Bedbug

Bret Stephens, like many of his ilk on the NY Times' sorry excuse for an op-ed page, continues to find new and more efficient ways to demonstrate why, even on the occasions when that paper manages to not fuck something up, it's just not worth bothering with anymore. At all.

As long as they continue to provide sinecures to lazy thinkers and shitty writers such as Stephens (and Brooks, Dowd, Douthat, Friedman, and several of their primary political stenographers), life continues to be simply too short to wade into the muck. You know what they're gonna say, how they're gonna say it, etc.

There is literally no point in reading such a publication anymore. I couldn't care less about their 1619 project. There are countless academic texts out there covering the same ground, better and more thoroughly. Go to a fucking library once in a while.

By now, if you're in the mix, you already know the broad strokes:

• little-known associate professor at GW University refers to Stephens as a "bedbug" in a barely-read tweet;
• Stephens (who is so diligently hard-working, he apparently has time to Google himself for untoward references) happens across the post and summarily challenges Karpf to come to his (Stephens') house and call him that to his face, in front of his wife and children;
• tweet naturally blows up and goes viral because of Stephens' whining;
• Stephens contacts Karpf's boss and tries (unsuccessfully) to get Karpf fired;
• Stephens tops of a week of win with a column so infantile and self-regarding, in a rational universe it would be cause to inform Stephens of his new tax status, and send him on about his way finding honest work.

Bear in mind that just a couple months ago, Stephens had a column chastising people for using the term "concentration camps" to refer to the, you know, concentration camps where we are forcibly confining, under inhumane conditions, refugees seeking legal asylum. And back in 2013, when the Obama Administration was trying to craft the JCPOA to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions peacefully, Stephens wrote a column comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain. Civility, y'all! Stephens, who is after all Jewish and spent much of his childhood in Mexico City, should actually know better than most about the implications of the things he writes. But his schtick is that of paid contrarian, and as such, once bought he stays bought.

Believe it or not, this is not to lambaste Stephens in particular. Frankly, anyone still reading him or the aforementioned page-monkeys alongside him deserve precisely what they get -- a paucity of any fresh thought or analysis, just the same litany of rearranged buzzwords one would expect from someone whose prime motive in life is to get invited to the elite Hamptons soirees.

Imagine the sort of inherited-wealth douchebag who spends six figures on their wedding and their kids' preschools and all that, and still has the balls to act like they earned every penny, and you have an idea of who Stephens writes for and aspires to hang with and to be.

The people who really run the country and own the assets and the political process; the people who talk enormous amounts of shit about everything and everyone that even mildly affects their eternal goal of permanent excess; the people who routinely refer to the poor and working class as other species, insect and otherwise; the people who immediately get their panties in a wad and pitch a yuuuuge fucking fit the second anyone criticizes them for anything, no matter how accurately.

There are niches within each, of course, but whenever you subject yourself to the unnecessary pain of reading yet another screed from Stephens or Bobo or Modo or Douthat, that is the subtext of the essay, whatever the particular subject on a given day:  what does a wealthy, do-nothing swell with an unearned sense of entitlement want to hear? How can I affirm that person's sense of self-regard?

One of the most pernicious ways each of them operates -- and this is simply part of the process of being a Times columnist in the first place -- is to reiterate the tautology that simply being on the op-ed page confers automatic legitimacy, therefore not being on the op-ed page renders critics as automatically illegitimate, worthy of discussion only as a point of refutation, or -- in Karpf's case -- an unwashed, unpedigreed Other, whose impolitic words instantly conjure up visions of 1930s Germany or 1790s France.

Just in the past two weeks, not to mention the last several years, the chief executive of the United States of America has:

• offered to purchase the sovereign territory of an ally, and cancelled a diplomatic visit when the offer was rightly rebuffed;
• referred to himself with divinely-inspired nomenclature ("the chosen one") in reference to his role in an ongoing fiasco with our largest trading partner; if there were an instructional handbook for aspiring dictators, referring to oneself with religious titles would be on page one, right before "renaming the months of the year after one's family";
• "temporarily" shut down the FEC, by making it unable to fill a quorum, and thus carry out its duty of safeguarding elections and ensuring that campaigns abide by the law (that no one enforces anymore anyway);
• committed a securities violation, by falsely stating at last weekend's G7 meeting that China "had called" him, which on the following morning raised the market out of the 800-point funk he had sent it into the previous Friday;
• committed a national-security violation, by tweeting a classified photo from a spy satellite of a failed Iranian missile test, essentially showing the location of the satellite;
• threatened his departing personal assistant, who was fired for bragging that she has a closer relationship to Trump than his own daughters.

No doubt I'm forgetting a few; feel free to remind me in comments. But this is just from the last couple weeks, and August is supposed to be the slow season when everyone is on vacation.

And yet to grossly overpaid idiot gatekeepers such as Bret Stephens, the real problem is all these intolerant liberals, you see, all these would-be Goebbels and Robespierre types who are dehumanizing their political opponents with their rhetoric, and sharpening the guillotine blades. Never mind that the US government is literally dehumanizing people every goddamned day, literally sentencing sick people to die from treatable ailments. Never mind that real honest-to-jeebus white-power types routinely make rape and death threats to (usually female) bloggers and tweeters routinely.

Fuck that "bedbug" shit, there are serious people out there making real threats that have other real people looking over their shoulders every time they leave their houses. Stephens is just a spoiled crybaby who got pissy with an academic, because he was insufficiently deferential to Stephens' gatekeeping greatness.

While you're reading this, while Stephens is writing his next unreadable, bullshit-laden jeremiad, these things are happening. Right now. Oh, look, there goes another one, another scared child raped in a foster home or dropping dead in a hot desert camp. Careful with that guillotine, Robespierre!

As we've been saying in here for a very long time, well before the bewigged gastropod oozed its way into the spotlight, we have to decide what kind of country we're going to be. Either we're the kind of country that shits on immigrants from the "wrong" countries purely as a punitive measure, or we're not. Either we're the kind of country that keeps monstrous demagogues from derailing the nation's collective trajectory, or we just passively sit there and watch it happen. Gee, this sucks.

An integral part of all this can be summed up in the classic kids' nutrition phrase you are what you eat. The New York Times, from its political coverage to its op-ed columnists to its society pages, is a verbatim transcript of smooth-brained establishment elite bullshit. Just because there's occasionally a few kernels of corn here and there doesn't make it any more nutritious if you pick those out and eat them. They think their once-a-year deep-dive coverage on Trump's crooked past (that they could  and should have done ten or twenty years earlier) or some such makes up for the other 364 days of shameless hackcess journamalism and their day-care center of tiresome slop-ed failchildren.

The fact that a significant percentage of the Times' op-ed columnists spend a non-zero amount of time worrying about the tone and civility of a literally powerless opposition should tell you everything you need to know about them -- as thinkers, as writers, as human beings. The problem is not that AOC has effectively coined the term "concentration camps" for those places, the problem is that Bret Stephens, who has a prime spot for commentary and could literally write about any subject he chooses and get it into the national conversation, chooses to write about how unseemly that term is, rather than the operational reality of those places.

Maybe Stephens should go talk to his wife and kids face-to-face about that; if he doesn't have the guts, I'll be happy to drop by and do so, since he's tweeting out invites. I'll even bring a six-pack of whatever beverage he chooses. I won't even drop an f-bomb, I promise. It'll be civil.

So people either support this nonsense with their dollars and their eyeballs, or they don't, period. Even then, even if Stephens were to get even more butthurt and decide to pretend to go out and ply an honest trade, he'd just go and write an unreadable book about his imaginary travails shoveling coal for the nation's flagship newspaper for hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, going on teevee and complaining about his lot in life whenever he chooses to, and having to deal with all those pesky internet Robespierres. Three hundred padded pages of boo-fucking-hoo, and yet another boo-hoo media tour to push that turd good and hard. He's gonna get paid either way, and the Times would just replace him with another interchangeable bedbug. The cycle continues.

But the bottom line really is that the worst possible thing you can do to someone like Bret Stephens is to completely ignore him, and the people who bankroll his crybaby nonsense. So maybe let's all do that. It's not like anyone's going to miss out on anything worthwhile.

One Down, Many More To Go

Fuck the Koch brothers, right in their evil hearts. The family fortune was literally started with their dad digging oil wells for Stalin, then building an oil refinery for Hitler. It's gone steadily downhill since then.

David and Charles Koch epitomize the Scrooge McDuck scumbag who hoards pelf for its own sake, occasionally doling out a crumb here or there to the "right" type of philanthropic endeavor, but never anywhere near the ballpark of what it would be if they just paid their goddamned taxes.

It would be nice to think that that sort of person is actually somewhat miserable, that having to spend all one's time plotting and scheming in order to hoard and accumulate endlessly would eventually create a mental feedback loop where that's pretty much all you can do anymore, just in terms of having an existence, rather than a life that you take joy in. Maybe not. Maybe people like that are just hardwired to endlessly compete with one another, to play dress-up and go to the big parties and schmooze and pretend they don't all hate each other.

Check out the intricate mechanisms of the political system right here and now -- there are enormous, deliberately set fires engulfing hundreds of thousands of acres in the Amazon rain forest at the current moment. It is an ecosystem within itself, and a cornerstone of the world's ecosystem. Destroying enough of the rain forest would drastically accelerate an already looming climate change situation.

This has been going on for years, of course, mostly to clear land for cattle ranchers, but since the election of the current Trump clone there, the process has been intensified. Since Preznit Genius Q. Dealmaker has decreed that trade wars are good and easy to win, China in response has cut off all American agricultural products for import, especially soybeans, which as you might imagine, China consumes a great volume of.

Guess which country China just signed a huge soybean deal with?

All of these features are natural results of the system the Koch brothers have quite literally purchased with their ill-gotten pelf -- not just lower tax rates, but the steady elimination of even basic environmental protections, and installing climate-change-denying clowns in important government offices. This is what they wanted, and we've let them do it, at the very least by having enough chumps fall for their self-serving propaganda.

It's a small consolation that, for all his filthy money, David Koch is every bit as dead as the homeless heroin addict in the next drawer at the morgue, and from the look of things a hell of a lot more reviled. It's a reminder, though, that the homeless guy deserves better, but hopefully it's also a reminder to the surviving Koch brother that no matter how many crumbs he disperses to the art museum or the philharmonic or whatever rich-asshole hobby, what he'll be remembered for is ruining the planet.

Oh, the rented dogsbodies at Reason and AEI and all that will slap together some insincere encomia, but Charles will know. He'll know that the family name has passed on to utterly useless progeny -- fat, soft, spoiled jerkoffs who will be used as catamites and barbecue in the eventual climate change holocaust. He'll be every bit as dead as the poorest dirt farmer he poisoned or exploded, and most people will spit as they say his name.

There's your legacy, Chuck. That's your mark on the world, after all that. Nobody in your life ever really loved you, without due compensation. Know that above all else. Enjoy what's left of your time, with your empire of dirt.

I Moved On Her Like a Bitch

Let's play devil's advocate and say that the US purchasing Greenland has the potential to be the next Alaska -- it apparently is rich with rare earth minerals, and there is an Australian mining company already there, doing what mining companies do. And we did think about doing it previously, way back in 1946. Obviously, there are other strategic and military-basing considerations as well. We may not agree with the basic premises of plundering more minerals out of a groaning planet, or of expanding military response capacity past an already exceptionally high level, but in those contexts, it's not the worst idea.

But here, for the millionth time, is a clear example of how Captain Crybaby smashes his World's Greatest Negotiator mug once again. See, a normal head of state would use his diplomatic corps to reach out to their Danish counterparts, send feelers up the comms channel to determine the feasibility of the idea, and how open they would be to it.

Most things have a price, and sometimes they don't, and you just accept it and move on to the next thing. You do it on a good note so that maybe an opportunity arrives where you can circle back and give it another shot. But that's it. We never should have heard a word about any of this. It should just have been a quiet conversation between friends, a question asked and answered, and both parties going on about their business.

Trump's response to Danish PM Mette Fredriksen's understated "absurd" comment is, of course, the response of every privileged rich white boy who's had a girl reject his advances. This is a species that is used to having their every stupid whim indulged and fawned over. They do not get told no, so when it happens, they get weird.

So since Trump can't just rape Fredriksen in a department store dressing room to temporarily expiate his terminal inferiority complex, he now has to compound the problem by abruptly cancelling a state visit and giving the Danish a hard time about their NATO financial commitments. (Once again, bearing in mind that NATO "membership" is not like being a member at one of Trump's rat-and-roach-infested dumps. The money does not go to Trump, nor to the US, nor even to NATO.)

Here is where it bears repeating to all of our wonderful European friends and allies, who are being repeatedly shat upon by this bitter old man, this boiled ham soaked in gravy with a piss-colored bird nest stuck on it:  people treat you how you let them treat you. That is, if you choose to respond with subtlety and grace, but not actually do or say anything of substance, he'll just do it again and again.

After all, he's never really been given any reason not to be an asshole. Think about it. The guy's a fucking moron, and a disgraceful excuse for a human being on every level, and he's never had to experience any sort of accountability or consequences for any of it, ever. Seriously, why should he change, if everyone else just lets him get away with his behavior anyway? For Trump's entire miserable life, everyone he's fucked over or been an asshole to has just shrugged their shoulders and said whaddaya gonna do?, and then done exactly nothing about any of it. Of course he won't change, there's never been a reason for him to change.

Maybe the European NATO countries should consider forming their own defense alliance, without us and our weird bullshit. Even if we come to our senses and flush this turd next year, it means nothing if #MoscowMitch still runs the Senate (or is even still in the Senate; he had no problem fucking Obama up from a minority-leader position). Even if the Democrats take over the executive branch and both houses of Congress, the pendulum is swinging faster and faster, the rubes are seething, and the psychotic billionaires who own this country are dedicated to stoking the herrenvolk into a full-blown civil war, if it gets them just one more percent knocked off their tax rate.

So no matter what happens next year, we'll be back here in 2024 or 2028. Trump will probably have waddled off to whichever circle of hell has Burger King, and someone smarter and slicker will be in place, without the clown outfit and the idiot ass-kissers. The climate will be worse, and Greenland will start looking more and more like a great place to move.

In the meantime, here's hoping that Denmark -- and they're welcoming PRESIDENT OBAMA next month, so that should be fun to watch Fatboy's Twitter tears -- makes a real statement in response. Cancel the state visit permanently, and say so straight up. We don't have anything to meet about. Let's not waste each other's time. PNG the US Ambassador to Denmark, a Q-adjacent Z-list actress who has no business doing what she's doing. Stand up for yourselves and punch the bully back, or he'll be coming for your lunch money again.

Nothing will change until bad behavior has real consequences. Complaining does not equate accountability. How can we hold this fucker accountable, once and for all?

Garbage Out

So, uh, do you believe me now when I talk about how shitty teevee has been gaslighting 'murkins and ruining their capacity to think straight, and doing it for decades? This is not a fucking coincidence. They are trying to rehabilitate Goebbels, is what this is, since Spicer doesn't have the self-awareness or dignity to either come clean about his role and give up the filth on this admin, or check out like an honorable man. I can't believe the steaming turds that ABC still runs, between this and HPV Hot Tub (you may know it as The Bachelor(ette)), but Jesus H. Christ, let's boycott them altogether already.

The Best People

Take a minute and go through the list of mutts in this article, many of them instantly knowable by a single name:  Omarosa. Scaramucci. Michael Cohen, Lindsey Graham (aka #LeningradLindsey because fuck that piece of shit). Graham hasn't turned on Trump yet, unlike the others, but at the first sign of possibly losing his Senate seat, you can bet he will.

Rack your brain for a second and try to come up with a single well-known person who supports this spray-painted, raccoon-eyed walrus, that you would describe as reputable or reliable or hell, a decent human being. They have all sold their souls for something cheap and fleeting, counting on the notoriously short memories of idiot 'murkins, their minds permanently mushed by decades of reality teevee pablum blurring the lines between fact and fabrication, history and narrative.

Some of them will turn when the time is right and the opportunism is useful, because that is what such people do, and that is the only kind of people he wants around him anyway. The few serious people in this administration, like Mattis and McMaster, didn't last long, and they get to play out the string of what had been reasonably respectable careers as toadies for a demented moron.

John Kelly was a serious person with some accomplishments, and decided to trash all that to play the game, until he too got pushed off the island. Now he's a board member for the privatized concentration-camp company that incarcerates children who get molested and old women forced to drink out of toilets, because they bought into the idea that this nation actually stood for something. Sorry, no asylum for you, you're the wrong color. But as long as there's an opportunity to turn a filthy buck out of the misery of others, why it would be -- wait for it -- un-American not to take full advantage of that.

There used to be the sitcom/movie trope of poking fun at the tradition of small, insular religious communities -- the Amish, maybe the Mennonites or Mormons -- to shun individuals who were seen as out-of-step with the rest of the flock. In the movies and teevee shows, it's usually a hardy-har-har at the old chinstrap-bearded farts looking sternly at the wanton yout', with their sex and their electrical-geetar music. Oh, won't these old fuddy-duddies ever learn that you can't stop progress, nor can you keep Kevin Bacon from getting footloose?

As Donald Sutherland observed in Animal House, the most interesting character in Paradise Lost is Lucifer, because being bad is more fun than being good. Obviously. Turns out this is also true in real life, as some of us have found out by spending time on either side of the fence. Though as those of us who spent a wayward youth know, if you're still doing the sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll thing after, say thirty-five or forty and you're not in an actual touring band that people have heard and which has remunerated you in some tangible way, you probably spend a lot of time in your local police log.

Reality teevee, if you think about it, has reinforced the fun-villain thing rather consistently, from the amount of marketing I end up skin-popping in my news feed. You don't need to be a fan of that crap to realize that they keep the rubes glued by making assholes the center of the narrative. Not even villains, mind you -- traditionally, a villain is portrayed as having a viewpoint, and even some level of competence. Think Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes story --  a bad guy, but not a buffoon or a clown, or even someone who was a dick just for the sake of being a dick. He had reasons for his efforts.

But now? All our villains are merely assholes. They exist primarily to teabag whoever's in the out-group, and not much more than that. It's not even a Dr. Evil level of cartoon villainy, more of a pro-wrestling level. "Real" housewives talking shit and flipping tables, useless, botox-and-silicon cunts acting like they contribute in some way to civilization.

At least pro wrestlers know they're acting, as do the fans. Now, once you bring that hideous dynamic into the political arena and weld it to more deeply-rooted notions of nationalism and patriotism and religious belief, they become inextricably linked. It eventually insulates them from and precludes any attempts at rational thought. This is why those bozos at the cult rallies and haunted diners sound, when they are actually quoted verbatim, drunk off their asses. They are literally beyond the point of any clarity of thought.

Not only can they not defend their own positions, they frequently can't even explain them coherently. They talk in heroic terms about a preposterous grifter who is openly using the office to line his pockets with their tax dollars, in a variety of ways, and they're completely fine with it. It's impossible to compete with or penetrate that level of buy-in. That's a cult. Any deprogrammers out there looking for work?

And so you get, to use the most recent example in Portland just yesterday, throngs of unemployable losers in variously ludicrous forms of larper cosplay, insisting very seriously that the only demographic in this country that has any right to feel truly aggrieved and oppressed is the (presumably, though you wonder about some of these dopes) hetero white christian male.

Ordinarily you'd say, jeez, these guys really need to get laid, but what poor woman deserves that, some weird asshole with a Toys-R-Us Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle chest plate, that he hand-decorated with Kek logos and Pepe the Frog stickers, pretending he's saving the world from the J-O-O funded conspiracy to replace pasty lumps like himself with undeserving wetbacks? Even if he did manage to find a woman, she'd at least have to be open to conversion -- in other words, already on board with the whole nutjob philosophy.

Circling back to the top of the post there, these comic-book assholes -- you wouldn't hire any of them for any sort of work, ever. You would not hire Michael Cohen as your lawyer. You wouldn't let Mooch handle your pension fund. You wouldn't pay Omarosa to do whatever the fuck she does. And they are a reflection of the disloyal turd who hired them in the first place, who cut them loose and who they have now publicly turned against. You wouldn't hire him to manage anything or do anything either.

Competence matters, it turns out. A lot of salt-of-the-earth types out there in flyover country are finding that out the hard way, that between an unnecessary trade war and months of spring flooding that affected planting and will affect their harvests shortly (not that they can sell their products anyway), that pwnage they thought they were pulling on the libturds is really on themselves. Turns out we can grow corn and soybeans and shit out here in California too.

The Midwest could disappear from the map tomorrow and it would affect anything on the Pacific coast. That may not be a nice or politically correct thing to say, but that's the way it is. I'm not wishing any ill will on them, other than what they've inflicted on themselves. I'm saying that they have labored under the delusion that we need them more than they need us.

And the truth is that we don't need them at all, while they need our hedonistic sodomite tax dollars just to keep their subsidized corn-holes afloat. But they've cooked their noodles for the past couple decades, watching this corporate nonsense that's irreparably altered their perception of everything, where incompetent assholes get to have all the fun and none of the consequences. So they went ahead and put one in charge, and it turns out....there are consequences. For everyone, but for them most of all. So perhaps karma is a thing after all. We'll find out with a bit more certainty in about fourteen months.

Maybe it's time to think more seriously about the notion of shunning, that identifying idiots who are destructive just for the sake of being destructive and turning our backs on them is not just an act of collective punishment, but of self-preservation. None of these people -- Omarosa, Moochie, and especially Trump -- should ever have been allowed into our collective lives and psyches. They are nothing but snakes and weasels, indecent people pursuing naked ambition, without any of the qualifications for doing so except a streak of ruthlessness and an utter lack of conscience.

If we want better people to lead the nation, then we have to be better citizens and consumers, and step up and make choices that reflect our needs and values. You can't just keep blaming a shitty corporate media, if you keep watching it and giving their sponsors your business. You can't blame the sneaky Russians and their micro-targeted Facebook ads, if you were dumb enough to believe them. You can't blame the corrupt voting precinct for deregistering you for not voting for ten years and misspelling your name, if you don't vote and can't spell your fucking name.

The biggest thing these fuckers fear is not anger and pushback -- hell, that's where they make their nut, stoking conflict and performative outrage. What they really fear is a pissed-off populace that is informed, focused, prepared, and paying attention, and is ready to calmly go forth and do business.

So make sure you're registered, right now, get a receipt from the elections office to verify it for later reference, and then vote with your wallet every damned day going forward. Maybe write your congress-critters once in a while, just to let them know you're watching. If enough people just did those things, and did them consistently, within just a few years all the bullshit going on right now would seem like a bad dream.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Fat

This dumb little skit from last week's empty-seat cult rally in New Hampshire is utterly meaningless, and yet perfectly encapsulates the operational aesthetic of this human centipede of an administration in general, as well as its top turd-sucker in particular:

President Trump on Thursday called the man he mocked for having a “weight problem” at a New Hampshire rally earlier that evening after discovering he was a supporter.

A senior administration official said Friday that after campaign staff got the rallygoer's contact information, Trump called him from Air Force One on the way back to Bedminster, N.J. [....to waste more taxpayer money playing fucking golf -- Ed.] The president left a voicemail message.

Fun! So let's break this down into its component parts, just to make sure we have it all covered:

• Morbidly obese septuagenarian who takes a golf cart to the shitter, and who literally believes exercise is bad for you, mocks a protester for being fat.


• Turns out the fat guy's a supporter, not a protester.


• Turns out that while he's not exactly Michael Phelps, he's not fat, either, certainly not compared to the spray-tanned, gravy-soaked tub of shit who mocked him from his very presidential stage.


• The fat guy who mocked the not-fat guy for being, well, fat decides to call and leave a very presidential voicemail in which he pointedly did not apologize -- because there is never anything to apologize for when you're oh-so-very-perfect in every conceivable way, and never wrong about anything, whatever and ever, amen.


• The chump at the receiving end of all this is such a cult-infused loser on wheels that he loves it, his support is unwavered in the least. Keep suckin' that dick, moron.

It's pretty sad to have to point out explicitly that pejorative terms such as "cult" and "loser" are not, and have never been (in this context, anyway) even mild exaggerations. This is textbook cult behavior, where the leader singles out an innocent member of the flock for punitive action or scorn, and the member loves Dear Leader for it.

Feet of Clay

Couple of interesting observations about the Obama years and legacy that are worth checking out, as we head into what will surely be an entertaining year in which we will hopefully do as little as possible. Whatever caveats and qualifiers people want to post hoc onto Obama's tenure as imperial custodian, the bottom line is that he was far better than the fool who preceded him, the chumps he ran against, and especially that damned thing that succeeded him. That said, his flaws deserve to be revisited, if only so that they can be avoided in the future.

I always felt that Primary Colors was an underrated gem of a movie, with pitch-perfect performances from the entire ensemble. It captured perfectly how the canned idealism of the Clintons so quickly soured into endlessly triangulated cynicism.

One of the better lines from that movie -- can't find it online right now, so going from memory -- was from Billy Bob Thornton's character, referring to Kathy Bates' true believer character, that when that sort of person finds out their guy isn't really the rock that their church was built on, it devastates them. They're not sure what to do going forward.

I think that's what's happened with all the post hoc analyses of Obama's terms. For one, he benefits simply because the people he ran against, and the people he governed against, were so awful. He comes out looking better simply by being a normal human, instead of a steadily worsening sequence of Star Wars cantina critters.

But what did he actually do to effectively combat that wretched hive of scum and villainy? Not much, it turns out; in fact, considering the massive scale of Democratic losses at all the lower levels, maybe worse than nothing at all. Maybe his health-care initiative will survive in some form. Everything else is already gone.

Obama was effective in conveying that feel-your-pain stuff that good pols need to have, but the be-the-change-you-want stuff kinda backfired. You can't tell the harried single mother working three jobs to keep her family afloat that you know what she's going through, and then when you get elected tell her that she has to step up and be the change. That's what she voted for you to do, dummy, to stand up to the animals keeping her down. She should have showed up for all the midterms, of course, but one might be able to see how such a person might have noticed by those points in time that nothing much was really going to change for their situation.

The Democratic candidate that can forcefully convey that they will fight on their constituents' behalf, and not back down or take some weasel way out, will be the one that can win, and win big. Stop whining about the corporate media and call them out, challenge the individual scriveners to step up and do real work, instead of theater criticism and pithy observations on how to eat corn dogs. Stop complaining about #MoscowMitch and his mastery of procedure, and learn to master it yourselves. He seemed quite able to stonewall things when he led a forty-one seat minority. Do that.

That's really the only worthwhile lesson to take from Obama, that all the well-meaning thoughts and words and intentions mean nothing against people who are dedicated to destroying you. Norms, rules, decorum, all of it -- utterly meaningless if only one side is bothering to observe those things.

Someone (can't recall who or where right now, but very recently) observed that Democrats could have 70% support on an issue, and still be waffling over how well it'll play in Real 'murka or whatever, worrying about what the Fixed Noise drones will say, while the Republicons will trot out some nonsense that barely has the support of their 30% wingnut base, but they'll drive it full throttle, damn the torpedoes.

The sooner the Democrats figure out why that is, and adjust accordingly, the sooner they can set about the righteous work of driving these clowns and monsters directly into the goddamned sea. No mercy, no remorse, no idiotic attempts at comity and collegiality. The Republican Party needs to be ended as a political entity, period, or nothing will ever change.

Crazy Inverted Yield Curve

Forgoing the crazy-old-drunk all-caps and exclamation point, but if I ask myself, Does this phrase spark joy?, the answer is an unequivocated, if perverse, hell yes. There is nothing "crazy" about the current inverted yield curve, or most any such critter, for that matter. It is merely a numerical expression of the confidence bond-holders have in the state of the economy.

Therefore, when Preznit Barstool Drunk spouts something like that in response to an eight-hundred-point dump on the Dow, it simply underscores the obvious:  he has no fucking clue how an economy -- this or any other -- actually works. Likewise when he steps on his old-man balls trying to declare himself the un-grinch, saving Christmas from the tariffs, contradicting his months-long chant that it is the Chinese who pay those tariffs, perhaps to some big imaginary tariff fund that then gets dispersed to the midwestern farmers who fell for this cheap three-card-monte game he's been running his entire life.

I'm not going to pretend to have any unique insight into what institutional investors are thinking when it comes to short-term bond yields exceeding long-term yields. It is reasonable to speculate that some or all of the following factors are affecting things:

• Regardless of who you want to give credit to, or offer reason why, the fact is that Trump is correct when he talks about the economy's record expansion. It has never before continuously expanded for this length of time. Which is great, but also by definition serves as a reminder that it will eventually contract, probably sooner rather than later. That's not politics, just probability, especially since the tax-cut stimulus was not reinvested in any meaningful way back into the economy.
• If you didn't know better, and you checked back over the historical patterns of economic expansion and contraction, you might start to suspect that the handful of people who own most of the assets are not only relatively unaffected by recessions and contractions, but in fact are generally able to find ways to profiteer from them. Yes, the smoke-and-mirrors finance weasels go belly-up and out the nearest window, but industrialists and companies that actually manufacture tangible goods usually make out just fine, because they are equipped to ride the cycle.
• It's becoming increasingly difficult not to look at pretty much every forecast and project through the prism of impending climate change doom. If you have seven to ten figures' worth invested in municipal bonds and other trading mechanisms depending on civic infrastructure remaining intact, you have to be getting at least a little bit worried. We're lucking out so far this hurricane season, but there will be more and more like the last couple years. How much did Harvey end up costing Houston, like $125 billion or so? Sooner or later one is going to smack clean into Miami, which already floods several dozen days out of the year, and eliminate billions of dollars of real-estate value. If you're in the right industry, of course you can cash in on the rebuilding end, otherwise not so much.
• Failchildren and useless heirs aside, a fair number of these greedy, pelf-grubbing weasels did not get to where they were by being stupid. They were happy to take the tax-cut gifts, but they know an idiot when they see one. He may be an idiot who works for them, but odds are he's going to screw something up sooner or later. It makes sense for them to hedge their long-term bets.

It's important to note that Trump is a special kind of stupid, and wreaks additional havoc unnecessarily, simply because he can't acknowledge even to himself that someone might know more about a subject than he does, and maybe he should listen to them. But it should also be noted that this is probably not too far off of where Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would have gone, the same tired-ass supply-side no-tax orthodoxy, fiddling while the country burns, so long as the donor-owner class is taken care of.

True, Presidents Rubio or Bush would not have lurched into cracker enclaves with increasingly strident white nationalist herrenvolk rhetoric, nor conducted sensitive foreign and trade policy negotiations with 5 AM Twitter shit-posts. Those things are certain to make the coming bumpy ride unnecessarily bumpier. But it was going to happen anyway, and the stage was set soon as our wonderful Gooper senators all endeavored to give a trillion dollars more to a handful of bastards who can't possibly spend what they already have.

Unlike Bill Maher, I don't want a recession. I get where he's coming from, though; there is a certain breed of cat that just isn't going to get that their boy's a fake-gilt dunce, until it's snapped clean off on them. But I don't know if those folks will get it regardless. They'll just buy into whatever lie he concocts to shift the blame -- Obummer, Crooked Hitlery, Fake News Media, blah blah blah.

In the meantime, it might be a good move to cash on out of your more volatile holdings, and dump it into a stable mid-yield money-market fund, because it's a reasonable bet that the market's going to take at least a ten percent haircut between now and Thanksgiving, despite the angry moron's fake heroism. Season's Beatings!

Blast from the Past

One of the very first posts here, for the most part it seems to have held up:

Riffs On Football As Cultural Metaphor

Like a....Two-Ton....Heavy Thing

Seems like some of the farmers are starting to get the hint here, you guys, that Orange Foolius might actually not be the bidness genius he keeps saying he is. It shouldn't take long for them to get dialed in on this good and hard -- farmers have to be smart and adaptive to circumstances, or they'll be finding another vocation before long. They know this guy's an empty burlap sack, they just can't admit it out loud yet.

And now that they're constantly reminded that they're only afloat by the good grace of our filthy sodomite subsidies (which is what you call welfare when it's going to white people), it's going to gnaw at them a bit more, especially since the bailout money is barely spackling the cracks. They're not getting ahead, and all those coastal elite faggot libturds they thought they were pwning are doing just fine.

They had to include a hard-head just for "balance," but we all know where this boat lets off:

Mike Knipper, a grain farmer from Iowa who likes some of Trump’s policies and dislikes others, said that most farmers in his community are Trump supporters who will continue to support him through the trade war.

“It doesn’t matter who is president. People like Trump and will support him, and few will change their ideas,” he said.

“Everyone’s willing to see this through, and those government subsidy checks might help them get by for another year.”

Okay, this is some industrial-strength, window-licking, up-to-the-third-knuckle nose-picking dose of stupid right there. It doesn’t matter who is president. Sure, except for the small fact that literally nobody else, no other candidate in 2016 or 2020 or any other year, would have led with starting a pointless, unwinnable trade war with China, and set it on the backs of small farmers, who are never more than a bad harvest or two away from financial trouble.

So maybe not every farmer is smart. That last chump seems determined to disprove the rule of thumb. See if them welfare subsidy checks get him across the line that exists only in his mind. What makes him think "another year" will do the trick? Does he really think that Almighty Trump has the sneaky Chinee right where he wants them or something, that "another year" of carefully applied pressure will cause them to buckle? Does he think that the specially trained trade aikido emanating from Dear Leader's tiny, tiny hands will eventually force Xi Jinping to his knees or something?

Perhaps this is the fundamental problem with the weird, teleological belief that people who work mostly with their hands are somehow more innately "wise" about everything, instead of (like most of us, hopefully) merely being competent or good at what they do. I don't think Mike Knipper has any concept of taking the "helicopter view" of how this trade war plays out, or the fact that his role is merely that of a pawn that unfortunately gets sacrificed so that the king doesn't get his flank exposed.

Some of these guys clearly haven't thought about any of this beyond just the base level of their own individual involvement in it. They don't know that while China still needs us, that becomes less and less so as time goes by, because while we have been schizophrenically veering between putting dick-swinging idiots and pusillanimous idealists in office, China has steadily been using the ancient art of checkbook diplomacy to cultivate new markets for themselves, slowly but surely cutting us out, preparing for a time that is rapidly approaching, when they have the number-one economy and we are trying to keep up by running in place faster and faster.

I don't want to bother with much in the way of excessive name-calling or I-told-you-so stuff with these folks. Either they get on the bus or they get run over, or they re-elect this asshole out of spite and get what's coming. What might help just a little in the way of sanity, though, since they are in many respects voting out of sheer spite, is to remind them that when the country eats shit because of this fucking clown, the real 'murkins are getting the biggest slice of that particular pie, and they get to eat first. It's not really even working for them on that basic level of spite that they were hoping for.

A Modest Proposal

So let's find and clear an island somewhere -- or hell, build one, the Chinese seem to be pretty adept at that sort of thing -- and dump these useless cocksuckers on said island, with their weapons, and let them end each other, once and for all. I mean, I admire what Christian Picciolini has been able to do with some of these white-power assholes, and good luck to him, and it would be great if the federal gubmint took the threat seriously and maybe even funded some programs to combat the problem, but there are already too many people, and these jokers contribute fuck-all to the world.

A few days ago, seven hundred undocumented workers at a food-processing plant in [rolls eyes] Mississippi were raided and detained by your good friends at ICE (Ice Baby, word to your mother). Of course, none of the supervisors or managers or executives from this fucking dump were hassled -- in fact, it turns out that the plant had just lost a sexual harassment settlement to the tune of several million dollars. Awfully convenient timing, that.

What got somewhat less attention is that over half of the workers were released about twenty-four hours later, perhaps because someone quickly realized that they'd have trouble finding warm bodies to perform these dangerous, soul-crushing jobs for seven dollars and seventy-five cents an hour. [strokes chin thoughtfully, a la Ben Sasse]

Screwing the Mooch

Apparently Trump bootlicker Anthony Scaramucci wasn't quite deferential enough the other night on Bill Maher's show, so he has of course been tossed under the proverbial bus (though, heh, Mooch is so short -- how short is he? -- he could have just as well been tossed under a Matchbox car, amirite? Bazinga!). Ahem.

Look. As tempting as it is to dump the we-told-you-so boiling oil on these dimbulbs when they finally have their come-to-Jebus moments, I'll refrain from it somewhat. Like it or not, Mooch does have a measure of that funny, self-effacing, quick-on-his-feet charisma that has probably gotten him where he is in the world of finance weaseldom.

What's annoying is the way Mooch soft-pedals his excommunication:  Recently [Trump] has said things that divide the country in a way that is unacceptable. Oh, really? Just recently, you say? This has been his schtick for decades, and certainly since day one of his candidacy. The establishment rubes who harrumphed at him on style points and hoped he'd "grow into the presidency" (translation:  tax cuts for billionaires, just be slightly less of a gaping asshole) were quickly and grandly disappointed to see that, nope, what you see really is what you get with this fucker. There is no second gear. He has always, always been like this.

And at no point in the nearly three years since the election [Christ, it only seems like ten thousand years. -- Ed.] has he even pretended to try to reach out to the majority of American citizens who did not vote for them. Hell, Obama won 2008 by a fucking landslide, and he at least made a few relatively sincere gestures here and there.

Trump could have proposed a grand infrastructure project, on the scale of the Tennessee Valley Authority or some such, created tons of good jobs, made some badly needed improvements across the country, maybe even shored up some of the areas out in Real 'murka that are taking it in the shorts from the Great Climate Change Hoax. Nope, he decided that he'd rather piss on China's head, and dump fifty billion dollars into Nebraska and Iowa, while farmers watch their harvest rot in warehouses, because they literally can't recoup their investment by selling the product. Fuckin' genius, man.

Scaramucci also mentioned on Maher's show that he (Scaramucci) has a cousin with a glass shop who is being severely impacted by the trade war, and is on the verge of losing his business. However the guy voted, that truly sucks. What I'm curious about is, will he vote to continue these hare-brained economic policies, or has he had enough of Duh Best Economy Evuh? Seriously, I have no interest in rubbing it in on these folks, but we all keep asking what will it take for them to realize he's a clown, and turn on him in 2020? This would help fine-tune the approach to that important question.

People are certainly allowed -- even encouraged, especially in this political climate -- to evolve and change their minds, to move forward and acknowledge that maybe they learned something. So welcome aboard the pain train, Moochie. Just please let's not pretend that he all of a sudden turned into a bad guy. He's always been a vile person, and eating shitty fast food doesn't make you a populist, any more than rubes and marks repeating that tired catechism make it so.