Saturday, October 28, 2017

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Hopefully the beginning of the end is nigh, but hope is neither a plan nor a shovel. It's more like the beginning of the beginning, and which way this goes is going to depend on a lot of factors. The Republicans -- including the newly anointed "mavericks" Corker and Flake -- are willing to go down with the SS Clownstick, so long as they push one more tax cut for the rich fucks who count their money by weight.

If you believe that the conduct of this maladministration is treasonous (and Seth Abramson has painstakingly constructed such a case for months with countless Twitter mega-threads), and you believe (reasonably) that most or all US Senators know even more of the details than we peons, then it's simple math to figure that the Goopers that still support these treacherous fucks are at best opportunistic bastards, but really just willing accomplices.

(The Uranium One story sounds like the usual distractive bullshit, but let's just state for the record that if Mueller wants to investigate that as well, that's fine, and regardless, if any criminal conduct is found in that, then those involved should face appropriate criminal prosecution and justice. Period.)

So the majority party in this country has already made it abundantly clear that rules, norms, and laws mean little. They stole a Supreme Court seat in broad daylight, for fuck's sake. Overlooking a little bidness treason is just something friends do for each other, when there's tax cuts on the line and they're scared shitless of the rube base.

All of which makes it very difficult to be optimistic about the Mueller investigations and impending indictments. Clownstick will pardon the people indicted, including himself, the Republicunts will let him, and what the fuck are you gonna do about it? Vote? If they let you, if they decide to count it. Ask Jon Ossoff about all that.

Or maybe #TheResistance will take to the streets. Okay, good luck with that. Remember that glorious weekend of Pussy Power, record demonstrations across the country, biggest protest ever? What did it change? Not a goddamned thing. They can wait you out, the way they waited out Occupy Wall Street and the pussy-hat protesters and all the rest. They are pure muscle and gall. They don't give a shit what you think.

Everyone points out correctly that Emperor Snowflake is not the disease but a symptom. That's true but incomplete:  America is beset by multiple diseases, not the least of which is that a significant portion of its inhabitants have the intellects of farm animals, and vote in the dumbest motherfuckers they can find, at all levels.

Nearly all of what ails this country can be alleviated by a very modest amount of economic redistribution from the assholes that have more than they can spend in a dozen lifetimes, many of whom didn't even work for it in the first place. But their ever-increasing hoarding has driven the country into a deep hole.

Snowflake wants to drop the top tax rate to 20%. Fine, eliminate all the loopholes, and you got yourself a deal. And I mean all the loopholes. Straight twenty, no exceptions or discounts, no bullshit write-offs, no offshoring profits indefinitely. Call their bluff, because there's no goddamned way any of them, corporations or inherited Walmart layabouts, will go for it. Their goal is zero tax, and the proles pay for privatized services that work for shit.

And the worst part of that particular disease is that it's shamefully simple to get the rubes to go for it. Steinbeck may not have known how perfectly on-the-nose his observation was about poor Americans seeing themselves as temporarily displaced millionaires. The most People of Walmart dipshit is convinced that they're just one lucky lottery ticket from the good life.

That is not an exaggeration, and once you understand that, it suddenly becomes clear how people keep voting against their own rational self-interest every time. They seriously believe that if they give the Koch Brothers another fucking tax break, that will somehow translate into an extra buck an hour at their soul-deadening widget-stamping job.

So there's a very good chance that Mueller will unroll a metric fuckton of irrefutable facts, and it won't matter. And there won't be anything you can do about it. You wanna talk about hope, well, I hope I'm wrong. But there are no surprises anymore. We're the frogs in the water, and it's been warming the whole time. This is right out of the "how empires fall" playbook.

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