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.

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.

Sign of the Times

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

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

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

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

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.

Superduperman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Our Liberal Media

I'm obviously not a fan of "celebrity journalism" -- gossip tabloids and such, but it does have its place, and at least shows the double-edged-sword side of fame and publicity. I don't read it, and it seems like the practitioners of that particular dark art should go out and find respectable work, such as giving handjobs for crack in a needle-strewn gutter. But it's easy to see how people can enjoy the temporary rush of reading tacky, scurrilous innuendo about the hapless souls who are at some indefinable -- even to themselves -- point on a predictable arc from discovery to love to loathing to (maybe) redemption.

But what really makes this Esquire profile of the Page Six tabloid is how eager these celebro-journos were to compromise themselves ethically, and then how many of them made the jump to other areas of manufacturing consent.

Toward the end of the article, it mentions how many of these turds would show up at Harvey Weinstein's big parties, with many popular stars in attendance, and omit details about Weinstein's frequent abusive outbursts, and accusations of physical and sexual assault, in order to ensure their invite to the next one. This appears to be the rule for these people, rather than the exception.

Earlier in the piece, it mentions how one of the tabloid writers, Tara Palmeri, eventually got on with ABC News, covering the White House. Now, this is not to single out Palmeri as a particularly noteworthy offender (especially since, frankly, she's fucking hot), but to suggest her as a rather mundane example of how "journalists" as a general class become accustomed to operating. They take the same shoddy ethical standards and style of coverage with them from entertainment to sports to news.

And that is the problem with the American corporate media ecosystem, right there in a nutshell. You cannot cover the people who run the damned country in the same way you do PR puff pieces on Matt Damon or LeBron James, and expect to maintain any sort of rigorous standard in the content you produce.

This is how the New York Times has been compromised so badly, and it seems that the Washington Post is sliding back under that low bar as well. Both papers (but especially the Times) tend to rely heavily on unnamed sources "speaking on background" regarding whatever bombshell-of-the-day they're peddling. As stupid and oafish as Trump may be, he at least understands, as Jimmy Breslin pointed out decades ago, that the media monkeys come cheap and easy -- all you have to do is return their phone calls.

So what do you think the likelihood is that Trump has people all through his inner circle who understand just how to use the credulous dupes at the Times to broadcast their messaging for free, in the guise of "reporting"? How much fact-checking do you think Maggie Haberman bothers with, to corroborate or refute whatever White House shithead "leaked" to her? The only thing this human centipede of an administration does competently is propaganda, and they know how to use the Times for their own means, just as Harvey Weinstein knew how to use Page Six for his.

But in the end, it's a free market, and companies don't sell what people won't buy. Jabbering assholes like Tweety Matthews are still on the air because someone's dumb enough to keep watching him, even though he has yet to have a fresh or interesting observation on any subject. Vulture capitalists are tearing through local and regional newspapers like a swarm of army ants because they can, and because no one will stop them.

This situation will never get better until enough people become more discerning consumers, and stop rewarding shoddy, cynical hacks like we have now.

Fighting Back

Big props to Congressman Ted Lieu for literally telling Devin "Traitor" Nunes' lawyer to shove his letter up his own ass. This is the only proper and reasonable way to respond to these scumbags, period. You cannot "work with" them (sorry, Joe Biden), you cannot "compromise" or "reconcile" with them. They have made themselves abundantly clear, multiple times. They are not your colleagues, they are your enemies, by their own actions and words. They can only be opposed, the more forcefully the better. Lieu has the right idea. His next letter should end with "and the horse you rode in on."

Bear in mind that Nunes, who is invested in a winery that does business with Russian distributors, is the ranking Republican (and was the chair until the midterms flipped the House) of the House committee that gathered and investigated evidence in the impeachment charges, as well as the Mueller investigation. As has long been suspected, but now confirmed by Lev Parnas, Nunes is balls-deep in this thing. Of course he was trying to brush it under when he ran the committee, he was "investigating" himself. Seriously, do the Russians get a bulk rate for investing in this party of shameless treason-weasels?

These people are impossible to parody. I look forward to Nunes being forced to resign, investigated, tried, convicted, being bankrupted in the process, and doing a few years in Club Fed.

***Kick a sawbuck or three to Phil Arballo, who is running to unseat this worthless punk.***

Prison pro-tip for Sweet Cheeks there:  if you leave it out in the sun for a few minutes while you're on the yard, a Jolly Rancher candy can be rolled into an elongated tapered point, and used as an untraceable break-off stiletto. Aim for the neck veins, cowboy!

Newt Gingrich Is Right

But not for the reasons he thinks he is.

I mean, come on. This is almost too easy. The very first point of response from anyone -- corporate mediots, Democratic politicians, panel-show assholes -- should be to point out that the last "client" Starr and Doucheowitz teamed up to defend was a dirtbag who pimped underage girls to "elite" predators (one of which was Doucheowitz himself), and ended up suicided on the floor of a jail cell, the case swept under the rug by the son of the man who originally hired said sex predator as a teacher at a private high school.

We really need some new writers. This script is making daytime soap operas look like Errol Morris documentaries. At this rate, it's going to turn out that one of these animals has a long-lost twin.

It's impossible to keep all your energies focused all the time on keeping all the fuckery straight with these turds. There's too much of it going, constantly and everywhere.

So, for example, while one might rail against whatever jabbering bluster Dear Leader is up to any given day, one might also contain the awareness that enablers such as McConnell and Graham are actually worse on a practical level, as they have completely sold out their country in service to a madman. They are in a governmental body that was literally written into the Constitution, which they pretend to revere, as a balancing entity against an executive branch run amok.

And we've had scumbags and hypocrites oozing through the hallowed halls of gubmint forever, even before Preston Brooks nearly beat Charles Sumner to death on the Senate floor for daring to suggest that the continuation of slavery was a moral crime that a free country could no longer abide. (I love the fact that despite resigning and immediately being re-elected, Brooks died less than a year after attacking Sumner, at the ripe old age of 37. Fuck that piece of shit.) There have always been worthless people -- and by that I literally mean people who are completely worthless just as human beings -- in positions of power. Obviously.

But you would hard-pressed to find any politician in the modern era as ethically bereft and morally corrupt as Newt Gingrich. The man is fucking scum to the very bone, and he systematically laid the path for his party to mutate and pervert language and talking points in order to undermine competent governance and hand it all over to equally corrupt oligarchs.

He's made the world an objectively worse place by actions over the years, and has no remorse at all -- indeed, he's enjoying himself way more than anyone with his track record should. And that doesn't even touch on his grotesque personal life. One can only hope that his quiet moments are anything but, when the lights are low and the rest of the world is asleep, and Newt has time to reflect on who and what he really is.

That is all he is, all he's ever been, and it will be his legacy when he finally boards his trolley to hell. Keep it in mind the next time some simpering corporate media hack has that bastard on to peddle more of his evil tripe. Might as well dig up Dahmer and Gacy for their side of things, for what it's worth.

Dunning-Krugerocracy

Lol, turns out Adam Neumann is somehow a much bigger dirtbag than had previously been known. Can't wait for the next big thinkpiece on how billionaires make the world such a great fucking place. I sincerely hope he reaps everything he's sown, but I also know that shitheads like that almost never do.

At the Movies

Scorsese is one of my favorite directors, although not infallible -- I thought Casino was about an hour too long and a pale follow-up to Goodfellas, couldn't make it through Age of Innocence, and oddly just never got around to seeing The Last Temptation of Christ.

But there was also one other Scorsese movie I had never seen, indeed wasn't really aware of, that apparently is seen as an overlooked classic by those in the know.

After Hours (1985)

(It's a 35-year-old movie, so of course there are spoilers.)

The premise actually sounds kinda promising, in a lighthearted '80s screwball comedy way:  office nebbish (Griffin Dunne) meets cute with a girl (Rosanna Arquette), gets invited to her place, and adventures ensue when he tries to return home. The cast looks promising. Teri Garr! John Heard! Cheech & Chong! Catherine O'Hara! Late '80s/early '90s babe Linda Fiorentino! Even Bronson Pinchot makes a brief appearance.

And it does start off promisingly, with Dunne as a bored office drone who catches Arquette's attention in a coffee shop while he's reading Tropic of Cancer. She gives him her number, he calls her later that night and she invites him over....at 11:30pm. Okay then.

Obviously, the plot of just about every screwball comedy turns on misunderstandings, implausibilities, and coincidences. Usually some combination of one or two larger ones, and maybe two or three smaller ones. Something to drive things along, and the audience just goes with it mostly because there's no movie without it.

But that's all this movie is, is a string of increasingly dumb implausibilities and coincidences. Dunne heads over in a taxi traveling at roughly Mach 1, and decides for some reason to take a $20 bill -- his only money, important plot point here you guys! -- and stick it in an ashtray, with the door window behind his head wide open, in order to suck the bill out of the high-speed taxi. Nutty, right?

Dunne arrives and goes up to the loft, looking for Arquette, instead finds Fiorentino, the goofy "sculptress" roommate hacking out her papier-mâché objets d'fart. Even though Dunne just told Arquette on the phone that he would be there in forty-five minutes, she decided to bail down to the midnight pharmacy, as one does, thus leaving Fiorentino the golden opportunity to come on to Dunne before falling asleep on him.

Arquette returns, decides to take a shower before beginning their "date" (by now it must be around 1:00am or so), which is weird and disastrous, with Arquette talking about being raped for six hours by an ex-boyfriend (again, as one does -- did I mention that these two just met a couple hours prior?). Dunne wisely ditches her and leaves, only to begin his series of wacky misadventures.

And it just gets worse, and stupider. Rather than pick through every thread of the narrative, I'll just drop a few of the remaining low points:

• Dunne finds his way back to Arquette's building only to find out she killed herself. Talk about a bad first date!


• After failing to jump a subway turnstile, Dunne then finds himself at a bar. The bartender offers to give Dunne a couple bucks (uh-huh) so he can catch the subway back home, but goshdarnit, the bar's cash register -- you know, where currency is stored for exchange with paying customers, like in a business -- suddenly won't open, and the only key is -- get this -- back at the bartender's apartment. Probably stashed way up the tight asshole of an erratic pet chimp, or an impenetrable safe with a combination that requires knowing pi to the thirty-second place.


• As assurance that he totally won't burglarize the bartender's apartment, Dunne leaves his own house keys as collateral. Again:  two in the morning in New York City, these people have never fucking met before, they're exchanging house keys so that one of them can spot the other one two dollars. Jesus Christ.


• Just as Dunne is about to leave the bar, Mister Bartender gets a call that his old girlfriend has just killed herself. In order to make sure Dunne and the audience know that it's the same weird broad, Bartender yells her name about a dozen times, Stella! style, while pounding the bar. Of all the bars in the naked city, right? There's a lottery-ticket coinkydink for ya right there, podna.


• Instead of just saying, you know, I can walk a hundred blocks back to my place after all, I don't really need the two dollars that badly, and getting his keys back, Dunne heads for Bartender's apartment all the same. There's wacky comedic misunderstandings, and there's borderline retardation.


• Did I mention that there's been a string of burglaries in the area lately? Reader, there has, and Mister Bartender's up-all-night neighbors are totally watching everyone like hawks, and see Dunne going in and out of the apartment. Keep that one in your back pocket for later. Foreshadowing!


• Let's see, what else? Dunne comes back to the bar only to find the distraught bartender has left for a few minutes (at 3:00am or so by now), so he hangs out with the oddball waitress (Garr) at her place across the street. Then he heads over to the punk club where Fiorentino and her S&M boyfriend are hanging, which makes you wonder who called Mister Bartender so quickly. He hooks up with yet another weirdo (O'Hara), who drives an ice cream truck and decides he's the burglar, which results in a vigilante mob chasing Dunne through the streets of NYC at four in the fucking morning, raiding businesses and apartments to search for him. Probably because the entire NYPD was taken up with getting Suicide Arquette down to the morgue. Who fucking knows?

Oh yeah, Dean Wormer's wife is in this thing too. What an incoherent mess it is. Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have had a field day with this pile of crap. It's tonally all over the place, every character is a complete idiot or an insufferable goofball, and none of it makes any sense. Who writes this shit?

I'm telling you right now that the only thing keeping people from rating this turd lower than Battlefield Earth is that it has Marty Scorsese's name on it. But because it's him, it's a "hidden gem" or whatever. Bullshit. It gargles rhino balls. I was thinking maybe he had some alimony to pay down or something, but apparently he took this project on after Last Temptation got cancelled, and he was pissed and frustrated and needed something to do. It had a budget of $4M and made $10M, so that's something I guess.

Fuck this movie. I want my two hours back. The only thing that didn't suck is that Linda Fiorentino has decent tits, but she only shows them for a few seconds early on, and for no fucking reason.

Grade:  F- (yeah, I know there's no such thing as F+ or F-)

P.S. I'm still looking forward to seeing The Irishman.

Let's Get Physical

So Preznit Fat Albert hey-hey-heyyyyed his way over to Walter Reed yesterday to begin "phase one" of what is apparently a multi-phase routine physical (uh, as such things tend to be?).

To be fair though, it probably will take multiple visits to remove the heads of Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, and Matt Gaetz from Fatboy's capacious cloaca. Plus his intravenous mayonnaise feedings may have to be reduced to once a week.

When that fucker finally kicks off, all his homiez will upend forty-dogs of KFC gravy on the sidewalk. I usually don't indulge in gratuitous fat-shaming, but for that worthless asshole, we'll make an exception. Every time you see him in a polo shirt, his gut and his ass look like three hundred pounds of chewed bubble gum.

Respect, Slight Return

Pretty sure Huckleberry meant to say "mouthful." In a business immersed in rank hypocrisy, this gutless clown takes the cake and fucks it like it's his very first time. What a worthless pile of shit he is. Do the right thing already, South Carolina, and flush your traitorous turd.

You Will Know Them By Their Fruits

It's good to see this story being covered in the midst of the never-ending shitstorm -- your tax dollars, friends 'n' neighbors, paying this fucking fraud to pose as a "spiritual advisor" to an avowed moral leper who's fucked around on every woman he's ever known, and has never earned a straight dollar. That second one would be precisely what she has in common with him.

[Fuckface]'s personal spiritual adviser, Paula White, launched a prayer effort alongside other evangelical Christian leaders on Tuesday, offering a prayer condemning the president's opponents, accusing them of being aligned with evil spirits and using sorcery.

Bitch, if we could use sorcery, he'd have never gotten anywhere near the White House in the first place. But it would explain why she looks like she does her own plastic surgery with a blowtorch and a spackling knife. As the poet Rodney Dangerfield once noted, the last time I saw a mouth like that, it had a hook in it. Doesn't matter what this hideous cow looks like though, the ugly goes clear to the bone on that one.

White is one of those "prosperity gospel" assholes, and while I would normally adhere to my principled stance of it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money, the presence of these filthy animals at the highest levels of government, like flies drawn to shit, is profoundly disturbing. Where is Jesus with the whip when you could really use him?

When and if we get out from under this diseased chancre of an administration, the first thing we need to do is make scumbag grifters and hucksters like Paula White PAY THEIR FUCKING TAXES. And anyone calling themselves a "Christian" and seeing White as anything other than loathsome needs to read their bible again.

Crush 'em

Another day, another tough guy leaving a threatening voicemail for a congress-critter who has the gall to disagree with Dear Leader. These losers really are a dime a dozen.

When all is said and done, if we really want to save what's left of the republic -- and hey, maybe we don't want to save it; there's a perfectly reasonable argument to be made that it's run its course, and is now just an empty husk for the plutocrats to take turns using like a blow-up doll -- but if we do think there's still something worth preserving and restoring to goodness if not greatness, then fucking well commit to it.

Obviously that means voting, despite how futile and pointless it seems anymore. Even so, game theory teaches that however dismal the odds, they're still slightly better if everyone votes than if they don't vote. And the good thing is that the more people that show up, the better those odds will get.

Unfortunately, you only get to do that every couple years at best, not counting special elections. What do you do in the meantime? Plenty -- for starters, make sure you can vote. Double-check with your local elections office to be sure. See if you can register to vote by mail, which you can do early, and is immune from the usual election-day shenanigans you read about taking place all across the angry-cracker states. No compromised voting machines to change your vote or "lose" a power cable or any of that bullshit that people do.

THEY CHEAT BECAUSE THEY KNOW THEY CAN'T WIN FAIR AND SQUARE.

Keep that in mind at all times, and use it as a weapon. Think about the thought processes involved in them not only cheating on the day of, but planning and strategizing how to cheat in advance, starting with #MoscowMitch (Putin's Bitch) preventing all election security legislation that has been drafted by the House, to come to a Senate floor vote. Many states use electronic machines whose software was created in -- wait for it -- Serbia. Yeah, no way the Russians could possibly hack our elections at all.

But simple math, and the results of the 2016 election, tell you that as awful as the cultists are (and no, it's not snark when I say repeatedly that I sincerely wish on them all the very worst things life has to offer), there are more people who see Dear Leader for what he is, and despise him for it, than there are of these simpering morons who would gladly let him fuck their wives and take a dump on their dinner tables. That's why they have to cheat -- there are more of us than there are of them, and they know it, pure and simple.

So use that day-to-day. Maybe I'll have to repeat this on a daily basis until I pull the plug on this popsicle stand in a year or so, but if enough of us boycott the companies that support the shows that put the liars and the propagandists on, they'll have to notice. Their money people will panic. The companies will pull ad space. I check into random Fox News shows every month or so, and they're running out of advertisers. It's all catheter companies who have nowhere else to go, or pharma companies that can absorb the hit.

But most of it's just in-house promo at this point, which means Fox is having to subsidize itself. That's not a sustainable business model, not even for an evil Australian bastard whose sole goal in life was to ruin the world. And you accomplished it, Rupert. Now kindly go off to your celestial reward.

As for the rest of it, the pro-wrestling spectacle that dominates the airwaves? Tune it out, turn it off, leave it. Don't listen, don't engage, don't respond. It seems like most of us have already gotten to that point, where we don't even bother to respond to that idiot relative or friend that we all have, that insists on sending whatever crap appeared on their front porch that morning. We don't even give them the satisfaction of a "bullshit" in response.

The goal at this point should be simply not to just elect any Democrat, but whichever Democrat understands the most that we can no longer return to some imaginary era of bipartisan comity. People like Joe Biden want to pretend that if we can just get rid of Trump, then we can go back to "getting things done," whatever the fuck that means. To which I would just reply, for starters:  Merrick Garland. Bokay?

Trump is not the cause of what ails us these days, but the natural culmination of thirty or forty years of Republicon propaganda and gaslighting, bankrolled by a handful of psychotic billionaires who should be rendered destitute at the earliest possible opportunity. And the party is all in on him at this point, and why shouldn't they be? He's given them everything they wanted, and told everyone to go fuck themselves in the process. He's perfect for them, and them for him. When he's gone, they'll just return to being obstructionist doorstops and discount fabulists. It's as if Diamond Joe has forgotten what Obama's entire second term was like.

So we all need to get on the same page and stay there. These people must be crushed, completely removed from power, and ended as a viable political entity. Period. You end the party, and you end the cult. Don't bother arguing with them or protesting. Explain only with your wallets and ballots, at every possible opportunity, and they will have to listen to you, I promise. It's not politics, it's math.

Horror Show

This is what passes for humor with these numbskulls. I mean, I was thinking about going as Tomi Lahren for Halloween this year, but the costume shop was all out of blow-up-doll-with-fivehead costumes. Boom! You like apples?

Ahem. Look, I know I'm always talking about "the balls on these people," but they've been on this "AOC is an idiot" schtick since she got elected, and it takes some serious fucking balls to be in a party that includes borderline retards like Louie Gohmert and Donald Trump, and still talk shit about AOC.

Or they talk shit about her past experience as a bartender. Let me tell ya something -- as a former touring rock musician who played dozens of dive bars all over Northern California, Nevada, and Oregon, I can tell you right now that pound for pound, as an occupation, bartenders are some of the finest people you could hope to meet. And that's at a very high, consistent rate, much higher than most occupations.

They have to strike a fine balance between keeping asshole drunks from getting out of hand, while still moving the product that gets them drunk. They have to fend off horny, obnoxious bros who think their pickup lines aren't stale; they have to play dice with the regulars and listen to their pathetic drunken bullshit stories; they have to listen lies all the time, whether from the bar manager or cheeseball musicians or pretty much everyone who walks through the door.

In other words, it's a perfect training ground for going to Congress, and having to deal with privileged old white men who can't bring themselves to cede a square inch of turf to anyone else, but who always have an extra few ducats to throw at hacks like Tomi Lahren, ankle-biting morons who literally have no other skills and serve no real purpose. Lahren wouldn't last a single shift tending bar.

I've seen a few clips of AOC at work questioning witnesses over various issues, such as outrageous drug prices. She's prepared and knowledgeable, and asks good questions. She's obviously not an experienced procedural hand like Nancy Pelosi, but again, compared with grandstanding nose-pickers like Gohmert or Ted Yoho or Matt Gaetz or Kevin McCarthy or any number of Republicon house mutts and senaturds, she's Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt combined.

But it's the clear mission of the propagandists to paint that lie, over and over again, until the rubes that actually follow them take it to heart. As always, we look forward to the day when Tomi Lahren's real nightmare comes true -- when she actually has to make an honest buck by doing something productive.

The Onion Timeline

Parody is deader than Generalissimo Francisco Franco. No mere bloggerses such as yours truly, we lowly scriveners who occasionally cook up short burlesques for your and our amusement, would stoop to something this cheap and obvious. And yet there it is (as always, click to embiggen).

If I've said it once, I've said it a million times -- every day with this ridiculous, jabbering moron is like watching Wile E. Coyote paint a tunnel on the side of a mountain. The added bonus of his dipshit kids (and useless dingbat Meghan McCain) lecturing everyone on nepotism is just icing on the cake.

So he green-lights ethnic cleansing on a loyal ally that helped stop ISIS. So Turkey's dictator now has fifty of our nuclear bombs. So we might be sliding toward World War 3, and/or a recession, and/or more and worse climate change issues. As long as that greasy piece of shit still sits there and people still pretend he's remotely fit to hold any office, we get exactly what we deserve.

Oh well, maybe Sean Spicer is preparing his next Dancing with the Scars skit. Probably dressed up as Maria Schneider from Last Tango in Paris this time. Bring your own butter!

The Stopped Clock

When he's right, he's right:

Romney is at least not an idiot (unlike Trump), which in this case makes it even worse. He knows he can and should do and say more, but simply refuses to. Partly this is because his character defects run nearly as deep as Trump's, it's just that Romney learned early on to mask his deficiencies with the appearance of fiduciary competence and moral rectitude, per the operational standard of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

However, if Romney somehow thinks his puling, chickenshit demurrals make him morally superior to Trump's boorish two-bit John Gotti antics, he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, nor anywhere near as upstanding.

In other words, contrary to Dear Leader's electronic imprecations, Romney is actually the very model of a modern major Republicon. But the rest of it? Yeah, spot on. A worthless, gutless, gormless pud. The day Willard Fucking Romney ever dismounts his goddamned high horse and actually does something useful will be the first time for such an event.

Propaganda Farmers

So apparently this piece of shit is making the rounds, and while it's two minutes you'll never get back, it's also instructive in how these useless cocksuckers really think, and one of the strategies they will surely use next year against whoever is going up against Grampa Walnuts.

Let's deconstruct this a little bit, shall we? First, it bears noting that Reason is part of a lib-con agitprop network funded in part by the Koch Family Foundation. There's a lot of irony baked in there, if you think about it:  I'm listening to Zappa's We're Only In It for the Money as I type this, so you can guess my general thoughts on hippie generosity in general, and The Beatles' corporatized "all you need is love" ethos. However, it's a dead certainty that all four band members would be fully behind a student-loan debt jubilee.

So, irony to the nth degree:  a stupid video produced by an agitprop "think tank" funded by a company founded by a scumbag who literally punched oil wells for Stalin and built a refinery for Hitler, pirating a song (no doubt without paying royalties or asking permission) that was written by people who would most likely be in profound disagreement with the sentiments expressed in the rewrite. I mean, the fucking balls on these people. Every goddamned time. They're impossible to parody.

But the meat of the "argument" is where the action is at, and where the Democratic candidate simply needs to craft a simple, direct message rebutting this wretched nonsense. The simple fact is that college costs have skyrocketed in recent decades (not just tuition costs, but textbooks as well), and the costs have risen eight times faster than wages. There are multiple reasons for this, but the biggest is the overt financialization of the higher education system, essentially getting state governments out of it and transforming the sector into a privatized industry.

And the bottom line is that, if you simply consider your educational investment as a product for which there should be commensurate value for what you're paying, the fact that wages don't even come close to tracking with costs mathematically proves that it's a ripoff. American students are getting soaked by Wall Street billionaires, pure and simple.