Access Washington

Just finished reading David Cay Johnston's The Making of [Fuckface Von Clownstick], and it's a very good (not great, but very good and quick) compilation of the countless small crimes of character His Orangeness rode into his current unearned position of power. As a career investigative reporter, Johnston for the most part wisely avoids editorializing and "analysis" and lets the ugly facts do all the talking.

There were a few specific items in the book I hadn't been aware of, but no real surprises. But there are three (actually more, but let's focus on three) major factors in Clownstick's rise to infamy that Johnston's book ably captures. Here they are in (imho) ascending order of importance:

1. During the Atlantic City casino years, the level of corruption and incompetence in New Jersey's gaming regulation boards was nothing short of criminal. Clownstick should never have been let anywhere near a casino, much less allowed to own one. Every job and investor stake lost in his failures is on the head of every corrupt gaming regulator who chose to look the other way instead of doing their fucking job.
2. In chapter after chapter, Johnston lists one failed scam after another, where Clownstick misrepresented himself and his family and his companies and his interests and stakes in any given project, from Chump "University" to Punta Bandera. In all of these, once the fish get wise and sue his ass, Clownstick ends up settling, contrary to his frequent boasts and LIES. And in all of these cases, the courts sealed the details of the settlements. Gee, it might have been nice for the public to know about these repeated incidents of fraud before the motherfucker ran for fucking political office.
3. The media sucks. Let it be shouted from the rooftops till all our eardrums bleed:  OUR MEDIA FUCKING SUCKS. More than any other entity, more than the in-the-pocket Jersey gaming commissions or the institutionally impotent court system, feckless media careerism is what propelled Clownstick into his current seat. Since the early 1980s, he has lied, bullied, cajoled, stroked, and bamboozled them collectively into giving him a platform to spout his LIES and nonsense, and then left them to lamely scramble after him and maybe (usually not) try to clean up the mess, too little too late.

To cite just one string of examples, how many times during the 2016 campaign was that asshole allowed to phone in from his gold-plated shitter to the Sunday morning follies, on all the networks, one after the other? How the fuck do you interview a presidential candidate over the phone, again and again, especially one with such a tenuous relationship with empirical reality? Yet they let him get away with it, over and over.

 

At no point did any of them say, Fuck it. We're not interviewing him unless he shows up, and then we're hammering him on at least some of the lies. Nope, they just let him call in, say what he wanted to, half-heartedly challenge him on his more egregious lies, but at no point did they stand up to him, or god forbid just refuse to have him on because of the incessant lying.

 

Have I mentioned that that cocksucker does nothing but LIE, about every goddamned thing?

And if today's collective marathon of pearl-clutching in defense of Baghdad Barb doesn't make all this clear, I don't know what will. These people are fucking terrible at their jobs. Or maybe I've just been misinformed all these years as to what their jobs actually are. Maybe they're supposed to suck up to powerful people who despise them. That certainly would explain things much better.

Look, we all get the rapidly changing institutional factors impacting their long-standing revenue model. Even the phrase "twenty-four-hour news cycle" means something completely different than it did from, say 1983 to 2015. Seriously. It used to mean that the cable news channels had so much airtime to fill, practically anything became a news story, or more likely, real news stories got beaten into the ground with incessant coverage and overly obsessive detail.

But the meaning of the phrase has changed since He Who Shall Not Be Named threw his hairpiece into the ring. Now with things happening constantly, there's not enough time to keep up with a given story and cover it with due diligence.

Here's another example:  Sean Hannity, Fox's flagship common-tater, was outed less than two weeks ago as one of three clients of Michael "Smithers" Cohen, the obsequious bratva-linked Clownstick toady, who clearly wants to spend the rest of his life polishing his idol's little cheeto. Now, it's bad enough that Cohen isn't really even a lawyer, he's a "businessman" (big finger quotes there, folks) who happens to have a law degree. He's a wannabe Ray Donovan-type "fixer" who uses said law degree to help his main client take care of things, like paying off his inconvenient hoors.

Now, Hannity has been extremely vocal in his defense of Smithers Cohen and Fuckface Von Clownstick, never once disclosing that he, Hannity, was another client of Cohen. When it finally did come out -- thanks to actual investigative reporting by The Guardian, a British media outlet -- Hannity lamely averred that he was an opinion and entertainment guy, not a serious journalist. NBC fired Brian Williams for far less (although Williams is back in a late-might slot at MSNBC these days, but still), but Fox took it all in stride and said they were fine with Hannity's excuse. Within twenty-four hours of the disclosure, Hannity was joking about it on-air with Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.

Since then -- again, bearing in mind that the initial revelation about Hannity was less than two weeks ago -- we have also found out that Hannity is a slumlord, using his ill-gotten pelf to buy up distressed properties with HUD-backed loans, and promptly jacking up the rent, because he's a fucking scumbag. Oh, and no one is surprised that Hannity has free-spending HUD director Ben Carson on with some regularity. It's all just a big coincidence. This sort of thing, this blatant collusion between a key anchorperson and the people he reports on and talks with, would have been unacceptable, even at Fox, just a few years ago.

Not to mention Clownstick's bizarre call-in rant to Fox & Fiends last Thursday, which now (please please) might be a monthly standing appointment. Fox is now officially a propaganda organ for these fuckers, and they aren't bothering to conceal it one bit.

Do gutless media twats like Chris Cillizza pontificate on those sorts of inconvenient truths? Why no, they prefer to grumble about the incivility of comedians calling out lazy media tools for their feckless, dickless careerism. Fucking lazy hypocrites, all of them. They are in the wrong line of work. They really are hurting America.

There are no consequences or accountability for bad behavior anymore. And that's what Johnston's book is really about, in the end -- this steaming orange turd is in charge because at every step of the way, when the courts, the media, the fucking gaming commissions had a chance to hold this fucking piece of shit accountable for the things he'd done, they pushed it off. They let it go; they let him go.

Fuckface Von Clownstick's entire existence -- indeed, his sole actual skill -- has been an extended exercise in getting other people to pay for his high-on-the-hog lifestyle. And he's been enabled the entire time by access journalism, from Page Six to the Today show, these careerist hacks who are more concerned with getting eyeballs and filling airtime than in calling an asshole what he is.

In a rational world, we'd drop him and his vile minions off on a remote island with all the Beltway hacks, let them deal with each other, and never hear from any of them again. They made him, they should be the ones to have to live with him.

The Integrity Pose

It's hard to decide whose Last Honest Man pose is more tiresome, James Comey or John Kasich. They're both fucking terrible, and only in comparison with a serious dirtbag like Brad Parscale does Kasich's mewling bullshit come out as even slightly less obnoxious.

Don't West Your Breath

There's something hilarious watching culture critics trying to get a handle on Kanye West's newfound bromance with the one and only Fuckface Von Clownstick. Because they are who they are and do what they do for a living, these critics contort themselves in order to frame a scenario in which a "genius" like West strategizes his public love for Archie Bunker in a Bozo the Clown wig.

It doesn't occur to these dumbasses that maybe West was never a genius in the first place, as we have amply chronicled here over the years. He's certainly a special combination of cynical marketing asshole and borderline retard, scamming his moron fans with $120 plain t-shirts and 52-page "books." It makes sense that he would align himself with a fellow money-grubbing dirtbag, gulling the rubes who are simply too dumb to know the difference between actual human intelligence and mere animal cunning.

More and more it seems that "critics" are merely hacks operating without any context -- historical, cultural, or even musical -- for bolstering their empty assertions. West is not a "genius" simply because he says he is, or because they say he is. If anything, it serves as a dead-certain indicator of sheer incompetence and total lack of critical thinking skills to bestow the g-word on a fucking clown with a bad rhyming dictionary and an AutoTune machine.

This is the natural consequence of everyone having access to the internet -- there's going to be a certain percentage of "writers" who are simply too stupid to know how stupid they and their insights really are. I keep seeing these digital scriveners jabber with all sincerity what a musical genius West is, without ever providing salient examples.

Surely there must be a snippet of remarkable lyrics or music to serve as demonstration of this supposed visionary greatness. You start to wonder after a while why we're just supposed to accept it as a given. And how does this nonsense end up in supposedly respectable publications such as the New Yorker?

The fact is that West and Clownstick were made for each other. They're two peas in a pod -- shallow, ignorant, narcissistic, obsessed with materialism and with their own delusions of greatness, stuck with trophy wives who are nearly as useless as they are, completely unable to see how mediocre they truly are.

The late great Sam Kinison once said in an interview about Whoopi Goldberg, "A nation decides not to hurt someone's feelings." That was unnecessarily mean on Kinison's part, as Whoopi Goldberg actually does have some talent and has said her share of sensible things over the years. But that nasty shot applies really well to Kanye West and his new orange butt-buddy.

The world would be a lot better off if we had never heard of either of these fucking buffoons. The best parts of both of them ran down the crack of their mothers' asses and ended up as stains on their respective mattresses. They can't fuck off soon enough.

Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury

Gee, you'd think that if they really wanted Mike Pence to feel safe at the convention of the gun manufacturers' lobby, they'd just post a bunch of armed schoolteachers. I hope the NRA fleeces these dipshits out of every loose dime they have.

Rogue States

After the seeming rapprochement between North and South Korea the other day, a few thoughts occurred, mostly in the realm of cautious optimism. I'd say LGM's Robert Farley pretty much captures my observations on what's happened so far, and what's likely to happen.

When Kim Jong Un says "denuclearization" and Mike Pompeo or Emperor Snowflake says the same word, there's a very good chance that two different meanings are being conveyed. It seems incredibly unlikely that Kim would surrender weapons that he and his father spent decades developing and building. At best he might agree to a cessation of testing and production, but in exchange for what? Farley is absolutely correct that on the off chance that NK completely disarms, with or without major concessions in return, Snowflake actually would deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bu Snowflake is who he is, and at heart he is a loudmouth, a fuckup, a loser who manages to escape accountability. He'll find a way to fuck this up, and it's because he thinks that the outcome of Korea will serve as a warning to the Iranian mullahs. It doesn't occur to him that maybe North Korea -- and South Korea, for that matter -- observe his bad-faith dealing with Iran, the constant overt attempts to derail and abrogate the JCPOA, and assume that we'll deal with them the same way.

Analysts continually try to assess Kim Jong Un and determine whether he's a "rational" or "irrational" actor. A truly rational actor would do exactly what Kim's been doing, and be sure to cover his ass going into this "summit" that's supposed to resolve things. Even before the current escalation in hostilities with NK, as much as it pains me to say, Kim seems to have been a rational actor for most or all of his time at the helm, certainly more so than Snowflake in his tenure so far.

Although NK is as much a cult as a country, the fact is that the Kim regime has to balance dynamic internal tensions as well as fend off potential attacks from the US, as well as the cynical game China and Japan and Russia (who have various practical historic and strategic reasons to want Korea to remain divided) are playing. His reaching out to his counterpart across the DMZ may actually have a small core of sincerity (Kim was educated in Switzerland, and is obviously much more westernized than his father), but the clear strategic goal for him right now is peeling South Korea away from our orbit, maybe driving a wedge with them on continuing sanctions.

The US' strategic goal with Iran seems to be whatever the Saudis and Israelis want. It's pretty clear that the Snowflake administration's short-term goal is to either provoke or contrive Iran into a war, further entrenching US troops in a region where they've been stuck for more than a quarter-century now, with no end in sight.

For someone who claimed to have wondrous prescience and profound insight into the folly of conflicts in that region -- without, of course, being able to articulate any of those observations even on a retroactive basis -- Snowflake sure seems eager to stoke that region's eternal grievances.

At least there's this -- once we've invaded Iran, there should be logistical continuity from Afghanistan to Syria, thus hopefully simplifying supply chains and movement of troops and materiel.

Dinner for Schmucks

As it does every year, the White House Correspondents' Dinner serves as a reminder that while individual journalists might be fine people, collectively they pretty much all fucking suck, are terrible at their jobs, and should be replaced at the earliest possible moment. Michelle Wolf did the two things a comedian is supposed to do, which is be funny and tell the truth, and if the truth is ugly, whose fucking fault is that?

Consider:  at the same exact moment Wolf smacked up the crowd with a few "[Clownstick] is so broke" yo momma jokes, and threw the lightest of shade at Baghdad Barb's overdone mascara, the so-called leader of the free world was at an indoor soccer field in Bumfuck, Michigan reciting his usual list of lies and calumniations, calling everyone who disagrees with him -- including journamalists -- traitors and enemies of the state. (That the pearl-clutching took some attention away from the magat rally is one small bright point.) So of course Wolf is the problem.

We have a real situation here, folks. If anyone can be characterized categorically as "enemies of the state," it is indeed the corporate media, from CNN to MSNBC to Fox to the NY Times and WaPo. Certainly the degrees of severity vary, and outlets such as the Post have made the effort to include some diamonds among the dross.

But consider Maga Haberman's whinging tweet about how poor Baghdad Barb was forced at gunpoint to sit there and "absorb intense criticism" about things that are objectively true. The only thing Wolf said about Barb's physical appearance was a throwaway line about "smoky eye," and as far as the critique on Barb's job performance, Wolf barely grazed her.

Haberman, of course, thinks she's being "objective" when she sticks up for Baghdad Barb. I honestly don't know why she doesn't just jump over to Fox News and have done with it.

Wolf could have gone much meaner and deeper. Obviously any WH press secretary for any administration is going to be something of a hack and a shill, dutifully sweeping various shenanigans under the nearest thing resembling a rug. But let's stop fucking around here -- Sarah Sanders has taken the job to a new low, aggressively lying and obfuscating for an administration that has richly earned (in barely a year) its multiple investigations and reputation for incompetence and corruption.

Sanders is an active, willing accomplice to their daily efforts to undermine this nation and pit its citizens against each other, while the clown-in-thief and his cronies nose each other along the public trough. She's the closest thing this country has to an out-and-out traitor; she's done far more damage than the likes of Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning could ever conceive. Calling Sanders "Baghdad Barb" in this here blog is about as polite as I can get when talking about her, a chuckling wink that only barely alludes to the depth of my contempt for her.

Sean Spicer was and is an asshole, but his main problem during his stint as Depress Suckaterry was that he too frequently, through his body language and facial tics, gave away what he really thought of the whole shitshow. Sanders, on the other hand, is all in on this thing, as they say. She's not acting in order to meet basic job requirements. She'd do this for free; the fact that she's well-compensated for it is just gravy. She enjoys rubbing the noses of the librul mediots and their librul snowflake readers in as much shit as possible. She's about as much of a good christian as Saddam Hussein. Any god that would be okay with her constant lying, and her shameless defenses of the indefensible, is not a deity worth taking seriously.

There's no need to make cheap remarks about her physical appearance -- her soul is as deformed and fugly as they come. Twitter Nixon had her number right from the start, when he said something to the effect that she looks like she's spent plenty of time over the years defending her brother.

Things have gotten progressively worse since that doddering monster waddled down the fucking escalator three interminable years ago, yet the mediots insist on doing things the way they've always done them. Their revenue model is dying, and they don't know what to do, so they don't do anything differently. We all know what that's a recipe for, and it's coming true, as expected.

They like to pride themselves on being neutral objective observers, but they're not, and the WHCD is annual proof of that. Their currency is access, the uncool kids doing whatever it takes to get invited to the kewl kids' party, even though once they get in, everybody hates them all the same. And I don't blame the people in power one bit for hating the media monkeys. I despise them as well.

It's a free country and all, but no one respects someone who eats shit and sucks hobo dicks, like some desperate Fear Factor moron, just to get in the room with a bunch of unqualified thieves and grifters, just so they can swill appletinis with them and transcribe the lies. As nasty as Wolf might been to Sanders and that fucking scumbag she carries water for, she saved her sharpest arrows for the mediot sellouts picking at their monkfish at their corporate-sponsored "see and be seen" tables.

And she still went easy on them. There's no two ways about this -- the media, with their horse-race bullshit and their stupid Cletus safaris and their fucked-up senses of objectivity and priorities, are collectively responsible for the mess we're all in now. This has been building for a long time, and all it took was a career con-man with a long and formidable track record of gulling credulous journamalists every fucking time into taking his calls and stenographing his lies and conspiracy theories and moronic barstool-drunk jabber. He's been playing them like a cheap accordion for decades, and they don't even seem to mind. Whatever gets them clicks and eyeballs, that's really all they care about.

Certainly their customer base bears plenty of responsibility as well. We're not off the hook by any means. The mediots do what they do because there's enough of us who seek it out, or are at least placated by it.

But it's a symbiotic relationship at best; if the media became more responsible and improved their coverage and reportage, the idiots would head for the usual fast-food options of epistemic affirmation, but the people who want quality and have given up on that hope would be back to support such an effort.

And it all starts with these assholes stopping the pretense that they can hang out and party with the people they need to cover rigorously and objectively. We talk about politicians needing to put country over party. The media need to put country over parties. They don't have to be assholes to the people that they cover, but they can't be their friends, either. There has to be separation. This shouldn't even have to be said, but sadly it does. The idea of "collegiality" has to stop -- they are not colleagues. They're not your fucking friends. Stop pretending that they are.

We're past the point of having some good-natured ribbing between friendly rivals, you dumb motherfuckers. They stole a fucking SCOTUS seat, and their golem spends half his time calling us traitors, and the other half forcing us to pay him to play golf. And that doesn't even scratch the surface. If the mediots had any real integrity, they'd stop attending this dismal, debased ritual.

Troll Playing

Like most other self-styled conservatard "thinkers," Kevin Williamson is more concerned about being a "provocateur" than actually saying something. I probably fail more than I succeed, but the goals of any writer -- especially an opinion writer -- should be clarity and organization. By the end of any opinion piece, the reader should have a very clear idea of the specifics of the writer's opinion on the subject. Otherwise, what's the point?

So we have a general idea by now that Williamson is anti-abortion. Fair enough. As a basic rule of principle, if you are calling for the criminalization for something that is currently legal, you should at least be able to provide some level of detail as to the punishment for engaging in this (again, currently legal) activity. This is especially true for something as culturally volatile as abortion.

(Gun rights would be another -- for example, it turns out that the father of Waffle House shooter Travis Reinking gave him back his weapons after they were confiscated at the White House last summer. Unfortunately, that does not break any current laws, but if you were to pass a law prohibiting that, what should the penalty be? Should it be open-ended and connected to whatever the person you know is mentally unstable does with the weapons you give him, and prosecuted accordingly? Discuss.)

But given his already problematic history of saying "provocative" things on the subject, Williamson has a particular responsibility to clarify his earlier musings. He's had plenty of opportunity to do so, and yet he keeps playing this stupid game.

On tonight's episode of The Jim Jefferies Show, he goes to Ireland to discuss that country's draconian abortion policies, and chats for a few minutes with a virulently anti-abortion politician. To his small credit, the politician actually answers the "penalty question" quite specifically:  fourteen years in prison for the mother, death for the doctor. Okay then. For better or worse, a voter can actually make an informed decision with that.

Kevin Williamson, despite repeated entreaties, seems to think that the penalty question is just a cheap librul ruse. But it's central to the very question of repealing Roe v. Wade. Either you believe abortion should be legal (possibly with certain constraints), or you believe it should be a criminal offense. Given the pro-life movement's consistently strident rhetoric about it being murder, it's a fair question to ask whether they mean that literally, and would prosecute it as such if they got their way.

The fact that Williamson bleats that it's an unfair question, and resists every opportunity to clarify his previous published writings on the subject (right up to the end where he offers to write a paid article) reveals what everyone already knew about him, and the endless supply of "conservative" writers like him -- they talk a good game about first principles, but in the end, they're all just hacks and trolls. Under the bridge is where the money is.

Frogs of War; Or, Alpha Frog

I don't pay a whole lot of attention to European politics in general or French politics in particular, but Emmanuel Macron's snuggling up to the likes of Emperor Snowflake reeks of desperation. Macron can't possibly think that the JCPOA can be renegotiated on the terms he and Snowflake propose, even though it's clear that Snowflake does think that's the case, making some blustery threats if Iran were to resume nuclear weapons development (which they obviously would if we welshed on the agreement).

Listening to this fat, incompetent old man rail like a barstool drunk at the teevee in the tavern, it's hard to imagine what sort of dupe listens to this idiot jabber and hears anything fearful or praiseworthy. Only a complete pussy would actually be scared of him, and only a cult member would actually think he sounds tough. If anything, he seems intent on showing both Iran and North Korea that the US cannot be trusted on these sorts of agreements.

(Nor is it helpful when Snowflake praises a murderous dictator like Kim Jong Un as "very honorable." It's slightly better than the schoolyard taunts of the past, but this is a guy who literally had his own half-brother murdered in public on foreign soil by poisoners, a Putin tactic if ever there was one.)

So Macron's star is falling, and with it his rather grandiose version of himself (which may explain at least some of his rush to embrace Snowflake, even letting Snowflake treat him like a chump at the photo-op). Macron is not wrong about the worrisome rise of authoritarian regimes in Eastern Europe, but the solution is not to push Poland and Hungary back into Russia's sphere of influence. All of Europe is facing this crisis of authoritarianism, due to several factors, but so far Macron has yet to demonstrate that has either the best or only solutions. His "Jupiter" posturing should go over very well with his Ozymandias hero.

Crowd Control

You can't help but feel sorry for the poor bastards in this article, but with the understanding that these are entirely foreseeable consequences of policies (or lack of) in their respective countries. Whether you let people breed like rabbits or restrict them into gender selectivity, the consequences are strangely similar -- an overabundance of men in those countries.

But that's also a symptom of there simply being an ever-increasing overabundance of humans in those countries, and pretty much everywhere else for that matter. You can't swing a poached leopard without finding some do-gooder bullshit about how the planet has infinite carrying capacity if we all consume less.

This might be a decent idea if, you know, the handful of individuals who own most of the stuff did anything with their lives other than hoard and accumulate. But that's not going to happen, and for every person who is conscious of the problem and tries to live modestly, have just one or two kids, recycles, there's another (or five or ten or twenty others) who are solidly conditioned to self-actualize through jonesmanship and shopping for things they don't really want with money they don't really have.

Sure, Earth can probably hold twenty billion ravenous humans, if most of them are willing to tolerate a Slumdog Millionaire existence while a handful of inheritance swells live the good life. Maybe some of the peons can get on with them -- they will, after all, need someone to cook their food, watch their kids, scrub their toilets, service them sexually.

And as we are seeing with the rising middle classes in China and India, they are having fewer children anyway -- but, as one might expect, are consuming more, just like their western counterparts. So even reduced birth rates come at a larger per capita ecological price. But it's still the right direction to head toward. An ongoing, concerted international effort to reduce birth rates and improve health and education in the worst parts of the world is obviously (except for the religious idiots who look at shanty towns and think their celestial friend will magically provide, in which case I encourage them to spend a year in the slums of Sao Paulo or Abidjan) a necessity. We should be dumping money into such efforts, rather than letting anti-condom and anti-abortion fanatics muck it up.

Nobody Does It Better

Nobody has ever been more of an obvious con man.
Nobody has ever been more incompetent at starting and/or running an actual business.
Nobody has ever been more transparent in their attempts to deceive, bamboozle, LIE at every opportunity, even creating opportunities to lie about things that are not even worth lying about.
Nobody has ever been more abusive to the English language, in terms of consistently using words that don't mean what he thinks they mean.
Nobody has ever been more destructive to this nation's norms and institutions, things we used to take for granted.
Nobody has ever been a worse husband, or a worse father. I hope that every time his gold-digger wife looks at him, she sees the blow-up dolls he stuck his little cheeto in, while she sat in her fucking tower, sometimes pregnant, sometimes with an infant for the nannies to take care of.
Nobody has ever been more of an obnoxious, cheap shill, in his tiresome attempts to hump everyone's leg until there's a tiny hole in it, insisting contrary to what all can see that he has a thirty-inch cock.
Nobody has ever been more like a stupid, tantrum-throwing toddler, every fucking day, without fail.
Nobody has ever been more gullible, taking all his marching orders from a bunch of traitors and sycophants at a propaganda network owned by an Australian.
Nobody has ever been more wasteful with self-tanning lotion, or spray, or UV beds, or whatever the fuck it is he uses to turn himself into a raccoon-eyed orange handbag.
Nobody has ever been more of a worthless cocksucker, useless and pathetic and utterly without any value whatsoever just as a human being.
Many people are saying that this asshole is a fucking embarrassment to what's left of this country, now that the pampered plutocrat class have killed it, and are merely figuring out how to divvy up the carcass.
People don't realize that because the Richie Rich scumbags have already killed it, the nation will probably never recover from what's taken place over the past three years.

Either we get rid of this piece of shit, and everyone who enabled him, or we deserve them. There is no middle ground to be had on this.
 

In Carny Nation

In case you haven't seen enough "Why Satan Won" thinkpieces over the last year or so, this one actually takes a fresher, more academic approach. I am aware of, but not familiar with, Bakhtin's "carnival" theory, but as explained in the link, it sounds similar to Barthes' deconstructed musings on pro wrestling as the true artistic expression of the proletariat.

The idea that the "jester" can provide a healthy outlet for the frustrations of the masses, without (usually) causing harm to the jester or the masses, is obviously an ancient and venerable one. Done well, it can provide the attentive ruler (or ruling class) an outlet as well, a path toward corrective behavior that could conceivably save their elite hides from a revolution.

But we're not on a path to revolution, or civil war, or anything else. It's just not going to happen. Nothing fazes us anymore. Billionaires have been screwing everyone else since the word "billionaire" was invented; to paraphrase Balzac, it's how they got there in the first place.

The elevation (to candidate for political office) of a comically boorish fake billionaire who pretends to be a populist certainly fits the carnival narrative of upending polite norms, embracing vulgarity and eschewing "correctness" and slapping the snobs in the face. But once the point's been made, elevating the cretin further -- or actually putting him in the seat of power -- makes the entire exercise utterly dependent on the person in question, their character or lack of it.

Pro wrestling was never particularly interesting to me, but the individuals from the ring that I've seen in interviews and movies tend to be very interesting people. There's a terrific documentary about Andre the Giant on HBO right now. Dwayne Johnson has crafted a successful movie career, mostly predicated on his likability, and John Cena is starting to do the same thing. Mick Foley was always funny and cool in his Daily Show guest appearances. Chris Jericho has his metal band Fozzy, as well as a goofy cameo in Devin Townsend's space-rock opera Z2. And of course there's They Live. Even Hulk Hogan was fun before he turned into a weird, cuckolded asshole with douchebag kids.

What made all the above individuals (and more that I'm forgetting, surely) funny and interesting is that they all made it very clear -- not explicitly, but clear all the same through their words and mannerisms -- that they were playing characters, that it was acting in the guise of sport. (Not to say that the physical damage and abuse isn't real; even if the punches and moves are exaggerated, most of us wouldn't last a minute in that ring.) They are there to entertain, have fun, hopefully make a few bucks.

It's much more difficult to tell where the crowds are at, though. They get into it with full-throated vigor, without seeming to have the knowing cynicism that comes with watching something that everyone knows is schtick, that we're all in on. And this will sound sexist, and I don't care, but if you've ever worked in an office with a lot of women, they can jabber on and on and fucking on about [pick virtually any "reality" teevee show, but used to be Survivor or Dancing with the Stars, now more likely one of the Bachelor franchises] as if the participants in these shows are "real" in the conventional sense, as if there's anything remotely non-contrived about a bunch of conventionally attractive people pretending to look for love in a hot tub while being filmed and selectively edited.

Unless I'm misreading the carnival theory premise (which is always possible), one of its central attributes is that it's temporary. Catharsis is important, but permanent catharsis would be paralyzing in many ways -- mentally, emotionally, productively. Set in an environment of epistemic closure, where facts and misbehavior don't matter, where the "legitimate" media are in a never-ending struggle to get clicks and keep moving, we've ended up with enough bitter, ignorant people who are too dumb and lazy to inform themselves, and instead act out of pure spite.

But that's exactly what the Republican Party has been cultivating for decades now, this ridiculous list of imaginary grievances, a narrative of complaints instead of policy and facts. It shouldn't be any surprise to have this massive audience of baying morons who take the schtick seriously, as literal truth. They were willing enough to vote for the wrestler who played to them, without worrying about the inherent cynicism.

Now they finally have a wrestler who is not playing a character. I think most people figured that the current waste of orange leather was playing the "heel" character, winking knowingly at "his" fans. We are all used to the schtick, regardless of our particular political persuasions. We expect the cynicism. Most people did not expect a wrestler who is his character, who has no separation at all from the jerkoff he has played on teevee for many years. (It is not for nothing that he really is a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, and that he frequently refers to his supporters as "fans".)

Emperor Snowflake is an old, lazy man who doesn't (perhaps can't) read, has the attention span and impulse control of a four-year-old, and wants to grow up to be a banana republic caudillo. The main thing to keep in mind here (beyond his innate, lifelong ineptitude) is that he's old. He'll be gone, maybe sooner rather than later, but statistically some point in the next decade or so.

(I sincerely look forward to taking a huge shit on his grave, whenever that time comes. I'll eat half an all-meat pizza and chug a pitcher of beer first, maybe a few shots of whiskey. Should be a good ten-pound growler for His Majesty.)

But the audience will still be there, rabid, ravenous, incoherent, impossible to please. It's one thing to sublimate your own identity for an entertainment product, to live vicariously through imaginary heroes because your own life is going nowhere. It's quite another to actively subvert the future of your country because the most important thing to you is sticking your finger in the eye of an imagined caricature of your political opponents. If this doesn't change or at least get disempowered, sent back to its rightful place of impotent rage, then we are screwed, and maybe we deserve it.

Requiem for a Bush

No doubt we've given Gramma Bush a hard time or two in here at some point, most likely after her Katrina gaffe, but compared to the current group of scumbags within the White House and supporting them in the media, she's a saint. It's not hard to appreciate a tough old bird who knew when to say when, went home on her own terms, and had bourbon at the end.

Having said all that, this classic internets conspiracy theory never fails to make me chuckle.

There's a Fox Among the Chickens, and a Killer in the Hounds

Of course, no one can possibly surprised that that fucking melon-headed mick Hannity is so far up his master's ass he might as well be a tapeworm. Just imagine for a second if (just spitballing a random example) Rachel Maddow had been shilling aggressively for Preznit Hillary, that it was public knowledge that they regularly had dinners together, that Clinton called Maddow regularly after her show and sought her advice, and that, oh by the way, they have the same fucking lawyer, the same lawyer that Maddow went batshit over when said lawyer's office was raided by the SDNY and FBI.

Hannity is literally functioning as a surrogate for Fuckface Von Clownstick, while pretending to provide something remotely resembling fact-based analysis of current events. He is perhaps the most compromised, in-the-tank hack ever to squat his fat ass in front of a camera, and considering the piece-of-shit network he's a part of, that's saying something.

Neither their audience nor their detractors are under any illusions about whether Fox News is anything more than a cheap, transparent agitprop shop. That's all they've ever been, it's their sole purpose, and all the Shep Smith or Juan Williams useful-idiot types don't change that a bit. A vile Australian who simply refuses to do the right thing and die already, who is literally the model for The Simpsons' C. Montgomery Burns, uses his entertainment network to bankroll his propaganda network, a place with an institutionalized culture of coercing its female employees into sex. Fuck every single person who sets foot into that cursed building.

Fox has to go. Every bit of it. Fox News, Fox Entertainment, Fox Fucking Football. It's all part of the same evil, lying, self-dealing org. Boycott all of it, whether it's Tucker Carlson or Family Guy. Sign every petition you can find, send a note to as many of their advertisers as you have stomach for. Put them all out of work, make them earn an honest living at long last. Burn it all to the ground, salt the earth, piss on the ashes. This can't go on. We have to stop normalizing and accepting this behavior with a shrug. There needs to be accountability for poisoning the well.

[Update 4/17/18 8:30 PM PDT:  Chuck Toad is another useless sack of shit who needs to go find honest work as well. Fire all of them and start over.]

Even When They're Right, They're Wrong

Three recent events -- two of them closely related to one another -- have surfaced as further evidence (as if anyone needed further evidence) that the god-emperor's compass of logic and reasoning is fatally flawed, because even in those rare instances where he says something that is accurate, he still manages to botch the execution. Let's take them in reverse order, starting with the most recent:

Syria:  It's difficult to imagine even his staunchest supporters being fooled by this nonsense. This is simply a repeat of last year's embarrassing dick-waving, slamming a few dozen million dollars' worth of ordnance into empty airfields and abandoned buildings. And for what? To "warn" Bashar al-Assad that dropping barrel bombs on apartment buildings is acceptable, but chlorine gas is not? Dead is dead. He's been killing children and civilians all along; whether it's with gas or with explosives packed with shrapnel shouldn't really matter. And warning the Russians ahead of time is exactly what he badgered Obama about in 2013. It's true what they say -- every tweet this asshole puts out has a rhetorical doppelganger from five years ago, hypocritically undermining his own pathetic attempts at logic.

He's right of course that in principle, Assad's conduct is unacceptable and should not be tolerated. But there are no good solutions to Syria, and Clownstick is certainly not the person to cut this particular Gordian knot. Russia is too heavily invested in the outcome now, as are (in no particular order) Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Israel. The possibility of a spreading conflagration that ensnares key powers and escalates drastically (in other words, a "world war") is very real.

Forget individual personalities for a second -- the United States right now does not have the diplomatic resources needed to negotiate a settled outcome to the escalating conflict in Syria and its surrounding region. Everyone who could have provided expertise and insight into forging a peaceful path forward has resigned in frustration or been purged. They simply don't have anyone left, and now John "Stop calling me Michael" Bolton has been handed the keys to the 'murkin war machine, for which you can probably attribute the timing of last night's action.

Give Bolton this much credit -- he has wasted no time in purging NSC staff and seizing control of the foreign policy security apparatus. The problem is that Bolton, while slightly more intelligent than his insect overlord, has roughly the same temperament, and is remarkably ill-suited for the job. He is the Doug Neidermeyer of gubmint careerists -- smug, supercilious. Bolton is a conniving, ankle-biting little shit who is going to further damage American foreign policy credibility for the next 10-20 years, and endanger countless military and civilian lives around the world. Count on it. He has no business being anywhere near the levers of power, because he only knows how to break things. Which makes him a perfect fit for this clusterfuck.

The fact that Hair Furor chose to end this morning's self-congratulatory tweet with "Mission Accomplished" should indicate how tone-deaf and unserious he is about all this. (Not to mention just plain bizarre, given his oft-repeated prescience about what a debacle the Iraq War was and would become.) He has no understanding of the larger forces in motion in the region, nor any interest in gaining any such understanding. What is the "mission"? What is the plan for when Assad confers with Putin, decides he's protected, and launches another chemical attack? How do we know there was even a chemical attack by the Syrian government in the first place? Because Bolton said so? Fuck that, we're gonna need actual evidence, if not indisputable proof. But just the fact that Shit-for-Brains thinks anything's been "accomplished" by one night of "precision strikes" on carefully-groomed targets should be a clear indication of how poorly suited he is for this sort of action.

So how do you solve a problem like Assad? Obviously, there is no "good" clear-cut solution. But a start would be to work up a joint regional security pact with Russia, predicated on repatriating internal Syrian refuges back to their homes, giving the country at-cost deals on grain to replenish their depleted reserves, and then pressure the Turks to open up the Grand Anatolia dam network to get the Syrian farmland some water. Can all that be done? Certainly not with the US diplomatic corps as it stands. But Emperor Snowflake enjoys jabbering about how much he loves him some Putin and Erdogan, sweaty he-mens who give the emperor a little cheeto chubby. There's no reason he couldn't use those world-class deal-making skills to get them to go along with something like that.

Remember that the Syrian civil war started because of climate change (among other things; Assad sold off the country's grain reserves to generate cash, not foreseeing a five-year drought). Recall also that much of the water problems in Syria and Iraq are exacerbated by Turkey's control of the headwaters of all the major rivers of the Mesopotamian region. Turkey craves the legitimacy that being a member of international organizations such as NATO and the EU would give them. That can be used as a bargaining chip to get the water moving again, and it would be the right thing to do for all parties concerned in the first place.

But of course, all of this is well beyond El Jefe Maximo's comprehension, and that of his henchmen. They don't do delicate or nuanced, and whatever Obama's very real foreign policy flaws were, the guy at least understood that being reckless meant dead people, American soldiers and foreign civilians alike. Snowflake doesn't know or care about any of that, he just knows what makes him feel like a big man. That's going to get us in trouble in Syria. But there's always the chance that, like the same actions there last year, nothing else will occur, and he'll step on his dick again next week, and we'll move on to that.

Trans-Pacific Partnership:  Turns out that, despite his colorful metaphors of wily Asians butt-fucking real 'murkin widget-stampers out in gawwwd's country, Snowflake is having a change of heart about the TPP. I think both candidates in the 2016 election were correct in their stances against the treaty, while recognizing that those stances were more rhetorical than principled. I have no doubt that Hillary Clinton would have at least attempted to renegotiate the treaty to make it viable for the US to enter into, and she would have been crucified in the media -- all media -- for doing such a thing.

With this fucking clown, there's been barely a peep so far, partly because there's been so much other clusterfuckery to cover, partly because he changes "ideas" like a sugar-addled kindergartner, so there's literally no expectations whatsoever regarding policy consistency, or even policy knowledge.

Remember how much we thought the bar had been lowered for special-ed Preznit Fredo Arbusto? Consider the notion that there is no longer any bar at all, at least not for Mister Man. Soon as a Dummycrat who can think and speak extemporaneously comes along, the bar will not only be put back in place, but it will be raised. I pity the fool who has to debate this asshole in 2020. There will be two completely different sets of expectations for the same event. The amount of slack this fucking retard and his dipshit cult are granted by the librul media is absolutely unconscionable.

Don't believe me? Ponder this counterfactual for a second:  you know all those stupid Cletus Safari articles that clutter up the major newspapers fortnightly? If Hillary Clinton had won, those same media monkeys would have done the exact same thing, gone out to the dilapidated diner in Fentanyl Flats and talked to the same incoherent, fist-shaking codgers ranting about how that bitch was fucking up real 'murka. You can fuckin-A count on that one. Our media are populated by clickbait slaves who have no guts or imagination, just a lemming-like drive to fill every news cycle with whatever's within a shovel's reach.

Anyway, the TPP. As originally drafted, there were simply too many intellectual property concessions in it (for starters) to make it viable for anyone but the elites who already own everything and spend their lives rubbing everyone's noses in it. So fuck them. But at the same time, the US withdrawing from the TPP also leaves us exposed to the Pacific Rim countries simply trucking on without us. This is something we're going to have to get used to in the decades to come, the rest of the world moving on without us. It cannot be overstated -- even if we somehow manage to avoid catastrophic conflict or natural disaster, the repercussions of this shithole administration will be with us for a very long time, certainly for the rest of my life (I'll be 51 next month) and probably for most of my daughter's life. And that's if we get our shit together and start turning this thing around, of which I am doubtful.

But again, Snowflake grumbles something about changing what passes for his mind and joining the TPP after all, yet provides no clue as to what the conditions would be, or how this would be done, or who would benefit, besides his goddamned children. Looking for possibilities to renegotiate and join the TPP is the right thing to do, but there has never been any indication that this particular gang has the knowledge or good faith to do something like that on anyone's behalf but their own as individuals.

Tariffs:  Even if (as with all things) his rhetoric on the subject was unnecessarily lurid and confrontational, there was a core of truth to Snowflake's assertions that free trade had damaged job prospects in the vaunted heartland, where (it cannot be said enough times) all the real 'murkins live, and only real 'murkins live. All of us heathens on the foul coasts are allowed to live only by their divine forbearance and grace. It's, like, in the Constitution or some shit.

But those folks do need jobs and careers that they can actually live on, and trade policy -- particularly with China and Mexico -- makes a difference for them. As with literally everything else this asshole touches, the problem is that he only does deals for himself. The big lie that the rubes bought was that he'd work his deal-making magic for them, never mind that he fucks up everything he gets his tiny doll-hands on, never mind that he's never negotiated anything that he didn't directly profit from. Even his charitable foundation was simply a transparently obvious tax dodge and money-laundering org.

So even if he cared enough to renegotiate trade policy with China to benefit something other than Princess' slave-made knock-off clothes, he doesn't know how. He "negotiates" deals like old people fuck. He said so himself in his own books that he just bullshits his way through everything; even his euphemism of "truthful hyperbole" serves only to underscore his inept approach to negotiation. He literally only has a couple of moves:  "anchoring" with a proposal he knows to be unacceptable, then "compromising" toward a more mutually acceptable outcome; and bullshitting his way through the deal and simply hoping that other guy is dumber than he is.

That is the deal-making philosophy of a degenerate gambler that puts the deed to his house on 33 Black at the roulette table, or goes all in at Texas Hold 'em on a ten hole card because another ten comes up on the turn. There is no strategy at all, he is all ego and volatile impulse.

And that's the common thread, not only with the three above examples, but with everything. This is where the rubes really got bamboozled. They cynically assumed -- against the weird "logic" of voting for a "non-politician" -- that like all politicians, Snowflake's campaign rambunctions were simply cut-to-the-chase examples of macho assertiveness, that he'd dial that down and get on to business in the job. They undercut themselves with that cynicism, somehow not realizing that, despite nearly forty years of televised evidence of this asshole humping the American media's leg like a terrier on a couch pillow, that that is who he is, that is all that he is. He is incapable of not being that guy.

There's a notion that a successful business-person cannot be a successful government executive, that despite the surface similarities, the mechanics of each job are too disparate. A CEO is too used to getting their own way to build coalitions and partnerships and work with others. There's some truth to that notion, but I wouldn't completely dismiss the possibility that a good business-person could be a good president.

But he's not a good businessman, and never has been. His only success is managing a portfolio of properties that he inherited from his dad. He's not a businessman, he's a fucking landlord, a rentier. Someone who is good at business creates and innovates. At the very least they develop better and more efficient ways to manage resources and optimize profits for stakeholders.

Snowflake has never done any of those things; at best he finds idiots who think his brand name is useful and he rents out his name to such people. It's pathetic to watch, really; normally even a moderately gifted bullshit artist has something to offer, they just exaggerate the benefits.

But he has nothing to offer, and never did. He's just a weird, pathetic old man who lives in an obscenely-decorated tower, where he can't even be straight about the number of fucking floors in the building, and goes around finding people dumb enough to believe his nonsense about having a twenty-four-inch cock. And that's just the stuff he does legally.

That is exactly the type of person who has a few random blind-pig-finds-an-acorn moments, and still never knows what to do with them. I wouldn't worry too much about Syria for now; hours after the "attack" they're partying in the streets as a show of defiance to the attacks, and attempts to distract a teevee-addled audience are doomed to fail when they're perpetrated by a careless bumbler with his own ADHD issues. But nothing good can ever come from this sad excuse for a man.

Chilling Effect

Well, there they go again -- an honest, hard-workin' talk-show raver has been run out of his job by LIBTARD CORRECKNESS YOU GUYS. First they came for poor Laura Ingraham for taunting, then Kevin Williamson loses his livelihood just because he insisted that getting an abortion be punishable by death. And now this.

Why oh why can't a free and open exchange of thoughtful ideas include threats of violence? I mean, where's the fun in that? Can't everyone else simply read the minds of people like Jamie Allman and Kevin Williamson, and intuit that they and their ilk are, to a person, just a bunch of fat lazy armchair tough guys who couldn't harm anything more powerful than a bag of Doritos, that this is all just idle jabber, that the losers who listen to these phony-tough assholes are just like them, a bunch of dickless crybabies chewing holes in their cheeks with their impotent rage?

The main thing to remember, at all times, is that there's really just two effective methods of getting your point across to the cocksuckers of the world:  ballots and wallets. But you have to go deep and wide. For example, why boycott Laura Ingraham when the network she works for is a cesspool of lies and filth? Fox is a scummy organization that operated in a culture of rape and sexual harassment, and now peddles lies in dump-truck volume. The network itself actively destroys the fabric of this country on a daily basis, for no better reason than to make money and piss off doddering morons.

Same goes for Jamie Allman -- the resignation is a nice start, but Sinclair aspires to be the network version of Fox's cable operation. They have literally said that they want to help Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, and they want to do it the same way Fox has been doing it, with lies and propaganda.

This is so much bigger than whichever of these scumbags is picking on this or that Parkland survivor, whther it's physically threatening David Hogg, or photo-shopping pics of Emma Gonzalez ripping up the Constitution. They are liars, calumniators, bearers of false witness. They support a piece of shit like Scott Pruitt screwing the taxpayers and wrecking the environment; they support a clown like Ryan Zinke strutting around like a fake cowboy and selling national monuments to oil companies, when he's not logrolling massive disaster relief jobs to unqualified companies in his district. They support a religious fanatic like Betsy DeVos destroying what's left of the public education system in this country, and turning it into profit centers.

This is all or nothing, folks. This is not a good-faith dialogue of intellectual probity and thoughtful ideas. This is nothing short of a rhetorical war with people who will never support their arguments in good faith. That is a waste of time. Either you ignore their poison and hope it goes away (futilely), or you let the companies who sponsor them know that it will cost them your business.

Maybe they'll do the same thing to Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert or Bill Maher. That's the risk and the promise of this strategy. The 2016 election cast into sharp relief what kind of country the US had turned into, or perhaps was all along. But we know more, so much more, now than we did even eighteen months ago, and there is no more excuse for the dipshits who voted for him thinking he'd "grow into the office" or "bring change" or whatever stupid thing they told themselves as self-absolution for their dumb decision.

There are no more excuses. What happens in six months will either reinforce the seismic shift of 2016, or possibly point to a direction back from the brink. The absolutely most effective -- and entirely peaceful and non-violent -- way to accomplish this is with economic coercion. But it's not just about the electoral cycle. It is an ongoing fight, every day, every week. You can bet that they are working at it diligently.

Remember, you don't have to take their shit. Their entire argument about the "free marketplace of ideas" is a pernicious lie. They have no interest in honest debate on any subject. Theirs is the ethos of full-throated, epistemically closed nihilism. There's no responding to it; you might as well yell into a toilet bowl. When enough people quit bringing sporks to the gunfight, and realize that these fuckers have no rules or mores, you can shut them down.

Motor Shitty Asshole

Imagine the whining from the conservatard claque if anyone -- anyone -- proposed shooting them during an interview. Well, no one listens to me, but uh, yeah, at what point do decent people hold worthless shitbags like Ted Nugent and Alex Jones accountable for this sort of thing?

Here's how it'll shake out:  there might be some sort of squawk of outrage, and Fuckface Nugent might mumble some sort of mealy-mouthed "I was only joking" sort of averral. Somebody else will do or say something stupid, and people will forget about it in a couple of weeks.

But here's the thing -- I don't know about you, but I've had my fill of these fucking people. All of them. The cliché they tell victims of domestic violence -- that people will treat you how you let them treat you -- is a hard truth. That other old wives' chestnut -- when someone tells you who they are, believe them -- is just as true.

Ted Nugent turns seventy in December, and it would be a fine thing if he keeled over into a wood chipper before then. Failing that, he has some concerts coming up, including one at the end of June less than a mile from where I was born. I will be contacting the club to ask them what they think about having someone who literally says "half of the government should be shot" performing at their establishment.

I would very much prefer to have Ted Nugent alive but with nowhere to play, nowhere to spew the vile nonsense he routinely does at his shows. It's probably too much to hope that he goes broke from lack of touring opportunities, but I sincerely hope that happens as well. He's a vile piece of shit, and the world will be a better place when he's dead and gone. In the meantime, our options in dealing with such people are ballots and wallets.

People -- including Bill Maher, who really oughta know better -- are complaining about the supposed "chilling effect" that David Hogg's boycott on Laura Ingraham's show has on free speech. In that particular example, they're not entirely wrong; Ingraham is at most a third-tier light on a network full of deserving douchebags. Frankly, the entire network should be boycotted, not just a particular performer (which is really all any of them are, trained monkeys).

But free speech does have a responsibility baked into it. The First Amendment merely says that the gubmint can't imprison you for speaking your mind, no matter how demented you are. But it certainly does not guarantee you or me or Rush Limbaugh or Ted Nugent a comfortable living doing so, especially when the person in question is saying things that are provably untrue, and/or incitements to violence. Arguing with such people is an exercise in futility. They are not there to debate the merits of this or that position. This is so obvious, it needn't be said. [And yet you did. -- Ed.]

I don't want Nugent or Jones arrested for the things they say; I want the people who sponsor and support them to pay a price for doing so. It should be unacceptable to decent people for someone to say that Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) should be shot. It should be unacceptable to claim repeatedly that a classroom massacre of first-graders was a hoax, as Jones has infamously done.

Kevin Williamson's another one. You cannot expect immunity from doubling down on the unspeakably stupid notion that women who have abortions should be hanged. (Extra points for Williamson's particularly stupid mode of doubling down -- by insisting he meant future women who have abortions, not the ones who have already had them. Oh, well, of course. Carry on then. Sheesh.)

This sort of rhetorical bomb-throwing keeps these losers employed, and that's the part that has to be shut down. They can spout their vile fictions all they want, but they should not have the expectation of securing a grand paycheck for their nonsense. (Incidentally, this also applies to more polite idiots such as Bobo and MoDo. Seriously, I can't believe there is anyone out there that still reads either of those two dipshits.) Williamson's defenders act like Williamson is someone trying to start some sort of good-faith dialogue, as if he's an honest broker in all this. All you have to do is read Williamson's responses to the abortion question [Q.: Are you serious?  A:. Hell yes, I'm serious.] to know that.

This is not to say that Williamson should have been fired from The Atlantic before he even had a chance to start. In fact, it would have been better for the abortion debate at large for Williamson to elaborate on his (let's say) peculiar sensibilities on the issue. But that is a different matter than noting that neither Williamson nor his new employers should have been in the least surprised when a number of people (including, you may be surprised to find, quite a few vagina-owning humans) were instantly revolted at the thought of reading a publication that employed such a person.

That is the accountability of the free marketplace, unless of course you're the one being held financially accountable for writing stupid things, in which case it's just a witch hunt.

Usually when free speech is squelched, it's from the top down. None of us will ever know how many momentous stories have been buried over the years by news editors, who are usually company creatures above all else. When it starts coming up from the bottom, from the powerless, people who don't have money or assets or media companies to push everyone around with, you can tell it's effective when the pigs start squealing.

So let's make Nugent squeal. The guy's already a fucking turd of a human being -- got a blowjob from Courtney Love when she was twelve and he was nearly thirty, right about the time he "adopted" a seventeen-year-old girl in order to beat the Mann Act. Plus, he literally shit his pants to get out of Vietnam, which is not a crime in and of itself (on the off chance he had a moral objection to the war), but tends to undercut his usual phony-tough guy stance.

Fuck him. He doesn't have to be shot, or even go broke, but if we're truly tired of hearing from people like that motherless fuck, the least we can do is make sure he can't show his face among decent people anymore. Let him have the Traitor-Slaver-Loser flag bozos, collectively drunkening to the thousandth iteration of Wang Dang Sweet Poontang. Fools and their money are lucky enough to get together in the first place. But it's time to start pressuring the companies that sponsor this shit.

Girth of a Nation

I wanted to like the Roseanne reboot, I suppose; at the very least, I resolved not to let it be a political decision, which appears to be something of a feat for many folks these days. But let's not kid ourselves -- the show's namesake has gone out of her way the last few years to be (or at least make effort to appear to be) a repellent troll.

As her bumptious political opinions have pinballed around the dial throughout her tumultuous public life, one thing has remained consistent for Roseanne the person:  she seems to place an inordinate value in being tough to pigeonhole or defend. This would be worthy of note if only she'd ever had an opinion on any subject that was worth repeating or endorsing. But her main goal has always been simply to be a pain in the ass. Like her ricockulous orange golem idol, she can't stand to be ignored. Unlike Preznit Tide Pod Challenge, she doesn't care if you like her or not.

But again, I don't want to be one of those Zhdanovite douchebags, stress-testing every note of every song and every line of every show for absolute alignment with my own view of the world and its sorry inhabitants. Ultimately, either the show is funny, or it isn't.

And the show is funny....until it isn't. There are a lot of nice little moments, and some decent laughs. John Goodman fits right back into the Dan Conner (easily the best character on the show, then and now) role like a comfortable shoe. The original kids are all back, as is Laurie Metcalf. They all fall right back into familiar rhythms.

But the first two episodes, which aired back-to-back last week, submerge the viewer in tone and smarm and reverse PC winks. It's likely that the writers were going for an Archie vs. Meathead dynamic between Roseanne and Jackie, but Michael Stivic was actually allowed to make a point once in a while. Jackie is simply a hopped-up caricature of every conservatard twitbag's laundry list of imaginary grievances:  shrill, smug, self-righteous, pedantic. It gets old quickly.

Roseanne, on the other hand, is never ever wrong about anything, just ask her. She defends her choice of a moronic grifter with a vague grumble about "jobs" and brooks no further disagreement. We'll see how that all goes with the jobs and the health care booming along as they are in that part of the country. The bottom line is that it becomes difficult to separate a show from its politics when the show is so blatantly political at every turn.

One of the plots in the second episode encapsulates the dilemma of the show pretty well:  younger daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert, who is producing the reboot) has moved back home with her teen daughter and tween son, the latter of whom is, as the kids say in the 'hood, "gender fluid." Ultimately the grandparents' initial discomfort with a ten-year-old boy wearing unisex clothes and nail polish gives way to the predictable trope of fierce family protection.

All well and good, except this is precisely the same demographic that, in real life, could not stop braying about the looming danger of transgender bathrooms and such like. The lack of empathy in the real people the Conners are meant to represent is palpable, and the feeling that they (Roseanne and Dan) would have jeered at the same kid if he were in a news item at a school is inescapable. That's how they are -- they didn't give a fuck about heroin addicts, until it hit their trailer park. And they didn't give a fuck about jobs until theirs went to China and India and Mexico.

The preening arrogance of these people -- the real white working class and their teevee avatars -- is just exhausting. They seem to think that their diet of deep-fried twinkies and Bachelor offshoots confers some sort of "realness" upon them, that they are somehow more genuinely American than someone who (hurr!) reads hard-cover books and pays attention to actual news. That's really the worst out of all of it, you know, that they really seem to believe such bullshit.

Mostly though, the show is just old Thunderbird in a new-ish box. Underpinning the entire operation is this endless, constant, overweening grievance. It's the conservative reactionary version of that dreaded word, entitlement. To listen to these jabbering maroons, you'd never guess that their guy won, that they have a majority in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, that every thing their dotard has been criticized for has been well-earned. Seriously, these are the sorest fucking winners ever.

It is not the pussy-hat crowd's fault that the doddering grifter keeps shooting himself in the clown shoes every week, nor is it their fault that it turns out that -- surprise! -- all of his promises were predictably empty, that the widget-stamping jobs aren't coming back to BFE, and in fact his tiny-dick-waving stunts with the Chinese are threatening a trade war that will specifically target these salt-of-the-earth rubes.

For several years running, we've been entreatied to "listen" to a cohort of hostile, incoherent jokers who can't muster any facts, and blame everyone else for their manifest failures in life. There is never any countervailing voice, never anyone in the supposedly liberal media, and certainly nobody on the "conservative" side, who ever bothers to even suggest, Hey, more people voted for the other person, wonder if we might listen to them just once? I've gotta listen to them, over and over and fucking over again, but god forbid they'd ever come around to listen to me. Well, fuck that shit, as my great-grandmother used to tell her Sunday school class.

I don't know why that is, and I give up asking. All I know is that I've seen and heard enough plaints from these fools in real life, and I don't need a thinly fictionalized version of their nonsense to drive the point home. They'll never be happy, because they'll never get an even break, and they're never going to be honest with themselves about why that is. So why bother?

There was a time when Roseanne was ground-breaking in many respects, and downright hilarious much of the time. Now it just comes off as preachy and predictable, every bit as smug and spiteful and ill-informed as the loony lefties it lampoons.

But at least that should serve as an object lesson for any would-be liberals. Roseanne does deserve credit for telling her story her way -- loud, brash, aggressive, fuck you if you don't like it. If there are any real liberals (in entertainment or government or news) left, maybe they should consider doing the same thing for once, instead of meekly waiting around for Cadet Bonespurs to send us into a recession and nuke Tehran as a distraction. Waiting for Mueller and/or November is not a strategy.

In the meantime, instead of bothering with the nattering narcissism of the Oracle of the White Workin' Class (when she's not farming macadamia nuts in Hawaii), do yourself a favor and check out The President Show's special. Kathy Griffin's portrayal of soulless homunculus Kellyanne Con-way steals what was a pretty solid show all the way around.