Petty Vacant

There is never a "slow news day" anymore, as the twenty-four-hour cycle burns ever hotter and faster, and thus needs more and more fuel. So it is that Bret Easton Ellis, the original Milo Y. for the lit-crit jet-set, finds his turn in the proverbial barrel, on the pointy end of one of Isaac Chotiner's Socratic-dialogue interviews. Hilarity ensues.

Chotiner has made a recent career/bloodsport of finding moral cretins within or adjacent to His Travesty's smear of influence, as it were, and gradually hoisting the subject on a petard of their own devising. It's a neat trick, and certainly one worth repeating endlessly on these fuckers, but what is most revealing about these interviews, whether it's with some toad directly barnacled to the fleshy hull of the USS Fatboy, or merely a smarmy meta-commenter like Ellis, is that none of these people are prone to sudden epiphanies, nor even flashes of self-awareness. It is essentially the same result as watching yet another CNN lackey jabber at Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Ghouliani.

But it's still interesting to watch Ellis' particular pathology at work here, as he repeatedly insists that he's not interested in politics or policy much at all, but rather that his recent book of essays lambasting "liberals" and "progressives" for their "overreactions" to Trump is about coverage of the spectacle that he, Ellis, considers hysterical and heavy-handed.

Ellis is not wrong when he says that the best solution is for people to focus on voting Trump and his crew out next year. Aside from that, he seems completely oblivious as to why anyone might be anxious in the meantime. We're eight-hundred-and-some days into this shitshow, and virtually every single one of those days has featured some bit of insanity or incompetence or outright illegality on the part of Trump and his coterie of losers and hangers-on.

Ellis seems content to lob smug meta-commentary about Chicken Little libturds overreacting to -- I don't know, let's pick a couple at random:  the chief executive routinely threatening and harassing political opponents and pesky mediots; the Attorney General (of the United States -- as in, the public's ranking legal advocate) literally functioning as the personal lawyer for the chief executive; the failson-in-law on a hotline with a Saudi prince who kidnapped an American resident, strapped him to a table and dismembered him alive; a dozen or so lies every day on average; long-term American interests being undermined by reckless foreign policy blunders, not to mention demagoguing the most serious issue facing all of us, regardless of political stance or income level -- climate change.

Right now, and for the past couple years, it has been this nation's policy to separate refugee children from their parents, purely as a punitive measure to discourage others. These people are fleeing conditions of violence that even the poorest, most miserable American would be hard-pressed to imagine (outside of the Alabama penitentiary system, anyway). Nonetheless, there are kids, young kids, who have died in custody, or been raped or molested in custody, or who haven't seen their parents in months, or two or all three of those things.

But as far as Bret Ellis is concerned -- and he's certainly not the only one, just the most recent; there's a spate of these fucking assholes as of late -- the real problem, you see, is the claque of hysterical libturds who just won't stop complaining about this doddering, soup-brained cockroach pitting the nation against itself while he and scummy family pocket everything that isn't nailed down.

One of the more hilarious asides in the interview is where Ellis lamely tries to defend Roseanne Barr:

You came to the defense of Roseanne Barr, saying that she denied, after tweeting racist stuff about Valerie Jarrett, knowing Valerie Jarrett was black.
Did she say that? That she didn’t know she was black?

You say it in the book.
Yeah, right, I quoted her.

It seems like you want to give some people the benefit of the doubt, but not others. Would that be fair?
I would like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

So when she tweets about Valerie Jarrett being the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and the “Planet of the Apes”?
Yeah, that’s a tweet. I don’t know. It’s whatever. It’s whatever you think it is and whatever she says she meant by it. It is her word against ours.

There's nothing evil or sinister in play here; the real crime is that someone who's living is geared around the usage and meaning of words, and getting to the core of what people mean when they say something, is completely useless at that pursuit here.

Think of that:  Ellis has written a book that, if not about politics, at least purports to provide some trenchant observations about political activity and thought. In the case of Roseanne's infamous, career-killing tweet about Valerie Jarrett, here is an opportunity to provide some observation. It beggars the imagination to figure plausibly how Roseanne didn't know Jarrett was black, yet plucked a Planet of the Apes reference from out of nowhere as a "joke" or an insult.

Ellis doesn't even have the energy or commitment to try to bullshit his way out of it, or even come up with a lame defense of Roseanne. It's whatever. Boy, does he have a fuckin' way with words or what?

Again, this is not Ellis' fault or creation. We are a decadent, lazy, spoiled society, and so sloppy thinkers and spoiled assholes like Ellis are given unfortunate stature, based on his string of modest successes back when Reagan was watching nuns get raped and murdered in El Salvador. There is no rigor in Ellis' analysis because he has already admitted multiple times that he doesn't really give a shit.

Hell, at the end of the interview, he kinda lets the whole thing slip:  It was much more interesting to me to write this as a nonfiction book, in terms of pulling this stuff from my podcast.

Great. So White is really just a compilation of podcast greatest hits, indifferently packaged under a single cover for seventeen bucks or so. Cool grift, broham.

The problem here is not that Ellis is an idiot, nor even an asshole, it's that he's so willfully lazy in his observations, bringing nothing new or fresh to the conversation. He can't even defend his own points that he's asking people to shell out good money for, he just lamely defaults to anecdotal conversations he had with female friends who were okay with Trump bragging about his pussy-grabbing prowess.

For the record, I have female acquaintances who were fine with Trump's "locker-room talk" too. The fact that they have pussies doesn't mean they can't still be wrong about this, and about him. It's the faux-feminist (fauxminist?) version of saying you have a black friend that doesn't mind when people use the n-word, as if that absolved anyone from personal responsibility.

Bret Easton Ellis is comfortably insulated from the consequences of this clusterfuck of an administration. He doesn't have kids, so he likely just assumes that the shit won't really come down until after he's gone, so he's not too worried about it. I actually get that reasoning -- I have a kid and I still sometimes get in that "fuck it" mood and decide it really just doesn't matter, none of it, that it's a prolonged exercise in futility and not worth the effort, that if enough idiots want to let it burn, then maybe we just fucking let it burn and live what's left of our lives while we can.

But I think one of the things that makes us human is that each of us has something that we feel is worth fighting for. It's going to be different things for different individuals, and there will also be lots of overlap, but there's something, big or small, the planet or your country or your family, that you care enough about to put your foot down and say decisively, Fuck you. Enough.

I think that one unstated component in the "outrage" and "overreaction" one sees covered in the media is this:  the 2016 election forced liberals and progressives in particular to confront the question of how Trump won -- that either the nation was becoming something they no longer recognized, or that it was like this all along, and the "right" set of conditions came along to clarify that situation.

And it is, by any objective assessment, a serious problem. It's bad enough that Trump is a gaping asshole, and a miserable fucking facsimile of a functioning human being. the real problem is that he's a jabbering moron, a clear fucking dunce who has made the world a worse place. That's really the way it is, and the fact that somewhere between one-third and one-half of this country loves it is an even worse problem.

It is no exaggeration to say that that last one will be the singular challenge for the next generation, and may never get resolved. I don't mean in the ideological sense, so much as just the functional sense, the basic mechanics of governance. This country is run by psychotic billionaires who would literally rather burn up the planet than pay a single percentage point more in taxes, and they own all the propaganda outlets. And they have just enough rubes on the hook to live out Jay Gould's fondest wish.

And so what happens, per Bret Ellis' prescription of voting the Shitbird-In-Thief out of office next year, is that whatever Republicons remain in government will simply revert to an even more toxic version of the rear-guard faction that hamstrung Obama for most of his tenure. The US and the world face some very serious challenges in the near future, most of them driven either by accelerating climate change or increased wealth disparity, and a paralyzed government coupled with propagandized media stoking a seething populace makes for a very dangerous combination.

But, you know, liberals just need to stop whining and accept that assholes run the world, right? Just bend over and take it, again and again for the rest of your lives.

At the Movies

More movies, some spoilers.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? -- I was skeptical of this one going into it, but the outstanding performances across the board won me over. By now you probably know the premise -- bestselling biographer falls on hard times, can't crack the changing marketplace, not getting any help from her agent or publisher, and so turns to the rather esoteric niche market of forging art collectibles.

Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant do most of the heavy lifting as Lee Israel and, um, Jack Hock, respectively. I strongly believe that comedians and comic actors tend to make excellent dramatic actors, and McCarthy reinforces that theory with her wonderfully nuanced portrayal of Israel, who wore an unpleasant, almost hermit-like demeanor as a defense mechanism, both from the world at large and from herself. Jane Curtin(!) is a nice surprise as Israel's agent, and the rest of the small supporting cast are wonderful as well.

The subject and scope of the story are indeed very niche-oriented, and might not hold everyone for the full stretch, but again this is a finely-tuned portrayal of the artist's contentious relationship with the world of commerce, and the fleeting caprices of talent and love.

Grade:  A-

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The Sisters Brothers -- The western genre hasn't traditionally lent itself to much introspection, but it seems that that has changed at least since The Unforgiven or perhaps Tombstone. Still, the western mostly depends on some sort of ending climax of saving the town from the bad guys or what-have-you. The Sisters Brothers takes these reliable plot devices and tweaks or ignores them altogether, preferring to concentrate on the inner motivations of its anti-heroes.

John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix portray the titular brothers with the unusual surname, contract killers who have never really done anything else. Reilly, as elder brother Eli, muses about their future after time eventually catches up with them, while Phoenix (Charlie), the more impulsive of the pair, lives in the here and now, moving across a violent landscape with nothing more on his mind than booze and whatever task his paymaster (Rutger Hauer, unfortunately unseen until the very end, and then as a corpse in a coffin) has set before him.

The brothers' mission this time is to track down a chemist who may have discovered a formula for finding surface and river gold, without having to pan or mine for it. As they near closer to their quarry, tracking through Oregon and California gold country, they begin questioning their purposes and motives, and what kind of men they want to be, and be remembered as. When it all goes bad, as these things inevitably do, the brothers come full circle to confront the origins of their violent lives.

Reilly and Phoenix are both quirky but versatile actors; here they play it straight, and it pays off with strong performances for both of them. Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed are also strong in key supporting roles. An interesting side note (for me, as a lifelong Californian who has been to every part of the state many times) is that the exterior location shooting was done primarily in Spain and France, and it sure as hell looked like California gold country to me. This is a terrific movie, directed with care and patience, belying the violent narrative throughout.

Grade:  A

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Bohemian Rhapsody -- This is a movie where you simply have to manage your expectations going into it. For one thing, it had been in various stages up production since 2010, with Sacha Baron Cohen originally cast to play Freddie Mercury, and ultimately departing the project for a variety of reasons. Several screenwriters and directors later, and recasting Mr. Robot star Rami Malek as Mercury, this is what you have -- a well-meaning but ultimately muddled Star Is Born template of excess, redemption, and tragedy.

Growing up in the late 1970s with parents that mostly listened to country or AM pop, bands like Queen helped me make a critical jump outside those relatively narrow parameters. There was especially heavy airplay around the Jazz and News of the World albums, culminating in The Game's smash hit success across the board. Just in those three albums, you can hear them successfully experimenting in multiple genres -- hard rock, arena anthems, cheeky pop confections like Bicycle Race, disco, and even rockabilly gems like Crazy Little Thing Called Love. But of course they had much more to offer throughout their career.

If you eschew the usual path of listening to one of the greatest-hit collections, and just go back through the catalog, you can hear and appreciate how truly fearless they were musically. Naturally the movie makes a huge deal of that with the conception and production of the title track, but A Night at the Opera was their fifth album, and they had been doing adventurous outings similar to Bohemian Rhapsody all along.

Hell, check out side two of Queen II, and imagine the guts it took to get something as intricately crafted and flat-out weird as The Fairy-Feller's Master Stroke onto vinyl. And then to have that song segue into Nevermore, a schmaltzy ballad which packs more passion and sorrow into seventy-eight seconds than you'll find in the entire catalogs of your Mariah Carey and Celine Dion types.

Most people have never heard either of those songs; most Queen fans are unfamiliar with them. They were never played in concert or on the radio. Sheer Heart Attack has a bunch of hidden gems as well; Flick of the Wrist and Stone Cold Crazy are much better than Killer Queen, which is pretty damned good to begin with. The radio hits were just the tip of the iceberg with these guys.

What Queen really did was take the chamber-pop aspirations of late-period Brian Wilson and Beatles, and put them in a prog-rock context, and then turned around and made those orchestrations accessible across a wide variety of musical genres. That's way more interesting (to me, anyway) than Freddie Mercury's conflicted personal life, although seeing Queen drove the point home much more than hearing them did, and it should be appreciated as well, Mercury unabashedly strutting and preening in unitards in giant arenas in front of traditionally homophobic hard rock fans, defying them to make the connection of people they were conditioned to hate making music that they loved.

Anyway, the movie and its expectations. If you watch it as a straight-up biopic, you'll be disappointed, not only because the musical chronography is botched (to cite just one example, Fat Bottomed Girls was released in 1978 and was a concert staple for years after; there is no way they could have toured with that song in 1973-74), but because it eschews real introspection for cliché.

There's an interesting situation with Mercury, clearly in love with his girlfriend Mary Austin (Lucy Boynton), not sexually attracted to her but wanting "everything else," and so keeping her in the mansion next door to his own. It's a dilemma of generosity and selfishness that is never adequately explored, just accepted after a while, as Mary gets a boyfriend and starts her own family, all while still inhabiting the house that Freddie bought. She clearly cares about him as well, but there is always that impasse, and she never fully moves on from being his muse/curator in the gilded cage.

One minor humorous note in the first half of the movie is the cameo appearance of a nearly unrecognizable Mike Myers as EMI Records exec Ray Foster, shit-talking Bohemian Rhapsody when the band presented it to him, and thereby turning the scene into an extended Wayne's World meta-reference. It's an interesting move, but again brushes over what, considering the band's earlier output, had to have been a much more complex discussion between the band and the record company. But we need the simplified Hero's Journey trope of Standing Up For Exalted Principles And Integrity, so that's where it lands here.

The rest of the band, played by unknowns, fall into the usual trite templates:  Brian May is the brainy astrophysicist who occasionally takes his head out of the stars to write some songs and play some solos; Roger Taylor is the pussyhound drummer who wanted to be a dentist; John Deacon is the quiet one, as all bassists other than Paul McCartney are. Who knew that Deacon was actually an electrical engineer who designed and built a custom amplifier for May's idiosyncratic guitar orchestrations? It's all second fiddle to whatever drama Freddie's cooking up at the moment.

The movie does succeed on its own terms in the final act, as Live Aid becomes the focal point of the band reuniting for Freddie's triumphant return, before becoming too ill to perform anymore. They did manage to record another studio album (Innuendo), and a very good one at that, but that's never even mentioned. (Although The Show Must Go On, from that album, does play over the final credits.) Basically they perform at Live Aid, and six years later Freddie dies, the end.

However. Malek is outstanding in his performance (especially the Live Aid performance at the end), despite the distracting prosthetic teeth, and the music....well, it's Queen. They could have just run two straight hours of music and that would have been great. This one gets two grades, one for the music and one for the movie.

Grades:  A+ (music); C (movie)

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Triple Frontier -- Another project that had been in the works for years, going through rounds of scripts and writers and directors and recasting, finally landing on Netflix and premiering last month. As action/heist movies go, the premise isn't half bad:  former black-op mercs, left high and dry by the gubmints they quietly did wetwork for, decide to rob a narco chieftain deep in the jungle near the convergence of the Amazon headwaters of Brazil, Peru, and Colombia (not to be confused with the Iguacu Falls intersection of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay).

The casting is solid enough, featuring Charlie Hunnam as the ringleader, and Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal, Garrett Hedlund, and Ben Affleck accompanying him on the heist. (Affleck pulled out of the project for a year to hit rehab, then returning for what seems like a fairly subdued performance, considering the premise.) And there are some nice action set pieces here and there, particularly in the opening scenes, but it ends strong as well.

The plot does make some use of the remoteness and lawlessness of the locale (although the movie was filmed in Oahu), but in the end, this sort of thing has been explored in movies ranging from A Simple Plan to Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the theme of greed getting the better of people.

Still, it's well-made and the cast is very good. It's an old theme but a good one, and the action moves along fairly tightly. There are plenty of worse ways to spend two hours.

Grade:  B+

Here's How You Get the Tax Returns

Scene from a plausible near-future:

[INT.:  Set of Sunday morning circle-jerk Meet the Press.]

CHUCK TODD:  Good morning, I'm Chuck Todd, and welcome to Meet the Press. Our first guest this morning is Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Welcome, Madam Speaker.

NANCY PELOSI:  Good morning, Chuck, thanks for having me on the show.

TODD:  The Democratic House has demanded that the Internal Revenue Service release the last six years of Donald Trump's tax returns. Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney recently indicated that that would quote "never" end-quote happen.

PELOSI:  Well, that's his job, isn't it, Chuck? [Pauses a beat] Such as it is.

TODD:  Trump has indicated that since he is still under audit, it would be impractical for him to release the returns.

PELOSI [smiles]:  Yes, he's indicated that.

TODD:  Richard Nixon released his tax returns while under audit. What would you ascribe Trump's reluctance to?

PELOSI:  First of all, Chuck, he's not under audit.

TODD:  How do you know that, Madam Speaker?

PELOSI: Well, I could give you the old "how do you know a lawyer is lying" joke, Chuck, but the obvious fact is that Trump has literally been clocked at lying an average of roughly twelve times every day he's been in office. This is clearly just another in an impossibly long list.

TODD: Do you have any actual evidence of that?

PELOSI: Look. The IRS rarely audits anyone in the first place, because they're chronically understaffed. And they almost never audit wealthy people, because people who are actually wealthy hire competent professionals and companies with liability insurance to do their taxes. I'm wealthy too, and I've never been audited. Why? Because I hire a CPA/EA to do my taxes for me. If he messes up and gets me audited, his company's reputation takes a serious hit. Donald Trump counts on people to seriously believe he sits there at his Louis the Nineteenth dining-room table on April 14th every year, sorting out his receipts, trying to stay one step ahead of The Man. I mean, Jesus Christ.

Finally, Chuck, Trump has been claiming to be under audit since at least 2014. I seriously doubt anyone has ever been audited for five years straight without either ending up in prison, or having to hock their house and possessions to pay back taxes, like Willie Nelson. So Trump has either done something seriously wrong and illegal, or he's, you know, lying. I'm actually giving him the benefit of the doubt here, and saying it's more likely that he's just lying.

Although there's probably some illegal stuff going on as well.

TODD: Why would he lie for so long about something like that?

PELOSI [smiles again]: Why does any man lie, Chuck? More to the point, what does every man lie about?

TODD [starting to blush]: I don't know what you mean, Madam Speaker.

PELOSI [smirking]: Of course you don't. Let me be more clear -- he's lying because, since he under-reports his taxable income and assets, because he's a chiseling scumbag, the returns will show that he's not worth anything near what he's always claimed. Not only would that be embarrassing for him, but he would then be placed in the position of not being able to amend that embarrassing low total, without then exposing himself to charges of defrauding the federal government. Which is still a crime, even for someone occupying the office of chief executive.

TODD: Oh. I was thinking you were referring to somethi....never mind.

PELOSI: Money, height, sexual prowess -- men always exaggerate, Chuck. Whether it's the size of their wallet or the size of their....equipment, they can't help themselves. But in this case, it's Trump's selling himself as a super-successful gazillionaire for decades that is his main vulnerability. For him to have to publicly admit that he's merely a cash-poor hectomillionaire, with nearly all his assets tied up in the real estate portfolio he inherited from dear ol' dad....well, that would be equivalent to dropping his pants on Fox and Friends and showing his tiny, tiny wiener.

TODD: Madam Speaker, I....

PELOSI: Look, Chuck, we come on these shows, in an endless rotation, and we pretend to say something to the people of America, but we're all just really talking to each other, right? That's how the game has always been played. I don't have an opinion on whether that's "right" or "wrong," it's just how it is. It's part of my job, and as my political career winds down and I have no aspirations to higher office, I want my current tenure as House Speaker to have a more meaningful legacy to it.

Part of that legacy is getting to the truth, and getting some sunlight on the facts. In the 2016 election, both candidates promised to release their tax returns. Hillary Clinton released thirty-three years' worth of returns. Donald Trump dodged and hedged, and ultimately reneged on that promise. He keeps saying "promises made, promises kept," and that's simply not true. The only promise he's actually kept is giving billionaires another tax cut.

Rather than get bogged down into another pedantic panel argument about truth and promises and whether they're really important or not, I think we have a responsibility -- as a co-equal branch of the US government, mind you -- to get to the bottom of why that is. There's a reason he's reneged on that promise, and there's a reason that he lies about why he "can't" release the returns.

Put it this way, Chuck -- he currently seems more concerned about keeping his tax returns from ever seeing the light of day, than he is about hiding the Mueller Report that supposedly exonerates him. Though he won't release that either, after previously promising he would, because it totally clears him.

Why do you suppose that might be, Chuck?

TODD: Well, Madam Speaker, it would be irresponsible of me as a journalist to speculate on the possible....

PELOSI: Oh, please. Cut the Walter Cronkite pose for a second and be honest -- with me, with your audience, with yourself. I didn't ask you for objective empirical fact. I asked you for your opinion, based on the things you do know have transpired these past few years, the things you have observed and mentally collected, and perhaps formed a pattern of informational reference.

Chuck, you're an adult, gainfully employed, you have a wife and kids, right?

TODD [bemused, hesitant]: Riiight....

PELOSI: You have a house or maybe a couple, you have a vehicle or maybe a couple, you had to do some adulting over the years and purchase those things. You've held a job that requires you to talk on a daily basis with people in my line of work.

TODD [still slow on the uptake]: Okay.

PELOSI: Well, we all know that politicians, at best, are a breed of, let's say, truth-stretchers. We tend to BS and finesse things a bit, sometimes things that are important, sometimes not. But someone in your line of work needs to have something of a BS detector to spot us and call us out. Wouldn't you say that's true?

TODD [puffing self-importantly a bit]: Well, yes, we pride ourselves at cutting through the usual Washington-speak and getting to the heart of the matter. I take my job seriously, and I know my colleagues do as well.

PELOSI: Well, okay then. So what does your highly-refined-from-decades-of-experience BS detector tell you, when someone -- anyone, whether it's Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or some hedge-fund twerp who makes a living robbing banks from the inside -- what does your "journalist's intuition" tell you when some rich guy tells you that he'd love to show you his tax returns, but gee, the IRS has been auditing him for nearly a decade, and gosh, his massive, throbbing portfolio of real estate is just too complex for mere mortals to comprehend? Does that ping your detector just a little bit?

TODD: I suppose, but I --

PELOSI: Chuck, if Donald Trump had been the salesman for your wife's Audi XUV or your Hamptons vacation house, would you have bought from him?

TODD [perplexed]: Uh, no, I guess I wouldn --

PELOSI: No one in their right mind would, Chuck. And that's all Jerry Nadler and Richard Neal and the rest of us are trying to do here, is get an inspection on the house. Unfortunately, we've already bought the house, but there's an opportunity next year to back out of a bad deal, and we feel that if enough people got a look at that inspection report, they might not like what they see. Maybe they see that the house is built on a sinkhole and infested with termites.

Chuck, would you have signed on the line which is dotted if the salesman who sold you that vacation house told you that he couldn't let you and your lovely wife see that home inspection report because....well because reasons? That the house was a hundred kinds of awesome and perfect, but you were just going to have to take his word for all that?

TODD: Ummm....

PELOSI: Look, you asked why Trump would lie about being under audit, and I'll repeat my answer -- because the returns show him to be not nearly as wealthy as he claims. There's also all that undeclared bratva money he's been laundering for years, but the thing we'll see right away is how....small it all really is. So small. Like a frightened baby mouse hiding in an unkempt tuft of grass.

TODD [regaining his composure]: Thank you for your time, Madam Speaker.

PELOSI [smiling like the cat that got the cream]: Pleasure as always, Chuck.

TODD: Up next, we'll have Rudy Giuliani and Kellyanne Conway explain why we should totally believe everything that comes out of the White House. Stay tuned.

{END SCENE]

Mueller Time, Slight Return: Collusion Delusions

Tempting as it was to join the rest of Hot-Take Nation and insert my two-and-a-half-cents on the Barr Summary (as opposed to, you know, what has been mischaracterized as the "Mueller Report") into the ether, it just seemed unnecessary and pointless. Still does, really, though there are slightly more positive signs now, two weeks after Bill Barr's forty-eight-hour whitewash.

But the main takeaway is that -- get this -- laws, like taxes, don't apply to the rich and powerful. They always find a way to escape accountability, because there's always some rented scumbag willing to shovel their shit. Prove me wrong.

That said, I can still stand by my observations from the evening Mueller delivered the report, but before Barr's bullshit summary. Farming out the white-collar cases to SDNY and EDNY and EDVA, while strategically smart, are not a magic bullet -- after all, if Barr is corrupt enough to do what he's already done, right out in the open, it's not much of a stretch to imagine him either assigning fixers to those fed divisions before the cases reach trial, or just assert exec privilege and kill them outright.

It sounds like schtick, but I promise you, it's dead serious:  when I say that these fuckers' slogan is what are you gonna do about it?, that's really the way it is. Everything is an act of defiance with these people, and so far, they've been right. There has been no disincentive, and certainly no real accountability, for criminal and unethical actions, for lying outright, for taking bribes out in the open. The Saudis might as well back a fucking Brinks truck right up to the White House and have done with it. What are you gonna do about it?

There's still a very real non-zero chance that those district cases proceed and succeed, though, so it's worth holding out some hope for that. In the meantime, the first couple days after Barr's summary dropped told you everything you needed to confirm about the spinelessness and sheer idiocy of some key media players.

There are plenty of suspects to choose from, but the one I'm most disappointed and annoyed with would have to be Matt Taibbi, who seems content to sit pat on his "the Russians are too inept to have pulled something like that off" defense. The thing is, Taibbi has made a respectable career built on rigorous skepticism applied to the most toxic bastards in this country, from Wall Street banksters to evangelical hucksters. He knows firsthand that the current crew would be more than amenable to that sort of foreign assistance, just as he knows that Trump has been laundering bratva and oligarch money for at least a decade.

I have no earthly idea as to what accounts for Taibbi's inexplicable refusal to see the preponderance of circumstantial evidence, not to mention the guilty pleas and prison sentences that have already taken place, as well as the testimony and trials of key players still to come. Michael Flynn still has to allocate. Roger Stone is going on trial later this year. This thing is far from over, and it sure as fuck ain't over because a reliable stooge like Barr was brought in for the express purpose of sweeping this thing under.

It's not just Taibbi, of course; no shortage of useful idiots have come scuttling out the woodwork in recent days. Look, if you really can't see the cognitive disconnect of the refusal to release a report that supposedly clears you 100%, then I don't know what to tell you. I think there's actually even a good chance that Barr told Mueller to wrap things up and close the investigation prematurely. It's at least worth checking into, if one of the columnists and/or panelists can make that extra crucial step to being journalists. The Democrats need to get Mueller in front of them and grill him like a rotisserie chicken, because there is fuckery afoot, and we all know it.

Again, I don't know what to make of people who can't see the obvious, and I don't know what to make of people who just shrug their shoulders and don't give a shit, even if it's all true. I think that's actually a bigger problem than the crimes that Mueller was investigating. People are content to live in their own epistemological bubbles, and the mediots are more than happy to spoon-feed them clickbait and cash the checks.

I don't mean that we must all be outraged every minute of every day; being stoked into constant outrage is a big part of how we ended up here, and there is more to life than watching this doddering asshole decompensate daily before our eyes. It's why I check in once every week or two these days. There's certainly enough to be angered about constantly, but you just drive yourself nuts doing that.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be pissed about what's going on. These things are unprecedented and unacceptable, and it's important that we all recognize that there is nothing special about Fuckface Von Clownstick, and therefore he needs to be held to the same standards of accountability as every other mortal. If we stop doing that, if we just let him get away with everything, then we're no longer captives, but accomplices.

Another huge part of the problem is that Mueller ran right away into the proverbial "mission creep" -- he found loose threads right away when he started investigating the key players behind Comey's firing, and Flynn's discussions with the Russians (and Saudis), and when he pulled on those loose threads, a whole bunch of interesting things started unraveling.

But by definition, that makes it much more difficult to package the whole story into a straightforward narrative that the average 'murkin can follow. It is a sprawling narrative with plenty of characters and seemingly dissociated events that only form a pattern when you step back a bit. But so is Game of Thrones, so is The Wire.

There's a lot of illicit cash and undue influence being peddled here, and I would literally bet my next paycheck that if we were permitted by the Grand Vizier to read this report that supposedly totally clears His Travesty of all wrongdoing, we would quickly find an unprecedented web of corruption. We would find that our foreign policy is literally being sold to the Saudis and Russians and Emiratis and Israelis, for starters -- not even "traded" for some vague general benefit of the US, but for the specific monetary benefit of the Trump/Kushner crime family.

These people are fucking criminals, full stop, and by going down the rathole of toxic people that were magnetized to this boiler room pump-and-dump scam, Mueller was starting to unearth some of the more direct connections when Barr was installed to pull the plug.

There probably was never a direct Boris-Badenov-handing-sack-of-cash-with-dollar-sign-to-Donald-Trump scenario that would inculpate him in court, anyway. This is all done with cutouts and third parties and sleazy intermediaries that wouldn't have passed muster in a Robert Ludlum potboiler. And no one has to make a request from an inherently corrupt person who has already been on the take for a decade before he took office; both parties already know what needs to be done. So there's no crime to witness and adjudicate, even though crimes most certainly took place.

But again, this whole impossibly baroque, sprawling narrative is really about us in the end, what we're willing to accept and put up with. And clearly we're fine with it all, or enough of us are that the needle doesn't budge. So maybe we're getting what we deserve.

At the Movies

Some recent viewings of note, in the order I saw them over the last month or so. There are spoilers here and there, but they're at a minimum.

Juliet, Naked -- Based on Nick Hornby's novel, this is a bright, small story about a reclusive rocker (Ethan Hawke) whose long-lost acoustic demo gets on the radar of an obsessive fan (Chris O'Dowd), who in turn pays far more attention to his fan board than to his long-suffering wife (Rose Byrne).

The cast is pitch-perfect, bringing the material into focus, and the writing is subtle but sharp, weaving solid observations about obsessives and self-appointed curators into the familiar tropes about lost connections and second chances. Bonus points for Hawke's rendition of Waterloo Sunset.

Grade:  A

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Landline -- This looked good on paper -- solid cast (Edie Falco, John Turturro, Jenny Slate) and a proven director (Gillian Robespierre) with a touch for comedy (Robespierre directed several excellent episodes of HBO's sorely underrated Crashing this season). And yet....

Two sisters (Slate and Abby Quinn) suspect that their father (Turturro) is cheating on their mother (Falco). And yet Slate is cheating on her own fiancé (Jay Duplass), so, go figure. Naturally, hijinks ensue. The younger sister is a bratty teen, who seems to delight mostly in being a disagreeable pain-in-the-ass.

Pretty much everyone in this movie is a spoiled, insufferable asshole. At the risk of stating the obvious, every story needs a protagonist -- that is, someone you can root for. But there's no one to root for here, really. They're all fucking jerky and unpleasant, except Duplass, who's just a pussy. Not to approach it from an academic Marxist (class-based) perspective, but after about an hour of listening to these privileged assholes bray at each other over their first-world problems, you kind of wish one of them would get mugged or beaten up, burglarized, something like that. Anything but listen to spoiled people whine for an hour and a half.

Grade:  D+

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Hereditary -- After the previous decade's spate of wretched torture porn, the horror genre has been enjoying something of a rejuvenation the last half-decade or so. The focus right now is on Jordan Peele, who with Get Out and now Us has managed to create entertaining pieces that have canny social observations baked into them. But Robert Eggers' The Witch was another terrific -- and sorely underrated -- addition to the canon, using flawless pacing and fantastic exterior shots to build real suspense, without a bunch of gratuitous blood and goo.

Hereditary lands closer to that latter category, starting with a well-used premise -- Grandma's dead, and the family starts finding out about the real Grandma. Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne lead a strong cast of mostly newer actors. It's a great ensemble and they thrive under Ari Aster's writing and directing. The movie probably could have been 10-15 minutes shorter in the first two acts, but it's not a major complaint.

It's hard to get into depth with this movie without giving too much away, but suffice to say that the suspense builds well and doesn't let up, there are a couple of gory shots but nothing unnecessarily graphic or overdone, and the powerful ending will have you recalling classics like The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, the way the tension gets ratcheted up effectively, without letting go.

Grade:  A-

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Black Panther -- I mostly don't bother with superhero movies, as they are essentially the same Hero's Journey template iterated with slight variations. It's like hearing the same song played in all twelve musical keys, maybe replacing major chords with minor or altered dominant chords, maybe a tempo change, but still essentially the same deal.

That's not a value judgment; the movies are well-made and generally have solid casts. But you have to be invested in the characters to really get anything from these movies, and it's mostly just not in my wheelhouse. Also, they tend to run about 20-30 minutes too long. Seems like 100-110 minutes should be enough to paint the numbers and tack on the franchise teaser after the credits.

So my main requirement from action or blockbuster movies is that the characters are engaging and the plot moves along, and Black Panther fits that bill. Like Wonder Woman before it, there is a certain aura of wokeness coming with this one, but it's not overdone. It takes some suspension of disbelief to buy that an isolated nation could use an essentially magical element (that only exists in one place) to build a technologically advanced civilization with no outside contact or trade. But as with all of these types of movies, the borders of verisimilitude tend to be blurry and selective, and are not meant to be scrutinized closely. It is, after all, a comic book.

The main thing is that the cast is strong, the story solid, the pacing steady, and the visuals interesting and innovative. Like Wonder Woman, it's woke, but in a good way.

Grade:  B+

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First Reformed -- Paul Schrader wrote Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. It's not an exaggeration to say that if he had done nothing else at all, he's still a legend. But of course he's written and/or directed many other projects over the years, with varying levels of success. Last year's First Reformed belongs among his greatest works. It's a small, intimate film that poses large questions.

Ethan Hawke (once again) plays Rev. Ernst Toller, a former military chaplain who, after losing his son in Iraq and subsequently his marriage, finds himself ministering to a historic church in upstate New York that is more of a tourist destination than a true congregation. Toller drinks and writes, vainly attempting to crib together some sort of penance or redemption for himself.

An environmentalist couple enters his church, the pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asking for his counseling for her husband Michael (Philip Ettinger), a climate-change obsessive who wants to abort the fetus rather than bring it into an already doomed world. A terrific one-on-one scene between Toller and Michael sets the trajectory for the rest of the movie, as Michael lays out his case in detail, and Toller convinces him to meet again for further counseling. When Mary finds Michael's suicide vest and informs Toller, Michael shoots himself, propelling Toller's soul-searching into new territory.

As Toller begins digging into the heart of Michael's environmental concerns, he begins putting them into a higher spiritual context:  Will God forgive us? (for destroying His creation). This leads him into direct conflict with the industrialist (Michael Gaston) who bankrolls the church as a token measure of green-washing, as well as the megachurch pastor (Cedric "the Entertainer" Kyles, in a terrifically subtle performance) who eschews Toller's introspective spiritualism for the more worldly concerns of "outreach" marketing.

The third act wobbles a touch, as Toller goes Travis Bickle on us rather abruptly, but pulls itself together for a strong (if jarring) finish. If you've read Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (and if you haven't you should) then you know Schrader's personal history, raised in a strict Dutch Calvinist home where movies were forbidden. Schrader also at one point considered joining the clergy (as did his frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese), and these characteristics imbue the story as a deeply personal effort from Schrader. The close, innovative camerawork complements the nature of the story perfectly.

There are a couple of moments here and there that feel, well, preachy, and again the ending could have been a bit tighter, but these are minor quibbles. It's a real shame this movie didn't get more (or any) attention. It's an outstanding work from a true master.

Grade:  A-

Do It Already

The idle threats of frazzled moms
Flutter and dissipate
Forgotten before they're heard
Again and again

So follow through at long last

Beat the brat's ass
Max the credit cards
Don't pay the bills
Cheat on your spouse

Bury the report that clears your name
Close the border
Stoke the mob
Lead the chant

Break away from Brussels like you promised

Tell Europe to go fuck themselves
Tell Canada to go fuck Europe
Tell murderers you love them
Tell everyone else you hate them

Poison the well and the water table
Fly from the bridge into a dead river of ash and feces and aphasia
Kill your own chickens
Pick your own fruit
Repeal Roe and shut down the clinics
Reap the whirlwind in your dust bowl brain

Watch the levees break
Steal your neighbor's boat
Row for higher ground
Pretend it never happened

Flex nuts and fake tough
Wrap up in flags of ancient traitors
Have a criminal fix your health care
Roll clean coal in your living room
Pwn faggot libturd snowflakes

You showed 'em alright
Showed 'em reeeeeal good

Taste the barrel, clattered against teeth
Crush fentanyl on corn flakes
Windmills cause cancer
Corporations are friends
Ignorance is strength
Freedom is relative
Resistance is futile
Facts are useless
Tucker's got a point

Don't feel bad
You gave up a long time ago
They'll forget you soon enough

Mueller Time; Or, It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Fitzmas

Obviously, the report has finally dropped, and obviously, anyone who thinks they know anything specific is full of shit.

My completely uneducated guess is that supporters and opponents of this human centipede of an administration will each be disappointed in different ways:

• There will not be a clear path of evidence to directly convict Trump on an impeachable offense.
• There are other investigations in motion, and Mueller of course wisely farmed out as much as possible to multiple federal districts, meaning that there is certainly more to come from those investigations, and Trump and his family and associates are going to be extremely lucky if they all manage to get through it with assets and freedom intact.

Some important takeaways, based on what we do know:

• Dozens of indictments, six guilty pleas, and several convictions.
• Paul Manafort (campaign manager #2, and the person who tapped Pence for VP) didn't get the thirty years he deserved, but seven years is a lot for someone who turns seventy in a week.
• Flynn (National Security Advisor) still has to allocute, and has given plenty of testimony and (one presumes) evidence as part of his plea deal.
• Rick Gates (deputy to Manafort) is still working with investigators.
• Felix Sater is scheduled to testify on March 27th. He knows everything Michael Cohen does, and probably more.
• Roger Stone's trial is later in the year. Stone is apparently deep in debt, and not wanting to take a nickel in Club Fed for Agent Orange.
• Steve Bannon and Tom Barrack turned over a combined five thousand pages of documents to House investigators last week.
• These are all key players, as is Michael Cohen, and now Elliott Broidy (who, along with Cohen, was one of the RNC finance chairs for the 2016 campaign), whose offices were raided last week, and who has already done time for this sort of thing.

Bottom line:  whether or not there's a "smoking gun" in the report, anyone who still says there was nothing is clearly on someone's payroll, and would have said there was nothing even with a smoking gun.

And the House committee, regardless of what we're permitted to hear and see of the report, will continue their collective spelunking of Fatboy's voluminous crooked ass. Tax returns, financial records, the "charitable foundation," the bank and insurance fraud committed in his loan applications, all the real estate he's been using to launder bratva money for the past decade or so, that's all still in play.

That's the other thing about the report -- it's not the end, it's the beginning. It will be a road map to the corruption and criminality baked into the entire apparatus, every player and every move they made. If even half of it's true, it's way too much to sweep under.

The real question, and the real challenge here, is whether it will move any cultists. Of course this is purely anecdotal, so feel free to disregard, but I've made it a point to ask my Trump-supporting friends -- none of whom are so far in as to, say, attend a rally, and at least a couple of them voted for Obama at least once -- what it would take for them to change their mind about their support for him. War, recession, proof of collusion and subversion?

It's a vague, open-ended question with some subjectivity, and therefore not easy to answer regardless, but still, it's troubling to note that none of them seemed worried about any of the Russia stuff, and all were happy with the economy. The thing to be most worried about here is that every one of the aforementioned players mentioned above could be convicted on concrete evidence, and a lot of them just won't give a shit. They'll flip on Fixed Noise and soak in whatever nonsense they push about the Dummycrat of the week, and that'll be that.

It's something to keep in mind as the perpetual campaign starts kicking into higher gears as 2020 inches closer. By definition, the cultists are completely impervious to evidence, to clear patterns of erratic behavior and sheer incompetence. When nothing matters to forty percent of the electorate but being assholes, you have a deep systemic problem that just might never be undone, and in fact might get worse.

I'm not worried about King Joffrey's idle jabber about the military, cops, or bikers -- the first two groups swear oaths that most of them actually do take seriously, and the latter group consists mostly of rapidly aging puds who won't ever get into a one-on-one fight.

What's more worrisome is the clear threat of more instances of politically motivated stochastic terrorism. The two most recent instances in the US -- the van-driving nutjobs who sent pipe bombs to prominent Democrats, and the Coast Guard lieutenant who was stockpiling weapons and drawing up plans -- were fortunately too inept to pull anything off. Sooner or later you'll get one who figures out how to pull it off.

Boycott CNN

Your periodic reminder that CNN, in its own way, is as bad as Fixed Noise, and the sooner they're out of business, the better off the planet will be. Fuck. Them.

I Want to Believe the Fairy Tale

Longtime readers of this here eternal rant may recall that back in a more innocent time, I put out a few e-books under the "auspices" of the blog name. Two were annual compendia of blog posts from the years 2012 and 2013 (with some fresh commentary included; I would feel bad screwing you out of two bucks for something you had already read), and two were 100% new analyses of people in the news for those years, along the lines of the old Buffalo Beast's annual Assholes of [the past year] series.

(Not to shake anyone out of their hard-earned couch-cushion change, but if you have a few shekels you can part with, the books are still available, and I think you might be pleasantly -- or not -- surprised by how relevant they still are, more than half a decade later.)

So in the Assholes of 2012 collection, which had the catchy title 12 in '12, I ranked the current thing in the Oval Office as the #3 asshole in these here Yewnighted States, due to his toxic blend of birther conspiracies and shameless ignorance. In retrospect, that ranking seems at once to be prescient, while also giving outsized importance to what was then realistically a noisy reality-teevee gadfly looking to fill his bottomless psychic hole, his pathetic need for publicity every fucking hour of every goddamned day.

What I was ignoring, even as it seems apparent in a back-handed way with the second factor stated above, was just how pernicious and effective reality teevee has become on people. Sure, it's been a staple here since the very beginning, how it's made 'murkins stoopid and whatnot, but the fact is that, since I really have never actually watched any of it, I only know of its effects secondhand at best.

Now, another more recent common theme of mine since the bewigged gastropod has oozed its way in and ensconced itself there, is that while it presents a significant problem, the real problem is the prion disease eating the brains of the idiots who voted for it, and still inexplicably believe in it, despite failure after failure after pathetic, toxic failure.

How do you deprogram a cult? We've been trying to figure that out with North Korea, among others for decades. But at least North Korea's cult is obviously held in place with a very real, palpable fear. These slapdick rubes sincerely love Trump without reservation. Until they decide that they love their country more than they hate whatever caricature of "liberals" Fixed Noise is pushing on them today, they'll follow him right over the edge. Don't kid yourself otherwise.

The joke about "when we're all living under freeway overpasses, grilling sparrows on curtain rods, the Trump voter will look over at his neighbor, who has no sparrow, and consider it a victory" cuts closer to the cold truth than any of us would like to admit. Think about it for a second -- whatever choice you've cast for imperial custodian or congressional prelate or what-have-you over the years, did you ever factor as long as it fucks over the other guy into your choice? Yeah, that's not a normal thing. But it's sadly become all too normal and obvious.

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Here's a little story, completely true, about the effects of reality teevee on otherwise sentient, normal, even nice people:  an older person of my acquaintance for about ten years (let's call her Mary), very sweet, devout church-goer, even more devout reality-teevee fanatic, and currently deep in the thrall of He Who Shall Not Be Named. But Mary is also the kind of person who always asks about everyone's families, remembers the names of your kids, even gets them a little something for their birthdays and Christmas. A sincerely kind person, but one who has been immersed and baptized in the poisoned well of Rupert Murdoch.

So some years ago, back around the time of the e-books (it really was a simpler time, wasn't it), she was rattling on about some Bachelorette-type show, and I was alternating between ignoring her, politely nodding my head, and occasionally providing some gentle ribbing. But at some point, having written so many caustic observations in here over the years about what I perceived (again, mostly secondhand) to be a negative, perfidious cultural epiphenomenon, I wanted to get the point-of-view from someone who watched all -- and I do mean all, she did and does have an encyclopedic knowledge of this crap -- of these shows.

"What's the appeal?," I asked. "You know it's seedy and gross -- these people who could all easily hook up in any meat market on a weekday night, pretending to have to go on a show to look for love, but really just wanting to burnish their social-media cred. You spend weeks watching them winnow through dozens of members of the opposite sex, frequently in hot tubs and other unseemly situations. And in the end, they're not going to get married, and if they do, they'll be divorced within a year, because this is not how anyone meets people. It's weird that someone like yourself, who takes pride in having been married nearly fifty years, would see value in that sort of thing."

Mary replied simply, I want to believe the fairy tale.

I think that cuts to the heart of both the appeal and the treachery of reality teevee. Whatever else you want to say about how and why it su-su-su-suuuucks, the fact is that the people who assemble this schlock are very good at distilling it down to elemental narratives that we all had drummed into us by junior-high school, and carry with us in our daily adult lives, whether we know and use them or not. They're there:  identifying cliques, choosing sides, likes, loves, hates, fears, what you can share with your "friends" and what you can't because they can use it against you with the rest of the clique, etc.

These are extremely effective tropes, and they've obviously been very successful at packaging them into interchangeable "entertainment" products to piece out in between endless scads of advertisements for fast food and insurance and feminine hygiene products and big ol' trucks.

But what we're seeing now with Trump is someone who really had been on the verge of being rightly consigned to history's dustbin as a ridiculous punchline, a perennial blowhard who tried to go all Ross Perot in the 2000 campaign and got reminded that the court had to put him on an allowance because, you know, he bankrupted a fucking casino, because he's about as good a businessman as he is a husband or father or human being. Until that fucking turd Mark Burnett pulled him out of that dust heap, brushed him off, cleaned up his ricockulous microweave hairpiece and spent the next decade presenting him to 'murka as a gin-you-whine boner-fried bidnessman.

And they bought it. And now they're buying it with him as an "outsider" politician, even though he's neither of those things. He's an "outsider" to the extent that actual billionaires want nothing to do with him, don't invite him to their elitist soirees, etc. But he's a trust-fund asshole through and through, never worked an honest day or made an honest dollar in his goddamned life.

But try telling them that. You can't change their minds with "facts" because they want to believe the fairy tale. So you have to come up with a better fairy tale, a more compelling narrative that clearly positions who the "good guys" and "bad guys" really are. Put it in Game of Thrones terms:  you may enjoy the moral fluidity of, say, Varys and Littlefinger, but there's no doubt where Ned and Joffrey were on their respective points of the moral compass.

Farmers in the midwestern states are going through huge increases in bankruptcy filings, thanks in large part to Purznit Shit-fer-Brains' brilliant trade wars, which are good and easy to win. This in spite of the fact that over eight billion dollars has already been expended in bailouts and price supports, because these people literally have entire harvest rotting in warehouses, because it cost them more to harvest it than they can currently get on the market.

Now, on the one hand, I am a huge -- and sincere! -- fan of people getting what they vote for, and in this case, these people are getting exactly that, good and hard. So fuck them. On the other hand, if I were running for president, and wanting to win the people in these states back over, I'd work on crafting a narrative that cleanly and simply outlines exactly what went down, and who's responsible. I'd find a handful of these suckers in every state and trot them up onstage, get them to recite their litany of woes to the audience of neighbors 'n' friends, and then make goddamned sure no one left the building without understanding that Fuckface Von Clownstick is entirely responsible for every miserable, sleepless night they've endured going through their financial hardship, and that we're going to fix it. And make sure that the corporate media shows up and broadcasts that shit, again and again.

That all of this has the added benefit of being 100% true is orthogonal to the real challenge. Truth just makes it a bit simpler to craft the narrative, but you'll still have to add a bit of fairy tale, a little something that they want to believe, even when they know in their hearts it isn't true.

Maybe point out to these farmers that while they're trying like hell to figure out how to hang onto what their parents and grandparents busted their humps to pass along to them, Jared Kushner is selling our nuclear tech to the Saudis, because he's neck-deep in hock to them. Maybe point out that things aren't going too well with North Korea after all, despite all the stunt summits and hand-waving and time-share salesmanship.

Maybe point out that poor and working-class people, whether they're in Alabama or California, have a hell of a lot more in common with each other, than with a thin-skinned fake tycoon who lies about everything, even things that don't matter. Maybe point out that, just as in real life, treating your friends and allies like shit does matter, because sooner or later you want or need something from them, and they have no reason to help you.

Maybe point out that this could all have gone completely differently, if he had just been 30% less of an asshole, that he could have won over moderates and even some liberals by simply making good on promises such as infrastructure and the opioid crisis, and not siding with nazis and calling everyone who disagrees with him an enemy of the state. Maybe ask why wages are still stagnant in Duh Best Economy Evuh, or why Genius Q. Dealmaker, Real Billionaire Tycoon, feels so comfortable cutting their health care.

I mean, if you didn't know any better, you might start to think that, you know, he's always been a fucking bullshitter.

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I hate to say it, but future Real Housewives of Scottsdale star Meghan McCain has the right idea:  you don't have to take any shit from this doddering cartoon character. You really don't. I look forward to George Conway finally screwing up the courage to tell that mercenary cunt wife of his to make a choice -- your boss or your family. (Although I also hope that, whether or not this Magnificent Bickersons act the Conways have going is real or some weird cover-our-asses-for-future-employment gambit, they both spend the rest of their lives broke and despised, just like the scumbag they helped put into office.) I look forward to enough senators finally remembering that they took an oath to serve the Constitution, and not a particular man, especially one so deeply unqualified and unfit for office.

More than that, I look forward to Trump's continuing decompensation. He's unraveling fast now -- fifty tweets over the past weekend, whining about Saturday Night Live reruns and Fixed Noise anchors, and equally meaningless nonsense. But what it really reveals is how fucking miserable he is.

I said this about Trump long before he threw his ricockulous microweave into the ring, and transitioned from being a distributor of thick envelopes to becoming a recipient of thick envelopes:  if you, Tonstant Weader, had a kajillionty bucks and could do whatever you want, would you spend your time picking Twitter fights with Bill Cosby and Rosie O'Donnell, giving dating advice to Twilight actors? Which is literally what he was doing at the time, when he wasn't LYING about Obama's birthplace.

But now he's the chief executive, with all the cultural "soft power" perks that come with it. It's the closest thing to a literal version of the old "if you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be" question -- he can reach out to virtually anyone from any walk of life, musicians, actors, writers, economists, people of skill and talent and expertise, and ask them to dinner. Obama made great and frequent use of this perk, not for cynical fundraising reasons (as the Clintons did, renting out the Lincoln Bedroom), but because he's a fan of art and science and people who do things most people can't. That's what a normal person would do.

Trump does none of that. He had (pfft) Ted Nugent, Kid Rock, and former veep flop (and current reality-teevee flop) Sarah Palin shortly after the election, as a suck it libturds! moment. Since then, nothing, not even z-listers like Tim Allen and James Woods, people who would suck his tiny dick in Times Square if he asked them to. No, he bails to the Maga-Lardo every other weekend to hang out with thrice-divorced urologists and has-beens and never-weres like Robert Davi.

I mean, I think I know who Robert Davi is. Or was. He's still alive, right?

But that should give you an indication of how truly miserable Trump is. He can do literally anything he wants, and this is what he chooses to do. And he knows that the walls are closing in, that even if Mueller's report turns out to be a nothingburger with extra cheese, there are already enough wheels in motion just at the SDNY to keep him in court for the rest of his life, and that he stands a very real chance of going to jail and/or losing substantial assets. It's driving him nuts, and he was never all that tethered to reality in the first place.

And that brings me immense joy, because I can scarcely think of a more deserving scumbag. And that's not an exaggeration. He is scum. His adult kids are scum. His current wife and his ex-wives are scum. They're all fucking awful people, lamely pretending to not be fucking awful, but by definition not really knowing how to pretend convincingly.

They are all part of the same vile problem -- and it is the same problem that we saw last week with the celebritard college admissions scandal. It is the tacit admission by wealthy people, that the whole point of being truly wealthy is not simply having more money, or just having enough money to not have to worry about money, the way the little people do.

The real point of being truly wealthy is having your own set of rules to play by, because you are insulated from the consequences that the little people take for granted. So you have a kid you want to get into college, but they not only aren't qualified to go, they don't even want to go? No problem, just bribe the right people in the right places in what is undoubtedly just another American racket, like health care and finance, just a grift designed to siphon money out of suckers.

And it worked until it didn't. Don't worry, America doesn't want to see the chick from Full House go to prison for a "victimless" crime, so she and Filliam H. Muffman will pay their token fines, and then go on PR rehab tours on the talk-show circuit, and go right back to what they were doing, which is whatever the hell they wanted.

But that's the same dynamic that Trump and his disgusting coterie of fellow grifters and enablers count on:  that the little people really lurve their pelf-grubbing insect overlords; that they're too fucking dumb to understand the difference between knowing something about real business and just being a garden-variety chiseler; that they hate their fellow citizens more than they love their country.

And it just might work, not because Trump might steal the election next year, or refuse to leave if he loses, or any of that. It's because Democrats and liberals want to believe the fairy tale too, only their fairy tale consists of the disproven notion that most people are inherently good and idealistic and care more about facts than emotional catharsis. They need to recognize that their base is fucking hostile now too, and adjust their approach accordingly.

I don't give two fucks about how competent Amy Klobuchar (for example) may be. What concerns me is that her tepid, sensible approach reminds me of the beige suit known as Al Gore, who couldn't even get his home state to vote for him against a proven dipshit like George W. Bush. We want a fight, so either be prepared to get in the ring, or go the fuck home and weed your garden and draft policy papers touting the intrinsic benefits of gutless incrementalism.

What would be very nearly as bad as Trump legitimately winning next year, is the Democrats winning everything back in an indisputable landslide, and still not understanding that unless and until the current incarnation of the Republicon party is burned to the ground and the ashes pissed and shat upon, nothing will ever really change except the players. They have to deliver a convincing message of real economic justice for everyone, and couple that with a sincere conviction to end these cocksuckers, once and for all.

And All Your Money Won't Another Minute Buy

The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same. .... What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect. -- George Orwell, 1984, Part II, Chapter 9

In the midst of the constant info-tsunami, you may have heard that noted hairpiece enthusiast Sheldon Adelson is in grave health. Considering Adelson is eighty-five years old, has looked much older for many years, and is in fact pure scum, it would be understandable if you shrugged your shoulders at such news, and went off to go read your horoscope or fix a nice cocktail.

Nonetheless, let's all spare a thought and/or prayer for ol' Shelly, something in the neighborhood of I hope it fuckin' hurts, reeeeeal bad.

If Howard Zinn proved anything, it's that most of history really just consists of wealth and power subjugating everyone else by whatever means available at the given time. Torture, murder, rape, slavery back in the day, compelled by violence and force; usury, debt peonage, and wage slavery nowadays wrought by sophisticated systems of disinformation and culture-war stoking.

Where these modes of subjugation once were in the service of religious and territorial expansionism, now it's just for the money. Imagine:  people who already have more wealth than they could spend in ten or twenty lifetimes, pitting the country against itself for another fucking tax break. A few more million dollars, which for them is a fraction of a percent, but for everyone else is more money than they'll see in their entire lives.

At least the religious fanatics believed in something, even if it was all bullshit. People like Sheldon Adelson believe only in what they already have way more than enough of.

Let's do the quick back-of-the-envelope calcs here:  if you had a billion dollars, you could spend $100,000 every single day for over twenty-seven years. And that's if you're giving it all away and buying toys and shit with no further value -- no real estate, no businesses, no stocks or investments or anything with a yield or resale value whatsoever.

The average American family takes close to two years to earn $100,000 gross, before all the expenses of daily life are deducted. I have a pretty good imagination, and I like toys, and I have no clue how I would go about wasting $100k every day for nearly three decades. You can indulge in hookers and blow for only so long -- believe me, I tried back in the Eighties and Nineties.

But seriously, we're not just talking about a lot of money, we're talking about a staggering amount of money, at the cusp of what most people can conceive. The vast majority of Americans still think conceptually of a "millionaire" as someone who is doing quite well -- little or no debt; chooses houses and vehicles instead of just getting what you can afford; two or more vacations per year, domestically or abroad; will be able to retire well before you hit the age of sixty. So now picture all that a thousand times over.

Sheldon Adelson is reckoned to be worth about thirty-six billion dollars.

And of course you have your other greedy elders who take an active role in undermining this country with their shenanigans in its electoral process:  Rupert Murdoch (turns eighty-eight next week), and Charles (eighty-three) and David (seventy-eight) Koch. Like Adelson, they count their billions in the teens. They could each live another ten, twenty -- another hundred -- years and still not be anywhere close to running out of precious, precious money. They could send hundreds of kids to college every year and not even feel it.

But it's not enough. It's never enough. I seriously think that the thing with people like them is that once you reach a point where you don't really need money anymore, because you have so much of it, you just use it to keep score, to compete with others in your social strata. It's all just a game for them.

Yes, they've done some philanthropy -- the Kochs have donated to rich-guy activities like symphonies and ballets, and Adelson donated $25 million to build a children's hospital. He also spent $100 million trying to get Newt Fucking Gingrich elected president, and another $100 million in the 2018 midterm electoral cycle. I'm sure he's got another $100M cocked and loaded for next year, to keep that jabbering scumbag in place. Probably already good to go, in case he kicks off.

Isn't that nice to know? When you flip on your teevee now, and are subjected to the daily ravings of a slobbering grifter, day after day after fucking day, it's all because a handful of elderly billionaires decided that the best way to lower their tax bills even further was to use their propaganda organs to pit working-class Americans against each other. Be sure to thank them.

Somewhere in hell, Jay Gould is smiling knowingly.

The Art of the Meal

The latest dog-and-jackass show in Asia turned out the failure any sensible person might have expected, and for all the obvious reasons. People can parse empty phrases like "sometimes you have to walk" all they want, but that's a waste of time. Sometimes you do have to walk, and we all have been there, whether it's buying a car or on a blind date or working out a business negotiation. But at this level, the only reason "you have to walk" is because you didn't prepare in the first place.

The thing about statecraft that one gets accustomed to just taking for granted is the principle that by the time the "summit" is held, the work has already been done. That is, the various diplomatic minions from both sides, armed with policy direction and strategic goals and interests, have hammered out the details, extracted and made concessions, feinted and weaseled and wheedled and cajoled, and finally arrived at some flawed agreement that both sides can live with.

The summit is really just supposed to be a public ceremony to affirm that which has already been agreed upon. Maybe some final details need to be smoothed out, but again, the pros have already stepped in and done the actual work.

Clearly, these basic concepts have never occurred to anyone of any standing in this inept goat rodeo of an administration. One imagines a human centipede consisting of Trump, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, maybe Lindsey Graham, and whoever else is unlucky enough to be in the room with them. And in this instance, the segments of the centipede continually trade positions and rearrange, the front becoming the middle, the middle rotating to the end of the line, and so on, an endless parade of mutual shit-sucking.

I mean seriously -- what the fuck did anyone in this group do to prepare for this nonsense? Anything at all, besides the usual dopey marketing boilerplate?

People talk a lot of shit about MBAs, business consultants, that sort of breed, as purveyors of empty jargon and Ponzi-style catchphrases, endlessly rolled down to the next level of hustlers on the pyramid. And they're not entirely wrong; from books to courses to TED talkers, there's obviously no shortage of tent-revival hucksters hustling rubes with the secular religion of productivity hacks and customer engagement strategies and renaming the Deming cycle and such like.

But I can tell you something firsthand:  one of the most basic principles they teach you in grad school is the value proposition. That is, a customer will want to employ your business because you provide value. Either you do something they cannot do themselves, or they can do it but you can do it more efficiently, better and/or less costly.

Just as fundamental to the legit b-school acolyte is the sacred nine-word dictum handed down from Mt. Sinai by the Moses of the MBA religion, Peter Drucker:  If you can't measure it, you can't manage it.

So this "Hanoi Hail Mary" nonsense serves as a perfect crystallization of what's being going on with these morons the entire time, seen through the prism of the above two business principles. What has been accomplished with these two pseudo-summits, aside from an increasingly embarrassing series of sorry genuflections to a brutal dictator, with nothing at all to show for it? He stopped testing? Big fucking deal -- he's already got several dozen functioning weapons. He hasn't needed to test for a long time. The only reason North Korea "tests" missiles anymore is to get attention. It's saber-rattling. Once Genius Q. Dealmaker let him into the country club, the need for showboat launches into the Sea of Japan was done. Anyone who doesn't at least know that much doesn't belong anywhere near this game.

He's going to run the gubmint like a business, they said. Yeah, like one of his businesses, was our retort.

Both of the above principles (value and measurement) should be obvious to all, that a real business earns its keep, and that success and failure can be measured and predicted, in order to set controls and projections. But how do they square with what we know -- what we've all observed for decades, again and again -- about Trump and his approach to business?

Inheriting a real estate portfolio from your tax-dodging dad does not make you a businessman, it makes you a rentier, and there's a very stark difference. To heavily paraphrase Gordon Gekko, the rentier does not create or innovate or produce or deliver, he owns, he collects, he hustles. And then he finds ways to avoid paying taxes on money he didn't really work to earn in the first place.

Every other "business" Trump has been involved in, or tried to start, has failed miserably. There is a clear reason for this, one that goes beyond the usual "Trump is a gravy-brained dipshit" smackdown.

In the Tolstoyan sense of happy families being alike, successful businesses tend to share many traits, one of the most critical being that they know who their customer is. Who is my customer? A business that doesn't ask themselves that question regularly (because your customers and their needs change, and your perception of them changes, and your ability to deliver to them can change, and so on) is destined to fail. When that business is run by an idiot with a load of ill-gotten pelf, those deficiencies can be masked for some time, until the bankroll runs out, and then they fail all the same.

(That's how he ended up as a bratva launderer. That's why he won't show his tax returns. Again, anyone who denies it or can't see it needs to be excluded from any serious conversation.)

So look at Trump's businesses (or "businesses") over the years through that prism, and you see the key to what he now regards as statecraft. All of the jokey failures, from the USFL team to the airline to the steaks to the casinos, the common thread is that Trump is his own customer. He sees himself as a glamorous man-about-town, women want to fuck him and men want to be like him.

As ludicrous as that sounds, that is obviously how he's always seen himself, and continues to see himself. The fact that most people see him as an insufferable blowhard with a comical wig and spray-tan does not pierce his megalomania. This poorly informed self-image, and his innate sense of corruption and incompetent self-dealing, has poisoned all of his value propositions over the years.

And there are certainly successful businesses where the founder asked themselves, what if I made this product for me, and it turns out to be a popular innovation. But "innovating" means taking an existing product and making it better, whether with a superior design or product delivery or whatever. Something about the product is improved, in comparison with other products of the same type and market segment.

But there was nothing better about his steaks, nothing different about his casinos. The USFL could have been successful -- the NFL still had Up With People doing its Super Bowl halftime shows during the 1980s, and had endured two lengthy player strikes. But even there, Trump found a way to fuck up what could have been a good thing. This is because he obviously doesn't believe in that second principle, the Drucker maxim about measuring everything.

If I had to boil down business grad school to a single essential thing, a consistent ideal to which all of the components point directly toward, it would be this:  Measure twice, cut once. That's it, that's pretty much everything put as concisely as possible. You can take a leap of faith from time to time, if it's something you believe in strongly, but you damn sure don't ever do it without knowing the ramifications and potential consequences beforehand. Anyone who really holds an MBA degree and actually paid attention in class understands this. You don't take any major action without charting out the possibilities, and then you keep measuring as you go along, so that you can take corrective actions as needed, since they're always needed sooner or later.

You never "go with your gut". Ever. Even when you "know" that your product or your innovation is "better" you still do analyses to figure out the market positioning and segmentation.

Let's take the Trump Steaks as an example. Let's pretend that it's a serious, viable opportunity, that the meat really is top-grade, that there's a reliable supply at a relatively fixed cost. Let's assume that the proposition should fit into Trump's vision of himself as a luxury-item promoter, that the steaks are part of a portfolio of "status items" that are sold. People pay thousands of dollars for fashion items like handbags, that are made for a few bucks in some Asian sweatshop by child slaves, so forty-dollar mail-order steaks are not necessarily a ludicrous idea.

So all of these things are given in our hypothetical:  I have a better product. Who is my customer, and how do I find them and sell my superior product to them?

I could put you through a boring mini-seminar of how to research this sort of thing, much of which revolves around the simple (but time-consuming and vital) process of closely examining competitors from varying market (price) segments, identifying and exploiting gaps and differentiations, repositioning, branding, etc. But for a quick thumbnail example that essentially illustrates the same point, I would say to look at Omaha Steaks for a successful example of how to do that. You may or may not like their product or how they do it, but the fact is that they understand their customer and the product, and why barbecue enthusiasts will pay more for a better cut of meat.

Trump, on the other hand, chose to market his steaks like he "marketed" everything else he slapped his name on:  I'm an awesome guy, and I like this product, therefore you'll like this product too! This is an Underpants Gnome equation at its very heart, something that never adds up. Especially if you're asking someone to pay a premium price for a highly subjective product like steaks.

Using a person or personality to sell a product is always a dicey proposition, even when it's a universally liked celebrity. But Trump has always been an abrasive figure, deeply crass and vulgar, a loudmouth blowhard who fucks around on his wives and talks shit out of his neck. So the steak commercials went over much like an "Easy Eddie" used-car commercial might, and no one fell for it.

But the commercials point out one other important trait that is also very consistent in everything Trump has ever done:  not only is Trump his own customer, he's also the product! From a true business perspective, this is nothing more than a perverse feedback loop -- selling yourself to yourself. Nothing good can come from it, certainly not any good product. It's basically jerking off in public, which is Trump's career in a nutshell (giggity).

You know who else sells themselves to themselves? Cult leaders and banana republic dictators. Televangelists. Con artists of every breed and stripe, including just about every knuckle-dragging bible-humping shithead politician from the South. But politics aside, you can see why this feedback loop can never work in the long run. The numbers simply cannot pencil out. There's only a "product" for as long as enough suckers are around to convince themselves of that.

And so, to make a long story just a little bit longer, this is why none of these stupid summits with North Korea can work out, as long as they're being done like this, like an inept product launch for a piece of shit sold on a late-night infomercial. Because Trump is both his own customer and his own product, and no one in his inner circle has ever told him no, he is incapable of approaching anything as a problem to be analyzed and solved with knowledge and expertise. Since he believes he knows more about every subject than the so-called experts, he's his own sole resource. Since he's a fucking idiot, it's a pretty sterile resource. And so the feedback loop continues.

Long before any sort of "summit" date was announced -- and this goes back to the Singapore thing last year, which was equally useless -- you send scientists and diplomats over to talk to their counterparts on the other side. This means nuclear scientists, people who understand how the uranium and plutonium is mined and refined and processed, what the steps and the equipment look like, and therefore how to verify that those things have been curtailed as part of the agreement. You have sub-agreements in place to ensure the physical security of these verification teams, that their findings jibe with your existing satellite data, that they aren't being impeded or menaced by internal security goons, etc. You have experts who understand the history and geopolitics of the country and its larger region, so that you can anticipate their interests and needs -- potential bargaining chips. You send diplomats over to find out what they need from us in order to make the concessions we want out of them. This is what we want from you -- what will it take to make that happen?

None of this seems to have happened, instead it's all been a loose thread of vaguely theatrical -- I don't even want to say "events" since they don't qualify as such -- punctuations with no consistent meaning or direction. The corporate media, of course, focus on Pompeo saying one thing and Trump saying another:  oh noez, they're contradicting each other, are they trying to fool the wily Norks?

A competent, serious media would start by asking what are America's interests in North Korea in particular, in East Asia in general, and how those interests square with ongoing policy in the Pacific theatre. Yes, we want them to denuclearize, but what are we willing to do, in terms of positive (bribery) or negative (threats) leverage, to achieve that goal? What is our strategy in North and East Asia overall -- that is, do we want to withdraw out troops from Korea and Japan, and if so, what are the geopolitical ramifications of that? Does a Japan that seems to be incrementally militarizing become more isolated, and begin pursuing their own nuclear program? How does that square with US interests in the region?

What happened in Singapore last year, and in Hanoi this week, is the natural result of people who don't even think about such questions. These fools run things as if they had simply binge-watched The Sopranos and The Office (American), and combined the worst features of both bosses, the cruel entitlement of Tony Soprano and the gibbering, mendacious incompetence of Michael Scott.

For the twentieth anniversary of the first season, HBO recently reran the entire Sopranos series in January, and I hadn't seen them for years, so caught probably half of them. What jumped out again and again, aside from the coal-black humor laced throughout, was how parasitic the wiseguys really were. They talked about garbage routes and union jobs and things like that, but none of them actually did anything, they merely extorted money earned by the peons that actually did those things. They ran boiler-room penny-stock scams on gullible seniors. But they talked about their livelihoods among themselves as if they were actual working people, instead of feudal lords overseeing extrajudicial fiefdoms. Their wives and grown children collectively participate in and enable that delusion of respectability.

The easy explanation is that since most people are innately "moral" to some degree, those who choose the apparent ease and convenience of the "amoral" lifestyle say these little things to themselves as rationalizations or justifications for their choices. But by the end, it becomes apparent that the reality of it is that they know better, they just don't care. If a landscaper gets beaten up in a turf war between rival crews and turns to one of them for help, he ends up working for free under implicit threat of further harm -- a literal slave. There is no introspection on anyone's part. This is simply the way "business" has always been done. Heads I win, tails you lose. Sucks to be you.

You could see some of that in Michael Cohen's open testimony in the House on Wednesday. Per usual, the media fixated on the rather pedestrian "revelations" that we already knew -- that he's a conniving hustler who fucked over small businesses and used his "charitable foundation" as a tax-dodge-slash-piggy-bank, paid off his mistresses from his campaign coffers, etc.

What was interesting to me was what Cohen revealed about how he saw himself, how he talked about his actions. He talks about how he had already achieved some measure of personal success before working for Trump, and then talks about his rather mundane goon tasks he performed for Trump -- sending out the various letters and documents by which Trump would threaten and cajole various interlocutors, to avoid paying his bills, to intimidate his former schools from releasing his grades and test scores.

It says something about Cohen that, as he recounts his vile activities on Trump's behalf, he seems absent from any contemporaneous bouts of introspection or conscience in performing those tasks. What sort of "successful" person goes to work on behalf of a shameless hustler whose primary activities consist of not paying contractors and hustling morons? At no point did Cohen -- who shamelessly and repeatedly reminds us that he is the son of a Holocaust survivor -- say to himself, what the fuck am I doing, and why am I doing it for this fucking asshole?

Even at the end of Cohen's opening statement, his mention of Melania Trump as a "kind" person who doesn't deserve any of this, felt tacked-on, like something Cohen thought would come off as a grace note of sorts. I don't think any reasonable person who has observed Melania Trump's actions and words, during her husband's campaign and during his tenure as an appalling excuse for a chief executive, could characterize her as "kind."

To be sure, she is quiet and polite, understands her place and role intrinsically. But she is on record as an Obama birther, she supports her husband's idiotic and destructive policies and statements implicitly and explicitly, and is at best a mercenary. If she has any lingering guilt for what she's abetted over the years, like Carmela Soprano, she has rationalized it away with the expensive trappings and trinkets of a spoiled courtesan. But she can't say that she hasn't been told.

It is helpful to look at Trump, both as a person and as a businessman, in that Sopranos light as well. His father and Roy Cohn taught him that greasing palms and cutting corners, schmoozing the media and lying through your teeth, was simply how "business" gets done. There's no need to measure or analyze anything if you know that the main obstacle to getting your permits and tax abatements is getting the campaign donations to the mayor and the councilman for your district.

And remember, he came to local and then national attention via the New York media, starting with the Times. He was a registered Democrat, donated to Hillary and Kirsten Gillibrand and others. They took his money, they took his calls. They printed his self-serving lies for years, they gave him a teevee show and a public platform, because they -- like Trump -- lie about who their customers are and what their product is.

And so he's not entirely wrong when he excoriates the corporate media for their self-serving bullshit. It was not until he threw his wig into the political ring that suddenly the media tried to grow a conscience about who and what he really was. But it was too late, and it rang false because they aren't very good at that sort of thing. The media's sudden "principled" stance re Trump hung off them like a pulsating tumor. That's why CNN is still trying to have it both ways by hiring a Jeff Sessions staffer to oversee their 2020 election analysis. They are "fake" in the sense that there is no moral core underpinning their editorial approach or even their objective delivery of their news-like product.

Their product is conflict, and their delivery device is panel shows and bullshit commentary. Really their product is their audience, and their true customers are the insurance and pharma and telecom companies that underwrite the panel shows -- and have various and sundry deals under consideration by various and sundry makers of the laws, approvers of the proposed mergers. Interests are vested, and intertwined.

CNN is (imho) the worst violator, but really just about all the corporate media monkeys are complicit in some form. As are we. Let me be more blunt, and put it the way Dr. Krakower might:  if you're still watching CNN for anything at this point, you're part of the problem, and like Carmela and Melania, you can't say you haven't been told. Fucking boycott them yesterday, and never look back.

It's more realistic -- if perhaps not healthy -- to look at the Hanoi "summit" as just another episode in this dopey reality show we're all forced to live in now, and as such, it will have relatively little consequence in and of itself. It's the overall dynamic that eroding what was already a shaky foundation. Turns out all it took to bring the whole edifice down was a handful of idiots who just didn't give a fuck.

The keys to getting rid of Trump are there, for the Dummycrat with the cojones to step up and use them. Again, Cohen's testimony yesterday was a reminder of part of it, that while he is indeed a convicted felon and liar and all-around weasel-for-hire, he brought corroborating documentation with him this time, as part of his allocution. One part of that documentation is three years' worth of financial statements for Deutsche Bank, back when Trump was trying to buy the Buffalo Bills. Guaranteed there will be something in there that will provide probable cause to go ass-spelunking for that fucker's tax returns -- and there will be the evidence of money laundering, or worse.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, is the need for Democrats to understand where this asshole's weaknesses really lie. Remember, everything is projection with this guy. The childish nicknames he uses on opponents are all characteristics that he dreads being called himself -- crooked, low-energy, little, lyin', etc.

It's helpful to dial down some of the hysteria a couple of notches and to keep in mind that he is not Hitler or Mussolini, he's Wile E. Coyote, and they need to start addressing him as such. Attack him on his incompetence, on what a ridiculous person he is. Use the things he says against him, which then forces him to lie further. I didn't say that. Well, we have the video, asshole.

His weakness is his narcissism; he cannot stand to think that people don't respect or admire him. These are deeply rooted daddy issues manifesting themselves, but they are very real all the same, and it is foolish not to exploit them. This latest public belly-flop is just another example to exploit, not just because of the more apparent non-results, but because of the obvious lack of preparation that led inevitably to failure.

Exploit those holes to their fullest potential, and you don't just bring down the cult leader, you take down the cult as well, because their self-esteem is tied inexorably to his. Once they understand that liberals are not crying but laughing at him, they can no longer support him.