Judging Amy

The religious fanaticism is only part of Judge Handmaid's problem. Her willingness to undo every meaningfully liberal piece of legislation in the past seventy years is just another part of the problem.

Don't get me wrong, these are both major problems. But as with Rapebro McGambledrunk, the worst problems are the ones that seem to get the least amount of attention. I mean, yes, Kavanaugh is a piece of shit blackout-drunk party-rapist, but instead of getting into the weeds on some unprovable he-said/she-said shit from thirty-odd years ago, maybe someone should have asked at his confirmation hearing who paid off his mortgage and his quarter-million-dollar credit-card debt. You know?

So it is with Judge Handmaid. Plenty of people have joked before about Trump trying to appoint "Judge" Jeanine Pirro to the Supreme Court, but Pirro actually spent more time as a judge than Amy Barrett. The judges on The People's Court all spent more time as judges.

Barrett is nothing more than a partisan hack who clerked for Combover Tony Scalia and became a law professor at Notre Dame, before Moscow Mitch handed her a seat on the Seventh Circuit as a full-throated fuck you to Barack Obama.

(Maybe it's just me, but if anyone treated me for a day the way McConnell treated Obama for the full eight years, I'd paint that motherfucker's office with Novichok and polonium. I have zero admiration for Obama's ability to silently eat shit from these mutants in perpetuity. To loosely paraphrase Stokely Carmichael, that high-road shit only works when your opponent has a conscience.)

The idea that she's "brilliant" or even significantly qualified has no clear evidentiary basis. I've seen judges on Law & Order with more purpose and gravitas. She and Kavanaugh are there for the same reason -- loyalty over ability. They are owned and operated by the scummy, secretive billionaires whose prime directive is paying half of the peons to murder the other half, while poisoning as much air and water as possible.

Our wondrous corporate media, content to fake their librul quals all the way to the bank, are obsessed with asking each other and opining on Biden's refusal to offer specifics on "court packing," which of course is what Moscow Mitch has been doing for a full decade now. After stonewalling Obama on judicial appointments for six years (again, thanks a fucking million, all you Democratic voters who couldn't bother your precious selves in the 2010 and 2014 midterms), since 2016 Mitch has turned the Senate into a rubber stamp for every Federalist Society squid imaginable -- the younger and dumber the better, so's they can infest the system for the next two generations.

So maybe some enterprising mediot might want to take it upon themselves to ask any Republicon senator about whether they'd pack the court more, should Trump get re-elected and they hold the Senate. Because I would bet you actual folding currency that they will.

Reversing "cultural" decisions like Roe and Griswold are just the start. Those things are just cover for their real agenda -- turning back employment rights, dismantling the EPA, bolstering the domestic white-power herrenvolk police state, and making sure that fewer and fewer people are able to vote in response to it all.

There appears to be reason for cautious optimism that Biden could win decisively, and the Democrats could pick up a solid majority in the Senate. It is absolutely imperative, not just for the good of the country, but for the continued viability of the Democratic Party, that if that does happen, they need to act swiftly and decisively, and not worry about what shitheads like Chuck Todd say about it, and to make sure that their treasonous "colleagues" across the aisle are given good reason to fear their own destruction. Any other outcome would be catastrophic.

True Believer

I love great comedy and comedians almost as much as I love great music and musicians. Growing up on a steady diet of (mostly) black comedians who would say literally anything to make people laugh, it's never mattered whether they were "dirty" or not. Sometimes it made it funnier, mostly on the holy shit, did he really just say that? sense.

In recent years, "clean" comedians such as Jim Gaffigan and Pete Holmes, both of whom are also to some degree persons of faith, have attracted notice, proving that funny is funny, no matter whether you're raunchy or not. Gaffigan especially, happily married with five kids, so Catholic he's actually performed for the pope, makes his family the centerpiece of his humor, somehow bringing it above the usual realm of "dad jokes".

So when Gaffigan lost his shit on Twitter last Thursday, having seen and heard enough lies and bullshit from this gang of shameless criminals, it was noteworthy. Unfortunately, so far it's mostly been noted either for the man-bites-dog nature of a guy who famously never swears being pushed into telling everyone to go fuck themselves, or for the usual shut-up-and-sing sentiments that get lobbed at (liberal) performers and athletes who upset their (conservative) fans by speaking their mind.

But what's really noteworthy about Gaffigan's tirade is the fact that it's an excellent example of someone taking their faith seriously, and not just as a cheap, convenient political posture. Atheists and believers alike have become desensitized to the public hypocrisies and greed of the most vocal professional god-botherers. It's a tacky public grift and we all know it, and we've just become used to it.

Which makes it all the more startling when someone demonstrates an actual understanding and appreciation of the teachings of Christ, empowering them as -- get this -- Christians. Even as a stone atheist, I can appreciate the fact that the central operational tenet of Christianity is empathy, a necessary element in any group endeavor, whether it's governance or business or love or compassion.

And it in fact underscores the primary reason why I have been an atheist since [checks notes] about seventh or eighth grade -- not because the stories of the bible can't be proven as empirically true or even possible in many cases, and not because god lets "bad things happen to good people" or whatever.

It's mostly because a critical mass of people who profess to believe refuse to walk the talk. They just talk and talk about it, and lecture everyone else about it, but they don't live it at all. Faith without works is dead, and people who just use their professed belief as an excuse to push other people around are not the sort of people I would want to share even fake ontological turf with.

And Trump's endless lies and violations of the nation's laws, as well as several biblical commandments on any given day, have simply brought these people's shameless hypocrisies to an impasse. They can no longer be taken seriously -- as Americans, as Christians, or even as decent people.

This fantastic Twitter thread by "Design Mom" Gabrielle Blair really drives that point home. She calls out the Trumpkins among her Instagram followers in no uncertain terms, the people who want her to shut up and talk about paint and floor tiles and home design shit.

And Blair, who is a practicing Mormon, is having none of it. She understands that the gap is irreconcilable, that she cannot continue to call herself a Christian and ignore the support of violent monsters as a simple agree-to-disagree moment. It is a clear matter of conscience, and silence is assent. And so she makes it clear to these people coming to her for design tips and mom group chats that she doesn't want to make content for people who endorse white supremacy, period.

As the self-deputizing brownshirts out there are now upping the counter-protest violence at the BLM protests, it is now more important than ever to point out to the street protesters -- you are wasting your time, and risking your health and life for nothing. Either arm yourselves -- Oregon, for example, is an open-carry state -- so you can at least defend when a truck full of douchebags rolls up with (if you're lucky) bear mace and paintball guns, or just stay home. It's been going on since May, and nothing has changed, nothing will change until the election clarifies it one way or the other.

Well, it might change one thing -- polls are showing a slight but perceptible nudge among squirrelly suburban swing-state whites toward the [rolls eyes] "law and order" vote. Just like '68. Feel better about all that "good trouble"? Yeah. Might want to start thinking real carefully about outcomes -- the lack of outcomes so far, besides an increase in violence, and what near-future outcomes are more likely. None of them are good.

In the meantime, shunning works, not just boycotting Fox News sponsors or what-have-you, but making it clear to the people in your life who value you that this is a dealbreaker for you, that you may still be their friend or relative, but they no longer have your respect, which at the very least means that political discussions are a no-go, since by definition they cannot be trusted to be honest interlocutors.

It's that simple. They have made themselves clear, time and again, with a consistency that becomes more unconscionable by the day. They are being understood for what they are, and the heinous acts they support, and they can't stand it.

And it really seems that, in a country where a majority of the citizens still at least profess some religious belief, it makes a difference to them when people of faith, such as Jim Gaffigan and Gabrielle Blair, are able to step up and articulate an argument directly derived from a faith that stems accurately from the messages of the New Testament, rather than the co-opted screeds of interchangeable face-lifted tax-dodgers. They understand correctly that there is no way to honor the actual tenets of their faith, and especially that central principle of empathy, and abide the daily cardinal sins of these people.

Ultimately, this is no longer an argument about politics. Hell, I disagree on political things with Democrats and liberals all the time, not just with conservatives and Republicans. This is an argument about ethics and morals and values as real, tangible things worth keeping, not just buzzwords to be cynically launched on some Sunday follies show hosted by whatever credulous dupe gets paid to do that shit.

Either you're okay with a thieving, lying, rapist pervert and his criminal family killing this country, or you're not. Either you're fine with 300k dead by the end of the year from a preventable pandemic, and the lies and economic destruction that have come with it, or you think it's a problem. Either you're good with people taking the law into their own hands and murdering unarmed protesters, or you recognize that as a dangerous step in the direction of brownshirts and death squads.

I think we'd all like to go back to living real lives and not spending every fucking day worrying about whatever new hellish atrocity is being visited on us by these monstrous people. But like with all those unnecessary COVID deaths, it is what it is, and every decision you make in the course of a day -- where you spend your money, who you choose to interact with and how -- counts in the aggregate.

We didn't ask for any of this, but after five years of bullshit from the Go Fuck Yourself cult, all we can say to them in response is, you have made yourselves understood, and this is what that looks like. That doesn't change as long as you continue to align yourself with these things and these people.

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.

Oil's Well That Ends Well

Every time Dear Toddler manages to not fuck something up, he still finds a way to fuck it up, and then lie about it and try to paper it over. That is all part of the playbook of the clinical narcissist, I guess. It's nothing if not entertaining to watch.

The world is a better place without Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, no doubt about that. But as it goes with people like that, the world also produces an endless supply of them. And clearly not only do we have no strategy in that region anymore, we have ceded our role to the Russians. Forget being the "world's policeman," we're just the Saudis' mall cop now.

Or maybe the Russians killed him, or perhaps al-Baghdadi killed himself. It's not like you can trust anything -- not even so much as a weather forecast, to say nothing of a secret combat operation -- that comes from anyone in this rotting fish of an administration, certainly not the head. What we do know for sure is that when the op took place he was, believe it or not, on a fucking golf course. So they had to stage the tough-guy situation-room photo later.

Jesus. Look, I'm not going to compare him to Obama or Bush or Reagan or whoever. But you really have to wonder about the sort of person who sees guys like Trump and Pence and thinks they're tough or masculine. Trump is, and always has been, the schoolyard bully who uses his doughy bulk and loud mouth to intimidate smaller, weaker targets, until one of them finally fights back and knocks him flat with the first swing. Pence is the pussy sidekick, the "hype man" who turns tail at the first sign of actual pushback.

Instead of simply reading a brief statement about the terrorist's demise, and leaving it at that, Trump decided to take questions and extemporize -- which, you may have noticed, is not his strong suit. So he ends up using it as yet another opportunity to take a shit on his predecessors (and really, maybe it's high time one or more of them speak up for the country, if not their respective legacies); invent yet another narrative where he was the only one with the genius foresight to know that Osama bin Laden was a troublemaker; thanked Russia and Turkey for their help with the operation before remembering to throw in, you know, American service personnel; leaked enough detail to let the world know that if you say the phrase "opsec" to him, he'll have no clue what the fuck you're talking about.

This endless symbiosis of unbridled arrogance and utter stupidity, this vainglorious, preposterous grifter whose main concerns are getting the American taxpayer to subsidize his rat-infested properties and receiving thick envelopes from his petrocrat patrons, once again manages with ease to take something that just about everyone across the political spectrum can readily endorse -- the violent demise of a brutal thug -- and turn it into a seedy spectacle, a pathetic, needy old man making the world watch him jerk off all over himself yet again.

And the whole thing about the oil fields American combat troops are supposedly "protecting"? For one, Syria produces very little oil; for another, Assad signed the oil rights over to Russia. The only reason Americans are still there is to prevent all the newly escaped ISIS fighters from taking them over and funding a resurgence. Anything else is industrial-grade bullshit.

Trump speaks as if he thinks that "us" "protecting" the oil fields means that "we" get to "take" the product, as spoils of war or something. Well, that's a war crime, not to mention the fact that "we" don't have any of the logistical equipment to extract and transport through the desert to the nearest seaport (which would be Basra, which is in Iraq, which has made clear they don't want any American troops within their borders anymore, so how do you get this oil which is deep underground right now out and into trucks to drive all the way from Erbil to maybe Kuwait City, and how much would all that cost?).

Our policy in the Middle East is and always has been a devil's bargain, deeply flawed and frequently counter-productive. We should have started pushing renewable sources thirty years ago, and cut those fuckers loose first chance and let things sort themselves out (within reason). But the fact is that it took some extremely intelligent (not to mention greedy) and educated people generations to achieve the fragile equilibrium that exists in the region.

And it took Genius Q. Dealmaker there just three years to burn it all to the ground. If you look through all the financial and strategic partnerships and alliances that exist between and among Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, you'll see pretty quickly how ugly this can get. Throw in the stateless Kurds, betrayed by their American partners to be slaughtered by Turkish-backed death squads, and all it takes is one Gavrilo Princip to go after the "right" figure (for example, Erdogan or Assad), with a vest full of Semtex and ball bearings and nails, to set the whole thing off.

And there are currently fifty US nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey, which despite its aggression is still a NATO ally that we are contractually obligated to defend. And you can bet the Iranian nuclear program went into overdrive the second they realized Trump was going to screw them over on the JCPOA. The only countries that have any incentive to work with us at all, or even pretend to be on "our" side, is our rented allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.

This is why, after all the snark about this water-brained dullard and his fifth-grade vocabulary, competence matters. Intelligence and temperament and character all matter. This shit is complicated. This is why it takes an adult to do the fucking job, someone who knows what areas they don't know much about, and so they listen to people who do know about those things. This is not a fucking pro wrassling match with the strutting and the kayfabe and the trash talk. People are losing their lives already, and a lot more will -- maybe even people you care about -- before it's over.

Fuck your feelings, indeed. How's that working out? Hope it was worth it for them.

The Power and the Glory

Usually Rod Dreher's inimitable brand of intellectual tomfoolery is Edroso's wheelhouse, and he's the master at it, but Young Rod dropped an egregious deuce the other day that ties in with a relevant article explaining the manifold hypocrisies of the evilangelicals (as well as a detailed follow-up to the latter article). So I'll take a poke at this chump.

Taking the second and third links first, let's cut through all the chaff and get to the heart of it -- evangelicals want power for the same reasons everyone wants power. They can pretend that their supposedly celestial concerns supersede the ephemeral worries of the evil secularists, but by their deeds shall you know them.

These money-grubbing Elmer Gantry types are poisonous to democracy precisely because they are by nature authoritarians, which in turn is why racism is their most useful tool, as it jibes perfectly with their dream of a white patriarchy overseeing all the other sheep. But it's just a tool, along with their cynical relationship to their professed belief system.

Their goal is that of a mafia boss, or a tinpot despot:  power and money. That's it. There's nothing else to understand. There is no point in spelunking the ass of their lurid post-confederate history of oppressing and subjugating women and minorities, because they're impervious to outside influence.

And there's definitely no point in trying to find common political ground with them. Publicize their hypocrisies, boycott their businesses, make them pay taxes, and keep them the hell away from the White House. These jackals have no business being within a country mile of any place of responsible government -- which of course is why they're perfectly at home in this hog-shit lagoon of an administration.

Now, as to Dreher, while I don't read him regularly, I've read him enough to have encountered his doubting Thomas schtick with irritating consistency. Here's a sample:

I resent the hell out of Donald Trump for putting so many conservatives, especially Republican lawmakers, in the position of having to defend him over stupid, easily preventable missteps.

Well, gee whiz, hoss, you think that might be because he's a dangerous retard with the soul of a banana republic caudillo, and has never bothered to hide any of that? The guy's a fucking criminal, and always has been. Dreher's just peeved that Trump's constant bad form puts a nasty patina on his flock's efforts to turn this country into the Republic of Gilead.

What would Trump have to do that would cause me to support his impeachment, or at least to vote against him for re-election — this, in spite of the very real and significant damage a Democratic president would do to causes (abortion, religious liberty) that mean a lot to me?

At this point, I don’t know. But I am sure I’m going to find out as the investigation goes forward.

For someone who constantly tries to paint this eternal struggle between political goals and moral ethics, he sure hasn't thought this one through at all. Again, considering that Trump lies routinely, has a track record as a crook, a schnook, and a serial philanderer, one would think that someone with Dreher's rigorous personal moral code would have figured out where his line was a long time ago. It's not like Donald Fucking Trump suddenly turned into this morally objectionable character based on a memorandum of conversation (not a fucking transcript) that surfaced a couple weeks ago.

It would be nice if (and maybe he has) Dreher would elucidate in some broad strokes what he would like done about his pet issues. The abortion rate in this country has steadily declined since 1980 or 1982, depending on whether you go by number per thousand live births, or total number reported per year. It is never going to be zero, no matter how much you pray or what kind of monster you put in a senator's seat or judge's bench.

But every "pro-life" person needs to be asked this point-blank:  what should the penalty be, for the woman and/or the doctor? Hell, set abortion aside for a second -- we have states that want to throw women in prison for decades for having a miscarriage, like some Third World shithole. We have states that want to force rape victims to bear their attackers' spawn.

That's the country Rod Dreher wants to live in, where an eleven-year-old girl being forced to bear her adult molester's child is more of a priority than whether the fucking president upholds the Constitution of the United States.

Look, I get the pro-life argument at its basest principle, but as with capital punishment, it doesn't take very long or very much of a leap for grandstanding morons to scapegoat poor people for political gain. That's really all this boils down to, whether Dreher realizes it or cares or not.

And I have no idea what the hell he means by "religious liberty." Is this still about the three or four bakeries that refused to do cakes for gay weddings? Again, is he seriously prioritizing that bullshit over whether this openly corrupt bastard is openly trashing his office? This Ukraine thing is just the one they have him most dead-to-rights on. If the impeachment inquiry allows sufficient scope to follow the money and is not interfered with by the equally corrupt Attorney General, it's practically a slam-dunk that they'll find that Trump and his dipshit son-in-law have been selling American foreign policy to the highest bidder, mostly the Saudis and Emiratis, who have been his best customers for many years. Not to mention all that bratva cash he's laundered.

But hey, as long as Joe Schmo's cakery in East Overshoe, Nebraska can tell those pesky faggots to fuck off, it's totally worth it.

The howls and cries of liberals who see no reason at all why anybody should support Trump in spite of himself fall on deaf ears. They don’t feel as strongly about religious liberty and the pro-life cause as I do, and therefore they don’t have an intuitive grasp of how disastrous a Democratic president would be, given how radical the party has become on those issues. If the situation were reversed, and a corrupt Democratic president was the only thing standing between a champion of the Religious Right taking office, and putting abortion and LGBT rights in jeopardy, they would know exactly how I feel.

And that's exactly what happened with Bill Clinton, and he got his ass impeached. So maybe what comes around goes around, even if it's too little too late. It's pretty simple -- either the law matters, or it doesn't. Trump has repeatedly demonstrated his unfitness for any office, routinely engaging in behavior that would have gotten him fired from the 7-11 graveyard shift. He is obviously incompetent and incoherent, clearly sociopathic in nature, probably in the early stages of dementia, deeply corrupt, likely compromised in multiple ways by his foreign interlocutors, and openly and aggressively challenging long-held norms and precedents that are actually important to operational and transitional integrity.

This nation faces some very serious challenges in the near future, not just climate change disaster mitigation but also planning for a smoother transition from global hegemon to (hopefully) principal partner in what will (just by sheer demographics and economic power) become an Asian century. Aside from the one tax cut for billionaires and stocking the courts, Trump has fucked up or ignored every legitimate issue this country faces -- even ones he demagogues regularly, such as immigration and trade policy.

Really, this is a rich irony that Dreher and the evangelicals richly deserve -- they profess to follow the teaching of Christ, and to revere the Ten Commandments, and have spent the better part of the last four years trying to square all that with their unwavering support of someone who routinely violates half the commandments, and has eschewed even the pretense of following even the most basic of those teachings.

The only thing the rest of us ask is that these hypocrites quit trying to make excuses to us, and go try their luck explaining it to the god they supposedly worship.

You Get What You Pay For

Missed this little gem when it first came out in March, but its verities are evergreen, like the scent of pine wafting over a virgin knoll, or some loser raiding his neighbor's garage for power tools to trade for meth and/or opioids. See if you can find any patterns in there, these twenty-five shithole counties, the handful of states they are in, the scumbags who keep getting voted in to represent those states.

There will be the usual plaints and defenses from certain corners, but the fact is that these folks are fine with the racism, the incompetence, the rank stupidity and the fact-free ranting. When they bother to vote, they vote for whoever gets them riles up the most about those people, even though they most certainly are those people, just white. Libraries are still free, and they can go down there any time and start educating themselves. They choose not to.

I'll bet you my next paycheck that a sizable plurality -- hell, probably a straight-up majority, can give you a play-by-play of The Bachelor or The Masked Singer or whatever brain-rotting garbage in being funneled into their hovels this week. Count on it. But how and why their lives are the way they are? Not a clue. But they know all the three-word lock-her-up build-the-wall send-them-back herrenvolk lieder by heart, and are ready and eager to drop them on the next dusky-hued type that gets in front of them at the Wal-Mart.

The people who represent these states seem to lead the pack in whinging about sociamalism, and yet these are all states that take much more than they contribute. It might be something if for once they walked the talk (or waddled the mumble, or however you want to put it) and started pulling their own weight. What might that be like? We'll never know. Let them vote and believe whatever nonsense they like -- just stop asking the rest of us to pay for it.

Render Unto Caesar

I can buy that Peter Wehner is sincere in his concern about the future of what passes for Christianity in this country, and how it has been hopelessly compromised by evangelicals' overwhelming support of a completely godless piece of shit.

But just like the seemingly sudden transformation of the Republicon party into a rump bund pretending to stroke its collective chin while enabling and supporting an utterly vile set of policies, this was a long time coming, because the elements were already in place. Trump just figured out how to weaponize them.

The dilemma "sincere" Christians faced and ignored a long time ago was when they decided to let open hucksters like Marion "Pat" Robertson and Jerry Falwell squirm their way into the political arena. They let weasels like Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins become power-brokers between people of faith and politicians with pockets, curating the official dogma of what "Christian" voters and their elected representatives would "stand for."

Besides, of course, everyone in the food chain taking suitcases full of cash. You really want to solve this problem, make these fuckers pay their taxes. Religious exemptions should not extend to business and politics, period. And the fact is, they've made politics their business, and they're making taxpayers subsidize them and their fucking Gulfstreams and mansions.

So when Wehner and his associates of faith are concerned that this open-market sellout to the thieving, lying, conniving, soulless, godless whoremongers that infest this suppurating chancre of an administration, when they see that these compromises may cost them the next generation of believers, all I can say is good. Because the kids that haven't been dragged through the molesty Jesus camps and cult megachurch indoctrinations deserve better than to be bundled into political currency by these hopelessly cynical people.

The new breed of temple money-changers that have barnacled themselves to the hull of this ship of fools -- Paula White, Robert Jeffress, Kenneth Copeland, Mark Owens -- are right to align themselves with someone so utterly bereft of even the concept of faith, as Trump clearly is. Because they are every bit as transactional in everything they do as he has always been.

It's hard to imagine the sort of chump who would actually be fooled by any of the posturing these people have done, the megachurch hucksters and their fatted, bronzed steer. In their way, the cultists are pretending and winking their way through this as much as the rest of the bastards whose cues they follow. It is a pro-wrestling dynamic as much as anything else. Call it "kayfabe for Jesus" maybe.

Which leaves (giving Wehner and Karel Coppock and that cohort the small benefit of the doubt) the true believers, who believe in the divine word and in the messages of Saints Ambrose and Augustine, out in the cold with nothing but their sincere faith. The problem with that is that there's not much market for it; the performative garment-rending of the inimitable Rod Dreher seems to be about where it begins and ends.

Even there, Dreher spends most of his time lathering over his tedious "drag queens to the left of me, fascists to the right" vaudeville act, in which he inevitably -- albeit, one is meant to presume, oh-so-reluctantly -- holds a gun to his own head and forces himself to vote the same as the fascists, if not precisely with them, you see.

They are all more than welcome to explain these fine distinctions to the actual humans:  asylum-seekers drinking from toilets while psychotic guards jeer at them; Yemeni villagers dying en masse from cholera after being carpet-bombed by our Saudi bankrollers, with planes and missiles we sold to them; journalists being strapped to tables and dismembered alive by aforementioned Saudis; soybean farmers in the Midwest losing their family's land and shooting themselves because they were dumb enough to trust a cheap fraud who cares more about cheating at golf every weekend than anything else -- people currently being harmed in real time by the policies enacted by these monsters.

If any of these people really believed in god, they'd stop wasting their time trying to explain their cheap hypocrisies to the rest of us, and concentrate on squaring things up with him. Or her, as the case may be.