganda machine and its various scumbags and dogsbodies [paid crisis actors!] focused squarely on them. Obviously the ultimate outcome of the marches remains to be seen, but the students have already demonstrated one very important principle that everyone can take note of:  you don't have to take shit from these people. At all.

These young people have had hideous, hateful nonsense hurled at them, in social media and on the teevee and probably in their local communities, death threats and invective from people they don't know, and therefore have no idea if they're "real" or just outrage trolling. And they've shrugged it off completely, refusing to acknowledge the assholes, calling out politicians at every level.

There are really only two ways to make the vile scumbags pay attention:  the ballot box and the wallet. And people can and should use both of those things, and not be afraid to dig deep. The Parkland students were effective in that arena as well, without really even trying; once the NRA rushed to show just how monstrous they truly are, it didn't take long for their corporate sponsors to distance themselves.

So who are the sponsors of the CNN show that had that dipshit Santorum on to burble his abusive nonsense? Maybe they need a friendly reminder about where their advertising dollars ultimately come from. That's what got that fuckhead O'Reilly banished to podcasting out of the den in his empty house. The gun-humpers have no compunction about pissing all over the First Amendment in order to "protect" their fevered vision of the Second Amendment. Maybe it's time to show that everyone can play that game.

Or, to dig a bit deeper, remember who produced the aforementioned fake-tycoon celebritard fuckfest? I've said it before and I'll say it again:  social media and reality teevee have wrecked this country, and the foremost purveyor of the latter form of televised diarrhea is that limey turd Mark Burnett, who also produces Survivor, which seems like it oughta be years past its sell-by date even for the inert gastropods who still watch that dreck (in between Bachelor marathons and intravenous mayonnaise feedings).

So who sponsors Survivor, and can they (and CBS, of course) be leaned on? Personally, I can't boycott something I've never watched, but they don't know that. This is what it's come to, because this is what they've insisted on. It's long past time now to give it back with both barrels. And we've all just been given a crash course in how to do that.

Rube Awakening

"One never knows how loyalty is born." -- Bert Cooper, Mad Men

Conor Lamb's recent victory in the PA-18 special election not only exposes very real fault lines in the crumbling Gooper claque, but also serves to bring some of the apostate rubes back home. Like all Cletus Safari articles, nothing more than anecdata can ever be churned by talking to a half-dozen people in a town whose name you've already forgotten by the end of the piece.

Still, the comments all point at the same thing:  they've grown tired of the shitshow, exhausted by the daily antics of ineptitude. The guy's a toxic asshole who can't get anything done. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is reflected in my own anecdata, talking recently with a couple of Clownstick-supporting friends who, while still supporting him, separately offered the exact same qualifier:  I wish he wouldn't tweet so much.

It's difficult to top that complete lack of awareness, and I said so, made sure to remind each of these people of that fact:  This is who he is, what he is. This is how he's always been. Lying about everything on his Twitter account is literally what got him into this. He's never not been a bullshitter. He lies about everything, no matter how small or inconsequential. Politics has nothing to do with it. He's a diseased soul.

Two things yesterday hammered those very points home.

• Using the legal system to harass stripper/porn star Stormy Daniels. Apparently there is a clause in the non-disclosure agreement that Daniels signed and David Dennison Fuckface Von Clownstick didn't, stipulating that each breach incurs a fine of $1M. Most sentient humans with at least some knowledge of the legal system agree that the amount is laughably unenforceable in an agreement that paid only $130K total in the first place, and wasn't signed by one of the agreeing parties.
• Firing Andrew McCabe, less than forty-eight hours before McCabe would have retired anyway. Whether or not McCabe gets some or all of his pension and benefits, the fact is that Clownstick sent his paid perjurer Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuhd to do the dirty work yesterday specifically to fuck McCabe out of what he had earned in his civil-service career.

This is the cruel, petty, vindictive side of Clownstick that again, fucking everyone warned the morons about. I know I call everyone I don't like an asshole, but this guy is a fucking asshole. If he had been born poor he would have been the neighborhood creep that spent his teens torturing stray cats, before moving on to hunting humans.

McCabe will land on his feet regardless; as one might assume (unless you're a doddering narcissistic moron), he kept notes of all their interactions, will probably see his inevitable book advance double or triple what it would have been otherwise, and is most assuredly on his way to Mueller's office Monday morning. He's not an idiot, and now he's been motivated by the world's worst boss.

Beyond the anecdotal down-punching, the immersion in the impotent god-emperor's temper tantrums and incoherent volatility, the fan club has to be seeing the catastrophic decisions affecting the bigger picture. He shitcanned Tex Drillerson while Drillerson was literally on the shitcan; he's pushing H.R. Haldeman Pufnstuf out the door, possibly for John Bolton, or some other swamp thing that'll make us wish for Bolton. Think of that:  by the time this abortion of an administration is eighteen months along, it will be on at least its third National Security Director, its second Secretary of State, probably its third FBI Director. And at least three other high-level positions are looking to be shuffled around, and possibly filled by dipshits from Fixed Noise.

And let's not forget who the dotard appointed as his economic advisor:  a cokehead with a history degree and a long track record of not knowing what the fuck he's talking about when it comes to the economy. The economy is actually doing relatively well [fake numbers!] for now, and two-thirds of the country still despises this motherfucker. But we're already overdue for a recession, and even the diehards might take some issue when Captain Eight-Ball fucks the dog and that extra twenty bucks in their paychecks goes away, along with the rest of their paychecks.

Then again, the economy won't much matter once we're tangled in North Korea, Syria, and Iran simultaneously, because Group Sex McPornstache wants to flex nuts for Cadet Bonespurs.

What struck me about the Pennsyltucky voters from the Times article was this common thread of "let's try something new," without bothering to even minimally vet that new something. Well, now they know, and at least some of them are willing to change their minds, and maybe even remember next time that stoves are hot, and that when someone tells you who they are, maybe you should believe them.

I think (though I'm not always certain) that I've come to accept that I will always be mystified by how otherwise intelligent, sensible people got gulled by this transparent snake-oil dipshit. I mean, we've all become accustomed to the screaming goobers with their Fuck Your Feelings t-shirts, barking slogans like trained seals at the Two Minutes of Hate rallies.

But there are some supporters (really!) who have good jobs and careers and skills and college degrees. They run their own businesses. Some of these folks are book smart and street smart, the kind of people who can hit a used-car lot and come out with a solid deal, not get rooked on the undercoating by Jerry Lundegaard.

And yet they fell for....this fucking clown, a serial failure who has to call the New York Post pretending to be someone else, to brag about how great he is in the sack, to shame his first wife and impress his mistress. These are people who care about "character" in their politicians, and they went for someone who, if nothing else, is entirely forthright about his completely amoral character and utter lack of business ethics.

This will never fail to baffle me. I feel like I'm missing some enormous financial opportunity, in not finding a way to scam them further. I get why they can't admit they fucked up, but how did they fall for it in the first place? It's like one of those internet-romance-finance scams, where some lonely divorcee sends a ricockulous amount of money to some guy with a nice photo and a smooth rap.

You read about these things and say, who are these fucking people? There's a similar pathology at play with the Clownstick dupes. They know they fucked up but can't admit it, even to themselves. So they keep doubling down and making excuses, until they run out of both.

At any rate, it seems to be finally starting to sink in with some of them, that he really is a barstool drunk -- inept, mouthy, right about every fucking thing even after being proven wrong every time. And he's an obnoxious asshole and a tiresome crybaby on top of all that.

It should speak volumes that they flooded the zone with Clownstick and his vile children, poured over $10M dollars into a race for a congressional district that won't even exist nine months from now. It should raise the antenna of Republican operatives and strategists that in Clownstick's me-me-me rally, illegally talking himself up for 2020 when he was supposed to be stumping for Rick Saccone, that neither he nor the teevee ads bothered talking about the tax cuts.

There's something in the air, and they can smell it, and they know it's not the smell of victory. We're about to see if the Democrats can actually learn something from all this.

Both Sides Now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Fucking Traitors

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

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

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

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

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

At the Movies

We're only reviewing one movie this time around, but it's a long review, and you should take the spoiler warning seriously.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

(***spoilers***)

This one presents a bit of a quandary. On the one hand, you have a Martin McDonagh (In Bruges) project with a top-notch cast, and solid performances throughout; on the other hand, the whole thing is wrapped in a tendentious Swiss-cheese plot that gets more annoying the closer you think about it.

By now, even if you haven't seen the movie you probably know the broader strokes -- a mother puts up billboards outside her small town, asking why her daughter's rape/murder from a year ago remains unsolved, and the town (especially the police force) turns against her. Naturally, hijinks ensue.

Tooth and Consequences

It would be easy to work up any number of hard-hitting riffs about this busted-grill asshole trying with all his meager might to intimidate a niche lefty bookstore located in -- wait for it -- Berkeley, but life is increasingly short, and there are always better things to do. People are freaking out about this dope, and they really shouldn't, because he's about as threatening as a fart in a hurricane.

I am, however, small enough to freely admit that you don't need to be Ace Ventura to observe that this snaggle-toothed dipshit is not, to put it mildly, one of life's heavy winners, and that that fact brings me joy. This is the prototype of every tiresome Cletus safari article that's been foisted on us thus far -- broke-ass loser in a broke-ass town, trying desperately to find someone else to blame their troubles on. Who's keeping an eye on the meth lab while Goober is sliming up Durant Avenue with his jabbering nonsense?

I warned well before the election and probably since then, that the genuine magat cultists (as opposed to the mere professional opportunists, your finance-weasel types and such like) would be sore winners just as much as they'd be sore losers if Hitlery had won. This is proof of that very thing, if your Facebook feed hasn't convinced you yet. You'd never guess from listening to this mouthful-of-dice knock-off-lid halfwit and his nutty sidekick (what books, exactly, has anyone been burning?) that their side won.

I've lived my entire life in Cali, and been in Northern Cali since 1974. I know every area of this state, and the people in each area. So believe me when I tell you that there's no fucking way these bozos live within fifty miles of Berkeley.

So you do the methmath:  these assholes -- again, their god-emperor won and has majorities in Congress and the Supreme Court -- drove probably close to an hour each way into the city to harass an indie bookstore. Do they think they will convince anyone, change any minds? Do they think that their tiny group of moron-rabble-rousers will intimidate a business into closing its doors?

I mean, I'm skeptical as a matter of principle as to the efficacy of street protests to being with. But it's impossible to discern what the goal is here. What do they intend to accomplish, or even dream they might accomplish? Outside of maybe Barbara Lee or a local supervisor or two, there is no politician at any level that is going to make any effort whatsoever to represent the concerns of Revolution Books and its customers. Hell, by definition the "revolutionaries" have committed themselves to working outside and away from the system as much as possible; there is no upside for any "establishment" politician to expend any political capital looking out for a handful of Antifa types.

So this much is true, in the most literal sense possible:  every second the insane clown posse spends, driving to the store and cluttering up the sidewalk for however long and schlepping back home, is a complete waste of time. It can have no possible net political outcome for their lost cause. At most, it might incite a couple of like-minded losers to waste some of their time moseying down to the lose-in. Okely-dokely then. Good luck with that.

I would like to think there is indeed a demographic force-ten storm brewing; if so, it will happen in spite of, rather than because of the Democratic Party, an entity in need nearly as much as the Republicans of a controlled demolition. Both parties are like decrepit Vegas hotels at this point, built on blood money and in business only to fleece customers and grease palms. The Republicans are traitors and enablers, but in the face of treason the Democratic leadership is as feckless and gutless as ever. They can all go straight to hell.

I'm going to use a lot of quotes here because people need to really think about what they want each word to mean:  If "we" "want" "our" "country" "back", it will have to be reclaimed at a true grass-roots level. Whatever is left of this nation will have to be wrested from the greedy, insatiable maw of the corporate scumbags who own and operate both parties.

But the fact is that regardless of the outcome in November, the true cultists like these losers on the sidewalk will be back in some form, unless gingivitis or the die-uh-beet-us does 'em in while they fester out in Opioid Flats. Because that's what Gomer and his empty tough-guy threats are really all about -- the impotent rage of someone who failed utterly at the business of life and knows it, and who needs to constantly find windmills to tilt at in order to distract him from an existence of abject failure.