Media-crity

Not sure who is more deserving of the "simp of the week" award:

• the guy who thought there'd be a good story in plumbing the deep thoughts of a bunch of frothing bozos, only to find that they were, well, a bunch of frothing bozos;
• the people who keep showing up to transcribe the plain lies of this peroxided cunt, and somehow manage to appear shocked when the bar goes ever lower.

Did you learn anything new from either of those narratives? Of course not. There was nothing to learn at all.

In the first example, we affirm the fact that in a nation of 325 million people, some of them are assholes, some of them are stupid, and some are both. It's up to you to figure for yourself just what "some" entails, but it's funny how often the camera pans up from these stupid "lockdown protests," only to show that, well, it's really just a few dozen idiots who just got tired of spanking their hapless monkeys to Judge Judy or whatever.

Who gives a fuck what they think? We already know what they think, because they never shut the fuck up. I mean, great job Journamalist Guy, for finally giving voice to belligerent slapdicks. Up to now, we really were in the dark as to what these cousin-fuckers were thankin' 'bout.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ. This fucking guy. Mommy, I stuck my head in the chimp cage, and they threw doo-doo at me and tried to rip my face off! The hell you say.

The second example is even more consistent and pervasive, since these accredited saps keep showing up for this fucking nonsense. It might be a good idea to return to basic principles and ask fundamental questions:  What is the purpose of a White House press conference? What is our purpose in attending these things, when we know they're lying, the public knows they're lying, and the liars know that everyone knows they're lying? What do we hope to achieve by daily transcribing this malignant guff, for people who have already made up their minds?

When there is no point to it, when it's all just a street-corner three-card monte game, you effectively are just a conduit for agitprop, the jet plane by which the lie gets around the world while the poor truth is still struggling to get its socks on. You can tell yourself whatever you need to in order to sleep at night, but you're really just helping Team Satan.

I didn't need you people to tell me that Kayleigh MagaNinny is an awful human being, utterly without principle, happy to sell her country out in order to cash checks from someone she knows full well is a monster. She defends his monstrosity with lies. That is her job. Used to be that a journalist with integrity would flat-out refuse to give oxygen to a subject that could not be vetted or fact-checked -- a subject that was, you know, a fucking liar.

Tune these fucking losers out, all of them -- the shitheads that do stunt coverage like this, and their subjects. The only reason any of them are doing it is because outrage sells, it gathers eyeballs and clicks. Fuck these people, let them ply an honest trade for once in their got-damned lives.

Why Do You Keep Hitting Yourself?

One of the constant refrains of online libs and mods and such is how horrible the putatively liberal members of the mainstream media tend to be, day after miserable fucking day. Columnists for the NY Times receive mild criticism as harbingers of tumbrels and guillotines. Network news anchors such as Norah O'Donnell do PR puff pieces with murderous petrocrats, and praise Dear Leader's showmanship hours after a State of the Union speech that was probably discarded from an early draft of Idiocracy for being too ludicrous. This week, Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd have separately characterized Bernie Sanders and his (admittedly bumptious) supporters in ugly, corrosive terms.

It will be a matter of minutes or hours, a day or two at the most, before another supposed liberal betrays the cause or whatever. And then countless virtual soapboxes will be mounted with alarming quickness, with accompanying videos and Twitter threads documenting the atrocity of the day.

Here is some free advice, and it may not even be worth that much:  Cut them loose. Stop watching them, stop reading them, stop patronizing their networks, their advertisers, all of it. These well-heeled turds have been poisoning the well with their worthless observations and hoary rhetoric for as long as I have been alive, always getting worse and never better as time has passed. Some other rented piece of shit in a suit will step in for each of them after they retire and spend their dotage crowing about how their bullshit kept 'murka's sacred promise alive. Write them off and don't look back. There are plenty of people out there plying an honest trade, not content to be PR flacks for billionaires and defense contractors.

Obviously, conservative outlets such as Fox News, Blaze, OANN, and the vast reserve of talk-radio douchebags have been far more poisonous, for far longer. But those entities barely even bother to pretend to be serious or real. They are comic-book caricatures, a combination of the worst elements of pro wrestling and televangelism, designed explicitly to appeal mostly to the credulous dupes who take both of those things seriously. I mean, come on. You basically have to be a Homer Simpson-level doofus -- a slow-witted, angry sap unwilling to read anything longer than a postcard, and really just needing a daily fix of button-pushing nonsense, to engage with any of those media at all.

But the "legitimate" outlets, the networks, CNN, MSNBC, they all posture and preen like a bunch of fucking show cats, smug and secure in the comfortable lie they tell their audiences, which is the same lie they tell themselves in order to be able to sleep at night. And then they turn around and have Kellyanne Conway or Rudy Giuliani or Alan Dershowitz on, because only by giving liars and propagandists an equal platform with facts and truth can we reliably ascertain a clear narrative, right? There is simply no other way to skin this poor squirrel.

If you've seen my NFL playoff predictions over the years, then you know how spotty my record of prognostication is. But I can guarantee you this with ironclad certainty:  they will never stop being terrible until they are forced to. I honestly don't believe too many people need to be told this. But it's like everyone is waiting for everyone else to turn away, so no one does.

And frankly, I literally can't believe that anyone who doesn't have a clear vested interest in the political consulting industry, the machine that never stops churning in this country, chewing up dollars and gaslighting citizens, making them crazy and turning them against each other, actually watches or reads any of these puling dipshits. Seriously -- do you personally, or anyone you know, actually fucking watch Chuck Todd, or read David Brooks?

Clearly someone is patronizing these tools, because they sell ad space and have teevee shows. But if you're not in the game, there is no point in watching them. They're not talking to you. They're talking to the bookies and grifters who infest the seedy demi-monde of influence peddling and favor trading. They're telling each other whom to make book on for the coming week or month.

It's awesome, in a way, that in a week where you literally had a throng of masked, hooded white-power creeps skulking through the nation's fucking capital city, faithfully guarded by their law-enforcement allies, there were dispatches from leading corporate media figures wringing their hands over the unseemly behavior of the Bernie bros. Why, I hear they may have heckled a few unbelievers on the ol' Twitter machine!

(Side note re the DC "Reclaim America" march:  The marchers' stated contention that they are fighting back against elements who wish to see them erased from American society are, in fact, correct. No one in their right mind would miss the cancerous presence of these people. There's a reason they were fully -- and illegally, but they're white, so.... -- masked and wearing sunglasses, like a rural militia with a rather theatrical flair. They don't understand much, but they know very well why they can't afford to be recognized. And they know why they had to be flanked by a cadre of bicycle cops the entire time, like the snowflakes they really are. They can't admit it, maybe not even to themselves, but they know. They know they are failures, that the very act of participating in that....thing is a profoundly shameful, stupid deed. Fortunately only they and their fellow snowflakes know what they've done, who and what they really are. Let them live long with the full shame.)

But the ongoing perfidy of the corporate mediots should encase your anger in carbonite, and ensure your resolve to never give those worthless cocksuckers a moment of your time, except to track the sponsors and toss 'em a quick template email explaining in a hundred words or less why you'll never buy their product again.

There is no other reason to watch any corporate network or cable news, nor to read the NY Times. These people are profiteering from the chaos, nothing more, nothing less. They are in cahoots with the regime, in effect if not in scheme.

I always think about that scene in Howard Stern's Private Parts, where the program manager explains to Howard that the people who love his show listen for an average of ninety minutes, while the people who claim to hate the show listen for an hour longer than that.

If the people who are pissed at Chuck Todd (or whoever the dipshit of the day is; there'll be another one tomorrow, coming right out with the rising sun) simply hit his mentions one last time, simply saying something like, Fuck you, I'm done, and I'm emailing your sponsors to let them know I'm done with them too, it would be over for them. Curtains. Kaput. Because once the hate mail and nasty comments drops off, that's a hit for their audience KPI.

So, uh, let's get this party started already. There are worse goals in life than to see Tweety Matthews and Chunk Toad be forced into cushy retirement.

Everything Trump Touches Dies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chop Shop

Just what you needed -- another checkdown on the plight of the Stockholm Syndrome corporate mediots. The self-referential version of a Cletus safari, the corporate media's other wonderful contribution to the "discussion."

Look, you morons, it's pretty simple:  if you stop showing up to these useless "yellicopter" stunts, he'll stop doing them. What the reporters, as individuals, and their employers are really afraid of is that if they act on their "principles" and don't show up, everyone else will still show up.

These things add no value to the average American citizen's ability to discern the nuances of policy emanating from this human centipede of an administration, like a stream of wet Family Guy farts following a feast of chili made with roadkill and Old Milwaukee. Like much of what the ragebait media does now, it is worse than useless, it has been outright harmful.

When you look at the valuable examples of media work, for example David Fahrenthold or Natasha Bertrand, you instantly see the enormous qualitative difference between what those two (and a few others like them) are doing, and the useless (funny how much that word crops up, but it's the right word) sound-bite coverage. The latter of the two merely serves as a convenient channel of lies and propaganda, presented as "oh, look at what this doddering rage-monkey said today," as if it was any different than what he said last week or last year.

But functionally it falls under the rubric of the old saw that the lies runs halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. And frankly, he's doing this worthless custom a favor -- White House press conferences have never not been little more than routine agitprop events. Trump and the mutants who work for him cannot help but let you in on the joke.

They hold anyone who questions or doubts them in very deep and cynical -- but completely sincere -- contempt, and this holds exponentially greater for the tedious scriveners who wait on the lawn to have lies screamed at them incoherently. And they make no attempt to hide it. The next step will be to limit Trump's press availability to "executive time" -- that is, he will only allow them to ask questions of them while he's growling out a huge, smelly Filet-O-Fish dump.

I don't feel sorry for them or their viewers and readers. Platitudes and bromides are useful in this context:  People will treat you how you let them treat you. When you expect little out of life and out of yourself, that's generally what you'll get. The only things Trump loves in life are money and the empty adulation of dipshits. And so on. Go back and read some Mencken, and be refreshed by what today turns out to be his rather sunny optimism.

Grampa Walnuts is dumber than a bag of snot, but he knows that the housebroken media monkeys will show up and dance to his tune, every fucking time. It's all they know how to do. It might be time for them to think about what their job really entails. Maybe this isn't what they aspired to do. God, you hope for their sake that they didn't intend to do that for a living, to serve as a collective rage-tampon for a demented criminal's daily rantings.

Not that investigating and uncovering the various nefarious activities of these scumbags is likely to change anything; America is nothing if not a deeply cynical nation, betrayed and bored to death by the mutual ankle-biting of the "elites" that the rabble somehow keep getting tricked into voting for. But what they're doing now comes with an ironclad no-bullshit 1000% absolute guar-on-tee that it will accomplish absolutely nothing. Might push a few more magazines or cheeseburgers or pharmaceuticals, but that's it. There is no scoop to be had in these things. It's a bad cat's litter box.

Trump's right -- it is fake news, in the sense that it's a contrived, cynical event, broadcasting things he says that he, they, and we all know to be untrue. There's nothing real or useful about any of it, and if the reporters had any goddamned self-respect, they'd just walk away and do some real digging. They'd rather stand there for hours in bad weather like a bunch of assholes, waiting for nothing, knowing full well that this evil old bastard is a sadist at heart, that their discomfort gives him a tiny chub.

Tune them out, turn the channel, boycott their sponsors. Withhold your business from all of them, as much as possible. That is the only thing that's going to change this sorry paradigm. Shut them down.

Poll Smokers

Ignore all polls -- yesterday, today, last week, next week, next month, a week before the election. I don't mean you need to remain ignorant of the polls, but seriously, what sort of person lets a poll result affect their vote or any part of their decision-making process? A dipshit, that's who. You already know that, though, you don't need some internet wiseass to point that simple fact out to you.

Much like reality teevee, the constant churn of meaningless data is a very real and metastasizing cancer on this country. It has poisoned the impressionable brains of simpletons, people who shouldn't be allowed out of the house with money or without a helmet.

Unlike every other modern representative government on this groaning, beaten planet of ours, the US is blessed with a perpetual campaign machine. It's another in a long list of uniquely American rackets that turn out to be lucrative, because we are largely a country of willing dupes.

So, for example, the health care system is a collusive racket between the insurance companies, HMOs, and big pharma. The university system is a collusive racket between the schools and Wall Street. Both are designed to do exactly the same thing -- hoover ungodly amounts of usury out of the pockets of a captive market.

Now, the perpetual campaign racket is similar in that it is basically underwritten by most of the above entities, since they all buy ad time on the corporate media propaganda outlets. But instead of sucking money directly out of your pocket, they grab your eyes and brains with piles of the worst sorts of tea-leaf-reading bullshit and pseudo-analytical nonsense.

Why are white men without college degrees twenty-five percent likelier to vote for Trump than any other demographic? they ask. I dunno, because they're idiots? Who knows? Who cares? I don't give two shits who my next-door neighbor or my relatives or some fist-shaking codger in a haunted Pennsyltucky diner is going to vote for -- at all. I mean, I care in the sense that I hope they don't make the stupid choice, but whatever their choice turns out to be, it doesn't affect my choice in the slightest.

But when you have billions of dollars thrown at weaselly consultants whose sole mission is to convince you that some doofus "swing voters" should be courted like a busload of horny supermodels, you have your racket. And it's every bit as pernicious a racket as the health care or college rackets, maybe more so in some ways.

The real job of this dipshit consultant with their focus-group polling, appearing on a panel with other useless assholes on Jake Tapper's show or whatever, their real job is to convince you that any bold ideas that might upset the billionaires who own everything is Bad, and makes Candidate X "unelectable." This is explicitly designed to force Candidate X to "moderate" their tone, coin some "conciliatory" phrases in order to reassure our benevolent plutocrats that All Is Well, why, we would never so much as dare to dream of anything beyond a life of pointless make-work, eternal usury, and endless advertisements.

So the real "problem" with Elizabeth Warren proposing a plan to move to a "Medicare for All" type of system, is certainly not that it might displace some number of paper pushers and bill collectors whose jobs would be made redundant, nor even really that a "wealth tax" would be instituted to pay for it. The problem the billionaires have with it is that they are unclear on where their revenue stream  is in the proposed new system. How can we monetize it? How can we financialize it? Where is the magic pond in this plan, the one where I get to wet my beak for eternity?

As I keep preaching, their equity is an amalgam of other peoples' debt, just as your personal debt could be pieced out as other peoples' equity. They have a clear vested interest in keeping as many people as possible broke, stupid, and on the debt hook for the rest of their goddamned lives. An important part of gulling people into voting against themselves over and over again is to make them feel like they have at least a small stake in life, something worth not losing or risking, and then destabilizing them with barrages of data -- some true, some false, none of it matters -- in order to induce a state of fear.

Fear of losing your job or your house because the company you work for pulls up stakes overnight and moves operations to China. Fear of losing your crappy health insurance, because if you or your wife or one of your kids gets cancer or hit by a bus or whatever, you're fucked. Hell, even if you do still have your insurance, you're probably fucked. But at least there might be some lube involved.

(Of course, the hospital will charge the insurance company a thousand bucks for the one-ounce tube of lube, which the insurance company will then deny and send you the full bill on the EOB, against your five-thousand-dollar deductible. But I digress.)

And so the pelf-grubbers and the usurers and the spreadsheet-diddlers who produce and create nothing, but own everything, are welcomed on to the corporate media which is institutionally aligned with them, to lecture the peons about the "moral hazards" of not gouging every possible cent out of working people, for a product which typically does not recoup its cost in the first place, never mind the next decade or so of vig added on.

And then they'll turn around and have that nazi Spencer on, or the liar Kellyanne. The mission is not to inform, but to deform -- to irretrievably mutate the terms of discussion, so that a truly honest debate can never be had. It takes some serious balls for these fucking hacks to grind on Liz Warren's proposal -- which is all it is, we're not even into the primaries yet -- and not provide a side-by-side comparison with that flag-humping Caddyshack reject, who has done nothing, has proposed nothing, to resolve or even address what most people across the political spectrum agree is a serious problem.

It's a game, and we need to stop playing it. People like Jake Tapper and Chuck Todd really ought to be ashamed of themselves. What they do is not journalism, it's (as Frank Zappa once memorably put it) the entertainment branch of industry. It's PR for the Koch brothers and for Exxon, and whoever else is paying the bills.

The perpetually changing polls in the perpetual campaign are critical pieces in keeping the average rube unsettled and destabilized. They're designed to give the just-over-half-bright viewer a few simple talking points they can memorize the next time they have a run-in with their smarty-pants co-worker at the water cooler.

They can prattle about the two million clerical and admin jobs that might be lost in the M4A transition, which would take years to implement in the first place, without considering that part of the problem is that at least some of the money that comes out of your paycheck to pay for your shitty insurance pays for those jobs, and that maybe creating a real marketing efficiency would not only save you money on your insurance premiums, but give those workers an opportunity for something better than churning out EOB forms.

They can recite Leon Cooperman's bullshit about the moral hazards of student-loan forgiveness, without thinking about the fact that Cooperman owns a stake in Navient, so yeah, students' debt is his equity, where have you heard that one before? I think we're at the point where you could start a super PAC called "Chickens for Colonel Sanders," and no one would see the irony in it. We're post-Onion now. And it's because mediots with no sense anymore of what is actually newsworthy decided to give infinite air-time to people with no scruples or principles whatsoever.

So I don't care what the polls say, even when I agree with them. And I don't care what any media monkey says, even if I nod along with them. I have already made my resolution, and it's best phrased in A.R. Moxon's tweet at right:

I used that exact argument with a Trump-supporting friend a few months ago. I reminded him that I was very much a ticket-splitter for a long time, but as the Republicans have increasingly soiled their brand with hucksters and scumbags like Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, et al, I've written them off forever.

I figure I've got another seven or eight presidential election cycles left, and I don't care how bad the Democratic candidate is, I will never vote for a Republican again, not even for so much as fucking dog-catcher. My wife will never vote for a Republican. My daughter just turned eighteen, and is very much looking forward to casting her "fuck you" drop in the ocean against Trump and his scummy ilk next year, and for the next sixty or seventy years. And we already stopped buying from companies that support Trump or Fox, watching shows made in Georgia, all of it. Yes, it's a bit of a hassle, but I am fucking done with all of these people, and refuse to give them anything -- time, money, attention.

Just as I know more than my share of Trump supporters, I also know a good number of people who, like myself, did vote Republican sometimes, but now regard them with a snarl usually reserved for child molesters and red-light runners. Trump is not the cause of all this, but the natural outcome of their efforts for my entire lifetime. It's not just him, it's always been them. They're fucking scum, top to bottom, whether they vocally support Trump or not. Silence is complicity.

And I will make sure that if a pollster calls me, they know that, that it's not just "no" to Trump, but "never again" to the Republicons. They're a party of Fredo Corleones, completely dead to me. I think maybe Matt Bevin just found that out the hard way as well, and Trump may finally start figuring out that despite what the paid prognosticators and his bullshit in-house surveys tell him, people don't like that motherfucker, because he's an awful excuse for a human being, and a goddamned embarrassment to a majority of Americans.

Fuck the pollsters, and the mediots who put them on the air. Let's get this party started!

Colon Cancel

You may have heard that out here in Cali, it's that time of the year -- wildfires roaring up and down the state, and the problem is now exacerbated by PG&E shutting down power to areas that might be in danger, or are experiencing high winds. (That is not a joke -- last Saturday night, it sounded like a fucking freight train running through my yard, all night.)

I'm very thankful to be out of the fire and shut-down zones (so far), but I have family and friends who are not so lucky, who are in their fourth day without power and counting, and/or have been evacuated multiple times, as the fires encroach evacuation sites.

So when I see these smug little fuckers cracking wise about how some mythical "woke" culture caused this, I want to cordially invite them to suck a fart out of my asshole. They can go fuck each other in the neck. You know who fights these fucking fires? Prisoners and professionals, period.

Dave Rubin doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, and I sincerely look forward to the day when he and Fuckface Carlson have their homes and irreplaceables destroyed by an event that can clearly be connected to climate change and its effects.

The most overused phrase from this misbegotten year is "cancel culture." I fucking despise that phrase, and the whiny millionaires who deploy it as some sort of preemptive license to be an asshole. Look, if you like something, no matter how bad a rep it has, watch it. Fucking binge-watch Real Inbred Housewives from Honey Boo Boo's Dirt Road till your brain cells start leaking out your ears, if that's what brings your pecker to full sail.

But when a professional "provocateur" steps over lines -- 'cause that's just what he does, man, he's a free thinker and you can't contain him with your "correctness" -- with flat-out lies that belittle what tens of thousands of people are enduring right now, he can't be too surprised when a critical mass of people see it and say, fuck you, asshole.

The First Amendment is the most important right we have in this country. It means you can say whatever the fuck you wanna say, and the gubmint can't throw your ass in jail. It doesn't matter if it's in poor taste, or even if it's an obvious lie, slapped on the table like a stale dog turd, defying you to call it for what it is.

But it doesn't grant you a guaranteed audience, nor does it compel anyone to give you a soapbox to use to spew your bullshit. So when I see shit like that, I just make a point to remind myself of who sponsors Carlson's shitshow, so I don't accidentally buy any of their products. I support free speech, but not paid lies.

When CNN gives jobs to unqualified propagandists like Corey Lewandowski and Sean Duffy, the latter of whom earlier today denigrated a decorated combat veteran, I know that that network adds no value to my existence. I avoid that network like the fucking plague. It doesn't help that they have professional liars such as Kellyanne Conway and Rudy Giuliani on routinely, or "Big Dick Toilet" chump and former acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. I'm not rooting through the shit pile looking for the occasional corn kernel or peanut. The whole thing is shit.

Their currency is devalued by the constant stream of hacks and liars, posing as avatars of false equivalency and intellectual probity. No, that dipshit Duffy trashed a guy who earned his Purple Heart at the same time Duffy spent his twenties screwing around on MTV's Real World. Fuckin' profile in courage right there. The people who put him in Congress oughta be ashamed of themselves.

This has nothing to do with individuals expressing opinions that I don't like, or disagree with. That's never a problem. That's where the fun happens in political discourse. It's when one of these self-styled "gatekeepers" decides to grant air time to liars and propagandists. It's a vile, destructive recursion of treachery -- we know the liars are liars, the network knows they're liars, the network knows that we know they're liars, the liars know that the audience and the networks know that they're liars, and so on.

It's not news, nor is it even entertainment. It's clickbait. Well, fuck them, and fuck the companies that buy ad time on those shows. You wanna know who hates America and is actively ruining it? Those assholes, all of them. Think of every awful thing that has transpired in the last three years from the antics of this administration, and know that the corporate media is responsible for it happening. Billions of dollars' worth of free air time, and a bloodless commitment to absolute both-siderism, no matter how false.

I wish I knew how to put them out of business. Nothing would thrill me more than to watch Tucker Carlson or Van Jones asking you if you want fries with that. All any of us can do is let our wallets speak for us at every possible opportunity. And if enough of us do that, they'll notice. Don't be fooled by their bullshit "cancel culture" plaints. That's just them scared shitless at the prospect of consumers exercising their free choice, choosing not to have their airwaves relentlessly poisoned by these soulless weasels. That's never a bad thing.

Feet of Clay

Couple of interesting observations about the Obama years and legacy that are worth checking out, as we head into what will surely be an entertaining year in which we will hopefully do as little as possible. Whatever caveats and qualifiers people want to post hoc onto Obama's tenure as imperial custodian, the bottom line is that he was far better than the fool who preceded him, the chumps he ran against, and especially that damned thing that succeeded him. That said, his flaws deserve to be revisited, if only so that they can be avoided in the future.

I always felt that Primary Colors was an underrated gem of a movie, with pitch-perfect performances from the entire ensemble. It captured perfectly how the canned idealism of the Clintons so quickly soured into endlessly triangulated cynicism.

One of the better lines from that movie -- can't find it online right now, so going from memory -- was from Billy Bob Thornton's character, referring to Kathy Bates' true believer character, that when that sort of person finds out their guy isn't really the rock that their church was built on, it devastates them. They're not sure what to do going forward.

I think that's what's happened with all the post hoc analyses of Obama's terms. For one, he benefits simply because the people he ran against, and the people he governed against, were so awful. He comes out looking better simply by being a normal human, instead of a steadily worsening sequence of Star Wars cantina critters.

But what did he actually do to effectively combat that wretched hive of scum and villainy? Not much, it turns out; in fact, considering the massive scale of Democratic losses at all the lower levels, maybe worse than nothing at all. Maybe his health-care initiative will survive in some form. Everything else is already gone.

Obama was effective in conveying that feel-your-pain stuff that good pols need to have, but the be-the-change-you-want stuff kinda backfired. You can't tell the harried single mother working three jobs to keep her family afloat that you know what she's going through, and then when you get elected tell her that she has to step up and be the change. That's what she voted for you to do, dummy, to stand up to the animals keeping her down. She should have showed up for all the midterms, of course, but one might be able to see how such a person might have noticed by those points in time that nothing much was really going to change for their situation.

The Democratic candidate that can forcefully convey that they will fight on their constituents' behalf, and not back down or take some weasel way out, will be the one that can win, and win big. Stop whining about the corporate media and call them out, challenge the individual scriveners to step up and do real work, instead of theater criticism and pithy observations on how to eat corn dogs. Stop complaining about #MoscowMitch and his mastery of procedure, and learn to master it yourselves. He seemed quite able to stonewall things when he led a forty-one seat minority. Do that.

That's really the only worthwhile lesson to take from Obama, that all the well-meaning thoughts and words and intentions mean nothing against people who are dedicated to destroying you. Norms, rules, decorum, all of it -- utterly meaningless if only one side is bothering to observe those things.

Someone (can't recall who or where right now, but very recently) observed that Democrats could have 70% support on an issue, and still be waffling over how well it'll play in Real 'murka or whatever, worrying about what the Fixed Noise drones will say, while the Republicons will trot out some nonsense that barely has the support of their 30% wingnut base, but they'll drive it full throttle, damn the torpedoes.

The sooner the Democrats figure out why that is, and adjust accordingly, the sooner they can set about the righteous work of driving these clowns and monsters directly into the goddamned sea. No mercy, no remorse, no idiotic attempts at comity and collegiality. The Republican Party needs to be ended as a political entity, period, or nothing will ever change.

Don't Just Stand There, Do Nothing

Seth Abramson has the right idea. This is what I mean when I talk about doing nothing. It means understanding that all the vile minions inching the ball forward for a racist thug have gone all-in on what they're doing, and there is no point in arguing with them, attempts at dialogue, blah blah blah. There is no halfway to be had with them, bearing in mind that that's been their approach since the early '90s.

Stop watching their shows. Stop patronizing their businesses and watching their shitty football teams. The El Paso survivors in the hospital have the right idea as well -- they refused to meet with Trump, as is their goddamned right. Good for them. Fuck him.

One of the dwindling few freedoms you still have is the right to say no, the right to decide where to spend your money, or where not to spend your money, the right to refuse to be a campaign prop for a toxic bigot with blood on his hands. He doesn't give a fuck about any of those people, even if they voted for him. All he cares about is people who will suck him off and tell him how awesome he is.

The guy's a piece of shit, and people are being murdered for it, and he thinks it's all a big game. You don't have to support that, nor do you have to support the people and businesses who do support that. Some folks will try to tell you that it is virtually impossible to disentangle the web of corporate integration in order to establish a clear-conscience supply chain for yourself. And that's true, as far as it goes; short of going full Unabomber and building yourself a shack (with hand-hewn lumber) out in the wilderness, you're putting blood money in someone's pockets along the line somewhere.

But you can make conscious choices to at least lower your toxic imprint on this groaning, ruined planet of ours. Don't worry about being Simon-pure with every little choice. Tackle the worst, most egregious offenders, the easy-to-dump choices, just ten percent. I promise you right now, if the Miami Dolphins and Equinox and Soulcycle lose ten percent of their business, Stephen Ross (who owns all three, and much, much more) will have to really think about whether that fucking $250k-per-plate fundraiser is worth it.

Same with the already dwindling number of sponsors for Fixed Noise's roster of white-power spokestools. Write them off, let them know. If enough people do it, they will feel the pain. That's not politics, that's math. Already most of those shows are down to extended My Pillow ads, in-house promos, and a couple of catheter commercials. It's working.

But it starts, as Abramson notes in his thread and as I have been trying to lay out in recent weeks, with refusing to engage with bad-faith actors anymore. I'm not talking about your annoying relatives and coworkers; if you haven't already learned to tune their nonsense out and change the subject or just leave, I don't know what to tell you. But they don't really affect anything.

The problem is the propaganda minions who spoon-feed the rubbish regurgitated by the people you know. The goals of the propagandists are to waste time and sap energy. There is no convincing them of anything, nor any point to daily rebuttals to the streams of lies on their shows. The time has come to put in the ear plugs, and set about the necessary work of driving them into the fucking sea. The only way this happens is to starve them of money.

Three Little Words

Boycott them all. Clearly there is no shame in their game, but Norah O'Donnell should definitely be ashamed of herself with this little nugget. Then again, she did a puff piece with Mohammed Bone Saw for 60 Minutes, whitewashing this "reformer" who butchers journalists and tortures dissenters.

Maybe the corporate media could cover, I dunno, the problematic coincidences between the El Paso shooter's 8chan manifesto and Hair Fuhrer's choice of words and phrases. So what if he spent a few minutes reading empty platitudes from a teleprompter?

The real problem here is that the corporate media really do understand their role as being that of the gatekeepers of the official narrative. That is what Norah O'Donnell makes a steaming ass-load of money for, not "journalism" or "reportage" or anything like that, but to burnish and curate a narrative which the psychotic billionaire owners of the system have a vested interest in perpetuating.

So how do we put these enablers and assholes in the unemployment line, while still having collective access to the news of the day, to empirical facts and useful information? This is something we need to figure out, and soon. Merely deposing the emperor next year -- should we be permitted to do so in the first place -- will not solve the problem; whether he is office or not, he will continue his idiot peanut-gallery bullshit until the day that final cheeseburger strokes him out, and they will cover him, because he's good for their business.

We need to put their business on a rocket ship, and fire it directly into the heart of the sun.

Whatever and Ever, Amen

Here we go again. To be fair, it is a Saturday, which means "white power mass shooting" nowadays. Unlike the asshole last week at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, who at least had the common courtesy to take himself out after gunning down three people (including a six-year-old), today's asshole was taken alive. So, not a black guy holding his phone in a threatening manner. Oh, and there's an 8chan manifesto where the shooter claims inspiration from the Christchurch massacre. There's a shocker.

Obviously this won't change anything as far as gun policy. Look, if gunning down a classroom full of second-graders didn't do it, and gunning down hundreds of concert-goers from a high-rise casino didn't do it, this won't do it either. But we might at least start taking a serious look at the pattern of enablement under this administration, the wink-and-a-nod "fine people on both sides" stance that is baked into the rhetoric.

He tweets out the useless "tots 'n' pears" crap they all do when these things happen, and then turns around at the next rally or the next tweet-storm and indulges the baser instincts of his audience. He used asylum seekers as scapegoats for the midterms, and hasn't let up. This has been going full steam for months, aided and abetted by the Murdoch agitprop machine. It should not be surprising that marginal doofuses with access to firepower are getting motivated and acting up.

It's an interesting coincidence that Elijah Cummings had an attempted home invasion the same week Fatboy decided to make him a target for the shitposts. Also interesting that there's an uptick in "go back where you came from" sentiments. It's almost as if the chief executive has influence over his supporters -- even more so when the group behavior more closely resembles that of a cult.

They hang on his every word. They genuinely believe he is divinely ordained, this ridiculous pig who's cheated on every woman he's been with, fucks porn actresses, doesn't pay taxes, screws over small business just for the fun of it, tells flat-out lies the way most people draw breath. Funny how Gawwwd always seems to pick  the most unworthy vessels for his big plans, with plenty of true believers waiting around for their chance to help out.

They try to pretend it's just about the ever-lovin' spite of pissin' off libturds, but they are devoted to this clown, they believe his transparent lies, the more ridiculous the lie the more they love it. Windmills cause cancer and we're bailing out the Midwest farmers with China's money. You can't buy that kind of gullibility at any price. These mouth-breathing slapdicks would jump off a bridge if he told them to. That's less of an exaggeration than we'd like to think.

Clearly, the main thing is that no one is made to feel like a racist, they just happen to support someone who tweets bigoted sentiments practically on a daily basis. Fine, whatever. Stop arguing with them, stop interviewing them. We know what they're going to say before they say it. They'll have an excuse for this shooting and that racist tweet, just like the last one, just like the next hundred.

Taking Debate

No, I didn't watch the debates, and hopefully you didn't either. Even the few spare post-mortems I did skim offered nothing of value, per expectations.

If we accept the basic premise that the media are gaslighting us as much or more as Trump or anyone else, then what exactly would we expect the result to be from packing in candidates -- more than half of whom are wasting everyone's time and have no business being there -- ten at a time, to field framed questions from principals of that very same ongoing system of corporate gaslighting? In other words, what value to the political process in general, or your decision-making process in particular, is provided by having Jake Tapper lob some bullshit provocation at Kamala Harris or Jay Inslee or whoever?

Starving the Beast

Ho-hum, another week, another set of openly racist tweets from Captain Shitposter. What are the odds that he washes his tiny, tiny hands after each and every rage-dump? What are the odds that any number of important stories will be obscured in the coming week by tedious "debates" over whether he is or he isn't? We already knew the answer to that long ago. There is no point in watching the nonsense, engaging with it on any level, arguing with people who for whatever reason still support this fucker, none of it.

H.L. Mencken's old newspaper of record did have a quick and noteworthy response, which may as well have ended with and the horse you rode in on. Victor Blackwell of CNN had an on-air response that was, to be sure, sincere and poignant, and well worth watching. But it wouldn't be surprising if, in the next segment or today or tomorrow, CNN turns around and has Kellyanne Conway or Seb Gorka or some other pock-faced turd sitting there explaining the vampire's point of view as part of some panel of interchangeable shitheads.

The corporate media need to portray their dereliction of duty as the very opposite of that:  we're doing our jobs, because when the chief executive says something, it's news. And so it is. But when what that fucking thing says is clearly racist, it is then the responsibility of said stenographers to point that out with clarity and conviction, not mealy-mouthed qualifiers such as racist-tinged or racist-infused or a slight hint of racism with hints of oak and french fries and stale cheetos.

Les Moonves and Jeff Zucker weren't lying when they said it was good for business. Because they don't really have much of a revenue model anymore. It's easy to forget that by 2015 most major media outlets were in full-on panic mode -- newspapers especially were going the route of laying off the young and handing a few golden parachutes to the lifers, if they were lucky. But even the cable outlets were shitting a collective brick by the time Fatboy waddled down his fucking escalator that barmy June morning and threw his wig into the ring.

GOP Delenda Est; Or, Season's Beatings

During my teen years, I would travel downstate to Los Angeles for the summer, mostly to visit my father, but also several other relatives in the area. So an uncle and aunt in Downey, a cousin in Newport Beach, and so on. This was a time when "summer vacation" meant a full three months, early June to the week after Labor Day. So it was a week here, two weeks there, much more fun than sitting at home, broke and broiling in the punishing NorCal summer heat.

The Newport Beach cousin was (and still is) an avid surfer and guitar player, and close enough in age to where it was a lot like hanging out with an older brother who actually wanted you to hang out with him. So I would go on all-day surfing junkets with him and his USC buddies. I learned to enjoy and appreciate surfing, not just as a challenging physical activity (ocean swimming is not for the weak-willed), but as a meditative activity. The board becomes an extension of you, just by repetition; there are points where you imagine an overhead view of yourself, a tiny dot in a vast area of green and blue, land nearby but not conveniently so, possibly sharks or jellyfish or rocks lurking just below the surface.

The main thing about catching that proverbial wave is recognizing that the ocean is constantly moving, pulsing, surging, defying you to grab hold and find some rhythm. It's a beautiful and daunting thing, that existential challenge, one that forces you to simultaneously acknowledge your smallness, yet have the courage to jump into the endless motion and figure out a way to ride it to shore.

That's what the political news sphere feels like, more and more -- endlessly churning, surging faster and faster, defying us to find purchase, get a grip on this swirling narrative and make sense of it. In filing the Cohen and Manafort memos on Pearl Harbor Day (or Noam Chomsky Day, if you prefer), Robert Mueller may be hinting at a more sardonic sense of humor than any of us might have supposed. Certainly this tapestry is unfolding to reveal what very well may turn out to be a case of treason rivaling that of the Rosenbergs or Benedict Arnold.

You certainly wouldn't put it past ol' Fuckface Von Clownstick to sell West Point to one of Putin's bagmen. And now we are getting a clearer picture of how he literally sold American foreign policy, not to mention its electoral integrity, to a nation he is deeply in hock to. The people who are still denying what's plain for all to see are either on the payroll, or permanently drunk on the Kool-Aid.

Boycott Spotify

It's not exactly a news flash that Alex Jones is a piece of shit. Currently he's seeking $100k in court costs from the parents of Noah Pozner, one of the young children murdered in the Sandy Hook hoax massacre.

So, you see, it might be understating things a bit to refer to Jones merely as a piece of shit. He's far worse than that, but it's difficult to quickly come up with a word that encompasses just how huge a fucking turd Jones really is.

Jones lost a bunch of advertisers from his YouTube channel earlier this year, but apparently Spotify still carries his lie-peddling podcast. This is still 'murka, and we all still have a right to free speech.

But we all may want to consider where we want to draw a line. A person certainly has a "right" to write and post (for example, certainly not an endorsement) slash-fic type crap that involves children or extreme violence or torture or pick-your-own-most-awful-thing, without being imprisoned for that speech, so long as they don't act on it or overtly incite other to act on it.

That right does not extend to compelling advertisers to support the medium by which such shit gets carried. And the same holds for Jones; he certainly has every right to record his lies and subhuman filth, verbal diarrhea that inflicts ongoing pain to parents of slaughtered first-graders. But he has not right to expect companies to disseminate that shit for him, much less for him to get paid for it.

So my daughter and I both have premium Spotify accounts, and they are now cancelled, and I've told them why. Maybe if enough people do the same, they'll step up.

Jones is fucking scum. I hope his ex-wife takes every penny, and he never sees his kids again, and that they know why, and Jones ends up selling oranges and handjobs (not necessarily in that order) at the nearest freeway off-ramp.

It's time to stop fucking around with these people, all of them. Spotify is a relatively neutral actor in a huge ecosystem that has far worse critters slithering through. Boycott them all the same. Boycott anything and everything with the name Fox on it, not just the propaganda channel. The fucking Simpsons cast and the football announcing crew are getting paid in agitprop scrip. So fuck them. I don't know about you, but I've had it with all of them. I want my country back.

Anything with Mark Burnett's name on it too. Reality teevee has ruined this fucking country, made it stupid beyond belief, and susceptible to this traitorous clown. That's bad enough; it should be intolerable that Burnett is also a friend to this bastard. Burnett and his wife can talk about Jebus and family all they want, but their deeds support the most ungodly (in every sense of the word) person to hold high office. They should be ashamed of themselves, but their money insulates them from consequences.

These people need to be made destitute. It's the only thing they understand.

Helsinki Syndrome

Even before the treasonous, openly collusive press conference this morning, the thing that should not be in office went on record just hours prior referring to the EU as a foe, to our closest allies as foes. That makes sense, since he's been treating them as foes.

He thinks NATO is one his fleabag "resorts," where he sticks members for exorbitant rates to eat shitty meat loaf and watch him drive his golf cart on the fairways. He thinks a trade deficit means Europe "took" money from us, because he doesn't know what trade deficits are or mean.

The tide cannot truly turn until all of our aggrieved friends and allies -- Canada, Britain, Germany, France -- quit complaining about what an asshole he is, and simply stand up to him. Push back, tell him to go fuck himself.

Because Generalissimo Babyfingers is a proud graduate of the Ike Turner School of Management, that's really all he knows, this dynamic of smacking up a bitch, and then half-heartedly "apologizing":  Baby, why you make me hit you like that? Just imagine how emotionally stunted the people who have stayed in his employ must be, in order to do so. He is a toxic soul, and such things are contagious and pervasive. The tap water in the Org building probably tastes like tear-stained despair. And lead, sprinkled with asbestos particulates.

We got a mulligan with our allies and friends after the Fredo Arbusto regime, though poor Obama's staff has admitted that for much of 2009, they did have to mount something of a charm offensive with primary allies, reassuring them that the last guys were an anomaly. It doesn't take much imagination to visualize their reluctance this time around to come around to such overtures, assuming we're even able to weed these motherfuckers back out of office and into the gutter whence they sprung.

The retaliatory tariffs are a good start as far as responses go, and we'll see how the effects start targeting the stubborn rubes in Schmucklandia. That's only fair, after all; you made your beds, folks, now go die in them. It's about as close to targeting his actual voters for adverse effects, rather than collective punishment, as you're likely to find.

Anyway. There are no two ways about this, no other options to be had. Forget the Golden Rule, especially when it comes to this guy; the principle one should have in mind instead is people will treat you how you let them treat you. He treats you like shit, because you haven't given him any reason not to.

They have schoolyard bullies in Europe and Canada, don't they? Of course they do; assholes are universal, even when they have funny accents and eat weird things. And the rules for dealing with such people are also universal.

Our erstwhile allies and friends have to reach the same conclusion that our own voters must reach:  this asshole will continue to fuck with you until you fight back. You don't have to take his shit. "Norms" and "rules" of "diplomacy" have been tossed; stop continuing with the charade that they are still in effect. This is a street fight, a barroom brawl.

And this cannot be repeated often enough, either, fella 'murkins:  make a list of shows and advertisers, generate a 150-word form letter, and do a single mass bcc send telling all these companies what you're boycotting and why. Everything with the name "Fox" on it, not just the "news" channel. Everything with Mark Burnett's or Harvey Levin's or Piers Morgan's grubby, jism-stained fingers on it. I'm sure you can think of others. The only loyalty any of these scumbags have is to the almighty buck, so make them care.

Access Washington

Just finished reading David Cay Johnston's The Making of [Fuckface Von Clownstick], and it's a very good (not great, but very good and quick) compilation of the countless small crimes of character His Orangeness rode into his current unearned position of power. As a career investigative reporter, Johnston for the most part wisely avoids editorializing and "analysis" and lets the ugly facts do all the talking.

There were a few specific items in the book I hadn't been aware of, but no real surprises. But there are three (actually more, but let's focus on three) major factors in Clownstick's rise to infamy that Johnston's book ably captures. Here they are in (imho) ascending order of importance:

1. During the Atlantic City casino years, the level of corruption and incompetence in New Jersey's gaming regulation boards was nothing short of criminal. Clownstick should never have been let anywhere near a casino, much less allowed to own one. Every job and investor stake lost in his failures is on the head of every corrupt gaming regulator who chose to look the other way instead of doing their fucking job.
2. In chapter after chapter, Johnston lists one failed scam after another, where Clownstick misrepresented himself and his family and his companies and his interests and stakes in any given project, from Chump "University" to Punta Bandera. In all of these, once the fish get wise and sue his ass, Clownstick ends up settling, contrary to his frequent boasts and LIES. And in all of these cases, the courts sealed the details of the settlements. Gee, it might have been nice for the public to know about these repeated incidents of fraud before the motherfucker ran for fucking political office.
3. The media sucks. Let it be shouted from the rooftops till all our eardrums bleed:  OUR MEDIA FUCKING SUCKS. More than any other entity, more than the in-the-pocket Jersey gaming commissions or the institutionally impotent court system, feckless media careerism is what propelled Clownstick into his current seat. Since the early 1980s, he has lied, bullied, cajoled, stroked, and bamboozled them collectively into giving him a platform to spout his LIES and nonsense, and then left them to lamely scramble after him and maybe (usually not) try to clean up the mess, too little too late.

To cite just one string of examples, how many times during the 2016 campaign was that asshole allowed to phone in from his gold-plated shitter to the Sunday morning follies, on all the networks, one after the other? How the fuck do you interview a presidential candidate over the phone, again and again, especially one with such a tenuous relationship with empirical reality? Yet they let him get away with it, over and over.

 

At no point did any of them say, Fuck it. We're not interviewing him unless he shows up, and then we're hammering him on at least some of the lies. Nope, they just let him call in, say what he wanted to, half-heartedly challenge him on his more egregious lies, but at no point did they stand up to him, or god forbid just refuse to have him on because of the incessant lying.

 

Have I mentioned that that cocksucker does nothing but LIE, about every goddamned thing?

And if today's collective marathon of pearl-clutching in defense of Baghdad Barb doesn't make all this clear, I don't know what will. These people are fucking terrible at their jobs. Or maybe I've just been misinformed all these years as to what their jobs actually are. Maybe they're supposed to suck up to powerful people who despise them. That certainly would explain things much better.

Look, we all get the rapidly changing institutional factors impacting their long-standing revenue model. Even the phrase "twenty-four-hour news cycle" means something completely different than it did from, say 1983 to 2015. Seriously. It used to mean that the cable news channels had so much airtime to fill, practically anything became a news story, or more likely, real news stories got beaten into the ground with incessant coverage and overly obsessive detail.

But the meaning of the phrase has changed since He Who Shall Not Be Named threw his hairpiece into the ring. Now with things happening constantly, there's not enough time to keep up with a given story and cover it with due diligence.

Here's another example:  Sean Hannity, Fox's flagship common-tater, was outed less than two weeks ago as one of three clients of Michael "Smithers" Cohen, the obsequious bratva-linked Clownstick toady, who clearly wants to spend the rest of his life polishing his idol's little cheeto. Now, it's bad enough that Cohen isn't really even a lawyer, he's a "businessman" (big finger quotes there, folks) who happens to have a law degree. He's a wannabe Ray Donovan-type "fixer" who uses said law degree to help his main client take care of things, like paying off his inconvenient hoors.

Now, Hannity has been extremely vocal in his defense of Smithers Cohen and Fuckface Von Clownstick, never once disclosing that he, Hannity, was another client of Cohen. When it finally did come out -- thanks to actual investigative reporting by The Guardian, a British media outlet -- Hannity lamely averred that he was an opinion and entertainment guy, not a serious journalist. NBC fired Brian Williams for far less (although Williams is back in a late-might slot at MSNBC these days, but still), but Fox took it all in stride and said they were fine with Hannity's excuse. Within twenty-four hours of the disclosure, Hannity was joking about it on-air with Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson.

Since then -- again, bearing in mind that the initial revelation about Hannity was less than two weeks ago -- we have also found out that Hannity is a slumlord, using his ill-gotten pelf to buy up distressed properties with HUD-backed loans, and promptly jacking up the rent, because he's a fucking scumbag. Oh, and no one is surprised that Hannity has free-spending HUD director Ben Carson on with some regularity. It's all just a big coincidence. This sort of thing, this blatant collusion between a key anchorperson and the people he reports on and talks with, would have been unacceptable, even at Fox, just a few years ago.

Not to mention Clownstick's bizarre call-in rant to Fox & Fiends last Thursday, which now (please please) might be a monthly standing appointment. Fox is now officially a propaganda organ for these fuckers, and they aren't bothering to conceal it one bit.

Do gutless media twats like Chris Cillizza pontificate on those sorts of inconvenient truths? Why no, they prefer to grumble about the incivility of comedians calling out lazy media tools for their feckless, dickless careerism. Fucking lazy hypocrites, all of them. They are in the wrong line of work. They really are hurting America.

There are no consequences or accountability for bad behavior anymore. And that's what Johnston's book is really about, in the end -- this steaming orange turd is in charge because at every step of the way, when the courts, the media, the fucking gaming commissions had a chance to hold this fucking piece of shit accountable for the things he'd done, they pushed it off. They let it go; they let him go.

Fuckface Von Clownstick's entire existence -- indeed, his sole actual skill -- has been an extended exercise in getting other people to pay for his high-on-the-hog lifestyle. And he's been enabled the entire time by access journalism, from Page Six to the Today show, these careerist hacks who are more concerned with getting eyeballs and filling airtime than in calling an asshole what he is.

In a rational world, we'd drop him and his vile minions off on a remote island with all the Beltway hacks, let them deal with each other, and never hear from any of them again. They made him, they should be the ones to have to live with him.

There's a Fox Among the Chickens, and a Killer in the Hounds

Of course, no one can possibly surprised that that fucking melon-headed mick Hannity is so far up his master's ass he might as well be a tapeworm. Just imagine for a second if (just spitballing a random example) Rachel Maddow had been shilling aggressively for Preznit Hillary, that it was public knowledge that they regularly had dinners together, that Clinton called Maddow regularly after her show and sought her advice, and that, oh by the way, they have the same fucking lawyer, the same lawyer that Maddow went batshit over when said lawyer's office was raided by the SDNY and FBI.

Hannity is literally functioning as a surrogate for Fuckface Von Clownstick, while pretending to provide something remotely resembling fact-based analysis of current events. He is perhaps the most compromised, in-the-tank hack ever to squat his fat ass in front of a camera, and considering the piece-of-shit network he's a part of, that's saying something.

Neither their audience nor their detractors are under any illusions about whether Fox News is anything more than a cheap, transparent agitprop shop. That's all they've ever been, it's their sole purpose, and all the Shep Smith or Juan Williams useful-idiot types don't change that a bit. A vile Australian who simply refuses to do the right thing and die already, who is literally the model for The Simpsons' C. Montgomery Burns, uses his entertainment network to bankroll his propaganda network, a place with an institutionalized culture of coercing its female employees into sex. Fuck every single person who sets foot into that cursed building.

Fox has to go. Every bit of it. Fox News, Fox Entertainment, Fox Fucking Football. It's all part of the same evil, lying, self-dealing org. Boycott all of it, whether it's Tucker Carlson or Family Guy. Sign every petition you can find, send a note to as many of their advertisers as you have stomach for. Put them all out of work, make them earn an honest living at long last. Burn it all to the ground, salt the earth, piss on the ashes. This can't go on. We have to stop normalizing and accepting this behavior with a shrug. There needs to be accountability for poisoning the well.

[Update 4/17/18 8:30 PM PDT:  Chuck Toad is another useless sack of shit who needs to go find honest work as well. Fire all of them and start over.]