Hilarious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Extremely Plowed and Incredibly Gross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rush to Judgment

Not going to waste much time or effort on this, because he really isn't worth it, but it is a fine larf to see some of the usual dopes entreating us to "be best" or whatever, with Rush Limbaugh's supposedly terminal diagnosis. (I thought he was stage four -- which, in my understanding, generally means "there's nothing more we can do" -- back at the beginning of the year.)

I could say something shitty, like hoping that every breath he continues to draw is more agonizing than the previous one, something like that. But the fact is that you have to care about something or someone in order to hate it (them) sufficiently. And I just don't care, at all.

I assume that most people, once they hit a certain age, begin having those little existential conversations with themselves. What kind of mark will I make? How will people remember me? What part of me will live on, and for how long?

Obviously, for 99.9999% of us (not an empirically proven number), the answers are, in order:  Little to none; fondly (at best) for a while, then less and less; very little, and not for very long. Even for people with large families and/or large groups of friends, they all move on at some point.

Limbaugh has made hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several decades by poisoning the well of what passes for American political discourse. People reflexively point to him calling then thirteen-year-old Chelsea Clinton "the White House dog" early in his career, but the fact is that that's one of his more harmless bits.

He's always been a cheerful prevaricator, a passer of rumors and innuendo, the orchestrator of an endless campaign of calumny and fear. Basically his show and his schtick have been an ongoing false-flag operation, distracting his rube audience with fake misdeeds from the Democratic villains of his passion play, while his Republicon saints robbed the country blind and stupid.

Here's what he had to say about Ruth Bader Ginsburg a couple years ago -- or has he memorably dubs her, Ruth "Buzzi" Ginsburg. [Ed:  Hi-yooooo!] You can see where Genius Q. Dealmaker swiped his splendiferous gift for nicknamification. Truly, this is inspired stuff. And he couldn't even wait for the body to get cold before he was clamoring for a (fascist) replacement to be installed in the seat.

It goes without saying that the people who will have anything positive to say about Limbaugh are the same sort of arm-dragging troglodytes who will miss Trump when that final Double Whopper finally takes him to hell. Limbaugh's impact is arguably larger than Trump's, and in fact, it's clear that the life's work of the former was to set the stage for the latter, to keep people dumb and angry and eager for the next day's outrage pill, like the Skinner-box rodents they really are.

Like I say, I don't really give two shits whether Limbaugh keels over tomorrow or ten years from now, because his legacy and operational principles will be the same either way:

1. The herrenvolk are entitled to their own set of rules and customs, which (as Frank Wilhoit so memorably put it) protect but don't bind them, while simultaneously binding but not protecting everyone else.
2. Hate and bullshit are easier to digest -- and more profitable! -- if you stuff those turds into a handful of cheesy "jokes" and nicknames, all of which are meant to be taken with utmost seriousness, while also being used as a shield to deflect the opposition's "humorless" rebuttals.
   
3. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it.

The one thing I actually do hope for Limbaugh is that, in his quiet, more reflective moments, when the microphone and lights are off, when he sits in his vast, empty mansion with his cat and his current wife, that he really thinks to himself about whether the life he chose to lead was the life he had dreamed of when he was younger, and if not, what might have gone differently.

The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike, and it sure doesn't hurt for everyone to take note that Limbaugh got a much fairer shake out of life than most decent people, and that whether we're "good" or "bad", we all end up the same.

So you might as well do something you can actually talk about in polite company, something that you don't have to be ashamed of. Carrying water for monstrous billionaires pays well, but the fact of the matter is that after a few weeks of grief kayfabe, they'll shove Charlie Kirk or some equally useless sack of shit in the chair to carry the water and poison the well, and Limbaugh will be completely forgotten within five or ten years, except for those who spit when they say his name, like Father Coughlin or Lord Haw Haw. Some legacy.

The main thing for liberals and Democrats is not to let themselves be gulled into this "let's be nice" high-road sucker's game. You have no obligation to forgive your abusers or their enablers, nor to mourn their demises. The fact is that they seek this absolution only as a way of minimizing the abuse and its effects. They don't actually care if you "forgive" them or are "civil" to them; it's just a cynical ploy to keep you on your back foot, to remind you that they will never give you the courtesies they demand from you at every turn.

Keep that in mind in the weeks and months (and even years) to come, because the bigger the landslide, the more you're gonna hear this "reconciliation" bullshit, this Rodney King can't-we-all-just-get-along rhetoric, as a hasty attempt to cover their real-world efforts to undermine the Democrats -- and more importantly, democracy itself.

Never forget what the true endgame is here -- making sure only the right people get to have a say in how their world runs. Limbaugh was an important voice in distilling that toxic brew down to a level where the average Keystone Light swiller could latch on to some talking points, and never have to worry about whether they were accurate in the least.

Season's Beatings (October Edition)

Lost in the narrowed bandwidth of the corporate "broadcasting" channels was the secretly recorded call between Melanoma Tramp and her former sidekick, Stephanie Something-Or-Other-Who-Fuckin'-Cares, in which Melanoma basically said "fuck Christmas." As we all know from Saint Bill O'Reilly of the Church of Loofah Harassment, there's a WAR ON CHRISTMAS, YOU GUYS, which makes the Baby Jesus cry tears of blood or something.

So one might think -- if one were, let's say, stupid enough to expect anything resembling intellectual consistency from the ghouls and rage-monkeys that still fester in that cult of disbelief -- that there might be some sort of outcry or resentment brewing among the Xmas war widows, who have indeed sacrificed more than anyone deployed in an actual war. I don't think anyone's holding their breath, right?

Here's what's annoying about that exchange, and Melanoma's bilious rant:  this fucking broad, who has never done a goddamned thing since arriving in this country but rent out her orifices, has the fuckin' balls to complain about having to put up Christmas decorations. Maybe if we all chipped in and left a C-note or two on the end table, so she feels duly compensated?

I mean, I couldn't possibly care less about White House Christmas decorations, and am repulsed by the Fixed Noise crowd's endless efforts to weaponize the whole thing. I despise all the pro forma bullshit that presidents and even congress members go through routinely, from pardoning turkeys to pledging allegiance to a flag that currently represents nothing but greed and stupidity and indifferent brutality. I actually agree with Melanoma's "fuck Christmas" rant, as far as that goes. But, uh, coming from someone who doesn't actually do anything, but wants all the perks and treats and privileges that come with it? Hey, fuck you, lady. Go back home to your NYC tower and fuck your boyfriend.

This sense of entitlement these people just take as natural, it is not natural, I assure you. The average schmuck is generally grateful just for simple things like good health and stable employment in a job that doesn't make them die inside a little more each day. Most people would kill -- like literally push a button on a stranger -- to have the kind of money and power and privilege that some people take not only for granted, but as their due, as what is owed to them.

Nobody in the Trump family, least of all the current generation, has ever added any value to the world. They just take and consume and pit the peons against each other for their amusement. That's all any of them are capable of, renting weak, morally compromised people to push around. You wouldn't miss any of them if they were suddenly gone, or (better yet) had never been there in the first place.

You want an "alternative history" counterfactual? Imagine for a moment if you had never heard the name "Donald Trump." I don't mean that he didn't get into politics, or even that he didn't exist at all. He existed, but wasn't built up over decades by credulous media dupes. He was just a somewhat wealthy asshole who kept it to himself and stayed off everyone's radar, didn't have to hump the world's leg for decades on end in a futile attempt to recoup the love daddy never showed him. He wasn't given a teevee show for a decade where he pretended to be a big shot and fooled millions of other credulous dupes out there in Real 'murka that he wasn't really a morally depraved money launderer who wanted to bang his own daughter.

Just imagine such a thing for a moment. You feel calmer and more meditative, don't you?

These people are not just bad at politics, they're objectively horrible people, in every way conceivable. I can't even conjure up a proper image of the sort of drooling moron who seriously thinks that any of these scumbags gives half a shit about anyone who isn't themselves. They don't even like each other, they sure don't give a fuck about anyone else.

These idiot fans hang out with their ridiculous cult flags, out in front of a hospital that has a children's oncology ward, among other things, where very sick people are trying to convalesce, while these chimps make noise and bleat undying fealty to their god-emperor-doctor, Kim Don Un, hoping he might come out and wave to them in his limitless beneficence. These sad motherfuckers deserve every little thing life has in store for them.

Extra points for Stormy Daniels' response to Melanoma -- who did softcore shoots of her own, and supposedly some "escorting" as well before she latched onto her booger-daddy -- talking trash about Daniels' five minutes of fame with Mister Man. We can assume it looked more or less like a dick, only smaller.

The White House Dog

 I swear before everything unholy and profane that, as sure as I am sitting here, this ad was going to end with a long, lingering shot of Lindsey Graham.

The Next Kyle

There's at least one of these assholes in every town:

A Black girl was beaten and harassed by a boy in an apparently racially motivated attack in Kansas.

Brandi Stewart said her 11-year-old daughter, Nevaeh Thomas, was playing with friends outside an apartment complex Friday evening near her Shawnee school when an older boy began taunting her with racial slurs, reported WDAF-TV.

....

The girl responded by telling the 12-year-old boy that “my Black is beautiful” — and that’s when he allegedly knocked her unconscious with a pole.

His parents must be proud. The kid will get some slap on the wrist, just enough to piss him off more at the injustice of it all, and then....well, you just wait until he hits eighteen or twenty-one. The trajectory of losers like that is as predictable as a drop of rain. He'll last just long enough to inflict real damage to someone else someday. That's all people like that do, and these days, they are overtly encouraged to do so as they please.

This nation, like most, has deep, ugly pathologies that it has tried to alleviate and/or remove, with varying levels of effort and success. That kid was taught by someone to treat other people like that. It gets passed down from generation to generation like some evil family heirloom, sweating, pulsating, sentient.

I don't know what you do to end it. I used to think that simply leveling the playing field for these sorts would at least put their "economic anxieties" on the back burner, and I still think economic justice is a necessary precursor to real social justice. But it's also likely that many of them would still be hateful assholes, just with more money.

I do hope that this poor girl grows and gains the understanding that not everyone is like the thing that attacked her, that most people really are not like that (though a distressing number of them really are like that). It's just the vocal zombie contingent that gets the most attention, who distract us all from the basic fact that there's still a slight majority of us who just want to live a life unencumbered by doubt and debt and hate and fear.

That is not to say that "love conquers hate" or "non-violence overcomes violence" or any of that nonsense. History should clarify that for you with a quickness. It is to say that, whatever else, a life lived immersed in hate and lies tends to be nasty, short, and brutish. It cannot be pleasant or peaceful or contemplative, bereft of anything resembling an inner life or an appreciation for anything worth appreciating.

There is no joy in the life of a person who treats other people like garbage, only the temporary escape from an ugly existence. The lies of the ad hoc heroic myth fade away quickly, and the person quickly realizes that people who live in the real world -- employers, friends, even relatives -- want nothing to do with him, that the only people who will associate with him are all awful.

Imagine, for a second, being someone like Laura Ingraham or Tucker Carlson, being just smart enough to know that what you do is disgusting and scummy, but being just dumb enough to believe that there is some amount of money that will fill the hole where your soul once was.

This is the life Kyle Rittenhouse has ahead of him, whether or not he goes to prison [Narrator: He won't.]. There will only be thirsty opportunists and hangers-on, and generational racists who will want to further indoctrinate him. It's a vicious, self-reinforcing dynamic, and we've seen it all before.

(All that said, I am not convinced that Rittenhouse is a racist per se. He seems more like an impressionable, not-terribly-bright kid who went looking for trouble and found some. Whether the white-power-adjacent influences in his information system take a more influential role as his life progresses along its new path obviously remains to be seen. It seems likely, though.)

All you can really do is shun them, but completely. That goes even more so for the enablers and handlers and media shitheads who use their platforms to push this evil nonsense just to put a few more bucks in their pockets. Many of them appear to be in their mid-twenties or early thirties. These people should never be able to feel comfortable around decent people again.

The Harder They Come, The Bigger They Falwell

I don't think anyone is surprised or even gives a shit that the Falwells are swingers. It ain't my thing, but I get that among some consenting adults, it is a thing. More power to them. Judging them on the mores and merits of "conventional" sexual expression is a waste of time.

As Hank Kingsley memorably put it many years ago, sex is not dirty, it's a caring act between two or more consenting adults. (Although it should be noted that Giancarlo Granda was only twenty years old when the affair started, the Falwells twenty-five to thirty years older and in an economically advantageous role, so make of that what you will. Probably nothing sinister to it, but for people who observe various power dynamics, there's one.)

However, judging Jerry Falwell Junior on the inherent hypocrisies of his lifelong monetized grift is encouraged. I do hope all the saps who attended "Liberty" "University" and their parents can appreciate what cannot have been a small investment for them. The entire point of keeping these homeschooled naifs sequestered from the evils of modern society as long as possible is precisely to avoid the sort of worldly shenanigans the Falwells enjoyed with their pool boy.

But these Nelson Muntz "haw haw" moments are frequent and fleeting, and all too human. The only thing that makes this at all interesting is this sneaking suspicion that there's a lot more to the story, and it involves money and/or sex. Junior's recent forced resignation from his legacy cash cow is somebody trying to get out in front of something bigger.

The kid is likely blackmailing them over something, and it's more than just Junior spanking his hapless monkey while the kid went to town on Mrs. Junior. It either rhymes with "money laundering" and/or "tax fraud," and/or Junior was more than just a passive observer.

Pro-tip:  If you're a high-profile couple in a very exclusive cultural niche that might take issue with your private life, it might not be a great idea to get involved in business deals with your bull. Similar to the principles of separation of church and state, or religion and science, but in this case, ah, two somewhat more volatile elements that should not have been mixed.

Regardless, there is a momentary chuckle in seeing one of these smugly judgmental assholes get hoist on their own petard. Not as hilarious as Franklin Graham's fetish for leather-clad garden gnomes, but close. These are not your neighbors minding their own business -- these are professional pecksniffs, minding everyone's business and getting paid well (tax-free) for it, and exerting political influence over other people's lives. So they deserve to get dragged through the damned mud for this.

Yes Please

Get a load of this fuckin' maroon:

So, I don't know who gets to break the bad news to the Commander o' Books, but even in a severe economic contraction, the People's Republic still accounts for almost fifteen percent of US GDP (last page of PDF in the link).

One in eight Americans live here in Cali, and we all get to sit back and watch, year after blessed year, as our tax dollars get siphoned away to keep the lights on in the parasite taker states, out there in Real 'murka.

Meanwhile, every year in the Golden State becomes more and more precarious, as more people keep coming in and our crumbling infrastructure gives way, in the face of climate change. Heat waves, wildfires, and rolling power outages all summer, followed by torrential rains and flash floods in the winter, and clean-up in the spring.

I wonder if some of that money we never get back from those fat cats in DC, our tax dollars that they use to keep the countless versions of Opioid Flats barely afloat, could be used here to shore up our own issues? I sure wouldn't mind finding out, and then Doctor Prepper there could take up the slack by showing the yokels how to build a smokehouse for curing roadkill, and filtering urine for drinking water. You know? Maybe if we weren't forced to prop up most of the south and midwest, we godless hedonistic sybarites might be able to keep our lights on and our heads above the rising water.

I've always had a bit of a grudging fascination with prepper culture, seriously. Perhaps it's the romanticized notion of living that rugged, contemplative, Grizzly-Adams-meets-Thoreau lifestyle of self-reliance that appeals to the Stoic gene. To be in the world but not of it, to watch the corrupt "civilized" world burn itself down while remaining safely out of the radius of effects is something that obviously appeals to people across a wide political and philosophical spectrum.

It's interesting, though, to note just how quickly all that went right out the window when the plague hit. These guys spend their whole lives supposedly training and preparing for that dystopian SHTF moment that fuels their lifestyle, and within weeks, boy, they were out in full force wailing about haircuts.

Where the hell do these people think all the toys they take for granted came from? The internet where they trade their dopey conspiracy theories and stupid ideas, the Twitter app where they heckle and jeer, the computers that they use to write and market their prepper books? That shit wasn't invented and developed out in Cooter's Huntin' Lodge, friendo, between rounds of moonshinin' and cousin-fuckin'. That was all college-edumacated elite types out here in the wild west.

I mean, is this guy kidding or what? I couldn't put a number on it with any precision, but I personally know more than a few native Californians who would be fine with breaking away. I sure as hell wouldn't mind. I resent being forced to support people who do nothing but talk shit about my state and the people in it. I would prefer if they just took their fucking welfare check, said "thank you," and went on about their goddamned way. But they won't. They never shut the hell up.

We grow every kind of crop here. We make every kind of product here. We're the fifth- or sixth-largest economy on the fuckin' planet, hoss. You need us, not the other way around. Don't kid yourself.

You want to pay off the national debt, start by demanding reparations from the Republicon Party and their billionaire tax cuts. Check the pockets on Grampa Walnuts' suit, and his family of grifters and ghouls. The fucking balls on these chumps, I swear to Christ.

They couldn't care less about the debt or deficit or any of it, until the Democrats control the gubmint, then they're all about the fiscal prudence. The sooner we just write these idiots off, omit them entirely from all serious policy discussions, and leave them to their masturbatory Red Dawn fantasies, the better off we'll all be -- even them.

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.

Sign of the Times

Good morning sunshine, the earth says hello! Today's fresh outrage is that the nation's bumbling, stumbling excuse for a flagship newspaper "accidentally" tweeted yet another stupid, empirically false fact-shaped item, in a sad attempt to flog one of their sad slop-ed columns. It's a recursion of stupid mendacity and narrative confusion that makes Inception look as straightforward as Night of the Living Dead.

(Which, when you think about it, is perhaps as good an explanatory cinematic combination as you can find, for this country in this year of our dark satanic lord.)

The question we should be asking is not, "why does the Times suck," or "why does the Times persist in doing ham-fisted shit like this," or "why does the Times continue to employ demonstrably useless -- no, destructive -- writers in its stable of opinion-mongering horse meat?"

No, the question we should be asking is, why does anyone continue to throw good money after bad to such a worthless, objectively harmful rag?

Wasted Motion

So here's an interesting dynamic, becoming more and more commonplace:

1. Trump breaks the routine tedium of saying and doing stupid things, and selling out American troops and foreign policy, etc., etc., to have an "event."
2. Some F-list rando celeb hitches their non-existent wagon to Dear Leader's ill-fitted coattails.
3. Twitter gathers up a collective "fuck you" to said celebri-dupe and moves on to the next one.
4. "News" and "commentary" sites churn out reliable, predictable content on the "cancel culture" template they all keep handy for such occasions. Like the "obituary roll" corporate news organs keep compiled for quick deployment in the event of the demise of an ancient or volatile famous person, there is now a "cancel culture" roll apparently.

Now, some folks will tell you with a straight face that in a country where police attack innocent civilians at will, and the chief executive makes a point of ignoring Russian bounties on American troops in a war zone, that the collective online sputtering of impotent fury is the biggest problem right now. Forty million out of work, one hundred thirty thousand dead and counting, a "lost year" for the entire planet, but the real problem is that a relative handful of Twitter randos wants to "cancel" Scott Baio or Mary Hart or whoever. It's all so terrible. Exactly like the French Revolution, or Kristallnacht.

Help, help, I'm being repressed!

I would be interested to know how you would go about "cancelling" someone who doesn't do anything. To take the most recent example, Mary Hart never really did anything anyway. She spent some number of years on a syndicated teevee show, regaling shut-ins and people who couldn't find their remote with the comings and goings of entertainment personalities. She read copy that someone else wrote, and pretended to give a shit. If that's a noteworthy skill then we are all superstars, truly.

More to the point, she retired a long time ago. (I mean, I'm pretty sure she did, right? If someone leaves and you don't notice they're gone, were they really ever there in the first place?) She's married to a game-show producer who hasn't done anything in thirty years. If Mary Hart has an appreciable asset that's even worth the bother of a boycott or whatever, good luck tracking it down.

The weird penumbra of bullshit surrounding the "cancel culture" trope is more interesting in its meta-senses anyway, the poutrage generated by the spectacle of completely powerless, anonymous internet commenters performatively commenting about someone who is being a public asshole precisely to generate that sort of reaction.

There's nothing to "cancel" for Mary Hart. She hasn't even updated her Twitter page in a decade. She's out of the game. She resurfaced for that, which tells you what you need to know about her as a person -- if, in fact, you really "needed" to "know" anything about her at all.

Obviously, that's a huge part of the problem with "celebrity culture," this weird idea that these individuals are at all interesting or noteworthy outside of the creative projects they're involved in. Sometimes they are, but just as often they really are just like you 'n' me -- in other words, nice but otherwise ordinary in most respects.

But there's an industry of reactionary "cancel culture" meta-commentary now, counter-reformationist content curation for the addled masses, who want to distract you from the real bullies and thugs with imagined scenes of a dystopian future where the worst thing that can happen is that some anonymous person calls you an asshole when you act like one.

Snowflakes indeed. I dunno. Some guy had a tee-shirt once telling me to fuck my feelings, so I suppose that's as good a response as any. But what this really is is the creation of a cottage industry. It started with the cosseted, sinecured pimps of the NY Times' sorry excuse for a slop-ed page, as MoDo and Bobo and Bretbug gnashed their teeth and rent their garments over the prospect of nasty comments being the rough equivalent of a guillotine in Times Square.

As my Texan great-grandmother used to say, a hit dog hollers loudest -- meaning that the more a criticism is justified, the more its target will whine about how unfair it all really is.

Which is another huge tell --  the people who are the first to tell you how unfair cancel culture is to its "victims" are usually the first ones to tell you that life isn't fair, so long as it's smacking someone else upside the head, but leaving them to peddle their nonsense.

Funny how that works, isn't it?

Very Fine People

Since we're all "reopening" the wage-slave service economy now, plague be damned, you can probably start the countdown to the next elite mediot haunted diner safari to lecture us all for the kajillionth time on the "economic anxiety" these salt-of-the-earth types factor into their decision-making, such as it is.

Any doubts or concerns about why my default position on these dirtbags starts at seething contempt and generally worsens, should be answered thoroughly by that video. That town and its inhabitants are a dog turd stuck to the sole of the world's collective shoe. This isn't some "worst of the worst" scenario; the cops are standing there while the lone protester gets threatened and assaulted. This is how it is in these places.

The only consolation to be had is that pretty much everyone you see in that video has the coveted blood type of Gravy+, and as such won't live long enough collect their Social Security. (Though clearly most of them are collecting it prematurely in the form of various other social programs, as you wouldn't hire a single one of those losers to clean your gutters or move rocks across your driveway.)

This is what you're up against. The cops won't help you; they're on their side, the side of authoritarianism and fascism. So don't get angry, get ahead. The main thing is to stop pretending that if their soul-deadening widget-stamping jobs came back to East Overshoe, they'd be totally different people. They wouldn't. They'd just be racist scumbags with steadier income. The factory leaving town twenty years ago is just the excuse they've always hidden behind. Did someone put a fucking gun to their heads and keep them from going to the free library and learning a new job skill?

It occurs to me that while I suppose I self-identify as a "liberal" essentially by default, since all the alternatives are either rabidly stupid or wildly ineffective, the thing I notice about real liberals is that most of them have this weird teleological need to believe in the "innate goodness of humanity" or some shit like that. It's like religion without the money -- which, you know, what's the fuckin' point then?

And the cold fact is that, as the prophet John Cougar Mellencamp sagely wrote thirty-some years ago, some people ain't no damned good. Like Dr. Cox in Scrubs said, most people are bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.

Not you or me, of course -- we're the good guys, right? I mean, I won't claim to be simon-pure, but I do know I've never been part of a snarling circle of predators surrounding a terrified kid for the high crime of speaking his fucking mind in what we used to at least pretend was a free country. You know? I have no doubt that most of these shitheads are trudging back home to lives of futility -- and that thrills me to no end.

They deserve to be miserable with every waking breath. I hope their lives are the stuff of Hank Williams songs. They pretty much have to be, because successful, happy people don't have time for this angry-chimp bullshit.

When they tell you and show you, over and over and over again, who and what they really are, it might be best to give up notions about helping them find their "better angels," and just believe them. They're nothing more and nothing less than miserable fucks who lost the game of life before they dropped out of tenth grade, and have spent their entire adult lives doing nothing but trying to pull the rest of the world down to their level. They'll lamely try to tell you that they just want to be "left alone," but somehow that always seems to include their gawwwd-given right to push around anyone who disagrees with them.

Leave me alone, but I insist upon the privilege of never having to leave you alone.

Dung beetles don't morph into butterflies, folks. Sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is simply insulate yourself as much as possible from the decisions of the lowest common denominators of society. Not every problem has a solution.

There is no percentage in arguing with some toothless cousin-fucker living out his vicarious revenge-porn fantasy (probably on his probation officer, or on the judge who slapped him with a restraining order and child-support payments, or on his ex's divorce lawyer, or her new boyfriend, etc.) with his stupid Punisher tee-shirt. Okay? There's just not a discussion to be had, no compromise, no "reaching out" by whatever "conservative Democrat" asshole thinks will get him that 50.1% electoral victory.

Just tell them that a nice chug of Drano will cure their tertiary syphilis and prevent the COVID, and let karma find its way.

Fight Liar with Liar

It's a very strange ongoing phenomenon to observe, on at least weekly and sometimes daily basis, not just the constant lies, personal attacks, innuendo, and outright slander and libel, but the degree to which it goes completely uncontested.

Let's look at just two (2) of the more recent notorious examples.

The first example is the recent resurfacing of the conspiracy theory arising from the 2001 death of Lori Klausutis, who was an aide to outgoing congressman Joe Scarborough. It's easy to forget, after nearly twenty years, that in fact there did seem to be some shady shit around that event at the time, and it chased Scarborough around for a few years. It doesn't help that Scarborough's default setting is "smug, supercilious prick."

But whatever. For this example, it doesn't matter whether Morning Joe had anything to do with Klausutis' untimely demise. (For the record, I don't think he did.) From a cursory glance at his Twitter feed, it appears that Scarborough has chosen simply to take the vaunted "high road" and express sympathy for her family getting all this dredged up again, and retweeting supportive messages. All well and good.

But DID YOU KNOW [arches eyebrow ominously] that back in 1989, Donald Trump had three of his Taj Mahal executives killed in a helicopter crash, not long before the whole money-laundering operation went tits-up? It's true!

I dunno about you, but if some cheesedick piece of shit was publicly accusing me of murder, and said asshole had roughly a metric fuckton of serious dirt, rumors, allegations about him, and I had my own teevee show, I'd make a point of finding the nastiest thing I could, find a few bucks in the production budget for a couple decent private eyes, and flog that mule till the motherfucker dropped. Just keep hammering on it every day until someone squealed.

But hey, if Joe Blow wants to keep that "thoughts and prayers" high road, more power to him. We can see how well that has worked for so many other people, who just didn't want to sink to that level. [rolls eyes]

The second example involves Trump's ongoing lies about how the previous administration left the federal government completely unprepared for the current pandemic. He has repeatedly blamed Obama by name. This op-ed piece from the St. Louis Times-Dispatch lays out the lies pretty well.

Now, the general election campaign obviously has not really gotten into gear yet, but as someone who voted for Obama twice, I would like to see the man defend himself. I don't want to hear any bullshit about "presidential protocols" of not attacking other office-holders.

That taboo has clearly been shattered, and it's an odd thing to see one side uphold it while the other repeatedly, gleefully violates. Sorta like watching a duel where the participants agreed to use swords, but one side showed up with an assault rifle, and the dope with the sword just stands there, occasionally murmuring "but we agreed to use swords."

I want Obama to defend himself, and call out Trump's repeated, blatant lies for exactly what they are. But I also want him to say that on my behalf, and on behalf of the millions of Americans who supported him, and still do for that matter. He's not just saying you sucked, Barry, he's saying we were suckers for supporting you.

If I had the pulpit to say that's a fucking lie, I would. Then I'd remind everyone that he won't show his tax returns because he's been laundering bratva cash since before 9/11. But I don't. I'm just an anonymous schmuck, a drop in the vast internets ocean. It doesn't matter what I think or say.

But it does matter if a former President responds to the worthless piece of shit currently festering in the White House, and debunks those lies with specificity. Especially when the current guy is also lying about voting by mail, because he wants get those disqualified, so that he can cheat his way in for another term. Do ya think the situation is getting urgent? Okay then, it might be time to respond with a real sense of urgency. Waiting till November is not an option, when there's a significant non-zero chance that the election will be rigged or postponed.

I do think it's likely that Obama and/or Biden will respond to those lies at some point in the relatively near future. But the responses should be in real time, and should be forceful and declarative. No dancing around with carefully nuanced phrasing and word choices. These aren't "falsehoods" or "untrue statements," these are LIES -- as in they are completely false and Trump knows it.

I'm not a fan of Rick Wilson's history of political cockpunching, but I will say that he's talked better trash, baited Trump ably, and put together several powerful ads, than just about anything I've seen from the Democrats. It's kinda sad that a career rent-a-Republican wants these fuckers out more than the Democratic Party seems to most of the time.

Like I said at the top, this is a very strange phenomenon. We've become accustomed to it. People have decided that nothing can be done about it, so nothing gets done about it. No one even tries. Every Democratic politician should have been flooding the zone, every panel show, every Sunday shitshow, with a unified message -- that's a fucking lie, period, end of sentence. You are allowed to call liars what they are. Keep going down this path, and you might find that changed pretty soon. The bottom line is that no one has to take this shit from this fucking guy.

Did you ever know a kid who was bullied in school? Did the bully ever stop because the kid ignored them? Sometimes you have to fight back, and you might even end up with a black eye or a bloody nose. But the fucker knows you're gonna fight back next time, and that makes it more likely to move on.

When they know you're never gonna fight back, why should they move on?

Superduperman

You know, if this babbling moron manages to win again, despite being THE STUPIDEST MOTHERFUCKER ON THE PLANET, this nation deserves every bit of what it's going to get, good and hard. I mean, I really don't know what to say anymore. It shouldn't even be close. Who looks at this shit and says, Oh yeah, this is what I want? Fucking super duper missile, like a dopey little kid wanting more ice cream.

I think you can get by in life being an idiot or an asshole, but not both. (Unless, of course, you have enough wealth to insulate you from the consequences.) Obviously, it's better if people are neither, but we all have our moments here and there. I think I've made a pretty solid case here over the years of being a straight-up asshole. Some of it is schtick, to make things more entertaining to read and maybe provoke a few laughs along the way.

But most of it is absolutely real -- I have zero patience for ignorance or stupidity, because I consider those things, in a world where information is mostly free and constantly available, to be a voluntary decision. You have to decide to watch Fox News rather than, I dunno, read a fucking book once in a while, or a newspaper, and learn how to mentally sort empirical facts from mere opinions and conjecture. Or better yet, just get off the fucking field and let the grown-ups handle things. Go back to the shack and play with your truck nuts already.

Still, many people are not terribly bright, nor do they care, and that's no crime. But combine it with the asshole temperament and real power, and you have the problem you see before you -- this elderly, doddering dunce, mincing around in his fat-guy suits and his shoe lifts that make him stand like a fucking centaur, his comically applied Oompa Loompa makeup with the raccoon eyes, spouting ridiculous nonsense like (again) an annoying four-year-old, knowing that no one has the guts to tell him to his face that he's a fucking degenerate, a metastasized tumor of a soul with a bag of rancid pudding where his brain should have been.

A nation that put this ludicrous simpleton in charge of anything beyond a broken pinball machine needs its collective head examined. There is no excuse for any of this -- yes, our political system is broken and run by the corrupt and the timid and the rented and the outright bought, but who the fuck put them there, keeps them there? Who keeps falling for this shit, over and over again, whether it's flag-humping and Jebus-stroking on the ratchet right, or stern "we can never ask for better things" N8er b8er lectures from the pawl center? (Aside from Bernie and AOC and maybe Barbara Lee, there are no real leftists anywhere near the halls of actual power.) Who decided they had better things to do in 2010 and 2014, instead of showing up to shore up what power they did have, which puts them into a real position to ask for those better things?

Hell, what do I know? I'm operating under the assumption that people can look at empirical reality, see what could be improved and what their role is in that, and then act accordingly.

Maybe the real problem is with my assumptions. Maybe not enough people are willing to take the time and effort to sift through things and figure out the mess for themselves. Or maybe they do know, but don't care, or would prefer to bitch and moan about it while watching whatever basic-cable panel of shitheads chokes their chicken for them.

I dunno, and at the end of the year, I won't be asking about it anymore. All I know is that if enough people out there don't pull their ever-lovin' shit together and act like this matters, it's gonna be a hard rain that's gonna fall. And I'll be in my boat, spraining both middle fingers.

Scum

Suspending my FTFNYT boycott for five minutes, only to say that I literally cringe to think about the many awful things that could happen to these plague profiteers, and it would only amuse me. If his house burned down tomorrow with his "investment" and all his worldly possessions in it, and it turned out he had no fire insurance or family to fall back on, I'd actually laugh out loud. I don't know what the hell happens to people that they turn out like that, where every crisis is an opportunity to screw over your neighbors.

I didn't used to be this way, wishing real misery on idiots, but then we didn't used to be this way, at least not so easily and publicly. The panic-buying of toilet paper is beyond stupid, but there has been a concomitant rash of stories like this across the country, these little weasels hitting all the Costcos and Dollar Trees in their area, buying up all the cleaning supplies, and sticking them in the garage, in order to jack up the price several hundred percent for their neighbors.

However, to be (a bit) fair to Matt Colvin and his ilk, how is what they are doing any different that what the various collusive legs of the health care stool do? Every facet of that filthy industry -- HMOs, insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations -- all engage in the very same type of "disaster arbitrage" Colvin is trying to pull. You think those COVID-19 tests are going to be free? You think treatment is going to be fully covered, even if you have insurance? Really?

Don't get me wrong, these jerkoffs are messing with the well-being of their communities, trying to turn a quick buck off of other people's panic and pain. They've earned your scorn, and it would serve them right if all they get out of it is a lifetime supply of Clorox wipes and Charmin. Just keep in mind that they're pikers and amateurs compared to the companies that profit mightily every single day from extorting money out of a captive market, all so their CEOs can rake in twenty million a year or so. As bad as Matt Colvin is, the people who gouge $500/month for insulin or $600 for a pair of Epipens that cost one-tenth of that to produce are a thousand times worse.

Or the people in the federal government whose job it is to protect the population from a pandemic, absolving themselves from responsibility and fawning over Dear Leader's stellar planning and astute stewardship, this heedless clown who literally claimed the disease was just a hoax right up to two weeks ago.

You think I'm indifferent to the fate of these Amazon arbitrage weasels, don't get me started on the health care execs and Trump's bootlickers. If every single one of them suffered and dropped dead from the bug it would seem like a fair exchange. Their conduct has been at best a complete dereliction of duty, their silence nothing more than complicity with a scheming, chiseling lunatic who would nuke Omaha tomorrow if he thought there was a few bucks or a few poll approval points in it for him.

Maybe it's time we all take stock of ourselves, and each other, and decide what kind of society we really want to be. Because if this is what we've fallen to, these chumps who are so out of options that they think that hustling a garage or pickup bed full of household goods at inflated prices is going to change their lives for the better, we're in deeper trouble than we think.

Run, Don't Walk Away

Oh good, another one of those tedious, disposable I went to a Trump rally and it really opened my eyes to the truth farticles. If I had a plug nickel, yada yada. I find these people nearly as repulsive as the actual unrepentant cultists, mostly because of their preening intellectual dishonesty, posing as some sort of truth-telling.

This one is rooted in another tiresome artifact of the era, the "cancel culture" plaint. What makes this one slightly more interesting is that it took place in, of all things, an online knitting community. And yes, the SJW shitheads in that community, badgering people for supposed racism and cultural appropriation and all that, are despicable, and should be slapped upside the head.

But again -- and this apparently cannot be repeated too many times, since there still are countless people out there who refuse to consider this -- they're just jerks spouting nonsense at strangers on the internet. They're not imprisoning (and shooting) immigrant children; they're not stealing money from essential programs to pay for a pointless wall, as a monument to a doddering slapdick cult leader; they're not purging the federal government of competent, dedicated public servants; they're not robbing the taxpayers to stuff the pockets of billionaires just a bit more. And so on.

There is no sense of proportion or degree with these fools, none at all. The Republican party is collectively undermining the rule of law, compromising the very principle of elected representative governance, right out in the great wide open, defiantly, petulantly. And all this sap can whinge about is a handful of puling dopes in a niche online spot.

Face it, lady, you hung out with people who willingly, gladly support a liar and a thief and a traitor, period, full stop. You can qualify it with all the "they were meeeaaaan to my wittle fwiends" and "Democrats are mean for calling racists racist" demurrals but there it is. Go tell it to one of those refugee kids getting raped in Dear Leader's for-profit internment camps, before they get "adopted" out to a fine white "Christian" family..

Trump and everyone around him is rotten and vile to the core, and the rally cultists are just a step removed. It is a fiction that they put up with him while "wishing he wouldn't tweet so much" or whatever. They don't love him despite his faults, but because of them. I don't think they are at all representative of the "average" Trump supporter, but at this point, there's no confusion or question about what he is and does. You should buy Stephen Miller a fucking drink or something. You know you really want to.

On the one hand, if this chump is so easily swayed, then she was never really a Democrat after all, which is fine, but the real problem is that she's okay with all the corruption and malfeasance, because the cult was nice to her, as cults are when you just stand there and listen respectfully to tendentious nonsense and blustery, hateful lies. Just because someone doesn't blurt racial slurs over and over again doesn't mean they're not racist. The trope early on with Trump, even back in the campaign, was don't worry about what he says, watch what he does. Okay. How's all that been working out?

There's going to be a lot more of this as the year moves along, these random useful-idiot pieces purporting to speak for much larger numbers of people out there. I think -- I hope -- most people are at least sharp enough to not fall for this shameless gaslighting, but you just never know. I mean, here we are. If someone had described the current scenario to you just five years ago, you'd have laughed them out of the room and called the guys with the nets.

Travel Bans

I wouldn't worry too much about the travel bans. Another four years of this shit, and this rotting husk of a nation will be a place no dirty fur'ner would want to check out anyway. It will just be a place where the Saudis who own Trump and his shithead failson-in-law buy all the high-end real estate just to squat on it, and the relatives of Russian and Chinese oligarchs to come and have their anchor babies in Dear Leader's hotel rooms.

Which Way to America?

It cannot be overstated or exaggerated -- the more someone professes to be "passionate" about the sanctity of the Second Amendment, the more likely it is that they just mean for white people. These are exactly the sort who, if they saw a black guy with a Glock in his waistband at the Starbucks, would assume the worst and ask questions later. Every goddamned time.

Fun fact:  it is illegal in most states (including Kentucky) to go around looking like you're about to knock over a fucking bank. Again, they get a pass because if it ain't white, it ain't right.

Every. Goddamned. Time.

Projection

Look, if you're the sort of person who shows up for an "event" hosted by a vile blow-up doll roughly posturing as a human being, you're probably okay with her mocking a stutterer.

Let's cut the shit -- this is who they are, to the cellular level, to the very atom of their being. It would be far more surprising if Lara Trump, or her diaper-wearing rapist of a father-in-law, or her scumbag husband and his troll siblings, or any single person in the toxic orbit of Planet Orange had even a second worth of acting like adults fit for the positions they're in, and just said, "You know, I respect VP Biden's long record of service to our country, but here are just a few reasons why I think you'll agree that we have something better in mind."

They don't not only because they can't, because they're incapable of functioning on that previously base level of acceptable behavior, not only because they really have no policies at all besides legalizing theft and plunder for themselves, but because it's the only thing their idiot kayfabe crowd responds to.

They don't give a fuck about health care or foreign policy or any of that. They just want to make sure you know that they shit on everything you believe in, everyone you hold any measure of respect for, every principle your parents and grandparents fought for.

We'll have forgotten this within twelve hours. It won't even be the thousandth most repulsive thing said by these fuckers between now and the election, or even now and the fourth of July. The important thing to remember is that this is not a gaffe or a slip-up or an inadvertent revelation of what they're really thinking. This is what they openly think at all times. They don't try to hide it. The mediots should stop pretending that they do. It's not a mistake.

Going Down with the Ship

Navy Secretary Richard Spencer has been fired. Here is his resignation letter. It is pretty much what you would expect, boilerplate from an old hand whose first duties are to the false gods of protocol and decorum. He does ultimately mention that his orders from Trump to reinstate convicted war criminal Eddie Gallagher go against the oath Spencer took to defend and uphold the Constitution. (The same oath that Trump and Gallagher took, by the way.)

One sentence about halfway down stands out for me:  The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. This is untrue. Every country we have ever fought against had codified laws. What happens with dictators and despots and tyrants is that they bring in lackeys and minions to administer the law. They use henchmen to cow the channels of communication to the public, in order to poison the well from which the populace collectively drinks. And on and on. We all know how the fascist model works.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. The difference is that the despot simply declares that the law means what we say it means, much like a pelf-grubbing evangelist declaring their interpretation of the bible to be the only true reading. He appoints ministers to oversee the law to his preference; he installs judges who have pre-declared their fealty to him. He stacks the deck, and defies anyone to do anything about it.

A good con man understands his marks, knows what they think they need, knows how to diagnose their problems and sell them the snake oil to cure it. He also knows how to spot key players and use them, making them complicit in his crimes. These are Trump's skills, his only ones aside from losing other people's money and never being held accountable.

He knows that his base hate libtards far more than they give a shit about the well-being of the country. He knows that Republican politicians are hopelessly greedy and in thrall to the tax-free evangelical nutjobs. He knows that the pols that aren't on someone's payroll are constrained by "norms" and "rules" and that sort of worthless honor-code bullshit. He knows that military chiefs are bound by codes of duty and honor as well, and are also political players once they reach the ranks of general or admiral (even before then, really).

He knows that Rupert Murdoch's propaganda organs will say and do whatever he wants them to and keep the ignorant rabble in line, because Murdoch is a greedy scumbag who doesn't care about anything but hoarding precious money. He knows that he has an advantage over his opponents, because they insist on playing by the rules, while he is unconstrained by such nonsense.

These things are all assets to the con man. By making them all complicit, they can't turn against him without taking some heat themselves. Perhaps they tell themselves that concepts such as "nation" and "country" are mere abstractions, and therefore betraying is not real, like cheating on your spouse or something. The old saying about how it takes one to lie and one to believe it also holds true.

But the rule of law is there the entire time. Laws and norms and rules only matter when everyone agrees to abide by them, and when there are consequences for violating them.

No one should be surprised by any of this. Trump has been open and consistent in this area, as with all of the other areas where people (mostly idiot reporters and panel-show dickheads) profess to be "shocked" or "concerned" or some such.

But right from the start, on the subject of war, the draft-dodger has been on point from the start:  fuck their heathen religion, plunder their oil as the spoils of war. War crime? You and what army is gonna enforce that?

So of course he pardons a shameless murderer like Eddie Gallagher, whose own platoon, every one of them, turned him in for his crimes. When Trump claims to know more about ISIS than the generals, or have some special insight on warfare that apparently escapes lifetime military professionals, he's shitting on their service and commitment.

He's talked shit about wounded and tortured combat veterans, as well as Gold Star families who have lost their loved ones in combat. Nobody in his family has ever or will ever serve in the military, because that would require real sacrifice and some level of selflessness, two concepts that are utterly alien to him and his scummy, chiseling family.

Not to mention the other two enormous implications of dumping Spencer: the first is obviously that this sends yet another message to the nations we occupy now and in the future that we can do whatever the fuck we want to them, without repercussion; potentially even worse is that the military justice system and the operational chain of command has been openly subverted, sending a message to any miscreants in the service that all they need to do to get out their jam is to get to Pete Hegseth or whichever Foxtard can get on the morning show and make his case for Grampa Walnuts.

Old jokes about "military justice" oxymorons aside, there is a system in place, and if its functions are subverted by a senile autocrat, with no pushback or accountability, what's to stop him from unilaterally thwarting a directive from a federal court or the Supreme Court? Pointing at law books and reciting statutes doesn't work if no one is going to enforce them.

For the thousandth time, you are dealing with someone who has done wrong all his life, and never really faced any consequences for any of it. Someone else always pays his bills. He sure as fuck doesn't pay them, and no one ever makes him. Why should this be any different? All his life, the people who are in positions to tell him no refuse to do that simple thing.

So when military personnel claim to support him, you have to think about what they're really supporting. Same as the women who support him, even though he's an enthusiastic sexual assaulter and serial pervert. They know who and what he really is. People need to get honest with themselves, and stop warbling about how these rubes have been bamboozled by Russian trolls and memes on Fakebook. They know what they're doing. They know what they're supporting. They're good with it. They want more of it.