Venezuela

Anyone who says they know how to "fix" Venezuela's many problems is full of shit, and/or has an agenda. But you can be sure that Elliot Abrams will find a way to make it worse. That turd should have been flushed twenty years ago, but the Cheney regime made sure to fish him out of the bowl and put him back to work.

There is some truth to that "drain the swamp" stuff, you know. It's just that there's more to it than simply swapping in your own gators.

The US has been sniffing around Venezuela since oil was discovered at Maracaibo back in 1905. Nowadays, it's also about the coltan and other valuable metals and minerals there, and a desperate, destitute populace that will settle for just about any respite from million-percent inflation and non-stop crime.

Where it gets a bit strange is that Russia is supporting Maduro and bucking our support of Guaido. I don't think this turns into another Syria, but odds are there's already a few cells of mercs and spec-ops guys setting up shop outside Caracas, training irregulars in "counterinsurgency" techniques. With Abrams' involvement, it could be another Guatemala or El Salvador. 

Competence

So many excellent turns of phrase in the latest David Roth rundown, all pointing to the same indisputable conclusion -- Fuckface Von Clownstick is a lazy, incompetent dirtbag. He's content to float the same raft of drunk-uncle email tales of third-hand mayhem, random factoids that even his own minions cannot support factually, put forth in order to bolster a fake policy that consists of a non-solution to a non-crisis.

He lies instrumentally -- that is, on an ad-hoc basis to achieve whatever immediate need happens to be in front of him at any given moment. If a clinical narcissistic personality can be said to have any inner world apart from filling the base primal need for adulation, this is it, just lying and continuing to lie, and denying the previous lies with more lies. This is all Clownstick's life has ever been, this is all his tenure as chief executive has been so far, and it's all he and it will ever be. He's incapable of anything else.

The one thing he knows is what every cult leader knows, which is that the flock cannot see the leader as weak, but that they will -- they need to -- believe the constantly shifting explanations. The lies are much tastier than the truth, and so they gorge on the lies, and he has an endless supply of them.

But what they won't be able to get around is the fact that he's not getting the fucking wall. Period, end of sentence, full stop. He failed, and he knows it, and they know it. He bought himself three weeks to find some bullshit excuse, and come February 15th, there still won't be a fucking wall.

Already he's backpedaling, spouting mealy-mouthed bullshit about it's not like he meant a full 2,000-mile wall, guys. Uh-huh. Okay, then, Grampa Walnuts. Whatever you say. Until you say you didn't say that, as if we don't have years of video.

This is the desperate flailing of a doddering con-man who never knew nor cared about the actual mechanics of governance, the processes and procedures that make the machine hum. His balls are parked in I Call Her Nancy's purse not because she's a brilliant supergenius, though obviously she is extremely knowledgeable about what she does and how things get done. It's because, after all the trash talk and cheap shots about the wet bag of oatmeal that passes for his brain, all you have to do is listen to him for about two minutes on any given subject, and realize that he really is a fucking idiot.

And all but his most devoted cultists have to start seeing that, little by little, that he is very bad at this presidentin' thang, even by Outsider Draining Elitist Swamp bog-standard cult dogma. Just using his own rational political self-interest as a metric here, and nothing else, he would have been much better off if he had done nothing at all, and let outgoing shithead Paul Ryan push through the continuing resolution to keep the gubmint funded.

Instead, his opening gambit was a filmed encounter with Pelosi and Schumer in the Oval Office, where he opened negotiations by conceding in video that a shutdown would be on him. That devolved into a spate of surreal episodes, such as the staged visit to McAllen that Roth mentions, cartoon plutocrat Wilbur Ross trying out various let 'em eat shit lines that even rich assholes usually know better than to say out loud, Trump himself spouting bizarre shit about federal workers running up tabs with understanding grocers and supermarkets, culminating in the head of the flight attendants' union calling for a general airport-worker strike a week before the Super Bowl, with a one-hour FAA shutdown at LaGuardia as a taste of what was to come.

Net result:  a five-to-ten-percent approval drop, permanent loathing from the entire federal workforce, scorn from a significant portion of the cult base. When you lose Coulter and Breitbart, you're in trouble. This is neither art nor deal, and even the dopey maroons out in the haunted Pennsyltucky diners can see that. This is what incompetence looks like; this is how a complete dipshit runs a business and negotiates. People who have haggled five percent off a used car at a lot have better skills than this fucking asshole, and they know it.

This all could have been avoided, you know. No, really. There was a path where even a cartoon clown like Donald Trump could have succeeded at the job of president. All he had to was act like a normal human being -- listen to people who know things; throw opponents a bone once in a while; read a fucking book now and again; watch something on teevee other than base propaganda. But that would require humility, skill, competence, an understanding of one's own limitations and mortality.

Obviously he's incapable of any of those things, so of course it's a fuckin' dumpster fire. But it's important to note along the way that it didn't have to be this way. But this is the path he's chosen, and he's sticking to it, so deeper into the desert he goes. We'll see who he takes with him, hopefully McConnell and Cornyn and Graham and Cruz, and the rest of that miserable lot. It's no exaggeration to say that their thoughts and actions have made this country a worse place. History will not remember them well, and Americans will and should defecate on their graves after they're gone. Hell, go take a fucking dump on their lawn right now.

It's about to get a lot worse for the cultists, you know. Junior is going to be indicted soon, and Mueller will have more evidence to drop, and we'll all be subjected to their widening gyres and contortions, anything not to believe what's been right in front of them since the Eighties. You thought it was weird already, it's about to get weird.

I have to say this for him, if nothing else:  as despicable as Trump is and has always been as a human being and a businessman, as much of a shit sandwich as this rotten cloaca of an administration is, it's been entertaining. Never a dull moment with these dismal fuckers.

I don't know if we ever get back to boring, not for a while. But it's a worthwhile goal.

Endgame

So the gubmint shutdown has been "temporarily" lifted -- like that's a thing -- and Nancy "I call her Nancy" Pelosi didn't budge an inch on anything.

(Incidentally, the key takeaway of the "I call her Nancy" stupidity is not that Trump's a retard, though of course he is. Nor is it that his insistence on referring to Democratic legislators by their first names is intentionally disrespectful, though of course that's his purpose, and I look forward to them returning the favor at some inopportune moment. It's that the fact he hasn't come up with some cheap, demeaning, smarmy "Crooked Nancy" or "Lyin' Nancy" type of nickname for her shows that he's scared shitless of her. He pulls that Pocahontas shit on Pelosi, he'll be wiping his greasy ass with a stump, and he knows it.)

It would be tempting to credit Trump's public capitulation this afternoon to this morning's arrest of professional fuckface Roger Stone, but I think the main share of credit for this one goes to Sara Nelson, the head of the flight attendants' union. Nelson had been calling for a general strike among airport workers earlier this week, and it was only a matter of time. LaGuardia shut down for an hour this morning, and it would interesting to find out whose calls made it to the White HouseCastle, because shortly after that, Fatboy's on the lawn in the Rose Garden, reading from a TelePrompTer and handing his balls to  I Call Her Nancy.

I was anticipating this, and had actually planned to write a post over the weekend predicting a strike and its potential impact, but events beat me to it, as they are wont to do. (Serves me right for having a day job.)

But the fact is, the Super Bowl is next weekend in Atlanta, which also happens to have the world's busiest airport. Hartsfield-Jackson is a massive hub airport, and a walkout there on the busiest sports weekend would be catastrophic. I was actually hoping it would go through, but clearly the LaGuardia shutdown got the message across.

He has no hand to play, the Republicon senators are at each others' throats and defecting, and now the base knows he's every bit the fucking pussy and blowhard most of us were saying he was all along. The tasty librul snowflake tears have long dried up. They decided they would rather be feared than respected, and now they are starting to realize that this is what it looks like when you have neither fear nor respect, just anger and retribution. That noise they hear is the whirlwind they reaped.

I know there have been countless "beginning of the end" moments just in the past few weeks or months, but it's really starting to feel like it now. You'll know it's the real deal when corporate media coverage turns from fear and scaremongering to mockery and ridicule. And it's starting to do just that now. They see what should have been obvious all along -- that he's all talk, no walk. He's a mouthy barstool jerkoff yapping about what he'd do, nothing more.

He's not Hitler or Mussolini; at best his tenure most resembles that of bunga-bunga kleptocrat Silvio Berlusconi. But at heart he's really just Wile E. Coyote, minus the sad charm. If he got his wall he'd be painting a tunnel on the side of it, or trying to trap Pelosi with a pile of bird seed beneath an anvil.

It would be something indeed if, even in the face of all the evidence and indictments and guilty pleas attesting to the hard truth that the chief executive conspired with a foreign power to rig the 2016 election, the individual who really catalyzed the eventual unraveling of the whole shitshow was a milf flight attendant who pushed back and showed them for the cheap hucksters they all are. It's also fitting that the only one who isn't going to flip on him (yet) is a weird old fop who dresses like a Batman villain and likes to watch his wife get spit-roasted by other men (NSFW).

Fatboy's going down, and hard. It will take a while longer, but it's happening. Junior is going next, and the failson-in-law ain't far behind. The whole fam damily is on their way to Leavenworth at this rate. Fuck every last one of them, forever and ever, amen.

The only way it could get better is if he takes McConnell and the rest of the traitors down with him. Because that is exactly what they are, and the time for reconciling or compromising with them is long gone. They must be rendered defeated and destitute and unemployable, unfit for any respectable work.

Mediocracy

I bet you won't fall on your face, your belly will hold you in place. -- Iron Maiden Be Quick or Be Dead<./I>

Since we're talking about the importance of accountability for a bunch of dipshit teenagers, let's also mention how much more important that ideal is for the cadre of adult professionals who monger opinions and convene panel circle jerks and such like. Obviously the Covington Catholic controversy sets right in their collective wheelhouse. They can spend the next week going over video swatches like the fucking Zapruder film, frame-by-frame analysis that ultimately confirms whatever a given observer has already chosen to believe beforehand.

I guess it beats reporting on whether the school is tax-exempt, as many religious schools are, and if so, how that status squares with the school bussing children wearing political endorsement swag to a political protest to advocate a highly specific -- and contentious -- point of view. But then again, let's face it -- the 501(c)(3) status that churches and religious organizations enjoy is one of the most ridiculous and least enforced legal fig leaves in existence. It barely falls under the scope of pro forma.

Keep America Hate; Or, Character Is Density

By now, we've all seen the photos and videos of this disgusting bullshit, and there's not a whole lot to add. Res ipsa loquitur, as the kids are wont to say in the 'hood.

On the one hand, maybe it's harsh to pick on children; on the other hand, these "children" are awful. No one put a gun to their heads to force those fucking lids on them. Would you care to meet their parents? There's no guessing as to how this happens. It would be a failure of imagination -- and, therefore, given the perilous state of what passes for our free and independent media ecosystem, entirely predictable -- to pass this off as yet another example of racism.

Certainly racism is a driving element, but it's really a matter of asserting upper-middle-class white privilege, on a second-class group. The only way it could be any better if is these losers try to excuse their behavior by saying that they thought Nathan Phillips was Mexican, and hence wanted to build a wall to keep him out, per Dear Leader's impassioned plaints. Build that wall! Lock her up! Derp derp derp! Dee- fence! Unh-unh! Dee-fence!

Christ. What a bunch of morons -- but worse than that, what a bunch of truly useless humans. The world would not miss them, had they never come along, really. Gunny from Full Metal Jacket had it right -- the best part of these doughy losers ran down the back of their mommas' legs, ending up as brown stains on mattresses all over the greater Cincinnati area.

Running Out of Synonyms for "Fuck 'em"

As the Cletus safaris become fewer and farther between, strangely they are also starting to take on the texture of a fine dessert or aperitif. This latest visit from the NY Times (I know, I know) to a benighted polyp somewhere deep in 'murka's taint, is too delicious to not be fattening:

MARIANNA, Fla. — A federal prison here in Florida’s rural Panhandle lost much of its roof and fence during Hurricane Michael in October, forcing hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away.

Since then, corrections officers have had to commute there to work, a seven-hour drive, for two-week stints. As of this week, thanks to the partial federal government shutdown, they will be doing it without pay — no paychecks and no reimbursement for gas, meals and laundry, expenses that can run hundreds of dollars per trip.

....

This, after all, is one of many towns across the country where private industries are few and the federal government is intimately connected to livelihoods. Wedged near the border with Alabama and Georgia, Marianna’s 7,000 residents depend on the federal medium-security prison to employ nearly 300 people in good-paying jobs with attractive benefits.

Which is sadder -- that there are towns across the nation where the best job opportunity is at the nearest prison, or that people are so desperate to keep that slight privilege that they'll drive for seven hours to work a two-week block of shifts for free?

But prison workers were facing trouble even before the partial government shutdown. At least two-thirds of the Marianna staff members sustained hurricane damage to their homes, according to prison managers. The local prison officers’ union estimated that 10 percent of its affected members experienced total property losses.

Charles Jones, 32, a corrections officer and vice president of the union, said he and his wife were expecting their first child next month. “Because of the storm, I’ve already had to defer a payment here and there for my car,” he said. “Those are the basic things that we’re trying to do.”

It's somehow strangely reassuring to hear that disaster management for this gaping asshole of an administration doesn't just fail Puerto Ricans. Say what you will, but at least they're consistent in their failure.

“Everybody I talk to wants the wall,” James Grover, 72, a car salesman from nearby Blountstown, said over breakfast on Saturday at the Waffle Iron, a diner on Route 90 that opens six days a week even though its facade, destroyed by the hurricane, is temporarily made up of plastic sheeting and plywood.

The photo of the diner is all the reason you need to click on that link. I know you're surprised at the notion that Florida doesn't believe in health inspectors for restaurants, but seeing it is another thing. It seems like exactly the sort of place where you would expect to find a car salesman who should have been able to retire by now, sharing his teleological belief in an expensive "solution" to a crisis that doesn't really exist.

The grand finale is where that now-infamous pull quote resides.

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

[emphasis mine]

Okay then, there ya go. Crystal Minton should be praised for her honesty, whether or not she intended it as such. I don't know how many such affirmations of the obvious people might need to decide for themselves, but there's yet another one, just as stark and blatant as you please.

As the next phase of the perennial campaign gets underway, and the various panel-show get their talking points ready for How Dems Can Win Them Back, and other equally useless suggestions, Ms. Minton actually provides an ideal angle of attack for whichever candidate decides to try to poach the coveted angry-rube sliver. There is definitely a way to reframe that he's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting whinge.

Every one of these Real 'murkins, be they ancient car salesman or plaintive long-haul prison screw, is stuck -- in their low-rent locale, in their mediocre career aspirations, in their sad lives of quiet destitution. Only people who have no other choice drive seven hours to stay in a hotel for two weeks and work at a prison, all out of pocket. These are folks for whom "economic insecurity" is not a direct cause for their vote, only because they are so habituated to economic insecurity, they don't notice it as a proximal cause of anything. It's a visible characteristic, like having brown eyes or being left-handed.

They want out of it, but you could give them a million bucks tax-free and they still wouldn't really know what to do with it. Get debt-free, maybe buy a larger, newer house (but in the same area). Take a couple family trips east of the Rockies: Branson, maybe DC or New York. They live close enough to Disney World to have been there already.

Mainly, though, their worldview would not change even if they were no longer economically insecure. It is not necessarily overt racism so much as lifelong conditioning that their strangely revered broke-down "way of life" of busted-out towns and opioid-addled relatives is "under attack," whatever the hell that means for them.

But it doesn't matter, because they are economically insecure, and they know they always will be, and so the way you snap them out of their dead-eyed cult gaze is to simply point out the obvious -- that all those godless heathen fag libruls, all those coastal elites, have been doing just fine. Maybe not great, because only the wealthy do great anymore, but their hero hasn't hurt the coastal elites, not even a little bit. Even the initial snowflake tears, as tasty as those might have been, have dried and galvanized what is now just as intractable an opposition bloc as the teatards were ten long years ago.

The snowflakes are just pissed now, and a lot of them are young, and they'll never vote Republicon now. Never. And most of them really haven't taken any sort of economic hit, because they don't typically work in industries or geographic areas that Master Dealmaker's idiot shenanigans actually affected. It's the floor monkey at the nail factory that's losing his job; it's the soybean farmer in Iowa watching his harvest rot in a cavernous warehouse; it's the already dilapidated panhandle craphole that just had its best jobs outsourced four hundred miles away in another state, because the disaster money still hasn't shown up to repair their houses and businesses and infrastructure.

They were already getting a raw deal. Right or wrong, they feel like they've gotten a raw deal all their lives. He promised to bring the pain to all those smug, condescending libruls who have the nerve to read books, who think they're so fuckin' smart. Instead he's just brought the pain exclusively to the people who love him the most. And they can't figure it out. It's hilarious. I'm getting a huge fuckin' chubby just thinking about it all over again. It's not just that they can't quit Preznit Monkey Paw. They voted for Ron DeSantis, they voted for Matt Gaetz, just ten weeks ago. They asked for this, and now, like the dumbest of dogs, they stand around scratching their nuts, wondering what the hell happened. It turns out that stoves are hot, and elections have consequences, and there are simply some folks who need to learn those lessons the hard way. Some of them will keep touching the stove, no matter what. As the man said, you can't fix stupid.

Democratic candidates, certainly at the national level, need to just write these numbskulls off. There's nothing you can tell them, and there's no need when there are millions more votes to be had just by motivating a relative handful of non-voters. But certainly local and state pols can make this argument to them, and it could conceivably be utilized by the right national candidate: He promised you he'd make it better for you, and slap them down. How's that been working out?

But again, in the meantime, these stories are like slightly delayed Christmas presents. How can you not love reading about people getting exactly what they voted for? That's democracy right there!

First They Came for the De-Platformed Snowflakes

Plenty of whining these days about idiots being "de-platformed," deprived of their God-given right to make a fat living spreading lies and abuse and wink-wink-nudge-nudge racism. Oh, what will become of poor Milo or Carl or Gavin, or whatever pied pissant is trying this month to coax the virtual hordes of incels and basement losers into the good life of flame-tweeting uppity bitchez and minorituhs?

Look, it's too bad that Milo Yiannopoulos is $2M in debt. Maybe, in the true ethos of the committed fiscal conservative bootstrapper lot, he should have made sure to secure gainful employment sufficient to support his high-on-the-cock lifestyle. Just as NBC isn't required to sell and broadcast advertisements for Pornhub or crush videos (even the latter of which was at one point ruled free speech), Patreon and other such outlets have the right to refuse service. This is less a matter of corporate control, and more a matter of cost-benefit analysis, the knowledge that for every one of these dipshit "provocateur" losers they take on, they'll lose a hundred or a thousand or a million users and contributors -- in other words, their revenue model.

Do people still need an explanation of how the free market works? It's suboptimal in many ways, but at least its one true ethos holds firm throughout -- no matter how stupid or awful it is, if it makes money, it gets in the arena. That's how Rush Limbaugh has stayed on the air for thirty years. That's how you got half a decade of Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo types, a decade of Kardashians, or two decades of various strains of "reality" teevee. They're all terrible, and entirely useless, even as entertainment. But they sold or sell ad time.

I mean, are these people fucking kidding? If one thing about teevee and the internets holds true over anything else, it's that Sturgeon's Law is pretty much the main operational guideline. Does anyone seriously think that putatively librul (in the sense that it's possible that they may have voted Democratic at least as often as they voted Republican) scumbags such as Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves think twice about all the free publicity they gave that jabbering baboon during the 2016 campaign? They held their noses and deposited their checks.

Mark Burnett is an even better example -- he's actually on record as being a Democratic voter and donor over the years, but when he smelled cheap pelf, he ran with the devil and never looked back. Not only was Burnett richly rewarded, he has broadcast properties all over the place. No one's boycotting him or cutting him loose. Why do you think that is?

Why doesn't Milo just start up a website with all his deep thoughts and put a PayPal link on the sidebar, get a mailing list going and shake down his readers? Or start up a YouTube channel and sell subscriptions? People make bank on YouTube watching other people play video games, or teaching people how to put on makeup. Surely these renegade thinkers can coordinate their thoughts to the same extent Jenna Marbles or Pewdiepie has, and figure their principled way out of the corporate Marxist gulag.

This is kinda what Sarah Palin ran into when she tried to monetize her grift after getting her tight ass kicked in the 2008 election. She tried the reality show, the Fixed Noise commentary gig, the paid subscription grift -- but they all required work, effort, content, attention. Or you have to pay someone to do that content creation-curation shit for you. So now she sits up in the tundra, tweeting her deep thoughts now and then, when she's not busy trying to keep her dope-addled son from pulling a murder-suicide with whatever dingbat he's hooked up with this year.

Same thing with these other yahoos, to some degree or other. They're not broke and desperate because they're being blackballed by mythic corporate librul fascists; they're broke because they're incompetent boobs whose schtick has worn thin. Sure, the basement dipshits looking for the daily outrage pellet in their Skinner-box lives will read it for free until the die-uh-beet-us finally keels them over. But they won't pay for it.

The Koch Brothers, worth over $100 billion dollars between them, each one averages something like a million dollars a day, they dump hundreds of millions into each electoral cycle, they bankroll think tanks and magazines. Say what you want about them, but you can't say they aren't engaged in every facet of the political and policy-making process. They invest a lot of fucking money every year in strategy, legislation, influencing, and who knows what else.

You think if poor destitute Milo was doing anything worth half a shit that they could use to their benefit, the Koch boys or one of their swollen failsons couldn't sweep in and give him a sinecure somewhere, a Reason column or such like? One of the conservatard vanity publishers couldn't throw him a bone after his debacle with Simon and Schuster?

Jesus H. Christ, rich assholes keep Dinesh D'Souza, who is a failure on every level -- moral, ethical, financial, legal -- solvent. If they wanted to, they would and could, and they wouldn't even notice the money. This nation is openly run by psychotic billionaires. If they wanted these Patreon numbskulls on their roster, they'd have signed 'em up already.

And again, it's not just Milo, who obviously has his own image problems to deal with. He's just the highest-profile example, but the end result is true for the rest of these slugs -- they don't do anything that their self-reinforcing audience of angry dupes is actually willing to pay for. Why should they, when they can get their pellets for free? They're not worried about any issues of "quality" or a higher level of thinking or writing skill. They don't want prime rib, they're fine with Cheez Doodles. And you can find those anywhere.

Why We Boycott CNN

Further evidence that Jim Acosta is a dickless weasel, and should go out and ply an honest trade at the earliest possible opportunity. You're hurting 'murka, Jimbo, and you inform no one, you illuminate nothing, you add no value.

There's only so many ways to put it:  having a paid liar on your "news" program is not journalism. At all. Genuflecting before said liar and not just taking her shit, but eating it and asking for seconds, is even worse. It degrades whatever husk remains of honest journalism; it lends credence to pure scum and cheap agitprop. It convinces no one, it changes nothing. This sort of shit makes the nation, and the world, and even the debased profession of journalism, objectively worse.

I bet his family can't look him in the eyes anymore. His friends, when they have to talk to him, probably have the tone of someone talking to a stage-four cancer patient, sympathy and sorrow and the urge to be anywhere else on the planet.

And Acosta can't see it. He thinks someone gets something out of his tedious excursions to the cult rallies, to be spit at and flipped off and shat on by angry morons. He thinks that lightly sautéing a sellout lackey like Kellyanne Conway one more fucking time is going to elicit some useful information, like he's going to catch her in another lie and this time it'll matter. Jesus Fucking Christ, where do you find rutabaga halfwits like this?

It's not just Acosta, of course -- Conway is CNN's go-to propagandist, openly defying them to find someone else for their hack-cess journamalism. And you know what? She's right. She gives them exactly the amount of respect they deserve. But it also happens to be the degree of respect CNN holds for its dipshit viewers.

Clear your conscience, Jimbo. Go investigate a real story and provide us with some facts, some actual information. Will it be ignored in the ceaseless tsunami of nonsense and bullshit? Almost certainly. But it's a good start for you to start scrubbing your soul clean, or at least a bit cleaner. Because this? This is the gutter equivalent of cheap Super-8 animal porn. This is a grainy '60s loop of a cranked-up biker fucking a terrified farm animal. This is shameful, repulsive. This is an unholy crime against nature and humanity.

This....is CNN.

Baby, It's Old Outside

The reason Fairytale of New York is far and away the best Christmas song ever is simple:  it is a song about maintaining hope even when you know better. That's the "Christmas spirit" in a nutshell.

That sounds cynical, but it actually the opposite of the hopelessly cynical, crass commercialism that infests the holiday and most of its entertainment offerings, which range from the utterly sappy to the winking, knowing we're all full of shit here, guys! spoofs.

And perhaps nothing is more cynical these days than this new and ugly "tradition" of finding some ginned-up story or bullshit cultural artifact as prima facie evidence of a "war" on Christmas. Like Black Friday, it actually starts around Thanksgiving, and truckles on in some form until the end of the year.

At least with Black Friday, you get the twin pleasures of discount electronics and beating up strangers. This other thing is just another in the endless series of imaginary grievances wielded by fist-shaking codgers and barely-employable widget-stampers who are still trying to figure out why no one's rebooted The Dukes of Hazzard.

This nation has become utterly boring in its incessant whinging, in its myopic focus on jabbering nonsense, while the planet's climate is self-destructing, and Central American children are paying with their lives for the high crime of seeking asylum from carnage. The average workin' 'murkin busts their fat ass for just enough to get by, and is one medical catastrophe or job layoff from the sidewalk. Our health-care system, like the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those three words; instead it's an open conspiracy by rentier capitalists to overcharge and underserve, to transfer money from the working poor to the already wealthy.

Promises Made, Promises Kept

Just what you always wanted -- yet another Cletus safari culminating in a Festivus "fuck 'em" profile. Despite the completely predictable quotes and observations and outcomes, it's still worth a read, if only to demonstrate clearly just how members of a cult process information and function in their lives of futility and acquiescence.

The more recent nature of the New Yorker article (the author visited the plant in November) can't capture the near-daily unraveling since the midterm elections, so maybe some of these folks have changed their minds, seeing as how they're facing a welfare Christmas because of their feckless leader's stupefying ignorance on every possible subject. But even leaving that aside, they're fine with everything he's done so far. We all get that no one wants to admit they've been conned, that for every schmuck that actually goes on teevee to lament how they got suckered by some obvious catfishing scam, there's a dozen or more that will never admit it, but Jesus H. Christ. The people at this nail factory need to be deprogrammed.

Considering that their $11.50/hour jobs are about to disappear, and they'll be competing for new work with the people who lost their jobs at the nearby Briggs & Stratton facility, the only thing that has a chance of deprogramming them is reality jamming one way up their asses and snapping it clean off.

GOP Delenda Est; Or, Season's Beatings

During my teen years, I would travel downstate to Los Angeles for the summer, mostly to visit my father, but also several other relatives in the area. So an uncle and aunt in Downey, a cousin in Newport Beach, and so on. This was a time when "summer vacation" meant a full three months, early June to the week after Labor Day. So it was a week here, two weeks there, much more fun than sitting at home, broke and broiling in the punishing NorCal summer heat.

The Newport Beach cousin was (and still is) an avid surfer and guitar player, and close enough in age to where it was a lot like hanging out with an older brother who actually wanted you to hang out with him. So I would go on all-day surfing junkets with him and his USC buddies. I learned to enjoy and appreciate surfing, not just as a challenging physical activity (ocean swimming is not for the weak-willed), but as a meditative activity. The board becomes an extension of you, just by repetition; there are points where you imagine an overhead view of yourself, a tiny dot in a vast area of green and blue, land nearby but not conveniently so, possibly sharks or jellyfish or rocks lurking just below the surface.

The main thing about catching that proverbial wave is recognizing that the ocean is constantly moving, pulsing, surging, defying you to grab hold and find some rhythm. It's a beautiful and daunting thing, that existential challenge, one that forces you to simultaneously acknowledge your smallness, yet have the courage to jump into the endless motion and figure out a way to ride it to shore.

That's what the political news sphere feels like, more and more -- endlessly churning, surging faster and faster, defying us to find purchase, get a grip on this swirling narrative and make sense of it. In filing the Cohen and Manafort memos on Pearl Harbor Day (or Noam Chomsky Day, if you prefer), Robert Mueller may be hinting at a more sardonic sense of humor than any of us might have supposed. Certainly this tapestry is unfolding to reveal what very well may turn out to be a case of treason rivaling that of the Rosenbergs or Benedict Arnold.

You certainly wouldn't put it past ol' Fuckface Von Clownstick to sell West Point to one of Putin's bagmen. And now we are getting a clearer picture of how he literally sold American foreign policy, not to mention its electoral integrity, to a nation he is deeply in hock to. The people who are still denying what's plain for all to see are either on the payroll, or permanently drunk on the Kool-Aid.

California Fire and Life

(apologies to Don Winslow)

Over the past twenty years or so, California's fire season has expanded from a late-summer nuisance to a nine-month volley of increasingly more catastrophic firestorms. Typically it rains enough between late November and mid-March to keep fire threats down, but our fire season now occupies nearly the entire period of time in between.

Last year saw parts of Santa Rosa, by far the largest city between the San Francisco-Sacramento I-80 corridor and the Oregon border, burned right to the ground. Hundreds of homes and buildings destroyed, thousands of people displaced. The fires disrupted the real estate market for a year, in about a hundred-mile radius, because of the sudden scarcities in an already scarce inventory.

This year has been non-stop all over the state, but especially burdensome in the relatively sparse population areas of Northern California, the region commonly known these days as the State of Jefferson. The Carr Fire engulfed the Redding area for weeks, causing destruction that will take years to recover from. And now the rather poorly-named Camp Fire (named because it originated near Camp Creek Road, not because it was a campfire that got away from the campers) has claimed the entire town of Paradise, and is heading down Highway 99 toward Oroville. Somehow Chico has been spared. Fire crews from all over the country have pitched to help, and the fire is finally getting contained. It's supposed to rain this coming week, which should help finish off the damned thing.

The King In Yellow

I barely regard him -- it -- as human anymore, using words like "monster" and "thing" to describe the creature that continues to defile the White House and corrode what's left of this country, day by rotting day. And at first there may have been a vein of schtick, trash talk, the proverbial smackdown, but that part rang hollow, that there might be any semblance of even grim humor to those specifically chosen words.

Because humans, even assholes, have common threads that identify them as such. We've gone over this many times before, but it can't be repeated enough:  humans have things and people that they like and appreciate for their own merits. Music, books, art, friends, family, pets, games, teevee shows, whatever. Something. Unconditional love.

Normal human beings enjoy these pleasant little features of life because collectively those little features are what make life worth living. It's hard to know what to make of someone who has never -- and that may very well be literally true, like never -- had an appreciative or complimentary thing to say about anybody or anything, except in the context of how its quality was a reflection of themselves.

Like, as a hypothetical, someone asking such a person how they felt about, I dunno, the Beatles' music, and the response being something like, Oh, Paul McCartney stayed at one of my hotels once. Big spender, Great guy. What's your favorite movie? You know, Madonna dropped $500k at the craps table at the Taj Mahal once when she was in town doing some post on Shanghai Surprise. How does anyone listen to that pathetic, weird old man for any length of time and not hear the festering insanity? How did such a person get into a position to gut the country so critically in just a couple of years?

We can all take a deep collective breath that the midterm election results at least show that we don't have to pull the plug on the old bird just yet. It's still on life support, but it's still life, and maybe even having a chance to breathe on its own a bit and start to recuperate.

But it will take more work, and lots of it. Because the results also showed that there are more horrible people than you'd hoped. I said after the 2016 election that those results raised the question of whether the country we thought we'd become with a black president had changed somehow, or maybe that election just revealed and confirmed what we really still had been the whole time -- a seething, teeming, bitter, vituperative mess.

There are a lot of assholes out there, and the thing has unleashed their energy; pure spite and id and moiling fury. Bad people can have good qualities, but if they're supporting something that inspires pipe bombers and synagogue spree-killers and yahoo border militias because they think it pwns libtards for them, well, they're still bad people in the end. Hitler loved his dog, yada yada.

The most dangerous thing about them is, if you really listen to them (not a suggestion, by the way) you find pretty quickly that since they neither know nor care what they're yammering about, there is nothing that will make them happy. Nothing. You could give them ten million dollars and they'd just waste it; you could kick out all the Meskins and they'd bitch that strawberries are now too expensive. You could shout Merry Christmas at them year-round and they'd wonder what happened to Blessed Memorial Day.

Nothing will make them happy because they don't want to be happy. The fight is all they have, because the fight is all it has. It campaigned on the notion that Obummer had turned Jebus' Nayshun into a flaming hellscape, and that worked on the addled and the butt-hurt. Complaining is all it's capable of, and so that's all they know anymore. More and more it is observed that the behavior is cult-like, and that's not an exaggeration -- nor, to them, is it a flaw. It's a feature.

Troll Flag

The conventional wisdom holds that the midterm election is a referendum on that fucking thing currently defiling the White House. This is only partially true -- it is a referendum on us, and what kind of country we intend to be. Do enough of us want to move forward into what will most assuredly be a transitional decade on many fronts (political, economic, environmental, cultural), or are we going to continue slouching back to the 1930s?

This must be what life is like in a particle accelerator -- countless atoms propelled at impossible velocities into observed collisions. Each week moves faster than the last, with more and more and more crazy things. It tells you what kind of week it's been when the Saudis' admission -- after weeks of denial and almost defiant dog-ate-our-homework excuses -- that they planned the murder of a dissident journalist and carried it out in their Turkish consulate, that such a thing doesn't even register in the top three things of the past seven days.

The attempted pipe bombings and now yesterday's massacre at a synagogue serve to bring us all into sharp relief. We already know what sort of diseased soul he is; what will now be revealed is what sort of people we are collectively. Either we are fine with insane losers being egged on by the chief executive at hate rally after hate rally, or we've had enough. Either we're okay with one of our "allies" holding a journalist to a table and dismembering him alive, or we're not.

Either we see the connection or we choose not to, between said chief executive spending years going town to town, city to city, night after night, openly calling for the imprisonment without charges of his political opponents, and having audiences of angry losers chanting along. They can try to bullshit onlooker with the bullshit evasion of It's just a joke!, but it is clearly not a joke, and when unbalanced loners and losers take that shit both literally and seriously, either you address your role in that situation, or you're fine with it all.

Make no mistake -- they are fine with it. All of it.

Partners In Crime

The Middle East is unraveling very quickly, and with momentum. The murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, committed by a Saudi hit squad sent by their thug king, is the latest and so far largest domino to fall. (Never mind, of course, that the Saudis have been mercilessly driving Yemen back into the Stone Age for several years now, aided and abetted by the current and previous US governments.

If the Obama Administration was somewhat slow and heedless in its (non-)responses to authoritarians taking over in Egypt, Israel, and Turkey, as well as the existing problems in Iran and Syria, the current gang has been even worse. They have made it very clear that their idea of foreign policy is merely a tollbooth, one which bails out the first failson-in-law from his various real estate snafus.

Naturally, the despotisms of the world prefer raw transactional politics, which is why these creeps get along so well with each other. And in fact, the current regime's enabling behavior, as an aversion to Obama's measured responses and precautions, has kept the region more volatile than it would otherwise have been. They are sleeping with a monster, and they are fine with it, because he's a rich monster who's happy to pay up.

Turkey is playing its own game here -- all of the information about Khashoggi's presumed fate, and the evidence for it, has been filtered out from Ankara. They have on-and-off relationships with the Saudis and the Israelis, and meddling in Syria from Russia and the US have only exacerbated the dynamic in the region. The one good outcome is that ISIS seems to have been mostly eliminated, though of course there's always another such group lurking under the next rock.

But with this greedy, doddering old fool driving things forward into a nasty election, this Saudi problem could get pretty ugly. Already the Saudi stock market is taking a hit, expecting sanctions, and they dump too much money into the US real estate market for it not to be noticeable if they decide to pull out or sell off their sovereign fund investments, or just slow down oil production for the winter to drive up gas prices.

Seriously, Fuck Kanye West

So did I tell ya or did I tell ya? The guy has, like, zero fucking redeemable characteristics. He's a perfect acolyte for this anal fissure of an administration -- not one-tenth as smart as he thinks he is, proudly ignorant, completely incoherent when he thinks he's trying to actually make a fucking point. He has nothing useful to say about anything or anybody. Just like his fat, elderly, doddering daddy figure.

Few things are more pathetic than watching a grown-ass forty-year-old man spew his little-lost-girl daddy issues; even Clownstick looked uncomfortable after a while. I think if there hadn't been a crowd there, Kanye probably would have tried to suck his dick.

The professional observers who are trying to make this a mental illness issue need to reconsider. He may be mentally ill, but that's not the problem here. Kanye West's problem is exactly the same as Fuckface Von Clownstick's problem:  he's an ignorant, jabbering fool who has nobody in his life to tell him no or set him straight on anything, so he's now far beyond the point where he would listen anyway.

You really can't tell people like that anything, all you can do is cut them out of your lives, and hope they finally see the pattern for themselves. Or not. If they can't get it together, you're better off without them anyway.

But this is how West has always been, always. Clownstick fans and self-styled conservatards think they're being clever by appropriating West as one of their own, like they've liberated him from the Dummycrat plantation. Well, they can fucking have him, and the wife-beater Jim Brown, and the murderous thief Don King, and the rest of the criminal types they think show the party as being more inclusive. Hell, dig up Ike Fucking Turner while you're at it.

The funniest part of it is that this serves as a perfect example of what I was just talking about in the previous post less than a week ago -- they can't tell musicians and athaletes to shut up and sing or dribble or dance, when they take a stance against their senile god-emperor, but soon as one starts singing his praises, they all reach for the hymnal and join in.

Shut Up and Sing

Onoez! Taylor Swift has broken the hearts and dreams of white-power cellar-dwellers by coming out in support of Phil Bredesen in the TN Senate election. In the slightly more "mainstream" conservatard disinfo universe, no doubt the Fixed Noise baboons are already verbally burning Swift in effigy.

This is a weird but entirely predictable phenomenon for them. I never hear of liberal (or "liberal") commentators or bloggers touting the endorsement of this or that celebrity. I mean, it's nice that, for example, Willie Nelson has endorsed Beto O'Rourke all summer, but it doesn't affect my opinion of Willie or Beto at all. I'd support a slab of river rock, if it was running against that dipshit Ted Cruz.

So the way your garden variety conservaturd will characterize this is some too-clever-by-half variation on Laura Ingraham's "shut up and sing" catchphrase. Of course, they don't say that to Kanye West anymore, now do they? Hell, some of us are old enough to recall how they all flipped when West was embarrassingly rude to Swift, crashing her award thingy like an asshole. Or when West claimed that George W. Bush didn't care about black people. (Not true, of course -- Bush didn't and doesn't care about poor people.)

But these days, as far as they're concerned, Kenny West is woke like a Tim Allen joke, y'all, wearing his MAGAt cap on that librul Saturdee Night DEAD fake-comedy program, hurrr, amirite. He showed them assholes whut's whut, I tell you whut. They try to make it sound like people in the entertainment industry are unqualified to reach an opinion on something (as if Ingraham or Hannity or Tomi Lahren or Greg Gutfeld are qualified to do anything that doesn't involve fellating raw power on a nightly basis), until they have an opinion they like.

Like all reactionaries, their real motto is ipse dixit. Because I say so.

It's even funnier when random morons post such memes on their social mediot pages. Some Fuckface in Pig's Taint, Alabama gets all het up about a celebrity or athlete trying to ram their opinion down 'murka's throat. But they're jes' a dumb celebrity! Har har! Entertain me! Dance, monkey, dance! Right, and who are you, and who am I, and who is that panel of privileged assholes on my basic cable feed? If it's your right to be an obnoxious dickhead on your friends' Facebook feeds, why is it such a problem when LeBron James or Tom Arnold speaks their mind?

We all know the old "opinions are like assholes" song:  Everyone's got one, and they all stink. Taylor Swift is not unqualified to voice her opinion because of her line of work -- if anything, the fact that she has to tour and travel constantly probably gives her a broader perspective and range of experience. I might even say the same thing about a garbage human being like Kanye West, if not for the fact that everything about him is a publicity stunt, and it's impossible to detect anything resembling sincerity from him. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a year or two passed and he and that hobbit he's married to publicly change their minds about their elderly oompa-loompa friend.

And they would still be insufferable assholes. When they give away 95% of their ill-gotten pelf and go help some isolated African village, without a camera crew in tow, then we can be impressed.

Devil's Triangle, Slight Return: The People's Court

Now that the vile deed is done and written in blood, here's a few follow-up points from yesterday:

• In the initial review of how each branch of gubmint has broken down, I meant to point out that in the case of the executive branch, this has obviously been going on for some time. The "unitary executive" trend gained steam after 9/11 of course, but Obama did nothing to stem or abate that trend. (Nor without any clear direction or guarantee of lasting effect, should he have.) It was always a bargain with the devil, in the possibility that sooner or later this increasingly unchallenged power would fall into the hands of an evil person, or an idiot -- or, as it turned out, both.
• The final vote to confirm was 50-48, with Steve Daines absent, Lisa Murkowski voting "present" rather than "no," and Joe Manchin defecting to the "yes" crowd, ostensibly to protect his re-election odds. I find that logic baffling; does anyone on either side of the fence seriously think that a Clownstick cultist is going to vote for Manchin because he voted to confirm Kavanaugh? If Manchin votes with his party, the count is 49-49, and Murkowski is forced to make a choice, as is Daines. That's what hardball politics is supposed to be about. Imagine if, say, that fuckhead Flake could have somehow been brought around. Suddenly Manchin's the deciding vote. Instead the guy fucking punts. Real party solidarity there, asshole. Maybe his Pharma Sis daughter has another price increase on the Epi-Pen coming up.
  
  For the next few weeks, liberals will be lecturing each other about "purity votes" and that sort of nonsense. Personally, I think Manchin's a fucking squirrel turd, and he is entirely welcome to go fuck himself repeatedly until you can drive a Buick straight up his gaping asshole. He deserves whatever rage and scorn actual liberals and Democrats can muster to heap upon him. He did something he didn't have to do, for no good strategic or tactical reason, at a time when all Democrats really need to stand and fight.
  
  All that said, he needs to be voted back in right now (though, you know, try not to be too surprised if the blue tsunami doesn't turn out quite as advertised, and he jumps parties), and then primaried hard the next time around. But it shouldn't be hard to understand the way people are reacting to this, the feeling that there's no point in voting Democrat if the fucker votes Republican. Heidi Heitkamp understood that there's no point in genuflecting to monsters, and so she voted her principle. It will probably cost her seat, but at least she's going down swinging. People are pissed, and they should be. For fuck's sake it hasn't even been a day and these tiresome lectures come out. Let people have a few minutes to fucking vent, before they vote the way you think they should vote. But in the end, come back around and show up, now and every time going forward. Use your anger, rather than the other way around. Don't forget, but don't self-destruct. Use it the way they use it:  to keep warm. Wolverines!
• More than anything, you can pretty much bet the bank that more will come about Kavanaugh in the weeks and months to come. This guy is fucking dirt, pure and simple, both as a human being and as a practitioner of the legal profession, much less a Supreme Court justice. The most critical lesson to be learned with Kavanaugh is that process should not be rushed, especially if the nominee turns out to be janky as fuck. It's fascinating how every dipshit peckerwood suddenly became a fucking SCOTUS scholar overnight, even though they couldn't name two other justices if you held a gun to their heads.
• Bottom line, here is the deal on this asshole:  Kavanaugh was selected by an executive who lost the popular vote, and confirmed by a collection of senators who represent a minority of the population, and was opposed by a majority of the citizens in every poll. Hang tight onto that, and don't let go. Use that anger constructively. Never vote Republicon again, for anything or anyone, no matter what. Start strategically weeding out fake Democrats like Joe Manchin, one by one by one. It can be done, but it takes work, attention, effort, commitment.
• If I have to read one more thing about how Chris Coons and Jeff Flake are such wonderful friends and colleagues who rely on each others' advice, I'm going to fucking puke. Earth to Chris Coons: your good pal made a spectacle of himself and his vaunted principles, and then turned right around and did what he was always going to do, what Susan Collins was always going to do. Quit letting yourself be fooled by these cock-smokers. There is nothing good about them. You're a sap to think otherwise.

There can be no excuses in a month. Either you're tired of all the winning, or you love it. Either you want a voice in your government and your collective fates, or you're good with all this. There's no middle ground. If everyone who was just too lazy or apathetic to vote last time around showed up -- hell, if half of 'em showed up -- you would have your tsunami, bigly. There are more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is show up.

Devil's Triangle

It's probably wishful thinking to assume that most -- or even many -- 'murkins have any real knowledge of the three branches of gubmint, and/or the principle of checks and balances. Maybe a plurality recall some of the broad strokes:  executive, legislative, judicial; these branches are designed to serve as checks on one another; now let us all pray and remember the sacred day that Jebus brought the Holy Constitution down from Mount Bullshit to bestow upon the Founding Fathers, who while infallible were in the end mere mortals.

With the tedious, rote theater of investing Rapebro McGambledrunk with a lifetime sinecure, in reward for his lifetime service as a company butt-boy, it should be clear by now that all three of those sacred branches have pretty much rotted off the proverbial tree. The executive branch is the playpen of a dipshit madman and anyone willing to suck up to him. The legislative branch is comprised of craven idiots who give the executive whatever it wants, provided the tax cuts and knuckle-dragger judges keep coming through. And now the judicial branch, long dying on the vine, is done.

Maine's good Senator, Angus King, sums up the objection to Kavanaugh thoroughly. Forget getting caught up in the endless he-said-she-said of Dr. Ford's accusation -- Kavanaugh's judicial record is problematic, as is his bullshit explanation of his massive credit card debt. And we all saw his temperament. This turd doesn't even deserve the job he already has. But they're going to promote him all the same. And there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it. Vote, sure, and protest and boycott and all that. Don't take any shit from these fucking mutants. But be realistic about the prospects, and manage expectations.

This has been going on for some time, since the Saint Reagan years at least. But Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010 served as the one-two punch to ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the rest of the political system. Kavanaugh's ascent, with all his spite and vengeance and his career of naked political opportunism, may very well be the end of SCOTUS as a legitimate institution.

So now there are no checks or balances on anything -- these branches now serve either to logroll each others' ideas in the service of the vile billionaires who put all of them in office, or to sit inert while the majority burns. This is untenable; by 2040 it is estimated that seventy percent of the US population will live in just fifteen states -- which of course means that the remaining thirty percent will have a 70-seat supermajority representing them.

On the one hand, we seem to have turned into a nation of drama queens, spurring each other on with ever more furious bouts of performative outrage over this or that hot-button issue of the day. On the other hand, it really doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that this election is essentially a make-or-break for the United States to continue on as a more or less functional entity, and that even if the Democrats take back the House and the Senate, which is highly unlikely, it will still take a rout in 2020 to start moving things back toward an even keel.

It should be clear by now that things will never get better until the Republicon Party is completely crushed, burned to the ground, the ashes scattered and the earth salted. All of them, including and perhaps especially the supposed "moderates" (Flake, Collins, Sasse, etc.), have cynically placed party over country and principle, every goddamned time. There should be no place for such people in a decent society, but we stopped being a decent society some time ago.

Balance is important in life, and so it should be in politics that you should have functioning, principled liberal and conservative parties in order to balance out certain tendencies in each. Obviously, we no longer have anything like that, there is no functional conservative party in this country anymore, just a virulently reactionary party and a technocratic centrist party trying vainly to keep in the game. But all the scumbag billionaires who own and operate the political system in this country bankroll just one party, the nutbag insane one.

The usual peanut gallery types are going to insist that the Democrats overplayed their hand on Dr. Ford's accusation and testimony. But that was the hand that was dealt -- all the other concerns about Kavanaugh, jurisprudential and financial, were brushed aside like pesky mosquitoes. This really was the only play to slow the process down at all. So what if it mobilized the basetards? Don't worry, there would have been some bullshit issue cranked out about this time to get them worked up regardless. If it wasn't this, it'd be football players again, some stupid shit. You never have to look far or try hard to find something to rile up morons.

And the thing is, Handmaid's Tale rhetoric aside, the Supreme Court is about to be catastrophic for a lot of things -- voting rights, worker's rights, privacy rights, the rights of individuals against corporations or the state. Hell, they'll push the Gamble decision on through, and then the emperor can pardon all his cronies. Won't that be fun? That's the most galling thing of all, out of all of this -- these whiny motherfuckers are never held fucking accountable for anything. Ever. Prove me wrong.

The Democrats need to start understanding the game as it is currently being played, and stop with the empty worship of "decorum" and "process" and "comity" and the like. These people are not your friends or colleagues anymore. They are your enemies. Trust me, you are certainly their enemies, and they are treating you accordingly. They will bury you with your dignity.

If the Democrats aren't doing every little thing to be obstructive, finding every obscure codicil and procedural maneuver available to slow this bullshit train down, then they fail, and the noble experiment in self-governance is done. You can tack on all the ponderous, empty, self-serving flatulence from the putrid likes of Jeff Fucking Flake, they add zero value except to Flake's future career as a scumbag lobbyist. It's fight or die, fuck or walk, shit or get the fuck off the pot and go home for good.

There are days when I hatch a speculative novel in my brain, about the current "cold civil war" going hot, or at least warming up. There is that aforementioned performative outrage, your dipshit Facebook friend who communicates largely in misspelled memes that really should all just read DURRRR FUCK OBUMMER DURRR N HITLERY 2 LOCK HER UP!!!. That shit is annoying but harmless; your FB friend is never going to actually prise his fat ass out of his couch and do anything. Hell, he may even forget to vote, so besotted with the innate greatness of Hair Fuhrer, he'll just assume a 100-0 landslide.

But the people getting arrested at the protests, the people harassing senators in the Capitol building, that shit is real, and those people are frustrated, and it wouldn't take much to see one or a few of them deciding that it's better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees, especially when they've just been flat-out lied to and shit on, their trauma mocked and ridiculed. That's not an endorsement, just an observation that it wouldn't be all that surprising sometimes.

And this is definitely one of those times. People are on edge, not just feeling but knowing, having their faces rubbed in it, that their government doesn't give two shits about them, that the national motto isn't In God We Trust, it's Fuck You, What Are You Gonna Do About It? That it's really just a bunch of elderly white men, and their female enablers, and the obscenely wealthy scumbags who rent them.

Unless you're in the donor/owner class, writing checks for these animals, you don't matter. Your sexual assault story doesn't matter, your family's hardship doesn't matter, your shitty job doesn't matter, the polluted water table that gave your kid terminal cancer doesn't fucking matter to them. At all.

Seriously. Flake's the perfect fucking example of that -- certainly his entire miserable career, but this past week has been an absolutely perfect snapshot of what he is, versus what he thinks he stands for. A week ago today, he nearly broke his arm patting himself on the back for his high-minded insistence that the FBI "investigate" the allegations Dr. Ford made in her testimony. Instantly, the scope and timeframe of the "investigation" was so tightly circumscribed that you wonder why they bothered with it at all, since it fooled absolutely no one, and therefore didn't even provide rhetorical "well, we checked it out" bullshit cover. It was nothing, worse than nothing.

And during that week, the Yale Law School, the American Bar Association, and several other organizations made their opposition to Kavanaugh known. Hell, the FBI didn't even interview Kavanaugh and Ford, the two main interlocutors, not to mention the many other people who came forward and wanted to talk to the FBI as well. The fix was in, and all could see. And Flake ended up exactly where we all knew he'd end up before he pulled his sanctimonious Lucy-with-the-football shit. Fuck him, and fuck Susan Collins and especially fuck Joe Manchin. These people are all vile, every bit as vile as the unrepentant knuckle-draggers like McConnell and Cornyn. I hope that when their respective times come, they all go out flat broke and universally despised.

So we have to vote, and we have to decide whether we want to take what's left of the country back, or let the rubes and the Jebus nazis have it all make the rest of us eat shit for the rest of our lives. It's going to take work, far beyond just the endless churn of the electoral-industrial complex. That's really what it comes down to. I can't even imagine what goes on in the head of someone who's "undecided" or who doesn't care enough to vote. If the shit comes down, I sincerely hope it gets snapped off in their asses worst of all.

Five Queasy Pieces

The following lengthy articles have all come out in the past week, have gotten a great deal of attention, and if you haven't read them all, you really should.

Ryan Lizza's Esquire profile of the Iowa farm owned and operated by Devin Nunes' parents makes for a decent story, if not quite as potentially explosive, given these hopelessly cynical times, as Lizza might believe. While the weaselly shenanigans of the Nunes family makes for fine reading, what's even more interesting is how the residents in that county, mostly farmers whose workforces are mostly undocumented immigrants, square the circle in their own heads about voting for a paranoid bigot who wants to build a useless wall. Then again, these are the same people who will tell you what hardworking self-made bootstrappers they are, as they take the gubmint subsidy check, not to mention the bailout money Preznit Mario Kart had to dole out to cover for his tariff screw-up. They can fool themselves all they want with their creative compartmentalization, but they're not fooling anyone else.

Excerpt from Michael Lewis' upcoming book, The Fifth Risk, provides excruciating confirmation that the idiots running the country are even more inept and incompetent than anyone had assumed. Everything's a full-on goat rodeo with these dipshits. They could fuck up a two-car funeral. The one thing you can give them some credit for so far is that they have managed not to lawn-dart the solid (if unspectacular) economy Obummer left for them. So far.

I already linked to the NY Times' epic exposé on the ongoing fraud and tax evasion that serve as cornerstones of the Clownstick family fortune for generations, but it really deserves a fresh link and a careful read. Old Man Fred Clownstick was one shady motherfucker, and he greased every Democrat palm within reach to make sure no one got too close to ask about his shell corps and bullshit trust funds. There are really two (at least) major takeaways from this article, which is undoubtedly the best thing this gaping asshole of a newspaper has done in several years:  1) Since the Seventies, the New York media had been all too willing to serve as PR dupes for this monster. It's a goddamned shame they didn't shut him down with real reporting like this a long time ago, before the joke got out of hand.;  2) He really is a wretched businessman. It's not schtick. His dad gave him over $400 million, and he swindled the IRS out of another half-billion, and he still became so cash poor that he had to become a money-laundering butt-boy for the Russian mob. Sad!

Dan Alexander at Forbes magazine has already done several fine investigative pieces on the chicanery of the Clownstick grifting enterprise. This long read makes the feel-good argument that the enterprise has actually been losing money for years now, and the shitbag's ascent into office has actually accelerated that problem. Good. May every goddamned one of them be made utterly destitute, and the name be forever stained, so that future generations feel compelled to change it. Fuck every last one of them.

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic has also been doing fine work for some time during these crazy years, and his latest effectively limns the random, gleeful cruelty that ultimately serves as the defining characteristic not only of the Human Centipede Administration, but of its most vocal supporters. As we always point out, when we hate on politicians, we also recognize that more often than not, they are accurate reflections of the constituents who sent them there. So it goes with the hate-rally crowds. We can try to explain some of it away with pained jeremiads about "epistemic closure" and such like, but in the end it all comes down to the cold fact that they're fucking assholes, proudly so. A decent society would have marginalized these dumpster-diving mutants long ago, or at least done the humane thing and bribed them to sterilize themselves. Going forward, the least the rest of us can do is assure that they reap everything they've sown.