The Great Depression

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Hilarious

This is one of those weird, harmless, funny stories making the rounds this week:  apparently Alec Baldwin's wife has been engaging in some sort of long-running Andy Kaufman performance-art exercise in pretending to be of Spanish heritage. Even funnier is that some of the self-appointed keepers of the "cultural appropriation" watch have declared themselves put off by this peculiar avocation of Hillary -- ah, I mean Hilaria Baldwin.

These subcultures are fascinating to me when they reveal themselves to the larger "culture," such as it is. If I understand the situation correctly, Hilaria has ensconced herself in the coveted "momfluencer" niche, getting attention and teevee time and emoluments not only for being married to a talented actor (who is a quarter-century her senior), but for being seen using certain brands on her Instagram feed.

Imagine being able to get a nice check delivered to your mailbox, simply by taking a selfie of you, for example, using Goya beans in your kitchen. Amazing times we live in.

It's all about what aspects of this "story" people want to fixate on. What's weirder -- that a thirsty celeb-adjacent milf entered an arena where such characteristics tend to be CV boosters, and leveraged a mythical aspiration as an extra foot in the door; or that there are upper-middle-class women out there for whom such a person is considered to be "influential" in some respect? How dare this person, whom I don't know but from whom I take merchandising cues, present herself as something she is not! Why, I never! (Well, maybe you should.)

Even funnier is that she has been playing this character for years, and only now some enterprising celebrojourno decided to do about thirty seconds of digging through public records to figure it all out. Well done, yournamalistas. Good thing there's nothing else worth getting to the bottom of these days.

If nothing else, her and her parents' love for Spanish culture appears to be sincere. Maybe she really wishes she were Spanish, rather than from privileged Boston Brahmin stock. Big deal. Look at the extended tedium of the Kardashian-Jenner tribe, and their exhausting, constant leg-humping to pimp and peddle and schmooze every goddamn product straight up 'murka's collective asshole. Look at Kanye's tiresome attempts to pretend to be a genius, or even pass as a functional human being.

This is going to sound completely sexist and lookist and chauvinistic, and I don't give a good goddamn -- anyone who can squeeze out five kids in seven years and still look like that can pretend to be whatever the hell she wants, and good luck with it.

Thug the Police

I get why articles such as this consistently approach the stories from the "race" angle. I do get it, and it's certainly an important element. But an even more important element, which goes completely unmentioned, is that any cop who guns down an unarmed civilian taking groceries into their house is just not very good at their job, at all. In fact, they're really fucking bad at the job.

And when your job lets you literally get away with murder, that's a problem.

Clearly this Meade character is your standard Hollyweird issue high-toned-cowboy type. This is a problem, and it transcends race. Hell, I'm a middle-aged white married guy with a degree and a good job, and I look the part. And I wouldn't want to be pulled over or approached by that asshole.

Or these fuckers. What the hell is this shit? Why are we forced to pay people like this to terrorize citizens, indemnify them from their misdeeds, and foot the bill for the inevitable lawsuits? For what? Is anyone any safer because they made this kid roll his window down, and pepper-sprayed his father for filming the encounter (as is his legal right)?

Or you can visit Greg Doucette's Twitter feed, and dig back through the hundreds -- I'm sure it's well over a thousand by now -- of videos from all over the country, of militarized punks beating the shit out of unarmed citizens peacefully exercising their rights. He's got a new one up tonight, of a Vacaville cop holding his K-9 partner -- yes, a dog -- down and repeatedly punching the animal in the head.

It's an understatement to point out that this is precisely the mentality that needs to be identified and weeded out of all local law enforcement agencies now, not that it will happen. They'll give this scumbag some public slap on the wrist, transfer the dog to another cop -- who probably won't treat it that way; I've known several K-9 officers over the years, and they absolutely love and spoil their canine partners as much as possible -- put the human cop on some bullshit desk job for eighteen months until it all blows over, then put him back on the street with some rook that no one else wants to work with.

Then he cashes out at age fifty with ninety percent of his wages, starts some "security" side-hustle mostly to chase tail, maybe coaches pee-wee soccer for the same reason, and never experiences a moment where he has to think back on things he's done, people he victimized. If the guy's holding down a fuckin' trained Malinois and punching it, there's at least a few humans he's done the same to, and will again. Maybe his wife, maybe someone he pulled over for a seat-belt ticket got lippy with him, but someone. Count on it.

Anyone who's interested in this topic is probably already aware of the broader counter-arguments:  the vast majority of cops are nothing like these bastards, yet that ninety-nine percent of "good" cops are constrained by the culture and the leadership of The Job, blah blah blah. and there's a lot of truth to all that. As with prison guards, when the nature of your job is dealing with assholes all day, it's only a matter of time before you just reflexively assume everyone is an asshole.

But I know this much -- if George Floyd was white, he'd still be alive. Ditto Breonna Taylor, and Philando Castile, and Eric Garner, and countless others. I know that the Minneapolis PD, and many other urban police departments, take a notorious "training" by the name of "Bulletproof Warrior," where the instructor basically trains cops to act and think as if they're IDF forces patrolling the Gaza Strip, dealing with suicide bombers and shoulder-launched missiles. That is not an exaggeration.

And until that stops, we're going to be doing this dance over and over again. And they don't just do it to minorities either -- don't forget about Daniel Shaver or Justine Damond. (Damond's killer, a cop of Somali descent, was eventually convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter, and is currently serving a 12.5-year sentence. Shaver's murderer had the benefit of being tried in Arizona, and so walked away from his crime scot-free.)

So it is about race, but it's mostly about power, and what sort of people are allowed to exercise it, and what sort of judgment some of these people have, and the lack of accountability when that judgment proves tragically wrong. This used to be a redneck-south commonplace sort of thing, but many of the more noteworthy incidents in recent years have occurred in relatively liberal enclaves, run by Democratic city councils and mayors, in states with Democratic governors and senators.

"Defund the police" is an unrealistic goal; not only won't it happen, but it shouldn't happen. There are bad people out there, and you do need some sort of enforcement mechanism to protect the public. But there's a ton of stuff that can and should be done along that spectrum -- demilitarize; remove the army toys; better psych batteries to screen candidates; better and longer training periods (in some states it literally takes more hours to become a hairdresser than a cop); ending qualified immunity; insisting on real accountability.

Returning to the top link as an example, it doesn't really matter to me whether Jason Meade can be proven to be a racist or not. I mean, it's awful if he is a racist, but the deeper problem is that he's demonstrated -- repeatedly, as his record shows -- that he's unqualified for his job. We don't need these self-styled "avenging angel" cowboy-preacher types. This is not a fucking Gary Cooper movie, and the people that can't handle that fact need to find another line of work.

Nobody forces anybody to be a cop, so if someone's at the point where they feel it's too thankless and dangerous, well, as the free-marketeers always tell us, get out there and create the future you deserve.

Mood for Thought

Fintan O'Toole has been making a name for himself this year with his scathing, pithy essays on our collapsing empire, and the doddering oaf we chose to run it the past half decade. His newest piece is making the rounds, and you should check it out.

Also, too. The Democrats are not your enemy the way the Republicons are, but they aren't your friends, either. Save yourself.

Extremely Plowed and Incredibly Gross

Now this is the good stuff I'm gonna miss. Just inject it right into my veins!

After going through what some called a scripted monologue that also featured interjections from Guilfoyle, Trump Jr. eventually paid some attention to what his girlfriend means to him. “And I’m reasonably thankful for Kimberly,” Trump Jr. began the awkward message. “Maybe not… not so much. I don’t wanna, you know, I’ve managed to maintain a very low bar with Kimberly, so I don’t want her to get too big of an ego, accustomed to kindness.”

I wouldn't spare too much sympathy for Li'l Kim there. Truly a nasty cunt, and that's not a word I use lightly. She deserves a companion like El Chupo, coked-up and vainglorious, forever stuck between desperately seeking his daddy's approval and wishing he was a Guccione.

One thing I'm absolutely certain of, and it brings me joy to no end, is the knowledge that Junior is one of the most miserable fuckers you could ever hope to avoid. All you have to do is listen to him and look at his facial expressions. He's an easy read, because like his old man, he's so painfully needy. He knows he's a pile of shit, that he could disappear tomorrow and no one would miss him, besides maybe his children. He has five, you know, and if even three of them are still on speaking terms with him by the time they reach adulthood, he should consider it a lucky break.

Don't feel sorry for any of these people. Unlike most people in that state of mind, Junior and Li'l Kim actually have the money and means to get off the pain train and work on themselves for as long as it takes to get right. They could take a year or two and just get away from the scumbags and pimps and chiselers that surround them, and figure out what their lives should really be like.

They choose not to, again and again, They want this. This is all they have. It takes courage to arrive at the understanding that you really are better off "broke" (relatively speaking) and happy than "wealthy" and miserable. It takes guts to realize that you need to work on yourself, and that the work never really ends -- that in fact there is joy and catharsis in the work itself.

Every single person in this grotesque "family" is a coward -- morally, ethically, spiritually. They have nothing else in their little lives but the unquenchable thirst -- for approval, for popularity, for the official cover to push around the haters and losers who see them for what they really are.

None of them has ever made an honest cent or been in a fair fight. That is all you need to understand about any of them. Guilfoyle's a perfect fit for them, because she's impossibly ambitious -- that is, her ambitions clearly exceed any actual talents by a country mile, and she knows it, so she has to make up for those deficits. She'd suck a roomful of random dicks to win a sack race. And she's fine with shacking up with a cokehead who talks about her like she's a stray dog. Her performance at the Republicon Convention a few months ago was not an act, it was her id unleashed, her true self boosted with what she knew her boyfriend and his creepy, ogling father would want to hear from her.

I would literally bet my next paycheck that Senior has grabbed her tits and/or ass at least once, or made some sort of obvious comment, and that Junior knows it, and will never confront his old man about it. Look at them, listen to them, you know it's true. Probably worse than that even.

I'm not saying that money can't buy you happiness -- despite what they tell you, it can. At the very least, having money is better than not having money, if you're a halfway well-adjusted human being. But if you're a miserable asshole to begin with, someone who's been able to coast through life never having to earn or justify anything you do or say, more money will just magnify those problems. It papers over them for a while, but sooner or later, it becomes clear that the demons are driving the bus, it's just a somewhat nicer-looking bus. Eventually the gold leaf and cheap filigree peel away and reveal things for what they always were.

Beltway Syndrome

Story time, kids -- pretty sure I have not told this one before, if I have it was years ago. After sixteen years, the Blogheimers is kicking in with some regularity.

So back in the mid-'70s, when I moved from smoggy Los Angeles to the epic glories of the Great State of Jefferson, we lived for about two years out in a rural district, probably ten miles removed from what was then a town of about 3,500 to begin with. I was in second grade, rode the bus, which given the distance it had to cover took about thirty to forty minutes to get to the school. Fun times.

Even at that age, I was a voracious reader, and would walk to the library on the next block over from the school to grab three or four books for most weekends. I liked the Hardy Boys "mysteries" in particular; as cheesy and twee as they might be in retrospect, they probably provided an early synaptic pathway for my adult love of most crime fiction.

Mind you, I'm not saying that the Hardy Boys are a gateway drug to Dennis Lehane and James Lee Burke, but if you start reading that genre (even peripherally) at seven years of age, you might hard-wire yourself to later, more adult iterations.

Anyway. So one fine morning we're on the school bus headed into town. Most of the kids got along fairly well, but one kid, a former friend from up the road who was a year older, and had several meaner older brothers (one of whom later did nine years for rape, and was ultimately murdered by his own adult daughter in retribution -- take a wild guess for what) who enjoyed egging him on, decided to give me a hard time. You know, for being a reader. As Homer Simpson so poetically put it, Egghead likes his booky-wook!

So first a couple of taunts and head-slaps, then shoving my books onto the floor. Even at the ripe old age of seven, I could sense a couple of important things quite clearly:

• This was going to escalate, one way or another.
• I can get out in front of this, or I can curl up and wait it out.
• If I choose option #2, this is going to be a daily occurrence. Plus, since I go to the same school as this asshole, and he's only a year older than me, this might go on for a while.

As the bus, piloted by a crotchety tart lovingly nicknamed "Myrtle the Turtle," trundled its way past the rural district cemetery, I picked up the top book from the pile on the floor, and swung it directly into the other kid's face. Didn't break anything, fortunately, but there was blood suddenly. I dropped the book and started swinging wildly, the way a kid who's never thrown a punch yet will do, connecting maybe one in five but getting a message through -- don't fuck with me, I will fight back.

After what seemed like an hour but was only a few seconds -- we were, after all, still moseying past the maybe two-acre cemetery -- I had enough awareness to consider the possibility that fighting on the bus might Get Me In Big Trouble. I stopped for a moment and glanced up the seemingly endless center aisle of the school bus, toward that large rectangular mirror where you could see what or whom the bus driver was looking at. Myrtle looked directly at me, and beneath that grim squint I could see the barest trace of a tight-lipped smile. All bus drivers know who the troublemakers are on their routes.

So I did not Get In Trouble; as I departed the bus, Myrtle looked over at me and said, "Don't do that anymore," with that same tight-lipped smirk. "Okay," I peeped meekly, just relieved that whatever that Trouble was, it wouldn't find me that day anyway.

Better yet, those other kids left me alone after that. We didn't magically become all friends, but they at least understood that, for their purposes of cheap amusement, I was more trouble than I was worth. And for the entire next year, until we moved across town, there wasn't any guff from anyone.

By now, you see my broader point. It's a staple of every cheesy prison movie, from The Shawshank Redemption on down -- you don't have to be a brutal predator, but if you show yourself as a victim, there will always be a line of takers to treat you like one.

I'd like to think Joe Biden has seen, far more intimately than any of us can imagine, how the empty tropes of collegiality and courtesy and comity work out in reality, when the other side is actively invested in engineering your failure, and makes it clear that they couldn't care less about how it all affects non-elite citizens. I'd like to think he understands that he doesn't have to take suggestions from professional cynics, that if he wants to purge bad-faith weasels and little Eichmanns out of his offices, that is his prerogative, and it is entirely in his own rational self-interest.

If Biden hopes to get anything done, he needs to start with wiping the functionary scum, the bureaucratic enzymes that processed the previous maladminstration's endless fecal waste, out of the body. And he doesn't owe anyone any apologies for it; in fact, he -- and the rest of the octogenarians running his party -- need to step up and take credit for as much as they can, shout it from the rooftops.

The "performative" aspect of politics has been gone into at great length here and elsewhere, increasingly so over the past half-decade. It sucks that it matters, but it matters. Just like in that little-kid "fight" on the school bus nearly a half-century(!) ago, it was less important that I "won" the fight, than that I showed all those kids that I was willing to fight, that they weren't just going to roll me.

Biden doesn't need to ask anyone's fucking permission -- not Moscow Mitch, and certainly not some Beltway scriveners who are directly dependent on their access and their surface-of-the-sun hot-takes, suffused as they are with the hoariest of conventional wisdoms. Only Democrats need to seek the permission of the opposition party. Only Democrats need to seek "unity" with the hopelessly angry, hopelessly incoherent bloc that comprises the base of the opposition party. Only Democrats are expected to "moderate" with purposefully immoderate people. Every fucking time.

They need to operate as if their backs are against a great big immovable wall, because they are. They need to remember back to 2006, when they took a midterm win and literally managed to save Social Security from privatization. They fought like they understood that it was real life-or-death shit, that the usual gutless incrementalism wouldn't cut it anymore. That was engineered by none other than Nancy Pelosi, which proves she can do it.

But they have to stop fretting and prattling about how they're going to "explain" their moves to some hostile low-info dipshit out in East Overshoe, Arkansas. Those motherfuckers will never vote for you, even if you came to their doorsteps with duffel bags full of cash. Bokay? They just won't.

When the Democrats stop worrying about "explaining" and "framing" shit, and putting real energy and effort into motivating people, it's an ironclad guarantee that they'll be surprised at the results. Say what you will about the conspiracy-addled doofuses on the right, but they are motivated, passionate, and they show up. I mean, they're motivated and passionate about all the wrong things, but what would a motivated and passionate counterpart to them on the left look like, people motivated about things that would actually benefit them and their communities and regions, the country and planet as a whole?

What might that look like? Since we are not permitted to vote for any parties other than the two (or two wings of the same one) duly anointed by the holy dollars of Corporate America and its mediaopoly octopus, we'll never know.

But in the end, this will be the one true barometer you can use to determine whether the Biden administration has a chance at "success," however you want to define it, and whether the next decade in the US can start undoing the ravages of the first two decades of this wondrous new millennium, or if we have more 'n' better decline of empire in the years to come.

It all starts with whether Biden and his team understand that this is their one and only chance to fight, that when the zombie apocalypse comes, capitulation is really not an option -- you can only strive to find slightly safer ground, and take as many of them down as you can in the process. They are not going to negotiate with you on anything.

So whom and what do they intend to fight for? We're about to find out, and the answer will either raise or doom their party, whether they understand that or not. But they need to decide, or Moscow Mitch and his merry brand of treasonous bandidos will be happy to make that decision for them.

Children of a Lesser Clod

Interesting thread here about a group of, um, freedom fighters storming the Oregon State Legislature in Salem. As they say in the 'hood, read the whole damned thing.

Coupla minor and fairly obvious observations:

• These people are fucking stupid. Like, aggressively so, like Pfizer developed a mega-vaccine to inoculate these bozos against the ravages of coherent thought, and pumped it straight up their asses until it was coming out their ears. It takes real effort to be that much of a dipshit.
  
• While thread writer Laura Jedeed is indeed correct that these folks are dealing with tough times and economic fallout from the plandemic, that even in "normal" times these are not people who are swimming in top-shelf liquor and prime rib and all, that's not the real problem. Every protest has some sort of goal:  as ludicrous as I might find the idea that mobbing the streets of American cities is suddenly going to make our militarized urban police squads think twice about killing black people, it's still a goal. "Defund the police" is never going to happen, but it is a mission statement.

  These hard-up slapdicks have no goal beyond durrr, let us into your sneaky Chinee meetin', so's we can cough all over ever'body while regurgitating half-remembered Alex Jones bits! Great. And then what? That's the thing about all these wannabe Braveheart doofuses -- they have no idea what they would do if they "won," or even what the act of "winning" would look like.

  Not much offends me, but as someone of some measure of Scots ancestry (but hey, also English, Welsh, Irish, French, German, Polish, Russian, and even a bit of Norwegian, so go figure), I do find it a bit off-putting every time one of these pathetic assholes tries to flex nuts on their William Wallace game. Wallace fought against real oppression and suffered one of the most brutal deaths you can imagine; these ridiculous fuckers might accidentally get maced (or "maced") by a nervous cop. Beyond being begged to wear a mask, and maybe not being able to get away with using hundred-round ammo drums on their full-auto village sweeper anymore, The Man ain't exactly knuckling down on them in any appreciable way.
  

• How many of these jerkoffs drove to their little zombie gathering in $50k trucks, waving $100-200 flags? How many of them are going to hit the swag kiosk for more of that shit? Tell me more about their economic anxieties. That song never gets old.
  

I wonder how much longer our boys in blue are going to feel comfortable having two sets of rules for protesters, kicking the shit out of unarmed hippie-types, while letting the angry right-wing losers run amok. You saw it in the Million Thousand Magat March in DC a couple weeks ago, where a few cops got hit by stray projectiles, while fascist gangs vandalized black churches. No Antifa to blame it on, so sad, too bad, truth sucks don't it boys?

All these herrenvolk fascists know that they're protected, that the one thing their ludicrous caudillo promised them was to be in the group that was protected by laws but not bound by them, rather than that other group that is bound by laws and mercilessly persecuted with them. So when they don't get their way, and the armored shock troops not only aren't helping them but are [gasp!] obstructing their righteous entry into the Halls of Representative Democracy, well, that is an unforgivably perfidious action.

If there's one thing these dirtbags drag around with them like a fucking cross, everywhere and anywhere, it's this overweening sense of betrayal, that they've been cheated out of something they think they earned, that they're sure they were entitled to. Prob'ly some black or meskin had it given to them, by some bleeding-heart Soros-owned libturd who's setting the stage to re-edumacate the good foke.

Heh. Re-educate? How the fuck do you re-educate someone who isn't remotely educated in the first place? How do you retrain someone who sincerely believes that the one skill they sorta learned thirty years ago is the only thing they should ever have to learn in life? How do you convey any sort of new idea or concept, any advancement or improvement in life and how we all live it, to people who haven't so much as looked at a book since they dropped out of high school? That's not snark, I know motherfuckers like that, literally like that.

It would be nice if someone were out to educate them, maybe drop some truth on their heads, that all that cheap shit they get at Wal-Mart -- hell, all those fucking lame-ass "flags" they fly, like they think it's something special -- all that sweatshop shit comes with a price. It warn't as cheap as you were led to believe, bunky, and here's the bill for it, right here right now. Fucking morons. Who says karma doesn't turn up once in a while.

Looks like things are about to get worse, probably in multiple ways. A new Covid-strain, probably engineered by Bill Gates, Xi Jinping, and the restless shade of Hugo Chavez, has hit the UK, so we'll see how all those "warp speed" vaccines do with the Covid-21. We'll see how all those salty goobers do with the $600 checks Uncle Mitch generously cut for them, and who they decide to blame for it.

Six hunnert bucks prob'ly don't buy too many of them "no step on snek" flags. Maybe they can go terrorize more retail outlets with their tiresome idiocy. Maybe one of them, or a splinter cell of them, decides to take things up a notch, while we're tagging more than a 9/11-sized body count every fucking day now.

Two infamous quotes, from two diametrically different people, running through my mind right now:

"Life's tough. It's tougher when you're stupid." -- John Wayne (possibly apocryphal)

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- Hunter S. Thompson

A modern, industrialized nation -- even in the best of times, even when not beaten down by a worldwide plague -- cannot survive being driven by its dumbest and cruelest elements. It just can't. People like that are always going to be part of the scenery, but if we don't find a way to push them back to the margins, and stop being responsive to every dumb thing they do and say and react to, it's going to be a long, ugly road down.

Probably a good time for each of us to do a quick personal inventory, make sure things are in order and stocked up. I don't mean going full prepper and hoarding 55-gallon drums of rolled oats in your concrete bunker, but just making sure that your home is secure, you have at least a couple weeks worth of food -- dried, canned, preserved and shelf-stable, you go out only when necessary for the next four to six months. Might not hurt to have a gun or two, just in case.

Next year is shaping up to be even worse than this one, and that will be the case right from the start. Until the agents of law enforcement decide to apply the laws equally to these increasingly violent and restive factions among us, this is how it's going to be -- only more so.

Fuck Your Feelings

As far as any actual librul or Democratic voter is concerned, it's just locker-room talk. Hell, Jen O'Malley Dillon should be given a promotion, a raise, and her own nightly show if she wants it.

Fuck that cheap plastic cuck Marco Rubio and all the rest of the pearl-clutching swine. They can all get on the next express train straight to hell, and rest assured I do not mean metaphorically or figuratively.

It's not even worth bothering with the countless levels of hypocrisy baked into Rubio's empty plaint. Suffice to say we can all recite dozens of examples, we see these people for what they are, and we count on the people we elected to see that as well.

Better get used to these moments for what they truly are:  a test of the Biden administration's nerve. If they even do so much as make Dillon apologize -- to whom? for what? if the treasonous scum of the GOP are not "fuckers," then the word has truly lost all meaning -- then you know what you're gonna be in for.

If we all agree that it's going to take difficult, coordinated work by committed, dedicated, intelligent people just to start undoing the fuckery of the last four years, then we also should agree that the basic fundamentals of such an undertaking involve realizing what's to be gained by compromise and comity and cooperation with the treasonous opposition. Maybe Li'l Marco can go have a chat with some of his colleagues who still -- nearly seven weeks after the most heavily scrutinized and verified election count in our lifetimes -- refuse to acknowledge the duly elected winner, even after all the electoral votes have been duly ratified.

The Biden administration needs to start from a simple premise, before it does anything:  Fuck them. Fuck them all. They act in bad faith. They are not interested in civility, but in capitulation. Treat them as you would a violent intruder in your home -- grab your trusty twelve-gauge and give them the choice of surrendering, leaving, or dying. They cannot be bargained with, and that has been their choice all along.

Once the Georgia runoff is done, however it shakes out, Biden needs to call in the DNC chair and tell them to find someone now to take on Rubio in 2022, and shovel $150 million at them if need be. Invest heavily in oppo research; a smug little shit like Rubio is guaranteed to have some poorly-buried soil falling out of his shoes at random moments.

Understand these people for what they really are, and start acting accordingly. They cannot be worked with. They cannot be compromised with. They can only be beaten into the ground, or succumbed to. If the last half-decade hasn't clarified that, nothing will.

Make no mistake, this is a clarification for the voters more than anything else. Is Biden going to see his moment for its possibilities and be a bold FDR type, or a cringing, whinging "our hands are always tied" font of lame excuses? We're about to find out.

But I think one of the unspecified things many of us voted for is someone who wouldn't bother to listen to a worthless piece of shit like Marco Rubio about anything.

This Year In Fuck 'em, Final Edition (Probably)

I think I have been relatively flexible on the issue of wearing masks in public during a worldwide pandemic, given the circumstances we all must endure. Although on a personal level I tend to think that someone who just can't be troubled to wear a mask for fifteen minutes while they're at the supermarket or whatever is, well, basically a selfish asshole, the fact is the world is full of those, overflowing even.

And as long as the assholes keep their distance, good luck with all that. I don't have the time or inclination to try to browbeat people or convince stubborn idjits. Life's just too short. So as long as they're over there, I'm minding mine over here.

(Now, the angry mow-rons who waddle into Wal-Mart or Trader Joe's and scream at the hapless staff about their fuckin' freedumbs, all's I can say about them is that I sincerely hope they get a dose of the freedom-virus with both barrels. But near as I can tell -- and I live in a pretty red area -- north of eighty percent of people are wearing their masks and minding their business. It's going to have to be close enough.)

But these jamokes? What, are we supposed to feel sorry for them or something? They made their choices, they get to live with the consequences. Isn't that the very essence of liberty and freedom? I'm not being snarkastic here, it's a genuine question. This is what they wanted, this is what they get.

I mean, I get the same sense from that story as I do when, say, a rodeo bull rider gets severely injured. They know what they're getting into; they understand that there's a very real risk of serious injury from teasing a twelve-hundred-pound farm animal.

You could say the same thing about "regular" athletes, but even base-paid NFL and NBA players make more in a year than a lot of the Gove County folks will see in a lifetime. Those fools were willing to risk their lives for free, for some incoherent idea of what "independence" is and should be.

Even today, mask-wearing remains controversial in Gove County, and friendships are being strained as authorities struggle to persuade their neighbors to follow basic public health guidelines, such as avoiding large gatherings.

It seems that too many of these schmucks sincerely believe that their performative "resistance" is going to make libturds cry or something. Another heh, showed yew moment, which is really all they have to look forward to in their weird little lives anymore.

Yup, you sure showed us all right. Boy, do we feel silly. Which is still better than feeling, you know, dead, or sick enough to wish you were dead. Let's not forget that there are plenty of people who survived the #TrumpPlague who now have heart problems, liver damage, cognitive difficulties, and other serious issues. Not everybody who gets it and survives comes out the other end unscathed.

It's really the opposite of hurting or offending anyone -- speaking only for myself, I can only say that the Gove County people might be surprised at how little some of us care. If you've been told for months that stoves are hot, and vending machines will crush you, but you insist on touching a burner and pulling a Coke machine on yourself, I just figure it's nature weeding out the stupid. It doesn't fill me with joy, but it doesn't sadden or anger me either. It's like seeing a dead raccoon on the side of the road, except that no one warned the raccoon about how roads and highways work.

They do owe some sort of apology to the frontline health-care workers who they endanger, though. Frankly, those people are saints -- I would have walked out months ago and said fuck it, especially in a small community where everyone's been told, but has collectively decided to be weird and stubbornly stupid about it. But then, for every person they see who put themselves in the ICU by being an asshole, there's probably two or six or ten that just had the bad fortune to be in proximity to the asshole at the wrong time.

Then you have these fuckers, people who insist on having big weddings with all the guests and parties and trappings, as if nothing else is going on. The sheer sociopathic indifference all of these people show to the wedding photographer they infected tells you everything you need to know about them. 

Whenever you hear some West Wing idealist type trying to pitch the "appeal to their better angels" jabber, refer to folks like that Texas wedding party to remind them that some people simply don't have such a thing. They really don't, and there's not a goddamned thing you can do about it, except keep the hell away from them.

Look, it's true that we all gotta die of something someday. But you don't have to die of this, and not right now. The idea that some people just don't get that until the plague hits them directly, or someone they care about, is deeply repulsive, and says something about the people who think and act that way.

And you can't blame all that on Trump, either. Trump was a lying, buffoonish slapdick decades before this shit hit us. Anyone who was relying on Doctor Babyfingers for life-or-death medical advice was probably bound to pull a vending machine on themselves sooner or later anyway.

Disbarred

Opus Dei anal cyst Bill Barr, whose dad was a teen-diddler and who had Jeffrey Epstein murdered in prison and all the seized Trump-incriminating evidence destroyed, has been fired for refusing to help Agent Orange steal the election.

I have to admit to being somewhat surprised, but as corrupt as Barr has always been, he is intelligent enough to see that it just wasn't close enough to poach. It's not that he wouldn't do it because it was illegal, it's that he couldn't pull it off with enough credibility, once the SCOTUS kicked the bullshit Texas lawsuit back into the dumpster whence it originated.

Even completely amoral dirtbags have some core principles, it turns out. Barr's is that he knows better than to self-incriminate any more than he already has. He's just lucky that the Democrats didn't have the stones to string him up for what he's done.

The biggest failure of leadership and governance regarding Barr's most recent tenure as AG is that he wasn't impeached for lying to Congress, which, last I checked, is still nominally a crime. The second biggest failure is that Barr will now take his walking papers and ooze into a seven-figure "consultant" sinecure at some scummy big-bucks white-shoe law firm, the kind that defends child slavery for fun and profit.

Something this nation has never quite figured out, and until it does, things will never get better:  power needs to be held to account, at least once in a great while. When allowed to operate with total impunity, you keep getting people and acts like these, endlessly escalating. All these fuckers should be in prison, yet they will all be rewarded in various ways. Really, why shouldn't they keep doing what they do?

The Blunder Games

Here is your dystopian future:  a hopelessly addled, embittered old man, brain permanently marinated in a bottomless vat of Cutty Sark, vaingloriously attempting to failsplain to Teh Kidz how flash drives work. Ghouliani is basically Trump with a drinking problem, and without even the small amount of exercise from a round of golf.

But that is not the problem, not remotely. The problem is that the comically inept project Ghouliani has undertaken here belies the truly corrosive nature of the effort. While we're having a larf at the audible courtroom farts and the drunk stripper testimony and the karmavirus catching the main players, they're fine-tuning their approach for the next go-round.

They know this won't work, and they're fine with that. It doesn't have to work, in the sense that "work" means "help Trump steal the election." That particular instance probably will not happen, though I wouldn't take that for granted until the actual moment of Biden's official investiture in January (and maybe not even then).

But this will definitely enable them to calibrate their efforts next time -- and I don't mean 2024, I mean the 2022 midterms. You just wait -- any Senate or House election that is even close is going to be contested.

One thing Trump actually has some expertise in is losing other people's money, which is not as simple as it sounds, since you first have to find wealthy people who are stupid enough to give money to a proven grifter. But second to that, Trump has certainly shown some venal aptitude for knowing how to clog the court system with frivolous nonsense and obstructionist pettifoggery. His penchant for vexatious litigation was well-known long before 2016, and as with all of his other ongoing bad behavior, he has never been given any reason to change.

This is really a moment of truth for Democrats:  either they succumb to the comfortable fictions of "unity" and "reconciliation" and "returning to normal," or they choose to enforce the laws and punish bad actors and criminals.

I wouldn't have much if any confidence in which path they will choose. When presented clear moral choices and opportunities, they typically choose to wring their hands and helplessly invoke Murc's Law. Time after time, they have proven to be infinitely better at excuses than solutions. Until people are held accountable for their actions, they will continue with their criminal activities. And why shouldn't they?

(If I were to propose some sort of addendum to Murc's Law -- call it "Heywood's Corollary" if you like -- it might be something along the lines of acknowledging the reality that Democrats face an opposition composed entirely at this point of amoral brutes, gutless hacks, and assorted actors of varying degrees of bad faith, and yet they (Democrats) continue to persist in equally bad-faith public recitations of an imaginary "need" to "return" to an imaginary "normal" state.

The point of having institutions is to curate a plausible history of how things work and how they transpire. To pretend that conditions were normal or desirable in any way, whether in 2015, 2005, or even 1995 or 1985, is to insist on indulging in a set of lies every bit as pernicious as anything the various Republicon chop shops routinely flop on the table like a twenty-pound sack of shit.

In accordance with formulating various internets laws and axioms and such like, I'll see if I can phrase all that more concisely in the near future.)

Happy Kempers

As irony goes, this is pretty much "crystallize it, crush it, chop it, snort it, and stay up for a month" grade shit:  Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who as Secretary or State rigged the 2018 election that put him in the governor's seat, is now getting death threats from his own party (as well as open harassment from Dear Leader himself) for -- you guessed it -- not rigging the 2020 election in favor of Kim Don Ill. Call it Stacey Abrams' revenge, call it what you will, this is brilliant, on-brand, if-you-put-it-in-the-script-they'd-laugh-it-out-of-the-room plot management.

And now Kemp and current SoS Brad Raffensperger and vote-suppression factotum Gabriel Sterling are all taking turns at the mike and whinging, with no self-awareness whatsoever, about how terrible and unfair it is that these toxic mutants they empowered have turned on them. Turns out that dangerous mow-rons are just that, and now they're holding street rallies calling Raffensperger and company traitors, with all the actions and consequences such phrasing implies. Turns out words mean things.

Remember the old saying that tragedy is when it happens to you, and comedy is when it happens to someone else? Yeah. They thought it was high-larry-us when libturds were crying and scared. Now, not so much.

Watching these crybabies go on and on about the ugly, scummy shitheads they encouraged for years gives me a chub that would slice through a brick wall. Fuck every one of these people. This is what they asked for; watching them get it with both barrels should bring us all exuberant joy, just in time for Christmas. Seasons beatings, motherfuckers!

This is not to say that death threats are justified or that anyone deserves to be harmed, let's be clear about that. But these are, after all, high-ranking gubmint officials. They have power to pursue recourse against such individuals. They don't just have to sit there and huddle in a corner and wait for it to become real.

So prosecute the scumbags, threaten them with jail time, get them fired from their jobs, etc. Make an example of them, and make it hurt. Otherwise, I don't what to tell you. But just like the militia clowns who plotted to kidnap and murder Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, there are concrete legal solutions to this problem.

There's a few things about this "stealing the election" nonsense that need to be set straight, on the MSM with a bullhorn if necessary:  obviously for Trump this is just another cheap, transparent grift; he's raised $170M since the election for this, and he can do pretty much whatever he wants with the money. (He's gonna need it for defense lawyers over the next couple years.) Republicon pols, of course, know better, but since they are emboldened by not getting the down-ticket ass-kicking last month that they knew they deserved, are still content to hedge their bets, knowing there is no percentage in unnecessarily agitating their zombie basetards.

As for said basetards? There's the real trick, and this is what needs to be broadcast the loudest:  they don't actually care about the integrity of the process. They would have been fine with wide-open cheating, so long as it gave them the results they wanted.

That's why they're entranced by these ridiculous antics spearheaded by Rudy Ghouliani and Jenna Ellis and Sydney Powell, these jokers that aren't even qualified to chase ambulances with a park bench ad, producing "witnesses" that aren't sworn in (because they'd go to jail for perjury) to attest to things that never happened. They don't care that Rudy is a drunk and a clown who has zero evidence for any of his assertions, that he's pulling all of this nonsense out of his ass and getting chewed out by judge after judge for it -- even judges appointed by Dear Leader.

It's a key feature of this whole dynamic we've watched unfold over the past five years, as we've all tried to make sense of "epistemic bubbles" and all the behavioral psych explanations for what parents of every bratty two-year-old already knows:  baby just wants his way, he doesn't care how he gets it.

And rewarding bad behavior just gets more of the same. It's long past high time that the people that enabled this nonsense in the first place learn that lesson themselves, good and hard. Don't worry, after all is said and done, they will have learned absolutely nothing from any of it.