Clarification, Slight Return: You're All Fired

Take a deep breath, and fix a nice beverage of your choosing. You've earned it, just by surviving the last week or so with most of your sanity intact. For a few moments that Saturday afternoon it felt like a burden was being lifted, didn't it? You got the first female and minority veep, and you get rid of Orange Foolius? Such a deal. Like a huge fucking turd finally being sent to its rightful destination, getting rid of Trump.

I mean, even by the low standards we've set here over the years, it's difficult to convey just what a low bastard Donald Trump really is. Just a straight-up, no-exaggeration piece of shit. As I've mentioned countless times before, I can find small but still identifiable redeeming qualities in just about any political figure, no matter how much of an asshole they are.

Cheney and Bush, if nothing else, clearly love their families, and however peculiar their personal codes may be, they are visible. Willard Rmoney, as spineless and unprincipled a person as one could hope for in a business cluttered with them, is still clearly a highly intelligent person. He's just chosen to use that intelligence to gut American businesses, send American jobs overseas, pocket the difference, and sell his soul to people even wealthier and less principled than himself.

Trump, on the other hand, has no redeemable characteristics that one can clearly identify. And the thing is, he never has. The one thing you can say in his "defense" is that he is exactly what he has posed as all these years -- an ignorant blowhard, the drunk at the end of every dive bar, blustering about how he'd "fix" everything "wrong" with this country. He's Archie Bunker with worse hair and other people's money.

But at least Archie adored Edith and Gloria. Trump adores only himself. It should be clear by now that he would burn this country to the ground, eviscerate its institutions and pit its citizens against each other in a national bloodbath, if it would allow him to retain a toehold of power.

And so that is what he is attempting to do now. Think of a cheesy horror flick -- the last victim has escaped the house in their car, not knowing that the killer is in the backseat. And now he's about to raise the bloody knife for one last attack.

The burden is not yet lifted, not until the madness has actually ceased. If I had a nickel for every time over the last five years we all said he can't get away with it while he, uh, got clean away with it, I could retire right now in luxury. He's doing it right now, trying to concoct some Wile E. Coyote scheme to get a couple of state vote counts into the SCOTUS review. It wouldn't take much to knock that EC advantage back.

Just like a full-grown rat needs a hole about the size of a quarter to squeeze its whole body through, these people just need the smallest gap to exploit. And if they've learned anything, it's that there is no reason whatsoever not to try. If you can think of a single disincentive or consequence that any of these fuckers -- Trump, McConnell, Barr, Kayleigh MagaNinny -- has ever gotten for their behavior, I'm all ears.

Frankly, they would be stupid not to try what they're doing. The media are already helping them, in their own stupid way. They can't help themselves, these chumps. They would rather engage in ponderous lectures to the winners of the election about how they must reach out to the losers.

Funny how they didn't inform them of that particular civic duty four years ago. Funny how the lunatic reactionary cultists are never entreatied to stand down and just act like fucking adults for a while.

I resent being harangued by some overpaid, weasel-faced ankle-biter that it's my job to reach out to them. You know? Funny how that works -- when "conservatives" win, it's because "liberals" need to listen to them more; when "conservatives" lose, "liberals" need to listen to them more. Heads we win, tails you lose.

So fuck them too, those insufferable mediots, even if they identify as "liberal" or "moderate" or "Democratic" -- hell, especially if they identify as those things. The fucking balls on these goddamned people, I swear to Christ.

These stupid calls for "unity." Okay. Fine. What, precisely, are we all supposed to "unify" around? If they refuse to accept the idea that Joe Biden legitimately won the election, then what is this common ground of which you speak? Hunh? Hmm? Seriously, where is this mythical halfway point at which liberals -- and only liberals, mind you, conservatives are never asked to do a fucking thing except to keep on keepin' on -- are supposed to meet and shake hands with their honorable opponents?

I have nothing to say to these people that isn't already in that link.

I have no idea what to say to these people, like, at all. Maybe one of these teevee geniuses can 'splain it all to me one more time, 'cause I'm a little slow on the uptake, and I'm all out of fucking kool-aid.

I don't know much, but I know one thing for sure -- the "liberal" or "moderate" who tells actual liberals and Democratic voters that they are responsible for initiating all the "healing" that "we" "need", these people are not your fucking friends or allies. At least I know what to expect from the cultists; the only thing I can think about the explainers is that they get an extra buck for every contrarian hot take they manage to extricate from their pulsating sphincters.

There is no halfway point between full-throated kleptocratic authoritarianism and democracy.

There is no common ground between ridonkulous conspiracy theories about fake sharpie votes, and a duly counted election outcome.

There is no unity to be found between open, brazen lawlessness, and upholding the law.

Assuming this open coup attempt fails, and the Biden administration is permitted by the divine grace of His Travesty's tiny wittle doll hands, they need to hit the ground running, now more than ever, since these current scumbags are going to make them wait out the entire lame-duck period.

It's not as if there's a fucking pandemic going on or anything. I hope Mike Pence is at piece with whatever warped god he worships. At least Trump has never pretended to worship anything other than himself. All these fake christians are going straight to hell, though, and they know it.

Whatever else, always keep in mind that over 72 million people voted for four more years of this bullshit. People are welcome to continue deluding themselves that they were all bamboozled by Trump cultism, by the Murdoch white-noise machine, by Russian micro-targeting on Fakebook. I would reiterate my ongoing suggestion that such assumptions are as ludicrous as the worst Trump-fellating Jon McNaughton painting, just poor by-products of magical thinking.

The world has always been full of assholes. There's just more of them now than ever, and even the dumbest of them are technologically empowered, and protected to a great extent by a nanny state that places warning labels on empty buckets -- not for safety's sake, mind you, but because for every dumb asshole who finds a way to pull a vending machine on himself, there's a goddamned ambulance chaser ready to sniff out the deepest pockets, to make sure his drooling goober client gets paid well for his self-imposed misery.

So it goes in the political arena. We're all at the mercy of the roughly 47% of the population who happen to be angry assholes. You can't reason with them, you can't convince them. You can't appeal to their better angels, because they have none. Like their idiot wampeter, they are completely unyoked from any sort of moral compass. There are no truths, or self rationalizations.

Either the Democrats will realize this and confront it with the necessary force and urgency, or they will default to capitulation. Chances are it will be the latter option, primarily because that is what the insect corporate overlords of the donor/owner class expect from all the pols they rent.

All any of us can do is find ways to divest from the framework as much as possible, to turn away from the constant churn and the bumptious sprawl of the endless news cycle, which oddly produces almost nothing that is new or useful to know. Defunding the horse-race media would be just as useful as defunding the police, frankly, maybe even more so. Imagine if, say, Maggie Haberman were boycotted, and had to go out and ply an honest trade, rather than sucking up to the semi-cool kids on the Trump campus, and stenographing their carefully targeted lies for credulous dupes.

Imagine if CNN were forced to stop bringing on known liars for "balance." Imagine if Mark Burnett never had another successful show.

Every individual has a say in all those things. You can let CNN know that you'll avoid them when they have some interchangeable toad spouting lies. No one makes anyone watch The Voice, or any other Burnett property.

Not that it'll matter in the end. Just like roughly half the people are assholes, most people just don't care enough in general to actually expend even a little bit of energy to stop the bullshit. I'm not interested in what percentage of Trump voters watched, say, The Apprentice when it was a thing. I think it's more interesting to try and figure how many soi-disant liberals watched it, knowing it was cheesy garbage and rolling in it anyway.

Think about it. Pop-culture artifacts over the last couple decades have increasingly become heuristic signifiers that overlap with and point to political tendencies. A simple example would be to think about what the overlap might be between certain reality-teevee curios and how they typically vote.

In other words, what percentage of, say, Duck Dynasty watchers were not just Trump voters, but enthusiastically so? What about viewers of the Duggars (remember them?) or Honey Boo-Boo? How about die-hard SEC football fans, versus the percentage of, say, 49ers fans who voted for Biden?

This may sound like silly culture-vulture posturing, but it is not. It's all just marketing, in the end. Good marketers figure out how to get you to spend money you don't really have on stuff you don't really want. Great marketers spot the patterns and figure out how to tie buyers of one product over to another product.

Experienced marketers will also tell you that it's as much or more about the experience of buying the product as it is about the quality of the product itself. That's how you use "cultural" signifiers to push those connections on your marks -- ah, I mean customers. And if your customer base is willing to spend years of their lives watching the hillbilly cosplay of a bunch of duck-call makers, they're ripe to buy the idea that Donald Trump, a filthy pimp who literally jokes about fucking his own daughter, is a man of god.

It's one thing when a wealthy, decadent society with nothing much to do or worry about collectively decides to use pranksterism as an ongoing mode of political expression. It's quite another when a rotted husk of a dying empire, with millions living in the streets, and tens of millions more just a paycheck or two from that point, make that choice.

I'm glad Biden won, but since it wasn't a bulletproof landslide, and Moscow Mitch still runs the senate, the victory is not what it could and should have been. I'm continuing forward with the same plans I had in case of a loss -- spend the next few years getting some tech certs; sock away as much money as possible; keep working on my house to get it ready to sell; and research the other areas that might be worth spending the rest of my life in.

I think that's all any of us can do, since you can't beat the marching morons with reason and logic. You just have to find ways to insulate yourself as much as possible from their bad decisions. Show up and vote every time, but prepare for bad outcomes all the same.

But the bottom line is that, absent an extremely bold and swift set of actions on the part of the Biden administration, many of which will almost certainly be slowed or thwarted by a treasonous Republicon senate, the next decade or two minimum is going to see continued decline, and it will not turn around without some set of massive catastrophes, some ongoing set of natural disasters in a wide range of areas. Nothing else seems to get through to people; the long, slow spread of the #TrumpPlague doesn't elicit the reaction you would expect from a quarter-million dead in nine months. It's going to take a hurricane wiping Miami or Houston from the map, or a mega-wildfire incinerating the entire State of Jefferson.

In the meantime, it looks like he's fucking gone, and all his cheating and stealing is probably going to fail. (Never say never until he's actually out of there; the thing about Calvinball is that there are no rules.) If nothing else, that's a start, and a small step back toward sanity. The next critical step is to investigate and prosecute everyone for every single criminal act committed, and I'm just not confident the Dems have the stones to push it.

As always, I hope I'm wrong about all of this.