Troll Flag

The conventional wisdom holds that the midterm election is a referendum on that fucking thing currently defiling the White House. This is only partially true -- it is a referendum on us, and what kind of country we intend to be. Do enough of us want to move forward into what will most assuredly be a transitional decade on many fronts (political, economic, environmental, cultural), or are we going to continue slouching back to the 1930s?

This must be what life is like in a particle accelerator -- countless atoms propelled at impossible velocities into observed collisions. Each week moves faster than the last, with more and more and more crazy things. It tells you what kind of week it's been when the Saudis' admission -- after weeks of denial and almost defiant dog-ate-our-homework excuses -- that they planned the murder of a dissident journalist and carried it out in their Turkish consulate, that such a thing doesn't even register in the top three things of the past seven days.

The attempted pipe bombings and now yesterday's massacre at a synagogue serve to bring us all into sharp relief. We already know what sort of diseased soul he is; what will now be revealed is what sort of people we are collectively. Either we are fine with insane losers being egged on by the chief executive at hate rally after hate rally, or we've had enough. Either we're okay with one of our "allies" holding a journalist to a table and dismembering him alive, or we're not.

Either we see the connection or we choose not to, between said chief executive spending years going town to town, city to city, night after night, openly calling for the imprisonment without charges of his political opponents, and having audiences of angry losers chanting along. They can try to bullshit onlooker with the bullshit evasion of It's just a joke!, but it is clearly not a joke, and when unbalanced loners and losers take that shit both literally and seriously, either you address your role in that situation, or you're fine with it all.

Make no mistake -- they are fine with it. All of it.

Partners In Crime

The Middle East is unraveling very quickly, and with momentum. The murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, in the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, committed by a Saudi hit squad sent by their thug king, is the latest and so far largest domino to fall. (Never mind, of course, that the Saudis have been mercilessly driving Yemen back into the Stone Age for several years now, aided and abetted by the current and previous US governments.

If the Obama Administration was somewhat slow and heedless in its (non-)responses to authoritarians taking over in Egypt, Israel, and Turkey, as well as the existing problems in Iran and Syria, the current gang has been even worse. They have made it very clear that their idea of foreign policy is merely a tollbooth, one which bails out the first failson-in-law from his various real estate snafus.

Naturally, the despotisms of the world prefer raw transactional politics, which is why these creeps get along so well with each other. And in fact, the current regime's enabling behavior, as an aversion to Obama's measured responses and precautions, has kept the region more volatile than it would otherwise have been. They are sleeping with a monster, and they are fine with it, because he's a rich monster who's happy to pay up.

Turkey is playing its own game here -- all of the information about Khashoggi's presumed fate, and the evidence for it, has been filtered out from Ankara. They have on-and-off relationships with the Saudis and the Israelis, and meddling in Syria from Russia and the US have only exacerbated the dynamic in the region. The one good outcome is that ISIS seems to have been mostly eliminated, though of course there's always another such group lurking under the next rock.

But with this greedy, doddering old fool driving things forward into a nasty election, this Saudi problem could get pretty ugly. Already the Saudi stock market is taking a hit, expecting sanctions, and they dump too much money into the US real estate market for it not to be noticeable if they decide to pull out or sell off their sovereign fund investments, or just slow down oil production for the winter to drive up gas prices.

Seriously, Fuck Kanye West

So did I tell ya or did I tell ya? The guy has, like, zero fucking redeemable characteristics. He's a perfect acolyte for this anal fissure of an administration -- not one-tenth as smart as he thinks he is, proudly ignorant, completely incoherent when he thinks he's trying to actually make a fucking point. He has nothing useful to say about anything or anybody. Just like his fat, elderly, doddering daddy figure.

Few things are more pathetic than watching a grown-ass forty-year-old man spew his little-lost-girl daddy issues; even Clownstick looked uncomfortable after a while. I think if there hadn't been a crowd there, Kanye probably would have tried to suck his dick.

The professional observers who are trying to make this a mental illness issue need to reconsider. He may be mentally ill, but that's not the problem here. Kanye West's problem is exactly the same as Fuckface Von Clownstick's problem:  he's an ignorant, jabbering fool who has nobody in his life to tell him no or set him straight on anything, so he's now far beyond the point where he would listen anyway.

You really can't tell people like that anything, all you can do is cut them out of your lives, and hope they finally see the pattern for themselves. Or not. If they can't get it together, you're better off without them anyway.

But this is how West has always been, always. Clownstick fans and self-styled conservatards think they're being clever by appropriating West as one of their own, like they've liberated him from the Dummycrat plantation. Well, they can fucking have him, and the wife-beater Jim Brown, and the murderous thief Don King, and the rest of the criminal types they think show the party as being more inclusive. Hell, dig up Ike Fucking Turner while you're at it.

The funniest part of it is that this serves as a perfect example of what I was just talking about in the previous post less than a week ago -- they can't tell musicians and athaletes to shut up and sing or dribble or dance, when they take a stance against their senile god-emperor, but soon as one starts singing his praises, they all reach for the hymnal and join in.

Shut Up and Sing

Onoez! Taylor Swift has broken the hearts and dreams of white-power cellar-dwellers by coming out in support of Phil Bredesen in the TN Senate election. In the slightly more "mainstream" conservatard disinfo universe, no doubt the Fixed Noise baboons are already verbally burning Swift in effigy.

This is a weird but entirely predictable phenomenon for them. I never hear of liberal (or "liberal") commentators or bloggers touting the endorsement of this or that celebrity. I mean, it's nice that, for example, Willie Nelson has endorsed Beto O'Rourke all summer, but it doesn't affect my opinion of Willie or Beto at all. I'd support a slab of river rock, if it was running against that dipshit Ted Cruz.

So the way your garden variety conservaturd will characterize this is some too-clever-by-half variation on Laura Ingraham's "shut up and sing" catchphrase. Of course, they don't say that to Kanye West anymore, now do they? Hell, some of us are old enough to recall how they all flipped when West was embarrassingly rude to Swift, crashing her award thingy like an asshole. Or when West claimed that George W. Bush didn't care about black people. (Not true, of course -- Bush didn't and doesn't care about poor people.)

But these days, as far as they're concerned, Kenny West is woke like a Tim Allen joke, y'all, wearing his MAGAt cap on that librul Saturdee Night DEAD fake-comedy program, hurrr, amirite. He showed them assholes whut's whut, I tell you whut. They try to make it sound like people in the entertainment industry are unqualified to reach an opinion on something (as if Ingraham or Hannity or Tomi Lahren or Greg Gutfeld are qualified to do anything that doesn't involve fellating raw power on a nightly basis), until they have an opinion they like.

Like all reactionaries, their real motto is ipse dixit. Because I say so.

It's even funnier when random morons post such memes on their social mediot pages. Some Fuckface in Pig's Taint, Alabama gets all het up about a celebrity or athlete trying to ram their opinion down 'murka's throat. But they're jes' a dumb celebrity! Har har! Entertain me! Dance, monkey, dance! Right, and who are you, and who am I, and who is that panel of privileged assholes on my basic cable feed? If it's your right to be an obnoxious dickhead on your friends' Facebook feeds, why is it such a problem when LeBron James or Tom Arnold speaks their mind?

We all know the old "opinions are like assholes" song:  Everyone's got one, and they all stink. Taylor Swift is not unqualified to voice her opinion because of her line of work -- if anything, the fact that she has to tour and travel constantly probably gives her a broader perspective and range of experience. I might even say the same thing about a garbage human being like Kanye West, if not for the fact that everything about him is a publicity stunt, and it's impossible to detect anything resembling sincerity from him. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if a year or two passed and he and that hobbit he's married to publicly change their minds about their elderly oompa-loompa friend.

And they would still be insufferable assholes. When they give away 95% of their ill-gotten pelf and go help some isolated African village, without a camera crew in tow, then we can be impressed.

Devil's Triangle, Slight Return: The People's Court

Now that the vile deed is done and written in blood, here's a few follow-up points from yesterday:

• In the initial review of how each branch of gubmint has broken down, I meant to point out that in the case of the executive branch, this has obviously been going on for some time. The "unitary executive" trend gained steam after 9/11 of course, but Obama did nothing to stem or abate that trend. (Nor without any clear direction or guarantee of lasting effect, should he have.) It was always a bargain with the devil, in the possibility that sooner or later this increasingly unchallenged power would fall into the hands of an evil person, or an idiot -- or, as it turned out, both.
• The final vote to confirm was 50-48, with Steve Daines absent, Lisa Murkowski voting "present" rather than "no," and Joe Manchin defecting to the "yes" crowd, ostensibly to protect his re-election odds. I find that logic baffling; does anyone on either side of the fence seriously think that a Clownstick cultist is going to vote for Manchin because he voted to confirm Kavanaugh? If Manchin votes with his party, the count is 49-49, and Murkowski is forced to make a choice, as is Daines. That's what hardball politics is supposed to be about. Imagine if, say, that fuckhead Flake could have somehow been brought around. Suddenly Manchin's the deciding vote. Instead the guy fucking punts. Real party solidarity there, asshole. Maybe his Pharma Sis daughter has another price increase on the Epi-Pen coming up.
  
  For the next few weeks, liberals will be lecturing each other about "purity votes" and that sort of nonsense. Personally, I think Manchin's a fucking squirrel turd, and he is entirely welcome to go fuck himself repeatedly until you can drive a Buick straight up his gaping asshole. He deserves whatever rage and scorn actual liberals and Democrats can muster to heap upon him. He did something he didn't have to do, for no good strategic or tactical reason, at a time when all Democrats really need to stand and fight.
  
  All that said, he needs to be voted back in right now (though, you know, try not to be too surprised if the blue tsunami doesn't turn out quite as advertised, and he jumps parties), and then primaried hard the next time around. But it shouldn't be hard to understand the way people are reacting to this, the feeling that there's no point in voting Democrat if the fucker votes Republican. Heidi Heitkamp understood that there's no point in genuflecting to monsters, and so she voted her principle. It will probably cost her seat, but at least she's going down swinging. People are pissed, and they should be. For fuck's sake it hasn't even been a day and these tiresome lectures come out. Let people have a few minutes to fucking vent, before they vote the way you think they should vote. But in the end, come back around and show up, now and every time going forward. Use your anger, rather than the other way around. Don't forget, but don't self-destruct. Use it the way they use it:  to keep warm. Wolverines!
• More than anything, you can pretty much bet the bank that more will come about Kavanaugh in the weeks and months to come. This guy is fucking dirt, pure and simple, both as a human being and as a practitioner of the legal profession, much less a Supreme Court justice. The most critical lesson to be learned with Kavanaugh is that process should not be rushed, especially if the nominee turns out to be janky as fuck. It's fascinating how every dipshit peckerwood suddenly became a fucking SCOTUS scholar overnight, even though they couldn't name two other justices if you held a gun to their heads.
• Bottom line, here is the deal on this asshole:  Kavanaugh was selected by an executive who lost the popular vote, and confirmed by a collection of senators who represent a minority of the population, and was opposed by a majority of the citizens in every poll. Hang tight onto that, and don't let go. Use that anger constructively. Never vote Republicon again, for anything or anyone, no matter what. Start strategically weeding out fake Democrats like Joe Manchin, one by one by one. It can be done, but it takes work, attention, effort, commitment.
• If I have to read one more thing about how Chris Coons and Jeff Flake are such wonderful friends and colleagues who rely on each others' advice, I'm going to fucking puke. Earth to Chris Coons: your good pal made a spectacle of himself and his vaunted principles, and then turned right around and did what he was always going to do, what Susan Collins was always going to do. Quit letting yourself be fooled by these cock-smokers. There is nothing good about them. You're a sap to think otherwise.

There can be no excuses in a month. Either you're tired of all the winning, or you love it. Either you want a voice in your government and your collective fates, or you're good with all this. There's no middle ground. If everyone who was just too lazy or apathetic to vote last time around showed up -- hell, if half of 'em showed up -- you would have your tsunami, bigly. There are more of us than there are of them. All we have to do is show up.

Devil's Triangle

It's probably wishful thinking to assume that most -- or even many -- 'murkins have any real knowledge of the three branches of gubmint, and/or the principle of checks and balances. Maybe a plurality recall some of the broad strokes:  executive, legislative, judicial; these branches are designed to serve as checks on one another; now let us all pray and remember the sacred day that Jebus brought the Holy Constitution down from Mount Bullshit to bestow upon the Founding Fathers, who while infallible were in the end mere mortals.

With the tedious, rote theater of investing Rapebro McGambledrunk with a lifetime sinecure, in reward for his lifetime service as a company butt-boy, it should be clear by now that all three of those sacred branches have pretty much rotted off the proverbial tree. The executive branch is the playpen of a dipshit madman and anyone willing to suck up to him. The legislative branch is comprised of craven idiots who give the executive whatever it wants, provided the tax cuts and knuckle-dragger judges keep coming through. And now the judicial branch, long dying on the vine, is done.

Maine's good Senator, Angus King, sums up the objection to Kavanaugh thoroughly. Forget getting caught up in the endless he-said-she-said of Dr. Ford's accusation -- Kavanaugh's judicial record is problematic, as is his bullshit explanation of his massive credit card debt. And we all saw his temperament. This turd doesn't even deserve the job he already has. But they're going to promote him all the same. And there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it. Vote, sure, and protest and boycott and all that. Don't take any shit from these fucking mutants. But be realistic about the prospects, and manage expectations.

This has been going on for some time, since the Saint Reagan years at least. But Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010 served as the one-two punch to ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the rest of the political system. Kavanaugh's ascent, with all his spite and vengeance and his career of naked political opportunism, may very well be the end of SCOTUS as a legitimate institution.

So now there are no checks or balances on anything -- these branches now serve either to logroll each others' ideas in the service of the vile billionaires who put all of them in office, or to sit inert while the majority burns. This is untenable; by 2040 it is estimated that seventy percent of the US population will live in just fifteen states -- which of course means that the remaining thirty percent will have a 70-seat supermajority representing them.

On the one hand, we seem to have turned into a nation of drama queens, spurring each other on with ever more furious bouts of performative outrage over this or that hot-button issue of the day. On the other hand, it really doesn't seem like an exaggeration to say that this election is essentially a make-or-break for the United States to continue on as a more or less functional entity, and that even if the Democrats take back the House and the Senate, which is highly unlikely, it will still take a rout in 2020 to start moving things back toward an even keel.

It should be clear by now that things will never get better until the Republicon Party is completely crushed, burned to the ground, the ashes scattered and the earth salted. All of them, including and perhaps especially the supposed "moderates" (Flake, Collins, Sasse, etc.), have cynically placed party over country and principle, every goddamned time. There should be no place for such people in a decent society, but we stopped being a decent society some time ago.

Balance is important in life, and so it should be in politics that you should have functioning, principled liberal and conservative parties in order to balance out certain tendencies in each. Obviously, we no longer have anything like that, there is no functional conservative party in this country anymore, just a virulently reactionary party and a technocratic centrist party trying vainly to keep in the game. But all the scumbag billionaires who own and operate the political system in this country bankroll just one party, the nutbag insane one.

The usual peanut gallery types are going to insist that the Democrats overplayed their hand on Dr. Ford's accusation and testimony. But that was the hand that was dealt -- all the other concerns about Kavanaugh, jurisprudential and financial, were brushed aside like pesky mosquitoes. This really was the only play to slow the process down at all. So what if it mobilized the basetards? Don't worry, there would have been some bullshit issue cranked out about this time to get them worked up regardless. If it wasn't this, it'd be football players again, some stupid shit. You never have to look far or try hard to find something to rile up morons.

And the thing is, Handmaid's Tale rhetoric aside, the Supreme Court is about to be catastrophic for a lot of things -- voting rights, worker's rights, privacy rights, the rights of individuals against corporations or the state. Hell, they'll push the Gamble decision on through, and then the emperor can pardon all his cronies. Won't that be fun? That's the most galling thing of all, out of all of this -- these whiny motherfuckers are never held fucking accountable for anything. Ever. Prove me wrong.

The Democrats need to start understanding the game as it is currently being played, and stop with the empty worship of "decorum" and "process" and "comity" and the like. These people are not your friends or colleagues anymore. They are your enemies. Trust me, you are certainly their enemies, and they are treating you accordingly. They will bury you with your dignity.

If the Democrats aren't doing every little thing to be obstructive, finding every obscure codicil and procedural maneuver available to slow this bullshit train down, then they fail, and the noble experiment in self-governance is done. You can tack on all the ponderous, empty, self-serving flatulence from the putrid likes of Jeff Fucking Flake, they add zero value except to Flake's future career as a scumbag lobbyist. It's fight or die, fuck or walk, shit or get the fuck off the pot and go home for good.

There are days when I hatch a speculative novel in my brain, about the current "cold civil war" going hot, or at least warming up. There is that aforementioned performative outrage, your dipshit Facebook friend who communicates largely in misspelled memes that really should all just read DURRRR FUCK OBUMMER DURRR N HITLERY 2 LOCK HER UP!!!. That shit is annoying but harmless; your FB friend is never going to actually prise his fat ass out of his couch and do anything. Hell, he may even forget to vote, so besotted with the innate greatness of Hair Fuhrer, he'll just assume a 100-0 landslide.

But the people getting arrested at the protests, the people harassing senators in the Capitol building, that shit is real, and those people are frustrated, and it wouldn't take much to see one or a few of them deciding that it's better to die on one's feet than to live on one's knees, especially when they've just been flat-out lied to and shit on, their trauma mocked and ridiculed. That's not an endorsement, just an observation that it wouldn't be all that surprising sometimes.

And this is definitely one of those times. People are on edge, not just feeling but knowing, having their faces rubbed in it, that their government doesn't give two shits about them, that the national motto isn't In God We Trust, it's Fuck You, What Are You Gonna Do About It? That it's really just a bunch of elderly white men, and their female enablers, and the obscenely wealthy scumbags who rent them.

Unless you're in the donor/owner class, writing checks for these animals, you don't matter. Your sexual assault story doesn't matter, your family's hardship doesn't matter, your shitty job doesn't matter, the polluted water table that gave your kid terminal cancer doesn't fucking matter to them. At all.

Seriously. Flake's the perfect fucking example of that -- certainly his entire miserable career, but this past week has been an absolutely perfect snapshot of what he is, versus what he thinks he stands for. A week ago today, he nearly broke his arm patting himself on the back for his high-minded insistence that the FBI "investigate" the allegations Dr. Ford made in her testimony. Instantly, the scope and timeframe of the "investigation" was so tightly circumscribed that you wonder why they bothered with it at all, since it fooled absolutely no one, and therefore didn't even provide rhetorical "well, we checked it out" bullshit cover. It was nothing, worse than nothing.

And during that week, the Yale Law School, the American Bar Association, and several other organizations made their opposition to Kavanaugh known. Hell, the FBI didn't even interview Kavanaugh and Ford, the two main interlocutors, not to mention the many other people who came forward and wanted to talk to the FBI as well. The fix was in, and all could see. And Flake ended up exactly where we all knew he'd end up before he pulled his sanctimonious Lucy-with-the-football shit. Fuck him, and fuck Susan Collins and especially fuck Joe Manchin. These people are all vile, every bit as vile as the unrepentant knuckle-draggers like McConnell and Cornyn. I hope that when their respective times come, they all go out flat broke and universally despised.

So we have to vote, and we have to decide whether we want to take what's left of the country back, or let the rubes and the Jebus nazis have it all make the rest of us eat shit for the rest of our lives. It's going to take work, far beyond just the endless churn of the electoral-industrial complex. That's really what it comes down to. I can't even imagine what goes on in the head of someone who's "undecided" or who doesn't care enough to vote. If the shit comes down, I sincerely hope it gets snapped off in their asses worst of all.

Five Queasy Pieces

The following lengthy articles have all come out in the past week, have gotten a great deal of attention, and if you haven't read them all, you really should.

Ryan Lizza's Esquire profile of the Iowa farm owned and operated by Devin Nunes' parents makes for a decent story, if not quite as potentially explosive, given these hopelessly cynical times, as Lizza might believe. While the weaselly shenanigans of the Nunes family makes for fine reading, what's even more interesting is how the residents in that county, mostly farmers whose workforces are mostly undocumented immigrants, square the circle in their own heads about voting for a paranoid bigot who wants to build a useless wall. Then again, these are the same people who will tell you what hardworking self-made bootstrappers they are, as they take the gubmint subsidy check, not to mention the bailout money Preznit Mario Kart had to dole out to cover for his tariff screw-up. They can fool themselves all they want with their creative compartmentalization, but they're not fooling anyone else.

Excerpt from Michael Lewis' upcoming book, The Fifth Risk, provides excruciating confirmation that the idiots running the country are even more inept and incompetent than anyone had assumed. Everything's a full-on goat rodeo with these dipshits. They could fuck up a two-car funeral. The one thing you can give them some credit for so far is that they have managed not to lawn-dart the solid (if unspectacular) economy Obummer left for them. So far.

I already linked to the NY Times' epic exposé on the ongoing fraud and tax evasion that serve as cornerstones of the Clownstick family fortune for generations, but it really deserves a fresh link and a careful read. Old Man Fred Clownstick was one shady motherfucker, and he greased every Democrat palm within reach to make sure no one got too close to ask about his shell corps and bullshit trust funds. There are really two (at least) major takeaways from this article, which is undoubtedly the best thing this gaping asshole of a newspaper has done in several years:  1) Since the Seventies, the New York media had been all too willing to serve as PR dupes for this monster. It's a goddamned shame they didn't shut him down with real reporting like this a long time ago, before the joke got out of hand.;  2) He really is a wretched businessman. It's not schtick. His dad gave him over $400 million, and he swindled the IRS out of another half-billion, and he still became so cash poor that he had to become a money-laundering butt-boy for the Russian mob. Sad!

Dan Alexander at Forbes magazine has already done several fine investigative pieces on the chicanery of the Clownstick grifting enterprise. This long read makes the feel-good argument that the enterprise has actually been losing money for years now, and the shitbag's ascent into office has actually accelerated that problem. Good. May every goddamned one of them be made utterly destitute, and the name be forever stained, so that future generations feel compelled to change it. Fuck every last one of them.

Adam Serwer at The Atlantic has also been doing fine work for some time during these crazy years, and his latest effectively limns the random, gleeful cruelty that ultimately serves as the defining characteristic not only of the Human Centipede Administration, but of its most vocal supporters. As we always point out, when we hate on politicians, we also recognize that more often than not, they are accurate reflections of the constituents who sent them there. So it goes with the hate-rally crowds. We can try to explain some of it away with pained jeremiads about "epistemic closure" and such like, but in the end it all comes down to the cold fact that they're fucking assholes, proudly so. A decent society would have marginalized these dumpster-diving mutants long ago, or at least done the humane thing and bribed them to sterilize themselves. Going forward, the least the rest of us can do is assure that they reap everything they've sown.

Hate Rally Arena Capacity Update

Heading into the homestretch before the midterms, Orange Foolius has been barnstorming the rubes hard, three rallies in the past 96 hours:

WesBanco Arena, Wheeling WV -- capacity 5,600
Freedom Hall Civic Center, Johnson City TN -- capacity 8,500
Landers Center, Southaven MS -- capacity 10,045

Let's mention a couple things that might sound grudgingly complimentary, but really aren't.

• New schtick has been added, in his quest to shoehorn Rapebro McGambledrunk onto what's left of the Supreme Court for the next generation or so. Key to this is his mocking attempt to undermine Christine Blasey Ford's account of McGambledrunk's alleged sexual assault. So if you're a woman who's tired of being condescended to in that fashion, or just a sentient human being, rather than an angry hillbilly gastropod, he's giving you your motivation. Right?
• He's flat-out telling them that the election is a referendum on him, that however they vote, they're voting for him. Again, very true. Considering how rarely he manages to utter anything at all that is true or accurate, it's unclear whether this assertion is intentional on his part. But it's true all the same.

Just a month and some change, and we will see which direction we're going to head from here. Vote with ballots and wallets, and get ready to smack these mutants back down.

This Would Have Been Helpful At Least Three Years Ago

In which the FTFNYT finally decides to do their jobs. Nonetheless, a very good read that might even result in some criminal charges [lol]. Now we just wait for the inevitable Maga Haberman tweet about how secondhand anonymous sources inform her of the emperor's current agita. Really, that should just be the default response to every single thing that every remaining supporter jabbers about:  He said he would release his tax returns.

Fuck Kanye West

No story or article to link, no new point to make. Just wanted to remind everyone within virtual earshot:  Fuck Kanye West.

Career Opportunity

It's very tragic how the emperor ridiculed yet another captive press animal. The way these poor people are forcibly compelled at gunpoint to sit there and be abused by a jabbering orange idiot. Maybe someone should contact law enforcement.

Seriously, it's hard to work up any sympathy for these people anymore. Again, with this human centipede of an administration providing fodder for investigative stories every day at every conceivable turn (and plenty of areas no one had even considered previously), it beggars the imagination why anyone who considers themselves a professional journalist would just sit there for the barely pro forma ritual of lies and abuse.

The renamed NAFTA deal is entirely predictable, coming from a buffoon who seriously believed that buying up some planes from a bankrupt airline and slapping his own name on those planes constituted "starting an airline."

Every so often when I'm on the road for work, I'll pass someone from the opposite direction that looks like a cop car from a distance. Then they get up on you and you see that it is a former law enforcement vehicle, but has been repainted and had the lights removed. There is no illusion that the driver is a cop. He's just driving a car he bought at a police auction. Everything these people do is like that -- a simulacrum of Doing Something, that disappears quickly on even the slightest scrutiny.

But Cecilia Vega figured that it would somehow be helpful to the public's need for real information, for her to sit there and listen to Fatboy's PR bullshit about "his deal," which will be yuge and the best, believe me, that I can tell you. She thought that she might sneak in a question about frat-boy justice Rapebro McGambledrunk, who somehow manages to keep swirling in the bowl, because none of the Goopers has the guts to just flush that turd and grab the next mutant off the FedSoc list.

I'm not a professional journamalist, nor do I play one on the teevee, but I useta watch that Lou Grant show when I was a kid, and through osmosis I have gleaned that journos don't like when sources lie to them or mislead them. So why would anyone sit there and stenograph a known liar, no matter what his temporary rank in this grotesque pecking order that our experiment in self-governance has devolved to? Seriously, what sort of respectable work is that?

This isn't the fault of Cecilia Vega, nor Jim Acosta, nor any single journo in particular. It is the natural expectation of a news-product industry that folded its entertainment and news divisions together, that prioritized smooth-talking, attractive talking heads over actual investigative journalism. It is the fault of media consumers who decided they were okay with all that, who don't mind that most of the "news" programs they watch absorb their info from are basically commercials for pharmaceuticals and fast food, with some random decontextualized content sandwiched in between.

(Did someone say sandwich? Has Subway got a special for you! Or maybe it's Arby's, or Carl's Jr., or Quizno's. Scarf your greasy meal made from meat processed by illegal immigrants and forced prison labor, you fat fuck, then wash it down with some carbonated sodium benzoate flavored with high fructose corn syrup. Drive there alone in a 3/4-ton king cab gas guzzler, and then take your statins and blood thinners afterward. The product lifecycle is complete.)

So, you know, maybe Cecilia Vega and all her colleagues should take their professional dismay and righteous indignation, and get motivated to cover something worthwhile for a change. We don't need another transcript of another dog-and-tangelo show; we don't need another rundown of the latest set of instrumental lies. Those things are worse than useless -- they've become destructive to the well-being of the nation, because they collectively instill a sense of futility and inaction. People are clearly inured to the bullshit. Why keep shoveling it?

Maybe check in with the SDNY and see how their spelunking of the "charitable" foundation is progressing. Maybe remind people that six (6) Republicon senators visited Russia on our nation's birthday, and that some or all of them are on the Russian payroll. Maybe investigate Lindsey Graham's bankrolled high dudgeon; clearly someone has something on him, what might it be? Even if he just wants to replace Sessions as AG, what sort of corrupt asshole would want to be the chief law enforcement officer for someone who literally believes they either are the law, or live above the law?

It might be something if some of these put-off scriveners asked themselves such questions, followed up on them, talked to people, see where the trail leads. That used to be what qualified as reportage. Everything else is just public relations and consumer conversion funneling.