Fuck Your Feelings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disbarred

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

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

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

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

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

Uncle Tim's Cabin

You know, it's sad and annoying that a black Democrat would shill for Trump, but you know, Vernon Jones has been a known shithead for quite some time, a true DINO. Clean your fucking barn out once in a while, people, or accept the fact that you're going to get "surprises" like this from time to time.

But really, if that's the best they can pull over to the dork side, some state lege asshole who appears to be feathering his nest for a post-house run on K Street, that's pretty small potatoes, until Jeff Van Camp gets up there Thursday. Now it's up to Vern's constituents to run his ass out of office, and then depending on who wins, up to the party leaders whether he ever holds a job in the arena again.

If the Dems win, Jones should spend the rest of his days asking if we want fries with that; if Kim Don Un steals one out, it's even odds whether Big Daddy will even remember Vern's name when he needs something. Favors and loyalty only run one way in this swamp, son.

As for real Republicons like Tim Scott and Ben Carson, who knows what the hell their deal is? They're not entirely wrong that the Democrats have frequently taken blacks for granted as a voting bloc, but, you know, if you can't see the contrast between enthusiastic skull-busters and half-hearted incrementalism, I don't know what to say. Neither is good, but one is far worse.

And guys like Scott and Carson can bullshit themselves all they want about how they're in a party that let them succeed on their own merits rather than the color of their skin, but if they don't realize that the GOP has its own "we gotta get one of those too" protocols, it's because they've chosen not to see it.

Vanish Armada

The ongoing national shitcom took a turn for the hilarious yesterday with the arrest and indictment of Meth Uncle Stevie B, along with several other shitheads, in a transparent money laundering scheme. I know, we're all shocked. The indictment is a pretty quick read, and I suggest you take a few minutes and peruse it.

Back in the Trump "University" lawsuit days, I opined (correctly) that the sort of schmuck who was willing to hand over their life savings to a cheesy huckster like Donald Trump deserved to lose their money anyway. They would have otherwise given it to a televangelist, or blown it on a sack of magic beans, or valuable moon acreage, some dopey shit like that.

That's not to say that Trump didn't also deserve to get sued, but I continue to live by the sacred adage that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money. That may not sit well with some folks, but that's really the way it is; whether we "like" it or not is orthogonal to that universal truth.

Anyway, take that principle and multiply it by several orders of magnitude with this "We Build the Wall" bullshit. Fuck every one of these people, right in their goddamned neck wattles. They deserve to get fleeced out of every dime they have. If they had actually worked hard to earn their money, they'd have more fucking respect for it.

So there's that. Every single person involved in this obvious scam deserves the worst. I reserve a smidgen of sympathy for figurehead Brian Kolfage, because he really did sacrifice his body for this nation. But by the context of his emails quoted in the indictment, he was at best a willing accomplice.

And he's going to pay, whether or not he does any time. The indictment specifically lists the boat Kolfage used in the stupid Dear Leader river "parade" in Tampa earlier this year, which (along with Kris Fucking Kobach being the scam's legal advisor) is so perfectly on-brand for this crowd it makes your teeth hurt. The only way it could have been better is if Kolfage had named the boat Stugots.

Speaking of The Sopranos, fellow indictee Andrew Badolato appears to be straight out of the Matty Bevilacqua mold -- pump-and-dump scammer who ratted out his associates to keep out of Club Fed, and eventually gravitated to Bannon, who barely bothers to conceal the late-night-infomercial aesthetic that underpins every one of his Wile E. Coyote scams. Overthrow the Pope? Check. Buy a medieval Italian castle, in order to establish some goofball Opus Dei warrior-monk training academy? Check. Say what you will, Steve-O's ambitions have come a long way since his bathtub crank days.

And now this money-laundering thing, which is guaranteed to unravel on at least a couple of high-level people. The thing is, a couple miles of wall did get built, and some of the money did move to the construction company -- you know, the North Dakota construction company that somehow won a billion-dollar contract to build a fucking wall across Texas. Did not realize that Texas had run out of construction companies.

Oddly, only about half of the $50M can be tracked so far. I'd probably check Fat Donnie's super PACs first, but that's me. I promise you that every single one of these schemes that gets uncovered, he and his shitbag family are wetting their beaks. And even if any of the money has been declared in those legendary tax returns, it's all in shell corps that will then have to be unraveled. They'll probably never get to the bottom of it all. Remember when Mossack Fonseca was a thing? Oh yeah, we had all those thieving high rollers dead to rights. Good times.

A fitting solution for all of this would be to throw the perpetrators in jail, recoup costs and heavy fines, and then use the money to tear down the wall and get the refugee families out of the for-profit rape camps these evil motherfuckers threw them into so long ago. But I'll be surprised if anyone actually goes to jail. Every day is Fitzmas in this country -- big crimes, big promises, very little outcome.

Economic Anxiety

I parked my truck and sat in the gallery during the morning session of the legislature. I watched the regard with which Bobby Earl was treated by many of his peers, the warm handshakes, the pats on the arm and shoulder, the expression of gentlemanly goodwill by men who should have known better. It reminded me of the deference sometimes shown to a small-town poolroom bully or redneck police chief. The people around him well know his hatred, of Jews, intellectuals, news people, Asians, blacks; no one doubts his potential with the leaded baton or the hobnailed boot across the neck. But they make friends with the ape in their midst, no matter how violently the tuning fork vibrates inside them; consequently they absorb his dark powers, and secretly gloat at the fear he inspires in others. -- James Lee Burke, A Stained White Radiance

An interesting twist on the so-called George Floyd protests (as if all that pent rage could be attributed in even a moderate portion to one tragic event, but when the camel's back breaks, only the final straw gets remembered, not the bales that were already weighing down the poor beast) is how the long-running effort to tear down monuments to traitors and enemy combatants has kicked back into gear, as well as the desire to remove the 'murkin swastika (aka the stars 'n' bars flag) from the respectable areas of public life.

Confederate memorabilia, like that of the Nazis, becomes "interesting" in the way villains tend to be in a standard fictional narrative. It's only when you sit down for a while and read, say, Elie Wiesel's Night trilogy, or Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad, that the "romantic" trappings of the doomed cause fall away, and you quietly affirm the understanding that these "causes" were not lost in some tragic sense, but fully evil in every respect, and do not deserve to be preserved, except perhaps as museum curios.

Certainly the commemoration of such vile enterprises should be recognized for what they are, and not hidden behind some bullshit lie about "history" or "heritage." A heritage of owning human beings and forcing them under threat of torture and murder to labor for free is nothing to be proud of.

Even in Northern California, one occasionally sees a confederate rag. I don't sweat it -- I appreciate the advance notice that an asshole (and probably several pit bulls and a meth lab) is within fifty yards of the damned thing. I do appreciate this mild twist to the usual Cletus safari, though, and how in the context of the article, we manage to meet at least three identifiable phyla in the taxonomy of the aggrieved southern cracker -- rednecks, peckerwoods, and coonasses. It's a shitbird trifecta, y'all!

It doesn't matter what I think about these folks, to the extent I would think of them at all. They've shown us what they are. There's nothing to debate with them, no discussion to be had. The only thing that matters, to the extent that it actually matters, is that it's a reminder that Heraclitus knew a thing or two, that character really is destiny, and people reap what they sow eventually.

Sometimes that harvest is in the daily tedium of a mediocre life spent watching people drive in circles for several hours, or slinging bumper stickers supporting a treasonous chief executive.

Sometimes that's punishment enough. It's not like there's anything to boycott there.

Summer of Stupid

Because the US has a constant surplus of genuinely stupid, credulous dupes who rilly rilly care about shit, but simply cannot be bothered enough to find out whether it's even true or not, there is always a running narrative or several at any given moment that serve only to reinforce that basic concept.

Here are three such current notions, and why they're fucking dumb, as are their adherents:

1. Voting by mail is inherently fraudulent.
   Given that its biggest proponent has been voting by mail long before he threw his head-ferret into the political ring, this one shouldn't even need to be debunked. And yet, because there is a gross ratio of simpletons who perceive a linear correlation between repetition and veracity -- in other words, the more you repeat the lie, the more they buy it -- it needs to be debunked.
   
   So here's the thing:  it's not even worth bothering with trucking out the usual statistical data showing that fraud by mail ballot is almost literally (and is statistically) nonexistent. Instead, let's think for a hot second about the mechanics of the mail-ballot process. Preznit Genius Q. Dealmaker would have his fan-club of shitheads and suckers believe that anyone could simply run down to Kinko's with their absentee ballot, and run off infinity copies, and pass them off as "real" (i.e., fraudulent) votes.
   
   Okay. Go ahead and try it. (Especially you Trumptards out there -- I fucking encourage you to try it, because it'll be a complete waste of your disability check.) Take your mail-in ballot and run off, say, a thousand copies. If you're feeling extra ambitious, make it a million copies. The folks at the copy shop will looove you.
   
   So. You've made your hundreds or thousands of copies of your ballot, right? Now you take them home, and spend x number of hours filling them all out, meticulously, methodically, consistently. You are gonna TURN THIS ELECTION ROUND, Y'ALL. Why doesn't everyone on the mail-in scam do this? you ask yourself. How the fuck did I get to be so much smarter than everyone else?
   
   Then, as you finish filling out ballot #9,999 or the ten thousand you made with your crafty little scheme, you notice a small but important detail -- the ballot registry number. You see, whether you vote in person or by mail, you have to register, and when you do that, the county verifies your residence -- to prevent duplication, you see -- and assigns you a number on the county roster. Since your "ballots" are all copies, it's all the same number, ten thousand times.
   
   Which means that once the county sees your ballot -- any one of the ten thousand or so you paid money to copy, and spent time to fill out, they check you off on the county roster. You voted, it's done. You can send the entire stack in if it floats your boat, but they will throw it all away -- but not before, if they're worth half a shit at their job, coming after you and slapping you with a fat fine for voter fraud.
   
   It's a concentric ring of increasingly stupid and obvious lies -- not only does Dear Leader and his entire claque vote by mail, and not only is fraud statistically nonexistent by mail-in ballots, it is mechanically and procedurally impossible to do so to any meaningful degree. You have to literally have no earthly clue how the process works -- like, at all -- to buy this one.


2. Statues and monuments are intended to be educational tools.
   This one is just too easy. No doubt you have seen by now some tedious version of the usual Facebook uncle YEW CAIN'T TAKE ARRR HISSTRY nonsense, as a response to the wave of statue-toppling going on right now.
   
   So go ahead and think for a second how much you know about American history -- or any history -- and how much of that knowledge was gleaned from looking at statues or monuments.
   
   Those cultural objects, whatever their values, are not intended to educate, but commemorate -- and in the case of the participation trophies cluttering the south, intimidate. That is not a "modern" "liberal" interpretation, four or five generations removed from the installation of such things, it was explicitly stated as such at the time. It was part of the benediction and investiture of those abominations.
   
   Consider:  what other country in the world insists on keeping monuments to people who took up arms against their own country and lost badly, names military bases after traitors and losers? Name one other country that honors enemy combatants. Go ahead, we'll wait.
   
   And yet, I'll wager that the average German knows a hell of a lot more about the Nazi regime than the average southerner knows about the confederate regime. No one "learns" anything of value from a statue or monument, even if it's of Abraham Lincoln or Albert Einstein. At best you get a plaque with fifty or a hundred words containing some decontextualized specifics about the honoree.
   
   But if you wanted to learn something about Einstein or Lincoln, if you wanted to get educated about the "history" of the confederacy and its participants and adherents, you'd read a fucking book. They still have those, you know. The library in your town is still free. I'll bet they have at least one book about Jeff Davis or Bobby Lee or Albert Pike, or whichever scumbag traitor shitbird they tore down today.
   
   The people who claim that participation trophies are the best -- or even a good, or marginally reliable -- source of information or "history" are participating in a mass self-delusion, a sort of line-dancing of evasion. They don't know the history, and don't want to know. They want to pretend that all interpretations are equally valid, even the empirically false ones, even the versions based on pure hatred and blatant racism, and they want you to join them in that pretense.
   
   They don't want to keep slave-owner statues and plantation "tours" because those things present a more complete picture of a complex time. They want to keep those things because they validate a vision and a goal of returning to a time where certain people ruled the roost, and everyone else knew their place.
   
   But let's call the lie for what it really is -- nobody ever came away from a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest or whatever traitor-slaver dirtbag you prefer, knowing more useful information about that person and the context and time they operated in, than they did before they stepped up to the plaque and moved their lips to the inscription.


3. Impeachment is a waste of time if you know you can't win.
   In the interest of fairness, and mostly because these people piss me off as much as confederate apologists piss me off, let's take a look at a rather stout beam of current liberal and Democratic orthodoxy.
   
   Now, if you are not too distracted by the homilies of inept confederate sculpture, you may have seen in the onrushing torrent of political coverage that since his sham impeachment trial a few months ago, the chief executive has continued to act in ways that not only countermand and subvert the national interest, but are blatantly illegal and unconstitutional.
   
   It turns out also that the current attorney general, a self-proclaimed culture paladin whose own father was the very same pederast headmaster who hired one Jeffrey Epstein, has openly played an active role in purging the ranks of the "Justice" Department, squashing inconvenient investigations, and generally making no secret of his goal of completing the job of turning this country into a fully fledged banana republic.
   
   The logical and moral thing to do would be for the House of Representatives (pay particular attention to the last word of that name) to use every tool at their disposal to investigate these ongoing misdeeds, with the goal of prosecuting and trying them in public, for the benefit of same. Beyond simply prosecuting and punishing these crimes as such, the ancillary goals would be to make it as inconvenient as possible for the criminals to continue their activities, as well as make it clear to them that their actions will not go without a response.
   
   Since the impeachment farce, which showed beyond all doubt that the Republicon senators have been irretrievably corrupted and must be voted out of office as soon as possible, the Democratic response to further calls for investigation and prosecution have been met with limp responses of "wait till November," as if people will actually get the chance to cast a vote and get it counted without undue interference.
   
   (Turns out there is no need to concoct a baroque scheme to mass-copy mail-in ballots, or bus in illegals from Massachusetts across the New Hampshire border. All you need to do is have vested financial interest with the companies that produce electronic voting machines for contentious states, and then make sure that the secretaries of state in those places can be bought. See the great state of Georgia for the most egregious example, but Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, and others are all following suit in various ways.)
   
   Of course a second impeachment of Trump, or a first impeachment of Barr, will end in acquittal by the Senate. So what? Do it anyway. Do it because it's your fucking job. See, there already was an election mandating the investigation of corruption. That was that "blue wave" of 2018, remember? You're representatives, and now it is time to represent. You really may not have another shot at this.
   
   Either the law means something, or it doesn't. Either corruption is something that should be called out and publicly shamed for what it is at every opportunity and every occurrence, or not. There is a disagreement on what "failure" means in this context. It does not mean trying and not succeeding in conviction, it means not trying at all, which is much more empowering and validating to the criminals than putting up a good fight and maybe not getting across the finish line.
   
   Look at how federal prosecutors have used creative tactics to secure convictions against mobsters over the years, from Al Capone to John Gotti. It frequently takes years, and multiple tries, and even questionable methods sometimes. But persistence is key, and while the odds may be slim, they're always better than pre-emptively giving up.
   
   Even the political aspect of trying makes more sense. The Democrats' problem typically is finding ways to inspire passion and action in its ranks. Who the fuck is inspired by yeah, we know they're guilty as hell, but let's wait six months and see if we're still allowed to vote?
   
   We voted, assholes, and it was clear at the time what we were voting for. So do it, not with narrowly-drawn articles that a chimp could scramble out of, but with a barrage of throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks charges. Hammer them for fucking jaywalking. Hammer them for being assholes. Hammer them because you don't like the color of their suits. Whatever.
   
   It's truly sad that a moral abomination of a political party has such a handle on marketing its horrific policies, but a lot of that boils down to passion. They may be nuts, they may be assholes, but they're all-in on those things. They don't second-guess, they don't worry about facts, or what works. They investigated the Benghazi nothingburger nine times, and when they still came up flat, they trotted it out at their convention to whip up the rubes. It was bullshit, but it worked where they needed it to work.
   
   What might it be like if the Democrats understood the gunfight for what it was, and finally dropped their Spork of Decorum™ and picked up a fucking MAC-10 and went to town?