American Carnage

And crows will eat your eyes. -- Motörhead, Traitor

I promise that I don't intend to make a habit of breaking radio silence, especially just a couple weeks after making a show of pulling the plug, but the events at the Capitol building on January 6th bear some consideration and discussion that I am missing in most of the mediocracy pow-wows so far. Watching the events unfold live, I realized I hadn't had such visceral feelings of genuine revulsion and anger since watching the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

Others have already brought up the 9/11 comparisons. But the thing is, if we are careless in pursuing true accountability and making it sting, the event may actually turn out to be closer to Fort Sumter. I know I've scoffed at the possibility of a true "civil war" dynamic in the past, and I still strongly believe that the lack of foresight, coordination, strategy, or even any aligned goal prevents these people from doing much in the way of setting up an actual competing governmental system.

But that doesn't mean they can't do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people giving it a try.

There appears to be genuine anger on the Democratic side, and a desire for real accountability and even retribution, and that's a great start. This is not something that can just be "let go" for the sake of comity. Many media observers were quick to frame the rioters as "domestic terrorists," and that too is good and necessary. Anyone shying away from those terms and that framing is in on the con, period.

There is nothing to be discussed or broached or reconciled with these rioters. At all. They are traitors and insurrectionists. Fuck them and their "Camp Auschwitz" and "6MWE (6 Million [Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust] Wasn't Enough)" tee-shirts. Fuck their treasonous flags, devoted to one individual rather than a show of loyalty to their country.

I am not joking in the slightest, nor trying to be polemic, when I say that as many of them as possible should be summarily tried in open hearings, and immediately after sentencing, lined up against a wall and shot. In an earlier time, they would have been gibbeted and immured, as a warning to others. Some of them are military. They should be court-martialed and sentenced to death. The death sentence can be commuted to life without parole at the Florence Supermax, or it can be carried out. I really don't give a shit which. They can dump these assholes into a filled swimming pool and toss a fucking toaster in for all I care.

At least some of those poor bastards back in the day, the folks who ended up in the gibbet, had legitimate grievances. These dopes have nothing but the nonsense they've been spoonfed by the lifelong liar Trump and his booze-soaked sidekick Ghouliani, who is probably lining up yet another thirsty pig to receive his slobbering, grotesque sexual overtures.

It has already been noted by multiple observers that it was just a damned lucky break that of the hundreds of legislators and staffers that were forced to quickly evacuate and hide and barricade themselves for hours, none of them were found and dragged and beaten or executed by the braying mob of traitorous slapdicks. Again, it wasn't for lack of trying.

There was a forty-foot gallows erected outside the building. How do you like them apples? Amazing what you can get away with when you're the right shade.

Another thing we need to understand fully is that all of this is exactly what he promised before the election -- and before the 2016 election. If I lose, it's because the election is rigged. Remember that, both times? Heads I win, tails you lose. There are always suckers -- people still purchase music and clothing from Kanye West. There will always be enough impressionable morons to make something happen, through deception and repetition. It's even easier when you have an entire teevee network at your disposal.

As the usual weasels start retconning excuses and strategems for "unity" (with what, precisely? Be specific, show your work, and your plan to get there from here.) and the like, we all need to consider the sort of craven individuals who make such proposals.

Imagine the sort of person who was in very real danger, whose colleagues and employees were in very real physical danger as well, and yet a couple days later, are bleating mealy noises about how we mustn't do anything at all to enrage these terrorists any further.

They were openly shouting for Mike Pence to be hung at their makeshift gallows. They were looking for Pelosi, for Schumer, for whoever they could tase and zip-tie into submission, for their fantasy show-trials. Oh no, we better not do anything to enrage them! Jesus H. Christ.

If you do not know your enemy by now, and truly understand them as such, you never will. I don't know what to tell such people, since they are clearly unyoked from any sort of moral compass, but are welded to a compelling motive of personal profit and ambition. Anyone insisting on a mitigation of accountability is a clear enemy of this country and all of its citizens, and needs to be treated accordingly. Let's not overthink this. They told us who they are, over and over again. At some point, it might be time to take them at their word.

The most important thing to consider about their weird collective psychosis is how they see themselves -- and each other, for that matter. Now, there is some money peppered through these crowds at certain nodes. All that faggy cult swag costs money, as does the tacticool gear, the trips all over the country to the rallies and the be-ins, like deadheads that took the brown acid and chased it with a bucket of Wild Turkey that had been left in the sun for a month.

But you can tell that the median morlock in these crowds is a goddamned loser -- not because their education abruptly halted somewhere around their seventeenth birthday, but because they felt at that point that they had learned and known enough, enough for the rest of their lives. And everything they've done in their lives since those critical decision points, every job and every relationship they've stumbled into and shouted themselves out of, reflects that outlook on life.

The word "loser" should be taken literally here, but like all such folks, they need to envision themselves as victims of circumstance, of the machinations of some malevolent force or baroque conspiracy. It can't just be that you're a willfully ignorant bum with anger management issues. It's always someone else's fault.

And now they're in their forties or fifties, these median dopes, their best years long behind them, and there warn't too many of those in the first place. They don't know much, but they know that much. The only thing they have to look forward to, the thing that informs what passes for their political sentiments, is the hope of pulling as many of their fella 'murkins down to the same level.

Remember the ancient joke about the campers awakened by the approaching bear, how you don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other campers? Well, imagine the sort of person that just wants to be the bear.

But because these people still see themselves as good people, as decent people, they did what all delusional people do and crafted a story that casts themselves as heroes rather than villains. The crucible of social media, and the common bond of the Q mythos, enabled them to quickly forge a more solid and sweeping narrative for themselves, noble hobbitses headed for Mount Doom to thwart the satanic pedophile cabal headed by Hitlery Clinton.

Did I get all that right? Does it matter? The main thing is that it gives them the excuses and the rhetorical cover they need in order to strive for something they know is monstrous. It doesn't matter that the strike dates of the Q mythos keep shifting, like doomsday predictions from crackpot preachers. It doesn't matter that Trump can't show a single tangible accomplishment that would benefit any of them. It doesn't even matter that Trump turned on Pence -- and even on them -- by essentially conceding the day after the riot, by acknowledging that there would indeed be a transfer of power on January 20th.

Some of them will squawk about betrayal and such, but their hearts aren't in it. After all, they have nowhere else to go. I don't mean the garden-variety asshole coworker or uncle we all have in our lives; I mean specifically the individuals at the rallies, at the Capitol riot. I mean the sort of person who seriously thought that if they bum-rushed the Capitol cops, smeared shit on the walls and vandalized the place good and proper, maybe dragged a couple of heretics out to the makeshift gallows and strung 'em up, that the other 330 million of us would just roll over and go, Oh, okay guys, we see your point now. I guess we can go ahead and flip the script for Fat Orange Elvis' second term. No fucking problem.

No, the people who invaded the halls of American governance last Wednesday afternoon have nowhere else to go, politically, morally, spiritually. These are people who have alienated every sensible person who was in their lives, who have moved on without them. These are people who have been rolling around in an impermeable hamster ball of epistemic closure.

Ted Kaczynski holed himself up in a hundred-square-foot cabin in the remote wilderness, with nothing but his jotted musings and his increasingly fevered aspirations. Imagine if the Unabomber had been able to stew and commiserate for years with like-minded souls in members-only Fakebook groups, steadily bringing each others' sentiments and outlook to a rolling boil.

Cold, alone, and alive
You're afraid but that's not what I asked. Wanna go for a ride?
Sharpen your teeth, my darlings, sharpen your minds
Take a finger -- if the hand feeds you shit, take one scalp at a time. -- Them Crooked Vultures, Spinning In Daffodils

We have a crisis in our angry-yokel population, to be sure (best one I've seen so far is Coup Klux Klan), but it seems to me that the real -- and sorely under-reported -- crisis is in law enforcement, a term becoming an oxymoron on the level of jumbo shrimp or Holy Roman Empire.

We saw it all last summer, the beatdowns of unarmed college kids and elderly trespassers, in city after city after city. Violence occurred, and buildings were set ablaze, but in countless videos, it was rarely the Molotov cocktail chuckers who were getting the batons, but mostly the passive, unarmed resistors.

 

We've all just come to accept it, since the only people who can do anything about it refuse to. But the actions and behavior of the Capitol Police on January 6th indicate a non-zero percentage of officers and leadership who are coup sympathizers at best, and sabotaging moles at worst. They let these hooting yokels right in to do as they pleased, and escorted them out and down the steps when they were done. They risked the lives of their own fellow officers, and got one of their own killed.  Arrests were comically few and mostly late in the day, after media figures had already been openly questioning their, ah, dedication to their job.

One thing for sure is that they were fucking terrible at their job that day, the Capitol Police. How the hell is it that the terrorists plan openly online for weeks in advance, with the date, time, and location, and there's no preparation whatsoever, no barricades, no reinforcements, no orders to use force early and often? They had bike racks that the terrorists swiped and used as ladders to climb the walls.

Not to mention the fact that this entire time -- during the Capitol invasion and even last weekend in Frankfort, Kentucky -- there have been cells of armed white supremacists menacing state capitals across the country. Kansas, Oregon, Washington, Michigan. They're planning more leading up to the 20th. No one is doing a goddamned thing about any of it. Wonder why that is.

This is not just a constitutional crisis. This is a very real crisis in "law enforcement" and what that entails, quite literally. You have an entire class of people who are held completely unaccountable, who are legally immunized from everything they do, no matter how awful. In the cities, they are militarized, and far more powerful than the legally elected city councils and mayors and such. They decide which laws to enforce, and how rigorously, and upon whom.

 

Their choices in those regards should be clear to all right now. It's certainly clear to the terrorists. They knew they wouldn't be touched, and they were right. Hell, they were given directions to Schumer's office. They put their feet up on Pelosi's desk. They took selfies with these paragons of law and order.

There is no justice if laws are not enforced equally. This is so obvious that it shouldn't need to be said. Yet here we are. It's good that people are finally saying it out loud. But as much effort as it's going to take to send the treasonous cockroaches scuttling back to their swamp caves, it's going to take ten times that effort -- a hundred times -- to weed out all the sympathizers and the thugs and the fascists that infest every level of this nation's law enforcement services.

 

I honestly don't think it's doable, and it's a real problem. We'll see on January 20th, for starters; now that one of their own came up as a casualty of their malicious incompetence, the CP have to at least make a half-hearted show of force for whatever inaugural recognition is taking place that day. Maybe we should all send them reminders to put on their fucking calendars.

 

Some of the assholes are coming back for seconds, and some new assholes are planning on showing up as well. They've printed up tee-shirts and everything, with the date and location. Maybe you should prepare, you know, just in case. Like a security type of thing.

And then people will go back to what they were doing, assuming that the foot-dragging agencies and entities entrusted with making these fuckers pay dearly will actually do their jobs. I have a feeling we'll be disappointed in that regard, which will only embolden them for the next round, for the eventual Tim McVeigh type who isn't a booger-eating cartoon character, but a trained, focused, committed killer.

 

There's been a lot of close calls with this sort of thing lately. Think about how close the governor of Michigan came to being kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by a cell of these "militia" dinks a few months back. You only get so many rolls of the dice before they come up snake eyes.

 

I hope I'm wrong. As of now, it looks like impeachment will happen, as will an effort to expel the treasonous congress-critters who fomented and supported this bullshit. Let them all swing for it.

Now, the right of revolution is an inherent one. When people are oppressed by their government, it is a natural right they enjoy to relieve themselves of the oppression, if they are strong enough, either by withdrawal from it, or by overthrowing it and substituting a government more acceptable. But any people or part of a people who resort to this remedy, stake their lives, their property, and every claim for protection given by citizenship--on the issue. Victory, or the conditions imposed by the conqueror--must be the result. 

-- President Ulysses S. Grant

Let's be clear -- the people who showed up to storm the seat of American governance (such as it is) are not good people, nor are they patriots. They don't give a fuck about this country, only their nihilistic death cult. They must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, or they're just going to do it again and again until they succeed. The people defending them and attempting to find points of "reconciliation" are even worse -- they know better and actually have power to do the right thing, but choose not to.

 

They don't want unity or justice, they want appeasement. They want reassurances that once again, for the umpteenth time, angry crackers have the "right" to expect leniency and complaisance. I don't know who they think they're fooling with this bullshit, but it ain't happening anymore. They bought the ticket, they can take the ride.

It's not all grim -- for starters, Sheldon Adelson is dead, as are Josh Hawley's presidential ambitions. Ted Cruz is finding himself more and more on an island. The Powers That Really Be have at long last decided that Fuckface Von Clownstick's antics really are bad for business, and so they are pulling the plug on the whole black op. Assholes are getting deplatformed, and it is glorious to watch them vent and preen in futility.

(Anyone starting in with that "freeze peach" bullshit can go right on ahead and fuck themselves with a pineapple. Not only are you not "free" to organize terrorist attacks and incite violence, you're definitely not free to use someone else's private business to do that shit. I mean seriously, have any of these morons ever even skimmed a EULA? The same question keeps coming up with Trump and all of his dupes -- are these people really that fucking stupid, or is it that they think everyone else is dumb enough to believe their bullshit?)

 

And in fact, so many of these dopes seem determined to prove that they're even stupider than they seem, which is always entertaining. The best part was when some of them -- led, to be fair, by their elite mouthpieces in the media and rump House insurgency caucus -- tried to blame the dreaded antifa. This would be the part in every cult where the cultists prove their loyalty by faithfully regurgitating something that they know not to be true, while insisting that it must be true because the leader said so.

 

Both the cultists and the leader understand this dynamic between them -- the leader knows that the flock know this thing to be false, yet prove themselves to him with this test. If he wanted a night with each of their wives and daughters instead, they'd gladly grant him that. That's not an exaggeration -- it's a death cult. They have shown over and over again that they are willing to die for him, willing to commit acts of violence and kill for him. It's not hyperbole. As dumb as they are, they are dangerous people and need to be treated as such. This goes for the petit bourgeoisie assholes who showed up, every bit as much as for the cartoon characters we mostly saw.

But the idea that any antifa-BLM type of counter-protester was anywhere near there, much less staging a false-flag incident in the midst of the real mob, is of course ludicrous. Here's a few things that should be said in response every time someone tries to pull that line:

• Gee, it's too bad none of the Real 'murkin Patriots there was able to stop them.
• If they were antifa, the cops would have actually beaten and arrested them.
• Even if they were antifa, prosecute and imprison them just the same.
• I don't believe that you really believe that. We know you know better.
  

That settles that. The other darkly humorous aspect was in a couple of the terrorist deaths. One asshole tased himself in the balls and had a heart attack, while trying to steal a portrait of Tip O'Neill. One gal got trampled while carrying her "Don't Tread On Me" flag.

You can't say the writers aren't pulling out all the stops this season.

I also enjoy reading the perfunctory, anonymized accounts of how dismayed and disheartened the various minions and dogsbodies have become. Their professional and personal ambitions thwarted, because it turns out that white-shoe law firms not only are notoriously gun-shy about hiring nazis, they also aren't terribly interested in hiring the assistant to the regional nazi. Who would have thought?

I'd say their choices are clear:  they can assess their role in this ongoing catastrophe, and how much time and effort they put into it, and come up with an honest multiplier, and put that amount of time and effort into some charitable pursuit -- helping the unhoused; rescuing animals; distributing vaccines; penning public apologia for being fucking scumbags and promising to do better with their given time in this mortal plane.

 

So, for example, the kid who brings Dear Leader his Diet Coke every hour can just do a 1:1 or 1.5:1 amount of time in such a pursuit. Kayleigh MagaNinny, on the other hand, needs at least a decade or so at a truly charitable pursuit that doesn't line her pockets, a place where she can truly contemplate what an awful facsimile of a human she let herself become. (Recalling, of course, that like so many of these interchangeable minions, she was vocally anti-Clownstick before she started cashing his checks.)

 

Or they can all go back to their respective homes, eat one final cheeseburger and jerk off one last time, and blow their fucking brains out. I really don't care which they choose, so long as we are spared any additional public navel-gazing from these dismal parasites, who take and destroy and lie and perpetuate their seedy little hustles, and then expect us to feel sorry for them when it predictably blows up in their faces.

 

Even allowing for the incredibly unlikely conditions I propose above, even where there might happen to be some form of genuine contrition and regret, none of them should be allowed anywhere near the levers of real governmental power again. They've already shown what they're capable of. There are plenty of people who can do government service right. There's no reason to try to rehabilitate traitors and failsons and shitheads. Again, if any of them had any real sense of shame, they'd have already done the right thing. Their problem is that they've been seen for what they are. Head on back home to Goatfuck, Missourah, and prepare to spend the rest of your sad life running dad's Kia dealership.

To listen to the plaints of these turds is to listen to their boss, the impotent threats implied in a cascade of wheedling and cajoling. It's like it never occurred to any of these assholes that it's possible to make money and be happy without being a complete piece of shit, without surrendering your soul.

I try to conjure an image of the sort of person whose biggest ambition is to push ass for Rupert Murdoch's red-baiting agitprop network, or to defend resource extractors and poisoners, to cash those fat checks and spend it on slightly better bottles of single-malt, a slightly bigger McMansion in a slightly better neighborhood, a slightly newer XUV to drive to the Whole Foods. People who think that that's all there is to life, all that's worth having and doing. People who will align and attach themselves to the lowest types in order to fulfill those empty dreams.

They're as bad as the rest of them, really. They hide behind their uptown degrees and their family connections, but they're willing to con violent rubes into doing the wetwork, they're willing to affix their lips to the rump of the despot, regardless of the souls he chooses to squish in his ascent to fleeting greatness and vainglorious conquest. The people who do evil, who commit the acts to further the agenda, cannot do what they do without the ceaseless behind-the-scenes toiling of these little Eichmanns.

They'll never do the right thing on their own, and you hate to use the word "purge," but the house is in dire need of a cleaning, to say the least. And make no mistake, had a few states turned the other way, or just made it close enough to steal, they would have completed the purge they've been doing in plain sight the whole time. The Foreign Service is gutted. There has been zero transition planning or coordination since the election. Even without a coup, the Biden Administration starts off in a deep hole, and that is by design and intent. Everything you see going on right now is because someone wants it that way.

And that's not just Trump, that's the little worker ants who were all too willing and happy to do his bidding. And now they're caught and identified and blackballed. They're worried about their future job prospects Well, fuck them. They deserve to never hold decent employment again. Let them toil away in Jeff Bezos' warehouses for nickels on the dollar. Make sure to send all the corporations who bankrolled the putsch a nice "fuck you" card while you're at it.

This is about retribution, but more than that, it's a deeply practical matter. Everyone involved in this beer-belly putsch -- and it ain't over yet, you just watch -- needs to be made to pay dearly, or it'll just keep happening until they get it right.

The bullshit stops with just two words -- enforce laws. Enforce them equally -- rich, poor, black, white, cops, civilians, famous, anonymous, the powerful and the powerless, from hedge-funders to hedge-trimmers. Maybe the question everyone should be asking is why it seems to be so damned difficult to live up to those two simple words.

Let's end with a poem of sorts, shall we?

The Art of the Fall of Rome, by D.J. Trump (with profound apologies to W.H. Auden):

Knuckleheads ascend the stairs

Approach en masse the blessed doors;

With incoherent yowls and roars

Affix the mall cops with mighty glares.

Messaging in fecal scrawls

The atmosphere grows ever tense,

As chants of "Hang that fucker Pence"

Echo through historic halls.

Cerebrotonic Q-balls may

Wrack their wretched lizard brains,

To seek the secret money trains

Where jooz transport their pilfered pay.

Homoerotic banners billow

As they catch the wafting breeze.

The bozos hear the lilting wheeze

Of the asshole from My Pillow.

Debt-collectors begin to swarm

Around the supercilious jerks

Writing I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK

On their non-disclosure forms.

Unsurprised it turned out shitty,

Tremendous birds with the best legs --

Seriously, people, you've never seen such legs --

Flee from plague-ravaged cities.

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of morons move around;

Can't get back up, so they can't sit down

Awaiting their quadruple bypass.

And in the end, the bitter cry

Because they never found the nerve

To tell the chumps what they deserve

To please, at last, fuck off and die.

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.

Children of a Lesser Clod

Interesting thread here about a group of, um, freedom fighters storming the Oregon State Legislature in Salem. As they say in the 'hood, read the whole damned thing.

Coupla minor and fairly obvious observations:

• These people are fucking stupid. Like, aggressively so, like Pfizer developed a mega-vaccine to inoculate these bozos against the ravages of coherent thought, and pumped it straight up their asses until it was coming out their ears. It takes real effort to be that much of a dipshit.
  
• While thread writer Laura Jedeed is indeed correct that these folks are dealing with tough times and economic fallout from the plandemic, that even in "normal" times these are not people who are swimming in top-shelf liquor and prime rib and all, that's not the real problem. Every protest has some sort of goal:  as ludicrous as I might find the idea that mobbing the streets of American cities is suddenly going to make our militarized urban police squads think twice about killing black people, it's still a goal. "Defund the police" is never going to happen, but it is a mission statement.

  These hard-up slapdicks have no goal beyond durrr, let us into your sneaky Chinee meetin', so's we can cough all over ever'body while regurgitating half-remembered Alex Jones bits! Great. And then what? That's the thing about all these wannabe Braveheart doofuses -- they have no idea what they would do if they "won," or even what the act of "winning" would look like.

  Not much offends me, but as someone of some measure of Scots ancestry (but hey, also English, Welsh, Irish, French, German, Polish, Russian, and even a bit of Norwegian, so go figure), I do find it a bit off-putting every time one of these pathetic assholes tries to flex nuts on their William Wallace game. Wallace fought against real oppression and suffered one of the most brutal deaths you can imagine; these ridiculous fuckers might accidentally get maced (or "maced") by a nervous cop. Beyond being begged to wear a mask, and maybe not being able to get away with using hundred-round ammo drums on their full-auto village sweeper anymore, The Man ain't exactly knuckling down on them in any appreciable way.
  

• How many of these jerkoffs drove to their little zombie gathering in $50k trucks, waving $100-200 flags? How many of them are going to hit the swag kiosk for more of that shit? Tell me more about their economic anxieties. That song never gets old.
  

I wonder how much longer our boys in blue are going to feel comfortable having two sets of rules for protesters, kicking the shit out of unarmed hippie-types, while letting the angry right-wing losers run amok. You saw it in the Million Thousand Magat March in DC a couple weeks ago, where a few cops got hit by stray projectiles, while fascist gangs vandalized black churches. No Antifa to blame it on, so sad, too bad, truth sucks don't it boys?

All these herrenvolk fascists know that they're protected, that the one thing their ludicrous caudillo promised them was to be in the group that was protected by laws but not bound by them, rather than that other group that is bound by laws and mercilessly persecuted with them. So when they don't get their way, and the armored shock troops not only aren't helping them but are [gasp!] obstructing their righteous entry into the Halls of Representative Democracy, well, that is an unforgivably perfidious action.

If there's one thing these dirtbags drag around with them like a fucking cross, everywhere and anywhere, it's this overweening sense of betrayal, that they've been cheated out of something they think they earned, that they're sure they were entitled to. Prob'ly some black or meskin had it given to them, by some bleeding-heart Soros-owned libturd who's setting the stage to re-edumacate the good foke.

Heh. Re-educate? How the fuck do you re-educate someone who isn't remotely educated in the first place? How do you retrain someone who sincerely believes that the one skill they sorta learned thirty years ago is the only thing they should ever have to learn in life? How do you convey any sort of new idea or concept, any advancement or improvement in life and how we all live it, to people who haven't so much as looked at a book since they dropped out of high school? That's not snark, I know motherfuckers like that, literally like that.

It would be nice if someone were out to educate them, maybe drop some truth on their heads, that all that cheap shit they get at Wal-Mart -- hell, all those fucking lame-ass "flags" they fly, like they think it's something special -- all that sweatshop shit comes with a price. It warn't as cheap as you were led to believe, bunky, and here's the bill for it, right here right now. Fucking morons. Who says karma doesn't turn up once in a while.

Looks like things are about to get worse, probably in multiple ways. A new Covid-strain, probably engineered by Bill Gates, Xi Jinping, and the restless shade of Hugo Chavez, has hit the UK, so we'll see how all those "warp speed" vaccines do with the Covid-21. We'll see how all those salty goobers do with the $600 checks Uncle Mitch generously cut for them, and who they decide to blame for it.

Six hunnert bucks prob'ly don't buy too many of them "no step on snek" flags. Maybe they can go terrorize more retail outlets with their tiresome idiocy. Maybe one of them, or a splinter cell of them, decides to take things up a notch, while we're tagging more than a 9/11-sized body count every fucking day now.

Two infamous quotes, from two diametrically different people, running through my mind right now:

"Life's tough. It's tougher when you're stupid." -- John Wayne (possibly apocryphal)

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -- Hunter S. Thompson

A modern, industrialized nation -- even in the best of times, even when not beaten down by a worldwide plague -- cannot survive being driven by its dumbest and cruelest elements. It just can't. People like that are always going to be part of the scenery, but if we don't find a way to push them back to the margins, and stop being responsive to every dumb thing they do and say and react to, it's going to be a long, ugly road down.

Probably a good time for each of us to do a quick personal inventory, make sure things are in order and stocked up. I don't mean going full prepper and hoarding 55-gallon drums of rolled oats in your concrete bunker, but just making sure that your home is secure, you have at least a couple weeks worth of food -- dried, canned, preserved and shelf-stable, you go out only when necessary for the next four to six months. Might not hurt to have a gun or two, just in case.

Next year is shaping up to be even worse than this one, and that will be the case right from the start. Until the agents of law enforcement decide to apply the laws equally to these increasingly violent and restive factions among us, this is how it's going to be -- only more so.

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.

Deep Thought #3

Imagine being such a waste of oxygen, such a completely desiccated soul, that your idea of an insult is to compare someone with Fred Rogers.

Had enough winning yet, America? Are you better off now than you were four years ago? Are you tired of people like Mercy Schlapp, a concert porta-john of a human whose husband is even worse, being given a platform, a presence, money, power? Are you tired of every day starting with waking up wondering what these fucking scabs have done today?

Do your duty, folks -- flush twice.

Joke on the Water

Worth a thousand words.

Suckers and Losers

Everybody has read the article by now, and absolutely nobody is surprised. Maybe it will move the needle a touch, but probably not, which is the real story.

Maybe he's right -- maybe people who are willing to serve and sacrifice for The State, a faceless leviathan that may or may not be there for them in their time of need, have been bamboozled. Maybe the people who continue to support this fucking monster, whose defining trait is open contempt of the very concepts of charity and grace, are also suckers and losers. Maybe the liberals and Democrats, waiting for their elected leaders to do something even performatively and making excuses for why they refuse to, are also suckers.

[Case in point:  Impeach Bill Barr now. He is openly discussing the ways in which he will sow distrust in the election results, and foment civil unrest. He has already lied to Congress multiple times, including at his job interview. It doesn't matter that the Republicon senators are traitors and will acquit him. The investigative process will generate enough evidence that can be use to prosecute Barr if Biden wins. And if Biden loses -- or "loses"? Hope your passport's in good shape.]

Maybe my dad, who fought the Nazis in the Atlantic and the Imperial Japanese in the Pacific, who was literally en route to Japan on a fucking minesweeper when we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a sucker for believing that his efforts then were necessary to keep the country he loved from turning into a mass of sweaty, ignorant slobs. Maybe my uncle, who served two tours in Vietnam as a Marine platoon leader and got soaked in Agent Orange, and died hard just a few weeks after his fifty-first birthday twenty years ago, was a sucker for jumping into a fight he was told was right and just. He got there and saw the truth and came back changed, and spent the rest of his life trying to get back what he'd lost. I have a younger cousin who joined the Marines earlier this year, for a CINC who's made it clear that he couldn't care less that the Russians are paying Islamic militants bounties on American military corpses. Sucker!

And on and on. It's a giant, all-encompassing scam, and we've all bought into some aspect or other of it. Remember when a couple of feckless billionaires inserted themselves into the Democratic primary, just long enough to knock Elizabeth Warren outta there? Where's OK Bloomer now that we could use his precious money, not just for Biden but for at least six or eight Senate seats? Where's Tom Steyer and all his bro-gressive happy talk? Yeah, they really care about "their country," but it's a different country than the rest of us live in.

Maybe the folks out in the streets protesting, as well-meaning as they are, might be suckers as well. They think something will "change" from their efforts. Well, you've been doing it all summer, and the only thing that's changed is that the police forces of Portland, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and NYC -- all cities run by liberal Democratic mayors in states run by liberal Democratic governors -- are much more comfortable openly displaying their true sympathies.

They stand aside while roving white supremacist gangs barrel through crowds in their $70k trucks and attack unarmed protesters. They let assault-rifle-toting kids who have just murdered people in the street with a weapon they were not legally allowed to possess just walk on by. They have not stopped killing, beating, kidnapping. They have made their position entirely clear, and no one is even pretending to try to stop them.

Black Lives Matter? Are you fucking kidding? Your life doesn't matter, liberal white protester. As far as the redneck death squads and their good buddies on the PD are concerned, you're not white. They probably won't shoot you seven times in the back, but you never know. They sure as hell won't stop the bearded goon with the riot helmet and the Kevlar Pepe the Frog vest from stomping the shit out of you.

Now that we're in the final sixty days of the electoral race, people are starting to look at the clock, because they're exhausted, demoralized, disheartened. They want it to "be over," but it will never be over. This is just beginning, sorry to say, but as we near the homestretch in this here blog, I am convinced that that will be the crushing minor chord I will end with in a few months.

Getting rid of Trump is -- and really, always was -- only the symbolic part of it. It's real, and it's vital to any semblance of continuity in what passes for elected representation in this flawed experiment. The real challenge, as the Atlantic article lays out so clearly, is in figuring out just how to deal with individuals who are fine with all of it. They have constructed an alternate reality for themselves, one that gives them permission -- hell, makes it their patriotic duty -- to support this thug who so openly disparages military service and sacrifice.

And putatively liberal media outlets make painstakingly multiple efforts over and over again to construct their own alternate reality, one where these people are Real 'murkins, who support monsters out of some well-meaning intent and love for their country. Such articles are not only worthy of every bit of scorn and derision we can muster, they also represent a profound dereliction of journalistic duty.

These people should be portrayed as they truly are -- as people who gladly support all of this, every bit of it. They are lying when they mutter something about "wish he would tweet less" or whatever. They love the tweets. After all, he's doing what they wish they had the platform to do -- tell all them fags and libruls and race-traitors to go fuck themselves. They wish he'd tweet more, that he'd crack down more on all the people they've been taught to hate, conditioned like hamsters in Fox News' Skinner box to pat the metal plate for the daily outrage pellet. I don't know if it's possible to deprogram most of them at this point. I do know that there is no point in trying to engage with them anymore.

It's easy for him, because he's never served anyone or sacrificed anything. He's never had to learn or understand or know anything, because he's rented minions to wipe his ass for him his entire miserable life. But the working-class schmuck that still rolls with all this? That's a harder nut to crack, and I don't know if you even want to waste your time on it. Remember that the largest number of voters is non-voters, and ask yourself why, and if there's a way to reach them.

Are they really lazy and stupid, or do they see the lack of leadership and conviction (to varying degrees, of course) on both sides, and simply say no? There's no excuse for doing that this time around, but again, if the opposition party started playing with a real sense of urgency, instead of always just playing not to lose, they might motivate some of those sideline spectators for once. What's the harm in trying?

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 Republican Party Hates America

You sell your oldest friends, you sold your countrymen
And yet we know your name....  Motörhead, Traitor

I long ago gave up on the New York Times, and I still think the daily harm they do outweighs the occasional good, but you have to hand it to them on their latest scoop (login required), which of course reveals much more than just the basic premise of the headline.

I don't know that I had "Russia offering bounties to Taliban insurgents for killing American soldiers, and Trump knew about it" on my 2020 bingo card, but I do know that I'm not surprised, not even a little. There are infinite ways for a faithless bucket of shit to prove themselves, and this is just one of the more egregious. It's appalling, but not surprising.

What is at least a little surprising is that none of the people around him who also knew simply stepped forward and took their chances, or at least leaked it to someone in Congress.

But hell, maybe they did try a congressweasel first. It's not like either party is willing to step up and confront this fucking monster.

The title of this post is a bit misleading. The thing about hate is that you actually have to give a shit about the things you take the effort to hate. And the Republicons have made it abundantly clear that they don't care enough even about their own base to expend the energy it would take to hate them.

Contempt is a more accurate word for this. It's the contempt that a successful con artist has for the saps who fall for his sorry act, the loathing a drug dealer has for his best customers, the resentment a pussy-hound has for the women he bangs in quick succession. It's the general sentiment that suckers and dupes deserve their lot, that they'll never earn a fair shake, that if you don't take advantage of their stupidity you're the real idiot in the equation.

Already that MagaNinny broad, that horrid fucking dingbat posing as a press suckaterry, has responded that Trump and Pence "were not briefed" on the bounty issue. Think about that:  the national security apparatus of the USA had identified a situation where a rival power was paying bounties on American troops in a war zone, and they chose for some reason not to brief the chief executive and his trusty li'l sidekick. It's difficult to determine whether it's worse that that's a pathetic lie, or that it might actually be true.

I have a relative who is currently finishing boot camp at Camp Pendleton. He wants to serve his country in the military. The great thing about being young is that you don't know any better yet. All politics aside, it's disturbing to think that he and the other kids he's in camp with, young men and women with their whole lives ahead of them, finding for whatever reason some value and virtue in military service for a dying empire, are being sold out by their commander-in-chief, a gutless, pathetic old man who has never sacrificed anything for anyone, who has always prided himself on getting the upper hand over the contemptible dupes who bought his nonsense.

I don't want to ever again hear about "supporting our troops" from these worthless cocksuckers, these scumbags who sold the troops out long ago, and would in fact push their own grandmothers into a wood chipper if it would get them re-elected to whatever gubmint sinecure they're currently milking.

One rhetorical question that gets asked with some regularity is what will it take for Republicons to stand up to Trump's corruption and malfeasance? What line would he have to cross in order to necessitate action on their part? A perfectly valid question that becomes more imperative with each passing offense.

But you might also ask that question of the supposed opposition party. How bad does it get before they decide that the situation is urgent enough to act with a  genuine sense of urgency? Political prognostications about the "failure" of an impeachment effort ignore the moral and practical necessity of investigating criminal activity, which now literally encompasses what was previously unthinkable -- an American president selling out the lives of American soldiers.

It's not enough to point out the sad, obvious fact that there is no bottom to the degeneracy of this human centipede of an administration. We may not have known the ultimate depth -- and they probably will sink even lower -- but we all understood the principle long ago. This is a situation that draws stark lines, and the political futures of all participating parties should be determined by where they find themselves in relation to those lines.

If the Democrats aren't calling for hearings and flooding the zone within the next couple of days, plague or no plague, we'll know where they stand as well. I have zero interest in perpetuating gutless incrementalism. They can take their "wait for November" bullshit and stick it up their asses. Either you use all the powers you have now, or you don't.

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.

The Bigger They Scum, the Larder They Fall

Looks like the Jonestown comeback rally at Tulsa's Sad Trombone Feed Lot didn't go quite as expected. Instead of a million attendees, looks like a million lulz showed up, along with a couple thousand of the usual sweaty orcs and gastropods who signed their X to the COVID (hoax!) waiver. Sad! But also high-larry-us!

It's not entirely clear whether Hills Have Eyes extra Brad Parscale is simply a slapdick IT weasel who's been punching above his weight for way too long, like a bad guitar teacher who's just barely good enough to stay one lesson ahead of his best student, and the clock is finally running out on his ineptitude; or if he's been this smooth meta-grifting super-genius the entire time, setting up a web machine to milk the rubes on swag, while he placates Diaper Don with carefully massaged polls, and now Grampa Walnuts went out to one of the deepest-red states expecting a victory lap and got caught with his old-man pants down.

Guess all those tickets Parscale was bragging about ended up going to TikTok teens who know the game way better than Lurch could ever dream possible. Tens of thousands of no-shows, so bad that Dear Leader had to cancel the outdoor speech, because of the optics of him serenading a mostly-empty parking lot. Maybe if he unbuttoned his shirt and started with a couple of Engelbert Humperdinck numbers.

Whatever the case, hopefully everyone who did show up got what they were looking for, good and hard. We'll find out in a couple weeks, when the incubation period has had its chance. Don't forget to chug your bleach, you guys! Twice as much means twice as effective. That's just science right there.

In the meantime, six campaign staff members tested positive for the #TrumpPlague. Most of the tests available are the swab type, which involves jamming a Q-tip up into your nose until it hits your pre-frontal lobe or thereabouts. Because of the staff members' proximity to Mister Man, they will all most likely have to be tested daily for the next two weeks, as will the rest of the staff.

I am not remotely kidding when I say that that knowledge thrills me to no end, and adds to what has already been a pretty good weekend. That gives me a chub that could hit a dinger out of Fenway Park, I shit you not. They chose to work for that dirtbag, this seems like an appropriate consequence, eventually leading to being drummed out of the political-industrial complex altogether, and being forced to ply an honest -- and low-paying -- trade.

Like these assholes insist every time there's a hurricane or flood while a Demoncrat is in office, maybe your vengeful sky-buddy is trying to tell you something. Repent now, shitheads, while there's still time.

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.

Media-crity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turtle Soup

Good profile of Addison McConnell in the New Yorker. The main thing to keep in mind about Moscow Mitch is not that he's the closest thing this country has to a flat-out traitor, nor that he's a soulless piece of shit lamely failing to masquerade as a human being.

No, the real takeaway with McConnell is that he's exactly what Republican voters want and deserve, and the sooner Democrats realize that nobody in that party can be "worked with" anymore, and that they must devote themselves to the goal of treating the Republicans as a hostile entity that must be completely eliminated from every facet of American governance, the better off we'll all be.

The fact that McConnell loathes Trump is not exculpatory, even though it hews closely to the "ends justify the means" expediency of the worst ideologues. In fact, it bonds McConnell to Trump inextricably, as the latter's term propels down the road to disaster and into the scrap-heap of history. Their relationship is not adversarial; it is deeply, grossly symbiotic.

McConnell is at least astute enough to know what sort of a turd Trump really is, a complete failure as a human being and utterly unfit for the office he defiles. McConnell loathes Trump and still does his bidding, obligingly, even cracking jokes at times. Hilarious.

No doubt McConnell tells himself routinely, in order to resist what must be a constant temptation to punch every mirror he passes by, that he is simply a reluctant, realistic observer of the dumpster fire that comprises the crude kleptarchy that now misrules the nation. The fact is that while Addison may not always be the guy holding the matches or the gasoline, he is the prime caretaker of the fire's ability to keep going constantly. He literally could stop all this at any time, and chooses not to.

The thing about these types is that they believe in "legacies" and such, and as he gets nearer to his eighties, no doubt Addison ponders from time to time how he'll be remembered. No doubt his donors and dogsbodies will sing his praises, but any decent person not previously rented by him will spit when they say his name, and envision themselves one day making it out to whatever marbled box Addison finds himself encased in for eternity, and taking a fat greasy dump at the head.

These are people who could have done anything with their privilege and power, but actively chose to dedicate themselves to making their communities and states and country worse places than they were. They will be remembered as such, except only by the rented losers of the industry. And every single person that still votes for scumbags like Addison McConnell, knowing what they really are and just not giving half a shit or thinking it's funny, deserves to burn in hell.

All that said, maybe it's time Democrats took a page from McConnell's playbook and turned it on him. He's ruthless, an evil master of procedure and mechanical process, and completely ready and willing to tear his opponents a new asshole just for the fun of it. The idea that Senate Democrats should continue to be "led" by an insufferable, pusillanimous twerp like Chuck Schumer is no longer acceptable. Time to go LBJ on those fuckers. No mercy.

It's time -- to use the technical jargon -- to fuck shit up. No more ice cream socials. Trump is openly looting and shaking down hospitals during a fucking plague, stealing PPE from medical personnel to auction off to the highest bidder. Maybe some of our elected representatives could look into that? If not now, when; if not them, whom? [extra points for pre-emptive grammar pedantry]

This is, in the strictest Clausewitzian sense, war. It's time to act like it. Get dirty, win back the White House and the Senate, and then set about reclaiming state legislatures, and crush that party of traitors. It's come to that -- either the Republican party ends, or the United States does. That's really all there is to it, and a lot of the reasons for that rest on the narrow, arthritic shoulders of Addison McConnell.

Your Periodic Reminder That Newt Gingrich Is a Piece of Shit, and Should Have Been Flushed Decades Ago

If you have ever looked around at the parlous condition of the United States in the last, say, twenty-five years or so, you can always remember that Newt Gingrich was the prime architect of all of it -- the lying, the hypocrisy, the open corruption, the literally Orwellian manipulation of language for purely political ends, the obstructionism, the borrowing of North Korean lickspittle tropes used to convey approval for Dear Leader's every stanky burger fart and dusty old-man ejaculation. You want to know why your government has been rendered impotent and ineffective in the face of rapidly spreading problems and events, Gingrich is one of the main proponents of that movement.

Gingrich pioneered the industrialization of all of that and more. He's done more to deliberately and methodically destroy this country than any single person outside the Billy Graham-Jerry Falwell multigenerational axis of evilangelism. A decent society would have shunned the likes of him -- and them -- long ago.

The man is pure scum and Italy can have him for as long as they can put up with him. He's a cheap snake-oil huckster of the absolute lowest order, and deserves far worse than he'll ever get. He should die penniless in a back alley and be discarded into a vat of eels for food. It's no wonder Gingrich idolizes Trump; neither man has ever been tethered to anything resembling a moral compass. Shame on any media outlet that gives Gingrich any sort of venue to peddle his wares. The more respectable thing for Newsweek to do would be to give O.J. Simpson or Harvey Weinstein a regular column.

I think what I'm saying here is fuck Newt Gingrich with an ebola-laden baseball bat.

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.

Dezinformatsiya

Should rational folks be dismayed, annoyed, concerned even, at the dead-certain likelihood that the Rooskies will deploy their Macedonian troll farms and Serbian voting-machine software and all other means available in order to disrupt the election here? Absolutely. It's a problem, and simply pointing out that "we do it too" to other countries, and have for decades, even centuries, is not a moral offset.

But it should be even more concerning that these preposterously transparent forms of disinformation actually work on anyone. The problem is not that such folks are stupid or gullible or any of that. They're not being fooled; they're being affirmed. They are being fed lies they already take as gospel, and they were never interested in being straightened out on the "facts."

This is what generations of being immersed in mental garbage at every turn, whether it's "reality" teevee, talk radio, pro wrestling, "celebrity" ass-sniffing, "true-crime" dramas, endless iterations of cookie-cutter comic-book movies, music that consists of a thump and an auto-tuned warble. I'm not pretending to be better or superior with these sorts of "cultural" artifacts; I've certainly been known to partake (very lightly) in at least some aspects of these things from time to time.

But we're awash in it anymore, and there are a lot of people who seem happy to just float adrift in that polluted river. Over time, theater and spectacle become more critical factors than wanting to -- or even being able to -- sort facts from lies. They don't care who caused the fifty-car pileup anymore, so long as they get to drive slowly and gawp at the explosions and bodies. It's fun! It's exciting! Someone else will clean up the mess!

This is how you slide -- or push, to be more accurate; this motion has always been at the volition of various and sundry players, some of whom make common cause, and some who have their own agenda -- away from the veneer of democratic republicanism, and into the soft, false security of authoritarianism.

Because we've become conditioned to react only to the emotional peaks and empty button-pushes, we worry more about reacting blindly to Trump's outrage du jour. That just reinforces the trope that he's merely an aberration that will disappear in a year or five years, rather than the culmination of concerted efforts by well-funded, influential entities who have always been in the river, just below the waterline, occasionally coming up just long enough to peer at where the fresh meat might be dangling legs off the boat.

So we have multiple, massive problems in play, which are dangerous on their own, but now operate in symbiosis, gathering strength and momentum. Consider:

• Money determines political outcomes. Duh.
• The people least concerned with "facts" or "truth" or "law" or "intellectual consistency" generally overlap with people who are least concerned about creeping authoritarianism. As long as it's their thug doing the pushing, anyway. This fluidity of principles makes them especially subject to cheap marketing and psy-ops tricks, such as microtargeted Fakebook ads.
• Imagine a politician with the ethos and character traits of Trump -- thieving, lying, scamming, unable and unwilling to discuss or tolerate any dissent, completely unyoked to any semblance of a moral compass -- but without the obnoxious, blustery demeanor, and with a functioning brain and the capacity to learn and do new things.

Just imagine. This really is as much about 2024 or 2028 as it is about right here, right now, this year. It's about whether we keep moving down the road to Junior and Ivanka jumping into the seat when Daddy finally gets bored with telling everyone to go fuck themselves, and toddles off to his resort chain to keep soaking the taxpayers -- while still telling them to go fuck themselves.

There's really (at least) three groups of people whose words and actions are completely against the ideal of a free society with duly elected representatives:  the donor-owner class who will literally burn it all down before allowing their precious billions to be taxed even one more percent; the rubes who buy into every precept that is designed to cut their own throats; the saps who are just too lazy to find sufficient motivation to get off the fucking couch and cast their lot.

That's really what you're up against -- every single day, not just on election day. The people who produce the disinformation, and the people who buy into it because they like it, or they can't be bothered enough to care either way.

But people have to stop buying the ridiculous, debunked notion that Trump is anything but the logical outcome of decades of marketing and agitprop. And they have to stop the equally ludicrous belief that "Americans" are "too good" to endorse the malignant, corrosive antics of this reeking outhouse of an administration. Some people were just looking for a cult to join, and now they got all the kool-aid they could ever want.

For the record, I do believe that much of the performative hand-wringing is yet another artifact of our increasingly useless librul mediocracy. But for those few holdouts whose distress is genuine, stop telling yourself "if only they knew" -- they know, and they fucking love it.

Why Do You Keep Hitting Yourself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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