The Great Depression

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anxiety Attack

I carry a bunch of anger with me. Who I carry it for rotates. -- Daniel Woodrell, Give Us a Kiss

People are apparently getting "anxious" in the final hours, and while it's understandable it's also unproductive. This and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee, but here is my humble advice:  turn that anxiety into anger, and keep it like a grudge. Win, lose, or draw -- whether Biden wins with a 2:1 majority, a ten-million PV lead, and sixty Senate seats, or if Trump somehow manages to cheat and steal and bluff his way through this like he has everything else in his rotten excuse for a life, keep that anger.

Wherever you are, a year from now, five years, ten years, have that anger close by, always there to remind how you felt all year long, how you've felt since 2015. Use it constructively. Maybe you decide to take action at some point -- run for local office, lead a boycott, write off the poisonous people in your life, or just make sure to show up and vote every single time, right on down to dog-catcher.

Beyond that, there's not much you can control. That's why you're anxious. But regardless of the outcome, just as we are approaching the end of one thing -- either the end of a kleptocratic scumbag, or the end of what was left of our hollowed-out husk of a republic -- we are embarking on the beginning of another major project.

And whether that new thing is the long, slow process of trying to restore some semblance of governance and justice to a foul machine, or watching things slide inexorably into violent despotism, the thing for us as individuals is the same:  insulate yourself as much as you possibly can from the decisions of bitter, stupid people who can't let go of their sad, pinched view of the world.

There's nothing you can tell them. There is no point in arguing with them, and there is no compromise to be reached with fascists or supporters of fascism. There is only removing ourselves from their equations as much as possible, and moving forward.

The only things anyone "knows" ahead of time is that it's about to get worse and better. Beyond that, the order and specifics are always in a to-be-determined status. Should the expected take place, and Biden wins by a healthy margin, and the Dems flip the Senate back to sanity (Senaty? Sorry, it was there.), we should all resolve to communicate only with the Democratic politicians, and exhort them to move swiftly and deliberately. Time will be of the essence.

Other than that? You don't owe your Trump-supporting relatives and acquaintances shit. No gloating, no exulting, no "I told you so" or some lame more-in-sorrow-than-pity reconciliation, nor any pwning of conservaturds.

Just this:  they made their decision freely and of their own volition. They have their own bullshit justifications and rationalizations, but after all that is said and done and shat onto the lawn, they know what they supported. Understand them for who and what they are, and understand that it isn't your job to find some half-baked rapprochement with that. They have to take the step of doing the work on themselves to understand just how low they've sunk. You can't do it for them, just like you can't make someone quit their substance abuse habit or gambling addiction or whatever.

My gift for prognostication is not what it once was (and it was never much to begin with), so I'm loath to make rash predictions. I would say there is some non-zero chance for each of the four outcomes I outlined in the previous post. (In order from #1 to #4, something like: 10%, 10%, 5%, 75%.)

More broadly speaking, I think it's really down to one of two possible outcomes:  the statistically likely one is the Biden landslide, but the possibility of it being close enough for Trump to cheat and steal cannot be dismissed. I think we've seen entirely enough he can't do that scenarios where he does that and gets away with it, to just ignore that likelihood. A cornered animal with zero scruples will use everything they have to avoid their fate, and he does have some considerable tools to delay and deny and poison the well just enough. And he knows no one in either party will stop him from trying.

But let's not engage in last-minute doom-scrolling. Let's err on the side of cautious optimism and say that the landslide holds, that it gets called early and the spread only increases from there. That still means two months of Trump's wrecking crew stealing everything that isn't nailed down, pardoning every scumbag criminal enabler, leaving as big a mess as possible, etc. That still means the Democrats will have to be actively nudged by their constituents away from any sort of rapprochement whatsoever with the traitorous fascists across the aisle.

Again, use that anger and keep it by your side, like a faithful pet that you can nurture forever. Use it to remind yourself that who they are right now is who they were all along, and who they will always be until they resolve to change. Character is fate, as Heraclitus knew 2,500 years ago, and so people either recognize their issues and choose to deal with them, or not. The rest of us always have at least some ability to walk away from them.

Game Plan

People look to me and say, "Is the end near? Is this the final day? What's the future of mankind?"
How would I know? I got left behind.
Everyone goes through changes, looking to find the truth.
Don't look to me for answers. Don't ask me -- I don't know. -- Ozzy Osbourne, I Don't Know

As we start to wind down this wondrous Year Of Winning, waiting with bated breath to see if the national fever has a temporary break, it's a good time for all of us to take stock in what is, rather than what should be, and what we want for ourselves and our loved ones in the months and years to come, regardless of next week's (next month's perhaps) outcome.

Start with what you know, what you can control. We can't control -- or even affect -- the ongoing dumbassification of America, as Chuck D memorably put it long ago. All we control is what we do. Do we still support a shitty corporate media, while complaining about it? Then we're each doing our small part to perpetuate the problem, right?

Look, I enjoy the writing of Paul Krugman and Jamelle Bouie and such like, and they've done some remarkable in-depth pieces lately. But if my New York Times subscription dollar also goes for the upkeep and maintenance of useless hacks like Maggie Haberman and Elaina Plott, and hopeless, sloppy thinkers such as MoDo and Bobo and Bretbug, then it might be time to spend my news dollar more wisely. You'd be surprised what conclusions the Punch Sulzbergers of the world will reach when the invisible hand of the free market gets jammed up their asses for a surprise exam.

And if they reach the wrong conclusions and keep the hacks and cut the good ones loose, then you drew the right conclusion about the Times in the first place. The good ones will find a way, just as they did when Deadspin got ripped apart, root and branch, and David Roth and Drew Magary and the rest of them went and founded Defector. Now that, I can tell you first-hand, is money well spent.

I mean, you saw the Plott thing, right? The usual hackjob Cletus safari, this time about white college-educated Trump voters in Georgia. Turns out one of these plain folks on the street was the president of a Young Republicans chapter (cell, pod, whatever -- the guy's in his fuckin' 30s, which tells you he's really there to wow some coed chooch with how he rolls with Dear Leader's inner circle or some shit), and another was a paid Republicon consultant.

The 'splainin' and backpedaling was as hilarious as you might assume, but here's the thing --  this is something that a professional journamalist would have been fired for in the past, and the Times has done this shit multiple times before on previous Cletus safaris. They frequently talk with county GOP chairs in Indiana and Kansas without identifying them as such. These articles aren't just tedious and unseemly, the lack of sourcing on them frequently puts them in the "journalistic malpractice" category.

I should be clearer -- what Plott did was not any sort of error or mistake or oversight, though it's being retroactively characterized that way. She wrote for the Atlantic before going to the Times. She knows what she's doing, and if she doesn't then maybe she needs a couple years stringing for some podunk rag so she figures out one of the cardinal tenets of decent journalism. This should be unacceptable, yet it has become routine. Plott is a self-professed Ann Coulter fan-girl. She knows exactly what she did, and why she did it.

But the fix is in, and it's mostly because these trust-fund babies need their fucking horse-race, the hell with the consequences for actual human beings.

Broadly speaking, there are four possible outcomes for next week:

1. Trump wins, GOP retains Senate. Game over. Either get your papers in order and start looking abroad, or learn to deal with the reality of it. The people who have been warning of "creeping authoritarianism" are, it will turn out, underselling it by a country mile. It will be Trump Unchained; it will spell the end of what's left of this rotted, doddering empire. A.R. Moxon has a fantastic thread enumerating the likely results. For the rest of my lifetime and probably yours, it will be a continued decline in every aspect -- economic, cultural, diplomatic, and more.
   
2. Biden wins, GOP retains Senate. The slide into collapse will be slower, but no less sure. The remaining Goopers may half-heartedly pretend to reject Spray-Tan Satan and all his nefarious works, but only a complete moron could fail to see that Trump has been the culmination of the party, that everything that has taken place has not been in spite of him, but because he and they are perfectly aligned. They'll do everything they can to hamstring Biden and grease the skids for Josh Hawley, who is slightly more intelligent than Trump, but whose religious fanaticism is much more sincere.
3. Trump wins, Dems flip Senate. This scenario is highly unlikely, but then look what we thought was impossible just four years ago. This would actually be better than the second outcome, as a Democratic Senate could effectively tie Trump's tiny, tiny hands in many areas. Whether they actually would, though, is as always a matter of fanciful speculation. Most of these assholes couldn't find their balls in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight. But the possibility would at least be there.
4. Biden wins, Dems flip Senate. Obviously the best possible outcome, and one with a pretty fair chance of actually occurring. Since we've just come to passively accept that Trump will cheat or steal a close election, this scenario has to be assumed to be at least something of a blowout -- roughly a 2:1 EC spread, and probably about a 53-47 D-R spread (including Sanders and King on the D side). This gives the Dems a clear mandate to start unfucking everything Trump and his scumbag administration has done. Again, whether they will actually take yes for an answer and act quickly and decisively is another story. It's not an exaggeration to say that the next couple decades (at the very least) in this country will be directly determined by the choices they make in this scenario.

For what it's worth, despite my usual cranky pessimism, I am still cautiously optimistic that the last outcome will be the one that happens. Seventy million people have already voted, obviously an unprecedented number. We've all seen the videos of lines in state after state -- not just in corrupt shitholes like Georgia and Texas, but even in "safe" states like New York. This nation's voting system, state by state, is a fucking disgrace and an embarrassment, criminally so, and it should be one of the top three priorities for a Biden administration to address.

But it's probably safe to assume that most people do not wait for hours in line to vote for the politicians who made them wait for hours in line to vote. You know?

(California, I am pleased to report, seems to have a voting system that actually functions pretty well. I voted three weeks ago, and have already checked and verified that my vote was received and tallied. As I always point out, one in eight Americans live here, so as much as outliers like to complain -- and like any other state, California certainly has its problems -- this is something that is working at a very large scale. Maybe it's not the smartest idea in the world to have essentially fifty different voting systems. Maybe it's time to standardize as much of this as possible, and not leave substantial swaths of the country at the mercy of backdoored Serbian software with no paper trails.)

Prison for praise is not worth thinking
Sin is still in and our ballots are shrinking
So unleash the dogs - the only solution
Forgive and forget, fuck no
I'm talking about a revolution -- Corrosion of Conformity, Vote With a Bullet

Enough people seem to be ready to change the channel on this reality shitshow, and that's at least something. But we all have to do this with the realization that, even in a 538-0 EC massacre, an 80-20 popular vote split, even if that were to occur, the work still needs to be done, and it's just beginning.

And I wouldn't discount the very real probability -- fairly low but not insubstantial -- that the Supreme Court will steal it for him, right out in the open. Brett "Rapebro McGambledrunk" Kavanaugh's specious, nakedly partisan ruling essentially boils down to states can count ballots as long as they're Republicon ballots, and again, they're not even trying to hide this. Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett (Ofjesse) all cut their teeth helping Fredo Arbusto steal the 2000 election from one Albert Arnold Gore, Junior.

(Knowing what you now know, you think maybe Gore should have carried his home state, or picked a decent running mate, or maybe fought harder for Florida? It really isn't 100% Thanksralph's fault here, not by a long shot. There's a lot of blame to go around.)

Political common taters across the spectrum are fond of pointing the finger at this or that party or elected representative as some sort of strategic or logistical fulcrum by which legislative impunity or perfidy gets leveraged. But every elected representative, no matter how great or awful, is an accurate reflection of the people who voted for them -- and of the people who couldn't be bothered to show up to vote against them.

This is the foundational problem with democracy, it turns out -- in a nation teeming with Idiocracy rejects, the fact of the matter is that no matter how smart or engaged you might be, the system is always at the mercy of the dumbest, most inconsiderate dipshit in the class.

Just like real life -- the last time you drove somewhere, it wasn't the 95% of drivers who watched where they were going and paid attention who you noticed, it was that asshole that merged right on your front bumper and hit the brakes. It's that jerkoff that takes two or three parking spots because he's just that fuckin' special. It's the tool in Costco that leaves their flat-cart across the middle of the aisle while they waddle away for "just a second" to find that five-gallon bucket of mayonnaise.

So it is with the process of collectively determining who might be the best-suited to manage the nation's well-being, to maintain its increasingly tenuous standing in an interdependent world that has already begun shifting its focus to the burgeoning Indian Ocean nations. It's the "undecided" voters, these fickle doofuses trudging along in "swing" states, who can't muster much in the way of empirical facts, but do understand all too well the disproportionate power they wield just because they live in Ohio or Florida.

(I don't know if we'll ever be rid of the damned Electoral College, but it would be the biggest favor we ever did ourselves, regardless of political affiliation. The look on my few remaining Republicon friends' faces when I remind them that, since they're in California, their votes don't really count, is priceless.

But the fact of the matter is, the only people who still support keeping the EC are the same people who support all the various, nefarious forms of voter suppression across the country. It all boils down to the same thing:  they're afraid of a fair fight. That's all there is to any of this. The fact of the matter is that there are some people who believe that rather than one citizen equals one vote, that one dollar or one acre equals a vote. Wonder who they keep getting that notion from.)

From time to time throughout this wondrous year, I have mentioned that I will be shutting down the blog at the end of the year. This was a decision I had made in the Before Times, before the #TrumpPlague took over everyone's lives, whether or not it actually infected them. I would modify that ever so slightly and say that there is a slim chance -- like five to ten percent -- that in the instance of Outcome #4 listed above (Biden wins; Dems flip Senate) I might instead take a brief hiatus and then return in some limited format, a couple posts a month or something.

For a while I thought about starting a Substack and at least collecting beer money for my cranky perambulations, but the fact is that it's increasingly difficult to keep writing about the same things over and over again. Turns out the daily spew from a hideous rage-goblin gets old after a while. And win or lose, the fucker ain't going away until the bitter end.

Trump has indeed sucked most of the oxygen out of the room and made it all about him, as he does, but there's more to it than that. Frankly, it's beyond demoralizing to be reminded on a daily basis that at somewhere between a third and half of your fellow citizens are fine with all this winning, that they want more of it, now. It's almost as demoralizing to consider that the putative opposition party has to be cajoled and wheedled into doing the bare minimum -- and frequently not even that -- to protect basic constitutional norms, to at least try to uphold the remaining integrity of the document they swore to protect and defend.

Even in the best case scenario, the winning party will have to be reminded constantly that there is no "returning" to a pre-Trump "normal," that those days are gone for good, and they can't get there from here. And while I get that all of us have been exhausted by this ridiculous toddler and his scummy family and henchmen, I frankly don't trust anyone beyond the usual "political junkie" (a pejorative I've always despised, connoting as it does an unreasonable fixation on, you know, what the people who make decisions that affect everyone's lives are doing and saying) class to remain engaged.

This thing will not work -- will grind to a fucking halt, I promise you -- if enough people are not willing to stick with it, to show up and vote every time, to make sure they're registered, to pay attention to who's doing what. As long as we have a critical mass of people who can only (maybe) be motivated by well-meaning pods of strangers, canvassing neighborhoods like Jehovah's Witness to plead with their fellow citizens to do their bare basic minimum civic duty, we're going to keep coming back to this.

Except the next Trump won't be a slobby, ludicrous buffoon. We all know that, but it's as if we're all waiting for someone else to do something about it. And it's true that as individuals, we have been rendered powerless in most respects.

But one thing you do have control over is the realization that the American political media -- with a few notable exceptions, but by and large -- is nothing more than a giant PR machine for the psychotic billionaires who really run this joint. Frank Zappa once said that "politics is the entertainment arm of industry," and boy was he ever right about that. There is not a lot of daylight between the coverage of most of those shows, and that of the Kardashians.

(Again, you can only generalize so far, but it tells you a lot about a certain number and type of person that anyone at all is still paying attention to those useless dunces. They can't just go rent their fucking island for their birthday and leave the rest of us alone, they have to rub everyone's nose in it. For the love of all that is profane and unholy, change the goddamned channel on these people, none of whom have ever done a single thing to merit the slightest bit of attention.)

So boycott the political media, boycott their sponsors, tell them what you're doing and why. If enough people do that, they will have to listen. CNN would be a great place to start -- CEO Jeff Zucker is one of the two people most responsible for Trump (Mark Burnett being the other so, uh, you might want to boycott The Voice while you're at it). The current dingbat posing as press suckaterry for this human centipede of an administration got her start as the token yammering conservatard on their stupid panel shows.

I think most normal people would prefer to just cast their vote and then get back to their lives. That is not feasible for at least the next few election cycles, if ever. Unless you stock the entire Democratic party with AOC clones, people who are passionate and smart and actually give a shit, and who you don't have to watch 24-7, this is how it is for now. We will have to keep Biden and Harris to their word; we will have to make our senators step up their game and get shit done, to put country not only party, but over whatever remnants of "collegiality" they want to cling to.

There are no good Republicons. They must be crushed. That's all there is to it.

The choice here is flawed but obvious -- fascism or not-fascism. White supremacy and theocratic authoritarianism with a corporate veneer, or not. I can give you a dozen things that annoy me about Joe Biden, but as P.J. O'Rourke memorably said about Hillary Clinton, Biden is "wrong within normal parameters."

If there's a more perfect metaphor for everything Trump has done in his life -- not just as chief executive, but all along -- it was last night. He held another super-spreader rally in Omaha -- where exactly one electoral vote is at stake -- and thousands of attendees, many of them elderly and enfeebled, were stranded for hours in the 31-degree night. At least seven of these idiot codgers were taken to the hospital for hypothermia.

To which I say, Good. Serves them right. I wish them all the very worst things in life, for however much remains for them. If they still want to vote for the geezer freezer after that, they deserve every single bit of the predictable consequences.

It's important to see things and people as they really are, and to act accordingly. Not react -- you don't need to run out and tell all your relatives and co-workers to go fuck themselves. That accomplishes nothing. It means to understand them, perhaps better than they are willing to consider the situation and understand themselves on honest terms, and take it from there. Maybe they can be reasoned with, maybe not. If not, just walk away, don't engage. Not worth your time to try to reason with people who have chosen to live in their own reality.

And in that instance, it's also an important fact to keep in mind -- Trump is an authoritarian fascist in nature and character, and will always behave as such. He cannot do otherwise. His party has chosen to ride along as far as the road takes them. The people who show up to the rallies have chosen the same path. They are all complicit in what has happened, and what is yet to happen. This is important to keep in mind.

Consider the following sketch:  two young men, Jeff and Larry, pull up to a convenience store. Jeff is driving, Larry is going to enter the store and rob it.

EXT. SHOT -- STORE PARKING LOT:  Car pulls abruptly into parking space near entrance. LARRY hops out and heads through the door.

INT. -- CONVENIENCE STORE:  LARRY looks around the store, sees no other customers, approaches counter and pulls a gun on CLERK.

LARRY:  Give me everything in the register and the safe.

CLERK [opening register]:  I can't open the safe.

LARRY [takes register cash, clearly dismayed at the measly amount]:  This all you got?

CLERK [bemused]:  No one pays with cash anymore. You know what year it is, right?

LARRY [glares, pissed]:  Smart-ass motherfucker! [shoots CLERK twice, heads out door and back to car]

JEFF:  You have a gun? That wasn't part of the plan.

LARRY:  What'd you think I was gonna rob him with, a spoon? Get the fuck out of here!

Now, at that point, Jeff has a choice to make. He can get out and run, and when the authorities eventually catch up to him he can hopefully convince them that he really didn't know Larry had a gun, or that he would shoot the clerk. Or he can put the car into gear and start driving away, which would immediately make him an accomplice, just as surely as if he'd killed that clerk himself. As far as the law is concerned, Jeff is a mur-diddly-urderer, pure and simple.

So it is with anyone still willing to support Trump, and especially the people attending the rallies, paid or not. There's still time to get out and run, but they choose not to. This is entirely of their own volition, and pretending that some Russian micro-targeted ad campaign bamboozled them somehow is just about the dumbest thing to believe in. They know what they're doing, what they're supporting, and why they're there. He's spreading hate, lies, fear, violence, and disease, and they want all of that, as if it's the purest heroin, injected straight into the collapsed veins of their arms. They can't get enough of it. If someone created Trump suppositories, these rubes would kill each other with their bare hands just for the right to stick one up their gaping assholes.

[Note to self:  Possible marketing idea -- Trump suppositories. Soaked in oxy or fentanyl maybe? Cheap vodka? Red white and blue, or would color really matter once they've been used? The whole family, or just the big guy?]

How many times can you hear it? It goes on all day long.
Everyone knows everything, and no one's ever wrong -- until later.... -- Rush, Show Don't Tell

It's important to see them for who they are, and to act accordingly -- not to confront them directly, since we've already established that as a complete waste of time, but to find ways to counteract them, to offset the things they do and say.

But there's a difference between paying sufficient attention and showing up as needed, and immersing ourselves in the arcane strategies of the weasel-faced consultants who appear like young Jimmy the Greek types, to offer their pigskin prognostications. Those people are only talking to each other, and to potential clients. They are not talking to you. Ignore them.

I made a decision to see this through partly out of some perverse sense of "duty," to make it to the end of this dismal movie, to watch how the fifty-car pile-up turns out, etc. That is definitely a huge factor in this. I've watched every scene of this stinker so far, I might as well see the end.

But there's also the realization that there really is no end, not a clean, defined one anyway. Either Trump wins and we're done, as far as an America that suits the majority of its inhabitants, or the Democrats win and we get to watch their feckless dithering for a couple years. Lather, rinse, repeat.

The only end that really matters is how each of us can begin turning away from this ongoing wreck, this sham of a government, and get back to fulfilling what used to be important to us individually. Surely we must be motivated by something more than tuning in for this week's scaremongering. I think a lot of us have lost some of that along the way. There are times when I think I have lost that, and other times when I look back and find a random past post to review and think, okay, that was pretty damned good. I caught something there.

There will be a few posts to wrap up the end of the election cycle, the year, etc. Stay tuned, stay frosty. Keep your fingers crossed for the big day. I'm always glad to be wrong about this sort of thing -- maybe it'll all work out. See you next Tuesday.

Street Voices

As penance for their miserable collective performance over, oh, let's say this past decade just to be charitable about it, for every one of these tiresome missives, there needs to be at least a dozen from people who weren't careless.

Let me play devil's advocate for a second:  look, I get it. Even people who haven't come within a hundred miles or a dozen degrees of separation from a single COVID case have still lost a year off their lives, with no real end in sight. They're tired of being cooped up. You cannot live your entire life as a bubble person, or move around in a hamster ball. You are at greater mortal risk every time you get in your automobile. These are facts.

But. The layers of bougie self-regard in this article are head-shakingly perfect. Gay and conservative and lives in Texas. So let's break that down to its chief political components:  he has a nice comfortable suburban lifestyle, so in a state that is always one hurricane season away from needing a quarter-trillion in emergency funds, in a state that has an atrocious rate of murders of trans people, in a state where slobby, neckbearded goons routinely strap on automatic weapons and drive their coal-rollers to the local Starbucks or Wal-Mart just to show everyone who's boss, this asshole almost certainly voted for a second term for Ted Cruz, and will probably do the same for fellow Trump-cuck John Cornyn. Because they assure him a lower tax bill. Everyone wants good roads and schools and services, but strangely no one wants to pay for them.

Do we have that about right? I will bet you gin-yoo-wine boner-fied folding 'murkin currency that we're in the ballpark with this one. There is no other reason for a gay man to be "conservative" in a place famous for kicking the shit out of people like him, not to mention the fact that there are no more true conservatives as such, just supernumeraries in a reactionary cult.

We'll never know, because this guy never quite indicates that he's learned his lesson from all this, from watching his beloved father-in-law (who was younger than me, for chrissake) die from the #TrumpPlague, to nearly dying from it himself. He just gives us a rather gnomic, pensive closer: 

There’s no relief. This virus, I can’t escape it. It’s torn up our family. It’s all over my Facebook. It’s the election. It’s Trump. It’s what I keep thinking about. How many people would have gotten sick if I’d never hosted that weekend? One? Maybe two? The grief comes in waves, but that guilt just sits.

Is he responsible for his FIL's untimely death? I wouldn't say so, but I get why he feels guilty about it all the same. The question becomes, what do you intend to do to make up for whatever it is you feel guilty about? How do you intend to move forward from this year of personal tragedies? It is not accidental that I use the word intend; to absolve our consciences and expiate our sins, real or imagined, requires us to think and act with real intent.

It would be nice if you could separate the medical dimensions of the pandemic from the political dimensions. It would also be fantastic if a duffel bag packed with unmarked benjamins was delivered to my front porch by a nekkid Scarlett Johansson. Tomorrow morning would be perfect; I usually wake up and start getting ready for work at about 6:15 a.m.

So I don't know what is meant by the wishy-washy phrasing of It’s the election. It’s Trump. I suppose it shows at least an implicit realization of how Trump's sociopathic indifference contributed heavily to the rapid, dangerous spread of this virus that killed someone he cared for deeply. But it does not convey a seriousness of purpose, an understanding that all the politicians who run the state he lives in bear responsibility for this as well.

There has been an immense amount of suffering and loss this year, for people of all ages, races, economic groups, geographic regions, all walks of life. The pain has been spread far and wide, but definitely not equally. Some have had to bear unthinkable losses, while some (like me) have had minor inconveniences at worst. It's not fair.

But it is connected in some instances to how seriously each of us chooses to take the situation, and how our choices inform our intent to move forward and on with our lives, as this plague hopefully fades away.

Now, what if it doesn't fade away? What if it lingers into next spring, and then next summer mutates (it is a virus, after all) into COVID-21? What do you think your elected representatives at the federal, state, and local levels should do to prepare for such and instance, and react in the event it occurs? Do you want more of the same? How's this magickal year been going for you so far?

Only Tony Green can answer those questions for himself. But it's those answers that determine whether he's actually learned anything from all this, and whether he intends to move beyond his own personal guilt and grief.

In the meantime, hey, dear media, what if you actually published something from someone who paid attention, wore the masks, did the distancing, didn't get weird or emotional or flip out over basic acts of common courtesy, just did their part to pull their weight and not spread the fucking plague. I wonder what that might be like, to give just a small token affirmation to the millions of people out there who have been doing all those things, instead of making fools out of themselves at Trader Joe's.

Part of the reason we have all become convinced that everyone else is some toxic combination of idiot and asshole is because that's all that's modeled for us by our insect corporate overlords. It's always the wizened, bigoted shithead in the haunted Pennsyltucky Stuckey's that gets the coverage, never the church deacon who quietly runs the food bank for the town and hustles shekels from the local car dealers to try to advance his part of Christ's mission, just an inch or two at a time.

To listen to the American corporate media for any length of time is to slowly condition oneself to think that man-bites-dog stories are routine and average and normal. They have become accustomed to the notion that all over this vast nation of ours, right now people are biting dogs by the score. There is no proper sense of perspective or proportion.

When the majority of the voices amplified consistently are the voices of shitheads and scumbags, it's not unreasonable to start assuming that we're outnumbered by shitheads and scumbags. Who knows? Maybe we are. We're about to find out, one way or the other, but the fact is that either result is going to require action with intent. But I think it's safe to say that the picture they've been painting is not very accurate. Their overweening obsession with clickbait and access and selling boner pills and cheeseburgers has clouded their judgment and compromised their stated professional mission.

Turns out the news actually is fake, to some extent, though in neither the scope, scale, nor direction that Dear Leader supposes, in his endless parade of self-loathing and eternal butt-hurt. But it's up to us to let them know we've had enough.

If you think it sucks that the Vichy Times continues to employ a "journalist" who is such a shamelessly lazy hack that she literally amplified a Wile E. Coyote-grade "scandal" from Rudy Ghouliani's scotch-soaked brain, before checking a single detail to find out that it was complete bullshit, then stop giving them your money. Encourage them to fire her worthless ass. Honestly, when was the last time -- or any time -- that Maga Haberman told you anything you wanted to know or didn't already know? When was the last time she didn't use her access to function as a propaganda vessel for these monsters?

If you think it's bullshit that NBC "News" has decided to rush a me-too clown-hall event for Dear Leader, then you need to realize that they're doing this as a favor to Mark Burnett, who ran Trump's dipshit fake-tycoon show, and now has The Voice as one of his more lucrative properties. So? Boycott NBC, especially that show. Boycott anything with Burnett's name on it; all he does is reality garbage, so it shouldn't be too difficult to figure those out.

If we want to get rid of the bastards and monsters who are ruining everything, the first step is to stop giving them money. Otherwise, expect more of the same, since they literally have no disincentive to change anything.

Warren Piece

As much of a clown car as the Democratic primary season began as, the real absurdities piled up as the field winnowed. And now, thanks to a lazy, sexist media nudging a lazy, sexist voter base, the (by far) most qualified candidate has bowed out, in order that we might be afforded the privilege once again of "selecting" among a handful of elderly, cantankerous white men, some of whom may or may not be losing their faculties.

One valuable anecdotal insight the corporate media did bestow upon us leading up to Super Tuesday was the repeated observations that voters preferred Warren, but were going to vote for Biden or Sanders because of the "electability" factor. This dumb, self-reinforcing circular logic undermines the whole point of a primary, and cements the hold that the party establishment and its corporate owners hold on the public's well-being.

It is not a coincidence that all the major pharma stocks experienced a generous bump yesterday morning, or that Jim Clyburn has benefited from the largesse of that particular industry during his political career. Make of that what you will.

"Electability" is a lie. You know who was considered unelectable? Barack Obama, a black guy with a thin political résumé and a Moooslim sounding name. You know who else was considered really unelectable? Donald Fucking Trump, a ridiculous asshole and multiply-failed "businessman" who'd been making a fool out of himself for decades. All the professional pundits and common-taters said so. No one in their right mind would vote for those guys. They were gonna get their asses kicked.

So when those same brain surgeons all preach from the same "a progressive will end up like McGovern against Nixon" hymnal, I check my bullshit detector. They're constantly wrong, and still somehow employed. These are the same people that always insist that Democrats and liberals must find common ground with their opponents, but never seem to get around to even suggesting such a thing for Republicans and conservatives.

Why do you think that might be? Hmmm.... [scratches chin thoughtfully]

I wonder if -- and just hear me out here -- if we think about our perpetual electoral-entertainment-industrial complex, about who buys the ad time, who owns the broadcast entities that rent out the ad time and run the ads, what other vested interests all those entities might have, and how that impacts which politicians they might decide to support, if all those factors have anything at all to do with one another, or with why Elizabeth Warren was essentially ignored, except to occasionally hint that she might be a hectoring schoolmarm who concocted a weird lie about getting fired for getting pregnant.

I wonder.... [scratches balls thoughtfully]

The fact is that of the main candidates, only Warren and Sanders would actually do something. So Bernie becomes this insurgent commie who wrote some weird slash-fic fifty years ago, and might shoot Chris Matthews in Central Park to celebrate Che Guevara's birthday or some shit. And Warren, again, is a shrill know-it-all bitch who just reminds all the he-men out there of their first wife -- or worse yet, of her divorce lawyer.

It's tempting to blame that insane dynamic on all the media or on Trump or whatever. But the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic voting base, who collectively decided to outsmart themselves by trying to game who they thought everyone else would vote for, rather than who they actually thought would do the job best.

And so now you're gonna get Joe Biden, who has spent his entire career supporting the rackets that run the country and make American life so financially ruinous and spiritually deadening -- health care, student-loan usurers, Wall Street thieves. Hell, even Clarence Thomas.

The narrative for now is how Biden is so "smart" and "decent", and that's true enough, as far as it goes. You know who else is smart and decent? Elizabeth Warren. Even Bernie, as loud and angry and off-putting as his energy tends to be, does seem to actually give a shit about something besides himself. Joe Biden does not have the market cornered on knowing how things work, or on being a decent human being.

I understand that in a country that has desensitized itself to the daily depredations of a scummy grifter and his vile family, that qualifies as a shocker. But we got stuck with Trump for largely the same reasons -- smug complacency from the Democratic party leadership, and an inability to understand the seething anger coming up from the increasing pool of downtrodden in the glorious gig economy.

I don't know who wants to break it to Nancy Pelosi, but uh, turns out end-stage predatory capitalism isn't much fun for most people. And where Trump sussed out that anger in 2016, and got just enough people who weren't regular voters to push him across the goal line, Sanders has captured that crowd on the other side of the aisle.

Many of the Berners will indeed come over for Good Ol' Joe when the time comes, because they rightly despise Trump and the dirtbags around him. But an indeterminate -- but possibly significant -- portion of them will just stay home, because they didn't plan to vote -- they planned to vote for Bernie. Failure to recognize that and give something to them to keep them motivated is every bit as bad as their stubbornness and apparent apathy.

A.R. Moxon had a fantastic thread this morning on the illusion of "compromise" as a governmental principle. Compromise is upheld as this ideal of opposing sides coming together to find common ground and work together for the good of the country. But that stopped happening a very long time ago, and only one party seems to recognize the situation for what it is.

Republican politicians don't even pretend to reach out to Democratic voters, or even moderate Republicans, so we don't even need to bother with that notion. Democratic politicians strive for this illusory ideal of placating the elusive "swing voter" -- as if someone who is still on the fence at this late date can possibly be considered a rational actor or an honest broker -- while "shoring up" their own base. In other words, their preference is to compromise with people who will probably vote, but may or may not vote for them. But they flat-out refuse to compromise with the people who will definitely vote for them, if only you give them something to vote for, besides more of the same.

Here's a pro marketing tip for all you would-be politicians and influencers out there -- it is very difficult to generate enthusiastic support from people if your only sales pitch is to threaten them if they don't buy your product.

Best case scenario is they buy your product -- which again, offers them nothing except the dwindling possibility of preventing things from getting even worse -- and loathe you and themselves afterward. More likely is they just make a poker face, nod in mock assent until you fuck right off already, and then stay home.

Please note:  this is not at all to say that you shouldn't vote. No matter who the nominee is, no matter how much they suck, you should vote for them, and vote in all the down-ticket races as well. Biden is at least lucid enough to know what he doesn't know, and to fill those gaps with smart people, rather than dumb, greedy bootlickers. A second Trump term will be catastrophic for this country and the world, period. Both Biden and Sanders have profound flaws, and I have deep reservations about each of them. But either of them is infinitely superior to the alternative, just for the Supreme Court alone, but for so many other reasons.

That said, I also think that the Democratic Party and its principals are at best engaging in an ongoing pattern of dereliction of duty, one that can only be rectified by giving it a complete overhaul, the very second after the Republican Party is eradicated completely from the American political system.

Consider the vaunted "blue wave", and how and why they were voted in for the midterms. People wanted shit to get done. They wanted Trump's corruption and criminality investigated and prosecuted. A majority of Americans polled indicated that they wanted Trump impeached and removed.

What did the House leadership do? They balked and slow-walked it the entire way, only finally investigating and impeaching when the crimes became impossible to ignore. They cherry-picked two narrowly-drawn articles of impeachment, though there were certainly more to choose from, to keep in the chamber for backup.

And when McConnell did exactly as predicted, and moved through a sham trial, the House Dems folded and gave up. No contingency plan, no further pursuit of criminality, no impeachment of Bill Barr, even though Barr lied in his confirmation interview and has operated quite openly as Trump's lawyer, instead of the country's lawyer. Again, either the law means something or it doesn't, and inaction speaks as loudly as action.

They claimed they wanted to focus on health care instead. Okay then. So now we have a global pandemic brewing, the administration lying and covering things up, as they do. People are dying and getting sick. The labor situation is such that poor people cannot afford to take time off to go see a doctor, much less pay for treatment, which will only exacerbate the situation. We will be very lucky if this doesn't cost a large number of lives in this country; it's already claimed some.

So. What is the opposition party doing to oppose this murderous negligence? What are they doing to shine a spotlight on the open malfeasance? Say the corona virus peters out tomorrow and there are no more casualties -- the administration's handling of it has made it clear that when the "real" zombie-apocalypse death-virus does come down, the country and the world are royally screwed. They'll just ignore it until enough people have died and the economy has stopped, and then toss people into camps in a half-assed attempt to quarantine them. They are unprepared because they clearly just don't give a shit.

Where is the Democratic leadership on all that, or are they still crowing about all the bills they passed that just die on the Senate floor, thanks to Traitor McConnell's hate for this country? It really doesn't matter if you pass four hundred or four million bills, if everyone knows they're just going to sit there in a stack, while you bleat about how that sucks. Yes, it sucks. Are you going to figure out what to do about it, or are you just going to shake working people down for more money and canvassing time, so you can keep your job and continue not to fix the problem?

It says a lot about the current state of the Democratic Party that, up until a few days ago, their candidacy for the presidency had essentially been hijacked to the point that two of the top three contenders, Bernie and Bloomberg, were not even Democrats. That's a sign of a party that has lost its moorings, and is not convincing its base anymore, because it doesn't stand for anything effectively and forcefully. It makes all the expected noises, but doesn't actually accomplish anything to move the proverbial ball forward. They've always got a shitload of excuses ready, though.

These are just some of the things that Liz Warren would have actually improved and changed, without meaningless bleats about "reaching across the aisle" to open traitors, hoping to appeal to the better nature of thieves and scumbags. Maybe Biden comes around on this. I hope so. Honestly, I'm long past tired of being right about all these people. Every goddamned time.

I'll tell you something that you will rarely see any Extremely Online Person ever ever write:  I would very much like, just once, to be wrong about all of this. And I don't just defy the people that I write about to prove me wrong, I would gladly thank them for doing so.

But it starts with us, in the collective sense, to stop falling for these ludicrous people and their transparent lies and bullshit narratives, to grow the fuck up and start voting with our brains and our wallets, instead of our feelings and our fever dreams. More than anything else, that was the promise that Liz Warren brought to the table, along with the willingness to actually stand up and fucking fight for something valuable.