First They Came for the De-Platformed Snowflakes

Plenty of whining these days about idiots being "de-platformed," deprived of their God-given right to make a fat living spreading lies and abuse and wink-wink-nudge-nudge racism. Oh, what will become of poor Milo or Carl or Gavin, or whatever pied pissant is trying this month to coax the virtual hordes of incels and basement losers into the good life of flame-tweeting uppity bitchez and minorituhs?

Look, it's too bad that Milo Yiannopoulos is $2M in debt. Maybe, in the true ethos of the committed fiscal conservative bootstrapper lot, he should have made sure to secure gainful employment sufficient to support his high-on-the-cock lifestyle. Just as NBC isn't required to sell and broadcast advertisements for Pornhub or crush videos (even the latter of which was at one point ruled free speech), Patreon and other such outlets have the right to refuse service. This is less a matter of corporate control, and more a matter of cost-benefit analysis, the knowledge that for every one of these dipshit "provocateur" losers they take on, they'll lose a hundred or a thousand or a million users and contributors -- in other words, their revenue model.

Do people still need an explanation of how the free market works? It's suboptimal in many ways, but at least its one true ethos holds firm throughout -- no matter how stupid or awful it is, if it makes money, it gets in the arena. That's how Rush Limbaugh has stayed on the air for thirty years. That's how you got half a decade of Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo types, a decade of Kardashians, or two decades of various strains of "reality" teevee. They're all terrible, and entirely useless, even as entertainment. But they sold or sell ad time.

I mean, are these people fucking kidding? If one thing about teevee and the internets holds true over anything else, it's that Sturgeon's Law is pretty much the main operational guideline. Does anyone seriously think that putatively librul (in the sense that it's possible that they may have voted Democratic at least as often as they voted Republican) scumbags such as Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves think twice about all the free publicity they gave that jabbering baboon during the 2016 campaign? They held their noses and deposited their checks.

Mark Burnett is an even better example -- he's actually on record as being a Democratic voter and donor over the years, but when he smelled cheap pelf, he ran with the devil and never looked back. Not only was Burnett richly rewarded, he has broadcast properties all over the place. No one's boycotting him or cutting him loose. Why do you think that is?

Why doesn't Milo just start up a website with all his deep thoughts and put a PayPal link on the sidebar, get a mailing list going and shake down his readers? Or start up a YouTube channel and sell subscriptions? People make bank on YouTube watching other people play video games, or teaching people how to put on makeup. Surely these renegade thinkers can coordinate their thoughts to the same extent Jenna Marbles or Pewdiepie has, and figure their principled way out of the corporate Marxist gulag.

This is kinda what Sarah Palin ran into when she tried to monetize her grift after getting her tight ass kicked in the 2008 election. She tried the reality show, the Fixed Noise commentary gig, the paid subscription grift -- but they all required work, effort, content, attention. Or you have to pay someone to do that content creation-curation shit for you. So now she sits up in the tundra, tweeting her deep thoughts now and then, when she's not busy trying to keep her dope-addled son from pulling a murder-suicide with whatever dingbat he's hooked up with this year.

Same thing with these other yahoos, to some degree or other. They're not broke and desperate because they're being blackballed by mythic corporate librul fascists; they're broke because they're incompetent boobs whose schtick has worn thin. Sure, the basement dipshits looking for the daily outrage pellet in their Skinner-box lives will read it for free until the die-uh-beet-us finally keels them over. But they won't pay for it.

The Koch Brothers, worth over $100 billion dollars between them, each one averages something like a million dollars a day, they dump hundreds of millions into each electoral cycle, they bankroll think tanks and magazines. Say what you want about them, but you can't say they aren't engaged in every facet of the political and policy-making process. They invest a lot of fucking money every year in strategy, legislation, influencing, and who knows what else.

You think if poor destitute Milo was doing anything worth half a shit that they could use to their benefit, the Koch boys or one of their swollen failsons couldn't sweep in and give him a sinecure somewhere, a Reason column or such like? One of the conservatard vanity publishers couldn't throw him a bone after his debacle with Simon and Schuster?

Jesus H. Christ, rich assholes keep Dinesh D'Souza, who is a failure on every level -- moral, ethical, financial, legal -- solvent. If they wanted to, they would and could, and they wouldn't even notice the money. This nation is openly run by psychotic billionaires. If they wanted these Patreon numbskulls on their roster, they'd have signed 'em up already.

And again, it's not just Milo, who obviously has his own image problems to deal with. He's just the highest-profile example, but the end result is true for the rest of these slugs -- they don't do anything that their self-reinforcing audience of angry dupes is actually willing to pay for. Why should they, when they can get their pellets for free? They're not worried about any issues of "quality" or a higher level of thinking or writing skill. They don't want prime rib, they're fine with Cheez Doodles. And you can find those anywhere.

Dwindling Swindle

Again, by all means, the fake news media should keep up the rigorous fact-checking and parsing of every detail. It won't matter to his diehards, because they're morons and proud of it, but it matters to him, because he watches CNN, and he can't stand it when they call him on his LIES.

But what gets under his orange leather even more is when it's pointed out that far fewer people show up to listen to him whine -- and if you have the stomach, go find one of the streams of last night on YouTube and give it a spin. JESUS H. CHRIST, WHAT A FUCKING WHINING CRYBABY. It was 107 degrees in Phoenix yesterday (but it's a dry hate, ba-dum-bum); save everyone the headache and just buy some billboards saying THEY WON'T STOP PICKING ON MEEEEEE!

Biggest. Goddamned. Whiny. Bitch. Ever.

I can't imagine that he's a poker player, much less a competent one. He bluffs like old people fuck -- like he fucks. He has way too many tells -- verbal tics, hand gestures, body language, facial expressions. Even an average player like myself would fleece him out his decrepit Batman tower in about an hour.

Because he broadcasts to the world what angers him. He did it literally on his inauguration day, the day we for some reason decided to give this fat fucking assclown an official investiture, and not do the right thing and ship his ass to Russia where he belongs. And what angers him the most is people not validating his self-conception of Awesome Perfect Greatness. People not showing up in droves to listen to him whine for an hour about how hard governing is and how unfair the lying liars of the lying media are for recording the words he says and playing them back. Waaahhhhh!

So to go along with the fact-checking, the media would do well to check the venue capacity stats, talk to the fire marshals, get a reliable attendance vs. capacity comparison, and include that level of specificity in the article. He seems unable to go more than a few weeks now without traveling to a safe space and sucking up to the tardcore base. Include a count every time, every venue he hits. He'll either stop or snap. Either way, 'murka wins, to the extent that it actually deserves to.

But from photographic evidence, it looks like they were at half-capacity at best in the building, and outside the venue counter-protesters outnumbered supporters at a level comparable to Boston a few days ago. And even some of them were paid shills, because everything with these people is projection. They assume the counter-protesters are paid by George Soros because that's what they do.

But one of the most basic facts the media can provide is a reliable estimate of attendance. It's important. Lamely saying "thousands" tells people absolutely nothing. How many thousands? Two? Ten? Fifty? And how many "thousands" does the venue hold, did they pack the hall or was it only twenty or forty percent?

Qualitative analysis is all well and good, but ultimately pointless. We know he's going to lie about fucking everything. Bokay? This is never in question; it was never in doubt before he got into politics. He's been a fucking liar about every little thing since the dipshits in the New York media started taking his calls. It's important to chronicle and archive the lies for posterity, so future generations can see the abject nonsense some of our fella 'murkins marinated in, but for the time being, listing the lies won't move anyone on the dial. Everyone on both sides already knows he's full of shit; the difference is that his base is fine with it, so long as it pisses off the right people.

At one point in the Phoenix rally, Snowflake gestured out toward the media cameras across the hall, filming the podium, claiming that they wouldn't film the rally, that the lights were going off. The audience looked across at lights that remained as they were, not going off, and they jeered all the same. They are all in, fully vested, full-throated accomplices in what will be looked back on as a slow-motion crime, or a gathering muck ball of a million little crimes.

This is the logical outcome of people who become cult members with a narcissistic asshole as its center of gravity. Some of them will literally never back out, no matter what, because his failure is also their failure, and because they can't own the hard fact that they failed long before they ever cast their sorry lot with this moronic charlatan.

So the qualitative analysis only gets you so far. It's the quantitative analysis, even the modest perspective lent by actual numbers versus capacity, that will give us information, and let us know that whatever spell he cast on these fuckin' morons, it's finally starting to wear off on at least some of them.

Pussies

Calling these delicate assholes "snowflakes" is far too kind. These sensitive little babies are now disrupting Shakespeare productions because they just can't handle it, nor can they be bothered to, you know, read the actual fucking play. Who are we kidding, most of them probably can't read more than 140 characters at a time.

It should be noted that this fuckface Posobiec is a professional troll -- you know, the kind that makes shit up about George Soros paying protesters while taking money to, uh, protest. Fucker's last name sounds like some bullshit pharma product that clogs your bowels anyway. But he's everything that he professes to rail against, and so much worse. And he knows it. It eats at him, like a psychic termite.

Hey, crybabies, if this shit hurts your wittle feewings that much, maybe you should shake down your wingnut welfare donors to fund your own production of the play, starring Scott Baio and Antonio Sbarro or other such unemployed boot-lickers. The beauty of Shakespeare is that the material is easy to rewrite for different periods, precisely because the themes are so universal. Power corrupts, and "heroes" and "villains" are mostly based on perspective. Who knew? Funny how they didn't get their panties in a fucking wad when it was Obama in the lead role.

In the conservatard version, Ben Carson attempts to stab the Dear Leader, only to be foiled by a cunningly placed belt buckle, at which point Julius Clownstick beats Brutus to death with his adult diaper and invades North Korea -- but only after making sure Undersecretary of State Dennis Rodman has returned home safely.

First, They Came for the Snowflakes....

It's always interesting to watch assholes like Tim Allen flaunt their "conservative" quals, especially in the context of how persecuted the poor darlings are.

Why, Allen has been kept down so harshly by the lib-nazis in Big Bad Babywood, that despite having not been funny for roughly two decades, and riding his one joke into the ground back while Bill Clinton was getting his pole smoked in the Oval Office, he was given another show in which he can be a low-rent Archie Bunker. Smell the persecution, libtards!

The reason it's interesting is that, as most of us know, Tim Allen Dick did time in Club Fed after getting busted in an airport with over half a key of coke. He got his sentence reduced in exchange for ratting out a bunch of fellow dealers. He's one of those conservatives who sincerely believes that everyone who does what he did ought to get the maximum sentence, while he should be allowed to skate. Mainly he's one of those guys that feels like he should get to keep every dime he earned slaving that one grunt joke, and that commie Kenyan moooslin would just give it all to crack whores.

The Crybaby Cult

Seriously, is this what the next four or so years is really going to be like, an endless series of fucktarded anthropological excursions into Clownstickistan to suss the sage wisdom of angry goobers. Time after time, the message is clear -- Clownstick opponents need to do all the compromising, never the whiny Clownstick enthusiast who is now additionally butt-hurt because that mean ol' Meryl Streep said some terrible things.

And for the record, all Streep said was that maybe it wasn't cool to make fun of disabled people. She never even mentioned Fuckface by name. That seems to have made her mild ministrations all that more potent to these cultists. They can't stand it, mainly because they know that Streep was right, that if they had a friend or loved one who had a severe condition, a debilitating palsy that manifested itself in painful contortions and spasms in random intervals, it would hurt them to see that condition mocked by a cynical third-rate con-man for the sake of political expediency. Just like they look the other way when their hero taunts a tortured war hero, but will insist with a straight face that they support and respect military service and personnel.

Wrong Question

Here we go again; get ready for yet another meaningless kerfuffle over an athlete expressing their opinion. Humble prediction:  not one (1) media entity will think to ask, Why do we feel the need to perform nationalistic chants at sporting events? What tangible need is served by this? Some people would probably miss it, but so what? Can we just watch a fucking ballgame without being pestered by your jingoistic nonsense?

None of those questions will ever be asked or answered by a corporate media entity. There would be too much incoherent whining and twittering.

Go Duck Yourself

As I've said before, I watched Dork Dynasty once, just to see what the fuss was all about, and literally felt stupider by the end of the episode. I have no idea if the show is still airing -- and if it is, what sort of galoot is still watching it, and why. Whatever the case, Phil and Willie Robertson have parlayed their pop-culture notoriety into their avocation of injecting their regressive views into the political and religious arenas.

During the RNC last week, Willie Robertson found himself in the human centipede of D-listers, explaining as only a cosplay hillbilly millionaire could about how the "elites" don't know how to talk to "real people". That latter is one of the most tedious conceits imaginable -- that simply being working-class makes one more "real" or "legitimate". In many cases it does, but not always, and there is no shortage of supposedly regular people who are completely preposterous examples of humanity.

Willie Robertson and his family have made enormous sums of money exploiting the class anxieties of dopes and peons whose only respite is to convince themselves that smart people really aren't any smarter than anyone else, that study and expertise and analysis mean nothing, that Jebus is watching, even if he hasn't made them happy and wealthy and successful yet.

Everybody Calm Their Shit

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” -- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Let's assume that you have received the official internutz memo about the most recent thing your are supposed to be OUTRAGED about -- the senseless murder of a noble gorilla, into whose enclosure had fallen a young child. Naturally the cries went up instantaneously, as if the zookeepers were just supposed to wait and see what a 400-pound, immensely strong beast was going to do with the toddler he was dragging.

Tragically, initial reports did indicate that Harambe the gorilla was indeed being kind to the child, and had not harmed him. But the very act of trying to extricate the kid -- or even to tranquilize Harambe -- might have set him off. Life is about risk management, when you get right down to it, and that is simply a risk that no decent parent would be willing to take with their young child.

Now, the argument is being made that the mother (both parents were there, but most of the verbal attacks seem to be directed at the mother) is negligent; after all, what kind of parent lets their kid fall into a gorilla enclosure? Who knows? Maybe there was a hole in the fence, maybe there was just a low spot that the Cincinnati Zoo will be surprised to find had not been breached yet. Kids have a way of taking off when you turn your back on them for even a second, stop go get a soda, take a dump, whatever. That someone might have been technically negligent for a split-second does not necessarily mean that they were criminally negligent, or even negligent in a more general sense.

Snark Week

Look, I'll go along with the argument that verbally smacking Kentucky dingbat Kim Davis around for her looks or her (in the past) apparently loose moral code might not be all that productive, might even be something that the flying monkeys on the other side would do. [Ed.: There's no "might" about it.]

But Davis chose to put her selective religious observations above the law, above the functions of her job, above basic common decency. And because her cause is explicitly deciding who can and can't get married on her watch, because said institution is a sacrament in the eyes of gawwwd, it is fair game to point out that Davis' own track record with said institution is a hell of a lot worse than what she takes it upon herself to impose on others.

Since Davis was elected rather than hired, she can't simply be fired. But instead of letting her make herself into a martyr behind bars, maybe the county board of supervisors might initiate a recall election, or a recommendation to suspend and dismiss Davis, something along that line.

Over the past year or two, we've seen several high-profile stories where small businesses owned by religious people have been fined, threatened online, etc., by your garden-variety social justice warriors looking to set them straight. Those folks I can see a little more neutrally, in the sense that within reasonable bounds, small businesses should have the right to refuse service to people you deem objectionable.

The line gets finer and the slope gets more slippery as you try to parse the intellectual difference between refusing to bake a cake for a neo-Nazi versus a gay couple versus a black person, but for now, if I don't want to (for example) give a guitar lesson to someone who posts on Stormfront and talks about his love for Hitler and hatred for those people, that's my right. The point (and there is one) is that it is possible to have an intellectually honest debate about small business rights, and air both sides to at least some extent. (Should a neo-Nazi who owns a small business be compelled to serve me, even though he's offended by what I said about people like him?)

But Kim Davis is a public servant, and the Supreme Court has affirmed the right for same-sex couples to petition the state to recognize their union. No clergyman can be compelled to officiate their ceremony, no beleaguered baker or hand-wringing photographer can be forced to cater or capture the magic moments. But the person who issues the licenses can and should be expected to do her job.

The hypocrisy of Davis' personal history simply serves to illustrate not only her own ethical impasse with what she's trying to impose on others in defiance of the law and the government she works for. Like the Duggar family and countless other religious folks who've made it their mission to hector and lecture us heathens about our wicked ways, Davis' hypocrisy serves as yet another in a long line, a veritable pattern of this sort of "do as I say, not as I do" behavior. That is precisely why it is not only okay, but practically necessary to hoist these idjits on their own petards every time it happens.

And the louder they proclaim their virtue, the more likely it is bound to happen. Say what you want about Larry King and Mickey Rooney, they never took it upon themselves to serve as moral arbiters of the personal lives of consenting adults.

Freedom of Choice

So the outrage de la semaine is, as it turns out, completely imaginary -- that is, a small business has been mercilessly e-heckled not because they refused to cater a gay wedding, but because they said they would refuse if asked. Is this what it's come to?

This is a tough one to be sure, friends 'n' neighbors, at least at first blush. From a practical standpoint, it's difficult to see how the appearance, right or wrong, of kajillions of cyber-twats over-reacting and e-spewing their self-righteous virtual venom is going to help win any converts to The Cause. All it's going to do is make the folks who already have their backs up pitch their coccyges that much higher, so much so that the pizza place in question -- which, let's recall, didn't actually have any complaints about discriminating against gay customers -- is now probably going to get a nice payday from ButthurtWingnutCrowdfunding.com, or whatever it's called.

It's one thing if a Big Corporation pulls that sort of shit and gets hit up with the Big Angry, quite another when it's a mom-and-pop prayer-circle pizza joint. I'm sure some noted sage or other had something pithy to say about picking and choosing one's battles wisely, but goddamned if some of these dopes never got the memo.

Of course, as you might suppose, that other side rushing to the defense of "religious freedom" is every bit as insufferable as their bien pensant counterparts, if anything even more so. I can't envision a scenario that puts me on the same side of any issue as noob tool Tom Cotton, and I'm not about to start with this issue, especially since the guy seems about as hinky as it gets. (Seriously, what kind of a grown-ass man buys birthday cake every few days?)

What all this nonsense has accomplished is that it's allowed idiots to crowdfund a cross to nail themselves to for their piety. This one is just a peach:

The florist who refused to provide flowers for a gay couple’s wedding has netted more than $80,000 from an online crowdfunding page dedicated to “protect her and her livelihood.”

Stutzman was fined $1,000, plus $1 for court costs and fees in March for refusing to serve a gay couple when they tried to buy wedding flowers in 2013, reported ABC News.

Stutzman said even though one of the men who wanted the flowers was her friend, providing flowers for his marriage went against her beliefs as a Southern Baptist.

Well, with "friends" like that....

It would be interesting if one (1) of the media entities publicizing this martyrdom jabber would follow up on the crowdfunding aspect of all these people, see how many of those pledges actually pay up, or if some of them, once the drunken glow of self-satisfaction wears off, look at a pizza place getting nearly a million dollars pledged to it in the course of just a few days, and decide that for that amount of money, what's the harm in changing your mind?

The concern trolls will ask questions, as is their wont, and they should be answered, as they apply across the board: does a Muslim bakery have a right to refuse service to a Christian or Jew, or to an unaccompanied woman; does a gay wedding photographer have a right to refuse to serve a straight couple; and on and on. Turning some of these tables on the most strident voices, forcing them to confront their own choices and their own personal bigotries, might just beat it into the heads of at least a few of them.

The current whinging will die down soon enough, as these dumb things tend to do. But it will be back, again and again, as the perennial presidential campaign continues apace. We've come a long way on this issue in a very short amount of time -- it was barely ten years ago that ol' Turd Blossom used it as a wedge in the southern states to get the win for his boy Fredo, and to grab a few down-ticket races as a bonus. But people have come around, the anti-marriage laws have been dumped and replaced.

Right now it's being portrayed as "personal rights" or "religious freedom," in much the same way that the Woah o' Nawthun Aggression is about "states' rights." But as Primus said long ago, the flame that burns twice as bright burns only half as long, and this is no exception. Once the brave and noble e-defenders of liberty have moved on to the next imaginary outrage, gay patrons will remember, and they'll be buying their flowers and pizzas elsewhere. In the end, this is not politics, or even religion. It's just business.

The God Racket

Religious huckster Ken Ham (yes, the "Creation Museum" jagoff) is at it again. Since even a Bible Belt backwater like Kin-tucky won't grant his Noah's Ark theme park (you read that right) a fat tax rebate, Ham has responded with perhaps the dopiest conceivable propaganda campaign -- a barrage of crayon-scrawled letters purportedly written by young children, anguished and aggrieved at the state's "refusal" to let the nice whackjob build his stupid park.

Just for the hell of it, let's enumerate just a few of the ways in which the supposedly Christian Ham is, well, a goddamned liar:

• The letters use clearly adult phrasing and appeals to argument, such as “Kentucky doesn’t want to be pushed around by non-believers," and “I am not just speaking for me but for the people of Kentucky, for the Christians of Kentucky, and for the next generation of Christians.”
• No one is preventing Ham from building his shitbox, the state simply decided that since Ham engages in discriminatory hiring practices, the taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill for his business.
• There is no such thing as a "Christian ark". Even if he actually existed and actually built an ark, Noah was not a "Christian", as Christians did not exist until, you know, Christ came along. These mouth-breathing halfwits can't even get the fundamental tenets of their own religion right.

Again, because I sincerely believe that it is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money, I support Ken Ham's plan to build his silly ark park. I hope he fleeces these maroons for everything they're worth, and spends every dime of it on hookers and blow. But there is absolutely no reason taxpayers should help him build the damned thing.

These people are the lowest form of hypocrites, really -- they talk shit about the evil gubmint every chance they get, emphasize their independence from secular authority, until it comes time to pay their fair share. It's the oldest ongoing racket of all.

The Paranoid Style, Part 2: State of Siege

It continues to be the one of the most fascinating dynamics in this -- or indeed any -- year:  the way political demographics who have distinctly characterized themselves by an intense, almost instinctive mistrust of the flex and impact of the gubmint jackboot, rush quickly and readily to defense of militarized, trigger-happy cops and their self-serving bullshit excuses for why they had to perforate that kid brandishing a BB gun in a playground in just two seconds flat. Well, as my dear memaw useta tell her Sunday school kids, fuck that noise.

It should be abundantly clear by now (and if it isn't, watch the video in the Reason link) that that whole "protect and serve" thing is done; it is simply your duty to comply, to shut the fuck up and do what you're fucking told. That might earn you the right to survive and get back to your meaningless hamster-wheel existence, but we're not making any promises, pally.

What's so weird and amazing is how thin-skinned they are, how any and all criticism, no matter how well reasoned and explained, is so frantically dismissed. Tamir Rice and John Crawford, both black males brandishing BB guns in an open-carry state (Ohio), get put down like dogs, without even being given a chance to comply. This is not in dispute, both murders are easily viewable on the YouTube.

As with Rodney King and Oscar Grant, who knows what lies these assholes would have told and gotten away with, but for the irrefutable video evidence? They shot someone because they failed to comply, to obey, because they could, because no one will call them on their bullshit. Because at heart, America is neither "liberal" nor "conservative," but merely authoritarian.

And a cheap, lame type of pseudo-authoritarian at that, pretending to chafe under the yoke of largely deferential federal and state authorities, while local and urban police forces run wild with no accountability whatsoever -- and indeed, the sincere support and appreciation of these erstwhile Red Dawn fantasists, the last civilized bulwark against those people.

This is of a piece with the collective 'murkin shrug over the "revelations" of torture, of which neither the torture allegations themselves nor the public coverage of same surprised any sentient being, domestic or foreign, friend or foe. These are the maroons who whinge about the consequences of terrorists finding out what they already knew, who in the next breath denounce the idea of rapprochement with a regime that tortures its political opponents. Oh, the humanity!

If irony and hypocrisy were Ebola, this country would be bleeding profusely from every single orifice. Our currency is now a hopeless mix of manufactured outrage and handwringing inaction, as if the perfidy of a few protesters posed a greater threat to the republic than, say, criminal financiers robbing you blind every goddamned day, the ongoing transformation of the economy into a series of rentier rackets, the impending commodification (and thus bankruptcy and peonage, due to the massive labor surplus it will cause) of the American workforce.

Everyone knows the old saw about politics basically being two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner. There is a great deal of truth to that, especially the higher you go in policy-making levels. A corollary to this premise is that "success" is largely contingent on the wolves' ability to gull the sheep into at least going long with the game. It's worked well for a couple hundred years so far.

What's changed in the last thirty years or so is how eagerly the sheep actively support the wolves now, if for no other reason than to not be identified as a fuckin' sheep. They bleat incessantly about the virtue of dying on their feet rather than living on their knees, which is admirable enough. Yet they can't wait to put the kneepads on at every opportunity; hell, they'll do it without asking at this point. Jamie Dimon could fuck their wives and rifle their underwear drawers right in front of them, they'd still man the Facebook barricades to post another stupid meme about how the asshole cop who blew away a twelve-year-old in a playground had no choice.

This is the sort of shit that makes me want to sell everything, like tomorrow, fucking high-tail it to Costa Rica, spend the rest of my life teaching tourist milfs how to surf and play guitar. I may yet do it; there is less and less reason not to. When the alternative is slaving away to pay down college debt, for the privilege of listening to seething mouthbreathers dog-whistle to each other, maybe it's time.

Outkicking the Coverage

Still trying to process both sides of the meta-issue surrounding gay marriage: on the one hand, people should be able to register their opinions without fear of retribution, and businesses (especially small businesses) as a rule of thumb ought to be able to refuse service to whomever they choose; on the other hand, substitute the word "black" for "gay" in each of these instances, and see how that all resonates.

The acceptability of gay marriage has taken place with such speed and scale and breadth that it is difficult to keep up with it, and therefore difficult to develop sufficient mechanisms for talking about people who, less than a decade ago, were on the side of a clear majority, and now find themselves scrambling to find a viable role as principled dissenters.

There is a very clear distinction between, say, the late and unlamented Fred Phelps' psychotic, traitorous death cult, obsessing to an unholy degree over the very existence of homosexuals, and a small bakery or mom-and-pop photo studio that just isn't comfortable with providing services to something they don't believe in. It doesn't excuse the latter group from growing up on the issue, mind you, but they probably also don't deserve to get dragged into court over it.

Where the linked article makes a categorical error is in lumping every instance of late into a half-baked dish of opinions and outcomes. What happened with Phil Robertson, Brendon Eich, and the state of Arizona, all of them employees or business concerns being pressured by the interests of capitalism and customer pressure, is simply the way things work. Each of those folks said or did something that many gays found insulting, and activist groups, by definition, mobilized and made it clear that, well, gays collectively have enough discretionary income to respond in kind. In other words, they made it clear that they don't have to take shit from people who depend on customers, be they teevee viewers or tourists. Simple as that.

We all see instantly how offensive, in just the last couple of days, the comments from LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling and teahadi ranchtard Cliven Bundy have resonated. There's just nothing debatable or defensible there. Well, Phil Robertson has repeatedly compared gays to criminals, drunkards, bestial enthusiasts. Should gays have to take shit from some pigfucking hillbilly, or do they have the right to tell Robertson's employer that maybe they won't patronize their product anymore?

Arizona was ready to legitimize the "turn away the gay" rights of businesses, and in a state that earns a good chunk of revenue from tourism, and is hosting the next Super Bowl, it became clear pretty quickly that their moralizing was going to cost them. Everything has its price.

Again, when we compare the ledger on each side, I would say that these noble, principled dissenters who suddenly find themselves unjustly persecuted for merely speaking their wittle minds, need to take a look at the big picture. In more than half the US states, people can still be fired just for being gay. No one, to my knowledge, has ever been beaten or killed for voicing their opinion against gay marriage, or homosexuals in general.

I think they're mostly just surprised at how quickly the tide of opinion turned against what they had thought was safe and acceptable. And that's okay, for a while, but it's time to get the memo, and understand that this dialogue -- a dialogue, let's remember, about the lives and rights of a group of consenting, law-abiding, tax-paying adults -- is back-and-forth. Each side has an inalienable right to call bullshit on the other for disingenuousness and intellectual dishonesty, and to vote accordingly with their wallets if necessary. Ain't that America?

Offensensitivity

Perhaps because the majority of the country has changed so much and so quickly on the issue, "gay marriage" is developing a set of meta-issues, and rather absurd ones at that. Now the question is longer whether discriminating against gay couples bears the same nasty whiff that discriminating against interracial couples did 40-50 years ago.

The most recent and persistent epiphenomenon is the martyrdom meme, perhaps best characterized in the self-imposed travails of Duck Dynasty honcho Phil Robertson and Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, the latter who was forced to resign for his contribution to California's Proposition 8 campaign back in 2008. So now Conor Friedersdorf's correspondent seems to epitomize the sort of person who feels aggrieved at whatever chilling effect is supposed to have taken place, as far as "allowing" what the aggrieved feel is legitimate difference of opinion.

And so it is, to a certain extent. Ostensibly, one of the great strengths of this country is that everyone has the right to be wrong, and even to be an asshole about it, so long as said opinion picks no pockets and breaks no arms. And that's where the problem arises, since in more than half of US states, you can be fired just for being gay in the first place, forget trying for a supposedly meaningless equal right to get married.

Nothing in life is absolute, and this applies to the Bill of Rights as well; you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, and you can't bring an assault rifle into a courthouse. There are balances that are struck all along the way in these sorts of debates, and hey guess what -- the First Amendment doesn't apply to companies and places of work. You can be an asshole, and other people can call you such. That's how it works.

That means that you can -- and should -- be fired from your job if you, say, host a website that advocates race war or features the crushing of small animals for the amusement of fucking creeps, even if such things happen not to be against the law (inexplicably, in the latter instance). You can, in fact, be fired from your job just for saying something impolitic, if your boss happens to feel that said speech costs the company sales and revenue. This is not exactly a secret or a surprise, and yet here you have grown-ass adults genuinely shocked that their sincerely, deeply held spiritual beliefs do not automatically grant them immunity from the consequences of discourse.

That's at least part of the reason why so many of us choose to blog in relative anonymity -- not to completely absolve ourselves from any and all consequences of what we might say out here on the internets, but because we are aware that even if we say something that is logical and accurate, we can still be held liable for it, if it has an adverse (or even a potential or perceived) impact on any organization we might be part of.

This particular issue is an opportunity to examine the idea that one's beliefs, no matter how sincere, do not automatically immunize them from participating in the same verbal scrum as the rest of us. I promise you, the small hint of opprobrium, of "hate" and "fear" as the CF correspondent put it, is a drop in the bucket compared to what "outsider" groups have felt even in the last generation or two, from gays to atheists to civil rights and antiwar protesters.

I think those folks and many others would find the idea hilarious, that someone could say something they have a pretty good idea will hit a significant portion of people the wrong way, and still expect to be exempt from even legitimate criticism (as opposed to, you know, the discrimination and violence that many dissenting groups have routinely faced). It may not be 100% "fair" to ostracize or fire someone for voicing the "wrong" opinion, but it is also not the duty of the rest of society to wait around for these people to start unpacking their ideological baggage, and letting it go, once and for all.

#raceforbutthurt

Three things worthy of note this past week, that perhaps aptly characterize the scope and extent of putatively librul activism.

One is the high-tech mau-mauing of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich. One of Eich's misfortunes is that he bears an eerie resemblance to a Despicable Me minion; the other is that he contributed $1000 of his own money to the repulsive (and ultimately repudiated) Proposition 8 referendum in 2008, to ban gay marriage in California.

Second is the #CancelColbert Twitter campaign launched against well-known satirist Stephen Colbert. Colbert's deliberately obnoxious and offensive (and, for that matter, rather outdated) sendup of Asian stereotypes, straight out of Mickey Rooney's Breakfast at Tiffany's praybook, rankled a college student with more time than sense on her hands. Hilarity, as it is wont to do, ensued.

Finally, the recent Supreme Court decision to openly legitimize what any sentient observer already knew -- that there is gambling going on at the casino, and rich assholes own and run the political system for their own benefit -- ruffled the Thanksralphers feathers one more blessed time, like a random breeze blowing up their skirts. Fourteen years later and the wound is no less fresh for them.

One tough guy suggested that said decision be branded into the forehead of everyone who voted for Big Bad Ralph way back when. Because everyfuckingthing that has transpired this benighted new millennium, from 9/11 to the Democrats' spineless acquiescence in the Iraq War to the heartbreak of psoriasis, sprang forth from the font of Nader's malignant narcissism.

To which I say, one, bring it, motherfucker, soon as you get your extra-chinned self away from I Can Haz Cheezburger, but you should probably pack a lunch; two, you have a hell of a lot of branding to do, since (repeat after me ad nauseam) almost thirteen times as many registered Democrats in Florida voted for Bush than for Nader. Logic would stipulate that even if one construed a vote for Nader as an indirect vote for Bush (it wasn't), surely only a burbling halfwit could misunderstand that a vote for Bush was a direct vote for Bush. Funny how they never ever break out the pitchforks for that one. There's a clue in that somewhere.

But more to their feeble point:  It wasn't Nader's fault that Gore was such a shit candidate he couldn't even win his own home state. Nor was it Nader's fault that, when push came to shove and Florida's dangling chads were hotly contested, Gore decided to demand a recount he thought he'd win (rather than one he probably would have won), and then conceded anyway.

And let's not forget what a soulless ratfucker Holy Joe Lieberman turned out to be. Still better than Dick Cheney, but that's like saying that chlamydia is "better" than syphilis. The endless whinging does not change the stone fact that the Democrats' manifest failures cannot all -- or even much -- be laid at the feet of Ralph Nader. True story.

But let's not rehash the epic travails and endless, heroic quests of the N8r b8rz any more than we have to. Let's look at the larger picture here. The outbursts over Eich, Colbert, the McCutcheon decision, what do they all have in common? An utter lack of focus and perspective, for one. Say what you will about the stupid conservatool outbursts over idiotic things such as Chick-Fil-A and Duck Dynasty, the fact is that when they want to, those fuckers mobilize. It's silly shit, but they show up anyway, at least at first, and at least enough to get picked up and noticed in the lamestream media they so roundly despise.

Certainly Brendan Eich stepped on his own dick by failing to explain himself sufficiently when he had the chance, lamely claiming that he didn't want to be pushed by activists into having to delve into his private political sentiments. But by all accounts, Mozilla runs a pretty clean shop, as far as equal treatment for gays is concerned. Also, too, they won, supporters of gay marriage, and rightly so. The country is coming to its senses on this issue, and will be the better for it. It's not as if Eich played the part of Bull Connor or Lester Maddox, handing out ax handles to thump every hommasekshul in sight. It was a thousand bucks, six years ago.

I submit that if one were of liberal sentiment and potent influence on these here internets, and one wanted to get the most bang for their ideological buck, as it were, one might choose different targets. Targets that matter, for starters. Where are the concerted hashtag efforts to push congress-critters into making corporations pay taxes; where are the #CancelAdelson or #CancelKoch campaigns, with nice laundry lists of the things those assholes own and sell (aside from, you know, people and influence) so that like-minded folks can, como se dice, boycott those motherfuckers?

No. Let's go after some techie slapdick, let's go after Stephen Colbert, let's go through yet another round of urban wailing over Ralph Nader's capital transgressions in the previous millennium. Good grief, from climate change to income inequality to poaching to overpopulation to the oppression of women and the trafficking of children to the open theft of this country's political system, there are a multitude of issues over which one can get one's panties into a death-dealing wad. Yet these other non-issues are the things they choose to get jiggy with, and over.

I'm embarrassed for these people, since they don't have the good sense to be ashamed of themselves. All that righteous anger and technical expertise could and should be harnessed to a team of Clydesdales, instead it's tethered to a yappy, ankle-biting Chihuahua.

[Update 4/7/14: Also, too.

1 Timothy 6:10

So plutocrat performance artist Tom Perkins, apparently trying to leave no doubt amongst the proles as to whether he really is an asshole, lobs this little polemic:

In order to vote, [Perkins] proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

"And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes," he continued, "should have a million votes."

Perkins demurred afterward, claiming that he had "intended to be outrageous and [he] was," but it was probably the truest expression of his beliefs about society at large -- and by association, the beliefs of many of his pelf-grubbing peers. These beliefs are simple, and pervasive, and borne out by the things they say and the things they do.

They believe firmly that poor people are poor not because of luck or circumstance, but because they're lazy and/or stupid, that they're basically children of a lesser god, and only by the benevolence and forbearance of their betters, and an occasional crumb from the table, can they be truly managed to a level of competence that is tolerable to the elites. They believe that they comprise the sum total of "greatness" this country still has to offer, choosing not to look back and see what really made the US great, a true world leader, for a considerable period of time. They have the luxury of being able to fuck things up, and then to sit back and complain about it.

To be (somewhat) fair, you have to give Perkins this much:  he's not an entitled idiot who walked into Daddy's money and just assumed he hit a triple. He has degrees from MIT and Harvard. (Then again, George W. Bush has a coveted Harvard EmBeeAyyy, doesn't he?) Still, Perkins does at least seem to have (or did at one time in his life) a marketable skill. The problem is that he thinks that skill gives him some sort of helicopter view over the rabble, and the right to exercise it as such.

Coming from a guy who weaseled out of a fatal yachting accident with a measly $10K fine, the whole thing is, pardon the expression, too rich. It's all just so terrible for them, the ingratitude of the peons. Not quite enough to change places, mind you, but terrible nonetheless. They have it all, but it ain't enough. They need us to love them, apparently, or at least admire their swagger and fortitude.

But that would be like a rape victim sympathizing with their attacker; the family of one of Ted Bundy's or Richard Ramirez' victims sympathizing with the animals that slaughtered their loved ones for the thrill of it all. There's Stockholm Syndrome, and there's mental illness catalyzed by extreme trauma.

The one-percenters, in their inexplicable defensiveness, have chosen to fight fire with stupid, to lash out at the least fortunate with the most despicable plaints. The peons need to organize enough to grab Perkins and his scummy ilk by their custom silk lapels and say:  Listen close, motherfucker. You won life's lottery. You and your children and grandchildren will never know for a day what 99% of us know every day of our lives -- that life is struggle; that we're lucky to cadge a paycheck-to-paycheck living doing something we can barely tolerate through the best years of our lives; that we're one bad break, a job shift to China or a health-care scare, from the street.

It barely merits pointing out that, since the political system is already owned lock, stock, and barrel by rich assholes like Perkins, that the "one dollar, one vote" principle he espouses is already in play, has been in play as long as any of us can remember. I don't know what system he's talking about; the system I know is one where rich people (like Perkins, who sits on Faux News' board) pit poor people against each other with imaginary distractions.

These idle rich fuckfaces use the system not just for their own benefit, but for their own amusement -- while you try to figure out how you're going to make it through the next week or month or year, they look for a new toy to play with, something else to keep score. It really is a game to them, and my long-standing contention that "Wall Street hates Main Street" couldn't possibly be clearer now. Although it does overstate the point; to hate something you actually have to care on some level, and they don't care. At all. At all. At all.

One assumes that Perkins' greatest expense, aside from taxes and stepstools to plant his nose up Danielle Steel's ass, is a team of minions to help him get his pants on around his giant fucking balls every morning. It's a toss-up at this point whether a more satisfying fate for him would be for him to be rendered destitute by some random ill fortune, or just to see his head on a pike.

Either way, Perkins is 82, so he'll be dead, sooner rather than later, but not soon enough. And some stray three-legged dog will stroll by, and piss on his headstone and take a massive dump on his grave.

Plus Ça Change

Just what you needed -- yet another paean to small-town foke givin' Teh Man the ol' whut-fer. Christ on a stale cracker, like anyone should fucking care that some backwater latrine whose population dropped from 668 in 2010 to 654 in 2012 (presumably from some combination of old age and common sense) seriously thinks that pointlessly erecting a Ten Commandments "monument" (pictured below) is some sort of heroic act of defiance to a brutal dictator.



I wrote extensively about this particular phenomenon several years ago, in the context of a book review, and near as I can tell, only the specific locations have changed, the predictable useless yahooisms have remained intact. Yes, Obama has only visited the state twice, once to speak at a memorial for a mining disaster (but fuck the MSHA and EPA, amirite peoples?), and later that same year (2010) for Senator Pork Robert Byrd's funeral. So there is, as they say, some resentment building in West Virginia, as they perceive a lack of sufficient response to their plaints.

It doesn't seem like anyone wants to break the cold, hard truth to the ruggedly independent Mountaineer State, so let me take a humble stab at it -- you people need to pull your heads out of your fucking asses, m'kay? There's no way to put a cherry on this turd cupcake, folks. When you have a state full of goddamned moochers, who sponge from the system far more than they contribute, who produce a single commodity whose vocational utility is rapidly diminishing (for a variety of reasons -- diversification of energy sources; mechanization of coal extraction; diminishment of "easy" extraction sites), who have disproportionately large populations of medical and welfare benefit recipients, there's not much point in doing meet-and-greets in Cooter's Gulch.

Not to mention the fact that barely one-half of one percent of Americans live in West Virginia, and it becomes quite easy to see why no one wants to bother with it. Great, you produce coal. Awesome. But since many of us can simply run down to Harbor Freight and get of the grid for under a couple grand, and there are other exploitable energy sources as well, it is incumbent upon the self-styled individualists to explain -- in greater detail than some weird fuck-you Ten Commandments monument, mind you -- why precisely the other 99.5% of the world's largest economy is supposed to give more than three-quarters of a fuck about your failure to prepare, anticipate, or adapt to the tectonic change that the entire planet saw coming two decades ago.

It's not my intent to indulge in gratuitous hillbilly-bashing, I swear. I do have compassion for people who have spent their entire working lives performing difficult, extremely dangerous labor, and are either spent from decades underground breathing toxic dust, or have enough to get by but have watched their towns and communities collapse around them. West Virginia has probably had more news stories about its pervasive drug problems than anything else, which is a shame, since anyone who has read up on the state and its abundant natural resources knows that it's a lovely place full of beauty and wonder, comparable to just about any other place in the country. (Yes, even my beloved California.)

But caves and geographic quirks are not enough, unfortunately, to turn a generational economic tide. The state's geographic and cultural insularity, as with many southern (and WV does pride itself on being the "most southern of the northern states, and the most northern of the southern states," among other directional superlatives), has finally caught up with it in that regard.

One branch of my family is a boisterous, insanely fun group of Irish Catholic Texans, so I know firsthand a little somethin'-somethin' about the suhthuhn culcha I routinely deride. Anyhoo, one defining redneck characteristic is the display of the confederate flag in some form, whether an actual flag or merely a bumper sticker. The redneck proudly informs dismayed passersby that his is a symbol of "pride" and "independence," as if it were up to one random simpleton to repurpose a highly objectionable emblem of rape, terror, murder, systematic subjugation. In our family, this fucking thing was regarded as nothing short of an American swastika.

But the reality of such a symbol, when one comes across it --and I did, this very afternoon, here in sunny NorCal -- is that its bearer is someone whom, as my East Texan great-grandmother would have put it, "cain't tell 'em nuthin'." No, indeed -- and that, ladies, fish, and gentlemen, is what you are seeing with your southern states, most of them (Texas and Florida notwithstanding, but even then only by economy of scale) unproductive moochers, culturally regressive, uncomfortable with the fairly major societal changes taking place, and not knowing what to do about any of it.

I wish I knew what to tell them, I wish there were easy answers for them. It would be nice to just be able to tell them to suck it up, take a few Khan Academy classes to get their shit together, and grow superhot peppers. [Ed. Someone has to give those hot-pepper guys a reality show. If people can watch other people open a goddamned storage shed, they can watch heat-seeking trenchermen grow two million Scoville unit peppers.]  But just as one cannot serve two masters, one also cannot be utterly dependent on gubmint largesse, and simultaneously expend precious scarce energy and resources railing against said gubmint. That's not politics, it's math.

Everybody Hurts

This is awesome. This is my favorite thing for the weekend so far (especially since the Raiders failed to show up yet again today). I could watch 20 minutes of this with nothing but a wah-wahhh muted trumpet noise every few seconds. Extra props to the glassy-eyed blonde dingbat at 1:27, "ROMNEY" written across her forehead. She looks like her cult just told her to start crushing pills in the applesauce, so they can catch the comet coming around the dark side of the moon, mind processing the command as pure gabble, but still not bridging the synaptic divide caused by weeks of barinwashing and protein-free porridge.

Seriously, you wonder about folks like that. Did she scrawl across her forehead bu herself, getting in front of a mirror to get the lettering just so, or does the poor thing actually know someone who's enough of a friend to do the writing for her, yet not enough of a friend to talk her out of it in the first place? (And yes, anyone who wrote "OBAMA", or "PELOSI", or "SPRINGSTEEN" across their forehead like that deserves an equal measure of ridicule. People who pretend to hold deeply-conceived political philosophies, and then dress up like they're going to a Florida State-LSU matchup need to get a damned grip.)

Anyway, so long as we're clear -- the core of the schadenfreude (or as TBogg is calling it, Mittenfreude, nicely done there) is not that these poor souls dared to disagree with "us", as if Obama voters were and are monolithic. It's that they failed to explain their discontent sufficiently, it's that both they and their candidates failed utterly to clarify their positions, what they'd change, what effects those changes would entail, how those changes might help the economy.

It's pretty simple, folks -- when plutocrats wreck the economy to their own advantage, and your party then has the balls to put one of 'em up as a nominee before the wreckage has even been cleared from the playing field, you need to explain yourself. And if you can't, it's your own damned fault.

Big Babies

Holy crap, what a self-righteous bunch of hypocrites. It's both okely and dokely for a bunch of unemployed yahoos, most of whom benefit from one gubmint program or another, to waddle around the park all afternoon with a bunch stupid signs and stupider slogans, festooned with misspelled words that don't mean what they think they mean. But heaven forfend a cartoon insurance mascot make fun of them for being a bunch of perpetually butt-hurt maroons.

I keep thinking that the best way to disperse these ridiculous public park putsches would be to give jobs to the participants, but for the life of me, I can't imagine anything these people are good at, besides pulling oddities out of their asses.

Palintology, July 2009 Edition

People are coming up to me in the street with alarming regularity and asking point-blank, "Regis, what do you think of Sarah Palin's latest move?" To which my reply is the only truly sensible one, "I don't," presumably leaving the impromptu Q&A session at that.

But that's a dodge, when you get right down to it, for a variety of reasons. One is that the interminable train wreck that is Palin's political career is never not going to be at least entertaining. Another, perhaps more important rationale, is the intensely symbiotic relationship between Palin and her devotees. It is not unlike that between the recently deceased King of Pill Pop (perhaps you've heard about his demise) and his legion of unemployable weirdos. The wampeter becomes almost messianic in the eyes of the followers, in that their adulation cannot be rationally articulated, and refuting evidence is readily ignored, no matter how abundant that evidence happens to be.

Anyway, La Palin. What's the deal? the kids are asking. Well, the deal seems pretty easy to me -- she's heading for the land of more money and fewer headaches. Buried fairly deep into Todd Purdum's already infamous Vanity Fair takedown is probably the clearest message of who and what Palin really is, operationally:

Palin communicated with legislators and her staff mainly by BlackBerry, sometimes using a personal e-mail account to avoid having to disclose documents under the state public-records laws. (The one time Meg Stapleton, who handles Palin’s personal and political public relations, ever answered multiple e-mails was when I wrote her and Palin’s gubernatorial office at the same time, and she replied: “Thank you for emailing. I will email you separately so as to remove us from the state account.”)

It's easy to assume at this point that there are many government officials who use parallel communications in order to circumvent those pesky transparency requirements. But for Palin it appears to be SOP, which belies not only her usual populist "nothin' ta hide" pose, but her other usual pose about do-nothing government. Really, if you're not doing anything all that earth-shattering, if it's really that mundane and needlessly overblown, then why the opacity?

And that seems to dovetail all too nicely with her stock patter on last year's campaign trail. Palin seemed to relish her "pit bull with lipstick" schtick a bit too much; no matter how quickly and thoroughly her assertions were debunked and refuted, she obstinately refused even to alter them, much less drop them for the sake of mere accuracy. This is the mark of someone who neither knows nor cares about the integrity of the things they happen to say, and if your instinct is to use language to conceal rather than to reveal, it's bound to be an overriding instinct. Everything you do and say is going to be used for that purpose.

Even worse than the smooth pathological lying is the endless playing of the victim card. It's gotten so old that even moderate conservatives such as Debra Saunders and Bobo Brooks are sick of it, which means that as soon as Goldberg cleans the Cheeto dust from his paws, he'll be on that wagon as well. It's become painfully clear that Palin, just like her perpetually aggrieved fan club, is much better at dishing it out than taking it. She'll lie about her own and her opponents' records on the campaign trail like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, and casually call people terrorists and socialists, but boy howdy, you do a lame PhotoShop of her kid or make fun of her non-abstinent daughter, and she pops a lung blowing the rape whistle.

If the lack of self-awareness these people routinely exhibit could be processed into some form of renewable energy, you'd have an endless supply of bullshit and our oil resource constraints would be over in a fucking heartbeat. But trillions of cubic feet of butt-hurt ain't solar power, and nobody other than the terminally stupid are buying into this Li'l Miss Can't Be Wrong act of hers.

Which is why she has to duck out while the getting's good, before her moron base has moved on to the next batch of fudge-covered nachos that passes for their intellectual lives and replaces their mental stability. Palin's only political options are to either run for a second term as governor, and now that she's gotten a taste of the outside world, that's out; run for Lisa Murkowski's seat next year, which would truly be a match between Dumb & Dumber, but one that Murkowski would almost certainly win; or become the Goopers' nominee in '12, which even Palin has to realize would be a tacit concession by her disarrayed party. Might as well nominate Bob Dole, for what it will get them; even Palin has to realize that her base is as narrow as it is (ahem) deep.

The mark of the true believer is to simply carry their martyr's cross for her, and John Fund is nothing if not absolutely reliable in his sheer intellectual dishonesty. He starts with the usual "baseless ethics investigations" hokum and then jerks the heart-strings.

Everyone in the family was weary of endless personal attacks, including mean-spirited suggestions on liberal blogs that all of her children should have been aborted and that she would run on a presidential platform promoting retardation.

Really? Which "liberal blogs" "suggested" such things, even polemically? I don't even recall reading any commenters who made such suggestions, much less actual blog postings. Near as I can tell, most simply pointed out the shameless hypocrisy and ignorance of Palin's holier-than-thou stances on reproductive choice, and her insistence on using her infant as a campaign prop. But again, she also initiated her own fair share of baseless, intensely personal attacks, and it's certainly no great challenge to find any number of conservatard blog commenters who regularly truck in thinly- (or not-at-all) veiled racism against Obama. I've seen exactly one (1) nasty PhotoShop of Sarah and Trig Palin, and that was recent; there are months worth of Obama pickaninny caricatures and angry-loner threats out there if you've got the stomach for it.

But Fund is nothing if not resolute in his hackery, committed to helping Miss Thang play her victim card just one more time, whatever and ever, amen:

In helping to convince Sarah Palin that her road forward in national politics would demand even more sacrifices and pain than exacted from most politicians, the media did nothing to encourage women or people of modest means to participate in politics. By sidestepping her critics, Sarah Palin is now moving to another playing field where she has more control over the rules of the game. Her friends say her critics may call her a "quitter" now, but they should wait and see what new role she decides to fill. She may wind up having the last laugh.

Oh, boo-fuckin'-hoo, Mary. Sarah Palin is going to where the money is, the Rudy Giuliani route, the traditional home of all good charlatans and hucksters -- the lecture/commentator grift. She can pull some decent bank for probably a year or so on the rubber-chicken circuit, pay down her legal bills and hit the Neiman-Marcus, telling the assholes what they want to hear, without disclosure rules and standards for accuracy and all those inconveniences, impediments to her (and their) peculiar solipsism. Then she can go to Faux News and be a color commentator, if she can live with Hannity and O'Reilly endlessly fwapping outside her dressing room.

I'd like to say that Palin's political career is well and truly over for good, even with a backhanded compliment that her weird celebrity status has transcended the mediocrities of politics. But she's young, and there's always that bloc of Americans that never run out of incoherent anger and volatile stupidity. This country allowed George W. Bush into the White House not once but twice (even if by chicanery); clearly anything's possible.