Learn to Swim, See You Down in Arizona Bay

Character is fate. -- Heraclitus

Some say a comet will fall from the sky, followed by meteor showers and tidal waves.
Followed by fault lines that cannot sit still.
Followed by millions of dumbfounded dipshits.
And some say the end is near, some say we'll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I could use a vacation from this stupid shit. -- Tool, Ænema

Here we go. After a brief feint at pretending to dither over their foregone conclusion, the cowardly scum that comprise the Senate Republicons did their sworn duty to their orange overlord and wrapped this farce up tighter than Yertle McConnell's favorite leather gimp.

No one is shocked or even surprised. We knew they would do this, because this is what they are. They hate this country, they hate most of its citizens, and they fully intend to cling to power by any means necessary. Now that they have openly authorized the chief executive -- as long as he's from their party, of course -- to do as he pleases, up to and including offering monetary inducements to foreign leaders to influence US elections, expect the phone calls and thick envelopes to fly fast and hard.

Like I keep saying:  Don't despair, prepare. Of course people feel like crying or throwing their hands up and saying fuck it, and checking out from all of it. What good does any of it do, if they're just gonna cheat to win?

Well, again, if they weren't worried about the outcome, they wouldn't need to cheat at every turn, now would they? Just a little over a year ago, people showed up for the midterms, and it paid off. Democrats retook the House. All the hearings and witnesses and evidence that came out during this process, the very fact that you were allowed to know about any of it is entirely due to the fact that people showed up in November of 2018. It's the difference between Adam Schiff running things, and a corrupt shit like Devin Nunes brushing it under the rug and running to lick his master's boots.

You don't have to wait until November to start voting either. Vote with your wallet, every day. Make your choices count. You know how much money things like the Kentucky Derby and NCAA basketball and Jim Beam bourbon dump into Kentucky's economy? Sit 'em out this year, until that festering turd McConnell finally gets flushed. Tons of teevee shows and movies are made in Georgia. What companies are still buying commercial time on Fox News?

You want things to change and improve, it's going to take a little work. Those things are bare minimum, but I guarantee you if enough people do them, it will make a difference. If you have more money, donate to some of the opposition candidates; if you have more time and the inclination to act like a Jehovah's Witness, I guess you could go door-to-door or hit the supermarkets, and get people to register to vote. If you have free time and some speaking skills and the patience to deal with idiots in the audience, maybe you run for your local planning commission or school board or city council.

(I've actually been asked by quite a few people in my area over the years, liberal and conservative, to run for some sort of local government seat. I'd be fucking terrible at it. I have the knowledge and passion, but not the patience. I've sat in on a few city council and county board meetings over the years. I know some of the members of these groups. It is nothing more than assembly-line tedium. Everything starts with pro-forma nuisances like reciting the pledge of allegiance, then before actually getting to business you have to give the audience a chance to speak. The only people who have time to attend these things are either elderly folks with nothing else to do, or idiots who are riled up over some $2.00/year mosquito abatement assessment being voted on. (That one is real, I can still recall it quite clearly.) Look at every time a new Krispy Kreme shop opens, or a new $1,000 phone is released with a slightly improved bezel. There is simply a certain percentage of people whose time is worth literally nothing to them. And they all show up at local gov't meetings. The first few episodes of the sitcom Parks & Recreation were pretty much a documentary of that phenomenon. So, thanks but no thanks.)

It's going to be difficult to keep the faith between now and then. The corporate media are engineered and incentivized to demoralize you, the better to keep you in your place. That's why they beat on Sanders and Warren, because either one of those two will actually do something. The media will go after Biden and Buttigieg and Klobuchar as well. It's always someone's turn in the barrel. They want to stir up infighting between the candidates' supporters, to depress turnout in the general election.

This is not incidental, this is the goal. An actual liberal media would not keep doing these tired-ass Cletus safari pieces, venturing out to talk to these spiteful hicks who won't fucking die already, who hate their grandkids and whine about communism but hey, where's my entitlements?

So boycott them too. Seriously, when was the last time CNN gave you anything of value? Why on earth would you read most of the Times columnists, or their lap-dog "reporting" and "anonymous" sourcing?

Of the five remaining "main" Dem candidates, I would honestly say each of them has some chance to win. There are people who have a vested interest in maintaining that Bernie or Warren are "too left" and therefore susceptible to a McGovern-type landslide. You may want to check if any of those folks offered predictions about 2016, and how that turned out.

Everyone got 2016 wrong. I got it way wrong (though, oddly enough, I do think that some of the breakdown and analysis in the linked post might still hold at least some water). Nobody, not even Trump himself, thought he would or even could win. A fake businessman with multiple bankruptcies, ridiculous appearance, a long track record of failure and incompetence, no experience in public office, had no chance against probably the most over-qualified person ever to apply for the job.

But he won because there really is a deep current of frustration and anger in this country, and he understood it well enough to monetize and weaponize it. Sanders clearly taps that discontent with just as much efficiency. Warren is getting better at it too. The panel monkeys and smart-set slop-ed columnists all beat the how're we gonna pay for it? drum like it's the only song they know.

It doesn't occur to them that some under-employed single mom with a sick kid or two and no insurance -- or hell, even with insurance, it's not like it's a vast improvement -- hears that argument and reflexively thinks about all the bullshit that gets paid for without so much as a blink. And now we're three years into paying that fat fuck to play golf on his own courses every goddamned weekend, so he can force the Secret Service to rent golf carts and jet skis and hotel rooms directly from him. Tell us again how we just can't find any money to cut working families some slack on the decades of interest payments they're forced to make to student-loan corporations.

That's the real reason the Cletus safari doofuses need to get their heads out of their asses and talk to some Democratic voters once in a while -- because we're fucking pissed too. There is a misconception that Trump's cult of cousin-fucking yahoos have some kind of monopoly on righteous anger, and that's entirely because they're the only ones the corporate media will talk to. They don't realize that Sanders and Warren have just as much of a shot as Biden -- maybe more -- because those two have learned very well how to empathize with the anger, and give it voice.

The bottom line on all this is to keep in mind one definite inevitability -- none of the remaining candidates will be ideal for everyone. Someone will have to compromise, someone will have to hold their nose for someone they really don't care for. To which I would respond, Are you sure you dislike Candidate X more than the doddering asshole that's been in there? Because that's the choice right now. It's a process -- you remove the person you're tired of, replace them with someone you can live with for the time-being, and then start looking for someone better for the next go-round.

Think of it as a slump-buster, if that helps. Sometimes you just need a warm body for a short period of time to get you out of a rut, until you find your rhythm again. I am fine with having Amy Klobuchar as a slump-buster, if it gets that clog out of the White House toilet. Hell, I'll vote for Mike Bloomberg or Tom Steyer if that's what it takes. We all need to focus on getting that fucker out, period. Worry about policy specs later.

Take a good, long look at the last two weeks, that despicable sham in the Senate. Get pissed. Make them pay, with your votes and your wallets. Be creative, be consistent. Make it hurt and don't stop the pain. Most of all, show up every time. Never forget that that's exactly what they don't want you to do.

Every election is always the most important one ever, which is another way to desensitize people over time to how things really are. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this year really is that important, and in fact may actually be a make-or-break scenario for the continuation of what we might still recognize and hope to be a relatively free country. The upcoming sham "verdict" will legitimize what these fuckers have already done, as well as what they are going to do, and they've probably already started doing it.

It's not an exaggeration that a we saw this week a major step toward formalizing the turn into a "soft authoritarian" state, a shell of a representative democracy but really just an open rubber stamp parliament at the behest of the despot and his cronies. This country has always been run by the wealthy and conniving, and we've been heading down this road even before Trump got into politics. But it was done with a wink and a nod and at least a sop to the proles here and there.

It's all wide out in the open now. It's Lamar Alexander -- who turns eighty in July, is independently wealthy, and is retiring later this year -- casting the die for this treachery, as one final favor. Not to Trump, but to Bill Barr, who now heads an organization that has been more or less explicitly empowered to engage in whatever tactics domestically that Barr sees fit.

Bearing in mind, of course, that Barr is an Opus Dei fanatic who is on record as another one of those "moral decay" assholes that really wants to force everyone to go to the same church. Notwithstanding the inconvenient fact that Barr's own father was a pervert who wrote sex-slave pulp sci-fi books and gave Jeffrey Epstein his first real job, a job that Epstein was literally unqualified for.

Remember when the Feds raided Epstein's Manhattan sex castle last summer and confiscated truckloads of evidence? Yeah, good times. Wonder how that all turned out. I don't mean Uncle Jeff's "suicide," I mean what happened to all the fucking evidence? Maybe someone could get a House subcommittee going to investigate that.

I get why people might get confused or frustrated with this endless barrage of connections and people and timelines and dirty deeds done for fun. They can only get so far in before they throw up their hands and decide that they all do it. Everyone is corrupt, doing the same awful things to the same lurid degree. I might as well just either check out, or at least cast my lot with the guy that pushes my buttons.

That's how you end up with a mendacious pro-wrestling clown. That how you end up with fifty-one grown-ass adults who are perfectly willing to sell their country all the way down the road to despotism, under an erratic, impulsive, vindictive, blindingly stupid criminal -- someone they all know full well is guilty and incompetent and corrupt to his bones, someone they all deeply detest on a personal basis, because he is weird and pathetic and needy and completely unlikable in the way a whiny, self-absorbed brat is unlikable. They sold their souls and their country for nothing, for a brief extension to their tenuous grasp on power, and the money they can't take with them when they die.

That's how you end up with such despicable, miserable people -- by abdicating your responsibilities, by not showing up, by hoping someone else will come along and do it, because someone always does. Welp, Superman's not comin' to save the day this time, podna, so you best take stock of the situation, figure out what you can and what you can't control, and prepare accordingly.

There are many ideas and emotions that compel me to persist in pissing my thoughts into the electronic void ad nauseam, but if there is a single key defining characteristic, it's this:  a sense of justice. I hate seeing scumbags go unpunished or rewarded, while decent people who work hard and play by the rules get trampled. It drives me nuts when people just accept it as "the way things are." No, the reason things get that way is because enough people are willing to accept it. As long as it's not them or theirs, it doesn't matter. It's someone else's problem, even if it's preventable.

All that we need to do is to look at these people and the things they do, assess them accurately and objectively, and act accordingly. Liars, hypocrites, thieves, killers, the people who enable them and do their dirty work for them -- bring them to account in all the possible ways. Maybe that means bringing them to account in a court of law if they've committed a crime, maybe it means heckling them out of restaurants if they're just really awful excuses for humanity.

The reason you hear the phrase "cancel culture" so much these days is because there is a subsection of wealthy or powerful or influential people who, thanks to the wondrous technology of social media, are being held publicly to account by people from "lower" classes, who in the past had no way to effect any sort of recourse at all for the Important Person's misdeeds. The Important People can't stand it that the great unwashed can now tell them to go fuck themselves, either in Twitter or Instagram, or in public if there's a sighting.

Sometimes this gets out of hand and hits people who just made a slightly off-color comment that they later wish they hadn't. Sometimes people over-react. Who knew? But the good outweighs the bad, and the proof of that was last summer, when within the space of a few weeks, you had Maureen Dowd and Bret Stephens, two wealthy and influential people who are rewarded handsomely even though they are terrible at their job, both whining (again, in their well-paid sinecures at the nation's (erp!) flagship newspaper) about how all the nasty emails and tweets they got presaged guillotines and Kristallnacht.

I mean, when you can get that level of high-pitched whining and pearl-clutching, you know you've hit the mark. But it's also a sad reminder that, since Dowd and Stephens still have their jobs, someone still enjoys reading them. People out there still plan to vote for Trump enthusiastically, no matter how much of a thin-skinned, incompetent criminal he is, no matter how many farmers hang themselves because his genius trade war bankrupted them.

Having a sense of justice is also the inevitable, hard understanding that it is truly rare. Plenty of horrible shit never gets resolved; countless horrible people throughout history were never held accountable. They slept fine right up until the end and died comfortably. No one did jack shit about them.

That's what you really have to prepare for -- more and worse things could and probably will come out as this year progresses, and there's still a good chance that he wins. The Democrats are already showing their talent for fucking things up in the nomination process, and their fallback position is to complain that the media tools are never fair to them. Obviously the reality goes further than that. There are a lot of people in this country whose actions are incoherent and spiteful, and there are plenty who are so untroubled by all of it, they can't even be bothered to show up. If he wins, it means they win; it means once again that maybe this country isn't what you thought it was.

I don't know much, but I know at least two things:  one, that my dad didn't fight the fucking nazis and imperial Japanese in WW2 for this bullshit, any of it; two, I'm getting old and really don't feel like spending the rest of my years concerning myself with an idea that doesn't exist anymore. In other words, if the majority wants to make Idiocracy a documentary, then maybe it's time to seek greener pastures. I can't imagine doing that to my daughter and eventually grandchildren, sentencing them to some pinched, cruel, oligarchic fascist state that thinks The Handmaid's Tale is an instructional text.

We've got about 277 days or so to figure this out, folks; there really may not be a next one at this rate. We might not even get this one. It only works if enough people have enough spine and sense to stand up for themselves.

And if they can't be bothered or roused or convinced -- well, that too is an answer.

Everything Trump Touches Dies

As irritating and demoralizing as it can be to watch an entire political party give its collective soul away to a vile would-be caudillo, there are some entertaining and even strategic points to observe in the ugly process. It seems only fitting that these points were mostly provided by none other than John Fucking Bolton.

The most superficial point has been watching the F Troop of slapdicks at Fixed Noise scramble themselves into a frenzy, trying hastily to excise Comrade Bolton from the photos and narrative of the People's Soviet, lest Comrade Von Clownstick be enraged or even inconvenienced by seeing a hint of Bolton's Cap'n Crunch facial hair. I don't know which frontal-lobe-impaired sliver of codgers in their withered audience is going to buy that truckload of horseshit, but Bolton was Trump's handpicked National Security Advisor, and the very same Fox hand-puppets crowed and snorted at all the libturds crying about Dear Leader's wise choice.

Ever heard of YouTube, motherfuckers? They can try to paint Bolton as a trouble-making commie all they want, but there ain't no memory hole anymore. The only people still buying Fox's tripe need it to stay alive now, to offset the possibility they walk too slowly past a mirror, realize what they support and what they've become, and blow their worthless brains out.

Which, honestly, I am surprised that mainstays like Lou Dobbs and Alan Doucheowitz and the morning-zoo crew haven't already done. You can see it in their eyes now. They know what they are -- and worse yet, they know that we know. Let them live with that, long and hard. This isn't business anymore, assholes. They're openly supporting the open betrayal of their country, hooting and yukking it up.

But that's small potatoes compared to watching #MoscowMitch's dopey gang of treasonous shitheads. They were sure as hell going to railroad this shit through, right up 'murka's poop-chute, and the Dummycrats were just going to have to sit there and take it, like Paul Manafort with his cellmate. McConnell was enjoying the prospect, you could see the evil gleam in his soulless eye-holes. He was getting off on it. He was going to get it over with before the SOTU speech, just the way Dear Leader wanted, and then they could get back to bamboozling the cult loons just long enough to make it to November and renew the prospect of looting the many for the very few.

They even brought in the most cynical team of dipshit "lawyers" imaginable:  the main White House counsel, who literally lied during his arguments on the Senate floor (which is grounds for disbarment); a professional "Christian" who is currently being investigated for (surprise!) embezzling millions of dollars from his megachurch (when he's not playing drums with a couple of discards from the band Kansas); Ken Starr, a sanctimonious, hypocritcal scumbag who would be tarred and feathered in any decent society; the drunk frat girl who took $25k from Trump to not investigate his fraudulent "university" in America's Wang. Like something out of central casting in a fourth-rate Animal House knockoff.

(Side note:  I have honestly lost track of how many times in the last few years some weird instance or assemblage of goofballs has occurred, where I seriously thought, If you wrote this in a treatment or script and pitched it, they'd kick it back for being too on-the-nose.)

So it was all set to go down, in the most humiliating way possible, and here comes Bolton -- and with him, a set of flash polls all showing that even a majority of Republican voters want to hear witnesses and evidence now. Turns out that even people who disagree passionately about the nature of the thing currently occupying the office of chief executive, still agree on the basic principle of if he's innocent, he shouldn't have a problem with presenting testimony and evidence that show how perfect the call was and how he did nothing wrong.

People who are old enough to recall the O.J. Simpson trial from a quarter-century ago remember that moment immediately after the bodies were found, the LA media copters hovering over the white Bronco, futilely trying to escape to Mexico. Certainly innocent people get railroaded and unjustly convicted sometimes, but only guilty people immediately assume that everyone else will assume they're guilty. You follow me?

The innocent person's initial instinct is almost always, Hey, I know I'm innocent. I have the truth on my side, and nothing to hide. I'll just tell them what I know, and go on about my day. Again, sometimes things don't work out that way once investigations and procedures get their wheels set in motion, but that's the initial response.

And of course the guilty person has the opposite response just as reliably. Their first -- and usually only -- instincts are to conceal and/or to escape, if they can. Since Trump cannot escape, he has to conceal, which is what he's done at every possible turn. He's had a million opportunities to straighten this whole thing out; the Democrats have pleaded with him to present all this evidence of how perfect everything was, to refute the sworn testimony provided last month by his subordinates that directly implicated him and Mike Pompeo, among others.

And at every opportunity, he's refused the chance to do so, angrily, insultingly. He thinks his sub-Nelson Muntz taunts of "Shifty Schiff" and the like are going to do anything but make Adam Schiff -- a trained prosecutor who's dealt with organized crime figures and competes in triathlons -- more dogged and determined to stuff that burger-hoisting garbage pail into the nearest jail cell, and strip him of every dollar they can find.

(Incidentally, this is just one of many reasons why intelligence really does matter to some extent. You should at least be sharp enough not to poke the people who can actually harm you.)

So everyone knows he's guilty -- the public, his own supporters, and the Republican members of Congress. The last two groups have made their own calculations about how and why they keep supporting someone whom they know is corrupt, and again, this is something they get to live with for the duration. They've rationalized themselves this far, you can be sure they'll continue to do so.

But it's that third group's calculations that become interesting in the strategic sense. Baked into the cynicism of the McConnell gang is the assumption that the general public will forget because they're easily rolled dupes, their own supporters will get ginned up over whatever bullshit they concoct for them in the fall, and they can all cruise to re-election. But throughout, they know not only that he's guilty of the bare minimum that he's being impeached and tried for, but that there's almost certainly plenty more shit that just hasn't bubbled to the surface yet, and that any or all of it could start coming out all through the rest of the year.

It was the only move they had, really, sticking with him at this point. You're all in or all out, bottom line. "The "heads on a pike" line may or may not have actually occurred, but does anyone seriously doubt that that's really the case? It's what his supporters like about him. It's why dozens of Republican House members, even from safe districts, have abruptly quit, finding suddenly that they no longer possess the intestinal fortitude to continue betraying their country day after miserable fucking day.

So the GOP Senate assholes had no choice. It was a sizable gamble, and it may be starting to backfire on them now, thanks to Bolton (who, again, let's be clear, is not motivated by any illusions of "patriotism" so much as an overweening arrogance and sense of self-regard). Because it turns out that Trump knew Bolton had a manuscript ready to drop -- and didn't even warn McConnell. So now they know that not only is more of his fuckuppery going to trickle out and stain all the carpets in the coming months, but there isn't even any honor among thieves.

What they've always said about Trump and "loyalty" is true, and can be empirically observed over decades of him never shutting the fuck up about anything (other than his money laundering):  The loyalty only goes one way, from you to him. It is never mutual, except as a matter of convenience to him.

So it is immensely entertaining to watch these genuinely despicable people find all this out the hard way. They richly deserve to be tossed out on their asses as soon as electorally possible, and then shunned for the remainder of their lives, and then rendered destitute by lack of further prospects, karma, worsening health, etc.

It won't happen, of course -- this is, after all, the nation that still allows a glowering pustule like Newt Gingrich to not have to live in a needle-filled alley sucking diseased cocks to feed his drug habit, like he deserves -- but there is at least a chance for them to lose at the ballot box, and they're starting to realize that. Nothing ever gets better with this guy, none of the scandals ever turn out to be less than initially thought. Always worse; always more. They're starting to realize that as well. More and more incriminating, stupid stuff is going to come out, and they're all going to be up to their necks in it.

Because they're accomplices, in the end, and even some of their own constituents, the ones not chugging the kool-aid and asking for thirds, are getting that as well.

They decided to have a Jersey Shore cult rally last night, and the Hoarse Whisperer has a very entertaining live-take thread of the festivities. I didn't (and wouldn't) watch the rally, but like Hoarse, I did watch some of them back during the campaign, all the way through, mostly to get a sense of why people were falling for this ridiculous grifter so hard, and what sort of nonsense was resonating with them, that sort of thing. They were just what you think they were -- amazingly dumb, hopelessly repetitive, demoralizing in that you realize that no matter how cynical you've ever been about the stupidity of people, it wasn't nearly enough.

And what Hoarse observes from tonight's rally is what I'm seeing lately in general, this kind of low-octane, lukewarm support. Don't get me wrong, they'll still vote for him, but the passion is fading, the novelty is wearing off, the "vote for change" excuse from before is no longer valid. You know what he's about, so you can't talk about "change" anymore -- you're either with this spiteful idiocy, or you're not.

I saw a lot of links today crowing about how all the hotels in Wildwood sold out in anticipation of the rally, all the crowds, blah blah. So here's the deal about that:  Wildwood has a population of a little over 5,000. That's five thousand. It's a resort town, so they do have more and better accommodations than most towns that size, but it's still barely more than a village in size. And Trump's rally promoters have been infamous in recklessly overselling these events. The convention center has a capacity of 7,000, which means they probably gave out 30-40,000 tickets, maybe more.

It has been their deliberate attendance model to pack the parking lot as well as the venue, which for a small resort town means traffic nightmares for a couple days around the event, and probably the stretching of the town's police resources, and definitely a security bill that Cheapskate McFrightwig will refuse to pay. All for a relative handful of suckers who think they want to be used as stage props for a traveling medicine show, who think they're pwning libturds by driving for hours and waiting for more hours out in the January cold of a Jersey Shore seaside town.

And then they get up there and realize they're really just there to hear the greatest shits, to chant USA and Lock her up! when prompted, like the barely-trained farm animals they really are. To spend an entire day waiting around, hoping above all else to get into an arena with a bunch of strange, sweaty groper types, to listen to a demented old man rant about dishwashers and how he'll fix their health care, while never really explaining even the broad strokes of how.

Clearly these are not the sharpest tools in the shed -- all you have to do is listen to them rattle for thirty seconds in any random YouTube video to see that -- but it may be starting to dawn on them finally. They're not really rubbing anyone's noses in anything, if they still can't afford health care, if they still have to work two jobs to survive, if they still live in crappy, boarded-up towns where the smart kids have left, the others are stuck or dead, and all those boarded-up lots are squatted on by out-of-town owners who don't care if the property ever re-opens or helps the town turn a buck.

And fuckin' Jim Jones up there at the podium in the high-school gym, with all the colorful insult-comic lines they can sing along to by now, like some discount Don Rickles, after the jokes are done and the circus has left town and they're back to their opioids and fast food and boredom, he's not going to do anything about any of that. Because he doesn't really care, not even a little bit. Shit, his dick-waving just got four dozen military personnel hospitalized with traumatic brain injuries, and he laughs it off as headaches. Walk it off, you pussies!

The schtick wears thin after a while; like any drug, the user has to chase more and more of it just to get anything out of it, never quite approaching that original euphoria. I think there is a very real cultural thread from Duck Dynasty to Trump, and as popular as that show was, it was done in five years. I mean, they basically beat everyone over the head on a constant basis with 130 "episodes" (I once caught one to see what all the fuss was about, and seriously felt stupider by the end of that interminable half-hour) and an unholy barrage of promotion and advertising and Wal-Mart swag and all sorts of cheap shit like that, but it wore out its welcome.

The human brain, no matter how dull and desensitized, can take daily barrages of nonsense and cognitive dissonance for only so long. And then it's old. If Trump knew how to give it a rest, or if the media knew how to change up their coverage a bit, it might be different. But they are all one-trick ponies, and maybe the American public is starting to get a bit war-weary. People are exhausted, and the one-liners are long past their sell-by date.

And even the most die-hard cultist has to wonder at some point, if Crooked Hillary is so crooked, and Republicans are in charge right now, then why haven't we actually locked her up? What's the hold-up here? Even the cynic has to wonder to themselves why they continue to sing along, if they know it's bullshit.

I make no predictions; my observations on the messiness of human nature are what they've always been. But the patterns are clear from an operational perspective, and from a perspective of how a rational actor would craft a strategic response to save their job and reputation:  the boss is erratic and impulsive and dumb and cruel, and would incarcerate every loyal minion and nuke the entire Midwest if it would make him a buck or save his worthless hide. Everything that is politically bad for them now is only going to get worse, never better. What do you do?

Either they hang together, or they hang separately. They know that. All it takes is for a few key players to break, though, and the floodgates will open. It is enormously fun to watch these mendacious shits twist in the wind.

Amor Fati

He'll get away with it, you know. All of it. He always has. No one has ever really held him accountable for much of anything. The closest call he ever had with real accountability was back in 1990, when he nearly bankrupted one of his shitbag casinos in AC, and as part of the bailout the creditor banks put him on an "allowance" of $450k -- per month.

And so he never learned anything from his many failures and stupid excesses, because why should he? There's never been any reason to. Just like the Wall Street wizards who lawn-darted the economy a decade ago, looted the wreckage, and still had the balls to insist on their performance bonuses. We don't hold rich and/or powerful people accountable.

Well, Bill Cosby and Jeffrey Epstein might beg to disagree with that. There are always exceptions. But they are notable precisely because of their scarcity.

And this impeachment trail farce. Right out in the open, like whaddaya gonna do about it, same as it ever was. Ol' Moscow Mitch, he didn't even bother with the pretense of a reach-around, the thin veneer of fake comity and moderation. In what trial court does the jury foreman declare his intent to work with the defendant and the defendant's counsel throughout the process and to acquit the defendant before the trial even starts? And what jury pre-emptively decides that they don't need to call any witnesses or demand any evidence that might prove the defendant's guilt?

More importantly, what sort of diseased society is okay with all of that? We may just be too far gone at this point, seriously, as a functioning republic or democracy or however you want to term it. This is pure despotism, right here. That's all there is to it. And an incredible percentage of people seem to be okay with it, or inexplicably apathetic to it.

The fix is in, and nobody will or can do anything about it. Not his party, because they're all in at this point, counting on cheating, suppression, and pig-blind stubbornness to carry them over the line. Not the opposition party, too intimidated to fully commit to what they've started, yet seemingly not understanding that if they fail and he stays, they're all targets. They should be setting up an ad hoc committee to investigate and draft more articles of impeachment right now, ready to load soon as this dog-and-phony show is through.

The media certainly won't challenge them, long as there's a buck to be made selling tickets to the circus. The librul media helped him in his ascent, every filthy, corrupt step of the way. He may be dumber than a bag of rocks, but intelligence and cunning are two different things, and the ability to read people and spot the most credulous, dull-witted saps in the room is a by-god bona-fide skill.

If you really think about it, the main ability required to screw people over, lie to them constantly and poison their brains, is just a willingness to do it and stick to it. Never relent, never break character, never admit guilt or defeat. There will always be people who want to believe the lies, and there will always be people who will ingratiate themselves to your cause and assist with it, in order to capitalize on the opportunity.

So it comes now to the people of this fair land to sack up, show up, and hold them all -- there's that pesky word again -- accountable. Like the impeachment, and even the crimes that led to the impeachment, it is an all-or-nothing proposition. It is not enough merely to remove Trump; a Democratic president with the House and Senate as is will be hamstrung and obstructed at every opportunity, with no small amount of assistance from the agitprop fiends at Fixed Noise.

The Republicon party has to be removed from power at every possible point, at every possible level. Period. They are nothing more now than a malevolent, destructive force that wants only to sow discord and wreak havoc. That is not an exaggeration. You want this bullshit to end, they have to end. There is no other way.

Frankly, I think voting is pretty much a waste of time. You're either outnumbered by the bastards, or cheated and no one does anything, or you win, but your guy gets prevented from doing much of anything regardless, and is mostly undone within months after leaving office anyway. It historically changes very little, and as Emma Goldman famously put it a century ago, if it did change anything, they wouldn't let us do it.

Having said all that, you should still vote anyway. Not because of any moral or patriotic duty, or any of that flag-humping, group-chant nonsense. Do it because it's the practical thing to do, because of game theory -- if you don't show up, things will definitely not improve, but if you do show up, not only is there at least a small chance of improvement, but the odds go up in direct proportion to participation.

You have the ability to increase the odds. The proof of that is if you didn't, if there really was nothing to be done regardless, they wouldn't keep investing so much in cheating and suppression. You don't need to cheat at a game that doesn't matter in the first place. Again, let math and logic and reason demonstrate what mere "patriotic duty" apparently does not.

And after all that, after all the fine thoughts and good deeds, he still might win again. There's actually a pretty good chance of it. What then? I wish I knew the answer to that.

Back in my wild youth, I did have my quieter moments when I read philosophy and economics, classics, things like that. I probably had a grip at the time on philosophy about like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, but being older and hopefully a bit wiser now, it comes back around with more heft. Re-reading the Stoics, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Seneca and such, is a good reminder about understanding what we can and can't control, and adjusting accordingly for ourselves.

So at the very least, don't despair, but prepare. Think about what specific aspects of your life will be adversely affected by the return of this demented old wet-brained pervert. It could be something concrete like your access to decent health care, or something more abstract, like the sinking realization that this country has a very deep sickness in its collective soul right now, and it simply may not recover in your lifetime. Maybe never.

All the people and things that we care about eventually come to an end. Toxins build up, systems break down, parts corrode and fall into disrepair. You can treat it and maybe prolong the inevitable, but sooner or later the bill comes due. The people who yap loudest about how much they supposedly love their country, refer to it as a living thing, as she or her, often seem to be the ones causing the most damage. The old gal is taking on some serious water these days, and the people who have the most power to help seem intent on drowning her.

So each of us really needs to consider the odds, and what our responses are to various scenarios. Maybe you decide you've had it, you don't want to leave but you can't stay anymore to continue watching the controlled demolition, helpless and mute. How do you move on? Maybe it's time to get your passport in order, see what the emigration requirements are to various places. Just in case.

For me, it's still a bit cathartic to vent and complain about the whole lot of it, but it's a very small part of my daily life, and I do and engage in other, more constructive things. I'm sure most of you do as well, and maybe it's healthier for us all to do more of those things and less of this thing.. I think we all need to find ways to insulate ourselves from the penumbra of pro-wrestling madness from these people, as well as to assure ourselves of the ability to just keep going with our jobs, families, money and health issues, all the things that we are all affected by to some degree, and can be made worse if we let ourselves get demoralized by the bastards.

There are some things you simply cannot get around -- the monopolies you pay each month for all your utilities; the needs for food and shelter and love and culture -- but we have choices about what we read and see and where we spend our money. Instead of bitching about the New York Times just drop them like a sack of manure, and don't look back. Instead of complaining about CNN having the teen rapist Alan Doucheowitz or the liar Kellyanne Con-Way defiling our teevee screens one more fucking time, just cut CNN loose. They're fucking useless anyway. Instead of griping about why no one is doing anything about climate change, look at what your contribution to that is, and reduce it by ten percent, then another ten percent.

If enough people do these things, all of which are within their power, things will change. A big part of it is the gatekeeper corporate media, whose vested interest is to get you riled up about shit you can't control, and hey while you're here check out our ads for cheeseburgers or boner pills or a big gas-guzzling truck to take your mind off your tiny dick. I stopped watching all teevee news, except for local weather, and that's one sure way to clear your head. I can't recommend it enough.

I don't necessarily agree 100% with the concept of amor fati -- to love or embrace whatever fate has in store for us, but you get the idea. If the fate of the country is Trump getting re-elected and ramping up his agenda, knowing he can get away with literally anything now, I don't think it's necessary or even wise to simply embrace that, or even passively accept it.

But we should prepare for it, not only because of how it will enable him and his henchmen to continue killing off this country, but because of what it clarifies about the citizenry. Blame the electoral college or the media or Russian Fakebook nonsense or whatever, but the fact of the matter is that there are enough people here who are okay with all of it -- they either actively support it, or are simply too goddamned lazy to get off their asses and do their job as citizens.

The 2016 election posed a conundrum to the engaged observer -- did the result reflect what the country had become, or did it reveal what it has always been? It seems to be a large measure of both, now infused and empowered with technology and authoritarianism and incoherent rage.

We can laugh at those dorks in Richmond yesterday, with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle camo-drag and their dick substitutes positioned in often comically dangerous places. Look at the photos of these morons, you wouldn't hire any of them to sweep your front porch. They're useless and they know it. Their biggest enemy is not Antifa, it's hardening arteries and sodium benzoate.

But they won. They marched with masks and .50 cal sniper rifles and even grenade launchers, through the streets of a state capital, defying laws and challenging authorities to do something about it. Their intent is to set up "sanctuary counties" where people can have whatever weapons they want, and the sheriffs won't enforce the laws.

And no one did or will do a goddamned thing about any of it. You think these assholes are up on it now, you wait until their boy skates on impeachment, tells Schiff and Pelosi to go fuck themselves in the SOTU speech, and openly cheats his way to re-election.

The beauty of it is, if everyone just ignores all that and shows up anyway, we can beat them back. Always remember, there are more of us than there are of them. We just have to stop dicking around, herding cats and worrying about what MoDo and Bobo and the rest of the slop-ed losers think about anything. They are trying to demoralize you. Stop letting them.

Endorse Meant

I mean this without the slightest trace of sarcasm or malice:  what sort of person attributes any import or meaning to the endorsement of a newspaper for a given political candidate, except perhaps as a negative characteristic?

In other words, I would never vote for a particular candidate just because the New York Times gave them their seal of approval, but it would certainly speak volumes about them as a legitimate journalistic operation if, say, they lost their fucking minds and endorsed Trump or David Duke or something like that.

But for the most part, the Times has continued to distinguish itself rather poorly overall. For every in-depth story or weekend magazine deep-dive they manage, there are a dozen or more elisions, omissions, qualifications, demurrals, anonymously sourced "hackcess journalism" pieces that add nothing of value. And then there's the stable of columnists, half of whom should have been set free in a dark forest with a crust of bread decades ago. (Feel free to guess which half.)

The main problem with old-school corporate institutions like the Times is that they practice "gatekeeper" journalism -- not only do they deem themselves as the font whence all conventional narrative springs forth like the purest blessed water, but they take it upon themselves to decide for everyone what "counts" and what doesn't, and how it should be presented.

In a normal political climate, it's still not a good thing; consent is still being manufactured, as it were. But in a climate where one side has figured out how to weaponize the studied hypocrisies of fake objectivity, it's become a dangerous dereliction of duty. They know what's really going on, and do still have something of a national soapbox to tell it like it is, but are simply too cowardly to do so.

That's how you get these half-assed dual "endorsements," where they profess to approve of the idealistic campaign of Elizabeth Warren, but have decided also for the more "realistic" and "electable" Amy Klobuchar. Who says you can't have it all?

Whenever reporters and op-ed writers start talking about "electability" as a positive attribute, you can pretty much dismiss whatever it is they're trying to push on you. As Osita Nwanevu notes, the word is nothing more than a "poisonous shibboleth," a totem wielded by gatekeepers and institutionalists to booga-booga the rabble into voting for the candidate who literally promises to do the very least.

It should not be a surprise to the folks in steerage that the swells in the luxury cabins have no interest in rocking the boat.

But as we always say here, it takes two to participate in any given con -- the con man and the mark, one to lie and one to believe it. No one makes you send your hard-earned money to televangelist grifters or Trump University hucksters, and no one makes you cast your vote for who someone else thinks is the best candidate.

I have, from time to time, advocated for particular candidates, but it is always with the understanding that this is my opinion. You are not required to fall into lockstep with me. Your priorities might be different than mine.

Presumably we agree that the one common goal among supporters of the various primary candidates is that Trump must go, the sooner the better. The Republicans who continue to support his open corruption and mendacity need to leave as well. These are basic operational premises. All the specific policy preferences -- health care, climate change, student loan debt, etc. -- don't matter without the removal of those obstructions first.

And that's what the primary campaign is for, to test the messaging and see which candidate resonates with the most voters, to sort out all the practical and stylistic differences. But the core premises are the same regardless. Klobuchar might be down my personal list a bit, maybe fourth or fifth, but if she ends up getting the nomination I'm fine with voting for her.

The other problem with the "electability" game is that the gatekeepers really mean which candidate is most palatable to older white conservatives, preferably in the Midwest, where only real 'murkins live. This is the real shibboleth, eternal, deathless, zombie-like in its singular direction. The gatekeepers then reinforce this myth by venturing out of their glass skyscrapers not to talk to the people in their own city (New York City alone has more inhabitants than all but twelve states, and has more than the bottom nine states combined), but to the fist-shaking codgers festering out in the desiccated, depopulated zones of the country.

I don't give a fuck what those people think about anything, even as ragebait. They will never vote for a Democrat. There is no point in trying to woo them. We need to stop playing this game, and if that means writing off the gatekeepers, that's probably for the best.

It's really just news-cycle churn, make-work for these smart-set types who really don't know, empirically, all that much about anything more than you or I do. How will people vote? I don't know, let's ask this statistically negligible sample set of random idiots from the same demographic sliver, in an ethnically homogenous state with maybe two percent of the total population. Sure, why not?

After that, it's just the usual Monday-morning quarterbacking nonsense for the next electoral cycle. Nwanevu captures that in this passage:

.... The victory or defeat of any given candidate does not foreclose the possibility that they might have performed differently under slightly different circumstances and cannot tell us conclusively whether another candidate might have done better or worse. The 2016 election race drew us close, but not close enough, to understanding this. Any politically engaged person today can rattle off a list of factors that might have tilted the race: Russian interference, irresponsible coverage of the Clinton email scandal, Trump’s omnipresence on cable television, James Comey’s eleventh-hour machinations, the Clinton campaign’s inattention to the Rust Belt. ....

Consider every one of those factors carefully. All of them rely on the credulity of the electorate. In other words, the majority of the vote went to Hillary Clinton, so clearly they were not swayed by those transparent gambits. You didn't fall for Russian Fakebook micro-targeting, you didn't fall for Jim Comey's stupid letter, you weren't affected by HFC's failure to genuflect to farm country.

That presumed credulity is at the heart of the gatekeepers' ministrations about "electability" and "realism." Convincing each individual reader separately that they should game their own vote based on the gatekeepers' cherry-picked analysis of bumptious flyover randos is the whole point of the game. It's an ongoing racket deliberately designed and deployed to discourage participation, and for those who do decide to participate after all, to second-guess themselves at all times.

Statistically, I should be a Trump voter -- white, middle-aged, above-median income, live in a conservative area. But I honestly cannot conceive of a single possible scenario, including a full-on invasion by outer-space aliens, where I can see myself voting for him, or anyone in that party. It would take a complete policy and attitude reversal on the part of them all, and frankly, an alien invasion is more likely.

So these empty assumptions are just that, and just because we see some poll numbers somewhere shouldn't change anything. If you stick to those core premises -- those fuckers have to go -- then the rest of it is clickbait and bullshit, and people need to recognize it for what it really is.

Off the Fence

For many years, I've maintained what I felt was a rather stalwart neutrality on the issue of guns and the Second Amendment. I believe reasonable people have a Constitutional right to reasonable hardware; i.e., no AK-47s or RPG launchers or flamethrowers. Universal background checks. Domestic violence convictions and violent felonies cancel out those rights for at least ten years, if not permanently. Mandatory insurance on these fetish objects might be an option worth pursuing.

I have generally supported and voted for politicians who maintain an essentially "moderate" stance on the subject. I am put off by the little-boy dick-grabbing "gun culture" as such, but I personally know enough responsible gun owners who are just as mortified by mass shootings and random violence as Gabrielle Giffords is.

I have a shotgun and a handgun that I rarely take out to the range, but are handy to have in an area where it can take the sheriffs a half-hour to show up in an emergency. I don't consider myself a serious "gun owner," when most of the real gun owners I know have over a dozen. Gun owners don't feel like their rights should be abrogated because of some random whackjob shooting up a mall, any more than any of us think that everyone's cars should be taken away because of a handful of drunk drivers.

Fighting Back

Big props to Congressman Ted Lieu for literally telling Devin "Traitor" Nunes' lawyer to shove his letter up his own ass. This is the only proper and reasonable way to respond to these scumbags, period. You cannot "work with" them (sorry, Joe Biden), you cannot "compromise" or "reconcile" with them. They have made themselves abundantly clear, multiple times. They are not your colleagues, they are your enemies, by their own actions and words. They can only be opposed, the more forcefully the better. Lieu has the right idea. His next letter should end with "and the horse you rode in on."

Bear in mind that Nunes, who is invested in a winery that does business with Russian distributors, is the ranking Republican (and was the chair until the midterms flipped the House) of the House committee that gathered and investigated evidence in the impeachment charges, as well as the Mueller investigation. As has long been suspected, but now confirmed by Lev Parnas, Nunes is balls-deep in this thing. Of course he was trying to brush it under when he ran the committee, he was "investigating" himself. Seriously, do the Russians get a bulk rate for investing in this party of shameless treason-weasels?

These people are impossible to parody. I look forward to Nunes being forced to resign, investigated, tried, convicted, being bankrupted in the process, and doing a few years in Club Fed.

***Kick a sawbuck or three to Phil Arballo, who is running to unseat this worthless punk.***

Prison pro-tip for Sweet Cheeks there:  if you leave it out in the sun for a few minutes while you're on the yard, a Jolly Rancher candy can be rolled into an elongated tapered point, and used as an untraceable break-off stiletto. Aim for the neck veins, cowboy!

Projection

Look, if you're the sort of person who shows up for an "event" hosted by a vile blow-up doll roughly posturing as a human being, you're probably okay with her mocking a stutterer.

Let's cut the shit -- this is who they are, to the cellular level, to the very atom of their being. It would be far more surprising if Lara Trump, or her diaper-wearing rapist of a father-in-law, or her scumbag husband and his troll siblings, or any single person in the toxic orbit of Planet Orange had even a second worth of acting like adults fit for the positions they're in, and just said, "You know, I respect VP Biden's long record of service to our country, but here are just a few reasons why I think you'll agree that we have something better in mind."

They don't not only because they can't, because they're incapable of functioning on that previously base level of acceptable behavior, not only because they really have no policies at all besides legalizing theft and plunder for themselves, but because it's the only thing their idiot kayfabe crowd responds to.

They don't give a fuck about health care or foreign policy or any of that. They just want to make sure you know that they shit on everything you believe in, everyone you hold any measure of respect for, every principle your parents and grandparents fought for.

We'll have forgotten this within twelve hours. It won't even be the thousandth most repulsive thing said by these fuckers between now and the election, or even now and the fourth of July. The important thing to remember is that this is not a gaffe or a slip-up or an inadvertent revelation of what they're really thinking. This is what they openly think at all times. They don't try to hide it. The mediots should stop pretending that they do. It's not a mistake.

Newt Gingrich Is Right

But not for the reasons he thinks he is.

I mean, come on. This is almost too easy. The very first point of response from anyone -- corporate mediots, Democratic politicians, panel-show assholes -- should be to point out that the last "client" Starr and Doucheowitz teamed up to defend was a dirtbag who pimped underage girls to "elite" predators (one of which was Doucheowitz himself), and ended up suicided on the floor of a jail cell, the case swept under the rug by the son of the man who originally hired said sex predator as a teacher at a private high school.

We really need some new writers. This script is making daytime soap operas look like Errol Morris documentaries. At this rate, it's going to turn out that one of these animals has a long-lost twin.

It's impossible to keep all your energies focused all the time on keeping all the fuckery straight with these turds. There's too much of it going, constantly and everywhere.

So, for example, while one might rail against whatever jabbering bluster Dear Leader is up to any given day, one might also contain the awareness that enablers such as McConnell and Graham are actually worse on a practical level, as they have completely sold out their country in service to a madman. They are in a governmental body that was literally written into the Constitution, which they pretend to revere, as a balancing entity against an executive branch run amok.

And we've had scumbags and hypocrites oozing through the hallowed halls of gubmint forever, even before Preston Brooks nearly beat Charles Sumner to death on the Senate floor for daring to suggest that the continuation of slavery was a moral crime that a free country could no longer abide. (I love the fact that despite resigning and immediately being re-elected, Brooks died less than a year after attacking Sumner, at the ripe old age of 37. Fuck that piece of shit.) There have always been worthless people -- and by that I literally mean people who are completely worthless just as human beings -- in positions of power. Obviously.

But you would hard-pressed to find any politician in the modern era as ethically bereft and morally corrupt as Newt Gingrich. The man is fucking scum to the very bone, and he systematically laid the path for his party to mutate and pervert language and talking points in order to undermine competent governance and hand it all over to equally corrupt oligarchs.

He's made the world an objectively worse place by actions over the years, and has no remorse at all -- indeed, he's enjoying himself way more than anyone with his track record should. And that doesn't even touch on his grotesque personal life. One can only hope that his quiet moments are anything but, when the lights are low and the rest of the world is asleep, and Newt has time to reflect on who and what he really is.

That is all he is, all he's ever been, and it will be his legacy when he finally boards his trolley to hell. Keep it in mind the next time some simpering corporate media hack has that bastard on to peddle more of his evil tripe. Might as well dig up Dahmer and Gacy for their side of things, for what it's worth.

Read the Transcript

It wasn't a transcript, it was a "memorandum of conversation" (aka MEMCON), as we all know, but Dear Leader has refused to admit, thanks to plenty of water-carrying from the complaisant corporate media.

(It seems like a small point, but it's not a small point at all -- in a responsible media ecosystem, every single time an article quoted him saying the word transcript, it should have been pointed out that that word means something, and that the document in question literally had a stamp on it saying NOT A VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT. Okay? For the millionth time, shit like that illustrates how we got here.)

But one of the key bits from the MEMCON was when Trump said to Ukrainian President Zelenskiy, in reference to US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, "She's going to go through some things." Now, thanks to the cooperation of one of Giuliani's -- and by extension, Trump's; don't think for a second that he wasn't greenlighting this thing -- goons, we know that all options were on the table, that Yovanovitch got the hell out of Kyiv just in time.

At minimum, they were plotting to rough her up physically; i.e., assault and battery. But they were clearly prepared to go to the wall on her. This is a goddamned United States Ambassador we're talking about here. No wonder the FSO corps cleared out so quickly. They knew best case scenario, they'd just be undermined in their stations, or rerouted to some shithole until they were too demoralized to continue.

And if they got too inconvenient, it turns out, these demented old boozehounds were ready to go full John Le Carré on them. All of it points to a scheme to influence or even take over the Ukraine energy sector, which serves as an intermediary for Russia supplying the rest of Europe, as well as a lucrative producer in its own right.

If the Democrats aren't already working on the next set of articles of impeachment, between this, the emoluments, and plenty of other things, they deserve to lose. This is a war, very much in the Clausewitzian "politics by other means" sense, and they need to be prepared to see it through, full measures.

At least now you have an idea of exactly why none of these treasonous scumbags wants to testify. Imagine what the rest of the iceberg looks like.

Operation Golden Chicken

If you had a nickel for everyone who got suckered into thinking that Cadet Bonespurs was really going to start a full-on shooting war with Iran, you could retire young. First and most importantly, bullies don't start fights with people who can actually fight back. Big part of the bully ethos.

Secondly, how many times do we have to do this dance before the endlessly credulous media saps and their panels of hacks figure it out? He did this with North Korea and Venezuela, shaking his tiny wiener at them for a while before putting it back in his pants and declaring either victory or love. The dictators of those countries are still in power, doing exactly what they were doing before numbnuts decided to splash his brilliance all over them.

It's helpful to consider the back story to all this, as well as the current ramifications of the pattern of actions with respect to Iran. It hasn't been all that long since Princess Snowflake and Big Daddy were in bed with Qassem Soleimani's Iran Republican Guard (IRGC), laundering money to build a hotel in Baku that -- get this -- never got built.

Most people who hear the phrase "money laundering" go all Office Space and start running for a dictionary definition. To be fair, the practical points of money laundering are intentionally difficult to follow. But it's essentially based on fairly simple premises -- find a cash-heavy business; falsify transactions; create nested shell entities as much as possible. Lather, rinse, repeat.

In the case of Trump Tower Baku, since high-end construction is particularly susceptible to cost overruns (or "cost overruns"), it's easy to run money through there, and chalk it up to a number of things -- materials, labor, overseas accounting practices. Think of The Sopranos scenes where they covered the "no-show" jobs on the construction sites -- a bunch of goombahs sitting around making sure minimal (if any) work gets done, possibly waiting for someone to bring a satchel full of illicit cash to move through the process. They can launder more money if the building is finished, sure, but they can move plenty of cash even if it never gets built.

We've all made fun of Trump's many and varied branding failures -- steaks, vodka, board games, magazines, airline, and so on. Then there's the actual business, the Taj Mahal casino, that he famously bankrupted.

It would be more surprising than not to find proof that all of the above failures were in fact not failures, but simply vehicles for laundering mob cash. Trump's dad got him in with the Italian mob early on, and when they all went to prison or got killed, and the Russians took over in NYC, Fat Donny got in bed with them. It didn't matter if Trump Vodka took off or not -- in fact, it was probably better off for all that it got written off as another speculative failure.

In his 2016 book, David Cay Johnston chronicles the account of how, when the Taj Mahal was bleeding cash and Donald was facing foreclosure, Fred Trump bought $3 million worth of chips to keep him afloat. That's money laundering.

(Incidentally, if you haven't read that book, you really should. It's a very quick read, and it ably shows how Trump's rise to power was greased not by the decades of mendacious fundamentalism of the Republicans, but rather by associations with Democratic politicians, corrupt state gaming boards, and most of all, a gullible NYC media that, as Jimmy Breslin noted long ago, could be bought with a simple return phone call.)

So he's more than corrupt enough to allow himself to have a "business association" with the suddenly psychotic Soleimani. (Don't get me wrong -- Soleimani was certainly not a good guy, responsible for many deaths, but somehow Trump manages to express his love regularly for openly, prolifically murderous despots such as Putin, Kim, and the Filipino thug Duterte, who brags about his extrajudicial slaughter.)

By the same token, Trump is also corrupt enough not only to rent out American troops to the Saudis as mercenaries, he's even craven enough to boast about it. So what's the going rate there, and whose bank account gets the payments? (Certainly not the troops themselves; they are free to fight while their stateside families live on food stamps in base housing. Oo-rah!) What's the payout when someone dies? Does it depend on whether the death was violent, or an accident, or illness or heat stroke once the summer comes? Does the family get some of that sweet Saudi cash then, or is it all for Jared? How does Erik Prince feel about having competition for his services?

Seriously, if we're so energy independent, why are we literally renting American troops to a bunch of inbred petrocrats in the country which spawned the monsters that perpetrated the worst attack on American soil? Anybody in our librul corporate media want to ask them that, or are they just gonna sit there and encourage the Secretary of Defense -- 'scuse me, the acting SecDef, we no longer have an actual functioning gubmint with accountable professionals in identifiable positions of employment -- to lie to them some more about just how many of our embassies Qassem Soleimani was planning to attack?

(Personally, my money is on all of them. It may take a few more days for them to ratchet the lie up that far, but they're nothing if not persistent.)

Compare and contrast with a couple months ago, when a Saudi military trainee murdered three people at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, while two other Saudis filmed the incident, and all Mister Tough Guy did about that was apologize on behalf of the Saudi princes. Yeah, real fucking American hero there.

So this is where Genius Q. Dealmaker's brilliant, once-in-a-lifetime negotiation skills have gotten us -- instead of having the Iranians under a flawed yet effective deal that pushed their nuclear ambitions out to 2030 at the earliest, there is now no deal. And of course they have every incentive to pursue and finish a nuclear weapon as soon as possible, and their previously somewhat restive population is now firmly behind the mullahs.

All because that soggy, senile bastard couldn't handle the possibility that BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA, A DAMNED KNEE-GROW, had managed to coordinate a better deal than he, Fuckface John Von Clownstick, Genius At Work, and the smartest, bravest, handsomest human ever to grace the earth with its tiny footprint, could have done. The fact is that any single member of our intrepid media could, way back in 2015 when this was all just a big joke, simply asked Mister Dealmaker to take us through just one (1) example of his countless masterful deals, and let the camera roll and the clown car empty itself, maybe we could have avoided this.

But we are where we are, and we're going wherever we're going. Just because he probably doesn't have the balls or brains to get into a boner-fied invasion of Iran doesn't mean that he isn't just monstrous enough to, say, nuke one of their cities to make an example of them. He's already spooked them into accidentally shooting down a passenger jet, and you can bet that he won't lose a wink of sleep over the dead. It's beyond arguing whose fault it was -- he literally does not care. At all.

Nixon had his "madman theory," but the subtext was always that he was actually a rational actor, but simply unwilling to publicly be seen prematurely taking anything off the table as a negotiation point. Trump is the other way around, pinballing wildly from one reaction to the next, coming off like a more cartoonish Lethal Weapon Mel Gibson, where you're not really sure what he wants or what all he's willing to do to get it.

What would be a sensible rationale for Iran to sign on to a deal with the very person who wiped his ass with the previous deal they had in place? What sane person even bothers discussing anything with someone like that? What's in it for them? Not getting nuked? Might want to check with yer boss Pootie-Poot then, chief; who does Trump suppose sold those centrifuges to Tehran in the first place?

On top of it all, the Iraqi government has urged that we remove all our troops from their country, to which Commander Babyfingers wasted no time in responding, fuck you, pay me, making us now an occupying force, an unwanted guest.

It's about to get worse, probably in multiple ways, in multiple areas, and this jabbering buffoon can only see how he and his scummy family and friends can wet their beaks from the mayhem. Since nearly half of us learned nothing from the Cheney regime, it's probably what we deserve.

Epistemic Closure

There's an interesting juxtaposition to be observed between these two articles:  one in the Wall Street Journal, the other in Counterpunch (not that I read Counterpunch, but this turned out to be a somewhat noteworthy one to stumble across).

It takes a tedious corporate appendage like the WSJ to grant op-ed time to an asshole who doesn't even have the good graces to be ashamed of himself for insisting that he "deserves" an exemption from the tariffs he supports. Fuck that guy, and fuck his employees. I don't what kinds of drugs you have to take to even start growing balls that fucking huge, but there are probably side effects. They got what they voted for. I don't see what the problem is.

As for the rural Ohioans caught up in the "shit-life syndrome," as it were, gee I wish I knew what to to tell you, folks. There are a lot of things wrong in this country, but two consistent verities are:  one, public education is not only free but mandatory, twelve years' worth, in fact; two, even dying shit-hole towns have free public libraries.

Get this -- you can walk in, pick out a book that contains information about something that interests you -- maybe even info that increases your skill set and enhances your employability -- and take it home for a couple weeks and read the motherfucker. You can do that over and over again, as many times as you like. Imagine that.

Those things are free, it should be reiterated. There is also, I'm told, a ton of free info on just about any subject you can think of, on this thing called The Internet. Turns out it's not just for jerking off and playing online slots, there are other uses for this not free but relatively inexpensive entity. Who knew?

Look, I do have some compassion for these people. They are definitely in a bad way. The problems in these small towns get compounded because almost all the smart kids who don't have family businesses to inherit get the fuck out of there as quickly as possible. They head off to college and they never look back. That leaves a serious imbalance of intelligence and talent. So the same handful of relatively successful people in the town just run things for themselves for generations, the losers keep losing, and the vicious cycle gets perpetuated.

This passage is something else, though:

I talked to Trump voters in 2016, and many of them felt that Trump was not a nice person, even a jerk, but their fantasy was that he was one of those rich guys with a big ego who needed to be a hero. Progressives who merely mock this way of thinking rather than create a strategy to deal with it are going to get four more years of Trump.

So let me see if we have this straight -- you make the time to stay informed and engaged on the issues and the candidates, you give a shit about something other than what's right in front of your nose and benefits you, and this is your reward? Being warned over and over again by these fucking op-ed writers that now you must pay attention to the special needs of the opioid-soaked denizens of Slapdick, Ohio? Cater to their goddamned fantasies?

My English is not so good, so let me be certain to phrase this correctly:  Fuck. You. Oh, and fuck them, too. Fuck them especially. You want another four years of winning, have at it, guys. I am not going to read the cultural tea leaves to search for which putatively Democratic candidate has just the right amount of "unconventional" voodoo to placate the fist-shaking codgers of the haunted diners of Pennsyltucky.

It is everyone's job as citizens of a free republic (hurrr) to pay attention and vote accordingly. It is expressly not our job to find a better brand of pro-wrestling kayfabe, in order to soothe the jangled nerves of hapless morons who couldn't be bothered to do the most basic elements of their jobs as citizens. They hate welfare until it's their dipshit kid getting it. They complain about immigrants, even as they need them to build their houses, kill their chickens, clean their hotel rooms, muck out the dairies. Who the fuck do they think is doing all that scut work for them, the fucking Keebler elves?

Again, we're all beyond tired of seeing and hearing this ridonkulous, braying jackass sucking out every molecule of oxygen left in the public life of this dying dinosaur of a nation. I'm pretty sure both of my middle fingers are permanently sprained from flipping off my teevee and computer screens scores of times daily.

The Counterpunch guy is right that one would think that a party supposedly in the pocket of the Hollyweird creative claque would do at least an adequate job of conveying a quick, effective message that maybe, just maybe, the Lyin' King doesn't follow through on his "promises," that they've been suckered yet again, and that maybe the least they could do for their country is either grow the fuck up or just stay home on election day.

But that day is still ten months away, and Dear Leader has provided plenty of fodder for mashups and compilations. Whether our wondrous corporate media will get their shit together as well remains to be seen. Maybe they could start figuring out what their job is, and do it already. I don't think any of us are holding our breath.

The two articles, coming from opposite ends of the economic spectrum, strike similar chords. And the correct response to each is the same:  This is what you wanted. He told you he was going to do all these things, and he's doing them. He's not sneaking anything in on you, he was quite open and upfront about all of this. If you're tired of all the winning, then take that into the voting booth with you. Otherwise, kindly go fuck yourselves. This is what you wanted. This is what you get.

These people seem to think that threatening the rest of us with four more years of Dear Leader is more of a threat to us than it is to them. And while four more years of this destructive, mendacious behavior will no doubt accelerate the fall of the empire, and expose many more millions here and around the world to grievous harm from war, climate change, environmental depredation, disease, and deaths from despair, the fact of the matter is that these people are cutting their own throats, not ours.

(Demographically speaking. I am well aware that there are plenty of folks on the edge who showed up and voted for Butter Emails, and are getting shafted. That sucks. But we are talking in the statistical aggregate here.)

They're the ones who are going to suffer the most, and the idea that we're supposed to stand there with sorrowful, empathetic looks and plead with them, No, please don't! is just too much. I don't want them to keep killing themselves, mind you, but I simply don't have the time or inclination to keep futilely trying to talk them out of their tree. For one, I don't negotiate at gunpoint, which is what these quasi-journalistic plaints and threats feels like after a while. I've never done it in real life, and I'm not about to start in the political abstract. That way lies failure and frustration.

But more importantly, the fact of the matter is that the gun is not really pointed at my head to begin with. They're pointing it at themselves, saying Stop or I'll shoot!. Well, okay then, don't let me stop you, hoss. Reminds me of that old Polack joke where the guy comes home and finds his wife in bed with another man. Distraught, ol' Stan grabs a gun from the drawer and holds it to his own head. The wife starts laughing. Stan says, Don't laugh, bitch, you're next!

Look. When in doubt, always keep this in mind:  there are 325 million people in this country. Some of them are idiots. Some of them are assholes. Some are both. That is not a political observation, just the law of averages. Also, as George Carlin said, consider the average American, and remember that by the definition of that word, half of 'em aren't even that smart.

There are never any demands made of them to get their shit together and fly right. It's always, always put upon the people who actually pay attention and give a shit, to compromise and make the supposed move toward the middle, while they get to take yet another step back away, so you have to keep trying to meet them in the new middle.

It's a ridiculously transparent tactic, and I don't know why people keep falling for it. It's bullshit, pure and simple. Maybe they need the old "Lucy with the football" graphic to get the fucking picture already. Or maybe, per Upton Sinclair, they get paid to not understand how it really is.

These constant entreaties to dumb yourself down to their level, to do something stupid or self-destructive to make them feel better about their own stupidity and self-destructiveness -- I have no interest in any of it, any more than I care about people who were stupid enough to get rolled by something as preposterous as "Trump University."

You know? Maybe they need to stop being fucking morons. Maybe life has to snap one off in their asses before they get the message. Maybe they still don't get the message, even after the fact. I don't know what to tell them. I do know that I am going to do everything I can to insulate my own life from the consequences of bad decisions made by dumb, toxic people.

Maybe that's really all any of us can do in the end. I'm not going house-to-house, like some goddamned Jehovah's Witness, trying to convince my neighbors to register to vote and do their damned job as citizens. Life's too short to wipe everyone's ass for them. If they can't be bothered, then I have better things to do, and I'm going to spend that time reinforcing my own ability to withstand their repulsive indifference.

It's a cheap parlor trick designed to look like cogent political strategy, this idea that we have to placate "real 'murkins" in order to win. It is a terrible lie built on an obvious fallacy. It is the attempt to commodify magical thinking and pig-blind stubbornness, things that by their nature cannot be predicted or controlled. This is all because the plutocrats and oligarchs who are gleefully wrecking this country cannot be persuaded to part with even a couple percent off their ill-gotten pelf, for the betterment of the country whose systems and institutions have benefited them enormously.

That's your real problem, right there, not trying to figure out how to second-guess the Cletus vote. The sooner these dopey scriveners get wise to that and get on the same virtual page, the better chance we'll have of getting through this more or less intact. As always, don't count on it.

Southern Man

I know this will shock the pantaloons right offa you, but get this -- the prison system in the "deep south" states is essentially a legalized version of what they had beaten out of them 150 years ago. Free labor for the private profit of the aristocracy. There's nothing more to it.

Willie Nash's ridiculous twelve-year sentence for possessing a cell phone that the guards never took from him in the first place is just a pretext (and probably a deliberate one) to keep him for another decade of free scut work. Think about it next time you have one o' them there Popeye's chicken sammiches people are stabbing each other over.

Face it -- you live in a country where corporate scumbags and their scumbag shareholders have clear vested interests in kidnapping people and forcing them to work in horrific conditions for decades at a time. The for-profit carceral state not only needs to be ended, it should never have been allowed to start in the first place.

Neil Peart 1952-2020

The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect
So hard to earn, so easily burned
In the fullness of time
A garden to nurture and protect
-- Rush, The Garden

I remember the first time I heard Rush very clearly. It was 1981, and I was a 14-year-old snot-nosed punk who had "discovered" Frank Zappa's Sheik Yerbouti and Black Sabbath's Paranoid just a year or so prior, introducing me to completely different noises to what I had been used to (basically country, AM pop, and '70s soul). I had that feeling you have when you're young and think you've got the inside track on something, like no one else was hip to it. That's part of the fun of being a teenager -- you have no clue yet just how clueless you really are about everything.

Anyway, so I had an older "cool" cousin who lived at the top of the wellhouse on my grandparents' dairy. He helped with milking the herd in exchange for room and board, and occasionally liked to head into town to tie one on and look for strange. He had an unfortunate knack for getting caught heading back home from the bar, and after a few repeat performances the county decided to provide him room and board for a few months.

So I asked him if I could borrow a few of his records while he was away, as I had gotten a new JC Penney stereo for Christmas, but had nothing to play on it, nor a job to buy records. (The following school year, as a sophomore, I began making money at school, selling term papers and skimming off a football pool I ran. Capitalism!)

I borrowed maybe eight records, paying special attention to the double live sets he had. Of those, three were soon to be permanently seared into my brain:  Rush's All the World's a Stage, Zeppelin's Song Remains the Same movie soundtrack, and Jethro Tull's Live Bursting Out. Each of these albums expanded my listening horizons in various ways, opening my ears to new musical ideas.

You Say You Want a Resolution

When I turned fifty years of age in 2017, I had to face up to some hard truths, and ask myself some difficult questions.

This was not some clichéd "midlife crisis" thing, or maybe it was; since I don't happen to be the "get a red sports car and a girlfriend half my age" type, it just took a more mundane form. But there it was all the same. And it had actually started a few years earlier, in the spring of 2014.