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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Litmus Test

Folks are always taking those dopey Which Dukes of Hazzard Character Are You? quizzes on the Facebook and such. I have here for you a much simpler, quicker, and infinitely more accurate psych battery for you:

  1. If you are angry about NFL players taking a quiet knee during the national anthem before the game, than you were about nazis in Charlottesville waving the flags of extinguished enemy nations, you are:
    A. an idiot
    B. an asshole
    C. a charter member of Cult 45
    D. all of the above
  2. If you insist that protesting during the anthem is the same as protesting against the anthem, and therefore "disrespectful,", but you were unconcerned about a presidential candidate taunting a tortured combat veteran and heckling a Gold Star family whose son was killed in combat, you are:
    A. a moron
    B. a liar
    C. unclear on what the First Amendment actually means
    D. all of the above
Pretty simple, right? If there's one thing that's depressingly consistent about the rube contingent that infests and propagates and keeps this nation down in perpetuity, it that these shameless assholes fetishize the symbols of democracy to a creepy extent, while simultaneously expressing utter hostility to the most important principle of democracy, that of free speech.

They seem unclear on what the First Amendment actually means, and what it entails. It is meaningless if it doesn't protect unpopular speech. It is useless if it does not allow nazis to march peacefully in a college town, or athletes to express their concerns in one of the few ways a black man in a culturally prominent role can get the attention of white people.

I don't want to hear anymore bullshit about "disrespect" from someone who talked shit about whether John McCain is a war hero or not. I've said it before, but let's do it once more:  I've taken more than my share of pot-shots at Poor Ol' Straight Talk, especially when he summoned the Arctic Harpy as his running mate in '08 (probably by saying her name aloud five times in front of a bathroom mirror). But it was always about things he said or did in a political context.

The Vietnam War, the farther we get away from it, looms more and more as a moral catastrophe in the US' history, which is saying something. There's not much debate these days from any political position that it was strategically and morally indefensible in retrospect. And one might say something about the morality of dropping death from far above, frequently on defenseless rural villages.

But here's the deal:  when McCain was shot down in his bomber, both arms and a leg were fractured. When the Vietnamese pulled McCain from his downed plane, they crushed his shoulder with a rifle butt and bayoneted him. He was tortured for months before the Vietnamese decided to make a propaganda effort to release him, since McCain's father was the supreme Navy commander for the Pacific region. McCain refused to be released before officers that had been held longer; the enraged Vietnamese immediately re-broke both his arms, knocked out all his teeth, and tortured him mercilessly for months after. (David Foster Wallace describes all this and more in his famous essay Up, Simba, or you can read the rundown here.)

McCain certainly has plenty of faults -- he was a cocky, swaggering asshole who routinely endangered other pilots and shipmates, and after his release from the Hanoi Hilton, he treated his first wife horribly. And again, the war itself is and was morally irredeemable. However, none of those things detracts from the simple fact that McCain endured horrendous treatment that would break most of us, and much of that came after he conducted himself honorably by refusing early release from a literal torture chamber.

All of that occurred while Bone Spurs McHairpiece was going through his own "personal Vietnam" by supposedly fucking everything that moved within reach of him. For all of his flaws, John McCain has more honor and courage in the sweat on his droopy old-man balls, than Fuckface von Clownstick ever had in his entire miserable body.

So anyone who's taking that "disrespect" tack about professional athletes expressing their opinion about something that affects many of them on a very personal level, they can shove it up their ass, take it up with their disgrace of a "leader," a crazy old man who's still butt-hurt that the NFL refused to let him buy the Buffalo Bills, because he's a greasy shyster who never pays his fucking bills and screws over everyone who's dumb enough to do business with.

Strange Magic

As everyone predicted, oversized machine hack Luther Strange lost his primary in 'murka's Taint to Christofascist Roy, I say, Roy Moore. What's funny -- but like everything else, not at all surprising -- is that HRH Emperor Snowflake has backtracked through his tweet-machine to drop his inconvenient truths down the digital poop-chute.

Make no mistake:  Roy Moore is as whackjob as they come, a true embarrassment to the notion of an impartial judicial bench beholden to the law of the land, as opposed to his interpretations of the verses of his book. He's a Christian Sharia judge, pure and simple.

Over the next year, we'll be hearing any number of things about money raised and spent, various modes of voter suppression, etc. It will be presented in the context of fatalistic inevitability, as if it is merely a matter of sheer determinism that people will always vote for the best-funded candidate, or that they are powerless to take steps to ensure that they are not unduly franchised.

So that's what needs to be pummeled into the brain stems of Alabamans who might find themselves repulsed at the idea of this peacocking little shithead representing their state in the US Senate -- you don't have to vote for the guy with the most commercials, or the last commercial you hear before the election. You are still allowed to go to the public liberry; you are still allowed to turn away from this week's Two Minutes of Hate for uppity black athaletes, and read a book or an article about anything, anything at all.

Also, too:  you have more than thirteen months before the election. That's a lot of time to double-check with your county elections office and make sure you are correctly registered to vote. It might take a fifteen-minute phone call to do that. It might take slightly longer to register to vote by mail, which I promise you will be the best move you ever made. If your state requires voter ID, you have time to acquire that ID. Maybe it costs twenty bucks. That's not fair, but even poor people are usually able to look around them and find twenty bucks worth of things they can get by without for a couple weeks -- smokes, snacks, cable, etc.

We can debate the fairness of things like voter IDs, but the point really is that all of these simple steps described in the above paragraph, for someone who might be uncertain about their ability to exercise their right as a citizen of this country, can be done well before next year's election. Hell, it can be done before this Christmas, probably before Halloween.

So how badly do you want it, how urgent is it to you to stand against the fuckery of the world right now, and the agents of that fuckery, such as Roy Moore? Either it's important enough to step up and take care of your business -- here, now, while the election's still a mile off -- or it isn't. Either you have skin in this game, and something to lose -- your health care, your right to get married or adopt, your basic right to walk down the street and live your life and mind your fucking business without being treated like a subhuman -- or you don't.

Personally, I don't have any skin in any of these games. Being a straight, married, middle-aged, gainfully employed white guy with insurance, I'm in the fucking wheelhouse. But I still care about what kind of country this is going to be, and we all have to understand that it takes constant effort. It does not end with the election, it begins with the election -- if your candidate wins, then you work to support their efforts and platform; if a Roy Moore type wins, you do what you can to dump him the next time around. That's it. That's all there is to this.

I don't live anywhere near Alabama, I don't know anyone there, and I doubt I'll ever set foot within a thousand miles of there. (A southern man don't need me around anyhow.) So there's nothing I can do about whether Alabama sends Roy Moore to the Senate next year or not. That's up to the residents of that state. No one wants to hear about how someone's diaper is full -- either you can vote or you can't, and either you pay attention and take care of business or you don't.

Sunday, September 24, 2017

Bum's Rush

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday, September 18, 2017

The Rehabilitation of Baghdad Bob

If the denizens of Tinseltown haven't torn any ligaments stroking each other and patting their own backs, they might want to take a moment to reflect on how sometimes the view of them as supercilious dilettantes is justified. Is there a particular need to resurrect Sean Spicer's career right now, that the peons were unaware of, and do our dancing entertainment monkeys need to lead that effort at the very same awards show where they repeatedly (and rightly) lambaste Spicer's former(?) boss.

It shouldn't need to be said that if you want people to take your stated political convictions seriously, as in I may or may not agree with everything you say, but it sounds like you've thought your positions through and are making an effort to be intellectually honest and consistent, then you don't pull cheap stunts like that. Spicer is not allowed to be in on the joke, because he is the joke; worse yet, he was the willing homunculus for a lying, corrupt, demented old man and his crime family.

In making Spicey the Sammy the Bull of the west coast political smart set, Stephen Colbert and whoever else masterminded this nonsense exposed themselves once again that, like their media weasel counterparts, clickbait and eyeballs rank over everything, including political principles. This little asshole actively worked to undermine this nation's confidence in their institutions. He willingly enabled the most corrosive political figure in our lifetimes to seek rhetorical cover behind lies and transparent bullshit. No one forced him, and I'm sure the checks cleared.

Spicer is a henchman, a dogsbody. He should not be stunt-cast on the Emmys, or invited to Harvard as a guest lecturer, He should be completely bereft of further career options, and go back to his rightful place in the food chain -- as the White House Easter Bunny.

Sunday, September 17, 2017

Ladies and Gentlemen, the "Leader" of the Free World

Some places refer to HRH Emperor Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick by his given name and official title. "Respect for the office" or some such bullshit, as if he has ever shown any respect for the fucking office.

Here's reason #1,359,277 why I will never refer to him as such, ever. He retweeted that the other day, but he cries like the LITTLE BITCH that he is every time someone does something similar about him. Fuck him, and fuck his dipshit supporters that, no matter their meaningless demurrals, support this kind of nonsense as well.

There are no two ways about this -- Snowflake/Clownstick is an embarrassment to this country. He's a miserable whiny cunt, and a horrible excuse for a human being. It's going to take a generation just to get rid of the shame of having this piece of shit in charge of anything more complicated than an ice cream truck.

So. What's it gonna be, 'murka? Tired of having a disgrace run the place? Are we motivated enough to get off our lazy asses and actually show up to the voting booth next time, and every time?

I don't just blame the dipshit deplorables for putting this fucking fool in a position of power -- I blame every putative "liberal" and "progressive" who just couldn't stomach voting for her, who both-sided the choice until they lost all rational perspective, or just took it all for granted because the retard pollsters insisted she had this in the bag.

You know why they insisted that she had it in the bag? Because no rational person could conceive of a situation in which enough people were stupid enough to vote for a lifelong three-card monte huckster. It's that simple. The majority assumed that the moron minority was smaller than it actually was. No one wanted to believe there are so many dumbasses in one place, that they can't see the craven misogyny, projection, and outright incompetence that fills every pore of Snowflake's fat diaper-clad body.

I said this shortly after the election, and it still stands:  liberals who were paying attention were forced to decide whether the nation was in the process of becoming something we no longer recognized, or whether it simply reinforced what it has always been in so many respects.

Either you side with college-turd tiki-torch suburbo-nazis, or you don't. Either you side with fat militia cosplay wannabes toting assault weapons, or you don't. Either you side with a fat, dementia-addled old man who rage-tweets his dumps and routinely retweets sentiments from "white genocide" types and wishes physical harm on those who oppose him, or you don't. I don't like the window-breaking antifa types, nor do I care for the trigger-warning campus speech police. But I'll take a hundred of them every day of the week over a single one of these endlessly projecting crybaby hypocrites.

And I sincerely hope that every one of them gets what's coming to them, which is a continuation -- an acceleration, in fact -- of all the circumstances that drove them into the arms of a con man.

Friday, September 15, 2017

Into the Void

Something non-political for a change, and infinitely more momentous:  after twenty years of faithful service, the Saturn spacecraft Cassini reached the end of its life-span, and plunged into the planet's surface. It took some unbelievable photos over the years. That's an amazing thing, one that transcends the smallness and venality of our earthly concerns, the amateur Kremlinology and dopey reality-teevee politicking.

Cassini serves as a wondrous reminder of what the human mind can achieve in its quest for real knowledge and our place in the universe.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Days of Whine and Poses, Slight Return

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Days of Whine and Poses

Edroso, as always, in on the right track here:
This goes back to something I've been saying forever about wingnut whining -- for example, when they complain that Yale and Harvard are prejudiced against them, I always say: Why not quitcher bitchin' and instead make Bob Jones and Liberty University the intellectual lighthouses to which the best students flock? Then you won't need to worry about Yale and Harvard! Bypass the gatekeepers! Be the star you are!

Similarly, why worry about the Times rankings at all? (Shoot, Regnery doesn't -- they say they'll stop using the Times rankings in their marketing which, given their bulk-sales-to-gomers approach, probably won't make any difference.) Conservatives having been saying for decades that the Times is untrustworthy and irrelevant -- why not instead lobby for the New York Post, Breitbart et alia to have their own lists, and then you can all enthuse that D'Souza's Liberal Fascism for the Even Dumber is #1 on the American Thinker Best Seller List?

The answer's pretty obvious: These guys don't really believe what they say they believe. They don't want the path cleared so they can be judged by the wide world on their own merits. What they want are the glittering prizes their enemies dispense, because somewhere deep in their blackened little souls they burn with desire for the approbation of the people they spend their days raging against, like spurned teenage suitors. And, if they can't have the prizes, they can at least retain the boogiemen -- Hollyweird! Eggheads! Shut Up and Sing! -- that they and their yokel supporters can invoke whenever they feel like having a good cry about how persecuted they are.
But I have to disagree, ever so slightly. "Conservatism" as we olds -- say, at least old enough to recall Saint Reagan's tenure clearly and in detail -- understood that word is long dead. It found itself temporarily supplanted by "neo" movementarian goons whose sole goal was to get us into Iraq (and this was before 9/11 gave us a convenient pretext). But one the neocons' war games became, well, inconvenient to their professed intemellectual strategery, the money guys got their Citizens United ruling, took a look around, and realized that what a nation full of reality-teevee-besotted retards really needed was some Real Housewives types to go to Washington, flip some tables, pull some weaves.

That engine is now being driven solely by full-blown, unapologetic reactionaries. And what reactionaries do more than anything else (as you might guess from the label) is complain. They react. And that's the problem with these assholes. They don't know how to govern, because they don't know how to take action. They only know how to rhetorically position themselves against what their sworn enemies do. They are not for anything, except destroying things. They don't have any true volition of their own.

I mean, Roy's base point is absolutely correct -- they are a bunch of fucking crybabies. And that's annoying. But the really scary thing is realizing that that really is the only song they know anymore. It was always a factor in how they defined themselves and differentiated themselves from, let's say, normal human beings. At this point, it appears to be about the only way they define themselves.

It cannot be pointed out too often how completely devoid of simple logic the conservatards' culture model really is. In their mythos, Evil Hollyweird, land of queers and jooos, forces their warped "values" on helpless reg'lar foke, who want nothin' more than good wholesome entertainment, like Hee Haw and such. (Never mind, of course, that the redder the state, the higher the divorce rate and the porn rate and the substance abuse rate, and on and on.)

Of course, none of this remotely squares with their endless jabbering about the Free Market and the Silent Majority -- or, in Dinesh D'Douchebag's case among so many others, Morality. In other words, per their pet theories, if the clear majority of the sainted 'murkin populace were really all that het up about the librul elites pushing them around at the box office, and the free market works its ineffable magic in response, then why aren't they putting these smut peddlers out of bidness, and putting their own stuff in?

I mean, did it ever occur to these culture monkeys why, of all the available networks, a show like (to cite just one notorious example) Family Guy airs on the network owned by the same asshole that peddles their propaganda on another of his networks? That maybe this is all just a long con, and they've always been the real marks?

Sunday, September 10, 2017

The Continuing Adventures of Florida Man

Good luck to everyone in Florida with one hurricane barreling through and another on its way, although there's a good chance that Irma and Jose will take plenty of morons with them.

The Freewheelin' Fuckface Von Clownstick

I don't know if the PTB at the FTFNY doesn't realize how many people are utterly repelled by bullshit like this, or they just don't care anymore. If they want to keep putting the "anal" in "analysis" and pulling nonsense like that out of their poopchutes, about all anyone can do is just avoid them like the plague. And of course WaPo isn't far behind. These people just can't help themselves.