Saturday, January 26, 2019

Venezuela

Anyone who says they know how to "fix" Venezuela's many problems is full of shit, and/or has an agenda. But you can be sure that Elliot Abrams will find a way to make it worse. That turd should have been flushed twenty years ago, but the Cheney regime made sure to fish him out of the bowl and put him back to work.

There is some truth to that "drain the swamp" stuff, you know. It's just that there's more to it than simply swapping in your own gators.

The US has been sniffing around Venezuela since oil was discovered at Maracaibo back in 1905. Nowadays, it's also about the coltan and other valuable metals and minerals there, and a desperate, destitute populace that will settle for just about any respite from million-percent inflation and non-stop crime.

Where it gets a bit strange is that Russia is supporting Maduro and bucking our support of Guaido. I don't think this turns into another Syria, but odds are there's already a few cells of mercs and spec-ops guys setting up shop outside Caracas, training irregulars in "counterinsurgency" techniques. With Abrams' involvement, it could be another Guatemala or El Salvador. 

Competence

So many excellent turns of phrase in the latest David Roth rundown, all pointing to the same indisputable conclusion -- Fuckface Von Clownstick is a lazy, incompetent dirtbag. He's content to float the same raft of drunk-uncle email tales of third-hand mayhem, random factoids that even his own minions cannot support factually, put forth in order to bolster a fake policy that consists of a non-solution to a non-crisis.

He lies instrumentally -- that is, on an ad-hoc basis to achieve whatever immediate need happens to be in front of him at any given moment. If a clinical narcissistic personality can be said to have any inner world apart from filling the base primal need for adulation, this is it, just lying and continuing to lie, and denying the previous lies with more lies. This is all Clownstick's life has ever been, this is all his tenure as chief executive has been so far, and it's all he and it will ever be. He's incapable of anything else.

The one thing he knows is what every cult leader knows, which is that the flock cannot see the leader as weak, but that they will -- they need to -- believe the constantly shifting explanations. The lies are much tastier than the truth, and so they gorge on the lies, and he has an endless supply of them.

But what they won't be able to get around is the fact that he's not getting the fucking wall. Period, end of sentence, full stop. He failed, and he knows it, and they know it. He bought himself three weeks to find some bullshit excuse, and come February 15th, there still won't be a fucking wall.

Already he's backpedaling, spouting mealy-mouthed bullshit about it's not like he meant a full 2,000-mile wall, guys. Uh-huh. Okay, then, Grampa Walnuts. Whatever you say. Until you say you didn't say that, as if we don't have years of video.

This is the desperate flailing of a doddering con-man who never knew nor cared about the actual mechanics of governance, the processes and procedures that make the machine hum. His balls are parked in I Call Her Nancy's purse not because she's a brilliant supergenius, though obviously she is extremely knowledgeable about what she does and how things get done. It's because, after all the trash talk and cheap shots about the wet bag of oatmeal that passes for his brain, all you have to do is listen to him for about two minutes on any given subject, and realize that he really is a fucking idiot.

And all but his most devoted cultists have to start seeing that, little by little, that he is very bad at this presidentin' thang, even by Outsider Draining Elitist Swamp bog-standard cult dogma. Just using his own rational political self-interest as a metric here, and nothing else, he would have been much better off if he had done nothing at all, and let outgoing shithead Paul Ryan push through the continuing resolution to keep the gubmint funded.

Instead, his opening gambit was a filmed encounter with Pelosi and Schumer in the Oval Office, where he opened negotiations by conceding in video that a shutdown would be on him. That devolved into a spate of surreal episodes, such as the staged visit to McAllen that Roth mentions, cartoon plutocrat Wilbur Ross trying out various let 'em eat shit lines that even rich assholes usually know better than to say out loud, Trump himself spouting bizarre shit about federal workers running up tabs with understanding grocers and supermarkets, culminating in the head of the flight attendants' union calling for a general airport-worker strike a week before the Super Bowl, with a one-hour FAA shutdown at LaGuardia as a taste of what was to come.

Net result:  a five-to-ten-percent approval drop, permanent loathing from the entire federal workforce, scorn from a significant portion of the cult base. When you lose Coulter and Breitbart, you're in trouble. This is neither art nor deal, and even the dopey maroons out in the haunted Pennsyltucky diners can see that. This is what incompetence looks like; this is how a complete dipshit runs a business and negotiates. People who have haggled five percent off a used car at a lot have better skills than this fucking asshole, and they know it.

This all could have been avoided, you know. No, really. There was a path where even a cartoon clown like Donald Trump could have succeeded at the job of president. All he had to was act like a normal human being -- listen to people who know things; throw opponents a bone once in a while; read a fucking book now and again; watch something on teevee other than base propaganda. But that would require humility, skill, competence, an understanding of one's own limitations and mortality.

Obviously he's incapable of any of those things, so of course it's a fuckin' dumpster fire. But it's important to note along the way that it didn't have to be this way. But this is the path he's chosen, and he's sticking to it, so deeper into the desert he goes. We'll see who he takes with him, hopefully McConnell and Cornyn and Graham and Cruz, and the rest of that miserable lot. It's no exaggeration to say that their thoughts and actions have made this country a worse place. History will not remember them well, and Americans will and should defecate on their graves after they're gone. Hell, go take a fucking dump on their lawn right now.

It's about to get a lot worse for the cultists, you know. Junior is going to be indicted soon, and Mueller will have more evidence to drop, and we'll all be subjected to their widening gyres and contortions, anything not to believe what's been right in front of them since the Eighties. You thought it was weird already, it's about to get weird.

I have to say this for him, if nothing else:  as despicable as Trump is and has always been as a human being and a businessman, as much of a shit sandwich as this rotten cloaca of an administration is, it's been entertaining. Never a dull moment with these dismal fuckers.

I don't know if we ever get back to boring, not for a while. But it's a worthwhile goal.

Friday, January 25, 2019

Endgame

So the gubmint shutdown has been "temporarily" lifted -- like that's a thing -- and Nancy "I call her Nancy" Pelosi didn't budge an inch on anything.

(Incidentally, the key takeaway of the "I call her Nancy" stupidity is not that Trump's a retard, though of course he is. Nor is it that his insistence on referring to Democratic legislators by their first names is intentionally disrespectful, though of course that's his purpose, and I look forward to them returning the favor at some inopportune moment. It's that the fact he hasn't come up with some cheap, demeaning, smarmy "Crooked Nancy" or "Lyin' Nancy" type of nickname for her shows that he's scared shitless of her. He pulls that Pocahontas shit on Pelosi, he'll be wiping his greasy ass with a stump, and he knows it.)

It would be tempting to credit Trump's public capitulation this afternoon to this morning's arrest of professional fuckface Roger Stone, but I think the main share of credit for this one goes to Sara Nelson, the head of the flight attendants' union. Nelson had been calling for a general strike among airport workers earlier this week, and it was only a matter of time. LaGuardia shut down for an hour this morning, and it would interesting to find out whose calls made it to the White HouseCastle, because shortly after that, Fatboy's on the lawn in the Rose Garden, reading from a TelePrompTer and handing his balls to  I Call Her Nancy.

I was anticipating this, and had actually planned to write a post over the weekend predicting a strike and its potential impact, but events beat me to it, as they are wont to do. (Serves me right for having a day job.)

But the fact is, the Super Bowl is next weekend in Atlanta, which also happens to have the world's busiest airport. Hartsfield-Jackson is a massive hub airport, and a walkout there on the busiest sports weekend would be catastrophic. I was actually hoping it would go through, but clearly the LaGuardia shutdown got the message across.

He has no hand to play, the Republicon senators are at each others' throats and defecting, and now the base knows he's every bit the fucking pussy and blowhard most of us were saying he was all along. The tasty librul snowflake tears have long dried up. They decided they would rather be feared than respected, and now they are starting to realize that this is what it looks like when you have neither fear nor respect, just anger and retribution. That noise they hear is the whirlwind they reaped.

I know there have been countless "beginning of the end" moments just in the past few weeks or months, but it's really starting to feel like it now. You'll know it's the real deal when corporate media coverage turns from fear and scaremongering to mockery and ridicule. And it's starting to do just that now. They see what should have been obvious all along -- that he's all talk, no walk. He's a mouthy barstool jerkoff yapping about what he'd do, nothing more.

He's not Hitler or Mussolini; at best his tenure most resembles that of bunga-bunga kleptocrat Silvio Berlusconi. But at heart he's really just Wile E. Coyote, minus the sad charm. If he got his wall he'd be painting a tunnel on the side of it, or trying to trap Pelosi with a pile of bird seed beneath an anvil.

It would be something indeed if, even in the face of all the evidence and indictments and guilty pleas attesting to the hard truth that the chief executive conspired with a foreign power to rig the 2016 election, the individual who really catalyzed the eventual unraveling of the whole shitshow was a milf flight attendant who pushed back and showed them for the cheap hucksters they all are. It's also fitting that the only one who isn't going to flip on him (yet) is a weird old fop who dresses like a Batman villain and likes to watch his wife get spit-roasted by other men (NSFW).

Fatboy's going down, and hard. It will take a while longer, but it's happening. Junior is going next, and the failson-in-law ain't far behind. The whole fam damily is on their way to Leavenworth at this rate. Fuck every last one of them, forever and ever, amen.

The only way it could get better is if he takes McConnell and the rest of the traitors down with him. Because that is exactly what they are, and the time for reconciling or compromising with them is long gone. They must be rendered defeated and destitute and unemployable, unfit for any respectable work.

Monday, January 21, 2019

Mediocracy

I bet you won't fall on your face, your belly will hold you in place. -- Iron Maiden Be Quick or Be Dead<./I>

Since we're talking about the importance of accountability for a bunch of dipshit teenagers, let's also mention how much more important that ideal is for the cadre of adult professionals who monger opinions and convene panel circle jerks and such like. Obviously the Covington Catholic controversy sets right in their collective wheelhouse. They can spend the next week going over video swatches like the fucking Zapruder film, frame-by-frame analysis that ultimately confirms whatever a given observer has already chosen to believe beforehand.

I guess it beats reporting on whether the school is tax-exempt, as many religious schools are, and if so, how that status squares with the school bussing children wearing political endorsement swag to a political protest to advocate a highly specific -- and contentious -- point of view. But then again, let's face it -- the 501(c)(3) status that churches and religious organizations enjoy is one of the most ridiculous and least enforced legal fig leaves in existence. It barely falls under the scope of pro forma.

Saturday, January 19, 2019

Keep America Hate; Or, Character Is Density

By now, we've all seen the photos and videos of this disgusting bullshit, and there's not a whole lot to add. Res ipsa loquitur, as the kids are wont to say in the 'hood.

On the one hand, maybe it's harsh to pick on children; on the other hand, these "children" are awful. No one put a gun to their heads to force those fucking lids on them. Would you care to meet their parents? There's no guessing as to how this happens. It would be a failure of imagination -- and, therefore, given the perilous state of what passes for our free and independent media ecosystem, entirely predictable -- to pass this off as yet another example of racism.

Certainly racism is a driving element, but it's really a matter of asserting upper-middle-class white privilege, on a second-class group. The only way it could be any better if is these losers try to excuse their behavior by saying that they thought Nathan Phillips was Mexican, and hence wanted to build a wall to keep him out, per Dear Leader's impassioned plaints. Build that wall! Lock her up! Derp derp derp! Dee- fence! Unh-unh! Dee-fence!

Christ. What a bunch of morons -- but worse than that, what a bunch of truly useless humans. The world would not miss them, had they never come along, really. Gunny from Full Metal Jacket had it right -- the best part of these doughy losers ran down the back of their mommas' legs, ending up as brown stains on mattresses all over the greater Cincinnati area.

Wednesday, January 09, 2019

Running Out of Synonyms for "Fuck 'em"

As the Cletus safaris become fewer and farther between, strangely they are also starting to take on the texture of a fine dessert or aperitif. This latest visit from the NY Times (I know, I know) to a benighted polyp somewhere deep in 'murka's taint, is too delicious to not be fattening:
MARIANNA, Fla. — A federal prison here in Florida’s rural Panhandle lost much of its roof and fence during Hurricane Michael in October, forcing hundreds of inmates to relocate to a facility in Yazoo City, Miss., more than 400 miles away.

Since then, corrections officers have had to commute there to work, a seven-hour drive, for two-week stints. As of this week, thanks to the partial federal government shutdown, they will be doing it without pay — no paychecks and no reimbursement for gas, meals and laundry, expenses that can run hundreds of dollars per trip.

....

This, after all, is one of many towns across the country where private industries are few and the federal government is intimately connected to livelihoods. Wedged near the border with Alabama and Georgia, Marianna’s 7,000 residents depend on the federal medium-security prison to employ nearly 300 people in good-paying jobs with attractive benefits.
Which is sadder -- that there are towns across the nation where the best job opportunity is at the nearest prison, or that people are so desperate to keep that slight privilege that they'll drive for seven hours to work a two-week block of shifts for free?

But prison workers were facing trouble even before the partial government shutdown. At least two-thirds of the Marianna staff members sustained hurricane damage to their homes, according to prison managers. The local prison officers’ union estimated that 10 percent of its affected members experienced total property losses.

Charles Jones, 32, a corrections officer and vice president of the union, said he and his wife were expecting their first child next month. “Because of the storm, I’ve already had to defer a payment here and there for my car,” he said. “Those are the basic things that we’re trying to do.”
It's somehow strangely reassuring to hear that disaster management for this gaping asshole of an administration doesn't just fail Puerto Ricans. Say what you will, but at least they're consistent in their failure.

“Everybody I talk to wants the wall,” James Grover, 72, a car salesman from nearby Blountstown, said over breakfast on Saturday at the Waffle Iron, a diner on Route 90 that opens six days a week even though its facade, destroyed by the hurricane, is temporarily made up of plastic sheeting and plywood.
The photo of the diner is all the reason you need to click on that link. I know you're surprised at the notion that Florida doesn't believe in health inspectors for restaurants, but seeing it is another thing. It seems like exactly the sort of place where you would expect to find a car salesman who should have been able to retire by now, sharing his teleological belief in an expensive "solution" to a crisis that doesn't really exist.

The grand finale is where that now-infamous pull quote resides.

A few miles away, another prison employee, Crystal Minton, accompanied her fiancé to a friend’s house to help clear the remnants of a metal roof mangled by the hurricane. Ms. Minton, a 38-year-old secretary, said she had obtained permission from the warden to put off her Mississippi duty until early February because she is a single mother caring for disabled parents. Her fiancé plans to take vacation days to look after Ms. Minton’s 7-year-old twins once she has to go to work.

The shutdown on top of the hurricane has caused Ms. Minton to rethink a lot of things.

“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.

[emphasis mine]

Okay then, there ya go. Crystal Minton should be praised for her honesty, whether or not she intended it as such. I don't know how many such affirmations of the obvious people might need to decide for themselves, but there's yet another one, just as stark and blatant as you please.

As the next phase of the perennial campaign gets underway, and the various panel-show get their talking points ready for How Dems Can Win Them Back, and other equally useless suggestions, Ms. Minton actually provides an ideal angle of attack for whichever candidate decides to try to poach the coveted angry-rube sliver. There is definitely a way to reframe that he's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting whinge.

Every one of these Real 'murkins, be they ancient car salesman or plaintive long-haul prison screw, is stuck -- in their low-rent locale, in their mediocre career aspirations, in their sad lives of quiet destitution. Only people who have no other choice drive seven hours to stay in a hotel for two weeks and work at a prison, all out of pocket. These are folks for whom "economic insecurity" is not a direct cause for their vote, only because they are so habituated to economic insecurity, they don't notice it as a proximal cause of anything. It's a visible characteristic, like having brown eyes or being left-handed.

They want out of it, but you could give them a million bucks tax-free and they still wouldn't really know what to do with it. Get debt-free, maybe buy a larger, newer house (but in the same area). Take a couple family trips east of the Rockies: Branson, maybe DC or New York. They live close enough to Disney World to have been there already.

Mainly, though, their worldview would not change even if they were no longer economically insecure. It is not necessarily overt racism so much as lifelong conditioning that their strangely revered broke-down "way of life" of busted-out towns and opioid-addled relatives is "under attack," whatever the hell that means for them.

But it doesn't matter, because they are economically insecure, and they know they always will be, and so the way you snap them out of their dead-eyed cult gaze is to simply point out the obvious -- that all those godless heathen fag libruls, all those coastal elites, have been doing just fine. Maybe not great, because only the wealthy do great anymore, but their hero hasn't hurt the coastal elites, not even a little bit. Even the initial snowflake tears, as tasty as those might have been, have dried and galvanized what is now just as intractable an opposition bloc as the teatards were ten long years ago.

The snowflakes are just pissed now, and a lot of them are young, and they'll never vote Republicon now. Never. And most of them really haven't taken any sort of economic hit, because they don't typically work in industries or geographic areas that Master Dealmaker's idiot shenanigans actually affected. It's the floor monkey at the nail factory that's losing his job; it's the soybean farmer in Iowa watching his harvest rot in a cavernous warehouse; it's the already dilapidated panhandle craphole that just had its best jobs outsourced four hundred miles away in another state, because the disaster money still hasn't shown up to repair their houses and businesses and infrastructure.

They were already getting a raw deal. Right or wrong, they feel like they've gotten a raw deal all their lives. He promised to bring the pain to all those smug, condescending libruls who have the nerve to read books, who think they're so fuckin' smart. Instead he's just brought the pain exclusively to the people who love him the most. And they can't figure it out. It's hilarious. I'm getting a huge fuckin' chubby just thinking about it all over again. It's not just that they can't quit Preznit Monkey Paw. They voted for Ron DeSantis, they voted for Matt Gaetz, just ten weeks ago. They asked for this, and now, like the dumbest of dogs, they stand around scratching their nuts, wondering what the hell happened. It turns out that stoves are hot, and elections have consequences, and there are simply some folks who need to learn those lessons the hard way. Some of them will keep touching the stove, no matter what. As the man said, you can't fix stupid.

Democratic candidates, certainly at the national level, need to just write these numbskulls off. There's nothing you can tell them, and there's no need when there are millions more votes to be had just by motivating a relative handful of non-voters. But certainly local and state pols can make this argument to them, and it could conceivably be utilized by the right national candidate: He promised you he'd make it better for you, and slap them down. How's that been working out?

But again, in the meantime, these stories are like slightly delayed Christmas presents. How can you not love reading about people getting exactly what they voted for? That's democracy right there!

First They Came for the De-Platformed Snowflakes

Plenty of whining these days about idiots being "de-platformed," deprived of their God-given right to make a fat living spreading lies and abuse and wink-wink-nudge-nudge racism. Oh, what will become of poor Milo or Carl or Gavin, or whatever pied pissant is trying this month to coax the virtual hordes of incels and basement losers into the good life of flame-tweeting uppity bitchez and minorituhs?

Look, it's too bad that Milo Yiannopoulos is $2M in debt. Maybe, in the true ethos of the committed fiscal conservative bootstrapper lot, he should have made sure to secure gainful employment sufficient to support his high-on-the-cock lifestyle. Just as NBC isn't required to sell and broadcast advertisements for Pornhub or crush videos (even the latter of which was at one point ruled free speech), Patreon and other such outlets have the right to refuse service. This is less a matter of corporate control, and more a matter of cost-benefit analysis, the knowledge that for every one of these dipshit "provocateur" losers they take on, they'll lose a hundred or a thousand or a million users and contributors -- in other words, their revenue model.

Do people still need an explanation of how the free market works? It's suboptimal in many ways, but at least its one true ethos holds firm throughout -- no matter how stupid or awful it is, if it makes money, it gets in the arena. That's how Rush Limbaugh has stayed on the air for thirty years. That's how you got half a decade of Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo types, a decade of Kardashians, or two decades of various strains of "reality" teevee. They're all terrible, and entirely useless, even as entertainment. But they sold or sell ad time.

I mean, are these people fucking kidding? If one thing about teevee and the internets holds true over anything else, it's that Sturgeon's Law is pretty much the main operational guideline. Does anyone seriously think that putatively librul (in the sense that it's possible that they may have voted Democratic at least as often as they voted Republican) scumbags such as Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves think twice about all the free publicity they gave that jabbering baboon during the 2016 campaign? They held their noses and deposited their checks.

Mark Burnett is an even better example -- he's actually on record as being a Democratic voter and donor over the years, but when he smelled cheap pelf, he ran with the devil and never looked back. Not only was Burnett richly rewarded, he has broadcast properties all over the place. No one's boycotting him or cutting him loose. Why do you think that is?

Why doesn't Milo just start up a website with all his deep thoughts and put a PayPal link on the sidebar, get a mailing list going and shake down his readers? Or start up a YouTube channel and sell subscriptions? People make bank on YouTube watching other people play video games, or teaching people how to put on makeup. Surely these renegade thinkers can coordinate their thoughts to the same extent Jenna Marbles or Pewdiepie has, and figure their principled way out of the corporate Marxist gulag.

This is kinda what Sarah Palin ran into when she tried to monetize her grift after getting her tight ass kicked in the 2008 election. She tried the reality show, the Fixed Noise commentary gig, the paid subscription grift -- but they all required work, effort, content, attention. Or you have to pay someone to do that content creation-curation shit for you. So now she sits up in the tundra, tweeting her deep thoughts now and then, when she's not busy trying to keep her dope-addled son from pulling a murder-suicide with whatever dingbat he's hooked up with this year.

Same thing with these other yahoos, to some degree or other. They're not broke and desperate because they're being blackballed by mythic corporate librul fascists; they're broke because they're incompetent boobs whose schtick has worn thin. Sure, the basement dipshits looking for the daily outrage pellet in their Skinner-box lives will read it for free until the die-uh-beet-us finally keels them over. But they won't pay for it.

The Koch Brothers, worth over $100 billion dollars between them, each one averages something like a million dollars a day, they dump hundreds of millions into each electoral cycle, they bankroll think tanks and magazines. Say what you want about them, but you can't say they aren't engaged in every facet of the political and policy-making process. They invest a lot of fucking money every year in strategy, legislation, influencing, and who knows what else.

You think if poor destitute Milo was doing anything worth half a shit that they could use to their benefit, the Koch boys or one of their swollen failsons couldn't sweep in and give him a sinecure somewhere, a Reason column or such like? One of the conservatard vanity publishers couldn't throw him a bone after his debacle with Simon and Schuster?

Jesus H. Christ, rich assholes keep Dinesh D'Souza, who is a failure on every level -- moral, ethical, financial, legal -- solvent. If they wanted to, they would and could, and they wouldn't even notice the money. This nation is openly run by psychotic billionaires. If they wanted these Patreon numbskulls on their roster, they'd have signed 'em up already.

And again, it's not just Milo, who obviously has his own image problems to deal with. He's just the highest-profile example, but the end result is true for the rest of these slugs -- they don't do anything that their self-reinforcing audience of angry dupes is actually willing to pay for. Why should they, when they can get their pellets for free? They're not worried about any issues of "quality" or a higher level of thinking or writing skill. They don't want prime rib, they're fine with Cheez Doodles. And you can find those anywhere.

Tuesday, January 08, 2019

Why We Boycott CNN

Further evidence that Jim Acosta is a dickless weasel, and should go out and ply an honest trade at the earliest possible opportunity. You're hurting 'murka, Jimbo, and you inform no one, you illuminate nothing, you add no value.

There's only so many ways to put it:  having a paid liar on your "news" program is not journalism. At all. Genuflecting before said liar and not just taking her shit, but eating it and asking for seconds, is even worse. It degrades whatever husk remains of honest journalism; it lends credence to pure scum and cheap agitprop. It convinces no one, it changes nothing. This sort of shit makes the nation, and the world, and even the debased profession of journalism, objectively worse.

I bet his family can't look him in the eyes anymore. His friends, when they have to talk to him, probably have the tone of someone talking to a stage-four cancer patient, sympathy and sorrow and the urge to be anywhere else on the planet.

And Acosta can't see it. He thinks someone gets something out of his tedious excursions to the cult rallies, to be spit at and flipped off and shat on by angry morons. He thinks that lightly sautéing a sellout lackey like Kellyanne Conway one more fucking time is going to elicit some useful information, like he's going to catch her in another lie and this time it'll matter. Jesus Fucking Christ, where do you find rutabaga halfwits like this?

It's not just Acosta, of course -- Conway is CNN's go-to propagandist, openly defying them to find someone else for their hack-cess journamalism. And you know what? She's right. She gives them exactly the amount of respect they deserve. But it also happens to be the degree of respect CNN holds for its dipshit viewers.

Clear your conscience, Jimbo. Go investigate a real story and provide us with some facts, some actual information. Will it be ignored in the ceaseless tsunami of nonsense and bullshit? Almost certainly. But it's a good start for you to start scrubbing your soul clean, or at least a bit cleaner. Because this? This is the gutter equivalent of cheap Super-8 animal porn. This is a grainy '60s loop of a cranked-up biker fucking a terrified farm animal. This is shameful, repulsive. This is an unholy crime against nature and humanity.

This....is CNN.