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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Doctor My Eyes

Oh brother, here we go again:  boy is Doctor Fauci angry with Trump's disrespect and lying now. Ooh, you can just feel the palpating fury and seething resentment, can't you? Yeah, baby, he's had it. Don't make him take his glasses off.

Give me -- and I cannot emphasize this enough, as they say -- a fucking break. Any "doctor" who continues to ply their trade for these murderous scumbags has abdicated their oath, period, full stop. That is all there is to this anymore. They are flacks for a monster who fantasized about wearing a Superman tee-shirt on his way out of the hospital last week, for some pathetic publicity stunt.

(Frankly, I think it's a goddamned shame someone talked him out of it. This is the sort of high-fiber content his shitbag cult deserves to be thumped over the head with.)

You could have made some sort of argument -- one I would still have disagreed with, but one which at least had some amount of good-faith reasoning behind it -- up till about June or July that Fauci felt that his comparatively moderating presence had some sort of practical effect on at least keeping the spread and the count lower than they could be.

Two hundred and twenty thousand deaths and eight million cases into this, though, and three weeks from the election, this is no longer remotely true. Fauci is, as he has been the entire time, providing a thin veneer of "respectability" to the ongoing carnage. Frankly, he should be ashamed of himself at this point. I'm embarrassed for him. I do not find him a credible figure; the fact that he is permitted a bit of room to roam with public "disagreements" and averrals does not change the fact that he clearly knows what kind of animals he carries water for, and still chooses not to set down the buckets and walk away.

Fauci turns eighty this Christmas Eve, so this is not about maintaining his career opportunities, or even burnishing his legacy, since his complicity these past months have, if anything, undermined that legacy.

If Dr. Fauci is truly committed to conveying accurate scientific medical information to a country in crisis from a deadly pandemic, then doesn't it make more sense for him to walk away from his role as a government minion, and be completely unconstrained by destructive, poisonous political considerations? I don't know what the man's fucking problem is, and I give up asking.

You're not saving a bunch of lives in the next three weeks by letting a piece of shit like Donald Trump dump on you further. Do what you should have done three months ago, and join Biden's campaign, and hit the chat-show circuit with the truth. Get that monkey off your back once and for all, doc. The best legacy is doing the right thing when it matters most.

In the Tank

Just as a reminder that the "elite" corporate media is a major part of why we are all being forced to live in the worst timeline, here are two examples just from today:

1. Meet the Press handed free campaign airtime to professional liar, deadbeat dad, and all-around turd Jason Miller. Imagine being so committed to your journamalistic integrity that you'll hand your show over to an unrepentant propagandist, without even a guest from the "opposition" party to give a pro forma rebuttal to the pro forma lies.
   
2. NY Times "profile" of Biden's reluctance to disclose specific details on their health protocols. It took three people to slap this fucking garbage together. It's like it doesn't even occur to any of them that maybe there are legitimate security reasons why, in the current climate, campaigns wouldn't want to give up too many details about that sort of thing. If you don't think Trump's White House is full of people (such as Jason Miller) who would use that info for nefarious purposes, you really should start paying attention.

All of these fools should be made to find other work as quickly as possible. Perhaps licking every door handle and toilet seat in the White House until they catch the bug might be a good start for them.

Again, there is a small, deeply nihilistic part of me that almost hopes that these thugs retain power, bust to watch them force these useless hacks to really tow the authoritarian line, with a genuine threat of violence.

These people get paid an awful lot of money to commit grievous harm to the operational integrity of the country, in a time of severe crisis. The least we can do is bankrupt their companies and shun each and every individual involved. Fuck. These. People. Stop feeding them.

It Is What It Is; Or, Weekend At Donnie's

Since we love to live in nostalgia -- that is, the fond misrecollections of an exaggerated past -- this whole year has been a fine reminder of the protracted collapse of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. The heightened inequalities; the government-controlled (and -caused) shortages of PPE during a crisis; running out of toilet paper for weeks. Hell, try to find free weights or dumbbell plates for your home gym, seven months later. Mundane shit like that, things that never used to be an issue.

Oh yeah, and a quarter-million dead in less than a year; the tens of millions of jobs lost, many still not regained; the blatant lying and gaslighting from the government; the violent crackdowns in the streets; the looting of the national treasury by all the sycophants and hangers-on to the inner party elites.

And now, the uncertainty of Dear Leader's precious health, so reminiscent of the old days when American intel agents would micro-analyze appearances by Brezhnev or Andropov or Chernenko, how many days between public sightings, which individuals were accompanying them, their mood and coloration.

The Soviet leaders, it was commonly understood even by many 'murkin schoolchildren, were ancient, doddering alcoholics being propped up by a coterie of faithful lackeys, whose duties were not to Матушка Россия, but to whichever figurehead the military and the few people with real money and power chose to install for the time being.

Whatever the case, their true loyalties were clear -- not to the country or its people, but to its figurehead. And the disposition of that figurehead was always worse than portrayed to the willing dupes at Pravda or Izvestiya.

It's also a condition passed along from the old Союз Советских that whatever impotent opposition exists must always be kept in a permanent state of suspended veracity -- that is, for each instance or event presented to them, they are forced to go through the hapless ritual of trying to parse what is "true" and what is the game being played. Is this really a masterful jujitsu move, an eleventh-dimensional chess play designed to make the strongman appear invulnerable when he single-handedly defeats the implacable foe that has ravaged the countryside?

It's not the usual clichéd well, yes -- and no, so much as it is well, sort of -- and, seriously? I mean Jesus Christ, have you really observed how these clowns operate? Come on, they couldn't play regular chess if you made the pieces out of gold and diamonds. There is no subtlety, no strategy. There is only id and impulse and appetite.

You can be sure that if he is able to be made to seem more or less ambulatory by, say, October 13th, they will frame it as proof of the strongman's innate personal might, his good genes once again thwarting the pernicious, sneaky kung flu. But for now, one thing you can be dead certain about is that he has it, and the symptoms are probably bad enough to have them worried.

One subset of common taters and panel-show chat-monkeys that are welcome to fuck off all the way into the burning core of the sun, are the ones piously insisting that we must all set aside our grievances and wish him and his infected minions well. This captures my feelings about that adequately.

Let's gets something straight, and this is just in the past week -- it appears highly likely that the "ground zero" event for all these "leading" Republicons getting infected was their smarmy little end-zone dance last weekend for their fucking SCOTUS pick -- who herself reportedly had the bug "over the summer." But pretty much everyone who has come down with it all of a sudden was at that super-spreader event.

I've seen quite a few photos and videos from that event; some sites are going over it like the fuckin' Zapruder film. You know who I haven't seen in any of the photos or videos so far? Mitch McConnell. If he was there, he kept a low profile.

Regardless, I think you can count on it that Trump gave it to Hope Hicks, and not the other way around; that he almost certainly knew he had it before Tuesday night's debate debacle (for which Chris Christie reportedly coached Trump to be a blustery asshole in order to deliberately goad Biden into stuttering); that he definitely knew he had the bug by Wednesday when he went to Duluth, and Thursday when he held a fundraiser at his rat-infested club in New Jersey.

He knew, and he didn't give a shit. Now we're supposed to give a shit. Fuck -- and I cannot emphasize this nearly enough -- all the way off. Anyone badgering or lecturing you to be a good Christian and think of these animals as fellow human beings in need, they are cordially invited to take that proverbial bag of salted dicks, and shove them sideways into their sigmoid colons.

That's one shred of actual freedom you are still allowed to retain, това́рищ, that they haven't taken from you just yet -- the freedom to not pretend that your abusers are your fucking friends, or that you owe them any sort of grace or fealty.

Ask yourself how they would be acting, how he would be acting, if it had been Biden and Pelosi and Schumer and all them, who had tested positive. Try to conceive of the vile shit they would come up with in their gloating, and then realize that your worst assumptions are not even in the ballpark. These people are fucking scum, period. All of them.

They hate you -- I mean really, truly fucking hate you. They stole a year, probably two, from your lives. Your kids and grandkids will be paying for all the looting they've done just in the last six months, trillions of dollars spewed to the worst fucking people in the world, not to save shitty jobs but so millionaires could give each other fat bonuses and then lay off the peons.

And they lie about all of it to you every second of every day -- and then insist that you thank them for it? That you express sympathy for them when the natural consequences of their sociopathic indifference comes back to bite them?

Seems the best response to all these inner party shitheads coming down with the karmavirus is the same response they've given the entire country:  I really don't care, do you?

Truth In Advertising

I get the complaint, but honestly, I don't see the problem here:

The Agriculture Department last week began mandating that millions of boxes of surplus food for needy families include a letter from President Donald Trump claiming credit for the program.

Look, if these assholes want to remind people of why they're in such a fix that they have to go to the fuckin' food bank, I say let them dig that hole.

Hey folks, hope you enjoy the Trump Box of charity food you need because the Trump Plague killed your gig economy McJob! Don't worry, we'll send you another letter taking credit when we kill off what's left of your health care!

More seriously, yes, the preening arrogance of this fucktard and his soulless minions, entreating the peons to lavish their gratitude upon Dear Leader for his beneficence, is as off-putting as the endless stack of other things that are at least as insufferable and intellectually dishonest. After all, fellow taxpayers, you and I paid for the food in that goddamn box, not Brokeahontas there. Like everything else in his waste of a life, he lets other people pay the money and do the work, and then he steps in and slaps his name [spit] on it and takes all the credit.

Are you pissed? Good. Take that with you into the voting booth. Keep it and nurture it, wield it against every piece of shit that ever carried his water or served as a flack for him. Nurse it like a Serbian grudge, and never let it go. Value your hate and disgust, and use it to keep warm on the long, cold, dark nights to come. Trust me, they deserve so much worse.

You want to be rid of these motherless fucks, like really and forever? That's what it's gonna take, and then some. Sorry, but that's what it takes when too many of yer fella 'murkins got fat, lazy, stupid, and complacent.

Turd Mentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They All Knew

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accelerated Decline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cancel Conspiracy Culture

The most interesting question to ask someone in charge of the RNC -- assuming there is someone at least nominally coordinating this hilarious dumpster fire -- regarding cancelled speaker Mary Ann Mendoza is not some arcane specific about whatever high-on-ludes QAnon bullshit she's spinning this week. Nor is it anything about how she thinks the world is under the spell of some shifty J-O-O.

The most interesting way to pose the question would be to get this hypothetical show producer to explain to their own customers why they chose to bump Mary Ann Mendoza, and just watch the wheels spin. This is all a freaky coke circus anyway, might as well send in the clowns.

(Fun fact:  Jerry Falwell Junior was scheduled to speak at the convention. They even told him he could have any time slot on any night. But Ol' Jer said he just wanted to watch. Get it? Just wanted to watch? Hello, is this thing on?)

For some inexplicable reason, I greatly enjoy conspiracy theories, the more convoluted and baroque the better. I find them highly entertaining. But that's a completely different matter than believing them.

One of the more unusual ones I find myself returning to a lot these days is this weird idea that George Soros is quietly funding everything authoritarian douchebags don't like, from the DNC's porn budget to Hillary Clinton's immigrant-child cannibalism pantry to sending every BLM and Antifa protester a fat check for showing up in the streets.

So there's that little Twitter chuckle of where's my check, George? We've all seen that. But let's deconstruct the premise down to its essence:  a shady billionaire is quietly funding a variety of individuals and entities that work in concert against the interests and well-being of the American nation and the majority of its citizens. Sound about right?

Well, that happens all the time, especially on the right. All of the things they think Soros is doing are actually being done by Rupert Murdoch, Sheldon Adelson, Foster Friess, Charles Koch, Robert Mercer, and many others that never make the news because that's the way they like it. The fucking Secretary of Education has spent her adult life funding efforts to privatize Michigan's public school system, in order to scale it nationwide.

No, they're not running a cannibal pedophile cult -- probably. But all the rest of it is right there in front of everyone. They don't blast it out from the rooftops, but they don't make much effort to hide it either. Old money tends to be quiet money. Not a lot of flashy Martin Shkreli types there. But they do spend it, and they do like the minions they rent to know where their paychecks come from. Think tanks, foundations, newspapers, magazines, teevee networks. Who bankrolls The Federalist?

It's yet another gaping flaw in the upside-down logic that rules the bizarro world the cultists inhabit. They sit and watch a propaganda network openly funded by an evil billionaire, where the morning show hosts literally lie about the plague being nothing, while those same hosts are socially distanced and working remotely. Uh-huh. That's a hell of a hoax.

What few specifics I have bothered to read about the QAnon mythos are comically ludicrous enough to give you a headache trying to make any sense of it. The idea that JFK Jr., of all people, would fake his own death twenty years ago in order to lie in wait for Donald Trump -- again, of all people -- to become chief executive and team up to purge the "deep state" of the power-mad sex cult that's really been running things all these years. This is an internet prank that got out of hand, thanks to timely assistance from Russian troll farms along the way.

Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that there is a "deep state" of criminality that includes Bill 'n' Hitlery, Obummer, and the usual gang of Demoncrats Jebus Don't Like, and they've been getting away for years with all these heinous crimes. Let's just postulate that that particular element is empirically true.

Why, then, doesn't Trump simply have his lapdog attorney general, a man whose sole operational principle is doing whatever master commands, investigate those people? Why does Trump need to wait around for John Fitzgerald Kennedy Junior, who has been hiding out in Pittsburgh for twenty years, to see the magical sigil in the sky that the seventh seal has been broken and the time is now?

Bill Barr has made it quite clear that he is ready, willing, and able to do whatever is asked of him, real or not, factual or baseless. They could initiate a complete bullshit investigation of Hillary or Obama or Biden or whoever, just to waste time and get media attention. Why haven't they done so? Whatever happened to Lock Her Up? I mean, seriously, if you got something on her, put your money where your fuckin' mouth is and prosecute her already.

Of course they have no answers, because they're not really looking for them. It's really a weird combination of two intrinsically American phenomena -- cults and porn. Obviously, many countries have one or both of those things, but nobody does those things like Americans.

The doomsday cult convinces its followers that the end is coming on such-and-such a date in the near future. When that date inevitably comes and goes without Armageddon, the cult leader simply moves the date back. A few followers realize they've been taken and peel off, and a few more join up to take their place, and the cycle repeats until the bozos finally die of terminal stupidity.

Porn, in its worst instances, can warp the minds of its frequent users. There are countless studies that have shown that excessive porn use leads viewers -- especially young men -- to have extremely problematic views about women in particular and sex in general. To put it more crudely, some of these dupes get into a routine of spanking it to their favorite jam, and after a while start reflexively thinking that every new woman they encounter really wants to jump their bones, but just doesn't want to admit it. Their brains have been rewired to think uncritically that something non-existent is not only possible, not only likely, but definitely true. They don't know the difference between fantasy and reality anymore -- or they simply prefer the former to the latter.

In both instances, the level of certainty is such that they can't merely be talked out of their tree with [pfft] "logic." That's just something that people who are in on it want you to believe, to divert you from the truth.

There's always been a certain percentage of people who are willing dupes for this kind of nonsense, who have lost at the business of life in one way or another, or who are outwardly successful but have no real inner life, and so cling to these idiotic ideas in order to feel part of something, to possess coveted knowledge available only to a select few. It's a self-reinforcing dynamic, and it's always been around, just because the law of averages stipulates that X% of people are fucking morons.

What's changed, of course, is that in the past decade, social media has served as a handy organizer and propagator for this garbage. Reality teevee has dulled people's critical thinking skills even more than porn, and across a much wider volume of viewers. And you have the worst of both worlds in charge -- a visibly stupid reality-teevee huckster who literally rose to prominence by pushing a harebrained conspiracy theory for five years.

There are a lot of things killing off this nation at an alarmingly fast pace, all of them predicated on a critical mass of people being dumb and angry. But within that is this even more disturbing phenomenon of chumps who, rather than observe what's going on right in front of them, prefer to concoct a ridiculous fairy tale that doesn't even make sense on its own bizarre terms.

Perhaps the most ironic part of all that is that Trump probably never "believed" the birther conspiracy he pushed all those years in the first place. Clearly he doesn't have beliefs as such, beyond how awesome he is, and how every woman wants to ride his thirty-five-inch cock, and pay him for the privilege. Again, you can see the "porn pattern" of empty wish fulfillment in the face of reality.

But he knew that just enough people out there did believe the birther stuff, enough that he could plant the seed, grow the crop, and reap the harvest. And he's made things so much worse since, people are tired and broke and angry and somehow bored all at the same time, wanting it to be over but not sure what they want in its place, since there is no "normal" to "return" to. They've gone from binge-watch to hate-watch, and now they want to the show to be over, but they're still uncertain of what to switch over to.

It would not be surprising if the coming decade is shaped in great part by competing conspiracy narratives, with varying political stances and elements of truth twisted to conform to those narratives. The more bizarre ones will be aimed at more religious types, since the personality traits align for wanting to believe in unverifiable fables that affirm one's preconceptions.

But they'll be everywhere across the board. Given the success they've had helping QAnon along, it wouldn't be at all surprising if the Russians decided to keep sandbagging Democratic prospects by discouraging lefties with some random bullshit about Biden or Harris or whoever.

The main goal is not even to get people to believe a specific thing, so much as to get them into a permanent state of never knowing who or what to believe. If your real goal is simply to enable the vast network of transnational money laundering to keep chugging along, all you really need is permanent destabilization. You don't have to actually defeat or conquer anyone.

It's been known to happen. I read about it on the internets somewhere.

Useful Idiots

So this guy gets some level of street cred in the political media for being a "serious" "conservative" or whatever, and so these silly attempts at analysis get attention as substitutes for serious thought. Trump's incessant antics and nonsense provide a lot of rhetorical cover for these guys, so they can dance around the obvious truth -- he's the logical culmination of all their efforts for the last forty years at least.

The idea that now they suddenly don't "stand" for their supposed long-preserved "values" is just industrial-grade bullshit. The only problem they pretend to have with Trump is that he's an asshole. But even that's a lie -- they love that he's an asshole. They get everything they want and they get to blame Fuckface if he loses, and double-down on the process if he manages to cheat and steal a win.

It's the perfect racket for an organization that stopped being functional two generations ago. To be fair, I suppose you have to be of a certain minimum age, and never read any books about times you're too young to recall directly, in order to know just how ridiculous this all is.

Republicons made a deal with the devil back in the 1960s, preferring to use angry crackers and their bullshit grievances, and steep them in a potent brew of god-bothering jabber, in order to gull the working-class rubes into voting to make billionaires wealthier. It's a working formula, so it's hard to blame them for continuing with it.

What's changed in the past decade is how much eight years of a black president enraged them, and how social media showed them that there were enough like-minded assholes out there that they could say the quiet parts loud. So Trump spent five years rounding up the dipshits with his birther conspiracies, and #MoscowMitch and #LeningradLindsey took notes, pretended to be offended.

Again, their feigned horror at his boorish manners is tempered by their glee at how he gives them everything they want, provides them plenty of distractions so they can quietly push through unqualified judges to lifetime appointments, and the instant validation they get from the millions of douchebags who are completely down with all of it.

Democrats and liberals need to stop reading articles like this and believing it, because it peddles a seductive lie that establishment Dem pols want very much to believe -- if we can just get rid of Trump, we can get back to normal. Maybe they're just holding their fire until they see how the election shakes out for them, but anyone who genuinely believes that "getting back to normal" is even a remote possibility needs to do themselves and their constituents a favor and retire as soon as they can.

There is no going back, and not just because of the way Trump has burned through the "norms" and "rules" and useless performative fripperies they have all wasted time with all those years, but because the country is in truly dire straits, and getting worse by the month. It will take years of triage to undo not just Trump's destruction, but even the destruction wrought by the Cheney regime is still being undone. You think we're done paying for the fucking war?

Many Dems and libs want to tell themselves that the "fever" that has overtaken their opponents and their constituencies is the result of the permanent pernicious influences of Fox News and AM hate radio. Implicit in that is that these folks have been tricked or brainwashed, and that is a dangerous category error. Yes, they're being lied to, but that's not because they don't know the facts, it's because facts are irrelevant to them. Facts are not part of their decision-making process.

This is a very difficult thing for Democratic policy-makers and strategists to understand, because they are hard-wired to try to "reach out" to these people, somehow never learning their lesson, always managing to trick themselves into thinking that it's easier to poach a couple percent from an increasingly polarized bloc that despises them, than to convince ten percent of the much larger pool of non-voters that there's something worth showing up for.

As the Trump base continues its slide toward lunatic cultism, it is important to recall a truism:  it is impossible to deal with irrational people using rationality. By definition they do not function or react with it. It's a waste of time. You're not going to deprogram them with ten weeks of thirty-second ad blasts, and you sure as hell aren't going to move them with [rolls eyes] your fuckin' binders of facts.

All this tedious theorizing from behavioral psychologists about tribal heuristics and cognitive biases and all that shit? Have you considered the possibility that maybe a lot of them are just indecent people, that you can attribute it to conditioning or temperament or social pressure or some combination thereof, but in the end, they're not going to listen to your appeals to rationality and so it doesn't matter?

They believe they're in a war for survival, and their elected representatives speak and act accordingly. They wield power. They don't fuck around. If the best-case scenario occurs, and Biden wins and the Dems flip the Senate, they need to act with a real sense of urgency, and do everything they can to crush the opposing party into a state of utter irrelevance.

And frankly, I don't see that they have that understanding among the leaders of the party. Again, they think Trump is an aberration, when he is the culmination. It's a vital difference that, if they fail to note and act upon, will bite them in the ass in 2024.

Meanwhile the nation's largest state is on fire throughout, hurricane season is kicking off with two storms converging on the Gulf Coast, the #TrumpPlague is still running wild, tallying up a 9/11-sized body count (that we know of) twice every week, tens of millions out of work, millions about to get evicted, economic depression looming, and only the handful of people who own the stock market are doing well.

And Tim Alberta's Republicon Party is fine with all of it. Does he really think Trump had to tell McConnell to sit on the hundreds of bills the House has passed over the last eighteen months, that Mitch had to be arm-twisted into withholding COVID relief that had been passed back in May? Fuck no, it's the same shit he pulled all through Obama's tenure as imperial custodian. And all his fellow senators stand by while Trump commits an impeachable act every week, sells out the country, shrugs his shoulders while a thousand Americans die every day.

Trump is just what an old-time street-crime team would call the "stall," the seemingly random guy that walks up to the mark and asks for directions while the partner comes up behind and picks the mark's pocket, or thumps him on the head with a sap.

The problem here is not that Tim Alberta's party suddenly became something he no longer recognizes; the problem is that Alberta knows full well that his party is openly, actively, gleefully destroying this nation, because all they really ever stood for was power and money. They see an opportunity to have it all, and they're giving it their best shot. They're a bunch of fucking traitors, and Alberta knows it.

There's no "coming back" from the things they've done just this calendar year, the monstrous things they've stood by and silently supported. Two hundred thousand Americans dead in about one hundred fifty days, and they couldn't care less. The economy is a shambles and it's a de facto banana republic, and they could stop it but refuse to. They have no shame.

They betrayed their country, and simply count on the fact that there are just enough awful people out there to keep them in business. They might be right about that, as it turns out. Maybe in time, a party of actual conservatives can be formed from the ashes of the current group of Russian dupes and flat-out turncoats. But it's disingenuous to pretend that this just started when Orange Foolius blundered into the room, especially as long as shitbags like Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr still draw breath.

Such a Nasty Woman

So Biden's veep pick is Kamala Harris, and it's not just a selection I can "live with," but I actually like her a great deal. Since I knew it wouldn't be Liz Warren, I was hoping for either Harris or Tammy Duckworth, and largely for the same reasons -- most importantly, they don't suffer fools gladly and they don't take any shit.

Those are vital qualities to have if this country is going to extricate itself from its self-inflicted mess. We got stuck with this miserable clown because no one in his own party had the balls to call him out early on, and tell him to sit down and shut the fuck up. Then the corporate mediots "couldn't figure out how to cover him," because they still do not understand (or maybe it's me that doesn't understand) what their job entails.

Then of course the Democrats were consistently shocked and appalled as he shredded their sacred norms and decorum, reducing the whole thing to kayfabe spectacle, a cheesy pro-wrestling exhibition where the stunts and the blood are real, only the narrative is fake.

For someone who seems to fancy himself a raging heterosexual, Trump is really only heterosexual in the most technical sense -- he likes people to know that he bangs attractive women, because he understands that as a point of "esteem" among the types of people whose respect he covets. But he clearly doesn't like women, unless they work for him or fawn over him. He probably doesn't even like sex (shudder) all that much, since good sex involves satisfying someone else's needs as well as your own.

Every woman who's ever voluntarily had sex (ugh, sorry) with this sweaty gastropod has done so only because of his money. And he knows it. Without his money, he'd never get laid, even back in the day. He doesn't know how to talk to women, beyond basic "how you like my new building" self-aggrandizing. He doesn't listen to anyone, certainly not some hoor.

The master dealmaker really doesn't know how to deal with women at all, unless they're the sort that are willing to work for a fucking pig like him. This puts him at a disadvantage with someone like Harris, whose presidential run was not exactly a smooth ride, but she is a fast learner, a sharp debater, and an experienced prosecutor who knows how to seek and exploit opponents' weaknesses.

And since this dumpster fire of an administration is nothing but weaknesses, she'll actually have to show some restraint. Pick a few choice wounds and really make them sting and sing for the crowd until they can sing it back:

• Are you better off now than you were four years ago?
• How's that record stock market working out for the working class?
• Well, he did say he would run the country like one of his businesses.

Harris will be good in that role, and she'll genuinely enjoy it because even though she's ambitious, she also seems to have an actual sense of justice. It will be good training for what, even if they win in a landslide, will be a difficult, ugly slog against the worst fucking humans infesting the planet.

I'm not just talking about Trump and Pence and their minion Moscow Mitch. I'm talking Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Hannity, Rupert Murdoch -- people who sold out their country long ago, and now are just molesting the corpse and cashing the checks. They'll be out in full force against everything Biden tries to do to fix the damage these thieves and monsters have done.

And it has to be a real landslide, a straight-up Reagan-Mondale ass-kicking. "Close" will not cut it. They have to take the Senate back as well, and they have to be prepared to go big and bold right away, and tell the critics -- including the ankle-biting "moderate" shitheads on the Sunday follies shows -- to go to hell. They have to have a marketing team to designate key people to hit the necessary media nodes and sell the plan with consistency and urgency.

As much of a downer as I have been in here lately, I still think it's possible. There's a sense of fatigue in some areas of the fan club; the cult will always be there, but there are some who really wanted to try something different, or just had been poisoned against Hillary for too long to ever vote for her.

And after four years of American carnage, they're tired. They've been stuck at home for six months, and this prattling dunce hasn't done a goddamned thing to make any of it better, he just shoveled more money to the few who needed it the least. These folks were fine with him telling libruls to go fuck themselves, but now he's effectively told them to go fuck themselves. The show has gotten old.

So it won't be easy, but despite the cheating and stealing and various modes of voter suppression, it is doable. And it is still worth doing.

Slope of Enlightenment

It would be difficult to put a number on just how many collective hours and column inches have been dedicated to assessing the various and sundry cognitive failings of one Jenius Q. Dealmaker, Fuckface in Charge, and Caudillo of Bedminster, First of His Name.

Clinical diagnoses abound:  the narcissistic personality disorder; oppositional defiance disorder; sociopathy; psychopathy; and on and on. And of course the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger effect, where stupid people are unaware of just how stupid they really are.

Certainly all of those ugly pathologies and more explain the smooth, diseased wad of oatmeal between his ears. But the armchair diagnoses give short shrift to the more immediate pathology at hand:

You, America. Fuck you.

Well, maybe not you personally, maybe not me personally. But take a week or several and make a partial list of all the fucked-up things El Caudillo has done and said over the past five years, and then remind yourself that once again, over forty percent of your fellow 'murkins are fine with it. They want more of it. They want you to have more of it.

Do they sound like the sort of people who can be reasoned with, who can be "met" in some proverbial "middle"? What is the middle on, say, Russia paying bounties to Islamic terrorists for American scalps? What would be the middle on defunding Social Security and Medicare? What is this middle people speak of, as applied to gassing suburban moms and kicking unarmed teenagers in the face, blinding journalists, extrajudicial domestic renditioning for civil disobedience?

That's just a few random items from the past six weeks or so. You know? A full reckoning would be damn near impossible.

The "middle" of a hog-shit lagoon still stinks of filth and disease. The "middle" of hell is still pretty fucking warm. Meeting Jeffrey Dahmer "in the middle" still results in someone ending up in the cooking pot.

Maybe I'm not being clear about this.

Every elected politician, no matter how "good" or "terrible," no matter how "smart" or "stupid," is a reasonably accurate reflection of their constituency. This is a truism that gets ignored all too often, especially by "moderate" or "conservative" Democratic politicians, who are forever trying to convince themselves, each other, and their donors, that "tacking right" on this or that petty social issue is better and more effective than, say, coming down unequivocally for something approaching economic justice for the rabble.

The reason Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey keep winning, even as they gleefully cut their constituents' throats and sell them down the river at every opportunity, is not because they're great guys doing a great job. It's because there are enough assholes who would rather undermine themselves and their families and communities, watching the exercise of raw power, than risk the chance of giving even one dollar to someone who they deemed undeserving. They would rather spend the rest of their lives wallowing in a pit of impotent bitterness and rage, than come to their senses and admit -- even just to themselves -- that they got rooked by a cheap, obvious con.

So El Caudillo's various cognitive pathologies and biases are also theirs, most acutely the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger effect. In an era where information is free and everywhere, if you are reasonably literate, then being an ignorant dupe is a choice.

You choose to watch the white-power rage-monkeys on Fox News, instead of reading an article -- or god forbid, a fucking book. You choose to forward the nonsense your idiot Facebook uncle sends you, without fact-checking a lick of it. You choose to chortle and snicker at His Travesty's increasingly desperate tweaks of an increasingly useless White House journamalists' pool, knowing that he's full of shit, knowing that you would never buy so much as a canned ham from this grotesque charlatan, much less a car or a house or health insurance coverage.

It's not just that "he's a dumb guy's idea of a smart guy," or "a poor person's idea of a rich person." His fans have that exact same vision of themselves. They decided long ago that they were much smarter than the average bear, so much so that they could decide for themselves what was "real" and what wasn't, who was telling the "truth" and who wasn't. They decided that the only person they could believe was a guy who's been telling provable lies his entire life, defying everyone to call him a fucking liar.

And now that we're chugging into a full-blown economic depression, a quarter-million dead by the end of the year, forty million already out of work, people waiting in line and online for basic goods, they're now distracting each other with some harebrained conspiracy theory about how everyone in Hollyweird is a SEX PREEVERT YOU GUYS WON'T YOU LISTEN?!

In their bizarro universe, celebrities such as Chris Cornell and Anthony Bourdain were "suicided" because they were on the verge of revealing this hidden truth. In that universe the Democrats, partly to protect their fellow child molesters but also just because they're assholes, have rigged this whole "plandemic," which will magically end on November 4th when Joseph "Satan" Biden is installed as the new antichrist. [cue Omen music]

It doesn't matter to them that there is far more photo and video evidence of Dear Leader palling around with Jeffrey Epstein (who was suicided) and Ghislaine Maxwell, or that Epstein literally lived next door to the rat-infested CoronaLago estate for years. They would rather believe that a pizza place that has no basement was running a child-trafficking ring out of its basement.

It takes a peculiar magnitude of cognitive bias to believe that on the one hand, the Dummycrats are too weak and impotent to electorally beat an obnoxious moron, while being simultaneously so omnipotent that they have forced the entire corporate media system and every other world leader to bend to their plandemic hoax. These idiots make 9/11 truthers look like the model of sanity and empirical probity.

They manage to get by in their little bubble, aided by an endless parade of self-loathing journos and politicians who cater to their "real 'murkin" pretensions. They're just as naked as their emperor has always been, long before he got into politics, and they're about to find out that there is an empirical reality, that this is not a simulation, that whether or not their monster manages to cheat and steal its way back in, a hard rain is gonna fall, and they better learn to swim.

This Is Us

However this movie ends -- and while my prediction wavers week-to-week, I think Biden squeaks through, though it will definitely get much uglier regardless -- it seems we may owe ol' Fuckface Von Clownstick a verrrry begrudging measure of gratitude. [pauses while readers collect their dropped jaws and exploded heads] Why? Hear me out.

1. The political system. Obviously it's a swamp of corruption and always has been, ever since it was an actual swamp waiting to be architected by some frog. But by simultaneously chanting the mantra "drain the swamp" while merely restocking it with his own gators, Trump forced observers to confront their own cynical assumptions about our political system, which is really just a vehicle for institutionalized graft and rentier capitalists, and to collectively turn away from it all with each of our assumptions, however individually divergent, confirmed. That is to say, whether you think it's more corrupt than ever, or whether you (amazingly) think he's doing everything he can to clean things up, your suspicions have been proven true to you.


2. The media ecosystem. The corporate (aka mainstream, "lamestream," ad nauseam) media are on their collective heels, ravaged by private equity vultures and by years of ad revenues lost to internet competitors. They are mostly just horse-race coverage now, vainly clinging to a transparent veneer of pretenses to some hallowed "fourth estate" principle they have rarely ever tried to live up to. It's just a rotating claque of fifty-percent prognosticators taking their tired opinions and slapdash analyses from panel show to panel show, and a gaggle of impotent losers stenographing lies and talking points (which are also lies).
   
   Nothing new is ever mined from these dismal pockets of (b)ore, just fools' gold. They are consistent only in the sheer paucity of original thought, and in the complete disconnect these bozos have from anyone with a real job -- so much so that they are routinely gulled, in their stupid Cletus safari articles, into collating either the marketing points of the chair of the Bumfuck County Republicon Party, or the foaming rants of some fist-shaking codger at a roadkill eatery.
   
   Mostly, though, the ease with which Trump has been able to render them as collectively supine, obedient, and utterly impotent, should make each and every media consumer out there wonder exactly what they're handing over their money and time for. Turns out they get paid whether or not they actually do their job -- or maybe being useless and compliant is their job after all. There's a Lucy-with-the-football dynamic in a lot of areas, and when it comes to the media and the average 'murkin, take a wild guess who's Charlie Brown.


3. The Republican party. Oh, if he loses they'll insist he was an aberration, an anomaly, a sui generis force they heroically endeavored to contain. The people who will be fooled by that want -- no, need -- to be fooled by it. There is nothing new in pointing out that Trump is simply the boorish but entirely practical culmination of GOP policies and strategy for the last fifty years -- steer racist whites into voting to let billionaires become trillionaires by hoovering ever more money out of the peons' pockets. That's all they've ever stood for in my lifetime, even counting Nixon's few liberal feints toward the EPA and such like. Anyone who continues to deny that at this point is either lying to you or to themselves. (Probably just to you, in order to profit for themselves. Because as we know, the only thing that matters in this world is money.)


4. The Democratic party. There are a few bright lights, but it's mostly a bunch of terrified bureaucrats more worried about losing their Wall Street donors than they are driven to motivate the burgeoning base of frustrated non-voters. I have no empirical data to support this, but I am convinced that for every lazy slob who just can't be bothered to give enough of a shit about anything to cast their lot, there is at least one other non-voter who is waiting for something or someone to vote for, rather than the evil of two lessers. I know because I was one of those people when I was young and foolish.
   
   Now that I am old and foolish, I can say that voting is definitely an exercise in futility, but one that would paradoxically become less futile in proportion with increased participation. In other words, the bastards keep winning because they are successful at discouraging you. Soon as you understand that it's not a one-time event, not the Super Bowl or the Kentucky Derby, but an endless exercise in process improvement, you focus on the dynamic aspect of improving the process, and the people who participate in it.
   
   For now, that means getting rid of the Republican party in its entirety, and putting the Democrats on notice. The old, entrenched entities of the party need to be made to understand that unless they are willing to fight for every inch of ground, they will be replaced at the earliest opportunity. Regardless, Trump has shown the current lineup for who and what they really are -- completely willing to spend months drafting performative bills to rot on Moscow Mitch's desk, but shrugging that there's simply nothing they can possibly do to counter or impede the open corruption of Trump and his dog Bill Barr. Either you use every power you have at your disposal, or you don't.


5. This is America. The COVID death count is about 160k at this point -- almost the combined total of WW1 and Vietnam. It will probably be over a quarter-million by the end of the year. Trump has found ways to be increasingly feckless and erratic throughout, getting worse and more brazen by the week, and his approval ratings have risen in the past couple weeks. He's made it clear he doesn't give a shit how many people die from this entirely preventable situation, and it's okay.
   
   You can make all the usual excuses about the media being in the tank or whatever, but there's no getting around this fact. Ignorant, nasty, spiteful people are fine with being ignorant, nasty, and spiteful. They've made a choice just like you and I make our choices. This is what they are, this is who they are. And when there's enough of them, to the extent that we humanize a nationalist mythos, imbue it with its own personhood and agency, it becomes a critical mass that determines what the country is, what it intends to be and do, what its role in the world should be and become. They have made themselves clear.
   
   The billionaires who really run this country, who own and operate the political system and all the nodes of information, make no secret that they hate you and me and everyone who isn't in their elite net-worth status. You're nothing but ignorant rabble to them, something to be manipulated and sold and used up as needed. They don't try to hide any of this. They would literally rather spend thirty or fifty percent of their precious profits subsidizing Rush Limbaugh or Fox News or some shithead think tank, than pay even one percent tax. That's just the way it is. You already know this.
   
   And it makes sense that Limbaugh or whoever is willing to take their money -- hell, I'd be happy to to take thirty million a year to do what he does (for a year anyway, before pulling the pin on that grenade and telling the audience to go fuck themselves), because you can bet when he finally kicks off, someone will take that job, and millions of broke peons with nothing to gain and nothing to lose will be happy to listen to whoever is willing to stoke their racial and class fears. It's a drug as potent as whatever strain of opioid is running through their dried-up towns this week, and they don't have anything else. That's the thing -- at least you can say Limbaugh and Hannity are in it for the money; to what extent is up for debate. But their listeners and viewers are cutting their own throats for free. (It's a small consolation to know that the billionaires and the talking heads they rent hate them too.)
   
   We'll see how it goes in ninety days, but unless it really is an unstoppable blue tsunami that completely eliminates these monsters, it might be time to consider that nations, like humans, have a lifespan, they run their course and then they turn to dust, and that maybe our individual lifespans are simply too short to keep at the futility of trying to talk suckers out of their tree. But again, as with the the above groups, Trump has clarified this dynamic for everyone.
   
   Liberals can no longer fool themselves into believing some tired variant of if only they knew. It should be clear by now that they know, and they're good with it, all of it. They want more of it. So maybe it's time to consider real estate prices on the Adriatic coastline or something. If this is how it is, then there's not really much you can do or say to change their minds. You can march in the streets and get your skull cracked and your eye shot out, maybe get whisked away by unmarked men in an unmarked van, maybe pull twenty years in Club Fed for throwing a rock at a Robert E. Lee statue. See what changes as a result of all that. How's it been working out so far?

I wish I had something more positive to say, but it's become impossible to have any faith or trust in any of this country's political leaders, media monkeys, or even average citizens. All the institutional bulwarks have failed, and all it took was someone with the nerve to completely ignore them. Too many people are simply too lazy and cynical to pull it together and change course, and that weighs down whatever idealism there is. I wish I was wrong more often than not. (If that was the case, then I'd probably have a cushy cable-pundit sinecure, or a NY Times column.) But you can feel free to go back through fifteen years' worth of archives, and you tell me what my batting average is.

I do think there is one last chance here to snatch the fat from the fire, but it will take dedication and commitment and consistency, for years after the election. This fight is not going away; they have a lot more money, and they use it weaponize that laziness and cynicism, and pit people with common interests against each other. Again, most people know all this already, but knowing something and acting in accordance with that knowledge are obviously two very different things, otherwise we wouldn't be where we are.

It takes more than a willingness to engage in the banal distractions of trying to convince some asshole on your Facebook feed or whatever. It takes voting with wallets, every day, as well as ballots every couple years. It takes sending periodic emails to companies and congress-critters alike, and letting them know where you draw those lines for yourself. If enough people did just those things -- which are free, and so many people have so much time on their hands now -- they would have to listen.

Either it's worth fighting and expending effort for, or it isn't.

So what's it gonna be?

The Questions You Didn't Ask

Not really questions, so much as a suggestion and an observation.

Suggestion:  Maybe one of these reportin' types, when asking Trump or one his bootlicking toadies about the prospect of starting the school year in the middle of an entirely predictable resurgence of the COVID pandemic, might point out that Trump still has a school-age child. Obviously a rich white kid in a private school is at a much lower risk, but there's still a risk, for the students and the school staff.

We all know the bit about how minor children should be off-limits, but it's not at all out of line to ask if Barron Trump is also going back to school, or if this is just another item in an endless line of Donald Trump trying to wheedle suckers into taking a risk he would never take himself?

Observation:  Obviously systemic racism is an enormous part of the police brutality problem, and is at the root of this wondrous summer of protests (which, again, the corporate mediots prefer to cover only when the proles strike back). But I would offer the notion that Trump whistling past a question about state violence with whoa, hey, wait a minute, cops kill more whites than blacks is not the brilliant defense he thinks it is.

It does qualify, like many of the things the stable genius blurts, as an inadvertent explanation. This is something that's been lost in the obsessive focus on the racism, at the expense of an equally large part of the problem -- this is what modern American police are trained to do, to act like an occupying army, to treat the civilians they serve the same way the Israeli Defense Force treats Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Just another example of how truly gullible and stupid mediots can be, to reflexively get into parsing rates versus totals, without at all touching on the fact that nearly 4,000 extrajudicial killings in the last five years is too fucking many, especially when we've all read and seen any number of examples where the level of violence was unjustified and overwhelming.

The idea of "defunding" the police is a polemic, and an unrealistic one if taken literally. The goal should be to re-examine the role of civilian law enforcement in this country, and to demilitarize that role, to take away the toys gleaned from military surplus, to stop the IDF-style trainings, to review the psych batteries and get the bullies and the assholes and the roid-rage turds the fuck outta there. Use the money saved to fund community engagement efforts and win back the trust of the public.

Again, it's easy to understand all the institutional reasons why these inconvenient questions don't get posed, but it doesn't change the basic dynamic that people have been realizing about the press for a while:  if you're not going to challenge these people, if instead you're just going to show up and sit there and transcribe the lies and nonsense, what fucking good are you?

Job Qualification, Slight Return: Dereliction of Duty

Per the previous post, Adam Davidson has a brief explanatory follow-up as to why and how the money-laundering sausage doesn't get made so much. And while it all makes a certain perverse sense, it's just a lame excuse. "It's confusing"? "It takes too long and doesn't have enough impact"? "Everyone knows Trump is corrupt and has become numb to it"? Really?

If that's their rationale, then my response is, then what the fuck do we need you for? If we already know Trump is a corrupt liar, then what is the point of sending journo minions to sit in carefully spaced folding chairs to transcribe the obvious lies of soulless shills? Is it not the job of good journalists to take stories that are complex and possibly "confusing," and craft a narrative that clarifies and explains, without oversimplifying or omitting salient detail?

Watergate was complex. Iran/Contra was complex. Somehow ways were devised to explain these narratives to the thumb-sucking rube that apparently constitutes the average mainstream media consumer.

I don't blame Adam Davidson for this, mind you; I've read plenty of his pieces and he's one of the good guys. Anyone wanting to be a solid reporter could learn a thing or two from him. But these self-serving excuses from editors, providing cover for their imperialist running-dog corporate publisher overlords, are bullshit, pure and simple.

Take a look around and pick at random from the rancid piles of content garbage Corporate America has made you care about, or at least know about. I've never watched so much as a minute of American Idol or Bachelor or Survivor, but there are names and faces I know and recognize from these products, thanks to constant network cross-promotion and Google News aggregation.

Obviously, that's the first step of effective marketing -- creating awareness through promotion and repetition. You're telling me they can do this with the thirsty wretches of reality teevee purgatory, but not with the fact that the chief executive is a treasonous, money-laundering criminal who literally doesn't care that the Russians are paying Islamic militants for American military corpses? Really?

In the past, when presidents have had especially egregious scandals, journalists felt some editorial responsibility to weigh in, sometimes even suggesting that they resign "for the sake of the country" or whatever. More than one hundred newspapers -- including most of the leading national ones -- called on Bill Clinton to resign before he was even impeached. These days, not so much. They don't want the headache generated by pissing off cultists.

Well, guess what, folks? No matter what you do or what you say, if you're not fully in the tank for Orange Foolius, they will hate you regardless. So you might as well do the right thing. Do your job.

Same goes for Democrats, especially House Democrats. They pre-emptively squash the idea of impeaching again, which gives the angry toddler a pretext to continue his behavior, knowing that it will not be curbed or punished. And why shouldn't he? He has no disincentive not to.

When challenged on this, the reflexive cry is, the Senate will just acquit, so it's pointless, the people just have to show up and vote.

So let's look at those two points separately:

1. House Dems were fond, at least before the #TrumpPlague hit (and hey, there's a missed opportunity for opposition branding, no?) of pointing out how many hundreds of bills they had passed, but that big meanie #MoscowMitch was holding up because he's a dick. Well, by their own logic, this is a stellar example of pointless, symbolic posturing. Why bother going through all the motion it takes to propose, write, troubleshoot, and pass bills when you already know they'll be ignored or rejected? But in fact, it's even more useless than another impeachment would be (or, for that matter, a separate impeachment of Bill Barr). The impeachment process entails extra mechanical process of investigation, which not only adds scrutiny to the proceedings -- assuming a few diligent scriveners can be prised from Kayleigh MagaNinny's asshole, or the East Wing Tiger Beat column Maga Haberman runs for the Times -- but also legally mandates compliance from the targets of the inquiries. In other words, Barr wouldn't be able to just laugh and blow it off, knowing that the Dems don't have the stones to make it sting. He' have to comply, or face criminal charges. This would effectively halt (or at least impede) Barr's ability to continue his behind-the scenes evisceration of the federal prosecutorial system.
2. The people did show up and vote. It was called the midterms. It was in all the papers and everything. It was triumphantly known as the "blue wave." Maybe you heard about that. The idea that the "blue wave" parsed out to, ehhh, just drag your feet into eventually making one half-assed attempt at impeaching this fucking traitor, and when you fail you totally don't have to bother trying anything else until the next election, good job everybody! is a ludicrous lie that only a cosseted, self-serving politidunce could possibly believe. The voters voted. The message was clear. You want me to vote again, I will, but I'm going to make sure to vote for people who take the fight seriously. Gutless dweebs who whine about the battle being lost before it is ever fought need to go back to their fucking car dealerships or whatever. I want people who are going to exploit every media outlet available to them, in order to spread a clear, consistent, unified message, and if that's too much to ask, the unemployment line is over there.

This is the great question we should ask ourselves and each other, about these self-appointed guardians of democracy who always seem to get caught sleeping on the job -- what is the job of journalists, what is the job of opposition-party politicians? I would suggest that maybe the layperson's understanding of those jobs is fundamentally different from the understanding of the people who actually hold those jobs. In that gap lies the real problem at hand.

We can't just keep whining that journos are in the tank for Republicons. If that's the case, then fucking boycott them. If you're still bothering with CNN or the NY Times, you're part of the problem anyway, whether you know it or not. If you're not primarying establishment hacks like Pelosi and Schumer, ditto.

Think back to Obama's terms in office. However corrupt and mendacious and comically awful the opposition party was, they were effective. Their goal was to obstruct and impede, and they largely succeeded. They kept him from doing most of what he wanted to do, and effectively ankle-bit him even when he was successful with something. They don't give a fuck about looking "unpatriotic" or whatever. They go for the throat, lie about whatever needs lying about, and say fuck you to the rest. They don't punt on first down or go into a prevent defense for the fourth quarter. You keep fighting until the whistle blows, period.

Summer is the doldrums, and hopefully the Democrats are using the downtime wisely to run up the score in the homestretch after Labor Day. This is not just about getting rid of Trump and getting Biden in there. This is about retaking the Senate and increasing the House majority. This is about the necessity -- the actual, practical, operational necessity -- of driving a stake through the blackened heart of that party of traitors and criminals, for the sake of whatever's left. This is about putting down a rabid dog.

Whatever the Dems think the score is right now -- 42-17 in the third quarter or what-have-you -- they have to commit to going all out in that fourth quarter and running the score up as much as possible. Make it 84-17 if you can, or 200-0. Changing sports metaphors, go Harlem Globetrotters on them. People like to tell themselves and each other that the best offense is a good defense, but that's not true. The best offense is a good offense. Don't overthink it.

The comfortable fiction -- one that not only Republicons but their feckless Dem enablers need you to believe, for the preservation of the establishment money machine that greases them all -- is that Trump is an anomaly, a political aberration. That is a lie, a goddamned lie. Trump is the culmination of fifty years of tactics and propaganda, come to fruition. If he wasn't such an asshole about it, they wouldn't even be embarrassed to say it.

The Republican party needs to be ended as a viable political entity, full stop. It is a fascist mishmash of grubby plutocrats, sweaty authoritarians, and thieving evangelicals. They hate you and everything you've ever cared about in your life. They are more than willing to completely destroy the country if they can broker the ongoing looting of the country for a handful of billionaires. It is important not only to end all support for them, but for any entity who continues to operate as if they can be "worked with" in good faith.

If corporate media entities can't be bothered with that sort of work, then leave them to their reality-teevee coverage. If politicians can't be brought around to understand who the real enemy is, then it's time for them to go. There is no longer another option.