Horror Show

This is what passes for humor with these numbskulls. I mean, I was thinking about going as Tomi Lahren for Halloween this year, but the costume shop was all out of blow-up-doll-with-fivehead costumes. Boom! You like apples?

Ahem. Look, I know I'm always talking about "the balls on these people," but they've been on this "AOC is an idiot" schtick since she got elected, and it takes some serious fucking balls to be in a party that includes borderline retards like Louie Gohmert and Donald Trump, and still talk shit about AOC.

Or they talk shit about her past experience as a bartender. Let me tell ya something -- as a former touring rock musician who played dozens of dive bars all over Northern California, Nevada, and Oregon, I can tell you right now that pound for pound, as an occupation, bartenders are some of the finest people you could hope to meet. And that's at a very high, consistent rate, much higher than most occupations.

They have to strike a fine balance between keeping asshole drunks from getting out of hand, while still moving the product that gets them drunk. They have to fend off horny, obnoxious bros who think their pickup lines aren't stale; they have to play dice with the regulars and listen to their pathetic drunken bullshit stories; they have to listen lies all the time, whether from the bar manager or cheeseball musicians or pretty much everyone who walks through the door.

In other words, it's a perfect training ground for going to Congress, and having to deal with privileged old white men who can't bring themselves to cede a square inch of turf to anyone else, but who always have an extra few ducats to throw at hacks like Tomi Lahren, ankle-biting morons who literally have no other skills and serve no real purpose. Lahren wouldn't last a single shift tending bar.

I've seen a few clips of AOC at work questioning witnesses over various issues, such as outrageous drug prices. She's prepared and knowledgeable, and asks good questions. She's obviously not an experienced procedural hand like Nancy Pelosi, but again, compared with grandstanding nose-pickers like Gohmert or Ted Yoho or Matt Gaetz or Kevin McCarthy or any number of Republicon house mutts and senaturds, she's Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt combined.

But it's the clear mission of the propagandists to paint that lie, over and over again, until the rubes that actually follow them take it to heart. As always, we look forward to the day when Tomi Lahren's real nightmare comes true -- when she actually has to make an honest buck by doing something productive.

Colon Cancel, Slight Return

It's been a while since we took a run at 'murka's favorite fake music guy, so here ya go:  Fuck Kanye West, not even for whatever his political pose might be this week, but because he is what he's always been --  a no-talent braggart who, like his fat orange buddy, has spent enough time in a bubble surrounded by toadies and sycophants to convince himself that he is, in fact, the chosen one.

Musically, he's a thief and a cheap pasticheur; lyrically he's a joke even for that genre. He couldn't write a thoughtful lyric, or pluck anything resembling a tune on a one-stringed instrument if you forced him at gunpoint. But he's about as full of himself as Michael Jackson ever was, and for much less reason, though Jacko was long past his prime before we even hit this wondrous new millennium.

And yet Kanye refuses to do the right thing and take his fat tax refund and just fuck off already. Can we set up a fund to, I don't know, pay his wife to distract him with hourly blowjobs until he passes out from exhaustion?

Colon Cancel

You may have heard that out here in Cali, it's that time of the year -- wildfires roaring up and down the state, and the problem is now exacerbated by PG&E shutting down power to areas that might be in danger, or are experiencing high winds. (That is not a joke -- last Saturday night, it sounded like a fucking freight train running through my yard, all night.)

I'm very thankful to be out of the fire and shut-down zones (so far), but I have family and friends who are not so lucky, who are in their fourth day without power and counting, and/or have been evacuated multiple times, as the fires encroach evacuation sites.

So when I see these smug little fuckers cracking wise about how some mythical "woke" culture caused this, I want to cordially invite them to suck a fart out of my asshole. They can go fuck each other in the neck. You know who fights these fucking fires? Prisoners and professionals, period.

Dave Rubin doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, and I sincerely look forward to the day when he and Fuckface Carlson have their homes and irreplaceables destroyed by an event that can clearly be connected to climate change and its effects.

The most overused phrase from this misbegotten year is "cancel culture." I fucking despise that phrase, and the whiny millionaires who deploy it as some sort of preemptive license to be an asshole. Look, if you like something, no matter how bad a rep it has, watch it. Fucking binge-watch Real Inbred Housewives from Honey Boo Boo's Dirt Road till your brain cells start leaking out your ears, if that's what brings your pecker to full sail.

But when a professional "provocateur" steps over lines -- 'cause that's just what he does, man, he's a free thinker and you can't contain him with your "correctness" -- with flat-out lies that belittle what tens of thousands of people are enduring right now, he can't be too surprised when a critical mass of people see it and say, fuck you, asshole.

The First Amendment is the most important right we have in this country. It means you can say whatever the fuck you wanna say, and the gubmint can't throw your ass in jail. It doesn't matter if it's in poor taste, or even if it's an obvious lie, slapped on the table like a stale dog turd, defying you to call it for what it is.

But it doesn't grant you a guaranteed audience, nor does it compel anyone to give you a soapbox to use to spew your bullshit. So when I see shit like that, I just make a point to remind myself of who sponsors Carlson's shitshow, so I don't accidentally buy any of their products. I support free speech, but not paid lies.

When CNN gives jobs to unqualified propagandists like Corey Lewandowski and Sean Duffy, the latter of whom earlier today denigrated a decorated combat veteran, I know that that network adds no value to my existence. I avoid that network like the fucking plague. It doesn't help that they have professional liars such as Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Giuliani on routinely, or "Big Dick Toilet" chump and former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. I'm not rooting through the shit pile looking for the occasional corn kernel or peanut. The whole thing is shit.

Their currency is devalued by the constant stream of hacks and liars, posing as avatars of false equivalency and intellectual probity. No, that dipshit Duffy trashed a guy who earned his Purple Heart at the same time Duffy spent his twenties screwing around on MTV's Real World. Fuckin' profile in courage right there. The people who put him in Congress oughta be ashamed of themselves.

This has nothing to do with individuals expressing opinions that I don't like, or disagree with. That's never a problem. That's where the fun happens in political discourse. It's when one of these self-styled "gatekeepers" decides to grant air time to liars and propagandists. It's a vile, destructive recursion of treachery -- we know the liars are liars, the network knows they're liars, the network knows that we know they're liars, the liars know that the audience and the networks know that they're liars, and so on.

It's not news, nor is it even entertainment. It's clickbait. Well, fuck them, and fuck the companies that buy ad time on those shows. You wanna know who hates America and is actively ruining it? Those assholes, all of them. Think of every awful thing that has transpired in the last three years from the antics of this administration, and know that the corporate media is responsible for it happening. Billions of dollars' worth of free air time, and a bloodless commitment to absolute both-siderism, no matter how false.

I wish I knew how to put them out of business. Nothing would thrill me more than to watch Tucker Carlson or Van Jones asking you if you want fries with that. All any of us can do is let our wallets speak for us at every possible opportunity. And if enough of us do that, they'll notice. Don't be fooled by their bullshit "cancel culture" plaints. That's just them scared shitless at the prospect of consumers exercising their free choice, choosing not to have their airwaves relentlessly poisoned by these soulless weasels. That's never a bad thing.

Fuck Your Feelings

So Mister Man, smug and secure in thinking that he timed the killing of ISIS Guy #1 perfectly with appearing at the World Series last night. And wouldn't you know it, a crowd that wasn't paid and curated for the weekly klan rally in Pig's Taint, Mississippi had a different reaction than he -- and, of course, the useless eaters in the corporate commentariat -- expected.

You don't need me to belabor the finer points on this one. I'm only going to say a couple brief things about it:

1. Hoarse Whisperer is correct. This is the sort of thing that has (let's coin it) an invisible momentum to it. It breaches the misplaced certitude and unearned confidence of the cultist and the hack. He'll never show his worthless face to a non-handpicked crowd again, and even his most die-hard toe-suckers will know. They'll never admit it, but they know. It is a small but critical point that should be brutally hammered by the right people (lookin' at you, Dem candidates). He's a fucking loser, and always has been. That he still has a cult only proves that there's a mark for every two-bit con-man, no matter how bad.
2. Thanks to his MSNBC gig, his current choice of spouse, and his occasionally public disavowals of the man who he slavishly promoted a mere three years ago, Joe Scarborough has cultivated a false image of himself as a political moderate. He is not. His congressional seat is the one currently held by professional dipshit Matt Gaetz, who should be doing public service announcements reminding people that while there is not yet a cure for terminal fuckface-itis, there is treatment. But Scarborough was a dollar-scrounging Gingrich disciple, anti-abortion, anti-women's rights. An assistant died mysteriously in his office. But even if he's squeaky clean on the Lori Klausitis case, politically he was never anything but a reactionary turd. Whether it's next year or five or ten years from now, the next time you have a Democratic president or senate majority, Scarborough will turn tack and revert to his natural ankle-biting posture. Bet money on it.

And just in general, anyone you see in the corporate media today lecturing about "civility" and "respect for the office" and all that (parody link), stop giving them your time and attention immediately. Such comments reveal exactly who and what they really are, much more clearly than any posing on a particular issue. Turn the channel, and pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for them to be rendered bankrupt and forced to ply an honest trade.

Trump has no "respect for the office" he defiles, nor the people he presides over, nor even most of the people who voted for him. He has no respect for anyone, and respect must be earned to be given freely and honestly. I've never had an ounce of respect for that fucking asshole, not back in the day, and certainly not now.

I'm absolutely mystified by people who couldn't see that he was nothing more than a mouthy jerkoff losing other people's money back in the Eighties, and only got worse from there. He's every drunk asshole blowhard at the end of every dive bar in every shithole town across this great land of ours. He just happened to start out with $400M in tax-dodging trust funds that his daddy set up for him. As Michael Jackson proved, you can get away with being really bad at business for a long time, when you have easy money to insulate you from the consequences normal people would face quickly.

And we left "civility" back at the train station three years ago. At this point, one side being obliged to play by Marquess of Queensberry rules, while the other spikes the Calvinball in their faces daily, is simply agreeing to get slaughtered. Don't take the bait. Tell them -- and him -- to go fuck themselves, in no uncertain terms, and every chance you get. We really should have a better class of mediots, but in the end, like politicians, the best way to be rid of them is to tune them out, once and for all.

Oil's Well That Ends Well

Every time Dear Toddler manages to not fuck something up, he still finds a way to fuck it up, and then lie about it and try to paper it over. That is all part of the playbook of the clinical narcissist, I guess. It's nothing if not entertaining to watch.

The world is a better place without Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, no doubt about that. But as it goes with people like that, the world also produces an endless supply of them. And clearly not only do we have no strategy in that region anymore, we have ceded our role to the Russians. Forget being the "world's policeman," we're just the Saudis' mall cop now.

Or maybe the Russians killed him, or perhaps al-Baghdadi killed himself. It's not like you can trust anything -- not even so much as a weather forecast, to say nothing of a secret combat operation -- that comes from anyone in this rotting fish of an administration, certainly not the head. What we do know for sure is that when the op took place he was, believe it or not, on a fucking golf course. So they had to stage the tough-guy situation-room photo later.

Jesus. Look, I'm not going to compare him to Obama or Bush or Reagan or whoever. But you really have to wonder about the sort of person who sees guys like Trump and Pence and thinks they're tough or masculine. Trump is, and always has been, the schoolyard bully who uses his doughy bulk and loud mouth to intimidate smaller, weaker targets, until one of them finally fights back and knocks him flat with the first swing. Pence is the pussy sidekick, the "hype man" who turns tail at the first sign of actual pushback.

Instead of simply reading a brief statement about the terrorist's demise, and leaving it at that, Trump decided to take questions and extemporize -- which, you may have noticed, is not his strong suit. So he ends up using it as yet another opportunity to take a shit on his predecessors (and really, maybe it's high time one or more of them speak up for the country, if not their respective legacies); invent yet another narrative where he was the only one with the genius foresight to know that Osama bin Laden was a troublemaker; thanked Russia and Turkey for their help with the operation before remembering to throw in, you know, American service personnel; leaked enough detail to let the world know that if you say the phrase "opsec" to him, he'll have no clue what the fuck you're talking about.

This endless symbiosis of unbridled arrogance and utter stupidity, this vainglorious, preposterous grifter whose main concerns are getting the American taxpayer to subsidize his rat-infested properties and receiving thick envelopes from his petrocrat patrons, once again manages with ease to take something that just about everyone across the political spectrum can readily endorse -- the violent demise of a brutal thug -- and turn it into a seedy spectacle, a pathetic, needy old man making the world watch him jerk off all over himself yet again.

And the whole thing about the oil fields American combat troops are supposedly "protecting"? For one, Syria produces very little oil; for another, Assad signed the oil rights over to Russia. The only reason Americans are still there is to prevent all the newly escaped ISIS fighters from taking them over and funding a resurgence. Anything else is industrial-grade bullshit.

Trump speaks as if he thinks that "us" "protecting" the oil fields means that "we" get to "take" the product, as spoils of war or something. Well, that's a war crime, not to mention the fact that "we" don't have any of the logistical equipment to extract and transport through the desert to the nearest seaport (which would be Basra, which is in Iraq, which has made clear they don't want any American troops within their borders anymore, so how do you get this oil which is deep underground right now out and into trucks to drive all the way from Erbil to maybe Kuwait City, and how much would all that cost?).

Our policy in the Middle East is and always has been a devil's bargain, deeply flawed and frequently counter-productive. We should have started pushing renewable sources thirty years ago, and cut those fuckers loose first chance and let things sort themselves out (within reason). But the fact is that it took some extremely intelligent (not to mention greedy) and educated people generations to achieve the fragile equilibrium that exists in the region.

And it took Genius Q. Dealmaker there just three years to burn it all to the ground. If you look through all the financial and strategic partnerships and alliances that exist between and among Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, you'll see pretty quickly how ugly this can get. Throw in the stateless Kurds, betrayed by their American partners to be slaughtered by Turkish-backed death squads, and all it takes is one Gavrilo Princip to go after the "right" figure (for example, Erdogan or Assad), with a vest full of Semtex and ball bearings and nails, to set the whole thing off.

And there are currently fifty US nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey, which despite its aggression is still a NATO ally that we are contractually obligated to defend. And you can bet the Iranian nuclear program went into overdrive the second they realized Trump was going to screw them over on the JCPOA. The only countries that have any incentive to work with us at all, or even pretend to be on "our" side, is our rented allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.

This is why, after all the snark about this water-brained dullard and his fifth-grade vocabulary, competence matters. Intelligence and temperament and character all matter. This shit is complicated. This is why it takes an adult to do the fucking job, someone who knows what areas they don't know much about, and so they listen to people who do know about those things. This is not a fucking pro wrassling match with the strutting and the kayfabe and the trash talk. People are losing their lives already, and a lot more will -- maybe even people you care about -- before it's over.

Fuck your feelings, indeed. How's that working out? Hope it was worth it for them.

Can't Someone Else Do It?

There have been more mass protests around the world this year, and for various reasons, but mostly revolving around either the predictable outcomes of engineered inequalities caused by late-stage capitalism, or the impending collective doom of climate change. I have mentioned my inherent skepticism of the effectiveness of protests, although I tend to support them as far as the basic principle of collective democratic expression goes.

The economic protests actually make more sense to me, as there is very little one can really do about not having enough money to survive or thrive, if you can't afford to move or you don't have enough time to find a better job. Pretty much every problem in life can be resolved with more money and/or time, but if you're already strapped for both, it can be very difficult to claw back more of either one.

Climate change, though, while a much bigger problem looming over us all, is oddly much more within the grasp of even a poor person. You can control how many children you have. You can control what sort of food you eat, and where it is produced. You can control what types and brands of products you choose to consume. You can control what sort of car you drive, whether or not you vote for politicians who will try to do something to address the impending crisis.

Now, we all live in the real world (except for religious fanatics who think this is all divine will and some providential intervention will save the righteous from catastrophe), and of course very few people truly have complete 100% control over all those things. The good news is that you don't have to have total control of those things. If a large enough number of people simply cut back ten percent on all those things, that would make a difference, and it would push companies and politicians alike to make real changes.

Perhaps the biggest dispute between climate change "believers" and skeptics is whether (or how much) of it is caused by human activity. The believers accept it as a given that it is mostly or wholly caused by human activity. And yet, curbing human overpopulation seems not to be a priority in the discussion. This is baffling, to say the least. No doubt there are historical, political, and cultural reasons why some people might be reluctant to address that factor, but as a purely practical matter, it is irresponsible not to talk about it. In the next few decades, there will be two billion more humans than there are right now. Where the hell are they -- and we -- supposed to go?

The photos of those massive public assemblies around the world were nothing short of inspiring. Tens of thousands of people in dozens of countries getting out there, demanding action. But what immediate effect can they have if they simply make a few modest changes as mentioned above? Start with ten percent and keep working it to a sustainable balance.

• Pick one or two days a week to not have any meat. (And no, "impossible whoppers" don't count. That's a scam, both nutritionally and as a point of sustainability.) Personally, I hate most vegetables, but things like black beans and polenta make great meatless meals. This is probably the single biggest area in which individuals can make a collective difference.


• Get as much (or at least ten percent) of your food from local sources as possible. This can be tricky for a lot of people, as farmers' markets can be expensive, or not as geographically prevalent in some areas. But one in eight Americans lives in California, which has everything everywhere as far as fresh produce and meat, and one in four Americans is in California, Texas, or Florida, all of which have abundant and diverse agricultural sectors. If just ten percent of the people just in those three states made the commitment and effort, it would make a difference. Food, especially processed and fast food, gets transported hundreds of miles on average. Many non-chain restaurants let you know about how they locally source as many ingredients as possible. Support them when you eat out.


• Vehicle choice is self-explanatory. Poor people can't afford SUVs and king-cab trucks in the first place, so that one is strictly a matter of Americans being conditioned to signal their prosperity and self-actualize through their choice of vehicle. Look, if you're really a farmer or a construction worker and you have a practical use for a beast vehicle, so be it. But if you're just an asshole trying to overcompensate or show off, that's a different story.

A big obstacle faced by environmentalists in marketing their prescriptions for the perils of modern life is that Americans are constantly bombarded with the trappings of consumerism. For example, we are conditioned to equate food with value, so meals get "super-sized" and all-you-can-eat buffets are popular. Convenience is a huge factor as well. Sometimes you may have to make a little extra effort, or find a better option for the product you want. But the bottom line is that when people are fat and vehicles are huge, that means that food and gasoline are too inexpensive. That's not politics, that's simple math.

We are taught to make our consumer choices to project our idealized versions of ourselves to the rest of the world. The style and make and model and color of our vehicle tells them about us. The knick-knacks and collectibles we populate our houses and garages with tell our visitors who we are.
So when some know-it-all comes along and explains how these objects we purchase and take for granted, how even the means of packaging and shipping them are contributing to the destruction of the planet, it becomes overwhelming to comprehend, and we react. Oh, I guess I have to ride a bike everywhere and eat weeds and twigs, huh?

And that's not the case at all. You can still drive a car, you can still eat meat. But if you give half a shit about what kind of world you're passing along to your kids and grandkids, you can very easily cut back on those things by ten percent. You might find pretty quickly that you can go twenty or thirty percent on some things; maybe a full-vegetarian diet suits you, or you can trade in your F150 for a Fusion hybrid without it cramping your lifestyle.

But I guarantee you that just about everyone in the western world living above subsistence level can do something. The trick is that after that feel-good event is over and you've shown the powers that be your collective will, you have to be willing to go back home and make those simple, modest changes in your lifestyle tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, without the crowds and cameras and media coverage.

It all comes down to whether enough of us actually want to do the work. We're going to find out how many people are willing to walk the talk, or if they're just expecting someone else to solve the situation for them. There is no "solve" anymore, there is only the choice of making modest changes now so that maybe most of humanity doesn't have to make truly drastic changes in the near future.

And vote for people who aren't in thrall to the fossil-fuel industry.

Civil Bore

Not to pull the Bill Maher "new rule" schtick, but there should be a rule for anyone who starts talking about or (more hilariously for Trump cultists) "threatening" a "civil war" (or "cival" if you're in illiterate MLB chumpire).

As John Rogers correctly points out, if you think you're serious about such a thing, you need to figure out the logistics first. Your best case scenario is that your Oathkeeper militia overtakes, secures, and maintains an area with the help of local law enforcement (unlikely, but technically possible in some parts of the country), and then what? Hold off the armed forces of the United States? (Posse Comitatus does not apply to armed, violent insurrections seeking to overthrow legitimately elected government.)

I should (and probably will, may post them if they're worth a shit) cook up a few short fiction scenes to game this out, but beyond spasms of regionalized ethnic cleansing of some sort, mass casualty episodes of domestic terrorism, perhaps assassinating political figures, there is no strategy, no endgame, no game plan for this sort of thing.

The very second you kill someone, whether it's some antifa type or a law-enforcement officer sent to take yer gun-slash-erotic-totem (what, you didn't seriously think Beto O'Rourke was literally, personally going to go house-to-house by himself to grab your AR-15, did you?), you're a killer, a mur-diddly-urderer, and there's walking that back.

Second Amendment fetishists fascinate me anyway, because they seriously do prize that sole attribute above literally everything else they profess to love about this country. The preferred framing of the situation is that of a bulwark against the overweening intrusions of Big Gubmint. And yet every time they board a plane, they take off their shoes and surrender their toothpaste, like the compliant little sheeple they really are.

All the Trump cultist, like the cult leader himself, has to keep themselves going is the fight. Struggle. Kampf. Jihad. The resurrection of long-lost terms such as Dolchstosslegende, Blut und Boden, and herrenvolk does not necessarily mean they are literal nazis, just that they are a lot less uncomfortable with the actual rhetoric and narrative that the originals had adapted to inform and excuse their subsequent actions. Those terms have suddenly become very useful again to describe some things that have become more prevalent. For starters, they seem to be perfectly okay with the children of asylum-seeking refugees being given to strangers as adoptees. Last I heard, that's human trafficking.

Any society, no matter how "modernized" or "sophisticated" or even "progressive" it may fancy itself, has a certain portion that is the polar opposite of all that. Maybe it's John Rogers' famous 27% figure, or a little bit higher or lower. My guess is that for just about every European or Anglosphere nation, the window is going to be somewhere between one-quarter and one-third, mostly but certainly not solely rural and non-college-educated, white and for some bizarre reason feeling persecuted.

They don't know anything about history "rhyming" or "repeating" itself, because you have to read it in the first place to be aware of those concepts and when they occur. All they know is that they didn't get the deal out of life that they think they deserved, and they know that no one will give them that deal. So the next best thing for them is to actualize through the candidate that ventriloquizes that anger most effectively, spouting lies and racist jabber in defiance of what the smart set claims as "good" and "right".

Doesn't matter to them that his cognitive skills are clearly impaired and worsening, that he consistently meets and exceeds the clinical checklists for narcissistic personality disorder and sociopathy, that he's incompetent and completely unfit for any office, that he lies constantly and is dumber than a sack of manure. It doesn't even seem to matter to them that, contrary to their delusion that he (hurrr!) "makes libturds cry," what he really has done is enrage and motivate the liberal base against him, as well as turn away key Republican electoral blocs, such as suburban voters and college-educated women.

And he hasn't even tried to fix any of the issues that they claim to care about -- health care, infrastructure, opioid deaths, good jobs. They don't care. It's a fucking cult, and should be treated as such. They might as well go to the Celebrity Centre in Hollywood and ask the folks there how they feel about L. Ron Hubbard.

You'd think that might dissuade idiot journos from skulking out to these desiccated holes to transcribe the tedious rants of interchangeable fist-shaking codgers, but no. There's money to be made in stoking the anger and fanning the flames, and pretending that two-thirds of the people in this country don't flat out despise that motherfucker. It's their revenue model.

So of course the chatter eventually turns to "civil war," but it's clear that hardly anyone across the political spectrum has really thought that term through. I think that to the extent we can have one, it's been in motion for some time. Mass shootings committed by people who just happen to have 8chan "manifestos" and the like, folders of photos of themselves with confederate flags and throwback Rhodesia patches on their fake army-surplus khaki jackets. "Lone wolf" types who are strangely connected in the bowels of social media, feeding and goading each other to commit an act for the cause and take one for the team.

Because most people simply don't read books anymore, certainly not history books, they tend to have a very antiquated notion of what a civil war looks like. They cannot help but frame it in the outdated context of the war of confederate secession, but there is no organized movement on the part of any state governments to secede, nor any clear "cause" around which to organize such a movement. Not to mention that aside from Texas and Florida, none of the other "red states" can afford to leave, since they all take more from the eeevil federal gubmint than they pay in.

Oddly, the Purge movies probably provide the closest idea to what a modern civil war might look like -- bouts of mostly urbanized stochastic terrorism, where law enforcement at every level either can't or won't interfere or mediate, and there are no clear sides, just random people fighting and killing each other for unclear reasons. And in more gang-infested areas of large metropolitan areas, that's basically what happens. But that's not politically-motivated warfare, just violent people doing business and crazy people doing crazy.

There's conceivably a path or paths in which interconnected cadres of bad actors could coordinate and organize systematic attacks on their perceived enemies, and do real damage. They could even fund themselves with sophisticated forms of highway banditry and various forms of theft. But taking and holding territory and fending off legitimate government enforcement would be beyond the capabilities of even sober-minded, intelligent groups of well-trained individuals.

And I'll be goddamned if I've ever seen so much as a single cultist who remotely fits that bill. Most of the camera pans at the hate rallies show vast swaths of paunchy middle-aged (or older) assholes who talk a big tee-shirt, but probably couldn't run a quarter-mile in ten minutes if you put a gun to their head. And that's just the women. [Hi-yoooooo!]

I wouldn't get too worried about the prospect of a Rascal Revolution. Their idiotic Red Dawn fantasies would peter out right about the time they lose the Fox News signal at the cabin. They hate the gubmint until that fucking check comes. They're loud and obnoxious, but there are fewer of them than they think, and there are definitely fewer of them than there are of us. And a lot of us have guns as well, and know how to use them.

Again, when we look back at this weird period of time, ten or twenty years or more from now, what will (or at least should) stand out prominently is the utterly credulous nature of these wannabe warriors, not only the passion with which they spewed their impotent virtual rage, but that they did it all on behalf of a ridiculous fucking clown who never did a goddamned thing for them, and in reality wouldn't have crossed the street to piss on them if they were on fire.

Strange Fruit

The dotard is not strategic, but his language is not accidental, especially heading into another hate rally in the deep south. It is absolutely elemental to his own deep insecurities, and those of the cultists, to phrase this situation -- entirely of his own making -- as one of victimization and persecution.

(It also links to their larger feelings of victimization and persecution; while most reasonable people can empathize with the crisis of people in their forties and fifties suddenly getting their jobs outsourced or commodified and being told to learn to code or whatever, it also begs the question of what exactly they did do when that job crisis hit them -- did they do anything at all to broaden their skill set, or improve their existing skills, or did they just retreat into a cocoon of Fixed Noise jabber in between the stream of court shows that show what those people do with their free time.)

Of course, some of the response to this ugliness is to offer the usual don't get distracted counsel, which is nonsense. We're functional adults with triple-digit IQs (hopefully), so we have the bandwidth to pay attention to all of it. And this is something that deserves attention, because the mentality that underpins that language is pervasive, and populates a politics composed of imaginary grievances.

And the corporate media continue to enable that bullshit narrative, with their Cletus safaris and their endless plaints about economic anxiety and such. The people in that crowded room in Sevierville, Tennessee are not good people making bad choices or whatever. They know exactly what they're doing and what they support, and they are not going to be persuaded by some focus-grouped idiocies cooked up by the usual gang of overpaid, weasel-faced consultants.

Frankly, at this point, I'd be more inclined to vote for a candidate that promises to enact policies to help them along to their ultimate destinations as quickly as possible, than one who spouts the usual pablum about "helping" them. Help them what, spend another twenty miserable years bullying everyone who isn't exactly like them, pretending that an entire system of violent oppression didn't permeate the region for a full century, that Emmett Till had it coming? These people don't do a goddamned thing besides suck up oxygen and health-care resources.

People on both sides of the issue keep dancing around the idea of "having to apologize" for the heinous acts of long-lost generations. But they're asking the wrong question. It's not that they think it's unfair being asked to apologize for the sins of their great-great-grandfathers, it's that they're not sorry about it. At all. They're still pissed that they lost. That's it. That's all there is to it. That's all it's ever been, and ever going to be. Stop trying to find "better angels" in people who really don't have them. It's not that complicated. Write them off and move on.

In the meantime, yes, this deserves attention, and no, it is not a distraction. Pay attention to the people defending the comment, and treat them accordingly moving forward. Lindsey Graham, who is the avowed Baghdad Bob for this administration, and a certifiable disgrace to the institution in which he holds office, is old. Make him retire in disgrace. Give every nickel you can spare to Jaime Harrison, and boycott every corporate media outlet that gives Graham air time to spread his shame. Hogan Gidley is young, thinks he has a career of some sort ahead of him. Remove that hope from him any way you can, again by boycotting any media outlet or company that gives him exposure or a job or any sort of recognition beyond a square kick in the balls. That little prick should spend the rest of a very long life knowing that he will never have respectable employment again.

I hate to sound like one of my long-passed elderly female relatives, but they were right about people. It comes down to two very simple principles:

1. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
2. People will treat you how you let them treat you.

If enough of us just let those two things guide our perceptions and reactions to all the players in this madness -- political weasels, media lackeys, soulless spokes-tools -- then we can't go wrong. These pigs live on money and attention, and when starved of both, they shrivel up. Don't engage them, don't debate them, don't give them the time of day. Just walk away from them.

Our Liberal Media

I don't know how many more reasons one needs to completely boycott the utterly worthless New York Times, but maybe this will help:

They spent months front-paging the Hillary server story, and now that she's been cleared, they dump that news back on A16.

Between that, the countless Cletus safaris, and the bad-faith hackcess journo pieces, it's actually very difficult to tell what purpose the Times serves anymore. Half the slop-ed columnists are notable only for the sheer paucity of insight or fresh analysis, and the reportage mostly has the undercurrent of a beaten wife who's terrified of angering her psychotic spouse. Who needs it?

I know it's still the "newspaper of record," but the only reason for that is because people still think it's the newspaper of record. That's a simple tautology to change, and a necessary one, because there should be no question that they will have their thumb on the scale in the name of "fairness" for the 2020 election.

The corporate media, whether cable teevee or print, are not your friends, and they are not the savior of the republic that they portray themselves to be. They're dogsbodies working for the psychotic billionaires who own and operate this popsicle stand, and their clear mission is to steer you into voting the way they want you to -- or better yet, not voting at all. Electoral inertia is their fondest wish.

Do yourself a favor -- clear your mind and dump these fucking weasels, the sooner the better. The one good extended piece they manage to crank out every month or so no longer offsets the daily harm they do. They are better than Fixed Noise only by a matter of degree.

Legalized Theft

When people talk about bringing manufacturing back to the US, they're really talking about health care, whether they realize it or not, whether they care or not. That's just how it is.

And when they debate a "choice" between "Medicare for All" or the "public option," it inevitably comes down to how much it will cost and who will pay for it. All of that avoids the elephant in the room -- how much everything costs. What we laughingly refer to (in Voltaire's "Holy Roman Empire" sense) as the "health care system" is in fact an unholy collusion between HMOs, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies, designed explicitly to hoover money out of a captive market, and if need be to hunt down destitute cancer patients and get them on the debt hook of our for-profit carceral state.

With private equity scumbags leading the charge, it's no wonder Wall Street hates Warren and Sanders -- they might actually do something about this evil system. No matter which candidate finally gets the nomination, they'll have their work cut out for them. As I've said for many years now, Wall Street despises Main Street, and this country is literally owned and operated by psychotic billionaires who would rather bankroll Grampa Walnuts another four years to start World War 3, than pay a single percentage point more in taxes -- or hell, even pay the taxes they actually owe right now.

We need another system, not merely a tweak here and there, but a complete rebuild. This doesn't work for most people anymore. It is sadistic, and the playing field is uneven for all but the few who own it. People do not change until they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing, and nowhere is that more true than with the handful of greedy chiselers who own most of everything.

Near as I can tell, there are just two ways to get them to that understanding:  violence, or making them broke. The second option would be preferable for a number of reasons, but may not be feasible since they own all the basic necessities people have to use or obtain, and it is extraordinarily difficult to keep a sufficient number of people attentive and motivated simultaneously.

But that's how it happens, and that's how it changes. No politician, no matter how well-meaning, will ever be able to more than make modest, incremental adjustments to a system that is irretrievably wrong, run by a business model that is literally set up to not provide the service for which it has already been paid, or to finally provide the product at an outrageous markup.

Family Affairs

Isn't it wonderful to live in a country where an endless line of otherwise unemployable fail-children can lecture everyone on the evils of nepotism? I mean, Hunter Biden seems like a garden-variety cheesedick failson who rode his last name as far as it would take him. Which makes him different from Ronna Romney, Liz Cheney, Meghan McCain, the adult Trump offspring, and all these other tedious assholes, exactly how?

Yes, it's bullshit that Hunter Biden should be able to get this makework bullshit job and scoop up an easy $50k/month for nothing. But that's a drop in the bucket compared to what the conniving, chiseling, pelf-grubbing spawn of Donald Trump's polluted seed raked in last year, and the year before, and next year. You know? The fucking balls on these goddamned people.

What the fuck does Meghan McCain do, sits her fat ass on a morning talk-show for bored housewives and inflicts her worthless opinions on everyone else, since she's completely unqualified for anything resembling actual labor where there's a tangible product at the end of the day. Her skill set includes calling the manager and pushing around the help. She doesn't do a single thing that you would trade a hard-earned dime for. If she was on a cruise that shipwrecked on a deserted island, she'd be roasted on a spit within a week -- one, because then you'd finally get her to shut the fuck up, and two, because she's completely useless otherwise.

I've always despised the Kennedys and Bushes for this same nonsense, this false sense of noblesse oblige intertwined with the expectation that since you know their name, you love their game. Oh, how nice of you to take a break from your Hamptons parties to pretend you give two shits about the peons. But at least most of the scions of those families made some minimal effort to be marginally competent at something. Not anymore. You wouldn't hire Eric Trump to fix your fucking toilet.

Once again, you have to give Paris Hilton some credit -- she may be a clueless idiot, but at least she had the common decency to take her hard-earned money and go the fuck away.

Paging Noel Casler

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The Onion Timeline

Parody is deader than Generalissimo Francisco Franco. No mere bloggerses such as yours truly, we lowly scriveners who occasionally cook up short burlesques for your and our amusement, would stoop to something this cheap and obvious. And yet there it is (as always, click to embiggen).

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times -- every day with this ridiculous, jabbering moron is like watching Wile E. Coyote paint a tunnel on the side of a mountain. The added bonus of his dipshit kids (and useless dingbat Meghan McCain) lecturing everyone on nepotism is just icing on the cake.

So he green-lights ethnic cleansing on a loyal ally that helped stop ISIS. So Turkey's dictator now has fifty of our nuclear bombs. So we might be sliding toward World War 3, and/or a recession, and/or more and worse climate change issues. As long as that greasy piece of shit still sits there and people still pretend he's remotely fit to hold any office, we get exactly what we deserve.

Oh well, maybe Sean Spicer is preparing his next Dancing with the Scars skit. Probably dressed up as Maria Schneider from Last Tango in Paris this time. Bring your own butter!

Video Games

These people, they just never stop, do they? These weird closet-case assholes who self-actualize by re-imagining an obese, drug-addled senior citizen who never exercises, probably can't walk more than thirty feet at a time and certainly can't run, as this righteous ninja taking down all his "enemies" like a bad-ass. Maybe they just ran out of fetish porn to liberate their knuckle-children to, who knows?

Apparently the video -- and we both know which video I'm referring to, right? -- has actually been out for some time, making the rounds of the incel sector of YouTube. Interesting that, in addition to showing "Trump" "killing" all the "fake news" networks, shown with logos for heads (wow, these guys just never cease to amaze with their profound creativity), and "celebrity" critics such as Kathy Griffin and Rosie O'Donnell, there are also political figures such as Rep. Maxine Waters, Sens. Bernie Sanders, Willard "Mitt" Rmoney, and Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama. Seems like someone should get a visit from the good folks of the Secret Service.

There are the usual howls of outrage from the usual howlers, but we'll see how long it lasts until the next one. Corporate media journalists are particularly sensitive about this one, understandably so. But this has been coming for a long time, and it's not like he's bothered to conceal his contempt for them. Some of them are doing good work with limited resources and bandwidth. Others might want to pause for a second and ask themselves if anyone is really clamoring for another profile of some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner.

Whatever the case, never doubt for a moment that these people have made themselves abundantly clear. Their "humor" is the humor of the Joker, the sadism of an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon or a bloody Deadpool (or in this particular case, Kingsman) movie. And that's not a slam against those movies; as mindless action movies go, they're well-made and passably entertaining.

But for these obsessive goons who worship a pathetic old huckster and make these little objects of devotion as a token of love, the line becomes blurred eventually, as their "works" become more notorious but strangely, women still won't fuck them. Obviously they're not successful at anything else in life, so it revolves around the one thing they're....well, good at is not the right word, maybe recognized for.

But even that has its limits -- this Carpe Donktum asshole is going to get doxed and outed, and probably shit-canned from whatever broom- or button-pushing job he has in meatspace. It's not like Commander Babyfingers is going to show his appreciation by appointing him Minister of Dopey Propaganda and throwing money at him. The real news is, that's not how Fat Donnie has ever operated. It's a one-way street, hoss. So good luck with all that.

The good news is that maybe now some folks can quit with the damned civility lectures. There's your fucking civility, champ. How do you like it? Maybe it's time to punch back by putting together a few two-minute compilations of Fatboy Says the Dumbest Things, give it Yakety Sax or sad-trombone bumper music, and make it viral.

Dubya and Me

To be a talk-show host, to state the painfully obvious, must be a very weird experience. It is literally your job to get along with everyone you encounter, to always have to know what to say and how best to say it. Since the majority of your guests are simply there to plug their latest projects, which you may or may not check out and may or may not enjoy, you also are put into the position of having to pretend the affirmative on both of those things. I just loved your [movie/teevee show/album/book], really! Eventually, as David Letterman showed us, such a thing wears a normal person down.

The personality traits seem by definition to be heightened in the daytime arena, where the fluff is even fluffier, and the goal seems to be to provide solace and affirmation to whatever the audience is stuck spending their afternoon tuning into such a thing. Daytime hosts are the hype people for video wallpaper, essentially. And they do it with the persona of being everyone's friend.

Oprah is the queen of this sort of thing, of course, and she's very good at it. She has cemented herself in the American psyche as a goodwill ambassador, someone whose work ethic and positive attitude has transformed lives.

But she has also inflicted Doctors Oz and Phil on an unsuspecting nation, so there's that. She is tight with Tyler Perry, who poses as a champion for black artistes, while simultaneously building an empire on the backs of non-union contract workers.

So when we all saw Ellen DeGeneres sitting next to ol' Fredo Arbusto at the Cowboys-Packers game last Sunday, one instantly assumed the requisite round of side-taking and tribal affirmation. I think it does say something about Ellen, but it also says -- as these things always do -- so much more about us, and our supposed deep concerns, and how impotent online twitrage is supposed to equal some sort of constructive action or activity.

Take Out the Trash

I need to remember to do this more often, but Her Royal Whineness Fuckface Von Clownstick has that way of sucking every molecule of oxygen out of the room:  the down-ticket races matter just as much, or even more, as/than the vote for president.

Liz Warren won't be able to do jack shit if that fucking traitor Addison (#MoscowMitch) McConnell is still in the Senate, much less running it. Henchman #LeningradLindsey Graham is just as bad, as is the useless hand-wringing of Susan Collins, whom the great state of Maine should be thoroughly ashamed of by now.

Below are three donation links to kick all three of these turds to the curb:

#MitchMustGo

Stand With Jaime Harrison

#RESIST Susan Collins

Do your duty America -- flush twice. And throw in a few bucks to each of these worthy candidates.

The Stopped Clock

When he's right, he's right:

Romney is at least not an idiot (unlike Trump), which in this case makes it even worse. He knows he can and should do and say more, but simply refuses to. Partly this is because his character defects run nearly as deep as Trump's, it's just that Romney learned early on to mask his deficiencies with the appearance of fiduciary competence and moral rectitude, per the operational standard of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

However, if Romney somehow thinks his puling, chickenshit demurrals make him morally superior to Trump's boorish two-bit John Gotti antics, he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, nor anywhere near as upstanding.

In other words, contrary to Dear Leader's electronic imprecations, Romney is actually the very model of a modern major Republicon. But the rest of it? Yeah, spot on. A worthless, gutless, gormless pud. The day Willard Fucking Romney ever dismounts his goddamned high horse and actually does something useful will be the first time for such an event.

Housekeeping Notes and Errata

Updating a few blog and Twitter links on the right sidebar, as I've been remiss lately. I've added three new Twitter links (Emptywheel, Lincoln's Bible, and Noel Casler) for different reasons, but essentially the same reason -- they are consistently fun and interesting reads.

On the blog front, I've updated Booman Tribune to Progress Pond (Martin Longman's new site), which I've been meaning to do for a while. I've dropped Global Guerrillas, as John Robb seems to be writing exclusively on Twitter and Patreon these days. That one may come back at some point, as there is a wealth of archived posts at that site.

And I'm dropping Dave Cohen's Decline of the Empire and Jim Kunstler, more or less for the same reason -- they've lost the thread. Cohen is a bit more lucid, but doesn't post fresh material anymore, preferring instead to repost Tim Pool or whatever confused pseudo-lib culture-con YouTube asshole is peaking at the moment.

Kunstler has essentially found a weird niche these days as Q-adjacent and putatively Trump-skeptical, yet not really, preferring to smirkingly refer to him as the "Golden Golem of Greatness" while endorsing every ridonkulous "deep state" theory swirling in the great Twitter toilet bowl of nonsense. For a while it was amusing, then it became a fine example of rank stupidity, but now it's just old and stupid, much like the aforementioned golem, and so I think it's just time to cut loose this repository of scatterbrained bullshit.

Clusterfuck Nation was one of the very first sites to be linked here, so it wasn't an easy decision. But one has to be careful in how one approaches conspiracy theories, lest they end up as a parody of themselves. No matter how sincere one may be in their unorthodox beliefs, in the case of the "deep state" theory, you have to take the following assumptions as essentially being baked into the theory:

• The entire foreign service apparatus, including the intelligence agencies and diplomatic corps, have actively decided to conspire with each other behind the scenes -- and with certain members of Congress, such as Adam Schiff -- in order to undermine Trump's presidency and "undo" the results of the 2016 election.
• Trump is completely innocent of all of the criminal charges and accusations -- collusion, conspiracy, campaign finance laundering, money laundering, influence peddling, tax evasion, bank fraud, and more -- that have been leveled at him throughout his term.

There is more, but those are the broader strokes. Now, in order to believe those things so that you can construct this incredibly baroque theory around them, you have to completely disregard these factors:

• We're almost to the 2020 election already, so removing Trump from office would result in Mike Pence (unless he can be implicated as well) becoming a president with an asterisk.
• The FSOs and intel officers that supposedly comprise this nefarious cabal are career service professionals, many of them conservative Republicans, who have served under administrations of both parties with nary a peep.
• The House Democratic leadership has been notoriously slow and reluctant to even initiate an impeachment inquiry, which is where we are at now. They clearly would have preferred not to do it at all, and let the voters sort it out next year. Trump's own words and actions made that increasingly untenable. The record is there for all to see.
• Trump's corruption and lying has mostly been in plain sight -- the mass no-show bookings at his hotels, the multiple lies per day about every possible issue. He doesn't even try to hide it. He admitted multiple times last week that he pushed Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden, and then openly doubled down and asked China's leadership to do the same.

Kunstler and the rest of the "defenders" of this monstrous halfwit would like you to believe something along the lines of "his words are being misconstrued" or that his boorish behavior and utter lack of style, tact, or even basic intelligence have made mountains out of mosquito bites. That is the most pernicious lie of all, but it is crucial to their thesis.

WHAT TRUMP HAS BEEN DOING IS ILLEGAL. Not merely "bad" or "wrong" according to some imaginary set of elitist points of political correctness, not "hurtful" according to some overly sensitive SJW type. It is against the fucking law to do many of the things we know he has done, not just his attempts to conspire with the Russians or shake down the Ukrainians, but the open influence-peddling with the Saudis as well.

He has been doing this sort of thing his entire adult life. If anything, it is a more ludicrous conspiracy to concoct that absolves him of continuing that conduct -- for which he has never been held accountable, and therefore has been given no incentive not to continue -- than simply applying Ockham's trusty razor and observing that it is far more likely that he would simply continue doing the things he has always done, and purge anyone who points out the inconvenient laws.

I am always up for interesting, thoughtful opinions that differ from my own, but are at least based in empirical reality. Kunstler is just rolling around in his parboiled nonsense, ignoring the myriad obvious factors that would undermine such fevered declarations. And his commenters are just an addled swamp of Q-tards peddling the same or worse. Again, it's not that your government hasn't been up to some nefarious shit, whether the imperial custodian of the moment happens to be Saint Barry or Fat Donnie or whoever. But again, Trump has never met a camera he didn't want to hump endlessly, has exhibited this behavior and temperament his entire life, and never made any bones about it. So you literally have to believe that he (for some unknowable reason) did a one-eighty on those lifelong tendencies, but was still the victim of this impossibly coordinated and drawn-out conspiracy, initiated by disgruntled foreign policy weasels. It makes 9-11 trutherism sound utterly rational and reasonable.

And I think at this stage, where you have Trump blithely talking about executing whistleblowers and imprisoning Congressional representatives and journalists who dare to pursue an investigation of this entirely plausible narrative, the endorsement of people like Kunstler for the baroque, unworkable conspiracy theory becomes downright irresponsible. Trump is openly betraying and undermining the USA's foreign policy interests, as well as subverting the Constitution, and Kunstler and his commenters think it's all a lark.

Maybe if we all did this to the mainstream media outlets that, for example, continue to have chronic liars on to poison the narrative and pollute the waters of discourse, for nothing more than a few bucks on the back end as recompense for selling their country down the river, we might get somewhere on this.

The Power and the Glory

Usually Rod Dreher's inimitable brand of intellectual tomfoolery is Edroso's wheelhouse, and he's the master at it, but Young Rod dropped an egregious deuce the other day that ties in with a relevant article explaining the manifold hypocrisies of the evilangelicals (as well as a detailed follow-up to the latter article). So I'll take a poke at this chump.

Taking the second and third links first, let's cut through all the chaff and get to the heart of it -- evangelicals want power for the same reasons everyone wants power. They can pretend that their supposedly celestial concerns supersede the ephemeral worries of the evil secularists, but by their deeds shall you know them.

These money-grubbing Elmer Gantry types are poisonous to democracy precisely because they are by nature authoritarians, which in turn is why racism is their most useful tool, as it jibes perfectly with their dream of a white patriarchy overseeing all the other sheep. But it's just a tool, along with their cynical relationship to their professed belief system.

Their goal is that of a mafia boss, or a tinpot despot:  power and money. That's it. There's nothing else to understand. There is no point in spelunking the ass of their lurid post-confederate history of oppressing and subjugating women and minorities, because they're impervious to outside influence.

And there's definitely no point in trying to find common political ground with them. Publicize their hypocrisies, boycott their businesses, make them pay taxes, and keep them the hell away from the White House. These jackals have no business being within a country mile of any place of responsible government -- which of course is why they're perfectly at home in this hog-shit lagoon of an administration.

Now, as to Dreher, while I don't read him regularly, I've read him enough to have encountered his doubting Thomas schtick with irritating consistency. Here's a sample:

I resent the hell out of Donald Trump for putting so many conservatives, especially Republican lawmakers, in the position of having to defend him over stupid, easily preventable missteps.

Well, gee whiz, hoss, you think that might be because he's a dangerous retard with the soul of a banana republic caudillo, and has never bothered to hide any of that? The guy's a fucking criminal, and always has been. Dreher's just peeved that Trump's constant bad form puts a nasty patina on his flock's efforts to turn this country into the Republic of Gilead.

What would Trump have to do that would cause me to support his impeachment, or at least to vote against him for re-election — this, in spite of the very real and significant damage a Democratic president would do to causes (abortion, religious liberty) that mean a lot to me?

At this point, I don’t know. But I am sure I’m going to find out as the investigation goes forward.

For someone who constantly tries to paint this eternal struggle between political goals and moral ethics, he sure hasn't thought this one through at all. Again, considering that Trump lies routinely, has a track record as a crook, a schnook, and a serial philanderer, one would think that someone with Dreher's rigorous personal moral code would have figured out where his line was a long time ago. It's not like Donald Fucking Trump suddenly turned into this morally objectionable character based on a memorandum of conversation (not a fucking transcript) that surfaced a couple weeks ago.

It would be nice if (and maybe he has) Dreher would elucidate in some broad strokes what he would like done about his pet issues. The abortion rate in this country has steadily declined since 1980 or 1982, depending on whether you go by number per thousand live births, or total number reported per year. It is never going to be zero, no matter how much you pray or what kind of monster you put in a senator's seat or judge's bench.

But every "pro-life" person needs to be asked this point-blank:  what should the penalty be, for the woman and/or the doctor? Hell, set abortion aside for a second -- we have states that want to throw women in prison for decades for having a miscarriage, like some Third World shithole. We have states that want to force rape victims to bear their attackers' spawn.

That's the country Rod Dreher wants to live in, where an eleven-year-old girl being forced to bear her adult molester's child is more of a priority than whether the fucking president upholds the Constitution of the United States.

Look, I get the pro-life argument at its basest principle, but as with capital punishment, it doesn't take very long or very much of a leap for grandstanding morons to scapegoat poor people for political gain. That's really all this boils down to, whether Dreher realizes it or cares or not.

And I have no idea what the hell he means by "religious liberty." Is this still about the three or four bakeries that refused to do cakes for gay weddings? Again, is he seriously prioritizing that bullshit over whether this openly corrupt bastard is openly trashing his office? This Ukraine thing is just the one they have him most dead-to-rights on. If the impeachment inquiry allows sufficient scope to follow the money and is not interfered with by the equally corrupt Attorney General, it's practically a slam-dunk that they'll find that Trump and his dipshit son-in-law have been selling American foreign policy to the highest bidder, mostly the Saudis and Emiratis, who have been his best customers for many years. Not to mention all that bratva cash he's laundered.

But hey, as long as Joe Schmo's cakery in East Overshoe, Nebraska can tell those pesky faggots to fuck off, it's totally worth it.

The howls and cries of liberals who see no reason at all why anybody should support Trump in spite of himself fall on deaf ears. They don’t feel as strongly about religious liberty and the pro-life cause as I do, and therefore they don’t have an intuitive grasp of how disastrous a Democratic president would be, given how radical the party has become on those issues. If the situation were reversed, and a corrupt Democratic president was the only thing standing between a champion of the Religious Right taking office, and putting abortion and LGBT rights in jeopardy, they would know exactly how I feel.

And that's exactly what happened with Bill Clinton, and he got his ass impeached. So maybe what comes around goes around, even if it's too little too late. It's pretty simple -- either the law matters, or it doesn't. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his unfitness for any office, routinely engaging in behavior that would have gotten him fired from the 7-11 graveyard shift. He is obviously incompetent and incoherent, clearly sociopathic in nature, probably in the early stages of dementia, deeply corrupt, likely compromised in multiple ways by his foreign interlocutors, and openly and aggressively challenging long-held norms and precedents that are actually important to operational and transitional integrity.

This nation faces some very serious challenges in the near future, not just climate change disaster mitigation but also planning for a smoother transition from global hegemon to (hopefully) principal partner in what will (just by sheer demographics and economic power) become an Asian century. Aside from the one tax cut for billionaires and stocking the courts, Trump has fucked up or ignored every legitimate issue this country faces -- even ones he demagogues regularly, such as immigration and trade policy.

Really, this is a rich irony that Dreher and the evangelicals richly deserve -- they profess to follow the teaching of Christ, and to revere the Ten Commandments, and have spent the better part of the last four years trying to square all that with their unwavering support of someone who routinely violates half the commandments, and has eschewed even the pretense of following even the most basic of those teachings.

The only thing the rest of us ask is that these hypocrites quit trying to make excuses to us, and go try their luck explaining it to the god they supposedly worship.