Manafort Paul Seizin's; Or, The Lyin' In Winter

Good news is scarce enough to practically be in witness protection, so the news that Paulie the Wig is finally turning state's is surely a welcome development. With or without that fucking turd Kavanaugh skating through his not-even-pro-forma bullshit confirmation, Fuckface Von Clownstick's goose appears to be cooking nicely.

It's getting buried in the disaster-porn hurricane coverage that our shithead corporate media live and breathe for, but the biggest clue that Manafort has something huge to trade is that the cooperative plea deal required him to surrender $46 million in personal assets. In principle, I've never been a huge fan of civil asset forfeiture, as its application in various states and municipalities has generally ended in people getting shaken down by an authoritarian extortion racket, instead of being left the fuck alone.

But in the case of Manafort, we'll make a small exception -- this asshole has spent his adult life as a PR tool for some of the most evil dictators of the late 20th century. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. He's a procurer, a pimp, a professional prevaricator. He's a money launderer, a tax dodger, a peddler of influence and a distributor of thick envelopes. People like Manafort are the grease in the world's brutal wheels, and it would serve him right to spend the rest of his life rotting in prison, thinking about how many people had to die for his fucking ostrich jackets.

Beyond all that though, it again helps to focus on the massive amount of the forfeiture, which apparently didn't take long to push Paulie on. Seems like just a week or two ago Manafort was counting on his good buddy Fat Donny Tangelo to pardon him and absolve his many sins. One assumes that Mueller showed Paulie just enough of his cards to let him know that Paulie's ace in the hole was no match for Bobby's (at least) three kings.

Maybe it's a full house, maybe it's a four of a kind. Whatever it is, it was enough to convince Paulie to roll on his only hope for a walk, and at the cost of pretty much everything he had. So it's big. And we're about to find out what it is. And we've earned it. I hate these fucking people so much, Trump and all his enablers.

I've talked a lot of trash in here over the years, and smacked some richly deserving muthafuckaz. But Trump (and again, a very rare lapse into the actual name of the thing, because mockery and ridicule are central to sapping its illusory power) is one of the few people for whom my hate is genuine and deep and eternal. I hate everything about him, and always have. I sincerely wish and hope and pray that he is pursued and inundated by every misfortune life has to offer.

We'll get into it in a bit more detail in the next post, but to be more specific, it goes beyond his tedious stupidity and willful ignorance. He's complete scum as a human being, and he's shown it over and over again; even under the most tragic of circumstances, disasters that should evoke empathy from the hardest of hearts, he is only worried about himself. Watching that over and over again for the last thirty years or so has been appalling and tiresome. And still he refuses to go the fuck away.

In the end, though, it's the completely unearned sense of entitlement he's always had. I don't just mean the smarmy expectation that whatever fortune and privilege he has is his divine right, I mean the in-your-face-and-up-your-ass conviction that he should be allowed to play by an entirely different set of rules than everyone else, simply because he's so fucking awesome and incredible and special. It's been his defining characteristic the entire time, since he started humping 'murka's leg in the 1980s with his ridiculous thoughts and tacky personal life.

I don't have to play by your mortal rules. Turns out you do, fucker. You're not nearly as special as you think you are. You're about to get hosed, bigly, and your close minions Paulie the Wig and Mikey the Weasel are providing the ammo. I've waited for this for so long, I don't know if I can afford enough popcorn. We don't need no water, let the motherfucker burn.

Ridiculous People

Because he's a ricockulous, spray-tanned slab of shit, Emperor Snowflake deigned to spend Thanksgiving "visiting" some Coast Guard members with -- reader, I shit you not -- fucking turkey sandwiches and mini-bags of tater chips. Nice, right? Way to support Our Sacred Troops, asshole -- have Subway cater your bullshit Thanksgiving handjob. What a useless fucking chump he is.

During which, of course, because he operates in the washed-up never-was schlock-rocker "enough about me, what do you think about my album?" demi-monde, he regaled the hapless attendees with his illustrious accomplishments.

Fuckface Von Clownstick is the "political" equivalent of Meat Loaf trying to pick up chicks in 2017 by singing parts of Paradise by the Dashboard Light. He seriously has no idea just how goddamned ridiculous he is, every fucking time, every step of the way. First name's Jerk, last name's Off.

Hopefully, many of us have things to be thankful for, away from the feculent sewer of this man and his entire oeuvre of louche incompetence. At or near the top of such a list should be the fact that none of us had to spend one precious moment around this wretched excuse for a human being and his enabler. These people are fucking awful, and they're going down, and for that we can all be thankful.
 

Runnin' With the Devil

So this is fun. Mo Brooks is a slimy sack of crap; it is truly a shame he didn't take a header down those marble steps and land on his face. These people would literally rather vote for a creep who sexually assaulted teenagers when he was in his thirties, and was literally banned from a mall, than for someone who sent murderous domestic terrorists to prison.

Alabama can get its collective back up and whinge about "Yankees" tellin' 'em whut ta do, but the fact is that this is a test for that state. They need to step up and decide what they're about. It's too late for Roy Moore (and the mediots need to stop referring to him as "judge" -- he's been forcibly removed from that position twice) to be removed from the ballot, so the choice is between Roy Moore and Doug Jones. Period.

So no nudging, Alabama, but what are you about as a state? Forget all the "dummycrats is sociamalists" mumbo-jumbo excuses -- you either support a skeevy pederast, or you don't. Either you stick with the Cletus the cousin-fucker stereotypes or you reject them. You're either the state of Bob Ewell or of Atticus Finch. You cannot have it both ways anymore.

Same goes for the Republican Party, which is still fundraising and canvassing for Moore, despite their public plaints; same goes for the GOP voters. Sometimes a moment comes along where you have to decide how you want to define your team, and this is one of those times.

The Goopers are really stuck on this one, and they know it. There are a couple of longshot scenarios to consider here, but they're not completely out of the realm of possibility:

1. Jeff Flake's seat in AZ is up for grabs, as is Bob Corker's in TN, and "Everybody Hates" Ted Cruz has to run for his seat next year as well. Things are not rolling the Goopers' way lately, and these are all gettable for the Dems.
2. Moore loses or is pre-emptively disqualified per the actions of the leaders of his own party, and he rallies the same breed of deplorable who are chomping at the bit to kill and/or die in the service of Fuckface Von Clownstick. A schism is created in the Republican party, and a breakaway "populist" party takes on the "establishment" party. Popcorn companies do record business, and the Dems sweep the midterms hard. Clownstick goes into full Downfall bunker mode, watching his idiot MAGA fantasy go up like a tire fire.

The second one is admittedly a very long shot, because no matter what these weasels say, politics is really more about the money than the ideology, and it's hard to imagine the sort of genuinely wealthy person who wants to invest in a Howdy Doody-looking asshole like Roy Moore, with his totally-not-a-closet-case leather vest and the pew-pew pea-shooter he needs in order to feel safe buying his Starbucks. But there's always some douchebag Robert Mercer / Foster Friess type out there who didn't work hard enough for his money to have any respect for it.

Either way, what a difference a year makes, especially when your enemies are so consistently ridiculous. It is truly a joy watching these assholes screw the pooch and turn on each other. May the aneurysm fairy start making the rounds, and they all ride the escalator to hell sooner rather than later.

Drumpferdämmerung; Or, Appetite for Distraction

After seven months that feels like an eternity, it is possible to hear a swirling sound, a rushing of water into a bottomless chasm. This toxic floater of an administration is on the verge of being flushed, and the world will be the better for it, if the clear majority of this country steps up and keeps its collective momentum. Who coulda seen it coming?

The media monkeys are welcome to chase their daily fixations for the time being, because it is important that our putative leader fails to clear even the lowest of ideological bars. The theater exile of porn/meth magnate Steve Bannon back to his propaganda post fools no one. The alcoholic slob is better able to do his real job back on the outside anyway, free from pesky oversight and pernicious leaks.

These people campaigned on being "outsiders" because that is how they function. Every breath they draw, everything they say and do, is designed to be an act of defiance. It makes sense that they would go back to focusing on how beleaguered they think they are (yes, with the Very White House, both houses of congress, and two-thirds of the state legislatures, so very persecuted). When your team is always girding for an epic battle against an implacable foe, it's much easier to distract from the sheer ineptitude that characterizes the team's operations.

But the numbers don't lie, no matter how much one's accounting ledgers resemble cookbooks. All the corporations populating the great dealmaker's bidness councils have scrambled over one another to flee, forcing all of them to be disbanded. Corporate events at the Maga-Lardo are being cancelled as well. People -- most importantly, people with money -- are leaving in droves.

Even Fatboy's best partner-in-crime, corporate-raider asshole Carl Icahn, probably the true eminence grise behind the gold-painted shitter, has joined the rest of the rats overboard, even after pocketing a half-billion clams in just a few months. Pretty good work if you can get it -- which you can't, unless you suck up to this fucking loser.

This has all happened in the last few days, while Emperor Snowflake has been on vacation. There's no other way to put it -- this is enormously fun to watch, the downward spiral of these fuckers. If you know of a  publicly-traded popcorn company, you may want to consider buying stock in it.

It's a mistake, though to ascribe this impending failure to toxic ideology. Clearly the US has no shortage of toxic people who are fine with having a white supremacist (more accurately, a brainless old bigot) in charge. No, this comes down to incompetence, pure and simple, and these people are so goddamned incompetent, their own voters oughta sue 'em for malpractice. And it's important to keep pointing this out. Emperor Snowflake is the epitome of the idiot who shoots himself in the foot repeatedly and sues the gun company.

Incompetence is also, incidentally, an ideal area for the Democrats to focus on in the midterms. The Russian treason being unearthed plank-by-plank by Mueller's team is part of the picture, and a significant one at that. And per Napoleon Bonaparte's sage advice, it's understandable that the Dems don't want to interfere with an enemy intent on destroying himself.

But if there's one lesson they should have learned from last year's debacle, it's the old (but true!) football advice that prevent defenses prevent you from winning. So the Democrats need to market their product better, and get better pitchmen. Who will be the face of the Democratic Party in four, eight, twelve years? What will they stand for, and what will people think they stand for? Narrative, logline, protagonist, sales pitch -- goddammit, storyboard that shit and find a fresh face to push it.

This is not complicated, and it's nothing against Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or DiFi, but those three names add up to over two hundred years in age, most of it spent pushing stones uphill in DC. A grateful nation appreciates those years of honorable service, but maybe it's time to hand the reins over to someone below retirement age. For Christ's sake, Feinstein appears to be running for re-election next year, when she will turn 85 about five months before the election. It's probably the safest Senate seat in the country; maybe it's time to hand it off to someone who can lead the party forward in a time that, whether or not Snowflake does the right thing and abdicates, is going to get weirder and worse before it gets better.

People have chosen their own realities and their own facts, and some of these bozos will back Snowflake no matter what the Everest of evidence against him looks like. Against all logic, they will presume it's all a conspiracy to a coup, and some of them will act accordingly. Bet on it.

In the meantime, though, the money is leaving, and that's critical -- especially when you consider that despite winning more than five times as many counties as Hillary, there's still a 2:1 disparity in economic output. This will be a much bigger decider than ideology or racism, of the midterms and 2020. Follow the money.

Ozymandias

If there was one useful feature of Duh Big Speech last night, it's that it sorted out the actual journamalists from the useless theater critics. Hacks from Chris Cillizza to Van Jones fell all over themselves praising Clownstick's uncharacteristically sober teleprompter reading. All of it bore the same damning whiff of faint praise, of a bar lowered well below sea level. Grampa Walnuts didn't make a boom-boom in his Depends this time! Yaaayyyy!

And of course, Clownstick garnered the most praise for what may be one of the most transparently cynical (even for these stupid pageant events) ploys in some time -- the eulogizing of Navy SEAL Senior Officer William "Ryan" Owens, who was killed in the recent Yemen raid.

Bringing up Officer Owens in and of itself is fine and good; obviously such things are a staple of these events. But there are a lot of issues boiling right under the surface of Clownstick's bluster about the yuge success of the mission that killed Officer Owens. It was reported just a few days ago that Owens' father refused to meet with Clownstick, and is calling for a full investigation. Questions about the raid being botched have been raised, as has been the possibility that Owens met with a fate not unlike that of Pat Tillman.

Whatever the case, no reportable intel has been gleaned from the mission (contra Clownstick's claim in the speech); the success of the mission is highly debatable (especially in the cold calculations of whether the loss of a SEAL Officer, which represents millions of dollars invested in training, offsets the gain of killing a dozen al-Qaeda scrubs that probably could have been nailed with a drone strike); and in fact Clownstick had spent the first part of the week trying the push the buck over to the generals, Obama, whoever, anything to distract from the fact that he, Clownstick, approved the mission while having dinner with Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, and later that night resumed his favorite hobby of troll-tweeting the failing New York Times.

Dr. T and the Women

So many takeaways from Bungle in the Jungle 2. Only one more to go, unless Clownstick, you know, pussies out. But it had everything, didn't it -- from the banana-republic threats to the silent stalking to (ultimately) Drumpf's innate need to show at every opportunity what sort of scumbag he actually is. Trotting out Bill Clinton's alleged rape victims to throw in the face of Hillary Clinton is a new low, even for Drumpf.

Hope his poised, precious daughter is proud of dear ol' Dad now -- you know, if she wasn't already proud of him creeping through beauty pageant dressing rooms like a fucking perv, or telling Howard Stern that he could refer to her as a piece of ass. I guess money buys a lot of forbearance, just like it buys a lot of plastic surgery.

With the outing of Bill Cosby as a serial rapist just prior to the 2016 campaign startup, there was always the possibility that, with Hillary as the expected Dem nom, BC's '90s antics were going to come back to haunt him. Look, from a standpoint of cheap agitprop, it really doesn't matter if Bill Clinton is a rapist, or just a philanderer with poor eyesight -- you can't preach a gospel of never questioning a rape accusation, and then trying to brush aside inconvenient accusations.

That said, I can't be bothered to give more than a fuck and a quarter at best about Juanita Broaddrick and the rest of them. They can't not realize that Drumpf is using them as props, and has already discarded them, as they are of no use to him at all. If they think they have been cheated by the justice system, then let them do what Cosby's accusers are doing -- band together, get a lawyer, and take his ass to court.

What Drumpf has been doing all along of course -- emotionally, politically, etc. -- is gaslighting his followers in particular, and the country in general. He makes shit up, denies he said it minutes later, accuses his accusers of having ulterior motives. It is the worst sort of emotional manipulation, far worse than any political candidate at any level in our lifetimes, and it is a clear indicator of how he would function in elected office if enough of us were stupid or spiteful enough to give him the opportunity.

At the very least, he's a pigfucker who despises women. That much is abundantly clear. But the Gooper pols who are shamelessly invoking all their female relatives as excuses to distance himself from the pussy-grabber are just as bad, maybe worse. They are just fine with disempowering women, making their medical decisions for them, making them take a fucking Greyhound bus 500 miles to find the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic because they don't have one in their own state anymore. But they're oh-so-offended by a hot-mic circle-jerk in the back of Billy Bush's Bangbus. Hey, fuck you. No one's buying your little "shocked" act.

Drumpf's implosion seems imminent, and more than justified. Frankly, I hope this rotten motherfucker and his entire shitbird family end up on the fucking sidewalk giving handjobs for crack. Every goddamned one of them is a conniving, money-grubbing, soulless sack of shit. But what we really have to watch out for is how is more, erm, energetic followers handle their hero's impending doom.

But that's okay, and entirely expected. Most of them can be distracted by Black Friday deals and discounts on cardboard containers of salted, deep-fried fat. In the meantime, let's bury this fucking prick.

Death and Texas

Not to whoop over the untimely demise of a fellow human being, but the sudden death of Comb-Over Tony -- and of course it was on a (no doubt canned) hunting trip at a "luxury ranch" in Texas -- is a yuuuge game-changer. That noise you just heard was the collective pants-pooping of what's left of the Republican party.

Hair Today, Goon Tomorrow

It's amazing yet immensely fun to realize that John Ellis Bush, of all people, has become the ideal target for Donald Trump's weekly campaign cockpunching. The added entertainment, given that Trump has been almost Palin-esque in his sheer contempt for anything resembling facts or objectivity, is that the glowing bull's-eye on Yeb's fivehead has made Trump more accurate in his attacks. He's forced Jeb to defend and obfuscate his brother's failures, and now Trump is calling Bush out for having to confer with his nonagenarian parents and dipshit brother over What To Do Now.

"Bush now has gotta cut back," Trump said at a campaign rally in Jacksonville, Florida. "Here's a guy who wants to run our country. And he can't even run his own campaign. And you know what? He's cutting back big."

The billionaire diagnosed Bush's campaign as "failing" and supplied with "no money." His White House bid, Trump said to wild applause, was "losing badly and embarrassing his family."

....

In Florida, Trump lambasted Bush's pivot towards family support, mocking Bush for "meeting today with mommy and daddy."

"They're working on the campaign," Trump jeered. "They're working!"

Even a stuffed asshole is right once in a while. Things will even out at some point, because Trump is a terminal douchebag with an impossibly high sense of self-regard, and he's a bully by nature. It is axiomatic that sooner or later he will step on his dick by talking shit about Oprah or beating up a penguin.

But in the meantime, it is fun watching him suck the lifeforce out of what remains of the vaunted Bush dynasty, political barnacles who have affixed themselves to the hull of this nation for several generations now. No doubt Poppy and Barb sincerely believe that after their Hispanic son, Neil and Marvin deserve a turn, or maybe one or more of Jeb's fuck-up children. That's the thing about this family of layabouts and parasites -- like rats and cockroaches, there's always one more of them.

We'll know pretty soon, like by January 1st, whether the Bushes still have any real juice or not, if Poppy or Dubya can actually lean on anyone with money these days. I think it's an even split -- they'll find a last few loyalists, maybe even enough to get them over the hump. Bush has the built-in advantage that, if he can just hang on for dear life long enough for that inevitable Trump implosion, he'll be a shoo-in.

What's hilarious is this belief that such an ascendancy is a logical event, rather than a symptom of the GOP's ongoing malaise (which is like referring to end-stage HIV as a nasty cold). The Bushes think that their next family scion belongs there, similar to how the Clintons believe that Hillary belongs there, but in a deeper and more pernicious way. One major difference is that there is no one in the Clinton family beyond Hillary waiting in the wings; maybe Chelsea wants in at some point, but there is at least as much chance that she grew up seeing how the sausage gets made and wants nothing to do with any of it. Even if she did, there's no one beyond her.

Anyway, back to the Donald-slamming-Jeb meme, what actually makes it mean something is how adeptly Trump illustrates the raw truth that there is no real reason for Jon Ellis Bush to be President of the United States. That there is also no earthly reason for Trump to be preznit is beside the point. We must take our nuggets of illumination wherever and however they happen to be unearthed. Sometimes it's from a billionaire turd miner.

Person of Influence

Pro tip for all you folks who might be thinking of making a living telling other people how to live their lives, just because your mommy is famous for being a burbling quitter:  Remember, you can walk away at any time, if you find the kitchen getting too hot for comfort. Just a thought, but maybe you can spend the free time overcoming whatever it is in your life that finds you with three broken engagements and two out-of-wedlock children (by two different men) by the time you're 25 years old.

(Not to mention that the assumption that former fiancé Dakota Meyer is the father of this child may not necessarily be true, which would be really scandalous 'mongst the fambly valyews types. This is what happens when you don't take your whore pills.)

It's bad enough that Bristol Palin makes decent money doing nothing more than being a sanctimonious, hypocritical dunce, but what's unforgivably obnoxious is the "respect our privacy" nonsense. There's no one stopping you from going away, sweet cheeks. Trust me, no one will miss you. Go get a real job, toil away in obscurity with whatever other skill you might possess. No one's stopping you, and no one will check up on your comings and goings at the burger stand. You chose to put yourself in the public eye, no gun was put to anyone's head.

Ah, but that's always the problem in our "reality" teevee addled excuse for a society -- whenever one of these morons steps on their dicks, their first impulse is to exercise their right to privacy, but they still want to keep their public platform, their show, their blog, whatever revenue source they have to monetize their meager talent. They think they should be able to have it both ways, to use said platform to influence behavior and promote their social causes, and then when they're caught being hypocrites (which, you know, tends to undermine whatever value is created by their promotions), they want a pass and privacy. No. It doesn't work that way, unless you want to do the right thing and just go away already.

But that won't happen. The only that terrifies them more than having the easy money spigot turned off is finding out that they could completely disappear and nobody would notice.

The Harder They Fall

While most of the news today is understandably focused on the sad demise of Joan Rivers, let's take a moment and reflect on the good news of the conviction of Bob (he of the "transvaginal wanding" and laughable presidential ambitions) and Maureen McDonnell.

This is pretty much bricks-of-cash-in-the-freezer corruption here, the sort of openly corrupt behavior that exists everywhere, but pervades in cultural backwaters such as the south. The real geography here, though, is of course the proximity, not only to the state house, but the presumed eventual advancement to a senate seat or even as part of a national ticket.

The perhaps more novel twist here was in the way Bob and Maureen McDonnell chose to defend themselves against the embarrassingly clear charges -- by going after each other, by portraying one another in the worst possible marital terms; he was emotionally distant and consumed with political ambitions, she was infatuated with a favor-grubbing nutritional supplement huckster who apparently had more money than discretion. Awesome. Sounds like a plot for a Dallas story arc.

Most days I feel like I've been around too long and seen too much to believe in karma, but then a case like this comes along and you have to wonder....

Alternate Reality

While the usual snark flies over whether or not the George W. Bush Liberry 'n' Tackle Shop contains My Pet Goat and a couple of unfinished coloring books [spoiler:  it does!], we can compare the coverage -- the attempt to be "even-handed" versus the cold, hard truth. (Extra points to the Atlantic for its freakshow commenters, especially "Summer," who seems determined to respond to each and every post with precisely the same invective and straw-gathering.)

The things that really stand out about Bush's ultimate legacy are not the tremendously bad decisions (as always, depending on whether you're one of the have-mores or not), nor his inability to pronounce incredibly complicated words such as "nuclear". It's the pains he and his various dogsbodies always took to show how disinterested Himself was in politics to begin with -- which begs the obvious question why didn't he just go into baseball and spare the world from his bumbling indifference?

I doubt we'll ever know the answer to that question; he probably doesn't know the answer himself. This is, after all, a guy who held the most important job on the planet, and could not be bothered to know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. More seriously, much like Sarah Palin, I can't recall a single instance where Bush exhibited anything but disdain for anything beyond the most superficial, facile analysis of any issue, foreign, domestic, financial, whatever. He took pride in going with his gut, and if it went wrong, well, fuck it -- someone else would pay the price, as always.

Forget the argument over whether Bush is intelligent or not. His intellectual acumen is less important than his intellectual perspective -- here is a guy who apparently had no interest in politics, yet became governor and then president; then did a terrible job by any objective measurement, and now claims not to care about history's assessment of his track record, yet is proud of his botchery all the same. Hokay then.

Scarier still is to look at the current model of the GOP, and consider that Shrub was a comparative moderate.

And as Faulkner said, the past isn't over, nor even past, not as long as there are at least two more Bushes jockeying to get back into office, so they can again parcel it out to their donors, rack up more debt for future generations to pay, then toddle off and act like they never wanted the job in the first place. This is precisely why this whitewashing matters, because American politics are dynastic, and have proven over and over again that from either party, there is no incompetence so wretched that it can't be elected if people know the name.

Bean Ball

I suppose this week would be as good a time as any to reiterate that Jim Bunning is a bastard's bastard, the sort of vicious codger one would normally just write off as a senile coot, but who in fact was a card-carrying asshole even in his ball-playing days. Okay, there ya go, it's been said once again, many times many ways, Merry Christmas, fuck you.

No, Bunning's latest really just reminds me of a few rather important things that, were the media even to consider them, would immediately dismiss them as peripheral, though they are highly central to the system's dysfunctions:

1. Bunning is retiring at the end of the year, but has this episode alerted Democrats as to the urgency of making sure the homestretch of his term is as miserable as possible? Does anything motivate them to punch back, I mean like ever? Prove me wrong, ladies, prove me wrong and sideline this dickhead for the duration.


2. The median age in the Senate is 63 years now, with 26 senators in their seventies or older. Are the interests of an increasingly impoverished nation being well-served by an insular group of wealthy old farts -- such as, say, Jim Bunning? Term/age limits would have unintended consequences, but so does wheeling Strom Thurmond into chamber long after his brain had turned to oatmeal.


3. Parliamentary procedures need to be changed, pure and simple. It has somehow become a token assumption that a supermajority is the only true majority, and now Bunning is able to cock-block a $10 billion apportionment by himself. What the fuck is that, besides the cheap trick of a group of people who each think they could and should be in charge?

Like many of the institutions that determine the course of our lives, these people frequently seem more concerned with the pomp and ceremony of their station than with actual performance. It shows in the results.

Farewell Redress

"Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying." -- Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

"They got the guns, but we got the numbers." -- The Doors

[Graphic via Vanity Fair.]

Perhaps you have heard about Oscar Grant, the New Year's partier who was shot -- while zip-tied and face-down on a Bart platform -- by a transit cop, touching off a series of riots in Oakland. As you might expect, these "riots" had initiated as peaceful protests, and even in the early overestimations of their severity, don't remotely approach real riots in the past.

As the Grant case has been covered in detail by the Bay Area media right from the start, I've paid pretty close attention to the whole story, and it sure as hell appears that, at the very least, both the transit cop and BART exacerbated the situation by acting in bad faith. BART confiscated one witness' video of the shooting at the scene, apparently thinking it had the only copy, until another video was leaked to a news station, thus foiling what would almost certainly have turned into an attempt at institutional opacity. Meanwhile, the cop resigned rather than talk to internal affairs. For the past seven or so years, we have immersed the country in the rank waters of how innocent people have nothing to hide -- well, there ya go.

Columnist Jon Carroll, who lives in Oakland, puts all this in perspective, while rightly contrasting the causes and severity of riots in other countries. It's simple for us sensible people to agree that trashing nail salons and such is a rash response to a sad situation, but it's also unfortunately true that sometimes that is what it takes for officials to take at least one appendage from the vicinity of their exposed asses and actually do their jobs.

All of which brings me to Captain Fuckup and his inevitable attempt to whitewash his miserable reign of error. I don't even want to think about how much time, how many words I've expended in various fora and blogs over the past ten(!) years, since this clown foisted himself on an unsuspecting nation. I assume most rational people have long tempered their assessments and opinions of him lest they attract the Secret Service. Such is the catastrophic damage Bush and his claque of merry bastards have wrought upon the nation and the world; such is his and their arrogant refusal even to acknowledge the fundamentals of it all, much less own what they've done.

Bare minimum, the man does not deserve another good day, or another good night's sleep for the rest of his life. Ancient curses were always more creative; may he and his be cursed with awareness and misfortune for the next ten generations, something along that line. Or, you know, a comical set of tragic mishaps involving daisy cutters and willy pete. Some people are incredibly lucky that karma does not exist, at least for them.

Bush didn't merely fiddle while the world burned; fiddling, after all, requires opposable thumbs, some measurable level of actual dexterity. This was simply an endless bumble, an incoherent, artless monkeyfuck of a tenure. And he's proud of it, every damned bit of it, a sociopathic level of indifference.

And why not? He and Cheney probably did just fine throughout all this. Did they lose a loved one in the wars they started, in the hurricane they ignored? Have their stock portfolios plunged the way everyone else's did; do you really think their pension funds took nearly as much of a haircut as yours has? Of course not. They, and the corrupt rentier faux-capitalists who purchase access to them, made out just fine, selling short on the margin, letting someone else carry the costs, in finance and in life.

And people just want to "move on", whatever the hell that means. We're not moving on from shit, bunky -- Iraq is stabilizing to the extent that Iran can co-opt it; Afghanistan is ugly and likely to get much uglier; the economy is a series of storms and rising waters, not lifting all boats so much as surrounding most houses. But at least the thieves got their no-questions-asked golden parachutes.

And no one riots about any of those things, they just trudge on, perhaps wishfully thinking that "things" will be "different" "now", without bothering to define those terms consistently. I can't imagine too many people, outside of hardcore political wonks, will actually watch Fredo's little goodbye speech; I certainly don't have any stomach for the emetic properties of such a thing. Nobody with half a brain has given a shit about anything he's had to say for years now. But one would think it'd be game for more open and impassioned repudiation somewhere along the line.

Not that they'd sit up and take notice, much less care. They don't unless they're compelled to, and no one's really compelling them.