Monkey Business

There's no better gravy for the soul than delusion. -- A.R. Moxon, The Revisionaries

Just when you're ready to write off the Times, they go and surprise you by doing something useful. Obviously, there's nothing new here, no surprises to be found. If you're the sort of credulous sap who ever thought Donald Trump paid his fair share, or has ever even made a truly honest buck, I have several bridges of various sizes to sell you.

Nor will the article change any minds; anyone still claiming to be "undecided" is either a true booger-eating, window-licking dipshit, or is cynically pretending for some reason to not just flat-out confess that they will be voting for the nazi grifter.

But the article is still an interesting read, and it does have use as far as confirming what everyone already knew or at least assumed. Perhaps the only thing mildly surprising is the confirmation of just how singularly bad at "business" Trump really is.

I mean, think about it:  he inherited a portfolio of trust funds and Manhattan real estate worth over $400 million; screwed his siblings out of their cut of the old man's money; made somewhere in the neighborhood of another $400 million from his stupid reality teevee bullshit; chiseled contractors and business partners in every venture he ever undertook; laundered bratva money for years; and after all that he's still broke.

That is truly an epic level of incompetence, folks. That's a Michael Jackson level of incompetence. Trump may not have had to pay off his side pieces as much as Jacko had to pay the kids he fondled, but still -- if you're paying $130k for a piece of ass, you're paying too much, I don't care if sparks shoot out of that ass.

But to blow through nearly a billion dollars of essentially found money, it's just staggering to comprehend, moreso for someone who at the very least could have paid many times over for investment advisors who could have easily helped him cover his nut and still live like a concussed rapper.

Forbes' Dan Alexander has done some terrific writing on Trump's various financial chicanery, and here he does a deep-dive thread into Trump's debt and assets. Fun stuff. It is hard to believe that anyone with real money would get involved with a huckster like Trump.

Certainly Trump is exactly the sort of dickhead Dorothy Parker had in mind when she said, "if you want to know what God thinks of money, look at the people He gives it to." Even by that standard, though, Trump is a special case. Even a dimbulb like Paris Hilton seems to be able to live the life she wants and still remain solvent.

As difficult as it is to get to that "net worth" level for people who aren't born to it, it's very simple to keep it and increase it, frequently by doing absolutely nothing at all. It was shown several years ago how, if Trump had done nothing more than invest his inheritance in a standard money-market fund indexed to the S&P 500, he'd be worth over $10 billion.

But you can't put a number on his pathological need to work on his weird, tragic daddy issues in public.

The Most Tedious Game

Interesting take on the the Q-ball "phenomenon." Like just about everything else, it makes sense in a weird way that this dopey, disjointed viral narrative -- which really doesn't even qualify as a conspiracy theory, since such things generally are used to explain things that have already occurred -- might really be the result of gamifying garden-variety internet pranksterism.

If there aren't already, there will likely be plenty of behavioral psychology studies and books regarding this sort of thing. This transcends the "is the dress blue or white" / "Laurel-Yanni" types of pop-culture takes from a few years ago. Nor is it quite the "epistemic closure" phenomenon that's immolated the political culture, such as it is, of this sweltering husk of a nation.

It's not even about the nature of "belief," since even cults are more or less consistent in the general arcs of their tenets, where the Q-balls just pile things up higher, as the last layer of revelations gradually prove to be untrue. Some of it may be the "inside knowledge" that conspiracy theories generally claim to impart, but even that doesn't adequately explain how people get tethered to shifting, increasingly loopy narratives.

It's really about how people get disenfranchised and disconnected from their corrupt political system, and so they construct a parallel system that operates in an alternate reality with its own peculiar mythos. Some of this is understandable -- the established system is such a transparent racket, so shamelessly awash in dark money from the sociopathic billionaires who really run this popsicle stand, it only bothers to be slightly responsive on whatever hot-button issue is currently distracting the rubes from their pockets being emptied. That is by design.

So which is really the more harmful -- in terms of actual, practical, real-world effects on ordinary people -- conspiracy theory:  the fanciful troll-narrative of Hitlery and her assorted minions running a cannibal pedophile ring from one of Uncle Jeff's secret islands in the Bahamas; or the idea that severe, ongoing wealth inequality can be comprehensively addressed by, say, modest tax breaks and loan prioritization for minority-owned small businesses?

Fuck NPR

Look at this ridiculous bullshit posturing as news. Fuck these people, and everyone who still supports it. Boycott them all. Demand better.

Ruthless

We all knew the day was coming, we just didn't know when. The only surprise is that it wasn't, you know, on Election Day or something like that.

Hell, it could have been a week after Election Day, and Moscow Mitch and his little dog Leningrad Lindsey would have bulled through a lame-duck appointment of whatever forty-year-old FedSoc shithead they were instructed to.

The nihilist side of me wants it to happen, wants this whole rotted husk of a nation to find out the hard way what happens not just when Roe is repealed, but voting rights, employee rights, fucking Griswold gets overturned.

As repulsive as the pelf-grubbing Republicons and their moron base and the psychotic billionaires who rent them are, I reserve the greater measure of my contempt for the Democratic voters who couldn't be bothered to show up for the 2010 and 2014 midterms. Forty-one percent turnout in 2010, just over thirty-six percent in 2014.

If you are one of the folks that couldn't be bothered to show up for those votes, but now, now you're concerned, I cordially invite you to go fuck yourself in the neck with a rusty chainsaw. Because you're one of the ones to blame.

Liberals and Democrats talk a good game about "taking action" and all, and inevitably it becomes some lame, meaningless, purely performative street-protest bullshit. People have been protesting all over the country, all summer long, and they have nothing to show for it. Feel free to prove me wrong, show me some tangible outcomes from all that good trouble.

Now, if you want to take some real action and maybe have a sliver of hope to accomplish something, figure out how much money you have to spare, and go here and donate to as many Senate campaigns as you can. I'm going to donate $25-100 to each of the following:

• Sara Gideon (ME)
• Jaime Harrison (SC)
• Mark Kelly (AZ)
• Cal Cunningham (NC)
• Theresa Greenfield (IA)
  
• Steve Bullock (MT)
• Jon Ossoff (GA-1)
  
• Barbara Bollier (KS)
  
• Al Scott (AK)
• Amy McGrath (KY)

I wish I had more to donate. I wish candidates like Abby Broyles (OK) and M.J. Hegar (TX) had more of a fighting chance, because Jim Inhofe and John Cornyn are two of the biggest gaping assholes on the planet, not just in the Senate. But it is, as they say far too often, what it is, and unfortunately it becomes a self-reinforcing dynamic of putting the money where it's going to be most effective -- races that are closer precisely because people have been donating more money to them.

But I think seven or maybe eight of the ten candidates listed above have decent-to-strong chances of winning their respective races, and that's enough to flip the Senate back to a solid Democratic majority. Even five would be enough to do the trick.

And then they have to act, decisively and aggressively, with the fundamental understanding that even in the instance of a blowout victory, this is their last best chance to punish the traitors across the aisle, people who sold out their country for a bag of nickels. No more "norms" or "rules" or polite suggestions about how things should be, but a cold recognition of how they are, what they've become.

Pack the court, blow up the filibuster, ram through as many judges as possible, dig up every punitive procedure you can muster and ram them straight up the GOP's collective poop-chute, no lube, no mercy, no pretenses of collegiality. This is war, and if Democratic leadership is not prepared to lead it and fight it as such, they too can find honest work. Enough dithering and hand-wringing. Fight hard or fuck off already.

Churchill famously said that when you're going through hell, keep going, and so we should and must, if we want to leave anything of value behind for our children and grandchildren. But with that comes, once again, the need to see things for how they really are, rather than how we think they should be. It might be a blowout in the other direction. It might end up close enough to cheat and steal and weasel their way through to an illegitimate victory, but one that nonetheless carries with it the very real trappings of power.

And then you know, without any doubt or uncertainty, how things really are. If there really are enough people who don't care, or can't be bothered to show up -- or there really are as many or more of them than there are of us -- well, now you know.

And you should plan accordingly. Until then, you should expect more of yourselves, more of your fellow citizens, more of the people you send to DC to represent you. No more bullshit, no more excuses.

Give till it hurts. Make sure you can vote, and then show up and do so. Don't worry about the goons and closet-cases with their Dear Leader swag and flapping gums. They can yammer all they want, but they can't physically prevent you from walking through that door and casting your lot.

And then you can at least say you did what you could. And get your documentation in order, because you might find yourself with a sudden need to vacate the Republic of Gilead. Look around you, and see if you can tell yourself that I'm exaggerating even a little bit.

Turd Mentality

Come 2030, only the rats will be happy. -- Stephen King, 1922

The Holocaust is not only history, but warning. -- Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

One hears the clatter, as the corporate media valiantly attempt to revert to their natural horse-race stasis, about the elusive "shy" Trump voter, that numinous unicorn of frustrated pollsters and halfwit pen-jockeys. This is the person who, when contacted by pollsters, supposedly claims as independent -- or even, amazingly, undecided.

I just can't decide between the kindly, ancient lifelong corporatist, or the burbling lunatic avatar of full-throated white supremacy. Neither campaign has sufficiently marketed itself to my delicate sensibilities.

Considering that the median Trump voter has, in its practically infinite guises -- construction worker, harried soccer mom, fist-shaking codger at Wichita Stuckey's -- embodied one common trait, that of incoherent yet sanctimonious fury, it beggars belief that there is an abundant cohort of like-minded individuals who just don't want to confess their devotion anonymously over the phone for fifteen seconds.

Perhaps the "shy" one, like the elusive sasquatch, exists but quietly, secretly, perpetually crouched in a furtive state, appearing only rarely and at random to adorn the fuzzy freeze-frames of hooch-addled mountaineers -- not to mention the credulous rubes of the aforementioned corporate media, very nearly as duped as the noise-addled rage-monkeys they so dutifully chronicle.

Never mind; the ultimate point of such leprechaun-hunting is really to keep it close, keep those ad buy rates as high as possible. Money is the blood of such things, and every campaign season is a newer iteration of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Between greed, laziness, and an unshakable institutional impulse to keep Democrats on a hook while letting their opponents' worst excesses go lightly covered, the practical outcome is to keep liberals and Democrats (to the extent that those actually overlap) always on their heels, always unable to push forward with any real force and/or clarity that might undermine the ongoing plutocratic insurgency -- which, after all, underwrites the entire tedious theatrical exercise.

If there is such a thing as a "shy" Trumpkin, maybe the reason they're keeping it quiet is because they know what they are and what they support, and the secret they're really hiding is that they're embarrassed of it. Which they should have been a couple years ago at most. Maybe they just don't want their friends to know what they are.

I doubt it. I know which of my friends and relatives still support him, we just don't talk about that anymore. It's actually pretty easy to shut down -- once they start bringing up the perfidy of the libturd media argle-bargle, all you have to do is respond, "You don't need to watch the media. All you need to do is watch him unedited, unabridged, unexpurgated on YouTube. There are hundreds of videos to choose from. Pick one at random. Make it interesting with a bottle of liquor. Drink every time he says something stupid and/or untrue. You'll be dead of alcohol poisoning by the twenty-minute mark."

You'd be surprised -- or perhaps you wouldn't -- at how quickly they change the subject, or at least the idiotic "fake news" tack of their dead-horse excuse for an argument.

A functional "opposition" media would be ringing Noel Casler's phone off the fucking hook. Aside from a People (of all things) article a couple years ago, I'm unaware of any major media entity that has talked to him. Certainly not CNN or MSNBC or the networks, these supposedly nefarious, scurrilous bastards who take any and every opportunity to crucify Orange Jebus every chance they get with their entirely made-up attacks.

You can't even chalk that version of institutional cowardice up to the marketplace. Are you fucking kidding? Casler @'s every single one of his targets, every time. Any responsible journamalist would at least run down the allegations, which are numerous and colorful -- and true.

The people that we're friends with or related to are generally not a uniform bunch, unless you grew up in a highly insular, conformist community. But most of us have some sort of balance of these various people in our lives. And we bond with them over different things -- music, cars, food, and occasionally politics is a conversational spice in all that, but generally not a qualifying factor or a disqualifying one.

A reasonable rule of thumb might be that the degree to which someone is eager to befriend or defriend someone for purely political reasons is likely to be directly proportional to your own depth of political fervor. Either that or the other person has become such an insufferable pain in the ass, they don't talk about anything else anymore, which is just exhausting these days. Looks like the ol' #TrumpPlague showed up just in time, eh?

I think what we're finding is that we've always been able to "agree to disagree" over usual, normal differences of policy preferences:  taxes, guns, education, blondes vs. brunettes, etc. And now those days are gone and we're not quite sure how to handle an increasingly volatile impasse.

But what you find when you read these countless anecdotes about people who "just can't even" anymore with their elderly parents, their co-workers, their Fakebook friends, whatever -- it's not really the political specifics that drives the problem. It's that people who live in different realities don't really have all that much to talk about anymore.

I mean, there are some basic principles in the mix as well -- for example, I happen to think rather strongly that the chief executive of this country ought not to be a rapist, an boastful pervert, a shameless asshole, a pathological liar, and/or a clownish moron. These would be foundational for me even if things were going well, though I could certainly be flexible on those ideals if, for example, such a person also managed to resolve some or all of the many dire crises facing this hollowed-out husk of a nation.

But they're not going well, and a big part of that is because of all those vile traits. By way of contrast, one could also be at least somewhat forgiving of current circumstances if said chief executive were kind, honest, intelligent, empathetic, strategic, and made even a modest good-faith effort at resolving some of these crises. But as we're seeing, character really is destiny. It does matter.

And we can tell ourselves it's just because we're all too polarized or propagandized or whatever, but the daily ingestion of this garbage political culture we're all immersed in has this as yet another in a long list of consequences. The contradictions have heightened, and it turns out that how you view all these polarizing events that tumble through our collective view every day or so clarify how you view the world in general, what's "real" and what isn't.

I don't know what to make of someone who sees Trump as competent or qualified for any job. His behavior would have gotten him fired from mop-up duty at a porn theater by now. More seriously, try to imagine a single company anywhere -- even a company that publicly slobbers over him -- giving him any sort of real job.

I'm not bullshitting here. Here's a challenge to consider:  that My Pillow asshole, Lindell? If Trump loses the election, I fuckin' dare that chump to give Trump any sort of actual job duty, anywhere in his company -- production, shipping, sales, accounting, finance. Anything. I defy the most Trump-eyed pelf-grubber out there to put their filthy money where their mouths are, and offer him an actual job that creates measurable value for that company.

It won't happen because Trump is a doddering, worthless piece of shit who's never been good at anything except stealing and lying, and his billionaire butt-buddies are slightly more adept turds of a feather. Lying and hypocrisy are their real currencies. The only thing Mike Lindell or Stan Kroenke or Charles Koch or any of these greedy bastards care about is having more, and you having less.

So of course they love Fat Donnie. But even if he were twenty or forty years younger, they'd never give him any sort of real job, one that involved work. At most they'd cut him a check to do a promo commercial for them. But again, I mean actual fucking work, something that takes skill, focus, ability. Something more than just delegating to minions.

And that reflects a certain way I view the world, and my expectations of the other people who share it. I don't know what to make of someone who saw any of Tuesday's clown hall event with George Snuffleupagus, and came away thinking we're in good hands. I don't know what to make of someone who is so brain-damaged that after five years of watching Trump's incessant prattling bullshit, they still think he's qualified to pick his own drug-decayed nose.

I do know that there aren't any more arguments or debates to be had.

Twenty Points Down

The popular phrase in preventing the smug assumption that Biden will beat the evil clown in a landslide, even though he clearly should beat that failed attempt at a functioning human being by seventy points and five hundred electoral votes, is to act like you're way behind in the polls. Ignore the polls. Don't get lulled into complacency by months of leading in the polls. And so forth.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it's easy to forget that people have been repeating that mantra for months with regard to a Biden-Trump matchup specifically, and they've been beating themselves with it for several years in general.

And it's a great idea in general. Show up. Make sure you can show up. Don't ever get complacent again, at any level.

With that mantra in mind, combined with current circumstances and rhetoric, it is not unreasonable or unforeseeable that many people are getting concerned about the practicalities of the election itself -- counting the votes properly, abiding by the results, transferring power properly. When you've been dulling your senses for the past four years that at least a third of your fellow citizens are perfectly okay with an open slide into outright fascism, it makes sense that you might start expecting the worst.

So I get where this guy is coming from, as far as the political probabilities go, and I think we can probably be cautiously optimistic about the ultimate outcome here.

But you know, I'd drop the whole quit being so paranoid, you fucking ninnies tone there. This has been a consistent pattern throughout Trump's reign of error -- the insistence that norms and rules and process will ensure correct outcomes. And in each instance, he has proven that none of that shit matters if there's no one to enforce it, if the only side that even respects those things anymore is also the side that refuses to use every tool at their disposal to exert what little power they actually have.

It's not a paranoid pipe dream at all:  Trump has repeatedly said that any election outcome where he doesn't win is by definition illegitimate. He continues to maintain this stance. No one is challenging him on it in any meaningful way -- not his own party, not the corporate media, not the courts, nobody.

It doesn't require any sort of violent overthrow, or even a stubborn "refusal" to vacate the White House. All he has to do is what he's openly threatened to do, and what political observers across the spectrum have speculated -- declare victory early, before mail-in ballots are counted; if Biden is the winner after the mail-in count, declare those votes invalid (as he has been doing for months already); muddy the waters just enough to throw it to the courts and the individual states.

He has all those tools at his disposal. His own party has long given up challenging him on anything; he could nuke Omaha tomorrow and Ben Sasse would say, Thank you sir, may I have another?. The Democrats have made it clear that they are either completely unable or unwilling to undertake any meaningful action. They will wait and dither and agonize until it's too late.

Now, do I think all of these things will happen? Probably not, but there is definitely a non-zero chance of it. It's definitely possible.

And that's the real trick right there, the root explanation for why so many people right now have this desperate, anxious undercurrent. It's not just that Trump is a piece of shit, or that the people who work for him are scumbags, or that the corporate media are cowed by the whole circus and just want clicks. It's the realization that there are more angry idiots and toxic weirdos out there than they thought there were, and that they have real leverage now.

The rise of the QAnon cult -- an utterly ludicrous, incoherent smattering of conspiracy jabber -- is a perfect example. Imagine a group of people that spin these credulous yarns about cannibal pedo cults and sex trafficking, while they emphatically support a party featuring such well known pedophiles and enablers such as Jim Jordan, Dennis Hastert, and Roy Moore.

And Trump himself -- in countless videos hanging out partying with his good buddy (and one-time neighbor) Jeffrey Epstein, on audio and video describing how much fun he had peeping in on teenage pageant contestants getting dressed, on his own daughter being a hot piece of ass, on sexually assaulting women. Right now he's refusing to give DNA that would exonerate him on a rape charge.

And yet you have this seething, teeming, growing movement of cult loons -- maybe thousands, maybe more -- who would rather construct an insane, impossibly baroque conspiracy that has no basis in fact, than confront the very real network of people right in front of them who indulge in sexual perversion.

I know that as good libruls, we're not supposed to judge others on their sex kinks, and 99% of the time, that's a pretty good rule to follow. But in the context of their own words and beliefs, it's helpful to keep in mind:  Roger Stone is an orgiast who gets off on watching his wife get spit-roasted by strangers. Paul Manafort enjoyed setting up gangbangs for his own wife, who has some cognitive disabilities from a horse-riding accident years ago, and may not have been an entirely willing participant.

Again, we're not allowed to judge, but just consider for a moment the sort of sexual pathologies one must have for those activities. This kind of shit makes the Falwells look like rank amateurs. Now keep in mind that Stone and Manafort have been business partners for forty years. One of their earliest clients -- who they still work for to this very day -- was a young swashbuckling real-estate developer named Donald Trump.

Turds of a feather, you know? I wouldn't stay in the same room with people like Stone or Manafort for five minutes, and I led a pretty wild life for a long time. And I sure as fuck wouldn't turn to people like that for guidance or advice on running a country. These are people who have spent their adult lives weaponizing the worms in their brains in the devil's arena of political consultancy, where nothing is true and everything goes.

We have a good chance of muddling through all this ugliness, if enough people are willing to show up and stick with it. But let's not shit on the folks that are getting nervous about their prospects. They have no one they can trust anymore -- their fellow 'murkins have lost their fucking minds, the Democratic party is full of ineffectual blowhards, the Republicon party is full of flat-out traitors, the basic mechanisms of the country no longer function, and the figurehead tyrant has openly promised multiple times to fuck up the electoral process.

You don't have to be paranoid, but you might want to at least wonder what the contingency plan is for when shit starts coming down. Hoping that certain people will "do their job" when that has failed multiple times previously is barely more than nothing.

Unindicted Co-Conspirators

I get what Martin is saying here, and agree with it as far as it goes. But this election is no longer a referendum on Trump and his motley band of dumbfellas. It's a referendum on us, pure and simple. As exhausting as the toddler-in-chief's daily poop-throwing has been, at least there's a perverse core of sense in it. It's in his rational self-interest for him to do the things he does, so he can keep laundering bratva money, looting the treasury, keep his worthless ass out of prison, etc. It sucks, but at least you can draw a thread of rationality to why he does what he does.

It's the rest of the animals in the zoo -- not just the people who work for him, whether at the State Spartment or at Fox News; but the Republicon congress-weasels who worked their way into their offices back when Trump was a broke clown between trophy wives; the Democrat congress-weasels whose worst nightmare is saying anything that might be objectionable to some pearl-clutching idiot in the midwest; and most of all, the broke-ass redneck derelicts who have nothing to gain and everything to lose, and would rather cut their own throats so they can trade retarded Fakebook memes with the dopes they dropped out of high school with. That last group does it all for free.

So that's what this is really all about -- if there really are more of us than them, if we are actually gonna show up in sufficient numbers, if this country is going to be worth a plug nickel in the coming years. There is still hope for that, but not much confidence or trust. And a lot of that is because of that collective hypocrisy, stupidity, chimp-menace grin masking a pinched, ugly, brutal view of the world, people who happy to rent themselves out in order to make that view reality, people who do it just for the fun of it.

Whatever is in store, the election is the beginning of it, not the end or even a step. It's a new era, either a descent into full fascism or an attempt to repudiate it. In the latter case, it will take real work and commitment from the people we elect to office, not mealy-mouthed gestures and puling plaints.

Turns out some people really do just want to watch the world burn. Well, it's burning -- here in the State of Jefferson, I haven't seen the sky for the better part of six weeks or so. There are huge fires up and down the entire west coast, thanks to that tricksy hoax from the sneaky Chinee. And no one's doing a goddamned thing about it, so we're about to find out just how many of those "watch it all burn" folks there really are.

They All Knew

Of course Trump knew. Did anyone really need Bob Woodward to sit on that amazing revelation for seven months to come to that realization?

(I hope every meal Woodward eats for the rest of his life, food purchased with the royalty checks from these courtier journals, tastes like blood. Because it's fuckin' blood money, pure and simple. Shame on him, and shame on anyone paying a red cent for his goddamned book.)

People are going to focus on the raw moral perversion of Trump knowing back in January that the virus was real, and dangerous, and could kill a lot of people. And that's true, as far as that goes.

But here are some other things he knew, and that everyone close to him knew right from the start:

• There would be multiple opportunities to cash in along the way -- stocks for companies producing various necessities.
• The procurement system could be gamed heavily, not only for profit, but for leverage. So bootlickers like Ron DeSantis got more PPE than he needed in the first place, while Robert Kraft literally had to fly supplies in on his private jet -- in a state with a Republican governor -- so that the feds wouldn't hijack them like the cheap Goodfellas knock-offs they are.
• Every dime of aid that has gone out has been with the condition that employees forced back to illness and death have no recourse against the fiends who sent them in to die. How's that chicken taste now?
• Every key Republicon senator and house member was in on it, right from the start, cashing in every step of the way. Kelly Loeffler, Richard Burr, those are just the ones you may have heard about. Wait till someone audits Matt Gaetz's transactions, or Ted Cruz's. You just watch.
• The billionaires' club has collectively gained nearly a trillion dollars over the summer, while tens of millions of working schlubs are still out of work, facing eviction, watching the world burn around them, watching loved ones die on a remote Zoom feed.
• All of it was preventable, but it just wasn't profitable. So you cash in on the crash, then you cash in again on whatever recovery is to be had (or allowed).

Good thing the mediots are still showing up for Kayleigh's Hour of Lyin' fer Jebus. So helpful. You guys are really preserving democracy there. Try not to pull any muscles patting yourselves on the back. Remember, folks, MagaNinny came directly from CNN. Keep that in mind next time you're watching Tapper or Lemon or whoever. Zucker's shop is Satan's boiler room, period.

Good thing the Democrats are utilizing every single procedural power at their disposal  to respond to all this. Let's see -- Chuck Schumer lamented that Trump lied. Yeah, I think I saw that on the cover of No Shit, Sherlock magazine back in the fuckin' Nineties, bro-ham.

So Chuck, are you calling out your scumbag colleagues for not stopping this fucker before he killed two hundred thousand Americans? Rep. Pelosi, are we drawing up articles of impeachment for, shit, any of probably two dozen various things over the past six months? Are we impeaching Bill Barr for finally dropping any remaining pretense about being Trump's personal lawyer?

No, they're "not worth it," according to Madame Speaker. You got that? We'll be over a quarter-million dead by Thanksgiving, and they got him on tape confessing to knowing, but Trump's not worth it. Oh, and he's a rapist, and the attorney general of the country is openly bending the law to prevent his accountability, but Barr's not worth it either.

I wonder, but am reluctant to ask, just what awful deeds these would have to do in order to be worth upholding the law. I think that the day after this election, regardless of how it turns out, Democratic and liberal voters should start asking that very question of Democratic politicians. Because while they may have plausible deniability of knowing what Trump knew back when he first knew it, they've known it since then. They absolutely know now what the fuck he's capable of, and still they choose to wring their hands and chant about waiting for November.

Whether or not you know someone who's been directly affected by the #TrumpPlague (and by now, odds are that you do, at least secondarily), everyone's been affected by it. An entire year of everyone's life has been essentially wasted on this -- on top of all the needless deaths and waste and economic destruction. Trump's fuckery and incompetence are the wellspring whence all this comes, but he doesn't operate alone.

Primo Levi said that it wasn't the monsters you had to worry about -- they're easy to spot. It's the ordinary minions willing to do the dirty work, or just willing to look the other way. Think about all the individuals who could have done and said something, who still could say and do something, anything. The leading newspapers and politicians who should have been calling for his resignation months ago. The people who work in the White House -- from the custodial staff to the paper-pushers -- who could walk out in protest. The congress-weasels who could call out their faithless colleagues for their support of this vainglorious would-be despot. Hell, John Kelly, who literally let Trump talk shit about Kelly's son's service and sacrifice at Robert Kelly's grave in Arlington. Doesn't get more in-the-tank than that.

At the current rate, another thirty thousand Americans will die unnecessarily, waiting for November. That's on them as much as it's on him now. Too bad it's not "worth it" to do anything about it, or at least try.

Debt and Taxes

Great article and interview from Luke O'Brien here that pretty much encapsulates the student-loan debt crisis. You know, if JoeMala are looking to gin up some enthusiasm amongst the youngs, there are worse ways to go about it.

This crisis is multifaceted:  moral, financial, economic, cultural, generational. It is scummy boomer grifters and shareholders siphoning money out of wage-slaves, while simultaneously berating them for not buying houses and starting families, as if they could afford to, as if they would want to continue overpopulating a sweaty, groaning planet that now just veers between state-size wildfires, giant floods, and an ongoing mass extinction.

Here is the thing about Navient and the rest of the student-loan weasels no one ever tells you:  they don't want you to pay off your loans. Ever. Your debt is their equity. That's not polemic, that's how it really is. That's math.

The fact of the matter is that even a partial debt jubilee would inject trillions of dollars of stimulus into the lower levels of a perilously top-heavy economy, where it's needed the most. Leon Cooperman will survive quite well without another billion to add to his pile.

This is something that the Democrats need to understand if they wish to maintain any real viability going forward, much less do any actual good for the regular public. This hoarding Scrooge McDuck economy cannot keep going. The problem with predatory, oligarchic hyper-capitalism is that eventually you run out of other people's money to steal.

Something Different

Next to the Chump Armada at the bottom of Lake Travis, this is the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Gilbert Gottfried reading the lyrics to Cardi B's WAP.

Joke on the Water

Worth a thousand words.

Accelerated Decline

Interesting thread here, food for thought. We're not there yet, but we are clearly on that path. Best case scenario -- Biden wins in a landslide, Dems increase lead in House and retake the Senate 55-45 -- it will take at least a decade to undo the damage wrought by these fuckers, and to get a handle on the redneck gangs and their buddies in uniform.

That's best case scenario, that the work will just be starting, and it will be treacherous and uphill the entire way.

I've talked a lot in the past, in my North Korea posts, of how that nation really needs to be deprogrammed, if it is ever to rejoin the community of nations. The US is not quite there, not yet, but again it should be clear that there is enough of a "cult bloc" that has been thoroughly programmed and conditioned, that some form of deprogramming needs to take place.

Since this is really the latest front in an extended plutocratic insurgency, a war of the billionaires on everyone else, it can only be de-escalated by rounding up "our" billionaires and encouraging them to do some effective counter-programming. Again, where are Bloomberg and Steyer and those types, soi-disant limo libs who routinely make empty claims about loving a "free society," yet are strangely silent right now, when their country could really use their help. They could each dump five or ten million into the Senate races in KY, SC, ME, GA, AZ, NC, and more, and not even miss the couch-cushion change. Bloomberg and Steyer each dumped nine figures into their futile primary runs, the former supposedly spending over half a billion.

Well, you got the candidate you wanted, guys. How about you finish what you started and get him across the line securely, with a tailwind of senators that will actually show up for work? Their islands in the sun will only stay above the rising tide for so long, and when it comes down, it's gonna come down on them and their type as well.

That's probably a pipe dream -- despite its constant bleats about freedom and rugged individuality, Americans are some of the most cowed, compliant people on the face of the earth. And with good reason -- who in their right mind would want to get caught up in its medieval for-profit carceral state, just to make some noise at a meaningless, futile street protest?

But at some point, enough people with nothing left to lose will start acting accordingly, Millions are facing eviction in the coming weeks, just in time for winter and a #TrumpPlague resurgence and the actual flu season and, oh yeah, a likely recession or depression.

We could have avoided all this, and for much less money, if the thieves that are lawn-darting the country had just given every household, rich or poor, a $10k check and said, stay home through March and April. We'll re-open May 1st. Enjoy your staycation. Nope, we had to spend $4 trillion bailing out cruise lines and televangelists and Trump groupies, like the Central Asian despotate we are aspiring to become.

So Bloomie and Tommy and their ilk mght want to take stock of the situation, and consider doing the right thing for once, and at least atone for their unconscionable fuckery in the primary.

Suckers and Losers

Everybody has read the article by now, and absolutely nobody is surprised. Maybe it will move the needle a touch, but probably not, which is the real story.

Maybe he's right -- maybe people who are willing to serve and sacrifice for The State, a faceless leviathan that may or may not be there for them in their time of need, have been bamboozled. Maybe the people who continue to support this fucking monster, whose defining trait is open contempt of the very concepts of charity and grace, are also suckers and losers. Maybe the liberals and Democrats, waiting for their elected leaders to do something even performatively and making excuses for why they refuse to, are also suckers.

[Case in point:  Impeach Bill Barr now. He is openly discussing the ways in which he will sow distrust in the election results, and foment civil unrest. He has already lied to Congress multiple times, including at his job interview. It doesn't matter that the Republicon senators are traitors and will acquit him. The investigative process will generate enough evidence that can be use to prosecute Barr if Biden wins. And if Biden loses -- or "loses"? Hope your passport's in good shape.]

Maybe my dad, who fought the Nazis in the Atlantic and the Imperial Japanese in the Pacific, who was literally en route to Japan on a fucking minesweeper when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a sucker for believing that his efforts then were necessary to keep the country he loved from turning into a mass of sweaty, ignorant slobs. Maybe my uncle, who served two tours in Vietnam as a Marine platoon leader and got soaked in Agent Orange, and died hard just a few weeks after his fifty-first birthday twenty years ago, was a sucker for jumping into a fight he was told was right and just. He got there and saw the truth and came back changed, and spent the rest of his life trying to get back what he'd lost. I have a younger cousin who joined the Marines earlier this year, for a CINC who's made it clear that he couldn't care less that the Russians are paying Islamic militants bounties on American military corpses. Sucker!

And on and on. It's a giant, all-encompassing scam, and we've all bought into some aspect or other of it. Remember when a couple of feckless billionaires inserted themselves into the Democratic primary, just long enough to knock Elizabeth Warren outta there? Where's OK Bloomer now that we could use his precious money, not just for Biden but for at least six or eight Senate seats? Where's Tom Steyer and all his bro-gressive happy talk? Yeah, they really care about "their country," but it's a different country than the rest of us live in.

Maybe the folks out in the streets protesting, as well-meaning as they are, might be suckers as well. They think something will "change" from their efforts. Well, you've been doing it all summer, and the only thing that's changed is that the police forces of Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and NYC -- all cities run by liberal Democratic mayors in states run by liberal Democratic governors -- are much more comfortable openly displaying their true sympathies.

They stand aside while roving white supremacist gangs barrel through crowds in their $70k trucks and attack unarmed protesters. They let assault-rifle-toting kids who have just murdered people in the street with a weapon they were not legally allowed to possess just walk on by. They have not stopped killing, beating, kidnapping. They have made their position entirely clear, and no one is even pretending to try to stop them.

Black Lives Matter? Are you fucking kidding? Your life doesn't matter, liberal white protester. As far as the redneck death squads and their good buddies on the PD are concerned, you're not white. They probably won't shoot you seven times in the back, but you never know. They sure as hell won't stop the bearded goon with the riot helmet and the Kevlar Pepe the Frog vest from stomping the shit out of you.

Now that we're in the final sixty days of the electoral race, people are starting to look at the clock, because they're exhausted, demoralized, disheartened. They want it to "be over," but it will never be over. This is just beginning, sorry to say, but as we near the homestretch in this here blog, I am convinced that that will be the crushing minor chord I will end with in a few months.

Getting rid of Trump is -- and really, always was -- only the symbolic part of it. It's real, and it's vital to any semblance of continuity in what passes for elected representation in this flawed experiment. The real challenge, as the Atlantic article lays out so clearly, is in figuring out just how to deal with individuals who are fine with all of it. They have constructed an alternate reality for themselves, one that gives them permission -- hell, makes it their patriotic duty -- to support this thug who so openly disparages military service and sacrifice.

And putatively liberal media outlets make painstakingly multiple efforts over and over again to construct their own alternate reality, one where these people are Real 'murkins, who support monsters out of some well-meaning intent and love for their country. Such articles are not only worthy of every bit of scorn and derision we can muster, they also represent a profound dereliction of journalistic duty.

These people should be portrayed as they truly are -- as people who gladly support all of this, every bit of it. They are lying when they mutter something about "wish he would tweet less" or whatever. They love the tweets. After all, he's doing what they wish they had the platform to do -- tell all them fags and libruls and race-traitors to go fuck themselves. They wish he'd tweet more, that he'd crack down more on all the people they've been taught to hate, conditioned like hamsters in Fox News' Skinner box to pat the metal plate for the daily outrage pellet. I don't know if it's possible to deprogram most of them at this point. I do know that there is no point in trying to engage with them anymore.

It's easy for him, because he's never served anyone or sacrificed anything. He's never had to learn or understand or know anything, because he's rented minions to wipe his ass for him his entire miserable life. But the working-class schmuck that still rolls with all this? That's a harder nut to crack, and I don't know if you even want to waste your time on it. Remember that the largest number of voters is non-voters, and ask yourself why, and if there's a way to reach them.

Are they really lazy and stupid, or do they see the lack of leadership and conviction (to varying degrees, of course) on both sides, and simply say no? There's no excuse for doing that this time around, but again, if the opposition party started playing with a real sense of urgency, instead of always just playing not to lose, they might motivate some of those sideline spectators for once. What's the harm in trying?

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

If the Pelosi salon thing lasts longer than twenty-four hours in the endless spin cycle, then this hollowed-out husk of a state deserves to go under, full stop. In the meantime, "I got set up" is maybe not the killer defense Pelosi seems to think it is.

Jesus. [puts palm to forehead, pinches nose, exhales slowly through nose for what seems like an eternity] Jesus H. Christ, people. How the hell, at this point in this infernal game, do the words "perfomative" and "kayfabe" not register with some of these people? There is no need to apologize, or explain, or demur or aver or any of the other cheap lawyer word-games these people play.

Since Trump wasted no time in latching on to this nonsense, all Pelosi needed to do was dump the whole thing in his lap:

Considering just last week Trump had hundreds of people on the White House lawn, clustered and maskless, and spent most of that week racking up dozens of Hatch Act violations, and just yesterday committed a felony and yet another in a long line of impeachable offenses by encouraging voter fraud in North Carolina, maybe he's not the right person to be lecturing anyone else on adhering to regulations. If I committed an infraction or violated an ordinance in getting my hair done, I'll pay the fine and just hire an individual to come to my house next time. In the meantime, you people need to get your fucking priorities straight.

But no, she took this stupid thing both seriously and literally, and so felt compelled to respond in kind. It's difficult to imagine that there are many people left at this point waiting for another reason to vote Democratic, and even fewer whose motivation hinges on the behavior of Nancy Pelosi. But there are a lot of people who would be more motivated to vote Democratic if they just once showed some spine and told their bullies in no uncertain terms to go fuck themselves.

This is not that fucking hard, people. Quit falling for the kayfabe. Stop legitimizing their bullshit as if it's real. Remind them that he won't show his tax returns because he's a fucking criminal. Remind them that they had to drape a fifty-yard tarp over a battleship ramp when he visited yesterday, because he's an infirm codger who can't walk a ramp or hold a glass of water.

I mean, we're not just talking about the Speaker of the House here, we're talking about someone who's held her seat for over thirty years, and usually wins at 3:1 or 4:1 ratios or higher. It's not like she's in a competitive race. And she's eighty years old, so hopefully nearing retirement hint hint.

It's irritating when people -- especially politicians -- who have absolutely nothing to lose play their hand as if there's something to lose. Lady, nobody outside the booger-eating cultists give two shits about your salon visit, so don't even waste the dignity of a fart on it.

At this point, what motivates voters is not "norms" or "decorum" or even ideas and policy positions, it's the understanding that you'll fight, and not put up with ridiculous bullshit. So hey, let's try that.

One Weird Trick

I swore off the Vichy Times long ago, because: 1) life is too short; and 2) they suck rhino balls. However, I'll lift the shun for a second here for this nifty bit of trolling from Jamelle Bouie, who turns out also to be a fine cook, as my wife recently made one of his recipes for poundcake, and it was excellent.

It’s not too late. With a little more than two months until the election, the [piece of shit] can still reverse course. But he cannot do so as long as he and his campaign indulge the fantasy that he is blameless and untouched by the crisis in “Democrat cities.”

....

Face to face with law enforcement at the site of a terrible tragedy, [Fuckface] will have the chance to rebuke both bad policing and the self-styled militias who raised the heat on an already tense situation.

[Fuckface] needs to show swing voters that he cares about the rights of African-Americans and has a plan to handle police brutality and violence. He needs to show his independence from the most radical parts of his base. It’s an opportunity he shouldn’t let go to waste.

Obviously, nothing close to any of this will happen, nor would it help him anyway, and Bouie of course knows all that. Which makes it even better -- Bouie is really taking aim at the cheap performative rituals his own newspaper indulges in routinely, without thought and only against Democratic candidates.

When we reflexively dismiss the "both-siderism" of the elite gatekeeper corporate media, what we tend to forget is that it really isn't expecting the same things from both sides, that the bar is immeasurably, inexcusably lower for one side than the other. Democrats are expected to genuflect for every perceived gaffe and pre-emptively stake out rhetorical ground in order to attract the elusive unicorn voter.

Republicons, on the other hand, can do and say and openly support the most vile things. It was disclosed yesterday that the leader of one of Loozyanna's largest neo-nazi groups has donated at least a couple grand to Hair Fuhrer. That's just the latest among literally hundreds of other things that ordinarily would have given reputable news orgs cause to demand resignation due to manifest unfitness for office.

That may be one of their main nefarious superpowers -- the ability to manufacture consent in the face of common sense and decency, the need and desire to keep stupid, reprehensible people in the spotlight, getting paid ten or a hundred times as much as the audience of dupes they lie to so smoothly. They keep doing it because enough people haven't made it clear to them that they shouldn't.

The Next Kyle

There's at least one of these assholes in every town:

A Black girl was beaten and harassed by a boy in an apparently racially motivated attack in Kansas.

Brandi Stewart said her 11-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Thomas, was playing with friends outside an apartment complex Friday evening near her Shawnee school when an older boy began taunting her with racial slurs, reported WDAF-TV.

....

The girl responded by telling the 12-year-old boy that “my Black is beautiful” — and that’s when he allegedly knocked her unconscious with a pole.

His parents must be proud. The kid will get some slap on the wrist, just enough to piss him off more at the injustice of it all, and then....well, you just wait until he hits eighteen or twenty-one. The trajectory of losers like that is as predictable as a drop of rain. He'll last just long enough to inflict real damage to someone else someday. That's all people like that do, and these days, they are overtly encouraged to do so as they please.

This nation, like most, has deep, ugly pathologies that it has tried to alleviate and/or remove, with varying levels of effort and success. That kid was taught by someone to treat other people like that. It gets passed down from generation to generation like some evil family heirloom, sweating, pulsating, sentient.

I don't know what you do to end it. I used to think that simply leveling the playing field for these sorts would at least put their "economic anxieties" on the back burner, and I still think economic justice is a necessary precursor to real social justice. But it's also likely that many of them would still be hateful assholes, just with more money.

I do hope that this poor girl grows and gains the understanding that not everyone is like the thing that attacked her, that most people really are not like that (though a distressing number of them really are like that). It's just the vocal zombie contingent that gets the most attention, who distract us all from the basic fact that there's still a slight majority of us who just want to live a life unencumbered by doubt and debt and hate and fear.

That is not to say that "love conquers hate" or "non-violence overcomes violence" or any of that nonsense. History should clarify that for you with a quickness. It is to say that, whatever else, a life lived immersed in hate and lies tends to be nasty, short, and brutish. It cannot be pleasant or peaceful or contemplative, bereft of anything resembling an inner life or an appreciation for anything worth appreciating.

There is no joy in the life of a person who treats other people like garbage, only the temporary escape from an ugly existence. The lies of the ad hoc heroic myth fade away quickly, and the person quickly realizes that people who live in the real world -- employers, friends, even relatives -- want nothing to do with him, that the only people who will associate with him are all awful.

Imagine, for a second, being someone like Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, being just smart enough to know that what you do is disgusting and scummy, but being just dumb enough to believe that there is some amount of money that will fill the hole where your soul once was.

This is the life Kyle Rittenhouse has ahead of him, whether or not he goes to prison [Narrator: He won't.]. There will only be thirsty opportunists and hangers-on, and generational racists who will want to further indoctrinate him. It's a vicious, self-reinforcing dynamic, and we've seen it all before.

(All that said, I am not convinced that Rittenhouse is a racist per se. He seems more like an impressionable, not-terribly-bright kid who went looking for trouble and found some. Whether the white-power-adjacent influences in his information system take a more influential role as his life progresses along its new path obviously remains to be seen. It seems likely, though.)

All you can really do is shun them, but completely. That goes even more so for the enablers and handlers and media shitheads who use their platforms to push this evil nonsense just to put a few more bucks in their pockets. Many of them appear to be in their mid-twenties or early thirties. These people should never be able to feel comfortable around decent people again.