Death of a Salesman

Touching back briefly on the week-long Saint John McCain media production:  I happened to catch a few choice minutes of the coverage this morning, reverential play-by-play from the dutiful CBS This Morning crew, segueing into the eulogies. I caught a taste of Addison McConnell's song-and-dance, before Poly Rayon stepped up to the mic.

I don't even recall what either of them said, and obviously it matters not at all. Ultimately, this week was about the media and their narrative regarding Poor Ol' Straight Talk, and his mavericky maverickness. He gave them that narrative, and they were happy to take it and use it.

Since McCain famously disinvited our petulant toddler-king, and good on him for that, the week's narrative was peppered by countless jeremiads about how McCain was too good for Clownstick. And that part is true enough -- McCain was a thousand times the man Fuckface Von Clownstick could ever aspire to be. Balls, charm, and a real sense of humor, all things that Clownstick thinks he has, but is in fact entirely bereft of.

Who Is America?

Slow holiday weekend, and I fully plan on indulging myself by doing as little as possible -- finishing up a couple of books, playing guitar, knocking back a beer or three, maybe doing a little writing (political and otherwise). So we're getting a free weekend of Showtime, featuring the Season 1 marathon of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest project.

Baron Cohen is a bit of a mixed bag for me; at times his cringe-inducing brand of comedy can be uproariously funny, at other times merely gross. Who Is America? fills both bills adequately right from the start, opening the first episode with SBC's southern conservative journalist character (complete with motorized scooter, natch) baiting Bernie Sanders, following that with a segment featuring SBC playing a paroled prisoner who "paints" with his own feces and semen, pitching his "art" to a credulous gallery owner.

I guess I'd give it a qualified recommendation -- there are few genuine surprises to be had, but that is probably in part due to the fact that we now live in a world where truth isn't truth, a demented old bastard runs the country, and nothing is really surprising anymore, primarily because we've all been forced to confront how said demented old bastard got into office. Reminding us that there are morons and assholes among us, many of them in positions of power, is no longer funny or cathartic. Irony suffered a mortal blow after 9/11, but now it's dead and ground into sausage.

That said, clearly a lot of work has gone into this, mainly in the variety of characters SBC has crafted to gull the dupes into revealing themselves. It's worth watching just for that, though again some segments are more worthy than others. Your mileage will vary, and you enter at your own risk.

One of the more relatively innocuous segments occurs in the second episode, where some interchangeable Bachelor dingbat gets tricked by the decadent Italian billionaire photographer character into doing a PSA for child soldiers. [rolls eyes] Yes, you read that right.

What makes this slightly more interesting is when a teevee critic decides to get in on the hijinks, and decry the seeming fish-in-a-barrel quality of the segment:

What is this segment trying to satirize, exactly? That a woman who’s already been used as a tool in multiple TV ratings ploys would make a fool of herself again? That she’s absurdly compliant with the demands of celebrity, to the point that she’ll go along with any script she’s given? At its most damning, the segment is a swipe at how happy Olympios is to be on television, and what exactly she’s willing to do for publicity.

....

But the segment does raise questions about Who Is America? and its goals. Why is this reality star a target? Why is the assumption that it’s hilarious to watch a powerful man manipulate a fame-hungry, clueless younger woman?

Those are an awful lot of questions that fail to see the (to me, anyway) rather obvious point of it all: what sort of "culture" routinely makes these random idiots famous and wealthy? Obviously, from movie B-girls to music and sports groupies, the entertainment industry has always used young women willing to do anything (and I mean anything) for what? Fifteen minutes of....well, it's not exactly fame, but let's call it attention of a sort.

The girl in question struck a very dim glimmer of memory, of someone perhaps seen in the "Entertainment" section of the Google News aggregator, a section that becomes increasingly irrelevant as it is overtaken by the children and stepchildren of one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers in his trial a quarter-century ago for murdering his wife and her friend. [Ah, fame! -- Ed.]

And indeed, Corinne Olympios first achieved the glories of name recognition when she caused the dating show she was on to be investigated for allegations of sexual misconduct, when Olympios got one of the male contestants to perform oral sex on her.

You want the epitome of meta-cynicism, folks, there you have it -- a cynical audience watching a cynical exercise in which cynical idiots pretend to be competing for love, filmed and edited to be as cynically manipulative as possible, and to encourage moral judgments from the audience. I've always considered myself a hopelessly cynical bastard, but this sort of shit is a depth beyond me.

Is it possible that that is at least part of what Sacha Baron Cohen is trying to send up here, using a character that is a crude, vulgar distillation of the gaudy Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless bullshit that captivated American couch potatoes for years? That's yet another level of cynicism that we've all just taken for granted for decades -- this idea that people who actually work for a living would like nothing more than to have their noses rubbed in the mostly unearned and inherited excesses of tacky swells and net-worth assholes.

In fact, that might have been the one way for SBC to top the routine meta-cynical excesses of the Bachelorette types, and the rotten, soulless anti-culture that's sprung up around it. There is a clear cultural connection between that sort of mindless Ow My Balls! bullshit, and its current political by-products. Maybe the teevee critic's error was in assuming that Baron Cohen was only interested in duping the Roy Moore types, and not thinking that maybe people like Corinne Olympios also participate in something that is ultimately harmful to the mental health of the people who are hooked on it.

When everything turns into a cheesy wink and a nod, a joke that we're all in on but continue to beat into the ground long after it stopped being funny or interesting, it can't be too surprising when we eventually get what we have now. Random jerkoffs with no discernible talent "monetizing" their side hustles on Instagram and YouTube, hoping to parlay that into some "reality" teevee bullshit, and thence into some Kardashian-Jenner quadrant of Satan's asshole, pimping collagen creams and taint waxes and such like.

Given the longstanding prevalence of this nonsense, it makes a certain perverted sense that a fake tycoon with fake hair and skin and a third trophy wife, a man who brags that he shits in a gold toilet in a marble tower, would be received by a sufficient number of certifiable dipshits as an authentic hero of the working class.

Ex Type Thing

It normally wouldn't be worth the time to read, much less repost, gossip-column bullshit from the third ex-wife of that vile fuckhead Ghouliani. It's hard to imagine what sort of person could possibly give a shit what such a person has to say about much of anything; listening to someone who took up with a married man with a long history of cheating has no right to whine about him when he inevitably steps out on her. You knew what you were getting into, honey.

What is interesting is that she strongly implies that Rudy's a fall-down, starting-to-pickle-his-aging-brain alky. Which would explain his summer of embarrassment, trying lamely over and over to get his story straight, never quite getting it right no matter how many tries the Fixed Noise flying monkeys give him.

And it also fits perfectly with the larger, greater pattern for the fucktards currently lawn-darting the country and sucking its blood -- not just blatant cronyism, but inept cronyism:  the dingbat daughter and failson-in-law; the two failsons-by-blood; the cabinet full of dipshits and dweebs and money-grubbing slime. The rest of Clownstick's lawyers come off just as stupid and venal as the "man" himself, so Count Drunkula fits right in with the rest of the lot. It's dipshits all the way down.

The end of the article is the cherry on the cake:

Estimates peg Rudy’s net worth at around $45 million, and to their infinite chagrin, his enablers cannot enable him now. The president’s lawyer doesn’t have a prenup.

Perfect. I hope she takes him to the cleaners, and then makes a large donation to Kirsten Gillibrand's and/or Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential run.

Verbum Dei

One of the more tedious ongoing narratives in the current mediasphere is the supposed rending of garments in the Catholic church over (surprise!) the roughly ten-millionth "revelation" of pederast priests raping and abusing children. That it's a subject yet again for "discussion" merely reiterates once again the utter paucity of ideas, of clear thought, of individuals in free societies deciding to once and for all during their brief existences on the mortal plane of flesh and futility to assert their own rights.

There are few good things about religion, any religion, and they're generally outweighed by all the bad things. But perhaps the best thing about religion, even in a frequently puritanical country like the United States, is that it's purely voluntary. No one makes any adult go to church, any church, and certainly no one forces anyone to stay in any church that preys on their children and their wallets.

No matter what this or any pope says about his internal anguish over these vile events, the prime directive of that position is to preserve the organizational structure, to do nothing that would threaten the authority of the hierarchy, and its sacred ability to prise cash from it eternal customers. That's not going to change, no matter how "progressive" the current pope's views are on gays and atheists and such. The job description remains what it's always been for two millennia.

The good news is that most of the major western churches have been losing younger customers, who simply aren't sufficiently interested or motivated to join a club with dues they can't pay and rules they won't obey. Especially in 'murka, where self-help books and lifestyle gurus function as the secular religion of the would-be upwardly mobile. The "solace" that religion can provide pales in comparison to the possibility of consumerist redemption in the temple of the holy kardashian.

So the dilemma for the spiritually conflicted is actually fairly simple:  either you support this, with your dollars and your commitment, or you don't. Rationalizing with "times have changed" bunkum won't help, not after the next eventual revelation, and the one after that, and so on. If they want to be Charlie Brown to the pope's Lucy, and keep on believin' that this time they'll get to kick the football, they are welcome to it. But the rest of us don't care and don't want to know.

Then again, like all "news" stories, the article and those like it aren't meant to reach or inform the ordinary reader, the peon with plenty of opinions but no power whatsoever. What we think of as news is really just the amalgamation of elites talking to each other, and filtered out to the masses as manufactured, pre-approved consent. Whether the priest wears a collar and speaks Latin, or wears a suit and spews state-sponsored bullshit, the result is the same.

Company Man

Well, it's the end of the line for the Straight Talk Express, and as we all brace ourselves for a weeklong onslaught of corporate media b-roll hagiography, it helps to keep John McCain's legacy in a balanced perspective. Erik Loomis at LGM has a pretty thorough rundown of McCain's career, warts and all.

And you know, turns out it really is mostly warts. I've written in this here jernt countless times over the years of McCain's genuine sacrifice in the Hanoi Hilton, and it would take a lot to offset that level of service -- regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the Vietnam War itself, and of McCain's job of dropping death on poor rural villagers. But a thorough review of McCain's personal life upon return from Vietnam, and especially of his actual record as a senator, shows that if it doesn't offset his brutal torture, he sure as hell gave it a shot.

To be fair, McCain does actually seem to have been mostly a right-wing reactionary by temperament. So that part at least wasn't cynical. And Loomis chronicles McCain's misdeeds quite well in the link, so I won't reiterate them.

Where McCain succeeded mostly was in burnishing his (admittedly respectable) quals as a tortured combat veteran, and in sussing out the very same thing that his arch-nemesis Fuckface Von Clownstick, Grand Imperator of the Empire of Dirt, First of His Name, figured out about marketing oneself -- the media are surprisingly willing to take your calls if you want to jump in front of their cameras and spout just about any old thing. McCain was funny and quick on his feet, and adept at exploiting that mediot weakness. Press the Meat would have had McCain on every fucking Sunday in a reserved luxury recliner, if he'd been available. And you can be sure McCain knew it.

So it's hard to just dump on McCain for being a bit of a bastard over the years. Like anyone, he had his flaws, he just happened to be better at using his personal history to conceal or override those flaws And most of what he did and stood for, he was quite sincere about. In the end, it was his most nakedly cynical move -- selecting the jabbering dunce Sarah Palin as his running mate -- that undid him.

We can remember John McCain for everything, good and bad. He willingly took more physical punishment than most people would or could, and he paid a massive physical (and no doubt mental and spiritual) price for it. He also made a reasonably good-faith attempt to atone for his campaign-finance corruption with the McCain-Feingold bill. And his midnight vote to save Obamacare last year probably saved many lives, and gave the finger to a lot of people who thoroughly deserved it.

And yet. Palin's selection as running mate accelerated the empowerment of the barrel-bottom dimbulb GOP base, which we are all now paying the price for, and will for decades to come, probably. And after McCain announced his cancer as terminal, as he vocally decried the perfidious machinations of the aforementioned Clownstick and his satanic minions, McCain could easily have made one last effort for his country, one that would have required no sacrifice at all, as he was already on his way out the door.

He could have stood with the Democrats on any number of recent issues, and preserved a 50-50 stalemate, instead of (like his fellow Arizona senator, Jeff Flake) indulging in cheap grandstanding about his damned principles, and then voting right along with this paper tyrant he and Flake kept squawking about.

McCain was much more establishment hack than gutsy maverick, but even there it's useful to observe how that weird dichotomy persisted, and to understand the mediocracy's role in perpetuating that myth. Politicians -- at least ones that stay in office -- are as much marketer as policy maker or anything else, and so if a politician is able to use "news" programs to effectively market transparent myths and falsehoods for decades, it is more an indictment of the media than of the politician who figured out how to use the media. That's not victim-blaming, that's noting that the game is rigged, and the refs are lousy at their jobs.

But whatever. Like many before him and many to come, McCain was wrong about many things, but as the saying goes, he was wrong within normal parameters. He was a true character -- pugnacious, funny, somehow managing to be self-deprecating and smarmy in the same sentence at times. He provided a solid contrast to the emotionally retarded thug sitting in the White House, and the cadre of feckless, gutless enablers on Capitol Hill.

The cultists think Clownstick is some kind of tough guy, that he's an alpha dog. Bullshit. McCain was a bona-fide tough guy, and it's a sad irony that so many of the pussy cultists prefer to piss on the grave of a mostly honorable man, in the service of someone who doesn't have an honorable bone in his fat orange body.

We wish he had been a better man, and done more good things that he could easily have done, but we'll also miss the guy. Rest in peace, Senator.

You Can't Be Neutral On a Moving Train

I think Steve is on to something here, that the one thing that could make Clownstick's base start to turn on him is if they felt like he wasn't owning libtards sufficiently. I would (and previously have, in various iterations) suggest that he really isn't doing that anymore, not that he ever really was. It just hasn't been adequately conveyed to them as such yet.

Don't bother reading or even skimming the soi-disant conservatard rags, your National Review and Weekly Standard and such like. We all know full well that your average basetard does not read such twaddle -- indeed, they clearly don't read any books or publications at all, preferring instead to get their talking points from whatever misspelled meme in their Facebook feed that rings their bell.

Strategically, it helps to step back and understand the base for precisely what they are, in as close to an ideological sense as possible. True, there is no orthodox ideology with these folks; it really does revolve around either whatever they think will annoy the librul caricatures that permanently squat in their fever dreams, or whatever jingoistic nonsense that strokes their outrage boner.

And so while they consider themselves "conservatives," what they really are is reactionaries. There is a difference, and it's an extremely important one. And among the cruder, more emotional and anti-intellectual of that breed, it's not even just about rolling the clock back, but about the fight itself. The struggle, the kampf, the jihad. The holy effort against the minions of the evil Other.

Ultimately they become identified -- and most critically, identify themselves -- by their opposition to things. What are they for, any of them? Beyond the ridonkulous spray-tan glow of their cult leader, they really aren't for anything. They just have an idea, carefully nurtured and watered by constant exposure to the UV rays of Fixed Noise, of what "liberals" are "like," and what "they" "want." All without ever actually asking or listening to or even just observing an actual liberal.

Cruz Control

This GQ article is a fine rundown of the Texas Senate race. Just read it, and soak in all the Rafael Cruz-y goodness. He's sticking with that "this human suit is getting itchy" schtick of his. Whatever works, fucko.

Seriously. The US Senate is teeming with assholes. Mitch "the Bitch" McConnell. Orrin "Saint Insufferable" Hatch. Marco "Pool Boy" Rubio. Rand "Serdechniy Droog" Paul. Obviously there are others. But Cruz manages to stand out even among that crowd of losers as a gaping asshole.

Cruz's worst traits are actually of the more subtle, nuanced type, but just as telling as (for example) McConnell's open-court poaching of two SCOTUS seats in less than two years. But you decide for yourselves which of these two salient Cruz facts paints him in a worse light:

• During the 2016 campaign, Clownstick called Cruz's wife ugly and insinuated that Cruz's father (who, to be fair, is both certifiably insane and, like his son, a gaping asshole) was involved in the JFK assassination. Cruz still sucks Clownstick's mini-cheeto every chance he gets, probably because he thinks he'll eventually get a SCOTUS appointment. Or maybe because he just has no self-respect. Does it really matter?
• As a child, Cruz sent money to Jesse Helms. Read that again, aloud if need be. AS A CHILD, RAFAEL EDWARD "TED" CRUZ SENT MONEY TO JESSE FUCKING HELMS. Maybe Cruz's whackjob evangelist dad made him sleep in the yard with the dog or something. But seriously, imagine the sort of "child" that sends money to a monster like Jesse Helms, instead of, I dunno, buying comic books and candy bars and the sorts of things Earth children buy with their money.

There's something deeply wrong with someone like that. He should consider himself lucky he's running against Beto O'Rourke, and not someone like, well, me. Because it's fucking Texas, where men are men and sheep are scared. And I can assure you, at every goddamn whistle stop I hit, I'd make damn sure to pick some random middle-aged gent out of the crowd, bring him up on stage for a minute, and it'd go something like this:

HEYWOOD J.:  Sir, can I ask you your name?
RANDOM MAN:  Rusty Shackleford.
HEYWOOD J: We've never met before, is that correct, sir?
SHACKLEFORD: Nope, never met.
HEYWOOD J.:  Mr. Shackleford, are you married?
SHACKLEFORD:  Yes, I am.
HEYWOOD J.:  Now, this might seem like a silly question but, do you love your wife?
SHACKLEFORD:  Yes, I do.
HEYWOOD J.:  What about your folks, do you love and honor and respect your parents?
SHACKLEFORD (growing concerned):  Well, of course.
HEYWOOD J.:  Yes sir, just establishing your bona-fides. This is Texas, and so I know you love your wife and your parents. So Mr. Shackleford, if another man disrespected your wife and your parents, what might be your reaction?
SHACKLEFORD (smiling, but also frowning):  Well, I guess I'd have to kick his ass. (chuckles)
HEYWOOD J.:  I expect you would, sir, as any decent man would. So what would you think of a man who called another man's wife ugly, and said his father killed JFK, and that second man not only didn't do anything about it, but tried to suck up to that first man who slandered his family? Now, we know how you'd feel about the first man, but how about the second man, the guy who had his wife and father insulted, and still wanted to be friends with the man who insulted them?
SHACKLEFORD (getting confused and a bit angry):  Well, shit -- sorry -- but that don't make any sense, what you're saying. You mean, the first guy calls the second guy's wife a pig, and then the first guy says the second guy's dad's a killer, and the second guy not only don't do nothin' about it, but he tries to pal up with that first guy?
HEYWOOD J.:  Yes sir, that's exactly what I'm asking you.
SHACKLEFORD (pauses, measuring his words):  Well, Jesus Christ, I really don't know, 'cause I honestly don't think I've come across someone that....shit, that gutless. Hell, I'd have less respect for the second guy, tell ya the truth. First guy's an asshole, no doubt. But that second guy, don't stand up for his wife or his dad? [widens eyes in exasperation] I'd say he needs a good ass-kickin' too!
HEYWOOD J.:  Yes sir, right you are. Just for the record, the first guy in the story is Donald Trump, and the second guy is Ted Cruz.

And I'd video that shit and put it up on fucking YouTube, over and over and fucking over again. Because it captures the intangibles that motivate people to vote with passion. They don't vote on this or that policy position, especially for a fucking senate seat. They vote on who moves them. And nothing's going to stir their contempt more than a smarmy little asshole who lets a clown shit on the mother of his children, and on his own father, and still fucking sucks up to him like a cheap Port Authority hooker to her pimp in a bad Starsky & Hutch knock-off.

I hope O'Rourke steps up and knocks his fucking block off, because it will win that Senate seat for him. That's the kind of thing that will galvanize the vote.

They Ask Questions

Not to single any particular person out, but this seems to sum up what a lot of people are supposing right about now:

Perfectly reasonable, right? Here's how the Human Centipede Administration answers that question:

The fuck you gonna DO about it, pal?

You have to admit, they're not wrong in that stance. What are you gonna do about it? Vote? Sure, if they allow you to, if Deripaska's Macedonian troll farm hasn't purged you off the rolls, if Brian Kemp hasn't prevented every black person in Georgia from voting against his enlightened despotism.

Recall that we've already had two (yes, two) presidential elections stolen just in this century, right in front of us, and no one did a goddamned thing about it. But just for sport, let's play along and say that you do get to vote and there is a blue tsunami and the Dummycrats reclaim the House and get to a 50-50 split in the Senate. Not enough to impeach and convict, but enough to control the House committees and jam up Traitor Bitch McConnell's daily efforts to skull-fuck what's left of the republic. Okay, now what?

We'll, I've been telling you since day one of this ongoing hemorrhoid what. The cornered rodent currently squatting in the White House will not only continue what he's been doing all along, he'll accelerate, increase, amplify. Because, again (you may have heard this one before):

The fuck you gonna DO about it, pal?

Everything is an act of defiance, a self-stroking of the imperial mini-cheeto, for no greater reason than to prove that he can, and to defy all comers to stop him. Imagine a four-year-old throwing a shit-fit in the cereal aisle for two years running, and a parent that lacks the will to step up and be a fucking parent. The supermarket workers are lamely standing at the edges of the scene asking the parent to take their asshole kid anywhere else, but the workers, the parent, and most importantly the asshole child all know they won't actually step up and shut it down.

And so the show goes on, because in this instant, the child has an entire propaganda network at his beck and call. Imagine -- dozens of supposedly professional careerists, basically just sitting around waiting for their marching orders from a demented old man who spends more time fixing his hilarious hair and skin than actually working.

When this is all over -- indeed, if it ever actually ends and this fucking turd is finally flushed for good -- there will be efforts from some corner to "reconcile," as if flat-out treason can ever be reconciled. At that point, lists need to be drawn up, and every single one of these Fixed Noise fuckers, right down to the kid that puts down the gaffer's tape, needs to be permanently blackballed from any sort of employment anywhere within a mile of government or news. They can all go ply their trade with fifty-cent blowjobs in the abandoned industrial park where the Beemer plant used to be before Cheetolini decided he knew more about tariffs than everyone else.

I'm not hardly kidding about this. If we ever get out of this jam, and if you really want to prevent it from happening again, they all have to pay dearly. Scorched earth. No quarter. What would General Sherman do?

Last Chance for Democracy?

With about seventy-five days and counting until midterms, it's important that voters -- well, let's be honest, Democratic voters -- need to not only be sure that they show up to vote, they need to take a few minutes beforehand and make sure they're still allowed to vote. These motherless fucks are perfectly willing to cheat and steal what they cannot win fairly. That fact should not be surprising.

So it's a good time to repost Ed Burmila's article about that very thing. Check in with your local county elections office, make sure you're still registered, that some teenager in a Macedonian troll farm owned by a Russian oligarch hasn't hacked the rolls and purged you and your neighbors off.

They are scum. They have no principles, no scruples, no reservations at all about stealing this thing. Take a few minutes while you still have time and make sure that they can't. Because if you think the last couple years have been hell, just imagine what it's going to be like if these bastards hang on to power, and assert an electoral mandate to do their worst.

Ladies' Night

Look, no one is ever going to mistake me for Brad Pitt, and I'm sure this will annoy many of my politically correct fellow travelers, but the takeaway from this Daily Crawler puff piece is that the four, um, females (I guess) are most notable for the fact that the Most Femnist Parsdent Evar would be the first to tell everyone how completely homely and unfuckable they are.

To paraphrase an old joke, if symptoms persist after four hours, don't worry about calling your doctor -- just look at that photo.

But the main point is not a joke. If Ronna RMONEY McDaniel takes her name back, or Baghdad Barb Huckabilly Sanders has a come-to-Jebus moment and renounces her ongoing service to Satan, or Kellyanne Conway has to make a decision between her marriage and her "career" as political fluffer, you can bet real cash that at some point, Mister Grab 'em by the Pussy will be sure to drop some sort of "looksist" shade on them. Count on it.

No insult is too small, no detail too petty. He's a doddering, senile piece-of-shit with a tenth-rate intellect and a memory of a concussion victim, but the one thing that asshole tattoos on his perfectly smooth brain is fucking grudges. They used to say that Barbara Bush knew how to hate, but Fuckface Von Clownstick lives for it. And if any of these dingbats turns on him, he will get personal. It's his go-to move.

In the meantime, if women have no problem selling their souls -- as well as other women -- to a serial predator, I have no compunction about calling 'em as I see 'em. They're fugly as sin, inside and out.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

The Charleston Civic Center has a maximum capacity of 13,600. It is not clear how full the arena was for the rally, but since this inbred-rube habitat of a state is still 2:1 in the tank for Commander Combover, it's entirely possible that it was packed, with more dullards milling around the parkin' lot bemoaning their luck. But hey, just being in proximity to his musky greatness has to be intoxicating, amirite?

Given the two shoes dropping yesterday, His Travesty has to be on the verge of a total meltdown, and he certainly had some moments last night. Remember, these stupid rallies are always under the pretense of campaigning for this or that local dipshit's congressional effort. In this case the stop was for whatever sap is running for Joe Manchin's Senate seat. But of course the candidate gets about two minutes to state his case, then he just straps on to daddy's back fat and rides for an hour or so.

There was one clip that's been replayed a few times already this morning, where Shithead repeats the word "collusion" five times in the space of about ten seconds, maybe twenty words total. The last iteration of the c-word is oddly singsong. It's like he thinks the repetition of the word has some sort of magickal property, as if Candyman or Sarah Palin will suddenly appear behind them. Certainly it does seem to lull the cult into their rally trance.

So here's the deal for these retard rally motherfuckers -- this is collusion, or more accurately, conspiracy. Disingenuous snipes about how Mueller's investigation has sprawled, or how Manafort is getting convicted for less-than-recent crimes, will only fool the willingly gulled. It's like they're suddenly finding out that racketeering investigations seldom end where they started, or that a serial-killing thug like Al Capone finally got tapped for tax evasion.

There's this show that's been on the air for some time, in multiple iterations, called Law & Order. Perhaps some of these epistemic-closure doofuses have heard of it.

The continuation of the "lock her up" chant, after all this time, may be the most salient point about the true intellectual level of these crowds. They are collectively dumber than a fucking box of rocks. You wouldn't trust a single one of these dopes to clean your gutters or change the oil on your car.

Not that anyone who would attend one of these rallies would be caught dead reading this blog, but there's always that off chance that one of the bigger librul fish sees this and amplifies this minor observation:

The Republican Party currently controls all three branches of government. If they wanted to initiate an investigation into Hillary Clinton for anything, from Uranium One to Her Emails, they could have started multiple such investigations at any time. At some point it may dawn on at least one (1) of these knuckle-dragging, cousin-fucking gastropods that there's a reason that no such investigation has occurred, or is even being proposed. DURRRR, WHY D'YA THINK THAT IS, GEEN-YUSS?

Hell, it might even dawn on one of our intrepid corporate mediots to ask that very same question, to the rubes and to the key players in this five-monkeys-fucking-a-football clusterfuck of an administration. Just keep asking it, over and over and over until their heads asplode, instead of stenographing his lies and their trained-seal responses to each of them.

It wouldn't hurt to also remind them periodically that the revenue from all that faggy magat swag they sport goes to pay off the skanks their hero porked a decade or so ago. For someone who's such a great deal-maker, he sure seems to pay a lot for sex.

Mouse

The Universe, God --
a celestial cat with infinite paws
      and infinite claws
            an infinite number of mice to play with
a lucky few get away for awhile
the rest are caught and let go,
      caught and let go,
for just long enough to think they're free
      in the light, in the clear
            out in the open air
if only for a moment

until the day, somewhere down the road
after all the hopes and dreams and ambitions
      all the love and sex and passion
            have come and gone
                  stumbled back and gone again
                        this time forever

....the mouse looks up, spent
      Just eat me, fucker.

Don't Do Something, Just Stand There!

The good folks at LGM have been all over what would be a Big Story, if we had a remotely competent corporate media. But since they're too busy transcribing Judy Ghouliani's "truth isn't truth" lies and stroking their chins about the meaning of it all, it mostly goes unnoticed.

Two Republican Secretaries of State, Kris K. (for Kansas) Kobach of Kansas, and Brian C. (for Cheater) Kemp of Georgia, are running for governor of their respective states. Kobach is perhaps most notorious for chairing the rigger voter fraud commission that FAILED in its mission to manufacture evidence of widespread (or even narrowly spread) fraudulent voting. Kemp's profile is a bit lower, but he deserves credit for stealing the GA-06 seat for Karen Handel (who also has a history of voter suppression when she was Georgia's Secretary of State) last year.

It's not an unfair question to pose to these scumbags:  why bother holding elections at all? Seriously, if they're not even bothering to conceal their cheating and rigging of the electoral system, why even bother? Let's just go full fashy and y'all can tell the peons who they voted for.

But this takes agency away from said peons. Kansans need to step up and take responsibility for their decisions, and start atoning for voting for a clown like Sam Brownback over and over again. The state is absolutely gutted, and they're lining up to have a two-by-four snapped off in their asses by Kobach. At some point people have to start paying attention and showing up, and not getting gulled over and over again by the last flag-humping teevee commercial they see before they go to cast their lot.

Georgia's predicament is a bit more transparent -- a white power minority (only slightly different from a white-power minority) preserving power over a black majority with several methods -- closing most of the polling places, throwing voters off of registration rolls, etc. They know they can't win fair and square, so they cheat and cheat and cheat some more. And no one does a goddamned thing about it.

Maybe disenfranchised voters should organize via this "social media" thing we keep hearing about, and organize a collective strike for a day or several. Maybe they should identify all of Kemp's corporate campaign sponsors and organize a boycott.

And maybe some politicians from the so-called Democratic Party could step up and make some noise too. I don't just mean the Chuck and Nancy show. How about former Georgia governor and noted fan of electoral integrity Jimmy Carter? How about recent president Barack Obama, if he's not too busy parasailing at Richard Branson's private Bahamian island? Former attorney general Eric Holder, mighty crusader against guitar companies and potheads? All of those people could at least raise a ruckus about this situation. But they don't even try. They never do. They'll mumble some bullshit platitudes about not wanting to corrupt the process, never mind that Kemp and Kobach and their ilk couldn't give half a fuck about corrupting the process.

Think about it -- Kemp and Kobach are openly rigging their own elections for themselves, right out in the open, and no one with any power is doing or saying a goddamned thing about it. And they're gonna get away with it.

Citizens do need to step up and exercise their franchise, as it were. But regular folks only have so much time to do such things, after commuting and working and finding some precious time in what little is left of the day to live their lives, knowing every moment of their debt-slave existence is befouled by the banana republic bullshit being rubbed in their faces every fucking day.

The future is going to be a lot uglier; it is absolutely going to get worse before it gets better, if indeed it ever really does. And this is how it starts, with the "small" stuff, stealing an election here and there, working the refs, knowing that the media exists to stenograph lies and truth side-by-side, naively thinking an addled populace will magically be able to suss the truth.

But in a world where lies are truth and truth is irrelevant, all that matters is the art of the steal. It would be a lot less disgusting and demoralizing to watch if some of the folks who seem to have a bottomless pocket of empty bromides for every occasion helped out a bit and gave the good guys a fighting chance once in a while. Instead they'll show up a week after the election somewhere on the rubber chicken circuit for $50k, to offer some cheap observations about our better angels or some such nonsense.

Allow me to be the first to pre-emptively say to them fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

Synecdoche

Virtually every policy and personnel decision/indecision made by this human centipede of an administration turns out to be a reflection, writ small of the operational principles baked into everything they do (and don't do).

• The Cabinet appointments, aside from Jim Mattis, are clearly put in place to either monetize or implode the department they were selected to run. So you have Betsy DeVos, who would love nothing more than to turn the nation's public education system into a faith-based profit center. Rick Perry, who had no idea what the Department of Energy does, and who vowed to eliminate it in his high-larry-ous 2012 campaign, is in charge of our nukes and our efforts at renewable energy and energy independence. Ben Carson is barely qualified to sort aluminum cans at the ree-cycle center, and he's been put in charge of public housing, much to the thrill of the rentier class.
• Tax cuts for people who already have many lifetimes' worth of money, and price hikes everywhere else to offset the measly thousand bucks some of the peons got as a one-time bonus.
• Unnecessary tariffs and trade wars leading to spontaneous bouts of winning at companies across the country. The one saving grace of that is that the companies seem to be by and large comprised of people who voted for this, so thank the FSM they're getting what they wanted.
• Turning the Veterans' Administration over to his buddies -- his customers -- at the Maga-Lardo. Fucking golf club cronies. The only reason this isn't a scandal is because no one has the ability to keep track of and pay attention to all the mendacity at this point. It's shit all the way down.
• And now this stupid Space Farce thing. Look, there is conceivably a good-faith argument to be for the US to initiate a hegemonic program for space. So why not make that argument, instead of standing there like a jabbering dupe and saying DURRRR SPACE FORCE DURRRR FUCK YOU LIBTARDS over and over again. Could it be that the whole thing is bullshit? Nahhh, not these guys. Jesus H. Christ. Yeah, if you didn't know any better, you might get to thinking that this Space Farce bullshit is just a trillion-dollar defense-contractor scam with a classified budget.

The main thing is that some of these things -- again, especially the Space Farce -- are proposed only as post hoc justifications, after Mister Man gets a wild hair going and starts talking some nonsense. They have to go back and run some PR and photo-ops and pretend like, Oh yeah, this a totally real, legit thing.

Sure, just like the voting fraud committee that tried like hell for months to invent a problem that Shit-for-Brains had tweeted, until they finally had to grudgingly admit that it was even more difficult to invent than Benghazi. There are more examples.

To the extent that these shitheads will be remembered in history books and classes, it will be for singularly distinguishing themselves with this level of consistency -- that everything they ever did or said was at direct cross purposes with their supposed populism, and illustrated how they operate -- empty, venal slogans turned into half-assed policy simulacra.

Failsons of Minarchy

There should be a caption/fanfic contest for this pic:

We'll throw in a few easy ones to get the party started:

• So that's what a muscle feels like!
• He said he'd let me borrow the ass-less chaps.
• If we're pulling a train, does that make me the engine or the caboose?

So what bikes do these realest of 'murkins have to ride, now that His Travesty has expressed his immense displeasure with Hardly-Dangerous? Seriously, did you ever think you'd live to see a public official in high office openly call for a boycott against a private business that crossed him? It'll be interesting to see just how much more winning these saps can take.

I don't think they've had quite enough snapped off in their asses just yet. Another quarter or two oughta do it for some of them; unemployment benefits run out quickly, especially in this wondrous worker's paradise where the unemployment rate is nominally 3.9% (Fake Numbers!), yet real wages are as stagnant as ever.

But yeah, this "Bikers for Clownstick" thing is just too much, as is that "I'm so turned on by all this lea-thurrrr" duckface. Not that there's a danger of some Nochni Volki scenario; these fake rebels either are card-carrying bozos who can't put their fingers together in the dark without a flashlight, or they're suburban assholes with jobs and mortgages and car payments who can't afford to lose their place in the swinger block parties with some weird mayhem-related charge.

A Feature, Not a Bug

Since the day this downtrodden nation of ours was inflicted with the venomous scowl and unearned sense of self-regard that makes up the entirety of Omarosa Manigault, it has been useful to point to her as a prime example that women can be assholes too. I am not kidding in the slightest when I say that I sincerely hope that her two-ply tell-all sells three copies. Who knows, she might actually have to go out and ply an honest trade.

She's just fucking awful, I guess is what I'm trying to say, and I can't imagine who in the world could possibly be edified by her "revelation" about Agent Orange, a man that Manigault has worked for or vicariously tried to work for multiple times on a lame-ass fake-tycoon teevee show. She knew exactly what she was getting into when she took that bullshit White House job, and copped an attitude when she took it, talking about how everyone would have to kneel before Zod and such. Seriously, fuck her.

Does anyone out there, regardless of political persuasion, believe that the verified existence of a tape of Clownstick uttering the n-word and c-word over and over again would change anything? Hell, you could play a video of it on the nightly news of him openly ranting that shit, and his cult would double down. That's how they talk and think about those subjects.

Forget the dog-whistle, he bullhorns that shit all the time, and has for decades. He got his start in the 1970's having to pay fines to the Nixon Administration for housing discrimination. He took out full page ads calling for the summary execution of the Central Park Five, and continues to insist upon their collective guilt, years after they were all exonerated.

Even his more recent kerfuffles with blacks, betray a certain mindset. He's repeatedly referred to Maxine Waters as "low IQ," and recently disparaged both Don Lemon and Lebron James, specifically in their intellectual capacities. You think a video of him laughing about "dumb niggers" would change anything? Hell, it would only reinforce what he's been saying forever.

This is why people -- black, white, or otherwise -- shouldn't be falling for the overtures any black celebrity pays to this piece of shit. Kanye West was a fucking asshole when he heckled Taylor Swift, and he's still a fucking asshole, and delusional to boot. (And his music has always been shit as well; all the critics who've sucked his dick over the years need to clean their ears out -- he's never been anything but a no-talent hack.) Omarosa would have taken their money as long as she could have, n-word or no. All those black ministers who show up to the fealty photo-ops are hucksters, selling fifty-dollar vials of oil and prayer towels to suckers, so they can buy a better Gulfstream and buttfuck more teenage boys.

For years I've observed exactly which "black friends" Clownstick has cultivated for public display, and they've always been the worst of the worst: Don King; OJ Simpson; Mike Tyson; Ray Lewis; Dennis Rodman; and of course, Kanye and Omarosa. Go ask Chuck D what he thinks of those assholes. It's a modern form of minstrelsy, and they should all be ashamed of themselves for letting him use them as props.

It's not exactly untrue that the Democrats have taken their black voting base for granted, but that is orthogonal to the fact that the Republicans routinely trot out trophy blacks to lamely try to conceal their rapacious policies that overwhelmingly affect poor black people. I don't have to drink Flint's poisonous tap water; my kid doesn't attend Baltimore's run-down schools.

So people such as those jive-turkey bloggeristas Diamond & Silk oughta be reminded frequently of exactly what they're really supporting, and that goes equally for shameless opportunists like Omarosa Manigault, and insufferable shitheads like Kanye West.

Fight Club

Recently attorney Michael Avenatti has been rumbling about running for president in 2020, and there have been some responses at various blogs and Twitters that I frequent. Many of the takes are, let's say, not exactly glowing.

I am willing to bet a cold hard C-note that Avenatti never makes a serious bid for running. I don't think running is his point. True, he is a shameless publicity hound, but he has the benefit of actually having something to say. There is a point to Avenatti appearing on MSNBC every couple days, certainly more so than the current thing in the Oval Office, with his morning-dump rage-tweets every motherfucking day.

It occurs to me that fighting -- more specifically, girding potential Democratic candidates to fight -- is Avenatti's point. People have gravitated to his pugnacious style, and they're right to do so.

Unfortunately, we're in an era where performative outrage counts as much or more as real outrage. It's pathetic, and it says a lot about the societal conditions of late-stage capitalism and an empire in rapid decline, but it's the deal all the same.

Do you want Fuckface Von Clownstick to go down in ignominious defeat, and slither back to his crumbling Manhattan twit-hole? Good, that's a start. Now, whoever goes up against that gaping asshole is going to have to pack a lunch, because he's obviously to going to lie and cheat and bullshit and bully his way through this. He's going to pull things completely out of his ass, not bother to brush away the peanuts and corn, slap it on the table and defy you to call him out on it.

That's been his sole move so far, and you know what? It's worked for him quite well. Because everyone is still playing by the Before Rules, while Calvin runs around playing Calvinball.

At worse, Avenatti is challenging Democrats to sack up and get in the ring, because Clownstick is a cheap cock-puncher who's going to fuck them up if they insist on sticking to the old Marquess of Queensberry rules. People want someone who's going to scrap, and not take any shit, and not get bogged down in thousand-word policy positions and focus-grouped responses.

Anyone planning to run who can't just flat-out admit that they don't like broccoli, or that their favorite ice cream is rocky road, or that they like Dijon mustard or Swiss cheese, needs to just step the fuck off right now and save us all the headache. And when they get criticized and calumniated by the Fixed Noise flying monkeys, they need to take a tip from Snowflake and fire back on them, call out Fucker Carlskin and Melonhead Hannity and ask what the fuck is wrong with them, if they get paid by the lie or what.

The midterms are going to be bad enough, and if the Dems can't roll in strong in ninety days, then you can already count them out for 2020. But they probably will make a dent in November, and if they wish to carry that momentum forward and build on it, they will have to put aside their quaint notions about decorum and civility and comity.

Either you genuinely believe that the nation and its institutions are being imperiled, and you act accordingly, or you don't. It's that simple. I don't give a flaming fuck about Michael Avenatti's lack of political experience. If he somehow won the Democratic nomination for president in the 2020 election, I'd vote for him happily. I want those fucking monsters out of there, and their miserable death cult terminated with extreme prejudice. I'd fucking vote for Stormy Daniels if that's what it took.

They Ask Questions, Slight Return

Speaking of mediots and accountability, someone's eventually going to need to step forward and explain why Megan McArdle is allowed to fail upward forever. I don't recall ever reading anything of hers that even qualified as a fresh take, much less a cogent insight.

But here she flat-out rips aside the curtain, exposes what we all already knew -- that the financial system is and always has been completely rigged for people of wealth and power -- and says, "What's the problem?"

Maybe the problem is that there is this enormous, pervasive industry in print and television and radio of "hot take" pundits who say and write stupid things, and are never held accountable for any of it. They don't have to accurate or even sensible; in fact the stupider and more inflammatory they are, the better off they usually do. Again, it's all about the money in the end, never the ideology.

This is your meritocracy, America. How do you like it?

They Ask Questions

Anne Applebaum spends several hundred words and some column inches asking what most people can answer with, say, six words:  Laws only apply to little people.

People like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone get away with their nefarious bullshit for generations because they know the right people, and more likely than not they possess incriminating information on them. Not that they need it; it is, as we've always said, a game of money and not really of ideology, and as such, people who bring in money are always protected to some extent.

Ideology is just something cobbled together to keep the proles distracted. Filthy pelf is where it's really at. This is not exactly a secret; hell, they don't even bother to conceal it.

I veer and vacillate between predictions, knowing full well that prognostication is a total fool's game in this worst-of-all-timelines. In a rational world, Manafort would be convicted with aggravating circumstances, and be sentenced to a traitor's fate in the Florence ADX super-complex, 23 hours a day of solitary confinement until he keels over from all the fecal matter clogging his arteries. The emperor is impeached and summarily deposed, and the GOP is permanently quashed as a functioning political institution. The hard work of rebuilding a disintegrated polity begins anew.

But nothing makes sense anymore, so the best bet is on the most absurd thing:  Manafort gets convicted, in this trial and his upcoming one next month; the emperor pardons him, as is his wont; the mediots bumble and rustle and fulminate, getting their pundit petticoats in full dudgeon; the basetards, emboldened by His Travesty's ongoing contempt for the RULE OF LAW, make it into their collective contempt as well. Just enough Dems win in the midterms to take the House but not the Senate, which is at least enough to hamstring Snowflake until 2020, which will then be the MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION EVAR.

And it all comes back to the basic fact that everyone talks a good game about accountability, but it always and only reserved for people who are too broke to defend themselves in court and hire good PR people.

I'd Rather Be an American Than a Republican

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Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Something called "Olentangy Orange" High School in Lewis Center, Ohio, with "roughly 3,000 people....with more in an overflow room" attending, according to Business Insider. Sad!

During the dismal proceedings, Emperor Snowflake whined about how hot it was in the high-school gym. That's just your flop-sweat, old man. Hope it don't make the spray tan run!

Ohio's 12th was John Kasich's district for nearly twenty years, from 1983-2001. (The district was redrawn in 2011, because politicians pick their voters now, instead of the other way around.) Snowflake won the district by eleven points in 2016. They've had a Republican representative for almost every electoral cycle for the last hundred years.

This time around, he couldn't even bring himself to talk shit out in the open about Lebron James, after trashing him on Twitter less than twenty-four hours ago. What a fucking pussy. They're running scared now, and they know it. All Lebron has to do is tape a thirty-second blurb for Danny O'Connor, reminding everyone that Snowflake's "schools," unlike Lebron's, ended up having to pay out a $25 million judgment for ripping off working-class suckas.

Wait until next weekend's white power rally in DC, when he steps on his mini-cheeto yet again in "responding" to that. "Alpha male" my ass -- he doesn't even have the guts to call out people who are proud of being fucking nazis. Grampa Walnuts only knows how to talk to his brain-dead sycophants, not to people who actually pay attention and aren't branded by his dipshit cult.

Kudos to Business Insider for not only posting, but leading off with the (shit)head count. That's how it should be done.

Reality Teevee-ocracy

This is some pretty solid smackdown. I have nothing to add, except that the "boredom curve" is inversely proportional to the amount of attention paid. People who can binge-watch Bachelorette seasons without losing their lunch or giving themselves a trans-orbital lobotomy probably loooovvve this bullshit; the rest of us, not so much. I never cared much for Candid Camera back in the day, either -- funny for about three minutes, then it's like, I get it, what else ya got?

I said some fifteen years ago that "reality" teevee is for people who can't handle porn or Faces of Death. If anything, I think I may have understated the case a bit. If religion is the opiate of the masses, reality teevee is the fentanyl-laced heroin.

And it really isn't the outrage so much anymore, as the article in the link notes -- it's the sheer tedium of it all. Again, how much Senile Grandpa Smears Shit On The Walls can you watch?

A Bottomless Well of Fuck 'em

Elections have consequences, part 512,783:

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The 16-year-old American daughter of a U.S. Marine held back tears as long as she could Friday before her family was split in two.

Her mother, Alejandra Juarez, was finally leaving for Mexico, rather than be sent off in handcuffs, after exhausting all options to stop her deportation.

....

Temo didn't figure his vote for [Fuckface Von Clownstick] would affect them personally. That was before the enforcement of [Clownstick's] "zero tolerance" policy toward illegal immigration.

Now, the Juarez family will be divided in two: Estela will join her mother in Mexico after she gets settled, while Temo cares for Pamela and pays the bills.

....

A reporter asked what she would say to the president. Alejandra said she'd ask how [Clownstick]could let this happen, since he "always says he loves the military and he's doing everything for the military."

"My husband fought for this country three times. The administration, yourself, you think you are punishing me. You're not just punishing me," she said, referring to her family. "I hope this make him happy. And I really pray that God will forgive him."

Lady, maybe you oughta have a talk with your fucking husband. These people are just too fucking much. He's doing exactly what he said he'd do, what he promised to do. When they say "Promises Made, Promises Kept," this is what they're talking about, and they're absolutely goddamned right.

Temo Juarez voted willingly for a man who kicked off his campaign by picking on immigrants, particularly Mexicans, portraying them in the worst possible light. Apparently Juarez assumed that Clownstick didn't mean Juarez or anyone he cared about, as if Clownstick was ever going to make any sort of distinction between brown people who aren't supposed to be here.

Welp, Juarez now gets to spend the rest of his life thinking about his own role in all this. Maybe he can explain his principled vote for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party to his daughters. You got all the time in the world for that now, chief.

There's not as many of them as there are of the Cletus safaris, but these dopey stories are no less baffling. I have no idea what to make of it, nor what we're all supposed to do with it. This is the political equivalent of deliberately pulling a vending machine over on yourself, and then whining that you have a broken leg.

The Mob Drools

desiccated shibboleths slouching
shoulder to shoulder, ass to belly
pasted on a face from yesterday

pinched and bitter
better days past forever
indifferent to what they're being used for

whatever it takes to pwn imaginary enemies
moar winning plz boss

nothing matters, nothing is true
no use for facts or context
only for pulse and rage and rhythm and
animal urge
the buildup to the purge
that they dream darkly

when the lights are out and the music's over
anger-jizz pooling on the arena floor
until tomorrow
when fresh outrage comes calling
and needs a face to sell the next lie

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Instead of complaining about the corporate media's lack of reportage on crowd size at these stupid things, I'm just going to do it myself. You'd be surprised how many arenas are listed in Wikipedia, with plenty of detailed info. Much more useful than reporting on what he lied about this time. I'll spare you the suspense:  every word was a fucking lie. Bokay? Emperor Snowflake is nothing if not consistent.

What's more interesting is that the crowds are getting smaller and smaller, little by little. Only diehard cultists go to these things anymore, and there's no point in even talking to them, much less reaching out to them. They cannot be converted, and they are not representative of the average person who voted for this asshole. They are entirely in their own world.

So. Tonight's tardfest took place at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Wilkes-Barre, PA, concert capacity of 10,000. Now we just need some shots affirming the empty seats. Do your job, fake news media!

Boycott Spotify

It's not exactly a news flash that Alex Jones is a piece of shit. Currently he's seeking $100k in court costs from the parents of Noah Pozner, one of the young children murdered in the Sandy Hook hoax massacre.

So, you see, it might be understating things a bit to refer to Jones merely as a piece of shit. He's far worse than that, but it's difficult to quickly come up with a word that encompasses just how huge a fucking turd Jones really is.

Jones lost a bunch of advertisers from his YouTube channel earlier this year, but apparently Spotify still carries his lie-peddling podcast. This is still 'murka, and we all still have a right to free speech.

But we all may want to consider where we want to draw a line. A person certainly has a "right" to write and post (for example, certainly not an endorsement) slash-fic type crap that involves children or extreme violence or torture or pick-your-own-most-awful-thing, without being imprisoned for that speech, so long as they don't act on it or overtly incite other to act on it.

That right does not extend to compelling advertisers to support the medium by which such shit gets carried. And the same holds for Jones; he certainly has every right to record his lies and subhuman filth, verbal diarrhea that inflicts ongoing pain to parents of slaughtered first-graders. But he has not right to expect companies to disseminate that shit for him, much less for him to get paid for it.

So my daughter and I both have premium Spotify accounts, and they are now cancelled, and I've told them why. Maybe if enough people do the same, they'll step up.

Jones is fucking scum. I hope his ex-wife takes every penny, and he never sees his kids again, and that they know why, and Jones ends up selling oranges and handjobs (not necessarily in that order) at the nearest freeway off-ramp.

It's time to stop fucking around with these people, all of them. Spotify is a relatively neutral actor in a huge ecosystem that has far worse critters slithering through. Boycott them all the same. Boycott anything and everything with the name Fox on it, not just the propaganda channel. The fucking Simpsons cast and the football announcing crew are getting paid in agitprop scrip. So fuck them. I don't know about you, but I've had it with all of them. I want my country back.

Anything with Mark Burnett's name on it too. Reality teevee has ruined this fucking country, made it stupid beyond belief, and susceptible to this traitorous clown. That's bad enough; it should be intolerable that Burnett is also a friend to this bastard. Burnett and his wife can talk about Jebus and family all they want, but their deeds support the most ungodly (in every sense of the word) person to hold high office. They should be ashamed of themselves, but their money insulates them from consequences.

These people need to be made destitute. It's the only thing they understand.

Orange You Glad I Didn't Say Dipshit?

The Vichy Times does its weekly weakly chore and dumps another insufferable "be kind to assholes and racists" word log. Do your duty 'murka, flush twice!

I don't want to bother with yet another ass-spelunking of yet another completely useless article. (Except perhaps to briefly note for the record that no one is ever going to write or publish an article ministering to racists and morons to reach out to godless heathen sybarites. Funny how that works.)

I bring it up only by of comparison to another type of "journalistic" effort that seems primed to supplant the Cletus safari variants. This type is being spearheaded by CNN's Jim Acosta, who seems to think his plaints about incivility have any practical use.

No doubt Acosta sees himself as doing the Lord's work in his chosen vocation. But frankly, it's tough to see what function Acosta actually serves. At all.

Think about it:  the guy goes to these stupid fucking carny conventions, where he is penned like a farm animal with other would-be journos, for these clown-cult gastropods to waddle by and spit and scream at and give the finger to. Acosta then transcribes the proceedings, from the clown's lies to the cultists' mindless adoration of those lies. Then Acosta hangs out for a while afterward and talks to the marching morons, shoots a few selfies with them.

And when he's not at the cult rallies, Acosta goes to the "press conferences," which are neither of those words, where he and the rest of the farm animals go through the dreadful routine of asking "questions" of Baghdad Barb, only to have that wonk-eyed cow sneer and lie to them. Some job.

Maybe Acosta has a terminal case of Stockholm syndrome. Whatever. But the fact is that no one forces him and his colleagues to attend these wretched affairs, and nothing useful is ever gleaned from any of them.

Someone should tell Jim Acosta and the rest of them that there is literally no point to what they do. They do not inform the public, because we already know that the fuckers they stenograph do nothing but lie and treat everyone with contempt. They do not protect the republic, because these fuckers don't give a shit about "norms" or "rules" or even the republic itself. They shit on your reportage, hoss.

There's a metric fuckton of stories that could be generated on these animals; arrogance, belligerence, and ignorance are a potent combination. What do you think the odds are that there's enough crap out there, solid stories that would be interesting and informative and maybe even make a real difference, for every herd journo that cowers in the press room just of habit, like battered spouses, waiting with bated breath to transcribe one more lie, one more outburst, for a populace that gave up caring a long time ago.

If Acosta is looking for sympathy for his travails, he should go make donuts or inseminate turkeys, either of which would be more useful than what's been doing. If he's looking for respect, maybe he should start doing respectable work. Because this is bullshit.