GOP Delenda Est; Or, Season's Beatings

During my teen years, I would travel downstate to Los Angeles for the summer, mostly to visit my father, but also several other relatives in the area. So an uncle and aunt in Downey, a cousin in Newport Beach, and so on. This was a time when "summer vacation" meant a full three months, early June to the week after Labor Day. So it was a week here, two weeks there, much more fun than sitting at home, broke and broiling in the punishing NorCal summer heat.

The Newport Beach cousin was (and still is) an avid surfer and guitar player, and close enough in age to where it was a lot like hanging out with an older brother who actually wanted you to hang out with him. So I would go on all-day surfing junkets with him and his USC buddies. I learned to enjoy and appreciate surfing, not just as a challenging physical activity (ocean swimming is not for the weak-willed), but as a meditative activity. The board becomes an extension of you, just by repetition; there are points where you imagine an overhead view of yourself, a tiny dot in a vast area of green and blue, land nearby but not conveniently so, possibly sharks or jellyfish or rocks lurking just below the surface.

The main thing about catching that proverbial wave is recognizing that the ocean is constantly moving, pulsing, surging, defying you to grab hold and find some rhythm. It's a beautiful and daunting thing, that existential challenge, one that forces you to simultaneously acknowledge your smallness, yet have the courage to jump into the endless motion and figure out a way to ride it to shore.

That's what the political news sphere feels like, more and more -- endlessly churning, surging faster and faster, defying us to find purchase, get a grip on this swirling narrative and make sense of it. In filing the Cohen and Manafort memos on Pearl Harbor Day (or Noam Chomsky Day, if you prefer), Robert Mueller may be hinting at a more sardonic sense of humor than any of us might have supposed. Certainly this tapestry is unfolding to reveal what very well may turn out to be a case of treason rivaling that of the Rosenbergs or Benedict Arnold.

You certainly wouldn't put it past ol' Fuckface Von Clownstick to sell West Point to one of Putin's bagmen. And now we are getting a clearer picture of how he literally sold American foreign policy, not to mention its electoral integrity, to a nation he is deeply in hock to. The people who are still denying what's plain for all to see are either on the payroll, or permanently drunk on the Kool-Aid.

Every day brings more to say, more to analyze, more to write about, and then the ground shifts before you can even get anything sketched out. Yogi Berra sagely mentioned the difficulty of making predictions about the future, but at the very least we should all be ready to expect the unexpected at this point. Mueller's timing of what would normally be a Friday afternoon fuggeddaboudit news dump will turn out to be a savvy move, as the corporate mediots will chew on it over the weekend, and have talking points ready for the coming week.

What we can expect (he said, adjusting his prognosticator's ascot) with reasonable certainty is that, by the end of this calendar year, just a few short weeks away, key Republicans will start distancing themselves from the fucking thing they've been enabling all this time. And why not? They already got what they wanted out of him -- tax cuts for billionaires, a pair of relatively youthful knuckle-dragging shitheads to toe the corporate line for the next forty years on the Supreme Court. Even after taking it on the chin in the midterms, they're in pretty good position.

And now the asshole-in-chief has become toxic. Bad for business. And at the end of the day, after all the rhetorical furbelows and happy-crappy bullshit, this is a business. The Democrats drink from the same corporate trough as the scum across the aisle. They are by no means the same, but they can only buck the system so much and retain office.

Still, you just watch. Ben Sasse is already looking outside the reservation fence at least, thoughtfully stroking his chin and asking inconvenient questions about Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart deal to get out of crimes that would dump regular people behind bars for hundreds of years. Huckleberry Closetcase is squawking about the murderer running Saudi Arabia, a country that is becoming less and less of a strategic interest as the US becomes more and more of a net oil exporter.

(It doesn't help that Huckleberry is prolly butt-hurt over not getting that sweet, sweet Attorney General gig. I mean, who in their right mind wouldn't want a promotion on the Titanic after it hits the iceberg?)

So perhaps karma, while unconscionably tardy, may exist after all, and we may yet get to reap the rich reward of watching every turd-polisher in this human centipede of an administration either go to prison or go broke. Top to bottom, we must not allow any of them to attain respectable employment ever again. Hope Hicks will be stuck at Fixed Noise. Sarah Huckabilly Sanders, aka Baghdad Barb, can take her wonky eye to some televangelist huckster network, pull down $50k/year shilling prayer cloths and healing oil and such. John Kelly should never be able to show his face in public again; his military service is now overshadowed  by the last two years. I hope George Conway dumps that wife of his for a supermodel who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch, and that Kellyanne never finds decent work again. And so on. Everyone associated with these scumbags can either come clean, or fuck off forever.

It will be the Democrats' natural inclination to "reconcile" and "unify" and "come together" for the good of the country. To put it mildly, that would be a mistake. There is no point in "reaching out" to a party comprised entirely at this point of dishonest brokers, people who in any other walk of life would be tried as accomplices, as they have aided and abetted malfeasance right from the start. People like Devin Nunes and Addison McConnell should never be able to eat in a restaurant again without looking over their shoulders; to consider civil negotiations over any matter of policy whatsoever would be nothing more than further complicity in a series of crimes that is still in the process of unreeling.

We can already look back to last month and know that flipping the House back to the Democrats was basically the final, pivotal event in averting the slide to full-on fascism. A Republican win across the board would have sealed our collective fates, serving as approval of the past two years, and opening the gates for much more and far worse. What is about to unfold will only reinforce that knowledge, of how close we came -- and that we're still not out of the woods yet, far from it.

But for now, he's royally fucked, as are his associates, and probably two of his children. I hope Junior and Jared get thrown into gen-pop, and they can find out first-hand what happens to spoiled, arrogant, chinless failsons. I don't care if Princess Snowflake goes or not; it's enough to know that her brand is done, and she's spent her entire adult life as a soulless brand-bot. She has nothing else, and the IRS is going climb up her family's ass with a vengeance.

2019 is going to be the worst year of His Travesty's miserable fucking life, and I am going to celebrate every goddamned moment of his downfall -- the additional investigations, the forced reveal of the tax returns, the further charges of associates and hangers-on, the disillusionment of at least some of the more sentient cultists, the awkward silence of some of the others.

Of course, some of them will bitter-end this one all the way. They have nothing else. The fight is all that matters. I recently read Vegas Tenold's terrific book about American white supremacists, and while there are few surprises in it, one overriding truth becomes clear toward the end, one that applies to the hardcore rally types as much as it does to the neo-nazi scum described in the book:  they fight not just against their caricature of librul perfidy, but against the bitter truth that the world has moved on without them, and has no real use for them anymore.

They're not educated enough to earn real money and join the leisure consumer class, and they're not motivated to vote consistently enough. Their anger was palpable enough to be redirected by a sui generis huckster with decades of name recognition, but his time is coming, and there's not a similar figure that can rouse that particular rabble. They'll waddle back to their hovels and go back to their slow deaths of despair.

Ordinarily you'd reserve some measure of compassion or at least empathy for such folks, but they squandered that long ago, with their bullshit attitude and complete incoherence. A few of the more adventurous types indulge in lurid insurrectionist fantasies, but there's simply not enough of them to make that kind of dent.

Recently a longtime friend decided to give me a hard time by unceremoniously dumping the "meme" at right on my personal Facebook page. (The bottle was smaller, and standing up, but the message was the same.) This engendered a handful of guffaws from other like-minded friends. I left it up for twenty-four hours, maybe in some sort of misguided effort to show I was a "good sport" about it.

But obviously it reveals a great deal about the individuals who respond to that level of nonsense in that fashion. It's bullshit on several levels, and deserves a quick bit of deconstruction here, since it would be a complete waste of time to attempt such a thing of Facebook.

For starters, it's completely hypocritical:  not only did their senile grampa hero spend five years lying and whining about Preznit Chocolate Thunder (PBUH), they complained about him incessantly while he was in office. By their own logic, he's the biggest fucking crybaby of them all.

I rarely post political items on my FB page; in fact, I rarely bother with the platform at all. It's useful in keeping in touch with family and friends who are dispersed around the country, and even then only to a certain extent. Occasionally I will get into a political argument with someone on there, but that's rare, and usually not initiated by me. By way of contrast, most of my conservative FB friends post political things (mostly forwarding crap like the above graphic) at least a few times a week, a couple of them do it multiple times daily. Needless to say, I unfollowed them long ago, but the point remains. I've said it before:  these people are the sorest fucking winners ever. What kind of losers do you think they are?

At no point is any attempt made to discern whether anyone's criticisms of Clownstick are, you know, accurate. Since they operate on their own sets of "facts," determining accuracy is unnecessary.

We all know this stuff by now. The reason I point it out yet again is to reiterate that there is no point in "reconciling" or "negotiating" with such people. We have nothing in common. They are not yoked to any empirical reality or moral compass, it's all rage and spite and screamy bullshit. To think you can get anywhere trying to "work with" or "reach out to" that level idiocy is, quite frankly, nearly as idiotic. There is no middle ground between the real world and the lost-cause horseshit of peckerwood logic. The sooner we stop pretending there is, the better off we'll all be.

Part of what that means is looking at the blatant suppression tactics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and the outright theft in North Carolina, and reminding these fuckers that politics is a pendulum, and it's coming back, and there will be no mercy next time.

I can't say I liked any president, not completely, but Obama has certainly been the best in my lifetime so far, in that he did the fewest reprehensible things, and comported himself well. But his most glaring flaw is that he's a nice guy, in a business that does not reward niceness. When he needed to find just one asshole and crush their balls in a vise, as an example to others, he failed to do so, time and again. We were reminded of that again just a few days ago, at Poppy Bush's funeral. Don't shake hands with that asshole, and his fucking wife! Don't even look at them! The Clintons and Jimmy Carter had the right idea about that. The Obamas need to learn how to hate better, and I don't mean that sarcastically.

You certainly don't need me to rehash the litany of "nice guy who did a lot of awful shit" ceremonial remembrances of Bush. What he was, more than anything else, was a relatively genial functionary who understood, thanks to his patrician upbringing, that if you just stick around long enough and don't be an asshole to the mediots, you will be canonized immediately upon death.

Indeed, if there's any takeaway to the week of tedious ball-gargling we just witnessed, it's that it served as a terrific reminder that the corporate media are mostly populated by callow individuals who are most susceptible to the most modest forms of flattery, such as when someone in power recalls the dutiful scrivener's name correctly.

Remember, before Fuckface Von Clownstick turned into this foaming-at-the-mouth cartoon character calling them the enemy of the people at every opportunity, he cultivated an easy relationship with them, either by returning their calls, or by calling them up and pretending to be someone else, to plant items about himself. To call these people "useful idiots" doesn't do the phrase justice.

When CNN receives a bomb threat literally minutes after yet another FAKE NEWS! ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!!! DURRRR!!!!1!11! tweet, and Jeff Zucker puts out a message in response about the sanctity of the media and his network, it must be recalled that Zucker is singularly responsible for promoting the creature on two different networks, over the course of over a decade. If any single person can be said to be responsible for what's going on now, it's Jeff Fucking Zucker. I hope he lives with that knowledge every day of his life.

We have to keep all that in mind as Mueller gets closer to the goal, and the administration and its dismal head keep unraveling -- that the Democrats and the corporate media, since they serve a corporate agenda first and foremost, are subject to a kind of centrifugal force, one that consistently pulls them in toward the center. Don't let them get away with it. The Republican Party has betrayed this country one too many times, and this should be the last straw for decent people. Boycott them and their think tanks and their supporters, run them out of town on a rail, salt their earth.