The reason Fairytale of New York is far and away the best Christmas song ever is simple: it is a song about maintaining hope even when you know better. That's the "Christmas spirit" in a nutshell.
That sounds cynical, but it actually the opposite of the hopelessly cynical, crass commercialism that infests the holiday and most of its entertainment offerings, which range from the utterly sappy to the winking, knowing we're all full of shit here, guys! spoofs.
And perhaps nothing is more cynical these days than this new and ugly "tradition" of finding some ginned-up story or bullshit cultural artifact as prima facie evidence of a "war" on Christmas. Like Black Friday, it actually starts around Thanksgiving, and truckles on in some form until the end of the year.
At least with Black Friday, you get the twin pleasures of discount electronics and beating up strangers. This other thing is just another in the endless series of imaginary grievances wielded by fist-shaking codgers and barely-employable widget-stampers who are still trying to figure out why no one's rebooted The Dukes of Hazzard.
This nation has become utterly boring in its incessant whinging, in its myopic focus on jabbering nonsense, while the planet's climate is self-destructing, and Central American children are paying with their lives for the high crime of seeking asylum from carnage. The average workin' 'murkin busts their fat ass for just enough to get by, and is one medical catastrophe or job layoff from the sidewalk. Our health-care system, like the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those three words; instead it's an open conspiracy by rentier capitalists to overcharge and underserve, to transfer money from the working poor to the already wealthy.
But yeah, a radio station in Ohio or somewhere decided not to play a song anymore. Some asshole in some other state looked askance at a nativity scene in the taxpayer-funded town square. Boo-fucking-hoo. You know? Is this what we've become? Is this the life we really want? It's just an ongoing (un)reality teevee show, of implausible events perpetrated by a rotation of idiotic characters, each one more feckless and vile than the last.
Consider just a few right off the top, from the last few weeks at that:
All of the market gains produced by the billionaire tax cuts are gone now, directly as a result of his idiocy, which means he's bad for business now. You might get a few more dead-cat bounces over the next couple weeks, but he is getting worse as things get worse for him. This is much more than merely being "unpresidential" on an hourly basis. This is the culmination of a horrendously clear pattern of someone who relies solely on his "gut" and whichever lickspittle "advised" him last.
(In principle, I am not opposed to "the gut" being involved in decision-making processes, at least as one of several elements in that process. There are many important choices that we all make in life that are not completely predicated on pure logic and reason. But clearly his instincts are completely divorced from reason and expertise, and even more damning is the obvious fact that his instincts are fucking terrible. His gut got him six bankruptcies and three marriages and countless sordid affairs. His gut is what got him the grand list of failed ventures: the airline, the scam university, the vodka, steaks, football. Seriously, how the fuck do you fail at selling steaks, vodka, football, and gambling to Americans? How is that even possible? His gut needs a firehose enema, because it's packed solid with nothing but shit.)
The Republicons took it in the shorts in the midterms, and they know it, and they're just one competent Democrat away from drowning in electoral revenge bukkake in 2020. The party is trying to make a rising star out of Beto O'Rourke, and they just might succeed. At the very least, he'd be a fine veep on a ticket with, say, Kirsten Gillibrand. (Although the best possible ticket would be Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar. The question is whether either of them want the gig badly enough. Put them together and they could do some real damage to the scum currently in place.)
The point is that sooner or later, the Democrats will figure out how to master the message and the media presence, and at that point the rolling blunder that is the Republican party will be out of shenanigans to use to shave the usual four to five points.
The incoming Dem House majority has promised, among other things, that they will make Fuckface's tax returns public. Among all the other evidence that Mueller has piled up, known and presumed and speculated, it is the tax returns that will show conclusively that he has been laundering bratva money for over a decade, probably much longer. You want a smocking [sic] gun, there ya go.
Maybe there's a pee tape, maybe not. The thing is, it doesn't matter. Clearly, his cult base wouldn't care less if there was a pee tape. But the fact is, the Russians don't need that kind of thing to leverage an asset. It's way back in the archives and I don't feel like digging for it, but a month or two ago Twitter Nixon neatly outlined just how such a conversation between Putin and Trump would take place. Even if there is such a tape, Putin needn't bring it up at all. They have mutual interests -- Vlad needs to scrub some stacks of cash, and Fat Donny is perpetually cash-poor because he lives like a rapper on an endless coke-and-Cristal bender. So Putin simply says, I need a favor from a friend.
In the meantime, it is awful tempting to indulge fully the idiot nihilism of the vaunted basetards, and give them everything they're mooing for. You want to get rid of all the illegals, let's do this up right, motherfuckers. Don't just build a stupid wall -- that's not nearly effective enough. Send ICE to Devin Nunes' family dairy in Iowa, clear out that whole fucking county, the whole state. Raid all of Fat Donny's fleabag golf resorts. Keep booting all the undocumented Irish out of Boston. Right? Isn't this what we want, what we need, what we as lucky-born natives of Gawwwd's Favrit Nayshun deserve? This is our birthright, dammit!
Seriously, who the hell do these morons think is picking their produce and processing their meat, changing the sheets at the hotels they stay in, washing the dishes at the restaurants they eat in? I saw a Burger King commercial the other night, ten chicken nuggets for a buck. Well, how the fuck does anyone think a ten-cent stub of pressed, processed, breaded, cooked meat happens? Economy of scale, sure. But there's a lot more to it than that. You think food is expensive? It's cheap, compared to what it could be.
You have to appreciate the ultimate irony though -- immigrants are being attacked by a man whose own mother likely overstayed her visa before marrying his father, whose current wife also overstayed her visa. No shame in their game, and don't you kid yourself about that wife of his, with that "gilded cage" nonsense people like to frame it as. She's just as bad as he is, in her own ways. She's trolling everyone just as much as he is. Neither one of them has done an honest day's work in their lives.
Keep in mind as this new year starts and the bullshit builds: the old man is a cornered rat, and he will destroy everything within reach on his way down; and the hardcore base is composed of people who will always find something to bitch about, because the fight is all they have anymore. The world has passed them by, no longer has any use for them, and they can't stand it, nor can they adapt to it.
The only thing to do is to keep moving, and don't look back. Their fondest dream is to be raptured anyway, so good luck with that.
That sounds cynical, but it actually the opposite of the hopelessly cynical, crass commercialism that infests the holiday and most of its entertainment offerings, which range from the utterly sappy to the winking, knowing we're all full of shit here, guys! spoofs.
And perhaps nothing is more cynical these days than this new and ugly "tradition" of finding some ginned-up story or bullshit cultural artifact as prima facie evidence of a "war" on Christmas. Like Black Friday, it actually starts around Thanksgiving, and truckles on in some form until the end of the year.
At least with Black Friday, you get the twin pleasures of discount electronics and beating up strangers. This other thing is just another in the endless series of imaginary grievances wielded by fist-shaking codgers and barely-employable widget-stampers who are still trying to figure out why no one's rebooted The Dukes of Hazzard.
This nation has become utterly boring in its incessant whinging, in its myopic focus on jabbering nonsense, while the planet's climate is self-destructing, and Central American children are paying with their lives for the high crime of seeking asylum from carnage. The average workin' 'murkin busts their fat ass for just enough to get by, and is one medical catastrophe or job layoff from the sidewalk. Our health-care system, like the Holy Roman Empire, is none of those three words; instead it's an open conspiracy by rentier capitalists to overcharge and underserve, to transfer money from the working poor to the already wealthy.
But yeah, a radio station in Ohio or somewhere decided not to play a song anymore. Some asshole in some other state looked askance at a nativity scene in the taxpayer-funded town square. Boo-fucking-hoo. You know? Is this what we've become? Is this the life we really want? It's just an ongoing (un)reality teevee show, of implausible events perpetrated by a rotation of idiotic characters, each one more feckless and vile than the last.
Consider just a few right off the top, from the last few weeks at that:
- The acting attorney general of the United States, the nation's highest-ranking law enforcement officer, used to hustle hot tubs and "big dick" toilets. His only qualification for even getting into the Department of Justice is that he got on Trump's radar by being the "opposition voice" on a sufficient number of CNN panel shows, all of which should be launched on a rocket into the heart of the sun.
- The most competent member of Trump's cabinet, Gen. James Mattis, resigned abruptly, when it turned out that Trump decided to pull troops out of Syria after talking to the president of Turkey (i.e., someone with an obvious vested interest in getting us out of their backyard). Mattis had put in for the usual 90-day resignation, but the next day, when someone explained to His Travesty that Mattis' resignation letter was in fact a clear rebuke, that retirement date was bumped up to December 31, and Mattis is being replaced with a defense contractor from Boeing. Enjoy those F-15's that the Air Force doesn't want.
- The acting ambassador to the UN is a former Fox News anchor whose main qualifications are that she's an administration factotum, and that she resembles a slightly hotter Cameron Diaz.
- The departed Secretary of the Interior resigned amid over a dozen investigations, some of which may very well result in criminal prosecution.
- The Secretary of the Treasury interrupted his vacay in Cabo to call the heads of the largest American banks to assure them, Kevin Bacon style, that all is well. The three major stock indexes (DJIA, S&P 500, and NASDAQ) each lost more than two percent the next trading day, Christmas Eve. Season's Beatings, bitchez!
- Not that there was an abundance of riches to begin with, but the most competent remaining member of the cabinet may well be one James Richard (aka "Rick") Perry, Dancing with the Stars alum, guy who thought wearing glasses might make him look like less of a dumbass, and a guy who literally got "D" grades in ag-degree college classes such as "Meats" and "Feeds and Feeding."
All of the market gains produced by the billionaire tax cuts are gone now, directly as a result of his idiocy, which means he's bad for business now. You might get a few more dead-cat bounces over the next couple weeks, but he is getting worse as things get worse for him. This is much more than merely being "unpresidential" on an hourly basis. This is the culmination of a horrendously clear pattern of someone who relies solely on his "gut" and whichever lickspittle "advised" him last.
(In principle, I am not opposed to "the gut" being involved in decision-making processes, at least as one of several elements in that process. There are many important choices that we all make in life that are not completely predicated on pure logic and reason. But clearly his instincts are completely divorced from reason and expertise, and even more damning is the obvious fact that his instincts are fucking terrible. His gut got him six bankruptcies and three marriages and countless sordid affairs. His gut is what got him the grand list of failed ventures: the airline, the scam university, the vodka, steaks, football. Seriously, how the fuck do you fail at selling steaks, vodka, football, and gambling to Americans? How is that even possible? His gut needs a firehose enema, because it's packed solid with nothing but shit.)
The Republicons took it in the shorts in the midterms, and they know it, and they're just one competent Democrat away from drowning in electoral revenge bukkake in 2020. The party is trying to make a rising star out of Beto O'Rourke, and they just might succeed. At the very least, he'd be a fine veep on a ticket with, say, Kirsten Gillibrand. (Although the best possible ticket would be Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar. The question is whether either of them want the gig badly enough. Put them together and they could do some real damage to the scum currently in place.)
The point is that sooner or later, the Democrats will figure out how to master the message and the media presence, and at that point the rolling blunder that is the Republican party will be out of shenanigans to use to shave the usual four to five points.
The incoming Dem House majority has promised, among other things, that they will make Fuckface's tax returns public. Among all the other evidence that Mueller has piled up, known and presumed and speculated, it is the tax returns that will show conclusively that he has been laundering bratva money for over a decade, probably much longer. You want a smocking [sic] gun, there ya go.
Maybe there's a pee tape, maybe not. The thing is, it doesn't matter. Clearly, his cult base wouldn't care less if there was a pee tape. But the fact is, the Russians don't need that kind of thing to leverage an asset. It's way back in the archives and I don't feel like digging for it, but a month or two ago Twitter Nixon neatly outlined just how such a conversation between Putin and Trump would take place. Even if there is such a tape, Putin needn't bring it up at all. They have mutual interests -- Vlad needs to scrub some stacks of cash, and Fat Donny is perpetually cash-poor because he lives like a rapper on an endless coke-and-Cristal bender. So Putin simply says, I need a favor from a friend.
In the meantime, it is awful tempting to indulge fully the idiot nihilism of the vaunted basetards, and give them everything they're mooing for. You want to get rid of all the illegals, let's do this up right, motherfuckers. Don't just build a stupid wall -- that's not nearly effective enough. Send ICE to Devin Nunes' family dairy in Iowa, clear out that whole fucking county, the whole state. Raid all of Fat Donny's fleabag golf resorts. Keep booting all the undocumented Irish out of Boston. Right? Isn't this what we want, what we need, what we as lucky-born natives of Gawwwd's Favrit Nayshun deserve? This is our birthright, dammit!
Seriously, who the hell do these morons think is picking their produce and processing their meat, changing the sheets at the hotels they stay in, washing the dishes at the restaurants they eat in? I saw a Burger King commercial the other night, ten chicken nuggets for a buck. Well, how the fuck does anyone think a ten-cent stub of pressed, processed, breaded, cooked meat happens? Economy of scale, sure. But there's a lot more to it than that. You think food is expensive? It's cheap, compared to what it could be.
You have to appreciate the ultimate irony though -- immigrants are being attacked by a man whose own mother likely overstayed her visa before marrying his father, whose current wife also overstayed her visa. No shame in their game, and don't you kid yourself about that wife of his, with that "gilded cage" nonsense people like to frame it as. She's just as bad as he is, in her own ways. She's trolling everyone just as much as he is. Neither one of them has done an honest day's work in their lives.
Keep in mind as this new year starts and the bullshit builds: the old man is a cornered rat, and he will destroy everything within reach on his way down; and the hardcore base is composed of people who will always find something to bitch about, because the fight is all they have anymore. The world has passed them by, no longer has any use for them, and they can't stand it, nor can they adapt to it.
The only thing to do is to keep moving, and don't look back. Their fondest dream is to be raptured anyway, so good luck with that.
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