Thursday, June 29, 2017
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
The Wrong Question
The health-care racket in this country is of deep and abiding interest to me, primarily in its baroque and blatant superstructure of grift and complicity. It is a scam that barely bothers to disguise itself as such. In fact, I did my master's thesis on health-care incentives in the public and private sectors.
But the reason I don't write much about it in here is because I've said all there is I can muster on the subject. Coming up with new material or observations would be every bit as difficult as trying to come up with more creative reasons why, say, stealing or killing is wrong.
However, as the Democrats continue to muddle through what should be, given its endless ineptitude, a plum opportunity to reframe its message, I offer a couple of suggestions on how to present said message to its putative audience.
The first is simple and gimmicky, but if you think about how you still know what "death panels" are, even as you know they never existed in the first place, you'll be reminded that sometimes cheesy and simple works. The Republican health-care plan, like the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those things, it is merely a massive tax cut with a bit of rouge.
So start branding it as a "wealth-care" plan. Send the minions out to flood the zone with that phrasing, shoehorn it into every possible discussion, tie it into this grasping, pelf-snuffling douchebag currently grifting the country, and ride that fucking pony. The one skill Clownstick has is as a brander, and there's one way to beat him at his own satanic game. Start right now, and by Labor Day, you'll have everyone singing it by heart. Wealth-care plan. Do it, you spineless motherfuckers.
The second suggestion is more difficult, but will help in conceptualizing a better message. The question I keep hearing and reading is this inane debate over whether access to health care is -- or should be -- a "right" or a "privilege." And it's not a useful question, not only because it skirts the issue of who's paying for what, but because it denies the reality of the situation.
Here's the situation in this country: health care is a product, period. It has producers, distributors, marketers, consumers, and the racket is constructed accordingly. That's not the way it should be, but it is, and has been for a very long time.
Now, the ongoing failure of the Goopers to secure any sort of "victory" in dismantling even the shitty system we have and selling off the parts to the already obscenely wealthy should present an ample opportunity to the, you know, opposition party. Fortunately for them, all they have to do is show some backbone against a cynical, ineptly crafted bill.
But there's an opportunity for more, if we're serious about this "right" vs. "privilege" guff (which we might be, but they are not). It would necessitate the Democrats standing up to their own insurance/pharma/HMO benefactors, which is why it won't happen. But that's where the real debate starts. Everything else is just a bunch of [mimes jerkoff hand motion] bullshit.
The Democrats are in such disarray that less than six months into the worst collection of scumbags to run this country in my half-century of existence, they are actually in dire need of crafting an identity and message that presents a genuine, viable alternative to these soulless cocksuckers. Well, here's a great place to start, especially since constituents have actually been making the effort to show up and be counted -- call it wealth care, and hang it around that fucking turd McConnell's chinless face, and make him dance.
But you also have to describe how, even if the ACA is preserved as is, what steps you take to improve it. It was always understood to be a work in progress, and now is the time to lay out how that progress would take place.
But the reason I don't write much about it in here is because I've said all there is I can muster on the subject. Coming up with new material or observations would be every bit as difficult as trying to come up with more creative reasons why, say, stealing or killing is wrong.
However, as the Democrats continue to muddle through what should be, given its endless ineptitude, a plum opportunity to reframe its message, I offer a couple of suggestions on how to present said message to its putative audience.
The first is simple and gimmicky, but if you think about how you still know what "death panels" are, even as you know they never existed in the first place, you'll be reminded that sometimes cheesy and simple works. The Republican health-care plan, like the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those things, it is merely a massive tax cut with a bit of rouge.
So start branding it as a "wealth-care" plan. Send the minions out to flood the zone with that phrasing, shoehorn it into every possible discussion, tie it into this grasping, pelf-snuffling douchebag currently grifting the country, and ride that fucking pony. The one skill Clownstick has is as a brander, and there's one way to beat him at his own satanic game. Start right now, and by Labor Day, you'll have everyone singing it by heart. Wealth-care plan. Do it, you spineless motherfuckers.
The second suggestion is more difficult, but will help in conceptualizing a better message. The question I keep hearing and reading is this inane debate over whether access to health care is -- or should be -- a "right" or a "privilege." And it's not a useful question, not only because it skirts the issue of who's paying for what, but because it denies the reality of the situation.
Here's the situation in this country: health care is a product, period. It has producers, distributors, marketers, consumers, and the racket is constructed accordingly. That's not the way it should be, but it is, and has been for a very long time.
Now, the ongoing failure of the Goopers to secure any sort of "victory" in dismantling even the shitty system we have and selling off the parts to the already obscenely wealthy should present an ample opportunity to the, you know, opposition party. Fortunately for them, all they have to do is show some backbone against a cynical, ineptly crafted bill.
But there's an opportunity for more, if we're serious about this "right" vs. "privilege" guff (which we might be, but they are not). It would necessitate the Democrats standing up to their own insurance/pharma/HMO benefactors, which is why it won't happen. But that's where the real debate starts. Everything else is just a bunch of [mimes jerkoff hand motion] bullshit.
The Democrats are in such disarray that less than six months into the worst collection of scumbags to run this country in my half-century of existence, they are actually in dire need of crafting an identity and message that presents a genuine, viable alternative to these soulless cocksuckers. Well, here's a great place to start, especially since constituents have actually been making the effort to show up and be counted -- call it wealth care, and hang it around that fucking turd McConnell's chinless face, and make him dance.
But you also have to describe how, even if the ACA is preserved as is, what steps you take to improve it. It was always understood to be a work in progress, and now is the time to lay out how that progress would take place.
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
Journo Theater
Question for the Serious Professionamal Journamalists out there -- do you people (yes, I said you people) suffer from some sort of collective battered scrivener syndrome? Honestly, it's just about impossible to understand why they are bothering to show up for these things. White House press briefings have always been a complete waste of time, a cheesy public-relations standard for whoever's in charge.
But they've amazingly become even more useless, more idiotic. We all get that there's a collective fear among the individuals that sit through this ritualized abuse that if they decide to stop going, everyone else will still go and they'll scoop them. There's a certain logic to that, and in fact their fears are probably well-founded. CNN says "fuck it" and stops showing up for this nonsense, but NBC and Fox and the rest of them are all still there, chirping their meaningless questions, eliciting snotty, contemptuous lies. Can't let go of that clickbait heroin.
If anything, the Clownstick cult is doing the media monkeys a favor by laying out in stark terms just how dumb this whole thing is. You want some "breaking news," here you go -- nobody gives a shit about how mean Sean Spicer or Huckabee Junior was to you. It's your own fucking fault for sitting there and taking it, again and again and again. Jesus Christ, talk about Lucy and Charlie Brown with the fucking football. Only a complete fucking sap feels sorry for Charlie Brown after the first time.
Now, a smart reporter might take this as an ongoing opportunity to go do some, you know, reporting, rather than merely transcribing the daily LIES of paid LIARS. Bokay? They lie to you, and you write it down, and then read it back to your colleagues in the studio, and relay to all of us peons in the audience how shocking all this is.
Well, no, it isn't shocking at all. It's fucking Groundhog Day, you retards. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? I'm telling you, all it takes is one (1) of these maroons to just say fuck it, stop showing up, go do some actual work during that time they'd otherwise be sitting there getting abused. It might take a week or two, but the rest of the lemmings would sit up on their hind legs and take notice, especially if the departed lemming finds something interesting. Which would be damn near impossible not to do with the incompetent, arrogant, deeply stupid people currently in charge of the federal government. All it takes is for a few people to actually do their jobs.
Think about it. We've all seen the audience shots of the press room, how many people are in there on a given day, for nothing. Oh, a paid liar lied? Well, you could knock me over with a fucking feather, Cronkite. I despise them for lying to you and to us so easily and repeatedly, but I despise you nearly as much for sitting there and taking it, day after miserable day, instead of going out and finding some useful information that might actually make a dent in this shameless clusterfuck of an administration.
That might actually happen if all of those inert bodies in the audience simply gathered their self-respect and thought for a minute about what their job is really supposed to be. Hint: it is not stenography. So go find something useful, or fuck off already.
But they've amazingly become even more useless, more idiotic. We all get that there's a collective fear among the individuals that sit through this ritualized abuse that if they decide to stop going, everyone else will still go and they'll scoop them. There's a certain logic to that, and in fact their fears are probably well-founded. CNN says "fuck it" and stops showing up for this nonsense, but NBC and Fox and the rest of them are all still there, chirping their meaningless questions, eliciting snotty, contemptuous lies. Can't let go of that clickbait heroin.
If anything, the Clownstick cult is doing the media monkeys a favor by laying out in stark terms just how dumb this whole thing is. You want some "breaking news," here you go -- nobody gives a shit about how mean Sean Spicer or Huckabee Junior was to you. It's your own fucking fault for sitting there and taking it, again and again and again. Jesus Christ, talk about Lucy and Charlie Brown with the fucking football. Only a complete fucking sap feels sorry for Charlie Brown after the first time.
Now, a smart reporter might take this as an ongoing opportunity to go do some, you know, reporting, rather than merely transcribing the daily LIES of paid LIARS. Bokay? They lie to you, and you write it down, and then read it back to your colleagues in the studio, and relay to all of us peons in the audience how shocking all this is.
Well, no, it isn't shocking at all. It's fucking Groundhog Day, you retards. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these people? I'm telling you, all it takes is one (1) of these maroons to just say fuck it, stop showing up, go do some actual work during that time they'd otherwise be sitting there getting abused. It might take a week or two, but the rest of the lemmings would sit up on their hind legs and take notice, especially if the departed lemming finds something interesting. Which would be damn near impossible not to do with the incompetent, arrogant, deeply stupid people currently in charge of the federal government. All it takes is for a few people to actually do their jobs.
Think about it. We've all seen the audience shots of the press room, how many people are in there on a given day, for nothing. Oh, a paid liar lied? Well, you could knock me over with a fucking feather, Cronkite. I despise them for lying to you and to us so easily and repeatedly, but I despise you nearly as much for sitting there and taking it, day after miserable day, instead of going out and finding some useful information that might actually make a dent in this shameless clusterfuck of an administration.
That might actually happen if all of those inert bodies in the audience simply gathered their self-respect and thought for a minute about what their job is really supposed to be. Hint: it is not stenography. So go find something useful, or fuck off already.
Cover Queen
In the scheme of things, it's barely worth mentioning, except as further evidence of what a needy little cunt he truly is. There's something seriously fucking wrong with him. This weird, incessant LYING about everygoddamnthing, no matter how insignificant, is a pathology. And it's just exhausting and pathetic.
Sonnet the Hedgehog
When I said it's a hoax, that's before it came out
that they fucked it all up in the first place.
The deep state elites are just trying to save face
from that nothing in which we had no doubt.
As the tweets are released and the media shout
about access curtailed to a mere trace,
we require a scorecard to keep pace
while the emperor goes into full pout.
Past unpredictable, future quite clear,
senile old man in incontinent rage
from a gold-painted toilet at five
in the morning. It might appear
to be a teevee-show stage,
but we'll be lucky to get out alive.
that they fucked it all up in the first place.
The deep state elites are just trying to save face
from that nothing in which we had no doubt.
As the tweets are released and the media shout
about access curtailed to a mere trace,
we require a scorecard to keep pace
while the emperor goes into full pout.
Past unpredictable, future quite clear,
senile old man in incontinent rage
from a gold-painted toilet at five
in the morning. It might appear
to be a teevee-show stage,
but we'll be lucky to get out alive.
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Young Man Blues
As we enter the hottest summer ever -- because we are now in an age where every year is hotter than the last -- let's take a look at three recent stories involving young men.
So the special elections keep becoming near-misses, the latest one being the $50 million or so spent trying to spring techno-milquetoast Jon Ossoff into the GA-6 seat vacated by corrupt lizard Tom Price, who was appointed to funnel the health-care system more fully into the pockets of the insurance-pharma-HMO axis of evil.
I caught Ossoff the night before the election on one of the interchangeable MSNBC shows, probably Lawrence O'Donnell, but it doesn't really matter. Ossoff came off as pleasant, intelligent, well-versed in policy specifics, but rather bland -- in other words, completely wrong for an electorate that is now basically nothing more than a collection of hamsters in a giant Skinner box, pressing the metal plate for their outrage pellets before getting back on the wheel that passes for their lives.
Excessive "Thrilla in Manila" media hype didn't help; not only did the enormous presence of "outside" money apparently rankle some of the locals' fine sensibilities, but the endless chimp-with-dartboard hot-takes just exhausted everyone.
One of the stupider tropes of the election was that it was a "referendum on [Clownstick]." Well, yes and no, mostly no. Technically, every election is a referendum on pretty much everything. In this case, it could be a referendum on the media, the pollsters, the voters themselves. GA-6 should be proud of the irony that, in order to show their proud disdain for "outsider money" and their desire for "change," they chose a careerist hack who was born in DC, while eschewing someone who was born in the heavily gerrymandered district, and lives within walking district of it while his fiancé finishes up her degree at Emory. So much for their lying excuses.
The polls generally leaned to Ossoff by 2-5% until the last few days when they evened out. Ossoff lost by four percent. It might be time to consider the possibility that:
Ossoff could have responded -- indeed, should have had in the can, ready to use -- showing Handel's scandalous behavior as a vote-suppressing bastard as Secretary of State in Georgia, as a Planned Parenthood attacking loon when she headed the pink-washing Susan Komen Foundation. The fact that he didn't -- the idea that at this point, anyone thinks they can get in the ring and still stay above the fray -- validated the hushed suspicions that maybe the kid was just a little too wet behind the ears.
Now, is hand-wringing and panic justified, going 0-5 in these special elections? Some say yes, others say no. Choose your hot take, 'murka! Again, the truth is both yes and no, again mostly no. These elections all occurred to replace critters who had been selected to join the boot-licking Clownstick cabinet, and as such, were chosen from very safe districts. In all of them, the Democratic candidate got within reach, closing 20+% gaps in some cases, barely half a year since November. So frustration is rational, but giving up in despair would be stupid. Even for a complete, unrepentant, gaping asshole like Emperor Snowflake, it's a lot to expect the cult to turn on him in just five months. Let him fuck them out their health care and job prospects first.
However, disgruntled Democrats are right to say that a change in leadership is needed. I totally agree with Charles Pierce that kicking Nancy Pelosi to the curb in the heat of the moment would be enormously counterproductive. I don't agree with Pelosi on everything, but she's smart, effective, raises money, kicks ass when needed, gets shit done. But she's 77 years old. Dianne Feinstein turns 84 tomorrow, and is up for re-election next year, and appears to be set to run.
This is both amazing and stupid. It's as if the party has never heard of succession planning, or developing a bench. They should be tapping one of the Castro brothers to go after alien-in-an-itchy-human-suit Rafael Edward Cruz's Senate seat next year. They should be pushing up-and-comers like Seth Moulton in front of every camera possible. In an endless news cycle with nearly infinite content modes, it should not be that difficult to get your younger talent out there to spread the message.
And what is that message, exactly? I said this a full year ago, and I'll say it again -- forget the "inclusive" SJW jabber, and focus on economic justice. In the end, it wasn't latent racism that caused all those rust-belt counties that voted for the blah guy twice to flip to Clownstick. It was the perception -- right or wrong, this is the alternate reality we all inhabit now -- that "Democrats" and "liberals" cared more about transgender bathroom rights than they cared about the washed-up, boarded-up, opioid-addicted wastelands infesting the hinterlands.
I think there may have been some justification to that perception. In his farewell press conference, Obama reflected on how a black guy with a foreign-sounding name could win in a place like Iowa, and he attributed it to going to all 99 counties, going to the pig-fucking competitions and eating deep-fried candy bars -- and most importantly, talking and listening to the people directly. You didn't really see that with most of the candidates.
Get some true economic populists with balls who will actually stand up to this bully, not with a scripted litany of fifty-cent words, but with the same "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" cadences he uses on everyone else. Work on some nicknames for him and make them stick. Have I ever mentioned before that most of branding and marketing comes down to repetition?
Go find a few of the blue-collar contractors Clownstick fucked over as part of his "business" model, put together quick two-minute videos of smash-cut money-quote excerpts from them, push it to the MSNBC night crew with a "deadbeat Asshole" type of nickname, and make a real concerted push. Why are these people so inept at crafting simple, effective messages? Because they still seriously think that better ideas win by virtue of their betterness. How's that working out? Stop overthinking this shit and take the piss out of this moron and his moron cult already. It should not be this difficult to brand a lifelong con-artist as such. Better messages, messengers, and channels help.
The GA-6 outcome may be the final straw in causing something of a rift in the Democratic Party. Sorry, but I think it would be a good thing for them. They need to re-focus on who they are just as much as who they are not, and they need to develop new blood much more effectively. It doesn't need to happen overnight; done correctly and patiently, they can easily reclaim enough seats in the midterms to hobble this inept scumbag crook and his thieving, grasping family, and then depose him in 2020. But they need to start now.
The sad tale of Otto Warmbier, the Midwestern kid with the on-the-nose surname, came to an abrupt close when North Korea essentially pulled the classic frightened-frat-boy maneuver -- putting the alcohol-poisoned pledge in a shopping cart and leaving him at the front door of the emergency room.
Plenty of people have weighed in with their "what did you expect" bumptions, and indeed, it would be difficult to come up with more inadvisable activities than traveling to North Korea. Maybe reporting on a Mexican drug cartel, or climbing Mount Everest in your jean shorts, those would be slightly worse ideas. But the kid was twenty-one years old, and I don't know about you, but when I was twenty-one, "dumb and impulsive" pretty much covered it. Between drugs, booze, motorcycles, and women, there are days where I wonder how I made it to thirty. Part of getting old is being lucky to survive a wild youth long enough to settle down.
It's also easy to lob armchair-quarterback critiques of the Obama administration's inaction in getting Warmbier returned, especially after being sentenced to fifteen years in a labor camp, in a trial that looked like a parody. But most negotiations with NK take place behind the scenes, out of necessity. And everything in dealing with this cult-like regime expends political capital, which is scarcer than Clownstick brain cells when it comes to getting leverage on the Norks. You can't shoot your wad on one person -- for one thing, even if it works, it makes every other person from your country that travels there an enhanced target.
Every traditional diplomatic element is stood on its head when it comes to working with the Kim crime family. There is no "rational actor" strategic thinking that will help, because Kim's only rationale is self-preservation, and he clearly doesn't care at all what happens to his people. And they have nukes and rough terrain and massive underground bunkers. Kim and his inner circle would be perfectly happy to hide for months -- after nuking Seoul and Tokyo -- while we eliminate the defenders and civilians. They really do not give a shit, and that's enormously tough to strategize.
No administration of any party can be reasonably expected to go too far to "rescue" someone when it may not be possible logistically in the first place. And who knows why they chose to send Warmbier home when they did? Probably either the Chinese leaned on them, or they just got tired of trying to keep a kid in a coma alive.
Whatever the case, what should we do about it? People are pissed about what NK did to Otto Warmbier, and they damn well should be. But again, what do you propose to do about it? Start a war? Increase sanctions and starve them out? Again, these things have no leverage, and only hurt people who had nothing to do with any of this. Anyone who says it's simple is nuts.
The old cliché about youth being wasted on the young has some merit to it, but the corollary to that is that the wisdom that is supposed to be conferred with age frequently gets wasted as well. Part of being "wise" is being able to recall what we were like when we were younger, and allowing the "unwise" to have the time and experience we were granted to learn the ropes.
Philando Castile is the latest example of (much to whitey's ongoing chagrin and confusion) Why Black People Are Pissed. The release of the dash cam footage is harrowing and disgusting. Jeronimo Yanez got away with murder, shooting Castile like a fish in a barrel, narrowly missing Castile's four-year-old daughter.
To hear Yanez screaming unintelligibly even after turning Castile into Swiss cheese is to hear the entire problem -- Yanez should never have been a cop or allowed to carry a gun in the first place. Here's a pro-tip for all you wannabe, gonnabe, and actual cops -- if this is how you act when someone is fully cooperating with you, you are in the wrong fucking line of work. Turn in your badge and go be a plumber or something, before you get someone killed. Sorry it's a dangerous job, but I refuse to concede my basic rights as a citizen to make it easier to push the peons around, and I don't expect anyone else to give up their rights.
The problem here is training, how much and what type. In many states, you need more hours of training to become a hairdresser than to become a cop. In Yanez' case, maybe taking two seconds to think about calling a police training Bulletproof Warrior would clarify the situation. That is not what you call anything that is designed to facilitate community relations, let's say. To say that it presumes a stance and a relationship with the people you're supposed to protect and serve as unnecessarily antagonistic is to put it very mildly.
And now a little girl gets to grow up having watched her father get murdered by a cop for no goddamned reason, while that inept-at-best police officer walked away scot free. They didn't even have the balls to fire his incompetent ass; Yanez was simply asked to voluntarily resign, which means he won't get anything on his jacket. He can land somewhere else. I hear Texas is pretty good about keeping Those People in their place. But this is someone who should never have a role in law enforcement again, ever. The video proves he was unqualified in the first place.
While the focus has been on young black men being killed unnecessarily by cops, that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. Yes, there is a racist (or racial profiling) component to it, but what this is really about is perspective, training, and accountability. If you are taking some kid and giving him about 800 hours of training, outfitting him with military gear, drumming it into his head that he's in some sort of American Fallujah where lethal combat awaits him around every corner, you can't be too shocked when he goes off on some hapless civilian trying to produce his wallet like a good peon.
The accountability is the main thing, and it has to be something that all of us, not just aggrieved blacks, need to stand up and be counted for. Philando Castile had a permit to carry his gun and we have audio and video footage that he was completely cooperative and docile during the stop, so where's the NRA on this, where are all the 2nd Amendment rights obsessives? Are black people allowed to carry guns, does the 2nd Amendment apply to them as well? These are not rhetorical questions; many of us are old enough to recall when Saint Reagan, as governor of California, instituted gun control measures precisely because of that very situation, because he and his old-cracker base were terrified that the Black Panthers were coming to exact retribution from them.
Turning fifty last month was a reminder of the obvious fact that we all view the world differently as we age, not just politically, but when you're young, the world seems full of possibilities, and its dangers seem eminently conquerable. You are too young and full of yourself to understand how deeply entrenched the system and its vile minions are against you. You might travel to countries where there are no laws or facts, or you might forget at the worst moment that some cops really are out to get you. Stay frosty, kids.
So the special elections keep becoming near-misses, the latest one being the $50 million or so spent trying to spring techno-milquetoast Jon Ossoff into the GA-6 seat vacated by corrupt lizard Tom Price, who was appointed to funnel the health-care system more fully into the pockets of the insurance-pharma-HMO axis of evil.
I caught Ossoff the night before the election on one of the interchangeable MSNBC shows, probably Lawrence O'Donnell, but it doesn't really matter. Ossoff came off as pleasant, intelligent, well-versed in policy specifics, but rather bland -- in other words, completely wrong for an electorate that is now basically nothing more than a collection of hamsters in a giant Skinner box, pressing the metal plate for their outrage pellets before getting back on the wheel that passes for their lives.
Excessive "Thrilla in Manila" media hype didn't help; not only did the enormous presence of "outside" money apparently rankle some of the locals' fine sensibilities, but the endless chimp-with-dartboard hot-takes just exhausted everyone.
One of the stupider tropes of the election was that it was a "referendum on [Clownstick]." Well, yes and no, mostly no. Technically, every election is a referendum on pretty much everything. In this case, it could be a referendum on the media, the pollsters, the voters themselves. GA-6 should be proud of the irony that, in order to show their proud disdain for "outsider money" and their desire for "change," they chose a careerist hack who was born in DC, while eschewing someone who was born in the heavily gerrymandered district, and lives within walking district of it while his fiancé finishes up her degree at Emory. So much for their lying excuses.
The polls generally leaned to Ossoff by 2-5% until the last few days when they evened out. Ossoff lost by four percent. It might be time to consider the possibility that:
- Pollsters are not very good at their jobs.
- Respondents are fucking with pollsters.
- Enough people are uninformed, flaky morons who can't make up their wittle minds on the starkest choices until the last second, effectively rendering the polling process into a lucrative circle-jerk.
- We heard over and over again how much money had been spent on this race. So what was it spent on? With that in mind, do media companies and political consultants and polling professionals have perhaps a vested interest in stoking a horse race, even when there might not really be one? Think their rates are a little higher when the polls show Ossoff up by three or neck-and-neck, than down by four or five in a reliably red district?
Ossoff could have responded -- indeed, should have had in the can, ready to use -- showing Handel's scandalous behavior as a vote-suppressing bastard as Secretary of State in Georgia, as a Planned Parenthood attacking loon when she headed the pink-washing Susan Komen Foundation. The fact that he didn't -- the idea that at this point, anyone thinks they can get in the ring and still stay above the fray -- validated the hushed suspicions that maybe the kid was just a little too wet behind the ears.
Now, is hand-wringing and panic justified, going 0-5 in these special elections? Some say yes, others say no. Choose your hot take, 'murka! Again, the truth is both yes and no, again mostly no. These elections all occurred to replace critters who had been selected to join the boot-licking Clownstick cabinet, and as such, were chosen from very safe districts. In all of them, the Democratic candidate got within reach, closing 20+% gaps in some cases, barely half a year since November. So frustration is rational, but giving up in despair would be stupid. Even for a complete, unrepentant, gaping asshole like Emperor Snowflake, it's a lot to expect the cult to turn on him in just five months. Let him fuck them out their health care and job prospects first.
However, disgruntled Democrats are right to say that a change in leadership is needed. I totally agree with Charles Pierce that kicking Nancy Pelosi to the curb in the heat of the moment would be enormously counterproductive. I don't agree with Pelosi on everything, but she's smart, effective, raises money, kicks ass when needed, gets shit done. But she's 77 years old. Dianne Feinstein turns 84 tomorrow, and is up for re-election next year, and appears to be set to run.
This is both amazing and stupid. It's as if the party has never heard of succession planning, or developing a bench. They should be tapping one of the Castro brothers to go after alien-in-an-itchy-human-suit Rafael Edward Cruz's Senate seat next year. They should be pushing up-and-comers like Seth Moulton in front of every camera possible. In an endless news cycle with nearly infinite content modes, it should not be that difficult to get your younger talent out there to spread the message.
And what is that message, exactly? I said this a full year ago, and I'll say it again -- forget the "inclusive" SJW jabber, and focus on economic justice. In the end, it wasn't latent racism that caused all those rust-belt counties that voted for the blah guy twice to flip to Clownstick. It was the perception -- right or wrong, this is the alternate reality we all inhabit now -- that "Democrats" and "liberals" cared more about transgender bathroom rights than they cared about the washed-up, boarded-up, opioid-addicted wastelands infesting the hinterlands.
I think there may have been some justification to that perception. In his farewell press conference, Obama reflected on how a black guy with a foreign-sounding name could win in a place like Iowa, and he attributed it to going to all 99 counties, going to the pig-fucking competitions and eating deep-fried candy bars -- and most importantly, talking and listening to the people directly. You didn't really see that with most of the candidates.
Get some true economic populists with balls who will actually stand up to this bully, not with a scripted litany of fifty-cent words, but with the same "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" cadences he uses on everyone else. Work on some nicknames for him and make them stick. Have I ever mentioned before that most of branding and marketing comes down to repetition?
Go find a few of the blue-collar contractors Clownstick fucked over as part of his "business" model, put together quick two-minute videos of smash-cut money-quote excerpts from them, push it to the MSNBC night crew with a "deadbeat Asshole" type of nickname, and make a real concerted push. Why are these people so inept at crafting simple, effective messages? Because they still seriously think that better ideas win by virtue of their betterness. How's that working out? Stop overthinking this shit and take the piss out of this moron and his moron cult already. It should not be this difficult to brand a lifelong con-artist as such. Better messages, messengers, and channels help.
The GA-6 outcome may be the final straw in causing something of a rift in the Democratic Party. Sorry, but I think it would be a good thing for them. They need to re-focus on who they are just as much as who they are not, and they need to develop new blood much more effectively. It doesn't need to happen overnight; done correctly and patiently, they can easily reclaim enough seats in the midterms to hobble this inept scumbag crook and his thieving, grasping family, and then depose him in 2020. But they need to start now.
The sad tale of Otto Warmbier, the Midwestern kid with the on-the-nose surname, came to an abrupt close when North Korea essentially pulled the classic frightened-frat-boy maneuver -- putting the alcohol-poisoned pledge in a shopping cart and leaving him at the front door of the emergency room.
Plenty of people have weighed in with their "what did you expect" bumptions, and indeed, it would be difficult to come up with more inadvisable activities than traveling to North Korea. Maybe reporting on a Mexican drug cartel, or climbing Mount Everest in your jean shorts, those would be slightly worse ideas. But the kid was twenty-one years old, and I don't know about you, but when I was twenty-one, "dumb and impulsive" pretty much covered it. Between drugs, booze, motorcycles, and women, there are days where I wonder how I made it to thirty. Part of getting old is being lucky to survive a wild youth long enough to settle down.
It's also easy to lob armchair-quarterback critiques of the Obama administration's inaction in getting Warmbier returned, especially after being sentenced to fifteen years in a labor camp, in a trial that looked like a parody. But most negotiations with NK take place behind the scenes, out of necessity. And everything in dealing with this cult-like regime expends political capital, which is scarcer than Clownstick brain cells when it comes to getting leverage on the Norks. You can't shoot your wad on one person -- for one thing, even if it works, it makes every other person from your country that travels there an enhanced target.
Every traditional diplomatic element is stood on its head when it comes to working with the Kim crime family. There is no "rational actor" strategic thinking that will help, because Kim's only rationale is self-preservation, and he clearly doesn't care at all what happens to his people. And they have nukes and rough terrain and massive underground bunkers. Kim and his inner circle would be perfectly happy to hide for months -- after nuking Seoul and Tokyo -- while we eliminate the defenders and civilians. They really do not give a shit, and that's enormously tough to strategize.
No administration of any party can be reasonably expected to go too far to "rescue" someone when it may not be possible logistically in the first place. And who knows why they chose to send Warmbier home when they did? Probably either the Chinese leaned on them, or they just got tired of trying to keep a kid in a coma alive.
Whatever the case, what should we do about it? People are pissed about what NK did to Otto Warmbier, and they damn well should be. But again, what do you propose to do about it? Start a war? Increase sanctions and starve them out? Again, these things have no leverage, and only hurt people who had nothing to do with any of this. Anyone who says it's simple is nuts.
The old cliché about youth being wasted on the young has some merit to it, but the corollary to that is that the wisdom that is supposed to be conferred with age frequently gets wasted as well. Part of being "wise" is being able to recall what we were like when we were younger, and allowing the "unwise" to have the time and experience we were granted to learn the ropes.
Philando Castile is the latest example of (much to whitey's ongoing chagrin and confusion) Why Black People Are Pissed. The release of the dash cam footage is harrowing and disgusting. Jeronimo Yanez got away with murder, shooting Castile like a fish in a barrel, narrowly missing Castile's four-year-old daughter.
To hear Yanez screaming unintelligibly even after turning Castile into Swiss cheese is to hear the entire problem -- Yanez should never have been a cop or allowed to carry a gun in the first place. Here's a pro-tip for all you wannabe, gonnabe, and actual cops -- if this is how you act when someone is fully cooperating with you, you are in the wrong fucking line of work. Turn in your badge and go be a plumber or something, before you get someone killed. Sorry it's a dangerous job, but I refuse to concede my basic rights as a citizen to make it easier to push the peons around, and I don't expect anyone else to give up their rights.
The problem here is training, how much and what type. In many states, you need more hours of training to become a hairdresser than to become a cop. In Yanez' case, maybe taking two seconds to think about calling a police training Bulletproof Warrior would clarify the situation. That is not what you call anything that is designed to facilitate community relations, let's say. To say that it presumes a stance and a relationship with the people you're supposed to protect and serve as unnecessarily antagonistic is to put it very mildly.
And now a little girl gets to grow up having watched her father get murdered by a cop for no goddamned reason, while that inept-at-best police officer walked away scot free. They didn't even have the balls to fire his incompetent ass; Yanez was simply asked to voluntarily resign, which means he won't get anything on his jacket. He can land somewhere else. I hear Texas is pretty good about keeping Those People in their place. But this is someone who should never have a role in law enforcement again, ever. The video proves he was unqualified in the first place.
While the focus has been on young black men being killed unnecessarily by cops, that doesn't really get to the heart of the matter. Yes, there is a racist (or racial profiling) component to it, but what this is really about is perspective, training, and accountability. If you are taking some kid and giving him about 800 hours of training, outfitting him with military gear, drumming it into his head that he's in some sort of American Fallujah where lethal combat awaits him around every corner, you can't be too shocked when he goes off on some hapless civilian trying to produce his wallet like a good peon.
The accountability is the main thing, and it has to be something that all of us, not just aggrieved blacks, need to stand up and be counted for. Philando Castile had a permit to carry his gun and we have audio and video footage that he was completely cooperative and docile during the stop, so where's the NRA on this, where are all the 2nd Amendment rights obsessives? Are black people allowed to carry guns, does the 2nd Amendment apply to them as well? These are not rhetorical questions; many of us are old enough to recall when Saint Reagan, as governor of California, instituted gun control measures precisely because of that very situation, because he and his old-cracker base were terrified that the Black Panthers were coming to exact retribution from them.
Turning fifty last month was a reminder of the obvious fact that we all view the world differently as we age, not just politically, but when you're young, the world seems full of possibilities, and its dangers seem eminently conquerable. You are too young and full of yourself to understand how deeply entrenched the system and its vile minions are against you. You might travel to countries where there are no laws or facts, or you might forget at the worst moment that some cops really are out to get you. Stay frosty, kids.
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Our Liberal Media
While it is a problem that NBC free-agent pickup Megyn Kelly is giving completely unnecessary face time to conspiracy-peddling jagoff Alex Jones, a bigger problem is that she's probably not going away -- in fact, this clusterfuck of an "interview" will probably end up being a stepping stone to Kelly getting that sweet Baba Wawa gig she wanted in the first place. NBC paid a lot of money for her, and they won't want to admit they fucked up.
I mean, Jones is who he is, but at least WYSWIG, right? If you want a fucking crackpot who believes that Sandy Hook was a staged hoax -- why is anyone's guess, since not a goddamned thing was done about guns as a result -- and takes his shirt off to eat barbecued spare ribs, then he's your guy. Jones mines that same ugly spectrum between entertaining and appalling -- let's coin the word appallitainment -- that other talk-radio shitheads like Rush Limbaugh have held court in for decades.
In fact, Jones and Limbaugh and the rest of these dirtbags simply underscore the point I and so many others have been making for quite some time, that Emperor Snowflake is not the disease, but a symptom. The hate-talk assholes are also symptoms, albeit much more pronounced ones, since they were there when Snowflake came on the scene, and they'll be around after he's gone.
Nope, America is the disease, and we're metastasizing like stage-four brain cancer. Now, you and I might like to look at ourselves and the people we care about as individuals of good nature and good will, and that may very well be true, as far as it goes. But in a nation of 320 million people and counting, the law of averages says that some indeterminate number of that aggregate total must be assholes. That's just science.
So it behooves us to get some sort of idea as to roughly how many assholes there are, how many are actively spreading the monkey-brain-eating prion disease that has taken over the American political body and the media that cover it. Alex Jones peddles hateful lies and conspiracy theories to addled retards, who then turn around and threaten and harass the parents of murdered first-graders because of some "hoax" that no rational mind can possibly explain.
There are conspiracies in this big, beautiful, awful world of ours, and every single one of them starts with one question: Cui bono? Who benefits from this plot, to what end is it constructed and executed? And can it be carried out as described?
And as much time and effort as Jones and his dipshit listeners have spent mooning over this loco jabber, none of them have yet presented a plausible theory of execution or rationale. This is where the 9/11 truthers fell short as well -- it's not that the gubmint is above doing something awful, but the logistics of it being carried off without a loose thread talking are roughly zero.
And in the case of Sandy Hook, even the "gubmint doing something awful" part doesn't make any sense. There are tens of thousands of violent gun deaths in this country every fucking year. Most of them could easily be leaned on in graphic, heart-tugging detail to push gun-control proposals. The idea that anyone would sit around and go, "You know what would really work with getting some gun control passed? Let's fake the slaughter of a classroom of first-graders? Can't fail!" Right.
Seriously, how fucking dumb does someone have to be to buy into something like that?
I like a good conspiracy theory or alternative history as the next person, but it has to make sense, and there has to be some sort of corroborating evidence. Here's a more harmless example: Cleveland Cavaliers player Kyrie Irving supposedly believes with some level of sincerity that the earth is flat. I have a feeling that Irving is probably just screwing with people, but let's say he's serious. One would reasonably assume in that event that Irving has thought out some sort of scenario or (from the fiction-writing arena) "world rules" that comprise a somewhat coherent thesis?
For example, does "flat earth" mean that the planet is a disc? Okay then, what is at the center of the disc? What is on the bottom face of the disc? Is the Northern Hemisphere on the top face, and the Southern Hemisphere on the bottom? (But wait, it's no longer a "sphere," is it?) And so on. Tectonic geology, climatology, orbital physics -- there are countless empirically proven facts such a "theory" would butt up against.
Anyway. It's not a problem that Alex Jones and his toxic crap is getting exposure -- in fact, it might be a good thing that folks who somehow have still not been aware of this weirdo get a load of what he's been selling. The problem is that because Megyn Kelly is not actually a journalist but a media personality, her instinct is to sell Jones and "humanize" him, in the name of "both sides" or something. She could have simply researched the things Jones is on record as having said, and perhaps asked him directly about some of the more contentious pieces, of which there are many.
It sucks that "we" are all in this together in some respect. The idea that someone who listens to Infowars and harasses Sandy Hook parents also votes, breeds, drives a car, and maybe owns a gun is disgusting and horrifying. That is the sort of person who is ruining this country and the world, and it's a goddamned shame they don't have the guts to do the right thing and end themselves, to prevent further polluting the gene pool.
In the meantime, the very least we can do is boycott Megyn Kelly, and maybe make NBC think twice about giving any sort of platform to a hateful liar. (And no, this time I don't mean Newt Gingrich.)
I mean, Jones is who he is, but at least WYSWIG, right? If you want a fucking crackpot who believes that Sandy Hook was a staged hoax -- why is anyone's guess, since not a goddamned thing was done about guns as a result -- and takes his shirt off to eat barbecued spare ribs, then he's your guy. Jones mines that same ugly spectrum between entertaining and appalling -- let's coin the word appallitainment -- that other talk-radio shitheads like Rush Limbaugh have held court in for decades.
In fact, Jones and Limbaugh and the rest of these dirtbags simply underscore the point I and so many others have been making for quite some time, that Emperor Snowflake is not the disease, but a symptom. The hate-talk assholes are also symptoms, albeit much more pronounced ones, since they were there when Snowflake came on the scene, and they'll be around after he's gone.
Nope, America is the disease, and we're metastasizing like stage-four brain cancer. Now, you and I might like to look at ourselves and the people we care about as individuals of good nature and good will, and that may very well be true, as far as it goes. But in a nation of 320 million people and counting, the law of averages says that some indeterminate number of that aggregate total must be assholes. That's just science.
So it behooves us to get some sort of idea as to roughly how many assholes there are, how many are actively spreading the monkey-brain-eating prion disease that has taken over the American political body and the media that cover it. Alex Jones peddles hateful lies and conspiracy theories to addled retards, who then turn around and threaten and harass the parents of murdered first-graders because of some "hoax" that no rational mind can possibly explain.
There are conspiracies in this big, beautiful, awful world of ours, and every single one of them starts with one question: Cui bono? Who benefits from this plot, to what end is it constructed and executed? And can it be carried out as described?
And as much time and effort as Jones and his dipshit listeners have spent mooning over this loco jabber, none of them have yet presented a plausible theory of execution or rationale. This is where the 9/11 truthers fell short as well -- it's not that the gubmint is above doing something awful, but the logistics of it being carried off without a loose thread talking are roughly zero.
And in the case of Sandy Hook, even the "gubmint doing something awful" part doesn't make any sense. There are tens of thousands of violent gun deaths in this country every fucking year. Most of them could easily be leaned on in graphic, heart-tugging detail to push gun-control proposals. The idea that anyone would sit around and go, "You know what would really work with getting some gun control passed? Let's fake the slaughter of a classroom of first-graders? Can't fail!" Right.
Seriously, how fucking dumb does someone have to be to buy into something like that?
I like a good conspiracy theory or alternative history as the next person, but it has to make sense, and there has to be some sort of corroborating evidence. Here's a more harmless example: Cleveland Cavaliers player Kyrie Irving supposedly believes with some level of sincerity that the earth is flat. I have a feeling that Irving is probably just screwing with people, but let's say he's serious. One would reasonably assume in that event that Irving has thought out some sort of scenario or (from the fiction-writing arena) "world rules" that comprise a somewhat coherent thesis?
For example, does "flat earth" mean that the planet is a disc? Okay then, what is at the center of the disc? What is on the bottom face of the disc? Is the Northern Hemisphere on the top face, and the Southern Hemisphere on the bottom? (But wait, it's no longer a "sphere," is it?) And so on. Tectonic geology, climatology, orbital physics -- there are countless empirically proven facts such a "theory" would butt up against.
Anyway. It's not a problem that Alex Jones and his toxic crap is getting exposure -- in fact, it might be a good thing that folks who somehow have still not been aware of this weirdo get a load of what he's been selling. The problem is that because Megyn Kelly is not actually a journalist but a media personality, her instinct is to sell Jones and "humanize" him, in the name of "both sides" or something. She could have simply researched the things Jones is on record as having said, and perhaps asked him directly about some of the more contentious pieces, of which there are many.
It sucks that "we" are all in this together in some respect. The idea that someone who listens to Infowars and harasses Sandy Hook parents also votes, breeds, drives a car, and maybe owns a gun is disgusting and horrifying. That is the sort of person who is ruining this country and the world, and it's a goddamned shame they don't have the guts to do the right thing and end themselves, to prevent further polluting the gene pool.
In the meantime, the very least we can do is boycott Megyn Kelly, and maybe make NBC think twice about giving any sort of platform to a hateful liar. (And no, this time I don't mean Newt Gingrich.)
Saturday, June 17, 2017
They Ask Questions
I agree with Jim Wright that health care is a right, but people also have the right -- no, the need -- to voice their concerns about being overcharged in the aggregate for said right. But first things first. The sooner everyone starts asking that question of themselves and each other, and comes to the realization that Paul Ryan and his donors are simply trying to ram a tax cut designed as a health care plan not down your throat, but straight up everyone's ass, the sooner we can send the assholes back home and get people in there who might actually say no once in a while to the insurance companies and their goddamned extortion racket.
Pussies
Calling these delicate assholes "snowflakes" is far too kind. These sensitive little babies are now disrupting Shakespeare productions because they just can't handle it, nor can they be bothered to, you know, read the actual fucking play. Who are we kidding, most of them probably can't read more than 140 characters at a time.
It should be noted that this fuckface Posobiec is a professional troll -- you know, the kind that makes shit up about George Soros paying protesters while taking money to, uh, protest. Fucker's last name sounds like some bullshit pharma product that clogs your bowels anyway. But he's everything that he professes to rail against, and so much worse. And he knows it. It eats at him, like a psychic termite.
Hey, crybabies, if this shit hurts your wittle feewings that much, maybe you should shake down your wingnut welfare donors to fund your own production of the play, starring Scott Baio and Antonio Sbarro or other such unemployed boot-lickers. The beauty of Shakespeare is that the material is easy to rewrite for different periods, precisely because the themes are so universal. Power corrupts, and "heroes" and "villains" are mostly based on perspective. Who knew? Funny how they didn't get their panties in a fucking wad when it was Obama in the lead role.
In the conservatard version, Ben Carson attempts to stab the Dear Leader, only to be foiled by a cunningly placed belt buckle, at which point Julius Clownstick beats Brutus to death with his adult diaper and invades North Korea -- but only after making sure Undersecretary of State Dennis Rodman has returned home safely.
It should be noted that this fuckface Posobiec is a professional troll -- you know, the kind that makes shit up about George Soros paying protesters while taking money to, uh, protest. Fucker's last name sounds like some bullshit pharma product that clogs your bowels anyway. But he's everything that he professes to rail against, and so much worse. And he knows it. It eats at him, like a psychic termite.
Hey, crybabies, if this shit hurts your wittle feewings that much, maybe you should shake down your wingnut welfare donors to fund your own production of the play, starring Scott Baio and Antonio Sbarro or other such unemployed boot-lickers. The beauty of Shakespeare is that the material is easy to rewrite for different periods, precisely because the themes are so universal. Power corrupts, and "heroes" and "villains" are mostly based on perspective. Who knew? Funny how they didn't get their panties in a fucking wad when it was Obama in the lead role.
In the conservatard version, Ben Carson attempts to stab the Dear Leader, only to be foiled by a cunningly placed belt buckle, at which point Julius Clownstick beats Brutus to death with his adult diaper and invades North Korea -- but only after making sure Undersecretary of State Dennis Rodman has returned home safely.
Friday, June 16, 2017
Newtered
I know we all enjoy the endless flying snark here in our little comedy treehouse, but friends 'n' neighbors, let me tell you something with utmost sincerity: it would be very difficult to find a more reprehensible person in American public life than N. Leroy McPherson (as some wags rightly tag him). I cannot for the life of me understand why this jowly bag of shit is allowed to stick around so long after his shelf life. Any media entity that has him on for anything needs to recheck its credentials as a serious journamalistic organization.
Gingrich is one of those people who manages to look relatively intelligent simply because his party has been taken over by ass-scratching booger-eaters like Joe Barton, who almost certainly is incapable of putting his fingers together in the dark. [Free recycled Polack joke: Barton is so dumb, he has been seen planting Cheerios in his backyard, because he thought they were donut seeds.]
Anyway, N. Leroy has been granted some sort of statesman emeritus pass by the mediots, because he is able to compose a relatively coherent sentence extemporaneously and without too much prompting. But he's still a fucking mow-ron with the intellectual honesty of a salted slug, and the moral code of a rabid hyena. It's only a matter of time before we find out that he and Roger Stone have been wife-swapping on Caribbean sex cruises or some such.
But moral objections aside, Leroy's simply a dressed-up dumbass, a yokel who isn't one-tenth as smart as he thinks he is. It's hard to say what his motivation is in shilling for this clusterfuck of an administration; as Balloon Juice commenter Amir Khalid points out, it takes a special kind of buffoon to sign up for a cruise on a sinking ship.
(Yes, there's a solid chance that all these Russia investigations might end up for naught, but at the very least, they will continue to siphon political capital away from an already emasculated group of dipshits and sycophants, who are simply too inept to accomplish the damage they want to, and too arrogant to see how stupid they really are. Not the kind of team a truly experienced hand would want to ply his trade with.)
The only post Gingrich seems to be after is securing the ambassadorship to the Vatican for his (third) wife, who was sucking his dick (but not fucking because that would have been cheating)while he was still married to his second wife and leading the charge against Bill Clinton for getting his pole smoked extramaritally. I may be wrong, but rumor has it that the pope takes that kind of shit fairly seriously.
You almost -- almost -- have to admire the sheer chutzpah it takes to be Newt Gingrich, to get out of bed knowing that you're a hypocritical turd of a human being nearing the end of life, with nothing to show for your grandiose visions but a charred, wretched legacy of lies and hypocrisy. People will not remember you well, asshole.
There's nothing wrong with latching on to the "Great Man" theory of the world, and fashioning oneself into at least a palimpsest of such a rare being. Everyone needs some sort of goal. But there's nothing worse than someone wanting all the trappings and accolades of the Great Man, while doing none of the work. Gingrich is nothing more nor less than a homunculus of the ugly, empty ambitions he has carried around with him his entire miserable life.
Again, a truly liberal media that took its responsibilities seriously would never allow him near their studios in the first place. His worst sin is he has nothing useful to add to the conversation. He's just a shill for the worst elements of American politics and society, the sort of people who, in a rational world, would be exiled to an island and forced to build their own shelters and live on whatever they could catch.
[Update 6/17/17 3:34 PM PDT: Further evidence that Gingrich is exactly as described above, maybe worse:
In the near future, when Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuhd finally perjures himself out of a job, Gingrich will make a fine attorney general for these goat-fuckers. Because once you yank back the threadbare shower curtain of intemellectual posturing, Gingrich is exactly the same sort of creature as his oompa-loompa overlord -- someone who sincerely thinks that words, facts, and even laws should automatically conform to behavioral impulses and whimsical desires.
Again, in a universe where "the media" actually had a liberal bent, an obvious corrupt liar like Gingrich would be welcome only on the inbred wankfests of Fixed Noise. Any other journamilistic entity that gives this lying toad the time of day should be ashamed of themselves, because they, we, and Gingrich all know that they're just giving stage time to agitprop. Gingrich, like Clownstick, is simply ongoing proof that karma has a lot of catching up to do.
Gingrich is one of those people who manages to look relatively intelligent simply because his party has been taken over by ass-scratching booger-eaters like Joe Barton, who almost certainly is incapable of putting his fingers together in the dark. [Free recycled Polack joke: Barton is so dumb, he has been seen planting Cheerios in his backyard, because he thought they were donut seeds.]
Anyway, N. Leroy has been granted some sort of statesman emeritus pass by the mediots, because he is able to compose a relatively coherent sentence extemporaneously and without too much prompting. But he's still a fucking mow-ron with the intellectual honesty of a salted slug, and the moral code of a rabid hyena. It's only a matter of time before we find out that he and Roger Stone have been wife-swapping on Caribbean sex cruises or some such.
But moral objections aside, Leroy's simply a dressed-up dumbass, a yokel who isn't one-tenth as smart as he thinks he is. It's hard to say what his motivation is in shilling for this clusterfuck of an administration; as Balloon Juice commenter Amir Khalid points out, it takes a special kind of buffoon to sign up for a cruise on a sinking ship.
(Yes, there's a solid chance that all these Russia investigations might end up for naught, but at the very least, they will continue to siphon political capital away from an already emasculated group of dipshits and sycophants, who are simply too inept to accomplish the damage they want to, and too arrogant to see how stupid they really are. Not the kind of team a truly experienced hand would want to ply his trade with.)
The only post Gingrich seems to be after is securing the ambassadorship to the Vatican for his (third) wife, who was sucking his dick (but not fucking because that would have been cheating)while he was still married to his second wife and leading the charge against Bill Clinton for getting his pole smoked extramaritally. I may be wrong, but rumor has it that the pope takes that kind of shit fairly seriously.
You almost -- almost -- have to admire the sheer chutzpah it takes to be Newt Gingrich, to get out of bed knowing that you're a hypocritical turd of a human being nearing the end of life, with nothing to show for your grandiose visions but a charred, wretched legacy of lies and hypocrisy. People will not remember you well, asshole.
There's nothing wrong with latching on to the "Great Man" theory of the world, and fashioning oneself into at least a palimpsest of such a rare being. Everyone needs some sort of goal. But there's nothing worse than someone wanting all the trappings and accolades of the Great Man, while doing none of the work. Gingrich is nothing more nor less than a homunculus of the ugly, empty ambitions he has carried around with him his entire miserable life.
Again, a truly liberal media that took its responsibilities seriously would never allow him near their studios in the first place. His worst sin is he has nothing useful to add to the conversation. He's just a shill for the worst elements of American politics and society, the sort of people who, in a rational world, would be exiled to an island and forced to build their own shelters and live on whatever they could catch.
[Update 6/17/17 3:34 PM PDT: Further evidence that Gingrich is exactly as described above, maybe worse:
Gingrich, for instance, during the 2016 campaign joined Trump in bashing NAFTA—a free-trade deal he, of course, played a key role in getting passed. The most recent addition to the list of Gingrich reversals is his absurd stance that now that Donald Trump is president, the president of the United States is not even capable of obstructing justice. "Technically, the President of the United States cannot obstruct justice," Gingrich told the crowd at the National Press Club Friday during an event promoting his new book, wait for it, Understanding Trump. "The President of the United States is the chief executive officer of the United States. If he wants to fire the FBI director, all he's got to do is fire him."Indeed they have, in the shopworn plus ça change sense. Gingrich is the perfect spokes-tool (or is it spokes-stool? Either one fits.) for this sewer that tries to pass for an administration -- hypocritical to the bone, completely and utterly without scruples, principles, or even consistent beliefs, other than the base will to power.
New Gingrich’s views on obstruction of justice are a wee bit divergent from when his role as the Speaker of the House was LEADING the charge against President Bill Clinton and VOTING to impeach Clinton for articles of impeachment that included, among other things, an obstruction of justice charge. "What you have lived through for 2.5 long years is the most systematic, deliberate obstruction-of-justice, cover-up, and effort to avoid the truth we have ever seen in American history," Gingrich said in 1998. "The American people have the right to expect that the rule of law will prevail, that no one is above the law," Gingrich said on the House floor the same year. Times sure have changed.
In the near future, when Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the Thuhd finally perjures himself out of a job, Gingrich will make a fine attorney general for these goat-fuckers. Because once you yank back the threadbare shower curtain of intemellectual posturing, Gingrich is exactly the same sort of creature as his oompa-loompa overlord -- someone who sincerely thinks that words, facts, and even laws should automatically conform to behavioral impulses and whimsical desires.
Again, in a universe where "the media" actually had a liberal bent, an obvious corrupt liar like Gingrich would be welcome only on the inbred wankfests of Fixed Noise. Any other journamilistic entity that gives this lying toad the time of day should be ashamed of themselves, because they, we, and Gingrich all know that they're just giving stage time to agitprop. Gingrich, like Clownstick, is simply ongoing proof that karma has a lot of catching up to do.
Poll Tree
I suppose it's okay to have a bit of a snicker over the idea that there's a small percentage of grown-ass adults who seriously think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, but it should be more concerning that nearly half of Americans take bible stories 100% literally.
Sometimes you figure that at least some of these people are just fucking around with the pollsters; after all, there's a fair chance that I would do something like that. But then you have occasion to venture out into the beautiful, big, messy world and talk to some of these folks, and you realize with much chagrin, they're dead fucking serious.
Sometimes you figure that at least some of these people are just fucking around with the pollsters; after all, there's a fair chance that I would do something like that. But then you have occasion to venture out into the beautiful, big, messy world and talk to some of these folks, and you realize with much chagrin, they're dead fucking serious.
Big Love
It's always a good day when one of these FLDS pervs gets busted. This one is particularly funny -- Lyle Jeffs had been on the run from the feds for a year, and was found living in his truck outside of Yankton, South Dakota. I mean, if you're gonna go down, go down swingin', chief.
Though he's getting popped for welfare fraud, Lyle Jeffs is part of a multi-generational, multi-family, multi-community cult that rapes girls, drives out boys, ruins towns, steals money from taxpayers, produces scads of inbred children and destructive intra-family relationships, and serves as a shameful vestige of a religion that, whatever its faults, has at least made some real effort to modernize itself a great deal in a relatively short period of time.
It would be nice to think that this shuts down these goofballs, once and for all, but like mushrooms and cockroaches, they pop up everywhere and are tremendously difficult to completely eradicate.
Though he's getting popped for welfare fraud, Lyle Jeffs is part of a multi-generational, multi-family, multi-community cult that rapes girls, drives out boys, ruins towns, steals money from taxpayers, produces scads of inbred children and destructive intra-family relationships, and serves as a shameful vestige of a religion that, whatever its faults, has at least made some real effort to modernize itself a great deal in a relatively short period of time.
It would be nice to think that this shuts down these goofballs, once and for all, but like mushrooms and cockroaches, they pop up everywhere and are tremendously difficult to completely eradicate.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Second Amendment Remedies
It's been mostly op-ed sites and lowly bloggerses who have trucked in the phrase "civil war" so far, and if you'd asked me a month or three ago, I'd have scoffed at the notion. 'murkins are simply too fat, lazy, spoiled, complacent, etc. And when students of history, whether amateur readers or academic researchers, go back and chronicle the happenings of this or that war, they tend to need a catalyzing incident and/or person, in order to outline and centralize their thesis or book. The assassination of the archduke, that type of thing.
So it makes sense that the natural temptation for real-time corporate and citizen journos will be to portray James Hodgkinson as some sort of modern-day Gavrilo Princip, rather than as a fool with a violent history who espoused "progressive" sentiments and hopefully died knowing that he did far more harm than good to whatever it is he purported to care about.
This is how it always rolls -- when a "conservative" wingnut commits a heinous crime, it's always the work of a lone psychopath; when a professed "liberal" does something, it broad-brushes everyone who might fall remotely under that broad umbrella. As this generation's Iran-Contra hearing continues to distract everyone to its ultimate conclusion of futility (and maybe a lowly minion taking it in the ass for Dear Leader), while they sneak in a DOA turd of a health bill and try to gut Dodd-Frank under cover of darkness, this event will simply add more fuel to their bullshit, at least among themselves.
How soon they forget about Sarah Palin putting a couple dozen congress-critters in cross-hairs, and getting one of them shot (along with nine dead, including a little girl) in a supermarket parking lot. Not to mention how their current hero stoked the worst sentiments in the undercurrent of this country, empowered the worst sort of angry rube. It should not be too surprising that angry rubes on both sides might get worked up and motivated to action by this constant puke-funnel. A lot of people are pissed off about a lot of different issues, and the scary fact is that most of them at least have a point about something. And no one is actually doing anything about any of it.
So it makes sense that the natural temptation for real-time corporate and citizen journos will be to portray James Hodgkinson as some sort of modern-day Gavrilo Princip, rather than as a fool with a violent history who espoused "progressive" sentiments and hopefully died knowing that he did far more harm than good to whatever it is he purported to care about.
This is how it always rolls -- when a "conservative" wingnut commits a heinous crime, it's always the work of a lone psychopath; when a professed "liberal" does something, it broad-brushes everyone who might fall remotely under that broad umbrella. As this generation's Iran-Contra hearing continues to distract everyone to its ultimate conclusion of futility (and maybe a lowly minion taking it in the ass for Dear Leader), while they sneak in a DOA turd of a health bill and try to gut Dodd-Frank under cover of darkness, this event will simply add more fuel to their bullshit, at least among themselves.
How soon they forget about Sarah Palin putting a couple dozen congress-critters in cross-hairs, and getting one of them shot (along with nine dead, including a little girl) in a supermarket parking lot. Not to mention how their current hero stoked the worst sentiments in the undercurrent of this country, empowered the worst sort of angry rube. It should not be too surprising that angry rubes on both sides might get worked up and motivated to action by this constant puke-funnel. A lot of people are pissed off about a lot of different issues, and the scary fact is that most of them at least have a point about something. And no one is actually doing anything about any of it.
Monday, June 12, 2017
The Idiot In His Flabyrinth; A Modest Prayer
Three brief Clownstick items for your perusal:
Let a hard rain fall: let them ruin what little of the health care system Obamacare managed to address; let the ban on scary Moooslins go through at long last; let them melt the mountains of Yosemite and Yellowstone for shale oil; let them pollute the waters and superheat the planet. Let them have their vile agenda, root and branch. Let it all push through.
Let the fan club morons in the flyover states reap the inevitable rewards. You voted for this, you assholes, it's only fair you should get the lion's share of the results. Let's see how all those jobs and opioid treatments go for you. Let everyone who aided and abetted this crime family get what's coming to them -- ruination and unemployability. Let the old joke about "you fuck one goat" come true for them and their careers.
And when it starts to sink in and the rest of us pull our shit together and undo these people fully, let us do it right. Let this shit family be completely broken, ruined financially, unable to grift or grasp or con or steal everything not nailed down anymore. Let them blow hobos in the alley and sell oranges at the freeway off-ramp to earn just enough for a cum-stained mattress at a fleabag hotel for the night. Let their children go to public schools. Let their future generations be compelled to change their names, a futile attempt to remove a wretched stain.
Fuck them. They make the world a worse place, every damned day. That takes some doing.
- This morning's first full cabinet meeting (five months in!), notable for its pathetic, mewling Soviet-style leader worship. Someone should tell Kim Jong Snack-Cakes that he's got some competition in the "need to be needed" sweepstakes.
- If you're still looking for a reason to despise the seemingly (only by comparison) "moderate" and "reasonable" Joanie Clownstick, this oughta do it. Has no one showed this privileged dunce her father's Twitter feed, did she not hear about the five years her father spent lying about Obama's birthplace, the mocking of cripples, war heroes, parents of dead soldiers, etc.? Is she for fucking real?
- This provided some much-needed comic relief. Read down the whole thread. These ugly-ass kids probably pre-spent their inheritances on plastic surgeries.
Let a hard rain fall: let them ruin what little of the health care system Obamacare managed to address; let the ban on scary Moooslins go through at long last; let them melt the mountains of Yosemite and Yellowstone for shale oil; let them pollute the waters and superheat the planet. Let them have their vile agenda, root and branch. Let it all push through.
Let the fan club morons in the flyover states reap the inevitable rewards. You voted for this, you assholes, it's only fair you should get the lion's share of the results. Let's see how all those jobs and opioid treatments go for you. Let everyone who aided and abetted this crime family get what's coming to them -- ruination and unemployability. Let the old joke about "you fuck one goat" come true for them and their careers.
And when it starts to sink in and the rest of us pull our shit together and undo these people fully, let us do it right. Let this shit family be completely broken, ruined financially, unable to grift or grasp or con or steal everything not nailed down anymore. Let them blow hobos in the alley and sell oranges at the freeway off-ramp to earn just enough for a cum-stained mattress at a fleabag hotel for the night. Let their children go to public schools. Let their future generations be compelled to change their names, a futile attempt to remove a wretched stain.
Fuck them. They make the world a worse place, every damned day. That takes some doing.
Saturday, June 10, 2017
Heavy Petting
One of the better one-liners from the 2016 campaign came from P.J. O'Rourke, who explained that he would be voting for Hillary Clinton because even though Clinton was "wrong about absolutely everything, she's wrong within normal parameters." It was useful not because it was particularly side-splitting, but because it concisely explained the dynamic at work, between a careerist pol who, while competent was widely despised, and a shameless, inept grifter.
It was also useful because it served as an illustration, however rare, of a conservative taking an opportunity to demonstrate the concept of intellectual honesty. Unlike many of his peers in the wake of the election, O'Rourke has been consistent in his opposition to the incompetent clown.
The characterization is also useful because it applies quite well to some conservative politicians. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse would be a good example, as would Mike Pence. Pence is a hack among hacks, a talk-radio weasel who latched on to the political grift, and was on his way to getting unceremoniously booted out of Indiana before the angry clown rescued him.
So Pence's cat Oreo died today, at the age of thirteen, and the linked article provides several photos of Pence and his wife holding their pets (they have another cat named Pickle, and a rabbit named Marlon Bundo). It seems pretty clear that Pence genuinely loves his animals. And while we may find it weird that Pence calls his wife Karen "Mother," and refuses as a matter of principle to dine alone with any other woman, they clearly love and care for each other.
It was also useful because it served as an illustration, however rare, of a conservative taking an opportunity to demonstrate the concept of intellectual honesty. Unlike many of his peers in the wake of the election, O'Rourke has been consistent in his opposition to the incompetent clown.
The characterization is also useful because it applies quite well to some conservative politicians. Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse would be a good example, as would Mike Pence. Pence is a hack among hacks, a talk-radio weasel who latched on to the political grift, and was on his way to getting unceremoniously booted out of Indiana before the angry clown rescued him.
So Pence's cat Oreo died today, at the age of thirteen, and the linked article provides several photos of Pence and his wife holding their pets (they have another cat named Pickle, and a rabbit named Marlon Bundo). It seems pretty clear that Pence genuinely loves his animals. And while we may find it weird that Pence calls his wife Karen "Mother," and refuses as a matter of principle to dine alone with any other woman, they clearly love and care for each other.
Thursday, June 08, 2017
It's Beginning to Smell a Lot Like Fitzmas
As most people knew ahead of time, by now you've seen that there wasn't a whole lot to the Comey hearing today, other than the continued pattern of certain senators making fools out of themselves, selling out their country for a buffoon. But that may not be the catalyzing incident necessary to finish off these freaks. (Then again, Seth Abramson seems to believe that the gun isn't just smoking, but is white hot.)
That doesn't mean nothing will come of what transpired today -- in fact, if Bob Mueller is on this as much as he is reliably rumored to be, it could eventually be the beginning of the end of this fucktarded regime and its unconscionable figurehead. Comey definitely gave Mueller a lot to work with, but it will be a patient build, plank by plank. It will not sit well with the ADHD cable news assholes and their audiences, but it's the way it needs to happen for it to sink in to the thus-far unflappable base.
This is at heart a clash of two defining traits: Comey's insufferable rectitude and Clownstick's Nixonian belief that by definition, the executive cannot do anything illegal. Either Comey or Clownstick is lying, and that's all there is to it.
Even after all's said and done, it's still entirely possible that nothing significant happens. The Republican majority in both houses will drag their collective feet until the bitter end. They are too tied up with this asshole now. They will not turn on him until he's bad for business, until his antics and stupidity threaten their electoral future.
That may happen as soon as June 20th, if Jon Ossoff manages to defeat lifelong Gooper hack Karen Handel in Georgia's Sixth Congressional District, former nest of blowjob fan Newt Gingrich and most recently of inside trader Tom Price. If the Democratic Party have any brains left in their organization -- a highly debatable proposition at best -- they will dump as much money and name endorsements into that effort as they can muster.
They should be organizing a benefit concert and begging Barry O to emcee it. They should be shaking down Lloyd Blankfein and Mike Bloomberg for cash money. This is a chance not only to gain momentum to turn the electoral tide, but to strike genuine fear into the hearts of assholes.
In the meantime, Clownstick's poll ratings continue to swirl the drain, and he is incapable of doing anything to reverse that trend. The best he can hope for already happened -- make an international trip, minimize the fuck-ups, and hope for approval ratings to level off. It temporarily stopped the bleeding, but the holiday recess is over and the alligators are back on his fat ass.
That and it's being forecast to be a relatively heavy hurricane season, and neither FEMA nor NOAA have directors. I hope I'm wrong, but I predicted months ago, that it would be a black-swan event -- particularly a natural disaster -- that would provide one of the final straws to this sad joke of an administration.
Or maybe he steps on his dick in an area where we have thousands of troops deployed and have a yuge arms deal in the works. It should be tattooed on the foreheads of everyone who supported Clownstick from the outset, and everyone who came around once it became politically convenient: This guy fucks up everything he touches. It might as well be the fourth law of thermodynamics, as sure as an axiom of universal physical law as one can imagine.
That doesn't mean nothing will come of what transpired today -- in fact, if Bob Mueller is on this as much as he is reliably rumored to be, it could eventually be the beginning of the end of this fucktarded regime and its unconscionable figurehead. Comey definitely gave Mueller a lot to work with, but it will be a patient build, plank by plank. It will not sit well with the ADHD cable news assholes and their audiences, but it's the way it needs to happen for it to sink in to the thus-far unflappable base.
This is at heart a clash of two defining traits: Comey's insufferable rectitude and Clownstick's Nixonian belief that by definition, the executive cannot do anything illegal. Either Comey or Clownstick is lying, and that's all there is to it.
Even after all's said and done, it's still entirely possible that nothing significant happens. The Republican majority in both houses will drag their collective feet until the bitter end. They are too tied up with this asshole now. They will not turn on him until he's bad for business, until his antics and stupidity threaten their electoral future.
That may happen as soon as June 20th, if Jon Ossoff manages to defeat lifelong Gooper hack Karen Handel in Georgia's Sixth Congressional District, former nest of blowjob fan Newt Gingrich and most recently of inside trader Tom Price. If the Democratic Party have any brains left in their organization -- a highly debatable proposition at best -- they will dump as much money and name endorsements into that effort as they can muster.
They should be organizing a benefit concert and begging Barry O to emcee it. They should be shaking down Lloyd Blankfein and Mike Bloomberg for cash money. This is a chance not only to gain momentum to turn the electoral tide, but to strike genuine fear into the hearts of assholes.
In the meantime, Clownstick's poll ratings continue to swirl the drain, and he is incapable of doing anything to reverse that trend. The best he can hope for already happened -- make an international trip, minimize the fuck-ups, and hope for approval ratings to level off. It temporarily stopped the bleeding, but the holiday recess is over and the alligators are back on his fat ass.
That and it's being forecast to be a relatively heavy hurricane season, and neither FEMA nor NOAA have directors. I hope I'm wrong, but I predicted months ago, that it would be a black-swan event -- particularly a natural disaster -- that would provide one of the final straws to this sad joke of an administration.
Or maybe he steps on his dick in an area where we have thousands of troops deployed and have a yuge arms deal in the works. It should be tattooed on the foreheads of everyone who supported Clownstick from the outset, and everyone who came around once it became politically convenient: This guy fucks up everything he touches. It might as well be the fourth law of thermodynamics, as sure as an axiom of universal physical law as one can imagine.
Bad Liberal
I get what Ed's saying about manipulative stories like these, but at the same time, it's very difficult to read them and not get frustrated. I've seen this stuff before, and have talked to social services workers who can attest first-hand that multigenerational families can and do learn how to work the system, and pass it on to the next generation. It is a mistake to simply fixate on the meager amounts provided by this or that program, because of the gray and black economies that exist in such communities (again, seen it first-hand).
Look, I'm not going to claim to be the Keeper of the Secrets to Success, but -- and this is just a thought -- maybe stop hoarding animals and having kids and living on fast food. Put down the cheeseburger and take a walk around the block once in a while. Hell, maybe go on down to the free public library and find a nice book to read, and then another, and then another. All of those things tend to impact the ol' bottom line financially. This is perhaps even more essential if you (for example) have an IQ of 75 and are therefore barely able to take care of yourself, incapable of even helping to manage a household.
But the adult daughter has four kids and counting; where is/are the father(s), and his/their financial contribution? Why can't the state offer her a financial incentive to get her tubes tied, instead of being forced to pay for more future wards of the state? Is it possible, just remotely, to give these kids something other than ramen noodles and ice cream and video games, and then wonder why they're bouncing off the fucking walls? Could the time wasted on holy-roller nonsense be spent any more productively, any way at all? If there's a common thread to these types of articles, it's that the subjects never have any ambition or vision for actually bettering their lives; their only goal is to make sure their benefits aren't getting cut.
This is what conservative think-tank weasels are talking about when they prattle on about the "culture of dependency," except, well, you know....
Most social services programs are designed to help the less fortunate get over the inevitable hump in life, and move forward. For people whose entire lives are one interminable, multigenerational hump, what can you tell them? This is less about the terrible coincidence of being disabled four generations in a row, and more about knowing how to apply for disability benefits, and passing that knowledge along to the next generation. The rest of the world is simply expected to endlessly subsidize lifetimes of poor decision-making and impulse control. There are at least six people in that house, and not one of them will ever hold a fucking job.
The anecdote in the beginning of the article about one of the kids dropping the puppy on its head, while they all stand around and wonder durrr, let's give it human medication says it all. It makes sense that they named it "Miracle," because it'll be a goddamned miracle if that dog is still alive in another year. It's a good thing the article at least didn't bother with which way the "matriarch" voted, if she voted at all, because it really doesn't matter.
Again, Ed's point that the increase in SSI and disability cases largely due to broke-ass states trying to shift fiscal responsibility on to the feds is 100% correct. But that doesn't mitigate the facts about the family in that Post article, that while there may be some cherry-picking to some extent, I have seen worse cases in the news in California.
The people who work in the programs sincerely want to help people in need. But there are few things more frustrating than having someone come in with the greatest reluctance just to get some job-seeking assistance, maybe a month of food assistance to get them over that hump to the next job, and only being able to give them bare minimum; and then having to deal with someone who is on the third or fourth generation of being on the dole, has no intent of looking for any sort of job, has no larger goals for themselves or their family, and in fact seems almost to deliberately sabotage every one of their life decisions, expecting someone else to step in and clean up the mess.
It would be easier to find compassion for Kathy Strait and her family if they did anything, anything at all, to improve their lot in life, and at least give those kids a fighting chance. But short of injecting them in the neck with speedballs, I'm not sure how they could fuck this up any worse.
Look, I'm not going to claim to be the Keeper of the Secrets to Success, but -- and this is just a thought -- maybe stop hoarding animals and having kids and living on fast food. Put down the cheeseburger and take a walk around the block once in a while. Hell, maybe go on down to the free public library and find a nice book to read, and then another, and then another. All of those things tend to impact the ol' bottom line financially. This is perhaps even more essential if you (for example) have an IQ of 75 and are therefore barely able to take care of yourself, incapable of even helping to manage a household.
But the adult daughter has four kids and counting; where is/are the father(s), and his/their financial contribution? Why can't the state offer her a financial incentive to get her tubes tied, instead of being forced to pay for more future wards of the state? Is it possible, just remotely, to give these kids something other than ramen noodles and ice cream and video games, and then wonder why they're bouncing off the fucking walls? Could the time wasted on holy-roller nonsense be spent any more productively, any way at all? If there's a common thread to these types of articles, it's that the subjects never have any ambition or vision for actually bettering their lives; their only goal is to make sure their benefits aren't getting cut.
This is what conservative think-tank weasels are talking about when they prattle on about the "culture of dependency," except, well, you know....
Most social services programs are designed to help the less fortunate get over the inevitable hump in life, and move forward. For people whose entire lives are one interminable, multigenerational hump, what can you tell them? This is less about the terrible coincidence of being disabled four generations in a row, and more about knowing how to apply for disability benefits, and passing that knowledge along to the next generation. The rest of the world is simply expected to endlessly subsidize lifetimes of poor decision-making and impulse control. There are at least six people in that house, and not one of them will ever hold a fucking job.
The anecdote in the beginning of the article about one of the kids dropping the puppy on its head, while they all stand around and wonder durrr, let's give it human medication says it all. It makes sense that they named it "Miracle," because it'll be a goddamned miracle if that dog is still alive in another year. It's a good thing the article at least didn't bother with which way the "matriarch" voted, if she voted at all, because it really doesn't matter.
Again, Ed's point that the increase in SSI and disability cases largely due to broke-ass states trying to shift fiscal responsibility on to the feds is 100% correct. But that doesn't mitigate the facts about the family in that Post article, that while there may be some cherry-picking to some extent, I have seen worse cases in the news in California.
The people who work in the programs sincerely want to help people in need. But there are few things more frustrating than having someone come in with the greatest reluctance just to get some job-seeking assistance, maybe a month of food assistance to get them over that hump to the next job, and only being able to give them bare minimum; and then having to deal with someone who is on the third or fourth generation of being on the dole, has no intent of looking for any sort of job, has no larger goals for themselves or their family, and in fact seems almost to deliberately sabotage every one of their life decisions, expecting someone else to step in and clean up the mess.
It would be easier to find compassion for Kathy Strait and her family if they did anything, anything at all, to improve their lot in life, and at least give those kids a fighting chance. But short of injecting them in the neck with speedballs, I'm not sure how they could fuck this up any worse.
Wednesday, June 07, 2017
Won't Someone Please Think of the Children?
Oh, so you're saying that the other Clownstick Foundation is a cheap money-laundering profit center as well? Shocking. No doubt it will just as effective as David Fahrenthold's reportage on the old man's original charity grift. Brought that whole operation right to a halt, it did.
P.S. Hopefully Eric Clownstick gets mauled by the next endangered animal he hunts. This whole family is so far beyond scummy, there may not be a word for it in the English language.
P.S. Hopefully Eric Clownstick gets mauled by the next endangered animal he hunts. This whole family is so far beyond scummy, there may not be a word for it in the English language.
Going It Alone / Leaning Into It
Princess Snowflake's entirely predictable decision to pull out of the Paris Accords is annoying and disappointing, but again, not surprising in the least. Coupled with the much-less reported indications that the yuuugely successful Cuba embargo might be reinstated for some bizarre reason, it seems safe to say that this administration's guiding operational principle is simply to wipe the black-guy fingerprints off of everything. That is the one common factor so far, as Snowflake has done any number of unnecessary things for no useful or practical (even from an ideological standpoint) reason, but rather just to be a dick. Hoocoodanode, as the say in the 'hood.
(Oh, and now, based on what they think was Snowflake's money line in his fuck-youse speech, they're throwing a "Pittsburgh not Paris" rally in Lafayette Park, in DC. Not in Pittsburgh, mind you, since that city went 80% for Clinton, and hasn't been the blue-collar steel city for quite some time, but is doing quite well all the same. No, they're doing it in a DC park named after someone who is buried in -- wait for it -- Paris. These halfwits can't even get the imaginary optics straight, not that it will matter to the yahoos, who if they ever did happen to travel to Paris for some insane reason, would almost certainly head straight for the nearest Mickey D's.)
The empire has been in decline for some time, more steadily and drastically since Saint Reagan. Bill Clinton and Barry O introduced at least the veneer of "social conscience" into the equation, and even took a few positive steps to mitigate the economic stagnation here and there. But the slide into the wood chipper, fast or slow, ends in a pile of mulch all the same.
And so the Euros are realizing that the signals were clear after all, that we have been off our meds for some time, that the accidental selections of Fredo Arbusto were no accidents, but merely close statistical manipulations injected with muscle and gall. That the investiture of His Royal Hairness Emperor Princess Snowflake Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho Fuckface Von Clownstick is not the disease, but merely latest and nastiest outbreak of the tertiary political syphilis the US has acquired by fucking ourselves once too often.
So it makes sense that Angela Merkel, as nominal head of the European Union, understands that it may be high time to bond with France's new golden boy Emmanuel Macron, and move on without the bumptious country mice and their jabbering mutt of a figurehead. Clownstick may only be around for eight years max, but again it is clear that he is symptomatic of a much greater malaise, one that is generational so far, and shows no signs of abating.
China has slowly, steadily set itself up to take over as the big dog for this wondrous new century, and we seem determined to help them in every way possible. Clownstick is hell-bent to prove that the US can go it alone, that interdependence is an illusion or a hoax, perhaps a scam engineered by the Chinese or the Euros or whoever's on his shit-list that day.
It doesn't really matter, since facts no longer matter, and knowledge has no value, since a man who has gotten what he wants for seventy years by grifting, lying, stealing, or renting it is now in charge, and his moron cult followers wouldn't know an actual bidnessman if he sent their jobs to Bangalore.
But since Clownstick felt the need to give Merkel an extra dig, after dumping on her from day one, don't be too surprised if she calls the heads of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and every German automaker that has manufacturing facilities here in 'murka, and finds a way to coax at least some of them either back home or into Mexico or Canada. It would not take much in the way of tax breaks and/or leaning on nationalist pride. You can only treat people like shit for so long, especially when they're not getting anything out of it.
Look, most of us have had a friend or relative that, for whatever reason -- drugs, alcohol, maybe they're just an asshole to begin with -- goes off the deep end and just becomes insufferable, impossible to be around. You avoid them, you do things with other friends without them. You go out with these other friends, steeling yourselves for the likelihood that the asshole might come shambling along and get pissy about everyone hanging out without them, probably (almost definitely) talking shit about them. You keep it in the back of your mind, what you'll say when cornered:
But you mostly hope to just avoid the fucker, until maybe they find a new set of friends willing to put up with their bullshit. Except in this case, the "new set of friends" Clownstick is reaching out to is entirely comprised of fellow assholes -- Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, the Saudis. We have to get our shit together as a nation, and decide if that's the collective path we want to go down.
Say what you want about the rubes and bozos who have fallen for the Clownschtick (see what I did there?) -- they have made themselves clear about what they think they want, and that they will show up at the fucking voting booth to git 'er duuuhnnn. Are the bien pensant pussy-hat protesters motivated enough to show up next year, and in 2020, to drive these motherless fucks out of office? You tell me.
And yet, as I finish reading Matt Taibbi's Insane Clown President, it is very difficult to not go into a completely nihilistic stance and dare these mutants to get exactly what they think they want. Taibbi presents an argument that is mostly very solid: the Republicans have lost their goddamned minds; the Democrats sold their souls to the same renters and owners who "donate" to the two wings of the Party of Privilege; the voters are getting increasingly angry at getting screwed over by cynical "social" politics on the right and "incremental" horseshit on the (relative) left; the media consist mostly of hacks playing high-school pecking-order games, who can be bought off with (in Taibbi's words) a beer and a box of cookies.
ICP is mostly a collection of Taibbi's Rolling Stone essays and dispatches from the 2016 campaign trail, and as such, it resonates with the knowing futility of the outcome of the dismal affair, and with the recap of all the salient factors leading to that entirely avoidable outcome.
But as good as the book is, it is grievously, perhaps fatally flawed in one major respect -- in his effort to righteously excoriate his callow media colleagues and the cynical liars they follow around for what passes for a living, Taibbi ends up letting off the hook the angry flyover dopes whose self-regarding anger got us all in the mess we're currently in.
There's probably some measure of white liberal guilt baked into all this, as journos seem to have become almost instinctively reflexive about not seeming to be too condescending, or to try to "listen" more. I would take the opposite tack here -- if anything, the media have collectively given far too much time and print and analysis to these idiots.
Every goddamned week for going on two years now, we have been treated to any number of anthropological excursions to these places so that we can hear directly from belligerent rubes a line of invariably bizarre and logically groundless reasoning about why a grifting insult comic should even be in the discussion to run the world's largest economy and most powerful military. It's still going on, months after the election, these dopey, uncritical transcriptions of these people's fallacious excuses.
Meanwhile, have you seen even one (1) article where these intrepid scriveners talk to a few Clinton voters? Not before or since the election, I haven't seen a single one. I wonder why that might be. One clue would be to check in on your supposedly liberal media.
The conservative media outlets function essentially as you would expect them to do, as agitprop arms of the Republican party in general, and therefore in support of Clownstick in particular. The liberal media outlets, while critical of everything Clownstick does, are still functioning in a mode of constant reaction. Christ, what did this fucking idiot do today? Because it's clickbait -- but it isn't journalism. They chased their tails for a good twenty-four hours over the stupid "covfefe" thing, something that should have been a one-hour eyeroll at most. And now they're breathlessly retelling his latest twit-fest over the London attacks, essentially doing his promo work for him. They do this shit all the time; again, from watching the baton-passing nonsense with the prime-time lineup over at MSNBC, it's easy to see why people generally hold mediots in such contempt.
This is the natural consequence of having to fill twenty-four hours a day with constant, instantaneous content. They don't have time to pursue and air real stories of substance, and if they did, the ADHD rodents watching and retweeting wouldn't watch it anyway. But the bottom line is that they are spending almost all of their time chasing what he does, at the expense of any number of other stories. And when you're dealing with someone for whom "bad publicity" doesn't exist, because they don't give a shit what you think and their operational response to everything is Or what?, again the end result is just troll-feeding. The fact is that MSNBC and CNN can't quit their Clownstick coverage even if they want to. He's keeping them afloat at this point.
All that aside, again the tragic flaw in Taibbi's ICP thesis is that all those smug, condescending liberals and cynical politicians let these good people down. And that's just a bucket of steaming horseshit, from top to bottom, starting with the premise that they're all "good people" to begin with.
Taibbi himself contributes heavily to clarifying that misperception, in his constant recounting of rally attendees and Clownstick supporters he talks to, who repeat nasty, hateful lies and wear t-shirts with lovely sayings like She's a Cunt and Fuck Your Feelings. Taibbi recounts how on Election Day, outside Clownstick Tower, some doofus in a MAGA hat tapped Taibbi on his shoulder, asked him if he was part of the media, and when Taibbi answered in the affirmative, the guy sticks his middle finger in Taibbi's face, tells him to go fuck himself, and walks away ruffling his young son's hair.
Real family values these folks have, classy right up to the very end. It's a goddamned shame there aren't any more Hunter Thompson types around; for one, Thompson was six-foot-six and usually on some combination of mind-altering substances. These fake-tough punks would think twice pulling that shit on someone if they thought there might actually be consequences. But they have become accustomed to thinking of journalists as effete pussies who can be penned off and ridiculed, and they won't even try to fight back. I wonder how they got that idea.
But it's too bad Taibbi didn't drop that asshole. He probably felt sorry for him, because only someone who is a miserable fucking failure in life does that to a complete stranger. But that's no excuse for what seems to be becoming increasingly common behavior for these fools. Imagine what they'd have been like if she'd won, what with their candidate queering the water all through October by claiming the election was rigged.
Unless he won, of course. Then it's fair. Heads I win, tails you lose. How you like them apples?
To provide a little anecdata to the contrary, I know quite a few Clownstick supporters in real life, and I honestly can't imagine any of them wearing those t-shirts or flipping off strangers like that. Talking trash on Facebook is about their speed, which is nothing. But even there, it makes you wonder why the mediots keep giving any time or space at all to these stereotypical angry maroons. Feeding idiot trolls is what got us all into this in the first place.
But again, these salt-of-the-earth types are exactly the same people that voted for assholes like clockwork, because they could be counted on to keep blacks, gays, uppity wimmins, whoever, In Their Place. Their support of Clownstick is nothing new; they have supported assholes and liars for their entire lives, gladly. They come from generations of people who have learned to assuage their own failures in life by retelling some Dolchstosslegende iteration, not worrying about whether there's a nugget of truth to it or not. They have spent generations telling themselves and each other that they're the only "real Americans," even as they hoover up extra tax dollars from all those blue-state fags and hippies they despise.
Is the American political system a brutal, corrupt joke, bought and paid for, owned and operated by cynical, greedy scumbags? Reader, you know it is. It is at least as mindlessly cynical, as a response, to elevate the epitome of the corrupt, venal grifter to a position of power. And yet the "liberal" media, including Taibbi, apparently as some sort of self-inoculation against being too smug or condescending, continue to engage in this pointless effort of "understanding" these nasty, hateful people for overthrowing the shackles of their overlords. That's not why they voted for Clownstick.
They voted for him because they hate Hillary Clinton, and they wanted to stick their middle fingers in the faces of caricatured liberals. It's not complicated. Clownstick could come to their houses, fuck their wives and daughters in front of them, and take a huge shit on their dinner table, and they would vote for him again if they thought it would make George Clooney cry. This is how they function.
This is not the reality any rational person would have wanted or envisioned, but it is the reality we have right now, because it is the political system and media and electorate we have. All televised media across the political spectrum, with their endless rounds of BREAKING NEWS, have failed, and the world would be a better place if they were simply shut down for a year or two. Here's a news flash for all of you fart-knocking cable dipshits -- when everything is breaking news, nothing is. You cannot maintain this level of theatrical, pearl-clutching hysteria over every blasted thing, only to turn to the same fetid gene pool of "analysts" to kick around the goat's-head of faux-debate.
MSNBC have proven themselves to be nearly as awful and shallow as Fixed Noise; the last several times I checked in over the last week or so, no matter which program or host, they found increasingly forced and cheesy ways to shoehorn in a lengthy plug for Megyn Kelly's new stint at the network. We get it; you shelled out a lot of dough for her and now need to suck everyone's dick to try to recoup some of that money. Good luck with it, but life's too short. Maybe the weekend prison documentaries will help shore up the shortfall.
Make no mistake -- the media will do whatever is most expedient in this mess. Clownstick supporters are correct in their assumptions that corporate media are instinctively conditioned to protect whatever pose the establishment wants them to. This is by definition; corporations are, after all, the establishment. This includes Fixed Noise.
But as mentioned above, these are the same mediots that slavishly promote every inept rage-tweet and senior moment, these are the same morons that will literally show an empty podium while they wait around for him to lob the same jabber he did last week, while they lob their own inane, value-free repartee. The only thing they reveal with their endless hot-take patter is how little they know and understand.
A few days ago, in anticipation of James Comey's testimony tomorrow, I happened to catch a few minutes of a couple of media maroons (pretty sure it was Chris Cillizza on Wolf Blister's show, like it matters) talking about how, while the Clownstick administration could prevent Comey from testifying by invoking executive privilege, it was almost unthinkable they would do such a thing because -- get this -- it might make them look bad.
This is what I mean when I say that these people are deeply stupid. This is what I mean when I say that their "commentary" and "analysis" are literally value-free, in that they are worth nothing, add nothing of value to what you or anyone else might know about anything, and that any amount of money you offer in return for what they say is currency that might as well be set on fire, or used for bumwipe.
Seriously. What kind of asshole would look at the operational style of this administration, at the things it has said and done virtually every single day since (and including) its inauguration (not to mention every day of the campaign), and conclude that there is a single person involved in the daily workings of the executive branch of the United States government that gives even one-twentieth of a fuck about how anything looks? And why should they give such a fuck? Is someone going to hold them accountable?
Let's put it this way -- the only way Comey was going to get shut down by executive privilege was if he really had something solid and earth-shattering. If he testifies (and the prepared advance transcript is here), it is because it's nothing to write home about. To seriously postulate that the administration felt at all compelled to let him testify because they were afraid of "how it would look" if they shut it down, is to have been asleep for a very long time.
As lamentable of an exercise as that particular episode was, it served as a perfect example of the media's biggest problem -- people like Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cillizza act like the people in power are supposed to give a fuck what Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cillizza think and say about them. And we all know they do not give a fuck. It is plain to everyone that these media eunuchs have nothing of importance, and fulfill no truly useful role. They sit there and preen and pose like they're all Edward Fucking Murrow, but we all know that they're incapable of investigating or generating any facts or news on their own, and are content to sit there and regurgitate various strains of conventional wisdom as informed commentary. And they know that we know this. They are impotent, toothless. They are lapdogs who pretend to be watchdogs. They are there to chase down midnight tweets and be pushed around and lied to by a homunculus like Sean Spicer.
There is no purpose transcribing the blatant lies of a White House press conference, anymore than there was a purpose to sitting in a pen at the rallies, to transcribe Clownstick's campaign lies, and be verbally abused by the chuckle-headed mutants attending these idiotic escapades. All it does is give these ugly proceedings the dangerous veneer of legitimacy. Especially when most of them don't bother at all to see what the opposition party is up to -- except insofar as they respond to whatever daily idiocy the moron-in-chief is up to.
Yet they are exactly the media this electorate deserves -- fat, impotent, useless, lying or ignoring what's really important. Maybe we need to have health-care policy rewritten by Mitch McConnell before enough people get what's at stake here. Maybe we need to have Li'l Lord Rage-Tweet piss off enough of our allies and trading partners to realize that while we're the largest economy on paper for now, the demographics are not remotely in our favor, because we're only five percent of the earth's population, and we have decided that we're happy with having ten percent of our population own eighty-five percent of the assets. Maybe we needed to have this thieving, scummy grifter and his wretched crime family barge into our house, steal our silverware and defile our furniture right in front of us, to get the message.
(Oh, and now, based on what they think was Snowflake's money line in his fuck-youse speech, they're throwing a "Pittsburgh not Paris" rally in Lafayette Park, in DC. Not in Pittsburgh, mind you, since that city went 80% for Clinton, and hasn't been the blue-collar steel city for quite some time, but is doing quite well all the same. No, they're doing it in a DC park named after someone who is buried in -- wait for it -- Paris. These halfwits can't even get the imaginary optics straight, not that it will matter to the yahoos, who if they ever did happen to travel to Paris for some insane reason, would almost certainly head straight for the nearest Mickey D's.)
The empire has been in decline for some time, more steadily and drastically since Saint Reagan. Bill Clinton and Barry O introduced at least the veneer of "social conscience" into the equation, and even took a few positive steps to mitigate the economic stagnation here and there. But the slide into the wood chipper, fast or slow, ends in a pile of mulch all the same.
And so the Euros are realizing that the signals were clear after all, that we have been off our meds for some time, that the accidental selections of Fredo Arbusto were no accidents, but merely close statistical manipulations injected with muscle and gall. That the investiture of His Royal Hairness Emperor Princess Snowflake Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho Fuckface Von Clownstick is not the disease, but merely latest and nastiest outbreak of the tertiary political syphilis the US has acquired by fucking ourselves once too often.
So it makes sense that Angela Merkel, as nominal head of the European Union, understands that it may be high time to bond with France's new golden boy Emmanuel Macron, and move on without the bumptious country mice and their jabbering mutt of a figurehead. Clownstick may only be around for eight years max, but again it is clear that he is symptomatic of a much greater malaise, one that is generational so far, and shows no signs of abating.
China has slowly, steadily set itself up to take over as the big dog for this wondrous new century, and we seem determined to help them in every way possible. Clownstick is hell-bent to prove that the US can go it alone, that interdependence is an illusion or a hoax, perhaps a scam engineered by the Chinese or the Euros or whoever's on his shit-list that day.
It doesn't really matter, since facts no longer matter, and knowledge has no value, since a man who has gotten what he wants for seventy years by grifting, lying, stealing, or renting it is now in charge, and his moron cult followers wouldn't know an actual bidnessman if he sent their jobs to Bangalore.
But since Clownstick felt the need to give Merkel an extra dig, after dumping on her from day one, don't be too surprised if she calls the heads of Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and every German automaker that has manufacturing facilities here in 'murka, and finds a way to coax at least some of them either back home or into Mexico or Canada. It would not take much in the way of tax breaks and/or leaning on nationalist pride. You can only treat people like shit for so long, especially when they're not getting anything out of it.
Look, most of us have had a friend or relative that, for whatever reason -- drugs, alcohol, maybe they're just an asshole to begin with -- goes off the deep end and just becomes insufferable, impossible to be around. You avoid them, you do things with other friends without them. You go out with these other friends, steeling yourselves for the likelihood that the asshole might come shambling along and get pissy about everyone hanging out without them, probably (almost definitely) talking shit about them. You keep it in the back of your mind, what you'll say when cornered:
"No one wants to tell you, so I'm just gonna tell you -- you're a fucking asshole, and no one wants to hang around you. You come over and raid our refrigerators and never offer to buy, and talk shit about everyone else's girlfriend, and you're just fucking miserable to be around. I'm telling you as a friend, either fuck off or get your head straight."
But you mostly hope to just avoid the fucker, until maybe they find a new set of friends willing to put up with their bullshit. Except in this case, the "new set of friends" Clownstick is reaching out to is entirely comprised of fellow assholes -- Putin, Duterte, Erdogan, the Saudis. We have to get our shit together as a nation, and decide if that's the collective path we want to go down.
Say what you want about the rubes and bozos who have fallen for the Clownschtick (see what I did there?) -- they have made themselves clear about what they think they want, and that they will show up at the fucking voting booth to git 'er duuuhnnn. Are the bien pensant pussy-hat protesters motivated enough to show up next year, and in 2020, to drive these motherless fucks out of office? You tell me.
And yet, as I finish reading Matt Taibbi's Insane Clown President, it is very difficult to not go into a completely nihilistic stance and dare these mutants to get exactly what they think they want. Taibbi presents an argument that is mostly very solid: the Republicans have lost their goddamned minds; the Democrats sold their souls to the same renters and owners who "donate" to the two wings of the Party of Privilege; the voters are getting increasingly angry at getting screwed over by cynical "social" politics on the right and "incremental" horseshit on the (relative) left; the media consist mostly of hacks playing high-school pecking-order games, who can be bought off with (in Taibbi's words) a beer and a box of cookies.
ICP is mostly a collection of Taibbi's Rolling Stone essays and dispatches from the 2016 campaign trail, and as such, it resonates with the knowing futility of the outcome of the dismal affair, and with the recap of all the salient factors leading to that entirely avoidable outcome.
But as good as the book is, it is grievously, perhaps fatally flawed in one major respect -- in his effort to righteously excoriate his callow media colleagues and the cynical liars they follow around for what passes for a living, Taibbi ends up letting off the hook the angry flyover dopes whose self-regarding anger got us all in the mess we're currently in.
There's probably some measure of white liberal guilt baked into all this, as journos seem to have become almost instinctively reflexive about not seeming to be too condescending, or to try to "listen" more. I would take the opposite tack here -- if anything, the media have collectively given far too much time and print and analysis to these idiots.
Every goddamned week for going on two years now, we have been treated to any number of anthropological excursions to these places so that we can hear directly from belligerent rubes a line of invariably bizarre and logically groundless reasoning about why a grifting insult comic should even be in the discussion to run the world's largest economy and most powerful military. It's still going on, months after the election, these dopey, uncritical transcriptions of these people's fallacious excuses.
Meanwhile, have you seen even one (1) article where these intrepid scriveners talk to a few Clinton voters? Not before or since the election, I haven't seen a single one. I wonder why that might be. One clue would be to check in on your supposedly liberal media.
The conservative media outlets function essentially as you would expect them to do, as agitprop arms of the Republican party in general, and therefore in support of Clownstick in particular. The liberal media outlets, while critical of everything Clownstick does, are still functioning in a mode of constant reaction. Christ, what did this fucking idiot do today? Because it's clickbait -- but it isn't journalism. They chased their tails for a good twenty-four hours over the stupid "covfefe" thing, something that should have been a one-hour eyeroll at most. And now they're breathlessly retelling his latest twit-fest over the London attacks, essentially doing his promo work for him. They do this shit all the time; again, from watching the baton-passing nonsense with the prime-time lineup over at MSNBC, it's easy to see why people generally hold mediots in such contempt.
This is the natural consequence of having to fill twenty-four hours a day with constant, instantaneous content. They don't have time to pursue and air real stories of substance, and if they did, the ADHD rodents watching and retweeting wouldn't watch it anyway. But the bottom line is that they are spending almost all of their time chasing what he does, at the expense of any number of other stories. And when you're dealing with someone for whom "bad publicity" doesn't exist, because they don't give a shit what you think and their operational response to everything is Or what?, again the end result is just troll-feeding. The fact is that MSNBC and CNN can't quit their Clownstick coverage even if they want to. He's keeping them afloat at this point.
All that aside, again the tragic flaw in Taibbi's ICP thesis is that all those smug, condescending liberals and cynical politicians let these good people down. And that's just a bucket of steaming horseshit, from top to bottom, starting with the premise that they're all "good people" to begin with.
Taibbi himself contributes heavily to clarifying that misperception, in his constant recounting of rally attendees and Clownstick supporters he talks to, who repeat nasty, hateful lies and wear t-shirts with lovely sayings like She's a Cunt and Fuck Your Feelings. Taibbi recounts how on Election Day, outside Clownstick Tower, some doofus in a MAGA hat tapped Taibbi on his shoulder, asked him if he was part of the media, and when Taibbi answered in the affirmative, the guy sticks his middle finger in Taibbi's face, tells him to go fuck himself, and walks away ruffling his young son's hair.
Real family values these folks have, classy right up to the very end. It's a goddamned shame there aren't any more Hunter Thompson types around; for one, Thompson was six-foot-six and usually on some combination of mind-altering substances. These fake-tough punks would think twice pulling that shit on someone if they thought there might actually be consequences. But they have become accustomed to thinking of journalists as effete pussies who can be penned off and ridiculed, and they won't even try to fight back. I wonder how they got that idea.
But it's too bad Taibbi didn't drop that asshole. He probably felt sorry for him, because only someone who is a miserable fucking failure in life does that to a complete stranger. But that's no excuse for what seems to be becoming increasingly common behavior for these fools. Imagine what they'd have been like if she'd won, what with their candidate queering the water all through October by claiming the election was rigged.
Unless he won, of course. Then it's fair. Heads I win, tails you lose. How you like them apples?
To provide a little anecdata to the contrary, I know quite a few Clownstick supporters in real life, and I honestly can't imagine any of them wearing those t-shirts or flipping off strangers like that. Talking trash on Facebook is about their speed, which is nothing. But even there, it makes you wonder why the mediots keep giving any time or space at all to these stereotypical angry maroons. Feeding idiot trolls is what got us all into this in the first place.
But again, these salt-of-the-earth types are exactly the same people that voted for assholes like clockwork, because they could be counted on to keep blacks, gays, uppity wimmins, whoever, In Their Place. Their support of Clownstick is nothing new; they have supported assholes and liars for their entire lives, gladly. They come from generations of people who have learned to assuage their own failures in life by retelling some Dolchstosslegende iteration, not worrying about whether there's a nugget of truth to it or not. They have spent generations telling themselves and each other that they're the only "real Americans," even as they hoover up extra tax dollars from all those blue-state fags and hippies they despise.
Is the American political system a brutal, corrupt joke, bought and paid for, owned and operated by cynical, greedy scumbags? Reader, you know it is. It is at least as mindlessly cynical, as a response, to elevate the epitome of the corrupt, venal grifter to a position of power. And yet the "liberal" media, including Taibbi, apparently as some sort of self-inoculation against being too smug or condescending, continue to engage in this pointless effort of "understanding" these nasty, hateful people for overthrowing the shackles of their overlords. That's not why they voted for Clownstick.
They voted for him because they hate Hillary Clinton, and they wanted to stick their middle fingers in the faces of caricatured liberals. It's not complicated. Clownstick could come to their houses, fuck their wives and daughters in front of them, and take a huge shit on their dinner table, and they would vote for him again if they thought it would make George Clooney cry. This is how they function.
This is not the reality any rational person would have wanted or envisioned, but it is the reality we have right now, because it is the political system and media and electorate we have. All televised media across the political spectrum, with their endless rounds of BREAKING NEWS, have failed, and the world would be a better place if they were simply shut down for a year or two. Here's a news flash for all of you fart-knocking cable dipshits -- when everything is breaking news, nothing is. You cannot maintain this level of theatrical, pearl-clutching hysteria over every blasted thing, only to turn to the same fetid gene pool of "analysts" to kick around the goat's-head of faux-debate.
MSNBC have proven themselves to be nearly as awful and shallow as Fixed Noise; the last several times I checked in over the last week or so, no matter which program or host, they found increasingly forced and cheesy ways to shoehorn in a lengthy plug for Megyn Kelly's new stint at the network. We get it; you shelled out a lot of dough for her and now need to suck everyone's dick to try to recoup some of that money. Good luck with it, but life's too short. Maybe the weekend prison documentaries will help shore up the shortfall.
Make no mistake -- the media will do whatever is most expedient in this mess. Clownstick supporters are correct in their assumptions that corporate media are instinctively conditioned to protect whatever pose the establishment wants them to. This is by definition; corporations are, after all, the establishment. This includes Fixed Noise.
But as mentioned above, these are the same mediots that slavishly promote every inept rage-tweet and senior moment, these are the same morons that will literally show an empty podium while they wait around for him to lob the same jabber he did last week, while they lob their own inane, value-free repartee. The only thing they reveal with their endless hot-take patter is how little they know and understand.
A few days ago, in anticipation of James Comey's testimony tomorrow, I happened to catch a few minutes of a couple of media maroons (pretty sure it was Chris Cillizza on Wolf Blister's show, like it matters) talking about how, while the Clownstick administration could prevent Comey from testifying by invoking executive privilege, it was almost unthinkable they would do such a thing because -- get this -- it might make them look bad.
This is what I mean when I say that these people are deeply stupid. This is what I mean when I say that their "commentary" and "analysis" are literally value-free, in that they are worth nothing, add nothing of value to what you or anyone else might know about anything, and that any amount of money you offer in return for what they say is currency that might as well be set on fire, or used for bumwipe.
Seriously. What kind of asshole would look at the operational style of this administration, at the things it has said and done virtually every single day since (and including) its inauguration (not to mention every day of the campaign), and conclude that there is a single person involved in the daily workings of the executive branch of the United States government that gives even one-twentieth of a fuck about how anything looks? And why should they give such a fuck? Is someone going to hold them accountable?
Let's put it this way -- the only way Comey was going to get shut down by executive privilege was if he really had something solid and earth-shattering. If he testifies (and the prepared advance transcript is here), it is because it's nothing to write home about. To seriously postulate that the administration felt at all compelled to let him testify because they were afraid of "how it would look" if they shut it down, is to have been asleep for a very long time.
As lamentable of an exercise as that particular episode was, it served as a perfect example of the media's biggest problem -- people like Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cillizza act like the people in power are supposed to give a fuck what Wolf Blitzer and Chris Cillizza think and say about them. And we all know they do not give a fuck. It is plain to everyone that these media eunuchs have nothing of importance, and fulfill no truly useful role. They sit there and preen and pose like they're all Edward Fucking Murrow, but we all know that they're incapable of investigating or generating any facts or news on their own, and are content to sit there and regurgitate various strains of conventional wisdom as informed commentary. And they know that we know this. They are impotent, toothless. They are lapdogs who pretend to be watchdogs. They are there to chase down midnight tweets and be pushed around and lied to by a homunculus like Sean Spicer.
There is no purpose transcribing the blatant lies of a White House press conference, anymore than there was a purpose to sitting in a pen at the rallies, to transcribe Clownstick's campaign lies, and be verbally abused by the chuckle-headed mutants attending these idiotic escapades. All it does is give these ugly proceedings the dangerous veneer of legitimacy. Especially when most of them don't bother at all to see what the opposition party is up to -- except insofar as they respond to whatever daily idiocy the moron-in-chief is up to.
Yet they are exactly the media this electorate deserves -- fat, impotent, useless, lying or ignoring what's really important. Maybe we need to have health-care policy rewritten by Mitch McConnell before enough people get what's at stake here. Maybe we need to have Li'l Lord Rage-Tweet piss off enough of our allies and trading partners to realize that while we're the largest economy on paper for now, the demographics are not remotely in our favor, because we're only five percent of the earth's population, and we have decided that we're happy with having ten percent of our population own eighty-five percent of the assets. Maybe we needed to have this thieving, scummy grifter and his wretched crime family barge into our house, steal our silverware and defile our furniture right in front of us, to get the message.